Yukio Mishima - The Sound of Waves

Translation can have a leveling effect on writing, especially prose. The nuance, intensity, and inventiveness of the writer go out the window in favor the plodding efficiency of the translator, who conveys the meaning and sense of the words but not the aesthetic impact. Translators could do far worse (and often do), but this tendency always leaves a translated text in suspicion, as if it were wearing a mask.

Though I don’t know any Japanese, I don’t suspect the firm, even-handed tone of Yukio Mishima’s The Sound of Waves is not the result of a business-like translation. Mishima approaches his story as if it were a fable, and he the distant, sure-handed, and slightly paternalistic narrator drawing the reader gently in to the parochial world of Uta-Jima island. The novel begins at such a distance, with a descriptive introduction to this pastoral setting that rather quickly alights upon the young hero of the story, Shinji-san, who just as quickly meets the object of his affection, Hatsue. Those looking for the slightest amount of narrative intrigue, tension, or plot twisting, let alone literary inventiveness, can stop reading at this point. Within ten pages, we can look to whatever boy-meets-girl narrative prototype we have in our heads and guess pretty quickly how this story ends. There will be a jealous, wealthy rival, an unsupportive father, a worried mother, gossiping women, an illicit and yet innocent love scene, and, finally, a heroic act that seals the deal. And this novel is actually less dramatic than all that.

That Mishima maintains our interest, then, is not so much by his use of plot trickery but rather the through the rhythmic precision of his language (I suspect for this he actually shares the credit with the translator, Meredith Weatherby). For Uta-Jima, we find out early on, has remained unmarked by the intrusions of modernity, and Mishima’s clean, almost simplistic diction is in step with his object’s provincialism. Shinji-san and the other young men on the island are wide-eyed innocents who

conceive, by sheer force of imagination, such things as streetcars, tall buildings, movies, subways. But then, once they had seen reality, once the novelty of astonishment was gone, they perceived clearly how useless it had been for them to try to imagine such things.

The modern world doesn’t enter here as a force of disruption or ruination; at no point is there a danger of things falling apart. Rather, like Uta-Jima’s peaceful waterfalls, pathways, lighthouses, springs, and boats, it glides in and out of the narrative, as in a daydream. At times, this is a world that seems to exist entirely apart from the narrative simply because it is so unaware of itself: “city youths learn the ways of love early from novels, movies, and the like, but on Uta-jima there were practically no models to follow.” As previously mentioned, every corner of this novel follows well-worn models, but we are the only ones who know this, not the characters that we affectionately look upon.

Many an author would very easily make such a stance come off as cloyingly trite; we all were subjected to a fair share of such stories in middle school. But again, Mishima relentlessly approaches his characters from a calming distance. Even a passage that references an allied bombing of a civilian boat does not resort to cheap and out-of-place moralizing of the sort that typically make such stories one-dimensional and obnoxiously didactic. At no point does the story interfere with the beautiful tranquility of the setting; rather, it is laid gently on top, so that the novel as a whole feels like a peaceful nap. Nothing awe-inspiring, for me at least, but satisfying nonetheless.