Theater Class (3)
Songman was a man who looked to be in his early forties, a little on the plump side and dressed without any fuss. The question was, why had he come looking for me? “It’s nice to meet you, sir. What brings you all the way out here?”
“You know Misong Publishing, right? I’m on my way back from signing a contract with them.” Misong was a small publisher in Paju Book City, one that mostly put out genre fiction.
So he’d signed a new contract. That was good news. “You’ve signed on for a new work, then. Congratulations.”
“Haha, thank you. The truth is, I live down in the southern provinces, so I don’t usually have any reason to come up to Paju. I thought maybe, just maybe, I’d have a chance to run into you here, so I waited around without much of a plan. And then, sure enough, you appeared like this. Hohoho.” He laughed with an easy, good-natured face.
He must have been waiting a long time, because even though the weather wasn’t especially cold, the tip of his nose had turned red. I could guess the reason he had waited for me.
He must have heard the rumor that, thanks to my critique, the sales of Photographic Memory had gone up by quite a lot.
He probably thought he should at least express his gratitude. “I felt I owed you far too much. I wanted to see your face and thank you properly.” As expected, I had guessed right. “Please, sir, let’s have a cup of coffee together. I’ll pay.”
“Normally, I don’t meet people in cases like this, but...” I couldn’t ignore the fact that he had clearly been waiting for a while.
Honestly, my heart was weak for this sort of thing. “No helping it, then. I’ll accept your thanks and spare a little time.”
“Yes, yes, I understand completely. Hoho.”
“I’ll buy the coffee. It looks like you’ve been waiting quite a while.” The reason I agreed so readily to meet him wasn’t just because I had softened.
I had also, somewhere along the way, become curious about something I wanted to ask him. A little later, we sat across from each other in a book cafe not far from Gyeongseong Publishing.
I said I would treat him, but he flatly refused and used his own card. He seemed to have a quiet stubbornness about him. He must have been very cold, because he kept taking long gulps of his hot Americano.
I said to him, “The weather seems to have turned quite a bit colder. If you’d said something first, you wouldn’t have had to wait so long.”
“Ah, but then I’m sure you wouldn’t have agreed to meet me.”
“...You know me well?”
“There’s been quite a bit of talk that you don’t meet writers, sir.” I laughed inwardly. Was that really the sort of thing that became gossip? “Whether it’s genre fiction, the literary establishment, or independent magazines, you have no idea how many writers pay attention to everything you do.”
“It’s probably better for me not to know that. Anyway, it looks like you’ve signed a new work. Congratulations.”
“It’s thanks to you, sir. As you know.” The rest of the conversation went exactly as I had expected.
He kept thanking me, but in a way that was neither obnoxious nor overdone. “I’m sure you’d say you were only doing your job. But I can’t deny that your writing changed my life as the head of a household. Simply from one person to another, I’m genuinely grateful.”
“That’s awkward. I came here on the condition that I wouldn’t have to accept your thanks.”
“Hoho! I’m just trying one more time. When else would I get to see you, sir? If there’s an opportunity, I have to thank you as much as I can. Hahaha.” His eyes crinkled with a friendly grin.
How should I put it? He was the sort of man who was quietly self-willed, but not unpleasant.
To be honest, I had a hard time imagining that he, of all people, had come up with the meticulously engineered trick in Photographic Memory.
But then again, the image of a writer and the image of his work were not always linked. And gradually, I came to the point of my visit. “Mr. Song. Have you ever read a novel by the writer Nashida Ito?”
“Nashida? Of course. If you’re writing mystery fiction and you haven’t read Nashida’s work, then what more obvious disqualification could there be?”
“Do you like his work?”
“Hmm... we have to acknowledge the quality, don’t we? Nashida won the Japan Mystery Writers’ Association Award, which is no easy thing to do.”
“No. Setting all that aside, I’m asking whether you truly like the ‘work’ itself.” He started to answer on reflex, then paused. “Hmm.” He searched for his words. I didn’t say this to him, but in my eyes, Theater Class was a notch below Photographic Memory.
If we were talking pure mystery mechanics, Theater Class might have had the edge, but the lingering effect, the emotion, the aftertaste of it all had struck me far more deeply. In that sense, I wanted to know what Songman thought.
He had read as many mystery novels as I had, perhaps even more. After thinking it over carefully, he said, “Listening to you, I think the reason I like Nashida is because of the tricks he comes up with. It’s impressive that he can devise narrative tricks that smoothly every time. But, well... I do feel a certain distance from them.”
“A sense of distance?”
“Yes. The novels have a somewhat manga-like quality to them, for one thing. Ah, but that’s also a common feature of Japanese mystery fiction in general. Detective stories for teenagers, boy detectives... that sort of thing.”
“True enough. Korean fiction, by comparison, is probably closer to Anglo-American crime fiction.”
“Yes. Fundamentally, it’s adult stories that don’t really make room for children... and they’re much more brutal. They don’t pull their punches.”
“Then why do you think Nashida’s work does so well in Japan?”
“Hmm, from what I’ve heard... it’s the atmosphere.”
“The atmosphere?”
“Yes. A Japanese writer I know said that, although it’s hard to put into words, the atmosphere of the novel fits the tricks and the incidents very well. Haha, well, there must be a reason. The Japanese aren’t idiots, after all.” That line, “there must be a reason,” struck me as especially meaningful.
It sounded as if the reason existed outside the manuscript.
After parting ways with Songman, I kept muttering the words to myself as I walked home. “There is a reason...” If I had heard something like that about any other novel, I would have scoffed.
What I analyze and understand is the manuscript itself, and nothing else.
If value was hidden somewhere beyond the manuscript, then that only meant the writer had failed to put that value into the text. But this time was a little different. What I had read was the translation, not the original.
In other words, what I had seen was, at best, a translated version. “There is a reason...” If Nashida was truly an exceptional mystery writer, and if I hadn’t been able to find that value in his manuscript... then there was only one place left to check.
The Japanese original.
Come to think of it, the fact that I had to look at the Japanese original meant Theater Class was no longer entirely in my hands.
I didn’t know Japanese.
Even if I did, there was no way I could produce a better translation than the version prepared by a professional translator. Besides, there was already a mountain of manuscripts waiting for a review from critique.
I could simply set Theater Class aside and keep reading the other manuscripts... and yet it still nagged at me.
It felt as if I had started something and left it unfinished. Japanese or not, I wanted to see it with my own eyes. Thinking about it now, that was a pretty serious habit. So the next day,
I went to see the editor in charge of foreign literature. “The original manuscript of Theater Class? Not the translation?”
“Yes. The original. Is that not allowed to be shown? I’m the only one who’ll look at it.”
“Well... officially, it’s not allowed.” He lowered his voice. “But for the editor-in-chief, of course it’s fine. I’ll print it out for you. Just a moment.” He found the file on his PC and immediately started printing.
While we waited, his eyes brightened. “By the way, Editor-in-Chief, you know Japanese too?”
“No. Not at all.”
“???? Then why...?”
“There might be a use for it.”
Why would there be a use for something if I didn’t even know Japanese?
That was exactly the look on his face. Then the printer stopped, and I gathered up the warm sheets of paper. “All right, I’ll take a look. Thank you.”
“Ah, ah—yes, of course. Take care, Editor-in-Chief!” He bowed to me.
Back at my desk, I set the Japanese manuscript down with a thud. Beside it, I placed the Korean translation, and on my PC I brought up a Japanese dictionary. I had made a decent little setup, but... “Why are there so many kanji?”
Sure enough, I was immediately thrown into despair. For a moment, I even wondered why I was bothering with this at all. “Why else? Because it feels like I have to do it.” I didn’t know. If I kept butting against it, maybe something would come of it.
Besides, I had studied Korean literature, and I did have a level 1 hanja certification. All right, the first sentence. 幕が上がる. 幕 is the character for “curtain.” It refers to a drape, a stage curtain.
Then, intuitively, what about 上がる? I typed 上がる into the search bar and hit enter. “...It means ‘to rise.’” The curtain rises. It was the same as the Korean translation. Which made sense, of course.
But then. “Huh?” The Japanese original looked different now.
The 上がる in the opening line of the original text appeared, quite perfectly, to mean “to rise.” So it wasn’t a matter of 上がる in Japanese becoming “rise” in Korean and then becoming the meaning of “rise” again.
It was that, skipping over the Korean translation in the middle,
上がる itself came to me cleanly as the meaning “to rise,” as though I were a native speaker. “...Could it be?” I hurriedly searched the internet for The 1000 Most Common Japanese Words. Several blogs came up, and I found one page that listed the original word and its meaning side by side, then read through it.
I didn’t make any real effort to memorize the vocabulary.
I only looked, the way I would let a novel settle into my head. And when I looked back at the Japanese original again... “...This is actually cool, isn’t it?” Theater Class had been translated in a patchy way.
It was as if my familiar Korean and a foreign language had been mixed together. It felt like I had been struck hard on the head. Why hadn’t I thought to test this sooner?
Just as Korean is a language, foreign languages are languages too. My ability... worked on foreign languages as well. I sprang to my feet.
Then I went down to the basement storage room.
There, damaged copies and unsold books were sorted and stacked. During my time at Gyeongseong Publishing, I had more or less learned how the books in storage were organized.
I went straight to the educational books section and rummaged through the boxes piled there. After a long search, I pulled out four books with a grunt. Introduction to Japanese Sentence Structure
Intermediate Japanese Sentence Structure
Advanced Japanese Sentence Structure
Professional Japanese Sentence Structure These were dictionary-sized books, each about a thousand pages long.
They didn’t look like something made for mass sales.
It seemed they had been specially produced as advanced teaching material for graduate programs in interpretation and translation, in collaboration with Japanese language departments at universities.
The professional volume, especially, would probably contain the cultural context of Japanese proverbs, slang, figures of speech, and modes of expression. I carried all of them out of storage. A nation’s language is not something you master just by memorizing words until your head aches.
The author’s intent that can be felt in the structure of a sentence, the subtle differences in nuance.
Those are what determine the atmosphere of a novel, and its true meaning. As I hurried along, I glanced down at the four books clutched in my arms.
How long would it take to read all of these...? “A day.” That was what I sincerely hoped.
By tomorrow, I wanted Theater Class to come to me as a completely different novel.