Spring Dreams, Part 2
“The novel most beloved by the Japanese.” I murmured the words printed on the card.
Seeing that card, I felt, more than anything, the shop owner’s immense confidence and his love for Kazuma at the same time. I tapped Spring Dreams.
Japanese books felt much lighter and smaller than Korean ones. “Ah—so you’ve come to buy Kazuma Tsuji’s Spring Dreams. A masterpiece.” Even Yang Yeon-gyu said as much.
It was certainly a classic, a masterpiece no one could deny. “Take your time looking around. I’m going to browse the books for a bit.” Yang Yeon-gyu walked slowly toward the English-language section.
I translated the recommendations on the fluorescent cards tucked here and there and looked through them. Then I opened the book.
The vertical Japanese script slipped naturally into my head.
I remembered reading it in a general-education class in college, but seeing it in the original gave it a completely different feeling. Spring Dreams was the story of a woman.
Born the youngest in a poor family, she grew up without much attention from her household.
She was always starved for other people’s attention, especially men’s, and because she was strikingly beautiful, one scoundrel after another latched onto her, dragging her life into ruin.
The woman always believed in men.
She believed there was always someone outside herself who would love her, and she believed someone would one day appear who could love her completely. Then she fell in love with a soldier.
The soldier truly loved her, but
he went off to fight in the Second World War and was killed.
After that, the woman married the soldier’s friend, who had returned alive. There was only one reason she chose him.
He told her he would love her, taking responsibility in place of his friend.
That word, “responsibility,” became a considerable source of comfort to her. But her husband gradually turned into a rough, violent man suffering from the aftereffects of war, and with no real way to escape, she endured it all and lived on.
Then one day, unable to bear it any longer, she got into a physical struggle with him.
It was a fight she had no hope of winning, but a large vase sitting in one corner of the living room became the cause of everything.
The man, stumbling on his own, hit his head against the vase and died, and the woman was handed over to the police on murder charges. A woman who had gone to prison for killing her husband.
By then she was middle-aged, with no one left beside her, and the one thing she had possessed—her beauty and youth—had disappeared as well. So she decided to build a family of her own.
By giving dolls the names of her dead former lover, the soldier.
The war ended and people reclaimed their everyday lives, but the woman lived on as an eccentric, reviled by others.
And one day she was found cold and dead in a small room, with a few human-shaped dolls neatly arranged beside her.
I read the book through while standing there.
To anyone watching, it must have looked as though I was flipping through the pages in a flash, but
Kazuma’s sentences were carved clearly into my mind. This novel… was not merely the life story of a single woman.
The accepted reading was that it embodied the anxious atmosphere of the Second World War through one woman’s mind. For that reason, in Korea people also criticized Spring Dreams like this.
That it was a work written by a nation of war criminals, pretending to be the victim.
But as that card—the novel most beloved by the Japanese—already showed,
the Japanese reverence for this novel was extraordinary.
It must have offered comfort to the hearts of its own people, who had suffered through that era.
Especially after Kazuma won the Nobel Prize and helped restore their bruised pride, that reverence probably deepened even more. But even if I set all that historical context aside,
this novel was undeniably excellent.
First of all, the language and expression used to lay bare a woman’s inner life were astonishing.
Some even said that modern psychological description in Japanese literature began with Kazuma. For example, passages like this were especially striking.
The moment the woman decided to marry the friend of the lover who had died in the war. Ah. When he held me, I wished I were blind or deaf instead, because I wanted to erase even one small trace of the feeling that this man was not the person I had loved. But I was a perfectly healthy, ordinary woman, and all I could feel was that I was a woman and he was a man. What, after all, is the difference between love and a man? I can only say that the difference is sorrow. There was no way for me to contain this sorrow, yet in the fact that he was a man I found great comfort. It was, so to speak, warmth, and I think that warmth is the strongest force and temptation a human being can possess. I felt as though someone inside me had thrown a stone at me. It was the stone of a promise made with the one I had loved, but I do not know. My forest of loneliness and desolation was so vast and deep that the stone could not possibly have sent an echo through it. And then he said it: I will take responsibility for you and love you. At the word responsibility, tears burst from me. They were tears unlike the sorrow of having no loved one here. Tears born from relief that, though love itself was absent, a man was present. I wept in his arms, and I wept and wept.
Look at the feeble, and at times pathetic, psychology of this woman.
It was only natural that such dramatic, ambivalent emotional description had seized readers’ hearts.
Given how vividly a novel from seventy years ago still struck me, it had to be a good novel. The real tour de force of it was the final scene.
The woman, who had lived an entirely dependent life and died lonely, at the end of her days.
She was already a corpse, but as though she were still alive, she said this. It is terribly shameful that people discovered my death because of the smell of my decaying body. Why can’t corpses give off the scent of perfume? I used hundreds of bottles of it over my lifetime, but now that I think about it, I can’t understand it. If we are going to rot and stink anyway, why do people make perfume and insist on using it to cover that smell? Still, there was one truth I could stand behind with pride: the dolls lying beside me were exceedingly clean and neat. People touched them easily. At last, they touched them. Again and again, since they could not bring themselves to touch the rotten me, they patted the dolls instead. …It is warm.
“…”
It is warm. I stared at the final sentence for a long time.
It was an ending with an enormous aftertaste. There was an aura to it that seemed to gather everything the woman had been swept through and compress it into a single line.
I could almost vividly feel the woman’s soul falling asleep, leaning on the touch of some unnamed neighbor. I turned the fluorescent card attached to the book over.
Sure enough, there was another line on the back.
A note written by the owner of the bookstore. “Kazuma’s true talent lies in the strength to comfort and affirm the fragile human heart.” That was when it happened. “Hmm?”
I felt a strange distance from that one-line judgment, if it could even be called that.
Especially from the phrase, “the strength to comfort and affirm.” In truth, that interpretation was close to the accepted reading.
It was precisely because of this warm thematic core that Spring Dreams was so popular. But…
“Is that really all there is to it?” Somehow, it felt like it didn’t quite fit.
Just as I was turning the reason over in my mind. “What are you thinking about so intently?” Yang Yeon-gyu appeared, arms full of books.
Coming out of my thoughts, I smiled as if it was nothing. “Nothing, really. I think I’ll just buy these two.” I pointed to the two copies of Spring Dreams. We headed to the counter together.
The bookstore owner glanced at me buying Spring Dreams and asked, “Korean?” Of course, Yang Yeon-gyu translated.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“You chose a good book. Spring Dreams is the best. How a writer from the war era could write with such human love… It’s a treasure of Japan. Here you are.” He put the books into a shopping bag and handed it to me.
“Human love.” I repeated the words.
Then I added in Korean, “I think I’ll need to look at that properly from the beginning again.”
─┼
After we left the bookstore,
we went to eat. “What would you like? Tell me if there’s anything you want to eat.”
Yang Yeon-gyu said it as if he could take me anywhere.
What did I want to eat?
Well. Nothing in particular came to mind, but…
“Since I’m in Japan, I’d like to eat some Japanese home-style food or soul food.”
“Soul food… then donburi, I suppose. Pork cutlet rice bowls.”
“Oh—nice. Donburi.” I’d seen it in Japanese dramas and manga.
Office workers getting off work, gathering in a small restaurant to eat beer and donburi.
After seeing that, I’d ordered donburi a few times at Japanese restaurants in Korea too. “Have you eaten a lot of donburi in Korea?”
“Of course. Who doesn’t like pork cutlet?” I said lightly.
Yang Yeon-gyu gave a faint, oddly amused laugh and led the way. “You might think differently after trying it.”
…Why was he acting like that? It was unsettling. He took me to a small donburi shop beneath an overpass.
It was run by a father and son, and
the menu consisted of only two items: donburi and fried shrimp. Clatter-clatter—amid the sound of trains passing overhead on the overpass,
we sat across from each other in front of two bowls of donburi. It really did look good.
Thick slices of meat, onions, half-set egg, and broth too.
With high expectations, I took a big bite. “...It’s sweet.” It was incredibly sweet. So much so that it was startling.
Yang Yeon-gyu laughed as though he had known this would happen. “At a real neighborhood place that doesn’t cater to foreigners, donburi is usually like this. Japanese home cooking uses soy sauce and sugar as its main seasonings. Even the vegetables here are a little sweet. I like it because I do well with sweet things.”
“Hmm—then from my next meal onward, I’ll have to go to fake Japanese restaurants that cater to foreigners. The rice being this sweet is weird.”
“Still, eat plenty. This is an experience too.” As irritating as Yang Yeon-gyu sounded when he said that, I decided to accept it.
If I didn’t try it now, when would I ever eat something like this?
Well, the more I ate, the more it seemed all right. The egg was a bit mucus-like, though. “By the way, you bought two copies of Spring Dreams, didn’t you?”
“Ah, yes. One is for my father, and I’m planning to reread the other.”
“In the original?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. I didn’t know you were that good at Japanese.”
“I learned it and ended up like this.” Since the subject of Spring Dreams had come up, I asked Yang Yeon-gyu, “You’ve read Spring Dreams too, right?”
“Of course. It was adapted into a film too. I think the film failed to capture the original properly, though.”
“What did you think of it? I’m curious about your personal impression.”
“Hmm. It’s been a while since I read it, but… I think it’s a good work. Especially in the history of Japanese literature, it’s indispensable. But how should I put it… I feel more of a defeated-nation mentality than comfort in that work. I’m not entirely sure why.” His voice trailed off, as though he couldn’t say it with confidence.
In any case, he was a film critic, not a literary critic. On the other hand, I was already certain. “I don’t think Spring Dreams contains human love.”
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