The Sweet

 [You may want to check the warning on this blog's translations.]

I translated another story by children's writer  新美 南吉 (NIIMI Nankich, 1913-1943) earlier, 牛をつないだ椿の木. The story translated here, 飴だま (amedama, 'The Sweet') is a lot shorter. It seems to be set in the Tokugawa period, when samurai had considerable freedom to punish perceived disrepect from commoners. For some reason, I can't help casting MIFUNE Toshirou (三船 敏郎) as the samurai in my head, particularly the Youjinbou period Mifune. The story is in the public domain; and you can read it online at Aozora Bunko here.

The Sweet

by NIIMI Nankichi

It was a warm day in spring. A woman travelling with two small children was riding on the ferry. As the boat was about to set off, there came a shout, 'Oy, wait there just a moment!'

From over on the embankment a single samurai came running, waving his hand, and leapt onto the boat.

The boat set off.

The samurai sat down heavily in the middle of the boat. The day was so warm that he fell asleep as he sat.

He was a strong looking samurai, with a black beard; but the sight of him sunk so deep in sleep seemed funny to the children. They giggled at him.

Their mother put a finger to her mouth. 'Be quiet!' she said. An angry samurai is a terrible thing.

The children stopped laughing.

A little later one of them held out her hand and said, 'Mummy, a sweet please!'

At that the other one said, 'Mummy, me too!'

Their mother took a paper bag out of her pocket; but there was only one sweet left in it.

'Give it to me!', 'Give it to me!' the two children begged her from either side. As there was only one sweet, she did not know what to do.

'Be good children and wait,' she told them. 'Once we get to the other side, I'll buy you some, you see.'

But the children just threw a tantrum, shouting, 'Please! Please!'

They had thought the samurai was dozing; but he suddenly snapped his eyes open and looked at the begging children.

Their mother was shocked. She was sure this samurai was angry at having his sleep disturbed.

'Behave yourselves!' she tried to calm the children down; but they would not listen to her.

At that the samurai pulled his sword smoothly from its scabbard and came over in front of the mother and children.

The mother turned deathly pale and set herself between him and the children. She thought he was going to kill them for disturbing his sleep.

'Give me the sweet!' the samurai said.

The mother handed it over with trembling hands.

The samurai put it on the railing of the boat and with a clink of his sword he split it neatly in two. Then, 'There you go!' he gave one piece each to the children.

After that he went back to his place and was soon sunk deep in sleep once again.

A camellia tree with a tethered cow

[You may want to check the warning on this blog's translations.]

I’m in two minds about putting this translation up. It’s a children’s story, 牛をつないだ椿の木, by 新美 南吉 (NIIMI Nankichi, 1913-1943), one of the best known writers of children’s stories from the first half of the twentieth century. Some of the stories are really very good, and I think this is good too; but it has a problematic element too, towards the end. I’ll quote from the last paragraph here (so if you want to read the story uninfluenced, skip ahead to the background explanation now): ‘In the end Kaizou did not come back. He was one of the gallant flowers scattered in the Russo-Japanese war.’ I can imagine this kind of sentimentality in an English imperialist writer in the late nineteenth century (though I suspect that even then someone like Kipling would not have had much respect for it). Reading something from a book of that period, I’d probably just shrug and call the writer an idiot and read on. But Niimi was writing for children in the second world war, when Japan was cheerfully throwing the lives of its own people away in an attempt to impose its rule on other countries. Since the first world war, writers worth reading in England didn’t write like that about war. If the story were just propaganda, I wouldn’t have translated it. The story is more one of someone finding meaning in doing one little good thing for the community. It's not by giving his life for the fatherland, but by building a well that Kaizou leaves something worthwhile behind him. That too would have been an idea that the regime of the time would have found useful – they were calling for a lot of self sacrifice from their civilians, for the sake of the war effort; but bad people can find a bad use for anything.

Background Explanation 

Rather that add footnotes or links, I’ll explain a few points in advance.

The story is set at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Russo-Japanese war was fought in 1904-1905. You can see the uniform described in §6 in this print.

I’ve written people and place names with spelling that reflects the Japanese. Most are pronounced as you might expect. The less obvious are roughly like this: Kaizou > Kye-zoh; Risuke > Ris-ke; Shingorou > Shin-go-roe; Shouhei > Show-hay; Oono > Oh-no. When the well digger Shingorou gets called Ido-Shin, ido means ‘well’; so it’s something similar to the Welsh ‘Jones the bread’ style of naming  (but I don’t know any Welsh people who actually say things like that).

A sen is 1/100 yen. A rin is 1/1000 yen.

A jizou (ji-zoh) is a Bodhisattva (enlightened being in Buddhist religion), often worshipped with small roadside statues in Japan, sometimes set up in rows.

I translated tea shop as café, because for me ‘tea shop’ conjures up something more genteel that what is evidently meant here. I translated aburagashi as fried cake pieces, as that seemed to be the direction that recipes I found on the internet were going. Konpeitou are small many coloured sugar sweets. I’m not sure if yakisurume (‘fried/grilled squid’) is literally squid, but an internet search seems to find sweet sellers selling something with this name whose ingredients at least include squid. The ‘knuckles’ are (apparently) a sweet made from soya bean flour: here.

You can read the story online at Aozora Bunko here.

I've put the actual translation after the break.