Record of a Night Too Brief by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Lucy North

Three pages into a Record of a Night Too Brief my margin notes start up a storm. Magic realism minus realism and magic?, the first one says. Then, Dream world realism, then, Fairy tale!, which is quickly scribbled out, replaced with, Absolutely not a fairy tale. Halfway in I gave up on naming a genre and switched to marking passages with exclamation and question marks. Neither represented exclamations nor questions, but just the visceral reaction to Kawakami’s writing, boiled down into two emotions, felt either separately or magnified and all at once: what, and yes.

Record of a Night Too Brief is a collection that explores the familiarity of confusion. Describing much more than that won’t do you or me much good: explaining what Kawakami’s writing is about is like explaining what food tastes like by talking about the shape of the plate. I will, however, make a good effort. It starts like this: a woman enters into the night. Another turns into a horse that’s also the night, another makes the mistake of accepting an invitation. Another finds a man in a coat that’s actually bunch of moles stacked up to look like a man. The moles speak mostly in insults. What do you feel is the most important quality in a man? the stack-of-moles man asks, and the woman answers, reckless: that he’s loaded with moles.

A sister tells the story of her family, and of all the things that go missing. Most recently, she tells the reader, [it’s] my eldest brother. He shows up in the night, sits atop his once betrothed, kisses her with bee stings, making her swell. The sister wonders at why their family is the way it is, and whether it’s always been that way, to which her parents reply: Don’t be stupid! Families are just families! That’s all there is to it!

A woman steps on a snake. The snake says, Now it’s all over. The snake turns into a human, (as far as I could tell, a woman in her early fifties), and moves in with the woman. Makes her dinners. Asks her would she turn into a snake, too, because it’s nice in the snake world, so warm and cosy. The woman says no, thank you, and keeps eating the dinners—because they’re nice, and the fridge always has cold beers in it these days.

Somewhere into the third story of the collection one of my margin notes says, this is what liminality feels like. And in that sense I’m also happy that I got to read this work in translation. There is something about the shape that sentences take when they’re grasping at thought, or an idea or a concept, that pushes the translated work further into the realm of the liminal: the almost-there, the not-quite. This applies to the best translations, perhaps even more so I would say the best ones know how to work this sense of confusion to their advantage. I myself grew up in a household where our parents didn’t speak each other’s language, and the kids a new one altogether, where the act of translation became a language in its own right. And so getting lost in a work that revels in the inaccessibility and oddity of words is a comforting ritual for me, still. Kawakami’s words, read through translator Lucy North’s creative interpretation, act like an extension of the story itself: the barely-awake quality of the stories mixing in the with blurry nature of joke translated, of trying to give a cultural sign given the same depth in a different context.

Record of a Night Too Brief is what folklore would look like if it didn’t aim for morality but instead lingered in the misty world of magic and consequences, for no other reason other than that’s simply what it’s there to do. It’s what fantasy would look like if the main characters, instead of asking questions, would lie down in a corner to have a nap. Where instead of overcoming an obstacle, they would turn into the obstacle itself—literally. This is a work designed for those who’d like the opportunity of visiting that land of waking up at 3AM and not quite knowing why—of not knowing whether you’re remembering a dream or the day you just had. Best read at: dawn, in airports, at a bus stop, between two trees that have grown bent toward each other.

Pushkin Press