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WHEN EVENING CLOUDS BY Japanese author Junzō Shōno (1921–) first appeared as Yūbe no Kumo in 1964–65, it created quite a stir in Japanese literary circles, and one critic later noted that the ensuing literary discussions had redrawn the map of postwar literature. As occurs with almost every such literary work, the novel has re­ceded more into the background over the intervening decades as critics have turned to the new sensations of each new era. But Eve­ning Clouds remains a quiet masterpiece, destined, I believe, to outlive numerous other works that have gained more attention in recent years.

Those who have read my earlier translation of selected short works by Shōno, Still Life and Other Stories (Stone Bridge Press, 1992), will find a great deal that is familiar here. There is, for example, the elegant simplicity of Shōno’s trademark style, as well as the makeup of the family Shōno portrays—father, mother, daughter, and two sons—and the constant interplay between the events of the present and the father’s memories, observations, and musings about events from the past. But the novel-length Evening Clouds is on a scale that makes possible the development of more complex and intricately connected themes, and while Shōno still focuses on small fragments, or “snapshots,” of everyday life, each of the fragments in Evening Clouds is more sustained and is closely integrated with the others to form a unified whole.

Despite this greater unity, the story Shōno tells in Evening Clouds is not laid out in a conventional plot involving conflict, development, and climactic resolution; it is not a story in which the author leads the reader by the hand, playing on his or her emotions to create suspense and a headlong rush to the finish. The story emerges instead from the interplay between the events of the present and the often meandering ruminations of the main character, Ōura, as he observes those events or takes part in them, and it very much requires the participation of the reader in piecing the story together out of suggestion, metaphor, and a succession of episodes that carry the force of parables.

Such techniques are of course included in the bag of tricks of most any writer, but with Shōno they are everything, and this means that the simplicity of his prose is quite deceptive. For best results, as they say, I do not recommend trying to read this book when you are feeling harried and rushed—unless the purpose is for the book to help you slow down and restore an inner calm—nor do I recommend reading it through in a single sitting. The first readers of the story, in fact, were forced to wait a full day between each brief episode as it appeared in one of Japan’s national dailies (with only a couple of exceptions, the episode breaks have been preserved in this text). Though it would be extreme to urge the same regimen on readers of this book, there is something to be said for proceeding at such a pace. Shōno’s story is one that repays a leisurely reading, with many pauses and breaks to reflect not only on the past and present events described in the narrative but on one’s own experiences, and also to ponder the deeper significances Shōno is constantly hinting at beneath the surface of his narrative.

Let me offer some examples of what I mean here. Figuring most prominently in Ōura’s reflections is the family’s move to a new house perched atop a ridge on the far southwestern outskirts of Tokyo a little more than three years before. It is a move not unlike that of American pioneers moving west in search of more elbowroom—though of course with none of the Wild West trappings.

When Ōura focuses early in the story on planting trees and shrubs in the yard of the family’s new home, Shōno is not merely hav­ing his alter ego recount a series of gardening decisions that need­ed to be made; to read it as such and skip ahead looking for where the “real story” starts would in fact be to miss the story altogether.

Rather, Shōno is using the metaphor of transplanted trees and shrubs to probe the nature of the family’s own transplantation: the disruption involved in picking up roots, the loss of countless ties that had helped sustain the family in its former community, the unanticipated surprises of the new locale, the feelings of vulnerability that reign so powerfully during the period of uprootedness, the instinctive drive to create a safe haven for oneself and one’s own, the difficulties of putting down new roots in alien ground, the secondary place of ornamental concerns, how the family both shapes and is reshaped by its new surroundings, and so forth. At the same time, he addresses a variety of more universal themes, such as humankind’s constant battle against as well as affinity to nature, and the role of time as both ravager and healer.

These themes are then reprised and expanded or gently echoed and reiterated in countless different images and events as the narrative proceeds, and new themes are added as well. An account of the family’s TV habits and, more particularly, of watching a Disney feature entitled “The Coyote’s Lament” may at first seem merely to detail more of the family’s day-to-day activities, but the coyotes’ story turns out to be a mirror image of what is happening to the Ōuras and their surroundings. Besides offering new dimension to the earlier themes, it brings to the fore another overarching focus of Shōno’s narrative: the powerful, unstoppable forces of change that constantly reshape the landscape around us whether we are prepared for change or not.

An account of how a great saké vat came to reside in the Ōura household becomes Shōno’s opportunity to probe chains of cause and effect, along with the role that accident or fate may play in events that we normally see as being under human control—themes that are subsequently reprised, among others, in the folktale about Sawayomudon catching a giant eel and the events that brought it to Ōura’s mind.

Still later, memories of the flower Ōura dug up behind the family home in Osaka as his mother lay dying amplify the theme of transplantation and extend the metaphor to the nature of family, linking it to other motifs in the story that evoke the ties that bind us to our loved ones and to the past—including the means by which we try to maintain those ties as well as the inevitable loss of them.

I have of course barely scratched the surface of the countless associations Shōno interweaves between the events that make up the present time frame of the story and Ōura’s reflections inspired by them. Although matters relating to the family’s move represent the most prominent thread in the narrative, when all is taken together, the story that emerges is not merely of one family, but of all humankind. It is a timeless, archetypal story of how we find a place in this world; of how we not only shape that place but are shaped by it as we try to make it our own; of how, in any event, the world around us keeps on changing in ways none of us can anticipate; and of where the possibility of carving out our own fragile happiness lies within this constantly shifting reality.

Even without being told, the nature of what Shōno describes and his manner of describing it would, I believe, lead most experienced readers to suspect he is writing autobiographically. The family of five in Evening Clouds (as well as in a career-long series of other stories about the same family under different names) is in fact modeled on Shōno’s own, and the events he describes are based closely on his family’s real-life experiences. While we cannot know how often he may tailor details—i.e., fictionalize them—to fit his thematic purpose, every detail he provides has the ring of authenticity; everything about his narrative suggests that Shōno is faithfully recording events exactly as he experienced them, and that the exceptions to this rule, if any, are extremely few. Shōno has spoken of all literature as being a “human document,” using the English term. Although he does not mean by this that all literature should be of a documentary nature, that has indeed been an enduring characteristic of his own writing.

It is interesting to note in this connection how Shōno manages to tell the reader—indirectly, as always, but with remarkable clarity—some of the thinking behind his stance as a writer, and perhaps a little bit about its origin as well. He does this in an episode that describes the family working together to make yam soup, which reminds Ōura of a rather tall story about a yam contained in an Edo period (1603–1867) travel diary by Tachibana Nankei, a Kyoto physician, which had made a strong impression on him when he first read it as a student. Shōno’s narrator proceeds to tell us a little more about Nankei and the record he made of his travels to Eastern Japan:

Nankei writes, “I undertook my tour of the East primarily for the sake of medical study, so anything having to do with medicine, even if it came up only in passing conversation, I intend to record for the benefit of my colleagues.” He did not expressly seek out stories that would amuse or astonish for his journal; rather, he simply recorded any and all things that touched on his own personal interests in some way.

In any case, there can be little doubt that he was a man of remarkable curiosity. For one thing, he surely would not otherwise have set out on such a lengthy journey with no concern for the hardships he was certain to encounter along the way. He apparently wished simply to document what he saw and heard, exactly as he experienced it. He declares, “Although there is a great deal more I could say about the matters I have set down in this book, I am purposely refraining from offering my own foolish opinions about them, so that the reader can deliberate and discard as he sees fit.”

Even without knowing that Ōura is Shōno, attentive readers will note that the author of the book they are reading also seems to be documenting what he has seen and heard “exactly as he experienced it,” recording not “stories that amuse or astonish” but “any and all things” that capture his interest in some way, and presenting his description of events, at least much of the time, without explicit interpretations—allowing the reader to “deliberate and discard as he sees fit.” Within the confines of his story, Shōno cannot overtly tell us that these are his own principles of writing. But he is able to suggest it to the reader indirectly by having the narrator describe Nankei’s writing and what he says about it.

In a subsequent passage, when Ōura reflects on the gap between what actually occurred to him in naval officers’ training camp and what he wrote home to his parents, he pointedly notes that he never lied but merely avoided saying anything that might distress them. Given the way Shōno works, it is not unreasonable to view this, at least in part, as his way of telling the reader that he is shaping his narrative through selection, but not through outright fabrication. By reminding us that we can never get the whole truth and suggesting that the distressing parts have been left out, Shōno brings back a hint (found also in a few other fleeting references) of the dark shadow of foreboding that hung so heavily over the earlier stories he wrote about this family, including many of those in the Still Life collection. But in keeping with Ōura’s stance elsewhere in the novel, Shōno has deliberately chosen not to dwell on such things here, for the fragility of the family itself is no longer his theme.

It is a tribute to the authenticity of Shōno’s record, and to the lightness of his touch in remolding events to his own design, that the result is both a vivid and true picture of a single Japanese family in early 1960s Japan and a timeless, placeless tale of Everyman and Everywoman that can resonate for readers of any generation the world over. Evening Clouds is not a closed book, but an open one. Different readers, especially those of different cultures, will find themselves deliberating on different passages and discovering different truths as they watch the members of this Japanese family putting down new roots, growing up, being buffeted by relentless winds and violent thunderstorms, slowly losing their sylvan landscape to the inexorable sweep of human progress, and transplanting a small portion of what is being displaced into their own back yard as a memento of what they once had.

According to one of his literary friends, Shōno hit on the title for this work as he was lying on the grass gazing up at the sky one evening, watching a succession of beautiful colors transform the clouds overhead in a continuously changing display. Indeed, this is a story about gazing at the changing sky and watching the trees grow; about experiencing each day to the fullest, not as a series of mechanical routines but as a work of wonder that merges the past with the present and with the future. Read it in that spirit, and it may be just the antidote you need for the high-stress, hyperdrive pace of the age we live in.

Acknowledgments

This translation was supported in part by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. It was only with this support that I was finally able to dedicate regular blocks of work time to the translation so that it could emerge from its almost constant state of suspension. I am deeply grateful to all those who made the grant possible.

My thanks go also to Mr. Shōno, for his patience during the long periods when I had to suspend work on the translation, as well as for freely giving of his time to answer questions that I had about his work; to the subscribers of the Internet mailing list honyaku, for providing me with invaluable help in determining how best to render a number of plant and animal names as well as cultural terms; to my publisher, Peter Goodman, for his enthusiasm and expert advice; and to my wife, Cheryl, and son, Michael, for their interest, encouragement, and support over the many years this translation has been in the making.

Finally, I would like to dedicate this translation to the memory of the late Robert Lyons Danly, who first introduced me to Shōno’s writings and who must be credited more than anyone else with teaching me the art of literary translation. I hope I have produced a translation that would have made him proud.

Wayne P. Lammers