I have recently finished a full draft of an English translation of『わたしハ強ク・歌ウ』(Watashi wa tsuyoku utau), tentatively entitled I Sing · Like I Mean It in English, by someone I regard as one of the most inventive writers working today, Sumito Yamashita. When I was first given a preview of the galley proofs of the novel just as the book was about to go to print, I was stunned by how relevant it was for my scholarly, creative, and translational interests all at once. I was invited to translate this novel by Yamashita’s editor at Kawade, Taichi Iwamoto, whom I met through our mutual friend, poet and artist Natsumi Aoyagi. The novel is a patchwork of quotes from Samuel Beckett, the Book of Job, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, William Blake, Anne Frank, and others, a daring adventure into narrative and linguistic otherness, and a deeply sincere exploration of polyphonic narration.
In a recent email to me, Yamashita characterized the process of having his novel developed into English and potentially introduced to the English-speaking world as something influenced by the blowing of “an uncanny wind” (fushigina kaze). His expression was in fact a humorous inversion of what I had just described in my earlier email as the “devil-may-care” attitude I have toward challenges we face in the path ahead to try to get this English translation published, which I described using the figurative expression doko fuku kaze – literally, “the wind blows from elsewhere”. Chance appears to play a significant part in our collaboration and in the life of this book, just as it plays a significant part in the occurrences which benight and bemuse the novel’s characters. My “devil-may-care” attitude is all an act, of course. Any effort to be doko fuku kaze is self-delusion – I am rather overexcited about the prospect of non-Japanese readers reading the book.
This was not the first time that I was hearing Yamashita-san use the expression fushigi. Fushigi is a term that means “uncanny” when used affirmatively, and “strange” when used pejoratively. The last time I had heard him describe something as fushigi – the term used, of course, in the former sense in this instance – was at a dinner in Kagurazaka following the “Poetry of Crisis” reading and discussion on October 12th last year. This was an event held for visiting poet Deborah Meadows featuring Aoyagi, along with translator and poet Hiromitsu Koiso, and me, at kohonya honkbooks.
The “Poetry of Crisis” event was conducted bilingually, without Japanese interpretation for the audience – although I did provide some informally. Yamashita-san, who was present in the audience at the event, kindly expressed at the dinner afterwards how, despite Meadows’ poetry being read aloud solely in English (though in one instance, translated compellingly by Hiro Koiso) and the questions being answered in English also, the experience of the event was “uncanny” for him, in the best possible way, even has he felt limited by his English proficiency.
His complimentary use of fushigi at dinner concerned Meadows’ powerful and unpredictable poetry, her reading voice, the strangely intelligible English of the event, and so on, but the uncanny wind that now blows in relation to I Sing · Like I Mean It has some relation to the one that blew then.
That is, the LA-based experimental poet Meadows’ early poetic career is particularly well-represented by a multi-poem project entitled The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick, published in various incarnations over a number of books, including the Gertrude Stein Poetry Award-winning collection Representing Absence in 2004. In an effort to thread our various questions about writing in a time of crisis together – quite unrelated to Yamashita’s novel, mind you, but now somehow seeming to correlate – I had quoted a couple of snippets from that series in particular for the dossier I prepared for our event. Moby-Dick becomes a model for narrative and performative deconstruction that not only inspires the polyphony and immediacy of Meadows’ The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick, but also, as it happens, Yamashita-san’s I Sing · Like I Mean It and its radical use of pronouns.
Both Meadows and Yamashita, as it happens, make special note of Melville’s imaginative expansion of the powers wielded by soliloquy. In “Chapter 37” in Itinerant Men, before the poem bricolages passages from the corresponding chapter of Melville’s novel, it begins:
Soliloquy.
A device to
speechify inner life.
(Meadows, 2013, 33)
If you know Moby-Dick, you may recall that it is Chapter 36 when we enter Ahab’s domain, his cabin, for the first time, and that the narrative evolves thereafter into a series of dramatic monologues, including Ahab’s own in Chapter 37. In deconstructed form, Meadows takes this unannounced shift into Ahab’s soliloquy and emblematizes the performative self-speechification that animates Melville’s narration of his characters’ inner lives. The poem ends with the following lines:
I’ve run
naught to pommel me
nor from me.
(34)
A rather fushigina collocation this is, but perhaps it is not too crude to wish to read Meadows’ poem’s “naught” as “not” and thereby as one reflecting on self-performance. So, in other words: Ahab’s much-discussed running toward the Leviathan as an act of running from himself which undergirds the paradoxically Romantic quest for a transcendent self is emphasized in the poem as an act of self-soliloquizing involving a productive doubling of the personal pronoun “me”. The oral, diegetic, and textual-technical contours are brought into greater relief by Meadows’ bricolage.
In I Sing · Like I Mean It, a novel featuring numerous literary quotations threaded through it, “Mum’s dad” is said to have had a short career as a whaler. This element of the story features direct quotations to Melville’s Moby-Dick which are quilted into the mode in which “Mum’s dad” and his history is narrated. Humorously, in a dramatic monologue-like fashion, the narrator of this episode in Yamashita’s novel finds the instability of the first-person pronoun in the chapter preceding Ahab’s soliloquy, Chapter 36, weird. As you can see below, while it is presented explicitly as a quotation, no further highlighting of the Moby-Dick extract is made using quotation marks and so on, allowing a natural connectivity between the narratives to flow:
Ishmael—or, should we say “I”—is down to his last penny, and since nothing on land particularly garners his interest, he thinks he might board a ship for a short time. “I” then boards a ship. Thus begins life aboard ship for “I.” The part where the white whale appears is a lot later. The whale just never seems to arrive. Whales are pretty much physically absent from the book. But what’s weirdest about Moby-Dick happens next.
CHAPTER XXXIV THE CABIN-TABLE
It is noon; and Dough-Boy, the steward, thrusting his pale loaf-of-bread face from the cabin-scuttle, announces dinner to his lord and master; who, sitting in the lee quarter-boat, has just been taking an observation of the sun—
After which the scene shifts here to the captain’s cabin-table, as it were. And yet, Ishmael’s absent. “I” is absent. Despite the story being narrated and progressing through “I,” a scene which “I” is not present for nonetheless emerges. Isn’t that weird? At the very same time, Mum’s dad had written in this way too, and without blinking an eye.
Because of the deliberate confluence of narratives in Yamashita’s novel, the paradoxical nature of the authenticity/artifice divide lying at the heart of what Meadows calls “speechify[ing] inner life” here is reiterated by the narrator’s wonder at the weirdly unexplained but somehow natural transition of first-person narration in and out of Moby-Dick, in a passage featuring Moby-Dick itself.
The reader no doubt laughs when the narrator asks, “Isn’t that weird?”; not just because Yamashita’s novel has featured shifts in narrative gaze even more dramatic and hallucinatory than in Moby-Dick, but because Yamashita’s I-voices have been plural (I’ll say more about that topic in a future article) and have investigated their own inner lives by consulting the books and notebooks of others, including major works of literature.
Yamashita regularly does this, that is, make explicit and more personal something uncanny which stems from the written literary record. It is not an amplification of the irony at the heart of self-performance, but rather something more like the reverse: a celebration of the uncanny acts of differentiation which mark the sincere human performance of selves (which perhaps must therefore take on the appearance of irony).
When the narrator reflects that “Mum’s dad had written” his own history in this manner, “without blinking an eye,” regardless of whether he had been influenced by Moby-Dick or otherwise, there is a sense that the performative linguistic devices through which we enact our existences – pronouns included – provide the possibility of expanding the inner human life.
References
Meadows, Deborah. Translation, the bass accompaniment: Selected Poems, Shearsman, 2013.
Yamashita, Sumito. Watashi wa tsuyoku utau [I Sing · Like I Mean It], Kawade, 2025.
Now the big question, with the literary quotes, do you plan on searching out the original English for each quote (in the case the original is in English) or do a “back translation” from the Japanese? There are of course arguments for both approaches and I’ve done both in working with the numerous quotations from French philosophy in the diaries of Butoh choreographer Ko Murobushi.