This is a modern English language translation of Kajii Motojirō’s short story “Lemon” that I undertook. It is a story about a man who has fallen on hard times, but despite it all he retains his ability to find beauty in the most unusual places. In particular, he chances to find a lemon which is indescribably perfect, and the very act of holding it soothes him inexplicably. The protagonist’s final action of leaving this lemon on a pile of books in Maruzen (a high-quality book and stationary store) was so unusual and inspiring that it triggered a series of similar incidents amongst students who read this short story and wanted to replicate this subversive act of defiance. This story is a classic and is widely used in school textbooks in Japan.
It was quite a challenge to translate as it does not lend itself to the English language particularly easily. His style is poetic, and highly impressionistic, leaving much to the readers’ interpretation. I have done my best to keep it as faithful to the original as possible, and convey the highly sensory aspects of it as concisely as possible.
「檸檬」 梶井基次郎。小説のオンラインバージョンはこちらへ： LINK TO JAPANESE VERSION OF THE TEXT ONLINE (opens in a new window)
This took me many hours to translate; please respect the time and energy I spent in translating this by NOT posting this on your site OR messageboard WITHOUT A LINK AND CREDIT. Thanks!
こちらの英訳は、非常に時間がかかりました。というわけで、是非読んで、他のブログやメッセージボードにポストしてもよろしいですが、こちらのサイトにリンクしていただいたら、とてもうれしいです。
Lemon – Kajii Motojiro
An ominous lump of character unknown placed continuous pressure on my heart. Was it frustration? Disgust? Like a hangover after drinking alcohol, but a hangover that comes from daily drinking. And it had come.
It was pretty bad. The consequent catarrh in my lungs, a nervous breakdown; I wouldn’t say that these were bad. Nor the debt which seemed to burn my back. What was bad was this ominous burden.
Prior to this, I would have rejoiced at any beautiful piece of music, any beautiful verse of song or piece of poetry. But now my patience had worn out. Even if I went out with the express intent of listening to a grammar phone, within the first few bars I wanted to get up and leave. Something had made it unendurable. And so it was that I wandered continuously from place to place.
For some reason I remember my strong attraction towards tacky, beautiful things back then and I wondered why I used to think like that.
In streets of broken scenery, beyond those cold, formal main streets, I found familiarity. Where one encounters dirty laundry hung out to dry, or the rubbish rolling around, glimpsing squalid rooms along the back streets; that was what I enjoyed nowadays. Streets on the brink of being returned to the earth by wind and rain; lines of sloping houses with crumbling plaster walls; the only thing here with any vigour was the vegetation and even then there were times when I was surprised to encounter a sunflower or kanna plant blooming.
Sometimes while walking along those streets I would suddenly try to create the illusion in my head that this place wasn’t Kyoto, but a place miles from here like Nagasaki or Sendai…
If I could I would flee Kyoto and go to the kind of place where I didn’t know anyone. First and foremost a quiet place. A single room in an empty inn, a clean mattress, a nice smelling mosquito net and well starched yukata. A whole month lying in bed and not thinking of anything. When the illusion began to come about, I then began to apply the pigments of my imagination to it. It was nothing less than the overlapping image of my fantasy superimposed onto the crumbling streets. I enjoyed watching myself becoming lost amongst it.
I had developed an attraction to fireworks, or rather the second-rate bundles of cheap looking red, purple, yellow, and blue striped patterned explosives. The falling stars over Nakayama temple, autumn festivals, the wilting pampas grass. The ones called “pinwheel fireworks” shaped in circles and individually packed into boxes. These sorts of things stirred my heart.
In addition, I came to like flattish glass marbles embossed with sea bream or flowers and glass beads on a string. It was an indescribable pleasure for me to place them on my tongue, a faint cool taste. Is there any taste as refreshing or as cool? When I was young I was often scolded by my parents for putting them in my mouth, but currently this sweet childhood memory had returned to me. Now I was older, and had fallen on hard times, through that taste certain sensations surfaced, a faint, fresh somehow poetic beauty.
You can probably guess that I was virtually penniless. Having said that, I would look at these things to soothe myself when my heart became agitated. Luxuries were a necessity. Even something costing 2-3 sen was a luxury. Beautiful things, that is to say things that tickled my lifeless antennae. Such things naturally consoled me.
Before my life started being eaten into, the place I used to like best of all was Maruzen. The red and yellow eau de cologne, eau de quinine; elegant perfume bottles of Amber and Jade engraved in the Rococo-style or fashionably hand-cut, faceted Kiriko glass. Pipes for smoking, small knives, soaps, cigarettes. In the past I could have easily spent nearly an hour looking at all these things; eventually buying a single, top rate pencil in itself was a luxury. However, it was now nothing less than oppressive. Books, students, charge accounts… these things all appeared to me to be ghosts of debt collection.
One morning, (at that time I was moving around from one friend’s house to another) I was left behind on my own, after a school friend quit school, leaving me in a vacant vacuum. After that I had no choice but to roam around. Something was chasing me. And so from street to street (like the backstreets that I mentioned earlier) I wandered, stopping outside cheap sweet shops, gazing at dried shrimp, dried soy-sauce flavoured dried cod, thin sheets of tofu, finally descending towards the Teramachi area in the direction of Nijo where I would rest my feet outside a fruit shop.
At this point I’d like to introduce this particular shop. Within the range of shops that I knew, it was a favourite. This one was by no means a splendid shop, but one could clearly sense the beauty which was characteristic of fruit shops. The fruit was lined up on a sharply inclining shelf and the shelf itself seemed to be a black lacquered plank. There was some kind of colourful, beautiful and fast-paced music flowing out of the shop but the fruit – just as colourful, just as loud – stood up rigidly in clumps, like they were people who had looked at a Gorgon’s evil mask and been turned to stone. Naturally, the further into the shop one went the bigger the piles of green vegetables became, and then there were things steeping in water like beans or arrowroot.
It was at night that it was particularly beautiful. Teramachi was generally a busy street, (I say that, but in terms of the way it felt, compared to Osaka or Tokyo it was much quieter I’m sure) light flowed abundantly into the street from the shop windows. For some reason there was a sphere of darkness surrounding the face of the shop. Because the Nijo side of the street was usually dark anyway. It wasn’t clear why it was so dark. However if it wasn’t for the contrasting darkness surrounding this particular shop, I doubt I would have seen the allure of it. Another thing was that the canopy protruded out and it looked a bit like the shop was wearing a visor coyly pulled down low over so as to conceal its eyes; it really was enough of a resemblance to make you think “Hey, that shop is wearing a hat!”
Because of the darkness surrounding the shop, one really noticed the string of lights outside the shop, stubbornly spilling glittering light onto the street. This naked electric light of tightly spiralling helices pierced my eyes, and I preferred to look at it filtered through the glass of the second floor of a nearby weighing shop.
Even so, this fruit store was one of the rare places in Teramachi where I could sometimes still enjoy myself.
On that day, I was unusually doing my shopping at that particular shop. In doing so, I discovered a most rare lemon. Lemons are pretty common. This shop was not particularly shabby, no different to any other greengrocer and so I had not spent time browsing here before. Oh how I loved this lemon! The colour of this lemon was exactly like simple, solid lemon yellow paint squeezed right out the tube…taking the form and shape of a spindle… eventually I decided to buy this single item. From here, I wondered where would I go? I walked down a street for a long time. The continuous oppressive pressure of the ominous lump on my heart that seemed to slacken ever so slightly, just for an instant, which made me wonderfully happy. To the extent that for the first time I was distracted from the persistent depression, I perhaps should have been doubtful that this lemon brought so much happiness, but it was paradoxically real. At any rate, my heart was a certainly a mysterious thing!
The coolness of the lemon was good, like nothing else. In times before, I always had a fever as result of the apex of my lungs being weak. My friends would flaunt my fever to anyone and I would grasp various hands for the sake of comparison, however my palms were always hotter than anybody else’s. I suppose it was because of this heat that I found great relief in grasping the transparent yet piercing coolness.
Time after time I brought it to my nose to smell it. The scent made me imagine the place in California where it was grown. A phrase from “Baikanshanokoto”[1] which I studied in Chinese literature suddenly surfaced: “a smell which hits the nose”. I deeply inhaled till my lungs were full of the scent. My lungs could never normally hold so much air; my lukewarm blood rose throughout my body and face, and somehow, I came alive, full of vigour.
Although I would not like to admit it, for a great many years I had been searching for nothing else but such simple pleasures of the sensation of touching something cold; the sense of touch; sense of smell; vision, now embodied in this lemon. It seemed to me to be a mystery.
My comings and goings were once again a light task carried out with excitement. While feeling that this may be a kind of pride, I strutted down the beautifully decorated streets, imagining myself as a poet or something as I walked by.
I thought about the lemon placed in a dirty hand towel, in an allocated spot of my mantle, weighing up the reflected colour; the weight.
Ordinarily I might have lost interest in such a thing, precisely because of its weight. But without a doubt the weight had been converted into something entirely good, entirely beautiful. A conceited joke from the depths of my heart – I considered myself foolish that such a small thing made me so happy.
Where to next…? I finally stood in front of Maruzen. Considering how I normally avoided Maruzen, in that moment I seemed to be able to enter with ease. “Just this once I’ll try and enter.” With that I entered the store aggressively.
However, I don’t quite know why but as soon as I entered, the feelings of joy which had filled my heart started to seep away. Neither the vials of perfume nor tobacco pipes, could not prevent the sinking feeling. Fresh depression had come once more. With every step and turn I grew weary. I tried heading towards the shelves of picture books. “If only I were to take one of those heavy picture books, I could recoup the strength I need to return to normal!” I thought to myself. However, as I took books off the shelf one by one, opened them, diligently turned the pages, happiness did not well up inside me as I hoped. Moreover, intolerable feelings took the place where happiness had been. I could not even return the books to their original places[2]. I repeated the action many, many times. Eventually, I came to a bitter-orange coloured book, the angles of which I particularly liked, and placed it down, unable to bear it. What kind of curse is this? Fatigue remained in the very sinews of my hands. The return of my depression. Unable to return the books to the shelf, I gazed at them herded up in piles.
I wondered what had attracted me so strongly to these picture books before. I finished exposing my eyes page by page each and every page, but when I surveyed the unremarkable surroundings I got a strange and out of character feeling. Before I had consciously savoured all of them…
“Ahh that’s it, that’s it.” At that moment I was reminded of the lemon concealed in my sleeve. The books were just a pile of colours all jumbled up. How about testing them against the lemon… “That’s it”.
Just then, a light feeling of excitement returned to me. I grabbed whatever I could, smashing and grabbing, unplugging, removing, pulling books from the shelves. I built a strange and fantastic castle, mixing reds and blues throughout.
Finally, it was completed. My heart skipped a beat, and I mounted the lemon gently on the drawbridge. Now it was complete.
I looked at the lemon. Its yellow hue sucked in and absorbed the gradient of clashing colours from within its spindle shaped body, replacing them with clarity. I got the feeling that the dusty air within Maruzen started to tense strangely around the lemon. I stared at it for quite a few moments.
Suddenly I had a second idea. It was so strange that it even I was startled by it.
I would walk out the shop pulling a face like I haven’t eaten anything. A curiously prickly feeling came over me. “I’ll be off then. Right, let’s go.” I left the shop briskly. The strange prickly sensation made me smile when I reached the street. I am such a strange rascal; I left that terrible, golden glittery bomb in Maruzen. In 10 minutes, the shop will explode from a massive explosion within the fine art section – such indescribable mischief!
I had enthusiastically pursued my fantasy. “When it explodes, the constraints of Maruzen will be blown to smithereens, I guess.”
With that I went on my way, painting my strange refinements of moving photographs onto the streets of Kyogoku as I went.
TRANSLATED FROM THE JAPANESE BY AMY SHEPHEARD, 2010. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
[1] 売柑者之言(pinyin “màigānzhězhīyán”) meaning something along the lines of “Statement of one who sells citrus fruits”. It is a story about someone who buys an expensive piece of citrus fruit which releases a stench that “hits him in the nose” when he cuts it open.
[2] In the context of the rest of this paragraph, this seems to be the best translation. However, no subject and no object are stated so it also has the possibilty of a second meaning: “I could not return to how I had been before”. I thought this was quite interesting as a play on words describing the simutaneous actions occuring, but it is near-impossible to convey in English!
