眠りの精
I found this a quiet, slightly melancholy story. Apart from some intriguing links to the previous story, there was little or no sinister or strange touches.
I had a couple of reflections.
I’m struggling to keep track of the timing of the different stories (anyone else worked it all out?). Here is an attempt. This story is set (in the train), thirty years or so after the narrator’s [another fairly vaguely sketched male character] step-mother married his father. Call the broken down train time T(c4). We learn than she won a prize for her story about 5 or 6 years later, and she left the narrator’s father after 2 years.
It seems as though maybe chapter 3 is the story that she published. So the events of chapter 3 (which led to the photo) must be somewhere between 26 and 30 years before the broken-down train (T(c4)).
Chapter 3 must be before the events of chapter 2 (when they discover the mountain of kiwis). The crying woman from c2 occurs 20 years after that, so maybe 6 to 10 years before Tc4.
That puts the events of chapter 1 at the same time. (The death of the boy in the fridge was 12 years earlier - so 18-22 years before T(c4)?)
- Broken down train [Tc4]
- Crying bakery assistant [Tc4 minus 6-10]
- Death of boy in fridge [Tc4 minus 18-22]
- The mysterious carrots [Tc4 minus 26-30]
- The meeting in the restaurant [a little before the carrots?]
- Ten year old narrator from Tc4 meets the novelist, goes to zoo, listens to a story (doesn’t remember it) [Tc4 -28-30]
No guarantee that this is correct
There are two slightly unsettling deaths in this chapter. The narrator’s first mother died of sepsis soon after his birth. (For those who aren’t aware, and thought this was a bizarre event, pimples or boils in the so-called “danger triangle of the face” can indeed lead to death). Then we have the 孤独死 of the step-mother/novelist, including the description of her mental decline in the ten years prior to her death. I wonder if we will hear more about her fears of someone stealing her manuscripts?
One question for others to ponder. We have the suggestion in this chapter that the story of 老婆 J is the prize winning story by our mysterious novelist character. That might make us wonder if it was entirely imaginary. (In which case, is the 果汁 story which links to it also imaginary?). But our narrator at the end of the current story finds the newspaper photo that featured in the 老婆J story.
So, do you think that the novelist embellished the (real) story of the misshapen carrots - to include the (imaginary) murder of the gambling husband. Or were these events real, and retold by the novelist?
Lastly, I went down a little rabbit hole thinking about the title of this story and what it means.
Obviously 眠りの精 is the title of the Brahms song that the children sing in the broken down train. But does it have any more significance?
We might translate 眠りの精 as the Sleep Sprite, or Sleep Fairy, but the more usual name in English is the Sandman. This figure comes from European folklore. There is a famous Hans Christian Andersen story about the little Sandman, who comes and sprinkles sand into the eyes of children and (if they are good) gives them sweet dreams.
There is nobody in the world who knows so many stories as Ole-Luk-Oie, or who can relate them so nicely. In the evening, while the children are seated at the table or in their little chairs, he comes up the stairs very softly, for he walks in his socks, then he opens the doors without the slightest noise, and throws a small quantity of very fine dust in their eyes, just enough to prevent them from keeping them open, and so they do not see him. Then he creeps behind them, and blows softly upon their necks, till their heads begin to droop. But Ole-Luk-Oie does not wish to hurt them, for he is very fond of children, and only wants them to be quiet that he may relate to them pretty stories, and they never are quiet until they are in bed and asleep. As soon as they are asleep, Ole-Luk-Oie seats himself upon the bed. He is nicely dressed; his coat is made of silken fabric; it is impossible to say of what color, for it changes from green to red, and from red to blue as he turns from side to side. Under each arm he carries an umbrella; one of them, with pictures on the inside, he spreads over the good children, and then they dream the most beautiful stories the whole night. But the other umbrella has no pictures, and this he holds over the naughty children so that they sleep heavily, and wake in the morning without having dreams at all.
There is also a much much darker earlier German story by EA Hoffman, where the Sandman collects the eyes of children who will not go to sleep!
Brahms’ lullaby is apparently based on a German folk song that isn’t related to the Andersen story, but has a benevolent figure who sprinkles sand to help a child go to sleep.
(There is a fascinating and detailed analysis of ambivalence in Brahms’ version of the song and story: Standing on the Threshold: Ambiguity in Brahms’ “Sandmännchen” (The Little Sandman), Tessa Husted – Ward Prize Celebration of First-Year Writers: 2021 – 2022 )
Anyway, the thing I wondered was whether Ogawa is implying that our novelist is akin to the sandman. IN particular, there is that very striking passage where she reads aloud her story to the 10 year old narrator from chapter 4. He very stringently tries to maintain his posture of attentive listening, but ends up wanting her to stop - her voice is starting to break because of how long she has been talking, and he fears she is going to cry. Is she the 眠りの精?
[Here, and at the very end of the chapter, we have a link to crying that seems to run through all of the chapters so far. The crying bakery assistant (chapter 1), the not crying teenager eating kiwis - later crying on discussing her father’s death (chapter 2), the verge of tears expression in the newspaper photo (chapter 3), the story reading that seems like she may cry (chapter 4)]
