Death of Nomura San and Frustrating Work in Senai, Johor

長い間、ここには何も書かなかった。何も書いていなかったいうわけではなくて、別に、生まれてから今までのことを思い出せる限り書こうとしていた。ただ、思い出せても、文章にすることを心が許せないことも、まだある。もう、10万字を超えたが、最後まで書き通せるかどうかは、さっぱりわからない。

おととい（11日）、ノムラさん死去の報あり。嗚呼……。大阪ナンバのノムラ南海に歓喜熱狂した。京都に住む子供であり、大阪球場まで観戦に行けた回数は多くはないが、それでも中学生の頃は南海ホークスに将来就職したいと思って、球団の「スズキ・マネジャー」に手紙を送ったほどだった。ノムラさんはヨメはんのせいで二度も失業している。南海ホークスを消滅させたのはこのヨメはんだと、今も思う。ノムラさんの追悼記事のなかで、南海監督を解任された当時の報道やヨメはんの脱税事件を原因とする阪神監督辞任について触れているものを見つけることができない。南海監督解任以降、この人にはこのどうしようもないヨメはんしか、信用できる人はいなかったのかもしれない。ノムラさんが「再生」させた江夏豊が、偶然に東北新幹線でノムラさんに会った時のことを『左腕の誇り』に……

「野村さんの嫁さんの性格とか、あのときとった行動はマスコミで報道されているとおりです。僕は監督と一緒に南海を辞めたんですが、そのときのことで、古い友だちがみんな野村さんから離れていった。で、僕は新幹線のなかで二時間ぐらい話をして、別れぎわに言ったんです。

『友だちがいないというのは、寂しいですね』

『うーん、そうやな。でも、まあ、金が残ったからなあ』」と記している。

ノムラさんの死去について、いろんな人がコメントしているが、自分が知る限り、江夏が何を言ったかについては報道されていないようだ。南海監督時代の選手たちからのコメントも見当たらない。ノムラとエナツ。自分にとっては、この二人が南海ホークスの象徴のようだったのに。

月曜日から今日（13日）まで、ジョホール州セナイで通訳。仕事をいただくことに感謝しつつ、終日引っ張りまわされること、通訳としての業務依頼なのに翻訳もしないといけなかったこと、そのために昼食の時間もなかったことに、大きな不満あり。同じ客先について。これまでも、文章を訳したことはあるが、それはいずれも１時間を必要としない作業だった。今回は、自分の１日分の翻訳作業に匹敵するかもしれない文章を数時間でやらねばならなかった。ほとんどの場合、通訳は翻訳せず、翻訳者は通訳せず、だろう。翻訳依頼ではないので、翻訳料金が発生しても何の不思議もない。通訳業務と翻訳業務は別のものであることを伝えようと思う。

Since Then

I haven’t written anything for so many weeks and the year is now going.

I don’t have enough work to make the company in profit these days, which is of course scary. In November, I had a small translation job about IOLs and a 3-day interpretation job for the same company about a training for sales trainers. And this month was better with two translation jobs for a Tokyo company affiliated with a German-based airline, 1-day interpretation for a Japanese TV producer and, in the following week in Tokyo, a 4-day interpretation job for medical-equipment engineers. I really enjoyed my stay in Tokyo, even with minor accidents (I got lost my way in Shimbashi as the trains and the Hahamatsucho platform were very crowded… Somehow, I managed to rejoin them after an hour or so).

And it’s been about penmanship, fountain pens and Kaiko Takeshi.  I got Rotring (not Montblanc) pens with five different nib sizes. And some dip pens too. And trying to see how it feels writing with them.

The book about Kaiko by Tanizawa was so powerful that my interest, limited to his reports about the Vietnam War until then, in Kaiko deepened. After this book by Tanizawa, I’ve read “輝ける闇, ” “青い月曜日,” ”夏の闇,” “破れた繭,” and ”夜と陽炎.”

Two days ago, I started “日本三文オペラ,” which is a fascinating Osaka story, and “ロマネ・コンティ一九三五年”  is waiting now. I also have four books of “新八犬伝.” The DVD of the puppet drama was rather disappointing.

Loneliness Can Kill

These days, almost every day, when I wake up, anxiety attacks. It feels like my wrists are swollen with blood circulation. And an article in The Economist, How Does It Really Feel to Be Lonely, expresses many things that I also feel.

 “’I’m lonely, and I want to have a family’, and there’s a kind of shame in that.”

“if I were to write the truth [to a dating site] – that I’m lonely and worried I might not have a family – it would be just the most off-putting thing.”

“The greatest suffering is being lonely, feeling unloved, just having no one,” Mother Teresa wrote.

“They feel ashamed or embarrassed, as though feeling lonely isn’t something serious.”

“I think it is very likely”, [the psychologist Adam Phillips] says, “that people who are lonely as adults were lonely as children.”

Looking back, James explains, he reckons he had begun to distance himself from his parents and their bitterly unhappy marriage when he was about six. By the time they divorced, when he was nine, he was “completely separate” from them: “I was living in the same house as my mother and sister, but I probably wouldn’t spend more than 15 minutes a day in their company. I routinely had meals alone, then went back up to my room and stayed there, alone.”

“Loneliness is worthlessness. You feel you don’t fit in, that people don’t understand you. You feel terrible about yourself, you feel rejected. Everyone goes to the pub, but they don’t invite you. Why? Because there’s something wrong with you.”

“Like being surrounded by a dark void that you have no way of crossing.”

“Mental-health problems and depression are quite fashionable now, but loneliness is not fashionable. There’s something shameful about it – ‘it’s my fault, there’s something wrong with me, I’m a horrible person.’”

For 91-year-old Robbie, living in Kent and a widower since 2012, “loneliness is not having somebody to do nothing with.”

After three books by Kaiko, I’m now reading The Sacred Willow by Mai Eliott. Yesterday, another book by Tim O’brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone, arrived and Tanizawa Eiichi’s book on Kaiko should be on its way here.

Ridiculous Foreign Language Learning in Japan

This afternoon, interpretation. Only for a few hours, but I had to follow speakers who never stopped for me.

And tonight, I finished Kaiko Takeshi’s autobiography, Torn Cocoon (破れた繭). The book covers many of the same things I’ve read about in Blue Monday, but there are several differences. For example, a maid working at a US military dormitory (Blue Monday), who asked about the pronunciation of “water,” becomes an “airline stewardess” (Torn Cocoon), who asked if he had been to Korea, the questions he had to handle at an English conversation school he was working. And the man who asked for private lessons for his upcoming trip to the US. In Blue Monday, he is the company president of a pharmacy chain in Osaka and in Torn Cocoon he is the company president of a confectionary manufacturer.

進駐軍宿舎のメイド「ワラでもウオーラーでも通じますけれど、どちらがきれいな英語かお聞きしたい」（青い月曜日）

航空会社のスチュワーデス「韓国へ行ったことがありますか」（破れた繭　耳の物語１）

「大阪の目抜きの町のあちらこちらに薬局をだしているチェーン・ストアの社長」（青い月曜日）

「菓子会社の社長」（破れた繭　耳の物語１）

But, a passage in Torn Cocoon, where my eyes stopped flowing, roughly says, “I was made to feel the pleasure of a sailor who is approaching a desert island by deconstructing long, complicated English sentences and reconstructing them in Japanese.”

「長くて複雑な英語の文章を分解したり日本文に組立てなおしたりする仕事には無人島に近づいていく水夫の愉しみをおぼえさせられた」 （開高健：破れた繭　耳の物語１）

Later, Kaiko laments his own lack of understanding of English in The Cross of Saigon. That’s not surprising at all. He tried to learn English by deconstructing English sentences and reconstructing them in Japanese. That is how it still is in Japan, I guess. Understanding English as and in Japanese… It doesn’t work. It never will. Deconstructing and reconstructing is just like adding numbers and symbols to Chinese texts to make them appear Japanese sentences! That’s not the way to learn Chinese, though I know those “Chinese” classes are not intended to teach students to learn the Chinese language. But what a waste… People still don’t seem to understand it, and teachers only follow the way given by the Ministry of Education that probably knows nothing about language learning. The maid’s question about the “water” pronunciation is stupid, and the teacher, Kaiko, didn’t know how to handle it.

Against the Flood by Ma Van Khang and Kaiko Takeshi

Now I remember on August 2 at CC, I said, “I can be very irritable when I’m busy and depressed when I have no business.” He said, “Then, you’re alive.” True, but tough.

On Saturday (21st), I woke up early. And I even thought about having bak ku the as breakfast in the neighborhood, but moved to the sofa and, lying down on it, began reading the remaining pages of Against the Flood by Ma Van Khang and, after the last page of it, started to read Aoi Getsuyobi (Blue Monday) by Kaiko. Against the Flood had an unexpected turn, with the beautiful “Hoan,” dealing with opium trade to get rich to shame those cowards and schemers who had acted against a man, “Khiem,” she so loved, being put in prison and mysteriously being freed by her “Network.” We don’t know if Hoan and Khiem ever met again. And it seems to me the story is rather forced, leaving me to think, “Oh no. Don’t stop there.” I wish I could read Vietnamese.

Reading Aoi Getsuyobi explains, and helps me understand, parts of Kaiko’s later works that I’ve read, Into a Black Sun and Darkness in Summer.

I still have Mai Elliot’s The Sacred Willow to read, whom I’ve met in PBS’s The Vietnamese War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, and Kaiko’s two volumes of his autobiography.

Surprisingly, Kaiko Takeshi describes in Blue Monday most of the countless “English conversation schools” sprouted up right after the war’s end “indecent.” “Indecent” is the adjective I always use for the “English conversation industry” where I had worked from the late 1980s to the early 1990.