目取真俊さんの小説やエッセイを特化したサイトを立ち上げる前にわたし自身のＨＰにリンクして以下の翻訳コーナーを昨日開始した。しかし妙なことに、文字化けが起こっている。ありえない妨害の始まりかと危惧して、このＧＯＯは信頼できるかと思い転載することにした。ＧＯＯブログで目取真俊の英語サイトを立ち上げてもいいのかもしれない。Yahooの問題？ＰＣのウイルス？
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Medoruma Shun's original short story （海の匂い 白い花） Scent of Sea White Flower
Scent of Sea White Flower
The scent of the sea breathed in the backroom where my grandmother lay for a year or so before she passed away. I felt a soft, warm atmosphere with a salty scent wrapped around my neck and wrists, when I opened the fusuma, or the Japanese sliding door in the backroom. White salt crystals grew on my skin some time after I left the room. My bedridden grandmother was already unconscious, and her eyelids moved just slightly when I whispered her name into her ear. My mother indeed bore the extraordinary burden of caring for her. After my grandmother was unable to go to the bathroom, my mother left her job and spent all her time with the nursing care. My uncle and aunt, living away from parents’ home, told my father to hospitalize her instead of offering any help to my mother, but he never listened to them. He lived with my grandmother in most of his life, except for few months when he served in Tekketsu-kinnoutai, or the Blood-and-Iron Imperial Loyalist Corps composed of children in the Battle of Okinawa during World War Two and when he was held prisoner by the U.S. military after the War. As was his second nature, he insisted that he take the responsibility, as the oldest son, for being by her bedside at home when she dies.
No matter how stubbornly he said so, it was my mother who nursed the grandmother. I quarreled with him over the heavy burden on my mother several times. However, she expostulated with me every time we did. My grandmother was a short-tempered woman. She underwent much suffering caused by my grandfather who was a political animal and a philanderer, and had worked to raise my father and his siblings. Developing a harsh personality during her straitened life, she got tough on my mother too. Although my mother must have always had something to worry about, she seemingly kept reminding herself that she should be devoted to caring for my grandmother until the last moment.
Those days, I worked for a high school in the middle region of Okinawa. At every weekend, I drove fast for two hours to my parent’s house. The scent of the sea in the backroom became stronger with each homecoming visit. One day when I went home, my mother complained to me that my aunt accused her of neglecting the washing of my grandmother’s body or the changing of her clothes. She was so mindful of all her actions that she could not have ignored attendance on my grandmother. The room was full of the scent of the sea no matter how many times she aired out the room. She said she heard even the sound of waves lately in the house where everyone was fast asleep at nightfall. At that night when I stayed at the home, I truly heard the slow lapping of waves while reading a book and opened the fusuma of the backroom twice. The comforter cover was lit pale by moonlight streaming from the window and the breathing sound of my grandmother in bed was just faintly heard.
Several months later, my mother told me the story about a swelling on my grandmother’s breast, when we were alone. Though she first thought it was just a boil, it swelled up like a resilient breast of a girl before her first period, with the tips of a beautifully shaped swelling having something like a little nipple. My father at first suspected a malignant tumor, but the color and shape made him back off his idea of asking a doctor to dissect it. She already had not tolerated surgery. After listening to the story, I entered the grandmother’s bedroom. While caressing her silver thin hair and hollow cheeks due to the removal of false teeth, I imagined the swelling growing like a young and fresh breast under the comforter and felt something sensually vivid and embarrassing.
The following week, my mother took me to grandmother’s room shortly after I arrived at my parents’ house. Sitting on grandmother’s bedside with me, my mother said I shouldn’t be surprised to see it. She pulled off the cover and bared grandmother’s chest veiled by kimono nightclothes. I gazed down at her breast with a straight-back while being ashamed to see the unexpectedly elastic skin and feeling like running away, and my mother opened the bust further to the left. I saw the fist-sized peachy swelling by her flattened left breast, and it really looked like a girl’s bosom. My mother said I hadn’t moved and took a close look. While I held still as she told, the tip of the third one begun to cleave by inches. It was splitting slowly, and translucent white tentacles were stretching from the inside. Appearing from the center of a flowerlike bunch of tentacles wavering and spreading out was the face of a vivid orange tropical fish. Two white bands and black eyes on an orange body. A clown fish of about five centimeters long, inhabiting a sea anemone, was turning around among hundreds of tentacles, swimming in the air away from tentacles of a flower, and returning to the back of the flower. As I was absorbed in the scene, she said emphatically that I should never tell this to anyone. She fixed the collars and pulled the cover over my grandmother’s chest again.
After walking out of the room, she told me a story heard from my grandmother. When the mother of the grandmother died young in her thirties, several butterflies were flying around at mother’s bedside. Their white, black and orange colors eased sorrow and fear of the grandmother in her early girlhood. This was the story I had not heard of before. I conjured up an image of a girl that admired the view while shedding tears. I felt as if I could smell a whiff of flowers that would have wafted in the air.
Shortly thereafter, my grandmother passed away. Though she did not recover consciousness, she was able to die in her sleep without suffering pain.
Her remains were cremated in a crematory by the sea and were housed in our grave on a hill overlooking the East China Sea.
Whenever I recall my grandmother, the vision of her peaceful countenance in her end is overlapped with that of a clown fish playing in a white-tentacle flower. I can’t help but feel that the heavenly colors of ocean life are the last consideration that she showed for us.
The scent of the sea still remains subtly in the backroom.
*Essays are a bit behind since Shoko has to engage in another project right now, but it's coming soon.
【Trnslated by XY, 2010.12.28】
All right is reserved by Shun Medoruma/Ｘ and Translation project X. Copyright ©
下は本来の形だが、立ち現われてくる時の文字化けがあるので同じタイトルで確かめてみたらいいかと思います。ここで新たに英文翻訳に特化したブログを創設してもいいかもーー。目取真さんの「海鳴りの島から」もＧＯＯブログでしたよね。彼のブログの中身も全部英訳したいほどですが、なかなかメンバーが少なくて難しい。もしこれをご覧になる方で翻訳に協力したい方がおられましたら是非連絡ください！沖縄は自ら世界に発信しないかぎりいつまでも日米の軍事植民地のままですからね。
＜写真は今朝庭で見つけたオオゴマダラのさなぎ！金色に輝いている！この翻訳プロジェクトＸが輝きますように！＞
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