Tatsuo Hori’s novella The Wind Rises

What actually qualifies a text as “reading between the years”? Anyone who thinks about it will not necessarily, but quite likely, come to the conclusion that it is a mood of mixed, contradictory feelings – and this is what is called elegiac: “The elegy was otherwise a work of sadness / But afterwards it also became joy consecrated,” says Gottsched.

In this sense, Tatsuo Hori’s Japanese novella is elegiac by its title and the motto that precedes it from Paul Valéry’s poem “Le Cimetière marin” (The Sea Cemetery), which combines death and life, sorrow and hope, in which the sun sets “on the Abyss Vibration” and in which the lyrical I exclaims at the end: “Le vent se lève! . . . Il faut tenter de vivre!” The translator Sabine Mangold prefers variants like “The wind is freshening up” or “The wind is rising” to the even more active one: “The wind is rising, now it’s time to live.” This also seems to be the case for the time being to fit the animated nature of Tatsuo Hori’s recent work. “Kaze tachinu”, originally published in 1937/38 in the magazine “Kaizo”, already has a remarkable history of impact in Japan, has been adapted for film several times and inspired Hayao Miyazaki’s praised anime “How the Wind Rises” – but is here for the first time in the transferred German.

capture the moment

The novella begins with an impressive image that seems to evoke the priority of life over art: in the summer, two lovers lie under a birch in the “lush, overgrown pampas grass” and snack on fruit. The woman has just been painting at an easel there, the man is watching her. When the wind knocks the easel over, the woman jumps up, but the man holds her tight “so that you stay with me and nothing is lost at this moment”.

But a short time later this idyll is destroyed, the woman has “surprising news” (behind which a fatal illness hides, as it slowly turns out) and autumn has “devastated the forest beyond recognition”. Tatsuo Hori places language images of the ephemeral beauty of shimmering light and clouds next to cool, factual insights that make the reader shudder. The romance of the text soon turns out to be unfathomable: the man who tells the story himself confesses to his fiancée Setsuko, “that it is precisely your fragility that makes my love for you even stronger”. The dream of a life together in a mountain hut becomes the reality of ending one’s life in a sanatorium; the temporary improvement turns into the opposite.

Finally the wind howls

In addition, the story becomes more mysterious. Their chronology seems to have gotten muddled, and Setssuko tells us that the couple’s husband, who is also the narrator, fantasizes “sometimes the most unbelievable things”. The fact that this man is a writer himself, who is working on a new work with his wife during his stay in the sanatorium, makes his wishes increasingly doubtful (“I would like to see you overjoyed while writing”) and gives the text a metafictional level – reinforced by the information that Tatsuo Hori (1904 to 1953) was fascinated by sanatorium stories all his life, that he himself fell ill with tuberculosis and died of it.

The text ends with the diary entries of a writer at the end of a year who deals intensively with Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Requiem for a Girlfriend”. On December 30th, he is all alone in a lonely Japanese mountain hut, apparently content in this “oasis of calm”, although the wind rising outside soon becomes a howling one, only blowing up dead leaves. In stark contrast to the image at the beginning, the novella leaves the question at the end of whether art has perhaps conquered life here. Could this be her moral warning and thus the greatest effect on the reader’s soul, which is balancing between the years and between existential weightings?

Tatsuo Hori: “The Wind Rises”. novella. Translated from the Japanese by Sabine Mangold. Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Halle 2022. 86 p., hardcover, €16.