š Thoughts on Traveling Practice
Last night I couldnāt sleep, so I read all of Traveling Practice by Yusuke Norishiro (translated by Takami Nieda) in one go. It was a short read, a slim 92 pages that took about two hours or so start to finish, and it left me with a tangle of strange feelings. The publisher Honford Star (excellent publisher to follow if youāre interested in Asian literature, by the way) describes it like this:
Traveling Practice follows a novelist and his spirited niece as they embark on a walk across the Japanese countryside during the last days before the pandemic. Through their journey, the book masterfully explores themes of memory and the power of writing to capture fleeting moments and preserve them. Nominated for the prestigious Akutagawa Prize and winner of both the Mishima Yukio Prize and the Tsubota Joji Literature Prize, Traveling Practiceās quiet, reflective tone and focus on the charactersā inner lives elevate it beyond a simple travel story, establishing it as a significant work of literary fiction.
The story is about the events happening around the novelist (I donāt think he was ever named), his niece Abi, and a fellow traveler named Midori, on their multi-day walk to Kashima in Ibaraki Prefecture. It is a humble travelogue, not one about visiting glitzy tourist spots or sampling exotic cuisine; but rather, of the ordinary adventures of walking along a river, eating omurice at a family restaurant, stopping for a rest at local shrines and temples.
Along the way, the novelist takes frequent breaks to capture these fleeting, ordinary moments in writing, the way an artist might pause to sketch their surroundings. These literary āsketchesā touch on the natural flora and fauna of a place, with a particular focus on water birds; the recent history of development of this specific stretch of inaka between Chiba and Ibaraki; and connecting these thoughts with the literary works and lives of celebrated Japanese writers. It is, in short, the sort of travelogue that I adore, of exploring hyper local places and allowing my mind to wander and make idle connections.
Throughout this all is a thread of looming dread. This trip takes place in 2020 March, a strange and disconnected time during the COVID pandemic. The Japanese government had just ordered all schools closed for a month, but otherwise the pandemic itself seemed like a distant, unreal problem. The reader and narrator know now that what was to come in the following months would make our actions during March look naive and foolish. If only we had known what was coming, and had made different choices.
In this light, the novelistās descriptions of this long walk with his niece takes on a melancholic, almost regretful tone. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and to learn that some disaster had befallen them, that they were forced to shelter in place due to an outbreak, or some other terrible misfortune that would tie into this motif of this desperate need to capture fleeting moments in amber memory. We meet Midori who is grappling with her own demons, but aside from a quick flight into and then almost immediately out of crisis, the journey is otherwise idyllic. Itās a weird little snow globe moment from before the COVID situation in Japan really went to shit. Maybe that itself is cause for wistful retrospection.
And if that were the entirety of the novel, I would have loved it perfectly. I too enjoyed remembering with chagrin the naivety I had at the start of the pandemic, before society was forever altered by the threat of this airborne illness. I enjoyed remembering being young and foolish and full of self-doubt and dreams, and it made me want to grab my own notebook and walk along the Sakai River to document all the cormorants and loons I find. The promises that Abi makes to her uncle, about going to the bird museum or visiting Midori in Kashima again, feel less like cliched ččŖćć©ćć° (shibÅ death flags) and more like earnest promises to the reader that they will make it through the looming pandemic somehow.
Big spoiler
Unfortunately, on quite literally the last page of the book, the novel takes a turn.
Reading more like a post-script than as part of the text itself, we learn that Abi died in a traffic accident in the following month, and that the narrator never got in contact with Midori again. Those promises about meeting up again in the future, a standard trope in a lot of Japanese media as a sign that they will not be kept due to some unforeseen disaster, were, in the end, typical death flags.
And, I know this will sound terrible, butā¦ learning that a major character died in the post-script was so abrupt and kind of random that I had to laugh??
It put me in mind of, say, watching a movie like My Neighbor Totoro. Imagine watching that for the first time, grappling with the themes of parental loss and retreating to nature and the passing of time and growing up and all of that. And you think wow, this is already so meaningful and emotional and great, I am so full of Feelings watching thisā¦
ā¦and then suddenly Satsuki gets hit by a truck and is instantly killed, smash cut to the credits. Like. WHAT. LMAO?? WHATTTTTT
That was the feeling I was left with for Traveling Practice. Like, it wasnāt enough to contend with the wistful regret of the time before the pandemic, of spending time with Abi in the final days before becoming an adolescent, of Midori standing on the edge of her own adolescence before jumping off into becoming an independent adult. No, we also had to make this about Abi being randomly killed in a traffic accident. Just likeā¦ a shocking twist for the sake of it, manufactured to make you Feel Something when I had already been Feeling A Lot, like a cheap sucker punch right at the end.
(To be honest, throughout the novel I was bracing for either Abi or Midori to catch COVID and die that way. I meanā¦ can you blame me? Itās Japanese litfic about memory and features two young women. There are few things in life that Japanese novelists love more than killing women in order to impress on their male protagonists how life and love are precious and fleeting. And likeā¦ at least catching COVID would have tied in with the setting and that sense of regret for squandering the pre-COVID days. Dying in a traffic accident is likeā¦ lol so random)
I did enjoy this book, donāt get me wrong. The writing has an earnest clarity that I can appreciate, and Norishiro liberally scatters breadcrumbs for the reader to follow to learn more about different Meiji-, Taisho-, and Showa-era writers, to look into the backstory of Kashima and Zico and the J-League soccer teams, to pay more attention to cormorants and loons and other water fowl. Translator Takami Nieda (who also did the excellent translation for GO by Kazuki Kaneshiro) deftly handles all of these references in a way that eases in readers unfamiliar with Japanese classics, but in a natural way that doesnāt read like Wikipedia sidenotes. If youāve got two or three hours and want to one-shot a very good book slightly marred by a (spoiler) ending, then I recommend Traveling Practice.
Now excuse me, I need to find my notebook and take a walk to the riverā¦