What does translating the follow-up to an internationally beloved book involve? That was the question that translator Yuki Tejima faced when working on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi’s book Totto-chan, the Little Girl at the Window: The Sequel. We spoke with Tejima about her process and the legacy of the first volume, along with an excerpt from the book in advance of an event this weekend in New York City.
When did you first encounter Tetsuko Kuroyanagi — either through her writing or her television presence?
Tetsuko Kuroyanagi has been an inspiring presence in my life for as long as I can remember. The earliest memory I have of her must have been in 1982, a year or two after my family moved to Los Angeles. She was, by then, an iconic figure in Japan, but there was no accessibility to Japanese television in the US like there is now, and my mother hadn’t heard or spoken Japanese with anyone outside of the family in the time she’d been in LA. Late one night, she’d put us kids to bed and was flicking through the channels and was stunned to see Tetsuko Kuroyanagi as a guest on the Johnny Carson Show. It was the first time she’d seen the star in years, on American television no less, and she says it brought to tears, took her back to Japan immediately. Even when I watch the YouTube clip now, Tetsuko-san is a marvel on that show. She was already a household name in Japan with her popular daily talk show – which is now in its fiftieth year – interviewing people like Yul Brenner, Ali McGraw, and every Japanese film legend you can name, and she is so comfortable chatting with Johnny Carson. For any Japanese artist, actor, performer, or public personality, being invited to appear as a guest on her show Tetsuko’s Room is how they know they’ve made it.
Has working on this translation project altered your perception of her work?
I had grown up seeing her in the media and listening to my mother talk about her, but I had never known, until I translated this book, how remarkably hard she worked – though she might not call it that – to become the first television actor in Japan, which would then lead to her famous radio characters, an iconic stage and television actress, the legendary television host. I was surprised to learn that she spent much of her adulthood searching for a talent, a gift to call her own, when she was not conventionally beautiful (that was her understanding), exceptionally gifted in opera (which she studied in music college), or able to blend in with her peers in school or the workplace. Even as she is booted off job after job for standing out too much or not fitting the role, she intuitively trusts in her own abilities, though she does not yet know what they are. She had been my mother’s hero over the years, but translating this book has made Tetsuko Kuroyanagi my hero as well.
The first volume of Totto Chan, The Little Girl at the Window was published in 1982 and translated by Dorothy Britton. Did Britton’s translation of the earlier edition have any bearing on how you approached translating the sequel?
Yes, I read and reread the first book in Dorothy Britton’s translation and was terrified to fill those shoes. There is a wonderfully whimsical and curious tone in the first book that I hoped to capture in the second book, though the sequel is about Tetsuko-san’s life after her childhood and the magical Tomoe Gakuen days, and the days depicted are not always wondrous and wonderful. The sequel is much more rooted in the reality of the outside world and the war, but Tetsuko-san still manages to find joy and delight in her every day as she goes about causing mishaps, hanging from a railroad bridge as a train thunders by above – I was horrified translating that page. I did flip back through the first book often to see how Dorothy might have handled a similar situation.
Was there a particular aspect of Totto-chan, the Little Girl at the Window: The Sequel that was especially challenging to translate?
Because the author’s voice is instantly recognizable to any Japanese person, and I do mean her actual voice, it was important to me that I try to capture it in English. As I translated, I read the text with her voice in my mind, such as the episode where she hears her own recorded voice for the first time and tells the sound engineers in the studio that something must be wrong with the machines because there is no way she could possibly sound like that. I wanted to know what that sounded like and scoured the internet for old recordings of her voice. I thought often about how a voice transitions from television and radio to the page, and then from the Japanese into English. Translators talk all the time about ‘capturing the voice’ when translating, and in this case, there was an actual voice to capture. What is voice? I thought. What happens to it in translation? I don’t know that I will ever translate someone whose actual voice is as well-known as hers, and that experience has been a gift.
Did you work directly with Tetsuko Kuroyanagi on any aspects of the translation?
I have not met never Kuroyanagi-san and have never imagined I would, simply because of who she is! Thankfully, there is so much in existence in the form of video, audio, and books, both by her and about her, that I never ran out of places to turn – including my parents, with whom I had many discussions about the Tokyo in which they and Kuroyanagi-san grew up – to help me sort out all of the famous places, programs, and celebrity names that appear in the book.
Fifteen Soybeans
Tokyo winters during the war were much colder than they are now.
“We’re cold, sleepy, and hungry,” Totto and her friends took to chanting as they walked to and from Tomoe Gakuen. They sometimes added a simple melody, too, and sang it as if it were their very own theme song.
While the rationing of rice had begun before the Pacific War, it didn’t take long once the fighting commenced for restaurants to start shutting their doors one after the other. As the war stretched on, rice rations turned into distributions of sweet potatoes, soybeans, corn, and coarse grains.
By the time the rice in Totto’s lunch had been entirely replaced by soybeans, her hunger became almost unbearable. Come Sports Day, it seemed as if the white rice in everybody’s lunch boxes had vanished all at once. Totto thought back to the sweet inari sushi her mother had made her the previous year and felt crestfallen.
Totto was about to leave for school one chilly morning when her mother handed her an envelope containing fifteen soybeans that she’d roasted in a frying pan.
“Now, listen to me. This needs to last you the whole day.” She placed the envelope in Totto’s palm. “Don’t gobble it up at once. There won’t be any food for you when you come home, so really think about when and how many you eat throughout the day.”
Totto let that sink in. Starting today, this would be all she had for lunch. And no matter how hungry she was, she couldn’t afford to finish it in one sitting.
“Drink lots of water with these. It will help to fill your stomach,” Mother repeatedly reminded Totto.
“Fifteen soybeans… I suppose I’ll have three for breakfast,” Totto decided, and popped one in her mouth on the way to school.
Crunch, crunch.
She chewed slowly with her molars, but the soybean was gone in no time. On to the second.
Crunch, crunch.
Again, gone in a flash. Just one more.
“And that’s three,” she sighed. Once she got to school, she drank plenty of water as Mother had instructed. “Those three beans will soak up the water and get nice and big,” she thought to herself as she imagined the soybeans expanding in her stomach. Totto tucked the envelope into her trouser pocket. She had only twelve soybeans left.
Right around lunchtime, they were in the middle of class when a siren sounded to warn of an air raid. Totto and her classmates took refuge in the bomb shelter in a corner of the schoolyard. With the bunker door closed, the shelter became pitch dark. The children held their breaths and stayed quiet in the beginning, but they soon grew restless and started to pass the time by whispering to one another.
“I had ice cream once,” somebody said.
“Oh, me too!” Totto piped up.
As they waited impatiently in that dark shelter for the siren that signaled the end of the alert, Totto couldn’t stop thinking about her soybeans. Unable to bear it any longer, she reached inside the envelope and placed two beans into her mouth, taking great care not to drop them.
Crunch, crunch, crunch.
That only whet her hunger even more. She longed to scarf down the rest of the bunch, but knew that if she did, she would have nothing left for the rest of the day. “Not now, not now…” she silently repeated, willing herself to show restraint. Then a thought occurred to her. “I still have ten soybeans, but what good will they be if a bomb falls on this shelter and we all die? Maybe I ought to eat them while I can.”
She had another thought. “What if we don’t get hit here, but a bomb burns down my house? What if when I go home, I find out that the house is gone, and that Daddy and Mother are dead? What shall I do then? Perhaps I had better eat the ten soybeans now, after all.”
Such worries spun around and around in her head, filling her with sorrow.
“I do hope our house hasn’t burned down…”
She ate two more soybeans.
The all-clear siren sounded a while later, and Totto and her schoolmates were finally able to crawl out of the shelter.
“We’re finished for the day,” the teacher said. “You may all go home.”
But the closer Totto got to her house, the more frightened she became that it would no longer be standing. Thankfully, she found her home looking just as it had when she left that morning.
“Phew. The house hasn’t burned down, and Mother and Daddy are alive. And I still have eight soybeans.” A wave of relief passed over her.
On nights when Totto was so famished that she couldn’t sleep, she drew pictures of her “dream menu” items. Mother had invented the game. To play, you sketched the foods you wished to eat and then went through all the motions, giving thanks for the meal, munching mouthfuls of air, asking for seconds. I’ll have another! Over and over, they drew pictures of sweet egg omelets, grilled meat, and other fancies, and pretend-chewed them all.
Eventually, the distributed rations were reduced to something called kelp noodles. To make them, thick kelp that had washed ashore was ground into powder, combined with the starchy vegetable konjac, and rolled into thin noodles that resembled udon. Totto didn’t like them because they reminded her of frog eggs, but there was nothing else to eat. And since the family had already run out of condiments with which to season anything, they simply had to boil the frog eggs and slurp them down as best they could.
One winter Sunday, Totto headed out for the Sunday School at Senzoku Church which she had been attending since she was a little girl. It was drizzling lightly and the air was very cold. As she walked, she murmured her usual “We’re cold, sleepy, and hungry” chant that somehow always helped her feel as though she were on a special excursion.
An icy wind was howling, causing a few tears to trickle down her cheeks. She must have been making a strange face, too.
“Hey, you!” a policeman barked at her. “Why are you crying?”
Totto wiped away her tears and replied, “Because it’s cold.”
“Think about the soldiers at war!” the policeman shouted. “They don’t cry just because it’s cold, and neither should you! Stop that at once!”
His anger stunned Totto. Apparently, wartime meant no crying, either.
“I don’t want to be yelled at again,” she thought. “And if you can’t cry when you’re at war, then I won’t cry anymore, even if I’m cold, sleepy, and hungry. The soldiers have it much, much worse than me.”
That was the best Totto could do.
Totto-chan, the Little Girl at the Window: The Sequel
By Tetsuko Kuroyanagi
Translated by Yuki Tejima
Published by Kodansha USA Publishing, LLC
Copyright (C) 2023 Tetsuko Kuroyanagi / KODANSHA LTD.
Photo: Mikico