Gaps
Haneko Takayama
Translated by Toshiya Kamei
While I was studying abroad, I wrote letters for other people. Ever since I can remember, I’ve been an avid reader. As writing came naturally to me, I agreed to such requests without giving them much thought and later regretted it. The thing is, no matter how carefully you write down spoken words, your peculiarities inevitably creep into what you write. I couldn’t erase my own peculiarities no matter how many times I reread and rewrote a letter. I never bumped into a girl on campus after she gladly picked up the letter I forced myself to finish, though I still feel I could’ve done better.
After that incident, I was hesitant to accept a similar request again. But in the end, someone else convinced me, saying that she had no one else to turn to. She wanted relatively easy content, a jumble of hackneyed phrases. Even so, the finished product failed to satisfy me. A letter must convey one’s feelings. If it fails to do so, it serves no purpose at all, not even as origami. Such a letter should go straight to the trash can.
What scares me most is that I never know if my client is happy with the result. That’s why they ask me to write for them in the first place. So, I felt too guilty to enjoy compliments from appreciative clients. When I confide to my friends, they laugh off my insecurities, adding, “You’ve got a discerning eye. That’s all.”
The young man who called out to us at the bus stop had a calm yet serious expression on his face. “Please someone help me read this letter,” he pleaded, looking around. I hesitated to volunteer, remembering my experiences in my school days.
The letter he held in his hand—actually an old creased piece of paper—contained grammatical irregularities particular to a certain region. Tourists on board would have found it difficult to translate the dialect into smooth English, let alone understand it.
Except me.
No matter how long the young man waited, he wasn’t likely to find anyone who would understand the contents of this old letter. My grandfather’s home village once possessed a dreamlike, special culture, now lost to history. Although I never used the language in my daily life, I was the only one among my large family who was always by my grandfather’s side, as he drifted in the haze of his second childhood.
When I offered to read his letter, the young man’s face relaxed somewhat.
I still remember a few of the peculiar sayings my grandfather used to say.
“A spell is not cast on paper or in ink,” he said. “It’s cast as if inserted into the gap between them.”
This saying left quite an impression on me.
My grandfather was a pioneer of national animation, which had developed at breakneck speed, lagging some distance behind the world’s cutting-edge standards.
My grandfather was born in a small village with a murky history. According to one theory, his home village was founded by craftsmen who set up workshops there. Another theory was that it gradually grew as traveling entertainers settled there. But its origin remains a mystery. Ditto for the language spoken locally. It featured warped characteristics that were hardly intelligible to residents in the surrounding areas. The linguistic divergence perhaps stemmed from the country’s policy to prevent technology drain. Or it resulted from the random mixing of nomadic cultures. No one has come up with a convincing theory behind it.
Years ago, my grandfather founded an educational film production company in that village. He used simple second-hand equipment acquired inexpensively from a developed country. The so-called studio consisted only of the basic equipment, ample land, and technicians who learned as they went along.
His educational films were shot utilizing primitive techniques and effects. Even so, they gained nationwide popularity as only simple documentaries were available at that time.
Back then, the national government had a real stake in children’s learning. So my grandfather received many commissions, which kept him quite busy, forcing him to churn out one project after another at short intervals.
These films didn’t attain cultural capital as the country’s first short films until much later. As a young boy, my grandfather learned fine craftsmanship. I wonder how he felt when he mass produced films that looked cruder than today’s GIFs.
Despite technical innovation, my grandfather’s movies seemed to have visually regressed on the surface. At that time, the domestic animation industry was crowded with large movie studios saturating the market with special effects films, so his movies were only expected to be nothing more than educational materials for toddlers. While nationalized education curriculum lost political momentum, my grandfather’s old movies were considered preachy propaganda designed to brainwash young minds.
Although his movies looked jerky, they curiously gained depth. Eventually, my grandfather was forced to cut his production budget and work with fewer crew. No one in the production department had a good grasp of the techniques used in his films from this period. When scholars specializing in my grandfather’s surviving oeuvre asked him about the specific methods he employed, he seemed to have given them only vague answers.
Each human brain is equipped with an ability to predict and compensate missing information based on what the eyes have seen. Simple animation takes advantage of that brain function. Only a few still images are needed for imaginary things to move in the viewer’s mind. If a stick figure with his right foot forward and the one with his left foot forward appear alternately, the figure starts walking in the viewer’s head.
In the end, a story is a form of entertainment that plays with the illusion your brain creates. Movies, novels, paintings, and music serve merely as triggers for such entertainment. I learned that from the turns of phrase that escaped from my grandfather’s agape mouth, drool spilling out.
With my gaze fixed on the letter, I recalled my grandfather while the young man’s eyes pleaded with mine. I could easily discern the relationship between him and the piece of paper in his hand. The letter was written in a way that encouraged such a prediction and stimulated the reader's mind to fill the gap in with information—his mother’s thoughts, her specific ethnicity, and epistle stories I failed to write in college, not for want of trying.
While reading the letter, I was more captivated by its magic than its contents. I’ll ask him when I’m done reading, I thought. Yet I hesitated.
Did your mother really exist? I wondered, but I caught myself before blurting out. Still keeping my gaze averted, I mumbled, “Maybe my grandfather didn’t either. . .”
Haneko Takayama is an award-winning Japanese writer. In 2009, her short story “Udon, Kitsune tsuki no” was a runner-up for the Sogen SF Short Story Award. Her story collection of the same name was a finalist for the Nihon SF Taisho Award in 2014. In 2020, her novel Shuri no uma won the Akutagawa Prize.
Toshiya Kamei holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Arkansas. His translations have appeared in venues such as Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Strange Horizons.