Tsuki to Mizu no Yoru (Night of Moon and Water)

Author: Kajiwara Niki
Imprint: (One Magazine Comic) Rutile R Collection
Publisher: Sony Magazines
ISBN: 4-7962-8818-X
vol 2: 4-7897-8172-0

Reviewed by Jeanne

I don't want to talk about it.

I mean I do, of course, desperately. (Has anyone else read this work?) But I can't. If I start getting abstract with this, if I talk *about* it, I'll automatically be missing the point.

It's the fault of the language. The words I'd use in English are the wrong words. They're made to describe western stuff and don't come near the reality of the Japanese thing. Seidensticker the famous translator said off-hand in his journal once that you can only describe Japan to someone who has already been there. This is hideously true. The words we use in English have contexts and resonances that are different from the Japanese fact and don't really apply to it. To call Tokyo trains 'crowded' conveys the wrong idea to someone thinking in terms of a western subway rush hour. 'Crowded' in Japan is about three times the western density of body per square foot and about a third the psychic discomfort and unpleasantness. It's this unexpected second fact that makes Japanese crowded totally different from western crowded.

So with this manga. I can only describe it to someone who's seen it. The usual words for talking about stories are too crude or imprecise or have the wrong resonances, and so miss the point. You'll think you know what I'm saying but you'll be thinking of the western thing and not the Japanese one.

'I suppose it's a love story' I could say. It's several love stories but it isn't western romantic love, except some of it is, maybe. Or maybe not. It's about fathers and sons, some, and friendship, some, and some connections that don't have a name in English because they're between the kind of people who don't exist here at all. It's about nameless emotions that are resonant when you see people feeling them but trivial the minute you put a label to them. In a manga where one character says 'I love you,' yes, it's easy to say 'Takaya is in love with Minoru and jealous of his friendship with Keiichi.' But what about people who don't think in terms of 'love' or 'jealous' in the first place, because they're too young or because it *isn't* that kind of love or because they're not human to start with?

I could say 'Nothing happens here.' That line is a killer. It suggests some minimalist French film where two people sit drinking coffee and never speak a word to each other. Of course something happens here, in fact a very odd something. A little boy meets a kappa. Two kappa, which is unusual we're told, and told why. And they're unusual kappa, for anyone who knows anything about that traditional Japanese bogle. But no, a Raiders of the Lost Arc action piece this isn't.

I could say 'I ache to translate it,' which is true, and odd. It's very simple Japanese, very straightforward dialogue, the kind of watercolour language the Japanese use a lot that normally doesn't resonate at all. 'You're late.' 'Mnh.' 'Did you get it?' 'Unh- yeah.' In context, it resonates beautifully.

There's a common idea that gets cited a lot when people are trying their desperate best to describe Japanese culture, and which gets near to the heart of this. What's important in a Japanese painting or a Japanese novel are the bits that are left out- the stuff you don't see. But it's hard for us to understand this concept until we see it happening. Watch two people having a totally mundane conversation about the weather, and sense that there's something more than that. 'Oh yes' your friend tells you later, 'they were together for ages and then she left him last year.'

So there are two narratives in the manga. There's the fairly simple one we see happening- little boy meets the two kappa. He brings his father to meet the kappa. Some years later he brings his friend to meet the kappa. A couple of flashbacks to his father's boyhood and the kappas' first meeting. The kappa go away. At some point in their gone-awayness one of them meets a little girl looking for a red mitten. Like that.

Behind this simple fairy-tale like plot is a whole narrative we don't see. We only see a little of its fallout- odd silences, the occasional inexplicable look of sadness. There are about fifteen stories you could write as back stories to the things we see happening, and some of them are absolutely heart-breaking- all about things that didn't happen and things that couldn't happen, and regret and resignation and sadness because the world is the way the world is, and how everything in the world is still all part of the same thing. Still, you don't know that the story you think happened was what did happen. It could have been something else. That's why the bits of the picture that aren't in the picture are so important.

You aren't told anything. You just see faces and hear silences, and you wonder. But even me telling you that doesn't convey the poise and beauty and fascination of this work. No sex, no overt love story even. Who needs it? I've got a picture of the boy's father talking with the quiet kappa while his son and the rambunctious kappa go off to look at things through Dad's binoculars. I've got a picture of two kappa who are probably just friends taking hands and walking away into the woods together. Wouldn't trade those for any Boys' Pierce in existence.

Yes, yes, everything I've been saying is moonshine and the glimmer of light on water. Nothing you can catch hold of. So here's something you *can* catch hold of. Any Japanese reading this is going to have an idea of what kappa are like, and must deal with the fact that these kappa aren't anything remotely like them except, well, they do have claws and webbed fingers and that seems- sort of seems- to bother the quiet gentle kappa a lot. You can check out pictures of traditional kappa to see what assumptions you should be bringing to this. Kappa are waterspirits with teeth who pull travellers into rivers so they drown. Further unpleasant habits of theirs can be found here. After that- well, look at the pictures of our kappa. We've got something else going on here entirely.