Echo on the Bay

by Masatsugu Ono, Angus Turvill (Translator)

Overview

"Cross García Márquez and Simenon and set the piece on the Sea of Japan, and you’ll have a feel for Ono’s latest… Fans of Kenzaburo Oe’s Death by Water and Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 will enjoy Ono’s enigmatic story.” —Kirkus (starred review)

All societies, whether big or small, try to hide their wounds away. In this, his Mishima Prize-winning masterpiece, Masatsugu Ono considers a fishing village on the Japanese coast. Here a new police chief plays audience for the locals, who routinely approach him with bottles of liquor and stories to tell. As the city council election approaches, and as tongues are loosened by drink, evidence of rampant corruption piles up—and a long-held feud between the village’s captains of industry, two brothers-in-law, threatens to boil over.

Meanwhile, just out of frame, the chief’s teenage daughter is listening, slowly piecing the locals’ accounts together, reading into their words and poring over the silence they leave behind. As accounts of horrific violence—including a dangerous attempt to save some indentured Korean coal mine workers from the Japanese military police and the fate of a group of Chinese refugees—steadily come into focus, she sets out for the Bay, where the tide has recently turned red and an ominous boat from the past has suddenly reappeared.

Populated by an infectious cast of characters that includes a solemn drunk with a burden to bear; a scarred woman constantly tormented by the local kids’ fireworks; a lone communist; and the “Silica Four,” a group of out-of-work men who love to gossip—Echo on the Bay is a quiet, masterful epic in village miniature. Proof again that there are no small stories—and that History’s untreated wounds, no matter how well hidden, fester, always threatening to resurface.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781949641035
Publisher:	Two Lines Press
Publication date:	06/09/2020
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	661,801
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	16 Years

About the Author

Masatsugu Ono is the author of numerous novels, including Mizu ni umoreru haka (The Water-Covered Grave), which won the Asahi Award for New Writers, and Nigiyakana wan ni seowareta fune (Echo on the Bay), which won the Mishima Prize. A prolific translator from the French—including works by Èdouard Glissant and Marie NDiaye—Ono received the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s highest literary honor, in 2015. He lives in Tokyo.

Angus Turvill was a winner of the grand prize in the Shizuoka International Translation Competition, and he has received John Dryden and Kurodahan translation awards. His translations include Masatsugu Ono's Lion Cross Point, also published by Two Lines Press, Tales from a Mountain Cave, by the great humorist and anti-militarist Hisashi Inoue, and Heaven's Wind, a bilingual collection of stories by some of Japan's finest contemporary women writers.

Read an Excerpt

“Was it really a deer?”

“What?”

“The thing you hit. Was it really a deer?”

I didn’t know what he meant. Dad looked confused. He didn’t seem to know what to say. “Were you watching?” he said eventually.

Mitsugu didn’t speak right away. His gaze was still fixed on Dad. Something stirred in his dull eyes, but it couldn’t gather enough force to break free. It stayed where it was, shifting uncertainly.

“Toshiko-bā always says she wants to die,” Mitsugu murmured, forcing each word out painfully. “‘I wanna die, I wanna die!’ she says.”

Again, Dad didn’t seem to know how to respond. Why were they suddenly talking about Toshiko-bā? “Has something happened to her?” Dad said dubiously.

“She’s always sayin’ she wants to die... You sure it wasn’t her on the road, shenshei? Wasn’t she lyin’ on the road like before?” He paused breathlessly between each question. “Was it really a deer you hit, shenshei? Or was it Toshiko-bā?”

“Yamamoto said something about someone lying in the road, didn’t he?” said Dad, glancing toward me, standing in the kitchen.

When Mr. Yamamoto was the policeman here, someone had come knocking on his door early one morning. It was a young truck driver from Marugi Fisheries. He told Mr. Yamamoto that there was an old woman lying on the road and he couldn’t get his truck around her. He wanted Mr. Yamamoto to do something about it. The truck driver had tried his best to get her to move, but she simply wouldn’t. It was all very strange. If it had been a drunk, then maybe it wouldn’t have seemed so odd, but it was an old woman. There weren’t even any houses nearby. It was such a peculiar situation that the driver couldn’t bring himself to pull her off the road, but no matter what he said to her, she just lay there, stock-still, eyes closed. He’d begun to worry that he might have hit her somehow without noticing. But then, to his relief, he noticed some faint movement in her throat. Seeing that she was alive, he turned his truck around and went to Mr. Yamamoto’s house for help.

Mr. Yamamoto told Dad that the driver had described the old woman’s face as rough and craggy. Mr. Yamamoto went back with the driver, but when they got to where he’d seen her, there was nobody there. No sign of her at all.

“The driver looked stunned,” Mr. Yamamoto said. “As though he’d been tricked by a spirit. ‘I saw her right there,’ he’d said, pointing at the road. Maybe I should have checked if he’d been driving drunk,” he laughed, “Anyway, it’s a strange place.” He tapped Dad on the shoulder. “Be careful you don’t get tricked by any spirits while you’re there.”

Dad was looking at me.

“I wonder if that old woman was Toshiko-bā.”

Of course, I didn’t know.

Editorial Reviews

04/06/2020

Ono’s deliriously captivating tale (after Lion Cross Point) draws on the violent past of a Japanese fishing village. The teenage Miki’s father, an ineffectual police officer, spends his evenings hosting four childhood friends who drink and gossip over the course of the narrative about the hapless Mitsugu Azamui, a local drunk who claims to have found a dead body on the beach. Miki, inspired by an ethnologist she sees on TV, begins to piece together stories of the past from the villagers while learning about Mitsugu’s family connection to a local legend of murder. In the meantime, Miki tries to conceal an illicit relationship with her social studies teacher. Ono invents a close-knit rural community rife with secrets and perhaps doomed by a long-ago murder driven by xenophobia and greed, which sheds light on the larger historical brutalities of Japan’s actions in Korea and Manchuria in the 1930s and ’40s. As a boat from the village’s past makes an unexpected, unwelcome return, Ono suggests that any possible redemption must come from an acknowledgment of history. While Ono captivates with metaphoric imagery (a red tide becomes a “huge snake, born of polluted water”), he occasionally skirts close to tasteless abjection with descriptions of lives derailed by cruelty and abuse. Still, this is worth a look. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Cross García Márquez and Simenon and set the piece on the Sea of Japan, and you’ll have a feel for Ono’s latest… Fans of Kenzaburo Oe’s Death by Water and Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 will enjoy Ono’s enigmatic story.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“[A] slim, albeit mighty, narrative that begins comically wry and ends with shocking resonance…Understated, yet unforgettably stunning.” —Booklist (starred review)

“[Ono] is a master storyteller…Echo on the Bay is a masterclass in defamiliarization and dislocation, in rendering reality, truly, powerfully bizarre.” —The Japan Times

“Ono undercuts almost every expectation you may have…Echo on the Bay is an engrossing and, at times bizarre, novel, but its true power is that through all of the disorientation and dislocation, at the center of the story lie acutely familiar sins.” —Asymptote

“Deliriously captivating…Ono suggests that any possible redemption must come from an acknowledgment of history.” —Publishers Weekly

“A masterpiece, reverberating with waves of history and life. Echo on the Bay cuts to the heart of class, place, and nation like no other book I’ve read.” —Kent Wascom, author of The New Inheritors

"An intimate, dark, and poetic portrait of a Japan that isn’t part of mainstream society, Ono demands we look carefully at how people living in a small fishing village are affected by global events. Like an anthropologist, Masatsugu Ono demonstrates his encyclopedic knowledge of a world he loves and cares for. This powerful and lyrical novel should be read by everyone.”—Xiaolu Guo, National Book Critics Circle award-winning author of Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China

“Masatsugu Ono’s work vibrates with the sounds of voices whose meaning has yet to be discovered.”—Yoko Ogawa, author of The Memory Police

“Masatsugu Ono belongs in the first ranks of not just Japanese literature but world literature.”—Akhil Sharma, author of Family Life

From the Publisher

★ 2020-03-29
Atmospheric tale, with shades of the procedural and the coming-of-age story, by Mishima Prize–winning novelist Ono.

Cross García Márquez and Simenon and set the piece on the Sea of Japan, and you’ll have a feel for Ono’s latest, told through the point of view of a middle schooler who’s uprooted from the city by her unambitious father, newly appointed the police chief of a small fishing village. Strange things are afoot there. Dad’s first friend is the town drunk, who’d “endured no real defeats, exhausted by an endless struggle against barriers (the enemy without) and hesitation (the enemy within).” The two stay up late, night after night, drinking while other townies make a sport of sending bottle rockets flying toward the home of a widow named Toshiko. Meanwhile, an election brings out political opponents, one of whom doesn’t have much of a platform except to keep those rockets out of the air, and more than a little whiff of corruption. Ono’s yarn brims with unexpected turns that not only link these matters, but also nimbly move the villagers backward and forward in time and space: Toshiko and the stumbling drunk have a connection that stretches across the sea to Manchuria, where a Japanese army of occupation behaved brutally during World War II, and now Chinese migrants are crossing the same waters in search of jobs in Japan, some dying miserably in the holds of rusting freighters even as a pollution-born red tide devastates the fisheries. Throughout, Ono peppers the story with magic-realist moments: The drunk finds a corpse buried in seaside muck that only he seems able to see while a "rock-like" fisherman and a chemically toxic colonel hover on the edges of an altogether beguiling, swiftly flowing story, one in which everything—well, almost everything—connects in the end.

Fans of Kenzaburo Oe’s Death by Waterand Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84will enjoy Ono’s enigmatic story.

Kirkus Reviews