There Is No Ghost by Keiko Sena
My rating: 4/5 cats
so, brian and chizuru, the pevear and volokhonsky of japanese lit,
have teamed up once more to bestow upon me another package of japanese children’s books, translated by brian, with help and cultural/moral/spousal support from chizuru. the books themselves would have been a cherished gift all on their own, but the translations make them absolutely priceless.
in case you missed their first gift, my review of it can be found here. the third book will be reviewed shortly, if i can stop being terrified of it long enough to review it.
once again, brian’s struggles with learning the language are hilariously chronicled on every page, as the annotations to his translations make painfully apparent:
like Don’t Want To Go To Bed?, the delight of my reading experience is more with brian’s annotations to his translations than the actual content of the book, and i’d love to reproduce them here in their entirety, but i won’t. you’ll have to trust that the samples i provide are just a small part of an adorable whole, and i am going to treasure my one-of-a-kind book(s) forever and ever.
this book takes the form of a song—a round in which a bunch of ghosts paradoxically try to prove to a scared little boy that ghosts don’t exist.
while the boy keeps insisting that they do exist, that he is scared, and he’s not buying into their lies (or “gaslighting,” as brian so appropriately characterizes it, albeit not a term or reference one expects to encounter in a children’s picture book)
nor does one expect to find a holiday tune so astutely called out for its ickiness:
brian says: The best way to sing this with a group of kids is to have one half sing like they are the ghosts and the other half sing the part of the kid(s), so you have a conversational back-and-forth dynamic, like that Christmas classic “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (but without overtones of possible coercion)
i mean, how can you not love that? that remark is one of the two things in this book that made me giggle audibly.
so it’s a back and forth between the ghosts and the little boy, where he keeps getting mixed messages from the ghosts = nooooo, we don’t exist, okay, we do exist but we are harmless if put in the freezer (!!??)
and then it’s more of the same—nooo, we don’t exist, okay we do exist but we can be friends and shake hands and eat meatballs on a stick together and you can take a bath, in between all of which the little boy repeats how scared he is.
which is all a bit troubling to me. especially in light of this statement:
i see chizuru’s explanation there, but it makes no sense that these ghosts are initially trying to convince the little boy that they don’t exist, acknowledging that he is a little boy, so why on earth would they then flip-flop into the attitude of okay, we exist and we can hang out if you’re “innocent and openminded and not yet firm in (your) disbelief of ghosts,” when it is that very disbelief they are originally trying to foster in him—i.e.—divest him of his innocence?
because that leads into some dark metaphorical territory. basically, they are saying (over the little boy’s protestations and fear), “if you are a child, I am willing to be friends” and we can “shake hands” and “share a snack” (which is represented as some skewered balls), and then you can “take a bath?”—it is all too reminiscent of the shady activities listed in Come On, Dad!: 75 Things for Fathers and Sons to Do Together, and just what child-befriending sickos are these the ghosts of?
after i read the book and emailed them my gratitude, brian sent me a link to the actual song, which is not at all how i was singing it in my head. (which was more like Bohemian Rhapsody with a jazz-age or lounge lizard filter over it)
here is that link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=116Jb…
i just don’t know what to make of this book. it’s way more ethically complicated than it first appeared, and now i’m all unsettled. and not just because of all the ghosts in my freezer.
here are some other books by this author whose titles i have translated myself, with zero knowledge of the japanese language and no assistance at all, relying solely on my visual literacy skills. how’d i do, guys?
Shrieking Cat
Ghost Cookie-Thief
Banshee Picnic
Poo Cloud
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