Titles from the venerable Penguin Classics imprint are usually books one knows one should have read even if one hasn’t (yet): known unknowns, as the famous saying goes. Behind the Painting by Thai author Siburapha is, even for the well-read anglophone consumer of literature, likely to qualify as an unknown unknown. First published 1937, this slim novel is one of Thailand’s best-known modern classics, has been adapted to film twice (as well as three stage musicals), and is a common set text in Thai secondary schools. Yet it is surely largely unknown outside Thailand.
Undeservedly so, for Behind the Painting is a fine novel, albeit very much a period piece, a sort of romantic bildungsroman in which Nopporn, a Thai university student in Japan, falls in love with an older woman, Kirati (or, more accurately, Mom Ratchawong Kirati to use her aristocratic title), wife of a family friend.
When Chao Khun Atthikanbodi took his wife, Mom Ratchawong Kirati, to Japan for their honeymoon, I was a student at Rikkyo University and, at the time, just twenty-two years old. I had known Chao Khun in Thailand because he and my father were friends, and he had always been kindly disposed towards me … Chao Khun Atthikanbodi wrote saying that he was coming to Japan with his new wife, Mom Ratchawong Kirati, and asked me to find accommodation for him and make other necessary arrangements.
The story unfurls as one might expect: the somewhat shy and reclusive (one might even anachronistically say nerdy) Nopporn is enthralled by the charming, elegant and youthful Kirati. She remains composed; he, less so and dismissive of convention. Kirati is not as unaffected as she appears.
It is of course a timeless story, one of desire and regret, of convention and resistance, of mutability (or not) of feelings with time; there are echoes of other classics. It is carefully-written and constructed, the plot moved along more by dialogue and interior monologue than action: little “happens”, which is precisely the point. Nopporn creates and then questions his own reality, one later tested by actual reality. This is a romantic and introspective novel; the understated social commentary is hardly noticeable.
The fluent translation by David Smyth seems appropriate for the period, restrained and refined:
That day I was wearing my university student’s uniform, and that was the first thing about me that Mom Ratchawong Kirati took an interest in. She said it was nice and neat and that she especially liked the colour, navy blue. As it happened, she was wearing the same navy-blue colour, with a white floral pattern on both her skirt and blouse. There was nothing showy about the colour, yet it conveyed a pride and dignity which is hard to put into words.
If it feels a bit old-fashioned, that may be because the original edition dates from 1990, the novella (for such it is) published along with three other stories. The somewhat sepia-toned feel is reinforced by coded references to the Thai aristocracy, the overall restraint in language and action, and the somewhat unsettling thought that World War Two was just around the corner, not that there is anything in the novel itself foreshadows that, quite the opposite.
Siburapha is the pen name of Kulap Saipradit, a writer who emerged in the 1920s as a champion of Thai stories. He was also a journalist, and as such had run-ins with newspaper owners and the government. A 1936 sojourn in Japan was evidently the inspiration for Behind the Painting. After the War, he was jailed and lived in exile in China from 1958 until his death in 1974; his works disappeared from the bookshops.
The painting of the title, which an older and now married Nopporn later hangs in his house, is a record of a memory:
Gazing at the picture when I am alone, I see the water meander by and then gather speed as its course descends. I see even the pale, autumn sunlight. And the two people sitting on the over-hanging rock, whom the artist has daubed on almost carelessly, I see quite clearly. I even see the long, curling eyelashes of one of them, and the three bright red triangles drawn over thin lips, lending their very thinness a wonderful charm. I know, all too well, that the artist put everything into that picture, that it was no half-hearted effort. In that tranquil and apparently very ordinary picture, I see everything unfolding. Every scene, every part, from the beginning to the final act, on which the curtain fell so tragically, only recently.
Behind the Painting feels like a discovery.