Is it a commendation or criticism of the author or translators that one would never have imagined, had one not already known, that Keiichiro Hirano’s Eclipse was originally written in Japanese for a Japanese readership? Set in late 15th-century France and deeply permeated with Christian theology and late medieval philosophy, Eclipse evokes nothing as much as Umberto Eco. This is perhaps the literary equivalent of award-winning Japanese whiskey, an achievement—given the need for a specific literary idiom in English—that perhaps belongs as much to the translators Brent de Chene and Charles De Wolf as the author.
Framed as a memoir, the plot is straightforward, or at least starts out that way: Nicolas, a young Dominican friar and recent graduate, much concerned with manuscripts, theology and philosophy, and a self-professed follower of St Thomas Aquinas, is en route to Florence. He finds himself in a small village near Lyon where he encounters a mysterious, dour and ascetic alchemist. The village is populated with other notable medieval characters: a garrulous blacksmith, a dissolute priest, a fellow Dominican who is also an Inquisitor.
One of the two translators, Brent de Chene, writes in his Introduction that
Eclipse is written for the most part in an archaizing style that lends the text of the novel a patina of age, and of dignity and restraint, that is entirely appropriate to the late medieval setting.
How this manifests in Japanese is beyond my ken, but in English, the tone, Nicolas’s voice, is spot on:
At that moment, what drew my attention was rather the lingering scent of wine given off by his sleeves. It was a sweet smell, but one that stagnated unpleasantly deep in the nose. Carried on a light breeze, it seemed to ooze out of the disagreeably warm air and hang there.
Eclipse was published in 1998 when Hirano was still an undergraduate.
The narrative arc progresses slowly. Nicolas is much concerned with both natural philosophy and faith; a great deal of his mental effort (and the book) is taken up with his attempts to reconcile theology with the real world, mirroring the very real philosophical debates of the time. He will discourse at length on Dominicans and Franciscans, heresy and the lapis philosophicus, the philosopher’s stone, which (pace Harry Potter) is the material that is the Holy Grail (as it were) of alchemy.
He witnesses, and is a tangential participant in, a series of disasters which include accusations of witchcraft and which coincide with a solar eclipse (hence the title). Hirano has evidently aimed for a high degree of verisimilitude or at least believability in his recounting of both Nicolas’s activities and mental musings—until the denouement. Hirano ventures at an ever-increasing tempo into the supernatural and spiritual, events which, however fabulous, might well have seemed credible to people at that more credulous time. (Readers who wish to turn to the Introduction for enlightenment about what in the world actually happened, should perhaps read it after the book since it contains spoilers.) Nicolas writes in his own preamble:
I wish to begin by swearing, as a Christian and in the holy name of God, that I shall falsify nothing and merely recount the truth… I have in mind my readers, who may immediately be tempted to cast doubt on this rather strange text. For this I do not reproach them: No matter how sympathetically they may read it, it is not a document that invites one’s trust …
Hirano is excellent at all the philosophical, theological, historical and alchemist lore. His descriptions are vivid:
In front, like a frozen waterfall, the cave wall could be seen. Its form, which, after one broad undulation above our heads, dropped suddenly and violently, as if trying to cascade into the ground, suggested the instantaneous realization of a shape that had managed to do away with the immense time required for its formation. The waterfall’s roar, swallowed up in its flow, with the flow in turn sealed up in the silence of the moist, ivory-colored rock face, appeared to pulse beneath the surface of the stone.
Even Nicolas’s lengthy intellectual digressions are delivered with an appealing earnestness. One needs to have a more granular knowledge of late Medieval intellectual history to know precisely how well Hirano has nailed it, but there is only the occasional apparent anachronism.
Eclipse was published in 1998 when Hirano was still an undergraduate. He was hailed as a prodigy. The book sold 400,000 copies and won Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize. However curious the effort may seem—the fact that it seems curious is itself curious; Western writers regularly set historical novels in Asia—one can see why: Eclipse is an engaging, thought-provoking and deeply-imagined work.