Tae Kudo is a neurotic 46-year-old woman who has become something of a hypochondriac in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. Some of her experiences will be deeply familiar to most readers—like her caution about masking or disinfecting her groceries. Others, like her hyperfixation on conscious capitalism, the environmental impact of her actions, or even refusing to be in the same room as a houseguest, may not.
Meanwhile, Shinobu is barely employed as a handyman. After a stint as a security guard for a US military base in Okinawa and some poor choices, he has landed in his resentful brother’s kura—the storage space behind his house without electricity or running water.
A series of odd events results in the two living together in an uneasy peace at the height of COVID panic in the spring of 2020 in Kumi Kimura’s Someone to Watch Over You.
Kimura’s writing is deeply unsettling.
Three ambiguous deaths haunt the novel. When Tae was a teacher, she lost a student to suicide. She still wonders if she’s to blame. While working as a security guard, Shinobu knocked down a protester he thought was armed and now fears he killed her. And, shortly before the novel opens, one of Tae’s new neighbors, Honma, died—possibly by his own hand. The residents of his new condo forced the man, who had recently relocated from Tokyo, to quarantine outside of their building. His body was found in the otherwise abandoned apartment where he was temporarily sheltering.
These “ghosts” cast a pall over the entire novel. Like the writing of Hiroko Oyamada, Kimura’s writing here is deeply unsettling. An anxiety-inducing cloud of unease hangs over the entire story, rendered into English by Yuki Tejima.
The deeply claustrophobic nature of Kimura’s writing and Tejima’s translation supports one of the novel’s central ideas: small-town Japan can be a very close-minded place. Tae is a native of the town, though she left for the outskirts of Tokyo and returned a few years before the novel opens. Nevertheless, she finds, “KEEP OUTSIDERS OUT GET OUT OF OUR TOWN” spray-painted on the concrete wall outside of her house. Later, when she tries to go bird-watching, a man tries to shoo her way, saying, “You don’t belong here.”
“I’m a resident of this city, too,” she longs to reply—but doesn’t.
The town feels both separate from and above COVID, even while it deeply fears the pandemic. Stay-at-home orders aren’t necessary “what with depopulation and everything”. In fact, the town itself could be considered another of the novel’s “ghosts”. Shinobu bikes through the town and sees
abandoned structures sealed off with do not enter tape, as well as unoccupied houses covered in overgrown plants and bushes. Only one house had its light on. The streetlamps [are] few and far between, and every other bulb was burnt out.
The novel also calls attention to the problems with Japan’s much vaunted COVID response and how shame led many people to refuse testing or hospitals to refuse to treat potential patients. As Shinobu notes to Tae
In a small town like this, you’re an embarrassment to your family if you get infected, and the town will be talking about it for years. I mean, who knows, there might be symptomatic people right now who are locked up in, I don’t know, a kura outbuilding or something. I heard some people went to a clinic to get tested but were told, ‘Do you want to risk being the first infection in the prefecture?’ and then got sent home.
For Kimura, the events of March 2011—earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown—serve as a point of reference for the trauma of the pandemic and lockdown in Japan. It’s clear that some of Tae’s anxiety is almost a decade old. For example, she has refused to buy any new electronics since watching the ‘endless footage of mud- and kelp-drenched television sets everywhere following the tsunami.’ She makes regular pilgrimages to Iwate Prefecture, where her student died and the site of some of the tsunami’s destruction, and notes the dilapidated remains of seaside towns. Shinobu notes that wearing a mask reminds him of ‘the whole radiation mess’.
March 2011 seems to be a touchstone for the pandemic in Japan—or at least it appears as such in another COVID novel to appear in translation this year, Mai Ishikawa’s The Place of Shells. Like Someone to Watch Over You, The Place of Shells correlates the trauma caused by the virus to the trauma caused by Japan’s 3/11 Triple Disasters of 2011—with the same kind of fear and grief now covering the entire globe. COVID plays a role in a third novel appearing in English translation this year; details about life during the pandemic are part of the setting Saou Ichikawa’s Akutagawa-winning Hunchback.
It’s an open question whether either Tae or Shinobu are actually any better off surviving the pandemic together than they were living alone. Because Tae is a hypochondriac, she insists that the two never see each other. She delivers food outside his room and does the laundry he leaves in the hamper separately from her own and while wearing a mask. They usually communicate by ringing bells to contact each other instead of using words. Only sometimes, late at night, will she come downstairs and have a conversation with him through the fusama. “Never having to see you but knowing there’s someone else in the house is ideal for me,” she tells him. “To be able to feel the other person’s presence once in a while, like a ghost…”
Ultimately, Someone to Watch Over You is about two people who have made mistakes and who were lonely long before COVID-19 made its way to Japan. They both live in a depopulated, shrinking town that was lonely already, too, and had already begun to eat itself alive; the pandemic has only sped up the process. It hasn’t actually changed their lives in any meaningful way, any more than moving in together makes either Shinobu or Tae less lonely. They’re just two more spirits in a town resounding with echoes of the departed.