“The Mud of a Century” by Yūka Ishii

Yūka Ishii (photo: Shinchosha)

“Perhaps you could call it a stroke of karmic good fortune that I was able to experience a once-in-a-century flood only three and a half months after moving to Chennai.” So opens Yūka Ishii’s The Mud of a Century, winner of the 2017 Akutagawa Prize. The novella’s narrator, a Japanese woman in her mid-late twenties, has found a temporary job teaching Japanese in Chennai (the erstwhile Madras), India to a small class of computer programmers employed by an IT company.

One generally disruptive student, Devaraj, works as a foil as well as being a de facto teaching assistant, subverting discussions and lesson plans, yet indirectly helping with explanations of cultural contexts that supplement and complicate the teacher’s emphasis on grammar.

The novella plays with magic realism, where the magic lies in competing versions of “reality” and each version can be held as true despite having irreconcilably different underlying premises embedded in their cultures, religions and languages. The novella’s situation, a language classroom involving Tamil, English and Japanese, helps Ishii play with the magic. Much of Ishii’s competing realities lie in the stories her narrator recounts.

 

The Mud of a Century, Yūka Ishii, Haydn Trowell (trans) (Gazebo, April 2023)
The Mud of a Century, Yūka Ishii, Haydn Trowell (trans) (Gazebo, April 2023)

The narrator tells her story from the bridge over the Adyar, a river described as “a typical urban drainage channel” which is full with stagnation and “the rancid odour of putrefaction” given that the river carries the “untreated sewage” of the city’s residents. Those residents have gathered to see what emerges from the mud.

The initial inventory sets the scene against which we can measure her own life story. There is the smell, then muddy trash, carpets, mattresses, clothing, stuffed polar bear toys, and other ordinary detritus of contemporary life. Then the first body emerges from the mud. A woman pulls a child out, chastising him with a “where have you been for the past seven years” as if his reappearance in the world is hardly remarkable. While life has gone on for the woman and the world, the child has apparently been in a state of suspended animation, maintaining his age and disposition. Others emerge from the sewage after decades and laugh and joke with their old friends as if time hasn’t passed.

On the bridge, she encounters Devaraj, who is doing community service cleaning up the mud for a traffic error. Several of the items he pulls from the mud trigger extended stories that are woven into her recounting of time spent in the classroom and class discussions of reincarnation, love, relations, money and debt, honor, and what it is to live a life.

Real mermaids, she tells us, don’t speak. She knows this because her mother was a mermaid.

When Devaraj rakes up a bottle of Suntory Yamazaki 12 whiskey, the narrator slides into her backstory, her past experiences with family, men, and in particular her ex-husband, whom she has asked for financial help. She is currently deep in debt, which sets the background for her working in India. The whiskey bottle also provides the inspiration recounting her early years. Her father was a debt collector and would take her along as he visited the people who owed money. Her relationship with money is complicated. Ishii has a loving relationship with language.

 

“I once read in a book with a blue cover that if you borrow too much money from people, your brain can end up filled with a substance that smells almost like lotus honey.”

 

Devaraj then extricates a small glass case that contains a “vague silhouette.” She identifies the silhouette from a fifth grade class trip to a temple by the sea where they saw a glass case.

 

‘It’s a mummified mermaid,’ the priest said, before turning to face the glass as he put his hands together in prayer.

 

The priest’s lecture on its origins is somewhat at odds with a classmate’s mother’s version, which appears to be a passing nod to Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”.

 

“One day a mermaid washed up on the shore, but everyone bullied her to death. So ever since, this place has been cursed by the mermaid’s angry spirit.”

 

The narrator’s extended flashback offers another variant. Real mermaids, she tells us, don’t speak. She knows this because her mother was a mermaid. The most she ever spoke was in an inaudible whisper that the narrator had to translate when her mother had to engage the world. Along with her mother’s story, the narrator speaks of another mermaid, a childhood classmate who never spoke at all.

By the end, the narrator has romanticized both the urban cesspool as well as her own situation in the world.

When Devaraj rakes up an old coin commemorative from the Japan’s Osaka World Fair, the novel shifts to Devaraj’s story as a child which allows some direct contrast to the narrator’s early years. Devaraj is normally outgoing, but when he tells his story, what she hears is

 

no mere voice, that it wasn’t the result of vocal chords trembling deep in his throat. It was fuzzy and faint, like the mist on a river’s surface after a rainy afternoon, and the content of its message quietly filled my heart.

 

Devaraj’s story involves working as a pickpocket as he accompanies his father, who is a traveling showman. Part of the message that fills her heart is in the custom of the ‘family’ marriage, which his father broke when he eloped for love. Devaraj is the one student in the class who argues for love over family.

By the end, the narrator has romanticized both the urban cesspool as well as her own situation in the world. The novel has also opened up possibilities, not only for the future, but for her own life story, which she has to revise in light of the cultural histories offered by her students as well as the mud. These possibilities include

 

Letters unwritten, sights unseen, songs unheard, words unspoken, rain that had never fallen, lips forever unwetted—one and all, they each belonged to the mud of this past century. Lives that might have been, lives that had never been, postscripts left for later—all emerged from this great and expansive earthy mire.

Rick Henry was a Professor of English at SUNY—Potsdam where he directed the BFA in Creative Writing.