The events of my story took place some time ago—in 1880, the thirteenth year of the Meiji era, to be exact.At the start of this short novel, the narrator described his friendship with a handsome student named Okada. Okada often walked the streets of Muenzaka in the evening and one time he happened upon a beautiful young woman living in a house in a silent neighborhood. Through his regular walks he had become acquainted with her, even if "the appearance of the house and the way the woman dressed strongly suggested that she was someone's mistress."Even in ill health she would have been beautiful, but in fact she was young and healthy, and today her usual good looks had been heightened by careful makeup and grooming. To my eyes she seemed to possess a beauty wholly beyond anything I had noted earlier, and her face shone with a kind of radiance. The effect was dazzling.The Wild Goose, also known as The Wild Geese, by Mori Ōgai (1862-1922) was a dazzling and iconic Japanese novel about Otama, the woman who agreed to become the mistress of Suezō, a shrewd moneylender, and her acquaintance with Okada, the young student she fell in love with. Through gentle prose, Ōgai presented their interlinked stories while illuminating the attitudes and mores of late nineteenth century Japan, at the cusp of its transition to a modernist society.It was a time when men of means like Suezō could hire go-betweens to negotiate and procure for them a mistress. The practice was then taboo and mistresses were then, as now, strongly discriminated against. Otama's previous marriage to a policeman turned out to be a sham, leaving her completely discouraged about her future prospects. Her plight was to be poor and her acquiescence to become a rich man's mistress was driven by her need to secure material comforts for herself and her old father. Part of the charm of the story was the narrator's close observations of Otama, Suezō, and Okada's motives and actions. Like the character of Suezō, the man despised by society for his occupation as moneylender, the narrator had "keen powers of observation", in the way he delineated not only three strong characters but believable secondary characters as well. Suezō's suspicious wife Otsune and Otama's father had their own complexities.Ōgai's marked evocation of a distinct place and culture and the marginal status of women at the time revealed a "not-quite" vanished age, in the sense that his characters' desires, despair, and anguish were just as transparent as the present. In addition, Ōgai's use of animal symbols (a pair of caged birds, a fierce snake, a flock of geese) and references to classical Chinese and Japanese literature had such cunning and grace that they didn't feel like literary devices at all but the very essence of the story, like fire to the brazier. In her mortification there was very little hatred for the world or for people. If one were to ask exactly what in fact she resented, one would have to answer that it was her own fate. Through no fault of her own she was made to suffer persecution, and this was what she found so painful. When she was deceived and abandoned by the police officer, she had felt this mortification, and recently, when she realized that she must become a mistress, she experienced it again. Now she learned that she was not only a mistress but the mistress of a despised moneylender, and her despair, which had been ground smooth between the teeth of time and washed of its color in the waters of resignation, assumed once more in her heart its stark outline.The unnamed narrator was a voice of kindness. His large sympathy for the fates of Otama and his friend Okada was unmistakable, relating their stories with penetrating understanding, even affecting a degree of respect and love for the two characters. He later revealed his storytelling method as a play on two perspectives: "Just as two images combine in a stereoscope to form a single picture, so the events I observed earlier and those that were described to me later have been fitted together to make this story of mine."With Natsume Sōseki, Tōson Shimazaki, Shiga Naoya, and Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Ōgai was an exemplary prewar Japanese writer of national stature, and The Wild Goose (Gan), published serially in 1911-13, was his most esteemed work. According to Murakami Haruki (if I remember him correctly), Gan had the same special status in Japan as Sōseki's I Am a Cat, Botchan, and Kokoro, Akutagawa's stories, and Shiga's A Dark Night's Passing.Translator Burton Watson mentioned in his thorough introduction that the original title Gan could mean both the singular and plural words, hence the two distinct English titles. In 2010 I have read the earlier 1959 translation, The Wild Geese, by Kingo Ochiai and Sanford Goldstein, and in fact selected it as one of my favorite reads of 2010. I don't have that copy anymore and so I can't make a general comparison of the translations. But this full translation by Watson contains endorsements from Edwin McClellan and Edward Seidensticker, two powerhouse Japanese translators, so that should count for something. Indeed this version I find quite beautiful.Gan was adapted into a movie in 1953.Earlier review of the Ochiai-Goldstein translation:A beautiful symbolic novel about the two states of nature that an individual can simultaneously experience: freedom and imprisonment. The story centers on a young woman who consented to become a rich man's mistress in exchange for material comforts for her and her father. The rich man's life and relationship with his legal wife are also explored. A complication arises when the mistress falls in love with a young man. Mori Ōgai's deft touch with characterization is evident in this small novel. The story is presented with a unique mix of romantic suspense and psychological mystery. The ending delivers an open-ended resolution that sustains the originality of the story. If it had been the usual neat ending, then I would not recommend this book highly enough.
Donald Richie's blurb on the back of my edition calls The Wild Goose "strange" and "captivating." These are appropriate adjectives.The strangeness resides in the novel's form. Our narrator leads us initially to believe this will be a story about his friend Okada, until a few pages in we are told that to appreciate the story about Okada, we must understand the history of the woman on Muenzaka street who had begun to captivate him. For this reason, our narrator will "relate it briefly here." This is a lie, for the story of Suezo and Otama occupies most of the novel. The tale of missed opportunity and unconsummated romance that bookends this story is oblique, understated, and brief. The strangeness is amplified by the circumstance that this missed opportunity is occasioned by a discordant yet charming farce concerning an accidentally poached wild goose, which was itself the inexorable denouement of a boarding house-keeper's decision to serve mackerel boiled in miso sauce on that fateful night. This missed opportunity is final, for the next day Okada will choose medical study in Germany over this Japanese beauty and the Tokyo streets lined with bookstalls selling Chinese classics (I defy you to find a Japanese novel from the early 20th century that doesn't encode this Japan/West dichotomy).The novel is captivating, and indeed elevates itself to great beauty, with Ogai's* quiet yet dead-on insight into the psychology of his characters. An uncommonly great part of the novel takes place in the minds of characters, as they attempt to navigate the confluences where desire and propriety, where courage and restraint, where freedom and inhibition, meet. I recognized myself in several moments, from when Otama's father prepares himself to treat his daughter with spite only to be unable to remain angry upon sight of her, to Otsune being so wound up in her thoughts that she walks past the gate to her home, to the way experience has trained Otama to sublimate her own expectations to the exigencies of circumstance:"Resignation was a mental process she was only too familiar with, and if she directed her mind toward that goal, it operated with the accustomed smoothness of a well-oiled machine."There's nothing flashy about Ogai's prose as interpreted for us by Burton Watson, and yet the accretion of moments like these has the effect of producing a beauty and intrigue that transcends any simple arithmetic logic.The way Ogai shows us his characters' inner life with unpretentious exactitude is complemented by the way he translates for us the restrictions of early Meiji society. Indeed, it's easy to miss that this is a novel dealing with a hierarchical society that has a tendency to trample under foot any inadmissible romance. Watson helpfully points us along this road in his introduction: "[the chain of events from mackerel-in-miso to Otama's heartbreaking disappointment] is no more than a surface explanation of the ironic course taken by events on that fateful evening. On a profounder level, Ogai knew that no liaison between Otama and Okada could be anything but fleeting and furtive, and assuredly could never offer the kind of escape that Otama dreamed of. The worlds of the student and the kept woman were too far apart to permit meaningful contact; the society of the time was too hemmed in by moral and conventional restrictions. If Ogai was to be truthful in his portrayal of that society, he could hardly end his story on any note other than one of longing and poignant regret."At the level of plot, then, the novel encodes the impossibility of this love affair, which we as readers wish utopically could be made actual. This brilliant move is what gives the book some of its enchanting quality. Ogai saw no need to directly dramatize the social prohibitions that make this love impossible; the fact that even in the realm of fantasy these two 1880 lovers couldn't be imagined by Japanese 30 years later as having actually transcended those prohibitions stands as a greater testament to the rigid nature of the society in question. The reader, then, is put in a position not unlike Otama: we watch this world through the little window Ogai provides us, and we form hopes of what might be, but we are ultimately fated by plot, by circumstance, and by strictures working beneath the surface to be disappointed.*The author's family name is Mori; because Ogai is his chosen pen-name, it is appropriate to refer to him as "Ogai," similar to how we refer to the writer Natsume Kinnosuke as "Soseki." It is, of course, totally fine to refer to him as "Mori" as well.
Do You like book The Wild Geese (1989)?
La edición que he leído de "El Ganso Salvaje" es la publicada en formato digital por Chidori Books, que ya lleva un año cumpliendo su objetivo: acercar la literatura japonesa a los lectores en español. Uno de los primeros títulos escogidos para llevar a cabo su objetivo fue “El Ganso Salvaje”, de Mori Ōgai, que se enclava en la colección “Grandes Clásicos”. La edición digital de esta editorial es sublime (como el resto de títulos de su catálogo), y para verlo sólo hay que fijarse en su portada, creada por el ilustrador y diseñador valenciano David González. Traducido por Sachiko Ishikawa, este ebook cuenta con una introducción de Margarita Adobes, editora de Chidori Books, quien nos traslada a la época en la que se escribió el libro y nos cuenta la biografía su autor, repasando todas sus obras, y en especial la presente. Toda esta información previa se agradece mucho, sobre todo para aquellos lectores que nos iniciamos en la literatura japonesa, y resultará esencial para ubicarnos en la época en la que ocurren los hechos narrados y comprender mejor “El Ganso Salvaje”, pues entre el protagonista de la historia y su creador, hay más de una similitud. La historia de “El Ganso Salvaje” nos sitúa en el Tokio de 1880, en plena era Meiji (1868-1912), época en la que Japón empezó su modernización y occidentalización, erigiéndose como potencia mundial. La presente obra nos transmite ese intento de modernización y apertura hacia occidente, y esa búsqueda internacional del conocimiento (uno de los estatutos de la Carta de Juramento realizada en 1868) cuando al protagonista, el joven Okada, se le da la oportunidad de terminar sus estudios de medicina en Alemania. Básicamente el argumento de esta historia es el siguiente: Okada es un joven estudiante de medicina que se aloja en una residencia de estudiantes en Tokio. En uno de sus paseos diarios por las calles de esta ciudad se cruza con la bella Otama. Desde ese momento se queda prendado de ella, y aunque al principio solo cruzaban la mirada, poco a poco el saludo se volverá más cortés, y pronto empezará a saludarla alzando su sombrero. Pero la bella Otama resulta ser la amante del prestamista Suezo, casado y con hijos. Tras un matrimonio nulo con un policía bígamo, Otama se ve casi obligada a ser la amante del prestamista Suezo para poder dar a su padre, con el que está muy unida, una buena jubilación. A pesar de su situación Otama terminará enamorándose de Okada, pero las casualidades de la vida, como una sopa de miso con caballa, o la aparición de un ganso salvaje, determinarán el final de esta historia, narrada por el compañero de Okada en la residencia de estudiantes.Este narrador parece conocer mucho a los protagonistas de la historia, y como Mori Ōgai sabía que los lectores se iban a preguntar cómo era posible que este personaje supiera tantos detalles de la historia que narra, a lo largo del libro este narrador va justificando cómo llegó a saber todo lo que sabe, pidiendo a los lectores que no nos dejemos llevar por “especulaciones absurdas”. Y es que esta novela se caracteriza también por interiorizar mucho en la mente de los personajes, pues si algo tienen en común es que más que actuar, sus acciones se quedan en pensamientos.La mayoría de los lectores destacan la historia de amor entre los jóvenes Okada y Otama, y lo definen como un amor “atrapado”. Es la típica historia de lo que pudo haber sido y por fatalidades del destino e inactividad de sus personajes, termina de otra forma. Pero yo destacaría también la relación entre Otama y su padre. “El Ganso Salvaje” es una novela de extensión corta, ideal para aquellos lectores que quieran establecer contacto por primera vez con la literatura japonesa. Pero a pesar de su brevedad, para los lectores que ven más allá de las palabras, esta historia está llena de simbolismos, y es que con muy poco, Mori Ōgai consigue transmitir una gran historia. Podéis leer la reseña completa que realicé para "De Lectura Obligada": https://lecturaobligada.wordpress.com...
—Marta
I had to read this for my Japanese Film and Fiction course. I liked it, and I didn't tire of reading it either. I almost read the whole thing without ever getting up from my spot. Some of the characters had annoying traits - but that's to be expected since they're human. From what one can gather, this story is loosely based on the author's own personal experiences. And like a lot of Japanese classics, this doesn't truly have much of an ending - I was expecting more to this. A lot of questions unanswered. But I believe the author did this on purpose.
—R.S.T.
I love small books, novellas....I can read them at a setting and take in an entire story. With the classic The Wild Geese by Ogai Mori, written in such an old style, which must have lost so much in translation...I took several sittings.Not because it was a difficult read, quite the contrary. But I wanted to savor the book's very Japanese and also very old-world charm, celebrate each sentence and scene for all its worth.Wikipedia provides an interesting synopsis:Suezo, a moneylender, is tired of life with his nagging wife, so he decides to take a mistress. Otama, the only child of a widower merchant, wishing to provide for her aging father, is forced by poverty to become the moneylender's mistress. When Otama learns the truth about Suezo, she feels betrayed, and hopes to find a hero to rescue her. Otama meets Okada, a medical student, who becomes both the object of her desire and the symbol of her rescue.But to me the intensity of the book lies in its somewhat tragic end, where a coincidence and a cruelly ironic yet commonplace incident spoils the reader's hopes. Not the hopes in the writing, which is luminous, nor the story, which is masterfully told, but in how the reader wants the story to end. And those, I think, are some of the best books, where you want to re-imagine the ending, want to appeal to the absent author to set everything right with the world.But as in life, this does not happen in the book, and you leave it with a bittersweet feeling.
—D. Biswas
