How keikaku read Supper

"The crux is the mother's mid-mouthful slide out of time. For five paragraphs this is a warm, crowded, slightly comic supper: a fat baby girl just able to stand by holding the table, banging a spoon, everything swept out of her reach, two young parents — not a wrinkle on either face, but a deep, drowsy tiredness already in his hollowed eyes and her fine shoulders — laughing helplessly and forgetting, in the racket, even to hear the storm outside. Then, in paragraphs 10 to 11, the mother puts a potato in her mouth. It is hard, gritty, as if frozen, thoroughly nasty. She says nothing. And the prose, without any marker of a scene-change, drifts with her: the three years since her marriage stretch until she feels she has lived a whole long life and grown quite old; the sufferings of those three years come back “dreamlike”, and she is suddenly seeing, from very far away, a dim picture (絵) of three people with their heads together telling one endless story in which everything — good and evil, sorrow, suffering, anger, joy — is told, while nobody moves, nobody is disturbed, and all of it is wrapped in 懐かしみ (natsukashimi, fond remembrance) and 許し (forgiveness) and a deep peace like the night's. The story stands or falls on whether the English lets that expansion happen inside an ordinary sentence at an ordinary table, and then lets it contract again to “only three years” (paragraph 14, paragraph 22, paragraph 27) and to work tomorrow."

Everything else in the text serves that one movement. The frame is built for it: storm heard / storm unheard / storm heard again. The child's noise in the first movement is not decoration — it is what the world sounds like from inside a life being lived at full stretch, and the mother's silence in the second half is set against her husband's repeated, puzzled 「どうして黙ってるの」 (“why are you so quiet?”, paragraph 19, paragraph 21) precisely because he cannot follow her where she has gone. And the vision's content is all summary and no event: nothing is shown happening, only everything having already happened and turned, in the telling, into fondness and pardon. If the English makes the vision vivid, specific or dramatic, the ratio inverts and it becomes a fantasy interrupting a domestic sketch, rather than the domestic sketch briefly seen from the far side of a whole life.

In the English: So: keep the trigger physical and uninterpreted. The potato is hard — “as if frozen”, gritty between her teeth, tasteless — and the distance it opens in her is rendered in the narration's ordinary diction of distance itself (“far”, “far off”, “far heart”, “rate”, repeated until it becomes a place). Do not name what she sees: not heaven, not death, not her own old age, not a judgement day, though it has something of all of them. “あの日” is only “that day”. The picture must stay a picture — 幻のような絵, “a picture like a phantom”, something her eye sees, not a doctrine she arrives at. An English version that upgrades the vision into consolation — that lets her (or the narrator) conclude anything — has written a religious tract over a story about a bad potato. Likewise keep the return unexalted: “もう少しの間だ” — “just a little longer” — nursing the child, clearing the table, getting up early tomorrow. The vision does not solve the poverty. It sits next to it, and the story ends not on it but on a man standing still, whispering, 「嵐だな」 — “a storm”. That bare last line is the frame closing: the storm announced in paragraph 1, unheard through the child's noise in paragraph 8, heard by her alone inside her silence in paragraph 19, and finally heard by everyone in the quiet of paragraphs 37 to 38. Keep it exactly that plain and that short; do not let it swell into a symbol at the last moment.