How keikaku read The Wine Worm

Begin where the text begins: not with Liu's history but with a held image and a withheld explanation — an unbearable summer, tiled roofs reflecting the sun like lead, swallows' nests that might steam their young alive, every field of hemp and millet drooping, and in the middle of it a naked man bound hand and foot with cord, lying on his back in a threshing-yard, apparently untroubled, with an unglazed jar at his pillow, a foreign monk shooing horseflies off him with a red-handled fly-whisk, and a Confucian scholar standing apart under the eaves, fanning himself and watching. The narrator lets this sit, insists on the silence and the noon stillness, and only then remarks, almost as an aside, that of course this is not Japan: it happened one summer at the Liu family's threshing-yard in Changshan, China. That order — image first, provenance second, explanation third, and the explanation itself a flashback to a chess game interrupted by a servant girl announcing a visitor — is the story's method throughout, and the English must resist rationalising it into a tidier sequence. The strangeness is the architecture.

The register is the second thing to fix before drafting. This is a young Taishō writer performing erudition: a kanji-dense, sinophile literary Japanese, full of Chinese place-names, reign-flavoured detail, furigana glosses and quoted tags ("whenever he drank alone, he finished a whole jar"; "three hundred mu of fields by the city wall, half planted with millet"), written over a Chinese strange tale. The English should feel learned and slightly bookish — a man who has read a great deal of Chinese fiction and is enjoying the fit of it — but it should not tip into period pastiche, mock-antique "thees" and "verilys," or into chinoiserie local colour. The pleasure the text takes in its materials is a scholar's, not a traveller's: names, measures, temples, the bamboo wife against the heat, the white-feather fan. Where the Japanese is dense with specification, the English should specify; impoverishing that texture into generic "old China" atmosphere would flatten exactly what the author is showing off.

Against that bookish frame, keep the body writing in section three as unliterary as it is. The similes there are deliberately low and exact — the thing in Liu's throat creeping like an earthworm, shifting like a gecko, slipping out at last like a loach; the expelled worm like a little salamander the colour of red mud, swimming in the wine and seeming to drink. Do not upgrade these into grotesque poetry, and do not downgrade them into clinical terms; their flat zoological oddity is the tale's evidence. The same flatness should govern the physical details of the frame — the pimple-like smallness of the scholar's rat-tail beard, the monk squatting "like a turkey" beside the jar — comparisons that are a little unflattering and entirely unmoved. Ennoblement, in Berman's sense, is the standing danger everywhere in this text: it wants to be made elegant, exotic or wise, and it is none of those things; it is learned, dry and faintly disgusting.

Watch the repetitions, because the text thinks in them. Heat returns in image after image — sun, drought, steaming nests, leaden roofs, the burning of Liu's upturned skin — and should be allowed to accumulate rather than be varied away; the reader is meant to be half-roasted by the time the thirst begins. Silence and stillness mark the three men at the start and return as the emptied stillness of Liu's decline. Wine is everywhere measured: the jar at a sitting, the jar at the pillow, the wine the worm swims in and drinks. The word for the creature itself, "wine worm," should stay one term, unvaried — not "alcohol parasite" here and "drinking demon" there — because the ending's argument turns on the single word: disease, fortune, or self. Destroying that verbal network, or the sun-rose-and-set regularity of the heat passages, would quietly unbuild the story.

The people should be kept at the distance the narrator keeps them. Liu is fat, good-humoured, small-eyed, vain in a childish way about being seen to receive a famous guest, curious enough to lie down naked on a stranger's say-so, and resentful of the monk only once the suffering starts; he is never introspective and never, even in ruin, presented for pity — the decline is reported almost as local news ("they say there is no counting how many times a year he takes to his bed now"). The monk is blunt to the point of rudeness, answers questions with counter-questions, explains his method only when pressed, and is never given a motive, a doctrine or a backward glance; his brusqueness is information. Mr. Sun, the Confucian chess partner, despises monks and Daoists on principle, speaks only because the words "wine worm" make him anxious about his own belly, and withdraws into his chess stones the moment he feels slighted; his snobbery is the tale's one piece of social comedy and should stay dry rather than broad. Nobody's speech should be warmed up, and nobody should be given the reflective interiority the Japanese pointedly reserves for sweat, thirst and nausea alone.

The fluent failures to guard against, gathered: clarifying what the text leaves open (why the monk came, what the jar was for until the moment it is used, whether anyone is to blame); expanding the Chinese setting into explanation a reader of the tale is trusted to absorb; smoothing the narrator's intrusions — the schooling comparison, the closing "Didacticism" — into the tale's voice; making the ending's three answers into a crescendo with the third as truth; and letting the decline gather pathos. The last pages should read as flatly as a report of weather changing: the man who could drink anything cannot bear the smell of wine; the round body is gone; the fields have passed to other hands; he ploughs, inexpertly, day by day. If the English makes a reader feel instructed, it has failed; if it leaves a reader holding a cured man who is somehow dead, it has worked.