Tiếng Hát Người Cá

by Masatsugu Ono, Lâm Thương (Translator)

Chọn chủ đề một vùng vịnh nước Nhật xa cách với đô thị trong Tiếng hát người cá, Masatsugu Ono đã tạo ra một cộng đồng riêng vừa thô ráp vừa ngọt ngào, vừa nhiều biến đổi nhưng vẫn giữ những nét truyền thống. Dường như vẫn còn đó một nước Nhật Bản đồng quê không mấy ảnh hưởng bởi kỹ nghệ. Độc giả sẽ được tiếp cận với một giọng nói khác của văn học đương đại xứ Phù Tang.

Tiếng hát người cá và Trôi trên Vịnh là một câu chuyện kép về một làng chài Nhật Bản, nơi không gian hầu như bị ngăn cắt với phần còn lại của thế giới, chỉ có rất ít cư dân, và cuộc sống diễn ra một cách trì đọng, buồn tẻ. Những đời người trôi qua lờ đờ, như ẩn như hiện trong mắt người khác và có khi trong chính bản thân người đó, không đầu không cuối…

Tác giả đã sử dụng thủ pháp hài hước, trong mô tả cũng như trong dẫn dắt, nhận định, với một văn phong rất nhiều hình ảnh, gợi mở, khiến người ta nhận ra một “chất Nhật Bản truyền thống” khiến ta ngỡ ngàng trước sự bền vững của nó sau tất cả những quá trình hiện đại hóa đến cực điểm.

Ngoài 2 truyện vừa, tập sách có thêm tiểu luận Từ Vũng đến Vườn Mộc Lan như một cầu nối giữa nước Nhật xa xôi của tác giả với nước Pháp nơi anh làm luận văn tiến sĩ văn học. Hòa trộn giữa hiện thực và trí tưởng tượng, những câu chuyện đem đến cho người đọc nỗi hoài nhớ tuổi thơ, thời mà dường như không có ranh giới giữa con người và thiên nhiên.

Tác giả Masatsugu Ono đã nói với độc giả Việt Nam khi sang thăm Việt Nam năm 2010: “Murakami viết về toàn cầu hóa nên ai cũng cảm nhận được, nhất là giới trẻ. Nhưng Nhật Bản vẫn sót lại những địa phương tiền-hiện-đại-hóa. Từ 1996, dân số Nhật Bản đã bị lão hóa. Ở các đô thị còn thấy nhiều người trẻ nhưng về các địa phương chỉ gặp toàn người già. Đối với riêng tôi, những ông bà già, những câu chuyện dông dài nhà quê lại hợp với tôi hơn, là thế mạnh của tôi. Và cách của tôi là mang tiếng cười vào tác phẩm của mình...”.

Genres: Fiction, Japan, Japanese Literature, Short Stories, Asian Literature, Literature, Asia

290 pages, Paperback

First published June 14, 2002

About the author

Masatsugu Ono (in Japanese, 小野 正嗣) maintains a steady output of fiction while working as a professor and researcher of Francophone literature. After doing graduate work at the University of Tokyo, Ono earned his PhD at the University of Paris VIII. In 2001, he published his first novel, Mizu ni umoreru haka (The Water-Covered Grave), which won the Asahi Award for New Writers. His second novel, Nigiyakana wan ni seowareta fune (Boat on a Choppy Bay), won the Mishima Yukio Prize. In addition to writing other works of fiction such as Mori no hazure de (At the Edge of the Forest), Maikurobasu (Microbus) and Shishiwatari-bana (Lion’s Tread Point), he has also translated works by Èdouard Glissant and Marie NDiaye into Japanese. Ono received the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s highest literary honor, in 2015. He lives in Tokyo.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘People who forget the past repeat it. We have to remember. We have to atone.’

History tangles its web around the lives of all it swallows, creating such a complex lineage those who wish to untangle it and examine the wounds within wonder if objective truth is merely a matter of perspective. ‘You can’t judge by appearances,’ we are frequently told in Masatsugu Ono’s Echo on the Bay, a deeply unsettling and destabilizing novel where underneath the first impressions of humor and small town gossip lurks a dark and tangled history of violence, betrayal and human folly. Weighing in at only 150pgs, this book hits with the force of novels twice its size, embroiling the reader in a multigenerational saga surrounding the families of a small coastal town where each revelation leaves you reeling and aching to understand more. It is dark and bleak yet full of intrigue as dead bodies may lurk in the beaches, and a boat that mysteriously disappeared decades ago returns and sits just off shore. Angus Turvill brilliantly captures the novel in English here, and the novel seamlessly skips around a lengthy timeline teasing out details in a convoluted—yet gripping—fashion as told in the ramblings of the local drunks. Through this offbeat narrative Ono captures heavy and necessary messages on history such as generational trauma, violence, the horrors of imperialism and a warning of climate disaster as we raze the Earth for profit while keeping the reader and narrator thirsty for the truth underneath it all.

‘Nothing serious happens here,’ the father says as the novel opens and the family (the teenage daughter, Miki, narrates the story) moves into a tiny fishing village. This is immediately ironic—I was reminded of the opening line to the surreal and bonkers series FLCL: ‘nothing amazing happens here’) as violence and debauchery lurk everywhere and the coastal town is not as idyllic as one would assume. ‘When I get out of the car, there's a dry smell, like manure,’ Miki tells us, ‘flies buzz around my head, their abdomen and wings bright in the sunshine — rough, black beads of light.’ Charming place, eh? Fishing and construction seem to be the only industries, and drinking the only entertainment. That is, until a local election pits two brother-in-laws against each other and a feud between families slowly unearths and their home, with the father as the only police officer in town, becomes a center for gossip as drinks loosen lips.

The characterizations here are extraordinary, with Ono creating so much in such a short space until you feel like you truly know these people. The father—‘a middle-aged personification of indecision, a caricature of a person whose primary aim in life is to avoid confrontation at all costs’—is immediately latched onto by the local drunk who ‘endured no real defeats, exhausted by an endless struggle against barriers (the enemy without) and hesitation (the enemy within),’ and lives off disability payments for damage done working. ‘He tried to drink himself from humanity back into an inorganic state,’ writes Ono, and the group of four other frequenters, laid off and collecting silicosis payments, do the same. They seem to Mr. Kawano, another local election candidate who runs and loses every time as a communist, to be ‘in human form, the antithesis of the capitalist society that Mr. Kawano hated—the end point of his criticism of that whole social system.’ Though in his speeches Kawano only seems to ask the locals to stop firing bottle rockets at the horribly scarred woman who lives in town and everyone wonders ‘was there a connection between that and communism? Nobody in the village knew enough about “communism” to be able to judge.’

Ono displays an extraordinary amount of restraint, never connecting the dots fully for the reader but placing them adjacent enough that you can’t miss. The damage done to the bodies of those driven to drink is not unlike the damage done to the environment by the fishing corporations. The waters are red and polluted and the weather becomes brutally hot and lifeless. ‘The red tide was blood shed by the bay,’ we are told. ‘it was blood sullied with evil and poison,’ and the officials only decide to do anything about it in order to protect the profits of the corporations, though it is known the fisheries are what caused the pollution and are killing the fish they need to survive, a pretty blunt statement on neoliberalism valuing profit over people and nature in a way that becomes like a snake eating its tail. Ono employs many metaphor and descriptions that all bend towards this idea, machines with ‘voracious iron mouths,’ or Miki’s description of warm air:

‘Hot air came rushing in—hordes of starving people swarming into a palace after the dictator has fled: forcing the great doors and, overrunning the palace, mad with anger and delight, grabbing riches that had originally been plundered from the people, from them’

The smell of rot and decay seems everywhere in the book, including the colonel who reeks of death from within, showing how the decay of morals brings about the decay of flesh and Earth.

But the real magic shines as Ono unveils the tangle of family histories and their connection to violence and the local companies and, while the picture eventually comes into focus, it is never quite nailed down and left to the reader to decide. It’s brilliantly executed, almost like a mystery-novel unveiling of clues that keep you in the dark until the time is right. Frustrated by the slow-burn reveal of wandering conversations, the narrator is reminded of hearing a western ethnologist describe the frustration of looking for information in a foreign culture:

’Just when you think your informants are about to tell you something, they go off on a tangent, recounting anecdotes of no direct relevance...the ethnologist begins to think sincere attempts to discover truths about a society and culture are being deliberately obstructed…For them, it’s the normal way of talking about the subject. We may think they’re digressing, but in their minds they aren’t at all. And what we find logical can be totally irrational to them.’

This description perfectly embodies the digressive quest for history in Echos on the Bay where the unfamiliar culture is the tormented memory lane of the intoxicated insiders.

‘Violence passes from person to person, and it builds up.’

Generational trauma informs every action in this novel, from abusive husbands who are not excused of their behavior but pitied for having been abused themselves to desires to set things right to account for past wrongs of a bygone generation. The mysterious ship is like a vessel connecting past and present with a cargo bay full of painful memories that, once opened, unveil a new horror for the present.

‘The boat in the bay floated silently as the rain beat down. It was like a memorial to the victims of a disaster that had been wrought by humans, and yet was more terrible than humans could imagine.’

Ono reminds us of the violence of history and warfare, such as villagers harmed by their own in occupied Manchuria and how it connects to refugees in the present. The town has a dark tale underneath, one that permeates every relationship for decades yet is only spoken of in whispers, and those who might uncover the truth are declared drunken fools. The novel, which opens as rather comical, becomes a chilling portrait of history and a stern warning to the future. ‘We have to atone.’

Despite the unsettling tone and messages, the novel reads rather whimsically. It was so gripping I finished it in a single day, haunted by it between readings and craving the answers. I had previously read Ono’s At the Edge of the Woods and was so charmed by the sinsiter surreal narrative that I knew I had to try another of his books and I have not been disappointed. While this book reads as less surreal there are still whifs of magical realism that feel comfortably nestled into the overall offbeat tone of the novel. Echo on the Bay has powerful teeth that gnash sharp criticisms, yet it is also overflowing with sorrow and empathy and is often disorienting and overwhelming, but delightfully so.

4/5

[Daniel Shindler · Rating 5 out of 5]

“ Echo on the Bay” is a slim novel that presents the history of Oita, a fishing village located on the Japanese coast. At first glance, it seems that very little happens there. But as residents bandy about current day gossip, recollections of the past seep out. Their stories are filled with local legend and conflicting realities. Their voices fuse to create a shifting portrait of events and history that challenges the reader to assemble the disparate strands coursing through this community.

The novel is narrated by Miki, a teenaged girl whose family has just moved to the village because her father has been appointed as the local policeman. From the outset, the village seems to reek of decay and stagnation.When Miki first steps out of the family car upon arrival, her senses are assaulted by a manure like smell while flies buzz around her head. A shroud of inertia seems to envelop her new home.

Both past and present village life are filtered through Miki’s voice as she sits at home and listens to village residents who come to her home to talk to her father. She is not skulking in the background eavesdropping on adult conversations. In this village network there is no need to pry or snoop. The village elders, highlighted by one particular drunk, settle themselves daily in her home and spend their days with her father imbibing on alcohol and gossip.

Slowly the history of the village emerges through the competing and conflicting stories of the elders. Their voices blend into a cacophonous lilt, sometimes resembling a Greek chorus and other times approaching the cadence of West African griots. The village has a tangled history of feuds and secrets spanning decades. Their backstory is embedded in the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and Korea and is punctuated by “ curses” and abuse that have affected individual families for decades.The mistakes of the past hover over the village like a malignant miasma as family behaviors and intemperate decisions reverberate through generations.

The novel is approximately one hundred fifty pages yet has the heft of a much longer narration. The offbeat and eccentric characters are drawn artfully and are laden with drama and mystery. They unfold their past with subtlety, misdirection and a good deal of understated humor. Their stories emerge in non linear fashion and are laid out in oblique trajectories, challenging the reader to correctly connect the conflicting strands. As the novel moves towards its denouement, we have become enmeshed in a cauldron of activity beneath the seemingly placid village exterior. We have been exposed to a web of history, generational trauma and the consequences of war and violence. We realize that the echo on the bay is the sound of history subtly pulsating across the village, either replicating past cycles or pleading for a different path forward.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is probably my last book for January in Japan - the second book I've read by Masatsugu Ono from Two Lines Press, who I subscribe to.

Miki is the narrator and has been reading about anthropology in high school, so when her father's police job moves the family to a fishing village (Oita) and people start dropping by to drink and tell stories, she pays attention and tries to figure out how pieces connect and why some stories seem to contradict. The reader is limited to that same information, so it takes a while to realize that there is an underlying history of violence and corruption in the community, not to mention great harm done to children that uncomfortably sits on the page but is never addressed by the characters in the book.

The characters run the gamut from oozing drunkards to strong silent fishermen to cruel children. I think some of the older characters are supposed to read as funny but I was too disturbed to find them amusing. The cover probably symbolizes the red tide that occurs in the story, destroying much of the fish farm and oyster farm infrastructure. It's funny how sometimes when I end a book feeling unsettled (most recently, books from Argentina and Japan) - it's because there is violence that is used as a metaphor. So I've been asking myself what this book is really about. Is it about corruption and violence? Could it also (I'm stretching) be about environmental destruction and the parallel to human corruption? Or have I read Tender Is the Flesh too recently?

A conversation on page 71 makes me think maybe it is just more directly about violence in families and how dangerous it is when it isn't dealt with. I know countries are all on different stages of dealing with domestic violence and the trauma passed down between generations. I did find an article that domestic violence cases had reached an all time high in 2019, and then in 2020, many articles about how pandemic situations have made these situations even worse, as they have everywhere people are stuck together for too long. The first significant study I could find was in 1999 and this book was published in Japan in 2002, so I kind of think I'm on to something.

"'Violence passes from person to person,' Iwaya said, tickling Shiro's neck. 'And it builds up.'"

I haven't yet found many articles or reviews who discuss the book from this angle - so many reviewers want to compare the author to Murakami and interpret the events as weird, as if they are not really happening. But to me the true power of the novel is the idea that they really are, that people choose not to see the dead bodies and the rotten fish and the child chained up in the yard. And they are suffering the consequences.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dad had a lot of things bothering him when he was stationed on the coast.
There was the abandoned boat floating in the bay. There was the body that Mitsugu Azamui said was on the beach, but which nobody ever found. There were the boys who kept shooting bottle rockets at old Toshiko-ba’s house. And then there was me, in love with Mr. Yoshida, my social studies teacher.

Echo on the Bay is the second novel in translation from Ono Masatsugu, after the excellent Lion Cross Point (my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), both translated by Angus Turvill and published by perhaps the US’s finest independent publisher Two Lines Press.

The original of this novel にぎやかな湾に背負われた船 (Nigiyakana wan ni seowareta fune) won the Mishima Yukio Prize (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mishima...) in 2002.

I described Lion Cross Point in my review as a “powerful novel(la), deceptively simple but artfully constructed and very unsettling” and praised how Turvill “does an effective job of rendering the local dialect of the characters into a generic English-language unsophisticated dialect”, and the same comments also apply here.

Echo on the Bay is set in a coastal fishing town. It is narrated by Miki, a teenage girl, whose father has been sent to the area to be the local policeman. The locals are a rather eccentric bunch, prone to talking and drinking. As the quote that opens my review suggests, there are a number of odd issues in the village, troubling Miki and her father, but finding out the stories that lie behind them is a tortuous business due to the elliptical ways the locals speak:

A Western ethnologist described the frustration people of his profession feel when they can’t get the information they’re looking for. I was beginning to feel that frustration myself. Just when you think your informants are about to tell you something they go off on a tangent, recounting anecdotes of no direct relevance whatsoever. And not just that. When they’re talking other people come along and join in. The flow of the conversation is taken off in a completely different direction. The ethnologists begin to think that their sincere attempts to discover truth about a society and culture and being deliberately obstructed.

“But that’s not the case,” said the ethnologist, whose research focused on a tribal society somewhere on the Upper Nile. “For them, it’s the normal way of talking about the subject. We may think they’re digressing, but in their minds they aren’t at all.”

For the reader, there is an additional layer of obfuscation due to Miki’s own curious choice of metaphors. For example, in the passage below she describes the local drunkard, around who many of the stories revolve, Mitsugu Azamui (always referred to in that Western style by the villagers, instead of the more usual Azamui Mitsugu with the family name first, due to an incident from the 1940s when American soldiers and Mitsugu was a child).

There was a large bottle in his hand, like a scepter- the only thing that was faithful to this solitary king. The liquid was pure, transparent – reflecting the scepter’s fidelity. But was it really pure? It was difficult to tell in the moonlight. The king was suspicious and, wanting to establish its true motivations, kept lifting it to his eye and looking deep within. Then he’d press it to his lips, as if the fidelity would be revealed by the pleasure the liquid gave as it ran down his throat.

But as Miki and the reader untangles the tales, a dark picture emerges that reveals much of Japan’s own past, embracing the invasion of Manchuria, colonial repression and the forced importation of indentured labour from Korea.

Ono is one of the leading Japanese novelists of the 'post-Murakami' generation (a label he accepts) and also a prolific translator of novels from French into Japanese, notably of another author Two Lines Press feature in English translation, the brilliant Marie NDiaye, which likely influences his own style. In a fascinating Paris Review article, he discussed Haruki Murakami and Kenzaburō Ōe, two writers often regarded by some Japanese critics as writing in ‘translationese’ as well as his own style, focusing on this novel:

I don’t think anyone would object if I said Ōe and Murakami are the two novelists that represent contemporary Japanese literature from the end of the war through the present. Is it surprising that reading foreign literature in the original played a crucial role in their literary development? They are always writing through the experience of the “foreign.” As Proust said: “les beaux livres sont écrits dans une sorte de langeue étrangère (beautiful books are written in a kind of foreign language).” Even if Oe and Murakami seem to be writing in Japanese, they might truly be writing in some kind of foreign language.

It was there, in Orléans, that I began to translate into Japanese Foucault, Glissant, Naipaul, and Marie NDiaye. I feel now that without this effect of distance—geographical distance from my hometown and linguistic distance made possible by it, as well as the in-between space opened up by the act of translation—I couldn’t have written my novel. This distance made it possible for me to see the place and people of my native land in such a vivid way that wouldn’t have been possible if I had been in Tokyo. I am convinced that, like in Murakami and Oe’s work, the in-between space of translation and complete detachment from Japanese helped me to be more sensitive to the language than when I was surrounded by it—or perhaps it allowed me to find my own kind of foreign language.

from https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...

Recommended – 4.5 stars

[Haiiro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Không khí giống trong mấy truyện đọc trên báo Văn nghệ ngày xưa của mẹ với phim truyền hình Việt Nam ngày trước. Kiểu nó cứ cũ cũ đượm buồn. Ono viết lan man quá mà tôi không nắm được chủ đích của ông nên bị out ra để nghĩ linh tinh sang chuyện khác hơi nhiều.
Rõ ràng là một cuốn không hợp thị hiếu tí nào nên dù có tư vị riêng, cũng không có gì bất ngờ khi Tiếng hát người cá nằm ố mốc vàng khè trên mấy bàn bày sách giảm nửa giá với đồng giá.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a conceptually interesting oral history of a remote Japanese fishing village, but I could not fully engage with it for various reasons. I much preferred Lion Cross Point by the same author.

[Ursa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mượn lời của nhà văn Nguyễn Quang Sáng thì đây là một quyển sách "buồn, đau và đẹp".

[Armando · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting take on what it takes to break away from a seemingly endless cycle of hurt and pain that a tight knitted community seems cursed to repeat. I was a little thrown off by the abrupt and somewhat comical ending to such a tragic novel, but I feel like I understood what the author was going for with it.

Some of the gore and vulgar descriptive details of the book I could certainly have done without, and at times the story felt like it had so many illusive threads in it that even the main character commented 'what does this have to do with anything? Get to the point!'

Overall, interesting read, a bit offputting at times but interesting nevertheless.

[Evan Mac · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to the folks at Two Lines Press for sending me this novel to review! When I had a problem receiving the book, they were communicative and helpful.

Echo on the Bay is the second novel I have read by Masatsugu Ono, the other being Lion Cross Point. Where Lion Cross Point focused on the pain of an individual in the context of a community, Echo shifts the focus to the community as a whole. The novel begins in the present: a new police chief and his family come to a Japanese fishing village. Most of the story is told from the perspective of his daughter who falls for her social studies teacher. Despite the inherent conflict possible in her illicit relationship, her main contribution to the narrative is soaking up the stories of the village's past. Characters take turns describing the social, political, and economic miasma that the town floats in. Some of these stories are told in conversation, others from an authorial voice in bold text. These passages are back-story-dumps that overwhelm the nuances of the novel's present timeline-- which fades from a narrative into a framing device.

Echo on the Bay suffers from its short length. Masatsugu is clearly interested in the town's past and the leeching effects of historical conflict, yet the long bold passages feel so separate from the narrative, so jarring, that they took me out of the story. I bring up the idea of length because I believe that Masatsugu's ambitions were too grand for a 145 pg novel. The complex history of war, immigration, and family feuds could take up 300+ pages, and the story of the new police man and his family could have been given room to create new dynamics, adding further complexity to that history-- adding to it-- as opposed to just witnessing it. The bold-texted passages could have formed a single section. Roberto Bolaño's Savage Detectives is a hard format to recommend, but I would have loved to start with the girl and her family, then dive into the history, then resurface in the present and watch the story unfold with a richer understanding of the background.

I will keep reading Masatsugu Ono as his books are translated! He is a master of nuance, and while I felt that this book was understated to a fault, many individual scenes were powerful for their quietness. Echo on the Bay also boasts some excellent weirdness and darkness-- think Murakami or Schweblin. I am excited to read what he writes next!

3/5 Stars. It made me curious, but it didn't pay off emotionally for me.

[Annie · Rating 3 out of 5]

To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, all happy villages are alike and all unhappy villages are unhappy in their one way. At least, this is the impression I got as I read Masatsugu Ono’s Echo on the Bay (solidly translated by Angus Turvill). When Miki and her family arrive in Oita after her father’s transfer, the family expects a quiet life in the coastal village. After all, why would they send a man who cannot pass the promotion exams to be the top police officer in Oita?

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss, for review consideration.

[Andy Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

All is not well in the Japanese coastal village of Oita, where teenage Miki has just moved to, with her father transferred there as policeman. The local drunk won’t take the hint, and arrives most days to drink his cares away with him. The inebriate Mitsugu claims he saw a body on the beach, but no one believes him. As the town’s council election approaches, corruption increases, and in response the townsfolk gossip, revealing dark secrets of family abuse from the time of the occupations of Manchuria and Korea.
This is a strange novella; there is little attempt by Ono to find any charm at all in the village, rather the sordid side of its past just grows - from the polluted fish farm, and the floating ghost ship drifting in the bay, to its inhabitants, most of whom are revealed to be criminals.
Quirky and potentially disturbing, this is much darker than Lion Cross Point, which was equally impressive. It demonstrates the versatility the author as he delves into the breakdown of normality.

[Squeeb (Jake) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book took me by surprise. It’s a slow, atmospheric novel that really makes you scratch your head for a while until the last 30 pages or so happen. From that point onward, I was completely hooked and couldn’t pry my eyes away from what I was reading. I think that this story would be a great premise for a film, I feel that having visuals would enhance the experience even more. I really wasn’t super over the moon about this book until the home stretch, and I am glad that I was rewarded for my patience.

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 Stars

Not what I was expecting, but it was super interesting. Basically got to get a taste of what it's like to live in a small village town, where everyone knows everything about others, yet nothing at all.

[John de Vos · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much packed into such a short novel.
Incredible.

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was really excited for ECHO ON THE BAY, which tells the story of a spooky rural fishing village with a messy past through the stories of neighbors and residents. It’s like a little novel of oral history. Unfortunately the romanticism and grossly graphic detail of sexual and domestic violence made this really hard to get through. It reminds me all the worst parts of a Haruki Murakami novel. Thanks to Nectar Literary and Two Lines Press for the ARC.

[Jack Greenberg · Rating 1 out of 5]

I got to Page 92 but then found that pages 93 to 140 were missing! I’m guessing there must have been a printing error... Was really enjoying the story up until this point so here’s hoping the publisher will rectify this issue soon.

[Honey Bee Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating 3 ⭐️ I was lucky enough to win this book from a @goodreads giveaway. It’s about a small village on the Japanese coast. The local police chief plays audience to the locals who come to him with bottles of wine as they share tales of the village. While this is going on the police chief’s daughter is listening in on all the tales and piecing together all the tales of violence, dangerous attempt to save Korean refugees from the Japanese police. This was a short read that I am going to have to reread. I don’t think I was in the right head space while reading this. I didn’t focus enough to get the names of the characters straight and I kept mixing them up as I read. I will defiantly give this book another read.

[Charlotte · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this novel since hearing about it 6 months ago. As much as I wanted to love it, stylistically it's not great and the plot seems insubstantial.

It's incredibly disjointed, making it a very difficult and confusing read in terms of understanding what's going and forming any connection to the characters or storyline.

After struggling through 50%, I DNF'ed. I'm disappointed.

[Alan M · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quietly devastating look at small-town Japan, this is a book that slowly unveils itself as it develops. It is narrated by Miki, the teenage daughter of a police officer who is sent to a small town beside a bay as the new local police chief. A quiet town, where nothing ever happens...

Populated by a cast of oddball characters, what emerges from the book is what Miki hears in conversations and stories as these characters meet and drink and pass the time. Miki herself is having an affair with her social studies teacher, but we slowly come to see a town where domestic violence and secrets abound, and where the worst characteristics of a nation come to the fore. A mysterious ship appears in the harbour, and when Miki's father finally gets round to checking it out the ship holds some truly shocking contents.

This isn't a big showy kind of novel. As I say, it slowly reveals itself to the reader, and the cumulative effect is a searing insight into the lives of a small town, and the secrets we all keep. The past, whether it be a nation in wartime or individuals in their own small lives, is something that we can never escape from. Haunting and unsettling, this is a definite recommend. 4.5 stars.

[Chris Brown]

This was a confusing and meandering novel that seemed to move all over the place as storytelling plots bounced back and fourth... At first glance i thought it was going to be a sit-com type comedy farce. But then became quite disturbing. Narrated by Miki the teenage daughter of a police chief who wants to finish out his career in peace and quiet, takes a job in a remote fishing village. the village has two industry's fish farming and construction owned each by two in-laws whose sisters had a falling out and now there's a small town election. The big issue is the boys shooting firecrackers at a disfigured old lady's house. the only real activity's in town seem to be drinking and gossiping. A typical scene - the villagers bring bottles of whiskey to the chief as gifts but really bribes and then come over to visit and drink it all and and gossip which left me with the impression that's all the town does. The new chief felt compelled to be a polite host so would spend all hours sitting listening and drinking while the rest of of the family wished they would go away so they could watch TV. It goes off in all directions Miki is having sex with her teacher who has the nicest car in town. A derelict fishing boat reappears in the bay but nobody investigates. The Father police chief is taking 4 people all friends on disability to be arrested for election bribes. He has to drive to the next town over the mountain in his own car because he doesn't have a real jail and they goad him into hitting a dear for the meat which wreaks his car then they speculate he may have hit an old lady lying in the road who wanted to die. These are all things Miki is listening to in her living room. There's as rotten red tide stench in the bay from over feeding the fish pens so the in law fishery owner decides to dredge the bay with the construction company's crane but there's a barge crane accident.... A boy handcuffed in a barn where there's various sex situations. Three Korean men escaped from a work farm where they were kidnapped and impressed into forced labor in Japan and are hidden in the barn. There's a whole conversation on domestic abuse and the naïve assumption that big men are automatically wife and family beaters when they drink. The book ends on a story about Japanese invasion of Manchuria during WW2 the atrocity's torture and as they retreat from Russian Army.

[Peter A · Rating 4 out of 5]

This genre-defying short novel portrays a small Japanese seaside village, full of dark secrets, accumulated over many years, that people are afraid or unwilling to talk about. The story is told through the voice of Miki, the teenage daughter of the new police chief in a small village on the Japanese west coast. As villagers come to her house to discuss issues with her dad, she listens; and through her other experiences in the village tries to piece together the stories that are not being told.

The book is full of characters, that all related pieces of different stories, some dating back to world war II, others more recently, including a riff between two key members of a family, a brother and sister. Finally, the appearance of a ship in the harbor that simply sits there is a catalyst to getting people to talk more.

Miki mentions a couple of time that an ethnologist must have patience to bring out stories, since the people who talk will often go off on what seems like unrelated tangents, but they are not (p 118). And this is how the book unwinds the story, one question leading to a different story and different question, until the mysterious presence of the boat is addressed, at Miki’s insistence.

There are many characters, which bring their own strengths and weaknesses, helping create a portrait of the town, and often adding wit. However, with so many characters it was difficult for me to keep track of them. Many of the stories are truly horrific. On the other hand, when one of the most horrific stories is finally told, it could lead to a more understanding and kind set of neighbors. I suspect the story will stay with me for a long time.

Thanks to my daughter for gifting me this book!

[Camille McCarthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was short, a quick read, and written in simple, straightforward language, but the story was not told linearly but more in many circles that ended up connecting to each other. Most of the book was really the backstory of what had happened in a small fishing village, and the present-day plot seemed very calm on the surface, but when details from the past were revealed you realized how much of a heavy past the characters were still dealing with. I thought it was incredibly well-executed, and showed how a place's history affects its present. Ono also did a great job of writing things out so that they seemed like simple details we could accept on the surface level, but then coming back to them and revealing what was behind them. There were some humorous moments in the book as well, but even the humor is pretty dark. I thought the darker parts of the story were also told in a way that was not traumatizing or sensational, and there is some magical realism thrown in. The way the story unfolds in pieces also makes it feel not as traumatic, even though there is a lot of violence. There's a torture scene towards the end but even that is told sparingly and doesn't go into dramatic detail which makes it a little easier to read.
I really enjoyed this author and this translation, and hope to read more of Masatsugu Ono's work in future.

[Yoshay Lindblom · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this Mishima Prize-winning novel, the newly transferred police chief sets about investigating an abandoned boat floating in the bay of a small fishing village in Oita prefecture in Japan. At the same time, one of the villagers claims he’s seen a body on the beach.

Miki, the police chief’s daughter, listens to the stories the villagers tell her father over a drink at their home. As these stories progress, they become increasingly graphic and violent in nature, and it becomes clear that the silly, inebriated, gossipy, sometimes comic village people are carrying a legacy of a disturbing and traumatic past.

Angus Turvill’s translation skilfully preserves Ono’s haunting exploration of Japan’s troubled historical past, generational trauma, inherited violence, and horrors of imperialism, all underscored by looming environmental catastrophe manifested in the novel as a giant red snake spawned from polluted water slithering through the viscous surface as the wind dies. 

It took me a while to get used to Ono’s layered narrative structure, but once I got used to the frame story technique, I couldn’t stop reading. I was struck by the author’s ability to elicit laughter and pain at a simultaneous pace. 

Highly recommend it to all who love history, glowing prose and a dark story sprinkled with ample humour. But tread carefully because there’s plenty of graphic description of abuse and violence within this slim 146 page novel.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Echo on the Bay is a beautiful trainwreck of a story. Told through the naive eyes of the local police chief's teenage daughter, the sleepy village's history of trauma unfolds story-by-drunken story from the locals.

Echo on the Bay is Ono's second released work by Two Lines Press, and much like Lion Cross Point, is beautifully written. The structure is similar to Lion Cross Point's- it is a story of trauma being unaffectedly told through the eyes of a naive child. Here, however, the repetition of pain echoing across generations and swirling ever-larger reads like a compressed One Hundred Years of Solitude. Family trees quickly grow and branch, interlinking guilt and condemning the entire town.

The story quietly condemns the powerlessness the police chief exhibits. This voice echoes throughout the story- a seemingly Japanese interpretation of the Virgin Suicides, where here, the entire village lays witness to the the many injustices, but can only cast indifferent, powerless eyes upon them.

A great entry in the Japanese body of works. It is very loud and oddly direct for a country whose history of violence continues to resonate loudly today until those stories are told.

[Terry94705 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a quiet, often humorous novel about life in a Kyushu village so small it has no stoplight. The narrator is a 15 year old girl who (we learn very quickly) is having sex with her teacher. This is only one of the dark undercurrents in this novel. Miki is very sharp, much sharper than her policeman father, newly assigned to the village. She watches and listens as locals  explain various characters and histories to her father, always in fragments and tangents. On tv she once heard a scholar explain the frustration of ethnographers as their informants led them in circles, never directly revealing the stories in ways that the ethnographer could follow. Such is Ono’s strategy in this admirable novel.

Possible spoiler: Does her policeman father know about her relationship with her teacher? That’s a question Miki seems to have herself. She seems smarter than her teacher too, and well aware of what she is doing. Yet I found myself feeling discomfort about Miki's situation that I might not have felt if the author has been a woman. And then I felt uncomfortable with that thought too. Sigh. Perhaps discomfort is the outcome of a good read.

[Leah Rachel von Essen · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Echo on the Bay by Masatugo Ono, translated by Angus Tarvill, the protagonist’s father recently became the policeman of a small seaside town with a heavy weight of rivalries and a history of trauma. She listens in as the residents, from the drunken Mitsugu Azamui to the Silica Four, tell the stories of the village, from sordid, painful rumors to love affairs that were open secrets. She spends nights with her social studies teacher, parked overlooking the beach.

Why does Mr. Kawano always show up to take Mitsugu home when he’s too drunk? Why is Toshi the only kid who doesn’t set off rockets at Toshiko-bā’s house? Slowly, she’s able to put together what happened between the two brothers-in-law who are in a constant struggle for control of the town, to solve the lingering mysteries rooted in the town’s shadows. It’s a readable book. The timelines can get a little tangled in your head for sure—I’m still only 80% on which thing happened before which—and it ends a little abruptly, but I enjoyed the full read.

Content warnings for alcoholism, ableism, suicide, animal death, sexual assault, age gap, pedophilia, domestic violence, prejudice

[Erik Wolfgang · Rating 4 out of 5]

One day I found this book at a used bookstore - I don't know, the title just called to me. I bought it because it was cheap and I hate leaving independent bookstores empty-handed. Despite that, it is a book that has had one of the strongest impressions on me during my life so far. I just can't stop thinking about Echo on the Bay, even months after finishing it.

More a tapestry than anything else, we see the present, past, and perhaps future of a small coastal town in Japan. This book is a meditation on the cycles of pain and suffering that human beings seemed cursed to repeat over and over again, thought generations. The big questions posed by this 150-ish page novel: Can we escape these cycles? Can we atone? Are left to the reader to decide.

This would have been a 5 star book for me, however the depictions of violence are just too much. I think that the author could have made his point without pages on end depicting scenes that made me physically sick to my stomach. I was on a train in Taiwan when I had to put the book down and just stare out the window in shock because of a particularly bad scene.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

The only sound was from the waves—

perhaps it was the sea’s song of solace
for the king.

The sea had nothing to fear
from the king’s harsh tongue.

It was just an observer
and could afford to be generous.

Mitsugu’s shadow stretched crazily
across the bay in the clear light of the moon
like a searchlight looking for people in distress
though in fact it wasn’t looking for anything.

It was wanting to be found.

It wavered on the surface of the water
sad and unstable.

…

In the end
the shadow searchlight found nothing in the bay
but the ghost ship

I wondered

how on earth….

We did see something, though.

I can’t definitely say that it was a living person.

…

I doubt that Mitsugu
dragged around by alcohol
wearing away the ragged cloth of his existence
would recall having been told even once.

Fish jumped and scattered like sparks
consuming the surface of the water
with silver flames.

[Richard Janzen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a strange unsettling book. A small coastal town in rural Kyushu is the setting. We learn about all the characters through their interactions in the present, but more through the stories of the past which seem to helps us see why things are the way they are.

The story started as what seemed to be a simple story of local drinking and rivalries, but included fairly casual references to the history teacher doing more than teaching history to his female student, domestic violence, teens terrorizing a strange old lady, and so much more. Then throw in Koreans trying to escaped forced labour in post-war Japan, Chinese migrants trying to get to Japan illegally, and so much more.

The comic style of the storytelling mixed with the almost casual reference to violent and serious situations, make this a unique read.

[Dree · Rating 4 out of 5]

A new police chief has brought his family to a small Japanese town. There is a local election going on, a ghost ship sits in the bay, and his daughter Miki (the narrator) eavesdrops on every conversation between her father and the townspeople that she can.

Both Miki and her father learn why the town drunk is a drunk--and why his elderly father is always ready to take him home. They learn why the two businessmen (running against each other in the local election, and brothers-in-law) hate each other. Why kids shoot bottle rockets and an elderly lady's home. They learn why others might behave as they do--and why it is largely forgiven. They find out about the shameful things that occurred in the past. And they are actively participating in what future generations will consider shameful...