Nao-Cola Yamazaki
TRANS. BY Polly Barton
A Totally New Kind of Umbrella
For the first time ever, a totally new kind of umbrella has been introduced in East Japan’s Saitama Prefecture.
Until now, the umbrella has been a device utilized exclusively by individuals in order to protect themselves from the rain. It consists of a length of cloth wrapped around a shaft shaped like a walking stick, transforming during battle to form a dome above the head of its owner to repel the rain that comes tumbling down from the sky. Ever since human beings first started walking on just their hind legs, they put their newly freed-up front limbs to use in developing all kinds of ingenious tools. One such tool was the umbrella. It assumed its present form in the eighteenth century, and since then, has not really evolved at all. It is, you could say, a rather a simple kind of instrument.
However, a totally new type of umbrella has finally been created. That said, using this term “totally new” here is perhaps a little misleading. There is no doubt that this so-called totally new umbrella lacks that thing that makes the best inventions so fascinating: that “pioneering” quality of approaching a problem from an utterly new angle. In fact, you could go so far as to say the only thing “new” about said umbrella is that it is much bigger than usual.
The driving force behind this particular innovation was the idea that, rather than each and every person using his or her own umbrella when the rain fell, it would be more efficient to have a canopy that functioned for the entire area. And thus the giant umbrella that covers the entire prefectural territory was born.
Poking up through the center of Saitama Prefecture, in the town of Higashimatsuyama, stands a large shaft. When the rain starts to fall, this shaft extends up into the sky with a great mechanical whirr, and the canopy, folded over on itself several times, spreads its ribs and unfurls.
There also are supporting shafts to the North, South, East, and West of the prefecture, positioned in Kumagaya, Tokorozawa, Misato, and Chichibu. When the canopy is fully opened, a pointy tip comes to rest on top of each of these shafts. Consequently, the whole of Saitama Prefecture is covered over by a sheet of vinyl, and nobody gets wet—not the fathers commuting back from their Tokyo offices to their homes in Saitama City, not the high schoolers playing baseball just like the team at Nishiura High School in Big Windup!, not the Totoro who gets out of the Catbus in the Tokorozawa forest, and not the little boys in Kasukabe out walking hand in hand with their mothers like Crayon Shin-chan.
Saitama Prefecture contains some forty towns, and has a high overall population density. If each and every inhabitant needed one of their very own, we’d be talking a hell of a lot of umbrellas. Moreover, they don’t necessarily even last. Prior to the completion of the giant umbrella, many people would buy the see-through plastic umbrellas sold at convenience stores for five hundred yen when they got caught in the rain, only to discard them after a single use. In other words, the use of just one umbrella for all residents has also made a significant cutback to the area’s consumption of natural resources.
Saitama Prefecture is wide and vertically flat, shaped a bit like a turtle, or a car. Accordingly, the canopy of the Saitama umbrella is not circular, like a normal umbrella, but turtle-shaped. The prefecture is landlocked, so the rainwater that collects in the gutter attached to the rim of the canopy is chiefly released into the prefecture’s main rivers, the Tonegawa and the Arakawa. Of course, some of the water is siphoned directly into the region’s reservoirs, and some is even fed into its fields and forests, meaning the leeks that are a specialty of the Fukaya area have been growing at an astounding rate.
I should mention here that I was brought up in Saitama City and, as a result, I love it very much. Saitama City is an administrative district that came into being when the towns of Ōmiya, Yono, and Urawa merged, so as to create a population large enough for the area to be recognized by the government as a designated city. Subsequently, the town of Iwatsuki also joined. The city is now the site of the prefectural capitol. And yet, the main shaft of the umbrella is not positioned in Saitama City, but in Higashimatsuyama, because Saitama City lies to the southeast of the prefecture. Placing the shaft there would set the whole umbrella off balance. Those familiar with the geography of the area will know that being in the southeast places Saitama City closer to Tokyo than the rest of the prefecture. Accordingly, when you hear people from Saitama City boasting about their hometown, you find that they often pride themselves in a strangely Tokyo-centric way on the fact that Saitama City lies close to Tokyo. It’s safe to say that people in Saitama are more knowledgeable about Tokyo than people from Tokyo themselves.
Another thing to mention about Saitama City is that it is generally recognized as an ideal place for men working in central Tokyo to build their dream homes. As a commuter town, it is overrun with families that very closely resemble one another. These families are middle-class, and they live in detached houses. They have a father doing an office job, a mother who is a housewife, two kids, and a Toyota Corolla.
I grew up in a house just like that, in a newly developed residential district. There were seven children in the same school year as me within a kilometer radius of my house, and as a result, I had lots of friends from a very early age. In school, neighborhood groups like that were a dime a dozen. Growing up in that kind of environment, you become hyper-sensitive to the norm.
The kind of bullying you encounter in places like those is not the malicious kind that happens in the countryside, where people continue to prey on a particular target. Rather, in the suburbs of a large city, the bullying is relatively egalitarian, because the victim is constantly changing. If you stand out even in the slightest, you will instantly be persecuted. The children there go about repeating the mantra: Just be normal, just be normal. After Saitama’s children have been subjected to an assortment of practices and rituals, they become adults.
But look! It has started to rain.
The shaft poking out of the ground in Higashimatsuyama begins to change shape. The surface of the shaft is decorated with a wood effect, but on the inside, it is solid metal. Up it goes, whirring higher and higher, then the ribs spread open, and vinyl covers the sky. Through the vinyl, you can see the heavens. When the rain falls, you can hear the plip-plopping of the raindrops from way up overhead.
The best part is when the rain stops. Bit by bit, the vinyl begins to dry off. The sun sparkles as it moves by. The landlocked prefecture of Saitama finally gets a taste of the sea. It is just like looking up at the surface of the water from the bottom of the ocean.
Nao-Cola Yamazaki debuted in 2004 with the Bungei Award-winning novella Don’t Laugh At Other People’s Sex. They have published over ten novels, essay collections, and a children’s book, and has been nominated for the Akutagawa Prize five times. Their latest release is Utsukushii Kyori (A Beautiful Distance), published in July 2016.
Polly Barton was raised in London and lives in Osaka. Aside from Nao-Cola Yamazaki, she has translated a variety of Japanese literary fiction and non-fiction, including work by Aoko Matsuda and Misumi Kubo. She is a 2017 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant recipient. Her translation of Tomoka Shibasaki’s Spring Garden was published by Pushkin Press in 2017.