Uśmiechnięty wilk

by Yūko Tsushima, Aleksandra Szczechla (Translator)

Uśmiechnięty wilk, jedna z ostatnich powieści Yūko Tsushimy (1947-2016) jest jednocześnie jedną z najważniejszych. To fascynująca lektura o pokonywaniu trudności i dojrzewaniu.

Akcja powieści toczy się w powojennej Japonii i opowida o przejmującej podróży dwójki dzieci, które przemierzają kraj pociągiem. Doświadczają okropności życia w czasach powojennych. Tłem wydarzeń są wycinki z gazet opisujące seryjnych morderców, stada dzikich psów atakujących i zabijających ludzi oraz tonące łodzie z setkami pasażerów na pokładzie.

Książka zdobyła m.in. prestiżową nagrodę Osaragi Jiro (2001) oraz została wybrana przez Japanese Literature Publishing Project (inicjatywę Agencji ds. Kultury Japonii) do promowania historii i kultury Japonii.

Genres: Japan, Fiction, Japanese Literature, Historical Fiction, Asia, Asian Literature

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Yūko Tsushima 津島 佑子 is the pen name of Satoko Tsushima, a contemporary Japanese fiction writer, essayist and critic. She is the daughter of famed novelist Osamu Dazai, who died when she was one year old. She is considered "one of the most important Japanese writers of her generation" (The New York Times).

She has won many major literary prizes, including the Kawabata for "The Silent Traders," one of the stories in The Shooting Gallery, and the Tanizaki for Mountain of Fire. Her early fiction, from which The Shooting Gallery is drawn, was largely based on her experience as a single mother.

Her multilayered narrative techniques have increasingly taken inspiration from the Ainu oral epics (yukar) and the tales of premodern Japan.

When invited to teach Japanese literature to graduate students in Paris, she taught the yukar, and her seminar led to the publication of Tombent, tombent les gouttes d’argent: Chants du peuple aïnou (1996), the first French edition of the epic poems.

Tsushima is active in networks such as the Japan-India Writers’ Caravans and dialogues with Korean and Chinese writers. Recent novels have been set in Taiwan during Japanese colonial rule, among the Kyrgyz, in medieval Nara, and in post-3/11 Tokyo. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages.

Reviews

[Sandra || Tabibito no hon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Co to była za książka!

[Rise · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was around 1889 that the Ezo wolf of Hokkaido was believed to have gone extinct. The main cause, according to Hiraiwa Yonekichi in Ookami—Sono seitai to rekishi (The wolf: its ecology and history) (1981, revised ed. 1992), was the intense persecution the animal suffered at the hands of humans. By 1905, the Japanese wolf, a distinct and endemic species found only in three islands of the Japanese archipelago, went missing as well. Its extinction was largely a result of hunting, the spread of disease, and the loss of habitat and prey. Anecdotal reports gave information of the possibility that the wolves were still in existence beyond these dates, but the truth of these claims was in question.

In fact, the extinction of the wolf species in western Europe came before these two species: 1680 in Scotland and 1710 in Ireland. A worldwide trend indicated that the population of the species was in decline.

Hiraiwa claims that wolves went extinct so early in Europe because they were always seen as a threat to people who from ancient times had raised livestock such as sheep and cattle. They feared the wolf as man's mortal enemy, and constantly persecuted the animal by every possible means—guns, poisons, traps, and snares, even hand grenades—until they had finally eradicated them.

This natural history of wolf, including the appearance of the animal in legends and classic novels, was the subject of "Prelude", in the opening of Tsushima Yūko's novel Laughing Wolf (published in Japan in 2000). The prelude ended with the mention of the extinction of the Japanese wolf in 1905 coinciding with the end of the Russo-Japanese war, after which, Japan was again involved in a war with China and then in the world war which ended in 1945, after Japan's unconditional surrender: "The Japanese wolf was no longer around, but as things turned out, wild dogs who had lost their masters could be spotted running through the smoldering ruins of Japan's cities."

For a work of fiction it was strange to read a long precis of a nonfiction book on wolves. It was also strange, and particularly jarring, when the following chapter changed in tone and took up a different narrative thread, indicating a hybrid approach to the novel. The story turned to a father and his four-year old son living in the apocalyptic landscape and waste of postwar Japan. The two survived air bombings and were left homeless and hungry. The child's point of view could remind one of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. The child recalling his early life through hazy memories: "One day fire came pouring down from the sky. The fence burned, the house burned, his mother, brother, and sister all burned. Even the cat burned. They all vanished from the earth." Later the father also died and the child was taken to an orphanage. One event, however, particularly lingered in the boy's memory. While he and his father were sleeping in a cemetery, he witnessed the suicides of three adults. When already grown up, he investigated the deaths and even visited the house of the wife and daughter of one of the dead.

The narrative also took up the point of view of the daughter, the young girl Yuki being visited by the now grown up young man Mitsuo. The tenuous connection between them did not prevent their becoming easy friends. The young man and the girl, 17 and 12 years old, both orphaned of fathers, decided to leave Tokyo and take a train trip to the countryside.

The novel then recounted their adventures while on train journeys and stops, inadvertently witnessing the social and economic realities of postwar Japan. As with The Shooting Gallery, a collection of Tsushima's stories in translation, the two characters in this novel were wont to escape their present situations and to create for themselves avatars or surrogate identities. Mitsuo and Yuki took on the names Akela and Mowgli, respectively, characters from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. With their new aliases, they appropriated not only the identities of a children's book's characters but also the fictional reality associated with them. Hence, their every adventure was colored by plot elements of The Jungle Book, as well as the difficulties they faced in their takeover of Cold Lairs, the world of men, which they were seeking to understand via the book's law of the jungle—We be of one blood, ye and I.

This newly created "alternate" reality allowed the novelist Tsushima and her characters to navigate the inhospitable, savage world-at-war heightened by poverty and crimes faced by the Japanese in the 1940s. Role-playing was thus adopted as a viable strategy for the two of them, as Akela and Mowgli, to survive the world where they saw and found themselves as outsiders: "He's the leader of the wolf pack, the solitary emperor who embodies the law of the jungle. He's the reason the human child Mowgli is allowed to live on the margins of the pack. I'm not all that distinguished, but I'm taking the name [Akela] because I have responsibility for you. I'm the leader—the father, older brother, and teacher all rolled into one—and you're the apprentice. So I think Akela and Mowgli are perfect for us." And so they transformed into the wolf and the young boy, outsiders in the midst of monkeys, the "Man Pack".

Among the people they encountered in their long train journeys were homeless men traveling to work in the coal mines. After the war, when poverty and scarcity of food struck the majority of the population, some of the homeless, including children, were forced to enter into manual labor in the mines in exchange for low salaries. After this incident, where Akela and Mowgli observed the men consigned to backbreaking work, several news clippings were inserted into the text, dated December 1945 to January 1947. The news provided direct context and circumstances of child labor in the coal mines.

By the second half of the novel, the set of news clips were interspersed in the text more and more frequently. The effect was jarring. It forced collisions between what was happening in the made-up (fictional) world and the actual (real) events, and the collisions of private and public lives. In the first place the real and imagined identities of the main characters were already integrated into their respective stories. In addition, the not seamless juxtaposition of the adventures of Akela and Mowgli and the accompanying news excerpts were also forcing the collisions of individual and collective histories. The hybrid text was now bringing out human-interest stories from war-torn Japan through a clash, or perhaps a necessary confrontation, between fiction and nonfiction, to tell a larger story. These episodic news and stories concerned the aforementioned laborers in the coal mines, the corrupt police raiding trains and confiscating rice and barley from the common peasants, a serial killer of young women, a major train accident, outbreaks of epidemic diseases, and other social problems brought about by the just concluded war. With a side-by-side account of events, the novelist was inviting pairwise comparison of the fictive and the realistic, in a manner that was more interesting than the 1Q84-1984 dichotomy of Murakami Haruki in his 1Q84 (trans. Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel). The latter novel was bogged down by didactic tendencies and narrative spoon-feeding, wrapped in a serviceable prose. Tsushima, in contrast to Murakami, had the novelistic flair to use language and plot elements in a seemingly conventional manner at first and then turn it on its head without apparent self-indulgence and self-validation.

Writing about the immediate aftermath of WWII in Japan, Tsushima was doing something interesting and innovative to the fictional form of the novel. Her technique had unassuming intelligence behind it. Laughing Wolf was a jarring text, in a provocative and brilliant sense, because it unsettled the pace and expectations of reading. The non-fictionality of past events was almost like a comment on the surrealism of the fiction-like present or future ("On a gigantic television screen atop a tall building the leaders of North and South Korea are shaking hands.").

A novel must somehow clear a path, demonstrate its mastery on the page. This novel wrote about aspects of Japanese postwar history in a manner that was not entirely beholden to the methods of conventional historical fiction. The central story of the novel—the friendship between a young man and a girl and their endless train journey—was ultimately heartwarming for its generous sympathy and understanding.

[Kamil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uśmiechnięty wilk towarzyszył mi przez ostatnie tygodnie i była to wyboista droga, bo momentami mnie przytłaczał, ale jednak w większości czasu zachwycał. Mam wrażenie, że szybko też o niej nie zapomnę. Obrazy jakimi karmi nas Yuko Tsushima nie są łatwe, a nieregularność i eksperymentalna forma tego nie ułatwia. Jest to pozycja dla tych, którzy szukają w literaturze intelektualnego wyzwania. Nie jestem pewien, na ile sam wychwyciłem wszystkie elementy tej powieści, bo trochę ich było.
Książka opowiada niesamowicie intymny obraz powojennej Japonii, która widziana jest poprzez perspektywę dziecka i nastolatka podróżujących przez kraj. Fabuła przeplata się i momentami łączy z wycinkami z gazet, które pojawiają się co jakiś czas nadając niesamowicie mroczny klimat wiszącego w powietrzu echa wojny i jej konsekwencji.
Bardzo polecam, 4,5/5 gwiazdek.

[Bookish Tokyo · Rating 3 out of 5]

“One day fire came pouring down from the sky. The fence burned, the house burned, his mother, brother, and sister all burned. Even the cat burned. They all vanished from the earth.”
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This is a book that is joyfully all over the place. Where reality merges into fiction and where fiction merges into reality. Starting out with an introduction scientifically outlining the gradual extinction of native wolf species, it then instantly turns to the lives of two young protagonists on a journey through a broken Japan.
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Two young protagonists, both orphans, are drawn together by a tenuous link. The friendship blossoms and through this blossoming they run away. Taking train journeys throughout a destroyed Japan. These long train journeys and the people and places they encounter portrays horrifyingly well the economic and social realities. A Reality that includes slave labor, murder, rape, wild dogs and a general sense of poverty and lawlessness. The two characters change their name repeatedly referring to“the jungle book” and the French novel “Sans Famille”.
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Living in Japan now it is hard to really understand how it could be so very different. Tsushima really describes well the lingering poverty and danger that seemed to be everywhere. I enjoyed this part of the story more. The pages that focused on the two aforementioned tales were less interesting and I really just wanted to get back to the two kids. It is a surreal almost hallucinatory book with opaque sections and dreamlike prose that made it both rich and confusing.
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I perhaps appreciated it more than truly liking it. It was a book that I felt kept me at arms length and ultimately I finished it with some interesting thoughts.

[Alapogo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Choć czasem się dłużyła to pozostaje mocno w pamięci. Jest to niesamowity obraz powojennej Japonii, społeczeństwa ,które dzieliło wiele różnic, ale łączyły podobne marzenia. I w tym wszystkim dwoje dorastających dzieci , które same muszą mierzyć się z przyszłością i swoją tożsamością. A w tym wszystkim dziecięca naiwność i nieodgadnione cele chłopca. Bardzo ciekawe studium psychologiczne.

[Milaii · Rating 3 out of 5]

Środek był interesujący, ale zakończenie zdecydowanie podbija stawkę.

Najsłabszą stroną książki, być może, jest monotonia opisywanych wydarzeń.

17 latek i 12 latka uciekają z domu i wsiadają do pociągu i w zasadzie większa część fabuły to opis tej podróży.

Siedzą, jedzą, chodzą do toalety (chodzenie do toalety to znaczna część tej książki) na chwilę wysiadają na przypadkowych stacjach, zmieniają pociąg na statek, aby za chwilę ponownie wsiąść do pociągu.

W pewnym momencie stwierdzają, że muszą nadać sobie nowe imiona i przybierają imiona z Księgi Dżungli. On staje się Akelą, a dziewczynka Mowglim. Otaczających ludzi zaczynają nazywać małpami. W połowie książki ponownie nadają sobie fikcyjne imiona, on staje się Remim, ona Capi – bohaterowie Bez Rodziny, Hektora Malota.

Jest to podróż przez doświadczenie wojny. Widzimy świat powojenny, ale pozostałości wojny wciąż są obecne we snach i w otaczającej rzeczywistości. Dzieci przez swoją wrażliwość stają się pewnego rodzaju medium i łączą teraźniejszość z przeszłością.

Fikcyjna fabuła uzupełniona jest o szare paragrafy w samym środku książki, które można potraktować jako dłuższe przypisy, referujące do prawdziwych wydarzeń. W późniejszej części książki dowiadujemy się, że są to wycinki z gazet.

[barbara opowiada · Rating 4 out of 5]

✨️3,75/5✨️

Książka opowiada o dwójce dzieci, którzy podróżują pociągiem, doświadczając okropności życia w czasach powojennej Japonii. Początek historii bardzo powolna, ale mimo wszystko jest ona niezwykle ujmująca, ukazująca obraz poszarpanego kraju.

[emkart_andbooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

To było… dziwne. Ale też na swój sposób intrygujące… Chyba nie potrafiłabym przyrównać tego do czegokolwiek.
To taka książka, w której trzeba patrzeć poprzez metafory i w którą trzeba wejść „głębiej”.

[Matt Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tsushima Yuko is the best author for this often brutal road trip through postwar Japan. The author’s prose, poetic descriptions, and focus on the most vulnerable make this a meaningful and moving novel.

[Ikkychann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Laughing Wolf by Yūko Tsushima is a powerful and haunting novel, written in prose that is both lyrical and unsettling. Here, she blurs the boundaries between reality, memory, and dream, leaving the reader suspended in a state of unease that mirrors the characters’ lives. Its difficult themes—violence, abandonment, and lives steeped in pitiless misery—make it a challenging book, but also a deeply rewarding one. This is one of Tsushima’s most mature works, and it confirms why she remains one of my favorite Japanese writers.

At the heart of the novel is Yukiko, a middle school student who runs away from home with Nishida Mitsuo, a young man claiming to have witnessed her father’s death when he was a child. Their seemingly endless train journey is more than an escape; it becomes an excavation of buried histories. Through Yukiko’s bleak present, Mitsuo’s fragmented childhood memories, and a society still scarred by the aftermath of war, Tsushima creates a tapestry where the personal and the national mirror each other. The shadow of World War II looms over every page, suggesting that individual scar cannot be separated from collective trauma.

The novel insists that we are not isolated beings but vessels carrying the unspoken burdens of our ancestors. Mitsuo’s life makes this painfully clear. He is less a self-contained individual than a repository of inherited sorrow. His past—living on the streets with a sick father, watching him waste away, and being left to the care of impersonal municipal authorities—is not just memory but the bedrock of his identity. He is made of this pain, unable to shed it, even as it nearly destroys him.

Mitsuo’s search for truth takes the shape of an archaeological dig. His use of newspaper clippings is especially striking: they become the physical proof that his life is not an invention, that his memories are real. The act of collecting them is more than nostalgia; it is a desperate attempt to stabilize himself, to build an identity on something tangible. When he finally confirms that his childhood recollections were factual, it highlights how fragile his sense of self is—so fragile that it requires written verification to exist. The clippings, tucked away in his handmade folder, are both a reliquary and a gravestone, holding the shattered fragments of a childhood he never asked for.

Because his real past is unbearable, Mitsuo reshapes it in fantasies. He tells himself sweeter lies: that he comes from a family destroyed nobly in a fire, that his trauma has the dignity of war rather than the shame of vagrancy. These fictions reveal his central conflict: the truth of his childhood is both unlivable and inescapable. Reinventing himself through personas—Akela from The Jungle Book, Rémi from Nobody’s Boy, or even the assumed name of “Nishida Mitsuo”—is his way of surviving. His very being is constructed through borrowed stories, because his own is too fractured to stand alone.

His connection to Yukiko emerges from this desperate need to find meaning through others. For Mitsuo, intimacy comes not from joy but from shared wounds. He doesn’t seek happy people; he seeks out Yukiko’s family because they, too, have brushed against death. The moment he visits her home and feels “a sense of contentment” reveals how essential this shared suffering is to his survival. Trauma is his only currency, the only language he knows to forge connections.

For Yukiko, the struggle is no less suffocating. Her home offers no protection: an absent father, a grieving mother consumed by responsibility, and the death of a disabled brother that only deepened the family’s disconnection. Instead of shelter, the home becomes a place of neglect and silence. Outside, the world is equally threatening. From molestation on a trolley to the constant fear of kidnappings and violence, she grows up knowing her vulnerability as a girl in post-war Japan. Patriarchy stalks her in every form—both in the intimate confines of her family and in the public sphere.

This leaves Yukiko in a painful bind. On one hand, she yearns for male protection, a substitute for the absent father and brother. On the other, she knows men represent danger. Her attraction to Mitsuo is born out of this contradiction: he feels safe precisely because their connection is based on shared trauma rather than desire. Running away with him is her act of rebellion, not a romantic elopement but a violent break from a system that suffocates her.

The moment Mitsuo meets her at the school gate is charged with meaning. He pulls her out of the faceless crowd of sailor uniforms—symbols of conformity and entrapment—and makes her visible. Her classmates’ envious stares affirm this: Yukiko’s act is not just escape but performance, a declaration that she refuses anonymity. Yet the choice is perilous. Her recurring dream of the “clean girl” and the “rag girl” distills this risk. By eloping, she knowingly embraces the fate of the “rag” girl—poverty, ruin, abandonment—because to her, the “clean” path is another form of death.

What makes Yukiko’s story heartbreaking is that her choice is both agency and trap. She recognizes that her decision to support Mitsuo is not born of love but of fear—fear of abandonment, fear of being invisible. She repeats the caretaker role she once played with her brother, this time with Mitsuo. It is a cycle, yes, but also an assertion: she is no longer a passive victim. She is now “the one who supports Mitsuo.” It is fragile and flawed, but it is hers. Her freedom is not in safety, but in taking on the perilous responsibility of another broken soul.

Their journey together unfolds like a pilgrimage across the ruins of post-war Japan. Each unfamiliar city, each cold rain, is steeped in the collective trauma of defeat—famine, refugees, abandoned veterans. Neither Yukiko nor Mitsuo experienced the war, yet both are its orphans. The war’s shadow seeps into them as surely as it seeps into the landscape they traverse. They are witnesses to a past they never lived, but cannot escape.

The devastating turn comes with the revelation of Mitsuo’s deception. His name itself is a lie, one of many identities he slips into because he has no stable one of his own. His rootlessness makes him both victim and perpetrator. Tsushima connects him to the figure of the post-war kidnapper, a social symptom of a traumatized generation, not a singular monster. The clippings confirm it: Mitsuo is both product and agent of his time, his manipulation of Yukiko echoing a wider social sickness.

The theft he commits is not just of her uniform money, but of her future—her education, her name, her place in the world. By stripping away her school uniform, he severs her from society, leaving her adrift like himself. Her deepest wound, the “crime of hiding his name,” captures the essence of this betrayal. In a world already eroded by loss, Mitsuo erases even himself, leaving Yukiko abandoned with nothing but a stolen identity.

What Tsushima shows with brutal clarity is that trauma is not simply inherited—it is transmitted, actively, destructively, from one person to another. Mitsuo carries the scars of war’s aftermath and passes them to Yukiko, ensnaring her in the same cycle of abandonment and loss. Their journey is not an escape but a reenactment of history’s violence, proof that the wounds of the past are never buried but endlessly carried forward.

In the end, Laughing Wolf is not just a story of two lost children wandering through the debris of their pasts; it is Tsushima’s unflinching meditation on how history claws its way into the present, reshaping lives long after the battles have ended. She refuses to offer comfort or redemption, instead showing how trauma becomes both inheritance and weapon, survival and curse. What makes the novel unforgettable is how it holds up a mirror to the reader: reminding us that the ghosts we inherit—whether personal or national—are never silent, and that our struggle, like Yukiko’s, is to decide whether to be crushed by them or to carve out an identity in their shadow.

[Opisuję Książki · Rating 5 out of 5]

„Dwoje dzieci słabiutko kwiliło z głodu i zimna. A może tylko im się zdawało, że płaczą? Być może w pudle po mandarynkach już od dawna przewracały się tylko dwa ciała martwych niemowlaków. Może kobieta najpierw zabiła dwoje dzieci, dusząc je poduszką, a dopiero potem wrzuciła do pudła? Jak długo pozwolono im na tym świecie żyć po urodzeniu? Jeden dzień? Tydzień? Miesiąc? To był też czas cierpienia dla kobiety. Gdzie ona teraz pójdzie? Będzie musiała jeszcze odciągać mleko z nabrzmiewających piersi. I wylewać je do zlewu albo kloaki”

Głównymi bohaterami „Uśmiechniętego wilka” jest dwójka nastolatków. Teoretycznie to historia o osieroconym „Mitsuo” oraz pochodzącej z niepełnej rodziny Yuko, jednak z biegiem czasu poznajemy historię z perspektywy „Akeli” i „Mowgli”, „Remiego” i „Capi”. Tożsamość bohaterów zmienia się wraz z czasem i miejscem, w którym się znajdują. A są oni wszędzie tam, gdzie dzieje się zło i ludzka krzywda – widzą zaciągniętych do niewolniczej pracy górników, są świadkami katastrofy Ukishima-Maru, w której ofiarami byli głównie wykorzystywani jako tania siła robocza Koreańczycy, słyszą o zbrodniach popełnianych przez Yoshido Kodairę, mają styczność z poddanymi kwarantannie repatriantami. Ich podróż naznaczona jest głodem, brudem, chorobami i strachem. Jest to też jednak podróż, w której starają się odkryć, kim tak naprawdę są.

Choć droga do poznania własnej tożsamości widoczna jest przede wszystkim u Yuko, dotyczy też „Mitsuo”. On „sam oczywiście był mężczyzną, ale gdyby to tylko było możliwe, wolałby w ogóle nie być człowiekiem, tylko czymś czystszym, bardziej godnym i piękniejszym niż człowiek”. Yuko z kolei na skutek podróży zmuszona jest do przybrania nowej tożsamości – choć początkowo fakt stania się „bratem” wydaje jej się trudny do przyjęcia, z czasem się z tym oswaja. Bycie „mężczyzną” ma w końcu dobre strony – jest się wtedy bardziej szanowanym, ale też, co zdaje się mieć o wiele większe znaczenie dla dorastającej dziewczyny, maleje zagrożenie, że ktoś w pociągu będzie wkładał ręce pod spódniczkę albo zaciągnie do lasu i w brutalny sposób pozbawi życia.

Bohaterowie „Uśmiechniętego wilka” na pierwszy rzut oka są od siebie zupełnie różni – dzieli ich w końcu doświadczenie życiowe, poziom edukacji, wiek, płeć i rodzinne związki. Jednocześnie są do siebie podobni a to, co ich łączy, to samotność. Oboje, choć z zupełnie różnych powodów, są zdani sami na siebie, tęskniący za miłością rodzica i poczuciem bezpieczeństwa. W końcu „dzieci są własnością rodziców. Tylko z nim jest inaczej. On nie jest niczyją własnością. Cenzura społeczna do niego się nie stosuje”.

Zdaje się, że sposobem bohaterów na przetrwanie w nieprzyjemnej rzeczywistości jest ucieczka do świata fikcji. Nie bez powodu w czasie swoich przygód odwołują się od „Księgi dżungli” oraz „Bez rodziny”. Swoje doświadczenia próbują porównywać do przygód bohaterów, tłumaczą sobie świat, tak jak miało to miejsce w powieściach. To właśnie w oparciu o „Księgę dżungli” w „Mitsuo” pojawia się sprzeciw wobec postępowania „małp” i krytyka rodzaju ludzkiego. To dzięki „Bez rodziny” bohaterowie mają nadzieję na poprawę swojego losu - bo przecież nie trzeba podążać wyznaczoną przez autora drogą i nic nie stoi na przeszkodzie, by zmienić zakończenie na szczęśliwe. Powieść Tsushimy nie ogranicza się jednak tylko do tych dwóch tytułów. Yuko w czasie podróży pociesza się niezrozumiałymi dla siebie poznanymi w szkole wersami z Biblii. Mijane krajobrazy przywodzą na myśl haiku Basho. W trakcie jeden z „przygód” bohaterowie porównują swoje losy do postaci z opowiadania „Zarządca Sansho”. Kontrast z pięknym literackim językiem i płynącymi z opowieści przesłaniami, stanowią wycinki z gazet. Będące one łącznikiem bohaterów z przeszłością ukazują jednocześnie panującą na świecie niesprawiedliwość, bezwzględność niektórych jednostek i ich okrucieństwo, dające dalsze podstawy do krytyki zachowania ludzi. Pokazują jednocześnie ludzkie dramaty będące konsekwencją wyniszczającej państwo wojny.

,,Uśmiechnięty wilk" to powieść pełna kontrastów. Ulotność krajobrazów miesza się z odartą z piękna rzeczywistością i złem, które, podobnie jak góry i morze, zdaje się istnieć od zawsze. Przepełnione pociągi i zapełnione dworce stanowią przeciwieństwo cichych cmentarzy. Oglądane przez szybę piękno przemija, niczym pędzący pociąg, wraz z bezpośrednim kontaktem z namacalnym i bezpośrednim kontaktem z brudem i nieporządkiem. Nieco naiwne, ale też niekiedy niezwykle trafne egzystencjalno-duchowe przemyślenia nastolatków ulegają weryfikacji w zetknięciu się przyziemnymi potrzebami fizjologicznymi.

Książka Tsushimy ukazuje ułomność człowieka, którego siła i starania mające prowadzić do władzy nad światem, ostatecznie i tak spełzają na niczym. Rozmawiają o tym sami bohaterowie - „Z ludźmi to dziwna sprawa, nie? Dostają pokrzywki, albo od jakiejś błahostki coś tam im się robi z głową, albo umierają z byle powodu – bo ich pies pogryzł, albo zarazili się jakąś bakterią, z zimna albo gorąca, albo jeszcze ktoś ich wypchnie z pociągu.”
To też książka o tym, że bez względu na czasy, gdzieś na świecie zawsze dzieje się zło a człowiek, niczym porzucone i zdane wyłącznie na siebie dziecko, może się temu tylko przyglądać. To opowieść w której sprawcy i ofiary żyją obok siebie i czasem ciężko jest stwierdzić, która strona jest tą dobrą, a która złą.

,,Uśmiechnięty wilk" to jedna z tych książek o której można pisać i rozmawiać godzinami. Analizować fragmenty, doszukiwać się ukrytych znaczeń i symboli. Dla mnie jest to książka doskonała.

[Hannah Thistlethwaite · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.75 stars

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

As both Territory of Light and Woman Running in the Mountains were about women raising a child as a single parent in 1970’s traditional, patriarchal Japan I decided to read something of Tsushima’s with a different focus. Published in 2000 Laughing Wolf dealt with a very different theme: the development of a relationship between 17 year old Mitsuo and 12 year old Yuki as they travel on their own through post WWII Japan.

The insight with which the author depicted these two young people facing numerous challenges was impressive. By enveloping themselves into characters from The Jungle Book and Nobody’s Boy she creatively portrayed how their attachment to each other developed. In switching perspectives from one character to the other she was able to create both a deep character and at times a poignant rapport between them.

Unfortunately, there were elements in Laughing which made it challenging to read. First, some of the episodes were described in such detail as to become slow going.

Second, not being familiar with either The Jungle Book or Nobody’s Boy meant that I could not readily grasp many of the references made to the plots or the characters of these two books.

Third, Tsushima depicted many serious social problems that were plaguing Japan after the war: poverty, homelessness, starvation, police corruption, violent robberies and assaults, packs of starving dogs which attacked people, child kidnapping and rape, and suicide. Unfortunately, her desire to share these overwhelmed the storyline that she was trying to develop between Mitsuo and Yuki. Her resolutions to some of the situations they found themselves in as the book went along were vague, at best, and stretched credulity, at worst. The 10th chapter, out of 11 altogether, was a series of vignettes about these social issues with no mention whatsoever of the two lead characters. I found myself skimming this chapter.

Washburn merits compliments for translating Laughing into a readable prose. The dialogues between Mitsuo and Yuki used the kind of slang which one would expect of two teenagers.

However, there were ways in which he could have made Laughing more reader friendly. First, his Prelude was a lengthy discussion of the place wolves have occupied in Japan. While this was interesting intellectually, he could have presented information on post war society in Japan to provide the reader with more context.

Second, Japanese terms for food and other aspects of the society were italicized but not translated. Why not provide English language meanings in parentheses or a glossary at the beginning of the book?

Third, the characters’ train travels took them to more than a dozen locales around the country. In addition to Tokyo others like Osaka, Kyoto, Yokohama, and Fukushima might be known by most readers. But many others required that I Google them in order to follow their travels. Why not include a map at the start of each chapter so readers could grasp more readily where they went?

Although I cared about what would happen to Mitsuo and Yuki, I was equally if not more ready for Laughing to conclude. IMHO, it is an unfortunate example of an imaginative concept that was not executed very well. Why did an editor allow Tsushima to lose focus on her characters towards the end of the book? Was it because she was a well known, award winning author at the time of its publication? And why didn’t an editor or the publisher provide more guidelines for Washburn in his prelude and in his translation? He could have made the novel more reader friendly than it was.

Tsushima passed away in 2016. A sequel about what became of Mitsuo and/or Yuki could have been terrific.

[Лина Сакс · Rating 4 out of 5]

Чудовищная история Японии.

Вот еще один жанр, который я не совсем понимаю, но он меня в данном случае впечатлил. Если смотреть определение, то контркультура в литературе противопоставляет себя общепринятым ценностям и идеям, отрицает доминирующее искусство. Вот тут и встает вопрос, а что является доминирующим искусством. Судя по всему мелодрамы. Тогда самое что ни наесть противопоставление будет. А вот с магическим реализмом противопоставить сие творение будет сложно, потому что немного не от мира сего в книге было.

Теперь все же кратко что же было в книге. Была история послевоенной Японии. Насколько я поняла (но подтверждения у меня этому нет) она была основана на реальных событиях, просто в книге присутствовали выдержки из реальных документов с 1945 по 1957, если я сейчас правильно помню последнюю дату и правильно поняла выделенные курсивом места.
Довольно страшное это было время. И от этого еще более удивительно, что страна действительно смогла выкарабкаться из ямы, в которую сама себя загнала посредством поддержки фашизма, ну, и плюс американцы с бомбой поспособствовали тому, чтобы им еще хуже жилось. И какой бы ужас в эти годы в стране не был, сейчас мы видим, что Япония довольно таки процветающая страна, хотя и не без своих проблем.

Истории героев как таковой не было, они были действительно вспомогающим элементом, посредством которых автор и рассказывает историю страны, заставляя героев передвигаться по железной дороги из одного конца в другой. Чтобы рассказать нам о рабочих на шахтах и как к ним относили; о самоубийствах, потому что кушать нечего, работы нет; об убийствах, но тут кто бы знал, какая травма у человека в голове была, что он девушек косил, как траву на поле в сенокос; о болезнях, которые привозились вернувшимися из лагерей солдатами; о болезнях которые распространялись в переполненных поездах; о детской смертности; об отказе от детей; о минах, что все еще были в водах рядом с портами.

Автор загоняла героев на холерные корабли, на корабли, которые тонут от столкновения с миной и оставляла их живыми возвращая на поезда, объясняя в конце это тем, что все происходило это не с ними, а просто в стране и все это были вырезки из газеты. Где уж действительно побывали герои толком не поймешь, но это на самом деле и не важно, так же как не важно, что ребята перемещались еще и по годам. Нас читателей подобным не смутить.

Заметила еще один интересный момент, но не знаю было ли это во всей книге использовано, но в главе "Дети вод" Юко Цусима конкретно взяла стиль Чарльза Кингсли из его одноименной сказки. Кусок не очень большой, но запоминающийся. Я по остальным главам не проверяла, но может и там что-то было от других авторов. Почему бы и нет, она ведь противопоставляет общепринятую культуру, рассуждает о рае и аде, использует "Маугли" Киплинга и "Без семьи" Гектора Мало, почему в каждой новой главе не пользоваться стилем другого автора подходящего под ее очередной рассказ об истории Японии?

Книга интересная, непростая. В ней есть что-то на поверхности, что-то в глубине, а что-то совсем в подземных водах. Не могу сказать, что книга восторг, но она удивляет, мне было интересно ее читать.

[Ekvi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Рассказ про путешествие сбежавших детей, перемежающийся жуткими новостями из газет (наверно, для атмосферы) - но более раннего времени, чем сюжет. Понравилась (если можно так сказать) атмосфера.

[Mohammad Awny Hamouda El-Mesallamy · Rating 2 out of 5]

It may take two stars & a Half thought but I couldn't get my self to give it 3 stars, it does have good points & a lot of killing points, one of them is some times the pointless long chit-chat of different yet alike stories & train rides & boring Lengthening, the documentary part was good yet I think it want's to be well blend it gives you the sense of giving an example & that I think is not a good thing, it's a good novel about some of the dark years of Japan modern after war days enjoyable in some parts lengthy in other parts & but it need a lot of patience to go through to reach the end ....

[Motheaten · Rating 4 out of 5]

The dire state of post-WWII Japan was seen through the eyes of a 12-year-old middle class girl and a 17-year-old orphan boy as they left Tokyo and travelled on trains for several days. References to Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book" and Hector Malot's "Nobody's Boy."