Shukutoku University Academic Repository / 淑徳大学学術機関リポジトリ

瀧, 直也

タキ, ナオヤ

Taki, Naoya

Japanese

Community Studies of Learning from Experience Activity

矢尾板, 俊平

ヤオイタ, シュンペイ

Yaoita, Shumpei

Public Choice and Community Studies

岸上, 眞子

キシガミ, マミコ

Kishigami, Mamiko

A Study of the Jumping Frog Story (II) : Mark Twain World

Williams, Susan M.

Kōda Aya: “Atomiyo sowaka: Nata”  「あとみよそわか・鉈」“Hatchet”A Translation 391
⑵
Preface
　In this translation Japanese names are presented in the Japanese order, that is surname ¡rst and 
given name last. Other Japanese words are italicized except for those generally familiar to the English-
speaking reader. e Hepburn system of Romanization has been used throughout but macrons have 
been employed to denote long vowels, with the exception of the names of well-known people or places 
such as Tokyo.
Translation
Hatchet
　e ¡rst time I held a hatchet in my hands was to chop wood for kindling to heat the bath water. I 
struck the wood and the blade got wedged in so I gave it two or three more taps to split the wood.
　“What a useless child! You can’t even chop wood. Don’t be so feeble!” Father said, and proceeded 
to show me how. 
　“You should be able to summon up more strength than that. Whatever job you are doing, sparing 
your e¯orts is a very stingy and ugly thing to do. When you throw all the strength of the body into 
doing something, then and only then, is it beautiful. A woman must be beautiful even when she is just 
chopping wood. She should be like a breath of fresh air.”
　At the time, when he went on like this I used to think he was such an annoying old man. He really 
翻　　訳
Kōda Aya: “Atomiyo sowaka: Nata”
 「あとみよそわか・鉈」
“Hatchet”
A Translation
Susan M. Williams※　
淑徳大学研究紀要（総合福祉学部・コミュニティ政策学部）　45　391−396,   2011
※総合福祉学部　教授
淑徳大学研究紀要　第45号（総合福祉学部・コミュニティ政策学部）392
⑶
got on my nerves.
　“Stand the piece of wood that you’re going split on the block, stand at right angles to it and bend 
your knees,” he explained. “It’s wrong to aim, raise the hatchet and chop. You should raise your arms 
¡rst, then take aim and chop. e wood should be split into two with one stroke. If it doesn’t work it’s 
because you’ve got your stance wrong.”
　“Except for the experts, the hatchets most people use are normally quite blunt, that’s why you have 
to do it with a single stroke. It’s no good thinking that you’re going to have two goes at it. Put your 
whole body into it, and press down on your diaphragm. Keep your wrists relaxed and flexible, and 
don’t bend at the hip. Look carefully at the grain of the wood and watch out for any knots.”
　I didn’t have the faintest idea of what I was supposed to do. Father did it two or three times to 
show me how. A weird shiver of repugnance ran up and down my spine. It was cold in the shadow in 
front of the shed. e white hands that lifted the thick-backed hatchet aloft, the sash which circled his 
rotund middle like the hoop of a barrel, the light blue edging of his plain, lined, pongee kimono and 
above all, his eyes: passion surged out of them. Years of drinking had made his eyelids sag, but now the 
wrinkles at the corners slanted sharply upwards. He brought the hatchet down with one swift stroke 
and the wood split in two.
　In the ¡rst place, I was already scared of waving sharp-edged tools about and it upset me to think of 
things undergoing sudden changes in shape.
　His eyes never wavered and as he chip-chopped his way through the kindling, his neck and 
shoulders appeared to be shrouded in a mist which precluded me from speaking to him. For an 
immature, over-sensitive girl it was a chore which required a great deal of self control. 
　e wood we used as kindling we bought as waste from the local lumber yard but the blocks looked 
good enough to be used as building materials. It should have been easy to chop up but I was timid and 
couldn’t steel myself to bring down the hatchet in one bold stroke. 
　Father didn’t like the way I stood holding up the hatchet.
　“One little kick and you’d be at on your behind!” he said.
　As I stood there unable to make up my mind to bring down the hatchet I was subjected to an 
onslaught of grunts and groans from my father hovering behind me. I shrank down. His voice sounded 
like stones. All of a sudden, a real stone came ying at me from behind. I stood up and glared at him 
face to face but when our eyes met I lost the battle and looked down at the ground.
　“Have another go!” he said, and if anything his choice of words was gentle. To be honest, though, I 
was too tense to notice whether there was even the smallest speck of a¯ection in what he was saying. 
Some people might think that his unrelenting intensity and his refusal to let up was a form of cruelty 
Kōda Aya: “Atomiyo sowaka: Nata”  「あとみよそわか・鉈」“Hatchet”A Translation 393
⑷
but for some reason my legs found the strength to plant themselves ¡rmly on the ground. Of course 
this may have been the result of a sort of rebellion born of desperation, at any rate it wasn’t true 
courage. I managed to pull myself together and I thought, “What’s and arm or a leg or two? Who 
cares if they get chopped o¯?” 
　I suffered from what was apparently a terrible fear of boulders. I can remember exactly when it 
started. It was at my mother’s funeral. In the temple there was a corridor that ran between the main 
hall and another large room, and a huge drum hung from the ceiling of this corridor. e beginning of 
the ceremonies was marked by the beating of this drum. Initially the drum was given two strong heavy 
beats and these were followed by a series of lighter taps, gradually increasing in speed as they became 
lighter and lighter. Finally there was a single strong stroke similar to the ¡rst two. I was only seven 
and as the ¡rst stroke sounded I felt overcome by a terrible weight, and terror struck to the very roots 
of my being. en, just as I was feeling relieved that the beats of the drum were becoming softer and 
faster the ¡nal great stroke fell and I could stand it no longer. 
　I stood up shakily and made for the door only to be stopped by somebody near me who held me 
fast and sat me ¡rmly on their knee so that I was unable to move. e beating of the drum and being 
held so tightly that I couldn’t move somehow got all mixed up together and in the darkness behind 
my tightly shut eyes, a huge boulder came out of nowhere rolling towards me. I could bear it no longer 
and struggled free. e drumming stopped. I had upset everybody but I felt calmer. 
　Since then I was frequently plagued by nightmares of being chased by drums and boulders and I 
would wake up crying. Soon after that just the word ‘heavy’ was enough to frighten me and when 
Father started telling us the story of Kamakura Gongorō and his fabulous strength, although it was 
the middle of the day, I panicked and ran out into the sunshine to get away from it. 
　Having been branded as stingy for running away, you’d think I’d have wanted to prove I wasn’t 
by resisting the forces of the boulder but instead I felt I wanted to hang on to it desperately. Once I 
endured it for so long that I got cramp in my legs. Father was shocked and massaged them until they 
got better, but that was agony too. 
　e business with the drum that was at the bottom of all this was so terrifying that I was quite 
unable to talk about it at all. However often Father asked me, I was never able to explain. Afterwards, 
whenever we went to the temple, even before we had left the house I was prepared for the worst. 
When the time came to go in, I stuck my ¡ngers in my ears, kept my eyes on the ceiling where there 
were carvings of peonies and doves to look at and forced my mind to dwell on pleasant things. 
　A wild and fierce side of my personality that even I was aware of was beginning to show. 
Concentrating on the image of the hatchet as hard as I could, I let it fall. 
淑徳大学研究紀要　第45号（総合福祉学部・コミュニティ政策学部）394
⑸
　Although I had had no experience of such a thing, the wood’s resistance to the edge of the hatchet 
made it feel as if I was chopping into a living thing. These eyrie and unpleasant associations that 
welled up inside me made my bottom rise up too. Father didn’t stop grunting out his encouragement. 
I didn’t let go of the hatchet. 
　The next thing I knew, my father had disappeared and so had my fear of sharp-edged tools 
and boulders. In the final analysis, it wasn’t the actual skill that Father taught me, it was how to 
concentrate the force of the whole body.
　Sometimes the wood that we got hold of was pine logs and sometimes it was dead pruned wood 
from garden trees. Pine always had a great many knots in it and sometimes the grain was twisted. 
When the pattern of the grain was straight, sometimes, deep in the wood there would be a kernel like 
the centre of a boil. At other times there would be a di¯erent type of thing entirely where you could 
see where a branch had started to grow out diagonally and it looked like the lead in a pencil. 
　When I got a six-inch log that was twisted right through, the grain was so stubbornly cohesive that 
it was impossible to know where to begin. I really sweated over that piece of wood. In the end I was 
forced to chip away at it little by little until it was all in small pieces. Father accused me of making 
tooth-picks
　Another time, when I was again ‘making tooth-picks’ and my father was nearby watching what I 
was doing, I happened to look up and I saw that he was scowling. en when the log was all chopped 
up into splinters he said,
　“Finished at last, have you?”
　I was day-dreaming and not really listening to him but I had the feeling that I had achieved 
something. 
　Cypress wood was easy to chop but plum was very di¦cult. It fought back so hard that I got pins 
and needles in my hands but in the end, it too went into the stoke-hole.
　Finally I got the knack and it got so that I could tell even in the fraction of a second before the 
blade touched the wood whether it would split or not so I suggested to father that using an axe would 
be even better.
　“How preposterous!” he spluttered. “What a ridiculous child!” “A hatchet is quite good enough for 
jobs like chopping wood for the bathwater” and he went on to give me a lecture on the hierarchy of 
the blade.
　Under the veranda outside father’s study, packed in one on top of the other, there were a large 
number of wooden engraving blocks that had been used for printing the illustrations for his books. 
ere was one from ‘e Scythe’ showing the boy raising his scythe to the man, and another of the 
Kōda Aya: “Atomiyo sowaka: Nata”  「あとみよそわか・鉈」“Hatchet”A Translation 395
⑹
pretty girl in ‘e Toy Bamboo Leaf Boat’. I could also make out one with the raised letters of the 
title of ‘Hamamatsu Chrysanthemum’.
　I don’t know if there was something bothering him but as told me to chop them up and burn them 
it seemed to stick in his throat. I thought it was a waste but I chopped them up one after the other 
without saying anything. ey were made of cherry wood. ey burnt very well. And that is the story 
of how I made ashes from plum, pine and cherry. 
Bibliography
( All Japanese works cited are published in Tokyo unless otherwise speci¡ed)
Abe, H., Ogata, R. Eds. (2000) Bungeibessatsu (Sotokushū) Kōda Aya: Botsu Go Jū Nen. Kawade Shobō Shinsha.
Copeland, R. L. and Ramirez-Christensen eds. (2001) e Father and Daughter Plot: Japanese Literary Women 
and the Law of the Father. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu.
Ericson, Joan E. (1997) Be a Woman: Hayashi Fumiko and Modern Japanese Women’s Literature. University of 
Hawai’i Press Honolulu.
Fukaya Ko. (2002) K da Aya no Katami. Seikyusha.
Hillenaar, Henk and Schonau, Walter eds. Fathers and Mothers in Literature. Rodopi B. V. Amsterdam, e 
Netherlands.
Kanei, K., Kobayashi, Y. et al. Eds. (1986) K da Aya no Sekai. Kanrin Shobō.
Kobayashi, I. (1956) Kagy an H mon Nikki. Iwanami Shoten.
Kōda Aya. (1997) K da Aya Zenshu. Iwanami Shoten. (Referred to in the text as KAZ) 
Kōda, A. et al. (1997) Taiwa. Iwanami Shoten.
Lippet, N. M. and Selden, K. I., eds and trans. (1991) Japanese Women Writers. New York: M. E. Sharpe, Inc.
Seivers, S. L. (1983) Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan. Stanford 
University Press, Stanford, California. 
Tanaka Yukiko ed. (1991) Unmapped Territories: New Women’s Fiction from Japan. Women in Translation, USA.
Tansman, A. M. (1993) e Writings of Koda Aya, a Japanese Literary Daughter. Michigan: Yale University Press.
Vernon, V. V. (1988) Daughters of the Moon: Wish, Will and Social Constraint in Fiction by Modern Japanese 
Women. University of California. Berkley, Center for Japanese Studies.
Washman, D. and Tansman, A. M. eds. (1997) Studies in Modern Japanese Literature. Ann Arbor: Center for 
Japanese Studies. University of Michigan Press. 
淑徳大学研究紀要　第45号（総合福祉学部・コミュニティ政策学部）396
　is paper is the next in an on-going study of the early works of Kōda Aya (1904-1990) and is a 
translation of the essay “Nata” (Hatchet) which forms part of the long memoir “Atomiyo sowaka”. 
is and other previously translated essays have been chosen from the collection of essays entitled 
“Konna Koto” ( is Sort of ing) principally because it was felt that they most clearly reveal the 
relationship between Aya and her father, Kōda Rohan.   
⑴
Translation
Kōda Aya: “Atomiyo sowaka: Nata”
 「あとみよそわか・鉈」
“Hatchet”
A Translation
Williams S. M.　


English

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