Love and Beautiful Distance, by Charlotte Goff
A translator considers what she learned about love translating Nao-Cola Yamazaki’s Beautiful Distance, where a love that shows rather than tells is at the heart of the story.
I picked up Nao-Cola Yamazaki’s 美しい距離, or Beautiful Distance, sometime in 2020. It was the first book I read in Japanese that made me cry. I remember giving the paperback a hug (something I do instinctively with a tiny number of books—most recently Deena Mohamed’s Your Wish Is My Command) and thinking that everyone should read it.
I was living alone at the time, deep inside another Scottish lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic. I worked full-time on a domestic abuse helpline and spent an average of thirty-five hours a week listening to the darker side of what can happen in intimate relationships. I wasn’t a translator yet, but I was starting to think more seriously about it: in the time where, prepandemic, I might have been socializing, I was watching whatever webinars I could, translating short sections of books I liked, and trying out for translation competitions. I was writing a lot in English, too; long into the night after back shifts, then as soon as I woke up the next morning. It completely absorbed me and provided a welcome respite from my work.
Increasingly, I started to think seriously about trying to translate Beautiful Distance. Whatever faith I lacked in myself as a translator at that point, I had for this book in spades.
In the years since, I have sometimes wondered what influence translation, and more specifically this text, has had on my relationships and romantic ideals. Equally, how far have my own beliefs about love shaped my interpretation of Beautiful Distance?
For me, the most moving thing about this novella has always been the love Yamazaki depicts between the protagonist and his wife. It is a salve for relationship ideals built on Disney and 1990s rom-coms. There are no grand gestures, no shouting from the rooftops. He doesn’t serenade her, hang one-handed from a Ferris wheel in order to get a date, or arrive at her doorstep with a creepy collage about how his wasted heart will love her until she’s a rotten corpse. He almost never says “I love you.” But his love for her is utterly transparent in everything he does: in the way he preemptively puts nail clippers in his briefcase for her, noticing her nails growing long; the way he’s ready to stand up for her but also to be led by her; the way he shows up for her while protecting space for her to be with other people she loves.
Compare that to the so-called love I had grown up idolizing—I totally fell for the hanging-from-a-Ferris-wheel thing—and what I heard on the helpline: “I love you” being used to manipulate and control. Yes, it’s a novel, but Beautiful Distance reminded me of what love at its best can be, at a time when I really needed to remember that. That love can be constant without being all-consuming, strong yet unrestrictive.
Yes, it’s a novel, but Beautiful Distance reminded me of what love at its best can be, at a time when I really needed to remember that.
I remember a reader of one of my early drafts suggesting that the characters’ love for each other could be made more explicit in the English dialogue. I was instinctively against this. Sure, the protagonist’s love might be more obvious or relatable to some English readers if he said “I love you” more. But this would also be a big betrayal of the text.
The aim, after all, is not to create a generic love story in English but to render this specific love story and this specific relationship. So, I would hope instead that, reading my translation, a reader’s very idea of what love is might be challenged. I hope it’s obvious that these two characters love each other, without them saying “I love you” over and over.
Does this risk making it less appealing to some English readers? Who knows? But I hope some people are desperate for just this kind of quiet love story, because it’s the kind of love story that doesn’t get celebrated enough. Plenty of English-speaking people don’t really say “I love you,” which doesn’t mean that they don’t love.
I hope some people are desperate for just this kind of quiet love story, because it’s the kind of love story that doesn’t get celebrated enough.
The kind of love shown in Beautiful Distance can be romantic or not. It’s the love my granddad showed when he sat by my nanna’s bedside each day before she died from cancer, and also the love that pushed someone I know to drive a two-hour round trip to the hospital every day during Covid—she wasn’t allowed to visit her son but could give the receptionist a Tupperware container of cut grapes to pass on. It’s harder to cinematize, perhaps, but, partly thanks to Beautiful Distance, quiet love is what I’ve grown to want, too. Straightforward, easy, expansive: two people wanting to come together while protecting space for each other’s freedom and independent worlds.
My fiancé and I went on our first weekend away two months after we met, to a spa in Aberfoyle. The day we arrived, I developed an abscess that got progressively worse as the weekend continued. By Saturday afternoon I struggled to sit or stand up. My fiancé drove to the nearest pharmacy for chocolate and painkillers, helped me walk along the corridor to the hotel restaurant for dinner, put my shoes on for me, and tied my laces when it was too painful to bend. Far from the weekend away of my dreams, but closer than I’d been in years to finding the quiet, caring love that I see in Beautiful Distance.
Edinburgh
