It has finally happened. After 14 years of living in Japan and about 15 or 16 since I read my first proper book in Japanese (not to mention three and a half since I became a freelance translator), I started reading the one in this picture from the end instead of the beginning – the back instead of the front.
You see, if you are looking at the front cover of a Japanese book, rather than the spine being on the left so that you open it by lifting the right edge up and towards you, the spine is on the right and you open it by lifting the left edge up and towards you. These days, the text in websites, emails, and so on tends to read horizontally and left-to-right, as is the case in English, but books and newspapers still follow the old-fashioned way, with the text reading vertically and right-to-left. This isn’t as difficult to get used to as you might think, and has the added advantage that when you are browsing in a bookshop, you don’t have to tilt your head to a 90-degree angle to read book titles, although I have seen pictures of newspapers from many years ago in which the headlines read horizontally and right-to-left, which to me seems just that little bit too out of the ordinary to be readily comprehensible.
My mistake in this case would have been much less likely to happen with a novel or a work of non-fiction, but with a manga – and in my defence – it isn’t necessarily immediately obvious which are the first and last pages. Also, the page with the publishing information on it – company, date of first and subsequent editions, that kind of thing – is customarily at the back of a Japanese book rather than the front.
I read about ten pages before I realised what I had done, and also in my defence, the manga in question – Hi no Tori (Phoenix) by Tezuka Osamu, who is referred to as either the godfather or the god of the genre – was the first half of a two-part story, so rather than an obvious climactic scene, the final page – in other words, the first one that I read – ended not quite with a caption saying ‘To be continued…’ but certainly at an inconclusive juncture (this also meant that, in the grand scheme of things, I had not been party to any significant spoilers, which, once I had overcome the embarrassment, was quite a relief).
What’s more, it is no exaggeration to say that Hi no Tori is a work of towering genius and a lot more complex than your average manga – this story, which is called Taiyō (太陽/Sun) and is actually the twelfth of thirteen volumes in a series that Tezuka did not live to complete – jumps back and forth in time from the distant past to the distant future, with parallels between the two and characters who share common traits appearing in both.
As it happens, I went to see an exhibition about Hi no Tori in Tokyo the other day, which featured many of Tezuka’s original drawings, along with expert interpretations of its meaning and significance. Having started with the first volume several years ago on the recommendation of a vice-principal at one of the middle schools where I used to work, I only have the thirteenth and final one to go, so will write about it in more detail in due course. Although I haven’t read them (I probably should, as the Japanese in the historical sections of the story can be pretty archaic and hard to understand), there are apparently English translations, not to mention several anime adaptations, so I urge you to check Hi no Tori out if you get the chance.
In the meantime, I will be paying slightly more attention to which way round I hold a Japanese book before I open it and begin reading.
