Haneko Takayama’s short story Udon: Unknown Dog of Nobody, published by Strangers Press as a stand-alone chapbook in their Kanata series, follows three sisters connected by their love for their family dog, Udon.
On their way home from school, Kazue and Misa find a newborn puppy abandoned in a styrofoam box. Horrified by the sorry state of the creature, they decide to rescue it. The way they see the matter, leaving the animal to die isn’t an option.
Seven days later, the puppy is still alive. Kazue and Misa’s younger sister Yoko goes to the pet store to get dog food, but she doesn’t know how many cans to buy. What if she gets too many, and the dog dies? After she buys just one can, she meets a classmate who assures her that, “When you care for things, they don’t die as easily as you might think.”
The next chapters provide snapshots of the sisters growing into adulthood as they continue to nurture small relationships with people and animals. In the final chapter, Kazue and Yoko take the train to snowy Toyama City to attend their grandmother’s funeral, where they’re immediately surrounded by the warmth of their extended family. Fifteen years after being rescued, Udon is a gross little gremlin, but he’s still alive and happy.
At the end of the story, Kazue reflects on “the many living things they’d raised, not to eat, not because they were useful. Creatures that weren’t human, weren’t in need of preservation.” She comes to the conclusion that there’s no need for animals to have “value” to be cared for, an observation that would seem trite if not for the dramatic opening of the novella, in which the author presents the newborn Udon as little more than a slimy mass of hideously squally meat.
Haneko Takayama’s fiction has been nominated for a number of prestigious awards, and she won the Akutagawa Award for her 2020 novel The Horses of Shuri, a speculative meditation on the connections between human culture and ecological history that reminded me of Hideo Furukawa’s Belka, Why Don’t You Bark. I’m happy to see Takayama’s fiction in translation, and LK Nithya has done a marvelous job, deftly balancing the casual dialogue of the sisters with the literary touches of the narrative prose. I was also impressed by how smoothly the translator was able to handle the brief touch of science fiction at the end of the story, which was nowhere near as surprising as perhaps it should have been.
Udon: Unknown Dog of Nobody is a slim but striking chapbook that presents an intriguing and artfully translated story about what it means to share our space with animals. If nothing else, after all the cozy books about cats, it’s nice to have a story about a dog for once!
Contemporary Japanese Literature 