Milky Way Railroad. Kenji Miyazawa

by his side and used in his suicide note the words bonyari shita fuan (a vague feeling of uneasiness), which Miyazawa repeats several times in the context of Giovanni’s quest. The same note also contains a reference to the Milky Way.

      Yet Miyazawa speaks not just the language of the stars, but also the language of everyday human discourse. And it is the marvelously constructed paradoxes of this tale that lift Milky Way Railroad beyond the level of ordinary children’s literature. Giovanni is sent on an errand to bring milk to his mother, but can’t do it until he returns from the Milky Way. The cow is out of milk just like the one in “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Jack must find his way out of maternal dependence by climbing to heaven, just as Giovanni does as soon as he finds the Pillar of Heaven. This Pillar of Heaven is a reference to the “August Heavenly Pillar” of Japanese mythology, which Izanagi and Izanami must walk around before allowing their Moses-like son to float away in a reed boat.

      His best friend, Campanella—representing the Weaver Maiden in the Tanabata legend—falls into the river in which the Milky Way is reflected. Giovanni must go to the Milky Way to find Campanella, but he also finds himself and learns some of the most important lessons of life from examples like the Scorpion, who is transformed into a constellation so he can serve others. Finally, Giovanni, the fatherless boy who yearns for his father’s return, can’t be reunited with his own father until his father’s best friend, the professor, loses a son (Giovanni’s own best friend).

      One life ends, another begins. Giovanni has sampled both. As he turns from the gloomy bridge over the Kitakami River, he sees the entire gleaming Milky Way reflected in its waters, the river of earth joined to the river of sky in a perfect bond.

      Just as he gave Japanese names to the obviously Western and Christian children on the train, Miyazawa gave his Japanese characters Italian names to emphasize the story’s universality, even though it is set in the very rural part of Japan where he lived. The names are also a tribute to his hero, Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639). Campanella was originally christened “Giovanni,” the name he used until he was fifteen. Thus the two boys, Campanella and Giovanni, are a kind of doppelganger, two aspects of the same child, one poor and reticent, the other rich and better educated. Campanella, who spent twenty-seven years in prison, part of them under torture in a lightless dungeon, wrote a utopian vision of a communist and sexually liberated world order in La cittá del sole (City of the Sun, 1602–23) and was an early champion of Galileo’s scientific proofs that the earth revolved around the sun. He was arrested for leading an unsuccessful revolt against the Spanish conquerors of his native Calabria. Campanella, like Miyazawa, hoped to integrate modern science with both orthodox religion and the mystical concepts that predate both Buddhism and Christianity. There are very slight hints that Miyazawa also favored rebellion: Giovanni’s father may be in jail because of a communist-inspired fishermen’s revolt that was raging at that time in Hokkaido, the topic of a popular novel of the period, Takiji Kobayashi’s The Factory Ship (1929).

      Miyazawa, who was an avid opera fan and owned one of the largest record collections in his hometown, probably first became interested in this Italian rebel-philosopher through the 1828 opera Masaniello or La Muette de Portici by Auber and Scribe. One of the most popular operas of its day, whose most famous aria was frequently sung in concerts up to Miyazawa’s time, it described another popular insurrection in the same part of Italy fifty years after Campanella. Miyazawa, in fact, was so impressed that he wrote a poem about Masaniello.

      The name of a minor character, Zanelli, also suggests this link to opera and the fictional doubles of the story. Renato Zanelli (1892–1935) was one of the foremost operatic tenors and the most famous Othello of Miyazawa’s day. He traveled and recorded widely, making twenty recordings for Victor in 1919, the year of his Metropolitan debut. Miyazawa would also have been fascinated with the fact that Zanelli switched in mid-career from baritone to tenor and had a brother, Carlo Morelli (1897–1970), who in true doppelganger fashion once appeared as Iago to his Othello in the Verdi opera.

      This translation, originally completed by Joseph Sigrist in 1971, was substantially revised by me. It was first published in abridged form by Japan Quarterly in 1984 and subsequently was revised again.

      D. M. Stroud

      Afternoon Class

      “Well then, everybody, while it’s been called a river or a leftover spill of milk, can you tell me if this pale white thing is in fact a river?” The teacher pointed to the whitish Milky Way zone stretching from top to bottom of the star map that hung over the blackboard.

      Campanella raised his hand. Four or five other students raised theirs. Giovanni started to raise his hand too, but quickly pulled it back. He felt sure that he’d read once in a magazine that the Milky Way was made up of stars, but recently he’d been in a continual daze, even in the classroom, and had neither free time to read books, nor books to read. He’d begun to feel that he didn’t understand anything for certain.

      But the teacher, only too quickly, noticed. “Giovanni, you must know.”

      Giovanni sprang to his feet, but found he had nothing to say. Zanelli squirmed around in the seat in front of him, looked back at Giovanni, and giggled. Giovanni turned beet red.

      “If you examined the Milky Way with a large telescope, what would you find?”

      They must be stars, thought Giovanni, but again he couldn’t come out with the answer.

      The teacher looked frustrated for a moment, but then turned to Campanella. “Well, then, Campanella!” And Campanella, who had only just then raised his hand so promptly, got up only with hesitation, having nothing in fact to say.

      The teacher looked intently and with some surprise at Campanella, but finally said, “Well then, that’s enough,” and pointed to the star map again himself. “If you looked at the pale white Milky Way through a powerful telescope, it would appear as a great number of little stars. Right, Giovanni?”

      Giovanni, turning crimson, nodded, but at the same time his eyes brimmed over with tears. “But I knew!” he thought—and so, of course, did Campanella. It had been written up in a magazine he and Campanella had read, together at Campanella’s house. (Campanella’s father had a Ph.D.) Campanella had jumped up and brought a big book from his father’s study, and, opening it at the place marked “Milky Way,” the two of them had pored over a beautiful full-page photograph, completely black except for the little white points that covered it. “Campanella could hardly have forgotten something like that,” thought Giovanni. “If he didn’t answer, it must mean that he’s thinking how hard I have to work morning and night. I’ve given up playing with the others when I come to school, or even talking much to Campanella. So, when he didn’t answer on purpose, he must have been covering up for me.” Giovanni felt an unbearable wave of sadness sweep over him, both for himself and for Campanella.

      “So then,” the teacher was saying, “if we think that this heavenly river is really a river, all of those little stars are like the sand and gravel in the riverbed.”

      “So then,” the teacher was saying, “If we think that this heavenly river is really a river, all of those little stars are like the sand and gravel in the riverbed. Or, if we think of the Milky Way as a great flow of milk, then it resembles a heavenly river even more. The stars are specks floating in the milk like drops of oil. And if you ask what compares to the water or milk of the river, we answer, ‘the speed of light,’ ‘the vacuum.’ The sun and the earth are floating in it. In short, we are floating in the water of the Milky Way River. And if we look in all directions from where we are within this watery space, we see the bluish tint of deep water. Now, down at the bottom, deep and far away, the stars are thickly concentrated, and so seem white to us. Look at this model.”

      The teacher pointed to a large, two-faced convex lens containing many shining grains of sand.