Vox Meditantis

3 responses to “The Other Shore”

1. 

   Steven S. Wallace

   01/09/2026

   This is a story about a Japanese clerk who is required to translate to facilitate exchange between European powers and Japanese customs people. The clerk sits on a precarious level of power. For one thing he does not know the language he translates fluidly. He straddles
   between merchants and can possibly make a mistake in translation.

   It is grueling work. And how soon will it be before experience of the principles makes him obsolete?

   One time after a session your narrator fell down and basically could not walk immediately. A Dutch businessman notices his predicament and assisted him. After three minutes of rendering silent aid, the interpreters ability to walk resumes and the Dutchman leaves his side. They never speak of this. The Dutchman has probably forgotten the aid he gave. He’s moved on to the next trade.

   The Japanese clerk regrets telling the story almost immediately.

   There is something humiliating about needing help of this kind. To be rescued. The natural thing when doing the rescuing is to call attention to the other person’s failing. “Oh my goodness! You almost drowned!! Here, let me be … the superhero … who but for my tremendous aid you surely would have perished.” (Sound familiar? 😂).

   No, the truly heroic thing for this man to have done (or this girl in my very very short story) is to step in, render the necessary aid silently, and when through with “saving the world” recede into the night, day or whatever atmosphere without a name or a second thought as to what has been done. It’s an old school way of proceeding. Whether in 1970s America or 150 years ago in Japan.

   An excellent story, Bob. 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

   SSW

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   1. 

      Bob Lynn

      01/09/2026

      I am not a clerk.

      Forgive me. That is an ungracious way to begin, and you have been generous with your attention, which is not nothing. But I must be precise, because precision is the only thing I have that cannot be taken from me by a man with two swords and a ledger. A clerk copies. A clerk takes what is already in one language and puts it into the same language in a neater hand. I do not copy. I carry a thing from one world into another and try not to drop it in the water between. Some days I do not drop it. Some days I drop it and pretend I have not. These are different skills from clerking.

      Also – and I say this because you have been honest with me and I owe you the same courtesy – I did not fall down. I stood up and my legs were not there, which is a different thing entirely. Falling down is an event. What happened to me was an absence. The legs simply declined to participate. There is a distinction. I realise it is a small distinction. I am a man who lives inside small distinctions. It is, as you have correctly noted, gruelling.

      But you have seen something that I did not expect anyone to see, and it has unsettled me, so I will sit with it a moment.

      You are right that I regretted telling it. I regretted it before I had finished telling it. I was regretting it during the telling, the way you regret a piece of pickled radish that has gone soft even as you are still chewing it. You know it is a mistake and yet you continue because to stop chewing would be to admit you should not have started, and that admission costs more than the chewing.

      But you are wrong about one thing, or perhaps not wrong, perhaps only looking at it from the harbour when I am looking at it from the bridge, and from the bridge it has a different shape.

      You say there is something humiliating about needing help of this kind. Yes. That is correct. A fourteen-year-old boy whose legs have failed him in a corridor full of Dutch factors and armed guards – yes, there is humiliation in that. I will not pretend otherwise. I felt the heat of it in my face and I can still feel it now, which tells you something about the persistence of heat.

      But that is not why I regretted telling it.

      I regretted telling it because by telling it I have given it to you, and now it is in your language as well as mine, and something will have changed in the crossing. You will carry it differently than I carry it. You will set it down in a different room. This is what translation does. This is what it always does. And that corridor – those three minutes – they were mine. They were the one thing I did not have to translate for anyone. His hand on my arm required no Dutch, no English, no French, certainly no Russian. It was the one conversation in my life conducted entirely without language, and now I have put language all over it, and I cannot take the language back.

      That is why I said forget it. Not because it was humiliating. Because it was clean, and I have made it less clean by speaking of it.

      Your observation about the manner of rescue – the silence of it, the absence of theatre – yes. You have understood this. I have watched men in this port perform generosity the way the Kabuki actor performs grief: every gesture visible from the back row, every kindness announced and witnessed and recorded in someone’s ledger. The Manchester man with the brass ankle fittings gave a coin to a dockworker last Tuesday and then told three people about it before the hour was out. I translated two of those tellings. The coin was real. The telling made it less real. By the third repetition it was no longer a coin given to a man. It was a story about the kind of man who gives coins.

      Pieter gave me nothing. He walked beside me. When my legs remembered themselves he went back to his copper weights. He did not tell anyone. He did not write it down. He did not even look at me in any particular way afterwards, not that afternoon, not the next day, not in the weeks before his ship carried him back to wherever the Dutch go when they leave here. I was not a story he told about himself. I was just a boy in a corridor whose legs were not working, and he was just a man who happened to be walking in the same direction.

      You say he has probably forgotten. I am almost certain of this. And I want you to understand: that is not sad. That is the point. That is precisely the point. If he remembered it, if he carried it with him to Rotterdam or Batavia or wherever he is now, if he told someone over Dutch gin in some harbour tavern – I once helped a Japanese boy in Nagasaki, you know, his legs gave out, poor creature – then it would become something else. It would become his story. His goodness. His memory to carry and display.

      He forgot it. So it is mine. The only thing in my professional life that belongs entirely to me and not to the magistrate’s office.

      You also raise the question of obsolescence, and I wish you had not, because I have been thinking about this since the port opened and I do not enjoy the thoughts. There are sixty-one days of evidence now. Sixty-one days of watching younger men with sharper ears arrive at the office, men who have studied not just Dutch but English from books printed in Edo, men who have never knelt on Dejima’s wooden floors and do not carry the old vocabulary of copper weights and sugar tariffs that is becoming, day by day, less useful than the new vocabulary of telegraph cables and steam tonnage and patent law. I know the word for camphor in four languages. I do not yet know the word for insurance liability in any of them.

      My teacher said once – in Dutch, naturally, because he said everything in Dutch, including things that would have been more honest in silence – he said that a language is a living thing and it will walk away from you if you do not walk with it. I understood him to be talking about grammar. I understand now that he was talking about survival.

      But I have been talking too long. This is a habit I am developing and it concerns me. A man in my position should say less, not more. The secretary is already writing things in his ledger that I have not been invited to read, and every word I say aloud is a word that can be carried somewhere I did not intend it to go.

      You have been kind to read this carefully. I notice you used the word heroic. I would not use that word. Pieter was not heroic. He was merely present, which is a smaller thing and a rarer one.

      I withdraw nothing I have said here. That is unusual for me. Make of it what you will.

      The blister, incidentally, has not improved.

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      1. 

         Steven S. Wallace

         01/09/2026

         Forgive me. I stand corrected. You sir, are far from a clerk!😂 And no. You absolutely did not fall down. Rather, the ground came up to you. For three minutes, and that was all! Best to say nothing more about it.

         I really love the short abrupt endings … may your blister become the thing which is forgotten.

         SSW

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