My Poison Snake: Erika Kobayashi on Growing Up in a Household of Sherlock Translators

[Admin_99]

Caution! Poison Snake On Premises!

So read a handwritten sign posted at the entrance of our house.

Our house was in the outskirts of Tokyo, in a town called Ōizumi in a district called Nerima. The huge Hikari-ga-oka apartment complex rose up just beside. That area had been used as an airstrip by the Japanese military during the war, and then as an encampment by American forces afterward. The grounds of Toei Studio was also nearby.

Next door there lived an old lady who worked part-time painting animation cels for Toei, and behind the house, cabbage fields spread far and wide.

Carpets were laid willy-nilly over the tatami floors of our house. I was the youngest of four sisters.

I spent my earliest years with my legs tucked beneath the musty-smelling kotatsu heater, peeling tangerines.

*

Papa and Mama would sit in the kitchen munching senbei crackers.

They were peering intently at foreign-language books spread out before them: the stories of Sherlock Holmes, written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Papa had once been a doctor, and Mama had once worked at a bank.

But with the arrival of their fourth daughter—that is, me—they decided to quit their jobs and devote themselves full time to translating the stories of Sherlock Holmes.

Their dream was to translate all sixty works—the entire Canon.

*

The postman would arrive and slowly, trepidatiously, open the door.

“Is there really a poisonous snake here?”

Kids in the neighborhood would come and ring the bell.

“What does a poison snake eat?”

Papa and Mama would answer them with straight faces.

“They love to drink milk. We train them using a whistle.”

The postman and the children would then retreat, half believing, half disbelieving what they’d been told.

As you may have guessed, the snake on the sign referred to the famous “Indian swamp adder” from “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.”

*

There was another sign at the entrance, though, this one reading Beware of Dog, and the dog it referred to wasn’t the Hound of the Baskervilles. There was an actual dog there beside the small doghouse outside, a rather unthreatening black Shiba Inu mix named Pompey. The name, of course, came from the dog who appears in “The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter.”

It always amused me to watch the nervous visitors as they crept so fearfully up to our door.

They’re all so scared of a poison snake? They’re all so scared of dying?

I had to laugh.

It didn’t occur to me then, but perhaps it wasn’t the snake that scared them.

After all, even just peering in through the entrance, one was confronted with chilling disorder. Both sides of the hallway were stacked with piles of books that reached up nearly to the ceiling, and there was dust everywhere. It looked like the proverbial hoarder’s dump. No one in the household, following the example of Holmes himself, ever lifted a finger for something as mundane as housekeeping.

And so, in my room too, I never picked up after myself, the carpet on the floor eventually hidden so completely by the clutter that I forgot its real color, and no one ever scolded me about it.

*

Slurping up ramen from the shop down the street, Papa and Mama would debate endlessly the best way to transliterate “Watson” into Japanese—as Wat-SOHN? Or Wat-SUN?

Meanwhile, my sisters and I would discuss various ways to die.

What would it be like to be bitten by a poisonous snake?

Maybe better than being bitten by a glowing, demonic hound.

I had to laugh.

*

My father and mother would turn the pages of their books, following the words.

Just as the English would turn into Japanese, Nerima would turn into London.

The drainage canal that ran nearby would become the Thames, and the concrete-walled mental hospital beside it would become St Bartholomew’s. The neighborhood conveyor-belt sushi joint became Simpson’s-in-the-Strand.

Dense white mist would rise up all around us.

My earliest years were spent in a version of Victorian England located in Nerima, Tokyo.

I’d never ridden in an airplane, but it was nonetheless the place that felt most like a hometown to me.

*

People died, one after the other, in these stories.

They would tumble over waterfalls or sink into bottomless quagmires, and die.

And in fact, every single person who’d lived in London in the Victorian Era was now dead.

Even if they never ended up implicated in a violent incident—never slashed by Jack the Ripper, never killed by poison gas during the war—they nonetheless, one way or the other, ended up dead.

Including, of course, Conan Doyle himself, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

*

My father and mother, after working steadily for over twenty years, finally realized their dream.  They finished their translation of Sherlock Holmes into Japanese.

All sixty stories and novels—the entire Canon—finished at last.

It was only a few years later that my father collapsed, and then died.

He was taken to the crematorium and became just bones.

As I used chopsticks to transfer his bones into the urn, I could no longer laugh.

No one, in fact, was more scared of death, of the thought of people dying, than I was.

My mother wore a deerstalker hat as she carried the urn home.

*

Long ago, a Sherlockian who happened to also be a biologist once told me,

“Poisonous snakes never drink milk, and they have no ears, so a whistle would have no effect on them.”

But then, he confidently added,

“That means that Dr Roylott, in addition to being able to bend a metal poker with his bare hands, must have had other special skills to draw upon in his schemes!”

*

Dense white mist rises up all around us.

I realized something for the first time then.

In a story, anything was possible.

A snake could drink milk, could hear a whistle.

The dead could come back to life, again and again.

I turned the pages of my books, following the words.

There, I met people who never existed, people long dead. I lived with them. With Holmes, with Watson, with Conan Doyle, with each and every person who’d been alive in Victorian London.

And so I wished, with all my heart, to become a writer myself one day. To write words, to write stories.

*

In the last years of his life, Conan Doyle became interested in Spiritualism, even saying, on the occasion of his death, that it was “nothing more than a passage to the next world.” I’ve yet to reach that point myself.

*

For now, I write these words.

I want to live.

With everyone: everyone near, everyone far, everyone living, and everyone already dead.

*

There, just on the other side of the door, a poison snake hears the sound of a whistle and climbs, slowly, up a rope.

 Translated by
Brian Bergstrom 

May 23, 2022

 ***

View the full article