The Stories Clothes Tell: Voices of Working-Class Japan by Tatsuichi Horikiri (review)

The low value that the academy places on translations has led to a dearth of contemporary nonfiction materials about premodern Japan. Those that remain in print are often thirty or more years old. While age does not speak to quality, it does mean that these volumes have been thoroughly exploited by several generations of researchers and students and can often feel stale through overuse. And the overall lack of translations hinders scholars with other regional specializations who do comparative or cross-cultural work because it limits their access to indigenous voices. A good translation, meanwhile, can introduce even professional scholars to works that they might otherwise overlook, be unable to acquire, or not have time to read in the original. For these reasons alone, Rieko Wagoner’s translation of Horikiri Tatsuichi’s Nuno no inochi is a valuable addition to scholarship on Japan. Moreover, Wagoner has produced a translation that is natural and fluid, often a difficult task in rendering Japanese into English. She has struck a nearly perfect balance by including Japanese terms that are important and specialized (all carefully defined in the text, in notes, and/or in the glossary) while omitting others in order to avoid overloading the text and overburdening the reader. Thus, most of the book can be read and enjoyed by anyone, although occasionally the wealth of ethnographic detail might be difficult to fathom for someone with no knowledge of Japan.

The book under review is a worthy showcase for Wagoner’s considerable skill. The Stories Clothes Tell—whose subtitle offers a slightly more accurate description of the book’s contents—does not fit easily into the categories we have designed to classify books. It is a memoir as much as it is a material culture study, and it is as much a discussion of the present as it is about the past. The genesis of the volume was a series of newspaper columns of the type that have largely disappeared from American newspapers, with some additional content later added to the compilation of the Japanese edition. It is worth noting that the original publisher of the columns was Akahata (Red Flag), a newspaper connected with the Japanese Communist Party. Horikiri’s perspective is very much a bottom-up history that would resonate with the readers of this newspaper. The newspaper-column format makes the thirty-one chapters quick reading, like a series of short stories that can be picked up, put down, and read in any order.

The “clothes” of Wagoner’s English title is a smoother translation for Horikiri’s “nuno” than the more literal renderings “cloth” or “textile” would have been, yet the objects that form the focus of the individual chapters are not necessarily articles of clothing; instead we find, for instance, bedding, mosquito nets, and banners. Horikiri’s aesthetic is not explicitly or directly informed by mingei philosophies, but it clearly represents them, as seen for example in statements such as, “Despite the worn and threadbare state it is in, this nora-gi [farmworker’s garment] certainly does exude its own quality of ‘beauty,’ however humble it may be” (pp. 22–23). In keeping with the Japanese belief that objects are imbued with the essence of their owners, these items are not subjected to a deep analysis of their characteristics, but rather used as springboards for discussing the past. The essays are a multivoiced combination of oral history, memory, and uncited but apparently research-based description. Wagoner defends this approach by proclaiming Horikiri’s “clear awareness of the limits of subjectivity and his engagement with issues of authenticity” (p. xviii). The book is, nevertheless, a highly subjective work. Horikiri was not trained as a historian and, for better or worse, he does not research or write like one. Many comments are speculative (albeit well informed) and empathetic, displaying what Horikiri calls kokoro, which Wagoner defines...