VOL.74/2024.09

Japanese Translator’s Pick

2023.06.05

There’s a place that I go to whenever the spring comes after the winter. It’s my mom and dad’s graves, who passed away quite a long time ago. The graves are barren and desolate, showing how cold it was last winter. The grass has turned yellow, the leaves are thickly piled, and there are even holes made in the ground by animals from the mountain. But it’s a relief that the tall pines and yew trees surrounding the graves are green. Basking in the spring breeze, I wipe down the headstones with a mop, rake leaves with a pitchfork, firmly step on dry grass, and startle, like usual. It’s because there are fluffy balls – pasqueflowers – everywhere. Blooming one step ahead of the winter, pasqueflowers were bending their purple heads down.
And a scene comes to mind. It’s the childhood of the two daughters. Whenever the two daughters, who have now become adult women in their 30s, visited my parents’ graves, they were surprised to see pasqueflowers, very cautious not to step on them, and insisted on picking them and planting them in pots on the balcony. I used to explain why they shouldn’t pick up the flowers. Well, this is the story of the picture book Pasqueflowers are Markers that Count the Spring (Blue Bird Kids), written by Lee Chung-Joon, where he describes a grandmother’s infinite love for her granddaughters. How many times were the two daughters hugged by their grandmother? Less than ten, because she passed away not so long after. So, it was not easy to explain to the daughters how much their grandmother, who they might not have a clear memory of, loved them without using the power of storytelling.
In the book Pasqueflowers are Markers that Count the Spring, Eun-Ji is a five-year-old girl living with her grandmother. The grandmother’s clock of life slowly ticks toward death, and unlike her body getting old and behavior becoming childish every other day, Eun-Ji grows fast and healthy and becomes taller than her grandmother. When the grandmother, who Eun-Ji used to play tag and do role play with, eventually becomes physically and mentally incapacitated, mumbling incomprehensible words, Eun-Ji’s parents teach her about human life and death. They tell her that her grandmother became a child because she shared all her life’s wisdom and love with Eun-Ji. And when she shares everything that there’s nothing left, she will depart this world, leaving Eun-Ji.
Eun-Ji couldn’t fully understand that such leaving meant death, but what she clearly knew was that her grandmother shared everything she had with her. And she hoped that her grandmother would be born again as a pretty, lovely child after she left Eun-Ji’s side one day.
At the end of the story of Pasqueflowers are Markers that Count the Spring, there was the last phrase for the two daughters - “Pasqueflowers are blooming like this today to share the remaining love because you were born so late that your grandmother couldn’t entirely share her love with you.”

Written by Kim Nan-Joo (Korean-Japanese translator)