Home » Japan » Yōko Ogawa » 沈黙博物館 [Museum of Silence]
Yōko Ogawa: 沈黙博物館 [Museum of Silence]
Our unnamed hero is a museumologist. On his travels he carries A Treatise on Museumology but also carries The Diary of Anne Frank for reasons we will learn. He has been invited to come to a remote rural Japanese village where an elderly lady wishes to set up a museum. He is met at the station by the lady’s daughter, who warns him that her mother is likely to be aggressive but to to take no notice of this. She is the same with everybody. The first thing that strikes him when he meets the mother is that she seems to be about a hundred years old and clearly not the biological mother of the young woman who met him at the station. We later learn that she is the young woman’s adoptive mother.
The various items he sees are items the elderly lady has inherited from her ancestors. She lays down two golden rules:Carry out tasks briskly and do what others don’t do, later adding a third We must not give up along the way. She also adds What I am aiming for is a museum of an importance of which greenhorns like you have no idea, which is essential and that will not be found anywhere else in the world.
When she asks his philosophy of museums and he trots out the standard definition from the manual, she berates him loudly. Listen to me, you will immediately forget this kind of petty definition. She tells him that she had visited museums all over the world, from the famous ones to small sheds and did not like any of them. They were only storage rooms. Convinced he is not going to get the job, he prepares to leave but, of course, he does get the job.
The young woman gives him a tour of the village. Of the few oddities, he notices a man wrapped in what looks like white fur. She tells him that he is He is the preacher of silence, i.e. he is part of a monastery community where talking is forbidden.
Work on the museum is slow to start He cannot get a straight answer as to what the old lady wants and she seemingly has rules about auspicious days for doing and not doing specific tasks. She even has him doing other tasks such as helping the gardener or shopping. Eventually he is taken to what once was a laundry room and now a store room, containing a series of apparently random items. She tells him that every time someone in the village dies she collects an item that best characterises the person. These are often stolen and not necessarily what the deceased would have chosen to represent them. For example, when a local prostitute is murdered, after the cremation she finds the woman’s contraceptive diaphragm and takes that. This all started when she was eleven and the old gardener fell off a ladder and was killed. She took his secateurs, which she still has. She plans to convert the old stables into a museum for these objects. He starts work and then, as he fears, a 109 year old man dies and they have to steal something of his.
We learn that our narrator had a similar moment. When his mother died, when he was still a child, they were clearing out the house. He grabbed a random item from a box being moved out. It was a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank. As we have seen, he still has it, still reads from it regularly and always takes it with him on his travels.
Living in the village, he soon gets to know the village and its people and part of the charm of this book is the various stories about the village, which is both an apparently typical remote Japanese village but, at the same time, one with its own quirks. The daughter and he even manage to visit the monastery, which involves taking a boat across the swamp, conducted by a novice who is, for now, allowed to speak.
However the focus is on the museum and while we learn about his philosophy of museum management and his experience in other museums, as well as the old lady’s views, what is often most interesting is how they collect souvenirs – the term that is used – of the recently dead. We get various incidents such as a random bomb attack – we initially do not know by whom or why – in which the daughter is injured but the preacher of silence killed and, later, a young woman is brutally murdered. It is our narrator who collects the souvenirs in a manner which we might consider most unethical.
we follow the daily events – the old woman being cantankerous, our narrator and the daughter exploring the area, including making friends with the novice at the monastery and, of course, more deaths, including two more women brutally murdered. The police are now involved, investigating both the bombing and the murders and even suspecting our narrator.
Throughout this book there is what seems a relatively straightforward albeit quirky story but, as is quite usual with Ogawa, a continual element of menace or, at least eeriness. Because of the nature of what they are doing, death hangs over the book. The murders, the bomb attack, the locals dying, animals dying, the old woman clearly getting nearer to death but we also have the mysterious manor which seems to be far more complex and odder than our narrator first thought, the disappearance of his brother, the monastery, hidden away with its monks who do not speak and other oddities. But, as always Ogawa tells an interating and unusual tale well.
One other oddity. This book has been translated in French, German and Spanish but not English.
Publishing history
First published in 2000 by Chikuma Shobo
No English translation
First translation into French in 2003 as Le Musée du Silence by Actes Sud
Translated by Rose-Marie Makino-Fayolle
First translation into German in 2005 as Das Museum der Stille by Liebeskind Verlag
Translated by Ursula Gräfe and Kimiko Nakayama-Ziegler
First translation into Spanish in 2014 as El Museo del silencio by Funambulista
Translated by Yoshiko Sugiyama and Sergio Torremocha