Friendship for Grown-Ups A Review

By Nao-cola Yamazaki

Translated by Polly Barton 

“One day, there was light. The light hit the rock. The rock was filled with life, [.]”

An immensely delightful read, Friendships for Grown-ups is a collection of three very short stories that are interlinked with one another. What got my attention was Strangers Press’ artistic format of this chapbook, so beautifully compiled, and of course Yamazaki’s graceful and delicate writing. Three stories that start with an amusing almost comical story called A Genealogy, which is about a rock’s evolution into finally becoming this woman called Kandagawa. An inanimate object such as a simple rock gives -through an evolutionary process – birth to an animate being, a woman whose name is Kandagawa, and who is the protagonist of the second story. I loved the part how as a human Kandagawa goes to the bath house and when she stretches her legs, she remembers how in the past she used to be a fish.

“When she looked at the painted nails of her feet that were sticking out of the bathwater, she though they looked like fins.”

The second and third story focuses on relationships. In The Untouched Apartment,
Kandagawa is having a dream about her previous apartment that she’d shared with her ex-boyfriend Mano. She then gets a call from him out of the blue, and together they set off to see their old apartment. Walking together in their old neighbourhood and visiting their university and restaurant, Kandagawa realises that she no longer is the person she used to be when she was with Mano. Like the coelacanth climbing out of the water onto land in the first story, she has evolved, moved on and become someone else.

“It was a white pebble, about the size of a peanut. She’d chosen it because it had looked somehow pure. She held it under the fluorescent light, and stared at it. It still had traces of soil in it. Unsure whether stones are combustible or non-combustible, she hesitated for a while. Then she threw it in with the non-combustible rubbish."

In the final story Lose Your Private Life, which is the longest out of the three, Terumi Yano who is Kandagawa’s friend, is a writer under the pen name Waterumi. She falls in love with Matsumoto a musical composer but her feelings remain unrequited. This story really struck a chord because it is about defining oneself through the eyes of others. Yano is heartbroken when she realises that Matsumoto only loves her novels and not her as a person. Yano struggles with the separation between the art and artist initially believing that she is separate from all of the novels she’s written, just a girl in love with a boy. Like the first story, Yano too through a difficult process realises that her raison d’etre is her writing and that the art and artist are one, and as the title suggests Yano finds a way to lose her private self, merging with her art.

“I fall in love because I think that unless I fall in love I won’t be able to write properly, but the things I write are a thousand times more attractive than I myself am, so nobody ever likes me as a person, but I’m going to give my life up to writing, so it doesn’t matter.”

I resonated a lot with the second and third stories in a way that it sat so close to me in its reflections. That we are continuously evolving through different phases of our lives, and yet how that change is the only constant is something that we all ponder upon from time to time. It is when you see it in a body writing, it strikes a major chord. Yamazaki’s fine story telling in Polly Barton’s brilliant translation is a dedication to that very aspect of the slippage of time without the realisation of which we have become someone else entirely.