Translation Memory
Midge Raymond
In the airport terminal, Dan Marxen’s wife slips a pill between her lips as he pretends not to notice. The little white pills look as innocuous as baby aspirin, but for Julie they have become, over the past couple months, as necessary as water — and because she lets them dissolve under her tongue instead of swallowing them, by the time they board she will be in a dreamy, hypnagogic state.
After takeoff, she lets her head fall toward his. “Did you know,” she asks sleepily, “that Japan has an earthquake every five minutes?”
He looks up from his laptop. “No,” he says, “I didn’t.”
Her eyes flutter at half-mast, then close. He thinks of the bottle of Maker’s Mark in the overhead, his gift for Keiji and the other executives at Saito Electronics, and wishes he could down a finger or two before the flight attendants start making their rounds.
The twelve-hour flight seems to last far longer, and by the time they reach Tokyo Dan feels as dazed as Julie looks. They stumble through baggage claim and customs to find the driver Saito has sent for them, a thin, round-faced man named Yamaguchi. The drive downtown will take more than an hour. Julie swallows another Ativan and drifts back to sleep as Dan watches the oncoming lights rush at them on the highway. At the hotel, he takes off her shoes and eases her into bed, folding her arms across her chest and tucking the blankets up around her chin. He looks at her for a moment, then moves her arms back down to her sides.
Then he returns to the streets. Shinjuku is alive with neon light, with the ringing of pachinko machines bursting out from behind automatic sliding glass doors. A few streets north, women approach him from the doorways of clubs, inviting him for drink, for dancing, for massage.
He passes a McDonald’s and sees a group of gaijin inside, Americans most likely, eating Big Macs and drinking coffee. He thinks of the presentation on web globalization he will give tomorrow. Use a splash global gateway to direct first-time visitors to local content, he will tell Saito’s executives. Keep a global link in the upper-right corner of each web page so that users will always be able to find their way back to the local home page. The advice, he realizes, is universal: no matter what the context, people want to feel close to home.
He is not tired but returns to the room, where Julie is sleeping soundly, almost too soundly. Dan turns on the television, volume low, and finds a local news station. He listens to the comforting sounds of the unfamiliar language, absolving him of thought, until he sees an ad in English for Mt. Rainier coffee, its packaging a blatant Starbucks knockoff. He makes a few notes and looks over at Julie again. She hasn’t moved. He leans down close, feels her light breath on his cheek.
Last month, on the morning Julie got laid off, he had been looking out a hallway window at his office in Cambridge, watching a hawk dismantle its prey. It was a sunless June day, and a storm was brewing, the clouds growing portentously dark. Dan had gotten up to stretch his legs, having been on a conference call for the past hour and a half, when a movement across the street caught his eye. He went to the window and stood mesmerized, even as he heard the distant, urgent ring of his telephone. Atop a telephone pole, the hawk was methodically plucking feathers from a captured pigeon. Fluff and quill drifted down onto the street, and, though he didn’t know it at the time, as the pigeon shrank to flesh, Julie was across the river packing her desk.
Later, he walked through the feathers in the parking lot and drove home to find her standing by a window facing the street, in a posture not unlike his own that morning. He stood behind her for a while, trying to see what it was she was looking at until he realized it was nothing.
The layoff wasn’t the true loss, for either of them. That had happened a month earlier, and it had been for the sake of her job. “We’ve still got plenty of time,” Julie said then. “And I won’t have this position forever.”
She still referred to it as “the procedure.”
For days he came home to find her in the same spot, staring at an empty street. When she turned to him, her eyes looked like thin wet glass, as if the slightest sound could shatter them. And so he said nothing, until she asked if she could accompany him to Japan.
Again he stands at the window, this time viewing the pink summit of Mt. Fuji beyond the maze of Tokyo’s skyscrapers. He turns away and pulls his watch and wallet out of the hotel desk, then picks up his laptop and glances over at Julie. She’s rolled onto her side, her hand under her chin, looking, to his relief, more asleep now than unconscious.
Keiji meets him at the entrance to the Saito building and ushers him past security. They walk though halls of polished linoleum and stark white walls, reminding Dan of the hospital where he took Julie. She’d suffered complications after the abortion, blood loss and scarring that the doctor said would not hinder her fertility, but Julie was not yet convinced.
He suddenly feels too warm and loosens his tie. He notices that all of the men and women in the building are in shirtsleeves, and he slips off his jacket.
He discovers later that Japanese companies are participating in a national energy-saving program that requires them to keep their building temperatures in the low eighties during the summer months. He tries to be subtle as he wipes sweat off his brow, his upper lip. He hopes no one notices the wet spots on his shirt.
But even as the sweat trickles down his back, he has to admire the culture of economy — in Japan, everything is scarce: resources, space, time. He has come to appreciate—through working with Saito and his other accounts—Japanese efficiency; it is not unlike the economizing of his own marriage. He wonders, as he tastes salt on his lips, whether the withdrawal of affection between Julie and him is perhaps not a falling apart but a storage of future energy; he hopes that perhaps what they are doing is not holding out but holding in reserve.
He tells the executives that nothing can replace what globalization experts call “depth of content.” “You can’t globalize your web site halfway,” he explains. “It’s better to do it all at once, or not at all. You’ll run into problems if you offer only one or two web pages in your target language. What happens when a Brazilian user lands on his local site, clicks through, and ends up back at a Japanese page?”
He watches Keiji and his colleagues nod in agreement. “You are saying, we need more than a façade?” Keiji asks.
“Exactly,” Dan says. He catches a drop of sweat at his eyebrow.
That night, his eyes begin to blur from hours of staring at his laptop. He shuts the lid and picks up the Tokyo guidebook that Julie bought before the trip. She doesn’t seem to mind; she’s watching Larry King on CNN International, her eyes gazing at the screen unblinking. He opens the book to a page with a folded-down corner, and he scans it to see what she’d earmarked. He finds an entry for the Buddhist temple Zozo-ji. Jizo, the deity that looks after aborted or miscarried fetuses…the temple grounds filled with tiny statues given by parents as offerings to Jizo… a place of worship and remembrance…
His chest tightens, and he sits up to take a breath. Julie, hazy on Ativan, doesn’t notice. Has she been to Zozo-ji already? He looks at her, her face unanimated and dull. She is still beautiful, her skin pale and smooth from years of avoiding the sun, her cinnamon hair streaked with a few strands of gray. He has always loved the gray, as much as she complains about it. When he sees the silver catching the light, he glimpses their future.
She leans back into a pillow and closes her eyes. He places the book back on the nightstand, leaving the corner of the page folded down.
“When used effectively,” he tells the Saito group, “translation memory can shave thirty to fifty percent off your translation costs.”
He explains how it works, using a PowerPoint slide showing two pages of text placed side by side. “The TM software,” he says, “highlights previously translated source material, and this saves you the cost of retranslating the same content. It’s not a perfect science, though. You’ll have exact matches some of the time; sometimes you’ll have what’s called a ‘fuzzy match.’ You still need an editor to verify the content, but because translators charge by the word, the savings with TM can be tremendous.”
But it takes a while, he adds, to build translation memory.
This is what he remembers: the day he and Julie met, five years ago, at an outdoor jazz festival on Boston Common, ten minutes before a thunderstorm sent them into the lobby of a boutique hotel.
He remembers martinis in a dim lounge, emerging later to a clearing summer sky.
“No, it wasn’t the Federalist,” she said at a recent dinner party, when someone asked how they met. “It was Number Nine Park.”
He remembers being told about the pregnancy, arguing that though it was unplanned they would make it work, refusing to drive her to the procedure but having no choice later, when the bleeding wouldn’t stop.
He remembers her saying, weeks later, “We agreed on this,” and being unable to convince her that they did not.
This is what happens when they lay out their memories side by side. At best, they are a fuzzy match.
That afternoon, an earthquake strikes Chiba state in the east as Dan stands with his laser pointer at the front of Saito’s main conference room. He won’t find out until later that its magnitude is 5.8, or that there was moderate damage at the epicenter. One minute he’s suggesting designs for a global template, and the next he’s swaying on his feet, wondering if it’s the jet lag, or if the heat of the room is making him dizzy. No one says anything. An earthquake every five minutes, he reminds himself, and keeps talking.
That evening, Julie skips her dose of Ativan and joins him for his dinner with the Saito execs at an upscale Japanese restaurant. He watches her feign interest in something Keiji is saying. The topic changes to sightseeing, and he hears her ask about Zozo-ji. He holds his breath.
“It was the temple of the Tokugawa family — the famous shogun,” says Keiji.
Aiko, the only woman executive, adds, “It is also known for the Jizo statues.”
“I read about that,” Julie says. She doesn’t look his way.
“So you know that people go to Zozo-ji to do mizuko kuyo,” Aiko continues.
He watches Julie shake her head.
“It is a ritual,” Aiko says. “Mizuko means ‘water baby.’ People do mizuko kuyo to give the spirit good wishes for its next life.”
“Some do it because of tatari,” Keiji adds.
“What do you mean?” Julie’s brow furrows.
“Sometimes the mizuko are angry,” Keiji says, “and parents do the rituals so the spirits do not take revenge.”
“It is a nice practice,” Aiko says, overriding him. She begins to explain the ritual to Julie, and at the same time Keiji begins telling Dan about the sumo matches in Ryogoku, and Dan tries to listen to both of them, his ear tuning more into Aiko. Yet he hears only fragments: monthly ceremonies, priests, drums, chanting.
The conversations ebb and swirl onto other topics. Dan watches Julie for signs of anxiety or grief; without the Ativan, he doesn’t know what to expect. Yet she looks calmer and more composed than she has since they arrived — than in weeks, as a matter of fact. She eats her noodles delicately as those around her slurp with unself-conscious gusto.
It feels as if they’ve been sitting at the long, low table forever; Dan’s knees ache, his legs bent awkwardly on the floor. He looks around the table, at the cornucopia before them: bowls of rice and soup, long plates of tofu and sushi, round dishes of pickled vegetables and dried fish, seashells filled with mussels simmering over open flames, sake and sweet wine. He recalls reading that the Japanese have a word for a fifth taste, umami, used to describe an otherwise indescribable flavor: something savory, something good. He tries to conjure umami as he sips a thick miso, but his tongue registers only bitterness.
Back in the hotel room, the pile of loose change that he’d left on the desk is stacked neatly next to the phone. A bag of Japanese rice snacks that he’d taken from the mini bar and left open on the bed has been sealed and placed on the bedside table.
Julie drops her purse on the desk and perches on the bed nearest the door, the one she claimed as hers the night they arrived. She looks at him, her cheeks warm with color, her eyes bright. It’s the sake, he thinks.
“So,” she asks, “did you hear what they said about Zozo-ji?”
“Of course,” he said.
“Well, what do you think?”
Sometimes the mizuko are angry. “I’m not sure.”
“Maybe we should go see it.”
“Are you worried about what Keiji said? That we need to pacify an angry spirit?”
“No, it’s not that. Don’t make fun.”
“I’m not,” he said. “I’m serious.”
“So do you want to go?”
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“I guess it could give us a chance to start over,” she says. “Offer an apology to the mizuko. Ask for forgiveness.”
He thinks, Who are you asking?
“Tomorrow’s our last day,” she says.
It’s not yet noon, but the air is feverishly hot, the city draped in a gauzy haze. Dan feels the moisture cling to his skin, as if his body is clenched in a sweaty fist. He and Julie walk along a wide boulevard toward Zozo-ji, then through the vast grounds of the temple. In front of the main hall, Dan watches a young couple toss a few coins into a collection box and pull the rope that rings the bell. They stand praying for several minutes, then clap three times before turning away.
Julie has wandered away from him, and when he looks to the right, he sees her approaching a courtyard filled with hundreds of tiny statues, lined up row after row toward the back of the main hall: the water babies.
The little statues stand about two feet tall, and they have been dressed in little red knit caps and sweaters. Some wear bibs; others wear T-shirts gaping with empty sleeves. The clothes are tattered, moldy from rainfall and faded by the sun. Beside them, plastic pinwheels whir in the intermittent breezes, alongside containers of flowers and candy, or toys. As he turns down another row, Dan sees white Japanese characters written on their backs, and he wishes he could read them.
Three schoolchildren speed by on bicycles, laughing and shouting, on a sidewalk adjacent to the temple. He and Julie are walking down different paths now, looking at the faces of the statues. Dan finally finds one that looks peaceful, its tiny hands folded in a prayer, its red knit cap and bib dirty and damp, its face serene. Next to it is a batch of dead daisies in a plastic vase. He stands looking at it until he feels Julie beside him.
“Aiko said you can buy the statues and bring them here,” she says. “Maybe we should’ve bought one.”
“I didn’t think about that.”
“I didn’t know where to get them. But I did bring this.” She holds up a pink wind-up Gloomy Bear, a ubiquitous Japanese toy.
“Do you like this one?” she asks, indicating the statue that caught his eye. He nods, and she places the toy in front of the statue, under its praying hands.
Back in Cambridge, two weeks after returning from Japan, he feels sluggish and dazed, as if he’s still fighting jet-lag. He pushes his chair away from his desk and stands, stretching. He walks out into the hall, pausing near the window where he watched the hawk that day, months ago. The telephone pole is bare.
He returns to his office, to the long list of e-mails and the blinking of the message light on his phone. Two new mergers in the past week have made waves in the industry — two translation agencies and two software providers. Everything, it seems, is merging, advancing. He is still working with Saito on its nascent web globalization project. They are balking at the costs: they want to see definitive returns, they want proof that their investment will pay off. “It’s a worthwhile gamble,” he tells them, but he can’t back it up with anything but his own faith.
He understands their impatience.
Sometimes, late at night when he is wide awake and it is morning in Japan, he can close his eyes and see them: the rows of Jizo statues, upright as headstones in a clouded cemetery.
He can see Julie’s hair that day, the wind separating the long, wavy strands and revealing the gray.
And he can still see the face of the small figure to which they bequeathed the toy. He’d stayed a few moments after Julie left, regarding the water baby before him. He reached out his hand, as if he might bridge the liminal divide between them, between their two worlds. He touched its cap, the fabric warm and moist in the humid air, then moved his hand to its face. It was gritty and stone-cold.