Kindred Spirits

When I used to teach at the University of Prince Edward Island, I would watch each summer as the province was transformed by some 3,000 Japanese tourists, all fans of one of the most well-known international adaptations of Canadian literature: Hanako Muraoka’s translation of L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables.

Long before that, Muraoka had been at work in her study in Omori, Tokyo, in the early morning hours of May 24, 1945, when sirens began to howl and a firebomb crashed through the roof of her house. Had the thing ignited, literary history would have taken a different course, but, being a dud, it left the translator, her nearly complete manuscript, and her library intact. And when Akage no An was finally published on May 10, 1952, postwar Japan found in it an emblem of hope and democratic optimism.