Catch 51: A Han-Japa Odyssey Kindle Edition

Half a century ago, two Japanese boys played baseball at a Catholic international school in Yokohama. Now they pitch each other stories about wounds old and new that time alone may never heal.

"I was a paulownia tree that was supposed to grow straight. But they cut me near my roots when I was a sapling, and grafted a strange branch onto my soul. They tied the gnarly thing with wire and fed me toxic nourishment -- which is how I got to be this who-knows-what I am today."

These are the words of Kimiyoshi Sugawara talking to Bob Toriumi, a grade-school friend he hasn't seen in 51 years. Their mother tongue is Japanese, but they went to an international school and converse in English.

Kimiyoshi agonized over having been made a fool of in college, where dorm mates called him a "han-Japa". He was also heavily burdened by memories of the sexual molestation he had received from a teacher he highly respected in high school. He lapsed into severe insomnia, and on the advice of a psychiatrist, he wrote stories of his traumas, titled them "Lullaby for a Madman", and buried them in a closet.

Bob, also a han-Japa, has had problems of his own, including his son Tsubasa, a sociophobe who has kept to himself mostly in his room at home for the past twenty-five years. Bob, who learns about Kimiyoshi's woes, asks him to let him read the "Lullaby".

Catch 51 is a story of how two Japanese, who had received the same peculiar educations at a Catholic international school but then walked very different paths, open their hearts on the occasion of their reunion 51 years later.

Japanese edition The POD and Kindle editions of this English translation of Catch 51 -- A Han-Japa Odyssey have been published by Soseki Books simultaneously with the POD and Kindle editions of the original Japanese, Kyatchi 51 -- Aru han-japa no tabi.

Kunioki Yanagishita (author and translator) was born in Yokohama in 1944 and graduated from International Christian University. His English translations include Kenzaburo Oe's novel A Quiet Life (Grove) and many of Oe's lectures, including Who's Afraid of the Tasmanian Wolf? (Rainmaker). His Japanese translations include Dick Gregory's nigger (Gendai Shokan). He is presently a kabuki drama translator and commentator.

William Wetherall (co-translator) was born in San Francisco in 1941 and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, specializing in Japanese literature, society, and history. A researcher, writer, and novelist, his literary translations include Oe Kenzaburo, Oda Makoto, Takagi Nobuko, Matsumoto Seicho, Nishino Tatsukichi, Yanagishita Kunioki, and others. He has lived in Japan since 1975 and has Japanese nationality.