The Friends

Yumoto, Kazumi. The Friends. Translated by Cathy Hirano. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996. [Originally published in Japanese in 1992].

When Yamashita goes to his grandmother's funeral, he is the first of the three friends to see a dead body and the event ignites a strange fascination with death for the group of friends. Following the inimitable logic of twelve-year old boys, the three friends begin spying on an old man in the hopes of catching the moment when he dies so they can all see exactly what a dead body looks like.

Kirkus Reviews (as quoted on the back cover) calls the book "a Japanese Stand By Me," and I was determined to disagree with what seemed like a glib cultural translation of a Japanese novel into something recognizable for a North American audience. But as I read the story I had to admit that there was an uncanny similarity in both the tone and content of the story. If Stand By Me was set in a Japanese city in the last summer before junior high school, and the journey took place in a series of visits (squished into the spaces between "cram school" and soccer camp) to an old man's house... There is the same playful exchange of insults between friends, conflict with the rival group of boys from school, a shared and ongoing obsession with death, enough of a sense of danger and risk to give the feeling of a journey into the unknown, and those occasional moments of honesty between boys when toughness and bravado give way to reveal closely guarded vulnerabilities and uncertainties.

What results is a quirky, moving, surprisingly gentle coming-of-age story about friendship, death, and discovery. In the midst of enormous pressure to do well on the upcoming tests that will determine what stream of junior high schools they attend, the boys begin to develop an understanding of the world that has nothing at all to do with school. Kiyama, Kawake and Yamashita are poised on the balance point between childhood and something new. As always, the inevitable changes that will soon send them in different directions are part of what make this last summer of childhood that much more poignant.

The translation feels seamless, and the prose is that rare creature which manages to be subtle, straightforward and unsentimental, yet emotionally resonant. I was unprepared to be find myself starting to cry at several small scenes in the middle of a nearby coffee shop as I read the book in a single sitting.

The descriptions of death, bodies and cremation are matter-of-fact - down to details about picking out the bones from the ashes in the crematorium with chopsticks to put them in the urn - probably more so than most North American novels for the same age group. But the idea of death is approached with that particular combination of fear and fascinated curiosity that is so recognizably that of a twelve-year old mind.

This is an amazing book - immensely readable, believable and likable. No surprise at all that it won the Batcherlder Award for translated children's books.