River's Edge & The Flat 'Battle' Field
Deep Diving the Translation of a Single Word
So the 1993 manga River's Edge, by Kyoko Okazaki, was finally officially released in English.
It's a problematic fave of mine, and (as I discussed in my review of it many moons ago) the peak of its edgy, angst-fueled aesthetic is this poem, standing alone on a field of black, near the end of the book:
"The flat battlefield" is a phrase that has really stuck with me since I read it, and anything that has that level of sticking power is a meaningful piece of art. I was uncertain as to my stance on River’s Edge at first, but for this and other reasons my opinion of the manga has grown over time - definitely give a read.
So when I got to this section in the official translation and I saw:
I was a bit bummed, "flat field" really just lacks the impact "battlefield" ha-
-wait what?
Reprinted by Permission of SSL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.
Copyright by William Gibson, originally published in "Robert Longo"
Okazaki didn't write this? William Gibson did?? The American cyberpunk fiction author? He...writes poetry? Turns out by the way this attribution is in the original manga, it just didn't survive the scanlation process, so I never knew. However, the translations don’t line up, and I wanted to know why.
I was curious about both how and when this translation shift occurred - if it ever did, maybe it was just sloppy scanlators or inherent semantic ambiguity. Figuring that out started with finding the origins of this poem - which turned out to be quite the endeavor! "Robert Longo" is not a book, he's a person - an American artist and filmmaker who directed the 1995 movie Johnny Mnemonic, which William Gibson wrote the screenplay for1. When you search books by the two of them nothing really turns up - at least on the western side of things. In America they never really did publish a book. But in Japan they published a few actually - some too late for 1993's River's Edge, but in 1991:
Publisher Kyoto Shion's Art RANDOM series, vol. 71, collecting art by Robert Longo, edited by Kyoichi Tsuzuki...and featuring inset poetry by William Gibson. Funnily enough one of the listings (Fukkan) actually notes:
現代美術コレクターだけでなく、ウィリアム・ギブスンのファン、岡崎京子のファン共々気になる作品集だと思います。
This is a work that will be of interest not only to contemporary art collectors, but also to fans of William Gibson and Kyoko Okazaki.
The poem from this book - which is called "The Beloved: Voices for Three Heads" - turns out to be way more famous as a reference by Okazaki than as a work by Gibson. A fact which started to be a problem when I wanted to dig deeper and find the actual poem and its context; when you google it you get...almost entirely Japanese results discussing River's Edge! Which means I couldn’t actually find the source poem, just Japanese translations of it from the manga.
However, buried beneath piles of mid-2000’s Japanese Okazaki fandom blog posts, I found the work of academic Gary Westfahl. He wrote a deep dive book in 2013 on the works of William Gibson, and in the abstract header for Chapter Five:
It also considers Gibson's poems such as “The Beloved: Voices for Three Heads,” his ventures into writing song lyrics, and the approach he used in some of his later nonfiction works
Ba-bam - and with a quick trip to LibGen pulling up a pdf version of the book, here we go:
Gibson's first literary publications, in 1963, were poems, and he obviously remained interested in the form, since in the 1980s and 1990s, when artists approached him about collaborative projects, he usually provided poetry. To date, Gibson has published three poems, not counting fanzine efforts, along with two other poems available only as excerpts. Asked to contribute to Robert Longo's 1989 performance piece Dream Jumbo, Gibson wrote a poem, "The Beloved: Voices for Three Heads," later included in a book, Robert Longo: Art Random, largely devoted to documenting that show.
My boy Gary Westfahl, coming through in the clutch! I was curious why this combination art book/poetry existed, but now it makes sense; the poem and the art were already a packaged deal as part of a performance art exhibit. And this also explains why the poem was so hard to find - as of 2013 Gibson only ever published 3 poems in his career! Westfahl also confirms that this poem was only ever published in print in Japan, making it virtually unknown outside of it.
Which, and this is kind of cool, means that the publishing of the translation of the Japanese manga River's Edge is the first time Gibson's "The Beloved: Voices for Three Heads" has ever been commercially published in the West.
How this play got over to Japan at all is still somewhat of a mystery - Dream Jumbo premiered in Los Angeles in 1989, but additionally in 1989 Longo had a titular "Robert Longo" art exhibit at the Seibu Contemporary Art Gallery in Tokyo, which had its own art book published - its fair to say he was "big in Japan" and so the success of Dream Jumbo made its way over. He would actually run a sort of gallery-version of the performance in Tokyo in 1995, for which he gave an interview that taught me that the name "dream jumbo" is pulled from the name of a popular Japanese lottery; perhaps it was always destined for Japan. And also Robert Longo is a bit of a weeb.
Anyway, the actual text of the poem:
Our love knew
The flat field
Yeah, it was originally ‘field’. With that confirmed, I checked the original Japanese page for River's Edge and:
戦場 - Battlefield
The first kanji is literally 'war', this is not ambiguous, there is no other read here. River's Edge changed the word from "field" to "battlefield". Or someone did - its possible the original artbook had a Japanese translation accompanying the text, or maybe its own English text was different, or maybe it was in Japanese originally in that book. Without a copy of the artbook I can’t be sure and its not like Okazaki herself is a translator - its credited in the manga to Hisashi Kurmaru.
...A fact which turned out to be a very helpful lead2, because adding his name into the search mix turned up the most precious resource one can find: a blog post from an Okazaki-otaku a decade+ after the fact who was obsessed with the poem and hunted down a copy of the original Art RANDOM artbook to see it for themselves. In their post they give a line by line comparison of the poem and its translation from the manga, credited to Kuromaru:
So while I am still not 100% sure when Kuromaru translated this text, the blog post confirms that he is the source of our creative twist, and the original artbook said ‘field’. Chad of chads, “Tach” from 2005, thank you for your blogging services.
What is funny is that this is not like a tiny little quirk I am interested in - I mean, okay, it's mainly that. But "the battlefield" is actually a part of Okazaki's brand as an artist. Here is a sketch she sold titled "Girl's Life on the Battlefield" (It uses the same kanji)
Here is a link to an exhibit of her work in Japan that was titled:
(Her art is incredibly on point btw).
Here is an entire book by art critic Noi Sawagari investigating How We Survive on a Flat Battlefield - Kyoko Okazaki's Theory! The one Amazon review says its content is "thin” and it was “tiring to read”, 2 stars, ouch.
But you get what I'm saying - Okazaki leaned into this phrase. I'm actually a little let down, when I read River’s Edge and was so taken with this specific moment I thought it was a ‘me’ thing; turns out the entire country of Japan was equally smitten and it became the tagline for the manga. Real loss of hipster points for me on this one!
Still, I really think “battlefield” is way more impactful - this elevation of the phrase would not have happened if it was just ‘field’, I feel confident on that. It connects very deeply to River’s Edge’s tone; all of the characters of the story are fighting violent bullies and oppressive social relationships and constantly waver on the edge of death and pain. The titular plot point of the story is a dead body the characters find in the grass on the edge of a river. These fields are soaked with blood, the poem should reflect that.
I am not calling the recent translation by Kodansha of River’s Edge ‘wrong’, or anything. It is just one of those tiny contingencies; a liberal translation and odd series of events, art crossing from LA to Japan, led to a brand for an up-and-coming josei manga author that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. What I am willing to say that this isn’t how I would have wanted to translate it. It doesn’t matter what Gibson wrote - this is Okazaki’s poem now. She wrote a manga about the battlefield, all of her fans agree, and an ideal translation would capture that collective legacy of the work for its new context. Hopefully this essay can show any potentially interested readers why.
Though, to take what in the first version of this essay was a ‘probably’ and elevate it to ‘confirmed’, I actually reached out to some of the people who worked on the English translation of River’s Edge. One of them was kind enough to confirm with me that they absolutely knew about this translation difference - but they had only obtained the legal rights to print the poem, not change it. Getting that permission would have taken months of extra work and, to read between the lines slightly, would not have been a common request and might not have even been possible. All of which is to emphasize how much this not in any way a criticism of the translation, it wasn’t a choice they had! “Reprinted by Permission of SSL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.”, indeed.
And wrote the short story the film is an adaptation of.
Astute readers will notice that I did not check the manga to find the translator until after I had searched for the poem extensively; this was an error on my part, had I done that as a first step finding a copy of the poem would have been easier.