The Witch of the West is Dead is Kaho Nashiki’s debut novel. While it is a work written around the motif of the artist’s own childhood, it is also a story about love. The love that grows between Mai, a “difficult child to handle” and her grandmother, who is British but lives in Japan and lives a peaceful and harmonious life.
When she receives the news that her beloved grandmother is critically ill, Mai’s memories go back to two years previously. At that time, she was an emotionally unstable child, constantly driven by anxiety. Mai thinks back to the most important summer of her life, the last time she was with the elderly woman whom she affectionately called “the Witch of the West”, when she was still refusing to attend school.
Her grandmother was a "witch" of sorts. She was intelligent, listened to nature, knew how to grow plants and, above all, knew herself and what kind of person she was.
Mai spent some time with her, surrounded by nature, to rest her body and mind. Here, she lived a simple life. Picking wild strawberries to make jam, washing sheets by hand, taking care of the vegetable garden, feeding the chickens and collecting freshly laid eggs… With her grandmother, Mai realizes the power of her handiwork, which she repeats day after day. Thanks to this, she is able to tame her emotions and ward off her anxiety. She learns to observe, listen, and feel all sorts of different things, to keep bad ideas away, to decide things for herself and, what’s more, to accept herself. Guided by her grandmother, she undergoes witch training of a sorts.
Although Part 1, the central part of the novel, was written over 25 years ago, the other chapters were written much later. Through this creative process we, the readers, learn about three periods in this girl’s life, including her grandmother’s monologue after she leaves home. The Witch of the West is Dead provides us with a reading experience that slowly touches on the beauty of the world. This books speaks from a perspective that is always full of tenderness, even on such weighty subjects as the act of mourning, human indifference and loneliness, and self-exploration. It is also a hymn to nature and the small joys of daily life; a novel that celebrates aging and the passing down of traditions through the generations. Its introspective strokes are colored by delicate descriptions of nature and emotions.
The challenge for me as a translator was to capture the waves of emotions surging through this hypersensitive girl and convey them in the best possible way. To hear this girl’s voice and to write it down as faithfully as possible. In her afterword, Kaho Nashiki herself expressed the message of the novel in the following words:
"Even if we don’t have a big voice, we can speak and communicate things in a small voice."
And I, myself, have chosen to transcribe this message in my own small voice.