The Navidad Incident: The Downfall of Matías Guili

by Natsuki Ikezawa
translated by Alfred Birnbaum

I never heard about Ikezawa before. I took this book from the library purely on the strength of its translator’s name. Could it be as good as anything by Murakami, I wondered.

I was not disappointed, although there’s no need to compare the two authors. The story is captivating and I even developed some sort of feelings towards its protagonist, President Matías Guili (undoubtedly, a criminal, but then all dictators are) and his long-time “secret partner” Angelina but, strangely, more yet towards his perpetually merry (hench)men, Ketch and Joel. The history of the fictitious Navidad Archipelago reminded me of that of equally fictitious San Lorenzo from Cat’s Cradle (“When England claimed San Lorenzo in 1706, no Dutchmen complained. When Spain reclaimed San Lorenzo in 1720, no Englishmen complained” and so on). The acute accent over the third a in “Baltasár” is never explained.

On the island of Gaspar, passengers are forbidden from drying their laundry on bus windows. During the Japanese occupation, when bus service was introduced between Baltasár City (then Shokyo, the “Showa Capital”) and the village of Diego (Dego), a rumor spread among the womenfolk that laundry hung on bus windows dried more quickly, so buses came to be used more as clothes driers than as transportation. The sight of brightly colored clothing fluttering from every window, however, conflicted with the aims of a modern conveyance, so the gravely concerned bus staff adopted a strict ban on “boarding the bus with wet clothing”. The phrasing “with wet clothing” failed, however, to specify whether the people were carrying or wearing the clothes. And in a land of sudden tropical showers, what use are buses that refuse service to someone who happened to get caught in a downpour? Thereafter, the rule was amended to read: “Passengers are forbidden from boarding the bus with wet clothing, except for what they themselves have on”. Discussions were held between the women and the transport company; the drivers maintained there was no plausible reason why laundry draped out of bus windows should dry any faster than elsewhere, and the housewives claimed from personal experience that it most certainly did.