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Durian Sukegawa’s Pour que renaisse le soleil: The Mystery That Solves the Wrong Question

  • Writer: David Lapadat | Music PhD
    David Lapadat | Music PhD
  • 18 hours ago
  • 6 min read

Two extinctions occur in the wrong order at the opening of Durian Sukegawa’s Pour que renaisse le soleil, first published in Japan as Taiyō o horiokose (太陽を掘り起こせ). In Iolanda Prodan’s Romanian translation, the first sentence reads: “Lumina din sufletul ei se stinsese înainte ca soarele să dispară de pe cer.” The light in Yoshie’s soul goes out before the sun vanishes from the sky.


That sequence is more suggestive than a simple equation between bereavement and darkness. It leaves the scale of events unsettled. Has private grief changed Yoshie’s perception of the world? Has the world independently followed her into darkness? Or has the novel placed two disasters beside each other without yet deciding how they meet? The sentence gives mourning cosmic dimensions while preserving a gap between the woman and the sky.


The rest of the novel cultivates uncertainty of another kind. We are made to wonder who is dreaming, composing, remembering or approaching death. Meanwhile, the central images acquire increasingly fixed meanings: darkness is grief, the sun is hope, the journey is recovery, and the strange boy leads Yoshie back toward her dead son. Sukegawa’s novel is narratively obscure but interpretively explicit.


Those qualities are easy to confuse. A book can conceal the ontological status of a scene—who made it, where it occurs, whether it is dream, memory or fiction—while leaving almost no uncertainty about what the scene asks us to believe. Pour que renaisse le soleil hides the ownership of its parable more successfully than it complicates the parable’s meaning.


A Withheld Identity, a Fixed Function


The boy who knocks at Yoshie’s door provides the first test. Kentaro, her only son, was forty when he died, a fact disclosed immediately. A mother’s loss remains a tragedy at any age. Kentaro’s adulthood matters formally because the child at the door does not resemble the man as he was at death; he collapses that adult life back into the childhood preserved by Yoshie’s memory.


The novel repeatedly activates the same circuit: the boy’s eyes resemble Kentaro’s, and his insect net recalls an old photograph. His movement along a curb restores a walk through a park and the memory of a panda. The visitor’s identity remains unavailable, but his function is established with mechanical consistency: boy, son, memory, grief. We do not know what kind of being he is, yet we quickly know what every appearance is for.


The lyric imagery behaves similarly. Stardust appears in the boy’s eyes, tears expand toward an ocean, and kumquat syrup casts rainbow colours into the dark. The surfaces vary while the emotional instruction stays stable. Each image returns us to innocence, sorrow or hope rather than acquiring a less predictable significance from the circumstances around it.


Sweet Bean Paste is just as gentle and far more persuasive because its simplicity passes through work: beans are washed, cooked, watched, tasted and brought to the right texture. Meaning gathers through resistance and duration. In Pour que renaisse le soleil, the sun does not gradually discover hope through what happens on the road. Hope is already packed inside it.


The Emails Answer a Different Question


The email exchanges introduce the book’s strongest formal possibility. The nocturnal journey turns out to be a story composed through correspondence between two septuagenarians, Yoshie and Hyota, whose illnesses place both lives under pressure. Hyota’s memories as a reporter enter the panther-man and the scenes of war. Yoshie’s family returns in altered bodies. Their invented road is built from two pasts that begin to migrate into each other.


The double narration has real force. Marie Charrel, writing in Le Monde, argues that the dreamlike quest can both bewilder and enchant. Japanese readers have likewise found the alternation between fable and email difficult while responding to its anti-war appeal and its hope for future children. The structure can disorient and move at the same time.


Its weakness is more precise than mere confusion. The correspondence gradually answers the interesting question of authorship—whose memory supplied a figure, whose life is nearing its end, who may be writing whom—but it also standardizes the fable’s meanings. A scene appears in the dark narrative; the emails then identify its biographical source and moral burden. The reader must reconstruct the levels while being told how the material crosses between them.


So ontological uncertainty survives longer than semantic uncertainty. We continue asking which narrative contains the other after the symbols have ceased to change. The book’s mystery concerns possession: who owns this child, this road, this death? Its allegory has already settled what child, road and death signify.


The boy’s eventual status shows the cost. As a possible metaphysical visitor, he could have retained an existence partly outside Yoshie’s grief—son, guide, death, or something untouched by all three. Once he is located within the jointly composed story, those alternatives contract. The disclosure identifies the device but does not make his previous appearances stranger or richer.


Different Histories, One Meaning


The same asymmetry returns when the novel widens into history. Hyota recalls the fall of the Berlin Wall, Cambodian minefields and Romania after 1989. The pandemic enters through illness and the hospital. War reappears within the fable in an absurd confrontation between a soldier, a tiny piece of land and a tank.


Sukegawa’s past as an overseas reporter gives this material genuine provenance. Yet distinct histories enter with particular names and leave with nearly identical meanings. Cruelty darkens the world; adults reproduce it; children deserve something brighter.


The humane judgment is too uniform for the events asked to carry it. A minefield, the collapse of a communist regime, a grotesque military defence and a pandemic ward do not organize suffering in the same way because agency, ideology, coercion and accident differ. The book supplies geographical specificity, then reduces the differences to a common ethical caption.


Moral clarity needs no redeeming ambiguity around war or atrocity. Historical particularity must still alter the thought rather than just provide additional proof; here the range of evidence expands while the proposition remains unchanged.


The concern for the world left to children produces a related simplification. Darkness is treated as though it had newly overtaken a once-brighter landscape, even as the novel lists earlier catastrophes. History offers no stable moral daylight from which the present simply fell. The harder use of the solar image would admit that hope may be necessary without pretending it restores a lost age of light.


Where Uncertainty Finally Matters


One late revelation does make form change meaning. The road toward death seems at first to belong to Yoshie, the bereaved woman following a child into darkness. Its deeper destination belongs to Hyota, the writer approaching his own death. The search for the sun is also his final act of composition: he creates a path he may not live to finish reading and leaves another person a world through which memory can continue moving.


Here the nested form earns its difficulty. The uncertainty over authorship alters the emotional ownership of the journey. Mortality, companionship and composition occupy the same structure, and the approaching disappearance of the writer changes why the parable exists. For once, not knowing whose road we have been walking produces a new interpretation rather than postponing information.


The ending nearly preserves that force, then closes the book several times. Revelation, farewell, statement of purpose, hope for the future and the prospect of entering stories accumulate in one concluding movement. Each exit is followed by another that enlarges or explains it, as if stopping might leave the reader with the wrong emphasis.


By then, however, the central imbalance is clear. We may remain uncertain about who wrote the road, which life it prepares to end and how one narrative contains another. We have long known what darkness, boy, journey and sun require us to feel. Pour que renaisse le soleil keeps its mystery at the level of narrative ownership after withdrawing it from interpretation. It solves who the parable belongs to. Unfortunately, the novel had answered what the parable means almost from the start.


An elderly woman and a boy walk beneath an eclipsed sun in a dark, ruined landscape, for an essay on Durian Sukegawa’s Pour que renaisse le soleil.

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