Karasu | Kofi BazzellSmith

Selected images from my manga “Karasu”, a drama about a man dealing with the loss of his daughter- inspired by a Japanese folk song by Hako Yamasaki about crows kidnapping children. Grief and death are inevitable, and this story is about that realization. I use space and slow pacing to evoke “Ma”, a narrative tool prevalent in Japanese aesthetics that highlights the absence of object(s) as the marker of attention. One becomes aware of what is not there- and contemplates. A translation can radically change the voice and subtext of a story. Since I am both the creator and the translator of this work, I have full control of these choices and I am experimenting with telling a story that may resonate in different ways with different audiences. Hako Yamasaki’s music is sung in Kyushu (southern Japan) dialect, but there is no way to translate the nuances and cultural histories of the dialect into English. Instead of seeing this as a problem, I decided to lean into what may be lost in translation, and to write the English dialogue in a Black southern dialect- creating a different experience for English readers. This project is the beginning of my attempt at a transdisciplinary and transcultural approach to telling a story. Two important lines repeated through the song: Naku ko wa doko jai…ka? Where is the crying child? Saratte ikou kai…ka? Shall we abduct/swoop them up? In Japanese, “Ka” is sued at the end of a sentence to denote a question is being asked. “Ka” is also the sound that a crow makes. Yamasaki was playing with this ambiguity, as she is speaking as the kidnapping crows in the song.