Quatre-Septembre and Four Stories That Stay With You

I came across Yoshio Ōsaki’s collection during a summer break. Between keeping up the blog, looking for a job and seeing people, I had gone a while without reading a book. It took a quiet moment to realize how long it had been.

I went to the library and decided to borrow something on the strength of its title. The Korean name of this book translates as A Quarter of September. I wanted to know what that might mean.

Yoshio Ōsaki and a title I could not divide evenly

September has thirty days. Dividing it into three gives you three neat stretches of ten days. Dividing it into quarters leaves a fraction. That small question got me to take the book home. The last story gave me a different way to read the title.

Four short stories

The collection has four short stories. The titles below are translated from the Japanese.

1. For Elisio, Unrewarded
2. A Bouquet for Kensington
3. With Sorrow and Without Wings
4. A Quarter of September

Each story follows a different person. What they share is a movement between a place or an object in the present and an event the character keeps returning to.

Ōsaki can bring you back to the present just as you want to know what happened next in the past. I liked the delay. Even after a story ends, it leaves you with the feeling that something could still happen to the people in it.

For Elisio, Unrewarded

The first story follows university students in a chess club. There is a love triangle, but the game gives the relationships a second language. That was what made me want to think about it after it ended.

A Bouquet for Kensington

A British woman and a Japanese man meet in a story held together by shogi. The editor of a shogi magazine is approaching retirement when a letter comes from a reader. Its arrival sends the story in a direction he could not have planned.

With Sorrow and Without Wings

Music is the connection in the third story. Ōsaki follows people whose lives have become entangled through the sounds they listen to and make.

A Quarter of September

A meeting while traveling in Europe leads to an enigmatic promise. Paris matters to what follows. The title finally makes sense near the end, which is a good reason to leave the surprise to Ōsaki.

A short conversation about Sartre

One story also has a conversation about Sartre. It takes up the existentialist distinction between a thing made to a prior design and a person whose life has yet to take shape.

• A character remembers somebody asking what existence means at a university lecture.
• The person listening wants to know how the speaker answered.
• The answer turns on an eraser. Its maker knows what it is for before producing it. A person arrives without that kind of blueprint and has to work out what to do with a life.

Quatre Septembre on the Paris Métro

Quatre Septembre is a real stop on Line 3 of the Paris Métro. Knowing that gives the title another possible reading. It also made me curious about where the station got its name.

France’s Third Republic was proclaimed on September 4, 1870, after the collapse of Napoleon III’s Second Empire. The date entered the street names of Paris.

The Métro stop takes its name from the Rue du Quatre-Septembre. A date that might otherwise live in a history book becomes a name people encounter while going to work.

South Korea has its own dates with a place in the history of democracy. The station made me wonder what it would feel like to hear one of them on an ordinary commute.

What a short story can leave behind

The stories are short enough to finish at a sitting, but I found myself carrying their images away. The history of the Métro stop is one more thing to discover after reading. The stories already have enough room for a reader who has never been to Paris.

Further reading

• OhmyNews — A Métro station named for September 4
• Joongdo Ilbo — The Paris station that remembers September 4

Book details

A Quarter of September (Quatre-Septembre)

Author

Yoshio Ōsaki

Korean edition published

September 26, 2006

ISBN-13

9788991312319

View on YES24

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