CANMORE – She was widely known as the first woman to summit Everest, which she accomplished in May 1975 as a member of the first women-only Everest team. Then she became the first woman to complete the Seven Summits – climbing the highest mountain on each of Earth’s seven continents.
Overall though, Junko Tabei, who died in 2016 at the age of 77, remains revered as a compassionate, humble, enthusiastic and devoted lover of nature.
Prior to 2018, however, Tabei’s story was available to readers only in Japanese. That all changed with the publication last year of Honouring High Places: The Mountain Life of Junko Tabei. This captivating and inspiring collection of stories originally written by Tabei in her native Japanese were lovingly curated for English speaking readers by a team of women from Banff/Canmore – author Helen Rolfe, and translators Yumiko Hiraki and Rieko Holtved.
The idea for the book came from Hiraki, a Japanese-speaking hiking guide and friend of Tabei’s who contacted Rolfe looking for an editor to work on an English book about her.
Next Thursday (May 16), Rolfe will share her story of co-writing Honouring High Places at the Canmore Legion.
The process of writing the book, Rolfe said, was continuously challenging and always interesting. One thing it never was, though, was a chore.
The biggest challenge arose from the fact that the Japanese language does not translate directly into English, which meant that Rolfe had to rewrite nearly every sentence of Tabei’s stories, working with translations of excerpts selected by Tabei and Hiraki from several Japanese books Tabei had written.
“The translations were facts about Tabei’s life that needed crafting into storytelling, as well as placed in flowing order,” Rolfe described. “The question became, how would I thread together random excerpts from previously written Japanese books to establish one tell-all story in English?”
For her efforts, Rolfe created an exquisitely crafted book that is a joy to read, not only because Tabei’s story is so compelling, and her character so delightfully admirable, but also because Rolfe’s writing and editing skills are so finely tuned.
The high-quality of the book, published by Rocky Mountain Books, was internationally recognized when it was selected for the short-list of nominees for the prestigious 2018 Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature.
Japan’s best-known and highly admired female climber, as a child Tabei was a frail girl with no talent for sports. Her ascent to her place in climbing history – all the more impressive by the fact she stood under five feet tall, which makes carrying a heavy backpack full of climbing gear significantly more taxing on the body than it is for a larger person – revealed a remarkable strength of character.
This trait served her well through her life as a mother and wife, when faced with cultural biases, and through her later years during the 2011 Fukushima earthquake, and as she dealt with the cancer that would take her life. True to form, Tabei continued to climb into her 70s.
Rolfe’s presentation on Junko Tabei and Honouring High Places takes place on May 16 at the Canmore Legion starting at 7 p.m. Hosted by the Alpine Club of Canada’s Rocky Mountain Section, the event is free and open to all.
