A vehicle approached, covered with pink and white and rainbow-colored balloons and blaring club music loudly into the air. Beautiful men danced atop the stage it carried, showing off their toned bodies. A welcoming cry welled up from the crowd that lined the street, and a crowd of musclebound men stripped to the waist flooded the street in the vehicle’s wake. There was another vehicle covered with women wearing golden dresses like royalty, followed by a group of lesbians and then a group of serious-faced men and women brandishing placards and shouting slogans. All the participants exuded an aggressive, “I’m so-and-so and such-and-such, here I am!” sort of pride, and it was a bit much for me to take. I felt humiliated. “I have an air penis! I have genitals made of nothing! It might just be a hallucination! It’s not even as real as a dildo! Never mind me, I’ll leave now!”
Yet, as my loneliness increased, so did my desire to assert my presence, and before long I’d darted into the street and mixed into the lively crowd of men and women who trailed after the tail end of the parade with little self-consciousness. There seemed to be plenty of others who’d gotten wrapped up in the festivities and left the sidewalk to join in even though they’d not officially registered as participants, so it seemed unlikely I’d be reprimanded for doing the same. And in fact, another young man jumped in and joined the group right after I had.
This young man seemed as uncomfortable as I was, walking along with his body hunched and his eyes fixed on the ground. It looked as if he’d come alone and was unsure whether he really belonged, so he’d watched from the sidelines until the urge to join in the parade became overwhelming and he found himself following me when I darted into the fray.
We seemed to be the only ones walking lonely and unaccompanied within the group. Telling myself that this was a festival, that the sky was clear and cloudless, I approached the young man and said, “You didn’t come with your boyfriend?” The man looked shocked and gave me a hateful look, shooting back combatively, “And what about you? Your girlfriend dump you?” I was unsure how to respond for a moment, but then concluded that though I was there to assert my existence and pride, the worst thing to do would be to pretend to be a lesbian, and so I said, “My boyfriend doesn’t share my opinion on these issues.” The man’s face twisted, and he snorted a laugh. Perhaps thinking that this was too rude a response, he added, “So, you joined the parade out of a sense of justice, because you oppose discrimination?” He was looking at my wrist as he spoke. There was a rainbow-colored bracelet hanging from it. In an attempt to get into the spirit of things, I’d bought it from one of the booths that lined the parade route. I didn’t really understand what the English words ACT AGAINST HOMOPHOBIA written on it meant exactly, but I figured I’d fit in better with these colors on my body somewhere.
“You saw me run into the street from the sidewalk, didn’t you?”
He nodded, muttering his assent. He seemed to realize that he’d followed my lead because he’d sensed a discomfort in my actions that resembled his own.
“Well, we all have our reasons. I guess we all came here because no one understands us, no one sympathizes with our situations. I wouldn’t say I’ve found a place to call home, but it did seem like I might not feel so ashamed if I came here,” he explained with sudden gentleness.
A list of possible “reasons” scrolled across the back of my mind, but it occurred to me that it might be precisely because his fit none of them that he found himself in search of “a place to call home.” His sense of shame once he got here might be due to his not being gay exactly.
“I’m sorry for earlier, saying ‘boyfriend’ without thinking.”
This at last brought a smile to his face, though a dark one, and he said, “That’s okay. After all, he was never really my boyfriend.”
His words sounded a chord within me, played a beautiful melody. My air penis appeared. I suddenly got the feeling that maybe this was someone who would actually be able to see it. My whole body finally became suffused with a heat appropriate to my surroundings. Energy began to pulse outward from inside me, igniting my flesh. Turning my newly heated gaze on him once more, he appeared translucent. It seemed as though if my inner furnace got any hotter, he might start to shimmer and eventually disappear altogether. He seemed like a man whose body was bound to the earth solely by the density of his emotions, whose borders were only vaguely defined. I found myself on the verge of reaching out and touching his uncertain skin. I wanted to embrace him, even if it meant embracing a cloud. Suppressing this urge, instead I said, “There seems to be an afterparty. Do you want to go with me?”
At the gay club in Shinjuku Ni-chōme where the afterparty took place, we gave ourselves over to the movement of our bodies and danced all night. Tsubasa seemed unused to this kind of place, his native uncertainty becoming even more pronounced, but nonetheless he seemed to make the best of it as he put his body through its paces.
I’d figured that the afterparty was to go all night, so it didn’t surprise me much when at around four in the morning, this woman who said her name was Hina told me with flushed cheeks that she was exhausted and then said, “My house is close, do you want to come over?” All I really wanted was to talk with her somewhere intimate, just the two of us, so I didn’t really care whether we went to her house or somewhere else, but in order to capitalize on the heat we’d unearthed during our conversation in the parade, it seemed like now, with our emotions and endurance peaking, it was the right time for liftoff.
As soon as we entered her fifth-floor apartment, Hina opened the windows. The air that had been trapped in the room started to exchange with the comparatively cool air from outside. The summer sky was already starting to brighten with the coming dawn, and we could hear song-birds singing noisily. “I don’t have an air conditioner, sorry,” she said, turning on a fan instead. We crouched together in front of it. “It’s so ho—ot,” said Hina, and she took her clothes off quickly, soon becoming completely naked. Taken aback, I just looked at her, and then she asked, “Do you see it?” while spreading her legs. She didn’t seem to be propositioning me, but rather seemed to be actually pointing at something. All I saw there was what I’d been imagining as I made my vagina cuts, just a set of normal female genitals. But I intuited that telling her that would disappoint her, so instead I just looked into her eyes.
“So you don’t see it either?”
Hina muttered this to herself, her voice and expression deeply disheartened, as if her very existence had just been refuted. A certain note of self-deprecation also sounded in her words, and I felt myself stirred by a tender sort of pity. “Can I touch it?” I asked, reaching my hand out. Hina nodded absently.
Not knowing quite what it was I was supposed to be touching, I started aimlessly caressing the area around her vagina. And then I suddenly withdrew my hand. What was that?
My body responded to his touch like a plucked string. He really touched it! I grabbed Tsubasa’s hand and made him touch it again. His hand was fearful, pulling back against me fairly forcefully, but his fingers were curious. They slowly traced the contours of the air penis. Experiencing the touch of another for the first time, it unfurled like time-elapse footage of a sprouting plant, erecting quickly to quivering stiffness. Startled once more, Tsubasa withdrew his hand. This time I made him grip it with his whole hand. As I did, my body convulsed with a pleasure I’d never known before. I moaned involuntarily. I communicated my desire to him with my eyes.
But I didn’t respond to her right away. After all, there were things I wanted her to know about me, too. Impatiently stripping off my clothes, I exposed my crotch to her, asking as I pulled my bothersome penis out of the way, “Can you see it?”
There were countless scars there. Some places were swollen like welts, while others were covered with raw, red scabs that looked about to spurt with blood if peeled loose. Tsubasa was obviously not showing me these. He wanted me to see something invisible. Not see it exactly, but know it was there. I tentatively brought my fingers clos
e. And then, in the area where the wounds seemed most concentrated, I touched him. Tsubasa, like me, responded convulsively. In a tense, high-pitched voice, he said, “That’s where I open up. Do you see?” I nodded. I lay on my stomach and licked him there. Just as Masakazu did to me, I caressed the tip of Tsubasa’s real penis as if it were a clitoris. Tsuabasa cried out hoarsely. The place I was licking soon became wet with something other than just saliva. Tsubasa’s vagina opened its red flesh walls to me and I pushed my tongue farther in. The smell grew thicker. Tears ran freely from Tsubasa’s eyes.
Unable to control my passion, I opened my body as my emotions overflowed. Hina breathed into my invisible vagina. Her breath blew through my hollow core and past all the other holes opening up all over my body, etching musical scales into the air. My music began to play.
And as it did, I put Hina’s invisible penis, which I had been gripping the whole time, into my mouth. She made a sound like the song of a rare tropical bird.
Her penis was like a rod of mochi skewered on a chopstick. It filled my mouth and made me start to choke, so I pulled my mouth away. I decided to nibble its side instead. Like playing a flute. I was playing Hina. I put the head in my mouth and worked my tongue and teeth like it was the reed of a clarinet. My eyes shed sparks in response to his touch, and I sang out, “Oh, oh, no, oh, no!” I raised my body up and made Tsubasa lay face up. Hina looked down at me from above. Her eyes saw me as I really was. Not as some person shaped approximately like any other man, but as I was, a body that produced sound when wind blew through it, an existence so faint it seemed about to disappear, yet still persists: she caressed the real Tsubasa Tsutsui. Tsubasa, who held me as I was, who needed no terms or labels, not gay or lesbian, not man or woman, not any of the myriad other ways I could be categorized: Tsubasa held me, accepted the air penis that made me unlike anyone else, as if I was just another person, just like everyone else. Tsubame had entered my heart and together we’d taken flight, yet alone I’d crashed back down, I couldn’t fly alone, but now I’d found Hina, who understood my vagina’s wish to be opened, who made my spirit soar, and tenderness for this Hina gushed up from within me like oil from a well as our bodies of air fit together, melded, saturating me with happiness, and sadness too.
Tsubasa was getting wetter and wetter, and so, as I gazed into his eyes, I plunged my air penis into his air vagina.
Hina’s still-swelling air penis continued to grow, and Tsubasa’s newly opened vagina was still quite narrow, so they came quickly, releasing cries like rushes of wind from their mouths. Hina’s voice sounded to Tsubasa like the cry of a raptor at the moment it fixes on its prey. Tsubasa’s voice burned into Hina’s ear like the squeal of a flute blown suddenly and too hard. As her air penis drove further and further into his air vagina, Tsubasa heard an unearthly wind blow through the conjoined hollowness they formed as the circuit between them closed, and his chest swelled with simple joy at the thought that the duet this wind carried might travel all the way to reach Tsubame’s ears. As the air vagina engulfed the air penis, the heat melted their doubled flutes into each other and produced a dazzling brightness. Tsubasa grew completely transparent as Hina looked at him through the nearly blinding light, and to Tsubasa, Hina’s entire body was transforming into one huge invisible penis.
As the two winds sounded their unbearably highpitched notes in unison, their melting, liquid bodies vaporized completely, billowing out the window into the boundless sky outside to evaporate into thin air. A breeze blew through the empty room, ruffling the curtains as it passed. The first golden rays of the morning sun fell across the tatami-matted floor. Even now, the intermingled sounds of the dual wind continue to play their hoarse-throated “Air.”
Sand Planet (2002)
They say everything the sand touches turns to sand. I was proof of that myself, long ago. I sat on that beach from dusk till dawn, watching the sun sink, the stars glitter, listening to the sea’s song all through the night, and then, as the sun rose again to shine down on me where I sat with my arms around my knees, I transformed into a sculpture of sand myself. Waves lapped at my hips, and bit by bit I crumbled, washed away into the ocean. But even as the sea swallowed me and I became just so many tiny grains, I never dissolved. I simply sank deeper and deeper, thousands of meters deep, until I settled in a pile at the bottom near a trench, and ever since, that’s where I remain, however many thousands of years may pass.
This is why deserts can only expand. Like an army of tiny crabs rising from the water to mount an invasion deep into the land, tiny grains of sand rise from the ocean floor and march relentlessly from the shallows to the beaches, from the beaches to the plains, from the plains to the mountains. If all the lands of the world become deserts, the oceans won’t have a chance. Steady and inexorable as the flow through an hourglass, every drop of water will eventually be replaced by a grain of sand.
This dried-out planet is already made of nothing else: sand continents, sand seas, sand skies. Only the shifting shapes of the dunes mark time’s passage. It passes but never progresses. It just circles around and around the same spot. And watching the sand as it moves, listening to the sound it makes as the wind carries it through the dunes: no one at all.
Fight the sand. Before I die, bury me in the Arabian Peninsula or the Sahara. Make a grave in the desert for all of the dying animals and people. If we bury the sand in bodies, now before it can overtake us, the organic matter will wet the sand as it rots. Bacteria will multiply, microbes will grow, feces will permeate the sand, soil will form. Now, before it’s too late, put me on a plane, send me to Morocco. Make good use of my corpse.
Miyoshi Kawai (48), father of Yoshinobu (17), lay muttering like this to no one in particular, day and night, till he died. Yoshinobu had actually tried to get the terminal cancer patient onto a plane, but he could not overcome his greatest obstacle: his mother, Myōko (45). She insisted that they couldn’t bury him in some unknown desert, but instead would inter him right there in the garden. Burned to ashes and shut up in an urn, their memories and feelings for him would fade, but buried raw and literally “returned to the earth,” their memories, feelings, even his body would blossom into new life. Reassuring him like this, they convinced him to breathe his last on the tatami floor in his own house. Yoshinobu, his little sister, Bimyō (15), and their mother dug up the garden that night, stripped him bare, and buried him. Ten days later, after an investigation by police who had received complaints from the neighborhood about a dreadful stench, the three of them were arrested on suspicion of illegal disposal of a dead body.
This autobiographical story was the first manuscript Yoshinobu ever submitted as a newspaper reporter. Aside from rewriting his father’s less intelligible utterances to make them more poetic, it was all true. After the investigation, Yoshinobu and Bimyō weren’t prosecuted, but Myōko was sentenced to three months in prison and two years probation.
Of course, the paper never published it. Though Yoshinobu was a member of the Saitama Prefecture Police Press Corps, this was the only manuscript he’d submitted after two whole weeks there, and the Saitama bureau chief was taken aback. Look, if you wanna write about an old story, it needs to be pegged to something in the present, and besides, it’s got to sound like a real newspaper article. Maybe when you’ve got a little more experience, you can take it over to the local news section and submit it again. And with this, he rejected the manuscript. Yoshinobu thought it made sense, so he quit his assignment at the police station, where he’d basically been a phone jockey anyway, and, following the example of his elder colleagues, began going directly to the cops and courthouse so he could submit some kind of article every day without fear of it being rejected.
Eventually, the bureau chief and the police chief at the station came to regard him as the most promising of the three in his cohort, and he was given free rein to gather information for a big-deal story just as an incident occurred at the Shirasagi Elementary School in Tokorozawa: an indiscriminate mass killing
just like the poisoned curry incident in Wakayama a few years earlier. It took place at the height of the rainy season, so at first it was suspected to be food poisoning or E. coli O-157, but then aconite and oleander were detected in the udon noodles with meat sauce, and it was declared a homicide. Fifty-four people were hospitalized: three teachers, thirty-four sixth-graders, and seventeen fifth-graders. Of these, three sixth-grade boys and five sixth-grade girls died by the next day. The police questioned the children who regained consciousness. When a sixth-grader named Soejima heard the names of the eight who had died, he asked, Is Yasuda still alive? After the police confirmed that the girl named Yasuda hadn’t eaten the school lunch and was unharmed, Soejima confessed that Yasuda headed an “association” that had committed the crime, which saved the skin of the criminal investigation division, who’d been unable till then to produce a single suspect. However, Yasuda refused to say a word to her interrogators, and they were forced to rely on Soejima completely to make their case. It remained unclear whether the association had members outside Yasuda’s class or year, to say nothing of whether it had spread to other schools, nor was it clear how many of the eight who died had been members, and then Soejima’s condition took a sudden turn for the worse and he passed away, paralyzing the investigation.
As a cub reporter, Yoshinobu was supposed to talk to the bereaved families and school officials, but he was aware that what he was really expected to do was to stay out of the way. They were refraining from interrogating the children and already had someone on-site at the scene of the crime, but since only the children knew the facts about the association, the mass media was using every resource at its disposal to dig up everything it could, and every story, no matter how specious, ended up treated like a major scoop.
We, the Children of Cats (Found in Translation) Page 10
