The cicadas began to sing. The man carried four full plastic water bottles, two in each hand, and placed two of them in the little building that stood like a checkpoint at the head of the trail into the woods as he passed it.
The man’s blue tarp tent was located a just a bit farther into the trees. Just before he entered the tent, Yoshinobu called out, Hey, I need some directions, can you help me? The man turned to look at him, and so he asked, Can you tell me the way to Abdullah’s residence? The man swallowed his laughter like a yawn and said, Why don’t you look up his address? And when Yoshinobu, shocked, exclaimed, You have addresses? he played along, saying, Yeah, that might be a good idea, we can put numbers on the trees and stick mail-boxes all over. Yoshinobu pointed into the trees and asked, Maybe over there could be Roppongi? And he sat down near to the man’s tent. He brought his egg sandwich out of his bag and set it on his knee. I’m going to have breakfast now, do you want to join me? he said in a low voice, holding out part of his sandwich. The man grew irritated and refused, but when the fragrant fresh-brewed coffee was offered to him, he accepted.
You really don’t know Abdullah? He’s from Pakistan.
I don’t know any foreigners.
Aren’t there some around here?
You sure you didn’t see a ghost? There’re a lot of those around.
Really? You see them?
Occasionally. I drink at night with someone and fall asleep, and when I wake up, poof! No one’s there. Maybe I was just drunk, who knows. The man laughed to himself.
Are there areas famous for suicides around here?
Suicides? There’s suicide and then there’s suicide, you know. If you can’t work and you’re body’s falling apart and you spend all your time drinking and you fall asleep somewhere and end up dead, that’s suicide too, now isn’t it?
That happens a lot?
It happens. People die but they’ve got no home, no one does, so you come back as a spirit and end up drinking with someone by mistake. I’m a new guy here, I’m still out on the edge doing this checkpoint job, that’s as far in as I can live for now, but you hear stories about the people farther inside. This forest used to be a lot thinner, but more and more people died in there and the soil grew rich and the forest got thick like this, I hear the dead come back and mix with the living folks in there. I’ve never been, but it sounds pretty fun.
Can I ask a question? It’s okay to tell me I’m being disrespectful. It’s just, I’ve heard that the people who’ve come here to live are hard to get a long with, they don’t like people. Is that true?
Who’d you hear that from?
A friend of Abdullah’s.
Who are you? The man’s voice became expressionless, as if he was getting tired of talking.
I’m a friend of Abdullah.
You know, sometimes people come by here looking to arrest illegal aliens.
I’m just a student, said Yoshinobu, producing an old university ID card. I had a part time job as a bag boy, I got to know Abdullah there.
Is that so? Well, I still haven’t seen any foreigners.
I’ll take a look around. You say you’ve never gone farther in?
NO FIRE! The man yelled, grabbing the cigarette Yoshinobu had just lit and crushing the ember between his fingers. No fire! It’s forbidden in the forest. If a fire started in here, everyone would die.
How was that decided? Did you all discuss it among yourselves? How do you let new people know?
Everyone knows without having to “decide” it. Think about what you’d fear most if all you had taking care of you was you. So no fire. You can walk around here all you want, but don’t smoke. I don’t know what’d happen if someone found you out here with flame.
Yoshinobu thanked the man and left him and his tent behind. It was nine-thirty. Still, he hadn’t gathered enough information to make an article. After walking about ten minutes away from the tent, he pulled out his cell phone and called in to work. No one was manning the desk yet, so he ended up talking directly to the bureau chief: I’ve been out since this morning following up on an appointment I had made for a story about urban life, so I’ll go to the Police Press Corps meeting this afternoon directly from here. He then put a call in to the Press Corps office to make sure no major incidents or accidents had occurred, and then, turning off his phone, Yoshinobu headed into the depths of the forest.
The intensity of the light was different from the day before, but the scenery was much the same. The trees and the soil seemed to sweat, giving off a rich odor. The atmosphere blazed hot enough to exude oil on the verge of being set aflame by the cicadas’ cries, while little birds chirped like falling water. Yoshinobu walked and walked, sweat dripping from his jaw, but he failed to find any tents or makeshift huts dug out by the homeless. There seemed to be no people at all. From time to time, he encountered a terrible stench and, following it, would find a clearing where the trees were a bit sparse and a hole had been dug and filled with a bunch of unidentifiable garbage. It didn’t always seem to be organic matter that was buried, but still, the sharp scent would remind him enough of how it smelled when he buried his father in the garden all those years ago that it made him wonder if corpses were hidden in the bottoms of these holes as well. Were the bodies of the homeless piling up, higher and higher? The metallic buzz of the cicadas and flies that filled these sunny clearings drilled fissures into Yoshinobu’s skull as he wandered, hallucinating corpses.
After stumbling upon however many of these garbage pits, Yoshinobu’s headache became so unbearable that he sought refuge in the hollow of a huge tree that towered in the deepest, shadiest part of the forest, but no sooner had he sat down than he heard a shrill, ragged voice somewhere nearby. He crept toward it and, peeking from behind a tree, found that he had returned to the clearing where he’d fallen asleep the day before, and that the old man in the reddish-brown wide-brimmed hat was standing there alone, his withered body stripped to the waist, waving his arms as he held an animated conversation with some unseen interlocutor. Upon awakening at the dawn of the first morn, I look around and all before me is snow—how can there be snowfall in these tropical climes, I cry! And following this preamble, the old man launched into song:
Oh, the snow’s a-falling!
Little stones a-falling!
Dig dig dig! Dig dig dig!
You can’t dig out!
I’ve never seen snow back where I was born, so to see it now, here on the earth’s backside, well …
You know, there is some snow that, no matter how hot it gets, never melts.
(The old man changes his voice for this line).
You mean this snow’s not cold?
(The old man touches his finger to the ground).
You see, it’s salty! This is salt! Salt blown here by the wind!
(The old man mimes licking his finger, and uses the other voice for this line).
What is this? The ground is sown with salt and rock, nothing can grow!
Yes, that’s the way it is here for the Sons of the Earth’s Backside!
(As he says this, the old man turns to where the audience would be sitting and stands stock-still, snapping to attention).
Take a ride on the Dominican turtle,
And end up in the Palace of the Dragon King,
The premier neighborhood in Hell!
Here, where the wind blows only hot, the only crops are stones, and the only dust is salt, people disappear like thinning hair, one after another: three people arrive and four pass on, five sicken and six die, seven are born and eight expire, until there’s no one left but me, Urashima Tarō, the last Son of the Earth’s Backside.
How long has it been now, I wonder? Once I was left all alone, I stopped being able to tell if I were alive or dead. How long before I become just so much fertilizer amid these stones?
Living here, so many miles from my nation,
In this far-off República Dominicana
Bathed in the sunset’s red illumination,
> I lie lower than the stones that mark the fields.
And so Urashima Tarō of the Earth’s Backside sat murmuring to himself when, wouldn’t you know, there came a voice! Don’t worry, dear Tarō, it said. It was the voice of the Dominican Turtle who had brought Urashima Tarō here to the Earth’s Backside. A giant clock hung from the Dominican Turtle’s neck, the hands on its face moving backward with each tick. Look, Tarō, I’ll return you to where you began! You can start over, in a different world!
So saying, the Dominican Turtle put Urashima Tarō on his back and started off on the road toward the mountains.
(The old man tromps around the clearing)
And wouldn’t you know it, when they reached the village, there were his friends who had tilled the salted earth with him, and they were cheerful and youthful as they came out to welcome Urashima Tarō home. All around, water sprung from the earth and jade-green foliage grew, and Urashima Tarō thought he must have been brought to the Kingdom of the Dead.
No, no, dear Tarō! This too is a neighborhood in Hell, but we decided to work together to dig wells and channel rivers, and now see our robust harvest! We entreated Mister Turtle to run his clock faster for us so we could complete our task, and it ended up taking a hundred and fifty years!
Ahh, so a hundred and fifty years is how long it takes for stones to turn to fertilizer!
No, no, we tilled the soil with the dead.
At this, Urashima Tarō and the villagers thought back to when they were brought to this strange land, deceived by promises that they would become “Plantation Owners in Paradise”; they remembered all the years and years that had to pass before this land of salt and stone could become a place to make a home.
(The old man mimes tears)
It hurts to think it’s been so long,
All those months passing into years—
This moment is the turning point,
We bid farewell at last, in tears.
Urashima Tarō of the Earth’s Backside found himself surrounded by these natives with their various shades of skin and lived among them happily, if humbly, but not a day went by that he didn’t think of his family back home: his mother, his father, his older brother, his younger sister.
So much time has passed, there’s no way any of them could still be alive! With no letters from me to them or them to me, surely I’ve been forgotten!
The sickness in Urashima Tarō’s heart soon spread to all the other villagers. Everyone grew melancholy and disconsolate, singing old songs together until their throats gave out, drawing pictures and telling stories of the sea and sky and forests of their homeland, unable to stop regaling visitors with one timeworn tale after another. Some told so many of these stories that they began to believe that they had never left their homeland and it was the Dominican Republic that was a dream.
Urashima Tarō of the Earth’s Backside became convinced that all of this was a sign that he should let go of his past for good so he could live peacefully in the present, and he decided to revisit his homeland one last time.
Turtle, O Turtle!
Please, Mister Turtle!
Take me back to my home on the far side of the Earth, If only once more before I die,
Please, Mister Turtle, please!
And the Dominican Turtle gave his answer,
O silly rabbit, you are mistaken!
Your home is here, beneath your feet!
It’s no easy thing to return somewhere
Once you’ve been forsaken!
But Urashima Tarō of the Earth’s Backside refused to back down.
This dream I see is almost my reality
But still I can’t forget the land from whence I came.
Leaving was easy, returning terrifies me, Terrifies me, yet still I must go, let me go!
You are sure you must?
I am sure, let me go, I must go! Nothing could terrify me more than this ache in my breast.
And so he left, flying the flag of his homeland made from cotton he’d spun with a song in his heart to signal his triumphant return; but, alas, too much time had passed, for a single second hand’s tick on the clock of the Turtle was a year in the life of those back home, and so, unbeknownst to him, so many, many years had passed that he could never return to his mother and father, he no longer shared a language with his brothers and sisters, it was as if he had never seen this city before, it had become a maze into which if he stepped a single step he’d never be able to escape.
It was just as the Dominican Turtle had told him, this land had prospered even as it’d forsaken its best and brightest, and so he vowed to return to the island where these best and brightest now resided; and yet, alas, the ache in his breast remained.
And so it was that the ache that plagued the breast of Urashima Tarō of the Earth’s Backside was incurable, and as he set off on his journey back to the warm, emerald green island, it spread throughout his whole body. Perhaps my entire life, beginning to end, has been a waste, he worried, and as he worried, he grew thin and wan and sorrowful, and he dreamed and dreamed, dreaming so many, many dreams that when he finally awoke again he found himself lying once more on the tiny tatami mat where he’d passed the first days of his life. And peering down at him, could it be? His younger sister, Yayoi, now so old?
(The old man lies down on the ground)
Ah, Brother, you’re awake at last! Do you know who I am?
(The old man says this in falsetto)
I think I do! You’re Yayoi, my sister! What happened, have I been dreaming all this time?
You’ve reached the end of your life, my brother.
But I haven’t done anything with it! I still have so much I want to do, for the good of the world, for the good of mankind!
You flew your flag in the Dominican Republic, my brother. Look!
And with this, Yayoi showed him a piece of pure red cloth. Indeed, it was the very flag Urashima Tarō of the Earth’s Backside had brought with him from the island to present to his mother and father, a flag of Japan dyed so red the sun in the center disappeared completely. Yayoi had kept it from the authorities like a secret, and now she wrapped Urashima Tarō’s body in this red flag with the red sun in its center and cremated him, burying the ashes and bones in forestland owned by her husband, and so it came to be that even now Urashima Tarō of the Earth’s Backside continues to dream his dream of the República Dominicana.
For all eternity may this world be thine,
O Forsaken of the Earth, till pebbles now
Into mighty rocks shall grow
Whose venerable sides moss doth line!
With that, the old man bowed deeply to his unseen audience, and Yoshinobu erupted into enthusiastic applause. The old man’s eyes boggled and his expression suddenly shifted, seeming on the verge of terrified tears, and, shrinking protectively into himself, he scampered like a rabbit into the forest. Yoshinobu gave chase, shouting, Wait! I just want to talk to you!, but the forest gave up no further sound.
It was two days later that Yoshinobu drove off to Takazaki so he could pay a visit to the owner of the forest. He’d obtained the bureau chief’s blessing to pursue the story the previous day. I’m planning on tying the homeless issue to the illegal dumping problem, so I’d like it to be placed under the jurisdiction of the Saitama Municipal Government bureau; if all goes well, I’m thinking of writing a series of special reports under the title, “The Transient Totoros of the Urawa Forest,” explained Yoshinobu. If all goes well or nothing goes well, you’re spending time on this thing so you better come up with an article in the end, got it? The bureau chief was reading a weekly scandal sheet with his feet propped up on his desk as he said this. At any rate, it’s better to get something out of it than nothing, so if you submit an article, make sure you also submit a request to cover expenses—and feel free to pad it out a bit, too, okay? I don’t want you to turn into one of the losers around here.
I bet you’d call the people I’m researching “losers,” too, asshole.
But Yoshinobu refrained from speaking his thoughts aloud and, declining the chief’s offer to join him for lunch, he set off instead to Saitama City Hall. After completing the paperwork to join the Saitama Municipal Government Press Corps, he introduced himself to the bureau chief there and, as he ate his lunch, finagled an introduction to Hisada, a city councilmember who was heading up the movement to preserve the green zones in the Higashi Urawa–Minuma Wetlands region; that night, they went out drinking together, and Hisada confessed, You know, I don’t really understand what that Saitama Daily article was talking about. I mean, it’s true that there are some homeless people living in the park along the stream, and it’s true that some of them live off what they pick up out of the garbage that’s dumped out there, but I’ve never heard of anyone actually making a home inside the forest.
I’ve seen some.
The people you saw were probably just poking around the areas where garbage gets dumped, if there were anyone actually living out there, they’d have been rousted out by the security we have patrolling the woods.
A liberal municipal body would do such a thing? Yoshinobu asked, taken aback, and Hisada chuckled ruefully. It’s quite a headache for us, that. We get attacked all the time by advocates for the homeless accusing us of protecting trees at the expense of people. But symbiosis is just a dream— if a bunch of people started living in a small wooded area like that, the balance of the ecosystem would be destroyed. A person can always move on and live somewhere else, but a tree is rooted to the spot, it can’t move once it starts growing somewhere, so the best we can do is ask people to refrain from crowding in on what’s already established. It’s not an adequate replacement, of course, but we do hand out food and donated clothes and blankets almost every day in the park.
We, the Children of Cats (Found in Translation) Page 12
