We, the Children of Cats (Found in Translation)

by Hoshino, Tomoyuki

  Yukinori awakened to his eyelids and cheeks and arms assaulted by the sharp light of the sun as it climbed high into the sky, piercing through the ceiling that was little more than a bundle of leaves. Pressing a beer to his aching head, he was greeted by Kisaragi, who seemed to be returning after being out somewhere. Yukinori asked her why she had such a strange, Japanese-sounding name like Kisaragi. It’s my code name, replied Kisaragi with a laugh, if I used my real name it’d cause problems for me later, and she plopped down next to Yukinori, pulled out a joint and lit it. As Yukinori moved to take the joint directly from her fingers with his lips, he found them covered instead with Kisaragi’s own. As they reverently inhaled the smoke, they slowly removed their clothes. Yukinori felt as if he were peeling off his skin. Kisaragi’s fingers on him seemed to caress the wet, shiny bundles of his nerves directly, and his body stiffened and shook with wave after wave of sensation. As Kisaragi wrapped his stiffest part in her fingers, he felt as if she held his very foundation in her hand and was thus able to invade his body. Kisaragi transformed into soft, flickering light and caressed Yukinori as if insinuating herself into his exposed skin. The skin the light caressed was inside Yukinori. His insides were splayed across his outside. The softness and warmth bathed his defenseless interior as if performing an act of mercy. Yukinori felt as if the one who had really been stabbed was himself. Yet that wasn’t true. Why hadn’t he been the one the knife penetrated, he thought, tears coming to his eyes. The whole reason he’d ended up stabbing someone in the first place was because it was pointless to ask the question why, so asking it of himself now seemed all the more futile, and an intense feeling began to rise within him. It swelled and strengthened, stimulated by the warmth and light caressing his interior. At some point Kisaragi’s warmth was replaced by Mary’s, and in her Anglophone-accented Spanish she cried out, you’re swallowing me, you’re sucking me up! Kisaragi slipped beneath Yukinori and began grunting rhythmically, her ass covered with sand. When from time to time the grunting grew muffled, it was due to her mouth filling with Abraham.

  The twilight was wet with the humidity rising from the river, and Yukinori regained consciousness hungry, dragging his heavy body like a python slithering through the tropical heat into the kitchen area, where he sucked down the last of the beans from the night before. Unsatisfied, he went out into Naturalism Avenue, fighting vertigo and looking for somewhere to buy food. He didn’t see any likely place, though he begged some bread from one of the houses bleeding light into the darkness, and then he lost himself in the labyrinthine tangle of streets, thinking that he had no choice but to keep moving, keep running, if he stopped he’d be overtaken by the question why, he had to keep fleeing as far as possible from Miss Michiko’s body full of holes vomiting her insides, and as he ran, he eventually calmed, realizing that he was fleeing an illusion built of darkness, and as the dawn began to stain the sky, making everything glisten as if submerged in water, he found himself back on Naturalism Avenue, standing once more before the “Dōjō,” and he went in and fell again into the futon of flesh.

  Awoken by his new friends dragging him up to find some real food, Yukinori breathed in the moist air so sour with sex and vomit and muttered that he could feel himself rusting. He wanted to rinse off somewhere he could feel fresh air, even if it was in the fetid river. Why don’t you just rinse off under my shower, joked Kisaragi, and Yukinori responded with ill-tempered silence as he trailed after the others.

  Yukinori regretted sleeping till noon. He usually carefully avoided napping during the day. Whenever he slept until the sun grew strong enough to throw the shapes of things into sharp relief, their edges honed to slice you open, he always dreamed of glittering knives. The knives shone bright enough to mistake for sunlight, slicing through clothes into thighs and torsos, felling body after body. The falling bodies belonged to Miss Michiko, or Yukinori himself, or his father, or the half-American, half-Japanese mixed-blood mother he’d never lain eyes on, whom he’d never even known the name of. He’d stab the knife eight times. He’d count on his fingers, fingers that smelled of iron. He’d bring these fingers to his nose and the lukewarm, wet metal odor would fill his nostrils like a nosebleed. He’d lick them and taste the iron. Then he’d wake up, more often than not, to find himself as stiff as steel.

  As soon as they’d filled their bellies with potato omelets, Abraham broached the subject of Yukinori joining their group. He didn’t mean the East Asian Culture Study Group. Join our organization, he said. The Study Group is just a local branch of the real group, meant to aid in the indoctrination of students. The real group is MARTA. MARTA aims to topple the neoliberalism that controls the world, to destroy racist nationalism and bring about a final worldwide revolution that will wipe out poverty and discrimination everywhere. Therefore all the mongrel out-casts of the world must unite and take the reins of power. But right now our leader and founder is rotting in prison and his immediate release is our top priority. We’ve been recruiting comrades to help with this, and Kiyoto, our Japanese agent, scouted you and gave you his highest recommendation, so please, join us and help us achieve our mission.

  Yukinori knew that the past seventy-two hours had been a brainwashing session designed to paralyze his common sense. Why should I rescue some Peruvian revolutionary, he asked, refusing Abraham’s entreaty. The organization has no nationality, replied Abraham, pointing at Mary, and that’s why our mission is one that will change the whole world, but then Yukinori cut him off, saying, I grant that your revolution has its reasons and makes sense for you, but “wipe out poverty”? “Final revolution”? It all seems a bit overdone. Abraham was silent. It’s simple, Kiyoto interjected. We’ll take some hostages and make our demands. If the demands aren’t met, we’ll kill the hostages. Win or lose, we’ll all escape together to Japan. I have associates already who’ll smuggle us in. That’ll be the only promise we make to each other. That’ll be the extent of it, we won’t owe anything else to any other organization. Our ultimate target is Japan, the giant castle in the center of Japan, that gaping hole surrounded by trees and walls. Kiyoto claimed to have all the necessary money lined up. My father owns land in Kobe, giving out money is part of his duty as a parent, plus it’ll be part of his reparations for my crime, he boasted.

  Just like when he read the diaries he’d written, Yukinori was seized with nausea that felt strong enough to turn him inside out. It wasn’t his hangover, or lack of sleep, or the marijuana. He was being poisoned by Kiyoto’s words. These quiet words that had seemed to cleanse and purify his body were now boring holes in it, burrowing their way in, invading him. They were oxidizing him, rusting him, turning him into something cloudy, unclean, riddled with holes. But on the other hand, something was also resonating deep within him. It was exactly like the impulse he’d felt to destroy his diary. It strengthened his nausea. Yet, when he’d been seized with that impulse, he hadn’t gone through with it, he hadn’t destroyed his diary. He felt his hair stand on end like flame. Kiyoto was what he had to destroy. Whatever else he was, Kiyoto was false, conniving, a trickster. The one who needed expelling was him. Him or me, thought Yukinori, only one of us could live.

  And even as he thought this, Yukinori nodded his assent to Kiyoto. Great, let’s drink to our new comrade, exclaimed Kiyoto, and he ordered a round of Pisco sours. Abraham led the toast, shouting: give me the world or give me death!

  The world or death. Him or me. Yukinori repeated this toast every fifteen minutes or so to himself, silently, in his heart. Every time, he felt an unpleasant sensation, as if he were viewing his feverish, frenzied self from afar. He felt water filling the space between him and this other self. And as he repeated the words, him or me, he realized it would be Kiyoto who’d survive. It was Kiyoto who’d framed the question in the first place. It was his logic it obeyed. Mermalada had used those words, too: it’s either him or me, she’d said. Broken by these words, he wanted to stand before Mermalada again, but this time fully intact, free of impurities and holes a
nd pockets of nothing, he wanted to confront her with his unmixed purity and this time he would be the one to break her. Kiyoto fed on hearts divided against each other and would therefore live forever. If he thought like Kiyoto, he’d be destroyed by his words. Yukinori intended to write these thoughts down in his diary. In Spanish or Japanese, it no longer mattered.

  After that, Yukinori was forced to live in a cardboard cell separated from the “Dōjō” for three days as a test of his loyalty. The boys who kept watch over him, trained to keep their eyes devoid of emotion, spoke not a word to him, leaving Yukinori to make do with the conversations of the other slum dwellers as he wandered the streets. Whenever they caught sight of him, their lips would purse and they’d shrink back like little birds from his questions no matter how unassumingly he asked them, so to find anything out he had to melt into his surroundings, into the walls and dirt, like a ninja. Then he’d write the information he gathered down in his notebooks. The conversations he overheard were frequently concerned with the countless sects crowded into this city bounded by chain link. There was an organization plotting to turn the world on its head for every shanty in the town, from underground cabals plotting revolution to new religions striving toward worldwide salvation, and while all were suspicious and hostile toward the government, they were even more so toward each other, and the hatred gathering within the fences grew ever stronger. As he recorded his findings, he realized that it was this hatred itself that Kiyoto aimed to foment. He nursed the paranoia and hostility that grew within him as he wandered the streets, ignored by the fellow cardboard city residents who’d been told to shun him, and found himself playing more and more into Kiyoto’s plans. Thinking that if he didn’t solidify his thoughts into words he’d be molded completely into the shape Kiyoto had in mind for him, he consolidated his antagonism by tracing the process of its flowering as he’d written it down during his three day incarceration, and, satisfied by this knowledge of how much of what he did and felt were part of Kiyoto’s plan, he drifted off to sleep on the final evening of his loyalty test.

  Yukinori opened his eyes to find something stickier and hotter than human skin sliding over his face and down his entire body, making it hard to breathe. He heard a sound like liquid rising violently to a boil. Before he could think of what it could be, smoke rolled into the room and filled it, wrapping itself around Yukinori’s body. Coughing violently, he crawled across the floor trying not to breathe in the smoke, and then the cardboard walls around him broke apart and folded down on him, the leaves forming the roof blowing upward, carried by the hot blast, and he could see flames dancing in the wind like waving hair. “They got me,” he cried in Japanese, and he reached for the bag containing his diary notebooks, only to find a brown envelope lying beside it with the words TREASON DIARY Magic Markered in Japanese across its face, so he grabbed that too and ran into the street, heading toward the gate and yelling Fuck, it’s a trap over and over to himself as he fled. A sound like a tree snapping shattered the air in front of him, and as the hot, close breath of the fire caressed his face, he smelled his hair begin to smolder and felt sweat begin to run down his skin as if his very flesh was melting and running down his body, and he pressed his eyes shut and covered his face with his hands. The slick feel of the skin beneath his fingers made him think he’d turned to wax and that this wax was catching fire and dripping through his fingers. He made a break for the river, which seemed to give off coolness amid the heat. To his right a man yelled, save my house, put out the fire on the second floor, and when he turned to look, he saw a column of flame rising like a pillar. The fire must have started there and spread, he thought. Flames danced across the tops of the cardboard buildings as fast as a person could run. He knew if he faltered he’d be overtaken. Yukinori broke ranks with the others fleeing around him, and, climbing over and stepping on the fallen, he ran for the fence and clawed his way up and over it. He didn’t stop running once he hit the riverbed and instead kept going until he reached the sludgy, putrid river itself and jumped in. Fighting the current, he waded across to the far shore, and, finally, after making sure the incinerating wind couldn’t reach him, he collapsed. All along the shore were others who’d fallen to the ground like he had, as well as those who stood and wept as they watched the fire, their faces stained red and sooty black by its light. Feeling his singed hair and clothes and the blistered backs of his hand, Yukinori stared vacantly at the flames as if watching a firework display. Flames bloomed as the fire burned like orchids or hibiscus flowers. Even amid all the red, he could make out shimmering threads of lemon yellow and jacaranda violet, the delicate green of dragonfly wings and the various colors of twilight.

  A hand clapped on his shoulder and snapped him out of his flame-induced trance. Kiyoto was laughing. Something cold slipped down Yukinori’s spine, raising goose bumps. It looks like something not of this world, said Kiyoto in the tone of someone struggling to suppress his excitement. His hair was scorched and shriveled, his blackened face slick with mud and soot. And not just Kiyoto, but Yukinori too, and everyone else gathered on the riverbank, all their faces were wet. He didn’t know if it was river water or fluid from burst blisters or blood, but he smeared his finger in it and sniffed and licked it. It was sweat. He hadn’t noticed himself sweating at all, he even felt a little chilled standing there where the fire’s heat no longer reached him.

  So you rescued it, I should thank you, said Kiyoto, indicating the brown envelope still clutched in Yukinori’s hand. I almost went back in to retrieve it myself.

  Why did a fire break out while I was incarcerated, asked Yukinori in a low voice.

  Why ask me? As if I’d know such a thing.

  So it was a coincidence this envelope shows up right when I’m trying to escape?

  And for that I give thanks. If it hadn’t, it would just be ash by now.

  Who put it there? The others?

  I don’t know. I couldn’t have banked on you rescuing it, could I?

  If it was so important, what was it doing there?

  I couldn’t have it discovered, there’s some bad shit written in there.

  Yukinori pulled one of the notebooks out and flipped back the front cover to read in the glare of the fire. The first page bore the heading TREASON DIARY I: TURN AWAY FROM THE SELF THAT RULES THIS WORLD. On the next page he read a poem cursing a nameless god. The narrating “I,” who’d been betrayed by this “unclean god,” becomes himself a “god of this stinking world/enclosed in concrete,” and then the “hate and pain/of the people I rule/will curse and kill” this unclean god. Reflexively, Yukinori vowed never to write poetry. It was all lies, poetry. Yet, looking at the shape of it on the page, the short lines running across the top half leaving a white expanse below, he felt anxious, as if it were his own lower half that had been cut away. The poem’s words seemed to infiltrate his body through this wound. Turning the page again, he found not another poem, but something more like footnotes. The further he progressed into the diary, the denser the words on the page became, as if driven by an increasingly pressing need to obliterate entirely the white space from the pages.

  Yukinori felt his heart start racing, and he closed the notebook. He was afraid if he didn’t he’d get sucked in and have to read it all the way to the end. As if reading his mind, Kiyoto told him he could take it with him and read it. After all, you saved it from the fire, he said. Actually, I want you to read it. Perhaps I wrote it just to be read by you, now that I think of it. As a souvenir of my time in the juvenile detention center. I plan to publish it when we complete our mission in Japan.

  Yukinori felt something crackle in his chest the way the fire crackled on the far shore. This guy knew I was keeping a diary during my incarceration. My writing was all a part of his plan. He’s showing me his diary now to ridicule me, as if to say that everything I write has already been written. He knew I wouldn’t be able keep my hands off anything written in Japanese that wasn’t my own, he planned the whole thing. Yukinori felt as if Kiyoto ha
d seen through him entirely, had even seen the things he’d written in his diary before they met.

  You can’t possibly be thinking that I set this fire just to make you read my diary, said Kiyoto, staring at Yukinori as he pondered his suppositions, and while his lips were smiling, his voice was deadly serious. These slum dwellers are an important resource. Why would I senselessly kill them before I could use them? Didn’t you see that guy screaming his head off back there while you were running away? The fire was set to spite him. The second story on his building could be used to send signals to the outside, so the story is that he’d been communicating with government intelligence and helping out with their sweeps of underground activists. So it was payback for that, or maybe the work of a different government snitch who’d found himself out of a job, I don’t know. But what does it matter? The important thing is you reading the diary.

  After that Yukinori washed up at Kiyoto’s apartment near the university, borrowed some clothes and went back home. When he flipped on the light, Mermalada sprang from the bed and assaulted him with a voice like scraping metal and a look in her eyes like a shooting flare: you’ve gone too far, there’s no taking this back now. I told you if you chose that creep over me I’d be gone for good, and, as if she’d prepared for this scene beforehand, she started to rip up all the letters Yukinori had written to her into tiny pieces like tearing bread into crumbs. These were the letters she’d said she’d wanted even to eat, every time she received them, the envelopes he’d paid for with his laboring flesh, the stamps he’d licked, the words his hands had put to paper. Yukinori simply watched silently from where he stood by the potted plants, bathed in the early morning sun coming through the window. Mermalada cried as she tore the letters apart. How could you do this when you know I understand how you feel, she whispered, her voice shaking, her nose snuffling. Yukinori realized that Mermalada felt the same unsettled feeling that Yukinori did when he came into contact with Kiyoto, but a hundred or two hundred times worse. Yukinori knew he was different from Kiyoto. His heart swelled with the desire not to lose her. Yet he remained frozen where he stood, enveloped in particles of orange light. Still muttering to herself, Mermalada finally left the apartment.