by Yoko Tawada
The Bridegroom Was a Dog
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Yoko Tawada
Translated by Margaret Mitsutani
A NEW DIRECTIONS PEARL
The mid-afternoon sunlight stuck, pure white, to the vertical and horizontal washing on the lines as an old man, walking through a large apartment complex in the airless, clammy heat, suddenly stopped in the middle of the road to look back over his shoulder and froze that way, and a brick-red car ground to a halt beside a mailbox as if its strength had petered out, though no one got out into the stillness of a July day at two o’clock, silent except for a distant drone that might have been either a dying cicada or the hum of a machine in a school-lunch factory.
In a six-mat room beyond the railing on her balcony a housewife was making tea, stopping now and then to frown at the blank TV screen as she picked at a scab on her knee; her neighbor, who had gone to the local Culture Center, had closed her kitchen curtains but not all the way, so you could see a half-eaten apple with lipstick stains on top of the refrigerator. In one corner of this apartment complex in a modern residential area, so dull it seemed dead until the children came home to get ready for cram school, there was a large, dirty homemade sign that had been clinging to a telephone pole for a year or more, always seeming about to fall off but somehow stubbornly managing to stay on. The rain had blurred the words “Kitamura School,” written with a pink magic marker in Mitsuko Kitamura’s handwriting, and the telephone number was half torn off, and there was so much yellow pigeon shit stuck to the map you could hardly read it, but since all the mothers in the complex with children of elementary or junior high school age knew where the Kitamura School was this didn’t pose a problem, and although the poster had outlived its usefulness no one bothered to dispose of it, either because it was too filthy to touch, or out of loyalty to the tradition, firmly established in the thirty years since the complex had been built, of not worrying about how dirty things outside were as long as the area around your own apartment was clean, which meant that when a pigeon was hit by a car and lay splattered all over the street or some drunk left a pile of turds somewhere, people just waited for City Hall to clean it up, so naturally no one could have cared less about this sign, which would probably stay there until the wind ripped it to shreds and blew it away.
Anyway, the children all loved the Kitamura School, which they nicknamed the “Kitabooboo School”; in fact, so many wanted to go there it had become something of a fad, and even if it failed to improve some kids’ grades, with all the stories these days about youngsters enrolled in cram schools they hated but actually spending the time in Game Centers, it was a relief to mothers, knowing they didn’t have that to worry about with the Kitamura School, so most didn’t let the strange rumors bother them, and when someone occasionally was heard saying she’d never send one of her children to a place like that, the others would tell her not to get so excited about some idle gossip which was only a kid’s imagination to start with, blown out of all proportion, and since children can’t really tell the difference between a little dirt and downright obscenity and tend to get things mixed up anyway, it was best not to believe everything they said, etc., etc.
Take, for example, what some grade school kids were reporting to their mothers about “snot paper”: “Miss Kitamura says wiping your nose with snot paper you’ve already used once is nice, because it’s so soft and warm and wet, but when you use it a third time to wipe yourself when you go to the bathroom, it feels even better.” Mothers blushed to hear this from a son or daughter of theirs, wanting to scold but not sure exactly why or how, and in the end just telling them, “You mustn’t say ‘snot paper,’ it’s ‘tissue,’ ” only to find that, no matter how determined they were not to imagine their child’s beautiful teacher sitting on the toilet wiping herself with that lovely moist tissue, Miss Kitamura’s smiling face invariably rose before them. And this, in turn, would remind them what the head teacher at the elementary school had said about her: “It’s unusual for a beautiful woman to look that happy. I thought traditional beauties were supposed to be sad and lonely.” Regardless of whether rumors about the head teacher’s being distantly related to Mitsuko Kitamura were true or not, the mothers talked themselves into believing that if that straitlaced old schoolmarm said Mitsuko was beautiful, she couldn’t be all that “dirty” and some even thought Mitsuko might be telling her pupils about “dirty” things on purpose, for educational reasons. And besides, none of the kids who had heard Mitsuko talk about the virtues of using “snot paper” three times followed suit and picked up an unhygienic habit; on the contrary, they were as wasteful as ever, rolling out reams of toilet paper so they could use just a few sheets at the end, and compared to the stories you heard about kids who competed with their little brothers to see who could pull the most tissues out of the box in the shortest time and then sent the whole wad fluttering down from the fifth floor window, Mitsuko Kitamura’s lecture on “snot paper” began to sound like a serious lesson in frugality. So in the end no one took their children out of the Kitamura School because of the talk about “snot paper”; in fact, long after the kids had forgotten all about it, many mothers found that it came back to them every time they went to the toilet, and some wondered if there wasn’t a softer, moister kind of paper they could use instead of this machine-made stuff, which felt awfully dry and scratchy sometimes.
What really stimulated their sensitivity in this area was the story the kids brought home about a princess and her dog. “Maybe the only story you know about a human being marrying an animal is ‘The Crane Wife,’ but there’s another one called ‘The Bridegroom Was a Dog’ ” Miss Kitamura began, and the children listened carefully until the end, but the tale was so long that the younger ones got mixed up when they tried to tell it at home, and the older ones were too embarrassed to repeat it, so curious mothers were left to piece together the fragments they’d overheard for themselves, but, anyway, the story went like this. Once upon a time there was a little princess who was still too young to wipe herself after she went to the lavatory, and the woman assigned to look after her was too lazy to do it for her, so she used to call the princess’s favorite black dog and say, “If you lick her bottom clean, one day she’ll be your bride,” and in time the princess herself began looking forward to that day. . . .
Up to this point in the story, the children’s accounts all matched each other, but there were various versions of what happened next: some said, for instance, that one day the black dog kidnapped the princess and took her deep into the forest, where he finally married her, while others said the princess’s parents flew into a rage when they happened to catch the black dog licking their daughter’s bottom, and sent both of them into exile on a desert island. The forest version had a hunter who killed the black dog when the princess wasn’t looking and married her himself, after which the princess, though puzzled at first as to why the dog should suddenly have vanished and this hunter appeared in his place, lived happily with her new husband until one night he mumbled something in his sleep about having killed the animal, whereupon she promptly picked up his gun and shot him dead. The desert island version also had a further episode in the princess’s life: she gave birth to a so
n, after which the black dog got sick and died, so to keep the family line from dying out the princess had relations with her son and bore more children. This arrangement she cleverly brought about by telling the boy one morning: “Go around the island to the other side and take the first woman you meet there as your wife,” and while he was following the coastline in one direction, she herself set out in the other, and when the son met his mother on the far side of the island he slept with her without knowing who she was.
To the children listening, who didn’t even know the word “incest,” all this seemed perfectly natural, and it wasn’t long before they’d forgotten all about it, whereas the part about the black dog obeying the lazy woman and licking the princess’s bottom clean left a far more vivid impression, as you could tell by the way they lapped at their ice cream cones, barking between licks, or slobbered on the palms of their hands while they did their homework, which made their mothers sick, and started them thinking that it might be better to stop sending the kids to Miss Kitamura’s after all before they got really strange, but then someone who was taking a class in folklore at the Culture Center swore she’d seen that story in one of her books, so it must be authentic, which was a comforting thought to the other mothers, one of whom said that any teacher who could get her pupils so interested in stories that weren’t even in the textbooks was certainly unique, and although the word “unique” didn’t sound quite right, most of them tended to agree, and there was a general sigh of relief.
Even so, since none of the mothers — either those who had grown up in the oldest part of Tokyo or the newer suburbs of Tama or Yamanote, or even those who hailed from the provinces to the north or west — ever remembered hearing a folk tale like that, some wondered whether Mitsuko Kimura hadn’t spent time wandering around Southeast Asia, or maybe even as far away as Africa, which led to new speculations about her past.
“Maybe she was a hippie. They say she plays the fiddle, you know. That’s probably what she was doing — riding around in the back of a caravan, playing the fiddle,” said a mother in her mid-twenties, obviously mistaking “hippie” for “gypsy,” but the word “hippie” suddenly reminded one of the older women of something:
“A while ago I was moving an old chest and found a weekly magazine underneath it that I hadn’t seen for years — a real relic it was — and there was an advertisement in it for a natural aphrodisiac made from dried eggplants that could be ordered from something called the Hippie Shop Kitamura. You don’t suppose that was Miss Kitamura?” and so the rumors grew broader and deeper, and when another mother mentioned having seen a face that looked exactly like Mitsuko’s on a wanted poster for a group of terrorists at the airport, some began to imagine that she’d been in hiding all these years, but then someone else assured them that she was just an ordinary teacher who’d been running the same kind of school in the Kansai area until she came here, which was enough to satisfy some of them.
One thing everybody knew for a fact was that Mitsuko Kitamura was thirty-nine, because every child knew how much fun it was to embarrass a woman teacher by asking her age, and that this was a bit of information that would never fail to interest their mothers, so when Miss Kitamura promptly told them “Thirty-nine” in answer to their questions, they duly reported it when they went home, which was why everyone at least knew that much about her, even though none of them had the faintest idea what she’d been doing until she suddenly moved into that house just a few years ago, when a family of farmers who had lived in the area for generations sold some land to build themselves a condominium near the station, and were about to tear down their old residence when Mitsuko Kitamura, wearing a white dress, appeared out of nowhere on a mountain bike and, claiming to be an old friend of one of their relations, asked if she could rent the house for ten years. Soon after this request was granted, she opened up her school, but to the folks around there it seemed pretty strange that such a stubborn old cuss as that farmer should give in so easily to a woman who came from god knows where, so for a while there was talk about her being a mistress he’d had stashed away; but when the locals actually saw her, she didn’t look the type at all, dressed in shabby farming trousers with stylish sunglasses, and after seeing her sitting under the cherry tree happily reading a novel in Polish, no one could tell what kind of family she came from, and besides, when a woman doesn’t have any children, the age of thirty-nine — past youth yet not quite over the hill — makes it hard to know what category to put her in, so eventually people thereabouts got tired of gossiping and decided to leave her alone, which just goes to show that the farming community wasn’t nearly as keen on rumor-mongering as the housewives in the apartment complex.
The town where all this happened was made up of two distinct areas to the north and south: in the north were the modern housing developments that had sprung up along the railway with the station at its hub, while the southern district that lined the Tama River had prospered since ancient times, and yet many people in the Tama region didn’t even know it existed, even though the public housing complexes that drew people to the north had only been in existence for about thirty years, whereas the south was really old, with the remains of ancient pit houses discovered near the river — human dwellings that dated back farther than you could imagine — and a traditional rice-growing culture that the farmers had kept alive until the introduction of cadmium rice in the 1960s, not to mention an old stone marker carved with the words “Eight ri from Nihonbashi” to show where a hamlet with a cluster of inns for travelers along the Old Tokaido Road had once flourished. Until the Kitamura School opened, the youngsters from the new apartment complex had seldom visited the southern area, with all its old houses that had survived the bombing in the war, except for the occasional sketching competition or science excursion to observe frogs, but nowadays, as though escaping the herds of people at home, they would hurry toward the Tama River on the appointed day, cross the highway, pass by the grounds of the local shrine, cut quietly across a plum grove, slip through the gap in the fence around Mitsuko’s house and pop up in her garden, where the first to arrive would find Miss Kitamura, not sitting at her desk waiting for them, but calmly sewing on a button, reading a book, or cutting her toenails.
One day when three second-grade girls came proudly showing off a praying mantis they’d caught on the way, Mitsuko was kneeling on the tatami wearing a threadbare pink tank top with what looked like brown rags on her bare shoulders, and when they asked: “What’s that, Miss?” she calmly answered: “It’s a plaster I made out of chicken shit.” Ignoring the chorus of “Oh, yuck! Gross!” she went on, “Last night at Ueno Station I ran into a old friend, and while we were talking I realized what a bastard he’d turned into since I’d seen him last, and I got so fed up and depressed that my shoulders are stiff today, and chicken shit’s the only thing that’ll loosen them up.”
The girls came closer, squealing in horror at the first whiff of the stuff, but they soon got used to it, their interest now shifting to the peach-colored tank top, about which they said quite openly, “You’d better buy a new one, Miss. That one’s all raggedy,” to which Mitsuko replied, as though everybody wore their clothes for as long as she did: “Oh? But it’s only been seven years since I bought it.”
The girls went crazy at first, clapping and jumping up and down as they chanted, “Raggedy! Raggedy!” but before long their attention turned to the breasts that were visible through the thin pink material. “The boys’ll be here soon, Miss. What’re you going to do then?” th
ey said.
Laughing, Mitsuko slipped the strap of the tank top off her right shoulder and, taking her ample breast out to show them, answered: “Here’s what I’ll do.”
Though they all shrieked “Oooh! Nasty!” it wasn’t often they got a thrill like this, and when they begged her to do it again, she gave them two encores, but refused the third time, saying: “If you like to look at boobs that much, why don’t you ask your mothers to show you theirs?” But then the girl who was thought to be the shyest of the three went right up to Mitsuko and pulled down both her straps, and just as the breasts came popping out like blowfish to a rousing cheer from the other two, the boys arrived.
Oddly enough, perhaps, far from sharing the girls’ delight, the lads took one look and beat a hasty retreat through the hole in the fence; though they always seemed to get a kick out of watching girls cringe and squeal, that sort of female behavior was unsettling, and besides, they felt let down somehow to discover their teacher had such big breasts, so there they were, moping behind the fence, when Miss Kitamura, dressed in a proper blouse, came out to get them, took them by the hand, and led them back to the veranda, where there was no sign of either the pink tank top or the smelly plaster, and the little desks and chairs were neatly lined up as usual.
One day there was a new pupil at the Kitamura School, a third-grader named Fukiko. For some reason, the boys never passed her desk without smearing snot on her notebook, which was apparently what they always did at school, too. This neither angered Fukiko nor made her cry. The other girls never spoke to her or even glanced in her direction, so perhaps they failed to notice, or were pretending not to. That first day, Miss Kitamura just stared vaguely into space with big, watery eyes which, either because of nearsightedness or lack of sleep, didn’t seem to focus on anything for the first hour of class until one of the boys smeared some snot on Fukiko’s notebook for the third time, when she suddenly went over, grabbed his arm, and dragged him to the cabinet, giving him such a shock that he must have thought she was going to hit him, for he pulled his neck in between his shoulders and closed his eyes, but when he cautiously opened them again, Mitsuko had taken out a blue notebook with a picture of a fox on the cover, and, handing it to the boy, who stood there stiff as a board, said:
