by Yoko Tawada
He was wearing nothing but a cotton summer kimono, which opened at the front when he put his right leg forward, but while the mothers, of course, pretended they hadn’t seen a thing, one of the kids cried out “Wow! Awesome!” — though it wasn’t altogether clear what he was referring to.
There was no reaction from Taro, so perhaps he hadn’t heard, but one of the mothers whispered “Oh my god, it’s Iinuma,” then promptly clammed up, which sounded ominous to Mitsuko, yet no one else apparently had noticed, for they all started saying things like, “We’ve been making such a nuisance of ourselves. We’d better be running along now,” as if they knew it was about time for Taro to begin his nightly routine, and although Mitsuko had intended to be polite and ask them to stay a little longer, she accidentally bit her tongue and missed her chance, so with Taro just standing there without so much as saying hello, an awkward silence ensued, until the women, shooting disapproving looks at this rude young man who still refused to speak, stood up and started dithering about, preparing to leave, while a Mrs. Orita, the person who had whispered “Oh my god, it’s Iinuma,” watched a fly buzzing around her as though it were a bee, following it with frightened eyes straight out the door ahead of all the rest, apparently only too happy to get away.
After seeing them off, Mitsuko stood vacantly in the doorway for a while, but at the sound of Taro washing the glasses in the kitchen, she stirred herself and got a fan, which she began waving wildly about, trying to chase out all the intrusive smells, occasionally stopping to think, then fanning again, repeating the pattern over and over again.
After having sex with Mitsuko as usual, Taro went out, and a while later the phone rang. It was Mrs. Orita.
“I didn’t get a chance to talk at your house with so many people around, but it’s about that young man who’s living with you; I just saw him for the first time today, but he looks so much like a fellow called Iinuma who used to work under my husband that I couldn’t help wondering. . . . He was one of my husband’s favorites, you see, but he disappeared three years ago, and his wife’s been looking for him ever since, poor thing, so if that really is Iinuma, I’d like her to know.”
At first Mitsuko answered coldly, “Yes . . . yes,” but as she listened the air seemed to close in on her and she found it hard to speak, so when the woman said, “I’m going to talk to Iinuma’s wife and have her go see for herself,” as though it were already decided, she couldn’t object.
When Mrs. Orita asked, ‘Where did you meet that young man, anyway?” she fudged it, since telling what had really happened was out of the question.
“Oh, just by chance; someone introduced him, and asked me to rent him a room. But tell me, how do you write ‘Iinuma’?”
Ignoring her question, Mrs. Orita proceeded to explain at great length what sort of person he was, so Mitsuko protested:
“But I’m not very interested in his character — sorry, it may seem odd, but I don’t really want to hear about it.” And she started to put the phone down, then reluctantly picked it up again and, to help her endure the steady stream of chatter pouring into her ear, held her head in her left hand and closed her eyes, patiently waiting for it to end.
According to Mrs. Orita, Taro Iinuma had gone to work for the pharmaceutical company her husband was with after graduating from a university in Tokyo, and though her husband had taken a liking to him from the start, if you’d asked him why, he wouldn’t have been able to tell you, but if forced to give a reason he would have said it was because young Iinuma was the kind of guy who could accept your point of view — could say, “I see what you mean,’ without sounding snide or insincere in any way. For example, one day not long after he’d joined the company, Orita had seen him in the parking lot leaning against a car with one shoe off, wiping the sole with a handkerchief embroidered with violets, and when he’d asked him what he was doing, Iinuma had said: “I stepped on a worm and got my shoe all dirty.” Looking at the expanse of gray asphalt, Orita had shouted, “How could there be worms in a place like this!” to which Iinuma had replied: “I see what you mean,” and stopped wiping right then and there. Afterward, though, when he was telling his wife about it, Orita had said he now realized that Iinuma had probably stepped in a pile of dog shit but for some reason couldn’t come out and say it, and that was why the poor fellow had lied.
Poor Iinuma — he was often the butt of his coworkers’ jokes, too. For example, the year he joined, he never used company pencils but always brought his own with him, like an elementary school kid, and no matter how many times he was asked about it, he refused to say why, so they all started teasing him, saying things like: “He’ll only use pencils with Miss Kitty on them.” Orita had taken him drinking and, when he’d loosened up a bit, asked him about it, too, first assuring him that he didn’t have to talk about it unless he really wanted to, so, on condition that Orita promise not to tell anyone else, Iinuma had explained his behavior to him: the “reason,” it seemed, was that the girl who sat across from him had the habit of chewing on her pencils when no one was looking, and since she was always leaving them around, she often came to borrow one from Iinuma, but that wasn’t all — she’d sometimes leave pencils on Iinuma’s desk in return for the ones he’d lent her, and since company pencils were all the same, there was always the possibility he might use one that she had chewed on, and the very thought of it made his palms itch.
“I envy you, getting pencils a pretty girl’s chewed on,” Orita had said, trying to make a joke of it. “Do they still have her spit and tooth marks on them?” But far from relaxing, Iinuma had stiffened noticeably, which made Orita realize that since kidding wouldn’t work, he’d have to give it to him straight. “You’ll never get anywhere if you let little things like that bother you. You’ve got to stop being so nervous,” he told him, and Iinuma had replied, in that special way of his, “I see what you mean,” and stopped bringing his own pencils to work the very next day, much to Orita’s relief, but while he’d felt pleased with himself for having given such good advice and even more well-disposed toward Iinuma for taking it, there had been various other incidents after that, such as the time he noticed that whenever Iinuma sat down he shifted his bottom this way and that on the seat of the chair, and no matter how hard his colleagues tried not to laugh, they couldn’t help exchanging winks and snickers, until Orita decided to do something about it, and told Iinuma about a doctor he’d once seen for his hemorrhoids, but Iinuma had said that wasn’t the problem: no, he didn’t have hemorrhoids, it was just that his skin was so delicate that when he used the toilet seats in the company men’s room, he broke out in a rash, and since Orita didn’t know what to do, he spoke to his wife, who told him there was something you could buy to put over a toilet seat — a plastic bag, shaped like a long sock — and when he suggested that Iinuma try it, he’d looked surprised and said, “I see what you mean,” then went out and bought one of them, and started using it.
Four years earlier, Iinuma had been engaged to Ryoko, a thin, soft-spoken woman who looked a bit like a fox; she worked in the same section, and since she was four years younger and only a high school graduate, Orita had felt confident she wouldn’t frighten even a timid man like Iinuma, but still wasn’t sure how the young man felt about his coming marriage, for he had the impression that although Ryoko was happy enough, Iinuma wasn’t so enthusiastic, and he wondered if Ryoko had found out about some weakness of Iinuma’s, making him feel obliged to marry her even though there was someone else he liked better, which was a bit
worrying, so he’d asked him about it in a roundabout way, and since it had seemed that wasn’t the case, he’d let it go, but though the wedding had gone off without a hitch and nothing noteworthy had happened afterward, about a year later, without a word of warning either to Ryoko or the company, Iinuma had suddenly disappeared.
It wasn’t as though he hadn’t had a chance to talk to Iinuma alone after the marriage, but they’d been busy at work that year, and the two or three times they’d gone drinking Iinuma hadn’t had much to say; in fact, he had only mentioned Ryoko once, when Orita remembered asking: “How’s Ryoko? Bet she’s a good wife.” Looking as though he really didn’t want to say it, Iinuma had replied: “Sometimes when I get home, I find my toothbrush has been broken into little bits. It’s surprising how strong even small women are, isn’t it?” Not knowing how to answer but thinking he should at least try to be encouraging, Orita had said, “Sounds like a woman you can depend on,” but Iinuma had just hung his head, and when he spoke again it was to ask: “Mr. Orita, do you like miso soup with fried bean curd? They say foxes do, but I don’t,” which made the older man say sternly, “Look, if she’s always fixing something you don’t like, why don’t you tell her about it? There’s no reason to put up with it,” but Iinuma had mumbled, “No, well, actually she doesn’t make that soup, it’s just that . . .” The words then trailed off, leaving Orita patiently waiting for him to continue: “. . . it smells like she does. I don’t like smells of any kind, and I can’t stand sleeping closed up in a little room with another animal, even a hamster. You can hear them breathing, you know. And the rhythm is completely different from mine, so just listening to it makes me feel like I’m suffocating.”
This, to Mitsuko’s relief, was enough to convince her that the man Mrs. Orita was talking about was definitely not her Taro, who loved smells so much he couldn’t live without them.
“All right, then, please tell Ryoko she’s welcome to come over any time and see if this guy’s her husband,” she said into the phone, and despite an obvious disappointment at hearing Mitsuko sound so cool and reasonable about it, Mrs. Orita called Ryoko immediately, explained how to get to the house, and strongly recommended that she go, only to find that Ryoko, too, was perfectly calm, asking, “Does Miss Kitamura like fruit? What do you think I should take her?” which wasn’t at all the sort of thing Mrs. Orita had expected her to be worried about, so she hung up feeling rather put out.
It was an evening late in August when Ryoko went to see Mitsuko Kitamura: the sky was heavy and so swollen with moisture it looked about to burst, and as the thunder rumbled like a lion growling deep in its throat and it suddenly grew dark, a small, thin figure with glittering eyes slipped into the garden through the break in the fence. Mitsuko thought it was a child at first, but closer up she saw a woman in her mid-twenties, who, after a brief glance at Taro, sitting in a corner of the garden gazing blankly at the sky, stared Mitsuko in the face as she bowed and said:
“I’m Ryoko.”
Just as Mitsuko hurried her into the house, large drops began to fall, bringing Taro slowly to his feet to join them inside, and since Ryoko’s expression didn’t change at all when she was looking him over, Mitsuko felt reassured, concluding as she poured her guest a glass of barley tea that Iinuma the missing husband and this Taro must be two different people after all, while Ryoko now kept her eyes fixed on Mitsuko, not even glancing in Taro’s direction when he stood up, went into the back room, and closed the sliding doors behind him. By now the evening shower was a downpour, but when Mitsuko got up to close the shutters Ryoko suddenly pounced on her, grabbing both ankles with a strength you wouldn’t have expected of her, so that Mitsuko flipped onto her back on the tatami, and found herself staring into Ryoko’s eyes, which looked so much like Taro’s it shocked her. Pinning her down, Ryoko pulled the scarf from around Mitsuko’s neck, sniffed at the reddish-purple, doughnut-shaped marks that were hidden beneath it, and asked in a harsh voice:
“Did you get my telegram?”
Mitsuko shook her head like a child falsely accused of something until Ryoko took her hands away, and while Mitsuko was picking herself up off the floor, she took a blue name card from her handbag and said:
“Come to my house tomorrow.”
It was so obviously an order that Mitsuko, unable to say no, just sat there in a daze, watching the rain drench the veranda, and by the time the evening sun had begun to reappear between the clouds, lighting up the strands of raindrops, Ryoko was nowhere to be seen.
Now alert but still unable to move, feeling as though she were tied up, Mitsuko eventually got up and went to the back room to see what Taro was doing, only to find that he, too, was no longer there.
The next day Mitsuko went to a neighboring town to visit Ryoko, who lived in an apartment complex which, except for a reddish tinge to the outside walls, was exactly like the one where Mitsuko’s pupils lived, and following the numbers in the address — 1-7-6-4 — she found Ryoko’s apartment, climbed the stairs to arrive in front of a door identical to the ones on either side, and rang the bell, but when Ryoko appeared looking meek and mild, the glitter of last night gone from her eyes, Mitsuko had no qualms about going in, nor did anything catch her eye as she surveyed the room, which smelled of fried bean curd, except perhaps for something on top of the dresser that looked like a bit of sacred rope, the kind that’s hung in Shinto shrines to ward off evil, and as her eyes wandered over it she noticed Ryoko smirking in the background.
Ryoko proceeded to inform her that the man she’d gone to check out the day before was definitely her husband, but she had not been shocked by his disappearance three years earlier, nor was she still searching for him without a clue to his current whereabouts as the Oritas believed, for she saw him occasionally in passing, and knew that recently he’d been “playing around” at night with a man called Toshio Matsubara, whom she’d also met — and who had struck her as surprisingly ordinary, though certainly not dull — but she knew her husband must also have a woman he played around with during the day, and had been wanting to meet her, too, when Mrs. Orita had obliged by creating this opportunity. All this, however, was news to Mitsuko, to whom it came as a huge shock. Toshio Matsubara was her pupil Fukiko’s father, and since he’d been raising her alone since the death of her mother some years before, it was he who had brought the girl to the Kitamura School to see about enrolling her, and though he was small and stout, with a loose, flabby face that made him look as if he might burst into tears at any moment, and despite having a right canine tooth missing which made him whistle his s’s in an irritating way, he’d been very polite, seeming to trust Mitsuko’s judgment completely, so she had soon warmed to him, and as they chatted away like old friends, she realized that he knew about all sorts of fascinating things like the life cycle of the crocodile and the structure of Indonesian houses, and someone told her later that he was good at his job as well, so he certainly didn’t seem the type to be “playing around”; but since she didn’t know exactly what Ryoko had meant by the term, she asked her.
“By ‘playing around,’ do you mean with women?”
“No, just the two of them,” Ryoko said sharply.
“What exactly do they do?”
This question sent Ryoko into spasms of laughter, making all further inquiry impossible, so Mitsuko waited quietly until Ryoko started again on her disturbing monologue:
“That man is no longer the Taro Iinuma I married. My husband was a nervous, wishy-washy sort of person, who couldn’t stand the touc
h of somebody else’s skin, and who I’m sure I would have divorced long ago anyway, but though he apparently still likes to keep things tidy, the Taro I saw yesterday is a completely different person. There was an incident just before he disappeared that may have accounted for the change in him. Anyway, even though Taro’s stopped being the man I was married to, there are one or two things about him that are still the same, so I thought if I decided to go back to him, I’d have to make myself physically as strong as he is now, which is why I started going to a dojo, but then as I got into training I found I was far more interested in that than in getting my husband back.”
Still slightly bewildered, Mitsuko asked: “When you say ‘training,’ you mean something like aikido?”
In the twinkling of an eye, Ryoko picked her up and laid her flat across the table, and while Mitsuko was flailing her legs and arms about, struggling to get down, she banged her knee against the wall, but hardly had time to yell “Ouch!” before Ryoko had her mouth on the spot, sucking at it like an octopus with loud smacking sounds until she’d drawn the pain right out.
“I feel I’m gradually turning into Taro somehow,” Ryoko said, which made Mitsuko blush, and as she rubbed her knee, Ryoko told her about the incident three years earlier that may have been the catalyst for Taro’s transformation.
On top of a nearby hill that wasn’t yet covered with rows of new houses, a restaurant had just opened, and one Sunday afternoon Taro and Ryoko had tea and cheese cake there, and after buying a steak and some sauce to take home, they started down the hill behind the restaurant, thinking it might be nice to walk to the station, and as they strolled along the lonely path through the woods they thought they heard an odd noise behind them, like the rumble of an engine, but when they turned around there was nothing there, just some old pipes stacked up in a clearing where some trees had been chopped down, so they went on, turning onto a narrow road, where they heard the same rumbling sound, this time coming from the waist-high grass growing in the fields on either side of them, and just as Ryoko muttered “I wonder what that is?” some dogs leapt out at them, one after another, but seeing they weren’t very big, only about the size of Shibas, Ryoko wasn’t frightened at first — even though thoughts like “They’re not wearing collars, so they must be strays,” and “They’re growling” did cross her mind — until one of the dogs jumped on Taro, and the moment he screamed, the others followed suit (except for one that went after the bag with the steak which he threw away as far as he could), sinking their teeth into his legs, refusing to let go, tearing his trousers to shreds as he yelled, “Stop it! Let me go! You’re getting me all dirty!” Ryoko ran back to the phone booth they’d passed to call the police, and waited there until some men from City Hall came with sticks and nets, but when she led them to the spot, the dogs had vanished, leaving Taro lying unconscious by the side of the road. After rushing him to a nearby hospital in a police car, they found that he had fifteen or sixteen bite marks on his legs, none of them fortunately very deep, and since he didn’t appear to have rabies and soon regained consciousness, Ryoko felt they’d been pretty lucky — a feeling that lasted only until Taro’s grandmother drove up in a taxi with a wild look in her eye and some dire warnings. “The boy’s lost. An evil spirit’s got him now,” she announced before bursting into tears, while Taro’s mother, who had arrived a little later, looked embarrassed and made excuses.
