After Hiroko and my brother no. 2 were married, Hiroko would come to live with us. This meant that we would be a family of six: officially, then, within three months of the wedding, one of us would have to leave. Hiroko’s family would be reduced to four, which meant they would, officially, have to take in someone new. Simply balancing out the numbers by making a convenient inter-family swap is not allowed. It’s taboo. It would have been out of the question, for example, if Hiroko had married my brother no. 1, for my brother no. 2 to go over to her family and take her place.
I am not certain when this rule of families having to consist of five members came into existence. But it seems to have been in place when my mother’s younger brother got married and his wife came to live with the family. This was the reason my mother was required to move out of the family home. Because an inter-family swap was out of the question, my mother had to go to live with a family of complete strangers who resided three streets away. After a five-year stay with them, she married my father, in a match arranged by Ten.
Nevertheless, to follow official procedures so closely and actually to move out like my mother did is now rather unusual. These days people rarely follow rules so literally, and false claims of a family having five members are common. So I doubt that when Hiroko does come to live with us anyone will really have to leave, and Hiroko’s family probably won’t bother to take in anyone new, either.
I suspect that the rule of a family having five members became a dead letter almost as soon as it was posted. If anything, it’s probably true to say that families—like my own and Hiroko’s—that have five members are the exception rather than the norm. One can easily encounter families having as many as fourteen people living under one roof, and others consisting of just a single individual.
Certain families also keep pipe foxes for company. These are mythical foxes endowed with magical powers that ascetic mountain priests in olden times kept in bamboo pipes and carried with them on their travels. About twenty years ago, my mother tells me, it was all the rage to keep pipe foxes as pets.
“Twenty years ago,” my mother says, sighing, “that was just when I was a newly-wed. My longing to have a pipe fox as a pet was almost unbearable.”
Hiroko’s family were said to have three pipe foxes, which may be one reason why my mother and my father were so keen to have her as their daughter-in-law.
At that time, my mother tells me, there were advertisements for pipe foxes tacked up all over the block, and it was possible to buy them with a mail-order purchase, cash on delivery. Make an order, and you’d get a pipe fox delivered in a box. The family who lived next door did that, and one day when my mother had returned from shopping and was in the middle of opening her front door the next-door wife came out and told her about it, in some detail. “It’s surprisingly well behaved for its size,” she said, “it doesn’t howl, and you can put it away in a pipe that’s only ten-by-two centimetres! When you touch it, it emits sparks, and if you leave it alone, it frolics about by itself. Our pipe fox has done wonders for the happiness of our home life. My husband drew up an ambitious proposal for his work—which is to do with vegetables, you know—and he got it accepted. And the children submitted artwork to the residents’ art exhibition, and they won top prizes. But the best thing of all is, pipe foxes have a marvellous smell!”
After chattering on at length about her happy life, the next-door wife went on her way.
“I begged your father to let me send away for a pipe fox,” my mother tells me, mournfully, over and over again, “but he never agreed.”
None of us children ever had an interest in pipe foxes. Not a single member of my family—neither my mother, nor my father, nor my two brothers, nor I—has ever set eyes on one. When my brother no. 1 went with my mother and father to visit Hiroko’s family, no pipe foxes were ever brought out for them to see. And there was no hint at all of any marvellous smell.
As for family structure, the usual combination is a father, a mother, and three children. Sometimes, instead of three children, there’ll be a grandmother and two children, sometimes two grandparents and one child. Sometimes the family will be a mother and four children. What’s important is that the official number is five. Of course, that is only the official number, and the reality is often different. As I already explained, some families have fourteen members, some families just have a lone individual.
There was once a family a few doors down where there were no grown-ups at all, just five children. Five children: not only officially, but in reality too—clearly the result of overzealous observance of the five-member-family rule. There were two boys and three girls, ranging from first year at primary school to second year of middle school. With no adults to maintain order, this family was noisy. They were continually bashing and banging things, making a commotion till late into the night, returning home, for example, with a large wheelbarrow found somewhere and pushing each other around in it. The family earned the disapproval of the neighbours, and the local health and public-welfare official made any number of visits. Attempts were made at scolding them and coaxing them to be quiet, but with no effect. Somebody then suggested putting the children into care, but no willing foster parents could be found. Meanwhile, the children continued to make a terrible din, and so finally the chairman of the residents’ health and welfare association paid the family a visit in person. When he and his assistant set foot inside, the two children of primary-school age bombarded them with flour.
And then, even stranger, the littlest two started tearing about, changing size, expanding and shrinking by turn, rampaging over the floor and the ceiling. The chairman and his assistant grew quite dizzy. Soon, the other children came out and joined in, and a great wind arose, turning into a tornado that whipped through the house, rushing from room to room, picking up the furniture with it. Eventually the chairman of the residents’ health and welfare association and his assistant had no option but to make good their escape, barely getting away with their lives. The children hooted with glee, their laughter resounding through the buildings, shaking the factory chimneys and the water towers. The neighbouring families hid behind their doors, trembling, too terrified to set foot outside. And the next morning they found their doors covered with that same white flour. After that, the home of the five-child family was a ruined shell. No one knew where the five had gone. Some people claimed they had ridden on the back of the tornado to some far-off land; others claimed that peals of laughter could still be heard from the apartment at night. But no one ever visited that apartment again.
My brother no. 1 makes himself visible to me from time to time.
Only recently, he appeared to me on the balcony on the east side of the apartment. I was airing the bedding when suddenly there he was, sitting astride the quilt. His face was pale and he looked weak and tired.
“I want more sweet things to eat,” he said. After that we made sure always to include jellies and buns stuffed with sweetened red-bean paste in the food that we placed for him on the family altar. This was odd because my brother no. 1 used to be very fond of alcohol. Of course, you do come across people who like to drink and also have a sweet tooth, but my brother never used to eat sweet things. And now, here he was regularly eating sweet things. I guess people must really change character once they lose their visible form.
“Are you bothered about Hiroko?” I asked him when he reappeared. He shook his head, sitting there on the quilt, but he didn’t say a word. I wondered if he was jealous because he had to have seen Hiroko and his brother happily exchanging sweet nothings every night. I have no idea whether people who lose visible form feel emotions such as joy or jealousy.
Seeing that Hiroko was soon going to become a member of the family, my father rigged up a new hammock from the ceiling, and my mother hung the quilt out on the balcony to air every day. This was the quilt that my brother no. 1 sat astride, so maybe he was bothered about Hiroko after all.
My brother no. 1’s presence would come and go: at times it was intense, a
t times quite faint. Of everyone in the family, I was the one who was most sensitive to it. Often he would sit on my chest in the middle of the night and I would wake up feeling the pressure of his weight.
“What’s the matter?” I would ask him, and he would reply:
“I’m feeling sad.”
“Sad in what way?” I would ask.
“I’m sad because I don’t have a body. I’m right here, close by you all, but I’m no longer family. That’s why I feel sad.”
“We’re still your family, even though you’re no longer with us,” I would say. But he would reply:
“Once someone disappears, they can no longer be part of the family.”
“What does it feel like, not to be part of the family?” I would ask.
“It feels like you’re no longer your real self,” he would reply. And then he would vanish, making a noise that sounded as if he was coughing.
I always feel out of sorts when I’ve had my brother on top of me. Held down and broken. The mood lasts half the day.
Every family has its own customs. It is the custom of Hiroko’s family, for example, to gather parsley and mugwort on the day of the spring equinox. The family hangs bunches of the herbs under the eaves and lets the aroma drift through the rooms of the apartment. The bunches of herbs also have the effect of blocking out daylight. Deep inside the dark rooms, Hiroko and her family sit, in the formal kneeling position, inhaling the heady fragrance of parsley and mugwort.
After a few minutes, Hiroko’s grandfather will get to his feet, and begin to weave his way on unsteady legs round and round, as if drunk. Then, one after another, every member of the family will do the same thing: her father, Hiroko, her two sisters, all of them will get up and totter their way round the rooms of the apartment. Apparently they carry on doing this for several hours. The only time they broke this custom, observed annually, was the year that Hiroko’s mother died, when the day of the funeral coincided with the spring equinox. Her grandfather argued that they should put off the funeral so that their practice of gathering parsley and mugwort could be observed without postponement. But her father insisted, and eventually the family did hold the funeral.
I heard about these events before my brother no. 1 disappeared. As usual, the information was relayed from Hiroko via the telephone in the centre of our apartment. The whole family listened with pricked-up ears, holding their breath as she related the story. That year, Hiroko told my brother no. 1, a number of extremely inauspicious events had occurred in her family because they had failed to observe their usual practice. Hiroko didn’t go into any of the details. No doubt they were family secrets. I don’t think my brother no. 1’s disappearance was caused by anything inauspicious, but maybe my father and mother’s not telling Hiroko about it owed to a similar sense of family privacy.
In comparison to Hiroko’s family, my family is rather unscripted when it comes to customs: we really only have two. On the third day of the third month, Girls’ Day, we gather sprays of subtly coloured flowers from the fields, bring them back to the apartment, arrange them on a tiered display, and contemplate them. And on one evening in the month of September we turn off all the lights in the apartment and gaze up at the moon.
Once Hiroko becomes one of us, we will have to persuade her to give up the formal practice of getting drunk on the smell of parsley and mugwort and to follow our rather unscripted ways.
But it’s only these last fifty years that every family has started to have its own particular customs. Before that, there seems to have been little that differed among families at all. When I ask my mother and father about it, they purse their lips and don’t say much. Well, maybe I should go and ask someone who’s old, someone like Ten, I say. And they reply: Don’t be stupid! Families are just families, that’s all there is to it! Since that’s the answer I get as soon as I start to ask, I’ve had no option but to let the matter go.
It was the day for Hiroko and her father and grandfather to make their return visit.
On a night without moon or stars, Hiroko, her father, and her grandfather arrived at our apartment. Standing in the entrance-way, their arms full of rustling, leafy branches of some pliant tree like the willow, they dinged the bell, and my family greeted them. The three visitors brought neither kelp nor dried cuttlefish, like my family had, only a chart showing Hiroko’s family line, which Hiroko’s grandfather presented to my father.
When Hiroko’s grandfather and my father were done making their introductory statements, everyone present took a breath, and we all shuffled over in a group to the room that holds the god shelf. Facing the eight million gods of heaven and earth who reside there, my father offered up an ancient Shinto prayer, and Hiroko and her father and grandfather joined in, albeit with some embarrassment. There was still no sign of my brother no. 1 even when all the observances were over. We knew this was probably what would happen, but it was extremely awkward nevertheless.
Hiroko’s father and my father then discussed one or two matters of finance. When this discussion ended, there didn’t seem to be many other topics to talk about, and the adults fell silent. Then my brother no. 2 plucked Hiroko by the sleeve, and invited her to retire to his room. Hiroko went along with his suggestion, making a sign with her eyes to the adults.
Slipping away furtively behind the god shelf, and pressing my ear to the bedroom wall, I found I could hear the sweet nothings they were exchanging. The words continued in an unbroken fashion, now loud, now soft. Peeking in through a crack in the door I saw my brother no. 2 and Hiroko, each sitting in a different corner, one in the west, the other in the east, taking turns uttering endearments to one another. Neither looked directly at the other when they spoke. Each just listened to the other’s voice. Hiroko became aware of me standing at the door and beckoned me in, so I went inside and lay down on the floor at her feet.
Once I lay down, I remembered that I used to lie like this next to someone else, long ago. In that memory I could recall someone stroking parts of my belly, my throat, and the palms of my hands.
The person doing this was my brother no. 1. Nekoma, nekoma, he would be murmuring, stroking me determinedly. When he did that, I would make a sound in my throat, a continuous, soft, purring sound, and I would slowly turn into something that resembled the creature he was calling. A nekoma is a little creature that is covered with a thick coat of fur on its legs, arms, and back. It has whiskers, and it lives amid the boulders and pillars that form the foundations of a house. At first you might take it to be part of the foundations, but then on closer inspection one day you notice a spot that is a slightly different colour from the rest, and once you are aware of that you see, slowly, a distinct outline that emerges gradually, very gradually, as a nekoma. Finally, it takes on its own form, quite separate from the boulders and pillars, and then it comes out from under the house and starts to walk around inside the house. It walks around soundlessly, and so very few people are aware of its existence, but my brother no. 1’s ears were sharp, and he would grasp on to the sound of its steps and call out, Nekoma! Nekoma! and the nekoma would immediately go up to him and curl up in a little ball in his lap, looking both half-awake and half-asleep at the same time.
I had never laid eyes on a nekoma, but my brother no. 1 used to tell me so much about them, I found myself involuntarily trying to take the form of a nekoma. I longed so much to curl up in a little ball in my brother no. 1’s lap, to be held like a nekoma in his arms. But my brother no. 1 had disappeared from my world, and so all I could do was to lie stretched out at the feet of Hiroko.
“I love you so much, I could die of my love,” I heard Hiroko say to my second elder brother, above me as I lay there.
“I love you,” my brother no. 2 would reply. “With a love that is as deep as a swamp, and as high as a heap of rubble.”
“A swamp, you say? What colour of swamp?”
“A dark, muddy, bluish-greenish swamp.”
“Well, my love is just as deep, just as deep as that swamp.”
“And the love that we both feel will merge together in the murky waters of the swamp, and sink down silently, ever so silently, to the bottom.”
“And what will we find, waiting there at the bottom?”
“Why, Hiroko: family, of course.”
The two of them repeated their sweet nothings any number of times. But I simply grew sadder and sadder. My brother no. 1 who used to stroke me like a pet had disappeared. I often had a distinct sense of his presence, but Hiroko and my brother no. 2 were now behaving as if he were no longer a part of our lives. And pretty soon that’s what he would be—gone from our lives for ever. Perhaps this was what my brother no. 1 meant when he told me he was sad. I try with all my might to become a nekoma, but since the person who used to do the things that made me become one has gone, I find it impossible. I have a physical form, I am still in the family, but I’m sad. And if I am this sad now, what is the point in being here? Perhaps it won’t be long before I disappear too.
The marriage between my brother no. 1 and Hiroko was dissolved with a telephone call to Ten, and with that same telephone call Hiroko became engaged to my brother no. 2 since the engagement formalities had already taken place. Both my father and my mother seemed to have forgotten that my brother no. 1 had ever existed. And my brother no. 2 seemed to have forgotten as well. Before I was even aware of it, the hammock in which my brother no. 1 used to sleep was taken down, and we were spending our days as a family of four.
Time passed, and the festival season approached. My father and my mother were taken up with the festival preparations. Every night discussions took place in the conference room of the apartment complex about arrangements for the event: who should be allowed to set up stalls. What kind of pattern should adorn the jackets of the participants. Whether we should drape decorations on the stones. And also how we should combat the insects.
Record of a Night too Brief Page 6
