by Yoko Tawada
Tomo once appeared with a woman as beautiful as a crane in tow. They had come to announce that they were getting married. There wouldn’t be a wedding — he would just enter her name in the family register. Several months later, Mumei was born. At the time, Tomo was traveling, so Yoshiro was left alone with the mother and her newborn. The birth was two weeks premature, and the mother had lost so much blood that she had to be rushed, unconscious, to the intensive care unit. The infant was placed in a glass box like a transparent coffin with tubes coming out of his body.
Three days after giving birth, Mumei’s mother stopped breathing. Having no idea where Tomo might be, Yoshiro thought it best to postpone the funeral as long as possible. While his mother lay in the “Rest in Peace Deep Freeze” like a wax doll, Mumei, looking more new-boiled than newborn, was taken out of his glass case, supported by the strong, warm, hands of a nurse, to spend his first few weeks of life listening to words of encouragement from Yoshiro.
On the fifth day after the mother’s death, Yoshiro was summoned to the Rest in Peace Deep Freeze to talk with two specialists who had been called in from somewhere faraway. One asserted that because of certain unwelcome changes in the corpse, a speedy cremation would be preferable to preserving it any longer, while the other wanted his permission to dissect the body and preserve it in formalin for research purposes. Yoshiro had no idea what sort of “unwelcome changes” they could be talking about. As none of his questions, phrased in layman’s terms, made the image any clearer he took a hard line, insisting that unless he saw the body for himself he wouldn’t be able to consent either to cremation or preservation, whereupon the specialists reluctantly escorted him to the body. Unable to believe what he was seeing, Yoshiro gasped and hung his head, covering his nose and mouth with one hand. When he cautiously looked up again, he discovered that this time, the sight of his daughter-in-law didn’t shock him nearly as much. The body, in fact, was rather beautiful. Later, however, he found it impossible to reproduce exactly what he had seen. For in his memory, the body continued to mature, to change. The center of the face grew sharper, changing into a bird’s beak. The shoulders became more muscular, sprouting feathers like a white swan’s. In time, the toes sharpened into chicken’s feet.
On the seventh day after her death, the body was carried to the crematorium where a private funeral was held, with only Yoshiro as next of kin. Tomo was still lost somewhere in the mist, while Amana had sent a message saying that since she couldn’t make it back in time from Okinawa, Yoshiro should take care of everything. By the time Marika managed to get to the hospital, Mumei was already eleven days old. Yoshiro greeted her standing beside Mumei’s bed, chest puffed out, as proud as if he himself had given birth. “A bright looking little fellow, wouldn’t you say?” he said, “And handsome, too,” but after just a glance Marika took out her handkerchief to wipe away the tears as she ran out of the nursery. Just as Yoshiro started to go after her Mumei started crying, so he stayed with the baby.
After a few days of treating Yoshiro like a visiting relative, the nurses began handing the baby bottle over to him and taught him how to change diapers. He would put the dirty ones into the hamper, and a bunch of clean ones, freshly washed, would be delivered the next day.
“I always thought diapers were made of paper — that you used them once and threw them away,” Yoshiro said one day. The nurse in charge of Mumei snorted with laughter that meant “Old people don’t know anything,” while another coughed and said, “If we used paper for diapers, there wouldn’t be enough for novelists to write on.” Embarrassed, Yoshiro pulled his head in like a turtle. In no time everyone in the hospital had found out that this old man clumsily changing his great-grandson’s diapers actually hid behind a pen name, writing novels.
Though Yoshiro had assumed that only babies without mothers were given formula, he now saw that all the mothers were bottle-feeding their babies. No breast milk was guaranteed to be safe, one of the nurses explained. Breast milk contained, along with its life-giving nutrients, a high concentration of poison. There was no cow’s milk in the formula, either.
“What’s in it then,” Yoshiro asked as a joke. “Wolf’s milk?”
“No, but there’s bat’s milk in it,” the nurse replied without cracking a smile. Surrounded by kind nurses who answered all his questions, Yoshiro enjoyed taking care of Mumei at the maternity hospital, yet still wondered why the doctor never appeared until finally he asked the nurse in charge, who seemed to find this question slightly insulting. After giving him her usual “Old people are so out of it” look, she just smiled and said nothing. When he gingerly asked another nurse, she informed him that the distinction between doctors, nurses, and midwives had long since been abolished.
When he raced into the nursery on the thirteenth day after Mumei’s birth, Tomo was nearly out of breath. Between gasps he squeezed out a “Grandpa” before lapsing into silence, standing there with tears in his eyes. Hoping he would respond, Yoshiro announced, “This is your son. I’ve named him Mumei, a name that means ‘no name.’ Any problems with that?” When Tomo broke down, sobbing like a child, Mumei, who had been fast asleep, burst into tears. The two wailed in perfect unison like siblings who, having both been blamed for starting a fight, start bawling at exactly the same time.
Institutionalized for a serious addiction, Tomo had had no information from the outside until news of his wife’s death came, when he had finally been released. Yoshiro refrained from asking whether he had been locked up after getting in trouble with the law or gone voluntarily, or how he was paying for his treatment. “I’ll take care of Mumei,” he said, as if comforting a child, “so you just take it easy and come back for him when you’re well.”
With children like this having children of their own, it was no wonder the world was full of children.
Only when Yoshiro said, “I know a place near here so let me treat you to a good meal,” did Tomo’s face show the hint of a smile. “Thanks, Grandpa,” he replied, letting out a wisp of a sigh, then spouting out the lines, “Time sure flies. To think I’m a father now,” like an actor in a bad play. You’ve got a lot of nerve calling yourself that, Yoshiro wanted to scream, but opted to ask, “What exactly are you addicted to, anyway?” instead. “You finally got over watching the doggies run round and round,” he went on, referring to his grandson’s gambling habits in a deliberately mocking tone, “so is it the little cards with the pretty pictures on them?”
“An addiction as bad as mine isn’t limited to any one object. It’s metalevel . . . as long as I can get that feeling of ecstasy, anything will do.”
“What did you bet on? Roulette?”
“No, not that.”
Blushing, Tomo looked down. This was something he absolutely had to find out, so Yoshiro kept at him until he got an answer, which left him so dumbfounded he gasped for breath before bursting into guffaws of laughter which blew all his anger away.
People say that grandparents love their grandchildren unconditionally, but to Yoshiro, Tomo was a tree that bore only the fruits of anxiety, leaving little time for love, unconditional or otherwise. As a toddler he was always crawling up onto the console of the Total Housework Computer System that almost all homes were equipped with back then to push every button and twist every dial he could reach, plunging the whole house into chaos. Bunch after bunch of frozen spinach would come tumbling out of the freezer to be defrosted, turning the kitchen floor into a green prairie, or the water in the bathtub would get hotter and hotter until the whole bath was at a rolling boil, melting Tomo’s rubber ducky into scrambled eggs.
Any machine that made big things happen with just the push of a button or two he loved, while he showed no interest in building blocks, Legos, or swings, either, which he generally gave up on after two or three bends of the knees. Balls did not attract him: he neither caught nor chased them as they rolled along the ground. He didn’t listen when picture books were read to him,
and the sight of kids his age never made him want to talk or play with them. Pulling their hair to make them cry was all the interaction he could manage. Yet at the sight of a switch he immediately went to flip it, his eyes growing brighter. Which is why Yoshiro wondered if he might be a computer programmer someday — not a bad idea, except that Tomo hadn’t the slightest interest in either mathematics or computer technology, caring only for pushing every button he could reach, and then sitting back to watch the grown-ups scurry around, cleaning up the mess. Thinking this anarchistic tendency might be channeled into art, imagining him planning happenings in the future, Yoshiro tried taking him to contemporary art exhibitions and performances. But there seemed to be nothing Tomo hated more than art; in fact, the one time he’d showed a glimmer of interest in a naked dancer, his body painted red all over, performing in an enclosure marked off by brightly colored streamers in the lobby of an art museum, had ended after a few seconds with him scowling, whispering to his grandfather, “More art? Yuck!”
Tomo spent his boyhood wielding virtual swords in battles with big, hairy lizards in digital games, reading Gothic manga sent daily to his cell phone, falling asleep in the beds of soap opera protagonists with the TV still on, and throwing antique vases out the window to smash on the pavement below for no particular reason. At school, his grades hung onto the very end of the balance beam, never quite falling off, but as his classes seemed unbearably long, he was always yawning, opening his mouth so wide his jaw almost came unhinged, or poking the kid in front of him with his pencil, or picking his nose, or looking up at the clock every few seconds, which drove his teachers crazy. “I‘d really study in a class that was over in five minutes,” he always said. Yoshiro ignored him, assuming he was just trying to get on the nerves of all the grown-ups, but maybe Tomo had been perfectly serious.
Yoshiro sometimes wished that instead of his grandson Tomo were a character in one of his novels. That way there would be no need to get angry, and also much more fun for both writer and readers. Strangely aware of the fact that his grandfather was a novelist though he never read himself, Tomo would brag about that to his friends, showing off copies of Yoshiro’s books in his room that he’d shoplifted from bookstores. Though Yoshiro had heard about the schemes where people bet on the next Nobel Prize winner as if they were betting on the races, and knew that enormous sums of money were involved, it never occurred to him that his own grandson would fall victim to this sort of commercial gambling.
“You never even read — what made you think you’d be able to predict the next Nobel Prize winner?”
“When it comes to gambling, a real pro can win in any field!”
“But you just bet on the name some tipster put at the top of a list. Didn’t you stop to think maybe the whole thing was set up to get as much money out of as many suckers as possible?”
Because their reunion at Mumei’s bedside ended in smiles, it stayed with Yoshiro as a bright, cheerful memory. Tomo returned to the institution, promising to come back clean. The word clean had sounded fishy somehow — after all, this wasn’t a commercial for laundry detergent, thought Yoshiro, though he hadn’t said so aloud.
When Mumei was a month old, Yoshiro carried him home, humming all the while, only to find bad news waiting for him: Tomo had run away from the institution, his whereabouts now unknown. The hope that he had slipped away wanting to see his son’s face again slowly revolved like a lighthouse, illuminating the night in all four directions, leaving the sea in darkness.
Yoshiro couldn’t decide whether to notify the police or not. He had a favorable impression of the now privatized police force, but positive feelings do not equal trust. The police force’s activities now centered on their brass band; they would march in uniform through the streets, swinging their hips from side to side as they performed circus and chindon-ya melodies. The band was extremely popular with children, and even Yoshiro was sometimes tempted to follow along behind them. But aside from brass band performances, no one seemed to know exactly what the private police force did. Police boxes on street corners, now renamed “Guide to Terra Incognito,” had nothing to do with the police force. The people stationed in them gave directions, and also provided tourists with information for a fee. Words like suspect, investigation, and arrest had disappeared from the newspapers. One theory had it that murder was all but unknown since life insurance had been abolished, though Yoshiro had his doubts about this.
He felt sorry for Mumei, with a mother now dead and a father in hiding somewhere, but death and disappearance seemed like private matters and he hesitated to involve the police. Squeezing the baby’s tiny hand, shaking it slightly, his desire to laugh and cry at the same time exploded, and out came the words, “We’ll hang in there together, chum.” Why chum, a word he had never used, not even once, until this moment? Perhaps he had wanted to say comrade, but after shaking off all the troublesome memories that stuck to it, he was left with chum instead.
It turned out to be a good thing he hadn’t informed the police. In not very long a letter came from Tomo. “I’ve left that place behind. Sorry to make you worry. But I have my reasons. The new Head is also the Supreme Leader of the Humananity Cult. More than I can take, really. Dogma filled days. No food made with beans, colored bread is prohibited, part your hair right in the middle. All these sickening rules — really scary. And a whiff of blood in the air. So I ran away. I roughed it for a while, until I ran into someone from my old gang, who brought me to this toy factory. They only hire burnouts like us. The whole factory is set up to look like a casino. Lose and you’re a slave; win, you’re the boss. The pay’s terrible but everything’s provided — food, a place to sleep, clothes. Don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve had nothing to worry about. The roulette wheels are old but nobody cheats, so I win most of the time.”
That was when Yoshiro decided that when Mumei started talking, if he were to ask, “Where’s my father?” he would answer, “He lives far away because he’s very sick and needs treatment.” If he asked what was wrong with his father, he would say, “It’s a sickness where you get so stuck on playing one game that you can’t do anything else.” But so far, Mumei had never shown any curiosity about his parents. When he started school, as none of the other children in his class were being raised by their parents, mothers and fathers were never mentioned.
Children without parents had long since ceased to be called “orphans”; they were now referred to as doku ritsu jido, “independent children.” Because the Chinese character for doku looks like a dog separated from the pack who survives by attaching itself to a human being and never leaving his side, Yoshiro had never felt comfortable with the phrase.
Marika was now head of an institution that housed about fifty “independent children.” Though it had a reputation for being well run in spite of severe economic restraints, its dependency on Marika was far from healthy. If she’d ever taken three days off, the whole place would have collapsed like a house of cards. All sorts of vital information was recorded in her brain alone: If, for instance, the farm which usually sent them their vegetables couldn’t make a delivery, were there were others that could be relied on, and if not, how could they adjust the menu? Doctors were in short supply, so when a child broke a bone, or had trouble breathing, or diarrhea that wouldn’t stop, and no hospital was willing to send a doctor, they needed to find one who’d come, which took an endless supply of knowledge and connections, plus a persuasive tongue — all things that couldn’t simply be turned into data and stored away. The extraordinary ability of the human brain to start sifting through a billion stored experiences the moment it senses trouble, picking out all that it needs, then combining and rearranging to reach a conclusion: only this managed to keep the institution afloat.
Marika now wanted to visit Yoshiro and Mumei, to spend an evening talking with them, maybe around a simmering hot pot. Determined to see them, she set about cobbling together a schedule from the few poorly conn
ected trains and buses. She was used to getting up while it was still dark. Every morning, summer or winter, before the sun hooked its fingernails on the horizon and began hoisting itself up, Marika was up, had placed a candle two inches in diameter and four inches tall on the table, and lit it with a match. The orange flame expanded and wavered as if made of rubber, then contracted, writhing. The flame reined in Marika’s thoughts, liable to dash off toward the many leftover tasks she had to get out of the way as soon as possible.
That morning, however, she took her bag and left the institution before even lighting a match. The grounds seemed larger than usual as she raced across, chased by vague feelings of guilt at neglecting such an important ritual. Between one streetlight and the next her feet disappeared, absorbed in the darkness. Outside the grounds, where there were no streetlights, she could feel dawn approaching. She hadn’t waited for a bus in a long time. As she stared at faraway hills that looked as if they were outlined in India ink, and the shadows of trees, two holes of light opened up in the darkness. The earliest bus had no passengers; and even the driver, who didn’t look up when Marika paid her fare, disappeared behind the partition when she sat down. She got off at the train station, the final stop, but in the station saw neither signs nor people. She sat on a cold bench in the waiting room, listening. She was starting to wonder if this was really a station. Based on experience she’d assumed as much, but you couldn’t count on things being the way they’d always been. Perhaps this was no longer a station, and she simply hadn’t heard the news.
After a while, a man in a top hat and a woman with a large suitcase came through different entrances and, as if they’d arranged it beforehand, sat down on the same bench. Remembering a scene like this from a spy movie she’d seen as a child, Marika watched the pair, trying to figure out if they were really strangers, or somehow connected. In time the waiting room bell clanged loudly, followed by the chuff, chuff of the local nearing the station. As Marika stepped out onto the platform, light raced eastward across the sky like a hunted animal.
