by Yoko Tawada
Despite knowing how many times she’d have to change trains on this tiring journey, she’d started out feeling sure she’d glide smoothly over the miles to Yoshiro and Mumei. Yet as she sat in room after empty room, waiting for other travelers to make it seem more like a waiting room, then climbed with them into train after train, she lost sight of the end of her trip, almost forgetting why she had set out in the first place. None of the trains sensed where she really wanted to go; they all coldly pushed her out somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Not that she minded changing trains, it was the layovers that were so irritating; somehow hers seemed longer than anyone else’s. Had the timetable been arranged expressly to her disadvantage — if so, by whom, and why? Marika had a special knack for interpreting the world as a series of interlocking conspiracies.
At last her train arrived at the final station, where she waited again for a bus, which jostled her until she got off, her heart about to burst with a longing that made her lean forward in spite of herself, her breath coming in puffs as she made her way between two long rows of prefab houses, forward, always forward, her steps quickening into a run. How many identical houses were there in this one block? The sheer number, and their sameness, was about to wipe the one house she was looking for out of her mind when suddenly it came into view. Yoshiro and Mumei were standing out front, waving like beckoning cats, their paws moving up and down. She used to think that hands should be waved from side to side like a metronome, but that may have been due to a steady diet of foreign movies long ago. Two beckoning cats: one big, one tiny. Thanks for beckoning. Suddenly everything seemed funny to Marika as she leaned forward even further, laughing as she ran toward them at top speed.
“Great-grandma is here!” Did the joking, whooping voice that said this belong to Marika herself, her husband, or her great-grandson? The trio’s happiness exploded into joyous fireworks as they jumped around like rabbits in springtime. Inside the house, steam was already rising from the clay pot, waiting for them. Finding the spot in the center of the cushion awaiting her bottom, Marika planted herself in it as if she were putting down roots. Beyond the cloud of steam, Yoshiro and Mumei looked like wizards in the mist. “Ha ha ha, ha ha ha,” laughed Mumei as he stuck his chopsticks into the broth time after time, never managing to catch anything. Fortunately, neighboring chopsticks were always ready to take up the slack, filling his bowl with delicacies from the mountains and the sea. When they found things in the pot they didn’t normally eat like shrimp or maitake mushrooms, Yoshiro and Marika shook off the dark specter of contamination: casting their nets for sweeter memories, seeking them out even as they crumbled like silken tofu, and not giving up until they’d scooped them into their bowls and devoured them, piping hot. But time showed them no mercy, hurrying on until, with the last forgotten slice of Chinese cabbage lying wilted at the bottom of the pot, the grandfather clock pounded out the hours.
“Ah, I’ve got to go.”
Marika stood up, forced her arms into the scrunched-up sleeves of her jacket, very slowly buttoning it all the way up to the neck though it wasn’t very cold, then put on her shoes, which had gotten awfully tight in such a short time, sighing, “Well, I’ll see you again sometime, I mean I’d really like to come, you know, if I can, real soon . . . but even if it isn’t very soon I want to come back no matter what, sometime . . .” Her spoken and unspoken words pushed and shoved her until finally, tearing herself away — as if ripping a page from a memo pad, and then crumpling it up to toss into the wastebasket — she started to walk. Her face, drenched with tears, was crumpled too, her voice dying away even as she spoke.
“We’ll come see you off,” shouted Yoshiro from behind. He was about to put Mumei on the back of his bicycle when Marika, shielding her face with both hands, said, “You don’t need to see me off, I want to leave alone,” in a singsong voice meant to hide the tears in her voice. On their own her legs moved faster and faster until they broke into a run, while her elbows — though this wasn’t Sports Day for heaven’s sake — started pumping up and down as she clenched her teeth, thrust out her chin and ran off, faster and faster. Maybe this is how you’d escape from a fire. Burning meant pain. She’d always hated good-byes and as she grew older she hated them even more. If ripping a bandage off was going to hurt as much as touching the raw wound then maybe you should just leave it on even after it got so dirty it was black and sticky, starting to rot along with your skin, she thought, somewhat childishly.
Neither the rocking of the trains nor the jostling of the buses wiped the image of her great-grandchild’s face off of her retinas. Back at the institute, with the pile of undone tasks threatening to spill over in an avalanche, between breaths she still heard Mumei’s laughter. The love she should be feeling for all the children here, equally, might thin out, replaced by her obsession with Mumei — that idea terrified her.
Marika had recently been given an important post on the screening committee of a top secret private-sector project she’d been involved with for some time now, selecting especially bright children to send abroad as emissaries. Even among the many in her institute, it would be hard to find one suitable. Smart children who used their intelligence only for themselves wouldn’t do. Neither would those who might have a strong sense of responsibility but no aptitude for languages. Speaking well was important, but kids who got drunk on the sound of their own voices were out of the question. Children who could truly empathize with others were disqualified as they’d always be crying in sympathy. Strong-willed children were welcome, but not if they were always forming cliques of underlings to boss around. Kids who couldn’t stand being with other people were disqualified, as were those who couldn’t bear to be alone. And those lacking the talent and courage to overturn established values as well as rebels, opportunists, the emotionally unstable — none of these would do. No child seemed likely to pass the screening test, except for one perfect candidate.
And she didn’t want to send Mumei on a dangerous mission. She wanted to leave him under Yoshiro’s protection, living calmly through his days, fighting to the end. No one could say how long he had to live, and there was no need to expose him to undue hardship. If only she kept quiet, Mumei would never be discovered by the screening committee.
Watching the little kids at the institute fall down and burst into tears brought back memories of when her daughter Amana was a little girl, crying all the time. Back then it was widely believed that parents should respond immediately to a child’s cries for help: trying to toughen kids up by letting them wail would make them grow up too stubborn to ask for help of any kind, which meant they might not live very long, so as soon as her daughter started to cry, Marika would hold her close, comforting her. But sometimes, when she felt their two bodies connecting by invisible arteries, she’d suddenly pull away.
There was something else she remembered. When Amana was about three years old, she’d taken her back to her parents’ house. One day, while they were sitting face-to-face playing cat’s cradle in the room with the grandfather clock, she saw capillaries growing out of their bodies like tiny branches. Slender as gossamer from a spider’s web, they spread out along the walls and up to the ceiling, twining themselves around the grandfather clock. Quaking in fear, Marika stood up. Until then, she had never seriously thought about the history of that house. Generations of people whose names she didn’t know, whom she’d never cared about, had been born and died there. The sweat of women forced to work like slaves drenched the walls; the pillars were splattered with the semen of masters of this house who had forced themselves on young servants. She smelled the cold sweat of a son who had strangled his bedridden father to get his inheritance. The walls and ceiling that had witnessed these atrocities glared down on her. The misery of married couples trickling down into the pipes connecting the toilet to the sewer. A mother who has chemically transformed her loneliness into ambition chokes her son, squeezing his slender neck between her sweaty thighs. A wife who never lets
on what she knows about her husband’s affairs mixes her own turds into his miso soup. That handsome arsonist seen loitering around the house might be a former employee, fired for no good reason. The umbilical cord binding the generations of a respectable old family is also a rope around the neck. And she had wanted to cut her ties to all these bloody forebearers, now taking such pleasure in sharing old family secrets . . .
My real family, she thought, are those people I just happened to meet in that coffee shop. My descendants are the independent children in my institution.
The first time Marika saw the simple prefab house where Yoshiro and Mumei had taken refuge, she found it refreshing. Afraid of appearing tactless because, after all, they weren’t living there by choice, she hadn’t said how attractive she found the house until she started talking to Yoshiro and realized that he, too, was quite pleased with it. It was so simple, with none of the oppressiveness of a sprawling, old family home, or the arrogance of a modern high-rise apartment complex.
They’d been lucky to have good carpenters, Yoshiro told her, who had put up these well-made houses in no time. Other houses just a mile or two away — built by trolls — had poor ventilation, were hotter in summer and colder in winter than it was outdoors, and had walls so thin you couldn’t even sigh without the neighbors hearing you, despite having cost three times as much.
The number of temporary houses had increased notably in the area from Tama to Nagano Prefecture; it was predicted that more and more people would be moving into the land along the Nakasendo, the old road through the mountains that leads to Kyoto. Central Tokyo was deserted. Although no one had heard anything about an evacuation of the Diet or the Supreme Court, the buildings that had housed them were definitely not in use. They were empty shells. When the Japanese government was privatized it was rumored that all the Diet members and judges had taken their generous pensions and moved to a newly constructed high-class residential area in Kyushu called “Satsuma Forest.” But where did the newly elected Diet members work? Did they really exist, or were they simply photographs with names? Yoshiro remembered going to City Hall, which doubled as Election Hall, writing a name on a piece of paper, and duly submitting his vote. That much, at least, had really happened. The pencil he’d used to write the name had definitely been real.
The Diet’s main job was to fiddle around with the laws. Judging from how often the laws changed, someone was definitely fiddling with them. Yet the public was never told who made the changes, or for what purpose. Afraid of getting burned by laws they hadn’t heard of, everyone kept their intuition honed sharp as a knife, practicing restraint and self-censorship on a daily basis.
When the public was informed that the isolation policy had already gone into effect, Yoshiro and Marika weren’t the only ones too shocked to do anything but gasp and moan. Yet every newspaper ran articles declaring, “There were many good things about the Edo period. Isolation is not necessarily a bad policy.” And many of the public intellectuals who wrote these articles — though actually opposed to isolation — found the humiliation of having the policy so suddenly sprung on them unbearable, as if they were being made to eat dirt; besides, if they admitted they’d been duped like everybody else their careers would be ruined, so now, in an about-face so obvious it would have amazed even Aesop’s grape-loving fox, they all insisted that they had supported isolation all along and in fact had been just about to recommend it to the government.
When Yoshiro submitted an essay entitled “Japan Was Not Isolated” to the newspaper, they refused to publish it. He wrote it to show how strong Japan’s connections to the outside world had been during the Edo period, through the channels of Holland and China, but the newspaper’s official scholar refused to give it his stamp of approval. He decided to hang onto the manuscript until the next time a magazine asked him for a contribution, yet strangely enough, all those requests from magazines dried up completely after that.
In a fit of anger, Yoshiro dashed off a children’s story, which he promptly sent to a publisher he’d worked with. It was about a little girl in the sixth grade. In the country where she lived, it was decreed that all children must bring a lunch of white rice with a red pickled plum in the middle to school. So every morning, the girl’s mother pressed a pickled plum into the middle of the white rice in bento boxes for the girl and her little brother, with a dark sheet of dry nori seaweed hidden under the surface. In a separate container, she packed things to go with the rice, like cold omelettes or spinach. One day, the girl’s mother was injured in a car accident and had to spend the night in the hospital. Her father, away on a business trip, couldn’t make it home right away. The little brother cried himself to sleep that night, so the next morning, to cheer him up, the girl cut the paperlike nori into the shapes of a panda’s eyes and ears to put on his rice. Extremely pleased with his panda lunch, the boy proudly showed it to his classmates. The following morning, his older sister was sent to a youth detention center, and her mother, now out of the hospital, was arrested.
Unfortunately, Yoshiro’s children’s story has yet to be published. The letter from the publisher said, “The content is incomprehensible to children.”
Under the cool silk bedding pulled up to her nose, Marika sometimes giggled, remembering when she and Yoshiro used to have sex. That had been more than eighty years ago. The images that came to her were more like dinosaurs at play than of erotic ecstasy between the sheets.
Marika’s skin and general bearing were still youthful, though inside, her body had changed completely. Long ago she had felt as if her nipples were being pulled outward, while now her breasts were spreading out, expanding inward, protecting the front from enemy attack. When she was young, perhaps because her nerve endings hadn’t reached that far back yet, her bottom was always the coldest part of her — in fact, when someone gave her butt a pat she was surprised at how far her own body bulged out in the rear — yet now her whole backside was always hot and haughty, issuing orders: “Get off me and open a window, NOW!” or “You’d better set yourself down on me and check those receipts again.” They used to say that henpecked husbands were “under the wife’s bottom,” and now Marika felt definitely under her own.
“The whole human race is becoming feminized,” asserted some specialists, while others said, “Children who are born male turn into females, while those born female turn into males.”
In areas where culture dictated that female fetuses should be aborted, Nature, enraged at humans disrupting her balance this way, had started playing various tricks. One trick was making sure that no one stayed the same sex all their lives. Everyone’s sex changed either once or twice, and people couldn’t tell ahead of time how many times their sex would change.
Yoshiro set the New Year’s photo Marika had sent on top of the chest of drawers. A child with half-closed eyes rested a heavy looking head on his wife’s left shoulder. From the expression, the child might have been either in pain or simply daydreaming. Long, thick eyelashes, lips like cherries, a very slender neck with an oddly well-developed Adam’s apple protruding from it. In comparison, Mumei’s neck looked positively sturdy, set firmly on his shoulders. The child with both hands on Marika’s other shoulder had its chin thrust out, sticking its tongue out at the camera. Another was asleep with its head on her knees, while still another knelt properly on the tatami, acting the model student. The sharp-eyed kid in the background might have been feverish, its face was so red. Several others didn’t even seem aware that they were being photographed. Though they all looked like girls, some were probably boys.
When Marika’s longing to see Yoshiro and Mumei rose like the tide, she forced it into the small rectangular space of a picture postcard, waiting for it to ebb. On a recent card she’d written, “How are you two getting along? I’ll bring a big sea bream made of sugar for your 108th birthday.”
Yoshiro didn’t really feel like making concrete plans for his 108th birthday party. But he did want to h
ear Mumei shout, “Paradise!” It would be fun to get into their bathing suits for a fountain party, or dress up like ghosts and set off sparklers in the evening. His ninety-ninth birthday, when all his relatives had gathered, seemed like a long time ago now. It was good that he’d picked ninety-nine rather than one hundred, but the standard birthday dinner around a big, round table at a restaurant had been a mistake. You could tell the younger relations by their rounded backs, thinning hair, pale faces, and by how slowly their chopsticks moved. Realizing their descendants were in such a sad state because they’d been so feckless made the elderly feel guilty, dampening the festivities.
While it wasn’t clear whether or not Yoshiro’s generation would really have to live forever, for the time being they had definitely been robbed of death. Perhaps when their bodies had reached the end, even their fingers and toes worn down to nothing, their minds would hang on, refusing to shut down, writhing still inside immobile flesh.
Yoshiro couldn’t see why his generation should celebrate long life. It was good to be alive, but that was normal for the elderly, so why make a fuss about it? With children dying off this way, wouldn’t it make more sense to celebrate a child’s having got through another day? He wanted to celebrate Mumei’s birthday not once a year, but every season. A party for each winter he managed to make it through without getting frostbite. Or for every autumn after he’d gone a whole summer without collapsing from the heat. At the turn of the season the body sloughs off old stuff and takes on new life. Yoshiro felt younger when spring came, but the change was always hard on Mumei. It took extra energy to meet a new season. And that wasn’t the only kind of change that was challenging for Mumei. He’d be bathed in sweat from temples to armpits in suffocating heat on a summer day with the temperature rising, so high it seemed it would never fall, but then the air would dry out a little and he’d be shivering as if he’d been stripped to the skin. The sun had only to peek through the clouds for his skin to dry up and crack; a drenching in an evening shower left him shivering right down to the bones. Every bit of food he put in his mouth was a challenge to be met. If sour orange juice bit into his stomach wall, he’d lose all its nourishment and burden his digestive system as well. Taking a breather after yesterday’s grated carrot, his stomach would then be desperately battling today’s bean fiber, not producing enough digestive juices to win, which caused Mumei’s tummy to swell up with gas.
