by Yoko Tawada
Always worried, always watching, Yoshiro took his own chin in his left hand and forced himself to look off in another direction. If he kept his eyes glued on him, the boy’s spirit might possess his great-grandfather and then turn him into a poor eater. Then who would look after Mumei? He kept trying to convince himself that his generation were an entirely different species from kids today, tough enough both physically and mentally to work from morning to night without ever getting sick or even tired.
Though he was always on the lookout for food Mumei could eat without too much trouble, he never bought new products unless he knew where they came from. Once thousands of dead penguins had washed up on a beach in South Africa, and a company run by an international pirate gang had dried the meat, which it then ground into powder to make meat biscuits for children. According to the newspaper, another company was smuggling the biscuits into Japan, making a killing. The biscuits reminded Yoshiro of dog food, but having heard they were an ideal protein source for children, he definitely wanted to buy some. The meat of penguins who had lived in Antarctica would probably not be very contaminated, though such a mass death might mean that an oil tanker had sunk nearby, which was worrying.
Having left the country without permission, Japanese pirates in the international gangs did not have the right to return. “I’d rather be a pirate with guys from all over the world than go back to Japan. I make more money and besides, it’s safer,” wrote one Japanese pirate in a letter to the newspaper. Yoshiro laughed out loud when he read it. If a letter like this could still appear in the newspaper, then freedom of speech was not yet extinct, unlike the Japanese crested ibis.
While it didn’t seem all that strange for Norwegians or Swedes, with their Viking heritage, to join pirate gangs, people from countries like Nepal, or Switzerland, with no connection to the sea, were also joining up. And the sizable number of Japanese pirates suggested that there was no gene for isolation.
The South African government announced it would take a firm stance against all forms of piracy. Yoshiro had heard about international pirate gangs at a lecture entitled “The Future of Sharks and the Prospects for Fish Cakes.” Because lectures weren’t censored, they were a source of raw information unavailable anywhere else. Yoshiro went to every lecture within walking distance, about six miles from home. Public lectures were always packed.
South Africa and India — having been among the first countries to withdraw from the global rat race in which huge corporations turned underground resources into anything they could sell at inhuman speeds while ruthlessly competing to keep the lowest production costs — now kept to a policy of supporting their economies by exporting language alone, discontinuing all other imports and exports. The two nations had formed what they called “The Gandhi Alliance,” which was gaining worldwide popularity. They got along so well that other countries were beginning to envy them. South Africa and India fought about soccer but nothing else, their positions on humanity, the sun, and language being perfectly matched. Contrary to the predictions of foreign experts, the economies of both were growing steadily.
Like these two nations, the Japanese government had also stopped importing underground resources and exporting manufactured goods, but with no language to export, it had come to an impasse. So the government had hired a linguist to write a paper proving that the language Okinawans spoke was linguistically unrelated to Japanese, to promote its plan to sell the Okinawan language to China for a good price, but Okinawa refused to let this underhanded scheme go through. They came back with an ultimatum: If Japan insisted on selling their language to China, then Okinawa would stop all shipments of fruit to the main island of Japan.
While Yoshiro’s mornings were packed full of worry seeds, to Mumei each morning was fresh, full of fun. At the moment, he was battling those mischievous sprites called clothes. Though cloth was not necessarily ill-tempered, it didn’t bend easily to his will, and as he tried rubbing it, smoothing it over, folding it, but generally having a hard time, bits of brightly colored paper — orange, blue, and silver — began to sparkle in the gray matter of his brain. He wanted to take off his pajamas, but with two legs he couldn’t decide which to start with, and while he was puzzling over this problem he remembered the octopus. Maybe he had eight legs, too, and it just looked like two because each one was a bundle of four, tied tightly together. That might be why when he tried to move one leg to the right he felt like swinging it at the same time to the left, or sticking it up in the air. There was an octopus inside him: Octopus, get out of there! He pulled off his pajama pants. He couldn’t have pulled his legs off with them, could he? No, they were still attached — it was only his pajamas that had come off. So far, so good, but he still had to get into his trousers for school. They were a mountain of cloth, with tunnels running through it. His legs were the trains, trying to get through the tunnels. He sure wanted to go back to the Meiji Restoration Museum and play with the model steam engine again. There were two tunnels, so the train headed for Tokyo can go in one, while the train going in the opposite direction comes out the other. That must be it, but although his right leg went in okay, his left leg didn’t come out. Oh, well, who cares? Flesh-colored steam engines slide into the tunnels. Chugga chugga choo choo.
“Mumei, are you dressed yet?”
At the sound of Great-grandpa’s voice, the octopus scuttled off to hide in his socks as the trains slid off the rails, leaving Mumei there all alone. He hadn’t yet completed the task of getting dressed.
“I guess I’m not much of a man,” he sighed gravely, prompting Yoshiro to burst out laughing as he urged, “Don’t worry about that now, just hurry up and put your pants on — here,” bending over to take the trousers in both hands and spread them out.
“I wish I could have some work clothes like we saw that time.”
“Work clothes? Oh, you mean a tsunagi. People used to call tsunagi overalls.”
“Overalls . . . sounds awesome.”
“But overalls is a foreign word, so you’d better not use it.”
“Better not use it” was a phrase that never sounded right to Mumei. Great-grandpa knows lots of words; he never uses lots of the words he knows; he teaches me words he never uses; then he tells me never to use certain words he tells me about. Great-grandpa blurred into several overlapping faces. Could clothes still be there, just as they were, even after the words for them had disappeared? Or did they change, or disappear, along with their names? “I don’t want pants with elastic in them,” Mumei had protested the week before at a children’s clothing store, “They leave diamonds around my waist that get itchy.” He had begged for overalls, but was refused on the grounds that a tsunagi would be too much trouble when he went to the bathroom by himself at school. When he’d seen the one on a plumber who came to their house once, he’d been so envious he’d never forgotten it. After refusing to buy him a tsunagi, Great-grandpa had stayed up all night making a special pair of trousers for him.
“If you don’t hurry up you’ll be late.”
That’s what Great-grandpa always says. It’s not that I hate school, but having to get dressed in a hurry and be there by a certain time sure doesn’t make me like it. It takes time to get ready, but that’s not my fault. Clothes, juice, shoes — they all do their own thing, and never help me out. It’s the same with the clock. The hands keep on moving at their own pace, never thinking of me at all. Why can’t we just go to school when we feel like it? The best thing about school is that there’re lots of other kids to play with, but the worst thing is that they bother you when you’re trying to learn. You can study much better by yourself. Whenever I have something really important to tell the teacher, some other kid always yells something stupid so he can’t hear me. The kid behind me pulls my hair while I’m thinking, and whenever the teacher starts to tell us something interesting somebody yells, “I gotta pee!” and that’s the end of it. Counting up the things I hate about school, I can’t wait f
or Earth Day, when I can stay home all day. How many times do I have to poop until another day without school comes around? Every morning, Great-grandpa eggs me on. “Come on, push. A good BM means you have the strength to fight against germs.” Today’s Tuesday. Tuesday is fire day, so maybe we’ll do an experiment with matches in science class. I’ll probably get burned. Tomorrow’s Wednesday, water day. I might drown in the heated pool. I wish they’d turn up the heat. It’s so cold now it makes me want to scream at first, but if I make too much of a fuss I get so tired my legs go all wobbly like noodles and I can hardly walk. “If you’re tired just lie down beside the pool and rest awhile,” the teacher says, but don’t grown-ups ever notice that the pool has tides? I’ll be lying down as the waves get higher and higher until they come right up over the edge, and splash, splash, splash, right in my face. Then a great big wave will come to swallow me up. I’ll gasp and lift my head up, trying to breathe, but the wave pulls my wrists and ankles down to the bottom. But wait — oh, yeah, I know what to do next: I’ll just turn myself back into an octopus. No need to be afraid of the water, I’ll get through water day as an octopus, and wait for Thursday — tree day. On tree day maybe the cherry tree in the schoolyard will fall on top of me and crush me. Almost all the trees are sick these days, even if they look healthy their trunks are hollow, so all it takes to make them fall over is a sigh from someone standing near. That’s why all those signs say “Do not sigh near this tree.” I can see it now — a whole row of cherry trees falling like dominoes, starting with the one farthest away. I run away. I’m so fast not even one branch hits me. Sure feels good, running like that. Friday is gold day. The sun has only one eye, bright yellow like gold, and when it glares down on me my whole body goes so stiff I can’t move. That’s why I’m not allowed to play outside by myself. I can see the cliff behind our school crumbling . . . with me caught in the landslide. No one comes to help me. My elbows get numb. There’s no feeling in my legs; when I touch them they seem like somebody else’s . . .
“Mumei, want some toast?”
The rye bread Great-grandpa toasts for me smells good, but it’s sure hard to chew. The mean little spikes of dried grain stick into the soft places inside my mouth all at once. I taste blood. Grain — even after you pick it, thresh it, grind it up into powder, knead it, and bake it — is still spiky — it never gives up. How stubborn can it be? Once when I said, “This toast tastes like blood,” Great-grandpa looked like he was about to cry, so I decided never to say that again. Great-grandpa has real bushy eyebrows and a square jaw, so he looks strong, but his feelings get hurt real easily, and he often looks like he’s about to cry. For some reason he seems to pity me.
But anyway, how can old people chomp away at hard bread that way as if there’s nothing to it? People used to have really strong teeth. They used to make what they called “extra-hard rice crackers,” as hard as rocks, just to munch on. Once Great-grandpa pretended to be chewing on a stone-hard rice cracker to make me laugh. It would have been even funnier with the real thing but he told me they don’t sell them anymore. He used to open his mouth wide, put the rice cracker between his teeth, and then pull down on the part outside so that cracker, round as the moon, would go gagariiin, and snap in two. Then his tongue would move the piece in his mouth back to his molars so they could break it up into little bits, just like smashing rocks. They say if the walls in an apartment building were thin enough you could hear the people next door eating rice crackers. Not just rice crackers. Those old people who could break roasted almonds or bite off bits of dried meat with their teeth must have been just like squirrels, or lions. I guess you couldn’t put me and Great-grandpa on the same page in the Illustrated Guide to Animals.
The old folks used to eat bird’s innards and pregnant river fish, roasted on skewers over open flames, too. I couldn’t believe it at first, but watching Great-grandpa I started to realize it might be true. He’s put together so completely different from us kids. Great-grandpa doesn’t just eat hard things, he eats so much I can’t believe it. That’s why he has energy to spare. He runs around after he gets up in the morning, to burn off his extra energy. We kids don’t have even a single drop to spare. If I spend too much energy getting dressed I don’t have enough left to walk to school and end up riding on the back of Great-grandpa’s bicycle. It’s embarrassing to ride all the way so I always try to walk at least the first ten steps or so, but my legs get so heavy I can’t walk anymore.
“Mumei, aren’t you dressed yet? You’ll be late for school,” Great-grandpa says, coming over to me. I know he’s trying to sound strict, but I’m not the least bit afraid.
Yoshiro inhaled the fragrant child smell that rose from the back of Mumei’s neck. That was it — this smell. When his daughter Amana was a baby, this was what he smelled when he picked her up, cradling her tiny body close. At the time he’d thought it was a little girl smell, but Mumei had it too, even more strongly. After Amana grew up, she had Tomo. Even now Yoshiro remembered the time she asked him to put the child’s socks on, how precious those tiny feet had looked as he fitted the socks over them, like covering particularly valuable apples with protective wrappings. Nevertheless, Tomo had never smelled as good as Amana. Even as a toddler, the smell he gave off was already mixed with mud and sweat. By the time he started elementary school he had abandoned socks; sticking his bare feet into gym shoes he’d flattened the backs of, he’d run outside to play whenever he wanted, without even bothering to say, “I’m going out.” Never quiet, never polite, but he had certainly been a sturdy lad.
“Don’t you love your own child?” Yoshiro had blurted out, soon after Mumei’s birth — a corny thing to say, really, but Tomo had startled him by firing back, “How do you know he’s mine?” He had immediately consigned this remark to the furnace of oblivion, doubting he’d find the truth in the middle of an argument, but as time passed, he heard a voice, whispering from the ashes. Tomo himself didn’t know whether or not he was Mumei’s father.
Mumei’s mother was neither a penguin nor a lovebird. Ignorant of chastity, she was always willing, never faithful, oblivious of condemnation, with no sense of sin, and she drank like a bottomless serpent. Now reduced to ashes, she couldn’t be asked about Mumei’s parentage. Even if she were alive, she probably wouldn’t remember.
Knowing there was a possibility they were not genetically related, Yoshiro had once considered sending a lock of Mumei’s hair to the hospital to be tested, but one day, feeling some hairs he’d picked up from the tatami between his fingers, he started to chuckle. Genes have no odor. Yet how well he knew that sweet, milky fragrance of infancy that still rose from Mumei’s body. It was clearly sending him a message. Neither of the child’s parents had ever gotten drunk on that smell the way he did. Didn’t that mean that Nature herself had chosen him, Yoshiro, as Mumei’s guardian?
Yoshiro heard singing from the house next door, a girl’s voice about to melt into the blue sky.
“Dragonfly, how do you fly, dragonfly?”
The clear, high dra of “dragonfly” reverberated in Yoshiro’s head. Had the owner of that sweet young voice ever seen a dragonfly? Probably not. Yoshiro himself couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen one. Yet an unseen dragonfly lived in this little girl’s song. Its translucent wings and long, pencil-thin, segmented body would zip through the air, then stop, hovering for a second before taking off in a completely unexpected direction. Dragonflies were so mysterious, stopping in midair that way. Just once, Yoshiro wanted to show Mumei a real one.
He heard the little girl’s voice clearly through the prefab walls. When she’d finished her song, a woman’s voice said, “We’d better be leaving for school now.” He’d seen the girl with this woman who looked after her out front on their way to school. But as the child was always dressed in what looked like a white spacesuit, he had never seen her face. Yoshiro assumed the suit was solar energy-propelled musclewear, though when Mumei sighed, “Doesn’t she look beau
tiful?” he had to admit that, yes, there was definitely something about the suit that made the word beautiful seem just right. Maybe this was the beauty of the future. Yoshiro remembered how girls used to choose clothes that would emphasize the curve of their waists or the size of their breasts, leaving their thighs or the backs of their necks exposed whenever possible. As he watched this little girl float down the sidewalk like a cloud the word that came to mind was not sexy but elegant.
Although the girl left for school around the same time as Mumei, she went to an elementary school attached to a research institute, attended only by children who had been chosen. Apparently all gifted in some way, they received specialized education.
Her adult guardian didn’t indulge in everyday conversation, always turning away after a perfunctory bow. Long ago Yoshiro would have tried to break the ice by noting how hot or cold it was, or how it looked like rain, but talking about the weather had become very tricky. Heat and cold mingled together into a dry humidity, taunting the skin. As if making fun of the very words human beings used to describe the weather. The minute you said, “It’s very warm” you’d be shivering; no sooner were the words “It’s awfully nippy this morning” out of your mouth than your forehead would be damp with sweat.
