Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River

by Jung Young Moon

  •

  Later I went to an antique shop in a ghost town that was on the way to C, where there was nothing but a heap of things that seemed to have ended up there somehow—through people who thought the things should not be so mistreated—after being mistreated in many Texan homes for being old, for being unsightly, for being tacky, for being mournful and pathetic and laughable, for being broken, for being lazy, for refusing to do something that they’d always done without complaint, for shirking responsibility, for not obeying, for being stupid, for not mingling well with others, and for various other reasons for which people could have mistreated them; or after being mistreated by everyone and everything other than intense sunlight, rain, and wind, after being kicked out onto the street one day for no reason, things it seemed no one would buy; and sitting among the things was an old white woman who, it seemed, must have been born in the nineteenth century and had been sitting there since sometime in the past century.

  It seemed that the woman, who was wearing the kind of dress a Native American woman would wear—as if to show that although she didn’t appear to have any Native American blood, she did in fact have some Native American blood even if it was just a little—looked as if she herself had turned into an antique from having spent so much time with the antiques in the antique shop, and she seemed to be the most valuable, perhaps the only valuable antique there, being in fact older than any other antiques there, and it seemed that she would, if I asked her if she was also for sale, say that I could name the price and take her, but that she could not just give herself to me since she was the most valuable, in fact the only valuable antique there, but would give herself to me with anything else that was there, and it seemed that even if I did purchase her, someone who seemed like a living fossil, I would have to keep her in a museum or something, but I didn’t have anything like a museum, nor could I build something like a museum and in the end resell her, because I had no proper place to keep her at whatever price she named and then put her back in the spot she was sitting in at her antique shop in a ghost town—and I wondered if I should bother doing so and then I decided that there was no reason to.

  It seemed that there should be another old person who was less old than the woman—who looked at a rough estimate to be about a hundred and twenty years old—assisting her, or a young person assisting her, but there wasn’t. The woman, who looked quite deathly pale for a person who was still alive but who also looked quite lively for someone who was already dead, didn’t look like a part-time employee there. I’d never seen someone so old, and in fact she was the oldest person I’d seen in the flesh; and she seemed in reality to be one of the oldest people in the world, and she looked as mystical as a statue of a saintly woman—name unknown—in an old church, or as mystical as a mystical old tree, and it seemed that it would be all right to put your hands together and make a wish while looking at the woman—whose pure white hair added to her mystical quality and whose deeply wrinkled face also looked extraordinary—as you would before the statue of a saintly woman or a mystical old tree, and so I did make a wish in my heart, although I didn’t put my hands together and I hoped that the wish, if possible, would not come true or that it would come true but with difficulty even if it did, and I once again considered purchasing her and having her on display at my house, but quickly came to the conclusion that I’d better not before the thought led to other absurd thoughts.

  It seemed that the nineteenth century, like an old friend who’d been with her through many things, was sitting with its arms crossed as if it were human but in disguise, in the shop of the woman who seemed to be the only thing from the nineteenth century among things that seemed to be from the latter half of the twentieth century, and that it was telling me to find it, but I couldn’t find the nineteenth century in disguise, and it seemed as if I could hear the nineteenth century in disguise saying with satisfaction that it knew I wouldn’t be able to find it, and it also seemed that there had been traces everywhere in the shop of the barking of a long-dead dog that had been with the old woman for a long time but it seemed that the traces, too, had long been erased, and it seemed that the smells emanating from old things were raising their voices and arguing with one another, and it seemed that the old smells emanating from things that were older were telling the young smells emanating from things that were less old not to run wild, and that the smells emanating from the less old things were telling the smells emanating from the older things not to meddle. The old woman spoke very slowly, so slowly that I had a hard time understanding, and she seemed to be saying that she welcomed me to a world in which time had come to a stop, and when she spoke it seemed as if a marvelous antique that could speak was speaking and her voice seemed to turn into dust and crumble.

  Dust had settled affectionately on the things in the shop, and although the southern hemisphere of an old globe deeper within the shop was covered in dust as well, it was less so than the northern hemisphere and managed to resemble the earth, but the northern hemisphere was thick with dust and resembled a primitive earth in a way, with almost no distinction between the continents and the oceans, and in a way it resembled not the earth but Jupiter or Saturn covered in a colossal cloud of dust, and, come to think of it, it seemed that I’d never seen a globe of Jupiter or Saturn, which seemed regrettable, but I thought, I’ve finally, in an antique shop in a ghost town in Texas, seen something that could be called a globe of Jupiter or Saturn. The only thing in the shop not covered in dust seemed to be the owner, who owned the dust, and it seemed that when she had nothing to do—which was always—that is, when it suddenly occurred to her that she really did have nothing to do, when it occurred to her that she couldn’t even recall the beginning of when she’d had nothing to do, she would dust only herself off with a duster as if she had suddenly thought of something to do, and then regret that she was done with her task, and that this task, which was the only task she’d had in a long time, was finished too quickly, that the only task she had was no more and that she shouldn’t have finished it so quickly, and then she’d wonder how long she’d have to wait until the next task came along, and it seemed that she loved and cherished dust so much that she washed her hair with it once every few days. And it seemed that, apart from this, she had long been trying—without any results—to come up with something ingenious though not useful that could be made with dust, while thinking that it would be all right for there to be no results, considering the nature of the research, and while also thinking that research, in the true sense of the word, should be without any results and that she—elated at the thought that the research she was conducting would be without any results whatsoever—would continue proceeding with an original research which seemed to include washing her hair with dust once every few days. I considered getting a job at her shop as her part-time assistant and conducting a joint research with her on dust, which was perhaps the beginning and the end of everything, but it seemed somehow that she would prefer an independent research.

  It seemed that no one had bought anything from the shop since long ago, or at least since the century had turned into the twenty-first, a state of being which seemed like a highly cherished tradition of the shop, and I thought I shouldn’t buy anything from the shop so that the highly cherished tradition wouldn’t be broken, but then I came across something in the innermost corner of the shop that caught my eye so that I bought it: a book. The book was about the ghost towns of Texas, and it included a story about the ghost town where the antique shop in a corner of an abandoned building was—along with a photograph of the abandoned building in which the antique shop was—but I didn’t see the old woman in the antique shop in the photograph, which was probably taken when she had stepped out for a moment. She seemed quite excited when I made to leave; she seemed to anticipate returning to her world of dust where time had come to a stop, and thinking about nothing but dust—and perhaps any thought regarding anything but dust seemed to her like an impurity.

  In the photograph, stuck on
the door of an empty office in the abandoned building was a piece of paper saying that the building was up for sale, along with a piece of paper saying, “Is this the bank that was robbed by Bonnie and Clyde?”, both of which, too, seemed very old, and—by the look of them, yellowed and torn—it seemed that they had been stuck there not long after Bonnie and Clyde robbed the bank. If the place was, in fact, the bank robbed by Bonnie and Clyde, who were from Texas, then I had ended up, for the second time, at a place that had something to do with Bonnie and Clyde—the first time having been by the Trinity River in Dallas, where Bonnie and Clyde had their first encounter. It was said that Clyde met Bonnie for the first time when he stopped by at the house of Bonnie’s friend, which wasn’t far from Trinity River, and in whose kitchen Bonnie was making hot chocolate and in which the two fell instantly in love.

  I thought about the hot chocolate that Bonnie and Clyde—who you could say lived a much more narrative life than did the river—drank together by the Trinity (the Holy Trinity) River, which perhaps had the most grandiose name of all rivers, though of course the river wouldn’t have looked the same way it did now when a Spanish explorer named the river at the end of the seventeenth century, and I thought about how it wouldn’t have been a bad idea to give a river a holy name (apart from the Trinity River that cut across Texas, there was the Trinity River that cut across northwestern California), and I thought that the Trinity River—which overflowed in the spring of 1908 and also in the spring of 2015, flooding Dallas, and whose width was widened in preparation for floods and which seemed to wait almost a century for the transient joy of overflowing almost once a century (many were the times I saw rivers overflowing with joy and flooding towns and fields, unable to contain the joy of overflowing), and which seemed to have no other pleasure besides that of overflowing, and which, although a so-called river, seemed to flow grudgingly, and which mostly flowed in a much too feeble current through downtown Dallas—as I was saying, I thought about how the Trinity River looked as if it were walking with a prosthetic leg, and about how it almost seemed like a non-narrative river (and as I walked along the river for a little while I felt as if I were helping along someone with a prosthetic leg, and I wished I could take the river to another river or place where it could live in a better environment and look better as a river).

  Perhaps Bonnie and Clyde fell in love even before they had finished drinking the hot chocolate Bonnie made, and they decided to rob a bank together while drinking hot chocolate again, and after robbing a bank they eased the fatigue of bank-robbing by drinking hot chocolate. Hot chocolate is good for drinking anytime but perhaps even better before or after robbing a bank, and perhaps Bonnie and Clyde wanted to drink hot chocolate even during the act or in other words they wanted to rob a bank while drinking hot chocolate, but the nature of the task made it difficult for them to do so and so they joked around saying that the worst part of their job was not being able to even drink hot chocolate at ease while working.

  I thought that perhaps Bonnie, who’d never had a job other than waitressing in Dallas, and Clyde, who likewise had never had a job other than stealing and robbing, felt, when they got serious about robbing banks, as if they’d found jobs as sort of bank employees even though they didn’t work as bank tellers (they may have thought—although they didn’t know how they’d come to have this habit of robbing banks, which they somehow ended up doing repeatedly—that they had entered the path of bank robbery, which seemed a little like their regular trade, and wondered if they shouldn’t think about things like the work ethics of bank robbers), and I thought that perhaps when Bonnie, who wrote poems and journal entries such as “The Story of Suicide Sal” and “The Trail’s End,” which later came to be known as the story of Bonnie and Clyde, said to Clyde in a drowsy voice one night after drinking hot chocolate, exhausted from robbing a bank that day, Don’t you think we’re like people in the movies? and Clyde, who didn’t write poems and journal entries and who thought less than Bonnie did and had less on his mind than Bonnie did, and, while serving his term in a Texas prison, had a fellow prisoner clip off two of his toes in order to avoid heavy labor in the fields, then was released from prison but limped for the rest of his life because two of his toes were gone, and who claimed to have committed crime not to get famous or for money but to take revenge on the prison system of Texas for his being abused while in custody (although he didn’t think much about other things, he may have thought a lot about the two toes he’d lost, which may have just been thrown away on a field in Texas or which he may have given as a gift to the fellow inmate, who kindly took the trouble to clip them off for him when he should have done it himself, but which, in the end, would have been thrown away in a field in Texas as well, and the toes which haunted him when he closed his eyes may have kept telling him not to forget to take revenge on the prison system of Texas, and he may have vowed to take revenge on the prison system of Texas because of them), and who couldn’t help but be rather disgruntled, didn’t undisgruntle himself completely but just a little, responded (also exhausted and in a sleepy voice), You’re right, we’re in a bloody movie and it doesn’t seem so bad, and then the two of them talked about how their anecdotes could be turned into a movie about robbing banks like in movies that weren’t easily forgotten, and, sensing their pursuers closing in on them, they talked about how physical or abstract it felt, and if Bonnie—who chain-smoked Camels, which were strong—somehow saw, from heaven, herself appear as a woman who smoked cigars in the movie that was actually made later, based on them, as if bank robbers as a matter of course had to smoke cigars, she would have smiled and thought, I should start smoking cigars instead of Camels from now on, and they could also have talked about how their feats in the early 1930s, just after the Great Depression when public enemies such as Al Capone had been active, could serve as inspiration for someone, and in fact it is said that at Bonnie’s funeral, condolence cards arrived from people presumed to be Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger.

  I didn’t recall if there was a scene in the movie Bonnie and Clyde of Bonnie and Clyde drinking hot chocolate, but I thought it would be nice if the scene appeared many times in movies as long as they were movies about Bonnie and Clyde, and perhaps their first adventure together had its beginning in the first hot chocolate they had together. I believed that just as you couldn’t leave dogs out when you talked about Jack Ruby and Oswald and the assassination of Kennedy, you also couldn’t leave out hot chocolate when you talked about Bonnie and Clyde and bank robberies, and perhaps they too thought that you couldn’t leave out hot chocolate from their story. And perhaps Bonnie and Clyde thought, as Ruby perhaps did when he was planning to kill Oswald, that what they were doing didn’t make sense but unlike Ruby they thought that it was all right as it was.

  •

  There were things that seemed to be with me even though they weren’t really with me because I thought of them so often, including a cat I didn’t have, and lately seven samurai who were with me in my mind and who didn’t suddenly come to my mind one day when I woke up, or come to me like people who come to me with some business on hand, nor did they strike my mind when I was wondering while struggling to fall asleep in my friend’s home in Texas—which is huge, bigger than France—what I should write, what other irrelevant thing there was for me to talk about, but instead who came to my mind when I thought, being sick and tired of saying this and that about Texas, that I needed something that went completely off on a tangent, but I didn’t know what they had to do with the Akira Kurosawa movie by the same title which I’d seen long ago and remembered almost nothing about, aside from the fact that seven samurai appeared in it, but anyway they weren’t samurai from the beginning but instead some vague moving figures which turned more and more samurai-like, then finally turned into samurai, seven in all, that were small like samurai figures and grew smaller at times but did not grow beyond a certain size, and I thought with incredulity and contempt, If you are samurai then I am a Jehovah’s witness, but it was r
ight that they were samurai just as it was right that I wasn’t a Jehovah’s witness, and they began to scuffle with one another for reasons unknown as if they’d made a pact, after which thoughts of the seven samurai would not leave my mind and the seven samurai seemed to be telling me to write this and that about them, and I thought it would be nice if the seven samurai appeared here and there in what I was writing, and so I ended up writing this and that about the seven samurai and, once, I even made the seven samurai appear in a story I was writing about a cat who was with me before I even wrote a story about the seven samurai:

  This cat who’s with me looks like a cloud at times, a shadow at times, a wailing sound at times, depending on the weather of the day, and also looks hard-pressed at times and looks the most hard-pressed when it looks like ash, at which time it’s better to leave it alone. But regretfully it has never looked like a hat or like a cat turning into a hat, but just once it did look like a hat that was burned to ashes the remains of which made it difficult for you to guess that it had once been a cat that looked like a hat, and that was the time when I was the most hard-pressed while being with this cat because a hat that had turned into ashes was no longer a hat. This cat looked like a still object at times and like a moving object at times but never looked like a mysterious object that could not be categorized at all, and I believe that I have never seen a cat like this anywhere else but I do think that it’s possible for me to not have recognized it even if I saw one. This cat almost always does not look different depending on the distance or in other words it looks almost the same no matter the distance, so if you look at the cat from different distances you don’t feel as if you’re experiencing an optical illusion. So it’s no use changing distances in an effort to see the cat looking less and less like a cat without looking like something that’s not a cat, then looking more and more like a cat and in the end looking completely like a cat. A cubist technique could be used for a visual reproduction of the cat but that alone could be terribly insufficient. There are times when this cat—who almost always does not look different depending on the distance or in other words looks almost the same no matter the distance—changes in size as a matter of exception, times when it grows so small that it disappears and becomes a cat that exists nowhere and so big at times that it makes it difficult for you to say from where to where is a cat, and from where to where isn’t, at which time everything, including a cat, looks like a cat in a way, and at a time like this the cat looks like an infinite cat with no end and I come to ask myself where the beginning and the end of the cat lie. You can’t see the cat growing but you can see the cat growing dark or bright, murky or clear, or thick or thin, and when you take a long look at it you may understand that that’s how the cat grows, and think that perhaps there might be an element of light, air, or liquid to this cat. There’s no telling if this cat—which is a cat now although there’s no telling if it has been a cat from the beginning and if it will be a cat to the end—became a cat when it could have become something else by either giving or not giving an inch (there are more things that couldn’t be said about this cat than things that could be said). Perhaps the most interesting thing about this cat is that it looks different depending on the angle from which it is seen and so I like to look at the cat from different angles, and the cat which looks different depending on the angle from which it is seen looks like a cat from a certain angle but hardly looks like a cat from another angle, and doesn’t look like a cat at all from yet another angle and there is even an angle from which nothing can be seen even though the cat is definitely there, and from another angle the cat looks like something that is far from a cat, like a horizon for instance at which time only the horizon can be seen without a cat on the horizon, and although I like to look at the cat from all angles that make the cat look different I like most of all to look at the cat when it looks like a horizon, which of course is because the cat before me looks like a long line that is far away in the distance. But I have yet to see the sun rising in majesty or the moon rising in pallor beyond the cat that looks like a horizon, or to see the cat looking like a sea horizon and not a land horizon, to my regret, and perhaps if I made an effort someday it may look like a sea horizon, and if I made even more of an effort I may see a huge cargo ship or something emerge beyond the cat that looks like a sea horizon, but such a thing may not be possible through my effort alone. And this cat has never yet from any angle looked like something that was just nice to look at and in turn lose track of time by looking at, by appearing to be a page of a very esoteric book or like the explosion of something much smaller than a cannonball, possibly something close to a firecracker. And the cat does not yet look like seven samurai from any angle and therefore does not look like seven samurai who, instead of fighting enemies, fight with one another and fall one by one until in the end all have fallen, then get up again and fight endlessly with one another. And the cat does not yet look like seven samurai from any angle who instead of swimming across a river come floating down the river as if with a purpose, and disappear down the river and then come floating down the river and disappear down the river again and again. This cat who looks different depending on the angle and who even looks like different things but who is not yet quite a cat that is turning into something other than a cat may not be the ideal cat, but the cat doesn’t have a name yet and so it could be called by any name but for now I am calling this cat which I have or which I think I have a cat beyond description, and I often think that this thing that I think of as a cat may not actually be a cat which does not make me think that I may be a cat but actually I’m not so sure about that.