Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River

by Jung Young Moon

  The second was not a scene of Hemingway being wounded in the First World War or the Spanish Civil War, nor of him hunting in Africa or somewhere else, nor of him fishing in the Caribbean or somewhere else, but instead it was of him being chased by someone somewhere—yet not by German soldiers or Spanish fascists, or by wild animals such as lions or water buffaloes, or by something with an enormous mouth and sharp teeth that lived in water, but instead by farmers, ones from southern Germany who had pitchforks, and who weren’t chasing Hemingway without a reason but Hemingway felt wronged nonetheless. This happened during his stay in Paris in the early 1920s, while he was writing an article titled “Trout Fishing in Europe” for a Canadian weekly, and while fishing, not all across Europe but still in several western European countries, when he had a fishing license that allowed him to fish, without any restrictions in certain areas for certain periods of time; but the farmers of southern Germany—who were quite hostile toward outsiders, and who didn’t even want them to set foot on their soil, and who thought that, in fact, they couldn’t have given even a single fish from their stream to outsiders—shouted and came running with pitchforks, which they’d just been using for work, to chase him away for the sole reason that he was an outsider, all, of course, as he tried to catch their fish in their stream; and when I pictured him running from farmers of southern Germany with pitchforks in their hands, I felt somehow invigorated. Then one day sometime later, during a meal, perhaps Hemingway looked at the fork with which he’d been eating and thought of the pitchforks in the hands of the German farmers who’d chased him away, and smiled while thinking, They really did seem like gigantic forks—I felt as if I were running away from gigantic forks at that moment.

  And there was something that sometimes, though not always, came to my mind when I thought of Hemingway, and that was that one of the biggest injuries he sustained—and he’d sustained big and small injuries all over his body for various reasons—was the big injury to his head that occurred when, while drunk one night in the bathroom of his Paris apartment, he pulled the skylight rope instead of the toilet cord, which, in turn, made the skylight fall. And thinking of this anecdote somehow drained me, and so after it came to mind I sometimes had to picture him running away from gigantic forks.

  Then one night I bought sake and lime at a supermarket, and concocted and drank a cocktail called Seven Samurai, thus becoming the first man ever to concoct and drink a cocktail called Seven Samurai, but I didn’t tell anyone about it, and later, when I was having sake with lime again, I didn’t think of it as Seven Samurai but simply as sake with lime, and so Seven Samurai became a cocktail that was prepared and drunk just once by someone and then was no more.

  My thoughts on the seven samurai sometimes made me lose myself in more rambling thoughts, and so I often had rambling thoughts about the seven samurai, sometimes half-heartedly and sometimes wholeheartedly, and something else that made me lose myself in more rambling thoughts were the plots of fictions, and I thought that the only plots in my life, if they could indeed be called plots, were the plots of day and night, of the weather of the day, and of the four seasons and the climate, and that plots, even though they were considered necessary in fiction, might as well not exist, and that the less they existed the better, but that the following plots still might as well exist:

  a plot in which seven samurai fight with one another for no reason or motive, or get swept away in a river;

  a plot in which characters I haven’t even created appear, and do things I haven’t even made them do;

  a plot that floats around on water;

  a worm-eaten apple plot;

  a plot that can be played with like a volleyball, but that can also be placed in a closet or by a window;

  a plot that can’t be seen very well, since it stands in midday shadow;

  a plot that can’t be bothered to do anything, and that sometimes answers reluctantly when you call out Plot, and that sometimes doesn’t answer you to the end, not like a dog would when he’s heard someone calling him;

  a plot that is neither intact nor not intact;

  a plot that gets worked up over nothing;

  a plot that gets worked up over a cross, as if it’s seen something unsightly;

  a plot that seems to resemble a ghost, although I’m not sure what it means for something to resemble a ghost;

  a plot with dilated eyes;

  a plot about to be asphyxiated;

  a double-helixed plot;

  a plot that can either be propped up or laid sideways, like a ladder;

  a plot that can’t be fed to the birds;

  a plot with a severed waist;

  a ping-pong table plot on which ping-pong balls bounce this way and that;

  a canned-sardines plot;

  a dissected frog plot;

  an aggravated plot;

  a venomous plot;

  a self-deceptive plot;

  a plot that’s left over, but can’t be finished off;

  a plot walking in the wilderness, clutching an empty stomach;

  a very temperamental plot;

  a shameless plot;

  a plot that even among plots is notorious for having a foul temper;

  a plot that roams the streets at night, looking suspicious as if seeking to find out the very reason it’s doing so;

  a plot that pretends to be poor;

  a things-that-shouldn’t-be-left-as-they-are plot;

  a biased plot;

  a plot without durability;

  a plot that functions only in winter, either looking like winter or dressed like winter;

  a flotsam plot;

  a deranged plot;

  a plot that does nothing but sleep;

  a plot that’s usually in an unconscious state but that likes lightning, and wakes up whenever lightning strikes;

  a plot that can be buried deep or shallow in earth, but cannot be dug up;

  a plot that can’t be shared, but can be taken away;

  a plot that doesn’t have an unspeakable story;

  a drowned-body plot;

  a possessed plot;

  an unseemly plot;

  a plot to which there isn’t more than meets the eye, but then there is;

  a plot that has many layers depending on the angle from which it’s seen;

  a plot that grazes idly on a meadow but collapses like a sheep cut out of paper when the wind blows;

  a plot that goes on a flying trapeze once a day, then comes down after a ride;

  an unsightly plot that was kicked out of a circus of plots, creating quite a sight;

  a plot that breeds goats as its regular trade and sheep on the side;

  a plot that casually disappears into the dark street when darkness falls;

  a plot that can be cut in two, one part of which can be kept and the other discarded;

  a plot that can’t be counted;

  a plot that can’t be seen with the naked eye;

  a plot in which heavy rain falls from moment to moment;

  a plot struck and burned by lightning;

  a plot that feeds on little plots;

  an ephemeral plot;

  a plot that’s given up on being a plot;

  an anti-plotist plot;

  an ill-bred plot;

  a petty plot;

  a good-for-nothing plot;

  a plot going to pot;

  a plot that doesn’t know it’s gone to pot, even though it did long ago;

  a plot that’s taken its own life;

  a plot in a thick fog;

  a hopeless plot;

  a plot that’s at odds with everything and keeps worsening;

  a plot that isn’t a plot;

  a plot that seems to have something that follows a plot although it doesn’t have something that precedes a plot, but doesn’t really; or in other words, a plot that has nothing, neither what precedes nor what follows a plot;

  a plot that digs a grave for fictions, then buries them;

  a
plot that’s hostile to other plots, one that is not a union of all the plots above;

  a plot in which all the plots above appear as fictional characters. (Anyone may write a poem or a piece of fiction with these plots, but if you do, please let me know.)

  •

  For Thanksgiving, N made oven-roasted turkey at her home in C, and a lot of people came over and partied, eating turkey, but a lot of turkey was left over and put in the fridge, and, later, while N was in Dallas with D, I was left behind with the leftover turkey—half a turkey remaining—and I had to dispose of the meat which, though I liked it, still wasn’t necessarily good at all times, and yet I had to eat it until I was sick of it, in salads, in sandwiches, cold and hot, and in all the ways I could think of, and when I did I also had to hope—feeling drowsy, perhaps because I recalled that turkey makes you sleepy—that eating all that turkey wouldn’t also make me take on the personality of a turkey, although I didn’t know what kind of personality a turkey had, and that if I was to have the personality of a turkey, I would hope to have the personality of a funny turkey. As I ate the turkey, I tried to think that what I was eating wasn’t a turkey that had died and turned into meat, but when I did think this I felt as if I were eating something that wasn’t edible at all, a tree or the root of a tree for instance, which made it even more difficult for me to eat it, and despite whatever I thought of the turkey as, whatever I turned it into in my mind, I still had to eat it in the end while thinking that what I was eating was turkey, and so I tried as much as possible to think of something else and not to think about what I was eating, but most of my thoughts reverted to turkey, to living turkeys, to the wild turkeys of Texas.

  In the United States there are about 1.2 million wild turkeys, half of which (or in other words six hundred thousand) are in Texas. They live in nests they build in trees, but are born triathletes, able to run twenty kilometers per hour, fly for up to four hundred meters, and swim as well. Most of the wild turkeys in Texas are known to live around the Rio Grande in the western part of the state, a river which originates in Colorado and part of which forms a border with Mexico and which flows into the Gulf of Mexico, and I imagined that the wild turkeys—which had hard feelings about humans because humans, when they saw them, did not pass them by but instead pointed fingers and shouted and threw rocks at them, as if they’d seen something they shouldn’t have, and as if that weren’t enough, they butchered and ate them—were biding their time in order to advance on eastern Texas and reclaim their territory, first seizing Texas and then the entire United States, but since it wasn’t time yet, they were grinding their beaks because they didn’t have teeth, and they were looking at the night sky of Texas thinking that the sky still belonged to them even though their land had been taken away, and they were drinking water from the Rio Grande, and they were putting their heads together trying to come up with a way to reclaim the state, and I thought that even if they were to get Texas back they wouldn’t do so through a physical method—unlike humans, who tediously enough resorted to force—but instead through an original method of their own—not coming in flocks, raising a cloud of dust like some kind of volunteer army or militia, and planting a winner’s flag and making it flutter in the wind—no, a method, rather, so that people wouldn’t realize what had happened, and so that even they themselves wouldn’t realize what had happened, as if that were the point, perhaps, and so people would go on living as always—not even realizing that Texas no longer belonged to them—and the turkeys, too, would go on living as always.

  Although it was a different matter from what was dreamt by some Texans who wanted the state to become independent and go back to being the Republic of Texas—in the past, Texas had belonged to Native Americans, including the Karankawa, the Kado, the Apache, the Comanche, the Wichita, the Coahuiltecan, and the Tonkawa, then successively belonged to France, Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, and the Confederate States of America, and in the end became one of the states of the United States of America—perhaps the wild turkeys trying to regain their land and the Texans who dreamt of independence could join hands together, albeit temporarily. But perhaps that wouldn’t happen, the two parties being unable to trust each other for different reasons. In the fight of the wild turkeys to regain Texas, I thought I’d side with the wild turkeys, as would my seven samurai, but that neither the seven samurai nor I would be of any help; but I believed that the turkeys would win the fight on their own without anyone’s help anyway.

  The seven samurai now fought with one another and got swept away in a river from time to time, but also sat or floated around quietly like turkeys sitting on tree branches, or other birds in nests, or ducks sitting on stagnant water, or boats on stagnant water, and I didn’t know if something had happened to them in the meantime or if something had happened to me, or what they were thinking, but it seemed that they didn’t have much on their mind just as turkeys or ducks didn’t have much on their mind, or that they didn’t have anything on their mind just as nests or boats didn’t have anything on their mind.

  There was virtually nowhere to go in the little town of C, so I thought about going to New Orleans or Oklahoma, but I thought that I’d probably want to leave New Orleans, where the streets overflowed with music, as soon as I got there because it was noisy, and although what had led me to consider going to Oklahoma was an article I’d read—in which a Korean-American comedian, who’d made an appearance on the Johnny Carson Show, said that he’d been the happiest in his life when he was studying vocal music at a university in Oklahoma while his mind was wandering after he came down with dementia—it didn’t seem like a good enough excuse for me to go to Oklahoma, and so I stayed home most of the time, but one day I went to the biggest bar in C—which was frequented by heavy drinkers, by cowboys, and by cowgirls, and by people who had nothing to do at night, and by people whose business it was to drink at night, and by people whose business it was to drink day and night—and I, who’d gone there as someone who had nothing to do during the day, but had even less to do at night, didn’t at all like the atmosphere there, where country music was playing loudly and where cowboys and cowgirls were bustling about dancing a two-step, but I bit the bullet and I had a drink at the bar and somehow ended up talking to a middle-aged cowboy who was from a farm somewhere.

  A native Texan, he spoke slowly as became a native Texan, saying one thing and stretching out the vowels, as if to say that he was going to say just that much—finding it quite bothersome to speak—since he had no choice but to speak, and then he went on to say the next thing, and in this way he said all that there was to be said. Already drunk, he mentioned after saying something else that he owned a farm, and when I showed interest he said that he’d invite me there, and when I said that I’d gladly visit he said that in order to get a proper look at his farm, you had to be on horseback, and then asked if I knew how to ride a horse, and when I said that I did he went back on his words and said that you couldn’t get a full look at it on horseback, and yet I didn’t fancy that his farm was so grand that it required a light aircraft to view it.

  He then protested that in Texas it wasn’t good manners to ask someone the size of his farm, but I’d never asked him the size of his farm. He told me what was on his farm and asked me if I wanted to see it all, and when I said that I did if possible he said that there was no need to see it all, and changing the subject he asked me if I’d ever shot a gun, and when I told him that I had he said that it had nothing to do with taking a look around a farm, and when he saw that I was at a loss for words he said that he had all kinds of guns at home. He also said that on his farm there were skeletons of dead animals such as coyotes, horses, and cows, as well as a number of abandoned oil wells, and he said once again that there were a number of abandoned oil wells, as if he were proud of the wells from which oil could no longer be extracted, and that they were all in disuse, and it seemed that he wouldn’t have sounded so proud if he were talking about an oil well from which oil could still be extracted. H
e told me I should give him my number and said that he would call me in a few days, and when I gave it to him he said once again that he would call me in a few days.

  As I ordered another drink, I hoped that he’d change the subject again and tell me something, but no words came from him and then he was snoring as if to say no words were necessary. He’d fallen asleep with his face buried between the bar and a cowboy hat, and I imagined that he liked to make himself as uncomfortable as possible when he slept, and that he fell asleep at the bar instead of at home every night, and that he then woke up and went home, though not straight to bed, but instead to a tree he favored and at the foot of which he’d slept countless times before, and I imagined that he would then catch the rest of his sleep there. The cowboy hat seemed to be saying that it could tell me unflattering things about its owner all night long, but I didn’t want to know, and yet I still went on drinking as if I were drinking side by side not with a cowboy but with a cowboy hat, which also looked drunk already, moving slightly as if tottering whenever the cowboy breathed. On top of that, the hat was a ten-gallon hat, which, because of the name, was often misunderstood to be a hat that could hold ten gallons of water, a type of hat that had originated among Spanish cowboys, and which was rarely worn by ordinary cowboys; and, in fact, it seemed as if it would be an outcast among cowboy hats, as it had a very long top that made it look quite ridiculous, and I thought that nothing—not even a hat—should look like that. The hat seemed like a hat that refused to be a hat, or a hat that had given up on being a hat.

  It seemed that if I initiated a conversation with the cowboy hat it would start talking about the farm, which its owner the cowboy had already talked about, or about how it had come to look so ridiculous, and so I drank while looking the other way. But still the cowboy hat kept coming into my sight, and it seemed to be saying that I could open up and tell it—even though it wasn’t human—whatever was on my mind, but it wasn’t in my nature to open up and tell someone whatever was on my mind regardless of the circumstance. When I got up from my seat having finished my drink the cowboy hat seemed to be asking me to take it with me, because it wanted to part with its owner who was asleep and drunk and whom it was sick of seeing but I ignored it. I hoped that the owner of the cowboy hat wouldn’t wake up to find that the hat that should’ve been on his head was now gone, and then hurl abuses at the hat which had disappeared as if fleeing by night. The owner didn’t call me afterward, and I didn’t return to the bar or ever see him again.