He stopped speaking and took a deep breath. He tapped his fingernails against the tabletop for a while. I was silent, waiting for him to go on.
“They all decide everything for us. Tell us to stay a month here, a month there. We’re like the rain, my mother and I. We rain here, and the next thing you know we’re raining somewhere else.”
The waves lapped at the rocks, leaving white foam behind; by the time the foam vanished, new waves had appeared. I watched this process vacantly. The moonlight cast irregular shadows among the rocks.
“Of course, since it’s a division of labor,” he went on, “my mother and I have our roles to play, too. It’s a two-way street. It’s hard to describe, but I think we complement their excesses by doing nothing. That’s our raison d’être. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yeah, sort of,” I replied, “but I’m not entirely sure I do.”
He laughed quietly. “A family’s a strange thing,” he said. “A family has to exist as its own premise, or else the system won’t function. In that sense, my useless legs are a kind of a banner that my family rallies around. My dead legs are the pivot around which things revolve.”
He was tapping the tabletop again. Not in irritation—merely moving his fingers and quietly contemplating things in his own time zone.
“One of the main characteristics of this system is that lack gravitates toward greater lack, excess toward greater excess. When Debussy was seeming to get nowhere with an opera he was composing, he put it this way: ‘I spent my days pursuing the nothingness—rien—it creates.’ My job is to create that void, that rien.”
He sank back into an insomniac silence, his mind wandering to some distant region. Perhaps to the void inside him. Eventually, his attention returned to the here and now, the point he came back to a few degrees out of alignment with where he’d departed from. I tried rubbing my own cheek. The scratch of stubble told me that, yes, time was still moving. I took the miniature bottle of whiskey from my pocket and laid it on the table.
“Care for a drink? I don’t have a glass, I’m afraid.”
He shook his head. “Thanks, but I don’t drink. I’m not sure how I’d react if I did, so I don’t. But I don’t mind other people drinking—be my guest.”
I tipped the bottle back and let the whiskey slide slowly down my throat. I closed my eyes, savoring the warmth. He watched the whole process from across the table.
“This might be a strange question,” he said, “but do you know anything about knives?”
“Knives?”
“Knives. You know, like hunting knives.”
I’d used knives when camping, I told him, but I didn’t know much about them. That seemed to disappoint him. But not for long.
“Never mind,” he said. “I just happen to have a knife I wanted you to take a look at. I bought it about a month ago from a catalogue. But I don’t know the first thing about knives. I don’t know if it’s any good or if I wasted my money. So I wanted to have somebody else take a look and tell me what they think. If you don’t mind.”
“No, I don’t mind,” I told him.
Gingerly he withdrew a five-inch-long, beautifully curved object from his pocket and placed it on the table.
“Don’t worry. I’m not planning to hurt anybody with it, or hurt myself. It’s just that one day I felt like I had to own a sharp knife. I was just dying to get a knife, that’s all. So I looked through some catalogues and ordered one. Nobody knows that I’m always carrying this knife around with me—not even my mother. You’re the only person who knows.”
“And I’m leaving for Tokyo tomorrow.”
“That’s right,” he said, and smiled. He picked up the knife and let it rest in his palm for a moment, testing its weight as if it held some great significance. Then he passed it to me across the table. The knife did have a strange heft—it was as if I were holding a living creature with a will of its own. Wood inlay was set into the brass handle, and the metal was cool, even though it had been in his pocket all this time.
“Go ahead and open the blade.”
I pushed a depression on the upper part of the hilt and flipped out the heavy blade. Fully extended, it was about three inches long. With the blade out, the knife felt even heavier. It wasn’t just the weight that struck me; it was the way the knife fit perfectly in my palm. I tried swinging it around a couple of times, up and down, side to side, and with that perfect balance I never had to grip harder to keep it from slipping. The steel blade, with its sharply etched blood groove, carved out a crisp arc as I slashed with it.
“Like I said, I don’t know that much about knives,” I told him, “but this is one great knife. It’s got such a great feel to it.”
“But isn’t it kind of small for a hunting knife?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it depends on what you use it for.”
“True enough,” he said, and nodded a few times as if to convince himself.
I folded the blade into the handle and handed it back to him. The young man opened it up again and deftly twirled the knife once in his hand. Then, as if he were sighting down a rifle, he shut one eye and aimed the knife directly at the full moon. Moonlight reflected off the blade and for an instant flashed on the side of his face.
“I wonder if you could do me a favor,” he said. “Could you cut something with it?”
“Cut something? Like what?”
“Anything. Whatever’s around. I just want you to cut something. I’m stuck in this chair, so there isn’t much I can cut. I’d really like it if you’d cut something up for me.”
I couldn’t think of any reason to refuse, so I picked up the knife and took a couple of stabs at the trunk of a nearby palm tree. I sliced down diagonally, lopping off the bark. Then I picked up one of those Styrofoam kickboards lying near the pool and sliced it in half lengthwise. The knife was even sharper than I’d imagined.
“This knife’s fantastic,” I said.
“It’s handcrafted,” the young man said. “And pretty expensive, too.”
I aimed the knife out at the moon as he’d done, and stared hard at it. In the light, it looked like the stem of some ferocious plant just breaking through the surface of the soil. Something that connected nothingness and excess.
“Cut some more things,” he urged me.
I slashed out at everything I could lay my hands on. At coconuts that had fallen on the ground, at the massive leaves of a tropical plant, the menu posted at the entrance to the bar. I even hacked away at a couple of pieces of driftwood on the beach. When I ran out of things to cut, I started moving slowly, deliberately, as if I were doing Tai Chi, silently slicing the knife through the night air. Nothing stood in my way. The night was deep, and time was pliable. The light of the full moon only added to that depth, that pliancy.
As I stabbed the air, I suddenly thought of the fat woman, the ex–United Airlines stewardess. I could see her pale, bloated flesh hovering in the air around me, formless, like mist. Everything was there inside that mist. The rafts, the sea, the sky, the helicopters, the pilots. I tried slashing them in two, but the perspective was off, and it all stayed just out of reach of the tip of my blade. Was it all an illusion? Or was I the illusion? Maybe it didn’t matter. Come tomorrow, I wouldn’t be here anymore.
“Sometimes I have this dream,” the young man in the wheelchair said. His voice had a strange echo to it, as if it were rising up from the bottom of a cavernous hole. “There’s a sharp knife stabbed into the soft part of my head, where the memories lie. It’s stuck deep down inside. It doesn’t hurt or weigh me down—it’s just stuck there. And I’m standing off to one side, looking at this like it’s happening to someone else. I want someone to pull the knife out, but no one knows it’s stuck inside my head. I think about yanking it out myself, but I can’t reach my hands inside my head. It’s the strangest thing. I can stab myself, but I can’t reach the knife to pull it out. And then everything starts to disappear. I start to fade away, too. Only the knife is al
ways there—to the very end. Like the bone of some prehistoric animal on the beach. That’s the kind of dream I have,” he said.
—TRANSLATED BY PHILIP GABRIEL
A PERFECT DAY FOR KANGAROOS
There were four kangaroos in the cage—one male, two females, and a newborn baby kangaroo.
My girlfriend and I were standing in front of the cage. This zoo wasn’t so popular to begin with, and what with it being Monday morning, the animals outnumbered the visitors. No exaggeration. Cross my heart.
The whole point for us was to see the baby kangaroo. I mean, why else would we be at the zoo?
A month before in the local section of the newspaper we’d spotted an announcement of the baby kangaroo’s birth, and ever since then we’d been patiently waiting for the perfect morning to pay the baby kangaroo a visit. But somehow the right day just wouldn’t come. One morning it was raining, and sure enough, more rain the next day. Of course it was too muddy the day after that, and then the wind blew like crazy for two days straight. One morning my girlfriend had a toothache, and another morning I had some business to take care of down at city hall. I’m not trying to make some profound statement here, but I would venture to say this:
That’s life.
So anyhow, a month zipped on by.
A month can go by just like that. I could barely remember anything I’d done the whole month. Sometimes it felt like I’d done a lot, sometimes like I hadn’t accomplished a thing. It was only when the guy came at the end of the month to collect money for the newspaper delivery that I realized a whole month had flown by.
Yep, that’s life all right.
Finally, though, the morning we were going to see the baby kangaroo arrived. We woke up at six, drew back the curtains, and determined it was a perfect day for kangaroos. We quickly washed up, had breakfast, fed the cat, did some quick laundry, put on hats to protect us from the sun, and set off.
“Do you think the baby kangaroo is still alive?” she asked me in the train.
“I’m sure it is. There wasn’t any article about it dying. If it had died, I’m sure we would have read about it.”
“Maybe it’s not dead, but sick and in some hospital.”
“Well, I think there would have been an article about that, too.”
“But what if it had a nervous breakdown and is hiding off in a corner?”
“A baby having a breakdown?”
“Not the baby. The mother! Maybe it suffered some sort of trauma and is holed up with the baby in a dark back room.”
Women really think of every possible scenario, I thought, impressed. A trauma? What kind of trauma could affect a kangaroo?
“If I don’t see the baby kangaroo now I don’t think I’ll have another chance to. Ever,” she said.
“I suppose not.”
“I mean, have you ever seen one?”
“Nope, not me,” I said.
“Are you so sure you’ll ever have another chance to?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s why I’m worried.”
“Yeah, but look,” I shot back, “I’ve never seen a giraffe give birth, or even whales swimming, so why make such a big deal about a baby kangaroo?”
“Because it’s a baby kangaroo,” she said. “That’s why.”
I gave up and started leafing through the newspaper. I’d never once won an argument with a girl.
The kangaroo was, naturally, still alive and well, and he (or was it a she?) looked a lot bigger than in the photo in the paper, as it leapt all around the kangaroo enclosure. It was less a baby than a kind of mini-kangaroo. My girlfriend was disappointed.
“It isn’t a baby anymore,” she said.
“Sure it is,” I said, trying to cheer her up.
I wrapped an arm around her waist and gently stroked her. She shook her head. I wanted to do something to console her, but anything I might have said would not have changed one essential fact: the baby kangaroo had indeed grown up. So I kept quiet.
I went over to the concession stand and bought two chocolate ice cream cones, and when I got back she was still leaning against the cage, staring at the kangaroos.
“It isn’t a baby anymore,” she repeated.
“You sure?” I asked, handing her one of the ice creams.
“A baby would be inside its mother’s pouch.”
I nodded and licked my ice cream.
“But it isn’t in her pouch.”
We tried to locate the mother kangaroo. The father was easy to spot—he was the biggest and quietest of the foursome. Looking like a composer whose talent has run dry, he just stood stock-still, staring at the leaves inside their feed trough. The other kangaroos were female, identical in shape, color, and expression. Either one could have been the baby’s mother.
“One of them’s got to be the mother, and one of them isn’t,” I commented.
“Um.”
“So what is the one who isn’t the mother?”
“You got me,” she said.
Oblivious to all this, the baby kangaroo leapt around the enclosure, occasionally pausing to scratch in the dirt for no apparent reason. He/She certainly found a lot to keep him/ her occupied. The baby kangaroo leapt around where the father stood, chewed at a bit of leaves, dug in the dirt, bothered the females, lay down on the ground, then got up and hopped around some more.
“How come kangaroos hop so fast?” my girlfriend asked.
“To get away from their enemies.”
“What enemies?”
“Human beings,” I said. “Humans kill them with boomerangs and eat them.”
“Why do baby kangaroos climb into their mother’s pouch?”
“So they can run away with her. Babies can’t run so fast.”
“So they’re protected?”
“Yeah,” I said. “They protect all their young.”
“How long do they protect them like that?”
I knew I should have read up on kangaroos in an encyclopedia before we made this little excursion. A barrage of questions like this was entirely predictable.
“A month or two, I imagine.”
“Well, that baby’s only a month old,” she said, pointing to the baby kangaroo. “So it still must climb into its mother’s pouch.”
“Hmm,” I said. “I guess so.”
“Don’t you think it’d feel great to be inside that pouch?”
“Yeah, it would.”
The sun was high in the sky by this time, and we could hear the shouts of children at a swimming pool nearby. Sharply etched white summer clouds drifted by.
“Would you like something to eat?” I asked her.
“A hot dog,” she said. “And a Coke.”
A college student was working the hot dog stand, which was shaped like a minivan. He had a boom box on and Stevie Wonder and Billy Joel serenaded me as I waited for the hot dogs to cook.
When I got back to the kangaroo cage she said, “Look!” and pointed to one of the female kangaroos. “You see? It’s inside her pouch!”
And sure enough the baby kangaroo had snuggled up inside his mother’s pouch. (Assuming this was the mother.) The pouch had filled out, and a pair of pointed little ears and the tip of a tail peeked out. It was a wonderful sight, and definitely made our trip worth the effort.
“It must be pretty heavy with the baby inside,” she said.
“Don’t worry—kangaroos are strong.”
“Really?”
“Of course they are. That’s how they’ve survived.”
Even with the hot sun the mother kangaroo wasn’t sweating. She looked like someone who’d just finished her afternoon shopping at a supermarket on the main drag in upscale Aoyama and was taking a break in a nearby coffee shop.
“She’s protecting her baby, right?”
“Yep.”
“I wonder if the baby’s asleep.”
“Probably.”
We ate our hot dogs, drank our Cokes, and left the kangaroo cage.
When w
e left, the father kangaroo was still staring into the feed trough in search of lost notes. The mother kangaroo and her baby had become one unit, resting in the flow of time, while the mysterious other female was hopping around the enclosure as if taking her tail out on a test run.
It looked like it was going to be a steamy day, the first hot one we’d had in a while.
“Hey, you want to grab a beer somewhere?” she asked.
“Sounds great,” I said.
—TRANSLATED BY PHILIP GABRIEL
DABCHICK
When I reached the bottom of a narrow concrete stairway, I found myself in a corridor that stretched on forever straight ahead—a long corridor with ceilings so high the passageway felt more like a dried-up drainage canal than a corridor. It had no decoration of any kind. It was an authentic corridor that was all corridor and nothing but corridor. The lighting was feeble and uneven, as if the light itself had finally reached its destination after a series of terrible mishaps. It had to pass through a layer of thick black dust that caked the fluorescent tubes installed at irregular intervals along the ceiling. And of those tubes, one in three was burnt out. I could hardly see my hand before my eyes. The place was silent. The only sound in the gloomy hallway was the curiously flat slapping of my tennis shoes against the concrete floor.
I kept walking: two hundred yards, three hundred yards, maybe half a mile, not thinking, just walking, no time, no distance, no sense that I was moving forward in any way. But I must have been. All of a sudden I was standing in a T-shaped intersection.
A T-shaped intersection?
I fished a crumpled postcard from my jacket pocket and let my eyes wander over its message: “Walk straight down the corridor. Where it intersects at right angles with another corridor, you will find a door.” I searched the wall in front of me, but there was no sign of a door, no sign there had ever been a door, no indication there would ever be a door installed in this wall. It was a plain, simple concrete wall with no distinguishing features other than those shared by other concrete walls. No metaphysical doors, no symbolic doors, no metaphorical doors, no nothing. I ran my palm over long stretches of the wall, but it was just a wall, smooth and blank.