“What was the cat’s name?” Izumi asked.
“I forget,” I told her. “Gradually, evening came on, and it grew darker. I was worried and waited for a long time for the cat to climb down. Finally it got pitch dark. And we never saw the cat again.”
“That’s not so unusual,” Izumi said. “Cats often disappear like that. Especially when they’re in heat. They get overexcited and then can’t remember how to get home. Your cat must have come down from the pine tree and gone off somewhere when you weren’t watching.”
“I suppose,” I said. “But I was still a kid then, and I was positive that the cat had decided to live up in the tree. There had to be some reason it couldn’t come down. Every day, I’d sit on the porch and look up at the pine tree, hoping to see the cat peeking out from between the branches.”
Izumi seemed to have lost interest. She lit her second Salem, then raised her head and looked at me.
“Do you think about your child sometimes?” she asked.
I had no idea how to respond. “Sometimes,” I said honestly. “But not all the time. Occasionally something will remind me.”
“Don’t you want to see him?”
“Sometimes I do,” I said. But that was a lie. I just thought that that was the way I was supposed to feel. When I was living with my son, I thought he was the cutest thing I’d ever seen. Whenever I got home late, I’d always go to my son’s room first, to see his sleeping face. Sometimes I was seized by a desire to squeeze him so hard he might break. Now everything about him—his face, his voice, his actions—existed in a distant land. All I could recall with any clarity was the smell of his soap. I liked to take baths with him and scrub him. He had sensitive skin, so my wife always kept a special bar of soap just for him. All I could recall about my own son was the smell of that soap.
“If you want to go back to Japan, don’t let me stop you,” Izumi said. “Don’t worry about me. I’d manage somehow.”
I nodded. But I knew that it wasn’t going to happen.
“I wonder if your child will think of you that way when he’s grown up,” Izumi said. “Like you were a cat who disappeared up a pine tree.”
I laughed. “Maybe so,” I said.
Izumi crushed out her cigarette in the ashtray and sighed. “Let’s go home and make love, all right?” she said.
“It’s still morning,” I said.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Not a thing,” I said.
Later, when I woke up in the middle of the night, Izumi wasn’t there. I looked at my watch next to the bed. Twelve thirty. I fumbled for the lamp, switched it on, and gazed around the room. Everything was as quiet as if someone had stolen in while I slept and sprinkled silent dust all around. Two bent Salem butts were in the ashtray, a balled-up empty cigarette pack beside them. I got out of bed and walked to the living room. Izumi wasn’t there. She wasn’t in the kitchen or the bathroom. I opened the door and looked out at the front yard. Just a pair of vinyl lounge chairs, bathed in the brilliant moonlight. “Izumi,” I called out in a small voice. Nothing. I called out again, this time more loudly. My heart pounded. Was this my voice? It sounded too loud, unnatural. Still no reply. A faint breeze from the sea rustled the tips of the pampas grass. I shut the door, went back to the kitchen, and poured myself half a glass of wine, to calm down.
Radiant moonlight poured in the kitchen window, throwing weird shadows on the walls and floor. The whole thing looked like the symbolic set of some avant-garde play. I suddenly remembered: the night the cat had disappeared up the pine tree had been exactly like this one, a full moon with not a wisp of cloud. After dinner that night, I’d gone out to the porch again to look for the cat. As the night had deepened, the moonlight had brightened. For some inexplicable reason, I couldn’t take my eyes off the pine tree. From time to time I was sure that I could make out the cat’s eyes, sparkling between the branches. But it was just an illusion.
I tugged on a thick sweater and a pair of jeans, snatched up the coins on the table, put them in my pocket, and went outside. Izumi must have had trouble sleeping and gone out for a walk. That had to be it. The wind had completely died down. All I could hear was the sound of my tennis shoes crunching along the gravel, like in an exaggerated movie sound track. Izumi must have gone to the harbor, I decided. There was nowhere else for her to go. There was only one road to the harbor, so I couldn’t miss her. The lights in the houses along the road were all off, the moonlight dyeing the ground silver. It looked like the bottom of the sea.
About halfway to the harbor, I heard the faint sound of music and came to a halt. At first I thought it was a hallucination—like when the air pressure changes and you hear a ringing in your ears. But, listening carefully, I was able to make out a melody. I held my breath and listened as hard as I could. Like steeping my mind in the darkness within my own body. No doubt about it, it was music. Somebody playing an instrument. Live, unamplified music. But what kind of instrument was it? The mandolin-like instrument that Anthony Quinn played in Zorba the Greek? A bouzouki? But who would be playing a bouzouki in the middle of the night? And where?
The music seemed to be coming from the village at the top of the hill we climbed every day for exercise. I stood at the crossroads, wondering what to do, which direction to take. Izumi must have heard the same music at this very spot. And I had a distinct feeling that if she had she would have headed toward it.
I took the plunge and turned right at the crossroads, heading up the slope I knew so well. There were no trees lining the path, just knee-high thorny bushes hidden away in the shadows of the cliffs. The further I walked the louder and more distinct the music grew. I could make out the melody more clearly, too. There was a festive flashiness to it. I imagined some sort of banquet being held in the village on top of the hill. Then I remembered that earlier that day, at the harbor, we had seen a lively wedding procession. This must be the wedding banquet, going on into the night.
Just then—without warning—I disappeared.
Maybe it was the moonlight, or that midnight music. With each step I took, I felt myself sinking deeper into a quicksand where my identity vanished; it was the same emotion I had in the plane, flying over Egypt. This wasn’t me walking in the moonlight. It wasn’t me, but a stand-in, fashioned out of plaster. I rubbed my hand against my face. But it wasn’t my face. And it wasn’t my hand. My heart pounded in my chest, sending the blood coursing through my body at a crazy speed. This body was a plaster puppet, a voodoo doll into which a sorcerer had breathed a fleeting life. The glow of real life was missing. My makeshift, phony muscles were just going through the motions. I was a puppet, to be used in some sacrifice.
So where is the real me? I wondered.
Suddenly, Izumi’s voice came out of nowhere. The real you has been eaten by the cats. While you’ve been standing here, those hungry cats have devoured you—eaten you all up. All that’s left are bones.
I looked around me. It was an illusion, of course. All I could see was the rock-strewn ground, the low bushes, and their tiny shadows. The voice had been in my head.
Stop thinking such dark thoughts, I told myself. As if trying to avoid a huge wave, I clung to a rock at the bottom of the sea and held my breath. The wave would surely pass by. You’re just tired, I told myself, and overwrought. Grab on to what’s real. It doesn’t matter what—just grab something real. I reached into my pocket for the coins. They grew sweaty in my hand.
I tried hard to think of something else. My sunny apartment back in Unoki. The record collection I’d left behind. My nice little jazz collection. My specialty was white jazz pianists of the fifties and sixties. Lennie Tristano, Al Haig, Claude Williamson, Lou Levy, Russ Freeman. Most of the albums were out of print, and it had taken a lot of time and money to collect them. I had diligently made the rounds of record shops, making trades with other collectors, slowly building up my archives. Most of the performances weren’t what you’d call “first-rate.” But I loved the unique, intimate a
tmosphere those musty old records conveyed. The world would be a pretty dull place if it were made up of only the first-rate, right? Every detail of those record jackets came back to me—the weight and heft of the albums in my hands.
But now they were all gone forever. And I’d obliterated them myself. Never again in this lifetime would I hear those records.
I remembered the smell of tobacco when I kissed Izumi. The feel of her lips and tongue. I closed my eyes. I wanted her beside me. I wanted her to hold my hand, as she did when we flew over Egypt, and never let go.
The wave finally passed over me and away, and with it, too, the music.
Had they stopped playing? Certainly that was a possibility. After all, it was nearly one o’clock. Or maybe there never had been any music to begin with. That, too, was entirely possible. I no longer trusted my hearing. I closed my eyes again and sank down into my consciousness—dropped a thin, weighted line down into that darkness. But I couldn’t hear a thing. Not even an echo.
I looked at my watch. And realized I wasn’t wearing one. Sighing, I stuck both hands in my pockets. I didn’t really care about the time. I looked up at the sky. The moon was a cold rock, its skin eaten away by the violence of the years. The shadows on its surface were like cancer reaching out its awful feelers. The moonlight plays tricks with people’s minds. And makes cats disappear. It had made Izumi disappear. Maybe it had all been carefully choreographed, beginning with that one night long ago.
I stretched, bent my arms, my fingers. Should I continue, or go back the way I came? Where had Izumi gone? Without her, how was I supposed to go on living, all by myself on this backwater island? She was the only thing that held together the fragile, provisional me.
I continued to climb uphill. I’d come this far and might as well reach the top. Had there really been music there? I had to see for myself, even if only the faintest of clues remained. In five minutes, I had reached the summit. To the south, the hill sloped down to the sea, the harbor, and the sleeping town. A scattering of streetlights lit the coast road. The other side of the mountain was wrapped in darkness. There was no indication whatsoever that a lively celebration had taken place here only a short while before.
I returned to the apartment and downed a glass of brandy. I tried to go to sleep, but I couldn’t. Until the eastern sky grew light, I was held in the grip of the moon. Then, suddenly, I pictured those cats, starving to death in a locked apartment. I—the real me—was dead, and they were alive, eating my flesh, biting into my heart, sucking my blood, devouring my penis. Far away, I could hear them lapping up my brains. Like Macbeth’s witches, the three lithe cats surrounded my broken head, slurping up that thick soup inside. The tips of their rough tongues licked the soft folds of my mind. And with each lick my consciousness flickered like a flame and faded away.
—TRANSLATED BY PHILIP GABRIEL
A “POOR AUNT” STORY
1
It started on a perfectly beautiful Sunday afternoon in July—the very first Sunday afternoon in July. Two or three chunks of cloud floated white and tiny in a distant corner of the sky, like well-formed punctuation marks placed with exceptional care. Unobstructed by anything at all, the light of the sun poured down on the world to its heart’s content. In this kingdom of July, even the crumpled silver sphere of a chocolate wrapper discarded on the lawn gave off a proud sparkle, like a legendary crystal at the bottom of a lake. If you stared at the scene long enough, you could tell that the sunlight enfolded yet another kind of light, like one Chinese box inside another. The inner light looked like countless grains of pollen—grains that were soft and opaque and that hung in the sky, almost motionless, until, at long last, they settled down upon the surface of the earth.
On the way home from a Sunday stroll, I had stopped by the plaza outside the Picture Gallery. Sitting at the edge of the pond, my companion and I looked across the water toward the two bronze unicorns on the other shore. The long rainy season had finally ended, and a new summer breeze stirred the leaves of the oak trees, raising tiny ripples now and then on the surface of the shallow pond. Time moved like the breeze: starting and stopping, stopping and starting. Soft-drink cans shone through the clear water of the pond. To me, they looked like the sunken ruins of an ancient lost city. Before us passed a softball team in uniform, a boy on a bicycle, an old man walking his dog, a young foreigner in jogging shorts. The breeze carried snatches of music from a large portable radio on the grass: a sugary song of love either lost or about to be. I seemed to recognize the tune, but I couldn’t be sure. It may have just sounded like one I knew. Half-listening, I could feel my bare arms soaking up the sunlight—soundlessly, softly, gently. Every once in a while, I would bring my arms up to face level and stretch them straight out. Summer was here.
Why a poor aunt, of all things, should have grabbed my heart on a Sunday afternoon like this, I have no idea. There was no poor aunt to be seen in the vicinity, nothing to make me imagine her existence. She came to me, nonetheless, and then she was gone. If only for some hundredth part of a second, she had been in my heart. And when she moved on, she left a strange, human-shaped emptiness in her place. It felt as if someone had zipped past a window and disappeared. You run to the window and stick your head out, but no one is there.
A poor aunt?
I scanned the area, then looked up at the sky. Come and gone. Like the transparent path of a bullet, the words had been absorbed into the early Sunday afternoon. Beginnings are always like this. One minute everything exists, the next minute everything is lost.
I tried the words out on my companion. “I’d like to write something about a poor aunt.” I’m one of those people who try to write stories.
“A poor aunt?”
She seemed a bit surprised. For a moment, she looked at me with eyes that were attempting to gauge something. “Why? Why a poor aunt?”
Not even I knew the answer to that. For some reason, things that grabbed me were always things I didn’t understand.
I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertip along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.
“I wonder if anybody would want to read a story like that?” she said.
“True,” I said, “it might not be what you’d call a good read.”
“Then why write about such a thing?”
“I can’t put it into words very well,” I said. “In order to explain why I want to write a story about a poor aunt, I’d have to write the story, but once the story was finished, there wouldn’t be any reason to explain the reason for writing the story—or would there?”
She smiled and lit a crumpled cigarette that she took from her pocket. She always crumpled her cigarettes, sometimes so badly they wouldn’t light. This one lit.
“By the way,” she said. “Do you have any poor aunts among your relatives?”
“Not a one,” I said.
“Well, I do. Exactly one. The genuine article. I even lived with her for a few years.”
I watched her eyes. They were as calm as ever.
“But I don’t want to write about her,” she added. “I don’t want to write a single word about that aunt of mine.”
The portable radio started playing a different tune, much like the first one, but this I didn’t recognize at all.
“You don’t have a single poor aunt in your family, but still you want to write a ‘poor aunt’ story. Meanwhile, I do have a real, live poor aunt, but I don’t want to write about her. Sort of strange, don’t you think?”
I nodded. “I wonder why.”
She just tipped her head a little and said nothing. With her back to me, she allowed her slender fingers to trail in the water. It seemed as if my question were coursing through her fingers to be conducted to the ruined city beneath the water. It’s still down there, I’m sure, the question mark glittering at the bottom of the pond like a polished metal fragment. For all I know, it’s showering the cola cans around it with that same question.
I wonder wh
y. I wonder why. I wonder why.
From the tip of her crumpled cigarette, she dropped her crumpled ashes on the ground. “To tell you the truth,” she said, “I do have some things I’d like to say about my poor aunt. But it’s impossible for me to come up with the right words. I just can’t do it—because I know a real poor aunt.” She bit her lip. “It’s hard—a lot harder than you seem to realize.”
I looked up at the bronze unicorns again, their front hooves thrust out in angry protest against the flow of time for abandoning them in its wake. She wiped the pond water from her fingers on the hem of her shirt, wiped them again, and then she turned to face me. “You’re going to try to write about a poor aunt,” she said. “You’re going to take on this responsibility. And the way I see it, taking on the responsibility for something means offering it salvation. I wonder, though, whether you are capable of that just now. You don’t even have a real poor aunt.”
I released a long, deep sigh.
“Sorry,” she said.
“That’s OK,” I replied. “You’re probably right.”
And she was. I didn’t even have / A poor aunt of my own.
Huh. Like lines from a song.
2
Chances are, you don’t have a poor aunt among your relatives, either. In which case, you and I have something in common. It’s an odd thing to have in common—like sharing a puddle on a quiet morning.
But still, you must have at least seen a poor aunt at someone’s wedding. Just as every bookshelf has a long-unread book and every closet has a long-unworn shirt, every wedding reception has a poor aunt.
Almost no one bothers to introduce her. Almost no one even talks to her. No one asks her to give a speech. She sits at the table where she belongs, but she’s just there—like an empty milk bottle. With sad, little slurps, she spoons in her consommé. She eats her salad with her fish fork. She can’t manage to scoop up all her green beans. And she’s the only one without a spoon when the ice cream comes. With luck, the present she gives the young couple will be lost in the back of the closet. And if luck goes the other way, hers will be the present thrown out at moving time along with that dusty, unidentifiable trophy and all that goes with it.