Water Cat
Even now, I can clearly recall the period in my childhood when the “ritual” possessed me like a fever. And the cats we spent intimate days with float up in my dreams on exhausted nights. Freed from everything, they float and sink, frolicking with fish. The cats gradually multiply until they become a school of cats, swimming in the wide sea.
For some reason, I understand everything in my dream. Yes, I see; I sometimes sigh. I understand that everything had to be the way it was at that time: the ritual, the melancholic face of the leader boy we called “the Priest”.
But when I wake up from this familiar dream, the past seems washed out and I realize that I am still, as always, living in the season of betrayal.
Chapter 1—Ritual: Fear Grows Under the Fur
In March, still the early spring, of 1890, the dockhands at the Liverpool port were, as always, sick of their unloading procedure. The load of that day was “fertilizer” that had come all the way from Alexandria in Egypt. The men could smell the moldy, dusty odor from branded wooden crates.
“Ugh. Smells like the inside of a catacomb,” one of them even commented, in a quiet voice. They all wanted to be done with the tedious work so that they could go and swig a half-pint of beer, wet their parched throats. No fertilizer from Egypt could be that good.
The dockhands were right. That day’s crates were suspicious, both in terms of their sender and their content. This fertilizer that was bought in mass quantity and sent to the port in England by an Alexandrian speculator actually consisted of the debris of countless cat mummies excavated from Ben Hassan’s pyramid. An endless number of cat mummies wrapped in linen had come out of that grave. They had struck a bottomless mine that would provide a stable year’s supply of fertilizer. So first, 8000 cat bodies, and then countless others had ended up in the ground of this region.
The cat was finally elevated to godhood in Egypt during the Tenth Dynasty, in 15th century BC. The heir of Tuthmosis IV and Amenhotep II, and the father of Amenhotep III, the Rah built a temple in Ben Hassan during his eight-year reign. The temple was dedicated to the goddess with a feline head, the goddess Pashat, who is also known as Bashat. Cats were her sacred creatures and it was thought that their eyes were rays of sunlight traveling from the other world. Killing cats was punishable by death, and when cats died, their masters wallowed in grief, and showed their state of mourning by shaving off their eyebrows. The corpses, with their intestines carved out, were cleansed and perfumed with rich scented oil; then they were wrapped in many layers of cloth and given proper burials. If the masters were wealthy, cats were laid out in colorful coffins. Whether or not the cats appreciated this was beside the point. After all, this was a country where the lives of cats were taken more seriously than victories in war. After three thousand years, the authority of the Goddess Bashat ended with its sacred virtues eaten up by carrots and pumpkins in the fields of Yorkshire.
Time just worsened. The season of rotten fish arrived.
Even three-quarters of a century after the cat mummies arrived at the port in Liverpool, their ordeals continued.
Now, one of the descendants of those cats vaguely cursed its fate in the darkness. It had made a blunder, after being chased arthe hands of fanatical heathens – which, in every age, included children. Prohibited even from taking its normal graceful saunter, it could only wait for that moment, in its dark prison, with its eyes open. Dozing, it could only dream of silvery fish.
The dream of silver scales eventually returned the cat to the memory of its past grandeur and golden throne. It dreamt of those sacred days when its ancestors had napped in the burning desert kingdom. Its ancestors had played the part of gods, given a temple looking down on rushing torrents. Would it, too, the cat wonders, be able to see the same sight?
The cat’s eyes, those beams of sunlight traveling from the other world, widened in the darkness.
Times just worsened. The season of rotten fish arrived.
Even this darkness, my darkness, is filthy. Does my anxiety emerge from this darkness? And what about these children who have taken hold of me? Anxiety, without taking a definite shape, grows under the soft fur. Until I see the light, I am entangled only with my own smell, and the thoughts of these children remain mysterious.
The boys sat in a circle, in the small field behind a small factory. They looked eagerly at the cardboard box placed in the center. No one spoke. They were lost in thoughts of the fat of the creature inside. Their leader, a boy everyone called “the Priest,” had not yet arrived.
Then, a boy who came late asked his companions, “Who brought it?”
“Tastuo. He brought the one from his house,” said one of the boys who had already been sitting in the circle.
The boy named Tatsuo had already offered a newborn kitten for the ritual. Today, he had brought the mother cat.
What a brown-noser. You’ll see. He’ll come here with his little sister in the box. That one, yeah, that dirty one, with snot hanging down from her nose. It was always the number one disciple who whispered these things. He never got blood on his hands, but was zealous about becoming the Priest’s favorite. What he hated the most was someone like Tatsuo, who contributed the most offerings to the ritual, despite the fact that he was slow.
“I’ll bring one tomorrow. I’ve already decided which one,” the favorite said.
“Shit, right. What are you going to do, use catnip? Every stray in this town’s gonna come,” someone answered.
The boys once again stared at their box.
After making them wait for a long time, the Priest showed up.
All the boys gossiping about him hushed, and nervously offered the box containing the sacrifice. The boy called the Priest, receiving the offering in silence, put on a wizened face and began to carefully examine the creature inside. No one spoke. No one had really decided on this rule; it had been like that ever since the ritual had first spread amongst the boys like a fever. A sweat-sour smell rose up from boy’s armpits. The smallest boy gulped in anticipation.
After the Priest had appraised the sacrifice, he cautiously closed the lid of the box and gave it back to an underling boy. This act was also the signal for departure. The boys held their breath and watched the Priest’s next move. The direction the Priest decided to walk set the course for the procession for the ritual. Today, they seemed to be heading toward the eastern part of the town. With that, the boys’ tensions seemed to calm down a little. They whispered amongst themselves.
“I bet it’ll swim.”
“Do you wanna bet?”
“Three baseball cards.”
“Okay, deal.”
“It’s pretty huge.”
“Doesn’t matter. Cat’s a cat.”
The boys made their way to the hilly road leading to the river. Under the sleepy late afternoon sun, the happy march of the cruel ritual began. It seemed that the boys were up to no good again, but the adults couldn’t be bothered with these children.
Busier than before, fathers couldn’t come home as often. In the town, the earth was being dug out continuously. As if driven by something, adults coloured the surface of the world, constructing buildings and bridges, widening roads. Graveled roads were quickly paved and hardened with asphalt smelling of gasoline, no longer turning muddy on rainy days. But by mid-summer, the asphalt melted, turning soles of shoes black with coal tar, and the pavement itself stunk. And then, with the underground sewage construction, the pavement was dug up once again. Pressingly busy. But because of that, children were given free time to run around. At that time, it seemed like they had all the time in the world.
The cruel ritual party marched on happily.
The boy leading the group had already glimpsed the light glinting from the river. The tamed river flowed slowly between two banks reinforced by boards. On this weekday afternoon, no living thing was about except for the blazing sun and grass and the hum of boys’ voices.
With the signal from the Priest, the box that had been carefully carried all this way was put down. Now, it was the boys’ turn to examine the sacrifice. Today, it would be an ancient, ratty-furred cat. Startled by the sudden light, the cat stood on its guard, then hissed. Its pupils thinned like needles and its mouth split from ear to ear. The boys were taken aback by the cat’s anger. If they weren’t careful, the cat could scratch them; even worse, it might jump out of the box and escape. They had made that mistake too many times.
The smell of cat, long imprisoned in the box, was foul. Every cat possessed an individual odor, some smelling raw, some smelling rotten. The smallest boy gulped again. Wind appeared on the bank at that moment.
The boys all stood up at once. The Priest started to walk toward the water after grabbing the cat.
“Wonder if it’ll swim.”
“Usually – big ones like that usually do.”
“If it swims up, then we’ll catch it again.”
Not paying attention to the boys’ anxiety, the Priest, as if understanding everything, continued with the ritual. Grasping the panicking cat’s tail, he swung it around above his head. Everyone held their breath: is it possible to hammer-throw a cat?
After being swung to the Priest’s heart’s content, the cat was thrown into the river. There was a piercing scream. It rolled, then hit the water. Splash. Then sudden silence.
It sank. It didn’t float up.
The boys stared at the river. If a cat didn’t float up at all, the ritual turned into something unpleasant. Cats didn’t rise up only if they had completely blacked out or hit their heads against a rock or something hard at the bottom.
“Look, there it is!”
The cat emerged at a spot unexpectedly downstream.
The boys started to run.
“It’s gonna swim!” cried voices of wonder and disappointment.
The cat looked surprisingly small when wet. Poking out its thin head above the water, it began to move its forelegs frantically. It swam as if every part of its body loathed the water. No one could really call that swimming – it was more like struggling. Despite paddling, the cat was barely moving forward. Perhaps it had lost its sense of balance completely, having been flung around in a pell-mell fashion. There was no of trace of its agility on the ground; it just struggled and struggled in the watery hell it had been thrown into.
All the same, the current was carrying the cat nearer to the shore. If it struggled some more, it might reach the bank. So the boys, anticipating another ritual, waited there.
The cat inched nearer to the shore. The boys were hoping, thinking seriously that there would be another chance at the ritual.
But, as if to jeer at them, most cats succeeded with this last spurt. They almost always disappeared into the water. Like a fish escaping from a line, they always slapped the surface with their tails and dove even deeper. No one ever believed that they drowned. Even if the cats had lost one of their nine lives then and there, they must at least have escaped safely from the boys.
When the cat completely disappeared, the boys sighed and groaned: “Oh no.”
No one can explain why this cruel game proliferated amongst us boys. Neither I, 11 years old at that time of the ritual, nor my little brother, who was 9 years old and following me around everywhere, knew how this game had started. One year, one day, the ritual had been resurrected with that gaunt boy as the Priest. We had not been the first ones. This ritual had been handed down secretly from one generation to another throughout history. Children, raising their round and soft hands, looked down at the corpse of a beast they had just killed. This kind of ritual had been repeated again and again on the tops of desolated hills, for eons. But on our hands there was no blood, and no corpse remained with us.
Many, many cats were carried off by the river like this. They didn’t drown. They only changed their habitat from land to water and then escaped to the sea. Cats in water must have moved more gracefully than on land. And they must have been able to more easily catch fish.
We must have been either bored or crazy.
Even now, I can still clearly recall that period in my childhood when the “ritual” possessed me like a fever. When things get too tough, the cats suddenly appear in stifling dreams on nights when I’m exhausted.
In my dreams, we are always marching on the embankment of the river. We had always thought about going to the sea where the cats had gone before us, but we never made it that far. I always wake up right as we reach the estuary where we can smell the hint of ocean. As a child, I almost never went to the sea – and even when I did, it was to beaches in the summer. That may account for our meager imagination of going downstream to the sea. We were children of an old castle town in the middle of the Kanto plains.
But you should not be deceived by the word “castle”. Even though it was a castle, it was only a flat castle, and by this time, there remained only a building made from what had once been a castle entrance left standing. We never thought about the ancient time of warriors. Besides, we lived in the newly developed area further south from the old castle town where people were reminded of the old days. My father said that when he first moved here right after the war, owls hooted nightly in the nearby forest and there were still fields all around where you expected animals like foxes to run. “Soon this will be the center of the town, you’ll see.” And as my father prophesized, more houses were built year after year. And the owls, the birds I hated as a small boy, began to disappear.
As the city moved southward, cats also migrated south and grew in number. By the time we were in the two-digit Showa era, everything was already in place for our “ritual” to take place.
After the mating season, the freezing February nights when they purred and clawed each other, running from one alley to another then copulating quietly in the dark, when they took naps in the early spring sun, the “ritual” was resurrected abruptly in this town or that town. Suddenly, those cautious and swift cats fell easily into the hands of boys. And as if it were natural, the boys took the cats to the river.
We must have been either bored or crazy.
If we weren’t, why would we have returned so many cats to the river? I want to think that we were bored. At school, they taught us boring lessons again and again, and adults were absorbed with various activities related to the soon-to-begin Tokyo Olympics. At every school, stimulated by the zealous nationalistic sports event, “marching bands” were organized and drumming was taken up by children everywhere.
It was, of course, a great feeling to march around following the rhythmical beats of newly purchased drums. This was a time when every boy aspired to be a member of a marching band. We had never heard anything like the precise and clipped sound of drums before in our lives. Or the marching of white, brisk socks like this. We didn’t mind sacrificing a little of our freedom to be a member, just for that.
But we soon learned that joining the marching band was impossible for those of us with behavioral problems. It was nearly impossible to be in the band without recommendations from our teachers. If grades and conduct were the criteria, of course there was no way for us to even touch a drum, never mind play one. In short, we had no chance. Against the great odds, one of my friends had managed to worm his way into the wind section. But what good was it if you weren’t in the percussion section, drumming?
All the same, my little brother kept practicing his drumming. His plan was to start practicing ahead of time, though he was still in a lower grade and couldn’t even audition for the band. Every day, he drummed on the bottom of the empty kerosene barrel with sticks cut from bamboo. Eventually, he had someone cut the barrel in two and put string on two sides so he could hang it from his neck. And that was how we ended up with an odd drummer leading our procession.
We marched on.
Following the drummer and the Priest, the boy carrying the cardboard box walked solemnly. And after these three, five boys marched in step, then out of step. A dog barked apprehensively from over the fence. Stupid dogs, we don’t want anything to do with you. You are land creatures down to your bones. You can doggy paddle all you want, but you’ll never be able to swim gracefully like a cat. One of the boys kicked a rock over the fence.
Nevertheless, the Priest didn’t seem to be enjoying this at all. At each ritual, the Priest led us to the place he had decided on, but he stared straight ahead during the march without a word. He lived with his father, who owned a small factory. The factory itself dealt mainly with lens manufacturing, and had two workers come in each morning.
The father was an odd man. He was always standing by the large furnace that boiled crude petroleum; once in a while, he would come outside for fresh air, covered in sweat, only to glare piercingly the at scenery around him. It was not like he came out to smoke or to stretch: this man, when he cooled down, spat on the ground twice, three times, and returned to the dim interior of the factory. He seemed to possess such stretched arms and legs, so we always thought of a spider in a dark place whenever we thought of him. The Priest must have gotten that gloomy personality from his father. When it came to figuring out what was on their minds, the father and son were the same in that they were undecipherable. The eerie light that shone in both of their eyes were alike.
The rumor went that this father had beaten a cat to death with a hatchet. Someone reported, as if he had seen it himself, that the cat’s skull had been cracked in two. The rumor went that ever since then, things were always going badly in that house: the mother ran off and was living with a man in another town; as soon as the mother left, the boy’s little sister was run over by a truck that was backing up; and the father was gravely injured while working. All this we heard from our parents and we had no idea when it had occurred. But the Priest’s father did have big burn mark from his ear to his shoulder, and in the dim light, it almost seemed as if he had something black coiled around his neck.
And yet, the business must have been good since the furnace of the factory roared even on weekends. One boy, who knew all the details, said that the factory was making lenses for sights mounted on the rifles of the U.S. Army, though we never figured out whether this was true or not. I remember peering into the living room of the Priest’s house once, when I went over to call on him. His father must have beaten the Priest; he was huddled on the floor, his eyes bloodshot. I remember seeing dirty dishes and a moldy roll of bread on the floor next to the boy.
We marched on.
What about the curse? Either it would be exorcised, or taken care of by the Priest leading us. Once the ritual had started, none of us were allowed to touch the cat. The Priest absolutely prohibited that. The Priest knew all about cats’ curses, and taught us all that on rainy days we couldn’t carry on with the ritual. At that point, the Priest stopped being a quiet boy.
Do you know the story, Curse of the Pumpkin?
Once, a pet cat stole a fish from its master’s table, so the master, angered, beat the cat to death with a thick piece of wood. The next year, a pumpkin sprouted from where the corpse was buried, and eventually ripened into a large fruit. When the family cooked and ate it, everyone suffered from stomachache. The doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong. One of them dug up the ground and found the pumpkin’s vine sprouting from the eye sockets of the cat’s skull. When you bury the corpse of a cat, poisonous plants always grow out of it. That’s why we must give cats’ corpses a water burial, the Priest had told us with a serious face.
I imagined the corpse of a cat slowly decomposing in the ground. The soft fur slowly falling off and exposing rotting, fatty skin. Blue-green decayed meat pokes out, forking its way out of the skin. Eventually, meat and organs turn into thick black liquid, settling in the stomach area. The liquid, embraced by the exposed skeleton, begins to shine blue. That is when the seed of a plant that the cat has swallowed before its death sprouts. Roots spread like a white snake through decomposed organs and the bud, with astonishing speed, crawls up toward the ground. And one night, strange leaves sprout. The stem grows upward, sucking nutrition from the rotten cat, until, in the desolated field, a yellow blossom flowers with the appearance of the moon. The flower shines like a cat’s eye under the moonlight, and the ripe fruit hit the ground, smelling raw like a cat’s breath.
The story, Curse of the Pumpkin, became my brother’s reason for not eating pumpkins all through that summer.
My brother, who refused to eat pumpkins, beat on the petroleum barrel at the head of the march without stopping. If only we could stretch a hide on that drum. Drums at school all had rich hides on them; what if we stretched a cat skin on my brother’s drum? Cat drum. What kind of sound would it make? Maybe a seductive sound, like a three-stringed zither? Or a deceptive sound, like a cat’s purr? What about the hide of the black cat that breathed heavily and lived in the field behind the town hospital? All winter long, that cat coughed strangely and napped in the sun. The skin of its chest that had endured the trial of endless coughing would be strong. But in spring, when our ritual began, the cat disappeared somewhere. And its successor, a gray tottering cat, had already been returned to the river.
Cats were always taken to different rivers. The Priest never explained why, and we never asked, either. Accordingly, the locations of the ritual changed every day. When the Priest headed east, we expected the banks of the Arakawa River, which ran through distant farmland, and when he headed west, it would be the wide levees of the Irima River. Both circled our town. Other big and small streams were also chosen, depending on the mood of the day.
But the ritual at the ditch-like Akama River–which was a filthy river in children’s minds–ended in complete failure. This river drew its supply from the sewage and flowed into the dump in the suburb. We did walk along the course of the river, but we never made it far enough to get to the other end.
Vegetable scraps flowed down the river. A man’s leather shoe beached on the mud in the shallows. The bloated corpse of a rat was stuck in it, and a dubious looking box floated on the water.
I had a friend whose family was in the night soil business. One night, my friend jumped into the passenger seat of the new septic tank truck that his father was getting into. He wanted to enjoy a late night drive. After driving around for a while, the truck stopped at a lonely edge of the river. His father turned off the headlights and dragged the thick hose attached to the truck into the river; he proceeded to dump a truckload of human waste. My friend, for the first time in his life, understood his father’s business. He broke into a cold sweat. It was the very river in which he and his friends fished for crawfish in the afternoons. Some of his friends showed off by barbecuing and eating crawfish and the boy himself had wanted to see what they tasted like. After that, he never joined the fishing expedition and feared the stool examinations for roundworms that were carried out at the beginning of every semester. (We used matchboxes for stool exams but before we knew it, they were replaced by round metallic tubes. Our moms used to do it with disposable chopsticks, but some kids, embarrassed, instead brought dog shit and were scolded for it.)
This was unfortunate for the cats sacrificed in that filthy river, but the ritual was carried out nevertheless.
Raising the young black-and-white male cat above his head, as if offering it to god, the Priest hurled it into a deeply cut ravine. The cat, rolling, hit the surface of the water not with splash, but with a splat. The river was shallow here, thickly layered with sewer-mud. The cat was swallowed by the mud.
Immediately, a dark muddy mass rose in the middle of the river. This mass, like a huge catfish, moved to the opposite bank with a speed that could only be called blinding. Once the huge catfish reached the bank, it finally took a shape of some kind. It clawed and crawled its way up the concrete wall. After it eventually reached the top of the embankment, it began to sneeze uncontrollably. It was trying to sneeze out mud that had gone up its nostrils. It must have swallowed a large amount of the muddy river, too, for it was beginning to hiccup. On top of that, the cat shook itself to get its body dry. We could only think that the cat had gone completely out of its mind.
So we cheered.
When the cat saw its tormentors, those awful children, on the opposite bank, it began
to run. Run, run. What will human children do now?
We cheered after the running cat, but the Priest pouted his lips as if disappointed, and stared at the concrete slope the cat had crawled up on. All that was left was a wet trail of mud that seemed to have been painted by a broken brush. From the look on the Priest’s face, we understood immediately that we had failed at the ritual. We had failed to return the cat to the land of water.
Chapter 2—The Secret Organization: Our Spies Carried Out Their Missions Thoroughly
Spring of that year. From March to April of 1964, we carried out the ritual almost every day. Many cats were returned to the water. They fell easily into our hands. There was no doubt that it was an intimate month between the cats and us, regardless of what the cats might have thought.
We never grew in number. Including my little brother, the scrawny drummer – who didn’t count in the first place – there were eight of us. We spent most weekends together, all eight of us. It wasn’t that we lived near each other or that we were particularly close – we all somehow ended up around the Priest. And though we could have talked about other things, we only talked about cats and the ritual. Each had his own stories about cats, and those who knew the most stories had the most influence in the group.
We were solid. Even though the mood of the Priest changed rapidly, like a cat’s eyes, the rituals were carried out without fail. It could almost have been called a secret organization. Around the town, there were still several bands of boys, each led by strong, upper-grade boys, where each group fought with the others. Unlike our group, which consisted of boys from different neighborhoods and grades and who otherwise wouldn’t have played together if it weren’t for the ritual, these others were usually made up of boys from the same neighborhood. In our group, one boy brought another boy and before we knew it, we were eight. We eight never talked about the meaning of the ritual, but we all understood, without saying it aloud, the mysterious doctrine: “Cats will once again live in the land of water.” It might sound like a childish, fraudulent doctrine, but based on it, we caught cats and carried them to rivers.
And that’s when the incident of the black cat and the heretics occurred. Everywhere, bands of boys began to form their own versions of these organizations and began to carry out sham rituals. In short, they, too, began to play ritual games. What was disagreeable was that they were just being cruel, without being rooted in any rule or doctrine. These heretics chased around cats for the sake of abusing them, not because cats were gods. Those cats that had been arrested on the streets were taken to a nearby field and punished accordingly, based on whim--if cats were guilty of some crime, it could be called punishment, but to these heretics, it didn’t matter.
One of the cats, that belonged to an old woman known as the Cat Hag, was tied to a stake and crucified on the ground one night. It was said that the Cat Hag, who couldn’t walk, went on calling out the cat’s name after it didn’t come home. Later, adults gossiped that the black cat had been named after her son who never came home after being sent to the New Guinea battle ground.
All night long, the cat looked up at the sky in that position. Next morning, it was found brutally murdered with its throat bitten through. A stray dog or something must have attacked it when it was still dark. Someone in the neighborhood said that he had heard strange beastly wails in the dead of the night.
“You’ll be cursed if you kill a cat,” adults told every child who wandered into the field. They were beginning to finally notice the foul game being played out by the children.
When we finally arrived at the field, there was no trace of brutality left, and instead a new mound of soil was in its place. We didn’t know whether someone had buried the corpse or just covered it with dirt, but on the piled earth, we could see some fur pieces mixed with dirt. It must have been torn to pieces.
A well-informed boy in our group mentioned the names of the possible suspects. He named a group led by a long-faced, big-nosed, and thick-lipped boy. Taking advantage of his size, the boy, who kids in other neighborhoods called “Horse,” had many boys under him, and was feared by those who refused to submit because he bullied them mercilessly. But his size was also noticed by his teachers and he was nominated to be the section leader of bass drums. After this, without fail, he gained more respect from his subordinates.
A boy came forward with a past offense to prove that Horse was indeed the guilty suspect of this heretical ritual: “He beat the crap out of me once!”
But our group was most interested in the person responsible for secretly carrying out the assassination of the cat that had already been suffering the most humiliating kind of punishment late at night, while everyone slept. Wasn’t it our responsibility to find out where that assassin who bit through the black cat’s throat had come from?
Could it have been a terrorist act by the rodent clan, who held a grudge against the cat clan? A desperate act by the descendants of ferrets whose duties had been taken over by cats (there was a time in history when even ferrets, which used to romp around in the plain of Musashino, ended up stuffed and enshrined in the school biology lab)? It could just have been the instinctive reaction of a passing stray dog, or it could a crime committed by some pervert passing it off as a stray dog’s actions. Someone--like the crazy homeless man who walked around the town muttering strange chants or the owner of the neighborhood hardware store who squashed and ate chickens in his backyard--might not think twice about killing a cat or two in the early morning. We put aside our rituals and let our imaginations go wild.
Out of all our hypotheses, we all liked the story about the killing by other cats. All the other cats from the Cat Hag’s house gathered around the staked cat and handed it their verdict: We regret to inform you that you will die. In order to recover your honor – you who are being humiliated beyond shame – and the honor of the Cat Clan, you must die here and your corpse will be left here as a warning to these human beings.
After an ancient cat had said as much in admonishment, one young cat must have run to bite through its poor comrade’s throat. That young cat had always been jealous of all the attention the Cat Hag gave to this black cat, and when he was appointed to be the executioner, he must not have thought twice about tearing through the windpipe. The executed cat must have died cursing the world, blood pouring from his wound. And eventually, a yellow pumpkin blossom would flower in the field.
After we had finished hypothesizing about the black cat, we headed toward the secret meeting place. Since his father owned an auto mechanic shop, one of the boys, Toru, had contributed the second floor of the garage, now used as a storage space, for us to use as a hideout. We always talked about the steps of the next ritual, each finding a comfortable place to settle in the hideout that was chaotically strewn with old tires and suspension springs, empty cans of grease, and dust-covered radiators.
Toru had four little brothers and sisters and one on its way, and every time his mother saw Toru, she handed him one or two of them for him to babysit. And they always soiled themselves there so the hideout smelled not only of oil but also filled with a foul piss smell; even a pigsty would not smell this bad. Toru was always the first one to run into the storage space to let open the only window there. And as if to say, “It’s safe now,” a small light shining in his narrow eyes, he invited us in. It seemed that neither he nor his siblings ever bathed--for they were all grimy and filthy--but because he had provided the place for our hideout, Toru’s status in the group was secure. Though we never said it in front of him, we always said, disgustedly, God, his sister sure is filthy. Everyone must have wished that the second sister wouldn’t be here today.
The Priest arrived later than anyone did. He seemed not to have gone to the field in question. Someone immediately reported the incident of the murdered cat to him in a hushed voice. It was Hiroshi, the first disciple.
Even though the Priest listened intently, he kept looking around uncomfortably. The Priest seemed not to like this hideout very much. His father and Toru’s father had had drunken fist fights before. Everyone knew the cause of the bawl that infuriated the whole neighborhood: the sister of the Priest was run over by a truck that belonged to this very auto shop.
The Priest paced back and forth without making a sound. He was always paying attention to the slightest sounds from downstairs. When Toru’s father was stomping around, yelling at the younger mechanics, the Priest never came close to the hideout; if he heard someone’s voice from downstairs, he quickly slipped out of the only window. Whether it was his father’s order or of his own choosing, the Priest seemed to be avoiding the man responsible for his sister’s death.
When the eight of us were gathered on the second floor of the garage, Toru’s father was talking loudly with a client in the inspection office at the opposite end. Amidst the loud noise from the factory, they sounded like dogs barking.
“My father’s pretty upset about this incident, too.” Toru, with his little sister on his lap, opened his mouth first.
“Everyone’s feeling pretty sorry for the Cat Hag. Kind of awful the way the cat was killed, you know.”
We all studied the Priest’s face. We all remembered the rumor surrounding the Priest’s father.
“No cat’s ever been taken from that house.”
“Those cats like it there. Bet they all think the Cat Hag’s like their mama or something.”
“Wonder what’s gonna happen to those cats when she dies?”
“She might be dead already, you know. I’ve heard that this devil cat, pretending to be the Cat Hag, lives there with the other cats. Just raise the floorboard. I bet you her bones are scattered everywhere.”
“But Horse has gone way too far this time. He threw a puppy into the river a while back. Then a sick rabbit –the baldy one. A chick he bought at the carnival. Doesn’t matter to him – anything would do.”
“A puppy? You mean one of the three just given birth at the bicycle shop? I was planning to get one.”
“The dog swam away. Bet it’s wandering around town this very minute.” “The rabbit got away too?”
“I heard that someone saw it floating around the water gate of the Akama River. Didn’t look like a rabbit at all. God, I wonder how animals can bloat that much when they drown.”
None of it was good news to us. Everywhere in town, unforgivable fake rituals were being played out. We looked at each other.
“Let’s put a stop to it,” the Priest said, as if to himself. With that, we all studied his face at once. If we could do anything, sooner the better. Before adults began to suspect, before the schools issued a prohibition, we had to nip these heretics’ acts in the bud. The Priest seemed to be seriously worried about the fate of our organization. There were only eight of us; on top of that, one of us was my scrawny-assed brother aspiring to be a drummer. How could we ever strike a blow at these apostates who had sprouted like bamboo shoots after the rain?
We were not stupid or brave enough to start a fight with a large group like Horse’s. Neither did we want to lose our afternoons of marching happily toward the river. My little brother hadn’t had enough drumming, and in the town, there were still many other cats that needed to be returned to the river. This can’t continue, said the Priest, cats will be impure. No one will be able to tell the difference between these heretics and us. Those cats will get cautious and we won’t be able to catch them anymore.
We thought about the words of the Priest and imagined this and that; we prayed for the continuation of rituals, moved by some unnamable emotion. Drum beats signaling our departure. Marching toward the river. Cat gods resting auspiciously in the box. The tin drum shouted, The cat is returning to the land of water! We never wanted to lose this precious time. Nor our intimate relationship with those supple, quietly breathing soft-fur sacrifices.
***
From the last week of April to May that year, we distanced ourselves from the formal aspects of the “ritual.” The ritual itself continued, but only in a watered-down version. We were busy plotting and sending out spies to the four directions. Of course, amongst the eight of us, we could only cover half of the town, so it was, literally, the four directions. One job of the spy was to mix himself with groups of other boys and to sabotage their rituals. In short, we had to intentionally blunder to let captured cats escape. And if the group was a small weak one, then seven of us, excluding the Priest, attacked and snatched the cat away. A spy had to plot these kinds of plans skillfully.
In our group, Hiroshi, the first disciple, and Tatsuo, the idiot Hiroshi hated with a passion, were the two best spies. Before we knew it, Hiroshi had made contacts with several groups and knew the exact details of each meeting place. Not only that, he had also wormed himself into the confidence of each leader of the group, and though a new member, he immediately began to command great influence in the group. Every time I saw Hiroshi walking with other boys, I wondered how long his loyalty would last with them or with us.
No one was suspicious of Tatsuo. Even though he was treated coldly by every group, he followed them around and did his duty at the crucial moment. Cats slipped out of Tatsuo’s hold and he always stood there absentmindedly as boys around him yelled. I did wonder whether he was really acting. Please, please, let me touch the cat for a minute, only a minute, he begged each time, and each time the cat clawed him and he let it escape. He had done this twice in the midst of our own rituals. He didn’t mind offering his own cats for the ritual, but whenever it was other people’s cats, he looked so sad, begging childishly, oh let me touch the cat one last time, please, please. In the end, the cats always got away and he had to go and capture twice as many to make up for his mistakes.
That day, my little brother and I walked the roundabout way after school to look at the park pond. My brother had said that there was a big green turtle there. Turtles weren’t all that rare, but how could we not go see this turtle when it had a shell as big as 10 inches in diameter?
But in the park pond, instead of a turtle, we saw Tatsuo. Around the pond, Horse’s underlings hung around with jeering looks.
“Hey, hurry up. Can’t you find it, slow poke?” one boy impatiently called, in the direction of the pond.
“Maybe it’s in the deeper place,” another one instructed. Tatsuo stirred the pond water covered thickly with green algae, and dragged his foot along the bottom looking for something.
“It’s not here,” Tatsuo said pitifully.
“It’s there, I know it. Look harder,” spat out a conceited boy, who’d been giving orders all this while.
“It’s not here,” Tatsuo whined, in a voice close to tears. His pants were covered with water plants and algae. Up to his forearms in the pond, he looked like a half-fish, half-man creature from the Amazon. Whether this was because he had let a cat slip away or because he was doing the dirtiest work, it didn’t matter – I hadn’t even known that he had managed to slip in to Horse’s group in the first place.
The turtle. They’re looking for the turtle, my brother’s eyes seemed to say, when he looked up at me. But when he saw that I was keeping my fist tightly closed, his face turned a little fearful. He knew that most of the time I, his older brother, made fists, nothing good was going to happen. Tatsuo was moving slowly toward the big rock in the middle of the pond. Like a volcanic rock, the rock had lots of holes in it. As his hand reached out to steady itself, he stepped on something and slipped. He didn’t fall on his butt, but slipped enough that he lost his balance. “Isn’t that enough?” I thought. And the moment I tried to voice it, Tatsuo crawled out of the pond.
The boys around the pond were about to yell at Tatsuo, who had abandoned his duty, but noticing something strange, they only stared. The reason soon became apparent. Tatsuo had come out bleeding from the right ankle. He must have cut himself with a sharp fragment of a glass bottle thrown away in the pond. The boys exclaimed in surprise, and then drew back. He must have been cut deeply, for it was bleeding uncontrollably.
“It’s your fault. You did it to yourself,” said the boy who had been bossing him around until a moment ago. As if not knowing what to do, Tatsuo stood there dumbstruck. Tatsuo might bleed to death. We had to get an adult to help us.
The next minute, Horse’s underlings ran off, leaving Tatsuo alone. And at the same time, one boy ran the opposite way. It was my little brother. He was running to the office of the park manager. For a small guy, he could be quick in these situations.
I told Tatsuo not to move. For the first time, he noticed that I was there, and replied “Okay,” weakly. He seemed to put his heart and soul into that reply. Imitating the tourniquet procedure the boy scout guys had taught me, I tied my own belt tightly around the ankle. I later found out that this had been absolutely useless since I didn’t know the tourniquet points, but Tatsuo just looked at me gratefully at this moment.
“Does it hurt?”
“Dunno. It’s kinda numb.” Tatsuo kept repeating that his leg was numb, but I didn’t know whether this was from bleeding or from being in the water too long.
From far away, I heard an adult voice. A man who seemed to be the manager came running, yelling, “What happened?” I could see my brother toddling after him.
“Oh man, this is bad. You better get this sewn up by a doctor,” said the manager in a calm voice, so I relaxed a bit. “Who are you? Are you his friend?”
I explained a simplified version of what happened, staring at his stubbles. He fixed the tourniquet – no no this won’t do – and when he heard about the other boys who had run off, he sighed, “Man, that’s awful.”
“There were guys like that in the army,” he said. He was my father’s age. My father occasionally brought up his own experiences during basic training in the army. Most of the time, he meant, “That won’t do if you were in the army.” In short, he had had an awful time in the army.
“Let’s take you to the clinic near here. Man, you sure are dirty. We better wash you off first.” The park manager carried the wounded half-fish, half-human creature on his back and began to walk. My brother latched himself right next to them, peering into the wound. Maybe the tourniquet was working, since the bleeding had slowed some from before, but his foot, from the ankle down, was white as candle wax. And like a cat being carried to the ritual, Tatsuo was quietly being carried to the hospital.
He only required three stitches. As he came out of the clinic, tightly bandaged, Tatsuo proudly boasted that he had never been treated in a hospital like this before.. He was told to change the dressing often and to keep the wound clean, but his bandage turned the color of dirt like the gaiters Japanese soldiers used to wear around their calves.
Nevertheless, our emissaries did their duties well. In two weeks, we could see the weakening of false apostles everywhere. It was around this time that children began to get bored with the game anyway. When one trend ended, children always started up with a new one. By cutting off their supplies at the right time, we had struck a definitive blow. And these sabotage activities gave us a good lesson: how frail human solidarity is. One group of boys split over an escaping cat. Another group didn’t have enough people on days when a lot of homework had been assigned. And from our group, Hiroshi, the first disciple, was gone, unnoticed. Hiroshi had won over a group of boys in a nearby neighborhood and had become its leader. The Priest didn’t make any comment about this, and we, too, never talked about why there were now only seven people at the hideout. I hated to see the jeering look in Hiroshi’s eyes whenever we ran into his group at some street corner. My little brother, who didn’t really understand all that was going on, called out Hiroshi’s name, but Hiroshi just walked away, leading his underlings ahead. Even though he had been promoted from first disciple to a leader, Hiroshi didn’t look happy at all; instead, I heard that he was always irritated, and that he made his underlings do nearly impossible things. We learned another new lesson from this: when one rises above one’s station in life, it only becomes a source of agony for that person.
Chapter 3 —Rainy Season: The Last Days of Yukio’s Cat
Our rituals picked up again as usual. Afternoons spent chasing after cats in alleys. Closing in on the cornered cats, then being clawed at in the late afternoons. Sunday mornings spent luring a cat into a trap and happily heading toward the river after befriending it for nearly three days. We had all the time we needed, all the time in the world for our ritual.
But cats didn’t disappear completely from the town because of us. The number of strays might have decreased, but cats weren’t so weak as to be pushed into extinction by children.
In the first place, we were prevented from the ritual by the long rain.
As soon as we had destroyed the false apostles in the last week of April, it began to rain as if the sky’s water had broken. The Priest, who hated rain, didn’t suggest going to the river with umbrellas in our hands. There was nothing else to do; we gathered at the hideout one by one and, putting our arms around our knees, we daydreamed about the big and small rivers that ran at both ends of the town and about the dirty banks of the Arakawa, which ran slowly in the distant farmland. Rivers swelled with water; muddy water curved the sides of the banks. Perhaps those weeds on both banks where we had stood might be carried off by water to somewhere far away. We, too, wanted to be carried off by the current to an unknown town.
It wasn’t only the sky’s water that broke. In dark corners around the town, female cats quietly gave birth to kittens. A season of death was followed by a season of birth. Sitting in the oil-stench hideout, we imagined these blind kittens, still with their ears glued to their heads, blindly snuggling against their mothers’ bodies. The softly furred bellies of mother cats must have been warm and comfortable. I remember vaguely that I, too, once slept enveloped in those soft fur flanks, a long, long time ago – though our mothers didn’t have fur and weren’t in the habit of moving us around by our necks.
“It’s gonna be busy once the rain stops,” Toru said to my brother and I, sitting against the wall with a window. His bony legs stuck out of his shorts, and had been thrown carelessly toward us. Dirty socks that had been worn for several days in a row were rolled up in the shoes that he had taken off and a foul smell rose from them. Large parts of his legs were covered with half-dried splattered mud. From the still wet feet, a rotten smell rose. Toru and his siblings all had this same smell; the whole family gave off the thick slimy odor of solidified oil mixed with sweat. Layered on top of that, the younger members of this family possessed another stench. Toru—with his sister who was the source of that stench in this very hideout sitting on his lap— snickered.
“I bet you it’s gonna be busy once the rain stops.”
Each time Toru said this, my little brother looked out the window in expectation, but the rain didn’t let up so easily. Eventually, no matter what anybody said, my brother just continued to concentrate on the repair of his petroleum barrel drum and did not even raise his head. This was the same for everyone. Annoyed with the smell of oil and the stench of shit, each of us had to submerge into the cat stories. Cats were the entrance and the exit, our guide and doubtful companions, and the partners that never opened their hearts to us. When would they rub themselves against us; when would they walk away with their tails stuck up?
I must beg your forgiveness for a digression. My daydream is about to enter a fairy tale. Everyone knows one or two stories about ghoulish cats. Using the story of the infamous Nabejima cat as the starting point of a story swap, adults showed off by telling ghost stories that they knew. From that circle, my mother had inherited a story from her father, my grandfather who, by the time I was born, was already on the list of the dead, who had joined the rank of ancestors. When my mother started to talk, she had no problem jumping not only forty or fifty years, but two to three hundred years’ worth of time.
My grandfather was a descendent of a warrior family in Mito, and came to this town after marrying into my grandmother’s family as her third husband, around the end of the Taisho Era. To explain why he was the third husband would require another story. For whatever reason, my grandmother had had to separate from her first two husbands. When my grandfather moved from Mito to Kawakoshi, the tradition of passing down this story from my grandfather to my mother and then down to us brothers began.
My mother was born right before my grandfather turned fifty, followed immediately by my uncle. (My grandfather was well advanced in age when he married into the family. Nevertheless, the old geezer had two children.) Twenty-eight and thirty years after her, I and my brother, in turn, cried our first cries in this world. This is what happens when I skip over what happened in the middle and just connect the bloodlines. My mother, who grew up listening to stories about ghoulish cats in the early Showa Era, turned out to have sons who were crazy about their rituals of returning cats to the water in the year of the Tokyo Olympics.
One of my grandfather’s favorite stories was “The Cat of Dentsuin Temple.” One late night, the monk of Dentsuin Temple heard whispers; when he listened hard, he realized that it was a conversation between the temple cat and another cat that had snuck in.
(The dance was rather boring without you last night.)
(I burned my tongue. The monk gave me a bowl of hot gruel.)
Around twilight, as the monk thought to himself, Ah, the ancient cats have been dancing around in the graveyard or someplace like that, the temple cat came into the monk’s bedroom and demanded in a ghoulish voice, “Monk, give me your robe.” Perhaps it was going to wear the robe and go dancing. When the monk replied, “Just take it, it’s over there,” the cat grabbed the robe in its mouth and ran off. It never came back.
Another story: A cat belonging to a samurai named Sasabou danced about with a hand towel around its head while its master was out, but one night, the master returned earlier than usual and found out; with one swish of a sword, the cat was slain. Apparently, the cat was singing a song, “Dance away while Sasa is gone,” mocking the master.
Apparently, the story of a cat dancing with a hand towel around its head was not uncommon. But the Dentsuin temple cat had wanted to dance about wearing a monk’s robe. And once exposed, the two cats had had to disappear, to avoid being killed. Some of the goody-goody cats, once discovered, had asked for permission to take leave, but before they left, they first repaid their masters by rebuilding run-down temples. Nobody knows where they went. Perhaps they were at someone else’s house in a far away town with no guilt on their faces. Maybe, using black magic, they had turned themselves into humans and were living with lots of cats in a corner of some town, like the Cat Hag whom we had all suspected of being a transformed cat. Under the floorboards of her house, there would be the real Cat Hag’s bones scattered around. A kitten would be playing with the skull as if with a ball.
If they hadn’t done any of that, I wonder whether they had ended up at the Cat Mountain? It’s often said that cats never come back from going into the deep mountains where people rarely go, places also said to be the haunts of ghoulish cats.
Once a cat that some people had loved disappeared out of the blue. They looked all over for the cat, but she was nowhere to be seen. When a traveling gypsy came to the house by chance, the family asked after the cat and was told that it was living on the mountain of Inaba in Kyushuu Prefecture. Some from the family set out to Inaba Mountain to look for the cat, but they lost their way in the mountains. While they were looking for the right direction, the sun set. Luckily, they reached a house in the mountains and, when they shouted a request for one night’s shelter, an old woman came out and invited them in. In this house, there were many beautiful girls–for a house so far up in the mountains–walking quietly around the house. When the visitors began to feel nervous about this and to look around carefully, one woman came to them, saying, I was the calico cat you had treated nicely, but I now live in this cat mansion in the mountains; you must get out right now, this isn’t a place for humans, and led her former masters out of the house. If they had spent the night there, they would surely have been eaten alive, and even knowing full well that she would be killed herself when the other cats found out about the escape of the humans, she had nevertheless decided to help her masters flee the mansion. Cats aren’t so forgetful after all, as people like to think, about past kindnesses.
Where do cats die? Old cats were said to go to the Cat Mountain to die, and it appears they didn’t want to leave their bodies lying around for humans to see. “The cat grave.” This was a topic we often argued about in the hideout while the long rain kept us in. Did they have a secret graveyard like the elephants? If they did, it might be the Cat Mountain. Just as we had never seen cats mate, we had never seen cats die of a natural death. We’d seen dead cats on the highway, but never cats that had passed on to the other side at the time of death visited upon them. We argued passionately whether this was so because they died quietly, away from human eyes, or whether, as death approached, they regained their wild side, suddenly disliking human habitations and going back to the mountains. And after all the theories had been argued out, the only feasible hypothesis was the theory of “Water Burial.”
For eons, it’s been passed down that the corpses of cats need to be thrown into the river. In one of the southern islands, people gave cats water burials, or “a returning” to the sea. The cats’ homeland was the land of water.
A cat, sensing its death, leaves its home without telling anyone. It stands on the dark bridge at night. The time when the half-moon begins to set and stupid sewage rats fall asleep. Trains haven’t begun to move, either. Soon, the eastern sky begins to whiten with the hint of sunrise; the half-moon descends a little more. As the sky begins to fill with light, the cat’s pupils shrink. But the light is no longer important to it. The cat turns its head, looking for darkness. The only thing that crosses its mind is the memory of darkness. The darkness will not come this way again, it thinks. That darkness where it purred, where blood rushed, that darkness it had run around in. The cat suddenly looks down on the shadow cast by the bridge. It is still night there. The river carries the remains of the night to the sea. The cat thinks absentmindedly about going back to the sea. And in the moment before the first light of the ordinary, southern day bursts into the sky, a black mass falls from the bridge into the river. The river swallows it as if nothing has happened and continues its movement toward the sea. After this small incident on the bridge concludes, the day of the town begins.
For a story we had made up, it wasn’t bad: the cat who returned to the sea to become a seagull.
***
We had to dive deeply into our individual stores of cat stories in order to last out the long rain that never ended. My brother drummed away on his fake drum to the beat of rain drops. As if out of his mind, he drummed four quarter beats of eighth notes followed by half beats, but he always stumbled at the eleventh beat. This was the extent of his concentration. The total number of notes he played strangely matched the number of cats that had disappeared from the streets before the rainy season. The son of the auto mechanic, Toru, had recorded the number of cats subjected to the ritual on the wall of the hideout. For each cat, Toru wrote a stroke of the Chinese character, “cat.” One character of “cat” was made up of eleven cats. We already had four “cats.” Not all of them had ended up in the river, but we had forty-four cats on our death list. Included were Tatsuo’s cat and the black cat belonging to the Cat Hag. And also the cat belonging to Yukio, who was the quietest boy in our group. Yukio must have been thinking about the last days of his cat while listening to the sound of the rain.
Yukio’s cat was still a kitten, less than a year old. It was a grey-furred creature, whose father must have been the gray and white stray that prowled around the neighborhood. That cat, too, would eventually end up in our hands.
Yukio treated the kitten still with kittenish awkwardness, as if it were his brother. Yukio was a child of the owner of a cement factory, with a younger sister with many years difference between them. There were no brothers. Yukio had taken a part of his name and named the cat “Yuki.” The cat was the color of grey snow. He played with his cat on top of the sand mounds that were brought daily by trucks and piled up high like a hill. I often saw them frolicking around, rolling down from the top of the sand mound taller than a man’s height. The cat seemed to breathe in a lot of sand from his nose and tried to cough it out.
After our ritual began and Yukio joined the group, he seemed to worry over whether to offer his “brother” to the ritual. Tatsuo had been bringing his cats from his house one after another. No one had forced him to, and besides, the Priest disliked that kind of easy supply of sacrifices. As for Tatsuo, he didn’t have to provide that kind of service, either. But for some reason, both Tatsuo and Yukio thought that they had to do so. Tatsuo was doing it so much that the First Disciple was jealous of him; on the other hand, Yukio, indecisive, fell more and more in love with his cat. He even brought the cat to school in his school bag as if he didn’t want to be apart from it even for a minute. The cat was quiet during the class so teachers didn’t say anything about it, but Yukio’s textbooks stank and became bleached from the cat piss.
Because of that, it was strange for Yukio to join our group; he always sat at the furthest corner of the hideout, holding on to his legs, his knees covered with sand. We had to pretend not to notice his face full of anxiety about wanting to hide about his cat. We didn’t care about his cat. But as our ritual became feverish, gradually reaching its zenith—something that happened in any case—Yukio reproached himself for his cowardice. I can still recall Yukio’s face when Tatsuo brought three kittens born at his house.
The end came suddenly.
Or, it wasn’t the end, but the beginning of the end for Yukio.
At lunch time, a boy from another class brought the news.
News traveled like waves, from a faraway class in another building, through the roofed passage in the first floor of this building that connected one class to another, went up the stairs and finally reached our class in the furthest corner of the second floor. “There’s a dead cat on the highway in front of our school–it’s been run over with its guts splattered all over the road.” It wasn’t uncommon for animals to get run over by cars on the highway, but it was big news when it happened right in front of the school, and moreover, with all the cat’s guts spilling out. We all remembered the big stray dog that had gotten run over last fall, with its stomach ripped in two and its guts smeared all over the road. That time, some neighbor had called the city sanitary department to get it cleaned up. We had all gathered at the classroom windows while men in white jackets had carried off the dead dog on a wooden board.
“What’s it like?”
“Small. Kinda dark, with a collar.”
We all looked at Yukio’s bag. The cat was gone, and so was Yukio. He didn’t come to the afternoon classes; he disappeared.
“You can see it from here. It’s smushed on the other side of the road.”
We all ran to the window. There was something black pasted across the road. At that very moment, we knew it was Yuki. Yukio’s cat had wandered off outside and had ended up under the wheels of countless cars.
Yuki could be seen now and again under the ceaselessly passing cars. It also meant that Yuki was being run over again and again. Here we go again, we counted. It hadn’t just been run over on its stomach. I could almost hear Yuki’s small skull crunching under the heavy tires of trucks.
Yuki lay on the highway for many days after that. No one thought to take away the corpse of a small cat. At first, some cars drove around it to avoid it, but as it began to lose its shape, no one bothered. By the third day, it was completely flat, a pasted fur. “Flattened dry squid,” we all thought. But thinking of what Yukio must be feeling, we couldn’t say it out loud.
We spent several days staring at the diminishing shape of Yuki’s corpse while Yukio remained absent from school. Gradually, from the classroom window, Yuki turned into a stain on the road. Only a black stain. But Yukio didn’t come back to school until the stain had gone completely.
By this time several rainfalls had washed the road back to its original color, and we had completely forgotten about the accident. Pale Yukio, who finally came back to school, only leaned against the window to stare out at some distant landscape during the break. The days became humid and, with the rainy season around the corner, Yukio’s bag—hanging from the nail at the side of his desk—emitted the raw and rotten smell of cat piss.
These poems are taken from the English translation of Heliotropes (La Presse Books, 2008),
Haruki Amanuma (1953 - ), a German scholar by training, is a novelist as well as a premier scholar of zepplin in Japan. He is the author of several experimental and lyrical novels for adults, as well as numerous books about history of flying for children. Currently the vice-president of the Japan Grimms' Association as well as the chair of the Japanese Children's Books Association, he is working on translation of Andersen's tales as well as the sequel to Water Cat. This novel, of which we include the first three chapters are included in our issue, was the recipient of the prestigious 1998 Japan Children Books Award.
Mariko Nagai is the author of Histories of Bodies (Red Hen Press, 2005), the winner of the 2005 James Saltman Poetry Award; and Georgic, the winner of the 2009 GS Sharat Chandra Prize and forthcoming from BkMk Press in 2010. She has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Yaddo, Djerassi, and UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for Artists. She is Assistant Professor and Director of Writing Programs at Temple University, Japan Campus, in Tokyo.