I haven’t written a word since. My writing’s meaning burned up along with Paper. As if tracing patterns in her ashes, I would begin this or that story, but it hurt too much—every word felt ripped from my very skin. And yet I have no other way of writing left.
Paper’s absence taught me that novels are already meaningless, that their meaning has always been illusory. There is no one left who craves words like she did, who wants to absorb them completely and be read herself in turn. And she wanted me to do the same to her, to absorb her and let her read herself off me. I responded as well as I could, imperfect as I am. But I was all she had. She wanted so much to connect with so many more, but only I ever made the attempt. And it was too much for me to bear alone. Now all I have left is a mouth full of regret. These lonely words hurt more than I can say.
The No Fathers Club (2006)
The No Fathers Club got its start not only because my days were filled with free time, but because my friend Yōsuke took me to see a game of No Ball Soccer.
No Ball Soccer was just like normal soccer, only there was no ball. The five members of the team would pass and shoot as if one was really there. The opposing side’s goalie would jump and make a save as if intercepting a ball actually flying toward the net. The shooter would be crushed. And the crowd would go wild, raising their voices to the heavens as if they truly had just witnessed an unbelievable save.
I was the only one who couldn’t see it. The players and fans and referees all watched the non-existent ball. They’d steal this absent ball from each other, dribble it between their feet, feint one way then move the other, leaving their opponents to overcompensate and fall. Careful not to overlook a gap in the defense, the offensive player would find one and shoot the absent ball through it like a bullet. It would hit the bar. The offense would raise their hands to their heads and shouts of “GOOOAAALLL!” would fill the air. A ring of celebrating players would form. The invisible ball rolling around near the net would get a kick from the sulky, defeated goalie.
At first I felt uneasy watching, thinking I was being tricked, that everyone was in on a joke that excluded me. Or like I’d been invited unsuspectingly into a cult, listening blankly to a charismatic zealot’s overheated sermon. But as I kept watching, at some point I started to catch the fever too, to stand up and cheer with everyone else for a particularly spectacular play or boo and give “thumbs-down” to a bad call. I still couldn’t see the ball, but it was really there. I even began to hear the faint thump as it connected with a player’s foot.
I hadn’t been this excited since I was in sixth grade, playing chicken in the dirt-filled expanse of an unfinished housing development during the summer and winning. The game was to race along as fast as our bikes could carry us, aiming for the furrows and jagged protrusions that scarred the area and launched our bikes into flight, and the one who could go the longest without braking was the winner. I wore my red windbreaker and practiced my falls for when I wiped out, and in the end I held victory in my hand, the rest of my body bloody from being scraped across the ground.
I’d just been killing time, perhaps, since the day I was born. I was raised in aimless plenty, average in my academics and athletics, in my looks and my conversation, in the economic status of my two working parents. Maybe that was why my passion had thinned. Despite my youth I already felt like I was just living out the rest of my days. When my father died in an airplane crash when I was eight, I felt as sad as anyone, but he’d hardly ever been home and I barely had any memories of him playing with me, so I became accustomed to his now eternal absence soon enough. He left a small inheritance and some life insurance money behind for us, and between that and the settlement from the airline, there was no danger of falling on hard times, so, though both my younger sister and I felt a bit uneasy about it, our days continued to overflow with leisure just as before.
Though I should have had my time occupied when I enrolled in a midlevel high school, my free time only increased exponentially, and it started to weigh heavily on my body. It got hard to breathe. I joined the soccer team, but the interactions I had there were just like in any other school activity, and as if flipping switches within myself I first played the role of newbie, then that of the experienced senior two years later. I’d wanted to play flat out, wild and willful like Brazilian players did, but it was impossible for someone as lacking in passion as I to even figure out how to act willful or wild in the first place.
I started hanging out with Yōsuke when I found out that his father had gotten sick and died when he was in fourth grade. Don’t get me wrong, though, it wasn’t like we found each other and started sharing our tales of woe about our single-parent households or anything.
One evening in early spring, near the end of our freshman year in high school, a particularly tiresome older teammate was threatening to keep us late after practice and Yōsuke tried to excuse himself, saying, “My father’s coming home tonight after being away for a long time, so I have to be home in time for dinner.” The older boy responded angrily, “What are you talking about, idiot? You don’t have a father!” Yōsuke dipped his head and gave his accuser a dark look. Everything grew quiet around them. Feeling bad, the older boy muttered, “Sorry,” to which Yōsuke drew himself up and replied fiercely, “He’s expecting me,” then gave a curt nod and left.
The next day, I greeted Yōsuke in a loud voice when he came through the door. “So was your father glad to see you?”
After a beat, he twisted his lips into a grin and said, “He gave me a whuppin’, ‘cause I was late.”
“He hit you? Even though he comes home so rarely?” I pressed him, and he replied, “Well, it didn’t hurt much, since he’s dead and all.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said, going along, “I massage my dad’s back sometimes, but it never gets any better, ‘cause he’s a corpse.”
“You too? Don’t worry, it’s just your mind playing tricks on you. His back’s not stiff, he’s just dead.”
“But I press down and it doesn’t give! So you’re saying he’s not stiff, he’s frozen?”
We couldn’t help but go on and on like this.
It was thrilling. No one else could join in. First the older boys, then everyone stopped talking to us. The atmosphere of the place grew frosty, the air palling balefully around us. Even though it seemed like we were making everyone angry, we couldn’t stop.
After that, Yōsuke and I would talk about our fathers from time to time. Regardless of whether anyone was around to overhear, I couldn’t suppress the breathless excitement I felt when we started to get carried away with our father talk. When we became sophomores, we performed a two-man stand-up routine at the welcome banquet for new members called “Let’s Talk About Papa.” Naturally, no one laughed, and we even heard people muttering darkly to each other, “It must be nice with their parents dead, no one to bother them. They should think about how we feel.” The two of us felt our teammates’ anger swell almost to bursting as we chattered away.
It was around then that I watched my first game of No Ball Soccer. It occurred to me as I did that we could use this approach for our problem. If a ball could materialize out of thin air that had more substance than any real ball just by having everyone agree to act as if it were there, wouldn’t a father more real than any real father materialize if we just acted as if we believed he was there with every fiber of our beings?
So we quit our increasingly hostile soccer team and started the No Fathers Club. We admitted only those whose fathers truly didn’t exist in this world, so children of divorce were out, though illegitimate children who didn’t know their fathers were in. The idea was to pretend we really had fathers every second of every day, leaving no room for sharing feelings or talking about our pitiful situations, so to those seeking therapy: sorry. We announced our conditions and even required the production of official family registers as proof, so we were shocked when we ended up admitting nineteen members, including some from other schools.
At our inaugural meeting, everybody introduced themselves and then we opened the floor to a discussion called “My Father’s Like …” We shared the problems and conflicts we had with our faux fathers and discussed together strategies for dealing with them. I told everyone how my father was perhaps too understanding, and that while it was nice that he let me do as I liked, I sometimes wondered if he really just didn’t care.
“So when I came home all bloody from playing chicken with my bike, my mom chewed me out, but my dad just said, ‘If he dies, he dies. What can we do?’ I thought, is that what he’d say to the papers if I committed suicide? And then later, when I drove the car around even though I was only fourteen, all he said was, ‘In Mexico they let kids your age learn to drive on their own and just get licenses for them later.’ It makes you wonder, right? Aren’t parents supposed to judge their children’s behavior just a little, teach them right from wrong?”
And the girl who then said, “Actually, I’m envious of you, Joe. Your father sounds like he really understands children,” was the girl I ended up dating, Kurumi Kunugibayashi.
“If you told a kid who had a real interest in cars that driving around when you’re fourteen was no big deal, he’d keep driving, right? But if that kid was just trying to act big by doing it, he’d lose interest. With just a few words from your dad, you lost interest and stopped trying to sneak the car out, right Joe?”
I was dumbstruck. You got me, I thought.
“Well, actually, yeah. That’s what happened, I heard him say that and I stopped trying to drive.”
And I even muttered to myself under my breath, yeah, that’s right, my dad was right all along. Muttering to myself like that really did the trick. At that moment, my father truly felt real to me.
“Yes, he was right all along,” agreed Kurumi, overhearing me. She went on.
“So that’s why I was thinking, maybe all the issues with our dads that we’ve been talking about only seem like problems ‘cause we’re still just kids. We just don’t understand what they’re trying to do yet. In my case, it took five years after the issue came up before I could look back and see what he was trying to do, to come to terms with it.”
When Kurumi first got her period at eleven, her father gave her a rather explicit sexual education. Showing her all sorts of things, from Hollywood sex scenes to pornographic woodcuts, he explained that it was just a natural part of life, like eating or drinking or breathing or menstruating, so there’s no need to make a big deal of it. It was just that if you’re too careless eating or drinking you’ll end up poisoned or dying young from alcoholism, so by the same token, if you’re careless about sex, you’ll end up pregnant before too long, so to avoid getting into trouble you should be slow and careful as you progress past your first time. It’s just like how you only start eating real food after getting slowly weaned from your mother’s breast, he explained.
“It was like torture. While he was showing me the woodcuts I kept thinking of all sorts of things, like when we’d go into the bath together when I was little, stuff like that. He started seeming dirty to me, and I was embarrassed and so angry I thought I’d explode, but he wouldn’t let me run away. I didn’t speak a word to him for a while after that.”
Kurumi paused, and surveyed the room.
“But what I understand now is that my father was also fighting down the same explosive embarrassment I was. It wasn’t that he wanted to talk about those things with me, it was just that my mom had dropped the ball and wouldn’t do it. So my dad had to take the dirty job and give me the information I needed. Though if it was appropriate to do it so explicitly to an eleven-year-old girl, I don’t know. But I do know that thanks to him, I’m well prepared for how perverted boys can be.”
The boys in the group chuckled a bit at this, though I was moved by her words once more. “Your father was trying to become your mother too,” I said, almost at a whisper. Kurumi’s eyes opened wide in surprise as she looked at me, and she nodded her agreement.
The only thing that intruded on the intimate space forming between us was the guy who then asked, “But that never happened, right? Were you talking about your made-up father? Or were you remembering when your real father was still alive?” In response, I warned him, “You’re about to lose your membership here, saying things like that. The rule is that we act like we truly have fathers, every moment of every day, in our thoughts and words and actions.” Guys like that, with weak powers of imagination who couldn’t keep up their concentration, ended up dropping out of the club before long.
Though, even I had trouble at that time thinking very deeply about what kind of person my father really was. The father I created now didn’t have to be a continuation of the father who died nine years ago. The way he parted his hair, how far his belly stuck out, what health problems he might have, how he’d romanced my mother when they were young, what he was like when he was in school, how old he was when he lost his virginity, all these things, even things a son would never know about a real father, if I didn’t create them for him he’d remain insubstantial. Imagining myself having to create absolutely everything, down to how he acted as a child and what kind of people his parents were, I felt faint at the prospect of the potentially endless labor ahead of me.
Even so, as we kept meeting and sharing tales of our fathers, the words began to come more easily, like flowers blooming, and my father began to take on an independent existence, to “take his first steps,” so to speak. The most important thing at this point was the responses I would get from the other members. Especially Kurumi, when she gave her interpretations of my father’s actions I felt I got a whole new perspective on him I’d never had before.
We started going out after two months passed, when summer started, and 70 percent of what we talked about was our fathers. Nervous, I made up all kinds of things, last weekend I drank beer with my dad, he told me about trying to start a small textile business, he’s Hong Kong– crazy and knows everything about Hong Kong movies, I rattled on and on. Kurumi responded in kind, happily jabbering about skipping school and helping out at the supermarket her father manages, about the things the other workers would tell her about him, about how he’s pretty popular with the ladies there but he’s too pure-hearted to notice, things like that. Our conversations were so taken up by talk of our fathers, we hardly knew anything regular couples knew about each other, not our interests or backgrounds, nothing. We went on a trip, just the two of us, to Hokkaidō during summer vacation, and even then we’d do things like imagine how we’d be acting if our fathers had come along, buying picture postcards and souvenirs for them, and we ended up seeing the sights as we traveled half through our fathers’ eyes.
Thinking back on it now, that might have been the peak of our relationship. The membership of the No Fathers Club took a sharp dive at the beginning of the second school term. All sorts of excuses were given, “I’m busy with my job,” “My schedule’s full with school activities,” “My father’s sick,” but what was really happening was members getting tired of the faux father game. When even second-in-command Yōsuke stopped coming, I confronted him, asking, “What about your responsibilities as a leader?” Yōsuke replied with a serious expression. “My father died.” Appalled that he’d say such a thing, I shouted at him harshly, “If he’s dead you can just bring him back, can’t you? That’s what we do!”
“It was a suicide. He drank a bunch of poison. He left a note saying, ‘Let me rest in peace.’”
“That’s impossible. A made-up father has no right to die. We’ve put so much into creating and supporting him, he can’t just disappear like that. If he did, it’s ‘cause your commitment is weak, Yōsuke. Just try again, do it like we started all this, like playing No Ball Soccer!”
“I started that, you know. ‘Cause I wanted to play soccer. I don’t want to live with a fake father forever. So, I quit. Say hi to your dad for me.”
And with that, the No Fathers Club shrank to just Kurumi and me. I told myself t
hat the others were just jealous of our deep connection. Just overwhelmed by the extreme realness of our fathers.
It was a mild, sunny day in early autumn, and we were discussing once again how we’d take care of our fathers in their old age. As we were imagining ourselves nursing our elderly charges in the future, the words, “But we’ll still be together then, right?” escaped my lips before I quite knew what I was saying. Kurumi looked me slowly up and down, then tilted her head slightly and said, “Well, I’d always thought so. You know what, I kind of want to meet your father, Joe.”
Meet my father? Not knowing how to respond, I sat there for a bit in stunned silence. Kurumi added, “I think our fathers would get along, don’t you?”
“So we’d all get together, the four of us?”
“Yeah. Why don’t you come by my house next time? I’ll play host.”
“Well … Dad’s kind of busy …”
“So’s mine. That’s why if we don’t do something about it, they’d never get a chance to meet. You haven’t said anything to your father about me, have you? I’ve told mine all about you. He seems to want to meet you too, and your father.”
I flinched. I didn’t know if I had it in me to start talking to my father alone at home. I could think up all sorts of details about my father to talk about with Kurumi, but it seemed impossible to start a conversation with him when I was by myself. Kurumi’s father suddenly seemed more grounded, more real than the one I’d created, and I felt passed up by her. Or, to be more precise, by the unwavering firmness of her commitment to her father.
“In any case, I’ll talk about it with my dad,” I said, then fled.
As I climbed into bed that night, I tried as hard as I could to imagine Kurumi in her house having a conversation with her father. If I couldn’t even imagine that, I’d surely misspeak when the four of us all met, and Kurumi would coldly criticize me, say things like, “Who do you think you’re talking to? My father’d never say something like that,” and that would be the end of it. Just like when you play No Ball Soccer, if Kurumi and I weren’t completely synced up, we wouldn’t hear the words of the silent conversation the same way.
We, the Children of Cats (Found in Translation) Page 3