“Oh look—it’s Soccer!”
Masako interrupted me as she caught sight of something on the veranda through a gap in the curtains, and she slid open the glass door and said again, “Soccer!” And there, in a small pool of light spilling out from the bedroom, sat a little white cat with black markings. The glass door and his spotted mouth opened simultaneously to let his soft miao pass through.
Crap, I thought. Soccer, this little cat marked just like a soccer ball who’d shown up on the veranda during the France World Cup, had a habit of ignoring Masako and running up to me. It always irritated her. She’d mutter about being the fifth wheel. Things would escalate, Masako making herself miserable until she was browsing pet store catalogs and home pages, pointing out dogs and little birds she would never otherwise like and saying, “Maybe I’ll get this one …” But the only reason Soccer liked me was because I was around during the day to play with him and feed him sweet shrimp. Whenever I happened upon him outside, he’d ignore me completely, even run away if I pressed the issue and tried to pet him; it hardly seemed as though he actually preferred me in any real way. But explaining this did little to assuage Masako’s loneliness in the face of our seeming chumminess.
But this time, maybe because he was extremely hungry, as soon as he saw Masako straighten up from crouching down to greet him, he ran in and followed right after her as she walked into the kitchen to the refrigerator, swirling around her legs as she put some leftover tuna and a bit of miso soup–soaked dried fish in a bowl and walked back into the bedroom to place it on the veranda, where he tucked right in.
As Masako was bending down to talk to the cat, I was bending down to pick up the things that had fallen on the floor during the earthquake: a half-read book, a box of tissues, some plastic cosmetic bottles, a stuffed cat playing with a soccer ball. There were used tissues spilling from an overturned wastebasket, and an empty pill case with the numbers 1 through 21 printed on it. Sleeping pills? Masako always seemed to sleep well, but maybe she didn’t.
“Oooh, Soccer farted!”
Masako came running in from the bedroom pinching her nose between her fingers, then took her hands, cold from the veranda, and cupped them to my cheeks as I crouched on the ground. “Cold cold cold!” she exclaimed. I remained frozen in place, staring down at a portable tape recorder, which had also apparently fallen on the ground. Masako withdrew her hands from my face. And she looked at me with eyes that communicated nothing, saying, “That’s from six years ago.” And indeed, the label on the tape made it clear it was the one I’d made then.
The first thing that came to mind was that perhaps Masako had intentionally placed it somewhere I was likely to run across it. But I never had, I’d just blithely gone about my business ignoring it until I finally noticed it now that it had been knocked onto the ground by the earthquake.
“It’s cold,” muttered Masako, and she went back into the bedroom to wrap the blanket around herself again. Soccer finished eating and sauntered slowly back in through the open glass door to curl up at my feet and fall sound asleep. His solid little body warmed my cold toes. I reached down to scratch him under the chin and down his back. His soft skin moved independently over his delicate bones. I got up and walked over to close the door to the veranda, leaving a gap just big enough for Soccer to slip through, and then picked up the portable recorder and brought it with me as I sat down on the bed. My head was in turmoil. I couldn’t decide whether to push play.
I should be the one to broach the subject, I thought. But Masako prevented this, too. “You left that tape out where I would find it because you had something to say to me, right? So say it.” It was impossible to clear up misunderstandings now that each of us was suspicious of the other, and so I thought instead about what I could say that would cut most directly to the heart of the things. “Let’s not get in another argument with your mother this weekend.” Masako wrinkled her nose, snorting.
“As if it had nothing to do with you.”
“That’s exactly it—I can’t think of it as something that has to do with me, and it worries me.”
“You might have held onto your hesitations for six years, but my feelings have changed since then. Festered.”
“You always tell me I don’t think enough about how you feel, but you don’t make any effort to understand the things that bother me, do you?” I couldn’t prevent the conversation from slipping away from the real subject.
“I don’t think that. I just don’t think you want to know the truth about the situation, that you don’t really know anything about me.”
“I know you’ve been hiding your feelings from me.”
“I don’t mean my feelings. I’m talking facts. You don’t know that I might not be able to have children, do you?”
At this, I stopped knowing which way was up, and, disoriented, I simply didn’t know what to say. After a bit, I managed to force out, “How was I supposed to know that if you never told me?”
“You wouldn’t have listened if I tried.” Masako’s legs hit the edge of the bed and she sat down on it, reaching over to scratch Soccer’s belly with her fingernails. Soccer’s eyes opened slightly, then closed again.
I knew I needed to understand Masako’s feelings now that I knew she was facing never being able to have children of her own. But children seemed so unreal to me, how could I imagine what it might mean not to be able to have them?
Masako began to talk. When she was younger, still in school, she’d been wrapped up in an affair with a married man who wanted her pregnant with his baby, and they ended up trying for over a year to no avail. And that’s why he left her in the end, returning to his wife and kids.
“I wanted to talk about it with you, Naru. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I thought that if you said you were happy enough without children, then I’d be satisfied with just our life together, just the two of us, and I’d never have to talk about it again. But if you said you did want children someday, I resolved to go in and get tested and do what it took to make it happen. Do you understand how scared I am of getting tested? No matter how sure I might be that I don’t want children, being told I can’t get pregnant is like being told I’m not really human, you know?”
“That’s … that’s not true,” I said in a small voice, “Those things aren’t related.”
“Exactly, it’s not true. It’s an emotional thing. And so you can understand why if I don’t feel like the people around me support me, like my family, if everyone’s looking at me like a failure, a failure as a woman, as a person, and then besides that, there’s that humiliating test to take, maybe I really will fail—facing all that alone, it’s unbearable. Surely you can understand that much, can’t you?”
And indeed, I should have known something was up eight months ago.
“But you wouldn’t listen to me. And so I got depressed on my birthday, and I ended up talking about it with someone else. Ryū.”
I sighed. Ryū was Masako’s coworker, and he came over pretty frequently to visit. Masako acted as Ryū’s relationship therapist. Ryū was in love with a man who’d been hired around the same time as him named Mashiko. The whole company, Mashiko included, thought they were just good friends, but Ryū had been thinking that he was laying the groundwork to be able to carry on a secret, intimate relationship even if Mashiko eventually got married; as it turned out though, Mashiko got married right away and Ryū fell into a deep depression, which occasioned his coming over all the time to visit Masako.
“He told me I was being stupid. People talk all the time about what a ‘real person’ is, what makes a ‘real man’ or ‘real woman,’ but can you really define what’s human and what isn’t? Ryū told me about when he visited Mashiko’s children, feeling as if he were jumping out of an airplane. Looking at those two children, he felt like he was excluded from the cycle of life, like he’d outlived his usefulness as a Homo sapiens. Ryū said he felt like he’d died in that moment, like he’d been killed, reduced to a living corpse. And
yet, at the same time, it struck him as meaningless to think of being human only in animal terms, that perhaps a human like him who was made to never have children is actually better for the world as a whole. If you’re born unable to have children, then not having children is ‘natural’ for you, what’s this talk of ‘treatment,’ who’s treating what, who’s the one with the problem? Ryū really gave me a talking to.” And then Masako’s tone grew cold as she asked, “Do you understand what I’m talking about?”
“You wouldn’t believe me even if I said yes.”
“Well, do you know what Ryū did after that, then?” “He decided to accept Mashiko as he was, children and all, and achieved even greater enlightenment through his silent forbearance. Am I close?”
“In an ideal world, maybe. Happily ever after and all that. But in the real world, if you don’t get something in return for your sacrifices, you end up breaking down. So what do you think ended up happening with Ryū?”
I shook my head, less interested in Ryū’s psychology than that of the woman talking about him. What was Masako getting in return for being held in suspense for so long?
“You can’t guess, can you? Of course not. It doesn’t interest you. All your attention’s taken up with your own worries.”
“I knew you’d say that. You’re always out to prove how little I understand about other people’s feelings. But you don’t need to prove it to me. I admit it. Everything you say is true.”
“I’m not proving something to you, I’m trying to explain myself, tell you something you didn’t know about me for the last six years. Maybe all the things that worry me seem of a piece to you from a distance, like when we lived so far apart all those years ago, but to me, it’s changing all the time, it’s never the same moment to moment.” Masako pulled out one of the drawers installed under her side of the bed and fished out a letter.
“I heard what Ryū had to say and thought, well, okay, so I can’t have children, so what? What’s the problem? I don’t know how Naru feels about it, but I’ll just have to live my life without children, it’s decided. But then I got this letter from Kasumi, and I didn’t know what to think anymore, it was all unclear again.”
Masako took the letter out of its envelope, looked it over to find the section she wanted, and then folded it to show me.
“I got it about a year ago. I was the one who introduced them, but I never dreamed something like this would happen. It was a real shock, enough to make my period late, which made me worry more, but the worst part was that I couldn’t talk to you about it.”
Ryū wanted to become a single father and had asked Kasumi to bear a child for him, since he couldn’t have one himself. He offered to pay for everything, so all she had to do was get artificially inseminated and have the baby. And of course, he’d pay her a fee on top of that. It’s not much, but would ¥5,000,000 be enough? Kasumi said she went out of her mind with anger, asking him what exactly he thought friendship really was, but Ryū insisted that having a child like this was his life’s purpose. I’d always wanted to share the joys and hardships of childbirth with someone else, but I was born without being able to give birth, he said. But I don’t care, it’s not a woman’s special privilege or God-given right to give birth, if a child arrives you welcome it whether it comes from some womb other than your wife’s or girlfriend’s, or out of a man’s body, or if it’s a clone or an android—it doesn’t matter how it’s born. I know I’d want it no matter how much it contributed to overpopulation, no matter if there were measures taken to limit how many new people came into the world, no matter how twisted this world ended up getting, how encrusted with unbending, obsolete beliefs, I’d still want a child to raise as well as I could to help straighten this twisted world back out, I’d want to pass on all the wisdom I’d gleaned from my brief stint upon this earth. Kasumi didn’t have an answer for that and asked if he’d considered adoption, but Ryū explained that he wanted to give everything he had to his baby, right down to his genes. Kasumi found herself left with no more counterarguments and moved by his words; it felt inhumane to refuse him after hearing him explain his motivations, so she accepted the offer with the caveat that to please her parents she would insist on having them get married, even if it was in name only, but Ryū refused, saying that if she really understood what kind of knowledge he wanted to pass on to his child, she’d know he could never agree to such an arrangement, that he would raise his child as a single father and that was that, and so she tried to refuse the fee he wanted to pay her but in the end he sent it to her, and she wanted to know what Masako thought about the whole thing, did she think it was okay?
I handed the letter back to Masako, saying, “I think I get it.” It was sad, and a bit repulsive. But I felt a certain kinship with the repulsiveness; I recognized myself in it.
“Well, I don’t get it. I can see why Kasumi would resist, of course, and I also understand the almost prayerful views that Ryū expressed, but I don’t know what to think about how it turned out. Hearing about it made me feel like my decision not to give birth was twisted, like it wasn’t the right thing to do anymore. Ryū’s not meant to give birth, but am I really not meant to, either? Every year I just get older and my body ages too, soon I’m going to pass the point of no return—I have to decide, right now, but I can’t! Even though the longer I put off my decision, the more the whole thing becomes moot.”
I couldn’t keep still any longer. “There’s nothing twisted about you! Either decision will be right.”
“So help me!” cried Masako, her voice rising.
I nodded my head and swallowed. “Did Kasumi end up giving birth?”
“I’m scared to ask. I’ll probably find out from them pretty soon anyway, like it or not.”
“Do you pity Ryū?”
“I … I don’t … ”
“I think I understand what he’s doing. He thinks that if there are more people like him in the world, if people like him become the norm, then everything will be better, the world would be a better place. But the flip side of that, and I don’t think he realizes this, is that wishing for that is the same as wishing that there were fewer people who aren’t like him in the world. He wouldn’t be able to ask a woman for the kind of thing he asked from Kasumi if he didn’t secretly feel that way. It’s a form of revenge against those who can have children themselves, who think nothing of it. It refuses to accept that part of reality, right down to the root. I don’t have such a well-defined target, but I think I share that kind of impulse myself.”
“I see,” said Masako, nodding deeply. “That’s what you meant when you said you understood. On this tape,” she continued, handing him the portable recorder, “you say that when you die you want to take the world with you. I didn’t get it at the time, but listening now, I can hear you fantasizing about extinguishing the whole human race to accompany you when you die. You said the only thing that seemed as immediate and real to you as I did was imagining all of Tokyo wiped out by sarin gas, right? Which means that when you’re with me, you’re able to block out everyone else in the world from your mind, right? So a child would just get in the way. You’ve wiped it out before it can even be born. No, it’s true, I’m sure of it. You’re a baby killer. That’s your way of extinguishing the human race. You said you understood my feelings just now, but I think you’d have to kill yourself to really do that. You feel guilty, like a baby killer, and so you can’t talk about children at all. You’re scared I’d figure it out as soon you admitted you didn’t want children.”
If I could have willed my heart to stop, I would have. Or willed a huge earthquake to strike and wipe me out. If I could have just died of natural causes right then, right there, everything would have been solved. I was an unnatural person. A human who rejects humanity, an inhuman human. The only natural thing I could do was die.
“Do you find me repulsive?”
“You really need to ask me that? Don’t you understand that I know there’s something in you stopping you before
you act on these secret feelings in your heart?”
“I can’t even believe that myself.”
“You need others to believe in you. I wanted to do that for you, Naru, and I wanted you to want me to.”
“I do.”
It had gotten light outside, beyond the curtains. Crows cawed at each other as they picked over the garbage. My eyes stung with a combination of fatigue and the dry air from the heater.
“What are we going to do?” asked Masako, sounding exhausted.
“The difference between me and Ryū is that I’ve got you, right?”
“I feel like I’ve been halfway like Ryū myself. Like I’ve been trying to ask myself to become my own surrogate mother.”
“And Soccer’s been the thing keeping you from doing it?”
Masako, as if suddenly coming to her senses, looked down, then under the bed, and then out in the kitchen, saying, “I guess he left,” as she walked onto the veranda. I followed her. Soccer wasn’t out there either. There was frost forming on the tuna in his dish. The air was cold and silvery, as if made of ice. There was no one on the sidewalk below. The only things that moved were the white puffs of breath from our mouths. This is raw reality, I thought. It was bracing as it touched my skin. I embraced Masako from behind as she said, It’s cold, and I whispered in her ear, “Let’s improve the world, together. Like Ryū said.” Masako twisted around to look at me, saying, “Should we really decide just like that, after a single conversation?”
“I think it’s what we both want.”
Masako took a deep breath. I felt her body swell, then shrink again.
“Well, that may be so,” said Masako, laughing suddenly. “It was good to get it all out, I feel better. Just don’t forget you’re still on probation, mister.”
“For how long?”
We, the Children of Cats (Found in Translation) Page 8