We, the Children of Cats (Found in Translation)

by Hoshino, Tomoyuki

“Your whole life.”

  “Ahh, a short sentence.” I felt myself beginning to smile as well.

  “You know, I thought it would work out like this. But why do I still feel suspended, like nothing is actually settled? Did we decide this all on our own, as two individuals? Or was it decided for us?”

  “Maybe it was.” It felt like something had truly changed, that the decision we’d made was right, and yet I too felt as though the two of us were floating, weightless. “But it’ll still feel like we decided this together, and that’s how reality feels for unnatural folks like us.”

  “So I’m unnatural, too?”

  “Yes. By which I mean, very human.”

  “I see. So, you want to get started now?” murmured Masako, nibbling along my jawline. I nodded, and we went inside like that and ended up back in bed.

  The paperboy came by, the brakes on his bicycle squeaking intermittently. I glanced out through a gap in the imperfectly closed curtains. Masako followed my gaze. Laughing guiltily, we stifled our voices and went back to our caresses. Running my hands and tongue across her body as if smoothing her hair, my breathing began to synchronize with hers as her hands and tongue responded in kind.

  Masako’s breathing gradually began to slow, become more regular. Eventually, her hands stopped their movements and fell back into the sheets. Hot and vaguely vegetable-scented, Masako’s breath flowed in and out of her half-open mouth. My lips and ears bathed in this breath, I knew that we weren’t going to make love.

  We’d left the door slightly ajar, and Soccer slipped back in, soundlessly.

  Air (2006)

  The flute played the quiet with its hoarse-throated cry. It was a song like wind allowing a flute to sculpt its contours, a Tōru Takemitsu composition called “Air.” My chest tightened as its birdsong phrase repeated. It felt like Tsubame had flown into my room and was whispering in my ear.

  With “Air” playing on a loop in the background, I spread tissues across the floor beneath my desk chair, dropped my pants, and rubbed myself erect. Then I took the alcoholwiped blade of my X-Acto knife and pressed it carefully against my penis, gently pulling it along the skin. The cold came first, followed closely by sharp pain, and a light flow of blood began running toward the root. I wrapped the shaft in tissue paper. With my spit-wet finger I caressed the mouth of the wound. An involuntary cry of pain escaped me. The stopper that had blocked my throat like the pit of a plum worked itself free at last, and sadness surged up all at once. My tears and cries seemed to have no end.

  I don’t do it because it feels good. I do it because if I didn’t, I would lose any sense I was still alive. It was a variation on the theme of the wrist cut, the penis cut. I have no desire to approach death, so I avoid my wrists. I want to approach a deeper, more fundamental loss, so I cut my penis. I can get as close as possible to the loss of Tsubame this way.

  I say I lost him, but he didn’t die, we didn’t even have a falling out. Tsubame simply went along with his diplomat lover, Dr. Hiroda (as everyone called her), when she was transferred to Mexico. At the farewell party the two of them held at their home, Tsubame had told me lightheartedly, “Come visit us! We’ll have three spare rooms, you can stay for as long as you like. Any one of them is bigger than your entire apartment, Tsubasa!” But I had already reached my limit. I couldn’t stand this one-sided affair any longer. It was just that I couldn’t bring myself to end things when he was near. When he told me he was going to Mexico, I realized my chance had come. Seeing that I could no longer stand the situation I’d found myself in, destiny had lent its helping hand.

  So I vowed never to go to Mexico, never to see Tsubame again as long as I lived. And with this feeling filling me, I sang him a farewell song at his farewell party. It was “La Golondrina,” a song sung in Mexico at times of parting, which I’d memorized phonetically for the occasion.

  Are you leaving, where are you going, golondrina?

  If you hurry so, you’ll tire,

  Lose your way in the wind,

  Have nowhere to rest your wings.

  I’ll make you a nest near my bed,

  You can weather the cold months there.

  I am lost here too.

  O Heaven! I cannot fly like you, golondrina.

  Oh, my lovely golondrina, I hear your song,

  And think of home, and weep.

  I’d also recorded myself playing the flute, and I sang with the recording as accompaniment. As I sang, the thought that the words were a direct expression of my heart overwhelmed me, and I started to cry. And once I started, I couldn’t stop. No one knew of my decision. Tsubame remained ignorant of the confession I was singing to him as I mouthed the Spanish syllables of “La Golondrina.” So my song was received with a vague sort of generalized pensiveness, punctuated by a few women bursting into tears in sympathy with mine.

  Tsubame praised my flute playing. He knew how hard I’d practiced to make the instrument my own.

  The first time we ever did anything alone together was when I went with him to a memorial concert for Tōru Takemitsu. Dr. Hiroda, who was originally supposed to have gone with him, had had something come up, so he asked me to go in her stead. I’d never heard the name “Tōru Takemitsu” before, and I found contemporary classical music so boring that I was fighting to stave off sleep throughout the show. I even abstained from the wine offered during the intermission. Still, Tsubame saw through all my efforts, of course.

  The concert ended with Takemitsu’s posthumous work “Air,” then the house lights came up. Tsubame hurriedly wiped tears from his eyes, saying softly, “I want that piece played at my funeral. It makes me feel like I wouldn’t mind no longer being human.”

  Was the piece really that great? Spurred by this thought, I ran out and bought it on CD. Patrick Gallois was the flutist on the recording. Even though I didn’t understand what made it so great, I listened to it over and over. And as I did, the Takemitsu-borne wind that Gallois played began to penetrate my flesh, to blow through my body. It was music, yet it wasn’t. It fell somewhere between a natural breeze and a man-made breath. I felt as if by opening my body to this wind, I, too, could transcend my own humanity.

  This must have been what Tsubame had meant, and I was filled with joy at my realization, and ran to tell him. And wouldn’t you know, he ended up giving me a flute of my own as a present.

  “It doesn’t matter if you’re bad at it. You understand the feeling, so I want you to play the wind,” he told me, rather affectedly. Artists have a tendency to say pretentious things without a hint of irony. Tsubame was an unsuccessful artist who painted all sorts of bric-a-brac in colorful abstractions, and who Dr. Hiroda, the daughter of a gallery owner and fifteen years his senior, discovered and later made her lover. To cut a long story short, I ended up meeting Tsubame because a close friend from middle school had a sister who was an editor for an art magazine, and we were introduced at a party at her house.

  Truth be told, the flute he gave me was somewhat of a burden. But I gave it my all because I knew it pleased him. I took lessons whenever I had a day off, and even during normal workdays I’d practice for an hour in the park early in the morning. I’d initially planned on mastering the phrase from “Air” that I liked so much, but this turned out to be much too distant a goal, seeing how I found myself occupied entirely with just “La Golondrina.”

  Listening to “Air” again now, I caressed the wounds cut into my penis, and as I blew on them, the pain seeping into my flesh, I felt the air rush through me. The wind blowing through my hollow core seemed to produce a hoarse-throated sound. I became a flute as the wind passed through me, and I played my own version of “Air.” I thought of Tsubame, who’d crossed the sky and left me. He’d shown me the difference between him and me, flightless wing that I am, and yet he also made me feel what it was to be alive. I resisted the urge to cut myself again.

  Layers of scars adorned my penis like the patterns carved by waves. When Misaki was about to go down on me the first tim
e, she noticed them and pulled back. “What’s that? Some kind of disease?” she asked. “Well, of a sort,” I replied ruefully, “A disease of the heart.”

  “I didn’t know you were into that kind of thing. You like it rough? I must not be enough for you!”

  “You are more than enough for me. It’s just when I’m alone, I end up hurting myself.”

  I told her the truth. I told her all about Tsubame, save for my pathetic feelings for him. But the explanation didn’t ring true even to myself. I’d never fallen in love with a man, my seduction success rate with women averaged about sixty percent, and things with Misaki were going perfectly well, so I hadn’t known what to make of my quickening heartbeat when I’d first met Tsubame. Did I simply respect a man so able to live life on his own terms? Was I just drawn to someone whose talents exceeded my own?

  Tsubame was popular. With his svelte physique, his gentle voice and way of speaking, his meltingly sweet disposition, his guileless way of approaching things that fell outside his ken, he possessed an openness that put everyone at ease while concealing the sharpness of his true insights. These elements blended miraculously to produce a sultry allure that wafted from him almost palpably. Yet he was devoted to Dr. Hiroda exclusively. All others who crowded around remained firmly in their places as dear friends, nothing more. Myself included.

  Yet I had the feeling that in his heart of hearts, I stuck out at least a little from the rest of these “dear friends.” And regardless, I simply wanted to be near him. It didn’t matter if it was just the two of us or not. It was happiness itself just to hear his voice speak his words, to have him laugh or be moved or get excited by mine. Our moods would melt into each other and become inextricably mixed. And then I would decide not to think about these feelings any further. I would shed my clothes and satisfy myself with Misaki.

  But even so … At long last, I confessed my secret feelings to Misaki. Her response was unexpected, or maybe I should say, old-fashioned. In short, she became a ball of fire ignited by jealousy and trust betrayed.

  “What is this load of crap? The truth is you like your junk slapped around by some dominatrix, don’t you? You get off when it hurts, right? So why don’t I try biting you? I’ll chew you up and spit you out, you animal, you monkey who walks like a man!”

  As she said this, she actually tried to bite me. Naturally, we soon split up. The truth was, I was playing at being something I wasn’t even more than Misaki guessed, so my fault in the matter was hardly trifling. But even so, I made use of Misaki’s convenient misunderstanding.

  My cuts scab over and the scars they leave after I peel them off overlap and build on each other, deforming my penis until it looks like it’s ringed with rubber washers. I was running out of places for my blade to slice. I wanted proof that I was alive. I wanted to remake myself into a form I could point to and say, “That is Tsubasa Tsutsui.” I imagined myself with a vagina, tracing the line coarsely referred to as the “ant trail” that runs from behind my balls to my anus with the point of the blade.

  I felt as if I already had a vagina. What other explanation could there be for the sweet pain that overcomes me? It was simply buried beneath this thick wall of flesh. My body was hiding my vagina deep within itself. A vagina concealed a hollowness. I was a flute, I was hollow too, wind rushing through my empty core. If I could just split my flesh open, my hollowness could be exposed. I could just turn my flesh back on itself and voila! A vagina would appear! Just as Takemitsu sculpted the air by caressing its contours to make wind into music, I could make myself into an instrument just by cutting through the hymen obstructing my flute! And then I would be my true self at last, and living my life would regain its meaning.

  Excited by these thoughts, I drove the blade hard into my perineum. Pain incomparable to any penis cut shot through me from my spine to the crown of my skull. This was my penis’s root. It was more resilient that I’d imagined, and more sensitive. But to cut into it was to make the vagina cut. If I couldn’t stand to do it, I’d never become my true self. The extent of the sacrifice gave value to the act’s completion.

  I pictured myself penetrating my own hole, exploring it with my fingers. Just imagining it, my body was gripped with agony. If I really did it, I suppose I’d pass out, ascend to heaven. Ascend. I’d rise like Tsubame up into the sky. We’d ride the wind and dance up there, together in the air.

  Today it happened in a crowded train. A penis appeared at my crotch. It was so sudden it hurt. It pressed up against someone’s thigh. I supposed there were a lot of men who did this, who molested their neighbors with an innocent look on their faces. I supposed that now I knew what it felt like to be one of them, however involuntarily.

  Though no one else could tell that my penis was there. My penis wasn’t real. It was invisible. I was just your run-of-the-mill woman, my body as feminine as anyone else’s, except from time to time I felt a penis sprout from my crotch. It was only the feeling that sprouted, though, my physical body didn’t change at all. I called it my air penis.

  I don’t really remember when it first appeared, but I do recall that sometime before I was old enough to go to school, I wet my pants trying to pee off the edge of a river-bank while standing up, even though no one had ever told me that was possible, and I ended up getting scolded by my parents. My parents had thought I’d simply lost control. I tried to explain that the pee hadn’t come out the hole I expected it to, but they didn’t understand.

  I was afflicted off and on with this illusory feeling ever since, and I began to worry about why this was happening to me as I neared puberty. I didn’t otherwise feel like a boy, and I wasn’t attracted to other girls. If only for this one little problem, I’d be able to wax lyrical about my girlhood like any other woman. My air penis held a certain sort of innocent sex appeal for me, and it began to interfere with my sexual development as a woman. This was because my hallucinatory penis was maturing right along with the rest of me.

  It was about a year after I first started to get my period that one morning I awoke to the feeling that my lower body was swelled to its very limit. Thinking I just had to pee, I went into the bathroom. I’d already sat down on the toilet before I realized that it was really just the feeling of my air penis growing harder than it ever had before.

  I’d already experienced the occasional erection before then. I found that if I just ignored them, they’d dissipate before too long, taking the air penis itself along with them. But this time it hurt, like a stake was being driven into my crotch. The pain was sweet, though. I put my hand on my air penis. A tingling kind of ache washed over me, making me dizzy. Before I knew it, I’d rubbed my air penis until I came. Of course, no sperm spurted out.

  After much painful consideration, I finally came to a conclusion on the matter I could live with. Say you were to lose your right arm for some reason. Even though there’s no arm there any more, a phantom arm may sprout and replace it, and it can grab things just as before, or you can feel like you’re writing with it, or biting its nails, or stroking your lover’s skin; the phantom arm can itch or hurt or even feel pleasure. Even after years have passed and you’ve become accustomed to everyday life with one arm, you may still be bothered by this sort of phantom arm sprouting up from time to time.

  This air penis of mine was surely the same sort of thing. It was the remainder of something that used to be there but was removed. Maybe in a past life, a man driven by a desire to become something else cut off his own penis and, at that moment, gave birth to me.

  Since reaching this conclusion, I became much more relaxed. Because my origins were different, it no longer mattered that I was developing differently than the other girls around me. I didn’t know if I was really a man, or, since I may have been driven to cut off my own penis when I was a man, I was really a woman, or if I was really neither one. I felt like a real woman most of the time, but when I started to think deeply about which gender I might truly be, I sometimes felt like a “counterfeit woman, hiding from the
world.” Counterfeit yet real. But nevertheless, a woman.

  With my relaxation came my first boyfriend. I could even have sex normally. One morning, I opened my eyes and then took off my clothes, asking him,

  “Can you see my wee-wee?”

  I’d woken up with an erection. Though it had almost nothing to do with sexual excitement, my air penis was hard.

  “I see it, I see it,” Masakazu replied, and he reached out and fondled my clitoris. Oh, for the—well, what could I do? What I really wanted was for him to feel my penis the way I did, to touch it and suck it and put it up his ass, but this would have to suffice.

  It was my personal idol. I couldn’t see it, but I knew my air penis was real. It was like a ghost, something that was removed and should have disappeared yet didn’t, as if it had unfinished business. What compelled it to appear, what excited its interest? I became increasingly intrigued by the shrouded origins and mysterious desires of my air penis.

  The temperature had risen to nearly 40° C. It was the hottest it’d been all summer. It seemed to me that the humidity in the staging area was making the heat twice as intense. Even so, the drag queens waiting for their turn to go, the people dressed like speed skaters covered in arabesque patterns, the bodybuilders displaying their bulked-up chests, the bearded men wrapped in leather and dripping with chains, the people made up to look like who knows what, the couples with their smiles so broad they seemed close to bursting, all their energy seemed inexplicably high. The only one who seemed to give off any negative energy was me, my bashful, retiring bearing paradoxically making me feel all the more conspicuous and anxious.

  I was attending the Tokyo Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade. I’d found out about this festival for sexual minorities on the Internet after making a cursory search to see if I was alone in having an air penis. If I hadn’t possessed such a thing, if I were just your average girl, I likely would have never encountered even the term “sexual minority” my whole life. I also found out for the first time that “heterosexual” was the term for those who weren’t “homosexual.” Of course, homosexuals weren’t the only “sexual minorities” out there. There were those who liked both boys and girls, as well as countless other, more complex conjunctions of love and identity. And since that was true, it seemed natural that a girl with an air penis could find a place among these folks. At the very least, I figured I’d meet others who shared some of the realities of my existence, so I found myself wandering out to watch the parade.