We, the Children of Cats (Found in Translation)

by Hoshino, Tomoyuki

  Yoshinobu mulled this over. Nature conservationists pour all their efforts into protecting trees, and advocates for the homeless pour all their efforts into protecting people, so it’s natural that these green zones and forests would become the frontlines of a conflict between the two. And he began to mutter to himself. Everything the sand touches turns to sand. Anything that’s part of a group tries to turn what it touches into a part of itself. Into a part of its brain. Bury the corpses in the forest. Die in the forest and come back as a tree.

  The conservation group Hisada represented had been buying the Minuma Wetlands piece by piece to place it in a “green trust,” but the Higashi Urawa forest had an owner from long ago who was willing to cooperate with them. Yoshinobu said that he wanted to meet this owner, and Hisada gave him the contact information.

  The person with the surname Sakai who came out to meet Yoshinobu when he arrived was an old woman, just shy of her seventieth birthday. Hisada had told him that the current owner was the widow of the original proprietor, but when Yoshinobu offered his business card with a formal Call me Mr. Kawai, the reply that reached his ears still dizzied him: And you can call me Yayoi Sakai.

  Do you get to visit the forest often?

  Oh no, I’m afraid I leave it all to Mr. Hisada these days. I visit maybe once a year.

  It’s a lovely forest, isn’t it?

  It truly is, there’s a certain mystical quality to it.

  Does it have a long history?

  She began to talk about a shrine that used to be there, how the only son of the man who ran it had been just a baby when he died, so the shrine ending up disappearing, and after a bit, Yoshinobu changed the subject, asking, Do you have any siblings, Ms. Sakai? And Yayoi grew quiet and nodded, asking softly, Have you been in the forest yourself, Mr. Newspaperman?

  Do you have something to tell me?

  Are you going to put this in your article?

  You don’t want me to? If I’ve offended you in any way …

  Yayoi waved her hand impatiently. Just conceal my name, and if you say that that would compromise your journalism, then so be it. But everything else I leave up to you, Mr. Newspaperman.

  I’ll make my decision after I hear what you have to tell me.

  That forest is a grave. My brother’s.

  It is? Your brother passed away?

  I think you already knew he had, Mr. Newspaperman. Please continue.

  What I’m about to tell you, I don’t know how much of it’s true or just made up. I didn’t hear it directly from Misao, my brother. I pieced it together from things I heard from the people I met who were involved with the case brought by those who’d been duped into immigrating to the Dominican Republic. I hear Misao wanted to join them in the struggle, but he was too late. It would have been something if he had, though, that’s for sure. He was stubborn through and through, with a firm sense of right and wrong; he always had a hard time getting along with others or compromising, and he was shy, too, I hear he kept to himself even over there among the other immigrants.

  You know, that temperament of his was part of the reason he emigrated in the first place. After the war ended, he was troubled, he tried school but it never seemed to work out, and he just ended up hanging around the house; if he encountered anything pure or idealistic he would get all wrapped up in it, make all these plans in his head. He’d tried becoming a productive member of society, but it hadn’t worked out, which made him ripe to get sucked into some revolutionary movement or other, and so our father signed him up when the government began advertising for people to go and settle in the Dominican Republic. I think Misao was twenty-five or six at the time. Mother and Father somehow got their hands on some stock to give him; he took it with a dark look on his face, and he hardly said a word to us from then till it was time to leave. Thinking back on it now, it must have seemed to him like they were paying him off so they could cut their ties for good. He must have gone along with it because he felt he had no other choice. Happily, we were told that the Dominican Republic was a lovely tropical nation where it was easy to grow crops, and he was going to receive a plantation with huge fields and a spacious house when he got there, and they told us he’d even receive a stipend for the first three years to get him started on the right track, so we figured Misao was finally going places, you know, he was our brother so we wanted to look on the bright side of his situation.

  But when he arrived, that wasn’t how it was. The land he received was a third of what he’d been promised, and the ground was so white with salt it looked like snow under the morning sun. When he tried to till the soil, it was just rocks, and it seemed impossible that anyone would look at it and think it could be made into farmland. The house was just a rough-hewn little hut dug into the ground, and no rain ever fell to cool the air, making it impossible to sleep. There was nothing to eat, and I hear it was the children who began to die first.

  It became unbearable before long for the immigrants, so they went to the consulate, asking them again and again to deliver on what they’d promised, but the consulate reminded the immigrants that as representatives of His August Presence, ambassadors were one degree from being angels—did they really want to sully the ears of a Son of Heaven with their pitiful pleading? You should learn shame, they were told. You should learn forbearance and fortitude, there’s no soil that can’t be turned to farmland with the diligent application of fertilizer, no matter how salty or stony it may be, and besides, no true Son of Japan would give up before attempting to smash the very stones into arable earth! And so their protests fell on deaf ears. I can just imagine what happened when Misao heard what they said. I’m sure he tried harder than ever, worked and worked and worked to turn every stone and every grain of salt to soil and make it the richest, most fertile land in all the world. I hear that even as those around him fell ill or abandoned their plots and left, he would be out there trying to break the stones into soil with his pickaxe, wash the salt away with water he would walk miles to get from the nearest well, sacrificing his body to this solitary battle with the earth. But for all his effort, none of the vegetables or fruit he grew ever got bigger than a little boy’s wee-wee, and so the de facto leader of the immigrants looked at Misao killing himself in the fields and decided to move him to a plot that was at least comparatively more farmable, if only to remove his piteousness from view.

  But even so, none of the land the immigrants were given to divide among themselves was good for much of anything, and the majority of them refused to give up, so all the immigrants ended up trying to make their living in the two or three areas of comparatively tolerable farmland. Naturally, there wasn’t nearly enough to go around, and Misao, saying that he couldn’t abide taking land away from anyone else, ended up becoming a tenant farmer on one of the large plantations owned by the Dominicans. Several of the immigrants reached out to him, saying that tenant farming like that was tantamount to voluntary slavery, but Misao refused their offers to work for them on their land, asking them how they could just cheerfully work on land that had been bilked from the natives by foreign swindlers and their accomplices? I won’t be a part of any more evildoings, he said, blunt as always. Some of the immigrants who were having the roughest go of it decided to band together and go back to Japan, and they invited Misao to join them, but he was just as blunt to them: What, you didn’t die like you were supposed to on this barren mountain they dumped you on, so you want to go back and be kept like a pet till you finally do? Don’t play the patriot with me! And on and on he went, spitting on the land of his ancestors until the Japanese immigrant community shunned him too.

  It was around that time that Misao started going into the forest. In the mornings and evenings, he’d just disappear from the village. One day, the wife of a Haitian tenant farmer Misao was friends with wandered into the woods to pick some wild fruit—mangoes, maybe? papayas?—and she ran across Misao in a clearing way back in the trees, yelling and singing. The tenant farmer, hearing his wife’s story, became
concerned, thinking that maybe Misao was performing some sort of dark ritual in there, so he entreated another Japanese immigrant to go with him to investigate; they sneaked together into the woods and tried to spy on him, but Misao sensed they were there right away and stopped performing his one-man show right then, dashing nimbly into the trees like some kind of lizard or squirrel or rabbit. And after that, Misao was never seen except when he worked the fields during the day, but his hoarse shouting could be heard emanating from the depths of the forest like the cries of some terrible bird. Some in the area would joke that it was like High Mass, except it was just High Misao.

  And so the years passed with no word from him, and Father died, and then Mother, and finally my eldest brother decided that even if it was just an empty gesture, we had to try and include him in the division of the assets, so he sent a telegram to the island requesting that Misao come back at least for a little bit. We were shocked when a reply came back right away saying he was on his way and two or three days later he showed up on an airplane. And we were also shocked by his appearance—he was barely sixty, I think, but he looked like a frail, wizened old man. His hair was pure white and the skin of his face and hands was like wrinkled leather—he looked like a different person altogether. At first he stayed with my brother out in Sakado, but he left there before long, claiming that he couldn’t talk to him, that no matter what he tried to say nothing got through, and so he ended up staying with me after I explained the situation to my husband. When I asked him what he and our brother were fighting about,

  Misao explained that he wanted to display a flag he’d brought with him at our parents’ gravesite, but our brother wouldn’t allow it, and he showed me this piece of red cloth he had. It was a Japanese flag that had been dyed so the white was red too. You know, like the song? “For the flag we fight! Till the red obscures the white!” He’d actually done it. I can’t tell you how disturbing it was to look at. I shuddered and asked him why he wanted to do such a thing, and he said, This flag represents my life, everything our parents did to me is all right there, and I wanted them to accept responsibility but I’m too late, they died on me, so I thought at least I could present it to their graves, but no matter how I try to explain it to my brother in this country’s goddamn language, nothing gets through.

  It was the same when we tried to talk about the inheritance. I don’t need anything from them but an apology, and since they’re gone I’ll take one from you all, I want you to apologize to me, just a word saying sorry for banishing me like that. We told him that we hadn’t banished anyone anywhere and were glad to be reunited with him, that we could figure out somewhere for him to live as part of the inheritance discussion so we could live together as brothers and sisters again, but Misao, he’d have none of it. You’re just like the government go-betweens, everything you say is lies, if you had any integrity you’d own up to what happened and offer me a word of apology, just one word! He was screaming at us in his shaky, high-pitched voice. I started crying then and said I was sorry, but our brother wouldn’t budge, saying, Misao, quit it with these mean-spirited accusations. Even if our parents are guilty of banishing you, it was because they felt they had no choice, and your sister and I were just children then, how could we stop them? I think everyone here understands how hard you’ve had it, so please, control yourself. And Misao muttered, Once you’ve been separated longer than you’ve been together, I guess even family become strangers, and refused to speak to us at all after that. He left for the Dominican Republic before the inheritance was even completely settled, and none of us made much effort to get him to stay. As it was, it seemed better that he just go back, for his sake as much as ours. My foolish brothers, it would have been better if either of them had been a little better at forgiveness. Though I ended up convinced that Misao would return again someday just because he left that red flag at my house, so I guess I was pretty foolish too.

  It was three years ago that the advocacy group for the Dominican immigrants came to Japan to file their suit. We’d been contacted by some of the immigrants themselves previous to that, informing us that Misao had passed on five years before but they hadn’t known how to get a hold of any of us, so it took a while to track us down. They explained that they had cremated him and made a grave back in the Dominican Republic, but they had also saved a part of his remains to bring back to Japan, which they kindly gave to us along with some of his effects, a note-book and a cassette tape. They explained that he’d disappeared completely after he returned from Japan and that they only knew what became of him because the Japanese Immigrant Cooperative was contacted by a nursing home in Santo Domingo that an old man of Japanese descent had died there and they went to investigate. I felt so bad, I wrapped his remains in that red flag with the red sun in its center and burned them as I listened to the tape, and then I scattered the ashes in the forest. I don’t suppose Misao minded that overmuch, at least.

  I’m sorry, can we stop? I’m exhausted. If there’s anything else you want to ask, I’ll be glad to answer your questions if you visit me again some other day, but I’m not sure what more I have to tell you, said Yayoi, ending the interview, so Yoshinobu returned to his car and tried playing the tape she’d handed him on the stereo. It turned out to be a recording of the one-man show Yoshinobu had seen in the forest. But there were parts inserted here and there that Yoshinobu hadn’t witnessed.

  For example, when Urashima Tarō of the Earth’s Backside is abandoned alone in the fields of salt, muttering vaguely that he stopped being able to tell if he was alive or dead, a figure rises from the ground like a heat shimmer, taking the form of a goddess who looks just like a bodhisattva, and she admonishes Tarō thusly:

  This forest, this island, this world: how many bodies have come to rest within them since dawn of human history? Thy feet rest upon land formed from the bodies of hundreds, millions, trillions of people who now exist as soil. It may be said that all that ye call land is merely corpses, people and cattle, fish and fowl and all the myriad creatures of the world piling up as they expire, year after year after year. Taketh the soil in thy hand: the mud that stains thy fingers once was living flesh. This world is a world of corpses. Ye living struggle and squirm but briefly amid the nooks and crannies of its cadaver-strewn surface. Ye may gain vitality by feeding on the dead, grow strong and energetic. But ye must never grow arrogant. Take heed.

  And as this salt-statue goddess rising from the field spoke to Urashima Tarō of the Earth’s Backside, tears flowed from her eyes that melted her away until she sank back down completely, salting the earth once more.

  Later, during the part when Urashima Tarō of the Earth’s Backside misses his absent mother and father, there is a section where he can’t stop going over and over the words they spoke, dwelling on every little part of how it was back home. Before long, this imaginary hometown is more vivid than the Dominican scenery in front of him, and before he knows it, his father appears in his hut and joins the action:

  And what’s this? My father has curled his fingers and pulled a finely folded Japanese flag through them and look! Now it’s red, all red, so red it’s dripping!

  Speak of this to no one. My words are only for you, Tarō. Lock them in your heart, let your actions show the world what I teach you. If you speak the words I teach you aloud, people may understand them but they will never penetrate their hearts, not all the way. This is how it is with the human mind. You must never simply believe the words people say, and you should never tell anyone anything that’s only words.

  Misao never performed his one-man show for anyone else. He kept it to himself, “locked in his heart,” performing it again and again with only himself as audience. Did this tape contain the story he needed to tell so badly, yet couldn’t bear to?

  Yoshinobu shivered as he brushed against the enormity of such loneliness. The loneliness of words that wanted so badly to be said but refused so violently to be told.

  Yoshinobu thought Misao was like the founder of a religio
n who rejected religion. He was too aware of how small a part of the universe he represented to do such a thing. He couldn’t bear to force himself on others, it was too obscene. He couldn’t abide the universal principle by which every story requires another’s suppression to be told.

  Misao rejected the logic of overthrow. He longed to effect change but he refused to overturn the world through struggle against others. Leaving behind words he’d never asserted or even said to anyone else, he attempted to articulate his world in its entirety, banishing nothing, no one.

  The notebook, worm-eaten and ink-smudged, contained drafts of letters and tables tallying harvest yields, columns of sale prices and profits. The letter drafts consisted of scribbled sentences like I’m doing fine, as always; Here’s hoping you get a chance to visit soon!; My sincerest condolences; at one point, a double strikethrough attempted to obliterate the line Why can no one understand my pain?

  Misao didn’t seem dead to Yoshinobu. He could always visit the forest and see him again. They were stuck in a stage where they kept bumping into each other without really connecting, but soon the time would come when they’d have a chance to exchange words, to really get to know each other. He’s not a stranger to me, that’s why I understand him, thought Yoshinobu. And besides, strictly speaking, Yayoi never actually saw Misao’s body, so there was no proof he was really dead. He should try to contact the members of that Japanese immigrant group who told Yayoi that Misao had died, maybe go to the Dominican Republic himself, see the grave they all pitched in to build for him: that would be perfect. In any case, Yoshinobu decided to pursue the issue as far as he could. And so he began commuting regularly to Higashi Urawa, gathering material about Japanese immigrants in the Dominican Republic on the one hand and hoping to get a chance to see Misao perform his one-man show one more time on the other.