His work was interrupted by the news of five sixth-graders from Shirasagi Elementary who’d gone missing and were discovered five days later, weakened and prone, in the woods of the Sayama Hills, and there was apparently a bit of turmoil regarding their being taken into protective custody. It was a homeless person living there who’d found them. You’ve been doing something with those free-range homeless people, right? said the bureau chief when Yoshinobu showed his face. Well, here’s your big break! Write, write, write! A hundred lines, two hundred, whatever, just give me something.
Yoshinobu poked around the area amid the masses of other reporters, and after filing his impressions of the investigation’s basic outline and the physical features and general atmosphere in the area with the Tokorozawa bureau reporter assigned to the police station, Yoshinobu wrangled an introduction out of Hisada that landed him a visit to the office of an NGO concerned with protecting the Sayama Hills area, where he received a lecture about the situation of the homeless in the Hills from an assistant professor who moonlighted as the NGO’s representative. And so, after making a map of all the places where the homeless population was concentrated and some of the animal trails and footpaths in the area, Yoshinobu entered the forest just after nine that evening, armed with a flash-light and some whiskey.
Compared to the small copse of trees at Higashi Urawa, Sayama Hills was exceptionally large and dense. The new moon plunged the area within the trees into a darkness so total it was like a bottomless bog. Every step he took terrified him, as though he were always on the verge of stumbling into deep black water. Turning on the flashlight only illuminated his immediate surroundings and disquieted him more, so Yoshinobu closed his eyes instead and tried to sharpen his hearing and sense of touch so he could grasp the shape of the darkness. The cries of the insects outlined the terrain’s hills and hollows. Small nocturnal creatures made sounds signaling the wherea-bouts of the trees. Open areas were indicated by the pronounced concentration of life he sensed in them. Was there a sea of souls spreading out endlessly all around us all the time, invisible to the naked eye? Belonging neither to the world of the living nor the dead, this sea of souls pressed in on Yoshinobu, forming a current that flowed, ghostlike, around him. Yoshinobu gave himself over to its flow and made his way forward.
From time to time, the smell of rotting organic matter other than soil and grass would waft toward him, which usually meant that he’d discovered an area inhabited by the homeless. Whenever this happened, Yoshinobu would call out, pass some whiskey around to whoever responded, and ask questions. Have you happened to see any elementary school kids wandering around? Do you know of any kids living here?
And so he ended up interviewing school officials in the daytime and wandering the wooded Hills at night, arriving as soon as the sun went down. The children were released from the hospital after three days, but they refused to say a single word to anyone: not to the doctors at the hospital, not to the people who had searched for them, not even to their parents; so it remained unclear how they spent those five days away from home, why they left, or what connection it may have had with the poisoning. The school officials reported that not only the five runa-ways, but increasing numbers of the general population of schoolchildren at Shirasagi Elementary had stopped speaking as well, particularly sixth-graders, leading the school counselor to diagnose them with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This was a big part of the reason why the school had yet to resume classes after the summer break.
Five days after he’d begun his nightly wanderings, Yoshinobu ran across a homeless woman, who, while not the one credited with finding the five missing children, had nonetheless let them stay with her for a night. He’d known of her existence from things the other homeless people living in the area had told him, but he hadn’t been able to find her. She displayed an unusual wariness at first, refusing to answer him and frustrating any attempts to get to know her until he handed her a prepaid cell phone, saying, Well, maybe we can use this to talk instead. Her voice came to him over the phone, explaining, I’m a woman, so I can’t just wander around as I please like the other people out here do. I can’t be too careful protecting myself. You don’t run into people so often in here, so it’s safe in that sense, but at the same time, if you do run into trouble there’s no one to help you. I try to blend into the woods so no one notices me here in my little hut, my senses honed like an animal’s to let me know if someone’s nearby, so to be found out like this by a reporter came as quite a shock.
Even with her fine-tuned senses, the woman hadn’t noticed them approaching. She’d been collecting fallen leaves to stuff her pillow and gotten tired, and when she straightened up to stretch her back, there they were: five kids silently walking toward her. They aren’t human, she thought. These children are not of this earth. Chills ran down her spine, but, perhaps because they were kids, she ended up calling out to them before she quite knew what she was doing. What’re you kids doing here? she asked, and all five of them, their backpacks slung over their shoulders, turned to face her at the same time.
You kids shouldn’t be in a place like this.
A boy wearing glasses nodded.
Well if you know that, then go home! she said, and told them how to get out of the forest. But the children shook their heads.
So you’re playing hooky, hiding out here when you’re supposed to be at school? Is that it?
The children didn’t answer and instead came closer, taking off their backpacks to sit at her feet.
Why so quiet? You kids from the deaf school?
A boy with a dyed blond crew cut nodded, but the tallest boy shook his head and took from his backpack a little booklet with “Last Words” written on its cover, opening it to a certain page to show her. There was a drawing of a person’s face with no eyes, ears, nose, or mouth, along with the words, “We believe in silence.”
You took a vow of silence?
The tallest boy shook his head and flipped through the booklet’s well-worn pages before showing it to her again. There was another illustration, this time of a naked green man sleeping in a tree, and beneath it the words “There are ways to use one’s voice and remain silent at the same time. Through silence, we can gradually get closer to nature, to the plants and animals.”
At this, the woman became convinced she was being played for a fool, and she said, I don’t understand this, but I want you to get out of here. Come on, stand up, I don’t want to have anything to do with you, and trust me, you don’t want to have anything to do with me, I don’t care if you ran away from home or whatever it is you’re doing, just go do it somewhere else.
A girl with long brown hair tied back with a bandana shook her head, and then folded her hands beneath her cheek to mime sleep.
Fine, don’t talk to me, but don’t expect me to understand you. Have it your way.
The woman began to leave, and as she did, the five children lay down simultaneously and shut their eyes as if to sleep. Looking back, she noticed a slight hollowness to their cheeks that stopped her.
You haven’t eaten, have you?
The boy with the blond crew cut kept his eyes closed, but nodded.
If you can walk, come with me, but I warn you: I don’t have anything good.
The tall boy opened his eyes and looked at the woman, shaking his head.
Can’t you move? Well, just wait here then, I’ll bring you something.
Now several of them were shaking their heads adamantly.
But if you don’t eat anything, you’ll die. Do you want to die?
None of the five answered that. A girl with big eyes wiped away a tear.
The woman was getting annoyed again, so the tall boy brought the little book back out, showing her the pages one by one this time. It was a homely thing, just a bunch of computer paper stapled together.
Page one: “Written here are our last words. In the end, they are the only ones we need to believe. Putting these words into practice, we will lose our need for words at a
ll. And when this happens, our hearts and bodies for the first time will be one, be perfect. Like the animals, the grass, the trees, the rocks. Do you have what it takes to stop being human?”
He turned the page, and on the next two facing pages, conspicuously large type on the right side proclaimed, “We believe in these last words, and pledge to forsake all speech!” while on the left, smaller type simply stated, “We believe in silence.” On the next page, the word “Teachings” was printed in bold, and every page thereafter featured a new lesson.
Lesson One: “Humans thrive on words and are destroyed by words. The words that destroy are no different from birdcalls or barks. To believe in these meaningless cries is like believing in a drawing of a sardine head. Let us stop thinking about the meaning of the meaningless words spoken by others and simply listen to them as music.”
Lesson Two: “We who were raised listening to words that destroy continue to speak meaningless words that bear no relation to what’s in our hearts. To cherish what’s in our hearts, let us refrain from speaking words. Let us use our voices as musical instruments instead.”
Lesson Three was the page she’d been shown before: “There are ways to use one’s voice and remain silent at the same time. Through silence, we can gradually get closer to nature, to the plants and animals.”
Lesson Four: “Once one has become accustomed to not using words, one begins to think less about things as well. One becomes closed. This is proof that one is getting closer to reaching a state of simply being alive.”
Lesson Five: “Those who are simply alive do not fear death. Breathing, blinking, dying: it is all the same.”
Lesson Six: “However, one must not be impatient. Those who attempt to end their words through death instead of silence end up cursed eternally. They suffer forever in a hell made of meaningless words.”
She flipped past the rest of the pages to the end. One page bore the legend, “Words have reached their end,” and on the facing page was printed: Author: Saeko Yasuda; Publisher: The Association of Finished Persons; Date of Publication: March 31, 2002.
The woman sat down with the children, saying softly, You’re serious about this, aren’t you? Being serious about something’s a scary thing. And then she asked them, This “Association of Finished Persons,” that’s you, isn’t it? The children nodded weakly.
But you’re not quite finished yet, she pointed out, laughing. You still understand the words I say, don’t you?
The boy with glasses put his hands over his ears. The tall boy pulled them away.
Now, now, you’re doing the best you can. But no matter what you are, plant or animal, everything eats, and if you kids don’t eat, you can’t finish being human.
Standing up, the woman roughly roused the children from the ground, pulling them up by their arms, swatting their buttocks with a stick, kicking at them with her feet as she herded them to her shack. The children began to perk up a bit as she did.
She started a fire in the clearing to heat up some expired instant miso soup, and the children sucked it down. However, they wouldn’t touch any of her expired convenience store rice balls, fried chicken, or chocolate.
They continued their conversation, the children responding to yes or no questions with headshakes and nods.
Do you plan to live in this forest? They stiffened, some of them nodding.
Well then, do you plan to die in this forest? All of them shook their heads.
You don’t want to die? They nod.
But you don’t want to live? They nod.
You poor things, your heads have outgrown your bodies. You can’t become animals or plants with such oversized heads. Look, this is the kind of person who can become an animal.
The woman folded her legs beneath her and brought the upper half of her body down to the ground, pushing out her bottom, and then braced herself low to the ground with her arms and stretched, meowing.
There are a lot of stray cats around here. I once read a book about a child who wanted to become a cat. Cats move their ears while they’re sleeping, and they wake up as soon as they sense danger; they can wake up and run away at full speed in an instant. The child thought that if she couldn’t do that, she’d never become a cat, so she practiced it diligently. Every morning, the second she woke up, she would leap up and race into the garden in a flash.
The children laughed, as soundlessly as they could.
Plus, she ate bugs and field grass, put anything and everything in her mouth to see if it was edible. Later, she learned to speak languages from Africa and all around the world and became a linguist. She was half-human, half-animal, and so she became a linguist.
The children knit their brows, and the woman flicked the creases between them with her fingernail.
You can’t become an animal just by giving up language, is what I mean. Do what you want—don’t speak, don’t eat, take poison—but what is an animal, or plant, or thing? If you continue not to eat like this, your arms and legs will waste away and you’ll be bedridden; but sad to say, you’ll still be thinking all sorts of stuff in your heads. Though I guess that might suit you kids with your oversized heads, maybe you’d prefer to live completely inside them, your bodies useless.
The girl with big eyes had begun tearing up as she looked at the woman.
Everyone dies. You won’t become animals following that stupid book, all that will happen is that you’ll end your lives for the sake of a life that’s not even your own. If you still want to disappear like that, feel free. But if you seriously want to slip free from a life lived only in your heads, then go on, get out, forage your own food. Either way, when you get up tomorrow you’ll no longer be welcome here. I want you wake up and dash away as fast as you can, like a cat.
That night, the woman let them crowd into her little hut while she slept outside, wrapped in a khaki-colored sheet.
Do you know what happened to them after that? Yoshinobu asked.
I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.
Well, I’m going to tell you anyway. They were discovered about four days ago lying on the ground, too malnourished to move, by some other homeless person living in the forest, and the police came and took them away after he reported it.
Is that so? … I guess some people can’t leave well enough alone.
Yoshinobu hung up the phone and got up from where he’d been sitting on the ground next to the woman’s hut, and then slipped out of the Sayama Hills while it was still dark, got in his car, and drove out to Higashi Urawa. He drove faster than he ever had before. He no longer felt the relation between pressing down on the accelerator, the car speeding up, and his body moving through space. So he pressed down on the accelerator as far as it would go. Yoshinobu himself remained perfectly still.
Some people can’t leave well enough alone… Yoshinobu supposed the woman had felt the edge of her loneliness as these words escaped her lips. Loneliness like a knife, slipping frictionlessly into the soft flesh of her breast. All he really knew of her, in the end, was her voice. As she was telling her story, Yoshinobu sensed that she must still have the children’s booklet, but when he offered to leave for a bit so she could put it on the ground outside the hut so he could take a look at it, she replied, I don’t have it, my memory’s this good because I need it to survive. So Yoshinobu made do with leaving her the prepaid phone, saying, If you think of anything else you’d like to tell me, just call. Though of course he knew she wouldn’t.
When he arrived at the woods, he closed his eyes and walked carefully just as he had in Sayama Hills, testing the ground first one step then the other. The sound of his footfalls, of the dirt, of the dry leaves and grass echoed in the dark and told him where the trees grew thick and dense and where they opened into clearings.
He couldn’t bear to sleep at home in his bed. He wanted to be free from human thoughts, lose himself amid the trees and earth. His father had wanted to be buried in sand out of a sense of duty, but instead he’d been stripped and buried in the so
il of the garden because of Mother. Surely this had been the fate he’d truly desired. And because of Yoshinobu, Mother too had ended up stripped and covered with garden soil before she was cremated. Surely this, too, had been what she’d truly desired.
Yoshinobu longed to bury his flesh within the earth as well. The trees sighed their heavy sighs as he reached the heart of the forest where not a breath of air from the outside world seemed to penetrate, and there he shed his shirt, his pants, his underwear and stretched out, face down on the ground. Do I want to lie and rot like this, too? Do I want it like they did, possessed by a desire to rot and rot until the tiniest particles of protein in my brain break down, become one once more with the soil?
He took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of the earth, enjoying the cool sensation of each grain of dirt that pressed against his cheek. If he stuck out his tongue it would reach the ground, he could cover his wet tongue with dirt, taste it as it melted in his mouth. Dirt, precious as flesh. He rubbed his skin directly against it. He moved his hand between his legs and dug out a hollow in the earth beneath himself. Dirt packed in under his fingernails as he dug and dug until he lost all feeling in his wrist, making a hollow that engulfed his hot, erect penis in soft, newly aerated soil as he thrust himself in. Once ensheathed, he stopped his movements and felt with his entire body the coolness of the earth and the sleeping breath of the forest; the rise and fall of the earth’s skin as it breathed, up and down, up and down; the smell of the trees and the breath of all the little animals; the sweaty dewiness of the grass. Planted now in the soil, Yoshinobu’s root drew all these sensations into itself and reached straight down into the earth, the way the soft soil slid along it tickling him all the while; and it got hotter and hotter as it passed through the magma and the juice dripping from the tip melted the hard layers of metal in the core as it bore straight on through until it reached the other side of the world, poking its head through the surface of Hispaniola, its mountainous surface strewn with rocks and blasted white with salt; and it grew longer and longer as it bathed in the rays of the tropical sun that sliced through the air like a knife, turning it greener and greener until the umbrella of the glans opened to shade the dry earth from the sun’s harsh rays, allowing the soil in its shadow to retain the moisture that rained from it; plants of all kinds sprouted in numberless profusion, great plains of grass forming in an instant; and soon the umbrella-tipped penis split into slivers that quickly thickened into a stand of white, cauliflower-form trees that soon enough turned a deep broccoli green; and then the earth grew wet and trees put down their roots, underbrush spread, palms and banana trees reached skyward, banyan trees extended their aerial roots to the ground, and a canopy of thick leaves formed, creating daytime darkness beneath them; and then a full moon appeared in the shadow-strewn sky, making the entire area glitter like a mirror beneath its glow, and in the midst of it all, delighting in the feel of the smooth bark of the trees against his penis, jumping up and down, singing and dancing, wasn’t that Misao? In and out of tune, singing songs and reciting lines. But the words were indistinct, Yoshinobu couldn’t catch them. Hey! Look over here! It’s me! Look at me! Yoshinobu felt like shouting at Misao even as he also had the feeling that he mustn’t hear what Misao was saying, that he must leave this place before too long, and the conflict between these impulses paralyzed him. And then he heard the flutelike call of an owl, and it smoothed his anxieties away.
We, the Children of Cats (Found in Translation) Page 14