We, the Children of Cats (Found in Translation)

by Hoshino, Tomoyuki

  Getting up and brushing off the dirt, Yoshinobu put on his clothes, searched for a rock to use in place of a desk, and booted up his laptop. The moon was a crescent so slender its weak light seemed barely able to reach the ground, but to Yoshinobu it shone like a silver sun, illuminating every sign of life within the forest down to the tiniest detail. The leaves sparkled like kaleidoscopes. The homeless woman in Sayama Forest, the five sixth-graders she met, all the children who ate the school lunches filled with poison and sickened or died, Misao’s mother and father and sister and brother, Misao himself, Minagawa, Yasuda, Soejima, his own parents, his sister—Yoshinobu saw them all twisting and twining around each other like the tangled roots of a mangrove, braiding together to form a single gigantic tree. Their words rose like sighs from the great tree’s crazed profusion of leaves, and he felt them on his skin as they knit together to form one grand, priceless story. Yoshinobu grasped desperately for them, his hands spinning line after line of characters as he did. What he wrote were words, yet were not words. A flag of Japan dyed deepest red, invisible to the human eye. A magic spell to turn the coming sandstorm into a muddy rain.

  Title The Homeless Totoros of the Outlying

  Forests (2)

  Subtitle “Last Words”

  Lede Two incidents: a school lunch poisoning three months ago that resulted in the deaths of nine elementary school students, a recent incident at Sayama Hills in which five elementary school students were found in the forest after apparently losing their way. Tracing the actions of students attending Shirasagi Elementary School, where both incidents took place, one homeless man emerged as the point where they intersect. Interviewing this man, who immigrated to the Dominican Republic half a century ago and who currently drifts from place to place in the Sayama Hills area, we get a better picture of the circumstances that drove these children to mass suicide.

  Text Start

  “I just don’t know how I should live out the rest of my life.”

  So states Kimi Usui (12), a student at New Tokorozawa Elementary in the city of Tokorozawa, immediately following the poisoned school lunch incident at Shirasagi Elementary. Kimi reports that she knew in advance that poison would be mixed into the school lunches at Shirasagi Elementary, as well as knowing that “it would be our turn next.” However, she despaired when the poison killed only nine students and was thus a “failure,” meaning that the “next turn” would never happen.

  “I think that most of the older students at Shirasagi Elementary ate the school lunches knowing they were poisoned.” Kimi’s words allude to the existence of an extensive “association” at the heart of the poisoning, while also forcing one to contemplate that it seems the children had been ardently anticipating the poisoning’s occurrence.

  Deep within Sayama Hills, famously the model for the forest in the film My Neighbor Totoro, a homeless woman named Michiko Kanamori (45) sheltered five Shirasagi Elementary sixth grade students in her makeshift “home” three days before they were found and taken into custody. All five had already stopped opening their mouths by that time, she says. Not to speak, not to eat.

  “If you tried to force them to use their mouths, they would open up this weird booklet and point at it. There they had written ‘We believe in silence.’”

  This handmade booklet, with “Last Words” printed on the cover, was, according to the colophon, put together by an organization known as the “Association of Finished Persons” (Representative: Misae Yamashita) and issued previous to the incident, on March 31st. Michiko wasn’t aware of it, but this little girl, Misae (11), was the core member of the extensive “association,” recognized as holding the key to solving the mysteries of the poisoned school lunch incident.

  Yoshinobu stilled his hands and took a deep breath, trembling. He was excited, as if soaring through the air. He felt as if he were looking down from high above even as he sat typing at his keyboard in the middle of this clearing that glittered silver amid the night-darkened woods. He had no doubt. He knew that he wasn’t just writing words—no, he was living the unseen lives of those he wrote about.

  As Michiko took the booklet in her hand and flipped through the pages, she found herself reading a strange, childish “lesson.” It stated that by refusing to listen to the words of others or use words oneself, by banishing every word from one’s head, one would at last exist simply, as an animal, plant, or object. The five followed this doctrine, practicing silence.

  However, the youths were also engaged in fasting, which the booklet did not instruct them to do. “If you want to become like an animal or plant, eat something,” Michiko encouraged them, but all they would allow to enter their mouths was a little miso soup.

  Michiko guesses, “After the incident with the poisoned school lunches, they can no longer stand to let food pass their lips.” However, if we remember the words of Kimi, quoted above, might we suppose instead that they were still pursuing mass suicide, just in a different form?

  Similarly, Tarō Shimaura (72), living a transient existence in the wooded areas of Sayama Hills, wakes at sunrise every morning and, deep within the forest, performs a one-man show distilled from his own life as it has occurred up until that day. Wishing not to be seen by others, he performs in the early morning, but near the end of last year he noticed he had an audience peeking at him from the shadows of the trees. It was Misae.

  Without a trace of embarrassment, Misae walked up to Tarō and spoke frankly and with deep emotion. “I’m still only a child, but watching that was like watching my own life.” When Tarō admonished her, saying, “It’s dangerous for little girls to come into the forest alone,” her face clouded. “That’s why I come here, because I don’t care what happens to me. I feel so unneeded by this world that I want to disappear, and so sometimes I come to the forest. Once I’m here, the trees and animals and birds don’t speak a word, and that’s good, it erases that feeling of being unneeded, makes me feel better. But now I’ve spoken with a human being inside the forest, and I feel like I can live again. This is the first time that’s ever happened to me. I want my friends to see your show, to hear your story.”

  Tarō refused, but Misae wouldn’t back down, promising that if he wouldn’t tell the story she would do it in her own words. Even so, Tarō held firm, but he knew that Misae would likely tell her friends at school regardless, and a feeling of doom overcame him, and he cursed himself for his carelessness.

  To be continued

  (Yoshinobu Kawai)

  * Note: all names have been changed.

  END

  Upon finishing part one, the reality contained within it overwhelmed Yoshinobu. He completely believed in the words displayed on his monitor, body and soul. This is the truth, he thought. We mustn’t let facts deceive us. He was pursuing secrets that could never be found in mere fact. He could see Yasuda and Misao talking to each other right before his eyes. He even stood up to try and approach them. Though bodiless, he could sense their presence all around him.

  He walked around for a while until his agitation subsided, and he realized that he needed pictures. When I get home, I should make a mock-up on my computer of the little booklet I couldn’t get from the homeless woman. I can use a digital camera to take a picture of the front cover, and then the truth will finally be realized.

  Yoshinobu sat back down on the ground, faced the laptop he’d set on the rock, and began part two.

  Title The Homeless Totoros of the Outlying

  Forest (2)

  Subtitle May This World Be Thine, O Forsaken of the Earth!

  Text Start

  The show that Tarō Shimaura (72) performed alone every morning within the depths of Sayama Forest, far from public view, was a story told in song interspersed with monologues detailing Tarō’s bitter experiences as an emigrant to the Dominican Republic. It begins with an altered version of the national anthem:

  For all eternity may this world be thine / O Forsaken of the Earth, till pebbles now / Into mighty rocks shall grow / Whose
venerable sides moss doth line!

  It was 1956, a little over ten years after the end of World War II, when Tarō left for the Dominican Republic. He was 25 years old.

  That year, a terrible infectious disease spread through his family, and his father and mother passed away from overworking themselves while sick. Because they lacked the money to put them in a hospital, the children cared for them until their final moments at home in their beds, and after conferring among themselves, the surviving five siblings buried the two of them in the garden.

  “It wasn’t just that we didn’t have the money for a proper grave—they also became good fertilizer for the sweet potatoes in the garden.”

  These golden sweet potatoes grew abundantly and were so sweet they seemed to melt in the mouth. The flesh of the parents became the flesh of their children through these sweet potatoes, the children’s bodies thus becoming the parents’ eternal resting places. When he thought of it this way, Tarō, even as a lung condition rendered him bedridden, felt their strength well up inside of him.

  When Tarō recovered his health, his oldest brother handed over an application from the government for emigration to the Dominican Republic. “It’s my responsibility to stay here and carry on the family name, so you go there and make a name for yourself.” He knew that this was merely an excuse to get rid of one more mouth to feed, but Tarō boarded the ship anyway, his pockets filled with a pittance to cover expenses and a pinch of soil from the garden.

  However, rather than the plentiful farmland and comfortable homes the government had promised, he found himself presented instead with a narrow wasteland and a crude shack.

  “When I got up in the morning and looked at the land, the whole surface was pure white. I got excited, thinking it had snowed on this South Seas island, but when I tasted it, it was salty. The salt in the soil had crystallized when the temperature had fallen during the night.”

  The soil, sown with rocks and salt, could never be farmland no matter how hard one struggled, and one after another the immigrants deserted their land. Tarō, however, remained.

  “When we appealed to the government officials, they refused to listen, saying that the rocks and salt would break down into fertile soil. But, though I tried every day to smash the rocks with a hammer, it was only my body and soul that crumbled into sand.”

  Eventually, the Japanese government could no longer avoid responsibility and arranged for the majority of the settlers return to Japan en masse, but Tarō refused to go, saying, “I don’t want help from you crooks again.” He moved to a different plot of land and got by as a tenant farmer on a Dominican plantation.

  Tarō finally decided to return to Japan at sixty, cursed by poor health and lessened mobility. In 1995, he set foot on Japanese soil for the first time in almost forty years; however, his siblings made no effort to meet with their penniless brother upon his return. As a final parting gift, Tarō sent them a flag of Japan with the white dyed pure red, and then “exiled” himself to the Sayama Hills.

  “In the end, it turned out that I’d died when I left Japan. But when I think about it, my body is made from the dead flesh of my parents, so my dead self will also become fertilizer for these woods. Even though I won’t remain in anyone’s memory, I am able this way to repay my debt to the living things of the earth. That’s why I’m not lonely.”

  Still, he kept performing his shows, perhaps because he did want to leave a memory somewhere, after all.

  “Everyone, no matter who they are, tries to overcome the dissatisfactions and obstacles in their lives by expressing themselves in various ways. However, these expressions of self should never be foisted on people, never be sold to the highest bidder. When you sell yourself like that, all you’re creating is a scam, a power relation. Whenever you try to say anything to anyone, the words get mixed with lies that others can’t help but hear. It’s this kind of thing, this power relation that’s most effective for cutting people down. Self expression is fine, but it should remain quiet, locked away inside your heart.”

  An expression of self meant never to be heard, borne from a desire to force himself on no one; this was Tarō’s one-man show.

  However, this expression of self nonetheless inadvertently touched the heart of Misae Yamashita (11). One day, as summer approached, Misae, who had come out to watch his performances many times during the winter, showed him a handmade booklet, telling him, “I made a book of the things I learned from you.” Tarō, after reading it, felt intense regret.

  “Because I’d been alone for so many years, I let myself feel at ease with her, began to hope that maybe she would understand, you know? But the words that child wrote were words of force and coercion. No matter who wrote them, that’s what they’d be. Words are always mixed with lies, so you should never try to use them to persuade others.”

  Tarō tried to warn Misae about this, but she obstinately insisted, “The words of your play are like a Bible to me. My mission in life is to spread them,” and soon she disappeared.

  Tarō doesn’t know that Misae was brought before the Family Court, let alone her role in the poisoned school lunch incident. Yet, seeing how things have played out, perhaps he does know, better than anyone else in Japan, what catastrophes may yet be on the way.

  And so, even now, Tarō continues to perform his one-man show in the Sayama forest, before an audience of no one.

  —End

  (Yoshinobu Kawai)

  *Note: all names have been changed.

  END

  You might say that this is my one-man show, Yoshinobu told Misao, who stood there right before his eyes, seeming on the verge of tears. Misao’s body was twisted a bit, looking back at Yoshinobu with dark, wet eyes, an elderly deer covered in a soft coat of white and reddish-brown. You must read these words, they will be able to break through and destroy those “Last Words,” this is where the truth is, here, in my … in this … and with that, Yoshinobu’s words left him.

  Silence reigned.

  Something very like despair raced through Yoshinobu’s heart. The deer blinked its sorrowful eyes, and, turning its white tail towards Yoshinobu, carefully walked away. Gradually, the sound of its footsteps as it picked its way across the dry leaves on the forest floor faded in the distance. And then, once more: silence.

  Yoshinobu returned to his apartment at dawn, the same time the morning edition went out, and he sent in the first part of his article to the office. In his email to the bureau chief, he wrote, “I’ve finished gathering material for my special report and decided to make it a column. A two-parter. The circumstances of the investigation make it a bit urgent, so I’d appreciate it if we could run this soon, if possible in the morning edition the day after tomorrow. I’m sending along the first part of the manuscript today. I’ll send part two and the pics for each installment sometime this afternoon.”

  After that, Yoshinobu spent two hours making the mock-up of the little book on his computer and took two photos of it with his digital camera, one a close-up on the cover, the other showing it lying open. To illustrate part two, he chose a snapshot he’d taken when he’d been interviewing the homeless in the Sayama Hills. Taken from behind at an oblique angle, the face of the middle-aged man in the photo is obscured, and Yoshinobu sent it off with the caption, “Tarō adds to his one-man show a little bit every day, even now. ‘No one ever stops growing.’”

  Yoshinobu didn’t turn off his computer, though, and instead he navigated his web browser to a search engine and typed in the words “letter of resignation.” He spent about a half an hour searching through the hits before he found a template he wanted to use, and then he composed a draft of a letter of resignation for himself. And with that, having done everything he had to for the time being, he collapsed, nearly unconscious, onto the bed.

  It hadn’t even been three hours when the phone call from the managing editor woke him again at ten.

  He was bombarded with questions. Am I supposed to use this two-parter as the top story in the prefe
ctural edition? Have you talked about this with the chief? It’s rather long, isn’t it? Are the pictures ready? The chief had fallen ill from overwork and was taking some sick days, so the managing editor was preparing the edition. Yoshinobu hadn’t predicted this.

  The chief told me that a hundred or even two hundred lines would be fine, since it was a special report, so I let myself have a good bit of room. And I sent some pictures with captions, you should have them already. The chief has a pretty good idea of what’s in it, so yeah, make it the top story today, that would be great, he said. Great, gotcha, said the managing editor, hanging up.