We, the Children of Cats (Found in Translation)

by Hoshino, Tomoyuki

  It wasn’t too long before he called again.

  About this manuscript, the content is good, but maybe you should obscure a few details a bit more.

  Don’t worry. I take total responsibility for everything related to this article. If there are any questions or complaints, you can let me know via cell phone.

  Even using aliases, people are going to know who you’re talking about. Have you contacted the parents of the minors?

  When the main bureau was doing the initial investigation, I requested some interviews but was refused.

  And then?

  I didn’t need them for this article. They might sue.

  Are you scared?

  Look, if this article was airtight, I’d be right there holding the line with you, but you know there’re holes in it.

  Trust me.

  I do trust you, but rookies are green, you know? To begin with, the writing is hardly standard.

  Is that so?

  It is. There’s a whiff of the literary to it, don’t you think? It’s a newspaper article, it has to be the facts. Just the facts, nothing more.

  But that’s what I tried to do, as much as I could.

  It has a lot of subjective opinion in it, too. It’s risky. When you’re young, you don’t notice these things on your own.

  It’s an article with a byline, right? Isn’t it natural to include the viewpoint of the writer?

  There’s nothing wrong with having a viewpoint. But these subjective things have to be supported by facts. A reporter can’t appear as the subject of the article.

  I didn’t put myself in it like that.

  You omit the pronouns, but you could put them back in if you wanted to, like “I think …”

  Look, if you can’t publish it as is, just reject it.

  It’ll be fine if you just change some phrasing, make it sound more factual. It’s a problem of style.

  I don’t think I really understand what you mean by “factual.” I don’t think writing an article is just a matter of stating facts, so please, reject it.

  If you don’t rewrite it yourself at least a little bit, I’ll just end up blue-penciling it myself until it sounds like a proper article.

  In that case, please file it under your byline, not mine. You’re rather high-and-mighty, aren’t you?

  Publish it as is or reject it, that’s all I’m asking.

  Fine, I get it. I suppose bearing full responsibility will be a good experience for you, too, at any rate.

  Eventually, it reached to the point that the bureau chief got wrapped up in it, so Yoshinobu promised to make as much effort as he could to revise it and this settled things down. Yoshinobu went back to sleep and, in the evening, went up to the office to discuss the layout of the headlines and so forth with the production editor of the prefectural edition, while the managing editor was busy having it out with another reporter about a manuscript.

  He invited the managing editor to a sushi dinner that evening and listened to him talk about how it had been when he was a cub reporter and his views on journalism in general. Around ten o’clock, the galleys were up, and Yoshinobu, as promised, edited his wording so the article would pass muster. In the production department, Yoshinobu approved the hard proof, fixing the manuscript for the second part to satisfy the managing editor as well. He also replaced the anthem parody addressed to the “Forsaken of the Earth” with an unaltered version of the famous Norinaga poem, If asked what lies within the true Yamato heart / the answer is the mountain cherry, fragrant at the dawn. The managing editor glanced over it briefly and commented, Now this is some good writing.

  The next day, Yoshinobu opened the morning edition and failed to feel the blinding excitement of peeling back reality’s false skin that he’d imagined he would. Seeing it in print like this, it’s like a different article entirely, he thought, the strength leaving his body. But at least there’s still the second half to go, he told himself.

  The chief was still on vacation. Just like the day before, Yoshinobu consulted with the managing editor about the modifications to his manuscript as employees from the sales department bundled copies of the Saitama edition for that day and the next into bundles of a hundred, preparing them to be distributed throughout area the next morning; he put in an appearance at the Saitama Prefecture Police Press Corps, surprising the reporters from other papers, and soon enough, the day was done. That evening, after going over all of the articles, the managing editor confirmed with the production manager that he was satisfied, put a word in with the younger reporters to “just finish up with the galleys,” and left; it was then that Yoshinobu put in a call to the production department to replace the second part of his article with the old version that included the “Forsaken of the Earth” anthem parody. He checked the galleys one last time and then persuaded the reporter assigned to graveyard duty, who was one of his cohort, to let Yoshinobu replace him, and so he spent his last night at the office.

  Early in the morning, two hundred morning editions for the next two days arrived from the sales department. One by one, Yoshinobu cut a page out of each prefectural edition and circled his article in red. At 5:30 a.m., he placed his letter of resignation on the department head’s desk, telephoned the prefectural policeman on duty, leaving his cell phone number so he could contact him if any major incidents or accidents occurred, and then, carrying the pages he’d cut out and a bunch of packing tape, he climbed into his Corolla II.

  First he headed out to Tokorozawa. The car flew down the empty highway at over 120 kilometers per hour. Low clouds covered the sky; there was no sign of the coming dawn. He stopped by the homes of the elementary school students he had visited during the course of his investigation one by one, following the marks on the map he carried, and quietly slipped only his page into each of their mailboxes. It felt like scattering poison, like planting bombs. Then he went to Shirasagi Elementary, sneaking through the school gate and into the main entryway to tape the pages to the glass. He stuck one to the school gate itself as he left. After that, he went around to New Tokorozawa and all the other elementary schools in the area and taped up newspaper pages on those, too. And then he went to the Sayama Hills. He looked for places where there seemed to be a comparatively high concentration of tents and taped newspapers on nearby broad-trunked trees. These aren’t poison, he thought, they’re wall papers. He also left several copies of the edition in front of various tents and shacks.

  Yoshinobu went back down the highway, this time heading toward Higashi Urawa. Once he gave back the words the forest had given him, his project would be complete. Words that were not words would struggle and squirm, eventually tearing through the thin, swollen membrane covering the world to expose the true face of slime-slicked, corpse-ridden reality.

  Traffic had already increased in the inbound lanes, and it was beginning to get congested. It was almost nine by the time he arrived. There was no time to paste up wall papers and stealthily slip away, so Yoshinobu hurried directly into the forest. The sky was still dark, the air heavy with mold and wet.

  He found no trace of any tents near the entrance to the woods; there was no sign of human life anywhere. The cries of birds and cicadas filled the air, and though Yoshinobu found it as hard to breathe as always due to the raw smell of the plants and soil, there wasn’t the killing heat from before. Yoshinobu couldn’t find the spot where he’d written the article two days ago. He gave up, resigning himself to just pasting up some wall papers on the trees around the entrance.

  As he taped the final sheet, Yoshinobu’s heart unexpectedly flooded with an intense wave of grief. An excruciating sorrow. Yoshinobu began to reread his article. At some point, he’d begun reading it aloud. By the time he got to For all eternity may this world be thine, O Forsaken of the Earth, he was shouting. Yoshinobu was no longer reading his article, he was performing Misao’s play. The speeches, the songs, the sermons: the show would go on, nothing could stop it. He began to perform the gestures that went with the words. When it wa
s time for him to grow thin and wan and sorrowful, he laid himself on the ground. When it was time for Yayoi to talk, he spoke in falsetto.

  And finally, he sang the anthem of the Forsaken one more time and finished the show. He bowed. There was no audience, of course. No one eavesdropping, either.

  Yoshinobu headed back toward his car, accompanied by the sound of his feet stepping on dry grass. Inside his head, he was still reciting lines from the show. He tried plugging his ears and loudly singing a different song, but he still heard it. He was overcome by the impulse to shout out loud, What can it mean to keep speaking like this all alone? I still have words to communicate to the outside world, look, these are my words, right here! He opened a morning edition from the bundle of newspapers he’d put in the passenger’s seat. But it was as if he’d opened a completely different national paper by mistake, as the thick lettering of an unfamiliar headline jumped out to greet him.

  Yoshinobu froze. Like sand through an hourglass, Yoshinobu could see the meaning draining from his article as it crumbled to dust. He could hear it in his ears. He could feel it on his skin.

  The words in his head had stopped. Yoshinobu tore the article out with his fingers, and, rushing into the darkened forest beneath with heavy clouds, pasted it over the first article of his that caught his eye, and then ripped down every other copy of his article that he could find.

  Large drops of rain began graze Yoshinobu’s cheek. Distant thunder resounded. Maybe the other papers would get soaked and all fall apart.

  “I Wanted to Stop Being a Person and Turn into a Cat”

  The Shirasagi Runaway Breaks Her Silence

  Official sources confirm that a twelve-year-old sixthgrade girl from Shirasagi Elementary (Tokorozawa), one of the children who had disappeared into the woods of Sayama Hills before being found and taken into protective custody by the Tokorozawa police on the 14th of this month, has at last begun to talk about what happened during her disappearance.

  According to sources at the school, the girl claims that she ran away because she “wanted to stop being a person and turn into a cat.” She tried locating food on her own within the Hills, but was unsuccessful and began to suffer from malnutrition.

  Asked to interpret this behavior, some experts have said, “It’s possible that the trauma of having eaten a poisoned school lunch led her to avoid any food prepared by human hands.”

  The girl refused to speak at all after being taken into protective custody on the 14th, but she began talking to her parents on the morning of the 18th and has now reportedly recovered enough to answer questions from the school and Tokorozawa city officials. They say the girl explained that her ability to speak again stemmed from remembering the words spoken to her by a homeless woman in Sayama Hills who had helped her.

  Sources also report that some of the other children who had run away with the girl and refused to speak afterward have now begun talking to friends and family, and as they recover, they may soon begin speaking about the incident as well.

  Author’s note: this novella was inspired by watching a video of “Homesick in My Dreams” (Kyōshū wa yume no naka de), by documentary filmmaker Jun Okamura, who makes films about Japanese immigrants in Brazil.

  Treason Diary (1998)

  Yukinori Akimizu smelled the smoldering of explosives beneath the floor of the Ambassador’s Residence, and the sensation relived by his skin as he imagined his arms and lips and scorched shriveled hair fly apart in a matter of seconds was the smell of iron that had enfolded him in its spreading wings as it rose up out of Miss Michiko’s body when he had stabbed and killed her with a knife at sixteen years and seven months old. Really, though, that iron smell had never actually left his right hand or cheek or anywhere else the blood had splashed, it was just that now, mere seconds before his death, it was as if his body had somehow become Miss Michiko’s body as it had lain curled like a red, hook-speared worm, and it felt as if that rusted iron smell that seemed impossible to imagine circulating within a living thing was now wafting out of wounds in his thigh, his stomach, his left breast, out of all eight stab wounds he had left in her body. He had written all of this down, he had wanted everyone to understand: his lover Mermalada, Miss Michiko, his father, Kiyoto, Kisaragi, Abraham, and now he wanted them to know that he understood for the first time how Miss Michiko herself must have felt as she was overcome by this inescapable smell, and he choked up with regret. Of course, he could just be choking on the smoke flooding the air. Had the explosion already happened? His eyes were filled with tears that flowed with no sign of stopping, and Yukinori found he could see nothing, hear nothing. He thought this was because he’d already been ripped apart, his arms and lips and scorched shriveled hair flying in all directions. There was no sound or smell left in the present for the dying. It was just: he still felt the brightness and warmth of lemon-colored light through his eyelids. He couldn’t imagine where the light would be coming from, it probably meant the roof had been blown off. The first time he’d felt himself bathed in such clear, pure light was when he’d first walked the streets of Lima that summer five years ago. The flowers, five or six times the size of any in Japan, reflected the light as if they themselves were suns, and Yukinori had felt as if these flowers with unknown names, these white and red and yellow and purple flowers, were pasted directly onto his eyeballs like posters. As he’d continued to walk despite this feeling, his field of vision had swum not only with flower petals and light but with flashes of some other color, and he had teetered precariously and finally collapsed. Happily, this occurred not fifty meters away from the house of Father Fidel Cato, who was expecting him, and he was soon discovered by the Father’s niece and admonished never to forget to wear a white hat in summer or he’d succumb to heat stroke again.

  The man who had introduced him to Father Cato was a third-generation Japanese Brazilian named Albert Morishima who had accompanied him on his journey to Lima. Had Morishima been a different sort of man, Yukinori would probably be tricking girls as a go-between for some prostitute trafficker by now, and, crying and gnashing his teeth, he vowed never to forgive his father who had so blithely handed his son over with no thought to the outcome. After fleeing the thankfully empty hallway where Miss Michiko still lay moaning, after scrubbing the blood from his body in the pool locker room shower, wondering how blood could have possibly gotten into all the places he discovered it, after staring blankly at the cherry-blossom-pink water flowing over the blue tile and swirling down the drain in the floor, after changing into his gym clothes and stuffing his bloody school uniform and knife into a rucksack and showing up at his father’s factory and telling him only that he had just stabbed a teacher at school and showing him the bloody contents of his bag, his father consulted briefly with his vaguely seedy Japanese-Peruvian underling Michael Hisomida and then ordered his son to do what this man said from then on and never showed his face again, not even after Yukinori was handed a fake passport by Hisomida, who seemed to run some sort of black market business on the side, not even on the night before he was scheduled to leave, when instead his father called him on the phone, saying that it seems as though the things I did to try and make you fly high may have instead triggered your attack, but you know that now our bond as father and son is severed, and with that, Yukinori was handed over for good. He was then handed over once more from Hisomida to Morishima and told that now he was Morishima’s cousin and could hardly speak Japanese. From then on, as though he really had lost his Japanese, Yukinori barely uttered a word. He was occupied instead with suppressing the nervous tension rising up within him so that he didn’t end up stabbing Morishima too, and he lost track of where he was or what was going on around him, and thus he no longer had to think. So he no longer had any need to speak.

  It was a period of dying slowly, thought Yukinori to himself around the time he became able to speak Spanish. I was like a tube of fish cake, he thought, my body just so much salty, dashi-flavored white paste, inside and out, save for a big empty
hole in my middle. There was nothing, no words or anything else to be found, just vacant space. Everything ended up sucked into this hollow void and crystallizing, embedding itself deep within him: the flowers fulgent and voluptuous enough to drive you crazy; the hot wind so dry it could shrivel a crocodile into a lizard; the cold morning fog, wet and heavy and eating into your chest to rot you alive; the sound of Spanish, like balsam berries popping. Yukinori Akimizu, this baby born in Los Angeles to his father’s Japanese-American mistress, then left with her when his father fled back to Japan, then brought and left with him after she tracked him down in Japan, he’d been slowly dying, his fish paste corpse carried to Lima, where he could be born once more. Now he spoke only Spanish, and he knew where he was, and he knew what was going on around him: he could give voice to it at last.

  So he wrote in his diary in Spanish. He was keeping a diary as language practice. He’d been keeping it since the day he arrived in Lima. He didn’t actually start writing it until after his Spanish had gotten good enough, but he went back and began his account from when his new self had been born.

  The diary always revolved around Miss Michiko’s murder and his father. At first the newly reborn Yukinori thought that reflecting on incidents and people from his “former life” was unhealthy and he tried to avoid it, but as his Spanish improved he felt his ability to think deepen, and he came to feel that this ability to put his past into words itself was a sign of rebirth. He described the incident again and again, attempting to recreate its most minute details. As he wrote and rewrote, he remembered more and more. Or maybe it wasn’t that he remembered more, but rather that he was only now finding out the things he had been thinking during those fateful moments.

  At first blush, it seemed a simple incident. Miss Michiko was standing in his way, he had a knife in his hand, so he removed the obstacle with the knife. But that no longer to seemed be the truth, he thought. He wanted to write the truth. He wanted to describe precisely the quiet feel of Miss Michiko’s body accepting the knife as easily as it would a man. The knife had encountered no resistance whatsoever. As it was sliding in, it was as if every orifice on Yukinori’s body had been sealed completely, and everything, Miss Michiko’s screams, the smell of flowering daphne that had always emanated from her body, the iron smell that came from either the knife or the blood itself, he couldn’t tell, the rustling sound his clothing made as he moved his arm, his own voice as he spoke, all of it seemed so far away and jumbled. Where there once had been air was now water. Miss Michiko’s eyes, her mouth, her ears, her arms, her very cells, they all opened wide to Yukinori. Thinking it over again, he realized that in Miss Michiko’s very lack of resistance, he had felt his own mother. It was not his knife but rather he himself he’d wanted accepted so smoothly into her warm, soft flesh, he thought, and wrote. He felt that perhaps after stabbing her eight times, what he’d really wanted was to nestle his own body into the curve of hers as she’d lain curled like an invertebrate at his feet, moaning in a low voice, and be caressed beneath the right hand she had pressed against the wound on her left breast. He realized that he’d been filled with the intense desire to take off his clothes and become a newborn baby again, put that bleeding left breast in his mouth and suckle the milk and blood and make it into a part of his own body. The truth was that he’d noticed himself starting to unbutton his white shirt and had quickly run to the pool locker room and undressed, stroking the part of himself that was just now entering adulthood with his blood-covered hand until he found himself staring vacantly at the cherry-blossom-pink water swirling into the drain as he rinsed away semen and blood. And if Miss Michiko truly had been a standin for his mother, he had made a mistake choosing into whom he would slide his knife. He should have slid it into his father. It was his father who’d stifled him, who’d been the muddy water isolating him from the world. His body grew and seemed to develop just like everyone else’s, but this was just an effect of it absorbing this dirty water and swelling. It was this filth-extruding father whom he truly wished to stab. Not just him, but the parents who had nourished his filthy seed into fruition, and their parents as well, he needed to kill them all with his own hands or he’d never be clean. And if that was impossible, he had no choice but to stab himself. But instead his knife had stabbed Miss Michiko. It had all been a big mistake, he thought. But now that he was living somewhere far from his father, it was the same as if he were dead. My father is dead. Writing these words, his father’s existence seemed truly to lose its reality, and he felt as if he had coalesced instead from the dew on the grass or out of particles of light.