We, the Children of Cats (Found in Translation)

by Hoshino, Tomoyuki

  As he wrote, he came to feel that writing itself was reflection, was redemption, was rebirth, was revenge, was oblivion. Transcribing the complex things inside him as precisely as possible in his still-clumsy Spanish was exhausting, like writing with an invisible third hand. It wasn’t unusual for him to begin and end a whole day just writing in his diary, but Yukinori accepted this exhaustion, seeing it as justly arduous labor and punishment, and during the two and a half years it took for the relation between his word-spinning brain and his mouth and hands to become transparent, writing and living seemed one and the same.

  But he was still assaulted with a discomfort bordering on nausea when he tried to read what he wrote. No matter how much time passed he could never get over it. He could find the newly reborn Yukinori Akimizu nowhere on the notebook’s pages. He’d told himself as he wrote that he was just practicing his Spanish, but this awful feeling like the floor dropping out from beneath him refused to go away, and sometimes it swelled to an unbearable intensity. With the nausea would come the feeling that his stomach, his lungs, all of his internal organs were about to explode from his throat until he turned completely inside out. And if it really happened, he thought, I’d be relieved. Like taking a knife in your hand, like kissing someone deeply, he imagined that if he could just feel again the sensation of skin rolling under itself, of sharp metal piercing mucusslick, barely resistant flesh just one more time, things would feel real again, and what was on the surface would remain on the surface and what lay within would remain within. When he felt like this, Yukinori would wander into Chinatown and set off firecrackers with the Chinese Peruvians. Watching the firecrackers explode with dazzling brightness, he’d feel himself becoming cleansed, and he supposed that if he were to throw his notebooks into the fray and blast them into the sky, some of his feelings of guilt would disappear too. But he could never lay a hand on them. He knew if he did, he’d be right back where he started. So he grew irritated, gripped with the desire to blast away the whole rest of the world, and rather than his notebooks he’d wrap hair from his head or skin peeled from the heels of his feet and hands around the firecrackers and watch these things fly apart instead.

  He stopped writing when he started thinking mostly in Spanish, when he found a job with Father Cato’s help working at a warehouse selling meat, when he took a mestiza Peruvian lover: when he began thinking of himself as just another Peruvian hyphenate. And it was then, during an eighteenth birthday party for Father Cato’s niece, that Kiyoto Kamihara showed up, uninvited. As this twentyone year old, having arrived from Japan just a few months before and barely able to speak the language, began speaking in Spanish to Yukinori anyway, he immediately felt as though he understood him completely, as if able to trace even his smallest inner contour and hollow with his hand, and they shared a striking rapport even before the revelation of their similar pasts. Inevitably, it seemed, Kiyoto turned out to have beaten two elementary school children to death with a hammer at sixteen and had panicked the populace with taunting letters telling of his crimes. Upon his release the previous year from a juvenile detention center, his family had advised him that he couldn’t live in Japan any longer so he should go elsewhere, and when he replied that he wanted to go to Peru, he’d ended up taking off right then, not even stopping to see his old house or his two brothers, accompanied to Narita by only his parents, and when he lost control of himself during a stopover in Atlanta, hallucinating that an airplane made of human flesh was crashing to the ground and flowing with blood, he saw his parents once more as they cried every day at his bedside in the hospital, and as he regained his sanity through the feelings of anger and contempt they inspired, he regained his ability to travel, and he finally breathed free air for the first time as he touched down in Lima.

  Yukinori remembered the incident well. It had had an impact, of course, but it had also left him numb. It had been as if a thick felt wall had separated him from the other boy, and just as he could barely hear the screams from the other side, the voices of his friends as they whispered about it around him would be similarly muffled for the other boy. He’d felt no connection between his life and those murders. Even so, it hadn’t been as if he saw them taking place in a separate world, either. It was more like how a sleeping leg doesn’t feel like a part of your body. So about a year later, as he was stabbing Miss Michiko eight times, he hadn’t felt influenced by the other boy, or as if he were imitating him: he hadn’t seen himself as similar to him at all. At the same time, though, he sometimes felt that it didn’t necessarily have to have been him who’d killed Miss Michiko, that it could have been any student, that he’d acted not on his own behalf but as someone’s proxy. As for who that someone might be, he knew it wasn’t anyone in particular. It simply seemed to him that while he and Kiyoto and this hypothetical third party had nothing really in common, they were nonetheless interchangeable. Though even this feeling could have just been an effect of the process of writing his personal history in his diary here in Lima.

  He and Kiyoto only exchanged confessions once. Moreover, they just recited the basic facts as if summarizing newspaper articles and withheld their emotions and opinions. Indeed, this very act of withholding itself conveyed their emotions and opinions quite clearly, and that each understood this was a sign of their deep connection. Yukinori felt that if he’d been able to run away to Lima before turning sixteen that the incident might never have happened. Kiyoto surely felt the same way. He wrote as much in his notebook, but even as he did so it felt like a lie.

  I came to Peru to change society, said Kiyoto. It’s my duty, and I’m qualified for the job, he said. In reply to Yukinori asking why he would come to Peru to do this, Kiyoto explained that if society has broken you, you must ally yourself with other broken souls wherever you can find them, and Peru is a broken country so it must be filled with broken people. In Japan it’s impossible for the broken ones to find each other, those who do the breaking conspire to keep everyone separated and lonely because they’re so afraid of the broken ones’ power, he explained further, intensity building behind his words. Broken people are like fictions in Japan, everyone pretends they don’t exist, but here in Peru I can have a real existence, and when I realized that, I decided to come here.

  These were new words to Yukinori. Hearing them, he felt himself start to be reborn once more. He felt the poison and ancient, impacted pollution within the self he’d made out of the pages of his diary escape and dissolve into the air where his voice mixed with Kiyoto’s as they talked. The nausea that threatened to reverse his skin and expose the mucous membranes within subsided. Yukinori quit writing his diary again. He wanted to break open the shell he had made for himself when he first came to Peru. He felt he could finally bury for good the shadowy Yukinori he found on the pages of the diary who felt like a trick of the mind.

  Kiyoto’s Spanish improved quickly as he became more integrated into Peru, the same way walking around breathing the air and drinking the water transforms those things into blood and flesh, but his speech never shed its stiff, written flavor. Yukinori started to worry that his words sounded like they came out of a book too, but when he asked Mermalada about it, she replied that they didn’t and that if anything his Spanish sounded like hers, so perhaps what he really sounded like was a girl.

  Mermalada was a woman with skin that looked and smelled like toasted wheat. She could predict the movements of Yukinori’s heart before he could, and in the blink of an eye, she could take control, make them hers. From the moment she was introduced to Kiyoto Kamihara, she sensed danger and tried to avoid him. The first time she said as much to Yukinori, the blood had drained from his face, and he’d felt rejected, the same way the Yukinori Akimizu who’d lived in Japan would have been rejected had she met him. The blood returned quickly, however, and this time flooded his head, transforming him from the shoulders up into flame. Looking at Yukinori, his face flushed red as a sunset, Mermalada told him that she was just jealous, that she was a weak, pitiful person, th
at Yukinori’s world was her world, and she burst into tears. Yukinori remembered that Mermalada was sensitive to the tiniest shifts in his mood as if to the faintest emissions of pollen from flowers, and he loved her all the more. Even so, when Kiyoto invited Yukinori to go with him to visit Santo Domingo National University, she responded that it was a bad place, and gave him a look so fierce he found himself shrinking back in its face. She demanded he cut off his friendship with Kiyoto. It’s either him or me, not both, she said. I’ve bared everything of mine to you, she cried, but you still hide the secret holes gaping open inside you. I understand how you must be feeling now, but if you don’t tell me anything about your past there’ll always be things I’ll never know. Yukinori moved to strike her, but the arm movement felt wrong somehow, and he pulled the punch. Instead he threw a picture of the two of them to the floor and stomped it, smashing it to pieces. Maybe there’s still hope for me yet, he thought, if only in the fact I did this and not hit her.

  Yukinori wanted to finally fill the holes within himself. He wanted to integrate the new Yukinori with the old, make them one and the same, inside and out. He wanted to be entirely new, all the way through, no matter how you sliced him. So he took time off work and headed out to Santo Domingo University with Kiyoto.

  Santo Domingo’s campus was a banquet of propaganda. There were posters plastered everywhere, forming a seamless mosaic leaving no space unadorned, and he covered his ears after tiring of hearing his voice drone on reading them back to himself. Across wall after wall, spray-painted in a thousand colors, the slogan IT IS RIGHT TO REBEL blared from all sides, reminding him of tunnels defaced by motorcycle gangs back in Japan. He’d seen many such tunnels growing up in the mountains of Gunma, where the gangs ran wild. He’d pass through them on the way to school. It seemed like an illusion that he was in Lima, visiting a university. It seemed more likely that he’d emerge from these graffiti-spackled surroundings and find himself back at the school where he’d stabbed Miss Michiko. He felt himself repeating his past and began to lose sight of why he was there. Lining the pathways connecting the departmental divisions were open-air markets staffed by hippie-ish men and women selling South Asian incense, Che Guevara and Mao Zedong–emblazoned posters and pins and T-shirts, books of East Asian philosophy with titles like The Study of Zen, collections of pornographic Japanese woodblocks, all sorts of things. Kiyoto stopped at one of these shops. He introduced Yukinori to three long-haired men and women named Abraham Cerpa, Kisaragi Gilvanio, and Mary Heidegger. Mary was an exchange student from Canada. Kiyoto explained that they were members of the East Asian Culture Study Group, and that he was their cultural consultant.

  During the course of the following seventy-two hours, Yukinori found himself sucked into the swirl of their maelstrom of good and evil. We’re going to our “Dōjō,” they said, referring to the place that doubled as their headquarters and their home, and together they climbed down into the bed of the Rímac River. It was a relatively wide river and its flow was sluggish, neither brown and nor grey but cloudy and stinking of rot. Foam formed on its surface and never dissipated, and from time to time a dead fish would drift past. It seemed to Yukinori like a flow of the viscous fluid produced by the decomposing bodies of various organisms. Yukinori grew sensitive to the smell of rotting meat. He saw in the mud the partially rotted shapes of people and monkeys and pigs and dogs and tomatoes and onions mixing together, their meat half fallen from bones that stuck up out of the mucilaginous broth as if from a well-simmered pot of chicken soup. Atop the piles of discarded trash that lined the riverbank lay the fresh garbage produced by the marketplace that day, like a sauce. There was a strip of land between the edge of the water and rise of the riverbank surrounded by chain link and honeycombed with cardboard buildings like a hive. A gate was located where the bridge met the riverbank, and on either side stood two boys who faced the visitors down, their arms folded across their chests and their hair grown long only in the back, like birds’ tails. A group of young men and women around Yukinori’s age played soccer in the road that led to the bridge. The boys nodded silently when Abraham introduced Yukinori as a friend.

  There were roads just wide enough for a person to squeeze down winding between the cardboard buildings, and each bore an official name. Abraham and Kisaragi’s house was located on Naturalism Avenue, District Four. Once inside he had to stoop to avoid hitting the roof made of giant leaves with his head. The room in back was a kitchen cum dining room, the room in front was a bedroom cum living room floored with straw mats, and behind the kitchen was a little garden where the wash could hang to dry. The so-called “Dōjō” was this living room, small enough that six people sitting side by side threatened to burst its seams and topple its walls. On the back wall hung an oversized portrait of Mao, and in unison they faced this portrait and sang songs of praise to him in Chinese, then lit some incense and sat zazen-style to meditate. Even Kiyoto went along, folding his legs beneath him with a creased brow and solemn, downcast eyes. Aghast at the ridiculousness, Yukinori restricted himself to simply crossing his legs and waiting for the others to move again.

  Beneath the straw mats was cold sand. The rotten odor of the river filled the room. The smell of cooking soup, the scratchy sound of salsa music playing on cassette players, the ammonia stink of urine, the cries of children, the voices of television actors, smoke of every sort, all these things and more emanated from the houses around him and mixed with the river’s stench. If he put a flame to the wall beside him, the entire place would go up in flames before anyone had a chance to get away, he thought: everything would burn away to nothing. These paper buildings could stay up only as long as it didn’t rain. They stood in the face of the dry wind, in the face of the realization that they could go up in smoke at any moment. Yukinori supposed that if fire ever really did end up peering down at this paper city from the towering height of its giant body, they’d have to use the river’s putrid broth of rotten plants and animals to quell it.

  After zazen meditation was finally over, it was time for Japanese practice. Before, he was told, there had been martial arts practice at this point. D-O-W-N-W-I-T-H-N-E-O-L-I-B-E-R-A-L-I-S-M chanted Kiyoto in Japanese, and everyone repeated it back. Next he asked: I-S-N-E-O-L-I-B-E-R-A-L-I-S-M-B-A-D? And Kisaragi answered: Y-E-S-I-T-I-S. I-S-A-M-E-R-I-C-A-C-O-R-R-E-C-T, I-S-C-A-N-A-D-A-C-O-R-R-E-C-T, M-A-R-Y-S-A-N? N-O-I-T-I-S-N-O-T. W-H-E-R-E-I-S-Y-O-U-R-H-O-M-E, A-B-R-A-H-A-M-S-A-N? M-Y-H-O-M-E-I-S-T-H-E-W-O-R-L-D.

  The sun went down, and after a dinner of jerkytough beef boiled in beans, they went back into town and stopped at the local bar. They ordered a bottle of cheap Pisco. As they drank and drank, they started talking to a nearby table of men, one of whom spit out his story: I’m a pilot but thanks to that fuck Montesinos I’m working as a damn taxi driver, and I’m about to lose that job too, and then Yukinori’s group raised their voices in a chorus, saying, you’re one of us, our time will come, see these hands, we’ll use them to take it back and return it to you, and with that they all sang a song together. They ended up draining two bottles’ worth of alcohol and Kiyoto paid the bill. The bar closed and they were chased out, only to buy even cheaper brandy through the steel-girded window of an all-night liquor store to take back to the riverbed “Dōjō” and keep drinking. Those who got sick threw up onto the ground through gaps in the straw mats and covered it with sand. Those who had to urinate would just walk out into Naturalism Avenue. I’ll blow it all away, repeated Yukinori to himself. I’ll blow up Chinatown with firecrackers. I’ll set fire to this shantytown and burn it to the ground. I’ll bomb Miraflores Plaza and reduce all those stuck-up bastards to chunks of meat. I’ll drop a bomb in the middle of Japan. I’ll machine gun my father full of holes. But I won’t have holes. I’ll be filled up full, all the way through. I’ll use my exceptional endowment to obliterate Mermalada and her foolish words and send her up to heaven. Just you watch.