We, the Children of Cats (Found in Translation)

by Hoshino, Tomoyuki

  Over the next four days Yukinori read to the end of the three notebooks of Kiyoto’s diary. It seemed both just like and completely different from his own. The first part was filled with naïve musings on the definition of “self ” and “humanity,” interspersed with large amounts of poetry, but gradually the focus shifted toward a more generalized, socially conscious perspective. In one of the notebooks, there was a daily series of “THOUGHTS ON JAPAN FROM THE OUTSIDE IN,” which attempted to interpret the incident he’d perpetrated through its context. It started as an analysis of his home life and his dissatisfaction with the education system, but soon he came to see it as performing a kind of social critique, and the analysis became a fevered call for revolution. It was in these pages that Yukinori saw Kiyoto’s ideas about “broken people” first begin to take shape. He wrote that while the impetus behind his crime was correct, its target was not, and this process of redirecting his actions toward a more appropriate object seemed to serve as expiation for his wrongdoing, as a kind of self-justification. But what didn’t come up was any mention of Peru. About halfway through the diary, Kiyoto finally described his crime directly. It took the form of a series of confessions recounting the incident accompanied by explanations for why it happened. Written in a studiously conversational style, each version differed slightly in its delineation of motive and in the details of the crime itself, but none failed to give some sort of clear causal explanation, and while Yukinori felt refreshed and comforted by this, as if swimming through a river of clear, cold water, he also felt a growing irritation as he sensed these accounts drifting farther and farther away from the incident itself as they retold and reframed it. He found the phrase WORDS ALWAYS BETRAY scribbled in the margin of one of the pages. Near the end, increasingly large gaps began to appear between the dates of the entries, and sometimes they sounded more like excerpts from a novel than a diary. This novel appeared to tell the story of a group of dispossessed people who’d had their voices taken from them banding together to convert their pent-up anger into energy and take back their stolen words through terrorism. As he kept reading, though, Yukinori noticed that the words structuring the diary were themselves stolen from other sources. Whenever footnote-like treatments of some book or other would appear, the subsequent entries would suddenly change, aping these new ideas.

  Yukinori felt as if bits of Kiyoto’s flesh were lodging themselves within his body and he wanted to dislodge them, rip them out. He was angry at himself for sucking these slick words down so easily and clinging to their comforts so tenaciously. He knew that words begat words. It was a fallacy to think they could ever be stolen or taken back. Kiyoto didn’t really believe that he’d be taking back his words by publishing these diaries. It was just a plan to render words themselves extinct. Yukinori was gripped again by a strong urge to kill Kiyoto, to prevent this coming loneliness at all costs. And again he wondered if this was not just one more trap carefully laid for him. Was Kiyoto trying to manipulate Yukinori into killing him?

  As if reading his mind once more, when Yukinori came to return the diaries, Kiyoto told him in Japanese that he had no ulterior motives for having him read them. I just wanted to give you an idea for where I was coming from, before you join me in our present action. From now on, there’ll be no more cogitating about hidden meanings, no more room for hesitation, just one concerted movement, full speed ahead. I’m only this confident because I’m not alone, I have other comrades supporting me. The Red Shining Path has expressed interest in using me. They’re pursuing a red and shining path to bring about a miracle. Did you know that the Path’s founder comes from a noble family that goes back hundreds of years? Anyway, it’s obvious that MARTA’s attempt to free its leader will end in failure. Worst case, they’ll all be killed. But we’ll get away, you see? We’re going to pose as hostages. I want you to prepare yourself to get a little banged up. Though our lives mean less to them than theirs do anyway. So why should we help them? I want to make this little cookie-cutter cell self-destruct. If it were to succeed, all that would happen would be the destruction of a few cookie-cutter cells on the other side. So was there any need for me to come all the way to Peru? There wasn’t, was there? But I’d heard from the Path that you were living here, so I decided to come. I thought it might be worth it to pick you up and bring you back with me. Though I have to say it’s been hard putting up with the people here, you know?

  Yukinori just nodded. It all felt like lies. Did he even know the Red Shining Path? It seemed patently obvious that he was lying about coming to Peru to meet him. All Kiyoto’d been thinking when he came here was that there’d be outcasts to reach out to, that Peru itself was a broken country that was outcast itself. Or rather, it had decided it had been broken and used words borne of hate and anger to make the rest of the world see it as broken too. Yukinori didn’t believe any of Kiyoto’s words. And it wasn’t because words always betray, either. It was because Kiyoto himself didn’t believe in words. Kiyoto had never been betrayed by words. You can’t believe the words of someone who didn’t believe in them himself.

  Yet Yukinori remembered tasting the pleasure of purification more than once in Kiyoto’s words. He’d felt the poison leave his body as he listened to the clumsy, halting Spanish coming from Kiyoto’s mouth, words that formed a discourse as cookie-cutter as any he decried. Yukinori always found himself defenseless in the face of it. Yukinori felt forbidden from ever keeping his diary again. He knew that if he resumed his writing he’d end up arriving where Kiyoto was now, that Kiyoto was seducing him, saying go ahead and write, go ahead and turn into me. It drove him crazy. It was he who prevented his own writing.

  Kiyoto told him he was starting his recruitment drive for the action scheduled to take place seven months hence, and he brought Yukinori along with him as he visited the refugees from the burned-out riverside settlement who’d gathered in Plaza San Martín. Some displaced residents had found new homes in other slums, but those who couldn’t wound up in the Plaza. Blue plastic tents erected by sympathizers encrusted the Plaza like barnacles, and even the “Dōjō” found new life, using one of these tents as a base for plying new refugees with alcohol and shady rituals like those previously performed on Yukinori.

  In order to devote all of his energy to these recruitment activities, Yukinori packed his bags and moved into a separate blue tent dubbed the “Dōjō Annex.” He did so to prevent himself from thinking, to prevent himself from writing. Whenever he allowed himself the smallest room to think, to remember Mermalada, to confront himself, he was seized with the urge to bury a knife into something soft. As his body filled with Kiyoto’s empty words, everything around him seemed to grow more and more hateful. He became slavishly obedient, and the feeling of his body possessed by someone else’s will, no matter how fleeting, closed any gap through which his thoughts could leak. As if marking time until an alarm went off and freed him, Yukinori transformed himself into a robot, and his body as he moved it felt like so much meat.

  Fire struck the new tent city a month after it had struck the old shantytown. This time it was day and it remained small, so no one died, but it sparked a rumor that the fivestar hotels facing the Plaza had conspired with government intelligence to burn them out. The refugees rolled up their tents and moved to the sandy plateau in the mountains on the far side of the Rímac the next day. There was already a major slum in that area, sprawling along one side of a major highway leading to the countryside, so Yukinori and the others ended up “settling” the higher slope on the opposite side. At first there were just tents, but soon there appeared homes built of cardboard and plywood. The settlers stole electricity from a nearby pole and water from the slum down below. More people started to move in, and within three weeks the makeshift city grew big enough that the roads winding between the shelters bore names again. And amid all this activity, Yukinori concentrated on his training and self-indoctrination, on this process of automating his being.

  Three months later, this new village was oblitera
ted once more. Unseasonable rain fell hard and reduced the cardboard houses to mush, and landslides wiped out the plywood ones as well, changing the composition of the ground itself so that nothing could be rebuilt. The residents evacuated for a time in a large shelter in the lower slum, but as soon as the rain stopped they were chased out, accused of stealing water. Left with no other choice, the refugees returned once more to the burned-out ruins on the Rímac riverbed. There was already a small group of squatters who’d created their own little community there. Work began to rebuild the chain link city, and just as the future was looking bright for this project, it was time for the MARTA members to move deep into the Amazon basin on the far side of the Andes and begin the final stage of their paramilitary training.

  Yukinori still felt warm, lemon-colored light bathe his body. Slowly opening his eyelids, his eyes were pierced by the sun shining in through the window. The hostages were shuffling wordlessly around the room for their morning exercise. Fine particles of dust danced in the shafts of light behind them. He could hear shouts filtering up from where the MARTA members were playing soccer down below. Yukinori was still alive. No one else had noticed that the air reeked, filled with this smell of iron or explosives, whichever. Yukinori observed the sunlight going in and out of the room through the windowpane. During the time it took for the particles of light to enter, bounce off the carpet, then go back out the window, the smell just grew thicker. It seemed that the explosion could happen at any time.

  Yukinori’s job was to spy on the hostages. Having infiltrated the Japanese Ambassador’s Residence dressed as waiters during the celebration of the Emperor’s birthday taking place there on the twenty-seventh of December, Yukinori and Kiyoto shed their white uniforms and blended in with the other guests during the confusion following rockets being launched into the Residence’s rear garden, pretending to be herded along with them by the masked guerillas who poured through the hole blasted in the fence, and as negotiations drew to a standstill, they were able to insinuate themselves into the society the hostages created and eventually caught wind of the action the government forces were plotting just outside the Residence walls, but Yukinori did nothing to prevent Kiyoto from spreading misinformation about it to the MARTA members. There was no reason for MARTA to trust them in the first place, after all, and he wasn’t even sure the real information was true anyway.

  Yukinori had transformed completely into a battle robot. He’d come to see himself this way as he trained deep within the Amazon jungle alongside Kiyoto and the thirteen other members of the team. A battle robot needs no words. He’d sent Mermalada his diary, telling her that in her hands she held the words that formed Yukinori Akimizu’s soul, and that even though they’d never meet again, he’d be with her, and that he prayed she felt the same way about him: these were his final words. Any that escaped his lips thereafter would be nothing more than so many robotic components. As he’d entered the jungle and sweat flowed from his body in the humid air that felt heavier than water, as his blood was sucked by mosquitoes and leeches, as diarrhea from living on nuts streamed from him, as muscles emerged from deep within his body, all the unnecessary words stored up inside him flowed free, borne along with his excretions to be swallowed by the Amazon, leaving him at peace. He’d had nothing more to tell.

  But now these words began to move within him once more. As the smell of iron or explosives drifted up from the eight holes carved into his body and from the space below the Residence floor, Yukinori was once again seized with shock. He felt himself become a bomb, felt the Residence begin to bleed. He heard the Residence cry out, heard Miss Michiko’s moans, felt himself swallowing Kiyoto’s words and shitting them uncontrollably from his anus, heard tense whispers amid the particles of light, he wanted to write this all down, this was the story he wanted told. That he wanted understood. Or rather, that he wanted someone to offer to understand, that he wanted to understand himself. Why was no one else noticing the smell as he did, it was pitiful, painful, a puzzle. With every movement of the air around him he hallucinated an explosion, and he attempted to fill in the blanks between Miss Michiko’s stabbing and the massacre about to ensue, he wanted to think it all through, wanted to write it all down, but the words that came to him transformed instead into a choking iron smell and colors made of flames, shards of Japanese mixing into Spanish until he saw a vision of his father’s flesh stuck in pieces to the ruins around him, of he and Miss Michiko and Kiyoto wrapped in threads spun from blood, falling. These visions and sensations collided into one another and Yukinori couldn’t piece together any relation between them.

  The light flickered in the wind. The wind was the beating of birds’ wings. There were inky-black wings glittering iridescent blue and orange as they danced outside the window. Perhaps the birds had come to suck the nectar from the red, flame-shaped flowers of the vine that twined around the iron window frame. A fluting bird-call rang out from where one of them perched. He felt the floor swell beneath him like a rising wave. Intense heat burst upward, strong enough to melt people like wax. Then a rushing blast of air, followed by an eardrum-battering roar that shook the building. The hostages who’d been walking around hit the floor, their hands covering their heads. Several angry voices could be heard below, but the bombs kept exploding and soon there was the sound of gunfire, cutting them off. Soldiers entered the second story from an unexpected direction and shouted something at the hostages, who squirmed across the floor like crushed ants in the direction the soldiers indicated. The soldier at the head of the group began exchanging gunfire from a hiding place near the door and suddenly his neck snapped back as if broken, and he fell face up on the floor. The other soldiers dragged him away. Another soldier descended the staircase and plugged a bullet into Mary’s forehead where she lay at the bottom glaring up at him, both her legs blown off and shitting herself. Reaching for Kisaragi as she wriggled her upper body, her lower half pinned beneath an oak desk, Abraham suddenly had his throat slit wide by a knife the size and shape of a rubber tree leaf, and the fountain of blood that erupted continued flowing even after the battle had ended and all the hostages were evacuated, filling the bathtub-size hole blasted into the ground beneath him to overflowing.

  And Yukinori and Kiyoto seemed to be everywhere at once yet nowhere to be found, not in the rust-colored pool of Abraham’s blood, nor in the group of hostages striking jubilant poses and exchanging handshakes outside the Residence walls, not among the shadowy figures quietly splitting off from the rest of the hostages, nor in the group of men in khaki uniforms leaving through the tunnels that had been dug beneath the Residential grounds to facilitate the attack. There was even a critically injured soldier who’d reported seeing two hostages killing each other amid the confusion, but he too eventually died. The official dead remained numbered at just fifteen: two government soldiers and thirteen MARTA guerillas.

  A Milonga for the Melted Moon (1999)

  They say it doesn’t exist, this city that glows like a flow of molten silver. Long ago, before the first words were heard, these plains stretched in all directions without end, and they say there fell rain like golden honey and snow like grains of silver. Clouds of crumpled silverleaf would appear in the clear blue sky and the sunlight, confused, would refract and light the sky even brighter, and then the silver would dance down, the daylight outshining even the plains that stretched below, untouched by any shadows thrown by boulders or tall-standing trees. The silver would split the sunlight more and more finely as it fell thick enough that everything below turned silver-white at once: the grass, the trees, the stones, the water. A glittering desert formed as the silverfall grew deeper, and, just as rivers of sand form amid dunes, the silver began to flow toward the sea, grains of it rubbing together as they tumbled until the friction melted it into a shining liquid. Soon these silver rivers flowed into those formed by the golden honey rain and their tributaries of liquid crystal, and as rivers begat more rivers, they widened until their shores pushed beyond the horizon and th
e river grew large as an ocean, large as a sky, flowing languorous as liquid candy. The untroubled surface of the great river reflected the sky without the slightest distortion, a perfect mirror. The sun as it shone on the river received its light reflected back and shone a doubly bright platinum. And as the pale light from the heavens met the denser light thrown back by the river, shadowed rifts formed in the sky, rifts shaped like knives, like fish, like birds, like people.

  The rifts shaped like people gathered in the sky and were reflected in the river, and they say that this was start of the city. And this is also why they say it doesn’t really exist. What looks like a city are simply shadows formed by fluctuating light. And the source of this light is no longer traceable. The river reflects the light, reflects the breath of the people. It reflects the birds as they fly, the fish as they swim. It reflects me as a man, it reflects me as a woman. It reflects you, it reflects him, it reflects her, it reflects a skylark. It reflects me and I become him, it reflects him and he becomes you, it reflects you and you become a swallow. You and I both, as we walk this earth, are nothing more than shadow sculptures carved from light. Everyone here is just light thrown by the city in the sky as it shines in the night. This city is so filled with light the night shines like the midday sun, the silver from the sky as it falls on the surface of the river builds up and combines with the new light falling from the sky, the proof is in the way the light comes not just from the sky but from the ground beneath our feet: no shadows trouble the surfaces of this city. Instead they hang suspended, unmoored from the ground, and eventually turn back into birds, back into people.