We, the Children of Cats (Found in Translation)

by Hoshino, Tomoyuki

  Then, one copper-colored midday near the end of summer, you appeared. The city at noon is extremely bright, and the cloudless sky above turns a blue so pure it starts to look black; some days stars appear. When night falls, the numberless stars shine like hot, crushed-crystal sand, and their light pierces like so many needles thinner than threads of silk, rendering us unable to raise our eyelids. Eyes shut and ears open, we can hear the streams of falling light vibrate like the strings of a guitar, play an arpeggio as they pour through the empty sky like molten metal from a cauldron only to coalesce again, turn back into silvery light once more as they reach the surface of the earth and flow into the river that continues on its course as a sound like the tangled songs of violins and bandoneones plays across its surface. But we all know that the stars, too, are merely heavenly reflections of the silver on the surface of the river. Everything here wavers like the voice of a violin, only really visible in silhouette, dizzying all who come here from afar. And yet you are the only thing I’ve ever seen that seemed truly distorted, as if constantly reflected in water.

  You were wearing a shirt striped with white and pale blue. That morning our soccer team had just won their game, so everyone was running around, frenzied; everyone was wearing striped shirts like yours, and everyone was clamoring to shout from the top of the lookout tower and spray amber-colored beer over the crowds below: “Viva!” Young men gathered at the base of the coquettish angel who stepped off the top of the tower with her wings spread, prepared for either takeoff or a tumbling descent, and they kissed her breasts and danced merrily, their arms slung around her hips. Perhaps under the impression that they could fly too, some of them tumbled from the tower to smash like ripe mangoes on the ground below. The traffic in the roundabout encircling the tower drew to a halt, and some drivers leapt from their cars as if driven mad by the sun and waved flags striped the same blue and white as everyone’s shirts, while others spun their tires against the gravel in a kind of waltz, or extended their hands out their car windows to interlace their fingers with those whose soft hands similarly extended from the cars beside them.

  But I found myself alone, set carefully outside the fray as if made of fine china. I was the only gloomy one. Everyone else’s voices and faces melted into each other like butter, but I found myself completely intact, able to pick out the songs of the darting little birds, discern the ripe passionfruit from the unripe, distinguish the smell of hogshead soup from that of soup boiled from chicken feet. And so I was the only one to notice you as you stood beneath the hundred-year-old jacaranda tree blooming in the central plaza and scooped red meat from a wedge of melon with a spoon, a tiny flag that matched the others’ tucked behind your left ear, skin the color of toasted wheat showing through your beer-drenched shirt, a red handker-chief stuffed carelessly into your breast pocket, a knife in a sheath tooled with a complex pattern of foliage hanging from your hip, your feet slid into two right shoes.

  The figure you cut blurred as you stood there surrounded by all the others. No matter how hard I tried to focus, your edges refused to resolve. At first glance you looked just like everyone else, but as I watched, you seemed somehow separate from the crowd’s din. Watching you I thought, here was a person with whom I’d be willing to escape the closed circle of my everyday. And this thought made my skin fragment and bubble, made me feel as if I were giving off steam. At the same time, I felt like I already knew you. Like I’d seen you countless times before. Your hips and the knife that hung from them seemed familiar. Every time I fall in love, it’s with the same person. The time we spend together always ends up a repetition. I was your captive even before you first called my name, first touched your fingers to my skin. My heart hurt as presentiment gripped it, and I felt a certain sadness as it did.

  The plaza rustled with a sound like the leaves of all the trees around us whispering at once. The breeze scrambled the sound of the soccer fans’ celebration into an oceanic roar. Never taking your eyes from mine, you briefly mimed wearing the rind of your melon atop your head of long, black, wavy hair before throwing it away, and then you were walking toward me, smiling only with your eyes, your head held immobile, stalking me boldly like an animal. I couldn’t tell if the wetness on my skin was from sweat or from the windborne spray of the fountain at whose edge I stood as I panicked and turned my face to the right, keeping your image in the corner of my left eye as you drew closer. You turned to your own right in response, disappearing from my field of vision with a squeak of your obviously new shoes. I turned my face farther to the right to see where you went. My neck corkscrewing like a crane’s, I watched you march away from me as if keeping in step with an unseen line of soldiers.

  I’d just resigned myself to my disappointment at your leaving when I heard the loud, sudden sound of gravel crunching beneath shoes to my left and turned to find you approaching, already almost close enough to touch. My skin quivered nervously, suddenly sensitive to the slightest breeze, to the soft breath of birds. The din of the crowds, the rustling of the leaves, all the sounds around me blended together and caressed my body like a bananashaped mass. I sensed soft heat gathering at my pelvis, movements in the air around me, footsteps that sounded like whispers—but then, at the very moment the surface of my body surged in anticipation of the feel of your breath upon it, you passed right by me, leaving me adrift in your melon and maté-scented wake. The right side of my body tightened as the cold spray from the fountain hit it, and all the energy left me at once as I curled forward, my knees cracking, and sat back down on the fountain’s edge, suffused with equal parts relief and despair. I gazed after your retreating head, heedlessly caressing each flowing strand of your hair with my eyes as it shimmered blue-black as the night sky. Imagining this hair as a series of dark waves I felt compelled to part, I was closing my eyes and preparing to let out a deep sigh when you turned back again, prompting me to rise to my feet like a cresting wave myself. It would have been better if I had just continued gazing at the far jacaranda tree as if able to gaze right through you, but my body’s response had already precluded that excuse and I was left with no way to escape as you made your third approach.

  Bearing down upon me, you slipped into my pale blue eyes without a splash. Kathung: my body filled with the sound of your submergence. You swam in my eyes like a thin, silver-bodied fish, and it tickled so that I exhaled sharply, neither quite laughing nor sighing. I shivered at the chill of the liquid in my eyes, goosebumps rising on my skin. You examined these bumps one by one as they arose, then at last raised your eyes to meet mine and laughed. Droplets of moisture seemed to rise like a sweet mist from your entire body and my body, in turn, began to moisten in response, grow sticky. I looked away, turned my gaze toward the sun. I squinted into the silvery, faintly reddish light and this light became concentrated within my contracting pupils, bouncing back on itself within them. Strength returned to my eyes and I turned back to look at you again, wanting to burn you with my gaze. The laughter disappeared from your lips, your eyes narrowed, and you circled me, your body close enough to brush my skin, your feet barely moving, and you withdrew an orange blossom from your pocket and tossed it to me. I don’t know if it was your scent or the blossom’s, but I found myself engulfed in a sweet perfume that seemed to melt me, dissolve my will, dissolve my bones, make standing seem ridiculous, make keeping my eyes open seem unbearable. The air undulated as you moved, producing a breeze that was hardly a breeze at all, and the golden, downy hair along my arms felt this breeze as an embrace. Your warmth penetrated to my very bones. The breath that escaped my mouth mingled with yours and riffled my downy hair again. Even as I asked myself why it would be so, I felt everything solid within me melt, turn liquid, threaten to overflow my body: there was nothing I could do. And even as my lower body buckled and I felt myself collapsing toward the earth once more, I heard your voice like a cello’s lowest register murmur something into my ear. Into only my ear. You spoke and the words echoed in the hollow of my body.

  You collap
sed like a wave retreating, clutching at my knees as you went down, drawing shallow grooves down my pants with your knifelike nails painted glittering green, until you lay completely prone upon the ground. Your eyes filled and turned transparent, swelling like a drop of water at the lip of a faucet, stopped by the lashes that edged your eyelids like the points of a crown, making it look as if your very eyes were liquefying. Your skin shone pure white from where your dress, the color of a ripe tomato, revealed it. This skin looked so delicate that to touch it would be to wound it, it seemed filled with liquid about to overflow, and even though I moved to support you, my hands refused to reach out; instead I bent to look you in the eye, brought my mouth to your ear once more to whisper my words as if filling you with breath to reinflate what had wilted within you.

  “Please don’t ask my name, it’s rude.” Your voice wavered in the air as if it would disappear like smoke if I weren’t careful.

  “I won’t. Even if I did, I’d just forget it. I’ve met people like you so many times before.” Your voice trembled like a flute’s song, and you refused to look directly at me.

  “I’ve seen you many times before as well. Not people like you, but you; it was really you.”

  “When, I wonder? I can almost remember, but not quite.” The warmth of your lips passed through your breath to touch my ear.

  “That makes sense. I didn’t meet you, I just saw you. I saw you practicing that dance of yours on the roof of your apartment building, that dance that looks like the movement of waves: I’d watch you from my room on the other side of the river.”

  “You came from the other side of the river? We can’t see the other side from here, but you can see us from there? I know nothing of that side of the river.” Your eyes glinted silver like the river, reflecting the shine of mine.

  “It’s exactly like this side. Even I find it hard to tell whether I’ve really crossed the river, if I really am in the city on the far shore.”

  “Is this the first time you’ve come?”

  “No, I’ve come and gone countless times before. For my work. I’ve crossed back and forth too many times, sometimes I lose track of where I really come from, where I was born, whether I’ve mixed my cities up. Watching you dance on your rooftop became a way for me to keep track. The city where the real you lives is the one I wasn’t born in.”

  “How can you see this city from the other side when we can’t see the other side from here? It’s impossible to imagine anyone being able to see across that river.”

  “We can’t see across it all the time. Only on windy days; your city appears with the sunset. An image like a shadow borne by the wind. On cold, dry evenings when the setting sun’s light burns red and the wind blows strong, the streets of your city appear overlain across mine. Sometimes the streets of my city disappear completely, and all I can see are the streets and buildings of yours; I get lost in them. The roof of your building lines up perfectly with my apartment looking west.” The outline of your body as you dance limned in apricot light overlaps with mine as I watch you.

  “That doesn’t happen over here.” It seemed as if you were being given kindnesses withheld from me, and I felt a twinge of jealousy, “And besides, there’s the thought of you peeping on me.”

  “I don’t peep! Your figure simply flies into my room. Though I admit I welcome it. I put a record on and dance with you even though you lack substance, lack skin to touch, lack smell. I’ve danced with you so many times.” You withdrew the red handkerchief from your pocket and wiped your brow with it.

  “It’s just a one-way thing then.” Against my intentions, your spirits seemed to fall.

  “I only wanted to surprise you. It’s fun to be surprised, isn’t it? Though whenever you surprise someone, it turns into a one-way thing.” My lips as I spoke brushed against your earlobe. The tiny hairs there fluttered with my breath. I extended the tip of my tongue a tiny bit and brushed them with it.

  “Could you tell just now when I licked your tiny hairs? Does your ear as I touch it feel connected to your eyes as they see me? Can you believe that all these parts go together, that they are all a part of you? That’s what it means to be surprised, to be taken apart.” And as you said this to me, my nerves as they clustered at my ear like ants swarming something sweet tried to reverse their course, tried to gather instead at my eyes but were unable to. My flesh suddenly felt stiff and cold and I filled with unease, so I traced a path across my skin from my earlobe to my eyelid with the pad of my fingertip. I could feel them connected by the surface of my skin, but when I thought about whether they connected deep inside, I became profoundly uncertain. I was suddenly outraged to have been asked to think about such upsetting things and began to run my mouth without thinking.

  “It’s just because you refuse to really touch me that I feel this way!”

  Your eyes undulated again like the surface of water, and this undulating spread across your entire body, smearing its edges. And then, as if inadvertently, I brushed you with my arm. I looked up into the dazzling sky filled with bronze sunlight and rubbed my eyes, then looked back at you. I always fall in love with this kind of person, I thought, and this time would be my last. But what kind of person was this exactly? I knew it was the kind of person you were, but when I tried to think of others besides you, my head would fill with a maelstrom of ashen grey that squirmed in all directions, leaving me muddled and confused.

  “I’d never worried about such things before. I didn’t mind that it was all just repetition. What’s so different about you? I feel sure that things with you will be no different than with anyone before.”

  “There’s no helping it. It’s the river’s fault your memory’s unclear. Everyone’s memories in this city end up flowing into the river. Those who raised me told me. In the city on the far shore, they’d say, the people go to sleep and then from between the houses memories flow like grey soup, you can see them run down into the river. Your mind and the river are connected. Your memories run and mix with other things. That’s the reason why your ears and eyes don’t connect: a river lies between them.”

  “But what about you? You said the city on the other side is just the same as this one.”

  “I don’t know. But maybe if I watched my city from here at night I’d see the same thing happen.”

  “But I told you. You can’t see your city from here.” Your voice had grown as thin as spider’s silk.

  “Well, then let’s go to the other side together. It might answer your questions if we did, and besides, I’ve become the kind of person who can’t stay in one place for any length of time. So let’s go.”

  You looked at me with those eyes the same emerald green as a lake I was sure I’d seen somewhere in the north, your gaze unblinking, penetrating deeper and deeper into mine, nodding your assent. I felt as though the harder you looked at me the more definite my outline became. You poured too much concentration into your gaze, though, and you began to forget who or where you were, only remembering that if you failed to grasp this moment it would never come again, and then you struggled to your feet but grew dizzy and fell back down. I reached for you, supported your back and hips, pulled you up as if lifting a giant squid into my arms and carried you to lay you out on a bench in the shade of the stout-trunked jacaranda tree. Your limbs were warm and flexible, sticking to my arms and legs like tentacles. Thinking you were about to say something, I stared hard at your lips, smooth as cherry skins, but all that emerged when they parted was breath and the sight of tiny teeth like kernels of white corn. To prevent being overcome with the compulsion to dive between these lips, I bought another red-fleshed, quartered melon from the booth that stood in the shade of the nearby chestnut tree and slipped its flesh between them instead, cutting it from the rind with my knife.

  The overripe smell of the red-fleshed melon thickened like slowly dripping honey with every step you took toward me as you walked back from the booth. You brought the knife in your right hand toward the melon in your left hand, seemin
g about to cut into the flesh from your palm, but you cut into the red flesh of the melon instead and placed it in my mouth. The sweet, smooth smell filled my nose and even seemed to reach my eyes, and as I stared at the pink flesh of your palm crossing my vision, I had a feeling like I was eating a secret of yours, something I’d been unable to see before, something I wasn’t supposed to know. I swallowed the fruit of your secret shame. I felt it in my chest and around my hips as the fruit from your palm turned quickly into blood within my reclining body; I felt it turn into flesh, into power. But even though it was I who should have been consuming you, instead I felt myself taken over. I became an extension of you and so there was no longer any need for us to talk, but you put voice to your words anyway, asking, “Can you stand? If you can stand, then we need to hurry, we need to get a car.” “I want one the color of strawberries,” I answered. “We’ll get one as swift as a swallow,” you replied as you stood me up. I thought you were going to hail a taxi from the road in front of us, but instead you walked me to the supermarket parking lot and found an open car the color of wine to heft me into, and then, after punching the code into the pad below the steering wheel, we were off, the shining breeze blowing through my hair.