Record of a Night too Brief

by Hiromi Kawakami

  He nodded emphatically, and emitted a roar. That special trumpeting roar peculiar to elephants.

  This was not necessarily to be believed, and so I asked the same thing of another elephant.

  That one nodded, just like the one before, and made exactly the same trumpeting sound. I asked about ten of the elephants, and got exactly the same response.

  Irritated, I made my way up to the front of the line. As I moved forward, the number of elephants increased, and they were more and more intertwined.

  Soon, I realized that the sight of the intertwining elephants reminded me of something. It dawned on me that it was a mandala. The elephants intertwined on the left side of the road were arranged like the Diamond Realm Mandala, and the elephants intertwined on the right side of the road were arranged like the Womb Realm Mandala.

  I suspected I had been hoodwinked. This irritated me even more, so I decided to go back. But suddenly, from the forests beyond the intertwining lines of elephants, dozens of elephant handlers came scurrying out and accosted me.

  “You do know those are mandalas.”

  “The Diamond Realm and the Womb Realm mandalas, no less. You don’t come across them often.”

  “Please, don’t hurry off. Stay.”

  Each elephant handler was dressed in gold brocade. But their robes were a bit shabby, and here and there the gold threads were frayed.

  “If you don’t like them, there’s always the option of becoming an elephant handler.”

  “What a great idea.”

  “You’d enjoy being an elephant handler.”

  And with that, they quickly started dressing me in gold brocade. I didn’t like this at all, so without a word I ran off.

  I ran all the way back to the square with the arrow-shaped sign, and as I was catching my breath, someone I seemed to recognize appeared. She immediately jumped to conclusions.

  “So you’re running away!”

  “But the mandalas were so boring!” I replied.

  “Well, I want to see them. Come on. Turn around,” she ordered me, imperiously.

  I was suspicious, wondering why I had to do what she said, but I obeyed her, despite myself.

  “Come on! Quickly! We must get a good look at the Womb Realm Mandala,” she commanded, even more imperiously.

  So I went back to where the elephants were. I found it completely uninteresting, but I gazed thoughtfully, as I’d been told to, at the Womb Realm Mandala, which was on the right. As I gazed, I started to feel drowsy. I’ll just have forty winks, I thought, drifting off. I suddenly remembered I should issue an order to someone, quickly. But by then I was fast asleep.

  14 ALLERGY

  Whenever we were separated, I would long for her. Even when I thought I had forgotten her, she would suddenly pop back into my mind. In fact, whenever there was any reason at all to remember her, I would remember her. So I decided to go back to her.

  I made my way back along an endless windswept path, and there the girl was. She was seated on a single chair, which she had placed on a totally bare stretch of land. To my surprise, she was smoking a cigarette.

  “Why are you smoking, for goodness’ sake?” I asked.

  “My body’s changed,” was her reply.

  As an experiment, I tried stroking the girl’s hair: several dry strands came away. With each stroke, more strands came away, fluttering down to the ground. It was a pretty sight, so I stroked her hair some more.

  “Please stop,” she said eventually.

  By that time, her hair had got a lot thinner.

  The smoke from her cigarette spread in every direction, blown by the wind. The smoke assumed the forms of all sorts of things, which was fascinating to watch. Cats, rats, weasels… They ran off into the darkness once they had been given form. Sometimes a rat would be caught by a cat, and I would hear it squeak, which was spectacular.

  “Aren’t you dancing?” I asked. The girl got up from her chair, and came and pressed her body against mine. As we held each other and danced, I glanced down, and there, peeping out from the strands of hair at the nape of her neck were what looked like mushrooms. Tiny, red mushrooms with flattened caps.

  Horrified, I pushed the girl away from me.

  The girl looked at the ground. She didn’t say a word. I felt guilty, and pulled her back to me. I put my hands round her shoulders, and we started dancing again.

  “They’re going to multiply,” the girl said, drooping dejectedly. “They scatter their spores once every few hours. They multiply rapidly.”

  I had blanched visibly, and I knew it; but I didn’t stop dancing. I just nodded.

  When the yowling of the cats and rats and weasels, which had got quite noisy, finally died down, and our feet grew heavy and tired, I looked again at the nape of the girl’s neck, and saw twice as many mushrooms there.

  “They have multiplied,” I said. The girl looked up. Her eyes, which were dark, almost black, like the eyes of a herbivorous animal, were fringed with long eyelashes. Her lips were plump and slightly pink, and the line from her temples down to her chin, with its fine downy hairs, curved in a gentle sweep.

  “You have some on your neck, too,” she said, in a voice like a whisper.

  I put my fingers to the back of my neck, and felt a number of small growths. I scratched one off, and bringing it to my eyes, I saw the beginnings of a tiny mushroom.

  “Your body’s changed, just like mine,” the girl said, sighing.

  A feeling of disgust rose in me. I felt nauseated. I wanted to give the girl a good shaking. But I controlled myself.

  “It can’t be helped,” I said, and I quickened our steps.

  As we whirled round, dancing, I knew the mushrooms would get bigger. Their mycelial filaments would increase, the small round bumps would get caps, and eventually those caps would pop open and release spores, countless spores, which would flutter down to the ground. Wherever those spores landed, these mushrooms would grow and proliferate.

  I could feel my body getting covered by the tiny red mushrooms. Though I’d hated them before, the repugnance gradually gave way to a nostalgic, almost sleepy feeling, and I became quite accustomed to them.

  I carried on dancing, twirling faster and faster.

  15 KIWIS

  Hearing a small shrill voice at my feet, I looked down and realized that the speaker was a kiwi.

  “OK, here’s your first question.” It was that high raspy voice so characteristic of the birds.

  “What food is the most efficient at producing longevity in canaries?”

  The kiwi was brown in colour, with what looked like black seeds scattered amid its plumage. Crouching down and peering at it closely, I saw they weren’t seeds but patches of darker coloration.

  “Come on, haven’t you worked it out yet? There are three possible answers: the egg of the reticulated python, the call of the stork at night, or soluble glass at molecular weight 126.”

  Somewhat astonished at this, I remained crouched and totally still.

  “Come on, haven’t you worked it out yet?” it shrieked. “The correct answer is soluble glass, molecular weight 126! Soluble glass, molecular weight 126!”

  I was still getting over my surprise at this line of questioning when another kiwi appeared.

  “In the past year, what is the number of victims of non-fatal lightning strikes?” this second kiwi asked. Its voice was somewhat lower than the voice of the first.

  “Come on! Haven’t you worked it out yet? The correct answer is…,” the bird screeched. “…Two billion and fifty million! Two billion and fifty million!” The kiwi repeated the answer over and over again, running around in circles.

  The number of kiwis was increasing by the minute. When I looked about me, there were dozens of them, all identical, and each one fired off a question to me in turn.

  “What colour was Henri Michaux’s favourite bread-making machine?”

  “Which one exists most essentially: a bolt on a door, or a hen on a bar?”


  “Which corner of a room gets darkest first on a rainy day?”

  “On a cloudy day, which will spread farther, the smell of cornflour or the smell of fresh cream?”

  “How many layers above the Cambrian layer are the round green stones discarded in the baths of ancient Rome?”

  I gave my answers in equally rapid succession.

  “Reddish-brown!”

  “A hen on a bar!”

  “The east-south-east corner!”

  “Cornflour!”

  “Thirteen!”

  At each answer, the kiwis squawked excitedly, the dozens of them running around in little circles together:

  “Correct answer!”

  “Quite correct!”

  “Correct! Yes, quite correct!”

  By the time I had answered fifty questions, the kiwis were getting tired, and so was I. We were all of us panting.

  “Surely that’s enough. Happy now?” the kiwis asked me, wheezing.

  “Me? It doesn’t make any difference to me!” I replied.

  At this, the kiwis started screeching:

  “That’s outrageous!”

  “See? This is why nobody likes her.”

  “It’s this kind of behaviour that makes you just want to…”

  I listened without saying a word, as the kiwis got more and more agitated, coming out with every criticism and insult they could think of.

  “Well, if that’s how you see it, how about if I just sell off the lot of you to an illegal trader of exotic birds!” I yelled, finally.

  They suddenly piped down.

  “You don’t have to react quite so harshly…”

  “We didn’t mean it like that…”

  “That’s so heartbreaking…,” some of them muttered.

  “I’m sick of it! Just sick and tired of having to spend my nights being pushed around by creatures like you!” I yelled, even louder.

  Every bird fell silent. Without a word, they started pecking at the grasses at their feet, some wandering off into the bushes.

  “Well, we didn’t mean to hurt you,” they said. Turning their small, round rear ends to me, they disappeared.

  The scent of flowers drifted over from somewhere. The flowers must have just blossomed a few minutes ago. Their scent had been blown quickly over on a breeze from the west.

  As the last of the kiwis called out “Goodbye!” and vanished, the scent of the flowers grew overpowering. The nature of the air was changing: night was on the point of giving way to early dawn.

  I waited a few moments, breathing in the scent of the flowers, but the undergrowth was utterly silent.

  “Hey, guys!” I tried calling. “I apologize! I think I said too much!”

  But no kiwis emerged.

  The scent of the flowers remained for a while longer, trailing in the air.

  16 FRACTAL

  I could hear a dry, rustling sound. It came from deep within the girl’s body.

  I put my ear to her stomach and listened. It was a low sound that kept the same steady beat, like someone walking over grass, or like a rhythmic clank below the whirr of an astronomical clock.

  The girl was breathing deeply and evenly, asleep. A thin film of odourless perspiration had started to moisten the nape of her neck and the space between her breasts. Like water rising in a lake, it gathered in every single hollow of the sleeping girl, and then brimmed over and cascaded: lines of sweat spread out over the girl’s body, dripping down onto the earth.

  The sweat poured off the girl’s body as she lay there on the soft grass.

  Drinking in the sweat, the grass on which the girl lay started to grow. The blades of the grass lengthened, the apical buds grew into branches, and the lateral buds rapidly sprouted into leaves. In the twinkling of an eye, the girl’s body was surrounded by a dense profusion of foliage.

  In addition to growing upwards, the vegetation spread outwards, producing concentric circles around the girl as she lay on the ground. Thousands of leaves of grass sprouted from the ground, each one putting forth bright-green new buds, and growing at incredible speed.

  If I listened carefully, I could hear rustling sounds falling like rain around me. It was the sound of branches growing, and leaves unfurling. The sound was fresher and more vital than the one I had heard from within the girl’s body.

  The vegetation surrounding the girl grew thick and luxurious, eventually becoming a forest. In the deepest part of the forest, the girl continued to sleep. Pressing my ear to her stomach, I could still hear the rustling inside her, echoing the dry rustling falling outside her.

  Soon the rustling seemed to be coming from more places: I realized that even though the forest had stopped growing, the rustling was still coming—from all directions around me.

  What I was hearing was the sound of footsteps. A whole host of footsteps, coming towards me, crushing the undergrowth on the forest floor.

  The footsteps belonged to the inhabitants of the forest, and even though I couldn’t see them because all the leaves and branches got in the way, I knew exactly which direction they were heading: I could judge it from the sounds blown towards me by the wind. At first they headed to the west, then they headed south, after that they headed east, and finally they headed north: the inhabitants were continually shifting direction.

  The hundreds of footsteps were going round and round in a circle, I realized, making their way closer to the centre of the forest.

  As they came closer, other sounds mixed with the footsteps: whispered exchanges of conversation, the clearing of throats, soft laughter, bugle calls. After a while, between the trees, I caught glimpses of the inhabitants. Gaudy feathers and bits of coloured cloth flashed among the trees.

  The inhabitants’ voices were now clear enough for me to understand distinct words, and the bugle calls and drumming grew ever louder.

  Finally, the inhabitants showed themselves.

  Each was about one metre in height. They had round faces. They were smiling, wrapped in ornately patterned cloth, and holding either a musical instrument or a long pole. They were barefoot, and chewing energetically. Their mouths were smeared with whatever they were eating. With their round faces, and their mouths smeared with food, the inhabitants walked in a procession around the sleeping girl.

  The girl continued sleeping. As if in response to the rustling sound the inhabitants were making with their bare feet, the rustling sound coming from within the girl’s body got even louder.

  The inhabitants continued filing round the girl, in ever-tightening circles. When they got so close to the girl that it was impossible to reduce the diameter of the circle, they started to go round, again and again, describing a circle whose circumference remained constant.

  The shuffling of their feet, their hushed voices, the drums, the bugles and their chewing mixed together in a cacophony, filling the centre of the forest with sound.

  High in the sky the morning star twinkled, and below it the inhabitants tirelessly kept up their circular file. Soon I noticed their bodies trembling slightly after each completed circle, and I could see that they were getting smaller and smaller.

  And in the twinkling of an eye, they were now no bigger than ants. Even after they had shrunk to the size of ants, the inhabitants were still chatting to each other in hushed voices, blowing their bugles, banging on their drums, and chewing.

  After a few more circles, these miniature inhabitants formed a long line, marched straight inside the girl’s body, and disappeared.

  When the last of the inhabitants had disappeared, I put my ear to the sleeping girl’s stomach, and heard, mixed with the rustling sound, the faint sounds of bugles and drums.

  17 LION

  Dawn was due to arrive soon, we had heard, so a celebratory feast was to be held.

  Numerous people whom I knew had been invited to a mansion on the bank of a river. We were all on easy, familiar terms, so the drinking started immediately, without pre-dinner speeches, and we then turned our attention to the lavish
spread on the banquet table. I was drawn to the salted bonito viscera and the salted sweetfish entrails, but since no one else seemed to have any interest in them, I contented myself with the root vegetables and grilled fish.

  After a bit, the host, who was the owner of the mansion, rose to his feet and, with his chin, made a slight upward movement. Immediately there was a tremendous commotion in the kitchen, and a gaggle of women in aprons and men with crew cuts came running out. Leaping over the table, they sprinted into the garden and made their escape. A couple of them were not so athletic, and their feet knocked cups and plates to the floor.

  The guests carried on drinking, apparently not giving it a thought. The host sat down again, and started digging into various dishes, including the cod braised in its skin, gluttonously.

  After several hours, or so I thought, had passed, I looked at the clock, and realized it was still well before dawn. The sky in the east was completely dark. Perhaps because the kitchen staff had run off, the serving dishes on the table were now bare of food. There was only the bonito viscera and sweetfish entrails, in platters at the centre of the table, completely untouched by anyone’s chopsticks.

  Suddenly, there was a rumble of sound—Kin!—and from the kitchen a huge form emerged and passed over the table. It had no corporeality: it was just a shadow. The shadow roared Kin! and then drifted from one spot to another in the room.

  Every now and then, it hopped onto the lap of the host, and took the host’s head in its maw. The host looked as if he had lost his head, as if his body ended at the neck. Regardless, the host went on tipping back the wine, drinking away, his head inside the shadow’s enormous mouth.

  When it had finished with the host, the shadow then went to each of the guests, and took each of their heads in its mouth. They too became headless, every one of them. And when the creature released them from its jaws, they were left without any features.

  As the host and guests were sitting there, without faces, the shadow became aware of the salted bonito viscera and sweetfish entrails in the centre of the table.

  The shadow got onto the table and started to devour the sweetfish entrails, barely chewing them, snapping them down. In the blink of an eye, the mound of entrails was gone. The shadow then started on the bonito viscera. These too disappeared in a matter of seconds.