The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature (Modern Asian Literature Series)

by Неизвестный

  It all started when one of Father’s former subordinate officers—Mother and I didn’t know him—dropped in one day to see “the general,” as he still called him. We didn’t know it then, but in the space of that short visit he managed to put a strange notion into Father’s head. The next morning Father, dressed more respectably than usual, went out. Our response to this unexpected event was not without a slight sense of foreboding, but it was on the whole optimistic. Could it be that he had found himself a lucrative job? “He looks quite impressive when he dresses up like that, doesn’t he?” Mother said. I nodded solemnly, remembering that in the old days, whenever something important was about to happen, like a promotion or an advantageous transfer, he went out exactly like that, dressed up and not saying a word. But alas, our optimism was without cause. Father returned late that evening hugging a huge box, minus the wristwatch he had bought in Singapore. Someone had taken it off his unprotected wrist as he was coming home. Anyway, that was when those disgusting creatures entered our lives. Just as a truly evil man has the face of an angel, so these rabbits, both the male and female, seemed extraordinarily endearing as they crouched quietly and timidly on the floor, their red eyes shining in the light. Would you believe it, but I found myself saying, “How pretty!” Mother brought out some bread, and each time she held out a little piece, one would gingerly stick its neck out, then suddenly snap at it and hop off with its prize to a corner of the room. They amused and cheered us, these lively little creatures with their pure white bodies. Their presence seemed to brighten up the whole house. Father of course was very pleased with himself. “In half a year,” he said, “they’ll start bringing in eight thousand yen a month.” Mother looked like a child who had suddenly been offered an enormous piece of candy. “My goodness!” she said with feeling, her toothless mouth wide open. And as Father proceeded to tell us about his scheme—a year’s yield of fur would be so much, which would mean so many pounds of yarn, which in turn would produce so many yards of cloth, etc.—Mother became so ecstatic she laughed uncontrollably. Oh no, she cried out joyfully, Father was being much too modest in his estimate; why, that much cloth would fetch far more than eight thousand yen a month! It was as though she was already seeing piled up around her mountains of cloth and yarn.

  I saw out of the corner of my eye a small black ball rolling on the floor. I looked, and found that there were many others just like it all around us. “Shameless” is the only word to describe it. Every time they jumped up in the air, another black ball would pop out from the crotch. There was not a trace of shyness in either face, no show of cringing, as the process continued. I looked at their utterly expressionless faces, at their cretinous red eyes with their vacant stares, and felt a nasty foreboding.

  The next day Father began working like a maniac. He was at his most irritating, I had found, when he “worked.” Indeed nothing irritated me more. Normally, his “work” meant stripping off the turf in the garden and turning over the soil when the weather was fine, or, if it was wet, making boxes of various sizes and shapes for which there was no conceivable use. Neither activity brought any tangible benefits, obviously, and as a hobby, it made no sense. What particularly mystified me was the energy he put into it. Half hidden in a cloud of swirling dust—we live by the Kugenuma shore, noted for its strong winds and rough seas—he would wield his hoe, giving a crazed, high-pitched cry each time he brought it down. It was like looking at some madman doing an unending dance, and the sight filled me with despair at the loneliness and pointlessness of the effort. One rain, and all he had would be a waterlogged field of sand where nothing would grow. “You’re wasting your time!” I would shout at him across the veranda from my bed. “I wish you would stop! Look at all the sand you’re sending into the house!” “What did you say?” he would shout back, glaring at me, his hoe held still for the moment above his head. “So what! What if it is a waste of time?”

  The coming of the rabbits provided him with a new obsession. He began to construct rabbit boxes. These were classified as nesting boxes, feeding boxes, exercise boxes, and so on, and each new model in a given category seemed more ingenious than its predecessor. The ideas he had picked up when he was making all those purposeless boxes before were now being put to good use. But they were so original that even when it came to a simple thing like lifting the lid off one of them, only he would know how. The sounds of sawing, planing, chiseling, and hammering now reverberated through the house without cease. Meaningless energy found its way through my skull into my brain, leaving no room for anything else.

  What sort of a cry a rabbit made was something I hadn’t thought about before, but I discovered that it was a squeak—chū, chū. It was, I found, a profoundly disappointing sound; and like the Emperor’s voice when I first heard it on the radio, it made me feel quite hollow inside. This strange, futile cry I had to listen to all the time; for, fearing the invasion of burglars and stray dogs, Father had put their boxes in the closet at the end of the corridor, no more than three feet away from my pillow. Rabbits, it would appear, sleep during the day and become active at night. At irregular intervals, but never stopping, various sounds reached me as I lay in my bed in the darkness. One moment I would hear their teeth grinding away at the wood, next their feet stamping on the floor, then their droppings or pee going down the drainage system (this was a remarkable affair constructed of tin, designed to meet the rabbit’s moving bottom whichever way it was turned).

  A typical night for me after the coming of the rabbits went like this. In the middle of the night I awaken from a bad dream. In the dream always, a huge rat has crawled into my bed and is gnawing at either my feet or my head. Being awake is worse than the dream, for then I am assailed by real hobgoblins. From the tips of my toes, embedded in the ticklish wadding of the coverlet, a strange itchy sensation crawls up my legs and finally buries itself in the afflicted part of my spine. Everything I have on me begins to feel terribly constricting. I tear off the plaster cast, then my undershirt, and scratch my back hard, but to no avail. All that the scratching does is to drive the itch farther inside. In a desperate attempt to force it out, I place my fingers on my chest between the ribs and push as hard as I can. As though in response to my anguish, the animals start making more of a din than ever. In the next room there is a duet of snores going on, interrupted by idiotic cries and mutters.

  Father suddenly neighs like a horse—he is laughing. He cries out, “Woobik!” He has been saying the same thing in his sleep ever since he returned from the War, and I have come to realize that what he is really saying is, “Want milk!” He was the youngest of nine sons, and was given his mother’s milk until the spring of his thirteenth year. At first I was inclined to suspect that he was not asleep at all and that it was a clever ruse on his part to persuade us of his unfitness for work. But I have since changed my mind, having observed the sincerity of his envy as he watches me drink my convalescent’s ration of dried milk. His nightly dream, then, is quite authentic, brought on by both an immediate desire and unforgotten childhood pleasures. I’m not in the least shocked by Father’s mother fixation, if that is indeed what he suffers from. I find it rather funny, as a matter of fact. True, the picture of Father sucking away at his mother’s breast is grotesque, but then, I’ve always had a weakness for grotesquery. This is not to say that the cry “Woobik!” in the middle of the night does not startle me every time. That the word is nonsensical and I have had to guess at its meaning, albeit correctly, makes it all the more sinister in its suggestiveness.

  Made a nervous wreck by this din in the dark, I begin to imagine that my body is about to disintegrate from both outside and inside. The noise becomes unbearable, and I try to pull the coverlet up over my head. But all I succeed in doing is to pull out handfuls of cotton wadding; most of the coverlet remains caught in my legs. The itch in my spine gets worse and worse. It is something, I feel, that rises bubbling like marsh gas out of the debris in my chaotic room— the dust, the rags, the mucus-soaked paper tissu
es—and seeps into my body. In an attempt to contain the itch that is beyond my reach, I hold my body absolutely taut. I hear again the rabbits crying in the closet, “chū, chū.” What an incredibly feeble cry, I think to myself, for creatures that can bang about so.

  The rabbits soon produced babies. These thrived under the skilled care of my veterinarian father. He never told us what he had paid for his two rabbits, but we could guess that they represented a considerable financial investment. Every day he would weigh each of the babies, take the mother’s temperature, and fuss neurotically over the texture and mix of the food he gave them at regular, short intervals. This exacting routine left him no time for the boxes. The ingenious drainage system, now long neglected, was a shambles. But let alone find the time to fix it, he couldn’t even get around to building a compartment for the babies. Inevitably, then, we found ourselves virtually sharing our own quarters with the entire rabbit family. Our house was turned into a veritable animal hut. That was bad enough, but what bothered me far more was that we, all three of us, began to resemble these creatures that cohabited with us. Even before the babies were born, there had been bits of rabbit fur all over the house. But now they literally filled the air, and our heads, covered with the stuff, looked like haloed apparitions emerging from a cloud of smoke. Because he was constantly brushing the rabbits, big and small, Father looked by far the strangest. There was rabbit fur in his nostrils always. As I watched him across the dinner table biting his food with his front teeth, the fur in his nostrils quivering with each breath, I would catch myself thinking of him as being one of them. Mother, too, seemed unable to leave the baby rabbits alone. They revived in her all her maternal instincts, I suppose. All day long she held them in her arms, and would even take them to bed with her, holding them close to her breast inside her kimono, not minding their scratching. In baby language and in hardly more than a whisper, she would repeatedly tell them—I presume it was they she was talking to—stories about me as a baby. Even Father would chide her then. “Hey, those are rabbits, not humans!’

  Saucers, bowls, and pans with bits of gruel, fish skin, tea leaves, etc., stuck to the bottom lay on the floor everywhere. Father was to blame for this. Can’t let all those good vitamins go down the drain, he said—he seemed to have committed to memory the exact nutritional content of every food he gave the rabbits— and refused to let Mother wash them. But what bothered me even more than the dirty dishes and pans was that while we ate, he would stare shamelessly at our plates to see how much he could hope to salvage for his rabbits. Mother, however, welcomed Father’s hoarding of leftovers. Having become slovenly in her old age, she wanted to have as little to do with the kitchen as possible. It was a double blessing for her: she could now stay away from the kitchen sink, and better still, she could serve us any horrid concoction she liked, for the less we ate, the more the rabbits got, and therefore the greater was her husband’s satisfaction.

  Of course, our house became a haven for bugs and slugs of every description. They crawled about happily here and there in every room, coated with sauce or soybean paste. Mother, now a woman of leisure but with no one else to talk to (her neighbors would have nothing to do with her), became my constant bedside companion. She would lie flat on her back on the floor beside me and play with the baby rabbits or, when she got bored with that, daydream about sweetcakes. “My, that was good!” she would cry out desperately. Yet unlike Father and me, she got fatter by the day. Her belly and face got quite round, and her legs, peeping out of the open folds of her kimono, were as plump as a child’s. Her kind of life must excite one’s imagination, for she would without warning start describing my future bride. It was like opening some cheap novel in the middle. Anyway, what I found intolerable was that this imaginary bride she was describing invariably became none other than herself. As we lay thus side by side through most of the day, a whole army of flies, attracted to our house from the neighborhood, would eventually congregate around us. Used to the presence of all such creatures, I didn’t mind them particularly. But even I was a trifle appalled when I happened once to pass my hand through my hair, and a pair of mating bluebottles flew out and away.

  Father was now engaged in an ambitious project. By some mysterious means known only to those who have served long in the army, he had managed to acquire some glass tubes, wire netting, copper wire, and suchlike, and with surprising speed and efficiency had built himself a scientific apparatus. Its purpose was as follows: to extract from human hair a certain nutrient, feed it to the rabbits, and thus accelerate their development. Clearly, the apparatus was no sudden inspiration. I remembered that recently, whenever he clipped his hair, he would carefully wrap up the clippings in a newspaper and put it away among his “treasures” on the shelf. But it soon became apparent that his stock of his own hair clippings was by no means enough for his purpose. He would mutter, ostensibly to himself but quite audibly, “A barber would have lots of hair to spare.” What he was trying to tell us, of course, was that he wanted Mother or me to go to a barbershop and ask for some. Having no desire to go on a fool’s errand like that, we would look away innocently, pretending not to have heard. He would then hang his head despondently. At such times he looked more like a rabbit than ever. Finally I deliberately told him a lie: “A barber told me today that the prefectural health department had prohibited the sale of hair. A barbershop runs the risk of being shut down if it’s caught doing it.” The lie was extraordinarily effective. He shook his head in silence several times (which was his way of summoning patience in the face of adversity) and stopped muttering about barbers.

  I was mistaken, however, in thinking that he had given up all thought of getting other people’s hair. He took to staring at me wistfully, then sighing like a bad actor—“Haaa . . .” And at night, as I lay in bed, he would watch me furtively, waiting perhaps for a chance to creep up to my bedside. And then one night, unable to restrain himself any longer, he blurted out, “What a lot of hair you have!” He scratched his own head wildly as he said this. Instinctively I covered my head with my hands. Oh God, I thought, he goes to sleep earlier than me and wakes up earlier; by four in the morning, he’s usually awake; with that beloved chrome-plated scalpel of his, he could shave my entire head clean while I was still asleep. My fear, though fanciful, was not entirely unjustified: I did have a thick head of hair, too thick indeed for comfort. As I put out the light that night and tried to go to sleep, I thought I could see Father bending over me in the manner of a slaughterhouse foreman about to start on a carcass with his skinning knife. From such fantasizing it was easy to fall into wondering whether I had not become one of them—one of those stupid, timid, yet shameless animals living with us.

  But all my father’s hope and hard work came to nought, even more helplessly than a prized potato field that is ruined by a mere two or three days of rain. As though our taking in the rabbits had been the immediate cause, angora wool ceased to be marketable. But this should not have surprised us. After all, rabbits were the easiest things to breed, and even without Father’s as-yet-unproduced patent medicine they grew plenty of hair. All those plans for selling the fur and spare rabbit babies and making eight thousand yen a month, of winning first prizes at rabbit shows, turned out to have been just empty dreams. But the rabbits survived the crumbling of Father’s hopes. They rushed about as wildly as before—no, they were even wilder, for the babies were now full-grown, and Father was too deflated to care what they did—distributing tufts of fur that floated about like ashes of disillusionment. They invaded the alcove and knocked down the scientific apparatus that stood there in vain resplendence, scattering glass tubes and bits of wire all over the room. With these were mingled Father’s hair clippings, mostly gray, which the rabbits had got at by biting through the newspaper wrapping.

  Mother began to complain incessantly that she’d had to sell all her clothes in order to buy bean-curd remains for them. As she watched them eat, she seemed to see bits of her clothes being munched away. Not long
ago, she had joyfully envisaged them as the provider of shawls, gloves, and other finery for herself. The feeble “chū, chū” of the rabbits now was constantly being drowned out by the hysterical cries of an aging woman: “How dare you pee there!”

  One day Mother came home with a “visitor.” This was the first we had had in thirteen months. He wore high boots, and came on a bicycle with a wicker basket attached to it. As he lugged the bicycle in through the front gate, Father and I watched and waited like soldiers in a fort: “Is he friend or foe?” Mother ran up to me and whispered in my ear, “He works for a sausage factory. Don’t tell Father.” I accepted the information with equanimity. The rabbits had become white elephants, and the sooner they were disposed of the better. Indeed, if the man had cooked a tasty rabbit dish then and there, I would have eaten it gladly.

  The meat buyer was led to the veranda, where the rabbits had been brought together. He said ingratiatingly, “What magnificent specimens!” Father, still ignorant of the visitor’s identity, acknowledged the compliment with a shy bow and a schoolgirl blush. Perhaps thrown into confusion by this, the meat buyer suddenly reached for the nearest rabbit and picked it up by the skin on its back. He said in a voice so loud I thought I could see the doors shake, “All you laymen get taken in!” The rabbit hung in midair helplessly under the man’s bare arm. Its limbs were all drawn in; the fur on its stomach fluttered softly in the breeze. “Laymen wanting to make money on the side always want horses or cows to begin with. But when they find they can’t get them, they go for pigs. And when they find they can’t get pigs either, they settle for rabbits. That’s when the trouble starts. Ordinary domestic rabbits at first, then angoras, then chinchillas and rexes. There’s no turning back then. You leave the rabbits, and go on to monsters like nutrias and guinea pigs. When you’ve reached the guinea-pig stage, you’re finished.”