by Yoko Tawada
“There’s a class on how to loosen up, you know. I saw an ad for it a while ago. They’re holding it at the aquarium. You reminded me of it when you mentioned tendons just now, because the Chinese character for octopus looks so much like it.”
“Oh yeah, I saw that poster too. Learn to Limber Up from the Octopus.”
“Yeah, that’s the one. I used to think stretching to limber up was nonsense, but you know, the human race may be evolving in a direction no one ever imagined. I mean, maybe we’re moving toward the octopus. Watching my great-grandson I certainly get that impression.”
“So in another hundred thousand years we’ll all be octopi?”
“Maybe so. People always thought of that as devolution, but it might just be evolution after all.”
“In high school I used to envy people with bodies like Greek statues. I was trying to get into art school, you see. Don’t know when I developed a liking for entirely different bodies — birds, say, or octopi. I’d like to see everything from an optical point of view.”
“Optical?”
“No, I meant octopi. I want to see through the eyes of an octopus.”
Remembering his conversation with the baker, Yoshiro waited for the soy milk he had poured into a small saucepan to heat up. Mumei’s teeth were so soft he couldn’t eat bread unless it was softened by steeping.
When he had seen Mumei’s baby teeth drop out one after another like pomegranate pulp, leaving his mouth smeared with blood, Yoshiro had been so distressed he’d wandered aimlessly around the house for a while, not knowing what to do. After trying to calm the waves of anxiety that crashed in his heart by telling himself that, after all, milk teeth were meant to be lost, he had finally put Mumei on the back of his bicycle and headed for the dentist’s office. Since they didn’t have an appointment they were kept waiting for over two hours. In the humid waiting room Yoshiro had crossed and recrossed his legs, pulling at his eyebrows or bringing two fingers to his lips as if smoking a cigarette as he looked up at the clock again and again. There were some oversized model teeth in the waiting room. Mumei took a large model wisdom tooth and put it down on the floor, pushing it along the red carpet like a toy truck. Imagining a world without people, where huge teeth had turned into trucks to roam the highways, Yoshiro shuddered.
Having tired of playing with model teeth, Mumei was now leafing through the pages of a large picture book he had spread across his knees, called Mr. Canine Tooth’s Adventure. Yoshiro peered over, not sure whether he wanted to read along or not. At the time he had been writing a children’s book. He wanted to write something Mumei would be able to read, but at the same time, Mumei’s presence made it difficult to write for children. A raw, honest treatment of the problems they faced every day would only end in frustration at the absence of solutions, making it impossible to arrive at places one could only reach in books. Creating an ideal fictional world for his great-grandson was another possibility, although reading about an ideal world wouldn’t help the boy change the world around him any time soon.
Mumei gazed down at the book with moist, dewy eyes. The cast of characters included Mr. Canine Tooth, the hero, along with Miss Wisdom Tooth, Mr. Front Tooth, Little Miss Cavity, and Mr. Gold Filling. When his owner falls down, Mr. Canine Tooth, slammed against the concrete, cracks off and falls into a sewer. Though the rats don’t know what to think of him at first, they eventually make him into a god, installing him in his own shrine. Worshipped as the god of the underworld, Mr. Canine Tooth manages to preside over festivals for each of the four seasons until the sewer is flooded in a heavy rain, which washes the shrine away and returns Mr. Canine Tooth to the world above, where a child picks him up, puts him in his pocket, and takes him home. At which point the nurse called Yoshiro and Mumei.
“Fall out,” Yoshiro mumbled before the dentist had a chance to speak. Still flustered, hoping the dentist didn’t think he’d said fallout, he quickly corrected himself. “They fell out of his mouth,” adding almost as an afterthought, “his baby teeth, I mean.” That was a subject-verb inversion, he was thinking when Mumei grinned, having come up with an inversion of his own: “They fell down, my grades I mean.”
“Baby teeth are meant to be lost so it’s natural, I suppose, but I was shocked at how easily his came out,” Yoshiro explained. “Teeth usually put up a real fight to stay in, don’t they? So why should his just pop out that way, or am I worrying too much?” he went on, sounding more and more desperate as his voice trailed off. The dentist replied coolly, “Any weakness in the milk teeth carries over to the permanent teeth.” Though this verdict made Yoshiro feel as if a huge boulder had just been sewn inside his chest, Mumei, with the curiosity of a budding scientist asked, “What good are milk teeth in the first place, if they’re meant to be lost?” The dentist patiently answered his question before beginning his examination. And then, when the dentist was finished, the boy came out with, “Thank you for treating my teeth so kindly.” This overly polite expression of gratitude made Yoshiro’s stomach flip over. Where could the boy have picked up such a foreign-sounding sentence, when books — even picture books — were no longer being translated? It was utterly mysterious.
Like most children of his generation, Mumei was unable to absorb the calcium he needed. Human beings may turn into a toothless species someday, Yoshiro thought, mulling over what the dentist had said on their way home until Mumei — responding to his unspoken anxiety — chirped, “Don’t worry, Great-grandpa, sparrows get along fine without teeth, you know.” Mumei had an uncanny ability to read people’s thoughts. It spooked Yoshiro sometimes, the way he didn’t just sense a person’s general mood, but actually seemed to read their minds, as if he were reading a book. Though he tried not to think the worst about Mumei’s future, he often found himself sick with worry, with high tides of misery sweeping over him day and night.
“You manage to eat plenty without teeth, Great-grandpa, and look how healthy you are.”
Yoshiro was still sunk beneath waves of anxiety, and here was Mumei, trying to cheer him up. That his great-grandson’s mental development consisted mainly of coming up with ever-new ways to comfort an old man made Yoshiro feel guilty. If only the boy would be a little more self-centered, do crazy things, live freely . . .
To get a little more calcium into Mumei, for a while Yoshiro had tried giving him about half a cup of milk every morning, but the boy’s body had responded with diarrhea. The dentist explained that diarrhea is the intestines’ method of getting rid of whatever they decide is poisonous as quickly and efficiently as possible. The brain in the head is well known, the dentist went on, but the intestines are actually another brain, and when these two brains disagree the intestines always get the upper hand. This is why the brain is sometimes called the Upper House, and the intestines the Lower House. Because Lower House elections are held often, it is generally believed that it’s the Lower House that truly reflects shifts in public opinion. In the same way, because the contents of the intestines are constantly changing, the intestines reflect a person’s physical condition more accurately than the brain.
Mumei’s mouth apparently won’t open all by itself, for when the dentist says, “Open wide!” his eyes and mouth respond simultaneously. Once, when his mouth opened so wide he nearly dislocated his jaw, he quickly shut it, then closed both eyes and said, “The earth is in the back of my throat,” before opening his mouth and eyes again, as wide as before. He had mentioned “the earth” once before, during his physical at the pediatric clinic. After rolling up his undershirt to stick out his chest, so thin every rib showed, he calmly announced, “The earth is inside this chest.” Turning away to hide his surprise, Yoshiro had looked up, pretending he was observing the trees outside, and grinned.
As physical sounded too much like phthisical, a word associated with asthma, tuberculosis, and death, the phrase physical examination had fallen out of use, with many doctors preferring to call it the monthly loo
k-over. The pediatrician would begin by carefully examining a child’s tongue and throat, after which the eyelids were pulled back to check the eyes. The skin on the palms of the hands, the face, the neck and back were given a thorough going-over, one hair was pulled out to be sent for analysis, and a light was shone into the ears and nose.
“You’re trying to find out how far cellular destruction has gone, aren’t you?” Yoshiro one time had asked, unable to suppress his anxiety.
“That’s right,” the doctor had answered with a grin, “but we can’t just put some cells into a machine and come up with actual numbers to show us that and any doctor who tries to tell you we can is a fraud. What we really have to look at is the whole body.”
This pediatrician, Dr. Satori, was distantly related to another Dr. Satori, an oncologist who had taken care of Yoshiro’s mother long ago, though the two didn’t look or sound anything like each other. The oncologist had always treated his patients like children. He took any question as a personal attack, raising his eyebrows and spluttering, “If you don’t stop doubting me and do exactly as I say you’ll never get well.” Dr. Satori the pediatrician, on the other hand, freely shared his knowledge with Yoshiro and Mumei. He never talked down to them, and wasn’t at all afraid of questions or even of criticism. Nevertheless, Yoshiro rarely asked him about anything. Seeing the numbers on Mumei’s chart, he was certain that only pain and death lurked behind them, so he simply nodded and let it go at that.
The results of children’s “monthly look-overs” were copied by hand, then delivered to the Central Division of the New Japan Medical Research Center by a foot messenger. A popular manga entitled A Message from the Sea Breeze, about a foot messenger with the legs of a Japanese antelope and a map of every town in the country in his head, inspired lots of children to dream of becoming foot messengers when they grew up, though the general deterioration in physical strength among the young would make that impossible — in the near future, young people would probably all work in offices and physical labor would be left to the elderly.
All original data concerning children’s health was recorded by hand, with each doctor hiding his patients’ data in a place of his own choosing. There were cartoons in the newspaper showing doctors squirreling files away in doghouses, or at the bottom of huge cauldrons. Though Yoshiro laughed when he saw them, it would occur to him later that this might be more reality than satire.
Because the data that each clinic delivered to the Medical Research Center were handwritten copies of handwritten originals, any attempt at erasing or tampering with large amounts of data would take an awfully long time. In this sense, the current system was safer than the security systems invented by even the best computer programmers in earlier times.
Now that the adjective healthy didn’t really fit any child, pediatricians were not only working longer hours, but also had to face the parents’ anger and sadness as well as feel pressure from unknown sources whenever they tried to explain the situation to newspapers or other public media. Many suffered from insomnia, or were even driven to suicide until finally the surviving pediatricians formed a labor union, boldly announcing a reduction in their working hours, refusing to submit reports demanded by insurance companies, and cutting all ties with the major pharmaceutical firms.
Mumei liked his pediatrician, so he never minded going for his monthly look-over. Visits to the dentist were as exciting to him as a school excursion — only Yoshiro found them depressing. Mumei loved sitting high up in the chair, talking to the dentist. On a recent visit, the dentist had said, “You mustn’t force milk on children who hate the smell. And even if they like it, you shouldn’t give them too much.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that,” said Yoshiro, while the dentist peered down at Mumei and asked gravely, “Do you like milk?”
Without skipping a beat Mumei replied, “I like worms better.” Unable to see the line that connected milk to worms, in his confusion Yoshiro let his eyes wander out the window, yet the dentist didn’t seem the least bit perturbed. “I see,” he said, “so that means you’re a baby bird rather than a calf. While calves drink their mother’s milk, baby birds eat the worms their parents bring them. But worms live in the earth, so when the earth is contaminated, the contamination gets concentrated in the worms. That’s why birds don’t eat many worms these days. Which explains why there are so many worms now that it’s easy to catch one. After it rains, you see lots of them squirming around in the middle of the road. You’d better not eat those worms, though — stick to bugs you catch flying through the air.”
He sounded so matter-of-fact he might have been explaining how teeth should be brushed. Did knowing Yoshiro was a writer make him want to compete, to send his words flying off somewhere no writer would think to go? Or had Mumei and the dentist already moved on to some future dimension, leaving him far behind?
Many dentists like to show off their speaking skills, probably because the more they talk the more their beautiful teeth are on display. This dentist was about to celebrate his 105th birthday, yet his jaw was still firm, his mouth lined with big, square, gleaming white teeth. Yoshiro was secretly thinking how much he’d like to steal those fine teeth to give to his great-grandson when the dentist opened his mouth and started talking again.
“According to one theory, it’s best to get your calcium from the bones of fish and animals. But they have to be from before the earth became irreversibly contaminated. So some people say we should dig way, way down underground to find dinosaur bones. In Hokkaido there are already shops that sell powder from ground Naumann Mammoth bones they’ve dug up there.”
By some strange coincidence the very next day, when he was passing the elementary school, Yoshiro happened to see a poster announcing a lecture on the Naumann Mammoth, to be given by a university professor of paleontology at the Cultural Park, and because lectures were a hobby of his, as soon as he got home he wrote Naumann Mammoth on the wall calendar. Mumei stopped in his tracks every time he passed the calendar, blinking furiously, his eyes glued to the words “Naumann Mammoth.” To Mumei, the words themselves were an animal that would start moving if only he stared at it long enough.
To break the spell that had nailed Mumei to the floor in front of the calendar, Yoshiro said, “The Naumann Mammoth is a kind of elephant that lived some five hundred thousand years ago. Some professor’s going to give a talk about it. Why don’t we go hear him?” His face lit up with joy, Mumei thrust both arms above his head, shouting, “Paradise!” as he jumped up in the air. Though astounded at the time, Yoshiro later forgot all about Mumei’s amazing leap.
It wasn’t just the Naumann Mammoth that cast a spell on Mumei. When he heard or saw the word heron, for instance, or sea turtle, he became obsessed, unable to take his eyes off the name from which he believed a living creature might emerge.
Encountering a real animal — not just its name — would have set Mumei’s heart on fire, but wild animals had not been seen in Japan for many years. As a student, Yoshiro had traveled to Kyoto through the mountains along the Nakasendo Trail with a German girl from a town called Mettmann. He had been shocked to hear her say, “The only wild animals in Japan are spiders and crows.” Now that the country was closed to the outside world, no more visitors came from afar to wake people up with a jab like that. Whenever he thought about animals, Yoshiro remembered the German girl. Her name was Hildegard. She and Yoshiro were the same age. Sometimes he still heard her voice saying, “Hello, Yo-shi-ro?” Even now, when there were no telephones, he would hear an electronic buzz in the air followed by “Hallo,” repeated several times, then, “Yo-shi-ro?” — her voice, the way it rose, was still reverberating in his ears. After “Yo” she would take a breath, then sweep upward on “shi,” turning up the volume before the final “ro,” which cut the name short yet nevertheless sounded like a kind gesture, a welcoming hand stretched out.
Then the conversation would begin, in broken English. Yoshiro
would ask a series of simple questions, like “What did you eat today?” or “Where do you buy vegetables?” or “Do little kids in Germany like to play outside?” He was dying to know if the environment in Germany was unchanged, or becoming more contaminated like Japan, and whether her grandchildren and great-grandchildren were healthy. Hildegard would reply, “I’m boiling the green beans I grew in my garden along with some herbs,” and at that moment, Yoshiro would be breathing in the steam rising from her saucepan, yet soon the voice on the other end of his imaginary telephone would grow too faint to hear, leaving him unable to tell whether he’d actually heard her voice or just imagined it. Real or not, when he closed his eyes he could see this scene: Hildegard’s great-grandchildren running around in the garden, jumping over a pond, standing on tiptoe to pluck apples from a tree, not even bothering to wash them before biting into the sour, worm-eaten fruit with their strong, white teeth. The apple eaten, they’d be wondering whether to go pick wildflowers in the fields or run to the creek to watch the fish.
Yoshiro wanted to visit Hildegard in Germany, just once, but the routes from Japan to all foreign countries had been cut off. Perhaps that was why he no longer felt the roundness of the earth beneath his feet. The round earth he could travel across existed only in his head . . . and there was nothing to do but follow that curve in his mind to the other side of the world.
Yoshiro imagined himself packing a small suitcase with clothes and toiletries, then taking the train and bus to Narita Airport. It had been years since he had been to Shinjuku — what was it like now? Billboards, far too gaudy to be overlooking ruins; traffic lights changing regularly from red to green on streets without a single car; automatic doors opening and closing for nonexistent employees, reacting, perhaps, to big branches on the trees that lined the streets, bending down in the wind. In banquet halls, the smell of cigarettes smoked long ago froze in the silver silence; at table after table in the pubs on each floor of multitenant buildings customers called absence caroused, drinking and eating their fill for a flat fee; with no one to borrow money the interest demanded by loan sharks rusted in its tracks; without buyers, mounds of bargain underwear grew damp and fetid; mold formed on handbags displayed in show windows now flooded with rainwater, and rats took leisurely naps inside high-heeled shoes. From sidewalk cracks stalks of shepherd’s purse grew straight up, six feet high. Now that human beings had disappeared from this urban center, the cherry trees that had once stood demurely beside sidewalks, slender as brooms, had grown thicker around the trunk, their branches spreading boldly out in all four directions, their luxuriant green afros swaying gently back and forth in the breeze.