by Yoko Tawada
“Probably so.”
“They have more fruit than they can eat, don’t they?”
“That’s practically all she writes about. It isn’t so interesting, reading about the latest red pineapple, or square pineapple, since they’re not going to be shipped here anyway, but actually, I’m getting a little worried. It’s strange, her writing about fruit and nothing else. A while ago I might have suspected she’d been brainwashed . . .”
The two fell silent, both thinking roughly the same thing. Since orchards are actually factories that produce fruit, working in one all day, cut off from the outside world, might be pretty miserable. The word orchard brings a paradise to mind, which makes people envious. They imagine workers walking in the mountains looking for wild mushrooms, discovering miniature farms made of moss on the forest floor on the way as they breathe in moist air wafting through the ferns, reading the hoofprints of deer, or picking out the songs of various birds — playing, really, in nature. That’s not what Amana was doing, though — she was working from morning to night in a fruit factory called an orchard. In the city there are art exhibitions, concerts, or lectures on the weekends, as well as other pleasures such as meeting new people, or just walking through the streets, discovering some shop you hadn’t noticed before. Though Tokyo was now impoverished, new shops still bubbled up from the depths to open up like flowers; just sitting on a park bench, you never got tired of watching the people go by. Walking around the city made the gears in your brain start turning. People had begun to realize that these simple pleasures were the most delicious part of the fruit we call everyday life, which is why even though their houses were small and food was scarce, they still wanted to live in Tokyo.
Yoshiro felt sure something was wrong: either Amana’s head was so full of fruit she could think of nothing else, or her mail was being censored, or she was hiding something from him. Her postcards were frustrating, as if the most important part was covered by the back of an invisible hand, making it impossible to read.
If telephones hadn’t disappeared long ago he might have called, though there were actually times when he was grateful for the absence of phones. All their past telephone conversations were arguments that ended with one of them slamming down the receiver. “I hate things that taste sour,” Amana would say, and Yoshiro would retort, “You’re so fussy about food — that’s why you were always catching colds when you were a kid.” This would set the girl off. “Force kids to eat stuff they hate and you end up with adults so dull and stupid they don’t know what they like,” she would scream, prompting Yoshiro to yell back, “I don’t remember forcing you to eat anything,” giving his daughter ammunition for the next round. With a picture postcard he couldn’t fire back immediately no matter what she wrote; besides, knowing at least a week had passed since she’d written it was enough to quell his anger.
Whenever he bought postcards, Yoshiro showed them to Mumei. The pressed flowers, so different from ordinary pictures, their original forms squashed down from three dimensions into two, fascinated the boy. When a postcard came from Okinawa, Yoshiro always told him, “This is from your grandma,” which seemed to puzzle him. The word grandma wasn’t in his vocabulary, and when he tried to remember Amana, the message in invisible ink on the last postcard was all he had to go on. Yoshiro couldn’t recall him ever having said grandpa, either. Mumei never thought of detaching the great from great-grandpa. To him Great-grandpa was what Mama had been to previous generations of children; he had virtually no other family. All the necessities of life came from Great-grandpa.
Though Great-grandma was also a faraway, shadowy figure to Mumei, the night before her last visit he had been too excited to sleep, just as he always was right before a festival. Yoshiro, too, had tossed and turned all night.
“What’s Great-grandma’s name?” Mumei had asked. “Marika,” Yoshiro mumbled in reply. “Marika, what an awesome name,” Mumei sighed with a smile, sounding older than his years. His next question, “Where did you two meet?” gave Yoshiro pause. The word meet didn’t seem right somehow. Where had he first met Marika, anyway? He couldn’t remember. Back then, they met every week at some demonstration or other. His memories of love began in demonstrations. As there was one every Sunday, they produced a surprising number of married couples. For some young people, demonstrations may have replaced the formal meetings parents used to set up with a prospective bride or bridegroom.
Knowing they’d meet at next week’s demonstration, they never bothered to exchange phone numbers or arrange to meet ahead of time. Being fast walkers, they always ended up together, ahead of the group. Even when the crowd was huge, stretching for miles behind, after walking about fifteen minutes Yoshiro would find Marika at his side. They could talk about the weather, or shoes, no matter what it was they’d soon be laughing, their smiles growing brighter each time their eyes met until finally the demonstration was over, when they’d wave and part with a cheery “See you next week.” They never thought of love. That is, until the day a group of hoodlums hit Yoshiro over the head with a baseball bat on his way out of a used bookstore and stole his wallet. He came to in the hospital. Although he was seeing double — two fluorescent lights on the ceiling, both wavering slightly — the doctor said his brain waves were normal. In time, his body no longer felt like jelly, leaving him with pains in the wrists, aches in the solar plexus, splintered bones (he was sure of it!), an assortment or swellings, scrapes, and cuts, coming to a total of about eighty-eight places where he still hurt, plus a head filled with worry that he wouldn’t make it to next Sunday’s demonstration. Unable to stand it anymore, late Saturday night or rather so early Sunday morning it was still dark outside, he sneaked out of the hospital and headed straight for the demonstration. When he appeared with his head and wrists wrapped in bandages, band-aids on his chin and at the corners of his eyes, the crowd gave him a round of applause, taking it for an act. Picking Marika out of the crowd at last, he ran toward the zipper that divided her back into two equal halves and, completely forgetting his own appearance, tapped her on the shoulder, surprising her at first, then watching as her surprise grew into shock at his having come at all in this condition. Finally, she blushed. Yoshiro felt his chest tighten. He had fallen into that strange hole called love, and didn’t have the strength in his arms to pull himself out again. He surrendered, squatting on the ground, covering his face with his hands.
The news of Marika’s pregnancy brought him a vague sense of happiness; when she suggested they marry he imagined with some trepidation the ensuing decades of listening to her high-pitched voice and certain things she had a habit of saying in that voice that were starting to get on his nerves. Until she said, “If we do get married I probably won’t be around much, if that’s all right with you.” Secretly relieved, he began to think that marriage to someone who was often absent might be bearable after all. Although he sometimes despised himself for having married with not entirely admirable thoughts in mind, so much music had flowed between them, so much time had passed since then that the line between right and wrong had faded away. He remembered seeing an ice cream maker in a department store as a child, watching the little mixer go round and round. “Look, you put milk, eggs, and sugar in the top,” he had been told, “and ice cream comes out below.” Just as with this ice cream maker, he and Marika were put into the top part, and two levels below, his great-grandson Mumei had come oozing out. With nothing above, nothing would have come out below, so things had probably worked out for the best. Every time he thought over this process, he realized anew that he had been not the chef but the ingredients.
Even after their daughter was born Marika didn’t stay at home. After breakfast she would leave the house with the baby in the baby carriage along with her purse and shopping bag. She headed straight for a coffee shop called “Milk Town” that opened at ten o’clock, where she picked out three newspapers to take to her seat. As the baby slept in her carriage, Marika mouthed the word �
�Coffee,” while the waitress, leaning on the counter, read her lips without bothering to come over to her table. Other mothers joined her before long, filling the coffee shop with baby carriages. The air was heavy with exasperated sighs, sharp, needling complaints, high-pitched giggles; voices that rattled off desire after unfulfilled desire, sticky, darkly resentful voices that were also somehow sweet and ingratiating. Around noon Marika would bring home the salad greens she had bought at a nearby Fair Trade Food Shop and quickly fix lunch, which she would eat with Yoshiro, who had spent the morning writing in his study. For the next twenty minutes they would sit face-to-face, husband and wife, sharing an intimate silence, until Marika rapidly did the dishes and left again, pushing the baby carriage. It wasn’t so much Marika taking her child outside as this vehicle called a baby carriage taking off on its own, moving ever forward, pulling Marika and all her feelings along after it.
Back then, Yoshiro had been writing a novel about a man who never left the house. Not that he was a shut-in. More like a hermit crab, he got panicky without a house to surround him, so was always racking his brains about how to get interesting people to come visit him.
He thought his wife must find it suffocating being in the house with him, morning to night. That was surely why she cooked up reasons to rush out of the house every morning, pushing the baby carriage.
One morning Yoshiro agreed to meet an editor at a coffee shop, but by the time he’d finished making notes on the project they were to discuss he discovered it was way past the appointed time. When he reached the coffee shop and saw the editor sitting way at the back, shoulders drooping, head down, staring at the translucent skin that had formed on the surface of his milk tea, he wanted to apologize right away but couldn’t get to the editor’s table. For the whole coffee shop had turned into a parking lot for baby carriages. While babies slept soundly in their mobile beds, mothers talked with furrowed brows. Fragments of conversation, phrases like “recyclable resources,” or “afraid my son might turn into a bird,” or “putting profit before public health” floated through the air into his ears. While the women were lost in conversation their coffee grew cold in their cups, the cakes they forgot to order dried up inside glass cases, cracks forming in the icing on top. He caught sight of Pessimism for Mothers on the cover of a book one of the mothers held in one hand while she had the other thrust deep into her baby’s carriage, making circling motions. Sticking his neck out like a giraffe, Yoshiro saw that the mother’s hand was rubbing the head of her fidgety infant, round and round, making a tangled mess of the child’s hair. Was Marika in another coffee shop like this one, reading and talking? Having a hen party, or a bull session, was she shooting the breeze or just shooting — what was she doing, anyway? Yoshiro finished talking to his editor and left the coffee shop in a state of distraction. He then noticed that the street, too, was full of baby carriages. While Yoshiro had been holed up in his study writing, the whole world had changed. All these children being born, flooding the city with baby carriages, filling the coffee shops with mothers. From beneath their cloth canopies, pacifiers protruding from their mouths like the beaks of birds, their tiny bodies making occasional ripples in their cloth swaddling, the new generation glared resentfully at Yoshiro. So this was what a baby is. If he were to meet his daughter Amana outside would she, too, look this strange? When the light turned green, the white lines of the crosswalk disappeared beneath a torrent of baby carriages. There were baby carriages in front of every bookshelf in all the bookstores; in fact, Yoshiro wasn’t able to reach across the three baby carriages blocking his way to get the newly published paperback In Praise of Masturbation. Still on tiptoe, he looked down into a baby’s eyes, unclouded as a mirror, watching him.
Not long after that, he heard the phrase “Baby Carriage Movement” from Marika for the first time. This was a movement to encourage mothers to push their baby carriages around town every day as long as the sun was shining. Mothers who woke up unbearably miserable every morning, feeling helpless, hungry, about to pee all over themselves with no one to help them, whether because of a moist, clammy dream they’d had the night before, or because being cooped up all day with a squalling infant stimulates memories of the mother’s own infancy, went out to push their baby carriages until they came to a coffee shop with a “baby carriage mark” in the window, where they would find books and magazines to read and other mothers to talk to.
When Yoshiro asked her, Marika was more than happy to tell him more about this “Baby Carriage Movement.” Pushing a baby carriage was the best way to tell how a town treated its pedestrians. Mothers had to stop if there was no sidewalk, or too many steps. Where the noise was nerve-racking, or there was too much carbon dioxide in the air, the baby would start howling. With lots of other baby carriages around a sort of domino effect kicked in until the collective howling was as loud as a siren, making passersby stop to think just how unpleasant or even dangerous this place was for human beings. New baby carriages were apparently being developed, with solar batteries that would recharge while they were outside.
Yoshiro had always been wary of righteous social movements. Milky-smelling virtue contained resentment like sulfuric acid, directed at male writers too busy penning their gloomy, perverse novels to think of their homes and families, and if Yoshiro were to let down his guard, the acid would surely spill over to burn his hands. Marika, however, had never criticized him for being a novelist, or even expressed an opinion about a single one of his books.
Perhaps because she had spent her baby carriage days breathing the fresh air outdoors, his daughter Amana liked to walk the streets, even when she had no reason to go out. As soon as her periods started she began staying out after dark, but when Yoshiro scolded her for it, she had retorted, “Thirteen-year-old girls have a better chance of dying at home than anywhere else. Burglars kill them, or they die when the whole family commits suicide. The idea that it’s dangerous outside is nonsense.”
When she was eighteen Amana abandoned Tokyo to enter a top-level university in northern Kyushu, where she majored in Organic Studies. She was always going on about how from the Stone Age until the Edo Period, Kyushu had had an international flavor. “In Tokyo nature has almost faded away. I want to live in Southern Japan,” she said. Yoshiro couldn’t understand why she said “Southern Japan” instead of “Kyushu.” Even after she graduated, Amana hardly ever came further north than Shimonoseki. When her son Tomo came for visits during summer vacation, he was always brought by a friend of Amana’s who had business in Tokyo.
With their daughter gone, Marika also moved out, giving work as her reason. She started out at an institution for runaways who didn’t want to go back to their parents, later building her own institution in the mountains for children with no one to look after them, which she called “Elsewhere Academy,” and settled in as Headmistress. It was rumored that Marika was able to take charge of the place because of her achievements in fundraising, which sounded a little creepy to Yoshiro, who had not only never raised funds of any kind, but couldn’t imagine whom you would go to, or how you would get them to cough up such enormous sums of money. As she was his wife he presumably could have asked her, but it was already too late by that time: he had realized that the closer you were to someone the more things you couldn’t ask them about. Without arguing, without getting divorced, the two quietly shifted into separation mode. Unable to turn back the clock, they let themselves be turned.
For some time after Amana and her husband moved to Okinawa, their now grown-up son Tomo became a real headache to Yoshiro. On numerous occasions Yoshiro tried to lecture him, but his scolding somehow always turned into a comedy routine, with himself as the straight man.
“What’s the most important thing in your life?”
“Can’t think of anything really.”
“Well, give it some thought, then. When do you feel it’s better to be alive than dead?”
“When I’m excited, maybe.”
“And when do you feel excited?”
“When I’m doing those three special things.”
“What three things?”
“Buying. Throwing. Drinking.”2
“You left out the direct objects.”
“I have no particular object, directly that is.”
“I’m not asking what your object is,” Yoshiro fumed, “I’m talking about the grammatical term ‘direct object.’ What they call the accusative case in German or Russian.” Realizing how futile this explanation was, he quickly added, “What do you buy? What do you throw? What do you drink?”
Sneering, Tomo answered, “I buy comics, I throw baseballs, and I drink hot chocolate.”
“Idiot! The only thing you’re good at is talking nonsense. Why don’t you train to be a novelist?”
“I could never do that. I can’t stand dead lines.”
“Not dead lines — deadlines. Why not be a poet, then? Poets don’t have to worry about deadlines — you can write poems whenever you feel like it. Besides, I hear poets are going to be making a lot of money.”
“Well, you don’t say . . . I’ve never been very good at making money, though.”
Nothing he said could wipe the stupid grin off Tomo’s face — it was like talking to a bowl of jelly. When Yoshiro got too exasperated to continue the conversation, Tomo would shower him with flattery. “You’ve got talent, Grandpa, and you only write what you want to write,” he’d say. “I envy you, really I do. Keep up the good work.”
Not knowing whether to blow up at him or burst out laughing, Yoshiro would just stand there, studying his grandson’s well-shaped nose and narrow eyes.
Even when he was still in high school, living at home, Tomo often stayed out all night, and then, after quitting school, he rarely came home at all. Yoshiro sometimes wondered if it wasn’t genetic, this desire to find a life outside the family. His wife Marika, his daughter Amana, and his grandson Tomo had all taken off.