by Yoko Tawada
A month before, someone had put up a poster on the wall outside the elementary school: NO ONE SPEAKS OF THE WEATHER ANYMORE OR REVOLUTION EITHER. In bold fancy lettering, it was a take on the famous quotation, WHILE PEOPLE SPEAK ONLY OF THE WEATHER I SPEAK OF REVOLUTION — but the very next day someone took it down.
And it wasn’t just hot and cold — the difference between darkness and light was also becoming vague. Thinking what a gloomy day it was, you’d be staring up at a gray sky, which would brighten as if illuminated by a light bulb hidden somewhere deep inside until the sky was so blindingly bright you had to turn away. You’d narrow your eyes on what seemed like a really windy day, then the air would freeze and stop moving altogether. As the sun was setting, the outlines of the roofs would light up. You’d turn the light on inside because it was too dark to read the newspaper, and as the paper absorbed all the light, the newsprint would disappear in darkness. At bedtime you’d turn off the light, only to find the moon so bright you couldn’t get to sleep. Wondering how it could possibly be that bright you’d open a window to find the moon wasn’t even out. It would only be the lead of a pencil left in the road that looked as if it was shining. Streetlights and lights in the houses would all be out, as if urging the night to act like night already, but be all that as it may, why was the dawn breaking in what certainly looked like the dead of night?
While Mumei was putting his shoes on, Yoshiro approached the yard next door from the south side, following the sound of the girl’s voice. Temporary houses didn’t have fences or hedges. Craning his neck to peer inside, Yoshiro saw a chest of drawers and a desk placed primly on the tatami, but no sign of people. Ten empty cans were lined up on the windowsill, each four inches tall, each with a small flower in it. A purple bell, a yellow pitcher, a red firecracker, a white whim, a scarlet stain. “Mumei would love this series of colors, maybe I should line our windowsill with flowers too,” he was thinking when he heard a voice from behind say, “Good morning.” Startled, he turned to see the woman who lived there, wearing a red silk dress with her white hair done up neatly in a bun, pushing a wheelchair toward him. The girl, in a white dress today instead of the space suit, sat in the wheelchair, smiling. Her dark eyes sometimes looked azure, depending on the light. Her eyes were very far apart. Perhaps that was what made him feel dizzy, looking at her. He wished Mumei could talk to her.
“Excuse me. I was just having a look at your flowers. Lovely, aren’t they? Would you like to meet my great-grandson sometime?” Yoshiro asked, slowly walking backwards as the two nodded, moving toward him. Mumei, squatted down beside Yoshiro’s bicycle, was slowly revolving the pedals with his hands.
“Mumei, say hello to our next-door neighbor,” Yoshiro said, then turning to the girl asked, “Could you tell me your name?”
“I’m Suiren,” she answered, nodding once to Mumei. There was confidence in the gesture, making her seem much older than Mumei although they were the same age. Leaning forward, Mumei walked unsteadily over to the wheelchair.
“This is my great-grandson Mumei. He’s glad to meet you,” he said. He was regretting not having let the boy introduce himself when Mumei, pointing at his great-grandfather, chirped, “This is Yoshiro. He’s glad to meet you.”
“My name is Nemoto,” the woman introduced herself, carefully pronouncing each syllable while leaving her relationship to Suiren unclear. Mumei couldn’t take his eyes off the girl. Not the least bit shy, he stared at her, nor did he seem to mind her staring back. Watching them embarrassed Yoshiro, who finally took Mumei by the hand, saying, “If we don’t leave for school soon you’ll be late,” and led the boy back to their house, where he wiped the bicycle oil off Mumei’s hands with a Japanese towel soaked in antiseptic.
Because Mumei’s birdlike legs turned inward from the knee down, he turned them outward as he walked, step by step. He kept his balance by making big circles with his arms as his school bag, the strap slung diagonally from one shoulder across his chest, flapped lightly at his slender waist. While Yoshiro pushed the bicycle, Mumei walked at his side. Yoshiro walked as slowly as he possibly could, trying his best to make it seem as if this was his natural pace. Mumei, in turn, pretended not to notice that Yoshiro was walking slowly on purpose.
When Mumei stopped, Yoshiro stopped too. After a while, Mumei would start again. Then, after about ten steps or so, he would stop. Each step was hard labor.
Day by day Mumei was storing up muscles in some unseen place. Not the sort that bulged so everyone could see them, but muscles he needed to walk in a way known only to himself, muscles that spread, little by little, throughout his body like a net. Yoshiro was starting to think that maybe the way human beings had always walked, upright on two legs, wasn’t the best way after all. Just as people had stopped riding in cars, perhaps they would stop walking on two legs one day, and invent a completely different way of moving. When everyone was scuttling across the ground like octopi, Mumei might be an Olympic athlete.
Shaking off his daydream, Yoshiro stopped the bicycle and put down the stand. “You really walked a lot today. Much further than yesterday,” he said as he slipped his hands under Mumei’s arms to lift him up, wincing as he always did at how light the boy was, then gently placed him on his little throne, firmly attached to the back carrier. It had a soft cushion to sit on, a backrest that reached all the way up to his head, armrests, footrests, and a green seatbelt, as well as other features. Yoshiro pedaled off, putting his weight behind it.
The open space in front of the school was as busy as a morning market. After Yoshiro lifted him down, Mumei walked straight toward the building without looking back. Guardians were permitted to accompany children to their classrooms, but as usual Yoshiro watched Mumei’s back for about three seconds before leaving as if driven away.
Once inside, Mumei took off his shoes and placed them neatly in the shoe rack with the heels touching. No one wore shoes indoors. The children walked down the corridor in cotton socks, feeling the cool of the wood under their feet until they came to a row of classrooms with tatami floors. The wooden boxes piled up in the corner of each room served as desks when necessary. There were no chairs. As soon as Mumei reached his classroom he fell upon the first classmate he saw like a playful puppy. Several other pairs of kids were clasped together in leisurely wrestling matches, most of them girls. None fell in a clumsy way. Keeping their hips low to the ground, they curled up like hedgehogs when someone pushed them over. Nervous guardians who’d been afraid at first that the kids would hurt themselves soon realized that they were pretty much immune to injury.
The blue silk scarf around Yonatani’s neck felt hot, almost suffocating until he finally loosened it. Sure he’d lose it if he left it that way, he tied it tight around his left wrist. Now I look like a wounded soldier, he thought. That was when his eyes met Mumei’s, sitting on the tatami looking up at him. The boy was staring at the scarf as if it were strange indeed.
“Why did you take off your scarf, Mr. Yonatani?”
“Because I’m hot.”
“Hot?”
“That’s right. Sometimes I suddenly feel very hot, or very cold. It’s a sort of menopausal disorder.”
“What’s a men-oh-paw-zal-dis-order?”
“It’s when your body changes keys. You know, the way music sometimes changes from a major to a minor key.”
Though in the old days you hardly ever heard of men suffering from menopause, the number of men whose symptoms were so severe they had to take time off from work had increased in recent years. That very morning, Yonatani had been reading the paper, an article about social problems, when he’d suddenly started shivering, his hands and feet like ice. He’d put on his socks, pulled a heavy jacket over his shoulders, and was drinking hot coffee when the heat in his throat began to spread through his body until sweat was running down his forehead, forcing him to throw off the jacket. To cool down his head, now like a kettle about to boil, he had come t
o school in his shirtsleeves. As soon as he entered the building he heard the kids screaming as they horsed around together — cries of joy, he knew, but his heart raced just the same. Ten years before he’d never been aware of the beating of his own heart.
Yonatani no longer believed as he had when he’d first started teaching that the children would hurt themselves if he wasn’t watching them all the time. Even that kid Mumei, who looked like he was about to fall over any minute, knew to lower his center of gravity before stretching out both hands to drape himself over Yasukawamaru’s back. He’d warned Yasukawamaru he was coming, too, with a high-pitched cry that sounded like a crane, giving the other kid time to slowly turn around to see who was coming up behind him. It was more like watching a carefully choreographed dance than two kids fighting.
A few steps away from the kids, Yonatani stood watching them play. Realizing how straight he was standing, his back stiff as a ramrod, he quickly squatted down to survey the classroom from a lower angle. When he was young, tall men had still been favored in Japanese society. This prejudice had obviously been imported from abroad, through foreign movies and magazines. Then, at the end of the Heisei Era, with society changing at the speed of pebbles rolling down a steep hill, memories of the Edo period rose up from dilapidated graveyards to dispel the notion that tall men had the advantage, for back then, in lean years the tallest were always the first to sicken and die.
Yonatani didn’t even know who the tallest kid in his class was. The yearly ritual of measuring children’s height had been abolished. When he heard other teachers say it was inhuman to stretch children out to measure their length as if they were pieces of cloth or string, Yonatani thought they had a point. Kids should be left to curve and bend as much as they liked. While playing freely like puppies, each child could develop the particular kind of strength he or she needed.
When Yonatani was a boy, there were lots of kids who couldn’t move without a scenario called “sports.” He himself had joined the neighborhood Little League baseball team at the age of five, the soccer club in junior high school, and in high school, the basketball club. They had practice eight days a week. When he told his class that the kids had burst out laughing, saying, “A week has only seven days!” but back then, following their coach, who was always growling, “As far as you’re concerned, a week has eight days,” they had duly tried to cram two days into one every Sunday, eating and doing their homework at twice the normal speed between morning and afternoon practice sessions. One morning during the first semester of his second year in high school, when the cherry blossoms were in full bloom, he’d found he couldn’t get out of bed, or even put on his socks, and that was when he’d quit the basketball club.
All through his childhood and youth, he’d kept his body moving, chasing after balls with his friends, yet he had almost no memory of touch, of his heart beating faster after coming into physical contact with another boy. Not only other kids, even his own body had seemed to be moving on some two-dimensional plane like an anime character he could watch but never really touch. The closest thing to a sensual memory he had was of putting his hand into his catcher’s mitt, that slight thrill he felt every time his skin touched leather, bringing the mitted hand up to his nose when the others weren’t watching to breathe in the earthy aroma. Once when a classmate called Michiru had left her hand lying on top of her desk, he had touched it by mistake. He’d pulled away immediately, but the shock of feeling her warm, moist flesh stayed, carved into his memory. After that he was always aware of Michiru, so much so that even when the classroom faded into black and white boredom, she alone appeared in living color. Every time Michiru said someone’s name he was listening, he examined every letter on all her school papers, watched everything she did at recess. That single touch, apparently, had stolen the key to his heart.
Watching the kids in his class, Yonatani was sure they had evolved far beyond his own generation. Just as playful wrestling matches helped make lion cubs strong enough to survive on the savanna, these children were learning about the earth through physical contact. If he were to give a name to this first morning class, it would be “spontaneous romping.” Yonatani considered his main job as homeroom teacher to be careful observation. Not supervision — observation.
Mumei threw himself on top of a group of boys sitting close together, sprawling out to cover them, trying out all the techniques of his special octopus-fighting method. When he was out of breath, he retreated to a corner of the classroom to hang his homemade COME BACK LATER sign around his neck. This was his way of keeping his classmates from bothering him when he needed to rest. He’d gotten the idea from a sign he’d seen on the door of a neighborhood noodle shop. Her head tilted coquettishly, Karo-chan sidled up to him and asked, “What does that mean?” He’d explained it to her just the other day and here she was, back again with the same silly question. A little put out, Mumei replied sharply, “I told you that yesterday,” but Karo, apparently not the least bit embarrassed, said, “I forget.” How could she possibly forget that fast? Convinced she must be laughing at him, Mumei snapped back a little too loudly, “Quit teasing me!” He heard a wail, loud as a siren. As soon as he realized it was Karo-chan bawling, he felt an invisible hand slap his cheek, and in a flash, understood that not everyone’s brain works in the same way.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized, “it means we’re closed for the time being, so don’t come into our shop,” repeating his explanation from before, word for word. Though it had satisfied her then, today she needled him: “Sounds weird — you’re not a noodle shop, you know.” So that was their strategy — ask the same question, get the same answer, but by reacting a little differently each time, worm your way in deeper. Girls sure had odd ways of doing things. Yet not all girls were like Karo-chan. “Never believe people who try to tell you that boys are a certain way, but girls are entirely different,” Great-grandpa was always saying. There were various types of girls. Mumei remembered the little girl next door. She looked mysterious, with her eyes so far apart. He was thinking how anxious he was to get home so he could see her face again when Yasukawamaru yelled, “Mr. Yonatani, I want to go to the outhouse.”
“Me too!”
“Me too!”
After considering the state of his bladder, Mumei decided he didn’t need to go. Even so, watching the heads of the other kids bob as they filed out of the classroom he found himself drawn toward them.
That reminded him of something Great-grandpa had said about words. He mustn’t copy kids he heard using foreign words like peppy or potty, but peebuddy — Great-grandpa had laughed when he said it — was entirely different, a word even the most extreme nationalist would accept as bona fide Japanese, so he should feel free to use it; besides, when you went for a pee with your friends, you all got caught up in the flow, so it was really the best time to let your hair down and have a good talk.
All those words — dead ones and the ones that weren’t quite dead but that nobody ever used anymore — were stored in Great-grandpa’s head. He was always wanting to throw out old crockery or toys they didn’t use anymore, yet he kept all the old useless words in the drawers of his brain, never letting them go.
He’d heard about a time when girls and boys went to different schools. After that, they went to the same school but the outhouse, which was then called the toilet, and gym class, were kept separate — sort of a neither-here-nor-there situation. Then boys and girls had gym together, but the toilets were still separate. That had been phased out as the differences between the sexes became less and less clear.
Toilet sounded to Mumei like toil, but since it wasn’t a place where you went to work, he sensed a contradiction in the word. But then again, it had apparently come from English, so maybe toil and toilet had nothing to do with each other after all.
The outhouse in Mumei’s school, used by both girls and boys, was a joyful place, filled with bright colors: red, yellow, blue, green. You coul
d have a nice leisurely poop squatted on top of a lotus flower, or choose a chrysanthemum from the flowerbed on the wall to spray with your pee. Long ago, the toilet wasn’t a place to play — you were supposed to do your business and get out as soon as possible. People who spent a long time in the toilet were suspected of doing something wrong on the sly. This was probably to reduce contact with harmful germs, but for some time now people had stopped worrying about coliform bacteria. The human body knew how to deal with them. Mr. Yonatani always assured them that there were plenty of things a lot more frightening in their environment now.
“It’s the Malaysian Peninsula,” Mumei said to Yanagi-kun, who was standing next to him, struggling to open his fly.
“What is?” Yanagi-kun asked, sounding bored as he continued to fight with his zipper.
“What you’re trying to get out,” giggled Mumei. A map of the world was plastered to the interior of Mumei’s forehead, making objects in front of him sometimes resemble faraway peninsulas or mountain ranges. The Malaysian Peninsula apparently didn’t mean much to Yanagi-kun, though.
The trousers Yoshiro had made especially for Mumei didn’t have either a zipper or buttons. The front was hidden by two pieces of cloth on the left and right that neatly overlapped. Yoshiro had only started sewing when he was in his eighties, but being an enthusiastic learner he’d quickly progressed to the point where he now made clothes with collars and sleeves so ingeniously crafted that Mumei was almost embarrassed to wear them. He’d been hoping no one would notice when Tatsugoro-kun looked over and shouted, “Hey, that’s really cool! Let me see.” Suddenly, all the kids were staring at him. Tatsugoro-kun said he wanted to be an artist specializing in clothing. In olden times, people who did that sort of work were called designers — a very popular profession, apparently. Tatsugoro didn’t want to be rich or famous; he simply wanted to make the bizarre clothing that appeared to him in dreams, and see people actually wearing it. Once he’d asked Mumei, “Wouldn’t you like a suit that turned you into a cicada the minute you put it on? All you’d have to do is flutter the sleeves and they’d chirr like a cicada. Awesome, huh?” Thinking that sounded a little too scary, Mumei had declined the offer. Another time the kid had asked, “How about a pair of trousers with a hundred pockets?” With that many what would you put in them all, he had wanted to know. Pencils, erasers, candy, marbles, tickets, pills, Tatsugoro replied — there’d be a special pocket for everything you could think of.