by Yoko Tawada
While the children were talking, the three gentlemen on this month’s Outhouse Cleaning Brigade came in. They were laughing and joking, discussing something as they peered into a test tube filled with liquid the color of a green tree frog. One had been a chemistry professor at the university, another had worked for a major pharmaceutical firm, while the third never spoke of his past. Because Mumei and his classmates weren’t strong enough to clean the outhouse, the young-elderly elite volunteered for this duty. Perhaps just cleaning wasn’t enough to satisfy them, for they were always developing new tools and antiseptics — research they funded themselves — which they then donated to the school. Seeing them always embarrassed Mumei, as if someone had seen his pee or poo, so he always tried to get away as soon as he could.
One time Yanagi-kun had run straight into this trio of elites on his way out of the outhouse. His whole body stiff, he had bowed deeply and said, “You are doing an excellent job.” Watching from a short distance away, Mumei had been terribly impressed and, wondering where Yanagi-kun had learned that expression, raised his hand in a class where they were discussing greetings to report what he’d heard.
“‘You are doing an excellent job’ is something an employer says to the people working for him,” Mr. Yonatani had explained, somewhat nonplussed. “Those men aren’t your employees, are they?”
Blushing to the roots of his ears, Yanagi-kun had asked, “So what should I say?”
“Excuse me is what you say,” offered Kama-chan enthusiastically.
Placing his hand lightly on her shoulder, Yonatani said, “Excuse me is what you say when you want to apologize for something. A long time ago it was also used to express gratitude, but you mustn’t apologize when you haven’t done anything wrong.”
“But we’re putting them to a lot of trouble.”
“We don’t talk about putting people to a lot of trouble anymore — that expression is dead. A long time ago, when civilization hadn’t progressed to where it is now, there used to be a distinction between useful and useless people. You children mustn’t carry on that way of thinking.”
“Didn’t people used to say arigato?”
“Arigato — sounds crunchy, but kind of sweet, too.”
“That word is also dead.”
Just then, one of the boys yelled, “Graaaaateful,” loud enough to make himself hoarse. Laughter bubbled up from the bottoms of the children’s feet until the whole room was seething like a pot come to the boil. “Ahem!” Yonatani dramatically cleared his throat. “These days it’s popular to shout graaaateful as an expression of thanks,” he went on, “but don’t you think it might sound strange to the young elderly, the middle-aged elderly, and most of all to the aged elderly? It makes them uncomfortable, don’t you see?”
“No weeeeee don’t,” the kids screamed back in perfect unison, not that they’d discussed which vowel to draw out ahead of time. Yonatani wondered how they managed that, noting that he probably would have chosen the o of “no” rather than the e of “we.” Could it be that each generation has its own sense of rhythm?
“Mama said something like that the last time she came for a visit,” Tatsugoro said, his brow furrowed. “Graaaateful sounds weird, she said.”
“You still say Mama? You’re really behind the times,” teased Yanagi-kun. Tatsugoro’s mother had mixed the old-fashioned word Mama in with his formula when he was a baby. Now that they no longer lived together, he still heard Mama whispering softly to him from somewhere in his inner ear. Enraged at Yanagi-kun for laughing at Mama, Tatsugoro pounced.
“A fight, a fight, let’s go watch,” Mumei chanted as if reading from a script, prompting the two boys to stop tussling and look over at him, wearily rolling their eyes. What Mr. Yonatani said next made them forget all about their feud.
“You know, arigato was a pretty good word after all. When we think of ordinary things as arigatai — very rare, or special, we see them with a new sense of wonder and gratitude. Arigato.” As soon as he said them, though, Yonatani lost confidence in his own words. With all the old ways turning flips, it was getting harder and harder for adults to say to children, “Do this and you’ll never go wrong.” Kids didn’t trust a grown-up who seemed too cocksure — they were more willing to listen if he didn’t hide his lack of confidence. All he could do was feel his way forward, unsure of the way, thinking carefully about each new thing he encountered, turning every doubt into words to give to his pupils. But as soon as the uncertainty became unbearable, causing his voice to waver and trail off, the classroom would get as noisy as a beehive whacked by a stick. He’d have to do something before things got out of hand. Suddenly it came to him — he knew just what to do.
Yonatani went to the closet at the back of the room and slid the creaky door open. Mumei’s heart, seized by a ticklish sense of expectation, beat faster. In his hand, the teacher held a pole six feet long with a map of the world wrapped around it, which he unfurled in front of the blackboard. Thrusting both hands in the air, Mumei jumped straight up, shouting, “Paradise!” The other kids stopped chattering and moved to sit around the map in a semicircle. Mumei wasn’t the only one who loved this map of the world. Catching the wind, the map turned into the sail of a huge sailboat; breathing in the salt air, listening to the lapping of the waves, they swayed gently back and forth to the rhythm as the sea breeze ruffled their hair and the cries of seagulls split the air.
“This is where you are now,” said Yonatani, placing the long nail of his index finger on the center of the Seahorse Archipelago. The map was covered with brown stains. Straining to see which were islands and which were brown spots, Mumei edged his way closer, moving first his left knee, then his right.
“Long, long ago, the Japanese archipelago was a peninsula, attached to the continent, until it was thrown off to become an archipelago. And until just recently it was still much closer to the continent, but the last big earthquake left a deep crevice in the seabed, pushing our archipelago much farther away. This map was made before that happened. Since then, a number of large-scale observation and research projects have been undertaken, but none seem likely to be completed anytime soon. The government says that a new map can’t be made due to a lack of funds, and is trying to push through a new tax called the cartography tax. Due to the greater distance from the continent, many changes have taken place in Japan’s climate and culture.”
Yonatani wasn’t sure how long it had been since he’d started talking to children just as he did to adults. The kids could catch the general meaning without a dictionary so long as new words were mixed in with lots of others they already knew. If about ten per cent of the words in everything they read were unfamiliar, their vocabularies would keep on growing. All he could teach them was how to cultivate language. He was hoping they themselves would plant, harvest, consume, and grow fat on words.
With eyes like grapes moist with dew, the children stared up at the map of the world, never tiring of Yonatani’s stories about countries beyond the sea. From among these kids he would have to find the one most suitable to be an emissary. Because his work involved constant observation of lots of elementary school pupils, Yonatani considered this to be his mission. For the time being he had his eye on Mumei, though he would have to watch him mature over the next several years before making a final decision.
Mumei blinked furiously. He felt a stabbing pain in the core of his brain. The pounding of his heart had shifted from his chest to his inner ears. He caught a whiff of blood from somewhere in the back of his nose. But he knew that if he said he wasn’t feeling well the teacher might end the geography lesson, so he swallowed hard again and again, clenched his fists, and endured.
To Mumei, the map of the world was starting to look like an x-ray of his own internal organs. On his right side was the American continent, with Eurasia on the left. In his gut he could feel Australia. What was it Mr. Yonatani said just now? That the Japanese archipelago was
once attached to the continent? How could that be? That it used to be a peninsula? Did that mean that a long time ago you could walk to the continent, cross tracts of land so broad you could feel the roundness of the earth, striding so far it made you dizzy just to think of it?
“Why were we sent so far away from the continent?” someone asked. Wondering who that was, Mumei tried to turn his head but his neck was so stiff he couldn’t move.
“My great-grandpa says Japan did something really bad so now the continent hates us,” said Tatsugoro, sounding pleased with himself; Yonatani nodded with a rueful laugh.
“Look. See this big ocean in the middle of the world? It’s called the Pacific Ocean. To the left of it are Eurasia and Africa; on the right are the Americans. The huge plates at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean shift sometimes. When that happens, at the edge of the plates there’s a big earthquake, and sometimes a tsunami. There’s nothing human beings can do to prevent it. That’s just the way the earth is. But Japan isn’t the way it is now just because of earthquakes and tsunami. If natural disasters were the only problem, we certainly would have recovered long before now. So it’s not just natural disasters. Got that?”
As soon as Yonatani said that, the fire alarm started clanging loudly. Yonatani walked over to the red machine to turn off the switch.
The next thing Mumei knew he was saying, “The earth’s round, you know,” in a gentle voice that carried well all the same. He hadn’t known what he wanted to say: the words just came out on their own. The other kids gave him puzzled looks. Mumei started to flap both his arms like the wings of a bird. He simply didn’t know what else to do, though to the others it looked like he was fooling around, imitating a crane. The teacher’s eyes narrowed in a smile. “Yes, that’s right. The earth is round,” he said, “This map is a flat drawing of a sphere. I’d forgotten to tell you that.” He pretended to scratch his head in embarrassment.
“Round? What do you mean? So this map’s a lie?” Yasukawamaru shouted, angry at having been betrayed.
“So that’s it. Round, huh?” Tatsugoro, too, was dumbfounded.
Yonatani didn’t know how to answer them. He hadn’t meant to trick them. What he’d wanted to tell them seemed more important than the fact that the earth is round. Yet perhaps the shape of the earth was important, too.
“Later on let’s cut up some paper and make a globe, like a ball.”
Bearing up under the pain of the two awls digging into his head from either side, Mumei flapped his arms like crazy. It was strange how none of the others could see what he was doing. The more isolated he felt the blurrier everything got, so he tried to focus on the map, staring at it until creases formed in his forehead. This map is definitely my portrait, he thought. The Andes Mountains curve outward then inward again, just like the bone of my right leg from my hip to my ankle. The bones in my torso curve inward toward the top, until they meet that mountain range rising from the left at the Bering Sea. All my bones are curved. Not that I bent them, they were just like that to begin with — if this is what’s called pain, it was there from the start, for no particular reason. Water from a melted Arctic glacier; the cold ocean; my brain. The earth is full of complicated wrinkles. My lungs are the Gobi Desert; the stretched-out palm next to it is Europe. The African continent has a big, broad chest but small hips. It’s like a dancer standing on one leg. My neck, which connects Africa to Europe, is twisted, with swollen thyroid and swollen tonsils, screaming for help. Australia is my gut, a big bag. There’s lots of food in the bag. But I can’t eat any of it.
“See? Maps of the world made in Japan always have the Pacific Ocean in the center, with the Americas on the right, while Eurasia and Africa are on the left. But if you cut the globe in a different way, when you open it up, you’ll get a different map of the world,” Mr. Yonatani said, looking around at the children’s faces. Mumei gasped. For a moment his body was released from the pain of overlapping with this map of the world. He now knew there were other, different maps. The teacher went on.
“There’s a trench beneath the sea that circles the Pacific Ocean like a ring. It runs up the coast of South America, then further north alongside California where it turns left to cross Alaska, then from Kamchatka it sweeps down to the Mariana Islands, forming a huge ring. The Japanese archipelago sits on top of this ring. There’s a bit of a dent in the ring now, along the eastern coast of Japan.”
“About how many glasses of water are there in the Pacific Ocean?” Yanagi-kun blurted out.
While the kids laughed, Yonatani looked straight ahead, not even lifting an eyebrow as he answered, “Water may spill out during earthquakes, so maybe there’s less than there used to be.”
“That’s a lie! Mr. Yonatani tells lies!” shouted Kama-chan. At that moment, Mumei felt the trembling of the earth in the whorl of his hair as water from the Pacific Ocean splattered out into the universe. His arms and fingers went into spasms. If he went on quivering this way his bones and flesh would melt into drops that spattered out in all four directions, but what could he do? He couldn’t stop it. The eyes and mouths that surrounded him were round O’s of surprise though he couldn’t tell who was who, nor could he speak. He watched his teacher’s face spread out like ripples, growing larger and larger, with nothing beyond it but darkness.
The street was made of glass sheeting. Below it was a seemingly bottomless cavern. The glass was said to be strong enough to withstand considerable stress; if it did crack, though, how far would one fall? When it was discovered that the contamination permeating the soil had seeped into the asphalt that covered the streets, citizens protested to the government, which refused to conduct an investigation to find out who was responsible, leaving the matter to the local authorities, which hired professionals to dig out the contaminated earth deep below the asphalt, then paid contractors to haul it away and place these thick glass sheets over the hole to keep pedestrians from falling into the depths of hell. People preferred not to know what the contractors had done with the contaminated earth. A conscientious newspaper reporter found out that they had sold it to the government. But what had the government done with all the dirt they had paid so much money for? The public reacted to a dodgy explanation offered by an official from the Ministry of Environmental Pollution — that it had been carried outside the solar system by a private spaceship where it had been duly discarded — with derision. For many nights the sky was full of stars laughing coldly down on them. Some worried that the moon had absconded in disgust. Fortunately, it reappeared a while later, looking exhausted.
The night the moon came back, the breasts of young boys grew round and firm while the fragrance of ripe figs wafted up from between their legs, thrown wide apart, their knees raised slightly as they slept. Mumei, too, awoke to a sweet aroma and, realizing that his sheets were damp, got out of bed to discover that red juice had left a large stain. Feeling as if someone were watching him, he flung the curtains open to find a huge, yellow full moon, low in the sky, staring at him. Why was the moon so big tonight? Did it just look big and fuzzy because his eyes had gotten weaker? Maybe he needed glasses. No, he already had a pair. He could see them, over there on his desk. Mumei knew that he was now fifteen years old. He clearly remembered fainting one day when he was in elementary school while looking at a map of the world. At that moment, he had apparently leaped across time, propelled into the future. Even so, this self felt right. It fit him nicely, without the excess folds there would be, say, in a coat that was too big for him. As watching the moon made his eyelids heavy he let them close, then opened them to find it was morning. He took off his pajamas, changed into an azure silk costume with a thin magenta necktie, and put on his glasses. Sitting in his wheelchair, he went outside. The glass beneath his wheels reflected the seven colors of the spectrum in the morning light like a soap bubble. Mumei glided smoothly down the road like an ice skater. The control ball read his thoughts through his fingers, turning the wheelchair to the
right or stopping it as he wished. Though in elementary school Mumei had been able to walk a little on his own, as he matured moving his legs had become more and more difficult until he could no longer even stand up for very long. Realizing that this fifteen-year-old self couldn’t walk at all didn’t particularly surprise him. As soon as his desire to go diagonally to the right traveled from his abdomen to his fingers, the control ball at the end of the armrest responded to the slight pressure, sending the wheelchair in that direction.
“Ah.” Mumei tested his voice. It came from his wristwatch, not his vocal cords. It sounded gentle and young, yet it was a voice you could depend on — warm, bright, and full of life. He wasn’t sure how reliable a breathing machine would be, though. Soon he would have to leave the task of breathing to a machine outside his body, which he would have to keep by him in order to live. What would happen to the machine if his wheelchair fell over? Needing someone to help him twenty-four hours a day would be an awful nuisance. Mumei liked going out alone, riding the wheelchair down a steep hill so that it would turn it over with him in it. After being thrown out of the chair, he would lie on his back looking up at the sky. For how many more years would he be able to enjoy these daring excursions?