One day, I got off the train midway, and I began walking toward U. I wanted to take a leisurely walk alone over the mountain crests with their commanding views. The road cut an irregular path through the woods, following the direction of the tracks nearby. Autumn flowers were in bloom here and there. The surface of the red earth glistened, and the trunks of felled trees were scattered across the ground. While watching the clouds float across the sky, I thought of the old folklore that survives there in the mountains. In these backwoods areas, with their primitive taboos and superstitions, one can still hear many legends and folktales. In fact, many of the local people believe the stories even to this day. The maids and the locals visiting our inn told me several strange stories in voices tinged with fear and disgust. They said the spirits of dogs possessed the inhabitants of one particular settlement, while cats possessed the inhabitants of another. Those possessed by dog-spirits ate only meat. Those possessed by cat-spirits lived on nothing but fish.
The people in the surrounding areas called these odd settlements ‘the possessed villages,’ and they were careful to avoid contact with them. Once a year, the people of the allegedly possessed villages would select a black, moonless night to hold a festival. It was strictly forbidden for anyone outside the village to observe what ensued during those mysterious rites. If by some rare chance an outsider happened to glimpse the proceedings, he would invariably bite his tongue and say nothing. The rumors about the villages ran rampant: the denizens of the villages were privy to special magic; they were hiding a vast fortune of unknown origin; and so on. After recounting these stories, the locals would add that one of the villages was located quite close to the hot spring, only it wasn’t very long ago that the inhabitants had deserted the town. They had up and left, but it was common speculation that they continued to live their secret life in a community somewhere else. As irrefutable proof, the people telling the story cited the experiences of others who had seen the okura, the true form of the malevolent spirits.
All these stories proved to me was how stubbornly superstitious farming people can be. Conscious of it or not, the villagers were forcing their own fears and realities on me. Because their stories interested me for anthropological reasons, however, I listened carefully. Secretive village practices and taboos like those they described can be found throughout Japan. One likely theory is that the people engaging in these practices were the descendants of immigrants from foreign countries with different customs and habits, and even today they continued to worship the clan gods of their ancestors. Another possibility is that the villages were holdovers from the seventeenth century, when believers in Christianity, persecuted by the Tokugawa government, went into hiding and practiced their religion in secret.
There are countless things in this vast universe that humankind does not know. As the Latin poet Horace once noted, the intellect of the mind knows nothing. Instead, people use it to make common sense of the world and have myths that explain things in everyday terms. Still, the secrets of the universe continue to transcend the quotidian. All philosophers must, therefore, doff their hats to the poets when they discover that the path of reason takes them only so far. The universe that lies beyond common sense and logic – the universe that is known intuitively to the poet – belongs to the metaphysical.
While indulging in these speculations, I walked through the autumn mountains. The narrow road continued for some time, then disappeared into the depths of the woods. The railroad tracks, the sole thing I relied on to guide me to my destination, were nowhere in sight. I had lost my way.
‘I’m lost!’
These lonely words rose in my heart as I came to my senses and left my contemplations behind. Immediately I became uneasy and began to look frantically for the road. I backtracked in an attempt to find it. Instead, I became all the more turned around. I ended up in an inescapable labyrinth of countless paths. The paths led deeper into the mountains and then disappeared into the brambles. I wasted a great deal of time. Not once did I see a single soul – not even a woodcutter. Becoming increasingly upset, I paced about impatiently like a dog trying to scout out its way. At long last, I discovered a narrow but clear path marked by feet and hooves. Following it intently, I descended little by little toward the base of the mountain. I figured I could relax once I made it to the base of one of the mountains and found a house.
I arrived at the foot of the mountain some hours later. There, I discovered a world of human habitation beyond anything that I could have anticipated in my wildest dreams. Instead of poor farmers, I had come upon a beautiful, prosperous town. An acquaintance of mine once told me about a trip he had taken on the Trans-Siberian railroad. He said the passengers would travel for days and days through desolate, uninhabited plains that stretched as far as the eye could see. As a result, when the train finally stopped, even the tiniest station looked like one of the most animated, prosperous cities in the world. The surprise that I felt was probably similar to what my friend had experienced. There in the low, flat plain at the base of the mountain stood rows and rows of buildings. Towers and lofty buildings shone in the sun. The sight was so impressive that I could hardly believe such a marvelous metropolis really existed there in the remote mountains.
Feeling as if I was seeing an image projected by a magic lantern onto a screen in front of me, I slowly approached the town. At some point, though, I crossed over into the projection and became part of the mysterious town itself. Starting down a narrow alley, I passed through some dark, confusing, cramped pathways, but then suddenly I walked into the center of a bustling avenue, almost as if I were emerging from a womb into the world. The city that I saw was so special, so unusual! The rows of shops and other buildings were designed with an unusual, artistic feel. They acted, as it were, like the building blocks for the communal aesthetic that pervaded the entire town. The whole place was beautiful, but the beauty did not seem to have been consciously created. The artistic feel had evolved naturally as the town gradually weathered and developed an elegant patina that reflected its age. This elegant depth spoke with grace and gentility of the town’s old history and the long memories of the townspeople.
The town was so tightly knit that the main avenue was only a dozen or a dozen and a half feet across. Other smaller streets were pressed into the space between the eaves of the buildings so that they became deep, narrow passages that wound about like paths in a labyrinth. Roads descended down flagstone-covered slopes or passed under the shadow of second-story bay windows, creating dark tunnels. As in southern climes, flowering trees grew near the wells located here and there throughout the town. A ubiquitous, deep shade filled the whole place, leaving everything as tranquil as the shadow of a laurel tree. What appeared to be the houses of courtesans stood in a row, and from deep inside an enclosed garden came the quiet sound of elegant music.
On the main avenue, I found many Western-style houses with glass windows instead of the sliding wooden and paper doors found in Japan. A red and white striped pole stuck out from the eaves of a hairdresser’s shop, along with a painted sign that read in English, ‘Barbershop.’ There were also traditional Japanese-style inns and shops that did laundry in the neighborhood. Near an intersection stood a photography studio with glass windows that reflected the sunny autumn sky with the lonely stoicism of a weather observatory. In the front of a watch shop sat the store’s bespectacled owner working quietly and intently.
The streets were thronged with bustling crowds, yet the people created little noise. A refined, hushed silence reigned over the place, casting a pall that was as profound as a deep sleep. The town was silent, I realized, because there were no noisy horse-drawn carriages charging by, only pedestrians. But that wasn’t all. The crowds were also quiet. Everyone – both men and women – had an air about them that was genteel and discreet, elegant and calm. The women were especially lovely and graceful, and even a bit coquettish. The people shopping in the stores and stopping in the street to talk also spoke politely in harmonious, soft vo
ices. As a result, instead of appealing to the sense of hearing, their voices seemed to present meaning in an almost tactile fashion, something soft to the touch. The voices of the women had the especially sweet and rapturous charm of a gentle stroke passing over the surface of one’s skin. People and things came and went like shadows.
I realized right away that the atmosphere of the town was an artificial creation whose existence relied on the subtle attentions of its inhabitants. It was not just its buildings. The entire system of individual nerves that came together to create its atmosphere was focused on one single, central aesthetic plan. In everything from the slightest stirrings in the air, there was strict adherence to the aesthetic laws of contrast, symmetry, harmony, and equilibrium. These aesthetic laws entailed, however, extremely complicated differential equations that, requiring tremendous effort, made all of the nerves of the town quiver and strain. For instance, even uttering a word slightly too high in pitch was forbidden, for it would shatter the harmony of the entire town. When the inhabitants did anything – when they walked down the street, moved their hands, ate, drank, thought, or even chose the pattern of their clothing – they had to give painstaking attention to their actions to make sure they harmonized with the reigning atmosphere and did not lose the appropriate degrees of contrast and symmetry with their environs. The whole town was a perilously fragile structure of thin crystal. A loss of balance, even for a moment, would have dashed the entire thing to smithereens. A subtle mathematical structure of individual supports was necessary to maintain stability, and a complex of individual connections governed by the laws of contrast and symmetry strained to support the whole.
However frightening this might be, such was the truth about the town. One careless mishap would mean the collapse and destruction of the entire place. Trepidation and fear had stretched the nerves of the whole town dangerously thin. The plan of this town, which seemed so aesthetically inclined on the surface, went beyond a mere matter of taste. It hid a more frightening and acute problem.
This realization suddenly made me extremely anxious. The air surrounding me was electrically charged, and in it I felt the anguish of the inhabitants’ nerves stretched to the breaking point. The peculiar beauty and dreamlike serenity of the town had now become hushed and uncanny. I felt as if I were unraveling a code to discover some frightening secret. A vague premonition, the color of a pale fear, washed over my heart, though I could not quite understand what it was trying to tell me. All of my senses were fully alert. I perceived all of the colors, scents, sounds, tastes, and meanings of the things surrounding me in infinitesimal detail. The stench of corpses filled the air, and the barometric pressure rose with each passing instant. All of the things that manifested themselves around me seemed to portend some evil. Something strange was about to happen! Something had to happen!
But the town did not change. The street was full of elegant people going to and fro, walking quietly without making a sound, just as they had moments ago. From somewhere in the distance, I heard a continuous, low, mournful note that sounded like the stroking of the strings of a kokyū. Like someone haunted by a strange omen in the moments before a great earthquake, I experienced an anxious premonition – mere steps away from me, a person falls…and the harmony on which the entire town is based collapses, throwing everything into utter chaos!
I struggled with this horrifying vision like someone having a nightmare and trying frantically to awaken. With each passing second, the sky turned bluer and more transparent. The pressure of the electrically charged air rose higher and higher. The buildings bent precariously, growing long and sickly thin. Here and there, they distended into bizarre, turretlike forms. The roofs became strangely bony and deformed like the long, thin legs of a chicken.
‘It’s happening!’
The words escaped my lips as my chest thumped with fear. Just then, a small black rat or something like it dashed into the center of the road. I saw it with extraordinary delineation and clarity. What on earth was going on? I was seized by the strange, sudden notion that it would destroy the harmony of the entire town.
Right then…the whole universe stopped dead, and an infinite quiet settled over everything. What next!?!
An unimaginably strange and horrifying sight appeared before me. Great packs of cats materialized everywhere, filling all the roads around me! Cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, and more cats! Everywhere I looked there was nothing but cats! Whiskered cat faces rose in the windows of all the houses, filling the panes like pictures in frames.
I shuddered. I held my breath from fright and nearly passed out. This wasn’t the human world! Was there nothing in this world but cats? What on earth had happened? Was this world real? Something had to be wrong with me. Either I was seeing an illusion or I had gone mad! My senses had lost their balance. The universe was collapsing around me.
I was terrified. Some final, frightening destruction would surely be closing in on me. I closed my eyes, and fear rushed through the darkness inside me.
But, suddenly, my senses returned. As my heart began to slow its furious beat, I opened my eyes again to examine the world of reality that now surrounded me.
The inexplicable vision of all those cats had vanished. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the town. Hollow, deserted windows stretched open their empty mouths. The traffic moved by uneventfully as the white clay of the dull streets roasted in the sun. Nowhere was there even a shadow of a cat. The town had undergone a complete change in feeling. Everywhere there were rows of plain old shops. Walking the dry, midday streets were the same tired, dusty people who live in every country. The mysterious, perplexing town of a moment ago had vanished without a trace. An entirely separate world had appeared, almost as if a playing card had been turned over to reveal its other side. It was nothing but an ordinary, commonplace country town. Wasn’t it the same old town of U that I knew so well? There at the barber-shop, facing the midday traffic outside the shop window, was a row of barber chairs that had no customers. On the left side of the dilapidated town yawned a clock shop that never sold anything, its door shut as always. Everything was just like I remembered it – a never-changing, humdrum town in the country.
Once my mind cleared, I understood everything. I had foolishly allowed myself to succumb again to my perceptual malady, to my disturbance of the semicircular canals. Getting turned around in the mountains, I had completely lost any sense of direction. Though I thought I was descending the other side of the mountain, I went the wrong way and ended up here in the town of U. Also, I had wandered into the heart of it from a direction opposite to that I arrived from on the train. All of my assumptions as to my whereabouts were completely backward, and my mistaken impressions were showing me a world with the directions all turned around. I was looking at a separate universe of another dimension, at the back side of the landscape where up and down, front and back, and the four cardinal directions were all reversed. As popular parlance would have it, I had been ‘bewitched by a fox.’
III
My tale ends here, but the end of this story is the point of departure for my strange, unresolved enigma. The Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi once dreamed he was a butterfly. When he woke, he questioned his own identity, wondering if he was the butterfly in the dream or the person he was at that moment.
This ancient riddle has remained unsolved across the ages. Is the universe of illusion only visible to those who have been bewitched by foxes? Or is it visible to those with clear intellect and good sense? Where does the metaphysical world exist in relationship to the ordinary landscape? Is it the reverse of what we ordinarily see? Is it in front? Perhaps there is no one who can answer these riddles.
That magical town outside the bounds of the human world remains lodged in my memory. I still remember the vision of that bizarre feline town with the silhouettes of cats appearing so vividly in every window, under all the eaves, and in every gathering on the street. Even today, more than ten years later, I still relive the terror of that
day by just thinking about it. I see it all over again as if it were right there in front of my eyes.
People smile coldly at my tale. They say it is the demented illusion of a poet or a nonsensical hallucination born of absentminded daydreaming. Still, I continue to insist that I did see a town of nothing but cats. I did see a town where cats took on human form and crowded the streets. Though reasoning and logic tell me otherwise, I am absolutely sure that, somewhere in this universe, I did encounter such a place. Nothing is more certain to me than this. The entire population of the world can stand before me and snicker, but I will not abandon my faith in that strange settlement described in the legends of the backwoods. Somewhere, in some corner of this universe, a town is inhabited solely by the spirits of cats. Sure enough, it does exist.
The Tarn
Hugh Walpole
Hugh Walpole (1884–1941) was a very popular and prolific English writer who published thirty-six novels, five volumes of short stories, two plays and three volumes of memoirs. His skill at scene-setting, his vivid plots, and his high profile as a lecturer brought him a large readership in the UK and North America. A bestselling author in the 1920s and 1930s, his works have been neglected since his death. Although best-known for his historical novels, Walpole also penned classic tales of the supernatural, including ‘The Clocks’ (1913), ‘The Twisted Inn’ (1915), ‘Tarnhelm’ (1933) and ‘The Silver Mask’ (1933). However, ‘The Tarn (1936) – a perceptive, clever, and all-too-true weird tale – remains our personal favorite.
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories Page 53