Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

  There must be some mistake, I was sure.

  Leaning against the wall, I smoked a cigarette. Now what? Was I to forge onward or go back?

  Not that the answer was ever seriously in doubt. I had no choice. I had to go on. I was sick of being poor. Sick of monthly payments, of alimony, of my cramped apartment, of the cockroaches in the tub, of the rush-hour subway, sick of everything. Now, at last, I had found a decent job. The work would be easy, the pay astoundingly good. Bonuses twice a year. Long summer vacations. I wasn’t about to give up now—just because I was having trouble finding one lousy door. If I couldn’t find the door here, I would simply go on until I did find it.

  I pulled a ten-yen coin from my pocket and flipped it. Heads. I took the corridor to the right.

  The passageway turned twice to the right, once to the left, down ten steps, and turned right again. The air here made me think of coffee Jell-O: it was chilly and strangely thick. I thought about the prospect of a salary, about the refreshing cool of an air-conditioned office. Having a job was a wonderful thing. I quickened my steps and went on down the corridor.

  At last there was a door ahead. From this distance, it looked like a ragged, old postage stamp, but the closer I came the more it took on the look of a door—until there could no longer be any doubt.

  I cleared my throat and, after a light knock on the door, I took a step back and waited for a response. Fifteen seconds went by. Nothing. Again I knocked, this time a little harder, then stepped back to wait. Again, nothing.

  All around me, the air was gradually congealing.

  Urged on by my own apprehension, I was taking a step forward to knock for a third time when the door opened soundlessly, naturally, as if a breeze had sprung up to swing it on its hinges, though, to be sure, nature had nothing to do with it. The click of a switch came first, and then a man appeared before me.

  He was in his middle twenties and perhaps two inches shorter than I. Water dripped from his freshly washed hair, and the only clothing on his body was a maroon bathrobe. His legs were abnormally white, and his feet as tiny as a child’s. His features were as blank as a handwriting practice pad, but his mouth wore a faintly apologetic smile. He was probably not a bad man.

  “Sorry. You caught me in the bath,” he said, drying his hair with a towel.

  “The bath?” I glanced at my watch by reflex.

  “It’s a rule. We have to bathe after lunch.”

  “I see.”

  “May I ask the nature of your business?”

  I drew the postcard from my jacket pocket and handed it to the man. He took it in his fingertips so as to avoid wetting it and read it over several times.

  “I guess I’m five minutes late,” I said. “Sorry.”

  He nodded and returned the card to me. “Hmmm. You’ll be starting to work here, then?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Funny, I haven’t heard about any new hires. I’ll have to announce you to my superior. That’s my job, you know. All I do is answer the door and announce people to my superior.”

  “Well, good. Would you please announce me?”

  “Of course. If you’ll just tell me the password.”

  “The password?”

  “You didn’t know there was a password?”

  I shook my head. “No one told me about a password.”

  “Then I can’t help you. My superior is very strict about that. I am not to let in anyone who does not know the password.”

  This was all news to me. I pulled the postcard from my pocket again and studied it to no avail. It said nothing about a password.

  “They probably forgot to write it,” I said. “The directions for getting here were a little off, too. If you’ll just announce me to your superior, I’m sure everything will be fine. I’ve been hired to start work here today. I’m sure your superior knows all about it. If you’ll just announce my arrival…”

  “That’s what I need the password for,” he said and began groping for a cigarette only to find that his bathrobe had no pockets. I gave him one of my cigarettes and lit it for him with my lighter.

  “Thanks, that’s very nice of you,” he said. “Now, are you sure you can’t recall anything that might have been a password?”

  I could only shake my head.

  “I don’t like this picky business any better than you do, but my superior must have his reasons. See what I mean? I don’t know what kind of person he is. I’ve never met him. But you know how people like that are—they get these brainstorms. Please don’t take it personally.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “The guy before me announced somebody he felt sorry for because the person claimed he ‘just forgot’ the password. He was fired on the spot. And you of all people know how hard it is to find work these days.”

  I nodded. “How about it, then?” I said. “Can you give me a hint? Just a little one.”

  Leaning against the door, the man exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Sorry. It’s against the rules.”

  “Oh, come on. What harm can a little hint do?”

  “Yeah, but if it ever got out, I’d be in deep trouble.”

  “I won’t tell a soul. You won’t tell a soul. How’ll they ever know?” This was a deadly serious business for me. I wasn’t about to give up.

  After some indecision, the man bent close to my ear and whispered, “Are you ready for this? All right, now, it’s a simple word and it has something to do with water. It fits in your hand, but you can’t eat it.”

  Now it was my turn to mull things over.

  “What’s the first letter?”

  “D,” he said.

  “Driftwood,” I ventured.

  “Wrong,” he said. “Two more.”

  “Two more what?”

  “Two more tries. If you miss those, you’ve had it. I’m sorry, but I’m risking a lot here, breaking the rules like this. I can’t just let you keep on guessing.”

  “Look, I really appreciate you giving me a chance like this, but how about a few more hints? Like how many letters in the word.”

  He frowned. “Next you’re gonna ask me to tell you the whole damned thing.”

  “No, I would never do that. Never. Just tell me how many letters there are in the word.”

  “OK. Eight,” he said with a sigh. “My father always told me: Give somebody a hand and he’ll take an arm.”

  “I’m sorry. Really.”

  “Anyhow, it’s eight letters.”

  “Something to do with water, it fits in your hand but you can’t eat it.”

  “That’s right.”

  “It starts with a D and it has eight letters.”

  “Right.”

  I concentrated on the riddle. “Dabchick,” I said finally.

  “Nope. Anyway, you can eat a dabchick.”

  “You sure?”

  “Probably. It might not taste good,” he added with less than total conviction. “And it wouldn’t fit in your hand.”

  “Have you ever seen a dabchick?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t know anything about birds. Especially waterbirds. I grew up in the middle of Tokyo. I can tell you all the stations on the Yamanote Line in order, but I’ve never seen a dabchick.”

  Neither had I, of course. I didn’t even know I knew the word until I heard myself saying it. But “dabchick” was the only eight-letter word I could think of that fit the clues.

  “It’s got to be ‘dabchick,’” I insisted. “The little palm-sized dabchicks taste so bad you couldn’t get a dog to eat one.”

  “Hey, wait a minute,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what you say: ‘dabchick’ is not the password. You can argue all you want, but you’ve got the wrong word.”

  “But it fits all the clues—connected with water, fits in your hand, you can’t eat it, eight letters. It’s perfect.”

  “There’s just one thing wrong.”

  “What’s that?”

  “‘Dabchick’ is not the password.”


  “Well, then, what is?”

  He had to catch himself. “I can’t tell you.”

  “Because it doesn’t exist,” I declared in the coldest tone I could manage. “There is no other eight-letter word for a thing connected with water that fits in your hand but you can’t eat it.”

  “But there is,” he pleaded, close to tears.

  “Is not.”

  “Is.”

  “You can’t prove it. And ‘dabchick’ meets all the criteria.”

  “I know, but still, there might be a dog somewhere that likes to eat palm-sized dabchicks.”

  “All right, if you’re so smart, tell me where you can find a dog like that. What kind of dog? I want concrete evidence.”

  He moaned and rolled his eyes.

  I went on: “I know everything there is to know about dogs, but I have never—ever—seen a dog that likes to eat palm-sized dabchicks.”

  “Do they taste that bad?” he whimpered.

  “Awful. Just awful. Yech!”

  “Have you ever tasted one?”

  “Never. Do you expect me to put something so gross in my mouth?”

  “Well, no, I guess not.”

  “In any case, I want you to announce me to your superior,” I demanded. “‘Dabchick.’”

  “I give up,” he said, wiping his hair once again with his towel. “I’ll give it a try. But I’m pretty sure it won’t do you any good.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I owe you one.”

  “But tell me,” he said. “Are there really such things as palm-sized dabchicks?”

  “Yes. Without a doubt. They exist somewhere,” I said, though for the life of me I couldn’t tell how the word had popped into my head.

  The palm-sized dabchick wiped his glasses with a velvet square and let out another sigh. His lower right molar throbbed with pain. Another trip to the dentist? he thought. I can’t take it anymore. The world is such a drag: dentists, tax returns, car payments, broken-down air conditioners…He let his head settle back against the leather-covered armchair, closed his eyes, and thought about death. Death was as silent as the ocean bottom, as sweet as a rose in May. The dabchick had been thinking about death a lot these days. In his mind, he saw himself enjoying his eternal rest.

  “Here lies the palm-sized dabchick,” said the words engraved on the tombstone.

  Just then his intercom buzzed.

  He aimed one angry shout at the device: “What!”

  “Someone to see you, sir,” came the voice of the doorman. “Says he’s supposed to start work here today. He knows the password.”

  The palm-sized dabchick scowled and looked at his watch.

  “Fifteen minutes late.”

  —TRANSLATED BY JAY RUBIN

  MAN-EATING CATS

  I bought a newspaper at the harbor and came across an article about an old woman who had been eaten by cats. She was seventy years old and lived alone in a small suburb of Athens—a quiet sort of life, just her and her three cats in a small one-room apartment. One day, she suddenly keeled over facedown on the sofa—a heart attack, most likely. Nobody knew how long it had taken for her to die after she collapsed. The old woman didn’t have any relatives or friends who visited her regularly, and it was a week before her body was discovered. The windows and the door were closed, and the cats were trapped. There wasn’t any food in the apartment. Granted, there was probably something in the fridge, but cats haven’t evolved to the point where they can open refrigerators. On the verge of starvation, they ended up devouring their owner’s flesh.

  I read this article to Izumi, who was sitting across from me. On sunny days, we’d walk to the harbor, buy a copy of the Athens English-language paper, order coffee at the café next door to the tax office, and I’d summarize in Japanese anything interesting I might come across. That was the extent of our daily schedule on the island. If something in a particular article caught our interest, we’d bat around opinions for a while. Izumi’s English was pretty fluent, and she could easily have read the articles herself. But I never once saw her pick up a paper.

  “I like to have someone read to me,” she explained. “It’s been my dream ever since I was a child—to sit in a sunny place, gaze at the sky or the sea, and have someone read aloud to me. I don’t care what they read—a newspaper, a textbook, a novel. It doesn’t matter. But no one’s ever read to me before. So I suppose that means you’re making up for all those lost opportunities. And besides, I love your voice.”

  We had the sky and the sea there, all right. And I enjoyed reading aloud. When I lived in Japan I used to read picture books aloud to my son. Reading aloud is different from just following sentences with your eyes. Something quite unexpected wells up in your mind, a kind of indefinable resonance that I find impossible to resist.

  Taking the occasional sip of bitter coffee, I slowly read the article. I’d read a few lines to myself, mull over how to put it into Japanese, then translate aloud. A few bees popped up from somewhere to lick the jam that a previous customer had spilled on the table. They spent a moment lapping it up, then, as if suddenly remembering something, flew into the air with a ceremonious buzz, circled the table a couple of times, and then—again as if something had jogged their memory—settled once more on the tabletop. After I had finished reading the whole article, Izumi sat there, unmoving, elbows resting on the table. She tented the tips of the fingers of her right hand with the tips of her fingers of her left. I rested the paper on my lap and gazed at her slim fingers. She looked at me through the spaces between her fingers.

  “Then what happened?” she asked.

  “That’s it,” I replied, and folded up the paper. I took a handkerchief out of my pocket and wiped the flecks of coffee grounds from my lips. “At least, that’s all it says.”

  “But what happened to the cats?”

  I stuffed the handkerchief back in my pocket. “I have no idea. It doesn’t say.”

  Izumi pursed her lips to one side, her own little habit. Whenever she was about to give an opinion—which always took the form of a mini-declaration—she pursed her lips like that, as if she were yanking a bedsheet to smooth out a stray wrinkle. When I first met her, I found this habit quite charming.

  “Newspapers are all the same, no matter where you go,” she finally announced. “They never tell you what you really want to know.”

  She took a Salem out of its box, put it in her mouth, and struck a match. Every day, she smoked one pack of Salems—no more, no less. She’d open a new pack in the morning and smoke it up by the end of the day. I didn’t smoke. My wife made me quit, five years earlier, when she was pregnant.

  “What I really want to know,” Izumi began, the smoke from her cigarette silently curling up into the air, “is what happened to the cats afterward. Did the authorities kill them because they’d eaten human flesh? Or did they say, ‘You guys have had a tough time of it,’ give them a pat on the head, and send them on their way? What do you think?”

  I gazed at the bees hovering over the table and thought about it. For a fleeting instant, the restless little bees licking up the jam and the three cats devouring the old woman’s flesh became one in my mind. A distant seagull’s shrill squawk overlapped the buzz of the bees, and for a second or two my consciousness strayed on the border between reality and the unreal. Where was I? What was I doing here? I couldn’t get a purchase on the situation. I took a deep breath, gazed up at the sky, and turned to Izumi.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Think about it. If you were that town’s mayor or chief of police, what would you do with those cats?”

  “How about putting them in an institution to reform them?” I said. “Turn them into vegetarians.”

  Izumi didn’t laugh. She took a drag on her cigarette and ever so slowly let out a stream of smoke. “That story reminds me of a lecture I heard just after I started at my Catholic junior high school. Did I tell you I went to a very strict Catholic school? Just after the entrance ceremony, one of the head nuns h
ad us all assemble in an auditorium, and then she went up to the podium and gave a talk about Catholic doctrine. She told us a lot of things, but what I remember most—actually, the only thing I do remember—is this story she told us about being shipwrecked on a deserted island with a cat.”

  “Sounds interesting,” I said.

  “‘You’re in a shipwreck,’ she told us. ‘The only ones who make it to the lifeboat are you and a cat. You land on some nameless desert island, and there’s nothing there to eat. All you have is enough water and dry biscuits to sustain one person for about ten days.’ She said, ‘All right, everyone, I’d like all of you to imagine yourselves in this situation. Close your eyes and try to picture it. You’re alone on the desert island, just you and the cat. You have almost no food at all. Do you understand? You’re hungry, thirsty, and eventually you’ll die. What should you do? Should you share your meager store of food with the cat? No, you should not. That would be a mistake. You are all precious beings, chosen by God, and the cat is not. That’s why you should eat all the food yourself.’ The nun gave us this deadly serious look. I was a bit shocked. What could possibly be the point of telling a story like that to kids who’d just started at the school? I thought, Whoa, what kind of place have I got myself into?”

  Izumi and I were living in an efficiency apartment on a small Greek island. It was the off-season, and the island wasn’t exactly much of a tourist spot, so the rent was cheap. Neither of us had heard of the island before we got there. It lay near the border of Turkey, and on clear days you could just make out the greenish Turkish mountains. On windy days, the locals joked, you could smell the shish kebab. All joking aside, the island was closer to the Turkish shore than to the next-closest Greek island, and there—looming right before our eyes—was Asia Minor.

  In the town square there was a statue of a hero of Greek independence. He had led an insurrection on the Greek mainland and planned an uprising against the Turks, who controlled the island then. But the Turks captured him and put him to death. They set up a sharpened stake in the square beside the harbor, stripped the hapless hero naked, and lowered him onto it. The weight of his body drove the stake through his anus and then the rest of his body until it finally came out of his mouth—an incredibly slow, excruciating way to die. The statue was erected on the spot where this was supposed to have happened. When it was first built, it must have been impressive, but now, what with the sea wind, dust, and seagull droppings, you could barely make out the man’s features. The locals hardly gave the shabby statue a passing glance, and for his part the hero looked as if he’d turned his back on the people, the island, the world.