Again I wake up. I try to stifle my breathing, expecting Kinoko-san to start up again with her “Rend me your ear,” but everything is completely silent, I don’t hear a sound. I don’t even hear Kinoko-san breathing. I want to turn on a light, but I can’t bring myself to get up. Of course if I just lie here thinking about it, soon the sun will rise and the room will grow bright, but every day the sun comes up a little later than before. I get so tired of waiting I almost say, “Never mind. Dark is fine. Stay that way.” If night were extended and it became quite normal to have one’s morning and afternoon in the dark too, that would really be all right eventually. Since one’s suffering is constituted by the waiting, having no light at all would be rather a relief. If it’s always dark, I’ll go out in the dark. If it’s supposed to be dark, one isn’t afraid of it anymore. The secretly glinting stars; the lights of distant cities. I rise in one smooth motion. My body is very light and I can get up without tensing any part of it. My head is strangely clear. The pain in my bones and the fever in my cheeks have subsided as if they had never been there, and like a dancer I stand on my toes on the bed. If I lift myself up a little, I might simply float away like mushroom spores. I give a little leap and my fingers touch the ceiling. It’s tremendous fun. In front of my eyes stretches a row of trees that look like telephone poles. I hadn’t noticed before that there were trees growing here. They are so tall I can’t see their tops. High up on one of their trunks, Kinoko-san clings like a koala bear. Her left arm is twined around the eaves of the roof and she is waving with her right hand. Did she climb up so high all by herself, or did she leap from the window? “Do come up, dear, do join me,” Kinoko-san sings, using the strange musical scale of a certain sort of bush warbler called something or other. Somehow, strength gathers in my shoulders and I find myself beginning to move my arms as if they were wings. I feel like flying, but my hips still seem too heavy for this. My head is heavy as a sandbag, too. If I fall, my hipbones will break and my skull will be shattered. When Kinoko-san’s voice calls invitingly, “Do come,” I feel that I cannot fall. Maybe if one simply gathers up one’s courage to fly, one doesn’t fall. Maybe when you alight on a voice, gravity fails. I have just placed my foot on the windowsill when I hear a huge commotion behind me. Cold hands suddenly insert themselves beneath my arms and I am pulled roughly back into the room. Palms smelling of soap become vivid flesh-colored butterflies flying around before my eyes. I find myself lying on the bed.
“We won’t be able to meet any more, will we,” Kinoko-san is singing far off, in the strange voice of a crow at sunset, but when in a panic I clutch at the window and pull myself up to look out, the trees that look like telephone poles are already gone.
CANNED FOREIGN
In any city one finds a surprisingly large number of people who cannot read. Some of them are still too young, others simply refuse to learn the letters of the alphabet. There are also a good many tourists and workers from other countries who live with a different set of characters altogether. In their eyes, the image of the city seems enigmatic, veiled.
I already knew the alphabet when I arrived in Hamburg, but I could gaze at the individual letters for a long time without recognizing the meaning of the words. For example, every day I looked at the same posters beside the bus stop but never read the names of the products. I know only that on one of the most beautiful of these posters the letter S appeared seven times. I don’t think this letter reminded me of the shape of a snake. Not only the S, but all the other letters as well differed from live snakes in that they lacked both moisture and flesh. I repeated the S sounds in my mouth and noticed that my tongue suddenly tasted odd. I hadn’t known a tongue, too, could taste of something.
The woman I met at this bus stop had a name that began with S: Sasha. I knew at once she couldn’t read. Whenever she saw me she gazed at me intently and with interest, but she never attempted to read anything in my face. In those days I often found that people became uneasy when they couldn’t read my face like a text.
It’s curious the way the expression of a foreigner’s face is often compared to a mask. Does this comparison conceal a wish to discover a familiar face behind the strange one?
Sasha complacently accepted all forms of illegibility. She didn’t want to “read” things, she wanted to observe them, in detail. She must have been in her mid-fifties. I don’t remember what color her hair was. I didn’t learn to register hair-colors as a child, and so I still can’t do this. Sasha often waited at the bus stop to meet her girlfriend. For Sonia — that’s what she called her friend — was unable to get out of the bus on her own. Her arms and legs were incapable of working in unison toward a single goal, they couldn’t all follow the same directions at once.
Sasha pressed Sonia’s arms and legs together and called her name a few times, as though the name could bring harmony to her limbs.
Sasha and Sonia shared an apartment. Three times a week someone came to attend to whatever written business there was. Apart from reading and writing, the two of them were able to manage everything they needed to live their lives.
A few times they had me over for coffee. There were questions Sasha and Sonia never asked, though I encountered these questions everywhere I went: mostly they began, “Is it true that the Japanese….” That is, most people wanted to know whether or not something they’d read in a newspaper or magazine was true. I was also often asked questions beginning, “In Japan do people also….” I was never able to answer them. Every attempt I made to describe the difference between two cultures failed: this difference was painted on my skin like a foreign script which I could feel but not read. Every foreign sound, every foreign glance, every foreign taste struck my body as disagreeable until my body changed. The Ö sounds, for example, stabbed too deeply into my ears and the R sounds scratched my throat. Certain expressions even gave me goose flesh, for instance “to get on his nerves,” “fed up to here” or “all washed up.”
Most of the words that came out of my mouth had nothing to do with how I felt. But at the same time I realized that my native tongue didn’t have words for how I felt either. It’s just that this never occurred to me until I’d begun to live in a foreign language.
Often it sickened me to hear people speak their native tongues fluently. It was as if they were unable to think and feel anything but what their language so readily served up to them.
From our bus stop one could see not only the various billboards but also the signs for a few restaurants. One of them belonged to a Chinese restaurant called “The Golden Dragon.” Two Chinese characters shone gold and green. The first character meant “gold,” and the second “dragon,” I explained once to Sasha as I saw her staring at this sign. Sasha then pointed out that the second character was even shaped something like a “real” dragon. And in fact it is possible to see the image of a dragon in this character: the little box in the upper right-hand corner might be a dragon's head, and the lines on the right side remind me of a dragon’s back. But Sasha knew it wasn’t a “picture” of the dragon — she asked me whether I, too, could write it.