The Forbidden Diary - Sachiko Kishimoto
THE FORBIDDEN DIARY
from monkey business: new writing from japan #1
Sachiko Kishimoto
transl. by Ted Goossen
*
February–March
The Cancel-Out Apartments
I have a little brother sprouting
from a spot behind my right hip. He’s about four inches long without any arms
and legs, and when he gets hungry (which is like all the time) his face turns
red and he starts bawling in this ear-splitting voice; and then he whips his
body back and forth so that it goes whap, whap against my butt. I hate the kid,
and there’ve been so many times I’ve thought about taking a razor and slicing
him off, but I just can’t bring myself to do it.
Cicadas shrilling outside my window.
February 4
Heard a rumor
about something called the “Cancel-Out Apartments” today. Seems it’s a
two-story building with five small apartments on each floor. If, say, a cop is
living on the second floor, and then another cop moves in on the first, the two
cancel each other out. I mean, they both vanish, poof, just like that. If there
are two babies in the building, poof, they’re gone too. If a Mr. Yamada moves
in, and another Mr. Yamada’s already there, you guessed it, both gone. In one
case, two tenants who seemed totally different—a thirty-five-year-old guy
working part time and a sixteen-year-old high school girl—disappeared together.
Nobody could figure it out. Then it was discovered that both had the same
fetish for, get this, the smell of dirty socks. People living in the Cancel-Out
Apartments are totally stressed because they can’t tell when someone who’s
somehow like them might move in. According to the rumor, the building is right
here in Tokyo.
February 5
Talked with O.
on the phone for the first time in a long while. Our topic was the names of the
bullet trains. If the Flash is faster than the Echo, and the Hope is faster
than the Flash, then, we decided, if they made a train even faster than the
Hope it would have to be called the Death, but no one would board the Death 101
for Kyūshū.
Translated a bit.
February 6
Met a dozen or
so people at K. Station on the Odakyū Line and we all headed off to a
bar/boxing gym called Knuckles. Everyone ordered their “sandbag set,” which
gives you a drink and forty minutes punching the heavy bag for fifteen hundred
yen, so we drank and pounded away to our hearts’ content.
After that we went out to a Korean
barbecue place, and after that drinking in Shimokitazawa. The party broke up at
4:00 a.m.
February 7
February 8
I can’t stand for people to see me
with my little brother, so when I go to the beach I dig a hole in the sand and
lie on my back with him in it. I talk, eat, and drink in that position. He
spends the whole time bawling except when I reach down and give him a bit of
whatever I’m eating, when he shuts up to chew. Then he’s so surprised and
excited at being treated nicely he whips himself, whap, whap, against my butt
even harder. He’s so ugly then I wish he would hurry up and die, but he gets
his sustenance from my body, so even if I stopped feeding him he wouldn’t
starve. I gave up and lay on the beach all day while my loathing for him grew.
February 9
Found an
inchworm pretending to be a twig on the potted oleaster in my room, so I named
him Little Desperado and made up my mind to love him.
Minuscule progress on the translation.
February 11
In the
evening, yakitori in Shibuya with T. from K. firm. Intended it to be a business
meeting, but somewhere along the line we got into this lengthy discussion about
cats and dogs and that plan died. T. hadn’t heard about the “Cancel-Out
Apartments.”
Walking home in the dark, I heard a
voice call “Boo!” but when I turned around no one was there.
My kid brother is buried in the sand
almost all the time, and when he isn’t he just cries with his face all crumpled
up. Still, there is the rare occasion when he falls quiet, and then I start
worrying maybe he’ll say something, which terrifies me because I know that if I
hear what he has to say, I’ll go insane.
February 14
I was taking a
shower when it suddenly hit me that when the Galactic Battleship Yamato enters
warp speed, the commander shouts, “Go to warp!” the instant the curves on the
screen converge, but although the other guy shouts back “Warp!” right away, he
takes his time pulling the lever, which means it will be way too late. Not much
use worrying about it now, though.
February 15
No sign of
Little Desperado. Whenever I give something a name and start loving it, it
always disappears on me.
Night—drank shōchū.
Opened a packet of dried durian that someone had given me. Shut it two seconds
later.
February 17
Received an
e-mail from F. There were a number of full-screen photos of her little boy
attached, and a message that simply read, “He turned five!” F. and I worked for
the same company ages ago, but we were in different departments on different
floors, so we only talked once or twice; then all of a sudden, a few years ago,
she starts sending me these pictures of her son. Photos of him dressed up for
the Shichi-Go-San children’s festival; on his first day at nursery school; on a
school trip; at Disneyland—and in each and every one he’s just standing there
facing the camera. I delete them as soon as I get them, so they won’t eat up
the memory on my computer.
Translated a bit.
February 18
A teen group
like AKB48 shouldn’t surprise anybody. After all, there’s another slightly
older and sexier idol group, The Girls of Earthly Desire, which has 108
members, not just 48. When I try to convince people that their singing and
dancing really does eradicate the 108 earthly desires of Buddhism, though, they
just laugh.
February 19
H. phoned
demanding the translation. Haven’t been able to make any progress since the
point where the narrator starts burying her brother in the sand and her hatred
for him grows. Now translating makes my head ache, and the cicadas outside my
window send up a terrible racket every time I sit down to work.
February 21
It hit me that
the strange voice I heard walking home the other night might be the same one an
old classmate of mine, a girl by the name of O., heard outside the window of
the school lavatory when we were students. According to her story, she couldn’t
tell if it belonged to a girl or a boy, or even a human or an animal, and
although it sounded idiotic, it still sent a shiver up her spine. The voice
stopped when she threw open the window, and she couldn’t see anyone out there,
either.
What happened to O. after that? Guess
she switched schools.
February 22
Another e-mail
from F., identical to the one from a few days ago. Seems she just pressed
Resend. Delete.
February 24
Found some
gross-looking sweets in the supermarket that tasted even worse than they looked,
so I tried to compose a haiku for the occasion, but even a monkey could have
written something better than what I came up with: Dried persimmon chocolates /
Wish I hadn’t eaten you / Santa Maria! Fell into despair at my lack of talent.
February 25
Went to
Bamboro, a Chinese restaurant in Akasaka, with some people from S. firm.
Vinegared jellyfish vermicelli chili sauce broth dumplings dim sum squid celery
stir-fry preserved duck egg Shanghai crab beer beer beer lao chu lao chu lao
chu lao chu. After that we headed for Caravaggio, a bar that, like the lakes at
Lop Nur, fades in and out of existence depending on the temperature date time
yin yang five elements moon phase, but although the bar was there that night,
the owner was semitransparent, so we had to make the highballs cocktails
whiskey simple snacks ourselves and then deposit withdraw whatever we felt like
from the cash register.
Started raining around midnight so we
broke up early.
February 27
I’ve got this
secret thing for old apartment buildings with outside staircases, and I
discovered a perfect one today while strolling around the neighborhood: it had
a rusty washing machine sitting beside each door, umbrellas hanging from window
grates, a tricycle lying on its side (the kid’s name inscribed in Magic
Marker)—the kinds of objects I love, in other words—and I was just standing
there happily sucking it all in when it suddenly dawned on me that this might
be the Cancel-Out Apartments, but when I moved a few steps closer to get a
better look, I realized one of the first-floor doors was ajar, and that maybe I
was being watched, so I split.
February 28
Oda Kazumasa’s
songs were stuck in my head all morning.
I’m so happy
To have met you
I could kill you and kill you
And never get tired
Kinda like a fake Oda song.
No progress on the translation.
Cicadas.
March 1
Ever since the
voice called out to me that night, memories of the girls’ school I attended in
junior and senior high have been surfacing one after another.
When K.’s parents were living abroad
and she had to stay temporarily with her grandmother, all she got for breakfast
were sweet bean jelly rolls. One day the short-tempered N. got so upset at the
noise we were making she stood and shouted “Shut up!” except that it came out
as “Shup!” which promptly became her nickname. Y. sent out New Year’s cards
that read, “My nipples hurt when something rubs against them!”
March 2
My calendar
for today read “Meeting—2nd Floor—3 pm,” but although the handwriting was mine,
I had no memory of having written it, no idea where this second floor was, and
no clue who I was supposed to be meeting, which meant I had no way to check and
could only wait trembling at home, expecting the phone to ring any minute and
someone to start bellowing at me, but in the end, the phone never rang.
March 5
A beautiful
day, so I hung my bedding out to air. Mount Fuji was white in the distance.
Memories of school (continued):
Our Western-style school building was
over seventy years old and filled with architectural oddities. For example,
there was a short staircase that began in the strangest spot and led nowhere,
while tucked away in another location was this little forgotten room that still
appears in my dreams. The coolest place, though, my secret spot, was the
bathroom built directly above the stage in the auditorium; it was small, but
had one wall that was all glass, which let in loads of sunlight and left the
room looking bright and clean. It was always empty, too, no matter when you
went.
Which reminds me, on the far wall of
the innermost stall there was a switch box of some sort with a small metal
door, and on the door someone had written: “Break on through to the other side!”
I tried pulling on the door but it wouldn’t open.
March 7
The phrase “My
kryptonite.”
The phrase “With children, first a
girl, then a boy, then an eggplant.”
March 8
I’m raising a horse at home. Someone
gave it to me to look after. It’s awfully small, no bigger than a dog, with
short, short legs. Its hide is the color of liver and very baggy, and covered
with grains of rice so that even though it’s my pet I can’t pet it. It used to
spend all day tearing in and out of the house whinnying in this thin, agitated
voice, and it ate like there was no tomorrow. Anyway, one day I took a vise and
tried clamping the loose skin around the horse’s ribs. The horse didn’t resist
as much as I expected, but after that it pretty much stopped eating, and when I
looked down on it from my window I could see that it was getting skinnier and
skinnier and its legs were shaking like a leaf; yet even so, it didn’t try to
run away, but just kept staring at my face.
March 10
Went to get a
haircut. I’ve known T., my stylist, for a long time, and today when I walked
into his salon, he guessed right off the bat that I wanted him to “take it all
off,” which made me feel good. I hadn’t had it cut in three years so it had
grown past my shoulder blades, but one swipe of the scissors took care of that.
What a relief!
On my way home, people on the street
seemed to be freaking out for some strange reason. When I looked up I could see
a passenger airplane circling unusually low over the city. Everyone was
pointing at the sky and shouting something I couldn’t catch. The plane was
rolling and shaking and bouncing up and down. Then, as the crowd oohed and
aahed, it started making looping somersaults, progressively losing altitude
until it crashed just beyond the Laforet building. “The shock wave is coming!”
someone screamed, and everyone started running en masse toward Harajuku
Station, which meant I was forced to run with them, and it was at that point
that I woke up. I was home.
But how much of it was a dream? I
reached back to touch the hair that had hung down my back, but it was no longer
there.
March 11
Walking alongside
the school grounds on my way back from mailing a letter, I passed a place in
the wall that was growing hair. A big clump of messy, bleached-out hair that
didn’t look human at all.
Gave it a wide berth.
March 14
Another e-mail
from F. “Why did you delete the photos I took the trouble to send you?” she
complained. “You should look at them carefully and save them!” Once more, a
whole bunch of photos were attached. The amount of memory they take up is no
joke, though, so I deleted them without looking.
Cicadas more annoying than ever today.
March 15
Don’t know what he finds so damned
amusing, but my little brother is in great spirits, flinging himself against my
butt like crazy. Whap, whap.
March 16
Woke up in the
middle of the night, grabbed the flashlight, made my way to the closet at the
end of the hallway, opened the closet door, and trained my light on the door of
the switch box inside. Nothing was written on it.
Heading back to bed I heard someone
calling to me from somewhere. When I turned around to look, the battery on my
flashlight gave out, leaving me frozen like a statue there in the dark.
April–May
THE HAIR SALON
April 1
Went a bit
overboard cooking stew, so now it’s stew morning, noon, and night. I live to
consume stew. Stew is what gives my life meaning. Oh, glorious stew!
Translated a small amount. Cicadas in
full voice. Headache.
April 2
Went to the
kitchen, turned the faucet on full force, stuck my hands underneath, and cried
out, “Wara! Wara!”
Playing Helen Keller is what I do
these days when I get blocked.
April 6
Rain in the
afternoon.
Met T. from the P. firm, with whom I
share the same birthday, at a coffee shop in front of the station. Listened to
one sad story after another— how his girlfriend left him on Valentine’s Day,
how he sprained his ankle the first day he went skiing and spent the rest of
the trip in the hotel, how he lost his wallet, his glasses, and his memory in a
downtown bar. Then he stepped outside, opened his umbrella, and kabam!, the
thing fell apart. All because Pisces is under the curse of Saturn.
Had a long phone conversation with Y.
in the evening. She confessed to a mild but budding crush on Obama.
April 7
The long-dead
poet Chūya Nakahara creeps into a corner of my mind at off-guard moments these
days to read his poems. That alone wouldn’t bother me, but for some reason he
stutters terribly:
“F-f-f-foul m-m-melancholy
A s-s-sprinkling of s-s-snow”
Enough already, I say, whereupon he
casts me a sad and mournful look and departs.
Infinitesimal progress on the
translation. Cicadas.
April 8
I want to make you happy, happy,
ever so happy, the world outside our door is sand and more sand as far as the
eye can see, it cries as it whips against our walls, I want so to make you
happy I dance and spin around you, and each night while the sand cries I
somersault over your body, grab you by both wrists and whirl you around and
around, but when I set you down you lie there curled on your side, your round
back a small, hard shell.
April 9
In the
afternoon, a blossom-viewing party hosted by N., a writer. The magnificent
cherry tree in the park across the street from his house is in full bloom now,
so we all brought our favorite food and drink and frolicked beneath the
flowers. Since I was a bit late, the party was in full swing when I arrived.
When the sun was going down somebody wondered if there really might be a dead
body buried beneath the tree, as in the Motojirō Kajii short story, so we got a
shovel and began digging. We produced a hole about three feet deep, but no
corpse. Well then, what would happen with a living body? someone asked. So we
picked up my friend T. from the P. firm, who was passed out drunk nearby, and
planted him in the hole to find out. As far as we could tell, though, there was
no particular change in the blossoms. After that we took the party inside,
where we fell into a heated debate over whether two TV personalities—one a
middle-aged male musician, the other a mannish female fashion model—resembled
each other or not. Broke up regretfully with barely enough time to catch the
last train.
April 10
Early morning
dream: I slit the back of a frog about a foot and a half across with a knife to
find a huge tadpole inside. Aha, so that’s how it works! I thought.
Had a mild hangover all day.
April 15
I was walking
down Setagaya Boulevard when a waiter from the Indian restaurant where I eat
occasionally tore past me in hot pursuit of someone, his face livid with anger.
Must have been a customer who took off without paying, I thought, but when I
looked down the road in the direction he was running, no one was there.
April 16
Happy, happy, I want to make you so
happy in every way, I tumble about on top of you laughing, yet you lie there
motionless, your eyes tight shut, so I pry your eyelids open and look inside
and, what is this? Are you still not happy? Have my efforts been lacking?
Forgive me, please! For a second time, I take hold of your wrists, drag you
outside, and swing you around and around over the sand, but when I look back
our home is spewing sand from its doors, from its windows, from everywhere.
April 18
Woke to a
cloudless day. Mount Fuji white in the distance. I hang the futon out to air.
My sister, who is visiting Morocco on
a business trip, phones with all sorts of questions: “Does ‘blackmail’ mean the
same thing as ‘intimidation’?” “How do you say to ‘bluff’ someone in English?” “How
about ‘fudging the figures’?” What sort of business is she doing in Morocco
anyway?
A microscopic sliver of translation.
Cicadas. Headache.
April 21
H. phones to
press me for the translation. I offer an abject, groveling apology. Then I
explain to him that the stories in the collection—of the little brother growing
from the heroine’s hip, or her pet horse with the granular, sagging skin, or of
the lover being swung around in circles to make him happy—are literally driving
me crazy, and to make matters worse, every time I resume work the cicadas
outside my window start screeching though it’s still only spring; but he shrugs
off my litany of complaints, reassuring me in soothing tones that from what
he’s heard it’s an orthodox love story, that if I just stick with it I will
find my rhythm, that I’ve got to pull myself together. Then he hangs up.
April 24
The little brother growing from my
hip opens his perpetually red and crumpled face to let out another earsplitting
cry. Yet no one hears him but me. Sure, I could reach down and caress him with
my hand anytime I wanted. I could even bend over and kiss him. But I never
have.
April 26
I go get my
hair cut. The assistant who shampoos me tells me that the lever that sends
contestants down to hell on the Arcane Impersonations No One Can Understand game show is controlled by none other than the comedian Tetsuhei
Arita himself—a most significant fact.
Having my shoulder-length hair lopped
off—a most refreshing feeling.
April 27
Passed the
school grounds on my way back from posting a letter. That clump of bleached-out
hair is still sprouting from the wall in front of the school. In fact, it seems
to have somehow grown.
Gave it an even wider berth.
April 29
Ever since it
dawned on me that it might be the Cancel-Out Apartments, I’ve kept a
surreptitious eye on that nearby two-story apartment building with the outside
staircase. Since my first attempt to check it out failed when the residents
grew suspicious, I tried a different time of day and went in the late
afternoon.
The building is squeezed between two
tiny dirt parking lots facing a narrow lane, so that you can pretty much survey
the whole property by turning your head while you are “just passing by.” With
five apartments on the second floor and five more on the first, it perfectly
conforms to the supposed layout of the Cancel-Out Apartments. It looks
inhabited, with plastic umbrellas hooked on the window grates facing the
exposed corridor and washing machines standing beside each door, but the
extreme quiet of the place gives it the atmosphere of an abandoned building.
Making sure no one was nearby, I
approached the cluster of mailboxes at the side of the building. As with the
apartments, they were arranged in two rows, five on top and five underneath.
Assuming this was the Cancel-Out Apartments, no two boxes should have had the
same last name. The names were on yellowing, sometimes tattered paper attached
to rusty metal boxes whose gray paint was flaking, which made them hard to
read. The name Nagai was written in characters on the middle box of the top
row, while the box on the far left of the bottom row could be read either Nakai
or Nagai—part of the name had been penned in Magic Marker directly on the
painted metal, which had flaked badly, making it impossible to ascertain.
Predictably, I didn’t dare to look inside the box and find out, so I decided to
just call it a day.
A millibar of translation. Cicadas.
May 1
Spent the day
with an editor and salesperson from X. publishers visiting bookstores to
promote my recently launched translation. In most places, I would be escorted
to a storeroomlike office in the back of the store, where I would sit at the
corner of a worktable and sign copies and write short messages on cards to be
displayed with the books. They’d usually apologize for squeezing me in, but I
love cramped spaces, so I felt right at home. I was fine for the first ten
bookstores, but after twenty my hand was understandably tired, and after fifty
my mind was completely fogged over. Sometimes it felt like I’d signed the wrong
book; at other times that I’d signed the wrong name. So I called it a draw.
To celebrate the end of our hard day,
we set off for the Bar Caravaggio in Akasaka, but look as we might we couldn’t
locate it. It should have been between an old coffee shop and a nose, ear, and
throat clinic, but today the coffee shop and the clinic were pressed tight
together with not even an inch separating them. Oh well, we shrugged, the
Caravaggio is like that sometimes, so we headed off somewhere else without
prolonging the search.
May 3
Chūya Nakahara
showed up again. Perhaps he’d felt outmanned before, for this time he brought
another long-dead poet, Sakutarō Hagiwara, along with him. They both started
reciting their poems, Chūya’s habitual stutter now augmented by Sakutarō’s
nervous habit of overstressing the ends of his words. I found the whole thing
both depressing and irritating.
Oh no-no-nostalgic pa-pa-parachute
Good evening, good evening to
Yuyuyuyuyuayuayua
When I snapped, “Pipe down!” they both
left together, Sakutarō’s arm slung over the shoulder of the downcast Chūya. As
they made their exit, though, Hagiwara looked back over his shoulder and gave
me the evil eye.
No progress on the translation.
May 7
Another e-mail
from my former colleague F., the first in quite a while. From its size I could
tell that this one had even more photos attached than the ones before. I didn’t
want to look, but she can apparently tell—don’t ask me how—when I delete them
unseen, so I opened them while chanting the spell, “Face it, face it.” True to
form, the first photo contained a single line, “My son at seven, at the
Shichi-Go-San children’s festival,” while the scores of others, all of which
showed her son standing blankly in front of one place after another, went
unidentified. I still can’t understand why she does this. I mean, it wasn’t
that long ago she sent out photos announcing her son had turned five. So how can
he be seven already? He doesn’t seem to have gotten any bigger, though he does
look a bit unwell. Whatever. I delete them all.
May 9
I wake up in
the middle of the night feeling that my room has somehow changed. It appears I
fell asleep sprawled on my back on the bare tatami without having laid out the
futon. Yet I’m sure that I’d gone to bed. There’s what seems to be the beam
from a flashlight playing on the wall, and when I hold my breath I think I can
hear voices calling. At some point I fall back asleep, and when I wake up in
the morning everything is back to normal.
May 11
In the evening
I call T. from the P. firm at work. Someone else answers and tells me he hasn’t
been in for a while. When I ask if he’s been sick, whoever it is just hems and
haws. Come to think of it, am I sure someone dug him up the day of the
cherry-viewing party? I’d assumed they had, but maybe I was wrong. Did he join
us when we moved the party into the house? My memory is a blur.
May 16
I go get my
hair cut. It doesn’t seem that long since the last time, but what can I do—it
grows like crazy when I’m busy or stressed. The same assistant comes and stands
beside me while I’m waiting my turn, regaling me with a steady stream of
tidbits about what’s hot in the world of TV entertainers. I worry a bit, since
everyone else is busily sweeping up hair or carrying towels around, but then
maybe that’s his job.
I pass by the school grounds again on
my way home. Not only has the clump of hair grown even more, now it’s combed
out into a wave.
Hey there, are we seeing the same
stylist?
May 18
I stand before
my mirror holding a white handkerchief in front of my face. Then I pull it
down, slowly open my eyes, stare at myself in the mirror, and whisper, “Can
this really . . . be me . . .?”
These days, whenever I get blocked I
pretend to be a character from girls’ comics of the 1970s.
May 29
Clear weather.
Mount Fuji faint in the distance.
In the evening, I get swept up in a
party celebrating the launch of a new magazine. It’s held in a downtown art
gallery rented out for the occasion, and is a real zoo, about three hundred
people in all. I recognize quite a few faces. One of them looks like T. from P.
firm, so I go running over and, yes, that’s who it is. I was so worried, I say,
I thought maybe we’d all left you buried there under the tree. That’s crazy, he
says, they dug me out right away. Don’t you remember? When he laughs I see a
cherry petal stuck to his front teeth.
May 30
The phrase “The
walls have ears, Claude Ciari.”
The phrase “The peak of youthful
ardor, shins all hairy.”
May 31
Again, I wake
up in the middle of the night. I sense right away that this is the same place
as before. Straining my eyes to see, I lie there on my back in the dark,
holding my breath. The room seems about ten feet square, and smells of old
tatami mats and dusty curtains. As my eyes adjust to the darkness I can make
out the vague outline of something looming nearby. Someone is crouching there.
I stay still, and the shadow hesitantly reaches out to touch my hand. I feel
the small, soft, trembling palm of a child.
I gently squeeze back.
*Note: The italicized passages are inspired by Stacey
Levine’s collection My Horse and Other
Stories.
.jpg)