We, the Children of Cats (Found in Translation) Read online

  Praise for Tomoyuki Hoshino and We, the Children of Cats

  “I see [in Hoshino] an ability to truly think through fiction that recalls Kōbō Abe. This superlative ability makes even the most fantastical details and developments read as perfectly natural.”

  —Kenzaburō Ōe, Nobel Prize–winning author of Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids and Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness

  “Like a heat shimmer on a summer’s day, Tomoyuki Hoshino’s stories tantalize and haunt. From ‘Paper Woman’ to ‘A Milonga for the Melted Moon,’ Hoshino writes of people stranded between poles of reality and dream—with each option as uncertain as the other. Wonderfully translated, selected, and presented, this collection of works will be required reading.”

  —Rebecca Copeland, Washington University, author of Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan and translator of Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino

  “[Hoshino’s] stories are filled with images like sacred spaces: even as each seems perfectly self-contained, they secretly refuse their apparent closures, spinning forever across limitless expanses, dropping seeds along the way for further growth. As they travel always towards some distant other place, they live on through myriad forms that possess no tidy resolution, no real end.”

  —Mayumi Inaba, award-winning author of Hotel Zambia and Portrait in Sand

  “These wonderful stories make you laugh and cry, but mostly they astonish, commingling daily reality with the envelope pushed to the max and the interstice of the hard edges of life with the profoundly gentle ones.”

  —Helen Mitsios, editor of New Japanese Voices: The Best Contemporary Fiction from Japan and Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs: The Best 21st Century Short Stories from Japan

  “What feels most striking and praiseworthy about Hoshino’s work is how he deals with ambiguity—not as a fusion of multiple meanings, nor as their simple coexistence, nor as symbolic of meaning’s absence; rather, he deftly weaves these concepts together and then, in the space between them, makes his escape.”

  —Maki Kashimada, award-winning author of Love at 6000° and The Kingdom of Zero

  “The loosely linked stories collected in We, the Children of Cats home in on everyday events of millennial Japan only to slowly pan out onto alternate realities—voyages, crimes of passion, cultural histories of treason, sudden quarrels, and equally sudden truces. Bergstrom and Fraser’s translations brilliantly capture the emotional tones and shape-shifting nature of Hoshino’s language. These stories explore the longing to be somewhere, sometime, or even someone else so strongly that reality itself is, before you know it, transfigured.”

  —Anne McKnight, Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies at UCLA, author of Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity

  Some of the translations in this collection have appeared elsewhere in slightly different form and are reprinted with kind permission: “Chino,” published online by the Japanese Literature Publishing and Promotion Center (J-Lit Center, 2005); “Air” in Chroma: A Queer Literary and Arts Journal (Spring 2008); and “The No Fathers Club” in Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs: The Best 21st Century Short Stories from Japan (Boston: Cheng & Tsui, 2011).

  The stories and novellas in this collection were originally published in Japanese in the following venues: “Paper Woman” as “Kamionna” in Issatsu no hon (Asahi Shinbunsha, March 2000), reprinted in Warera neko no

  ko (Kōdansha, November 2006); “The No Fathers Club” as “Tetenashigo kurabu” in Bungei (Kawade Shobō, Spring 2006), reprinted in Warera

  neko no ko (Kōdansha, November 2006); “Chino” as “Chino” in Kawade Yume Mook: Bungei Bessatsu—Asian Travelers (Kawade Shobō, July 2000), reprinted in Warera neko no ko (Kōdansha, November 2006); “We, the Children of Cats” as “Warera neko no ko” in Shinchō (Shinchōsha, January 2001), reprinted in Warera neko no ko (Kōdansha, November 2006); “Air” as “Eaa” in Gunzō (Kōdansha, November 2006), reprinted as “Ea” in Warera neko no ko (Kōdansha, November 2006); “Sand Planet” as “Suna no wakusei” in Subaru (Shūeisha: March 2002), reprinted in Fantajisuta (Shūeisha, 2003); “Treason Diary” as “Uragiri nikki” in Bungei (Kawade Shobō, Summer 1998), reprinted in Naburiai (Kawade Shobō, 1999); “A Milonga for the Melted Moon” as “Toketa tsuki no tame no mironga” in Bungei (Kawade Shobō, Spring 1999), reprinted in Naburiai (Kawade Shobō, 1999).

  We, the Children of Cats: Stories and Novellas by Tomoyuki Hoshino Copyright © Tomoyuki Hoshino, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2006, 2012. Afterword and translation copyright © Brian Bergstrom, 2012 Translation for “Chino” copyright © Lucy Fraser, 2005

  This edition © 2012 PM Press

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

  ISBN: 978–1–60486–591–2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011939692

  Cover: John Yates / www.stealworks.com

  Interior design by briandesign

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  Contents

  PREFACE

  To All of You Reading This in English

  Stories

  Paper Woman (2000)

  The No Fathers Club (2006)

  Chino (2000)

  We, the Children of Cats (2001)

  Air (2006)

  Novellas

  Sand Planet (2002)

  Treason Diary (1998)

  A Milonga for the Melted Moon (1999)

  AFTERWORD

  The Politics of Impossible Transformation

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To All of You Reading This in English

  As you know, on March 11, 2011, an enormous earthquake struck eastern Japan. At the time, I was at home in Tokyo working on a novel. The shaking was unlike anything I’d experienced before. It went on and on, up and down and side to side, as if I were in a small boat tossed by angry waves; minutes passed, but still it didn’t stop. The book-cases and walls swayed like wind-buffeted trees.

  I’d never thought earthquakes were frightening, but in this moment, I felt true terror in my heart. This is how my life will end, I thought. I felt the strength leave my body, and, afraid I would collapse right there, I put my hand against the wall, using all my might just to get through it.

  As soon as the shaking subsided, I turned on the television. Tsunami warnings were sounding. The tsunami arrived unbelievably quickly. There was no sense of reality to it at all. It crashed over the coastline and rushed across rice fields with amazing speed. Images of it swallowing fleeing cars and fleeing people were broadcast live from helicopters. Watching them, I felt my heart break a little, somewhere deep inside.

  That wound has yet to heal. And if someone like me, shaken up in Tokyo and watching the tsunami on television, was so affected, how must it be for those the tsunami touched directly? When I think of them, my body trembles.

  Twenty years ago, I lived in Mexico, drawn there by a love of Latin American literature. Doing so taught me that what I saw before my eyes at any given moment was not the entirety of reality. Latin America is a place where, for good or for ill, extraordinary events ordinarily occur. I was frequently faced with absurd occurrences I could do nothing about, but on the other hand, it forced me to be creative and resilient as I confronted whatever may come next. I found my powers of imagination growing more expansive as I lived there in that society.

  Now, faced with this enormou
s earthquake and tsunami, what I need, as my heart threatens to break apart completely, is the will and imagination to confront another reality I can do nothing about. As I read back through the pieces in this anthology on the occasion of their translation into English, I felt this need all the more keenly. That’s why I write stories in the first place, I thought.

  In every story, the characters attempt to confront an unyielding reality using the power of their imaginations. The characters in these stories all share a certain measure of minority. This minority is invisible to the eyes of the majority. Which makes it as though it never was. But reality is made up of more than just what meets the eye. In these situations, those in minor positions call upon their powers of imagination to create spaces of belonging. This imaginative power creates worlds that affirm their being rather than deny it. With a strength that rivals that of reality itself.

  The earthquake and tsunami, as well as the resulting nuclear crisis, have transformed, in the blink of an eye, the position of the majority, who had been simply living their lives normally up till then, into that of the minority. And those who had already been living in minority positions have been driven to ones even more minor. Especially now, because the damage they’ve sustained has been so great, various people existing in positions of minority have disappeared entirely from the world’s view. Those calling for “reconstruction” imagine only the reconstruction of the majority, leaving those in the minority behind once again.

  Truth be told, after the quake, it hasn’t been uncommon for me to feel writing literature to be rather ineffective. Yet, at the same time, it is only by writing stories that I am able to inhabit a future at all.

  The stories included in this anthology are, without exception, ones for which I feel a deep affection. My fiction may be a bit different from the image that comes to mind when you think of modern Japanese literature. But these fictional worlds are minor Japanese realities (even as several have Latin America as their setting).

  My wish is for the words in these stories to overcome our various differences and lodge themselves within the bodies of all of you.

  Tomoyuki Hoshino

  June 2011

  Translated by Brian Bergstrom

  Paper Woman (2000)

  It’s been two years now since I became a novelist, and I’ve found myself thinking more and more about just who it is who reads the things I write. This may be simply due to the relatively poor sales of my own books, of course, but it may also be due in no small part to my recent pondering of what larger meaning a novel’s existence might bear. After all, statistically speaking, the number of people reading novels is decreasing, part of a general decrease in the sales of literature, but I think the real problem may be that fewer and fewer people really read any more, really consume literature as if printing the words on the interiors of their bodies.

  As I’ve continued my professional writing career, I’ve come to think of it as an art that wavers, like a heat shimmer, between joy at the prospect of becoming something else and despair at knowing that such a transformation is ultimately impossible. One could say that a novel’s words trace the pattern of scars left by the struggle between these two feelings. Which is why a novel should never be seen as a simple expression of an author’s self.

  For this reason, I use my novels to write about things other than myself. But I am nevertheless always aware that what I end up creating will never be more than a portrait of my own imperfect transformations, that what the reader is deciphering while reading my novels is merely my psyche. And as they do, they’ll also be reading their own psyches, which are likewise caught in the process of trying to become other than themselves. A true experience of reading is always located in the territory where these two forms of consciousness intermingle.

  The moment this intermingling occurs, a professional writer becomes a professional reader. I myself have written more than few critical essays about the work of others, and have even earned money reading the rough drafts of aspiring authors. In the majority of cases, what I find in their works is an arrogant assertion of the author’s self at the expense of all else. Or, alternatively, an author covertly draws attention to the spectacle of his or her attempt at transformation, thereby inadvertently creating a one-sided assertion of authorial self anyway. It’s been said that as the number of readers has dwindled the number of authors has swelled, and I would add that this is linked to the proliferation of ferocious posing among these authors. On the Internet, within fanboy culture, anyone can pose as anything. But I increasingly get the feeling that no one is truly attempting to become something else, or rather, that no one has anything in particular to aspire to be, that they don’t have any real idea what they want to become at all. It’s impossible for anyone who’s never truly attempted to become something else to comprehend the despair of inevitably finding oneself unable to. Someone who has never felt the despair of trying every means possible to do the impossible has no way to imagine the unhappiness of another. So there’s no reason to think such a person could ever truly write a novel.

  Of course, if one asked them, “What do you want to be?” or “What do you want to do?” one would receive perfectly normal answers, such as, “I want to become a creator, and work for myself,” or “I want to find a job that will allow me to maintain a stable household,” and such answers would indeed be the result of earnest consideration. But this resolve reveals its fundamental unsteadiness once push comes to shove, once one’s conviction to pursue whatever goal is forced to stubbornly weather seeming impossibility to persevere. One could say that most people are only living their lives halfway when compared to the passion of someone like the Paper Woman, whom I met a year and a half ago. Or at the very least they could be said to be missing out on an essential part of life.

  The Paper Woman was another of these writers attempting to become a novelist. She wrote a fantastical tale about a woman who could eat only paper and eventually became entirely composed of the stuff, and it moved me enough that I took it upon myself to contact her and set up a meeting.

  As I surveyed the teashop where we agreed to meet, I picked her out at a glance, saying to myself, “Aah, that has to be her.” She was as pale as if she were the woman in the story come to life, her short hair dyed a beautiful silver. Of course, her diet turned out to include more than just paper, and she brought Darjeeling and orange-marmalade-slathered scones to her lips with relish. “Do you sometimes dribble soy sauce onto sheets of paper and wrap them like seaweed around your rice?” I asked, and she replied with a touch of contempt. “I’m not a literal bookworm, I don’t actually eat paper. Besides, no matter how much paper a bookworm eats, it’s still just a worm in the end, no? Wanting to become paper and eating paper are two different things.”

  “Good point. If eating paper turned you into paper, all a little kid who wanted to be a soccer player would have to do was eat other soccer players to succeed.”

  “Have you eaten many authors, Mr. Hoshino?”

  “No, no, I’ve never spent any time wanting to become an author. Become a novel, maybe.”

  “If you’re still saying things like ‘I want to become a novel,’ you’ve got a long way to go, I’d say.”

  “Would you?”

  “I mean, I was thinking things like that when I was still in elementary school and keeping a diary. I realized that diaries were lies, that they were filled with omissions and inaccuracies, so if I wanted to write the details of my days precisely, down to the smallest second-to-second fluctuations in my mood, my life and my writing would have to overlap exactly. In other words, I’d have to become a novel.”

  “You were quite precocious.”

  “I was just a bookish little girl. And you were a late bloomer, right, Mr. Hoshino?”

  “So how is wanting to become paper different than wanting to become a novel?” I asked, getting a bit more serious.

  “If you took the matter a bit more to heart, I think you’d see what I mean for yourself. But to a
nswer you anyway, in elementary school I was working with some papier mâché and I realized that it was a lot like brains. You know how you make papier mâché, right? You soak newspaper in water until it gets soggy and starts to mash up, and then you add some glue. So, in other words, within this gluey substance are countless words and letters all smashed together. It’s like my brain as I read books and then think, my thoughts forming out of the mashed-up words I’ve put into my memory that I rearrange to make something new. Brains are just so much papier mâché.”

  “So your brain is hardened and stiff?”

  “I just have to make sure it isn’t exposed to the air. Anyway, I began to think of myself as formed out of papier mâché, which made me better able to understand how it must feel to be paper itself.”

  “Such anthropomorphism is quite typical of young girls.”

  “It’s not anthropomorphism. Pay attention. What I realized was that the feeling of having no feelings was how it felt to be paper. In other words, I was attracted to paper, but paper itself, as banal as it sounds, has no inner self, can only absorb characters and words into itself without assigning them meaning. That’s how I wanted to be, I realized. And I simultaneously realized that the more I wanted to be paper, the farther I got from actually being like it, which made me sad.”

  “So that’s why you wrote that story.”

  The little girl protagonist could only eat paper, which upset her stomach and made her pale and thin. One day she went to school and almost no one noticed her, and she was caught off-guard by the reflection she glimpsed of her profile in a window out of the corner of her eye. She was almost invisible from the side, as thin as a page. She began to worry that she was more paper than girl.

  “Have you ever thought much about mermaids, Mr. Hoshino?”

  “Well, to a certain extent. There’s a part of me that’s always been rather enamored by fish. I even wrote a story called ‘The Mermaid Myth’ when I was in grade school.”