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

  “You should publish it sometime! I went through a Mermaid Girl phase myself, though it was in high school in my case. My boyfriend at the time had what you might call a ‘mermaid fetish,’ to the point that everyone called him Merman, actually, and he always told me that I’d make a good mermaid. It sounds like a joke when I say it now, but at the time I did all these things to please him, growing my hair out until it reached my butt, wearing a bra made of scallop shells, making myself a spangled tailfin. I would invite Merman over when my parents were away and wait for him on the bed dressed like that.”

  “Costume play, huh? Do you have any pictures?” “God forbid.”

  “And you’re right, it makes for a funny story, but you can also feel the special sadness of the mermaid myth, too. What makes them so attractive, so moving to contemplate?”

  “It’s the impossibility. But it’s also a gender issue, I’d say. These days there are all sorts of people who are neither man nor woman, or who are mixed racially, and it seems like it wouldn’t be too huge a leap to think about humans mixing with animals, or even mixing with plants and trees. We can imagine these things precisely because of the times we live in. Mermaids are simply ahead of their time. It makes their sorrow all the more palpable.”

  “I think I understand. You want to become a hybrid child of human and paper.”

  “Indeed. Well, paper doesn’t have blood, so I couldn’t really blend with it that way. I think I want to intermingle at a level deeper than blood.”

  “So, at a spiritual level? Though paper doesn’t really have a ‘spirit,’ either, so …”

  “It’s difficult, right? What does it really mean to be paper? There are so many things I’ve yet to learn.”

  It was a few days afterward that we began living together, and it was four months after that when we married. I called her Paper. Indeed, she became my Paper Doll.

  It didn’t feel as if I’d literally wedded myself to paper, of course, but I was happy all the same. Paper conformed to my personality with almost alarming speed and soon came to resemble me almost exactly. It wasn’t just a matter of liking the same food or music or places. She began to resemble me in all ways, getting hungry at the same time I did, growing annoyed at the same things and in the same way, using the same words and phrases I would when discussing a movie we’d just seen. When I’d display my pleasure at this, she’d just reply happily, “I have a lot more blank pages left in me!”

  And truly, I was happy and comfortable. But I worried that I was the only one who really was. Was Paper able to tell that in my heart of hearts I didn’t really feel that she was paper, and did this make her sad? And was she on the verge of slipping into a vortex of depression from that very emotion, since feeling sadness was itself simply yet more proof that she wasn’t really paper?

  So I made every effort to treat Paper like actual paper. I got a hint from a British movie I saw for an erotic game we could play. We called it “The Earless Hōichi Game.” I’d use a variety of pens and brushes to write stories all over Paper’s skin. At first this tickled her, but soon Paper’s pale skin would grow flushed and sweaty, her breathing ragged. Goosebumps would appear and she would murmur hoarsely, and from time to time she’d open her eyes and watch my hand move across her, trembling as she did. When I’d still my hand and read what I’d written aloud, she’d be overcome again, her body twisting and turning, gripped with a new type of excitement. There was no need to make her earless like the real Hōichi, so I used a fine-tipped pen to inscribe the lobes and curved inner surface of her ears. She was especially sensitive there, and seemed to orgasm under my pen.

  I, too, was filled with an uncommon pleasure as I wrote. Egged on by the heat that would rise from Paper’s body, from the perfume of her sweat and other fluids, from the sound of her moans, I would write and write and write. My whole body would flush with heat as a tingling pleasure engulfed it, and my nerves grew so sensitive that I could no longer bear to wear clothes. At the same time, I felt a clarity within me that made me feel like I was not one man but ten. Was this what omnipotence felt like? Writing was making me all-powerful.

  We’d end the game when I finished writing, or when I’d run out of space on her body, or when one of us grew too tired to go on. And that was when I’d punish Paper. If you were really paper, you’d feel nothing, you’d just lie there and allow yourself to be written on. You’re a counterfeit Paper Woman. You don’t deserve to be written on. I’m erasing it all. Berating her like this, I’d dunk her in the tub and wash her body clean. Paper would always weep then, wrenchingly, despairingly, and murmur her desire to be tattooed.

  Surprisingly, Paper would remember the things I wrote across her body perfectly. By “perfectly,” I mean down to the exact characters I chose. She claimed to remember them with her skin. She said the feeling of the pen moving across her skin would return sometimes, and even though she fought against it, she’d feel pleasure as it did. So I’d type what she told me I wrote on her into my word processor. Soon our “Earless Hōichi Game” became the method by which I wrote everything. I became unable to write anything that didn’t have Paper lying beneath it. I wrote my stories during this period as if painting them. And you could say that Paper was my muse in this sense.

  Our tragedy, as is usual with these things, began with Paper’s pregnancy. We’d been having sex without taking precautions since even before we got married. So it was hardly a shock when we got the news eight months after the wedding, but Paper became withdrawn nonetheless, sighing to herself while gazing out at the setting sun from the veranda. I tried to placate her at first, saying things like, “It’s perfectly natural that paper would become pregnant,” or, “A child of paper might turn out to be paper too,” but Paper would just look up at me and say, “That’s not what I’m concerned about,” refusing my comfort.

  “You know I don’t literally want to take the shape of paper. Don’t talk to me like a child.”

  “I’m sorry. I guess I just overestimated how alike we’d become, thinking we’d merged completely, body and soul. It seems I’ve been neglecting my efforts to get even closer to you.”

  “Don’t say such things. It makes me want to die. It’s me who’s lost the ability to become you.”

  “What are you talking about? Your ability is nearly supernatural!”

  “But I understand now. I’ve lost my ability to be made into things. So I’ve gotten pregnant. Becoming a mother is the same as becoming an author. I can no longer just accept the words of others, now I have to produce my own. My time as paper has come to an end.”

  I understood Paper’s sadness. It was the same as the terror that haunted me as a writer. One trades one’s self-hood for the ability to write. It’s the choice one makes the moment one decides to be an author. Or, not just an author. Taking one’s place in the world involves a choice like this for everyone; no one is exempted.

  “If that’s how you really feel about being pregnant, maybe it would be better to get an abortion. I’d feel sorry for the child.”

  “I can’t do that. I’ve made the decision to accept anything, to hybridize spiritually, physically, in every sense, and so I can’t decide to expel something from me as if cleansing my blood. It’s not our place to decide who deserves pity.

  “Tomoyuki, it is up to you to save me.”

  “I want to become more paper-like too, just like you.”

  Paper ended up loving the little boy she birthed and raised. Naturally, she didn’t try to make him into paper, and we gave him a normal enough name, Kazuyoshi, by reversing the characters for Hōichi. I helped her raise him too, of course, and while he slept I’d use Paper as paper like always, caressing her with my pen, drawing illustrations and completing manuscripts on her body, reading her favorite stories to her as she closed her eyes to relax. In order to become more like paper myself, or, to put it more precisely, to become more like Paper as she strove to become more paper-like, I began to read much more than I had previously. I read all the b
ooks Paper told me she’d read, one after another. I tried to guess what she was thinking when she stared blankly into space, using all the information about her that I’d gleaned to attempt to replicate her thoughts down to the letter. Whenever I’d succeed in expressing Paper’s feelings even better than she could, or supply her with the exact word she was grasping for, she’d smile like an artificial flower blooming underwater. I loved this smile of hers above all.

  Even so, the void inside Paper never filled. Its edges spread wider and wider, and I found myself unable to keep up. Paper taught Kazuyoshi words, and though he couldn’t speak yet, he could recognize and point at them with his finger, but as she stared at her child trying to vocalize, her expression would darken, the skin on her face would harden, and she’d appear to fall into that deep hole within herself out of which she was unable to crawl. Perhaps taking after his mother, Kazuyoshi’s ability to memorize words was astounding. But this seemed only to add, however slightly, to Paper’s sadness. When I asked about it, Paper told me that faced with her child’s genius, the shining white of the blank pages in her memory would dim, seem dingy. “My pages are ripping out,” she’d lament, weeping.

  “Don’t the pages filled with writing outnumber the ones ripping out?”

  “What good is that? What good is a book with missing pages?”

  “Paper wears out. It’s a mistake to think that you can keep it pristine forever.”

  “I want to be a perfect archive, though. For Kazuyoshi.”

  “A library of everything? A famous author once wrote that you’d have to become the whole world to become a perfect archive.”

  “I know that. Look who you’re talking to, I’m the woman who told you that in order to keep a perfect diary she’d have to become one.”

  “But a person cannot become a world. A person can never be any more than just a part of one.”

  “You’ve become quite a degraded being, haven’t you? I don’t think you could get any more broken down than you are now!”

  “I’m just an ordinary man. That’s why I can understand your pain at not being able to truly become paper, right? It’s not just you, Paper, anyone can feel this way, be gripped with regret and sadness at the prospect of never truly being able to understand another person’s feelings completely. As an ordinary man, I can want to understand you as much as I can, become you as much as I can, and still I can’t avoid reaching the limit of my ability to do so. But isn’t reaching this limit satisfaction enough?”

  “It didn’t matter who it was, Merman or anyone else: all I ever wanted was to understand everything there was to understand about the people important to me. I want to understand the you that even you don’t understand. I use words to absorb things into myself. If I could really become paper, really become a book, I’d be able to absorb all of the people important to me into myself. But I can’t become that kind of paper, so there’s no way I can become you the way I want to. And I can’t bear to be such a flawed model for Kazuyoshi. My very existence has lost its meaning.”

  “I still need you, Paper. You are the only thing that allows me to write. I can only commune with things outside myself through writing. I’m a limited, unremarkable man, so I still need words to do this. And paper.”

  It became a daily chore to convince Paper to go on. All my time and energy were exhausted just with childcare and stabilizing Paper’s emotions, so nothing was left over to devote to stroking Paper with my words. And Paper, in turn, took this cessation of my pen’s play across her skin to mean that her utility in even this arena had come to an end, agitating her even more. So I pushed myself to write something, anything on Paper’s skin at least once every other day, no matter how tired I was. But as I scrawled these pale approximations of the sentences that used to flow across her, Paper would feel the difference on her skin and her expression would cloud. And eventually, my exhaustion rendered me unable to produce any more words at all. In the end, the mere sight of Paper’s tired, lackluster skin would fill me with dark irritation.

  Paper, for her part, was growing visibly emaciated. Her hair whitened even without her bleaching it, and it would fall out like withered grass if brushed too hard. Her appetite disappeared as well, and soon she resembled nothing so much as a collection of bones and dehydrated skin. Her tongue grew mossy, her eyes perpetually widened in seeming fright, her gaze fixed. This drastic change occurred so quickly I didn’t even have time for it to sadden me.

  It was about a month ago that strange words began to flow from Paper’s mouth. I should have taken more notice then. I’d been pouring all my energy into writing on Paper’s “human parchment” when she suddenly murmured, water definitely flow definitely insect. Though she sometimes moaned or made other sounds during our writing sessions, we never conversed, so this brought me up short. Running her fingers along the folds in the skin around her pelvis, she continued, murmuring, yo e ro sun, just nonsense syllables. “What is it?” I asked, and she replied, “I see characters, characters besides the ones you’ve written,” and then she started pointing to the words I’d just written on her. “Look, you wrote the water radical, , right here, and ‘definitely,’ , here. Put them together and you get the character for ‘flow’: . And below that, look, combine that ‘u’ with the ‘definitely,’ plus ‘insect’ and you get ‘honey’ ! And over here, along the left crease of my groin, yo sun combines and becomes ‘investigate’: !” But all I saw where she pointed were so many wrinkles. Every time she moved, these wrinkles would shift, and it seemed that they’d form new words for her to read. Wa ki shi nichi yon mata na sai hi, she’d burble, taking apart the characters for “chatterbox blossom” I’d just written, and soon I couldn’t take any more. I was gripped with despair. I took a sleep mask I’d been given on an airplane from my dresser to place over Paper’s eyes and dressed her in clothes that exposed the least amount of skin possible.

  It was around that time that I started to seriously consider tattooing Paper. I thought that if the words on her skin were fixed and meaningful, she’d stop getting so caught up in the chaos of the characters’ formation, and her mind would grow more ordered as well. I decided to write out a translation of Don Quixote, a book we both esteemed above all others, in as fine a print as I could manage, then find a good tattoo artist to complete my plan.

  But it was already too late. One day, Paper was dozing in a sunbeam on the living room floor, scratching absently at her dry, nearly eczematic skin, when she suddenly informed me, “I think I’ve finally completed my transformation into paper.” And thereafter, I was forbidden to write on her, or touch her skin, or even enter her room. Outside the times she needed to take care of the bare minimum of her bodily needs, Paper remained holed up in her room, holding Kazuyoshi in her arms and reading to him from books only she could see. Weeping, I ended up having to enlist the aid of the tattoo artist to tie Paper naked to a bed and force sleeping pills into her mouth, and thus we were able to finally tattoo her with Don Quixote, starting with the first chapter.

  Paper remained docile during the tattooing even after she woke up. Though she’d sometimes moan in pain, she also read along as the words were drilled into her skin, laughing at the characters’ antics. This was the final step on the journey Paper had undertaken to connect with the world solely through books. Though my passion failed to even approach Paper’s, I still embraced a similar desire to hers as an author, so I vowed in my heart to pour as much energy into my future tappings at my computer as Paper was devoting to her body now.

  Paper wanted her whole body covered, but I decided to leave her face blank, telling her she could always fill it in later. The words Don Quixote: The Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha ran down her backbone. “Let’s compare spines!” exhorted Paper, so we lined her up with the new Don Quixote translation that had just come out from Iwanami Press and took a picture. Of course we couldn’t fit the entire thing on her body, but I assured her that we’d try to fit more onto her in the future.

  Characters inke
d in midnight blue now covered Paper’s body like a swarm of tiny insects. Her body as she stood palms out, arms spread wide, looked like a jacaranda tree in full bloom, the dark blue seeming almost to glow. Transfixed by the sight, I kissed the lines of text that striped her skin. I ran my tongue along them as if using it to read. Goosebumps appeared just as they had when we’d first begun to live together, and she sighed heavily. I felt satisfied, as if I’d somehow become like Paper as well as she completed this final step in her transformation. “I am paper!” exulted Paper loudly. I nodded my agreement.

  The next day, I headed to the clinic at Paper’s request to take Kazuyoshi to get his DPT vaccination. I did a little shopping too, and ended up returning home about four hours later. I knew something was wrong as soon as I opened the door. I was greeted by the thick odor of petroleum. Paper’s figure, standing in the living room and silhouetted in the light of its southern exposure, glowed bluely. Before I had time to say a single word, Paper struck a match and lit her gasoline-soaked hair. Faster than the blink of an eye, flames engulfed her head and rose toward the ceiling. Fire leapt up in front of me, too, even as I started to run toward her. Paper spread her flames to the gasoline-soaked surroundings. All I could do was clutch Kazuyoshi to me and retreat as I screamed incoherently into the flames. Kazuyoshi started screaming too, as if he were also on fire. Paper’s voice cried out, “At last! I’m so happy! I am finally, truly paper—look at me burn!” Brushing embers from me, I watched as the blue-black writing melted into the oils bubbling up from her skin and transformed into flame and smoke. “No, no, this is wrong!” I wailed, sobbing. You’re wrong, there is no paper, no words that exist in a state of perfection, pristine and hidden from human eyes, such paper is not really paper at all, you have me, you have Kazuyoshi, we can read you, we can write on you, we can still give you meaning, you know the promise of eternity is a lie. But my words failed to reach Paper. She collapsed into the flames and burned up as I watched. Fleeing the spreading fire, I finally ran out the door, delivering myself and Kazuyoshi into the embrace of the silver-suited firemen rushing to the scene.