The Emissary Read online

  The Emissary

  Also by Yoko Tawada

  Available from New Directions

  The Bridegroom Was a Dog

  Facing the Bridge

  Memoirs of a Polar Bear

  The Naked Eye

  Where Europe Begins

  The Emissary

  Still in his blue silk pajamas, Mumei sat with his bottom flat on the tatami. Perhaps it was his head, much too large for his slender long neck, that made him look like a baby bird. Hairs fine as silk threads stuck to his scalp, damp with sweat. His eyes nearly shut, he moved his head as if searching the air, trying to catch on his tympanic membrane the scraping of footsteps on gravel. The footsteps grew louder, then stopped. The sliding door rattled like a freight train, and as Mumei opened up his eyes, morning light, yellow as melted dandelions, poured in. The boy threw back his shoulders, puffed out his chest and stuck out both his arms like a bird spreading its wings.

  Smiling, deep wrinkles around his eyes, Yoshiro came closer, his shoulders heaving. No sooner had he lowered his head, lifting a foot to take off a shoe, than beads of sweat dripped from his forehead.

  Every morning, Yoshiro rented a dog from the Rent-a-Dog place on the corner to run with along the riverbank for about half an hour. When the water level was low, the river looked like silver ribbons that stretched out much further than you’d expect. Long ago, this sort of purposeless running had been referred to as jogging, but with foreign words falling out of use, it was now called loping down, an expression that had started out as a joke meaning “if you lope your blood pressure goes down,” but everybody called it that these days. And kids Mumei’s age would never have dreamt that adding just an e in front of it the word lope could conjure up visions of a young woman climbing down a ladder in the middle of the night to run away with her lover.

  Yet even now, when foreign words were rarely used, the walls of the Rent-a-Dog store were still plastered with the katakana script used to write them. When Yoshiro had just started loping down and wasn’t sure how much speed he could manage, he’d first rented a Yorkshire terrier, thinking a small dog might better, but then he’d found it much too fast. He’d stumbled, almost falling, gasping for breath as the dog pulled him along, turning its head now and then, cheekily holding its snout high with a self-satisfied air as if to say, “How’s that for speed?” The following morning he’d tried a dachshund that turned out to be so lazy it had sunk to the ground after the first two hundred yards or so, forcing Yoshiro to drag it all the way back to the Rent-a-Dog place.

  “Some dogs sure don’t like to go for a walk,” he’d griped as he returned the animal.

  “A what? A walk? Oh, yeah, a walk, ha, ha, ha,” laughed the man behind the counter, finally catching on. It was a superior sort of laugh, directed at this old geezer who still used outdated expressions like a walk. The shelf life of words was getting shorter all the time — it wasn’t only the foreign ones that were falling out of use. And some words that had disappeared after being labeled “old-fashioned” had no heirs to take their place.

  A week before he’d rented a German shepherd, which had been just the opposite of the dachshund; in fact, that dog was so well trained he made Yoshiro feel inferior. Yoshiro could run at top speed until he was so exhausted he’d be dragging his feet, barely moving, but whatever the pace, the shepherd stayed with him, right at his side. When Yoshiro looked at him the dog would flash back a glance as if to say, “How am I doing? Perfect, wouldn’t you say?” Disgusted by all this exactitude, Yoshiro firmly resolved never to rent another German shepherd.

  So Yoshiro had never found his ideal dog, and yet when the man behind the counter asked “Which breed do you prefer?” he was secretly pleased with himself, the way he hemmed and hawed, unable to come up with a reply.

  In his youth, Yoshiro had prided himself on always having an answer ready when someone asked who his favorite composer or designer was, or what kind of wine he preferred. Confident in his good taste, he had poured time and money into surrounding himself with things that would show it off. Now he no longer felt any need to use taste as the bricks and mortar for a structure called “individuality.” Though shoes were still important, he no longer chose them as a means of asserting his identity. The Idaten shoes he was now wearing were a new line recently marketed by the Tengu Company — extremely comfortable, they resembled straw sandals. The Tengu Company was based in Iwate Prefecture, and inside each shoe Iwate was written in India ink with a brush, followed by the kana for ma and de.1 The younger generation, who no longer studied English, interpreted the “made” on old “Made in Japan” labels in their own way.

  In high school, his feet had seemed almost like foreign appendages the way they kept on growing, leaving the rest of his body behind, with soft, easily punctured skin that made him seek out brand-name foreign shoes to keep them covered with thick, hard rubber. While working for the company he’d joined after university, he had always worn heavy brown leather shoes to hide the fact that he didn’t intend to stick around very long. After publishing his first novel, he had spent part of the royalties on a pair of hiking boots. Before leaving home, even if he was only going to the neighborhood post office, he would lace them up tight in case he got stranded somewhere.

  It wasn’t until he was past seventy that his feet felt happiest in wooden or straw sandals. This sort of footwear left his insteps exposed to rain and mosquitoes, yet as he gazed down at the bare skin, quietly enduring all these dangers, he thought, “These feet are just like me,” and a desire to run welled up inside him. He’d been looking for something akin to straw sandals when he came across these shoes, made by Tengu, Inc.

  Stumbling as he took his shoes off, Yoshiro rested a hand on the wooden pillar to steady himself, feeling the grain of the wood under his fingers. The years are recorded in rings inside the trunk of a tree, but how was time recorded in his own body? Time didn’t spread out gradually, ring after ring, nor was it lined up neatly in a row; could it just be a disorderly pile, like the inside of a drawer no one ever bothers to straighten? The thought made him stumble again; this time he put his left foot down to steady himself.

  “Seems I’m still not very good at standing on one leg,” he muttered to himself, prompting Mumei to scrunch up his eyes, lifting his nose slightly as he asked, “Great-grandpa, are you trying to be a crane?” The moment he spoke, the boy’s head, which had been bobbing around gently like a balloon, abruptly stopped, settling into its proper place on top of his spinal cord as a mischievous, sweetly sour look appeared in his eyes. For a moment, his great-grandson looked so much like a little Buddha it rattled Yoshiro, leading him to bark in as harsh a tone as he could manage “Are you still in your pajamas? Hurry up and get dressed!” He yanked open the dresser drawer, where the child’s underwear and school clothes, neatly folded into a square the night before, were patiently awaitng their master’s call. Mumei always worried about his clothes, afraid they’d get up and leave in the middle of the night. He’d be beside himself, picturing his shirt downing cocktails in some nightclub, his trousers dancing up a storm until they finally traipsed back home, dirty and wrinkled. Which was why Yoshiro always made sure they were safely locked up in the drawer before he went to bed.

  “Get dressed by yourself — I’m not helping you this time.”

  Plunking the clothes down in front of his great-grandson, Yoshiro went to the bathroom to splash his face clean with cold water. Wiping his face with a thin Japanese cotton towel, he stared at the wall in front of him. There was no mirror. He wondered how long it had been since he had seen his own image. Until he was in his eighties, he had checked his face every morning, trimming his nose hairs if they were too long, putting camellia sa
lve on the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes if the skin was dry.

  Yoshiro draped the little towel over the laundry pole in the garden, securing it with a clothespin. He wasn’t sure when they had stopped using plush, Western-style bath towels. They’d taken so long to dry there were never enough. Japanese-style towels, on the other hand, were so thin and light you could just hang them over the pole where they’d catch the wind, flapping gently and before you knew it they were dry. Long ago Yoshiro had been in thrall to those huge, heavy bath towels. Every time he used one he would stick it in the washing machine, tossing handfuls of laundry detergent in after it, but those days now seemed like a joke. Spinning all those heavy towels around in its belly was agony for the poor washing machine — each one would die of sheer exhaustion after a few years. Hundreds of thousands of dead washing machines had sunk to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to become capsule hotels for fish.

  Sandwiched in between the eight-mat room and the kitchen was a room with a wooden floor about six and a half feet wide in which a light foldout picnic table and folding chairs like the ones anglers use were set up. As if to add to the gay summer excursion atmosphere, on the table was a thermos emblazoned with a picture of a raccoon dog with a huge dandelion sticking out of it.

  Recently all dandelions had petals at least four inches long. Someone had even submitted one of these jumbo dandelions to the annual Chrysanthemum Show at the Civic Center, giving rise to a debate over whether it should be recognized as a chrysanthemum. “Oversized dandelions are not chrysanthemums — merely mutations,” asserted one faction, while another charged that “mutation” was a pejorative term, further enflaming the war of words. Actually, the word mutation was rarely used anymore, having been replaced by the more popular environmental adaptation. With most plants growing larger and larger, if the dandelion alone had stayed small it would have ended up like a kept woman, hiding away in the shadows. It had simply grown larger in order to survive in this new environment. Yet there were other plants that had chosen to survive by getting smaller. A new species of bamboo, no larger than a person’s little finger when fully grown, had been named “the pinky bamboo.” With trees this small, if the Moon Princess from the Woodcutter’s Tale came down to earth again to be discovered shining inside a bamboo, the old man and woman would have to crawl on their hands and knees peering through magnifying glasses to find her.

  Among the anti-dandelion faction were those who said, “The chrysanthemum, that noble flower chosen for the Imperial crest, cannot be put in the same category as a weed.” Whereupon the Dandelion Support Association, comprised mainly of members of the Brotherhood of Ramen Workers, fired back with the famous Imperial decree that “There is no such thing as a weed,” which finally silenced their enemies, ending the seven-month-long Chrysanthemum-Dandelion controversy.

  For Yoshiro, one look at a dandelion was enough to bring back childhood memories of lying in a grassy field gazing up at the sky. The air was warm, the grass cool. He heard birds chirping far away. Turning his head to one side, he would see a dandelion in bloom, looming just slightly above his eyes. Sometimes he would stick out his lips like a bird’s beak to give it a kiss, then suddenly sit up, looking around to make sure no one had seen.

  Mumei had never once played in a real field. Even so, he seemed to have an image of a field he carefully cultivated in his mind.

  “Let’s buy some paint for the walls,” he had said suddenly, several weeks earlier. Not catching his meaning, Yoshiro had asked, “The walls? They’re still clean enough, don’t you think?”

  “We can paint them blue, like the sky. With pictures of clouds, and birds, too.”

  “You want to have a picnic indoors?”

  “Well, we can’t have one outside, can we?”

  Yoshiro swallowed hard. In a few years’ time, perhaps, they would no longer able to leave the house, and would have to be satisfied with a life surrounded by outdoor scenes painted on walls. Trying his best to look happy, he replied, “Good idea. I’ll see if I can find some blue paint.” If the idea of living under virtual house arrest hadn’t occurred to Mumei, there was no need to destroy his innocence.

  Because he didn’t get along with chairs very well, Mumei always took his meals sitting cross-legged on the tatami, eating from a lacquer tray with a swirling design of the famous Naruto whirlpool. He appeared to be playing make-believe, acting the role of a feudal lord. He also did his homework sitting on the tatami at his low desk by the window. Even so, he protested vehemently whenever Yoshiro said, “Since we don’t really use the table and chairs, why don’t we give them away?” Mumei may not have needed them as furniture, yet the table and chairs inspired him, calling forth images of a long forgotten time, or of faraway lands that he would probably never visit.

  The paraffin wrapping sounded like a sudden shower when Yoshiro peeled it back to get out a loaf of rye bread. It was Shikoku-style German bread, charred the color of midnight and heavy as granite. The crust was hard and dry, the inside soft and moist. This faintly sour black bread was called “Aachen,” written with Chinese characters that meant “Pseudo Opium.” The baker had named each variety of bread he baked after a German city, which he wrote in Chinese characters with roughly the same pronunciation, so that Hanover meant “Blade’s Aunt,” Bremen “Wobbly Noodles,” and Rothenberg “Outdoor Hot Springs Haven.” The poster on the bakery door said, “So many kinds of bread. Seek out the one that suits your taste,” a hollow slogan that got on Yoshiro’s linguistic nerves, yet looking at the baker’s thick, doughy earlobes always brought back his sense of trust. They would no doubt be delicious kneaded and baked; the longer you chewed, the sweeter they would taste. The baker was “young elderly,” a phrase that had once cracked people up but was now standard usage. People weren’t even called “middle-aged elderly” nowadays until they were well into their nineties, and the baker was barely into his late seventies.

  Wanting to linger on your futon a few minutes past the time you have to get up is perhaps only human; if so, there was nothing human about this baker. Every morning at exactly four o’clock, without the aid of an alarm clock, he leapt out of bed like a jack-in-the-box propelled by a tightly coiled spring. Then, striking a match four inches long, he lit a candle, two inches in diameter and four inches tall, which he put in a candle holder to light the way as he stepped into his pitch-black kitchen. Though he worked there every day, each morning he felt as taut and determined as if he were entering a sacred temple for the first time. He could tell from a slight warmth in the air that while he was asleep, someone in this very space had added yeast to invisible dough, let it rise, then lovingly baked it for him. He was sure that it was this invisible night bread — bread that would never be sold — that made his daytime bread possible. Its warmth and aroma were gone in moments, and although he never saw who baked the night bread, he was certain it was this mysterious being that kept him from feeling lonely as he started his solitary work.

  Because the bakery opened at 6:15 a.m. and closed at 6:45 p.m. some people suspected that the baker had once worked in a school, but this schedule was simply the result of his having measured the time each separate task in the bakery took, starting from 4:00 a.m. when he got up. If a corporation decides its employees are to start work at 8:30 a.m. they all have to be there, sleepy or not, but the baker followed rules he had made up himself.

  The bakery had one other employee who, like Yoshiro, was over a hundred years old. A small man, he darted about the shop like a weasel. As Yoshiro was watching him one day, the baker approached to whisper in his ear, “He’s my uncle. Says anyone over a hundred doesn’t need to rest anymore. When I ask him if he’d like to break for tea he gets mad and yells, ‘Young people these days spend more time on breaks than they do working.’ Scolds me for even suggesting it.”

  Nodding vigorously, Yoshiro replied, “Old people have always complained about the young — seems to be good for them — take an old man’s
blood pressure after he’s gone on about kids today for a while — it’s always lower than before.”

  Looking enviously at Yoshiro, elderly enough to dispense with adjectives like “young” or “middle-aged,” the young-elderly baker said, “Actually, my uncle’s blood pressure is lower than mine. Doesn’t take medicine either. You look like yours is low, too. Watching my uncle work it’s hard to believe that youngsters used to retire in their sixties.”

  “Retirement — what an odd system, but it was important back then, as a way of handing jobs over to younger people.”

  “A long time ago, when I was a painter, it made me kind of proud to think I could never retire.”

  “So you gave up painting?”

  “Yes. I used to paint landscapes in oils, but some art critic would write, ‘This scene definitely looks like the Swiss Alps’ or something, and that always got me worried. No matter what I painted, somebody would think it was a foreign place. Downright scary. I decided to take cover in the family business, and now I’m here for good, baking bread. Of course bread originally came from Europe, but for some reason it’s still allowed.”

  “To think people used to say French bread, and even English bread . . . Sounds so Japanese now — really takes you back, doesn’t it?”

  Yoshiro had lowered his voice when mentioning foreign countries and, glancing around to make sure no one was listening, the baker said, “Actually, we used to call this German bread. Officially it’s Sanuki bread now . . . people don’t seem to remember that bread is a foreign word.”

  “Bread reminds you of faraway lands — that they exist, I mean — that’s what I like about it. I’d rather eat rice, but bread sets you dreaming. So keep up the good work.”

  “Sure thing. But you know baking bread is hard work. I’m always straining my muscles, or maybe my tendons even. My arms feel so heavy when I’m lying down. Sometimes I wish I could detach them when I go to bed at the shoulder like a robot.”