1

Eighty percent of the human body is made of water, so it isn’t surprising that one sees a different face in the mirror each morning. The skin of the forehead and cheeks changes shape from moment to moment like the mud of a swamp, shifting with the movements of the water below and the footsteps of the people walking above it.

I had hung a framed photograph of myself beside the mirror. The first thing I would do when I got up was to compare my reflection with the photograph, checking for discrepancies which I then corrected with makeup.

Compared to the fresh complexion shown in the photograph, the face in the mirror looked bloodless and pale, like the face of a dead person. Perhaps this is why the rectangular frame of the mirror reminded me of a coffin. When I held up the candle to look more closely, I saw that my skin was covered with fine, overlapping scales, smaller than the wings of tiny insects. Carefully I inserted one long thumbnail beneath a scale and flicked it off. In this way I was able to strip off the scales one at a time. When I unbuttoned my pajama top, I saw the scales covered not only my face but my chest and arms as well. If I began removing them one by one, I would be late for work. I decided to take a bath to soften the scales and then rub them off.

Once upon a time there was an impoverished village in a valley where no rice would grow. A pregnant woman was so hungry that when she found a fish one day she wolfed it down raw without sharing it with the other villagers. The woman gave birth to a lovely baby boy. Afterwards, her body grew scales, and she turned into an enormous fish. She could no longer survive on land, and went to live all by herself beneath the river. An old man took the child in. Boys have always swapped insulting comments about their mothers when they quarrel. “Your mother’s a whore!” “Your mother doesn’t have a belly-button!” They don’t know what those things mean, but they say them anyhow. This boy heard the same contemptuous words over and over: “Your mother has scales!” One day the boy asked the old man what it meant to have scales, and where his mother really lived. Once he had discovered the secret of his origins, the boy could think of nothing but how to change his mother back into a human being. In the end, he decided to break open the rock of the surrounding mountains to irrigate the fields and make a rice paddy. The villagers’ poverty would end if they could grow rice. The boy went to see his mother to tell her about his plans. She was very happy and wanted to help. The boy drew a map and decided where to break open the rock wall. His mother threw her large, scaly body against the rock again and again, and little by little it began to crumble. Day and night she threw herself against the rock. The scales that were scraped from her body flew up into the air and danced in the wind like blood-stained cherry petals. This is how the village, which had no cherry trees, came to be called the Village of Cherry Blossoms. Once they had irrigated fields, the villagers no longer had to starve, but the mother, who had lost all her scales and become human again, bled to death.

When I finished getting out of my pajamas, the phone rang. Still naked, I picked up the receiver. I didn’t say anything, and from the other end of the line came a man’s voice I had never heard before.

“It’s you?”

I thought about this for a moment and said, “It isn’t.”

“If it’s not you, then who are you?”

I put down the receiver. That was my first conversation on this strange day.

Slowly I got into the hot water, starting with my big toe. As long as I don’t move the water around, I can stand even very hot water. I closed my eyes, held my breath, and submerged myself entirely in the long bathtub. I thought: burial at sea is fine, a grave beneath the earth is fine, but not cremation — cremation I couldn’t stand.

When I got out of the bath, the scales had softened. I scraped them off with a pumice stone. They came off with relatively little effort. I would have hated having to throw myself against a rock wall and die. It was a good thing I had no son.

When I returned to the mirror, the scales were gone, but on my nose I saw a large number of tiny blisters smaller than ants’ heads. I popped one with my nail, and a greasy white substance came out. It smelled like rancid mayonnaise. Once I started I couldn’t stop and popped one after the other. Outside I could hear the birds beginning to chirp and flap their wings. Unless I hurried I would really be late for work. When I had popped the last of the blisters, what remained was not smooth skin but a desolate desert landscape scattered with deflated balloons.

The telephone rang again. I picked up the phone and didn’t say anything until the caller said, “Hello, it’s me.” It was a familiar voice.

“Excuse me, may I ask who’s calling?” I couldn’t help asking, even though I knew who it was.

“It’s me,” the man’s voice said. “Is it all right if I come over tonight?”

“That would be fine, but I won’t be home till late. You have the key?”

“I’m working late too, so I wouldn’t have time earlier, anyway. See you then.”

I wondered how I already knew I wouldn’t be home till late.

I washed my face with white sand. This is the only way to smooth a skin that’s become like a desert. This sand was supposedly made of whales’ bones that had been tossed up by the sea and bleached in the sun. When I scooped some up in my palm and held it to my face, the sand spoke to my bones through my flesh. I distinctly felt the shape of my skull in my hand. Beyond a skin made of light and flesh made of water, there is another body. Only, as long as that body is alive, no one will be able to hold it close.

Sometimes other people’s skulls look transparent. At such moments I fall in love.

When I had moistened my skin with milk lotion, the face in the mirror began to look like the face in the photograph. This lotion isn’t a pharmaceutical product, its made of real mother’s milk. So it not only moisturizes the skin but also soothes the nerves and gives one energy.

I finished my makeup and combed my hair. In the grasslands of a dream, I painstakingly combed out the spores of poisonous mushrooms and the carcasses of winged insects. When I was a child, I never combed my hair. This was because it made me feel as though my head had just been emptied of its contents. It was not really the brain, but the hair, that did the thinking. At school the teachers always said to comb and braid your hair, probably because they were afraid of the children’s hair. They say that hair has strange powers. In the old days, people used to cut a lock of hair to give to someone setting off on a journey, to ward off harm. They also used to touch foreigners’ hair to cure illnesses.

Once, a long time ago, there was a village in which lived a gluttonous woman. She worked hard and had a good disposition, and so she was well-liked in the village, but she ate so many helpings of rice that her husband thought it strange. Moreover, she forbade others to watch her eat, and would take her meals alone at night in the barn. One night the man crept up to the barn to watch, and he saw that each of the woman’s hairs had turned into a snake and was eating rice. Astonished, the man got out his rifle and shot the woman dead.

They say hair is the part of the skin that has died and hardened. Part of my body is already a corpse.

Once upon a time there was a monk who saw the reflection of a monk in a pond and leapt into the water to embrace it. The pond lay at the edge of a small forest. The temple lay at the other end of the forest. A narrow path led from the temple through the forest to the pond. There was also a second path that led from the temple to a village. This path was seldom used. The monk arose each morning at five, cleaned the rooms of the temple, studied the sacred texts and spent his afternoons working in the garden. There he planted vegetables and grain, which sustained him. In the evenings he continued his studies of the sacred texts. When he stayed awake too long, it sometimes happened that he fell asleep still seated at his desk.

The moon was full. The monk fell asleep reading a prayer book. Fast asleep, he walked through the forest to the pond.

The monk walks along the edge of the pond and sees the moon in the water.

He sees it with closed eyes, for he is asleep.

Seeing it does not cause him to awaken.

Awakening would not help him to see.

He leaps into the water.

And?

He drowns.

He drinks.

He drinks the water. He drinks the moon.

He wanted to embrace the moon. But now he’s

drunk it.

And he drowns.

Who are you?

I like to read, and I take walks at night when I

Kinoko-san says “disheard” instead of “misheard.” At first I thought it just sounded that way because my eardrums have gotten loose, but no matter how many times I hear her say it, it really does sound like “disheard.”

Sometimes I almost get up the nerve to correct her: “It’s not ‘disheard,’ actually. One says 'misheard.’” But then I swallow my unspoken words.

Every morning at six, Kinoko-san arranges the neckline of her kimono just so, draws herself up straight and smiles with her shiny cheeks and kindly-looking crow’s feet. Even when I’m absolutely certain about something, she can dismiss it with a bright laugh, saying, “I myself might think the same if I were just a bit younger.”

When Kinoko-san laughs, I think of the word aristocrat. Willowy, pliant, the nape of her neck exposed, her cheeks soft. Aristocrats are crats who have been “arist.” The moment this thought appeared, I realized I didn’t know how to write it out. There are many ways to write a wrist.

I don’t even know how to write “Kinoko”, for that matter. Perhaps Kinoko-san herself doesn’t know, or she has forgotten or wants to keep it hidden — in any case, she won’t tell me. She did, though, tell me this much, that at first she didn’t even realize the name Kinoko sounded just like the Japanese word for mushroom. Furthermore, it was originally her family name, and the “—ko” was simply part of it, but when written phonetically, the “—ko” looks like the kind of ending which used to be tacked on to the end of girls’ names. So people are always assuming Kinoko is her given name and calling her “Kinoko-san” with an air of particular intimacy. Kinoko-san herself doesn’t like to be constantly clearing up misconceptions, so she lets it go. I wish I had a kanji dictionary. Even if I could never leave the house again, even if I could never again have anything to call my own, if only I could just once consult a kanji dictionary! No doubt because of all this brooding, I had a strange dream. I was sitting alone in a big zasbiki room with mats on the floor when a roof beam above me suddenly burst into flames. In a panic I opened the sliding paper doors and rushed into the hall, but then on the hall floor I found a kanji dictionary bound in leather. I tried to escape with it, but the cover was stuck to the floor and I couldn’t pull it loose. The book was going to burn up along with the rest of the house so I tried to look up the most important characters, but when I started to count the number of strokes, smoke came pouring in from one of the rooms and I couldn’t see. I tried to wave away the smoke with my hand, but then I started coughing, my hands were shaking, and I kept losing count. The fire seemed to be getting closer, my skin was hot, and the ends of my hair began to sizzle. Why was the dictionary stuck to the floor? I didn’t need the cover — all I had to do was tear out the pages and take them with me. So I tried to pull out all the pages at once, and heard a shriek. Impossible, I thought, looking around. There was no one there. Perhaps certain books do scream when they’re torn apart. My field of vision was washed in red from the flames. Crying, I woke up.

The Japanese word for “misheard” sounds like a frog croaking. If there is a frog that croaks “misheard,” there must be others that croak “mistook,” “misread,” and so on. You could line them all up in a row.

When Kinoko-san addresses someone, for some reason she always starts by saying, “Lend me your ear.” She says it so deliberately and with such earnestness one really feels one ought to cut off one’s ear with a fruit knife and lend it to her. A chilling thought. If only she would say the words a bit more lightly, it wouldn’t be necessary to take them so literally. She also likes to say, “I’ll just borrow your ear now, if I may.” Sometimes I want to tell her, “An ear isn’t the sort of thing you just borrow from other people whenever you feel like it,” but then I swallow hard and hold my peace. I bite my nails and tell myself, “All right, then. If she wants an ear, I’ll give her an ear. An ear isn’t something you have less of just because you lend it out. Let’s say you slice it off with one slash of a razor — fine! Then just wind a bandage around what’s left” My speech, unlike Kinoko-san’s, is becoming less elegant by the day.

When approaching another person, it’s immature to begin by saying, “Um…” or “Uh…” On the other hand, “You know” is a bit too self-important, “Excuse me” is too formal, “By the way” too inefficient, and “Now then” too brisk. When you consider the options, Kinoko-san’s ear-borrowing isn’t so bad after all. Having heard it so often, I’m getting used to the phrase. You can get used to almost any phrase if you hear it every day.

But now Kinoko-san has come up with more and more radical variants. First she changed the phrase to “Rend me your ear,” then to “render” and even “surrender.” Since she’s been growing more elegant daily, it isn’t surprising to hear her append an extra syllable, or shift the consonants in one direction or another. Still, it makes my chest clench up to think of rendering my ears.

This reminds me of a painting, an old oil painting about the size of a window. An angel is blowing into a horn, and from the other end of the horn a spurt of liquid flies across the sky right into the Virgin Mary’s ear. Just such a portrayal of the Annunciation is hanging in the abbot’s room. It’s certainly a bit risqué.

“Isn’t this picture a bit risqué?” I ask warily, but the abbot only says, “Not at all, not at all.”

Angels are urban creatures, and thus not necessarily dangerous, though apparently you’re running quite a risk when you see a blue butterfly. The day I first heard this, I was out in the yard alone in the evening and saw a butterfly. Was it blue? I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t. Looking at it more carefully, I noticed that the butterfly had a tiny human face. It fluttered around my head until I couldn’t tell where was earth and where was heaven. And then it happened. Before I knew what had hit me, there was a moist afterglow shimmering inside my head. Once that happens, there isn’t much you can do. Still, I could have managed, but then I began to slide backwards, further and further. Perhaps behind me the sea was very low. No matter how far I slipped, I kept slipping more. Instead of screaming for help, I said, “Kinoko-san, courage! Don’t give up.” Kinoko-san gave me a surprised look. Somehow I was back in my room, which was strange.

Sometimes it’s a relief to have Kinoko-san nearby, and other times her presence is oppressive. When Kinoko-san coughs, all sorts of strange thoughts run one after the other through my head. When at last they subside, Kinoko-san turns over in her sleep. Then I start to hear her voice saying urgently over and over, “Please, I want you to surrender your ears.” I wish I could make her stop. What would make her stop? I get as far as deciding I could fit the palm of my hand exactly over Kinoko-san’s mouth and hold it there to keep her voice in, and then I fall asleep.

Rather than trying to correct Kinoko-san’s pronunciation of the word “misheard,” I decided to insert all sorts of other expressions into her ear, things like “didn’t quite catch that” and “thought I heard when actually she said” and “in one ear and out the other.” Perhaps Kinoko-san would abandon her fixation on the one single expression and open her ears to others. This might be enough to make my murderous intentions, which have been provoked by the constant irritation of a single nerve, vanish in the wind.

“Kinoko-san, there’s this woman who never says anything interesting, so whatever she says to me goes in one ear and out the other, but the other day I didn’t hear what she said just when it was actually important, and now I’m regretting it. You remember that tall high school student who is always coming by, what was his name again? He mentioned his name but I didn’t quite catch it, and the question is, is he her grandson or not? Apparently she doesn’t have any children. Is it possible for a person to have grandchildren without having any children?” Kinoko-san gave me a sympathetic look and said smoothly, “Oh, certainly.” At the time, a deep skepticism rose within me and I began to wonder whether Kinoko-san’s sense of reason hadn’t finally been warped, but when I thought it over the next day, I realized that one can indeed have grandchildren without first having children. Perhaps it was not Kinoko-san who was warped, but my own brain that was beginning to soften.

Sometimes Kinoko-san would wake up in the middle of the night and say, “Surrend me your ear.” The odd thing is that I would wake up not from hearing her voice, but a few seconds before she began to speak. It’s coming, I have a feeling it’s coming, I know it’s coming, I would think, holding my breath, and sure enough she’d say it. There was never anyone around to save me. All alone, I would lie grieving over the fate of the ear I would have to surrender. To add insult to injury, there wasn’t anything in particular Kinoko-san wanted to say. Once she came out with “render me your ear now,” she would just look at me without saying anything, the smell of disinfectant would rise in the darkness, everything so quiet we could hardly breathe. Distressed, I would seek out other topics, start talking about anyone who came to mind. For instance, that person whose name I could never remember. “That person, you know, the one whose name I flailed to catch, now what was she called?” I tried saying. Even in the dark I could feel Kinoko-san bristle with excitement at the word “flailed.”

The next morning, Kinoko-san, her face striped in the light coming in through the blinds, opened the large smile in the middle of her face, and murmured, “Well, I do believe I’ve finally afflailed.”

It seemed as if I had finally afflailed, too. In the old days when I went into town, all sorts of delightful things to buy would leap into my field of vision. I rarely came home empty-handed. Now if I went, I found nothing I wanted to buy, nothing I wanted to eat. I didn’t even really know what they were selling. I could see they were making all sorts of shapes out of translucent plastic. Sometimes I found them pretty, but I couldn’t get a sense of what they were for. I thought I might understand if I deciphered the tiny letters covering the instruction booklets like ants, but I couldn’t get myself in the mood to read. I didn’t feel like eating either. Everything I ate was soft and smelled of monosodium glutamate, and I couldn’t say whether it tasted good or bad. To tell the truth, I wasn’t even in the mood to leave the house, but I didn’t want to admit it, so I would go out, swinging my arms. I would say, “I’m going out for a bit. I mustn’t just sit at home afflailing away the day.” And Kinoko-san would narrow her eyes in a smile and say, “Have a nice time now.” She didn’t look envious. Probably it wasn’t so much that she couldn’t go out, but that she’d graduated from doing so. Out near the row of stores in front of the train station, hundreds of tin monkeys were smashing cymbals together. But it appeared that sounds were unable to penetrate within ten centimeters of my ears, so I didn’t hear a thing. I said to my ear, nose and throat doctor, “Cities are so annoising, it’s just as well my ears are getting hard of hearing.”

Once I’d let myself say so, I suddenly couldn’t remember whether there really was such an expression. Surely one’s ears could not be hard. Ears are soft. If they are hard, they must have been cut off and given away, then must have hardened in their severed state. It was really too generous of me, giving away ears. Of course I only meant to lend them out, but apparently my intentions were misunderstood. My gestures are always too lavish and so this sort of thing is always happening. Or perhaps at the moment I really meant to sacrifice them, I can’t remember.

I remember Kinoko-san saying once, “In my day, I too sacrificed my ears for another person, as one does in this world. But that person went far away.” Far away might mean hell. One feels sorry for such people, but what can one do? A person who flees with another’s ear ought simply to go to ear hell and turn into earwax. That’s fate, and there’s nothing one can do about it. One may wish to save such people, but what can one do about earwax?

The ear, nose and throat doctor, whatever he was thinking, suddenly said, “There isn’t much we can do about minor hearing loss. If it gets too bad, you can wear whatever’s needed.”

I wondered where it was that the entrance to hell lay gaping open like an ear. I tried going out inside my head. On one side of the train station, a narrow road ran parallel to the tracks. There were stalls for ramen noodles and for pots of soup. There was an old bookstore and a record library. As I continued to walk, I began to feel as if hell had opened up in the shape of my ear. From a short distance away, it looked like a rain puddle that was starting to dry up, but when I got close, the dips and hollows of the green mud took on the shape of an earlobe.

I began to feel as if I wouldn’t mind lending out just an earlobe. The inner ear I really didn’t want to lend, but the outer part would be fine. I tried saying out loud, “A lobe? Certainly. My pleasure.” At the time there was no one else in the room with me, but the flower wilting in its vase beside the window lifted its head to look at me, the curtain rose and fell and played against my cheek, and the ceiling began to perspire. I wondered whether I really was alone. Kinoko-san had said she was going to the hospital for an operation, which was apparently happening this very moment. If they didn’t manage the operation properly and cut off some necessary part of her, she would not be coming back. If it came to that, I would donate a body part of my own. I could give at least one. Many of the body’s organs come in twos. I have two ears. Two lungs. I think there might even be two of the uterus, I don’t remember now. “There is the intestine, too. It’s twelve fingers long. Surely you can spare one,” I could hear the staff saying. “There is your twelve-layered court dress. Surely you can spare one, and you’ll still be warm.” I was cold. The windows were shut tight and the heater hummed, but the cold came creeping up from the floor into my bed.

Late that night Kinoko-san came home. She was lying upon a pedestal made of silver and covered with a pure white tablecloth. I pretended to be asleep and watched the whole thing. Kinoko-san seemed to have lost consciousness. The tablecloth was stained with strawberry jam.

The next day, for some reason, I didn’t wake up till it was light outside. I felt the sunlight so strongly on my eyelids that I opened them, and saw Kinoko-san staring at me from one side. Startled, I tried to explain, “I’m so sorry, but I really can’t lend you my ear. I don’t have it any more, because they tricked me, and I never got it back.” Kinoko-san smiled weakly and said, “Oh, my dear. How lamendacious, to lose your ear.”

Apparently she was looking at where my ear used to be. I wondered how it looked. I couldn’t see it because it was just out of my line of sight, but my ear really seemed to have been cut off. And it was Kinoko-san, not me, who was supposed to have had the operation. All last night I had surrendered to writhing creatures. Over and over again they had said to me, “We’re coming with a knife, we’re coming to get you, we’re coming for an ear.” I said, “I’ll take a permanent marker and write protective poems on my ears.” “Then we’ll take your liver,” they said. I was being oppressed by formless creatures. They clung to me on all sides and I couldn’t shake them off. But I had never seen or felt my own liver, so I thought that maybe I would be fine without it. How pathetic, I thought, a person who’d never seen her own inner organs.

“My dear, have you never seen yourself?” Kinoko-san asked, laughing lightly. Dumbfounded, I replied evasively, “These days I don’t even look in the mirror any more.” “Well now, all you need is a hand mirror,” Kinoko-san said, this time laughing like wind chimes. I held up my hand behind my neck, as if my nape would be reflected in my palm. Kinoko-san said, “You only look at your upper parts, don’t you.” Taken aback, I rummaged in the drawers for a hand mirror. I couldn’t find one, so, relieved, I started looking for something I could use to change the subject. I used to have such an assortment of objects it was exhausting to organize them. What’s funny is if now somebody asks me, “What objects, for instance?” I wouldn’t be able to answer. I think they were in general useful things. Now I didn’t have anything. What I finally found was a moldy wallet. It appeared to have some change inside, but I was too lazy to open it.

“My dear, have you really never looked at yourself?” Kinoko-san insisted. I couldn’t very well ignore her, so I looked at her face and saw that her cheeks were flushed pink and her lips were burning. My answer was, “I understand. Please help me.” But that night, and the next, no help arrived. I grew irritated at myself for just waiting. A woman who waits is too passive. After all, this wasn’t a 1930s ballad. Thinking I would do something decisive at least inside my mouth, I picked up my toothbrush. With a Vivaldi violin concerto racing through my head, I attempted to move the toothbrush at a tremendous pace. My fingers stumbled over themselves, and it didn’t go well. Giving up, I banged on the wall with my hand, which made quite a noise. But still I couldn’t get out. I was trapped. Blood was throbbing in my temples. “What’s the matter?” A worried face; I couldn’t remember whose. “Such a noise, whatever is the matter?” She was speaking politely. As long as they are polite, I don’t get very angry no matter what they say. “Such a noise? Surely you disheard,” I replied, only my tongue stumbled over the words and I said “disheardened.” “Now please stop, it’s time for your meal.”

“I’m simply afflailed.” “So busy.” “Just didn’t manage.” “Still, these days it does seem as if.” When talking to a large company over dinner, one is not so much looking for things to say as walking along a narrow road trying not to touch things one shouldn’t and somehow making one’s way forward. If one says something wrong, the listener’s mucous membranes are injured. The listener groans and opens his eyes wide. When one gets tired of seeing that, one clams up. When spoken to, one doesn’t answer. One wishes, then, to be alone with Kinoko-san. One needn’t watch one’s words with Kinoko-san. On the other hand, one never knows what she will say next. “It twitches, you know. So interesting,” she says, laughing. “But isn’t it a little frightening?” I ask. “Oh no, not at all. After all, it’s one’s own, isn’t it.” “But what if somebody sees you?” “I don’t fret about such things any more.” “Isn’t it a little frightening, it being for instance wet and all?” “Come now. It’s not the least bit frightening. On a rainy day even the window is wet, after all.”

Kinoko-san smelled different all at once. It turned out someone had made her a present of a Chanel perfume called Egoïste. “What a lovely scent, you’ve become a misrecognizable beauty,” I said. Kinoko-san laughed and gave me a look. When a person smells different, it’s as if she’s altogether a stranger, and one becomes a little shy. “It was a gift, you see, from a person I did something for.” It seemed tactless to ask what the something was. She must have understood how I felt, since she added, “Diapers to bath, everything.” I understood then that she was speaking of her son.

This so-called son, I must add, appeared only in conversation, and never in person. At dusk sometimes, when Kinoko-san’s eyes lost their focus and stared into space, I would think, “She’s thinking about him,” and I would stare into space, too. I would see countless amoebas drifting in the air. They might have been nothing but the dust that plays in the liquid surrounding the eyeball. “Was there a visit?” I asked, but Kinoko-san didn’t answer. So I reached over to the dry slice of bread on Kinoko-san’s plate, and quickly pushed it into my mouth. On Sundays we had bread. At first I thought it was there to represent Christ's body, but it turned out that on Sundays the cook had the day off and wasn’t there to cook the rice, so there was bread instead.

At dawn on Monday, when scattered footsteps began to disturb the ear’s horizon, Kinoko-san suddenly said something like, “Isn’t it strange to say ‘packaged bread.’ Isn’t bread itself a kind of package?” I ignored her. At such times if I start to answer her, the other people might think I am at her level, and that would be frightening. The staff turned Kinoko-san’s body over like a sheet of paper and said accusingly, “You didn’t try the bread. There is no excretion, which suggests the bread wasn’t eaten. You must have thrown it away somewhere.” Kinoko-san only blinked her eyes with a puzzled air and said nothing. Three of them came over and tapped her back. A cloud of dust rose and Kinoko-san’s back turned white. Kinoko-san narrowed her eyes with a look of great contentment, but I couldn’t breathe with all the dust and began to cough. There was a great commotion, “Where’s the bread? The bread? The bread?” One of them was bending over with a twisted neck to look under the bed. Another checked the window locks. O bread, o bread, why hast thou forsaken me?

The morning confusion subsided, and the staff disappeared. Somewhere a telephone is ringing. There is no receiver so I can’t take the call. The people here are quite malicious, having a phone specially made with no receiver. Still, it’s better than nothing. Even if you can’t take the call, a call is still a call. “It’s ringing!” I think, and my upper body grows warm. Apparently there are still people who call me. After a while the telephone falls silent, without my having touched it. Then Kinoko-san’s telephone begins to ring. I tap Kinoko-san’s back, saying, “It’s ringing, it’s ringing.” Kinoko-san pretends not to notice. She seems to want me to think she gets so many phone calls she needn’t answer every one. I don’t mind, but she’s certain to regret it if she doesn’t pick up out of pride, just when someone is trying to call. Perhaps in hell there is no telephone, and even if there is one, maybe no one will try to call. “They’re calling, don’t you hear?” I tap harder. Suddenly, someone pins my arms from behind. “Stop it. What are you thinking? You shouldn’t hit people.” Some juvenile delinquent girls are holding me back and shouting. These people don’t like to see me keeping company with Kinoko-san, so every now and then they blow up. They are imprisoned by jealousy, envy and spite, so they quite often misunderstand one’s actions. They don’t have the ears to hear my explanations. To some extent, one has to forgive them on account of their youth, but I can’t forgive people who use their youth as an excuse to oppress others. I see a palm in front of my eyes, so I bite it as hard as I can. My teeth impose themselves between thin bones set together like the sticks of a fan. There is a scream, and the hand flies up with amazing force, jerking my mouth along with it so that my jaw is almost dislocated, and after that I don’t remember anything.

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.

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.

A few weeks later Sasha showed me a teacup and said that she’d discovered the “dragon” symbol on it. Indeed, the cup did bear this sign. Sasha had seen it in a shop and immediately bought it. For the first time in her life, she could read. Then I wanted to teach her some more characters. She’ll always be illiterate, since she can’t read the letters of the alphabet, but now she can read one character and knows that the alphabet isn’t the only system of writing in the world.

Next to the bus stop was a small shop in which Sasha sometimes bought Sonia a bar of soap. Sonia loves soap, or, rather, she loves the packaging it comes in. The packaging was misleading: the paper on the outside was painted with butterflies, birds or flowers even though all it contained was soap. Very few products have pictures on the package that aren’t immediately connected in some way to their contents. Sonia always unwrapped the soap right away when Sasha gave her some, then wrapped it up again.

Once the box the soap came in bore a phoenix on which the word “soap” was written in fine print that Sonia of course couldn’t read. Sonia understood only the picture of the phoenix and the contents: soap.

Only because there is such a thing as written language, I thought to myself, could they paint a phoenix on the box instead of a piece of soap. What else could fix the meaning of its contents, the soap, if the letters weren’t there? Then there would be the danger that the soap might, in the course of time, turn into a phoenix and fly away.

Once, in the supermarket, I bought a little can that had a Japanese woman painted on the side. Later, at home, I opened the can and saw inside it a piece of tuna fish. The woman seemed to have changed into a piece of fish during her long voyage. This surprise came on a Sunday: I had decided not to read any writing on Sundays. Instead I observed the people I saw on the street as though they were isolated letters. Sometimes two people sat down next to each other in a café, and thus, briefly, formed a word. Then they separated, in order to go off and form other words. There must have been a moment in which the combinations of these words formed, quite by chance, several sentences in which I might have read this foreign city like a text. But I never discovered a single sentence in this city, only letters and sometimes a few words that had no direct connection to any “cultural content.” These words now and then led me to open the wrapping paper on the outside, only to find different wrapping paper below.

In this city there are a great many women who wear bits of metal on their ears. They have holes put in their earlobes especially for this purpose. Almost as soon as I got here, I wanted to ask what these bits of metal on people's ears meant. But I didn’t know if I could speak of this openly. My guidebook, for instance, says that in Europe you should never ask people you don’t yet know very well anything related to their bodies or religion. Sometimes I thought these bits of metal — especially when I saw one in the form of a scythe, bow or anchor — might be a sort of talisman.

At first glance, the city doesn’t strike me as particularly dangerous. Why, then, do so many women wear talismans on the street? Certainly it can get a bit spooky at times walking around the city alone. It’s just that too few people live here. Even during the day I’ve often walked home from the train station without seeing anyone at all.

If these bits of metal are supposed to be a talisman, why are they so popular among women? I didn’t know the name of the evil force these women were trying to protect themselves from with this talisman’s help. They never revealed its name to me, and I still haven’t made a concerted effort to find out what it is. Where I come from, people say you should never utter the name of a dangerous being aloud. If you do, this being will really appear. It has to be named indirectly. For example, you can simply replace its name with “it.”

Gilda, a student who also lived in my building, always wore a triangular piece of metal on her ear. The first time we had a real conversation, she told me that a fifty-five-year-old librarian at the university had just committed suicide the day before. Up until her death, this librarian had fought to keep computers from being installed in her department. The woman couldn’t have been intelligent, Gilda said, or she would have understood that computers are merely tools, not monsters. But apparently the computers weren’t the cause of her suicide. She’d been suffering from severe depression for years. She’d lived alone, Gilda said, fingering her little triangle of metal.

“What is the meaning of that piece of metal?” I asked. She looked at me in surprise and asked whether I meant her “earring.” The word “ring” had an unsettling effect on me. Gilda replied indifferently that the earring was simply a piece of jewelry and had no meaning at all.

As I had supposed, Gilda was reluctant to discuss the earrings significance. Instead she told me that highly educated women had holes put in their ears at a relatively late age, whereas working-class women started wearing earrings as girls.

I had read in a book that there are cultures in which part of the sexual organ is cut away during the initiation rite. A different part of the body can be substituted, however; the feet, for example, or the ears. In this case not the earring itself but merely the perforation of the earlobe would be significant.

But why was Gilda always so nervous? One day she placed two porcelain dogs on her windowsill. She refused to put the pots of flowers I’d given her there. These dogs were to sit on the windowsill all day long and stand guard over her apartment, like the stone dogs where I come from that guard the Shinto shrines. Gilda said she often had the feeling, when she was alone in the apartment, that a strange man was coming into her room through the window.

Once she knocked on my door in the middle of the night and said there was something wrong with her computer. I was really quite surprised she’d woken me up for this, since she knew I didn’t know the first thing about computers. But soon I understood what the matter was: Gilda claimed there was an alien being living inside her computer and producing sentences. She kept discovering sentences in her essays that she definitely hadn’t written herself. But she refused to give me any examples; she said the sentences were indecent. I advised her to attach a talisman to her computer to make the evil force leave and keep new ones from coming. I used the term “evil force” because I didn’t know what else to call it.

The talisman Gilda selected wasn’t at all what I’d had in mind; I’d imagined something like a doll made of reeds or a piece of snakeskin. But Gilda went to a health food store and purchased three stickers. Each sticker bore an image that was no doubt intended to epitomize the evil force: a car, a nuclear power plant, a gun. And above each image stood the words; No thanks.

It struck me as overly polite to express gratitude while rejecting an evil force, but perhaps the word “thanks” was simply intended to avoid provoking the opponent’s aggression.

Gilda pasted the stickers on the front of her computer, next to the screen, and appeared satisfied with them. A week later she bought three more stickers and put them on her bicycle, the refrigerator and the door of her apartment.

But I don’t think she was completely reassured. Her computer, it’s true, was now clean, but as if to make up for this, she began to feel as though an alien being were forcing its way into her body. She bought herself a sweater with a big tiger’s head on it. Everyone who approached her had to brave the tiger’s fierce gaze. Gilda also bought herself a jacket made from the skin of a dead animal. She wore tight pants printed in a leopard-skin pattern and a belt studded with several triangular bits of metal. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d put on a mask with a lion’s face.

Despite all this, her misgivings remained. At dinner, for instance, when she sat alone in the kitchen eating her soup, she suddenly had the impression that the soup contained everything she’d been trying to avoid all this time. She told me she’d decided to fast for a week or two. There were so many poisons in food, she explained, and, besides, she had too much excess flesh on her body. Gilda wasn’t fat, but she was incapable of loving her own flesh because she sensed within it the presence of an alien element. She called this element “chemicals.” Every culture has its own purification ceremony, or several of them. In this city, however, the ceremony has no predetermined day, time or opening prayer. There are no specifications, or at least no rules I could recognize as such. One day Gilda bought herself a book on fasting, and a few days later, when I met her on the stairs, she had already started. Her face looked less narrow than usual: it was almost round, as though there were water trapped beneath the skin. The piece of metal on her ear appeared heavier and colder than before. I swallowed the words I’d meant to say to her, for she seemed to me, all at once, like a stranger who — although I lived in her language — couldn’t have understood me.

On her door flapped a sticker that was trying to come unstuck from the smooth metal.

On Tuesdays I like to eat my father. He tastes of venison. Bread dough is what he’s made of. I know he’s really a woman. But you can’t say this to his face or his eyes will turn hollow. When the fire is hot and the sun goes down, his dead brother whispers in his ear; you’re a woman. He’s made of bread dough. His nipples are raisins. The eyes of a woman he went to see in prison yesterday were also raisins. My father has black nipples. I’ve never seen them, they are buried deep in the flesh of his chest. Like mother and daughter they lie side by side in a cold sweat. Once a day they wake up and leap out of his flesh like a scream. My father tells me about them because he knows I’ll like them. But he doesn’t show them to me, he presses them back into place before I open my eyes. Usually I eat my bread cold. As I chew I feel the warmth of his flesh. I chew and chew and imagine I am continuing to chew. In reality I stop chewing and look around and find the raisins in the oven. They are burnt and smell like the shadow of a stag. A woman once lived in this house. When my father moved in, she was abducted. I can no longer recall the woman's face. I feel annoyed and go on eating. I sit down on the chair and go on eating. I like eating my father. It makes him think of the woman and repeat her words, which he taught to her: Whoever sits on the chair must want to stand. Whoever stands in the kitchen must want to fly. I could fly without effort if I stopped eating. But I go on eating and grow heavier and heavier. I wish I were made of raisins. In the language of raisins I say: do not call me by a place name. Do not give me women's shoes. It is the night of the festival of girls. My father gives me a woman's spoon. I can’t sleep when my bed smells of burnt venison. My father tells me he used to be a man. When he ate bread from the oven, he became a woman. He shouldn’t have told me that. I knew everything about him. The bread dough told me ages ago. Now we can no longer go on eating under one roof I run away from home and have nothing left to eat. At the edge of town stands a house. The door is ajar. From the house comes the smell of venison. I go in and see a bed. It has three legs. In the bed lies my father, who can’t possibly be here. His belly is soft and warm. In his belly, my mother sleeps. I’d have to wait a long time for her to be born. He doesn’t want to let her go yet. Otherwise I’ll have to keep eating away at his belly until I reach her. I stand in the garden and ask the apple tree what will become of her. I can hear two people breathing in unison. One sleeps in the other’s belly. The belly is made of bread dough. I’m not hungry. I don’t have to be hungry to want to eat the bread. It is dark now, and the lantern casts the shadow of a hunter. If it is my father, I will kill him before he can shoot the sleeping woman. It is my father. I have no gun. He gives a cry and falls. A fatal bullet is embedded in his belly as proof of the murder. I didn’t do anything. From his belly, two raisin eyes peer out. Two people are dead, and the third survives.

1

One of the German words I’ve become more and more attached to in recent years is the word Zelle, or “cell.” This word lets me imagine a large number of tiny spaces alive within my body. Each space contains a voice that is telling a story. For this reason these cells can be compared to cells of other sorts: telephone booths, and the spaces inhabited by prisoners and monks.

It’s beautiful when a phone booth is lit up at night on a dark street. In the section of Tokyo where I grew up, there was a park full of ginkgo trees. In one corner of the park stood a phone booth that was very popular with young girls. From dusk to midnight it was continuously occupied. Probably the girls could develop their talent for telling stories better in this cell than at home with their parents. They gripped the receiver firmly and glanced around with lively, empty eyes, as if they could see the person they were talking to somewhere in the air. The transparent glass box, lit from within, where the girls spent so much time stood between the dark shapes of the trees in the park: this image fascinated me even then, when I myself was a girl. But the subject matter of the girls’ conversations was of little interest. They spoke mostly about the males with whom they had relationships. Sometimes the phone booth resembled a transparent tree occupied by a tree spirit. The Japanese fairy tale “The Bamboo Princess” begins with an old man seeing a luminous bamboo trunk and chopping it down. Inside he discovers a newborn baby girl that he raises together with his wife. The tale ends with the girl, who has become a grown woman, flying back to where she really comes from: the moon.

The nocturnal phone booth might also have been a spaceship that has just landed in the park. The moon men have sent a moon girl to Earth to inform them about our life. The girl is just making her first report. What would she say about the park? Would she have much to report so soon after her arrival?

Later, in Austria, I saw a cell that immediately reminded me of the phone booth. It was made of solid wood and stood in the unlit corner of a Catholic church. The walls of the cell radiated warmth and calm; right away I thought I would be just as happy to stand inside telling stories as the girls in the phone booth. A friend told me the cell was called a “confessional” and that, like the nocturnal phone booth, it was a place to talk about sexual encounters. But unlike a modern phone booth, the confessional was made of wood and stood there like a tree whose roots have grown deep into the earth. It couldn’t fly away like a spaceship. So there are storytelling cells that stay in one place, and others that appear to be mobile.

And so I understood why a chamber that resembles a prison cell is better suited for composing an erotic text than a large room in which optical sensuality is staged. I don’t think much of asceticism, nor do I believe that sensual pleasure can enter a piece of writing only when it is suppressed in real life. The claim that a person who writes is not truly living can be made only by someone who sees a person and his life as subject and object. He might say the most important thing is to live one’s life. I would say: I live, and my life lives as well. Even my writing lives. Thus the question of whether a person is living when he writes is misguided to begin with. One asks this sort of question only to make everything revolve around man.

It doesn’t have anything to do with asceticism when someone sits in a cell and writes. It has much more to do with the activation of the living cells that comprise their own phone booths, monks’ cells and prison cells within the body. Countless stories are told in these enclosed spaces. When I write, I try to hear the stories coming from within my body. When I listen, I realize how unfamiliar my own cells are to me. They consist of what I have inherited and what I have eaten. Thus it often happens that a story I hear within my body seems to me chronologically or geographically distant.

But can one understand the language of cells at all? The question brings to mind the image of yet another cell: the booth for simultaneous interpreters. At international congresses you often see these beautiful transparent booths in which people stand telling stories: they translate, so actually they are retelling tales that already exist. The lip movements and gestures of each interpreter and the way each of them glances about as she speaks are so various it’s difficult to believe they are all translating a single, shared text. And perhaps it isn’t really a single, shared text after all, perhaps the translators, by translating, demonstrate that this text is really many texts at once. The human body, too, contains many booths in which translations are made. I suspect that these are all translations for which no original exists. There are people, though, who assume that everyone is given an original text at birth. They call the place in which these texts are stored a soul.

My tongue is always somewhat swollen when I wake up, much too large to move easily within my mouth. It blocks my windpipe, I can feel the pressure building up in my lungs. How much longer do I have to suffocate? I wonder, and at once it begins to shrink. At such moments, my tongue reminds me of a worn-out sponge: dry and stiff, it retreats into my esophagus, dragging the rest of my head behind it.

Once in a dream I was standing on a deserted highway. My entire body was one huge tongue. Far off in the distance, I could see a man in uniform lying on his stomach. I told myself I hadn’t seen anything. Tongues don’t have eyes. Then two policemen appeared from nowhere and spoke to me. They said I was the only one who could have witnessed this brutal murder. Shooting a uniform in the back carried a severe penalty. In reality, the man lying on the ground was a tin soldier. There was a lit cigarette sticking out of the pocket of his metal trousers.

I was a tongue. I left the house just as I was: naked, pink and unbearably moist. It was easy to delight people I met on the street, but no one was willing to touch me. The shop windows were full of plastic women who lacked sexual organs. The prices on the tags had been crossed out with red ink. Vigilant citizens are careful not to touch any tongues that haven’t been wrapped up in plastic. My entire person now consisted of one huge tongue. I was unable to find work. Then I wrote an autobiography. The life story of a tongue. I read it aloud to audiences in Melsungen, Hemmelsdorf, Winsen, Bad Hersfeld, Bendestorf, Reutlingen and Ittingen.

For several weeks now I’ve had difficulties each time I give a reading: the letters on the pages of my manuscript transform themselves into a wall. I walk patiently along this wall, but there is no door, no window, not even a bell to ring. I can’t read the sentences, even though I’m the one who wrote them. (But how can I use the word “I” so carelessly? As each line is completed, it pulls back from me and is transformed into a language I no longer understand.)

Unsure of what to do, I begin to force out the first few words. Each one is a hurdle. If only the text didn’t have any words in it, I think, I’d be able to read it easily. The wall of letters blocks my view. Sometimes the sentences break off so suddenly I nearly tumble into the hole of the period. And no sooner have I gotten beyond this danger than the next sentence is already standing there in front of me, with no visible entryway. How am I to begin? The words are becoming more and more angular, unwieldy. Soon the individual letters are sprouting out of them in all directions. Where does a word begin? Where does it end? My courage, which consists of one huge tongue, shrinks until it is smaller than a comma. I have to clamber up each of the letters with my tiny feet, unable to see what lies behind it. Each sound plunges me into an abyss. My voice becomes softer and softer, while the written characters become louder and louder.

I am sick. My entire illness consists of one huge tongue. I look under “doctors” in the phone book but don’t know which one to call. My old dentist hated tongues because they interfered with his examinations. My internist ought to be interested in tongues, since they reveal the condition of the stomach. But he never let me show him my tongue. I turn a few more pages in the phone book. Finally, under the heading “language,” I find a language doctor.

The next day I call the language doctor and go to his office. I tell him about plunging into the abyss and my language pains. This man in his white smock immediately interrupts me and starts making recommendations. In each sentence I say, I am to select a single word I wish to emphasize. This word, he says, should dominate over the others and take complete control of the sentence, otherwise anarchy will reign in my oral cavity. I am to focus on this single word and skim over all the others with a light breath. Suddenly my tongue starts to speak in Japanese.

Not like that, he says, select a word to emphasize. But I can’t pick out a single word at the expense of all the others. It’s not that it offends my sense of democracy, but the rhythm of my breathing trips me up. The doctor is insistent. It really is necessary, he says, for me to emphasize a single word, not by raising the pitch of my voice, but by giving this word greater weight. Once again, Japanese words begin to spring out of my larynx, or are my vocal cords a tape running in some strange machine?

Not like that, the doctor says, hold the pitch steady, otherwise it sounds indecent. In the world of phonetics, pitches are like prostitutes. Besides, “b” isn’t supposed to sound like a spring wind creeping up behind your back; it should make an explosive entrance. In the word “bed,” for instance: one should leap into bed in a single bound, not creep in furtively.

Following the doctor’s instructions, I begin to emphasize only these few chosen words, and all at once the letters of stone vanish. How strange! In order to read, I have to look at the text. But to avoid stumbling, I have to pretend the letters don’t exist. This is the secret of the alphabet: the letters aren’t there any longer, and at the same time they haven’t yet vanished.

In a dream, I meet Zoltán in the street. I invite him to have tea with me. It’s getting dark. In the light of a neon lamp, his face looks pale. What’s the matter? I ask. His skin has become nearly transparent, and beneath it his red and blue veins appear like written characters. On the bare flesh of his inner thigh, I see an “n.” What is that? I ask. Embarrassed, Zoltán replies that he’s become so thin he can no longer cover his blood with flesh. In the chilly air of the dark room, his skin becomes more and more transparent, as if it were covered with ice. I’m glad I have on a fur coat. Is it a tattoo? I ask him warily. No, it’s just my nature, he murmurs. But what about that “n”? That can’t be just nature.

He says that when I say “n,” I shouldn’t press the back of my tongue against my palate; the tip of my tongue is supposed to press against the back of my front teeth. Otherwise you can’t hear this consonant at all, and I would be cutting off the end of his name.

No, not like that, he says, the “n” is supposed to sound different. But for me, this is physically impossible. If the “n” isn’t followed by a vowel, I can’t coax my tongue back to the front of my mouth. Therefore I can’t, for example, pronounce the word “want,” because my tongue is pressing not against the consonants but against Zoltan’s soft penis. It appears to be true that nothing can cover his transparent skin any longer. I watch as countless tiny letters flow into the organ. If only there were an “o” in between! It would be easy for me to say “wanot.” So why shouldn’t I say “wanot” instead of “want”? If some day I no longer need the “o,” I can just drop it. Until then, I’ll keep my wanot. The penis is becoming harder and harder, its surface feels smooth, like silk cloth. Perhaps a person, to be a friend, has to want, to wish for something in the future; but I’m not a friend, I’m a tongue. In any case, I can’t pronounce the word “friend” because there’s a single “n” in the middle of it. “Frienod!” I cry out. At this moment, Zoltan’s penis explodes. Liquid characters spurt out of it, gleam briefly in the neon light and vanish again amid the silence of mute taste buds.

1

For my grandmother, to travel was to drink foreign water. Different places, different water. There was no need to be afraid of foreign landscapes, but foreign water could be dangerous. In her village lived a girl whose mother was suffering from an incurable illness. Day by day her strength waned, and her brothers were secretly planning her funeral. One day as the girl sat alone in the garden beneath the tree, a white serpent appeared and said to her: “Take your mother to see the Fire Bird. When she has touched its flaming feathers, she will be well again.” “Where does the Fire Bird live?” asked the girl. “Just keep going west. Behind three tall mountains lies a bright shining city, and at its center, atop a high tower, sits the Fire Bird.” “How can we ever reach this city if it is so far off? They say the mountains are inhabited by monsters.” The serpent replied: “You needn’t be afraid of them. When you see them, just remember that you, too, like all other human beings, were once a monster in one of your previous lives. Neither hate them nor do battle with them, just continue on your way. There is only one thing you must remember: when you are in the city where the Fire Bird lives, you must not drink a single drop of water.” The girl thanked him, went to her mother and told her everything she had learned. The next day the two of them set off. On every mountain they met a monster that spewed green, yellow and blue fire and tried to burn them up; but as soon as the girl reminded herself that she, too, had once been just like them, the monsters sank into the ground. For ninety-nine days they wandered through the forest, and finally they reached the city, which shone brightly with a strange light. In the burning heat, they saw a tower in the middle of this city, and atop it sat the Fire Bird. In her joy, the girl forgot the serpent’s warning and drank water from the pond. Instantly the girl became ninety-nine years old and her mother vanished in the flaming air.

When I was a little girl, I never believed there was such a thing as foreign water, for I had always thought of the globe as a sphere of water with all sorts of small and large islands swimming on it. Water had to be the same everywhere.Sometimes in sleep I heard the murmur of the water that flowed beneath the main island of Japan. The border surrounding the island was also made of water that ceaselessly beat against the shore in waves. How can one say where the place of foreign water begins when the border itself is water?

1

One winter afternoon — I had an ear infection — I walked through an underground passage that led from a subway station to a street with many shops. I had a three o’clock appointment with my ear doctor, whose office was at the end of the street. How late was it? I wondered. Just before the entrance to the passage I’d seen a clock mounted on the side of a kiosk. The clock was missing the numbers three and seven. Beside the clock stood a man who was just taking the missing numbers from his tool kit so as to affix them to the clock’s face. The woman inside the kiosk shouted to him how nice it would be to be able to see the correct time again. All at once it seemed strange to me that the numbers were arranged in a circle, since ordinarily numbers are always written from left to right.

As I entered the artificially lit passage, I realized I’d forgotten to check what time it was. It was flea-market day in the passage. The people standing on either side of the aisle inspecting the items offered up for sale looked to me as though they’d come from a dream. Their voices echoed as if from a great distance, and their bodies lacked contours. The night before I had dreamt of a flea, or of a market. When I woke up because of the pain in my ear, I felt as though there was a flea leaping about inside. I remembered a story in which a young woman develops an earache during a coach ride. I can’t remember if she was the main character in the story or whether it was only her pain that made me think of her as a heroine. The young woman’s mother and lover pour water into the painful ear, shift her head back and forth several times, then pour the water back out. When they do so, a damp flea leaps out of her ear. The woman faints, and her mother screams for help, while her lover seizes the flea — his prey — between his fingertips and pops it into his mouth.

The flea market was like an illustrated encyclopedia. The ground was crowded with small objects made of copper, colored glass, rubber, beech wood, paper, nylon and other materials. On the wall of the passage, which bore several years’ worth of posters advertising concerts and demonstrations, a number of jackets and coats were displayed for sale. They had been thoroughly cleaned, some of them even ironed and fitted out with new buttons, but I realized that their previous owners had left behind invisible traces on the clothing. These traces were frightening. It wasn’t some contagious illness I was afraid of, but rather the stories of lives unknown to me. A dark gray jacket, for example, which I noticed straight off, reminded me of a neighbor whose life remained a mystery although I’d known him for ten years. He wore a similar jacket, the left pocket of which was pulled slightly out of shape. What did he always carry in it? Every morning he left his apartment, and returned every evening at six o’clock. I knew only the name of the bank he worked for, nothing more. Every so often I noticed, emanating from his apartment, the smell of singed hair.

A hoarse voice addressed me from the left, polite and threatening at once. I shouldn’t just look at the jacket, I should try it on. It’s true it was a man’s jacket, but it would be just right for me. I said nothing and, making no move to touch the jacket, stayed where I was. A short while later a gaunt-looking man with a guitar case appeared. He stopped before the jacket, placed the case on the ground beside him and without the slightest hesitation tried the jacket on. Apparently he was not at all afraid of its former owner. At the time I didn’t yet know that even jackets fresh from the factory already have life stories unknown to me and are not like blank paper. The traces are well hidden, but sometimes one can discover them by accident. Once I purchased what appeared in the store to be a perfectly ordinary radio, but at home that night when I turned it on, it emitted a strange noise. The sound resembled the hoarse scream of a male voice. Then there was a brief scratching sound. I inspected the radio with my magnifying glass and discovered in one of the buttons a splinter of fingernail. It was embedded like a fossil in the black plastic. Probably someone working on the assembly line had been attacked by a machine and lost a fingernail, or even a whole finger. The attack was probably classified as an accident. During the quality control check, the finger had been discovered and removed, but no one had noticed the fingernail. I dug it out with my pocketknife and buried it in the garden. Since then, there have been no more inappropriate sounds from my radio.

At a flea market, no one tries to hide the traces hidden in an object. The stuffed animals with their somewhat squashed faces observed me ironically, furiously or disdainfully. Paperback novelettes with faded covers still bore coffee stains and greasy fingerprints from their first readers. The books can never forget their readers, though the readers have no doubt forgotten all about the books’ contents. Even more than the traces on these objects, the order in which the items were arranged fascinated me. An iron and a candlestick stood side by side, as though there were some relation between them. I was even able to think how this proximity might be deciphered: the iron produces heat and the candlestick light. Each takes the place of the sun, which from the underground passage is never visible.

The interior of my ear is never illuminated by the sun either. It doesn’t want to be illuminated, not even by the ear doctor’s artificial light. For eardrums can receive sounds only in the dark. How late was it? Would I still be able to get to the doctor’s on time? A pair of ice skates and a clock lay side by side, as though challenging me to guess their relation. I stood before them until I had found a solution: ice skates and clock — both turn in circles. When the skaters twirl on the ice, their skates have to turn with them. When ice skaters twirl, they look like the dolls in music boxes, which you wind like a clock.

At the end of the passage I discovered a book between a black umbrella and a sewing machine with a treadle. I don’t know why this book in particular drew my attention. I picked it up, and noticed its slight warmth in the palm of my hand. On the book’s cover I saw letters that were written not from left to right, but in a circle. I asked the man who was standing there hawking his wares in what language the book was written, since I don’t know of any language whose letters are arranged in a circle. He shrugged his shoulders and said it wasn’t a book, it was a mirror. I refused to look at the thing he was calling a mirror.

Maybe it isn’t a book, I conceded, but I would still like to know what’s going on with this writing.

The man grinned and replied: To our eyes, you look exactly like this writing. That’s why I said it was a mirror.

I rubbed my forehead from left to right, as if rewriting my face.