Record of a Night Too Brief

MISSING

LATELY, THINGS just keep going missing. Most recently, my eldest brother—that is, of my two elder brothers, brother no. 1. It’s been two weeks now since he disappeared.

As for what he’s up to, it’s hard to say, but it would seem that he’s still at home with us. I just know from the telltale signs: the door to the next room will suddenly rattle, though there’s not a breath of wind; chopsticks and rice bowls will be used, inexplicably; shelves that were thick with dust the night before will be found spotlessly clean in the morning. I know it’s him.

Since disappearances happen all the time in my family, we got used to it pretty quickly. The only awkward thing in the case of my brother was that arrangements for his marriage were just at the point of being concluded.

The first person in our family to disappear, I’ve been told, was my great-grandmother. In her case, the word was that she’d been “spirited away”, and nothing was seen of her for more than a year. When she returned and explained what happened, her daughter—my grandmother—scribbled down what she said. The account went like this: It wasn’t that I wasn’t there I was there right by you You just didn’t hear me no matter how loudly I spoke You looked around when I prodded you You reacted to my touch But you didn’t see me It was a mystery to me my being invisible to you

So it would seem that she was in fact right there with her family the whole time. It was just that they couldn’t see her. She was able to see everything that was happening to her and to those around her perfectly well.

That transcribed account is the only record the family has of what happened in the case of my great-grandmother’s disappearance. Most of the notes that others scribbled down detailing what she’d said got lost over time or used as scratch paper. Probably people were so relieved that she came back after a year that they chose not to enquire further.

But I find it strange that they didn’t. True, it was a different age, and people’s expectations were different, but for someone to have not been there for a whole year—did they not think that a bit odd?

Anyway, after that, family members started disappearing periodically, and perhaps it all started to feel like less of a worrisome event, but no one seems to have felt the need to look into the reasons. When my brother no. 1 disappeared, the family didn’t seem to show much surprise at all.

Well, I suppose as a family we prefer a quiet life. We do have a habit of accepting change in the state of affairs without reading anything too complicated into it—and that goes for me as much as anyone. I did wonder, a lot, about my brother no. 1, in those moments before dawn when time seems to stretch out endlessly, or before falling asleep when dim images rise up before one’s eyes. But I could think of no means of getting him to come back.

Brother no. 1’s betrothed was a woman named Hiroko, the eldest daughter of a family who lived on the uppermost floor of a block in the housing development next to our own. The Hikari Housing Development is a vast complex, with row upon row of multi-storey apartment blocks that are served by a number of different circular bus routes. When you alight from the bus and walk between the buildings, a strong, constant wind hits you full in the face, whisking the hat off your head and whatever you’re holding out of your hands. A notice in large letters at all departure points says: STOW ALL BELONGINGS IN YOUR RUCKSACK. DO NOT WEAR HATS, MUFFLERS, OR EARRINGS. KEEP YOUR CHILDREN NEAR YOUR SIDE AT ALL TIMES. THE RESIDENTS’ ASSOCIATION WILL ACCEPT NO FINANCIAL LIABILITY FOR ANY INCIDENTS THAT MAY OCCUR.

It was one of these buses that my brother no. 1, my mother, and my father boarded when they went to apartment 2907 for their first face-to-face meeting with the family of the wife-to-be.

The order of events for this meeting had been decided over the telephone through the long-time matchmaker for the family, Sasajima Ten. A very old woman, Ten has been plying her trade for generations, even before the time of my great-grandmother. Nowadays, since families tend to be smaller, Ten probably gets less chance to demonstrate her abilities, but she still seems to be surprisingly busy, with a huge clientele whom she tells us she has to rush around taking care of. No one in my family has ever seen Ten. She conducts, as I’ve said, all her business with us by the telephone. Presumably, in the time of my great-grandmother, Ten visited all the families involved at home and sat with them, knees touching, sipping a cup of tea, but on the telephone we never ask her any questions about how she does things, or the way she used to. So nobody really knows.

As Ten had instructed, on a specific day that Ten had chosen, my family made the visit to Hiroko’s family, taking the betrothal gifts of dried kelp and cuttlefish, and a chart documenting our family lineage. They were met at the door by Hiroko’s grandfather, father, and two younger sisters, who stood in a row spanning the width of the hallway. Hiroko stood behind them, hidden, and it was only after the long exchange of delicate formalities was over that my family could get to see what she looked like. Such rules don’t seem to have existed during my grandmother’s time—on the contrary, it seems to have been pretty much anything goes, and the same for the time of my mother and father. In any case, on that day, whether at Ten’s urging, or because my family was somehow influenced by the way they did things in that neighbourhood, everything in the betrothal ceremony went exactly in accordance with the protocol Ten had laid out.

With the greetings over, Hiroko came forward to receive the gifts, which was indication that she was welcoming my brother, mother, and father into her home. The kelp was immediately placed on the display shelf for precious objects in the alcove, the cuttlefish stowed in the refrigerator, and the family chart put into a frame and hung above the Buddhist family altar. Facing the altar, my brother and mother and father intoned the Buddhist Heart Sutra, while Hiroko’s family observed a five-minute silence, and with that the betrothal formalities were complete. The wedding date was scheduled for six months hence.

When my brother no. 1 disappeared, we did not actually tell Hiroko. My brother no. 2 simply took his place. Hiroko and my brother no. 1 had always murmured their sweet nothings to each other over the telephone. The telephone was located in the central room of our apartment, which was not large, and we heard the things brother no. 1 used to say to Hiroko. My brother no. 2 said exactly the same things, in a voice that was indistinguishable from my brother no. 1’s, and Hiroko showed no sign of catching on that my brother no. 1 had left the picture. Not surprisingly, it didn’t occur to anyone in the family to let her know.

When the telephone call came a few days later from Ten saying it was time for Hiroko and her family to visit our family, we were slightly perplexed. But still no one told Hiroko that my brother no. 1 had disappeared. We didn’t tell Ten, either, or ask for her advice. We simply arranged for Hiroko to make her visit, accompanied by her father and grandfather, in one week’s time.

Before my brother no. 1 went missing, it was Goshiki.

Goshiki, the name of which is properly written with the Chinese characters , meaning “five colours”, is a ceramic jar, a family heirloom that had been passed down through a venerable line that I imagine dates back to well before any living person can remember. It’s a great hulk of a jar, and it is claimed that the spirit of one of our forebears inhabits it. The person who started this claim was my grandfather, and at first no one believed him, but he kept saying it and after a while it became an accepted fact that Goshiki was inhabited by a spirit.

Goshiki was so big, it took up nearly half the space of the parlour in our apartment. As children my brothers and I used to try to stand around it with our hands joined, but our arms could never encircle it. It was decorated, as its name implies, with glazes of many colours, and shaped like your typical jar from somewhere in Asia. When my mother put my brother no. 1 to bed, she would say that Goshiki spoke when everyone was fast asleep. My brother no. 1 then started claiming he heard Goshiki speak. Kuma-nori, kuma-nori were the words he heard Goshiki speak. Three years later, my brother no. 2 started claiming the same thing. My brother no. 2, however, claimed that Goshiki said not kuma-nori, but kuma-nara. Then, four years later, Goshiki started speaking to me, saying kuna-nira. At that point my mother explained that no one but the three of us had actually ever heard Goshiki say a word. Since Goshiki was now not only inhabited by a spirit but had also started to make utterances, we should perhaps have started referring to it with a little reverence, as Goshiki-sama, but we felt more comfortable with plain old “Goshiki” so we continued to refer to it in our old familiar way.

It was the task of the male head of the family to clean and polish Goshiki. Before my father it had been my grandfather, and before him my great-grandfather. Every day Goshiki would be wiped clean, and once a month a special polishing fluid would be used to give it a sheen. In my greatgrandfather’s day the polishing methods were rather willynilly, and people seem to have been happy to leave Goshiki for several months just to gather dust, but as the decades passed the procedure got more formalized and codified.

My brother no. 1 had been next in line to inherit the role of Goshiki-polisher.

It was the day after a once-monthly polishing ritual that Goshiki vanished without a trace.

We were awakened by a shriek from my brother no. 2, who was always the earliest of us all to rise. One after another we ran out of the bedroom where we slept in our hammocks.

My brother no. 2 was in the parlour, his legs planted firmly on the floor, one arm straight up in the air, the other pointing at the empty space.

“Goshiki’s gone! Goshiki’s gone!” he was shouting, repeatedly. My father and brother no. 1, with open hands, patted the space where Goshiki had been, but no sense of Goshiki’s presence was to be found. After half an hour of the family futilely hunting high and low we abandoned the search. Meanwhile, my brother no. 2 was still shouting, “Goshiki’s gone! Goshiki’s gone!”—sounding like some sort of automated alarm, and finally my mother had to shut him in a closet to muffle the sound.

When my brother no. 1 disappeared, no one yelled out his name or made any concerted effort to look for him.

After that, we saw neither hide nor hair of Goshiki again. But my brothers and I did sometimes hear its voice. In the dead of night when I got up to go and relieve myself, I would hear the refrain kuna-nira, kuna-nira waft down from above. When I walked to the end of the road lined with cypresses to go and draw water from the well, I would hear kuna-nira, kuna-nira float down from between the branches.

On days when I heard Goshiki speak, something slightly out of the ordinary would always happen. A full moon. Rumblings of thunder. Masses of tiny ants on the walls.

The family etched Goshiki’s name in simple katakana into a wooden post in the corner, and before long we started to gather there in the morning, clap our hands to summon Goshiki’s spirit, and pray.

After Hiroko and my brother no. 2 were married, Hiroko would come to live with us. This meant that we would be a family of six: officially, then, within three months of the wedding, one of us would have to leave. Hiroko’s family would be reduced to four, which meant they would, officially, have to take in someone new. Simply balancing out the numbers by making a convenient inter-family swap is not allowed. It’s taboo. It would have been out of the question, for example, if Hiroko had married my brother no. 1, for my brother no. 2 to go over to her family and take her place.

I am not certain when this rule of families having to consist of five members came into existence. But it seems to have been in place when my mother’s younger brother got married and his wife came to live with the family. This was the reason my mother was required to move out of the family home. Because an inter-family swap was out of the question, my mother had to go to live with a family of complete strangers who resided three streets away. After a five-year stay with them, she married my father, in a match arranged by Ten.

Nevertheless, to follow official procedures so closely and actually to move out like my mother did is now rather unusual. These days people rarely follow rules so literally, and false claims of a family having five members are common. So I doubt that when Hiroko does come to live with us anyone will really have to leave, and Hiroko’s family probably won’t bother to take in anyone new, either.

I suspect that the rule of a family having five members became a dead letter almost as soon as it was posted. If anything, it’s probably true to say that families—like my own and Hiroko’s—that have five members are the exception rather than the norm. One can easily encounter families having as many as fourteen people living under one roof, and others consisting of just a single individual.

Certain families also keep pipe foxes for company. These are mythical foxes endowed with magical powers that ascetic mountain priests in olden times kept in bamboo pipes and carried with them on their travels. About twenty years ago, my mother tells me, it was all the rage to keep pipe foxes as pets.

“Twenty years ago,” my mother says, sighing, “that was just when I was a newly-wed. My longing to have a pipe fox as a pet was almost unbearable.”

Hiroko’s family were said to have three pipe foxes, which may be one reason why my mother and my father were so keen to have her as their daughter-in-law.

At that time, my mother tells me, there were advertisements for pipe foxes tacked up all over the block, and it was possible to buy them with a mail-order purchase, cash on delivery. Make an order, and you’d get a pipe fox delivered in a box. The family who lived next door did that, and one day when my mother had returned from shopping and was in the middle of opening her front door the next-door wife came out and told her about it, in some detail. “It’s surprisingly well behaved for its size,” she said, “it doesn’t howl, and you can put it away in a pipe that’s only ten-by-two centimetres! When you touch it, it emits sparks, and if you leave it alone, it frolics about by itself. Our pipe fox has done wonders for the happiness of our home life. My husband drew up an ambitious proposal for his work—which is to do with vegetables, you know—and he got it accepted. And the children submitted artwork to the residents’ art exhibition, and they won top prizes. But the best thing of all is, pipe foxes have a marvellous smell!”

After chattering on at length about her happy life, the next-door wife went on her way.

“I begged your father to let me send away for a pipe fox,” my mother tells me, mournfully, over and over again, “but he never agreed.”

None of us children ever had an interest in pipe foxes. Not a single member of my family—neither my mother, nor my father, nor my two brothers, nor I—has ever set eyes on one. When my brother no. 1 went with my mother and father to visit Hiroko’s family, no pipe foxes were ever brought out for them to see. And there was no hint at all of any marvellous smell.

As for family structure, the usual combination is a father, a mother, and three children. Sometimes, instead of three children, there’ll be a grandmother and two children, sometimes two grandparents and one child. Sometimes the family will be a mother and four children. What’s important is that the official number is five. Of course, that is only the official number, and the reality is often different. As I already explained, some families have fourteen members, some families just have a lone individual.

There was once a family a few doors down where there were no grown-ups at all, just five children. Five children: not only officially, but in reality too—clearly the result of overzealous observance of the five-member-family rule. There were two boys and three girls, ranging from first year at primary school to second year of middle school. With no adults to maintain order, this family was noisy. They were continually bashing and banging things, making a commotion till late into the night, returning home, for example, with a large wheelbarrow found somewhere and pushing each other around in it. The family earned the disapproval of the neighbours, and the local health and public-welfare official made any number of visits. Attempts were made at scolding them and coaxing them to be quiet, but with no effect. Somebody then suggested putting the children into care, but no willing foster parents could be found. Meanwhile, the children continued to make a terrible din, and so finally the chairman of the residents’ health and welfare association paid the family a visit in person. When he and his assistant set foot inside, the two children of primary-school age bombarded them with flour.

And then, even stranger, the littlest two started tearing about, changing size, expanding and shrinking by turn, rampaging over the floor and the ceiling. The chairman and his assistant grew quite dizzy. Soon, the other children came out and joined in, and a great wind arose, turning into a tornado that whipped through the house, rushing from room to room, picking up the furniture with it. Eventually the chairman of the residents’ health and welfare association and his assistant had no option but to make good their escape, barely getting away with their lives. The children hooted with glee, their laughter resounding through the buildings, shaking the factory chimneys and the water towers. The neighbouring families hid behind their doors, trembling, too terrified to set foot outside. And the next morning they found their doors covered with that same white flour. After that, the home of the five-child family was a ruined shell. No one knew where the five had gone. Some people claimed they had ridden on the back of the tornado to some far-off land; others claimed that peals of laughter could still be heard from the apartment at night. But no one ever visited that apartment again.

My brother no. 1 makes himself visible to me from time to time.

Only recently, he appeared to me on the balcony on the east side of the apartment. I was airing the bedding when suddenly there he was, sitting astride the quilt. His face was pale and he looked weak and tired.

“I want more sweet things to eat,” he said. After that we made sure always to include jellies and buns stuffed with sweetened red-bean paste in the food that we placed for him on the family altar. This was odd because my brother no. 1 used to be very fond of alcohol. Of course, you do come across people who like to drink and also have a sweet tooth, but my brother never used to eat sweet things. And now, here he was regularly eating sweet things. I guess people must really change character once they lose their visible form.

“Are you bothered about Hiroko?” I asked him when he reappeared. He shook his head, sitting there on the quilt, but he didn’t say a word. I wondered if he was jealous because he had to have seen Hiroko and his brother happily exchanging sweet nothings every night. I have no idea whether people who lose visible form feel emotions such as joy or jealousy.

Seeing that Hiroko was soon going to become a member of the family, my father rigged up a new hammock from the ceiling, and my mother hung the quilt out on the balcony to air every day. This was the quilt that my brother no. 1 sat astride, so maybe he was bothered about Hiroko after all.

My brother no. 1’s presence would come and go: at times it was intense, at times quite faint. Of everyone in the family, I was the one who was most sensitive to it. Often he would sit on my chest in the middle of the night and I would wake up feeling the pressure of his weight.

“What’s the matter?” I would ask him, and he would reply:

“I’m feeling sad.”

“Sad in what way?” I would ask.

“I’m sad because I don’t have a body. I’m right here, close by you all, but I’m no longer family. That’s why I feel sad.”

“We’re still your family, even though you’re no longer with us,” I would say. But he would reply:

“Once someone disappears, they can no longer be part of the family.”

“What does it feel like, not to be part of the family?” I would ask.

“It feels like you’re no longer your real self,” he would reply. And then he would vanish, making a noise that sounded as if he was coughing.

I always feel out of sorts when I’ve had my brother on top of me. Held down and broken. The mood lasts half the day.

Every family has its own customs. It is the custom of Hiroko’s family, for example, to gather parsley and mugwort on the day of the spring equinox. The family hangs bunches of the herbs under the eaves and lets the aroma drift through the rooms of the apartment. The bunches of herbs also have the effect of blocking out daylight. Deep inside the dark rooms, Hiroko and her family sit, in the formal kneeling position, inhaling the heady fragrance of parsley and mugwort.

After a few minutes, Hiroko’s grandfather will get to his feet, and begin to weave his way on unsteady legs round and round, as if drunk. Then, one after another, every member of the family will do the same thing: her father, Hiroko, her two sisters, all of them will get up and totter their way round the rooms of the apartment. Apparently they carry on doing this for several hours. The only time they broke this custom, observed annually, was the year that Hiroko’s mother died, when the day of the funeral coincided with the spring equinox. Her grandfather argued that they should put off the funeral so that their practice of gathering parsley and mugwort could be observed without postponement. But her father insisted, and eventually the family did hold the funeral.

I heard about these events before my brother no. 1 disappeared. As usual, the information was relayed from Hiroko via the telephone in the centre of our apartment. The whole family listened with pricked-up ears, holding their breath as she related the story. That year, Hiroko told my brother no. 1, a number of extremely inauspicious events had occurred in her family because they had failed to observe their usual practice. Hiroko didn’t go into any of the details. No doubt they were family secrets. I don’t think my brother no. 1’s disappearance was caused by anything inauspicious, but maybe my father and mother’s not telling Hiroko about it owed to a similar sense of family privacy.

In comparison to Hiroko’s family, my family is rather unscripted when it comes to customs: we really only have two. On the third day of the third month, Girls’ Day, we gather sprays of subtly coloured flowers from the fields, bring them back to the apartment, arrange them on a tiered display, and contemplate them. And on one evening in the month of September we turn off all the lights in the apartment and gaze up at the moon.

Once Hiroko becomes one of us, we will have to persuade her to give up the formal practice of getting drunk on the smell of parsley and mugwort and to follow our rather unscripted ways.

But it’s only these last fifty years that every family has started to have its own particular customs. Before that, there seems to have been little that differed among families at all. When I ask my mother and father about it, they purse their lips and don’t say much. Well, maybe I should go and ask someone who’s old, someone like Ten, I say. And they reply: Don’t be stupid! Families are just families, that’s all there is to it! Since that’s the answer I get as soon as I start to ask, I’ve had no option but to let the matter go.

It was the day for Hiroko and her father and grandfather to make their return visit.

On a night without moon or stars, Hiroko, her father, and her grandfather arrived at our apartment. Standing in the entrance-way, their arms full of rustling, leafy branches of some pliant tree like the willow, they dinged the bell, and my family greeted them. The three visitors brought neither kelp nor dried cuttlefish, like my family had, only a chart showing Hiroko’s family line, which Hiroko’s grandfather presented to my father.

When Hiroko’s grandfather and my father were done making their introductory statements, everyone present took a breath, and we all shuffled over in a group to the room that holds the god shelf. Facing the eight million gods of heaven and earth who reside there, my father offered up an ancient Shinto prayer, and Hiroko and her father and grandfather joined in, albeit with some embarrassment. There was still no sign of my brother no. 1 even when all the observances were over. We knew this was probably what would happen, but it was extremely awkward nevertheless.

Hiroko’s father and my father then discussed one or two matters of finance. When this discussion ended, there didn’t seem to be many other topics to talk about, and the adults fell silent. Then my brother no. 2 plucked Hiroko by the sleeve, and invited her to retire to his room. Hiroko went along with his suggestion, making a sign with her eyes to the adults.

Slipping away furtively behind the god shelf, and pressing my ear to the bedroom wall, I found I could hear the sweet nothings they were exchanging. The words continued in an unbroken fashion, now loud, now soft. Peeking in through a crack in the door I saw my brother no. 2 and Hiroko, each sitting in a different corner, one in the west, the other in the east, taking turns uttering endearments to one another. Neither looked directly at the other when they spoke. Each just listened to the other’s voice. Hiroko became aware of me standing at the door and beckoned me in, so I went inside and lay down on the floor at her feet.

Once I lay down, I remembered that I used to lie like this next to someone else, long ago. In that memory I could recall someone stroking parts of my belly, my throat, and the palms of my hands.

The person doing this was my brother no. 1. Nekoma, nekoma, he would be murmuring, stroking me determinedly. When he did that, I would make a sound in my throat, a continuous, soft, purring sound, and I would slowly turn into something that resembled the creature he was calling. A nekoma is a little creature that is covered with a thick coat of fur on its legs, arms, and back. It has whiskers, and it lives amid the boulders and pillars that form the foundations of a house. At first you might take it to be part of the foundations, but then on closer inspection one day you notice a spot that is a slightly different colour from the rest, and once you are aware of that you see, slowly, a distinct outline that emerges gradually, very gradually, as a nekoma. Finally, it takes on its own form, quite separate from the boulders and pillars, and then it comes out from under the house and starts to walk around inside the house. It walks around soundlessly, and so very few people are aware of its existence, but my brother no. 1’s ears were sharp, and he would grasp on to the sound of its steps and call out, Nekoma! Nekoma! and the nekoma would immediately go up to him and curl up in a little ball in his lap, looking both half-awake and half-asleep at the same time.

I had never laid eyes on a nekoma, but my brother no. 1 used to tell me so much about them, I found myself involuntarily trying to take the form of a nekoma. I longed so much to curl up in a little ball in my brother no. 1’s lap, to be held like a nekoma in his arms. But my brother no. 1 had disappeared from my world, and so all I could do was to lie stretched out at the feet of Hiroko.

“I love you so much, I could die of my love,” I heard Hiroko say to my second elder brother, above me as I lay there.

“I love you,” my brother no. 2 would reply. “With a love that is as deep as a swamp, and as high as a heap of rubble.”

“A swamp, you say? What colour of swamp?”

“A dark, muddy, bluish-greenish swamp.”

“Well, my love is just as deep, just as deep as that swamp.”

“And the love that we both feel will merge together in the murky waters of the swamp, and sink down silently, ever so silently, to the bottom.”

“And what will we find, waiting there at the bottom?”

“Why, Hiroko: family, of course.”

The two of them repeated their sweet nothings any number of times. But I simply grew sadder and sadder. My brother no. 1 who used to stroke me like a pet had disappeared. I often had a distinct sense of his presence, but Hiroko and my brother no. 2 were now behaving as if he were no longer a part of our lives. And pretty soon that’s what he would be—gone from our lives for ever. Perhaps this was what my brother no. 1 meant when he told me he was sad. I try with all my might to become a nekoma, but since the person who used to do the things that made me become one has gone, I find it impossible. I have a physical form, I am still in the family, but I’m sad. And if I am this sad now, what is the point in being here? Perhaps it won’t be long before I disappear too.

The marriage between my brother no. 1 and Hiroko was dissolved with a telephone call to Ten, and with that same telephone call Hiroko became engaged to my brother no. 2 since the engagement formalities had already taken place. Both my father and my mother seemed to have forgotten that my brother no. 1 had ever existed. And my brother no. 2 seemed to have forgotten as well. Before I was even aware of it, the hammock in which my brother no. 1 used to sleep was taken down, and we were spending our days as a family of four.

Time passed, and the festival season approached. My father and my mother were taken up with the festival preparations. Every night discussions took place in the conference room of the apartment complex about arrangements for the event: who should be allowed to set up stalls. What kind of pattern should adorn the jackets of the participants. Whether we should drape decorations on the stones. And also how we should combat the insects.

During the festival season we are visited by swarms of insects, and the residents of the apartment complex are always concerned about what steps to take against them. The insects are about as large as a person’s thumb. In colour and shape they resemble the rhinoceros beetle, though they’re somewhat smaller in size. They fly around making a loud droning sound and sting people. Once someone is stung, the skin swells up with bumps that are the size of a coin, and these bumps then become blisters, which take a long time to heal. The best thing would be if we could spend the whole of the festival indoors and so not risk any contact with the bugs. But we have to go outside: the festival always takes place in the grassy area in the middle of the complex. A festival held indoors wouldn’t be a festival.

This year my father and my brother no. 2 were going to act as “living pillars”, that is, humans who would lure the insects away from the crowd. The practice involves someone covering themselves all over with a lotion having a particular sweet smell that bugs find irresistible, so that they will fly straight towards the smell and thus be ensnared. So why not rub the lotion on an inanimate object? Because the insects are not lured simply by a sweet smell: it’s got to be a sweet smell smeared on a human being.

On the night of the festival, it was decided that Hiroko would be allowed to come and observe. Ordinarily it would be strictly taboo to go to the apartment block of the family of one’s husband-to-be before marriage, but since her husband-to-be was going to be one of the living pillars, she was given special dispensation.

When Hiroko came over, it was discovered that she had covered herself with a thick layer of insect-repellent ointment. “You didn’t need to go that far,” my mother admonished. “We will have the living pillars, after all. But you’re not one of us yet, are you?—so you’re not familiar with our ways.”

Hiroko blushed, embarrassed. “I’ll take care from now on,” she said, apologizing. “I’ll be one of your household soon, I’ll take care not to do anything wrong.”

My father and my brother stripped down to their underwear; the sweet smell they had smeared on their bodies permeated the air, and the bugs swarmed round them, buzzing loudly. My father and brother stood stock-still, their faces taut.

In a few seconds their faces and bodies were a crawling mass of insects. “Are they really going to survive that?” Hiroko exclaimed in horror, clearly wanting to throw aside the restraining hands of my mother and the officials of the residents’ association and rush to help the human sacrifices. It was difficult to know if my father and brother could hear her. They were covered from head to toe with insects, but they stood bolt-upright and didn’t move.

Hiroko started screaming. “Why do you have to do this stupid thing? Why don’t the rest of you let yourselves get stung?”

But no one paid her the blindest bit of notice.

“If you want to change things so radically you could always stand for election as a member of the residents’ association committee,” a committee member said to her.

“All right. As soon as I’m a member of the family, I will!” Hiroko replied, indignant but with resignation. And with that she lost consciousness.

Immediately the insects swarmed over to her, but not one would land on her because of the strong insect-repellent.

My mother and I sighed as we pressed cool towels on her forehead.

With the festival over, my father and my brother no. 2 took to their hammocks and didn’t get up for a whole month. Their entire bodies were swollen and covered with blisters: it was a month before the blisters burst and formed scabs. The scabs were on their feet, hands, bellies, eyelids, and ears—whatever patch of skin had been left exposed—and as the scabs hardened they got extremely itchy: in the last week or so, my father and my brother were scratching themselves constantly. There were scabs even inside their ears, which meant that communication during the telephone calls between my brother no. 2 and Hiroko was impossible.

“Can’t you do anything about those scabs?” Ten would plead with us on her occasional telephone calls. Hiroko was apparently missing the sweet nothings she exchanged with my brother no. 2 so much that she was growing wan and thin. Her voice did seem to my mother and me—we were now taking her calls—to be growing pitifully weaker. Despite the communication difficulties, Hiroko still made her calls every day at the same time, and attempted to discuss this and that. Hiroko would always end every call in tears.

How is someone who is so sensitive ever going to become one of us? my mother and I wondered. It’s not something you say out loud, so we didn’t express it. But we each knew this was what the other was thinking. I strongly suspected that what had made Hiroko so delicate was her family’s custom of breathing in the fragrance of parsley and mugwort. Or maybe it was those pipe fox things they kept over in her family.

On nights when Hiroko seemed particularly disconsolate we went and reported to my brother no. 2 how very sad she was, and he would react with amazement. His heavy, scab-covered eyelids would widen as he stared in surprise.

Why on earth is she letting it get to her so much, he seemed to want to say.

“I think it might be because she loves you,” I would reply. And then he would make a face that said:

“Well, I love her too. I want to marry her, don’t I? But why does she have to cry about something like this?”

“It’s not clear.”

“Do you think she’s a bit peculiar?”

“No. She comes from a different family, that’s all.”

When all the scabs fell off my brother no. 2’s body and he was able to have a normal conversation on the phone, he put a call through to Hiroko. Hearing his voice, she immediately broke down in tears. The entire family was listening.

“I love you so much!” Hiroko said, sobbing uncontrollably.

“You love me so much it makes you cry?” my brother no. 2 replied, in a bored tone of voice.

“Yes! Yes! I do!” Hiroko replied. And then, bursting into another fit of sobbing, she blew her nose loudly. I was sure that Hiroko’s relatives were all ranged around her and listening, in the same way that we were with my brother.

After thinking for a while, my brother no. 2 spoke.

“My love for you,” he declared softly, “is wider even than the floor area of the largest apartment in this apartment complex.” There was the sound of applause at the other end. At that we on this end started to clap too. The ripples of applause kept on coming, one after another. In the brief pauses between them we could hear Hiroko blowing her nose.

It was the day of the wedding at last. Dressed in bridal robes embroidered with gold thread, Hiroko made the journey over from the Hikari Housing Development. Her family accompanied her. All of them came over in a slow-moving procession, having loaded Hiroko and her furniture onto a truck decked out with banners of white and red, in accordance with instructions given them over the telephone by Ten. Hiroko’s sisters and I were the bridal attendants, and Hiroko’s grandfather read out the Shinto prayers, and in this manner the wedding ceremony proceeded without a hitch. There were the usual delicacies for a sit-down meal, and everyone ate their fill. When it was over, Hiroko’s family expressed their profuse thanks and took their leave. And then off they went, piled onto their festively decorated truck.

Hiroko sat with a distracted air surrounded by our family, still dressed in her kimono embroidered with gold thread. My brother no. 2 seemed to find the kimono amazing, and constantly pulled at its sleeves or lifted up the hem. Hiroko looked as if she wanted to brush his hands aside, but she didn’t and simply sat there looking uneasy. My mother took them to the room where their hammocks were hanging, and closed the door. This was the rite of the first marital night.

As we stacked up the lacquer platters which the sushi had been delivered in and washed up the saké cups, we listened intently, just as we had when they talked on the telephone. But no sound, not even the faintest rustle, came from the room. No vows of love, no screams, no whisperings. My mother opened the doors very slightly, and made a few gestures of encouragement, but neither my brother no. 2 nor Hiroko made any movement in response. Waiting until dead of night, the family entered the room to take to their hammocks. My brother no. 2 and Hiroko were each fast asleep, each in their own hammock, snoring. Hiroko was fully dressed in her gold-embroidered kimono.

Then, suddenly, there was my brother no. 1. Hiroko awoke: in the early hours after the night of the wedding, as she lay there in her gold wedding dress, she was in pain—she was gasping in agony. Something was weighing heavily on her chest. Everyone else rushed out of bed and tried to calm her, stroking her, rubbing her, but her pain continued unabated.

Only I could see my brother no. 1. There he was, sitting astride Hiroko’s chest, looking quite unconcerned and kissing her. He looked very happy as he put his lips to hers. Perhaps my brother no. 2 got an inkling of his presence because he was calling out to him, Nii-san, Nii-san, and trying now to shake Hiroko. But he couldn’t see my brother no. 1, I could tell, because he was addressing his attentions to entirely the wrong spot.

“Hey,” I said softly to my brother no. 1, “you’re hurting her.”

“No, I’m not. She likes what I’m doing,” he said. And kissed her again. Hiroko started to get flushed and swollen in the places where he put his lips. Her cheeks, the area under her arms, her breasts, everywhere swelled up, in exactly the same way as the people who’d been stung by the insects. My mother and father and my brother no. 2 paced around the room in a dither.

“Don’t you think you should stop?” I asked.

My brother no. 1 replied sadly:

“I’m only doing it because by rights she’s my wife.”

There was nothing I could say to that.

“Are you still sad?” I asked.

My brother no. 1 didn’t answer, but only started to kiss Hiroko more passionately. Hiroko creased her forehead in pain. In a few minutes she fainted, and the tension left her body. In that instant my brother no. 1 vanished from sight.

My brother no. 1 was no longer visible to anyone now, and we all busied ourselves with caring for Hiroko. I found myself feeling a little envious of her. I wanted to be kissed by my brother no. 1 like that too. I wanted to curl up on his lap and have him kiss me like that, passionately.

“I can hear a crane crying,” Hiroko started to say. She would say it as she stood next to my mother at the sink polishing our tin cutlery, or as she was massaging my father’s stiff shoulders. She would suddenly tilt her head at an angle and interrupt our conversation to come out with it. As soon as she said it, her body would shrink one whole size smaller, with an accompanying throbbing sound: hyun.

No one else in the family could hear the sound of the crane—none of us could recognize the cry of a crane in the first place. My father and my mother and my brother no. 2 stared at Hiroko in bewilderment. With her body now appreciably smaller, Hiroko kept mumbling those words as she continued with her tasks—as she polished the cutlery or kneaded my father’s shoulders. Since she was now considerably reduced in size, the tin cutlery was far too unwieldy for her, and her tiny hands were quite ineffective for massaging. My brother no. 2 had stopped exchanging love talk with her once the wedding was over. My mother tried whispering to him discreetly that Hiroko had probably started mentioning the crane’s cries because she was unhappy about not getting sweet nothings from him. After listening to this with an impatient look on his face, my brother no. 2 made a perfunctory attempt at murmuring into Hiroko’s ear, but Hiroko simply listened with a blank look in her eyes. My brother no. 2’s sweet nothings didn’t have the passion they’d had during their engagement. Hiroko wasn’t the only one—the whole family no longer cared to listen.

These days, though I heard no crane, I frequently heard another sound: Goshiki muttering kuna-nira, kuna-nira. The words would reach my ears as I walked the frozen paths in the early morning, or the dark roads behind the housing development at dusk. Goshiki! Goshiki! I would call, and Goshiki’s voice would get a little closer. Every time I heard Goshiki calling, in the exact opposite way to Hiroko, who would shrink when she heard the cry of the crane, I got fatter. As I walked along the frozen paths, Goshiki’s voice came pouring into me, and my body got bigger and bigger, swelling up like a bag getting filled with warmth.

Hiroko was diminishing in size by the day; my brother no. 1 hadn’t appeared again, and it began to seem that Hiroko was having difficulty fitting in with our family. She became so tiny that she could be held in the palm of a hand. At night when we went to bed we would have to pick her up in our fingers and place her gently in her hammock. And she became completely useless at kitchen tasks. The few times my brother no. 2 tried to talk to her, she would stick her fingers in her ears and tell him: “You’re too loud!” All she did was sweep the tatami room from dawn till dusk using a tiny broom. But no matter how energetically she swept, it would be night by the time little Hiroko had finished. At supper, we would find it unbearable to see her listlessly eating her carrot and mustard-cress salad, repeating that sentence, “The crane is crying.” In the end my mother decided that it was time to call Ten.

Everyone listened in intently on the conversation.

“Hiroko’s shrunk!” my mother said.

All of us heard Ten huff and puff on the other end of the line.

“So she hasn’t matched up, then.”

“No, she hasn’t matched up.”

During this conversation, my brother no. 2 was lying in a corner of the room, chiselling a bit of wax. Hiroko was in the tatami room, still her diminutive self, sweeping the floor.

“Well, maybe we should return her,” said Ten.

And it was decided that’s what we would do.

“I wonder why all my recent marriages have gone bad!” Ten grumbled.

“Is it just the recent ones?” my mother said, her voice curious. Ten huffed and puffed grumpily again.

“I haven’t had a single success in all of ten years!”

We’d never heard any talk of her record of matchmaking failures before, so this was quite a jolt. Ten carried on huffing and puffing for a while, then reverted to her usual tone.

“How about letting me try with your girl?”

By girl, of course, she was referring to me. I’d been suspecting this might happen. Ever since I’d started to hear Goshiki call to me more frequently and my body had started to swell, I had been pretty much resigned to it. Immediately Ten and my mother started discussing how to get me out of the family and off into a new one.

As soon as my mother and Ten had decided on how to settle the matter of Hiroko, they began discussing a suitable family to whom I could go in one month’s time. My father and I listened in on the conversation between my mother and Ten, but my brother no. 2 gave his attention completely over to his piece of wax, and all Hiroko did was sweep the tatami room. It almost seemed as if there was no sense of their presence—as if they had disappeared. Even things that have disappeared leave some trace of their presence, but these two were still visible to the eye and yet seemed to have vanished completely. As if to take the place of these two presences that were absent, my brother no. 1 now appeared by my side and started listening in attentively on the conversation between my mother and Ten. My brother no. 1 started kissing me passionately and caressing my breasts, and I began to swell up like a bag filled with water, making soft liquid sounds, and swayed in pleasure from side to side.

Matters with Hiroko were settled with a minimum of fuss. She had now shrunk so much she was as tiny as an aubergine seed, and so we put her into a glass container with a gauze cover to make sure she wouldn’t be crushed, and waited for her family to come to retrieve her. Hiroko’s family brought back the kelp and the dried cuttlefish that we had taken over to them, and we carefully handed over Hiroko in her glass bottle.

“Do you often have family members who shrink?” my father asked, when it was all nearly over.

“We do—often,” Hiroko’s grandfather replied, in a confidential tone.

My father and my mother exchanged glances.

“Members of our family disappear,” my father declared.

Hiroko’s grandfather nodded gravely. “Every family has something about it, doesn’t it?” he said.

Suddenly my brother no. 1 made an appearance. He was intoning a prayer in the centre of the room. My brother no. 2 was as weak and lifeless as he had been since Hiroko started to shrink. He was still chiselling his pieces of wax.

“Do I hear something?” said Hiroko’s grandfather, seeming to sense the presence of my brother no. 1. Goshiki’s voice started resounding loudly in my ears. Kuna-nira, kuna-nira… Overlaying the tones of the tuneless mumblings coming from my brother no. 1, it drowned out, inexorably, every other sound.

Hiroko’s family were just on the point of closing the front door as they left when my mother asked, as if the thought had suddenly struck her:

“Do pipe foxes really have a marvellous smell?”

Hiroko’s family looked at my mother in wonder. “Pipe foxes?” Hiroko’s grandfather repeated.

“Yes, pipe foxes,” my mother replied.

“What on earth are they?”

My mother and my father twitched slightly, but recovered in a second.

Once little Hiroko and her family had taken their leave, my brother no. 1 disappeared and Goshiki’s mutterings ceased. I asked my mother and father to tell me about pipe foxes. They both looked baffled. “What are you talking about?” my mother replied. My father shook his head adamantly.

“Well, then, can you tell me about my brother no. 1?” I immediately asked.

At this, my mother and my father looked even more mystified.

“You’re talking nonsense, girl. Goodness, what a tiring day. I’m all worn out,” my mother said, pounding her shoulders. And my father echoed her words.

“I wonder if Hiroko will ever go back to her previous size.”

“‘Hiroko’—what’s that?”

“You know—Hiroko, the woman my brother no. 2 married.”

“Never heard of her. Have you, Father?”

“No, never.”

The wax pieces that my brother no. 2 was carving were spilling out of the room. They had an extremely strong smell. Neither my mother nor my father took any notice of what I was saying, and they went to lie down in their hammocks. I left the house to see if I could catch any sign of Goshiki, and wandered around the park in the middle of the housing development, but no sound reached my ears. Soon it began to seem as if I were wandering around in a dream, and I became uncertain whether my brother no. 1 or Hiroko had even existed. When I returned to the apartment, my mother and my father were sleeping like logs, snoring loudly. My brother no. 2 had disappeared. Only his wax leavings remained.

When I got up the next morning, the excess wax had been swept up, and the number of hammocks reduced to three.

Once again the season has changed. The family has now taken up burning incense. I’m not certain how long this custom of incense appreciation has existed in my family. I have the feeling that before we did this we did something else, but I can’t recall what it was. Sitting squeezed between my mother and my father, I take deep sniffs of the warm, soothing aromas.

I am now swollen, tight and fat like an enormous tube. I began to bulge in the last season, but this season there’s no hiding it—I’m huge. My mother and my father lavish me with care, keeping me well fed, if only to make me swell up even more. The apartment feels a lot roomier now than it once did, and maybe that’s why they’re trying to make me get bigger. Some days I can clearly recall my two missing brothers, but other days I wonder: was I just imagining them from the very start? The incense smells like sandalwood, and when I listen to its fragrance Goshiki’s voice floats into my ears. Goshiki’s voice—the one thing I can be certain is real. With Goshiki’s words ringing in my ears, kuna-nira, kuna-nira, kuna-nira, I put a call through to my husband-to-be. I have only met this person once, at our betrothal ceremony, and to me he looked identical to my brother no. 1, but since I don’t recall what that brother looks like, that doesn’t make much sense. Looking at old photos doesn’t help either. I seem to remember in real life my brother no. 1 had much more heft—in the photos he looks flat. But the voice of my husband-to-be on the telephone is sweet and low, and that’s probably the thing that matters.

When I leave here and go to join the family of my husband-to-be, will I undergo a similar kind of transformation as Hiroko’s? Will I too just disappear, even now that my body is all big and swollen? My brother no. 2 claimed that if you sank to the bottom of the deep swamp of love, you’d find family waiting there. I have yet to get any visits from my brother no. 2. When my brother no. 1 makes his visits, he lets me know that he cares. With a huge effort, he pushes my big blob of a body over on its side and then kisses me all over, gently but passionately, like he did that time to Hiroko, and strokes and pats my hair. I long to curl up in a little nekoma ball with my head in his lap, like I used to, but I don’t think he could take it, I am so big and swollen. And anyway, he’s not here, he’s not physically around, so it’s impossible. My father intones sutras every day; my mother selects different incenses to burn, and I continue to swell, spending my time simply waiting for visits from my brother no. 1. Goshiki’s voice sounds continually, insistently, in my ears, and every day we gather before the wooden post and clap to summon its spirit and pray.