The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

THE LIFE OF A POET Kobo Abe

Whir click clatter. Whir click clatter. From early morning until late at night, the thirty-nine-year-old crone went on pumping the shiny, oil-blackened spinning wheel, cutting back on her already scanty sleep and toiling like a machine in human guise. All so that twice a day she might fill her stomach-shaped oilpan with noodle-shaped oil, and keep the machinery inside her from ever stopping.

On and on and on she worked, until eventually, it came to her. She realized that the machine made of parched flesh and yellow bone was overflowing with the dust of her weariness. And she was seized with doubt.

What have my innards got to do with me?” she wondered. “Why have I got to go on working this spinning wheel for their sake, when they’re a mystery to me? If it’s only to feed the weariness inside me, there’s no point in going on, for Weariness, you’ve grown too large for me to hold.” Whir click clatter. “Ah me, I’m as tired as if I’d turned to cotton.” ’

Just as she was thinking this under the yellow, thirty-watt bulb in her tenement workroom, the crone ran out of fiber. She issued a command to the machinery inside her to stop. But strange to tell, the spinning wheel kept right on moving of its own accord, showing no sign of slowing.

Implacably, the wheel spun round and round, grasping with the last bit of thread for a loose fiber with which to continue its work. Realizing there was no such fiber to be found, the loose end stuck fast to the young crone’s skin, winding around her fingers. And so from the fingertips on, her body, so limp and bone-weary it resembled nothing so much as a wad of cotton, began to elongate, unravel, and wind onto the wheel. Only after she was completely turned to thread, and the thread was wrapped entirely around the bobbin, did the machine finally slow to a stop with a light, moist rattle rattle rattle.

“First you fired fifty workers and made us do their work in addition to our own. Then, with those people gone—the ones who had the courage and the conviction to speak out against your injustice—you forced us to work even harder, and earned a profit of fifty million yen! We demand a raise!”

The son of the thirty-nine-year-old crone had been fired for distributing handbills printed with such inflammatory words. For the sake of his unfortunate comrades left behind, he had spent one entire day stenciling words of purest oxygen with which to rekindle the dying flames in the furnaces of their hearts, and another turning them out on the mimeograph machine. Then, exhausted, he had lain down and fallen fast asleep at his mother’s feet, his bare midriff covered with old newspaper, as she pumped the foot-treadle of the spinning wheel with a whir click clatter.

With the final rattle rattle rattle he opened his eyes, just in time to see the tips of her toes slipping away, through her black, dirt-encrusted work clothes. He watched, horrified, as her toes stretched out longer and thinner, only to disappear through the narrow hole on the spinning wheel.

“Mother!” The old son of the young crone sat cross-legged with his arms around his knees and his fingers laced, tightening his grip until the nails turned purple. Whenever he encountered something too taxing for his mind to contemplate, or too overwhelming for his heart to feel, he unconsciously assumed this position. After a time, he cast aside the newspapers, laid his mother’s empty clothes across his midriff, and stretched out again, succumbing to the wave of exhaustion that swept over him—an inescapable law of physical existence. When this man who owned nothing but his cast-off bonds once gave himself over to sleep, nothing could deter him.

The next morning brought the footsteps of the woman next door, who was as poor as he was. She had come to collect the thread that her neighbor had spun the night before. She used it to weave jackets in order to stimulate the metabolism of her family of five, which tended to grow sluggish on her husband's meager salary.

—Where’s your mother, out? Now where could she have got off to so early in the morning? Oh no, just look at all this thread not rewound. What’ll I do? I’m in a hurry, so I’ll take it as is. But tell her I’ve got to add on a little service charge, will you?..

The aged youth stifled a yawn, sat cross-legged, and laced his fingers over his knees again.

—I have a feeling it’s not such a good idea for you to take that away.

—Oh, you do, do you? Well, that’s all very fine. Tell me, have you invented a magic formula so we can fill our bellies on air? When you do that, don’t look so mopy, will you?

—That’s my trouble, ma’am, I don’t know how I should look.

—Of course not. If you did, I’d give you the back of my hand! Oh, go on. What a boy you are to tease me like this, so early in the morning!

In three days, the crone was woven into a jacket.

The woman who had woven it went out on the street carrying it over her arm.

On the corner by the factory, she called out to a passer-by.

—Mister, how about a nice jacket? It’s good and warm. You won’t catch any colds with this on.

—Why, maybe you’re right. It’s even warm to the touch.

—Of course it is. This is one hundred percent wool, I’ll have you know! Clipped from live sheep.

—It almost seems as if someone was wearing it until this moment.

—Nonsense. This is no second-hand item. I just finished weaving it myself.

—Are you sure something else isn’t mixed in with it?

—Come closer and feel it again. The wool is from a live ewe.

—Maybe so. Hey, did you hear that funny noise? When I pinched it, it yelped. Is that because the wool is from a live ewe, too?

—Don't be silly. All you heard was the growling of your own belly. You must have eaten some rotten beans.

Inside the jacket, the young crone fought back her tears. Seeking to become the jacket completely, she thought with a brain of cloth and felt with a heart of cloth.

The crone’s son came by.

—Ma'am, are you going to sell that jacket? I have a feeling it’s not such a good idea.

—Oh, you do, do you? Well, I have a feeling you’d better not stick your nose in my business! That s all I need, to be teased by a pauper like you.

—Jackets are made to be sold, aren’t they, he mused.

—And don't forget it. Anyone who thinks they’re made to be worn has got another thing coming. Say, mister, come take a look! This would look terrific on you. All the girls'll give you the eye. And you’ll never catch cold.

But try as she would, she found no takers. It wasn t that the jacket was poorly made. The knitting needles she d been using for the last thirty years were by now extensions of her fingers, and with them she had woven a sturdy, practical garment. Nor was it the season, for soon it would be winter.

The problem was simply that everyone was too poor.

The people who needed her jacket were too poor to buy it. Those who could afford it were members of the class that wore expensive, imported jackets. So the jacket ended up in a pawnbroker s storehouse, in exchange for thirty yen.

All the pawnshops were already full of jackets. And all of the houses in town were full of people who owned no jackets. Why didn’t they complain? Had they forgotten that there even were such things as jackets?

Crushed by poverty like so many pickles at the bottom of life’s barrel, the bags of skin surrounding their flesh had been drained of dreams, souls, and desires.

Ownerless and unprotected, these dreams and souls and desires hung now in the air like invisible ether. They were what had needed jackets. Yes, that was it. The same poverty that kept people from buying jackets had robbed them of anything inside requiring the protection of one.

The sun stooped, shadows lengthened and paled, winter arrived. Traces of the escaped dreams, souls, and desires of the poor gathered in the sky as clouds, cutting off the sunlight and making the winter bitterly cold.

Trees shed their leaves, birds molted, and the air became as smooth and slippery as glass. People walked hunched over, ends of noses turned red, and words and coughs froze in the air like clouds of cigarette smoke, causing suspicious teachers to whip their students, and foremen their laborers, out of misplaced zeal. The poor feared the coming of night and mourned the coming of dawn. Men in foreign jackets spent all their time cleaning and polishing their hunting rifles, and women in foreign jackets pirouetted before their mirrors thirty times a day, adjusting expensive furs around their necks. Skiers melted wax for their skis, and skaters oiled grindstones to sharpen their skates. The last swallow flew away, and the first coal-seller stood on the streetcorner, rubbing his hands to keep warm.

All of this, along with the normal changes attendant on the coming of winter, chilled the cloud of dreams and souls and desires within and without until each dream, each soul, each desire froze and crystallized. And one day, they began falling to earth as snow.

In such orderly fashion did the snow fall, filling all crevices, that when you stared hard it seemed rather as if space itself was flowing heavenward. The snow soaked up all sounds of ordinary life in the streets. In the strange quiet, late at night, you could hear the soft jingle of snowflake brushing snowflake, like the chiming of tiny silver bells in a great, soundproofed room.

Naturally, this snow of crystalline dreams, souls, and desires was no ordinary snow. The crystals were wonderfully large, complex, and beautiful. Some had the frigid whiteness of fine, thin porcelain, and others the faint off-white glow of ivory shavings made with a microtome; still others bore the seductive gleam of thin, polished fragments of white coral. Some looked like an elaborate arrangement of thirty swords, others like seven varieties of plankton in layers, and still others like the most beautiful crystals of ordinary snow, seen through a kaleidoscope and magnified eightfold.

And this snow was colder than liquid air, for someone witnessed a flake of it fall into liquid air and vaporize with a puff of steam. It was also unusually hard. Those sword-shaped crystals could have shaved whiskers.

When automobiles passed over it, far from melting in accordance with the law of regelation, the snow jingled underneath and its sharp edges slashed the tires to ribbons. Nearly every substance known to science would either be cut to pieces before it could grind down one of those snowflakes, or freeze before it could melt one away.

What examples should one give to illustrate such coldness? In imitation of Verlaine, should one speak of the snow that fell on the brows of lovers sitting cheek-to-cheek in a wintry park—and left them hard and unmoving as a painted Dali sculpture? Or of the snow that fell on the brow of a man with a temperature of 106, as he lay groaning on his deathbed—freezing him midway between life and death, unable to stir in either direction? Or of the snow that fell on a beggar’s oilcan stove as it burned feebly by a tumbledown wall, freezing the flames motionless as glasswork?

Hour after hour, day after day, night after night... on and on fell the snow, ceaseless as the conveyor belt in a Ford factory. Endlessly, softly it fell, with a jingle as of tin on wood floors, falling on branches of roadside trees,

on mailboxes,

on empty swallows’ nests,

on roofs,

on roads,

on sewers,

down manholes,

on streams,

on railway bridges,

on tunnel entrances,

on fields,

on birdhouses,

on charcoal burners’ lodges,

and on the pawnshop storehouse where the jacket lay. . . .

And then fresh snow fell on the old, covering and softening the hard edges and turning the whole town into soft slopes and gentle curves until, in a matter of days or perhaps hours, as if the gears of a movie projector had suddenly ground to a halt, the entire town stopped cold. The axis of time disappeared from Minkowski’s theory of space-time, and only space, as represented by a single plane, moved against the direction of the falling snow.

A worker carrying his lunch sack leaned partway out the door to gaze up at the sky, and froze that way. A ball thrown by children playing in an empty lot froze in midair, as if caught in an invisible spider’s web. A pedestrian about to light a cigarette froze with his head tilted to one side, holding in his hand a match lit with a still, glasslike flame. A clump of smoke came crawling out of a large factory smokestack like a mischievous imp with a black cloth over its head, and froze motionless, like gelatin that had hardened in cold water. And—before it had a chance to hold fast in midair like the ball—a sparrow fell to earth, shattering like a light bulb into a thousand pieces.

The snow continued to fall.

The mercury column plunged lower and lower until there were no calibrations left, and the thermometer itself began to shrink.

From time to time, cracks raced across the surface of the town, raising great swirls of snow as they went. But these, too, were soon buried under falling snow.

Even so, in the beginning a few families managed to keep from freezing. They were the families wearing imported jackets. The imported jackets themselves had no great warmth, mind you, but their owners, being wealthy, all had roofs impervious to snow, and blazing stoves. In time, however, even these people noticed the growing emptiness of their larders. Gathered around their hot, glowing stoves, family members began to keep sharp watch on the size of one another’s portions at mealtimes. Fuel ran short and sofas gave way to wooden chairs, then orange crates; then people sat on the floor, and then one by one the floorboards were carefully ripped out. Electric lights gave way to oil lamps, then to candles, and finally to darkness. The ladies who had worn sleek furs shriveled into dried-out foxes, and the gentlemen who had polished their hunting rifles while thinking of their bank stocks turned into hairless, rheumatic dogs. Their college-aged sons, once absorbed in detective stories, armed themselves with pistols and raided their mothers’ hoards of canned goods stored carefully away in bedrooms.

From out of the darkened windows, in place of dignified voices scolding the maid, or the gentle, refined laughter of victorious gamblers, there began to issue curses, screams, the thud of heavy objects falling, sounds of ripping cloth, and loud, heartbreaking moans.

Heads of families consulted hysterically with one another over independently powered, cordless telephones, and finally decided to appeal for foreign aid. This was the response to their inquiry over the wireless:

—Buy another five thousand jackets. New design. Ideological tiger-crest, mottled black and white. Or would you prefer fifty or so atom bombs?

It became apparent to them all that the only solution was to get the poor in motion again, get the factories operating again, and start a war.

One resourceful fellow made a bundle of sticks, fastened bent wire on the end, stuck it out through a crack in the window, and tried to hook one of the frozen pedestrians outside. For an instant, all the families in imported jackets stopped fighting and held their breaths, glued to their binoculars and cordless telephones. But the pedestrian only crumbled silently to pieces.

Then came the final, self-destructive burst of hysteria. People were undone, like toys with broken springs. Despairing, they sought the quickest route to becoming meaningless matter. Open a window, stick an arm out into the snow, and freeze yourself—this, it seemed, was the last remaining option of a rational being.

Strangely enough, just when it seemed that every imaginable creature was frozen solid, there was still one mouse whose life went on as before. She lived in the storehouse of the pawnshop where the crone’s jacket was stored. She was looking for material to make a warm nest for her five babies, soon to be born.

Unlike humans, the mouse knew nothing of poverty that could bar the fulfillment of one’s deepest desires; when she found the wonderful jacket, she didn’t hesitate a moment. Taking it in her mouth, she gnawed off a piece. All at once, blood flowed from the severed place. The mouse’s teeth had sunk in just over the crone’s cloth heart. Uncomprehending, the mouse fled back to her nest in astonishment, and promptly miscarried.

The crone’s blood spilled out quietly and spread into every corner of the jacket, staining it bright red.

The snow suddenly stopped. It is likely that the limits of cold had been reached, freezing the very falling of the snow and so making further precipitation impossible.

Then the red jacket, still glossy with blood, rose lightly into the air as if it had been donned by some invisible creature, and glided outside. Through the unmoving snow-space, where day was indistinguishable from night, it glided and swam.

Before long the crone-jacket located a young man in the snow. It was her son, frozen by the factory gate with a wad of handbills stuffed under one arm, caught in the act of handing one to a worker, who stood frozen with a hand outstretched to receive it.

The jacket stopped in front of the youth and wrapped itself around his aged body. He blinked. Then he moved his head gingerly from side to side, and shook his body little by little. He looked around in wonder, then down at his red jacket. All at once it came to him that he was a poet, and he nodded, smiling.

He gathered the melodious snow in his hands and gazed at it. Now he could touch it without freezing. Had it become even colder than the snow, then, that gleam in his eye? He scooped up snow like sand at the seashore and poured it from palm to palm, without injury. Had it become harder than steel, then, the skin of his hands? He was confused. He had to remember. How had this transformation come about?

Frowning, he tried hard to focus his thoughts. Yes, there was something that he must remember. Something that every pauper knew, if memory were not suspended, frozen. Where had this snow fallen from?

Even if he didn’t know the answer, perhaps he could feel it. Look at these crystals of snow, he told himself, so marvelously large, complex, and beautiful. What are they if not the forgotten words of the poor? Words of their dreams . . . souls . . . desires. Hexagonal, octagonal, duodecadonal, flowers lovelier than flowers, the very structure of matter . . . the molecular arrangements of souls of the poor.

The words of the poor are not only large, intricate, and beautiful, but succinct as mineral, and rational as geometry. It stands to reason that none but souls of the poor can become crystalline.

The youth in the red jacket listened to the snow-words with his eyes. He decided to write them down on the backs of the handbills under his arm.

He grabbed a handful of snow and threw it in the air. It flew up with a jingle jingle, but when it fell back down the sound changed to “jacket, jacket.” The youth laughed. His happiness escaped through his barely parted lips as a quiet, cheerful melody, and disappeared into the distant sky. As if in answer, the snow all around him began to hum “jacket, jacket.”

After that he began a precise, detailed investigation of each separate crystal. He wrote everything down, decided on his notation, compiled and analyzed statistics, made graphs, and listened again, even more carefully. He could hear it—the words of the snow, the voices of the dreams, souls, and desires of the poor. With tireless, amazing energy, he went on working.

Gradually, the snow started to melt. Having finished speaking to him, evidently it had no further reason to exist. In the order that they finished speaking, those crystals of snow so cold they had frozen flames now melted away without a trace, like the snows of early spring that vanish the moment they light on the black, moist earth.

In fact, it was almost spring. With every word that he wrote in his notebooks, as if the pages were calendar leaves, spring crept ever closer.

One day, through a crack in the clouds, the sun thrust out a ray of light like the arm of a mischievous little girl. And then, as if groping for a golden ring let fall by mistake into the bottom of a water pitcher filled with old, foaming brew, slowly it shook the town from its slumber.

One could sense creatures stirring. A man came reeling forward, half-paralyzed, saw the young man and laughed, holding out a hand in greeting. Touching the arm of the youth, he muttered “Jacket,” and ran away. Before long the youth was surrounded by a large group of people, new ones joining all the time; “Jacket,” each one would whisper, laying a hand on his arm, and then go off, smiling. These people spread throughout the town.

All around, the unattended storehouses were opened, and countless jackets were carted off. “Jacket!” The joyful, powerful paean was sung out ringingly to all the messengers of spring: to the heavy, moist black earth; to the babbling stream, tumbling and racing along like a three-year-old just learning to run; and to the pale green jewels poking out from between the lingering islands of snow. Though it was spring, there was still a chill in the air, so how beautiful, how wonderful it was to see those poor people clothing themselves in jackets!

The last flake of snow gone, the youth’s work was done. The factory whistle sounded, and all around him, crowds of people wearing jackets set off to work, smiling. Returning their greetings, he closed the last page of his poetry collection, now complete.

And vanished into that page.