Where Europe Begins

THE REFLECTION

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

can’t fall asleep. I always see exactly

what I’ve just read.

You see what you’ve read in the water.

You see it in the sky.

The monk doesn’t just leap into the water straight off.

He glances to the right and left.

He glances up and notices there is no moon in the sky.

I beg your pardon?

The moon as such does not exist. There is only its

reflection in the water.

Perhaps you just can’t see it.

Seeing doesn’t mean much.

Perhaps the moon is just missing today.

It’s never been there.

Then why does the monk see the moon’s reflection in

the water?

The reflection is from yesterday.

Or the moon is from yesterday.

You can’t see yesterday’s moon.

The moon no one sees belongs to yesterday.

It’s in the wrong time.

You can’t help but see wrong what

lives in the wrong time.

The monk sees with the wrong gaze.

No, the moon just appears at the wrong moment.

Even a right moon can be wrong

at the wrong moment.

The moon no one sees is a wrong moon.

Something no one sees can’t be wrong.

The monk doesn’t even notice he’s seeing

a wrong moon.

The moon doesn’t know it’s being seen

as a wrong moon.

It’s only a reflection.

A reflection is never wrong.

It’s not a reflection, it’s a water moon.

The monk sees a moon made of water.

This moon is fluid. It is not superficial.

It is only superficial when seen.

It is no longer superficial when touched.

The hand that has touched it is wet.

One day later the newspaper reported the monk’s suicide. Many in the village were surprised, since it was rare for a monk to die in this way. Only now did they realize how little they knew about his life. They had seldom seen him. When they conversed with him, he spoke only of death. But this was only because of his profession. It didn’t occur to any of them that the monk, too, would one day die. Some said that he had probably fallen into the pond and drowned by accident. Others said this was impossible, as the monk was an excellent swimmer. When he was still a small child, he liked to swim in the pond as much as all the other village children. After becoming a monk he stayed out of the water, for he had come to revere it.

The monk leaps into liquid, to embrace liquid.

He does not drown. He clings to the water moon.

His hands are wet.

For a dissolving gaze there is nothing more solid than

water. For water there is nothing more solid

than a human gaze.

The monk gazes upon the water with closed eyes.

He does not swim. He sits upon water.

He lies down on water. He does not know where the

sky is, where the earth.

He who can forget the sky does not sink.

Who are you.

I talk too much and write too little.

He who sits near the water speaks a great deal.

The water supports all conversations.

He who lies upon the water has ceased to speak.

Who are you?

I swim too often and speak too seldom.

A girl from the village walked to the pond. Her mother had told her the monk had died there. It was a quiet afternoon. The sky grew darker and darker, the air cooler. Then a wind sprang up and unsettled the water’s surface. The girl heard a sound from beneath the water.

What do you hear now?

I hear a water sound.

Every water sound casts some light.

Let there be light! And there was sound.

It is bright.

Can you see more now?

No, it is too loud here. That’s why you can hardly see.

In sleep, one sees only by hearing.

What do you see now?

I hear a water sound.

In the nocturnal landscape the monk washes his hands.

Because his hands are too clean. He rinses away their

cleanness.

He washes his hands with the wind.

And the wind has the form of a wave.

The wave reaches the monk, and he is wet.

The monk does not unclothe.

He never shows himself naked.

In his robe he sits upon the water.

The folds of his robe become waves.

One newspaper article said the monk had been found naked. The corpse was floating on the water when a fisherman came to gather insects.

The girl wanted to find the dead monk’s robe. If it was true he had been found naked, his robe had to be somewhere near the pond. After a while it grew dark. The mother was waiting at home for the girl. She thought the girl had gone to the next village to visit her old teacher. The girl looked for the robe and couldn’t find it. Disappointed, she sat down and gazed into the water. Something gleamed: it was a book.

The monk never unclothes.

He never parts from his robe.

He parts only from his prayer book.

He throws the book into the pond.

And it sinks into the water.

The water is cold.

But the book does not drown. The texts can breathe

without air.

The book lies underwater.

The monk has nothing left to read. He has time now

to drown.

Anyone can swim. But only he who knows that the

water has no form can drown. Only he who

knows that his body has no form can drown.

Only he who reads can drown. That water and body

are formless can be found only in the book.

The book lies in the water.

It glows as the sky darkens.

From outside the water the book cannot be read.

The monk leaps into the water to read the book.

And he drowns.

He sinks beneath the water and sees not a splinter of

the moon.

He sees the splinters of the reflection.

When the monk leaps into the water the image on its

surface shatters.

The girl squatted down, stretched out her arms toward the book and tried to reach it. The soil beneath her feet was soft and subsided, and the water was much deeper than it had appeared. The girl fell into the cold water and drowned. That night there was no moon.

The moon sees the monk in the water, reading the

prayer book.

The moon leaps into the water to embrace the monk.

It shatters.

It splinters.

The splinters scatter through the water.

The pond now is empty.

In the empty pond lies a book.

And a monk who is reading the book.

And the moon which is embracing the monk.

And a girl who is dead.

Once upon a time.

You are now. You are here.

SPORES

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.

CANNED FOREIGN

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.

THE TALISMAN

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.

RAISIN EYES

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.

STORYTELLERS WITHOUT SOULS

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.

2

In Hamburg-on-the-Elbe there is a small harbor known as Devil’s Bridge. A long time ago, no one was able to build a bridge across the Elbe strong enough to withstand a severe autumn storm. The devil made the desperate Hamburg merchants an offer: he would build an indestructible bridge. In payment he demanded a soul. The merchants promised to give him a soul when the bridge was completed. When the devil had finished work, it became apparent that none of the merchants was prepared to forfeit his soul, and so they sent a rat across the bridge to the devil, who stamped on the rat in fury and then sank into the earth. Since then the harbor has been called Devil’s Bridge.

When I first heard this legend, I didn’t understand it, because I didn’t know rats have no souls. That is, rats have no souls for the devil, who is quite Christian in his orientation. In other religions that tell of the lives of plant souls and animal souls, a rat most certainly does have a soul — one every bit as precious as that of a Hamburg merchant. The devil needn’t have been disappointed.

I have two ways of visualizing the human soul. In the first, the soul looks like an elongated roll I once ate in Tübingen. This sort of bread is called Seele or “soul” in Swabia, and many people have souls in this shape. But this doesn’t mean the soul is inserted into their bodies like a roll. The soul is an empty space in the body that must constantly be filled with the roll that has the same shape as this space, or with an embryo, or with the breath of love. Otherwise the owners of the souls feel as if something is missing.

The second way I picture the soul is as a fish whose name is also “sole”: thus the soul is related to water, or to the sea. I’m thinking of something like the soul of a shaman. Among the Tungus, for example, it’s said the soul of the aspiring shaman draws the tribal river down to the dwelling place of the shaman’s ancestral spirits. There, among the roots of the tribe’s shamanic tree, lies the shaman’s animal mother, who devours the soul of the new arrival and then gives birth to it in the form of an animal. This animal can be a quadruped, or it can be a bird or a fish; in any case, it functions as the shaman’s double and guardian spirit.

It’s a nice thought that somewhere in the world the soul is leading its own life in animal form. The soul is independent from the person in question. The human being has no way of knowing what the soul is experiencing, but still there is a link between him and his soul. I would like to share a life with the person I call “my soul” as the shaman does with his; I never see or speak with this person, but everything I experience and write corresponds to this person’s life. I appear to be soulless because my soul is constantly in transit.

3

In a book about Indians I once read that the soul cannot fly as fast as an airplane. Therefore one always loses one’s soul on an airplane journey, and arrives at one’s destination in a soulless state. Even the Trans-Siberian Railway travels more quickly than a soul can fly. The first time I came to Europe on the Trans-Siberian Railway, I lost my soul. When I boarded the train to go back, my soul was still on its way to Europe. I was unable to catch it. When I traveled to Europe once more, my soul was still making its way back to Japan. Later I flew back and forth so many times I no longer know where my soul is. In any case, this is a reason why travelers most often lack souls. And so tales of long journeys are always written without souls.

4

According to Walter Benjamin, there are two kinds of storytellers: “When someone goes on a trip, he has something to tell about, goes the German saying, and people imagine the storyteller as someone who has come from afar. But they enjoy no less listening to the man who has stayed at home, making an honest living, and who knows the local tales and traditions. If one wants to picture these two groups through their archaic representatives, one is embodied in the resident tiller of the soil, and the other in the trading seaman.”

There are some who travel much farther than sailors and remain in one place even longer than the oldest farmer: the dead. And so there are no storytellers more interesting than the dead. But it is a problem that their language cannot be understood, it is not even audible. How can one hear the stories of the dead? This is one of the most difficult tasks of literature and is solved in different ways in various cultures.

A theater, for example, is often a place where the dead can speak. A simple example is found in Hamlet: the dead father comes on stage and tells how he was killed by his brother. That is the decisive moment in this play, without which neither Hamlet nor the audience would have access to the past. They would have to go on believing the story of the murderer, who claimed Hamlet's father had been bitten by a poisonous snake. Through the dead man's story we learn a bit of the past that otherwise would have remained obscure. The theater is the place where knowledge not accessible to us becomes audible. In other places, we almost always hear only the tales of the living. They force their stories on us to justify themselves, and so that they will be able to go on living, like Hamlet's uncle. The tales told by the dead are fundamentally different, because their stories are not told to conceal their wounds.

5

There are other places besides theaters where one can hear the stories of the dead: for example in an anthropological museum. At the Museum of Anthropology in Hamburg there are a number of transparent coffins lined up one beside the other, each containing a dead figure. Each figure personifies a tribe. A coffin standing on end resembles a phone booth because the figures inside look as if they are about to tell a story. That is probably why these coffins have to be standing up rather than lying flat, as coffins usually do.

The figures in the coffins — dolls made of plastic — bear witness to the link between death and these dolls: all of the tribes represented in the form of dolls were, at some point in history, culturally or economically conquered by others and to some extent destroyed. As in other museums as well, a power relationship is illustrated here: that which is represented is always something that has been destroyed. In a zoological museum, for example, a stuffed wolf might be put on display, whereas no wolf can display a human being. Historical museums, too, are marked by a hierarchical relationship between past and present.

As long as an outsider appears threatening, the others try to destroy him. When he is dead, he can be lovingly represented as a doll in a museum. One can look at the doll, listen to the explanations of its way of life, view the photos of its homeland, but there is always something that remains unclear. There is a veil separating the museum visitor from the dead doll, making it impossible to learn much. One learns much more when one attempts to describe an imaginary tribe. What should their lives look like? How does their language function? What is this completely unfamiliar social system like? It is equally interesting to play the role of an observer who comes from a fictional culture. How would he describe “our” world? This is the endeavor of fictive ethnology, in which not the described but the describer is imaginary.

6

That the dolls can be thought of only in conjunction with death can be seen in the following brief example: a long time ago, when the people in many Japanese villages were suffering inescapable poverty, it sometimes happened that women who gave birth to children, rather than starving together with them, would kill them at birth. For each child that was put to death, a wooden doll called kokeshi, meaning make-the-child-go-away, was crafted, so that the people would never forget they had survived at the expense of these children.

7

It is difficult to understand the language of dolls. To our ears, they are usually mute. The language of the dead isn’t really comprehensible either. For the most part it can’t even be heard. Only in a state in which one is not fixated on understanding can one hear it.

I remember a day when I felt as though I’d heard the language of the dead. In 1982, in the spring, I visited a village in Nepal inhabited by Tibetans. Before me stood a temple from which a prayer was emanating. When I listened more closely, I realized it consisted of several voices. I looked inside the temple and saw a single monk praying. From his body came several voices. After he had taken a breath, he once more spread out a deep voice like a carpet on which several other voices could then appear. He produced these voices from within his body, offering a sounding board to storytellers who themselves had none. The dead, for example, who had no bodies of their own in which their voices could resonate, were able to become audible in the voice of the monk.

At the time I tried to produce my own voice carpet. I failed in my attempt, but for the first time I became conscious of several secondary voices that form part of my speech. I began to pay attention to these voices as I spoke. Telling stories no longer took the place of listening; rather, listening gave rise to stories.

Perhaps the ear is the organ of storytelling, not the mouth. Why else was the poison poured into the ear of Hamlet's father rather than his mouth? To cut off a person from the world, you must first destroy not his mouth but his ear.

8

There are even dolls that can articulate the language of the living. In 1992 I visited London to see them. It wasn’t only the popular singing and speaking wax figures of rock musicians that could speak our language, there were also several less famous mechanical dolls in the guise of a fortune teller or a doctor. I found a mechanical doctor at a marketplace. When I sat down opposite him, he told me in a mechanical voice to place my hands on the glass plate. Between us stood a desk topped with a glass plate through which one could observe his fascinating mechanism. The creases in my palm were read, that is, they were deciphered like letters of the alphabet. The doctor nodded and picked up a slip of paper with a precise gesture. He wrote out a prescription and gave it to me. Unfortunately, his handwriting was illegible. A furiously wavy line traversed the paper from left to right. This, then, is what the translation of the creases in my palm into a particular language looked like. I pretended I was able to read this writing, thanked the mechanical doctor and went on my way.

TONGUE DANCE

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.

WHERE EUROPE BEGINS

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?

2

The crews of three Russian ships stood in uniform on the upper deck playing a farewell march whose unfamiliar solemnity all at once stirred up the oddest feelings in me. I, too, stood on the upper deck, like a theatergoer who has mistakenly stepped onstage, for my eyes were still watching me from among the crowd on the dock, while I myself stood blind and helpless on the ship. Other passengers threw long paper snakes in various colors toward the dock. The red streamers turned midair into umbilical cords — one last link between the passengers and their loved ones. The green streamers became serpents and proclaimed their warning, which would probably only be forgotten on the way, anyhow. I tossed one of the white streamers into the air. It became my memory. The crowd slowly withdrew, the music faded, and the sky grew larger behind the mainland. The moment my paper snake disintegrated, my memory ceased to function. This is why I no longer remember anything of this journey. The fifty hours aboard the ship to the harbor town in Eastern Siberia, followed by the hundred and sixty hours it took to reach Europe on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, have become a blank space in my life which can be replaced only by a written account of my journey.

3

Diary excerpt:

The ship followed the coastline northward. Soon it was dark, but many passengers still sat on the upper deck. In the distance one could see the lights of smaller ships. “The fishermen are fishing for squid,” a voice said behind me. “I don’t like squid. When I was little, we had squid for supper every third night. What about you?” another voice asked. “Yes,” a third one responded, “I ate them all the time, too. I always imagined they were descended from monsters.” “Where did you grow up?” the first voice asked.

Voices murmured all around me, tendrils gradually entwining. On board such a ship, everyone begins putting together a brief autobiography, as though he might otherwise forget who he is.

“Where are you going?” the person sitting next to me asked. “I’m on my way to Moscow.” He stared at me in surprise. “My parents spoke of this city so often I wanted to see it with my own eyes.” Had my parents really talked about Moscow? On board such a ship, everyone begins to lie. The man was looking so horrified I had to say something else right away. “Actually I’m not so interested in Moscow itself, but I want to have experienced Siberia.” “What do you want to experience in Siberia?” he asked, “What is there in Siberia?” “I don’t know yet. Maybe nothing to speak of. But the important thing for me is traveling through Siberia.” The longer I spoke, the more unsure of myself I became. He went to sit beside another passenger, leaving me alone with the transparent word through.

4

A few months before I set off on my journey, I was working evenings after school in a food processing factory. A poster advertising a trip to Europe on the Trans-Siberian Railroad transformed the immeasurably long distance to Europe into a finite sum of money.

In the factory, the air was kept at a very low temperature so the meat wouldn’t go bad. I stood in this cold, which I referred to as “Siberian frost,” wrapping frozen poultry in plastic. Beside the table stood a bucket of hot water in which I could warm my hands at intervals.

Once three frozen chickens appeared in my dreams. I watched my mother place them in the frying pan. When the pan was hot, they suddenly came to life and flew out the kitchen window. “No wonder we never have enough to eat,” I said with such viciousness even I was shocked. “What am I supposed to do?” my mother asked, weeping.

Besides earning money, there were two other things I wanted to do before my departure: learn Russian and write an account of the journey. I always wrote a travel narrative before I set off on a trip, so that during the journey I’d have something to quote from. I was often speechless when I traveled. This time it was particularly useful that I’d written my report beforehand. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have known what to say about Siberia. Of course, I might have quoted from my diary, but I have to admit that I made up the diary afterward, having neglected to keep one during the journey.

5

Excerpt from my first travel narrative:

Our ship left the Pacific and entered the Sea of Japan, which separates Japan from Eurasia. Since the remains of Siberian mammoths were discovered in Japan, there have been claims that a land bridge once linked Japan and Siberia. Presumably, human beings also crossed from Siberia to Japan. In other words, Japan was once part of Siberia.

In the Atlas of the World in the ship’s library I looked up Japan, this child of Siberia that had turned its back on its mother and was now swimming alone in the Pacific. Its body resembled that of a seahorse, which in Japanese is called Tatsu-no-otoshigo—the lost child of the dragon.

Next to the library was the dining room, which was always empty during the day. The ship rolled on the stormy seas, and the passengers stayed in bed. I stood alone in the dining room, watching plates on the table slide back and forth without being touched. All at once I realized I had been expecting this stormy day for years, since I was a child.

6

Something I told a woman three years after the journey:

At school we often had to write essays, and sometimes these included “dream descriptions.” Once I wrote about the dream in which my father had red skin.

My father comes from a family of merchants in Osaka. After World War II, he came to Tokyo with all he owned: a bundle containing, among other things, an alarm clock. This clock, which he called the “Rooster of the Revolution,” soon stopped running, but as a result, it showed the correct time twice each day, an hour that had to be returned to twice a day anyhow. “Time runs on its own, you don’t need an alarm clock for that,” he always said in defense of his broken clock, “and when the time comes, the city will be so filled with voices of the oppressed that no one will be able to hear a clock ring any longer.”

His reasons for leaving the land of his birth he always explained to his relatives in a hostile tone: “Because he was infected with the Red Plague.” These words always made me think of red, inflamed skin.

A huge square, crowds of people strolling about. Some of them had white hair, others green or gold, but all of them had red skin. When I looked closer, I saw that their skin was not inflamed but rather inscribed with red script. I was unable to read the text. No, it wasn’t a text at all but consisted of many calendars written on top of each other. I saw numberless stars in the sky. At the tip of the tower, the Fire Bird sat observing the motion in the square.

This must have been “Moscow,” I wrote in my essay, which my teacher praised without realizing I had invented the dream. But then what dream is not invented?

•

Later I learned that for a number of leftists in Western Europe this city had a different name: Peking.

7

Diary excerpt:

The ship arrived in the harbor of the small Eastern Siberian town Nachodka. The earth seemed to sway beneath my feet. No sooner had I felt the sensation of having put a border, the sea, behind me than I glimpsed the beginning of the train tracks that stretched for ten thousand kilometers.

That night I boarded the train. I sat down in a four-bed compartment where I was soon joined by two Russians. The woman, Masha, offered me pickled mushrooms and told me she was on her way to visit her mother in Moscow. “Ever since I got married and moved to Nachodka, my mother has been behind Siberia,” she said. Siberia, then, is the border between here and there, I thought, such a wide border!

I lay down on the bed on my belly and gazed out the window. Above the outlines of thousands of birches I saw numberless stars that seemed about to tumble down. I took out my pocket notebook and wrote:

When I was a baby, I slept in a Mexican hammock. My parents had bought the hammock not because they found it romantic, but because the apartment was so cramped that there was no room for me except in the air. All there was in the apartment was seven thousand books whose stacks lined the three walls all the way to the ceiling. At night they turned into trees thick with foliage. When a large truck drove past the house, my Mexican hammock swung in the forest. But during the minor earthquakes that frequently shook the house, it remained perfectly still, as though there were an invisible thread connecting it to the subterranean water.

8

Diary excerpt:

When the first sun rose over Siberia, I saw an infinitely long row of birches. After breakfast I tried to describe the landscape, but couldn’t. The window with its tiny curtains was like the screen in a movie theater. I sat in the front row, and the picture on the screen was too close and too large. The segment of landscape was repeated, constantly changing, and refused me entry. I picked up a collection of Siberian fairy tales and began to read.

In the afternoon I had tea and gazed out the window again. Birches, nothing but birches. Over my second cup of tea I chatted with Masha, not about the Siberian landscape but about Moscow and Tokyo. Then Masha went to another compartment, and I remained alone at the window. I was bored and began to get sleepy. Soon I was enjoying my boredom. The birches vanished before my eyes, leaving only the again-and-again of their passage, as in an imageless dream.

9

Excerpt from my first travel narrative:

Siberia, “the sleeping land” (from the Tartar: sib = sleep, ir = Earth), but it wasn’t asleep. So it really wasn’t at all necessary for the prince to come kiss the Earth awake. (He came from a European fairy tale.) Or did he come to find treasure?

When the Creator of the Universe was distributing treasures on Earth and flew over Siberia, he trembled so violently with cold that his hands grew stiff and the precious stones and metals he held in them fell to the ground. To hide these treasures from Man, he covered Siberia with eternal frost.

It was August, and there was no trace of the cold that had stiffened the Creator’s hands. The Siberian tribes mentioned in my book were also nowhere to be seen, for the Trans-Siberian Railroad traverses only those regions populated by Russians — tracing out a path of conquered territory, a narrow extension of Europe.

10

Something I told a woman three years after the journey:

For me, Moscow was always the city where you never arrive. When I was three years old, the Moscow Artists’ Theater performed in Tokyo for the first time. My parents spent half a month’s salary on tickets for Chekhov’s Three Sisters.

When Irina, one of the three sisters, spoke the famous words: “To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow…,” her voice pierced my parents’ ears so deeply that these very same words began to leap out of their own mouths as well. The three sisters never got to Moscow, either. The city must have been hidden somewhere backstage. So it wasn’t Siberia, but rather the theater stage that lay between my parents and the city of their dreams.

In any case, my parents, who were often unemployed during this period, occasionally quoted these words. When my father, for example, spoke of his unrealistic plan of founding his own publishing house, my mother would say, laughing, “To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow….” My father would say the same thing whenever my mother spoke of her childhood in such a way as though she might be able to become a child again. Naturally, I didn’t understand what they meant. I only sensed that the word had something to do with impossibility. Since the word “Moscow” was always repeated three times, I didn’t even know it was a city and not a magic word.

11

Diary excerpt:

I flipped through a brochure the conductor had given me. The photographs showed modern hospitals and schools in Siberia. The train stopped at the big station at Ulan-Ude. For the first time, there were many faces in the train that were not Russian.

I laid the brochure aside and picked up my book.

A fairy tale told among the Tungus:

Once upon a time there was a shaman who awakened all the dead and wouldn’t let even a single person die. This made him stronger than God. So God suggested a contest: by magic words alone, the shaman was to transform two pieces of chicken meat given him by God into live chickens. If the shaman failed, he wouldn’t be stronger than God any longer. The first piece of meat was transformed into a chicken by the magic words and flew away, but not the second one. Ever since, human beings have died. Mostly in hospitals.

Why was the shaman unable to change the second piece of meat into a chicken? Was the second piece somehow different from the first, or did the number two rob the shaman of his power? For some reason, the number two always makes me uneasy.

I also made the acquaintance of a shaman, but not in Siberia; it was much later, in a museum of anthropology in Europe. He stood in a glass case, and his voice came from a tape recorder that was already rather old. For this reason his voice always quavered prodigiously and was louder than a voice from a human body. The microphone is an imitation of the flame that enhances the voice’s magical powers.

Usually, the shamans were able to move freely between the three zones of the world. That is, they could visit both the heavens and the world of the dead just by climbing up and down the World-Tree. My shaman, though, stood not in one of these three zones, but in a fourth one: the museum. The number four deprived him permanently of his power: his face was frozen in an expression of fear, his mouth, half-open, was dry, and in his painted eyes burned no fire.

12

Excerpt from my first travel narrative:

In the restaurant car I ate a fish called omul’. Lake Baikal is also home to several other species that actually belong in a saltwater habitat, said a Russian teacher sitting across from me — the Baikal used to be a sea.

But how could there possibly be a sea here, in the middle of the continent? Or is the Baikal a hole in the continent that goes all the way through? That would mean my childish notion about the globe being a sphere of water was right after all. The water of the Baikal, then, would be the surface of the water-sphere. A fish could reach the far side of the sphere by swimming through the water.

And so the omul’ I had eaten swam around inside my body that night, as though it wanted to find a place where its journey could finally come to an end.

13

There were once two brothers whose mother, a Russian painter, had emigrated to Tokyo during the Revolution and lived there ever since. On her eightieth birthday she expressed the wish to see her native city, Moscow, once more before she died. Her sons arranged for her visa and accompanied her on her journey on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. But when the third sun rose over Siberia, their mother was no longer on the train. The brothers searched for her from first car to last, but they couldn’t find her. The conductor told them the story of an old man who, three years earlier, had opened the door of the car, mistaking it for the door to the toilet, and had fallen from the train. The brothers were granted a special visa and traveled the same stretch in the opposite direction on the local train. At each station they got out and asked whether anyone had seen their mother. A month passed without their finding the slightest trace.

I can remember the story up to this point; afterwards I must have fallen asleep. My mother often read me stories that filled the space between waking and sleep so completely that, in comparison, the time when I was awake lost much of its color and force. Many years later I found, quite by chance, the continuation of this story in a library.

The old painter lost her memory when she fell from the train. She could remember neither her origins nor her plans. So she remained living in a small village in Siberia that seemed strangely familiar to her. Only at night, when she heard the train coming, did she feel uneasy, and sometimes she even ran alone through the dark woods to the tracks, as though someone had called to her.

14

As a child, my mother was often ill, just like her own mother, who had spent half her life in bed. My mother grew up in a Buddhist temple in which one could hear, as early as five o’clock in the morning, the prayer that her father, the head priest of the temple, was chanting with his disciples.

One day, as she sat alone under a tree reading a novel, a student who had come to visit the temple approached her and asked whether she always read such thick books. My mother immediately replied that what she’d like best was a novel so long she could never finish it, for she had no other occupation but reading.

The student considered a moment, then told her that in the library in Moscow there was a novel so long that no one could read all of it in a lifetime. This novel was not only long, but also as cryptic and cunning as the forests of Siberia, so that people got lost in it and never found their way out again once they’d entered. Since then, Moscow has been the city of her dreams, its center not Red Square, but the library.

This is the sort of thing my mother told me about her childhood. I was still a little girl and believed in neither the infinitely long novel in Moscow nor the student who might have been my father. For my mother was a good liar and told lies often and with pleasure. But when I saw her sitting and reading in the middle of the forest of books, I was afraid she might disappear into a novel. She never rushed through books. The more exciting the story became, the more slowly she read.

She never actually wanted to arrive at any destination at all, not even “Moscow.” She would greatly have preferred for “Siberia” to be infinitely large. With my father things were somewhat different. Although he never got to Moscow, either, he did inherit money and founded his own publishing house, which bore the name of this dream city.

15

Diary excerpt:

There were always a few men standing in the corridor smoking strong-smelling Stolica cigarettes (stolica = capital city).

“How much longer is it to Moscow?” I asked an old man who was looking out the window with his grandchild.

“Three more days,” he responded and smiled with eyes that lay buried in deep folds.

So in three days I would really have crossed Siberia and would arrive at the point where Europe begins? Suddenly I noticed how afraid I was of arriving in Moscow.

“Are you from Vietnam?” he asked.

“No, I’m from Tokyo.”

His grandchild gazed at me and asked him in a low voice: “Where is Tokyo?” The old man stroked the child’s head and said softly but clearly: “In the East.” The child was silent and for a moment stared into the air as though a city were visible there. A city it would probably never visit.

Hadn’t I also asked questions like that when I was a child? — Where is Peking? — In the West. — And what is in the East, on the other side of the sea? — America.

The world sphere I had envisioned was definitely not round, but rather like a night sky, with all the foreign places sparkling like fireworks.

16

During the night I woke up. Rain knocked softly on the windowpane. The train went slower and slower. I looked out the window and tried to recognize something in the darkness…. The train stopped, but I couldn’t see a station. The outlines of the birches became clearer and clearer, their skins brighter, and suddenly there was a shadow moving between them. A bear? I remembered that many Siberian tribes bury the bones of bears so they can be resurrected. Was this a bear that had just returned to life?

The shadow approached the train. It was not a bear but a person. The thin figure, face half concealed beneath wet hair, came closer and closer with outstretched arms. I saw the beams of three flashlights off to the left. For a brief moment, the face of the figure was illumined: it was an old woman. Her eyes were shut, her mouth open, as though she wanted to cry out. When she felt the light on her, she gave a shudder, then vanished in the dark woods.

This was part of the novel I wrote before the journey and read aloud to my mother. In this novel, I hadn’t built a secret pathway leading home for her; in contrast to the novel in Moscow, it wasn’t very long.

“No wonder this novel is so short,” my mother said. “Whenever a woman like that shows up in a novel, it always ends soon, with her death.”

“Why should she die. She is Siberia.”

“Why is Siberia a she? You’re just like your father, the two of you only have one thing in your heads: going to Moscow.”

“Why don’t you go to Moscow?”

“Because then you wouldn’t get there. But if I stay here, you can reach your destination.”

“Then I won’t go, I’ll stay here.”

“It’s too late. You’re already on your way.”

17

Excerpt from the letter to my parents:

Europe begins not in Moscow but somewhere before. I looked out the window and saw a sign as tall as a man with two arrows painted on it, beneath which the words “Europe” and “Asia” were written. The sign stood in the middle of a field like a solitary customs agent.

“Were in Europe already!” I shouted to Masha, who was drinking tea in our compartment.

“Yes, everything’s Europe behind the Ural Mountains,” she replied, unmoved, as though this had no importance, and went on drinking her tea.

I went over to a Frenchman, the only foreigner in the car besides me, and told him that Europe didn’t just begin in Moscow. He gave a short laugh and said that Moscow was not Europe.

18

Excerpt from my first travel narrative:

The waiter placed my borscht on the table and smiled at Sasha, who was playing with the wooden doll Matroshka next to me. He removed the figure of the round farmwife from its belly. The smaller doll, too, was immediately taken apart, and from its belly came — an expected surprise — an even smaller one. Sasha's father, who had been watching his son all this time with a smile, now looked at me and said: “When you are in Moscow, buy a Matroshka as a souvenir. This is a typically Russian toy.”

Many Russians do not know that this “typically Russian” toy was first manufactured in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, modeled after ancient Japanese dolls. But I don’t know what sort of Japanese doll could have been the model for Matroshka. Perhaps a kokeshi, which my grandmother once told me the story of. A long time ago, when the people of her village were still suffering from extreme poverty, it sometimes happened that women who gave birth to children, rather than starving together with them, would kill them at birth. For each child that was put to death, a kokeshi, meaning make-the-child-go-away, was crafted, so that the people would never forget they had survived at the expense of these children. To what story might people connect Matroshka some day? Perhaps with the story of the souvenir, when people no longer know what souvenirs are.

“I’ll buy a Matroshka in Moscow,” I said to Sasha’s father. Sasha extracted the fifth doll and attempted to take it, too, apart. “No, Sasha, that’s the littlest one,” his father cried. “Now you must pack them up again.”

The game now continued in reverse. The smallest doll vanished inside the next-smallest one, then this one inside the next, and so on.

In a book about shamans, I had once read that our souls can appear in dreams in the form of animals or shadows or even dolls. The Matroshka is probably the soul of the travelers in Russia who, sound asleep in Siberia, dream of the capital.

19

I read a Samoyedic fairy tale:

Once upon a time there was a small village in which seven clans lived in seven tents. During the long, hard winter, when the men were off hunting, the women sat with their children in the tents. Among them was a woman who especially loved her child.

One day she was sitting with her child close beside the fire, warming herself. Suddenly a spark leapt out of the fire and landed on her child’s skin. The child began to cry. The woman scolded the fire: “I give you wood to eat and you make my child cry! How dare you? I’m going to pour water on you!” She poured water on the fire, and so the fire went out.

It grew cold and dark in the tent, and the child began to cry again. The woman went to the next tent to fetch new fire, but the moment she stepped into the tent, this fire, too, went out. She went on to the next one, but here the same thing happened. All seven fires went out, and the village was dark and cold.

“Do you realize we re almost in Moscow?” Masha asked me. I nodded and went on reading.

When the grandmother of this child heard what had happened, she came to the tent of the woman, squatted down before the fire and gazed deep into it. Inside, on the hearth, sat an ancient old woman, the Empress of Fire, with blood on her forehead. “What has happened? What should we do?” the grandmother asked. With a deep, dark voice, the empress said that the water had torn open her forehead and that the woman must sacrifice her child so that people will never forget that fire comes from the heart of the child.

“Look out the window! There’s Moscow!” cried Masha. “Do you see her? That’s Moscow, Moskva!”

“What have you done?” the grandmother scolded the woman. “Because of you, the whole village is without fire! You must sacrifice your child, otherwise we’ll all die of cold!” The mother lamented and wept in despair, but there was nothing she could do.

“Why don’t you look out the window? We’re finally there!” Masha cried. The train was going slower and slower.

When the child was laid on the hearth, the flames shot up from its heart, and the whole village was lit up so brightly it was as if the Fire Bird had descended to Earth. In the flames the villagers saw the Empress of Fire, who took the child in her arms and vanished with it into the depths of the light.

20

The train arrived in Moscow, and a woman from Intourist walked up to me and said that I had to go home again at once, because my visa was no longer valid. The Frenchman whispered in my ear: “Start shouting that you want to stay here.” I screamed so loud that the wall of the station cracked in two. Behind the ruins, I saw a city that looked familiar: it was Tokyo. “Scream louder or you’ll never see Moscow!” the Frenchman said, but I couldn’t scream any more because my throat was burning and my voice was gone. I saw a pond in the middle of the station and discovered that I was unbearably thirsty. When I drank the water from the pond, my gut began to ache and I immediately lay down on the ground. The water I had drunk grew and grew in my belly and soon it had become a huge sphere of water with the names of thousands of cities written on it. Among them I found her. But already the sphere was beginning to turn and the names all flowed together, becoming completely illegible. I lost her. “Where is she?” I asked, “Where is she?” “But she’s right here. Don’t you see her?” replied a voice from within my belly. “Come into the water with us!” another voice in my belly cried.

I leapt into the water.

Here stood a high tower, brightly shining with a strange light. Atop this tower sat the Fire Bird, which spat out flaming letters: M, O, S, K, V, A, then these letters were transformed: M became a mother and gave birth to me within my belly. O turned into omul’ and swam off with S: seahorse. K became a knife and severed my umbilical cord. V had long since become a volcano, at whose peak sat a familiar-looking monster.

But what about A? A became a strange fruit I had never before tasted: an apple. Hadn’t my grandmother told me of the serpent’s warning never to drink foreign water? But fruit isn’t the same as water. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to eat foreign fruit? So I bit into the apple and swallowed its juicy flesh. Instantly the mother, the omul’, the seahorse, the knife and the volcano with its monster vanished before my eyes. Everything was still and cold. It had never been so cold before in Siberia.

I realized I was standing in the middle of Europe.