Life Ceremony, page 15
Having expected a strong flavor, I felt a little let down by the taste. It was really plain. While slightly bitter, it was fragrant, and rather easy on the palate. I drained the leaves and put them on a plate. Having gone to the trouble of pulling out the root, I should eat that too, I thought. It seemed similar to burdock root, so it should be good stir-fried. I quickly cut it into julienne strips and fried it in a generous amount of oil. I put it on a separate plate, then set it down next to the plate of leaves on the table.
The leaves had shrunk quite a lot from boiling and produced a rather small portion, but when I placed the dishes next to a bowl of defrosted rice, it made for a far more splendid meal than my regular breakfast. The stir-fried root had taken on an appetizing aroma, and though it was slightly bitter, the flavor was less marked than burdock root. The flowers didn’t have much taste but were soft and easy to eat, and I hardly used any of the soy sauce I’d put out in case. I could hear the voices of some people standing on the street outside my window. They were speaking in Japanese, and I should have been able to understand them, but I was utterly absorbed in enjoying the green flavor and couldn’t catch a word. A shrill voice blended with a low one, and they no longer sounded like language as they melted down into a simple vibration in the throats of animals, setting the window quietly trembling.
By Wednesday I was completely over my cold and had just stood up to go to lunch with Yuki when she noticed me holding my bento and her eyes widened.
“Oh, that’s not from the convenience store! Did you make it?”
“Yep.”
As always, we staked our places in the empty meeting room and sat down. Yuki peered curiously at my lunch and pointed at some fried greens covered in plastic wrap.
“I don’t suppose you picked that yourself somewhere?”
“I did. I couldn’t find any mugwort, but there were loads of dandelions.”
“Dandelions? Are they edible?”
“Of course. They’re often used in tempura and things, aren’t they?”
“I don’t know, but . . . better not to risk it. They’re just weeds, right?”
I raised my head and looked at her. She seemed troubled, as though seeing a child picking something up off the floor and eating it. I remembered that I’d felt the same way until now, and I smiled at her.
“Oh . . . maybe you’re right,” I said. “Okay, I won’t.” I wrapped the dandelion stir-fry up again, thinking I’d eat it at home later.
“What about this?” she asked, pointing at the omelet that contained obako leaves.
If I couldn’t eat that, I wouldn’t have anything but rice left for lunch, so I quickly told a white lie. “My grandmother in the countryside sent me that.”
Yuki looked relieved and laughed. “Really? Wow, does she grow it?”
“No. She probably picked it on the mountainside.”
“Oh, how wonderful! Of course, you can’t do that in the city.”
“Right.”
While giving token responses to her questions, I tasted the omelet. The obako leaves mixed in with the egg had a robust vegetable flavor. I’d been researching the topic and had discovered that dandelions were originally imported as vegetables and were sold in grocery stores abroad. Yuki obviously hadn’t known that when she reacted so strongly against them, while feeling that weeds picked in the mountains were fine. I watched her somewhat scornfully as I ate my lunch. If you had the intention to live a decent life, you could do so anywhere. I felt a bit stupid myself for not having realized this before, simply because I’d always lived in the city.
I started eating wild vegetables every day. The best time to look for weeds was in the evening, when I was feeling hungry. That day too, after work, I changed into some lightweight clothing to go out to harvest my dinner. I had the feeling that this was more like true labor than the time I spent tapping away at the PC keyboard or calculator on my desk.
I wanted to walk around the office neighborhood while it was still light. It wasn’t so effective to go when it was dark, as I couldn’t tell plants apart and there was less of a chance to discover a new harvest location.
I looked down in satisfaction at my sneakers, which were pale blue but had already gotten dirty with soil. Until recently I had forgotten that sneakers look good when they’re dirty like this. I ran my hungry gaze over the surroundings as I walked along the street among men in stifling suits and meticulously dressed women. Now that I had learned to walk like an animal, I realized how much I had been viewing the city as a collection of symbols. I had been faithfully following these artificial symbols, thinking that this turn would take me to the station, that this was a sidewalk, those places over there were restaurants, and so forth. When I ran my gaze over the world with an empty stomach, the surroundings shed the armor of these symbols and revealed their true nature. My light blue sneakers could now walk beyond those symbolic meanings, striding over the sidewalk, deeper and deeper into this new world.
I decided to have fleabane leaves for my main dish that evening, and I set off for a certain children’s playground in the office district. The playground was not well cared for, perhaps even abandoned, and fleabane grew there in profusion. Just thinking about it made me feel hungry, and I naturally started walking faster. I knew exactly what was growing where in this office district, and it was my daily routine to change my route according to what I wanted to eat that day.
In addition to the fleabane in the children’s playground, there were some small dandelions in the flower beds on the side of the major road nearby. There was also a small space in the back of a parking lot on that big road where a small number of obako leaves were growing among the weeds, so I was careful not to harvest too much of it at one time. Today I would eat fleabane and tomorrow shepherd’s purse, I thought as I walked to the playground.
I had a sort of premonition and took an unusual turn off my route, scanning the side of the road as I went. Seeing some shepherd’s purse growing profusely among the flowers in an old brick planter, I crouched down happily and picked some. My senses seemed sharper than usual today, maybe because I was hungry. The hungrier I was, the sharper my sense of smell seemed. I was totally absorbed in my newly discovered wild animal existence. Maybe something similar happened to pet cats that ended up on the streets. It was still only a small part of me, but it was certainly taking root within me.
When I got to the children’s playground, I saw a homeless person sitting on a bench there. He had with him a large number of magazines that he was apparently intending to sell. I was probably more of a feral human than he was, I thought with amusement. Eating vegetables direct from the earth, taking only enough to eat today, this was a healthy way to live. You could even safely eat a small amount of clover if you cooked it, and fish mint leaves that had been boiled and rinsed in fresh water no longer smelled so strong, and surprisingly they lost their bitter flavor when cooked with miso or stir-fried in oil. I particularly liked fleabane fried with bacon, and I’d started to get withdrawal symptoms if I didn’t eat it every three days or so. Dandelion root was good fried and flavored with soy sauce and sugar, and was fragrant fried with no flavorings. With such delicious fresh vegetables so close to hand, I had no desire to buy those wilted leaves in the supermarket.
As I walked to the station carrying my bag of shepherd’s purse and fleabane, I ran my eyes over my surroundings, thinking that I might just harvest one more type of plant for tomorrow’s breakfast.
Walking like this, feeling like a feral human, even machines and buildings were warm to the touch, and some even emitted sounds and vibrations. Their presence was similar to the sounds emitted by life-forms in the forest.
I heard a faint hum behind me and turned to see a vending machine standing on the side of the road. I went up to touch it and felt the body heat of a vending machine on my palm.
Satisfied that the low voice and vibrations coming from inside it were being transmitted through my skin, I started walking again. Two-legged animals were walking around on the sidewalk, their various cries intermingling shrill howls and low growls rising up through vibrating Adam’s apples. Since the night when I’d realized that the noises humans emitted had first been animal cries and then called language, I’d been able to listen to them purely as sounds.
Several taxis were stopped on the side of the road, the heartbeats of their engines ringing out in unison. A silver lump spewing hot breath flowed past them along the river of coagulated gray liquid. Buildings stood quietly on either side of the river, and the organs at work inside their bodies gave off waves of heat that were faintly perceptible outside. I was floating in the middle of a gray ocean, and a big silver fish approached from afar, making a sound that rent the air as it approached, ruffled my surface, and receded again.
The city was filled with the presence of various beings. The vibrations of air really were the same as the ones I’d felt those summer nights in the mountains.
Pushing my way through the hubbub of living creatures, aware of my empty stomach, I picked just enough for tonight’s meal from the gaps in the city. The presence of living creatures seemed to spread far and beyond into vast space. I too became part of the commotion, setting the air trembling with my breath as I moved around, permeating the streets with living vibrations.
Suddenly I noticed a clump of clover growing alongside an artwork placed outside an office building. I’ll put some of that in an omelet for breakfast tomorrow morning, I thought happily, pressing my face against the artwork as I thrust my hand into the patch of weeds and plucked some leaves.
I peered into my now rather heavy bag, and a smell of green wafted up. Satisfied, I was about to get up to leave when a sudden thought occurred to me and I ran my hand over the soil I had just dug up.
I could feel the damp and warmth coming from it. With my hand still thrust into the soil there next to the artwork, I savored the sensation of the earth that had raised my food for me. Nutrition nurtured by the earth flowed into my palm. I pushed my hand even deeper into the soil, and it overflowed the gaps in my fingers, staining my sallow hand brown. My hand looked like a tree. Normally I was different from plants, separated from the earth, but I was growing out of the earth too. Evidence of this was the fact that the plants I had picked in this city were spreading to all corners of my body. I squeezed together the fingers growing in the soil. My fingers and the soil mixed together, melded, and stared up at the plants growing out of them.
I was taking my usual route home from work, picking today’s weeds and putting them in the bag as I went. I’d come to a park to pick some fish mint, and I noticed a child squatting down. I went a bit closer and saw that he was digging what looked like a grave. Next to him, a small pale blue bird lay on its side alongside a strangely elaborate Styrofoam gravestone with the bird’s face and name drawn on it in colored pens, and origami flowers stuck all over it, even on the back. The boy looked solemn. Still holding a fistful of fish mint, I decided to say something to him.
“What are you doing?”
He looked up at me. “I’m making a grave,” he answered, and went back to being engrossed in his work.
What would my grandmother have said to such a symbolic way of mourning the death of a bird? I wondered. Remembering what I’d told Yuki about my father and his chicken, I gently whispered to the child’s back, “Why not eat it?”
“What?”
“Grilled bird is delicious, you know. I’ve eaten it before. It’s fine to return them to the earth, but I don’t think the bird will really understand having such a human-style grave. I think maybe it would make the most of the bird’s life if you ate it.”
I thought I was being helpful, but the boy’s face crumpled and he started crying. A woman, probably his mother, started coming over to us, and I quickly stood up and ran out of the park. I glanced behind me to see the boy clinging to his mother’s skirt, bawling.
I didn’t know why I had to run away, but certainly the mother would have treated me as a weirdo.
Before I knew it, I had wandered into mysterious territory. I could say more definitively than ever that I was sane and more wholesome than anyone else. At the same time, a normal child was in tears, complaining to his mother that I was abnormal. I walked fast, clutching the fish mint leaves in my hand. It was natural for someone living in the forest to eat the forest, and likewise it was natural for someone living in the city to eat the city. But if I said anything of the sort to that boy, no doubt he would cry harder.
It was just that it hadn’t occurred to them. If they tried it, the memories of the wild rooted in their flesh would come back to them, and they would discover that eating the city like this would connect the earth between the gaps in the concrete and their own body. They would understand how natural this was, but they just wouldn’t try it. As I walked, I took a bite of the fish mint leaves clutched in my hand.
It was the first time I’d tasted this pungent plant without cooking it. The moment I placed it in my mouth, its particular smell and sour taste filled my senses. The strong flavor was reminiscent of celery, and in order to hold on to it, I stuffed some more leaves into my mouth. My inner organs were set trembling by its living taste, a taste that didn’t exist in the dead bodies of the vegetables lying cold in the supermarket displays. I continued walking determinedly along the gray streets, chewing on the fragments of the city, dissolving them in saliva, swallowing them, and feeling them fall into my stomach.
The next day, when Yuki and I went to have lunch in the meeting room, she peered curiously into my bento box. “What a lavish-looking lunch you have today.”
“Yes. I just got sent lots of vegetables from the mountains. I made some dishes this morning before they go bad. Would you like to try some?”
“Really? Well, just a little then.”
“Yes, go ahead! My grandmother must have picked them in the mountains.”
I knew very well how much Yuki liked hearing me talk about the mountains, so I placed sample after sample of the various dishes on top of her bento as I talked to her about the mountain landscape, the touch of the grass on your feet as you walked through it, and the huge bugs that you never saw in Tokyo.
“Delicious!”
“Really?”
My plan was to draw her into my new vision of nature here in the city while taking care not to provoke a negative response. I had to avoid prematurely shocking her, paying deliberate respect to her perception based on her current understanding of common sense. I had to gently, caressingly stimulate her empathy and slowly, slowly, pull her over to my world. I had already managed to infiltrate her mind with some feral sensations. Now I would steep her in that world more and more until she was almost drowning in it.
I now felt as though I was beginning to eat the city in a different sense than before. Once I had finished marinating Yuki, how would I get started on the next person? Utmost care had to be taken over that first caress. For example, I could start by mentioning the feeling of homesickness aroused in me upon stepping out of the gray office on a warm spring day and suddenly noticing the smell of summer in the air, the sort of comment anyone could empathize with, and gradually start blending in my own feral sensations. The story could be chanted like a magic spell. Little by little it would penetrate the target body and slowly change that person.
Yuki was eating some boiled shepherd’s purse dressed with soy sauce and bonito flakes. She looked at me with a smile. “You know, Rina, whenever you talk about the mountains, I feel kind of nostalgic, even though I don’t have memories of a home in the countryside myself. Strange, isn’t it?”
“I guess it happens. Maybe that sort of thing is hardwired in our genes. Oh, I was going to say that Granny sometimes sends chicken meat too. Next time I’ll bring a little along to share. Talking about the house in the mountains, did I ever tell you?
UntilIleftelementaryschoolitwasmyfamily’scustomforthethreeofustogetintothecaranddrivetomyfather’schildhoodhomeinthecountrysideandstaythereforaweekovertheObon
festival,itwasatypicalcountryhousedeepinthemountainso
fNaganoandwewoulddriveupthenarrowmountainroadto
reachthehousewhichhadanentrancehallaboutthesizeofachild’sbedroomandanatmospherecompletelydifferentfromourhouseinSaitama,Iwassofascinatedbytheoldhousethatassoon
aswearrivedIwouldimmediatelystartrunningaroundand
exploringbutwithalltheroomsconnectedbyslidingpaper
doorsIwouldsoongetlostandthenburstinontheroomwhere
alltheadultswererelaxingandgetscoldedbutassoonastheylet
megoIwouldbeoffagainrunningaroundslidingdoorsopenandonceI’dfinishedexploringinsidenextIwouldplayoutsidetomyheart’scontentuntilitwastimefordinnerandIfelthungry”
I continued murmuring these tender words. Little by little the memories slipped into Yuki’s body and wriggled around in her innards. After a while, they would be flowing unnoticed around her whole body, and she would gradually lose her physical sense as she knew it now—just like the marvelous change that happened to me a short while ago. And then we would start to live a wholesome existence together in this world teeming with life.
Hatchling
“Haruka, have you decided which friends you’re inviting to the wedding?” Masashi asked.
“Oh, sorry! I got the replies to my email, but haven’t got round to doing anything yet,” I answered lazily.
“Oh, come on. Make sure you do answer them. They’ll be going out of their way to come, so make up the list quickly. You’re so untogether, I swear!”
“Yeah, I know. Sorry!”
“Well, I guess being super laid-back and doing everything at your own pace is one of the good things about you.”
