Хироми Каваками - Record of a Night Too Brief

The guests carried on drinking, apparently not giving it a thought. The host sat down again, and started digging into various dishes, including the cod braised in its skin, gluttonously.

After several hours, or so I thought, had passed, I looked at the clock, and realized it was still well before dawn. The sky in the east was completely dark. Perhaps because the kitchen staff had run off, the serving dishes on the table were now bare of food. There was only the bonito viscera and sweetfish entrails, in platters at the centre of the table, completely untouched by anyone’s chopsticks.

Suddenly, there was a rumble of sound— Kin! —and from the kitchen a huge form emerged and passed over the table. It had no corporeality: it was just a shadow. The shadow roared Kin! and then drifted from one spot to another in the room.

Every now and then, it hopped onto the lap of the host, and took the host’s head in its maw. The host looked as if he had lost his head, as if his body ended at the neck. Regardless, the host went on tipping back the wine, drinking away, his head inside the shadow’s enormous mouth.

When it had finished with the host, the shadow then went to each of the guests, and took each of their heads in its mouth. They too became headless, every one of them. And when the creature released them from its jaws, they were left without any features.

As the host and guests were sitting there, without faces, the shadow became aware of the salted bonito viscera and sweetfish entrails in the centre of the table.

The shadow got onto the table and started to devour the sweetfish entrails, barely chewing them, snapping them down. In the blink of an eye, the mound of entrails was gone. The shadow then started on the bonito viscera. These too disappeared in a matter of seconds.

The shadow now looked around the room. The guests, faceless, were still tossing down their wine. The shadow approached one of the guests, fastened its mouth onto his neck, and began siphoning up the wine in his belly. It did this to all the guests in turn; then it went up to the host and sucked up the wine in him, and finally, coming to me, it took my entire head in its mouth, and sucked up the wine in me.

I thought I would faint from the pleasure.

When it had just about guzzled up everything in me, the shadow started to take on a form. First a gold mane appeared, then a neck, then a body, fluffy shanks, and finally a tail, and alongside those, a beautifully contoured coat of sleek fur. It was a lion.

The lion leapt up onto the table and sprang out into the garden. In the east the sky had begun to take on a faint colour. The lion ran to the sky in the east. It sprinted at full speed, devouring every creature it met in the night.

When not a single creature was left, and the lion had disappeared beyond the eastern sky, the host occupied his throne, and the guests dispersed by twos and threes.

Night was giving way to the first glimmers of dawn.

The girl was already showing signs of no longer being a girl.

In a short span of time, her skin had become like paper, her eyes transparent. The ends of her arms and legs had begun to divide into branches; her hair had fallen out.

I gazed at the girl, who continued to change as she lay on the ground.

She was changing into something I didn’t recognize at all. I had the feeling I was about to remember something I had forgotten. Because it was something I had forgotten, I had no idea what it might be, but it felt as if I was going to remember it any moment now.

“Darling.” I spoke to the girl.

“What?” answered the girl.

“Were you always that kind of thing?”

“Yes, I think I probably was.”

The voice replying wasn’t the voice of the girl, of course: it was the voice of the thing I didn’t recognize. It was high and low at the same time, the kind of voice that might echo inside the hollow of a tree.

I looked at the changing girl, and I started to feel sad, and I cried.

“What’s the matter?” asked the thing that had once been a girl.

“You’ve changed,” I replied.

“That’s how I’m made. There’s nothing I can do about it,” the thing said, laughing.

I started to feel even sadder.

“Are you still crying?”

“Yes.”

“This is what happens to everyone who is born.”

“But I had no idea.”

“If you hadn’t noticed, it’s happening to you as well.”

I looked at my arms and legs, and saw that they were now dividing into branches, just like the girl’s: they looked like something between trees and nets. The surface of my skin was rough and tattered, and the hair that had fallen from my head lay in clumps on the ground.

I kicked at the clumps of fallen hair, but all that happened was that something down there that had divided into countless branches, like a bamboo broom, swept them together in a pile.

“But why?” I asked, dispirited.

The thing that had once been the girl answered, smiling:

“We’ve got old.”

The moon, which should have sunk long ago, rose steeply in the eastern sky, as it had done at the beginning of the night. As we watched, it travelled across the emptiness, and then sank to the west.

We were still watching when again the moon rose in the eastern sky, but this time it was a little larger than it had been a moment ago. It proceeded to rise and sink again and rise and sink again, with incredible speed, becoming a full moon first, and after that gradually waning.

“Do you think we’re like that moon?” I asked.

“Not at all!”

“So we’re different?”

“The moon gets to renew itself. We don’t.”

Several brownish butterflies came flying by. The girl stopped talking, and closed her eyes. The butterflies alighted on her, their wings opening and closing slowly, then flew off.

I felt tired, so I lay down next to the girl. Lying there, I looked up and saw a lion roaring Kin! and flying through the sky, as the moon rose and sank over and over again. I listened to the roar of the lion, and I put my lips to the lips of the thing that had once been the girl, and kissed her. Then I grew old, very old, and rotted away.

“Any minute now, it’s going to begin!” someone shouted excitedly—and immediately people gathered in a huge crowd. The lamplighter was making his rounds, extinguishing the lamps with his long pole, pushing against a stream of people going the other way.

The forest had been cut down, and the rivers filled in. The hills had been scraped flat, and valleys levelled. When the land reclamation was completed, everyone in the crowd pulled out saws and mallets and chisels and hoes from the folds of their kimonos, and started to build a town, using the trees they had cut down, and the crushed stone they had quarried from the hills.

People were digging holes and sinking pillars into them, others were securing timber trusses for towers, and others were tamping the crushed stone prior to building residences. The sound was deafening.

In a short time, a town came into being. People whistled as they packed away their saws and mallets and chisels and hoes, and sat down and started to brag about the buildings.

The braggadocio continued till the sun was high in the sky. Finally, when they had tired of that, the people unpacked their lunch boxes and gobbled their food down.

One person lay down to take a nap, and soon everyone had flopped down to do the same. When everyone was asleep, the snoring loud, I poked my head above the surface of the water and sniffed the air.

The air smelt metallic. Moving my front legs and hind legs in turn, twisting my body, I dragged myself over the ground. My front legs were really very short, so I could only move slowly. Behind me came numerous other newts, my companions.