Хироми Каваками - Record of a Night Too Brief

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m feeling sad.”

“Sad in what way?” I would ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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