Хироми Каваками: Record of a Night Too Brief

Are they going to lock me up now? I wondered. And before I knew it, they had.

That was it: I was locked up, for ever.

There were a number of fish in the tank. They looked like loaches. Someone was scooping them up, one by one, with his hands and throwing them down hard on the floor.

It was a child.

Once thrown down, the loach lay in a half-dead state for a few seconds, then revived and shimmied its way over to one of the many puddles nearby, leaving arteries of water on the floor behind it.

“If you throw them down so hard, the loaches will die,” I said, reprovingly.

The child frowned. “They won’t die,” he replied in a low voice, and continued throwing them down— thwack! thwack! —on the floor.

He had been scooping up the loaches and throwing them down for quite some time, but it didn’t seem to make a difference to the number of fish in the tank. A small fluorescent light had been attached to it, illuminating it against the darkness. The child was standing slightly out of reach of the glow, so I couldn’t make out the features of his face.

He continued throwing the loaches down, one after another. But far from decreasing, the number of loaches in the tank seemed to be increasing.

“Do you like Yanagawa hotpot?” the child asked.

“What?” I said.

“Yanagawa loach hotpot,” the child repeated, throwing down another loach with force. Thwack .

“I don’t mind it.”

“In that case, I’ll give you this fish tank.” His voice had got lower.

Why hadn’t I walked past him and paid no attention to the loaches?

The child pulled at my sleeve with a wet hand, slipping a loach into my hand. “Try one!” he said, throwing down another loach.

At the bottom of the darkness, near my feet, I could see loaches making their way, shimmying, towards the puddles. As they slipped below the surface, the water seemed to vanish, then slowly to reappear.

“No. I can do without loaches,” I replied.

The child’s head drooped. “Are you sure?” he asked, and then he started to whimper.

I got a strong sense of foreboding at this, and I decided I’d better get away from him. Furtively putting the loach he’d deposited in my hand down on the floor, I began to walk away with an unconcerned look on my face. But the second I had put the loach down, a big puddle had formed in that very spot, spreading to my feet. The puddle looked like an oil spill, very thick and sticky: when the loaches found their way into it, it swallowed them up, without a ripple.

“Are you sure?” the child asked again.

“Quite sure!” I replied.

At that, the child shoved me, and I fell into a puddle. I found myself being sucked into it. When I was completely submerged, I looked around me. Everything was dark. Was it dark because it was night, or because the puddle was filled with black creatures? I wasn’t sure, but as my eyes got used to the darkness, I could see.

Down below, at the bottom of the puddle, where I was now sinking, I could see countless loaches. No way… No way! I thought, and looking at my hands I saw that they were turning into fins—and my legs merging into a tail. I concentrated on my repugnance for loaches, and my fins started turning back into hands, but when my concentration waned, they immediately started turning back into fins.

“Are you so sure you don’t want the fish tank?”

The low voice of the child reached my ears from above.

The words stuck in my throat, but I knew I had no choice.

“I love Yanagawa hotpot!” I shouted up at him.

Suddenly I found myself scooped up in the child’s hands, and thrown down hard against the floor. I wriggled my way towards the child’s feet, and then shimmied up one of his legs. I kept going up to his hips, and from his hips to his belly, and finally I reached an arm. I then wriggled down this arm to his fingers, at which point he grabbed hold of me, and threw me down to the floor.

Seven times we repeated the process, until eventually I turned back into a human.

“You really love Yanagawa hotpot, don’t you,” the child said, laying it on thick.

“Oh yes, I love Yanagawa hotpot!” I replied, again.

After pressing the tank into my hands, the child flopped-flipped-flopped in a puddle, then disappeared. The puddle was still, and then it too disappeared.

The loaches in the tank were multiplying rapidly. The tank teemed with loaches.

I hurried home, careful not to let any water spill into the night, and began preparations for a loach hotpot. I sliced up burdock root, added water, and brought it all to a boil, using all the stewing pots I had. Then I threw the loaches live into the pots, and covered them. A delicious aroma rose into the air.

“You really can’t get enough of Yanagawa hotpot, can you?” I heard a child’s voice say from somewhere, one more time. As if in response, all the creatures that live and breathe in the night made their way into my apartment through the crack in my door. And they all had a Yanagawa hotpot feast.

Without my noticing, the girl and I had become separated. I looked for her everywhere, but could not find her.

The moon had risen to the highest place in the sky, and on the ground the shadows of the plants were dimly lit in the faint moonlight.

“Where are you? Where are you?” I called out, but there was no answer from the girl. I called out many times, but she did not answer.

As I walked, following one shimmering shape in the moonlight to the next, I found several of the girl’s soft outer skins that she must have discarded. Each time I saw one, I would gather it up in my hands, thinking it was the real girl, but every discarded skin was simply a discarded skin.

I didn’t know why I was searching so hard for the girl: I felt she was someone I had known all my life, and yet at the same time I hardly knew her. But I kept on looking. If someone had asked me if I liked her, I would probably have answered, yes, I did, but if someone had asked me whether I really cared about her, I might have answered, no, I didn’t, actually. Maybe the only reason I kept searching for her was that I had begun searching for her.

The discarded skin I now picked up was the largest yet, and it was still a bit warm. She was probably hiding somewhere nearby. I walked on, calling out, “Where are you? Where are you?”

At a spot where the shadows outlined by the moon abruptly stopped, there was a big box. I reached out to touch it, and felt it tremble.

The girl must be inside the box, I felt sure. In front of the box was a discarded skin even larger than the one I had found a moment ago. It was lying on the ground, looking just like the living girl with her knees slightly bent. I stroked it gently. But being only a skin, it didn’t have the slightest response.

I searched for a latch, some way to open the box, but it was just a smooth white box, nothing more. I sat there, wondering what to do, when the box trembled some more.

Open me up! it seemed to be saying. Or maybe it was saying: Don’t open me! Again, it shook. I clasped the box in my arms, and rubbed my cheek against it.

Simply doing this, of course, was going to get me nowhere. Somehow I had to force the box open. But the surface was completely smooth, sealed. I tried poking at the box with a pocket knife, but the blade simply bounced off the surface.

I walked back and forth, thinking.

Again the box trembled. I wondered: should I get an axe and chop it open? But that might end up splitting the girl in half. Well, maybe I should take the box home with me, just as it was, to stroke and treat it with affection for all eternity. But that would be no different from being without the girl altogether.