Yoko Tawada: Where Europe Begins

“Oh, yes, so I’ve heard.”

“The ladies don’t like it when you make noise.”

The president of the German firm looked over at me, expecting a translation.

“What kind of liqueur is this?” Again I translated a sentence no one had said. The German president looked pleased, and explained the notion of pre-dinner drinks. When I translated, the Japanese president looked bored and said, “Look, they sell these in Japan too. Now, let’s talk about you,” he added paternally. “Why are you living all by yourself in a place like this? You should go home and get married, or your parents will worry.”

At this point, the master chef and his assistant carried in a large fish between them, as if they were carrying a wounded person on a stretcher out to an ambulance. The white, swollen belly of the fish looked like a fat woman’s thigh, and perhaps because of this, the arrival of the fish at the table was greeted with suppressed laughter. The fish’s back was blue-green and thickly covered with translucent scales. One chef skillfully slid a knife from tail to head, stripping away the scales. There was a burst of applause. The eyes had already been removed. The open mouth had no tongue in it. The chef rapidly cut up the body and divided it among eleven plates. Finally, only the eyeless fish-head and backbone remained. “Now then, ladies and gentlemen, let us raise our glasses and make a toast. To the future.” Over the skeleton of the fish, glasses clinked. To the future.

For a while, everyone forgot to talk and ate fish. One could hear only the sounds of metal against china, and quick intakes of air between bites.

It was a relief to me that everyone was eating. When they eat, they don’t talk.

I’m not well suited to the task of interpreting to begin with. I hate talking more than anything, especially speaking my mother tongue.

Until I started elementary school, I called myself by my name. When school began, the teachers told the girls to call themselves watashi and the boys to say boku . At first everyone was embarrassed and mumbled compromises like atai and boku-chan , but soon, at least in class, everyone was using the words watashi and boku quite properly. I was the only one who couldn’t, and since I didn’t want anyone to find out, I stopped talking. I spoke only to my mother. I called myself exactly what my mother called me. Soon I went to middle school, where I was no longer able to avoid speaking, so I stuttered: Wa, wa, wa, ta, ta, ta, shi … The Watashi fell to pieces with extra vowels between its spaces: that was the name for myself which I finally arrived at. When I stuttered, all the extra vowels made it feel like singing, and it felt good to speak that way.

I heard the click of a cigarette lighter. Evidently someone had begun to smoke. The faces around me were flushed from the wine. When jaw muscles relax, the atmosphere becomes relaxed as well. People’s mouths fell open like trash bags, and garbage spilled out. I had to chew the garbage, swallow it, and spit it back out in different words. Some of the words stank of nicotine. Some smelled like hair tonic. The conversation became animated. Everyone began to talk, using my mouth. Their words bolted into my stomach and then back out again, footsteps resounding up to my brain. The chunk of fish in my stomach was having a bad time of it and began to protest. My stomach muscles clenched up and I began to stutter. It felt good to stutter. “Tha, tha, tha, that,” I said. The skin of my stomach grew taut like a bagpipe and I bellowed, “That ha, ha, ha, has, has.” I didn’t know myself whether I was laughing or stuttering, but it felt agreeable. The words scattered and rose fluttering into the air.

The others noticed the change in me and fell silent.

“Are you all right?” the woman opposite me whispered, glancing over at the company president.

“Excuse me, please.” I stood up and went to look for the bathroom. The restaurant’s long hallway continued into the hotel, and I found myself lost in its back corridors. There was no one else in sight. I saw only rows of doors. Finally I saw a door with the silhouette of a lady on it. I went in, pressed myself against the heater by the window, and slumped down. The scale whose pans were trembling inside my ear suddenly pitched to one side, and I found myself falling down a bottomless pit.

4

From far away came a crackling sound. I wanted to open my eyes, but from the inside I couldn’t tell where my eyelids might be. From behind the network of my capillary vessels, I was trying to remember a face.

My mouth was dry, like a scab, and my tongue stuck to my palate. I could breathe only through my nose. The smell of milk boiling. There was a lot of sugar in the milk. The smell of sugar burning. Saliva gradually collected in my mouth. My tongue grew moist and I could move it again. Something wet and soft was touching my lips from the outside. The sole came slipping into my mouth and played with my tongue, gently at first, then with more force. Finally the sole gripped my tongue between its teeth and ate it up.

At that moment my surroundings grew bright. By my head sat an unfamiliar woman who was wiping my forehead with a wet towel. The right side of the woman's face was distorted by burn scars like hardened lava. The left side had a thoughtful expression I found beautiful. This was unmistakably the beauty of a woman of forty, but every time I blinked she looked different, now like a girl and now an old woman. She wore the sky-blue uniform of the hotel staff. On the blank wall behind the woman hung a torn employee roster. I seemed to be in a room for the hotel staff. When the cold towel touched my forehead, a delicious feeling of strength began to rise along my spine like mercury.

“How do you feel? A little better? You were lying on the bathroom floor. What happened to you?” The woman fixed her gaze on my face. Her eyes reminded me of blue gas flames.

After a little while she said, “Oh, of course. She doesn’t understand.” She took off her uniform, preparing to go home. I didn’t want to be left alone, so I tried to ask her to take me with her, wherever she was going, but I couldn’t find my vocal chords. When I sat up, my body had become very heavy.

After she changed her shoes, the woman said, “Well, let’s go then. It’s not very comfortable here, so let’s go home.”

We made our way toward the back entrance of the hotel. The woman stood in front of the punch clock, looking for her card. Apparently she couldn’t find it, and after a while she gave up and shrugged. If she had had a card, I would have learned her name, I thought. Since she had no card, perhaps she was only pretending to be a hotel employee.

It was already dark outside. I wondered how many hours had passed. Although the woman had decided I didn’t understand her, she continued to talk. “Some people say they don’t like cleaning bathrooms, but I must say, for me it’s the most interesting part of the day’s work. Sweeping the lobby isn’t nearly so good. Most of the customers’ rectums aren’t on straight, you can’t imagine in what directions all the excrement flies. That comes from sitting in an office all day long. I used to work in an office myself, so I know what I’m talking about.”

When I heard the word “office,” I became sad. I wouldn’t be able to go back to the office again. After all, I had disappeared on the job.

“It’s certainly true that you don’t see what goes on inside a person. Highly respectable gentlemen may produce the most miserable excrement, and perfectly proper executive secretaries may defecate all over the place. And of course they’re all busy, I suppose, so they forget to flush.”