Yoko Tawada - Where Europe Begins

The circus had seven tents set up on an empty lot outside of town. It was close to noon, but everyone might have been asleep still, it was so quiet. At the entrance to each tent was a sign indicating its function, such as “Department of Accounting” and “Wild Animals Division.” I checked them one by one and finally reached a tent marked “Office of Human Resources.”

Inside sat a man with a necktie and a piercing gaze.

I was about to say that I had come in response to the advertisement, then remembered that I had no tongue. The man grinned and said, “You must be the person with scales. We didn’t expect to find one so soon. Last week our mermaid died of breast cancer and we’ve been at a loss.”

The man seemed to have taken an immediate liking to me. “It’s not good to touch a mermaid’s breasts all the time. And this friend of mine, a poet, insisted on drinking her milk every day, until finally she died.”

He stood up and said, “Let me show you the sideshow.” I remembered the sad snakes and salamanders I had seen in freak shows during my childhood. So this town, too, had such sad installations.

It was dark inside the tent and I couldn’t see much. There was an eerie sound a bit like rustling grass. When the man turned on the light, at least ten women in miniskirts came into view, sitting at office desks and sorting papers. When the women saw the man, they shouted in unison, “Good morning!” They were all beauties who might have just stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine, and their cheeks and lips were as red as if they’d just been slapped.

“This is the pride of our circus, our freak show.” There were neither snakes nor salamanders, but this was clearly it. I had no idea why they needed a person with scales in this office. The women looked at me and smiled, but said nothing.

After the man left the room, the women wordlessly began to slap each other. For some reason I alone was not slapped. There were a lot of small holes in the walls. Perhaps people were watching from outside. When one of the women fell to the floor gasping for breath, the whole group threw themselves on her and dressed her in a wedding gown. This procedure was repeated with a second woman, and in the end the place was full of brides lying on the ground. Terrified, I climbed up a pole and sat on a trapeze.

“Get down from there!” I heard drunken men shouting from outside. There had been spectators after all. “You can’t run away from life! Get down!”

Then someone cut the rope supporting the trapeze. I tumbled headlong to the ground and lost consciousness.

When I came to, the mass wedding was in full swing, and I was lying on a fish platter in the middle of the table. The brides had resigned from their jobs and washed off their makeup, and the bridegrooms looked exhausted. One of the women stood up, raised her glass and announced, “From now on we intend to lead honest lives!” “Honest lives!” echoed the other women. “If things stink we’ll say they stink! People with scales stink!” The men, looking terribly exhausted, sat in their chairs waiting for the ceremony to end. “If we want something, we’ll say we want it! We want money!” the women shouted in unison. Glasses clinked. “A toast to freedom!”

The chef arrived with a large knife in his hand. When he took a bow, everyone present burst into applause. He placed the blade of the knife against my back and stripped off my scales. The scales flew into the air like cherry blossom petals, and my skin burned. There was a roar of applause like waves breaking.

•

When I woke up, I was lying with my fingers under me. They were cold and numb. I always feel relieved when I wake up from a dream. No work is more exhausting than sleep.

Since the mirror was turned to the wall, I couldn’t put on makeup. I warmed some milk, sat down on a kitchen chair and opened the newspaper. In the human interest section was a photograph of that woman. There were no burn marks on her face. A photographer must have retouched the picture to make her look so unhappy. As well as unattractive. The article said that although there had been an investigation due to the suspicion of foul play, the investigation was now closed and it was concluded that her death had been a suicide. Apparently it was standard practice to retouch the photo of a suicide to make her look unattractive.

8

The mirror that was hanging with its face to the wall beside my photograph had been a parting gift from my mother.

The month before, I had traveled to Japan for the first time in years. My mother hadn’t come to meet me at the airport. She always said the sound of airplanes reminded her of the Tokyo air raids, and so the airport was the one place she couldn’t bring herself to set foot in. In those air raids she had lost her entire family.

It was a strange homecoming. When at last I reached home and knocked on the door, my head full of impossible memories, there was no answer. Quietly I tried the door. It wasn’t locked. Inside it was completely dark. I turned on the light and opened the sliding door. A machine that looked like a cross between a bicycle and a handloom filled the small room entirely. Behind it, on a futon, lay my mother. She pulled herself up, gazing into space like a blind woman.

“Okaasan, watashi yo.”

I hadn’t spoken Japanese in a long time. In the word okaasan (mother) I met my old self, and when I said watashi (I) I felt as though I were my own simultaneous interpreter.

My mother looked at my face, but her expression did not change. It was as if she didn’t know who I was. Then she stood up slowly, thought for a little while, and said, “Oh, it’s you.” Then two tears the size of marbles rolled down from her eyes, but her face remained expressionless. An image from a European movie passed through my mind: a mother and daughter throwing their arms around each other in ecstatic reunion.

My mother’s face was covered with luminous scales.

“You look well — as if you’ve gotten younger,” I said. She pointed to the strange machine and said, “It’s because of the daily training.” She rolled up her sleeve and showed me her muscular arm. “But I’ve developed more than just muscles. I have a hysterical lump in my throat that hurts and makes it hard to breathe.”

I didn’t know what a hysterical lump was, but I didn’t have the courage to ask.

“And you, why has your hair gotten so thin?” Alarmed, I touched my hair.

“And why does it have such a reddish gleam?”

“It must be the light.”

“Why the light?”

“The light’s different here, so my hair looks different.” “Is that so,” my mother said, looking sadly at my hair. “What is that machine?” I asked.

“It’s a training machine for body-building.”

“Why did you get a thing like that?”

“I don’t have anything else to do. Besides, it would be terrible if for instance I fell ill and stood in the way of your career. I decided I ought to strengthen myself a little.”

“But you’re fine, you’re already healthy.”

“I’m not in the least healthy. I read in a magazine that when new muscle tissue forms, the amount of female hormones in the body decreases, which results in a reduced rate of depression, but that’s a lie. It just gets harder to breathe, because of the hysterical lump. Besides, I have the feeling that without you here I’m gradually forgetting all my words.”

My mother glanced me up and down.

“How did you get such an Asian face?”

“What are you talking about, Mother? I am Asian.”

“That’s not what I meant. You’ve started to have one of those faces like Japanese people in American movies.”

I looked around the room. There were no mirrors. That was why my mother hadn’t noticed her own scales.