Asia Literary Review No. 33, Spring 2017

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No. 33, Spring 2017

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No. 33, Spring 2017

Publisher Greater Talent Limited Managing Editor Phillip Kim Editor in Chief Martin Alexander Senior Editors Kavita A. Jindal, Michael Vatikiotis, Zheng Danyi Special Acknowledgement Ilyas Khan, co-founder of the Asia Literary Review Production Alan Sargent Front and back cover images with kind permission of the artist, Yomei Chiang and Sotheby’s Hong Kong The Asia Literary Review is published by Greater Talent Limited 2504 Universal Trade Centre, 3 Arbuthnot Road, Central, Hong Kong asialiteraryreview.com Managing.Editor@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Editor@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Submissions@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Subscriptions and Advertising: Admin@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro Printed by Charlesworth Press ISBN: 978-988-14782-9-0 (print) ISBN: 978-988-12155-7-4 (e-book) ISSN: 1999-8511 Extracts from The Shoe and The Comedian were provided to the ALR through the generous support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, ltikorea.org ‘Grass Cradle, Glass Lullaby’ and ‘Blood Like Water’ are published with kind permission of Fox Spirit Books www.foxspirit.co.uk The image accompanying ‘Grass Cradle, Glass Lullaby’ © Imran Siddiq www.imranwrites.com @flickimp ‘A Trunk Call, Colombo’ and ‘Islamabad’ are published with kind permission of Bloomsbury India.

Individual contents © 2017 the contributors/Greater Talent Limited This compilation © 2017 Greater Talent Limited

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Contents Editorial

5

Fiction from Tangut Inn

8

Yijun Luo translated by Pingta Ku

Grass Cradle, Glass Lullaby

24

Isabel Yap

Blood Like Water

34

Eve Shi

The Wall

49

Ho Sok Fong translated by Natascha Bruce

The Shoe

60

Kim Soom translated by Jason Woodruff

from Star Sign

74

Shibasaki Tomoka translated by Laurel Taylor

In the Name of the Father

86

Sun Yisheng translated by Nicky Harman

Flotsam

112

Zach MacDonald

from The Handymen of Mahoro

135

Shion Miura translated by Asuka Minamoto

from The Comedian

152

Kim Seong Joong translated by Stella Kim

Non-fiction Interview: MargrĂŠt HelgadĂłttir

21

Asia Literary Review

from Underground Fire

99

Yu Jian translated by Simon Patton with Ellen Chow

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Poetry Dinner Conversations Poem for a Dead Dog Ode to Patrick Swayze

44 45 47

Tishani Doshi

A Trunk Call, Colombo

57

Indran Amirthanayagam

Update on The Left-Behind Woman On a Pair of Young Men in the Underground Parking Garage at fX Sudirman Mall What the Dead Want from the Living Scenes from a Beautiful Life

66 69 70 72

Norman Erikson Pasaribu translated by Tiffany Tsao

Dha: Ladakh Manali: Himachal Pradesh, 2012 Harajuku, Ginza: Tokyo

105 107 109

Corinne Elysse Adams

The Skin of Tradition Midlife Crisis

131 133

Mona Dash

Islamabad

149

Mehvash Amin

Watchers on a Working Day No Place Like

164 165

Zilka Joseph

Contributors

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Editorial Edit orial

Edit orial

O

ne of the Asia Literary Review’s principal aims over the past decade has been to introduce undiscovered Asian voices to the Englishlanguage world. Sometimes, stories come to us from emerging writers (some young, some not-so) as unsolicited submissions which simply leap off the page and demand attention. However, many more of our published works new to an English readership come to us from an indispensable but under-appreciated core of literary professionals – the translators.

Translation is both a rewarding and a fraught undertaking. Translated texts have been circulating for centuries, bridging cultures, expanding human thought and driving profound social change. The accumulated library of translated literature has allowed us to hold any one of a vast number of foreign worlds in the palm of our hand and enter it from the comfort of a familiar armchair. What would anglophone culture be without the enrichment of a Homer, Hugo, Dostoevsky, Márquez, Mann, or Murakami?

Yet, translating literature has always been – and always will be – an imprecise and subjective craft, vulnerable to harsh criticism. The debate over the translator’s role is old, and yet it continues to rage. How closely, in terms of technical fidelity, should the translated text adhere to its source, even if the resulting voice, description and dialogue end up odd or clunky in the target language? Alternatively, how much liberty may the translator take in adapting the text? At what point does the resulting work become not so much a faithful representation of the original, but something altogether different? Anyone who has read two translated versions of the same work will sense how different each experience is from the other. And who’s to say which is better – or whether such a judgment can even be made?

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Editorial

The ALR was pleased that the Man Booker International Prize was recast in 2016 to focus exclusively on single works translated into English, with the prize money shared equally between author and translator. This approach acknowledges both the vital contributions that world literature has made to the anglophone library, and the delicate balancing act that the two collaborators must engage in to produce an internationally successful work.

We at the ALR were delighted when the 2016 winner was The Vegetarian, written by South Korea’s Han Kang and translated by Deborah Smith.

This past winter, in our own more modest celebration of translations, English PEN and the ALR jointly organised a competition called ‘PEN Presents . . . East and South-east Asia’. Translators from the region were invited to submit book proposals and translation samples related to works written by noteworthy local authors who have not yet had a complete work published in English. A panel of judges chose six finalists from a wide variety of entrants. The selected translators were granted a cash award, had their work compiled into a catalogue that was marketed at the London Book Fair in March 2017, and have been invited to London for an event in June 2017 when a winner will be chosen.

This volume of the ALR features translations from five of the finalists (listed alphabetically by translator): Natascha Bruce, for Ho Sok Fong’s Lake Like a Mirror (Malaysia) Pingta Ku, for Yijun Luo’s Tangut Inn (Taiwan) Laurel Taylor, for Tomoka Shibasaki’s Star Sign (Japan) Tiffany Tsao, for Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s Sergius Seeks Bacchus (Indonesia) Jason Woodruff, for Soom Kim’s The Shoe (South Korea) We also include captivating work from three other entrants – Nicky Harman’s ‘In the Name of the Father’ (China), Stella Kim’s ‘The Comedian’ (South Korea) and Asuka Minamoto’s ‘The Handymen’ (Japan).

The world these days seems more divisive than in the past, with a social rhetoric increasingly about walls rather than bridges, divorce rather than union. Translations such as those in this volume offer resistance against this troubling trend. The work is passionate, dedicated and courageous.

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Editorial

The translators implore us to broaden our horizons rather than withdraw from debate into the echoes of our own intellectual caves. They ask us to maintain a supple mind and an open heart. For providing us with this opportunity, the ALR extends its deep gratitude to literary translators everywhere.

Phillip Kim Martin Alexander

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from Tangut Inn from Tangut Inn Yijun Luo

Yijun Luo translated by Pingta Ku

The Uxoricide

N

ow I’m going to tell you a story about women and love, said Tunick.

Or rather, it’s a story about the dark side of love: fickleness, jealousy, and fury. You shall witness many evil deeds committed in the name of love.

It’s a story that unleashes your most perverted fantasies, in which you torture your ex-lovers out of guilt and feigned anger, ruin them with rumours, kill them with a borrowed knife, wipe out every single relative of your loverivals, fornicate with your neighbour’s wife and daughter, kill your best pal and screw his voluptuous wife (which arouses in you the incestuous pleasure of the levirate), slay your love-rivals and their sons, sleep with your son’s wife, and send your little sister to your best friend after teaching her to seduce him with her spread legs, so that she’ll conceive his little bastard and seize his entire fortune. . . . Whatever you dream of. There’re so many eye-dazzling crimes, said Tunick, that only a ‘Museum of Decadence’ would be large enough to display them. All these crimes – believe it or not – were committed in real life by one man, and he is the source of all my stories about the Tangut Kingdom. That man was stout but handsome, with an aquiline nose. He loved to wear white garments and black coronets. He swaggered on the back of his galloping steed with bows and arrows across his shoulders. That cruel, malicious demigod’s blood was saturated with pantherine aggression, suspicion and strength. He was the stallion of stallions. Upon seeing such a macho whose veins and pores discharged pure

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testosterone, wankers like us (whose sole proof of manhood is a pair of pea-sized balls hanging below our loins) can’t help but moan like whores in heat. If he lived in our time, he would be more visionary than Che Guevara the dreamer, more vengeful than Iosif Stalin the tyrant, and more rhetorically seductive than Osama bin Laden the demagogue. . . . He was Tuoba Yüanhao, the founding father of the Tangut Kingdom.

None but he was powerful enough to weave such a scroll of lushly violent tapestry, where numerous female faces came alive with hatred, violence, and lust; where ivory bellies flaunted thick bushes and diamond-shaped bodices patterned with furious trolls and gaping toothy maws; where bloody pantomimes – perfumed with semen and vaginal juice – administered death through hanging, poisoning, slow slicing and dismembering in dim light.

None but he could endow the hell screen of blossoming evil and the flesh forest with such splendour, such suspense and such horror, that we almost forget the rhizomatic structure of human ethics and yearn for a pantheon that houses the tragic sublime.

This story starts with Yüanhao’s seven queens, and ends with his own funny and noseless face, whose very centre became a big bleeding hole.

Now, let me now introduce Yüanhao’s first queen, Tunick said, Lady Weimu. Dull and dumb, she hovered in the background like Pepper’s ghost.

She belonged to the vanishing past, just like Cinderella’s birth mummy or Hamlet’s spooky daddy. She embodied the fragile conscience that had been abandoned by a palaceful of people who made a deal with the Devil and sleepwalked into a collective dream of massacres. Historians tell us that she ‘was virtuous and acted with the vtmoƒt decorum.’ Although we know nothing about her sex life with Yüanhao, she did bear him a son. The Weimus were a prosperous clan of the Yínxìa Tanguts and the very clan to which Yüanhao’s birth mother belonged. (So, Lady Weimu and Yüanhao were cousins by blood?) Unfortunately, Weimu Shanxi, one of the clan’s chieftains, plotted against Yüanhao, who in overwhelming anger – well, perhaps behind the mask of feigned anger he’d calmly calculated all consequences and manipulated his subaltern nomadic troopers to end the conflict between the Weimus and his blue-blooded Tuobas (which would later be renamed as the Ngwemis) – slaughtered the entire Weimu clan and poisoned his own mother. Try to imagine the scenario: Yüanhao’s aunties, all covered

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from Tangut Inn

in blood, hid themselves in his mummy’s tent, sobbing and panting, ‘Your wolf cub, the little one whom we bathed and whose willie we toyed with, is now with his men out there, waving their scimitars and dyeing everything crimson.’ It is the Tangut version of The Oresteia: the paternal will and the maternal sin. Oh yes, it is Lady Weimu that led the chorus behind this tragedy of matricide. Historians tell us that she ‘righteouƒly reprimanded Yüanhao’, but she was to realise that Yüanhao would be the one to crush the trio of monolithic goddesses with massive breasts and lead the Tanguts from matriarchy towards male violence. In a theatrical darkness and silence, he slew Lady Weimu and their mixed-blood son.

His second queen Lady Yelü (also known as Princess Xingping) was the elder sister of Yelü Zongzhen the Khitan King of Mos Jælud, and their political marriage was made to solidify the Tangut-Khitan alliance against the Song Empire. Historians tell us that ‘ƒhe was at variance with Yüanhao and dide’. Tunick said, would you please try to feel for Yüanhao the dictator?

During the daytime, his feverish mind was engrossed with plots to outwit his foes and build his own kingdom. In his tent, he and his tacticians would play chess over the map of battlefields against a duo of invisible foes. They would rehearse a variety of strategies: paying annual tributes, feigning submission, pretending benevolence, colonising enemies’ borders with exiled criminals, attacking enemy sentries with spearhead forces, capturing citadels, sending spies as envoys offering horses and camels, inciting Tangut tribes to rise against the Khitan. . . . Yet, at night, this exhausted predator had to crawl into the embalmed tent of his queen as a humble castrate in a matrilocal marriage, and screw her while recalling those genteelly-worded petitions (of insincere bullshit) he submitted to her Khitan brother. How could he not be swollen with a dark fury to strangle her when they had sex?

Some say this poor princess died in childbirth and Yüanhao never went to her deathbed. There was indeed something suspicious about Lady Yelü’s death. However, historians tell us that ‘the Khitan Priuy Counƒellor Yelü Shucheng was ƒente to interrogate Yüanhao about this very incident’. Perhaps we could try to visualise the subsequent scenario: Yüanhao, stark naked and wet with sweat, violently shook a female corpse by whose side lay a dead infant. ‘I’m screwed. I literally fucked her to death.’ He spared no foe, but for the very first time he felt a sense of fear as he gazed at her corpse and

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witnessed the evaporation of life. He pictured a crusade of vengeance in his head: the Khitan King of Mos Jælud and his heavy cavalry were encroaching on the Tangut border like an immense tsunami. Of course, it was just a phantasmagoria of horror, but the death of Lady Yelü anticipated the fall of Yüanhao’s kingdom. Her life was sacred, yet the bestial impulses of Thanatos and Eros drove him to kill her. (The sense of sexual humiliation ignited the fuse spiralling over his penis and set off the bomb.)

We Tangut dudes are hopeless fools! Tunick sighed.

Then here comes Lady Yeli, Yüanhao’s third queen. She was a reincarnation of Hera and a perfect match for the king. She was such a slender coquette that even Yüanhao stood in awe of her physical presence. None of the Tangut peeresses dared wear her beloved gilt ‘moiré crowns’. Her two uncles, Yeli Wangrong and Yeli Yuqi, commanded Yüanhao’s elite eastern and western legions of Paramount Warriors. Lady Yeli, Tunick said, indeed reminds us of the tall lean Nicole Kidman and her impossibly coltish legs.

Imagine this: our sulky king was staring at her with Tom Cruise’s sapphire eyes, scolding her in their gauze tent, ‘Don’t you dare lift me into the air while we’re doing the thing,’ while Nicole – oops, Lady Yeli I mean – was pushing our naked king upwards with her sleek legs and pedalling his belly like riding a bike. It panicked him so much that he felt like a fragile, tearful baby teased by mummy. To puff up his kingly pride, he would carry her in his arms and waltz in their tent, but her staged coyness couldn’t quite conceal that she was twice his height.

My narration seems to have deviated from the historians’ depiction of Yüanhao and Lady Yeli and begins to overlap with sneaky paparazzi snapshots of Tom and Nicole. But Lady Yeli was nothing like Nicole except for her slender figure. As sly as a female crocodile, she wielded her beauty and body to gradually become an éminence grise within the kingdom and thereby protect her baby crocodiles from their sadistic father who relished the blood of his own offspring. She was the very counterpart of Yüanhao, a femme fatale who spared no life and who carried out her plots at all costs.

Tunick said, Before revealing more about Lady Yeli, I must interpose some brief accounts about Yüanhao’s fourth and fifth queens here, lest we forget that he, like an unfeeling reptile forever afloat upon the intangible debris of the evanescent present, was hopelessly addicted to the sick pleasure

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of uxoricide. Historians don’t have much to say about his fourth and fifth queens, save for a couple of incidents: In the thirde yeare of the Tangut æra of Guangyun (AD 1036), Lady Feiƒuo killed herƒelf. By fals report Yüanhao was ƒaid to haue deceaƒt on his way to aƒƒayl the Guƒiluo City of Gyag. Delighted was Lady Feiƒuo, and ƒhe played muƒickes day and night. When Yüanhao returned, ƒhe killed herƒelfe in horror.

The other episode took place in the eighth year of the Tangut era of Tianshou (AD 1045): Lady Miemi gaue birth to a ƒon and named him Ali; they were not fauoured and exiled to the prefecture of Xìa. Ali grew vp and conƒpired to rebel againƒt his father. His ƒubalterne Wo Xianqi betrayed him. Yüanhao ƒieƒed him and ƒank him down the riuer and ƒente a man to beƒtow death vpon Lady Miemi.

KILL! KILL! KILL! He slew every woman who had induced ecstasy in him, slashed every pair of pale boobs that he’d felt with the palm of his hand, and silenced every low moan of fear, delight or pain. He’d never figured out how to handle women’s beautiful, milky bodies. His senses always failed to tell their bodies from heavenly melodies, satin fabric and muskwood fragrance. His queens always made him high and sucked him dry with their fine fingers, peach lips and warm, wet vaginas when his loins were swollen with burning desire. But carnal pleasure couldn’t save him from constant attacks of unbearable migraine. He always heard the drums of war as he was about to come, and his whores would gaze at him with their cautious, fearful eyes.

Tunick said, Now let’s pick up the narrative thread of Lady Yeli again.

After putting Lady Weimu to death with her backbiting, she was now enthroned as Queen Xiancheng. Her cunning and cruelty would be justified, if we consider the danger she and her sons encountered in the den of Yüanhao – a lion that ripped and devoured his own cubs. She enchanted the bloodthirsty king with her perfumed boobs, coltish legs and oestrogen,

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merely for the humblest wish to protect her sons from harm in a slaughter game of paternal sins.

Things went well at first, Yüanhao anointing their first-born son Ningming as the successor to his throne. Ningming was a miraculous antithesis of Yüanhao, a fountain of light derived from a swamp of darkness: he was kind, intelligent, and preoccupied with the ‘asceticism of absolute fast’ as a Taoist priest’s apprentice. (Wouldn’t Yüanhao look at this antithesis of himself and wonder: Isn’t my blood running in this lad’s veins?) Yüanhao once asked him, ‘How to attain a better life?’ Ningming answered, ‘Auoid human blood.’ Yüanhao then asked, ‘How to rule a kingdom?’ Ningming answered, ‘Reƒtrain thy deƒire.’ Yüanhao was so furious (‘Thou ƒpeakeƒt idle words!’) that he expelled Ningming from his sight forever. Shocked and humiliated, Ningming choked and fell dead.

Grief-stricken by the premature death of Ningming, Yüanhao held a solemn state funeral for his dead son. (Why on earth did Yüanhao suddenly behave like a bereaved old father? Did he realise in great horror that he’d just destroyed a heaven-sent miracle of evolution and wiped away a dewdrop of civilisation distilled from his evil barbarism?) Lady Yeli took advantage of his momentary weakness and asked him to anoint their second son Ningling as the new crown prince. This lad was almost a clone of Yüanhao: conceited, arrogant, cruel and suspicious.

Please forgive me, Tunick said, as my story seems to have gone awry.

Characters from different planes were messed up and became accomplices in a terrible endgame. Men, women, fathers, sons, daughters-in-law, aunts, nieces . . . as if the entire household got locked in a chamber and was so doped up that all had lost their minds; they were engulfed in a collective madness of sadism. Yüanhao became so unlike himself. A large part of him was degenerating into a suspicious, feeble, lustful old man – maybe not that old, for he was only forty-six when he died – who was being manipulated like a marionette. His bestial impulse to expand the kingdom became a cancer that ate away at his mirror-maze of self-projections.

The tragedy accelerated towards its dénouement after Yüanhao’s sixth queen, Lady Moyi, made her debut. Well, how shall I put it? This divine Lolita of Uyghur descent should have been bestowed on Ningling, but, dammit, she was so sinfully beautiful! On the eve of the royal betrothal,

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Yüanhao witnessed the terrible beauty that would cause his destruction and undo his splendid project of conquering the steppes, of striking the Song and the Mos Jælud, and of building golden palaces as bright as burning stars. He’d made up his mind to slay his own son at the first sight of her.

But things would be complicated, as he would also have to slay the jealous Queen Yeli. (Gosh! She was a satin-clad mule compared to the divine creature shimmering before his eyes). Oh, wait, there were also the duo of her powerful uncles who held in their hands his elite legions of Paramount Warriors. . . . But a foggy, milky fragrance leaked from between her thighs, wafted into his nostrils and flooded the frontal lobe of his brain. The floral scent from beneath her skirt became stronger and stronger and seduced him right in front of a houseful of courtiers.

He sent the decree: ‘The royall wedding of the crown prince ƒhall be poƒtponed.’

Click. The magical self-destruct mechanism was activated. Yüanhao announced that Lady Moyi would be his ‘New Queene’; he built a grand summer palace on Mount Tiandu and indulged in sensual pleasures day and night. (‘Thou naughty dirty puss,’ Yüanhao grunted with great affection.) All the courtiers were overwhelmed by a maelstrom of apprehension.

The eleuenth yeare of the Tangut æra of Tianƒhou. Spring, the firƒt daye of the new lunar yeare. The ƒun was red and without luƒtre. The ceremonie was held, and courtiers looked at each other in horror.

She who should’ve been Lady Yeli’s daughter-in-law became her rival in love; she who should’ve been Ningling’s crown princess, his stepmother. I won’t depict the indignant visages of Lady Yeli and Ningling, said Tunick.

I would rather quote a passage from the historians to demonstrate how Yüanhao got rid of Lady Yeli’s two powerful uncles: The murder of Yeli Wangrong and Yeli Yuqi The nature of Yüanhao was ƒuƒpicious and deceitful, and hee ƒlew thoƒe whom hee truƒted not. Wang Song ƒowed diƒƒenƒion and Wangrong was ƒlain. Yuqi, the brother of Wangrong, was known as the Lord of Tiandu.

Hee was at variance with White Grannee, the wet nurƒe of Yüanhao. Yuqi

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led his legions to croƒs ouer the Han border, and White Grannee ƒieƒed the opportunity to ƒpit venomous words againƒt him and ƒayde hee would rebel.

Yüanhao was ƒuƒpicious but tooke no action. Zhong Shiheng bribed Su Chinang, a Tangut chieftain whoƒe father was fauoured by Yuqi. Shiheng beƒtowed vpon Chinang gilt belts, embroidered robes and officiall poƒitions, and aƒkt him to ƒteale the Miƒari Blade which Yüanhao beƒtowed vpon Yuqi. Shiheng ƒayde: ‘Yuqi ƒurrendered to the Song and gaue them his Miƒari Blade as the token. His brother dide because of the venomous words of White Grannee, ƒo Yuqi offered ƒacrifices on the border of the Song and made a woodden monument, whereon he mourned for his brother and their vnfiniƒht ƒcheme.’ At night, Shiheng aƒkt his men to ƒack the monument and burne it with paper moneyes and make the valleye as bright as daye. The Tanguts went to the valleye and found rituall veƒƒels and burnt paper moneyes and the Miƒari Blade and the burnt monument.

Yüanhao ƒaw the blade and was conuinced; hee depriued Yuqi of his militarie power and beƒtowed death vpon him.

No sooner had Yüanhao killed Yeli Wangrong and Yeli Yuqi – who once ambushed and wiped out 100,000 Song soldiers in the battles of Sanchuankou and Haoshuichuan – than he knew he’d taken the bait: the indignant Queen Yeli, our Nicole Kidman, wielded the wrongful execution of her two uncles as her final pair of jokers to turn the tide of the bloody game. She was clad in snow white, elegantly shedding tears. The Yelus – men and women, old and young – were slaughtered as the inevitable consequence of Yüanhao’s fury. Tunick said, Lady Yeli must’ve been trembling, entreating Ningling in a low moan of desperation: Blood for blood, you must behead the entire Moyi clan. Once you accede to the throne, I want that slut frightened to death by the mere thought of the torture that is to be inflicted upon her. You must send your men to the Song Empire and bring back their infernal punishments, and you must try each of them on that slut. . . .

But the truth is Yüanhao felt repentant for what he’d done. He sent his men to look after the remaining Yelis. Meanwhile, all historical accounts of Lady Moyi were somehow discontinued. Perhaps the venomous silkworms that hatched out of the divine Lolita’s crotch and drilled into Yüanhao’s

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head were short-lived. Perhaps the incestuous ecstasy had vanished after his subliminal murder of the Yeli brothers. Perhaps the exhausted old man thought of his younger days when he and his fellow Tangut chieftains swore eternal brotherhood, hunted on horseback with their earrings and scimitars clinking and clanking, or sat side by side while their leather boots and armour sent forth a ‘gamey’ scent. Perhaps the two women, in their ill-lit tents, cast on each other the black magic of curses, counter-curses, conjured demons. . . . Long story short, Lady Moyi – the dazzling creature who had descended from heaven to cause the dad-cuckolding-son scandal – disappeared, for good and all. She reminds us of Helen of Troy, whose pure pheromones drove all heroes crazy and trapped them into an endless spiral of massacres. However, one day her figure became transparent and her fragrance faded away, as if she were exposed to some alien aircraft’s teleportation ray. They finally awoke from the hypnotic chaos and stopped shedding blood. They felt confused and ashamed, yet giggled like fools, relishing a residue of vague happiness. . . .

It’s pretty sad that Lady Moyi disappeared after the holocaust of the Yelis.

However, at this solemn moment of mourning and condolence, Yüanhao’s seventh queen was grotesquely silhouetted against a sinister mist. Tunick said, I’m fully aware that many may storm away when they hear the following episode. They may say, ‘I’ve had enough of your gibberish!

Yüanhao is bloody human scum, period!’ But I beg your indulgence, for my story is nearing the climax of this human tragedy. If you’re all too familiar with Hollywood’s almost sadomasochistic moralism of revenge and justice, then you may find the finale of my story mildly satisfying. As a Greek philosopher had it, if we don’t force ourselves to observe such shocking, irregular and aberrant celestial events as meteor showers, total solar eclipses, comets’ tails, Scorpio in retrograde motion, dying white dwarfs . . . how shall we ever comprehend the higher cause of the mysterious cosmos?

Yüanhao’s seventh queen, Lady Mozang, was widowed by the death of Yeli Yuqi. (In other words, Lady Yeli was her niece.) When the kingdom was newly founded, Yüanhao and his best pal Yuqi had beheaded thousands of Song soldiers on the steppe; each rode a warhorse and took it in turns shooting arrows at the kneeling Song generals Ren Fu and Sang Yi until they became a pair of blood-stained hedgehogs. That night, after slaying

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the Tibetan king, after destroying the City of Qara-hoja, after beheading Uyghur warriors, after slashing green-eyed Nestorian monks, Yüanhao and Yuqi – still trembling with excitement and fear of the furious pagan gods afloat above the slain like fairy fire – stared into each other’s soul and drank like two fish. (‘We’ll never betray each other! He who breaks the vow shall be slain!’) It was she, Yüanhao’s best pal’s wife, who sliced the roasted mutton and served them with her noble hands. When Yüanhao sent his decree to bloodwash the Yelis, she rushed into a Buddhist nunnery and went through the rite of pabbajja. However, he decided to invite his best pal’s widow back to the palace, under the influence of Queen Yeli’s indignant grievance over her uncles’ wrongful death.

We can’t quite manage to reconstruct the scene of reunion, as the pair was overwhelmed by a complicated mixture of emotions. On the one hand, he, the ruthless demon whose hands were stained with her husband’s blood, had the absolute power to spare or take anyone’s life. In the face of such a dominant male predator, her ovaries sent forth a series of confused biological signals of fear, hatred and induced ovulation. Much to her shame, she found her body beneath the black frock swollen with desire, her nipples tumescent, her vagina wet, her intestines rumbling, and her erogenous zones burning and flushing. On the other hand, she was the only log of driftwood that could save him from sinking into the inferno of nothingness; he had not only killed her husband but also the most cherished part of himself. The woman before his eyes might preserve some pieces of his best pal’s soul. He told her with exaggerated sincerity: ‘I won’t be happy again in this life until I meet all my old pals’ ghosts in the underworld.’ This bald nun in a black frock was the taboo of taboos. She was a living creature, yet her undulating bosom pumped out a pungent smell of death that reminded him of his mad creation of a hell screen, and of all those rotten cadavers that he could never bring back to life. He asked her to strip off her religious habit, held her breasts in his hands, caressed her quivering waist and arms and luxurious satin thighs, and realised that her uncanny flesh was the very embodiment of the secrets of death. The intense vibration of her illuminant body frightened him, as if the force he ejaculated into her body had become ten times stronger. Historians tell us nothing but three brief words: ‘Hee knew her.’ But the ecstasy, despair and terror they experienced in coitus were

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beyond all human language. Yüanhao and Lady Mozang clung to each other’s flesh, desiring to rub it into their own genitals. Each uttered a bestial glottal moan in tears, but in it there was neither love nor empathy.

What was about to happen seems rather predictable: the free fall towards death. By then Lady Yeli had found that her late uncle’s widow had become the new SM queen of the slaughter game in the king’s bed. (What? It’s the Yelis that’d been slain, isn’t it? What the hell are the Mozongs doing here?)

She was furious: ‘Is it all about bloody crossword puzzles? Must I hold my breasts and chase after that fat butcher and wipe out every single woman tangled in the spider web of his families?’ Thus, she imprisoned Lady Mozang within the Jietan Temple in the City of Eri-qaya, and did whatever was necessary to forbid her brazen aunt from discarding her religious habit and returning to her secular life.

Meanwhile, Yüanhao was totally absorbed into a hazy, unrealistic vacuum of sexual immorality. He paid no attention to his anxious courtiers and their obscurely coded dissuasion. He told lies without intending to hide his vice.

He lurked incognito in the Jietan Temple at night. He took Mozong the nun hunting in his royal forest, on the pretext of interpreting the emerging omens on a smoked mutton femur, or of studying Buddhist scriptures in the nocturnal forest. But all he did was copulate with the avatar of death in the wilderness. He was a lone wolf who tried to heal himself of curare poison in the wrong way by painfully fucking the nun with burning breasts and a frozen womb. Evil pleasures were intensified by the strain of a relationship under surveillance. He became uncontrollably aroused even if the nun was simply grabbing his phallus with her coal-black hand in the dark.

‘I’ve finally realised the quintessence of civilisation,’ Yüanhao exclaimed.

‘It’s all about telling lies and denying your desires.’

The next year, Lady Mozang gave birth to a son in a tent by a river on their way to hunt. The river was called ‘the Cave of Liangzuo’, so she named him after the river. At that time Yüanhao had already handed his kingdom over to Lady Mozang’s elder brother Mozang Epang. It is also Mozang Epang who fostered Liangzuo, Yüanhao’s illegitimate son. Tunick said, I’ve heard many stories about lifelike marionettes opening their eyes during the nights of a full moon and stabbing their master puppeteers; or about an illustrated beauty, after a finishing touch to her soulful eyes, becoming a

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Yijun Luo

femme fatale, lifting her skirt, walking out of the silk paper and strangling the miniaturist who has granted her life. At that time, Yüanhao had become a precious prey for the duo who had evolved from his pale semen into human forms. He was incapable of speech. He lost the concept of time, and got stuck in the warm, wet vagina where those vengeful ghosts beneath his sword were hiding. There were two teams of predators: one was comprised of the indignant Lady Yeli and the cuckolded Ningling, the other Lady Mozang, Liangzuo the illegitimate son and Mozang Epang the éminence grise. Each side wanted to kill its opponents; they had to assassinate Yüanhao at the magical moment when he became a cat (or a wolf, or a unicorn, or a camel, or the Tangut’s real form: a muntjac), cover his corpse with a cloth of flamboyantly embroidered satin, forge a copy of his will and testament, and occupy the pilot’s seat in the ‘giant machine of evolution’ before the Tanguts realised that their king had ceased to be. The two lads – who came into being as the meaningless derivatives of Yüanhao’s lust – now had to exterminate each other’s matriarchal surname and usurp the nom du père.

To drape over their own shoulders the dragon gown made from their father’s human skin. To become the father.

In the eleventh year of the Tangut era of Tianshou – my story is finally about to end, Tunick said – Ningling the Crown Prince held high his sword and broke into the palace. Some historians tell us that Yüanhao was as drunk as a skunk and his ferocious face had become gentle because he could no longer focus his mind. Tunick said, I can’t help but think of many classic confrontation scenes in Western or Sci-fi films, wherein time seems to freeze in the instant when father and son are about to kill each other. Ningling might have said nothing but ‘I’m committing a crime beyond comprehension,’ whereas Yüanhao might have had difficulty calling to mind when the hell he’d begotten this son. He raised up his hands like a film director trying to stop an actor brimming with wild ideas that have nothing to do with the scenario he’s shooting. He wanted to shout, ‘Cut!’ but feared that he would lose the emerging thoughts and sentiments that he’d never previously known. He maundered, ‘I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry that my experiences can’t be bequeathed. I’ve never shared with you the mysterious moments I’ve been through: those moments of guilt, of solitude, of fear, of nausea after killing, of being loved, of emptiness when waking up feeling unloved, of

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confessing my sins, of spurting happiness . . . I’m sorry that we’ll end up two isolated men. It’s too late for me to share with you all the experiences I’ve stolen from the claws of death. . . .’

Ningling might have whispered: ‘You’ve confused our evolution with your own memories.’ Or perhaps he didn’t say anything at all. In the next split second, Yüanhao felt as if a door had opened in the middle of his face and a strong flood of light was pouring from it into the dark chamber; he felt as if a crowd of dwarves – with haloed heads, gilt faces, jewelled crowns, armlets, earrings, necklaces, bracelets – were rushing out of the hole.

Ningling’s sword had cut off his nose. There was a long silence before he heard a woman scream from a great distance. He tried to stop his royal guards: ‘Don’t kill my son!’ But he couldn’t: his eyes were blinded by the spurt of blood and his mouth was clogged with a salty, fishy paste that he knew too well. Outside the palace gate, not far away from the blind, noseless king, Mozang Epang’s men shredded the fleeing Ningling into a thousand scarlet ribbons.

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Interview: Margrét Helgadóttir

Int erview: Margrét Int erview: Helgadóttir Margrét Helgadóttir

M

argrét Helgadóttir is editor of the Fox Spirit Book of Monsters, a seven-volume series with titles published annually from 2014–2020.

The first three volumes cover European, African and Asian monsters. In 2016, African Monsters was shortlisted for the British Fantasy Awards.

In this issue of the Asia Literary Review we feature two stories from Asian Monsters: ‘Grass Cradle, Glass Lullaby’ by Isabel Yap and ‘Blood Like Water’

by Eve Shi.

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Interview: Margrét Helgadóttir

Where does your passion for monsters come from? And how do you define what a monster is?

I love diversity and the different; the abnormality sticking out in the homogeneous crowd. I also like the dynamics between light and dark and how they give life and meaning to each other. Werner Herzog said, ‘What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.’ I am also quite fascinated with the psychology of monsters. Some would say that monsters are the mirrors of ourselves, that we make them, and then fear them for what they show us about ourselves.

I think we tend to place monsters into two categories: either the beasts living within us or the beasts living next to us. Fox Spirit Books gives these latter monsters a renaissance, to re-establish their dark reputation, to give them a comeback and let the world know of their real terror. These monsters have no interest in you except tearing you apart or putting terror in your heart. Bless them.

What do you think the nature of monsters from local folklore says about a country’s culture and psyche?

Folklore is often closely linked to religious beliefs, old myths and legends.

I am quite fascinated by how humans of all times, regardless of geography, culture or demography, have created monsters. No matter where you are in the world, monsters have been something to blame when bad things happen – the sudden death of dear ones, bad luck, shipwrecks – or a way to explain mysterious things like thunder and lightning. Many monsters also challenge our thoughts and fears of what will happen when we die, or the relationship between humans and animals in the wilderness.

You’ve published anthologies on monsters from Asia, Europe and Africa.

How are Asian monsters different from those from other regions?

Some monsters are universal. You will always find the shape-shifters, the flesh-eating walking dead and the great monsters of the lakes and sea. But what is important to one culture might not be so vital to another. A signifier in Asian Monsters is the close link between spirits and ghosts and Asian folklore. Some of these spirits and ghosts are mischievous, others quite terrifying, many sad. So the tales about Asian monsters create an almost

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Interview: Margrét Helgadóttir

ethereal, dreamlike atmosphere throughout the book. This is very different from the previous volume, African Monsters, where the stories were more about place and origin, about immigration and going home – maybe a strong witness of how much soil means to the African authors. The African monsters are also more closely connected to magic – like witches; and nature – like the haunting forest spirits, the forest growing wild and the deadly water. Home is also an underlying theme in Asian Monsters, but here it’s more about the family itself and the strong relationships between loved ones – dead, living or absent.

Do you think a people’s relationship with its monster fiction and folklore changes with a country’s economic and political development?

I think, just as we remember folklore and ancient beliefs, the old monsters will survive. What is interesting is that many of the monsters created today are based on old beliefs; and others are hybrids, created out of climate change or nuclear catastrophe.

Asian Monsters is published by Fox Spirit Books, www.foxspirit.co.uk.

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Grass Cradle, Glass Lullaby Grass Cradle, Isabel Glass Lullaby Yap

Isabel Yap

‘Grass Cradle’ illustration by Imran Siddiq

Y

I

ou came to me unexpectedly, long after I had stopped hoping. The air smelled of rain and grass. I was carrying the shopping, an umbrella tucked under my arm. I was carrying a loneliness that extended like a sword from my heart. The loneliness was not unusual. The umbrella was; I’m usually more forgetful than that. The shopping bag I was carrying had two cans of beer and some frozen chicken drumsticks. Those have since been consumed.

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Isabel Yap

I heard you crying from the tall grass. I’ve never minded babies crying.

How they go e-e-ehhh. Or sometimes uwaaa-eh, with a different intonation. I heard you and I wondered: Where are you?

Am I hearing you from a window? Is your crying just amplified somehow?

Whose child are you?

The answer I dared not hope then: you were mine.

II A story about young love: It was the month of May, sacred to the Virgin. That’s what she was. She wore baby cologne and dresses with pockets. In the classrooms, the air was sticky and all the students smelled faintly of lemons.

There wasn’t anything special about him. The first day he wore a baseball cap, but the teacher told him to take it off. He was no rebel. He never wore it again.

They watched a horror movie together and when a dead girl slithered through the window, she did not scream, but placed her hand on his thigh.

Weeks later, as far away from the classroom as they could be, behind a line of trees: a kiss, then two, then three.

For days he had imagined his hands where they were not to be imagined.

Suddenly, they were there.

She said, ‘I want to be able to make bad decisions.’

He broke a button off her blouse in his haste to remove it.

III No name, no letter, nothing. Should I take you to the police? Knowing that they might take you from me. Knowing that shard in my heart— You could be mine.

One thing I could own.

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Grass Cradle, Glass Lullaby

One thing for me to love. I have a lot of love to give, I thought. A lot that I could give you. And there is a place for you in my little flat; there is a place for you here. On my bed. With me. I can make you a nest with my pillows. I can feed you somehow. No one is ever prepared for this, anyway.

How the heart swells, how you learn simply by doing.

You didn’t cry when I lifted you.

IV You cry now. You cry endlessly. Sometimes it tires me.

I use a pillow to cover my ears, but never your mouth, your teeny-tiny mouth.

V A story no one with prayer in her heart would like: The priest stood by the confessional, watching la niña. Her fingers were wrapped around a rosary. The veil was draped artfully over her head, and her lashes cast shadows on her cheeks (there was flickering candlelight – he could measure their length down the side of her face). It’s the olden days.

No one would believe her. The shut door, the way her shock turns to horror turns to grief, then numbness.

Now let’s make it more modern. Let’s make it a story no mother wants to hear.

Scrap the church. Make it an office.

Make him her boss, not a priest. A button-down, a nice tie from Marks & Spencer. Is that different?

You expect better from a holy man. But if the boss is clean-shaven, if he gels his hair evenly, if his smile is pearly-Colgate-white, you probably expect a lot of him too.

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Isabel Yap

VI So I cradle you.

You are so tender.

You fill me up. Your little toes, your eyes. How are you real?

I never had anyone but you, but I know exactly what to do (except for the times when I don’t know at all, except for the times when I fumble). It’s because of Katya’s children. I look after them well, whenever I visit. I haven’t told Katya yet, but I might.

I am not sure what Katya would think of you. Of me with you.

VII My breast swells with milk. That isn’t even possible.

You are changing me, I think, as I let you suckle.

VIII You’re curious about the boy: His mother slapped him when she found out. ‘What did you do?’ she cried. ‘Why did you do that?’

She had him when she was in seventh grade, she knew that pain. A baby can’t have a baby! He stood and cried, and she broke her heart against his bent head – You are still my world, you are still my world, I know there are times when we can’t control ourselves. . . .

I won’t tell you whether what he chose made a difference, whether they stayed together, whether the girl kept it or let it go, or got beaten by her father, or never mentioned it at all. Either way, they’ve both grown up a lot.

Either way, there are scars from the words that have been exchanged, the nightmares dreamt, the memory of skin – how it delights, how it damages.

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IX Katya visits me unexpectedly. It is her way of operating, for my sister is never unwelcome where she appears.

‘It’s the month of May. We must pray a novena together.’ She embraces me, then moves into my room. She pauses. ‘Whose baby is that?’

My tongue loosens. ‘Mine. It’s mine.’

‘But who – who is the father?’

‘I don’t know.’ I don’t care. You have no father, you only have me; I’m the only one you need in this whole world.

Katya swallows, and stands by the crib I bought you. Oh yes, anak, I bought you so many things. Little outfits, milk bottles, a globe of coloured lights to give you sweet dreams. ‘He is adorable,’ she says, ‘but perhaps you should report him, he could be a missing child—’ ‘This is his home,’ I say.

Meanwhile your little fist has reached out to tug at her rosary.

X My neighbour who is never home returns suddenly. Cooks dinner. The stench of garlic hangs over everything, wafting over the entire floor. It makes me restless, and I run my hands under the tap for ages, but they still feel unclean.

You cry and cry and cry. I press a swaddling cloth to your nose when it starts bleeding.

In the end, I visit my neighbour. She answers the door, panting slightly.

Her hair is tied into a very tight bun. Over her shoulder I see the kitchen counter with a pot and knife and chopping block.

Breathless, she asks, ‘Yes?’ ‘Your cooking is making my baby cry.’

‘Your baby?’

‘Yes.’ ‘Oh.’ Her eyes flicker to my chest, my swollen breasts. ‘Oh, I’m very sorry.’

‘No, it’s all right.’

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Isabel Yap

‘I’m nearly done. I won’t cook this again.’

I thank her. She shuts the door. It still takes ages for the smell to fade, though I open every window in our home. Through the night, you toss and turn against me, your skin blistering, burning.

XI A story about the most powerful bond: A clerk doing a stint at the maternity wards for medical school is slowly losing her mind. The OBs are always screaming, screaming at the mommies and the nurses and the interns and the orderlies. Mommy – massage your nipples! There are too many hormones in the air. The orderly is wrestling with a bed pan, trying not to cry. Everything smells like shit.

This isn’t meant to put you off children, or pregnancy, or anything like that. Birth is a wonderful thing. The maternity ward is not.

A mother comes, and the baby is cut out of her. The mother dies. The baby is put in an ICU. In the middle of the night, while the orderly is pausing for a five-minute nap, a woman screams. At first they think she’s going into labour, but no, she’s speaking: She’s walking! I see her walking!

She means the dead mother’s ghost, creeping to the ICU to be with her child.

This isn’t a ghost story, you see. It’s a story about love. The most powerful kind of love – a love stronger than death.

XII Things change.

I cannot return to work. I send emails saying I have a family emergency, but I don’t care if that world crumbles, as long as you are happy. Yet you cry. You gnaw at my breast (some of the skin comes away). I give up on leaving the house, except to take out the rubbish, which piles up – so quickly – why do you shit so much?

Katya calls, I don’t answer.

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My neighbour knocks on the door. She complains that cockroaches are crawling into her home, that clearly they are coming from my place. I say nothing. She says, children should not live under such conditions. When I don’t reply, she finally leaves.

XIII The news, a week later: A family was killed in a car, off the highway, quite near to me.

In the middle of the night, someone flagged them over and stabbed the couple to death.

They might have had a baby, the news reporter says.

I look at you. I palm the irregular curve of your head. Were they your family? It doesn’t matter to me now. How did you live? How did you come to me? It doesn’t matter to me now.

Katya sends me a text, but I don’t read it.

XIV Let me tell you, anak, about the jagged edge of loneliness – just in case it helps, though I want to tell you now, you will never feel that way, for I will always be with you.

My mother wasn’t ready to have me, even if she was ready to make bad choices.

(I still don’t know what that makes me.)

I grew up with that sword sticking straight out of me, until it was bearable, until I nearly liked the curve of it.

When someone touches me, however, I shrivel. I’m sand.

But how I wanted you – something to cradle, something to sing lullabies to.

(But I let having you pass, I let my insides turn to sand.)

I think I am only truly human when I hold you. Is it so terrible that you have become my oxygen?

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Isabel Yap

XV You drink my blood. I let you. I peer into your mouth. Your teeth are jagged.

(Like my loneliness – like the loneliness I haven’t felt, since you.)

If I can fill you up, the way you do me – then I am only doing what I must, I can only be happy.

XVI But oh, I’m not enough. You cry and cry, and your hunger grows and grows.

The neighbour and the smell of garlic, again. This time, I realise what she’s trying to do. The bright spark in her eyes, and the song rising from her room, that makes you scream as if you are being cut.

I bang on her door. She answers with a knife, but I’m quicker.

She falls, first to her knees, then flat on her face. I turn off her stove.

‘I’ve brought you dinner,’ I tell you. ‘Please stop crying.’

I left the pot at her place. I already know you don’t like garlic.

XVII A story for which I have no conclusions: The mother faints. From between her legs they pull the small fragments one might find of a child. I won’t tell you if she meant for that to happen.

I won’t tell you how it makes her feel, how it makes the young doctor-intraining feel – holding her hand, unable to find the words.

There is no grief like a mother’s grief, no love like a mother’s love.

You already know this, I think. There is enough mother-love to fill the world, and only so many small ones to absorb it. But you can do it, I know, mahal. You are up to the task.

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XVIII Last night, when I held you, your face changed. It was terrifying. I held you against my heart and let you rest there, and I could feel your red eyes boring into my skin, hear you hissing. I was afraid, but love is like that. Sometimes it requires bravery, asks us to quell our fears. Your teeth! Your eyes – fire dancing! And the way all of your skin creased around your face, into terrible wrinkles— I closed my eyes and tried to fall asleep, and ignored it when you wrestled away from me and prowled the floor. It seemed forever until you changed into yourself again, crying weakly, needing me.

I picked you up. You smelled like grass, lemons, milk. You smiled.

XIX Katya visits. I don’t let her in.

She knocks on the door. ‘Please,’ she says.

When I don’t answer, she begins: ‘Hail Mary, full of grace . . .’

There is a knife on my table but I won’t pick it up.

Nor will I let her take you away from me. Or me from you. ‘. . . and blessed is the fruit of your womb . . .’

After the tenth one, she pauses, and then she sobs, saying she’s worried about me, that she doesn’t understand what’s going on. I know she doesn’t.

The depth of her loneliness has always been incomparable to mine, so the depth of her love is, too. I don’t know why I didn’t see this earlier. I don’t know why I ever thought I needed her.

I’m fine. I’m fine right here.

Katya leaves, or I think she leaves, after several hours’ vigil. I’m afraid she will return with others, and we might be forced to part.

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Isabel Yap

XX I understand what you want, long after I’ve stopped trying to decipher it.

You cry: e-e-ehhh.

Hush now.

I understand, see? Look. Mommy is holding the blade. This is what you wanted, yes? My milk, my blood, the neighbour’s skin – that wasn’t enough.

It’s not quite a sword, but mahal, I can’t find one so easily. This should be enough to give you my heart. It is no longer poisoned by loneliness, for you’ve taken that away.

Oh, but I am afraid. Love does that sometimes.

Don’t worry. I’ll give you what you ask. Sorry, I’m crying, I don’t want you to see that! Mommy does get sad sometimes. But it’s OK, we’ll still be together. You will always carry me in you. I will never leave you.

Please stop crying.

Hush now, anak. Shhhh. Hush.

‘Grass Cradle, Glass Lullaby’ is included in Asian Monsters, published by Fox Spirit Books, www.foxspirit.co.uk.

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Blood Like Water Blood L ike Wat EveerShi

Eve Shi

M

y friend Budi told me that Pak Eko saw the creature toward midnight. The pensioner was watching a dangdut singing competition on TV when a faint thump came from his front porch. The second time he heard the sound, Pak Eko went to wake his sleeping son. The young man, feeling entitled to a full rest after a day’s work at the sub-district civil office, only grunted.

Armed with a knife, Pak Eko carefully unlatched the front windows. The porch, its cracked tiles dull under the fifteen-watt bulb, seemed empty. Pak Eko caught a whiff of something rotten, and then it was gone. He was about to close the windows when the creature appeared on the left side of the porch.

Pak Eko’s terrified yell rang out in the cold night. Within minutes, his immediate neighbours had arrived one by one at his house. By then, Pak Eko was lying on his bed, eyes closed and taking one slow breath after another. His son, looking mildly embarrassed, sat by the bed and massaged his father’s temples with fingers smeared in cajuput oil.

‘It smelled a bit like fish,’ the young man mumbled. ‘Very tall – all my dad could see was its chest. That’s about it.’

Budi’s uncle had been among the neighbours who gathered outside Pak Eko’s room. Budi passed the story on to me as we crouched beside a stream, a manila-paper water mill sticking out of the bank. We had been struggling to position the water mill just so, to make the water slap consistently at its sails and rotate them.

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Eve Shi

‘Sounds like an amazing night,’ I said. Rough grass separated the stream from the village’s main street, a bumpy, potholed stretch of asphalt. Beyond the street lay fields of unharvested rice, the water glinting with reflections of the five o’clock sun. ‘The kids in my class talked about it all day long.’

‘That creature was a lelepah,’ Budi stated, with the confidence of someone who was well-versed in Central Javanese folktales. As if I, along with the other children in the village, hadn’t absorbed the same stories from our elders. ‘Don’t you agree, Wiya?’

‘Pak Eko must’ve had a pond on his porch, since those creatures only eat fish.’

Budi flapped his hand in a familiar gesture: Clever Wiya, resorting to sarcasm whenever she can’t come up with a proper response. I briefly considered dunking him in the stream, but instead kept my thin smile on.

‘Lelepah aren’t even from here,’ I added. ‘They live at Progo River, near Magelang. That’s far to the south.’

‘Maybe one of them got lost. Or it could be something else!’

As we continued to fiddle with the water mill, Budi wondered aloud what else the night visitor might have been. A burglar? No, they come in groups and rarely work solo. Pocong, a living corpse? But it wasn’t wrapped from head to toe in a white cloth. Genderuwo, then? No, they usually stalked women and children. And Pak Eko saw no fangs or fur. Finally, Budi concluded that the creature had indeed been a lelepah.

‘Tall and fishy-smelling,’ he said. ‘Can’t be anything else.’

I sat back on my haunches, observing the serenely turning water mill.

‘Why didn’t it do anything to Pak Eko?’ Budi sniffed. ‘Probably got scared. My uncle said these creatures may be strong, but humans are smarter.’

When I got home, the evening chill was setting in. My father was lounging on one of the front veranda’s two plastic chairs. He dragged on a kretek cigarette, his ankles poking out from the edge of his striped sarong.

‘Stay inside after dark,’ he told me. The smoke-cloud he blew out was faintly tinged with the fragrance of cloves. ‘Everyone is jittery about Pak Eko’s visitor. Village security is doubled tonight.’

I nodded.

‘Were you playing by the stream again?’

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Blood Like Water

Taking off my sandals, I stepped into the house. ‘Yes. Budi and I made a water mill.’

At the name, my father stiffened a little, but made no comment. ‘You got plenty of homework today? Better start doing it early.’

Like Pak Eko, my parents were fans of the dangdut singing competition.

They stayed up until the show was over, and then went to bed. Lying on my back, I listened to their bedroom door snicking shut. The sound was comforting, a sign that all was right with my family.

Ten minutes ticked past. In the silence, a song clawed its way out from the depths of my memory. It vibrated in my ears, the voice both sly and childlike: Lelepah, lelepah, eats raw fish I eat it at the house’s west side.

Over and over the two lines played, the repetition turning them into a taunt. My stomach turned hollow with hunger. My bones creaked as they elongated. The strands of hair on my shoulders grew and crept down, thick and matted, to my chest.

I climbed off the bed. The top of my head almost brushed the ceiling.

In my ears, the song played on, two words shriller than the rest: raw fish, raw fish.

It was not all that a lelepah ate. Even Budi, steeped as he was in folktale knowledge, had forgotten that.

I left quietly by the back door. Silhouettes of men patrolled the street, muttering among themselves. I waited until they passed before walking on, keeping myself in the shadows.

After last night, I’d learned to be more careful and headed for Pak Eko’s back door. It was locked but, compared to the front door, was farther away from the other houses. And, more importantly, from the patrolling men.

With a quick punch, I broke the back door’s bolt in two.

Undisturbed by the short, sharp crack, both Pak Eko and Anjar, his son, slept on. I went straight to Anjar’s room, where I knocked him unconscious.

Then his flesh crunched between my teeth, and dispelled my hunger.

Content and feeling satisfied, I left the house.

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*

*

*

My schoolmates shared the gory details among them with amusing speed.

Around adults, however, they were more restrained, as Anjar was to be buried in the afternoon. Everyone, including children, was expected at least to look solemn.

‘But why the son?’ Budi whispered to me. School was over, and we were standing with the other children on one side of the main street. The cloth-wrapped body, pallbearers, and a white-faced Pak Eko had just passed us by. ‘Why not Pak Eko?’ ‘The younger the flesh, the juicier it is.’

Budi’s eyes widened. Had my tone been smug instead of indifferent? But all I said was the truth; even now, I could taste Anjar’s bone marrow on my tongue.

Around us, the kids were scattering away and down the now empty street.

‘Police found anything?’ I asked.

‘They’re working on it.’

Good luck to them. All they’d find in Anjar’s room was the DNA of a fish, if that. Nothing to further their investigation.

‘A lelepah used to eat raw meat,’ Budi murmured. ‘Human meat. Now, they catch fish and eat those instead. . . . What’s a lelepah doing here, anyway, so far from Magelang?’

He seemed to expect no reply, and I gave him none. We walked back to our respective homes. No doubt Budi’s parents, like all the other parents in the village, had forbidden him to go outside in the afternoon. This might mean no more water mills, I thought, not without a pang of loss.

Speaking ill of the dead is bad form. Or so social norms declare. Humans, however, have poor manners and loose tongues. Two nights after the funeral, my mother brought up the subject of Anjar. My parents and I were in the middle of dinner, and the menu was fried tofu and sayur asem. Thin yellow slices of corn floated in the sayur asem bowl, the only bright colour on the table.

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‘. . . when Anjar was in middle school,’ my mother was saying, ‘he and one of his classmates. . . . It had been about – a girl from the next district?

Her name was Ratna or something.’

My father took some time before answering. ‘That incident has never been proven.’

‘Pak Eko and the other boy’s parents spoke with the girl’s family, didn’t they? Worked things out the peaceable way.’

In my understanding, the peaceable way meant evading court appearances and similar legal hassles. Being tried for a crime was a taint upon any family’s reputation. Coming to a mutual agreement to forget and move on was more important than anything, including the victim’s pain and trauma.

‘I was in the teachers’ office today and they were talking about Ratna.’ I speared my fork through a plump square of tofu. ‘She was on her way home, taking a shortcut through a deserted alley, when the two boys waylaid her.

Afterwards, she was so frightened, she refused to go to school for two days.

Didn’t even want to have her injuries checked at the community health centre.’

Slowly, almost in a daze, my parents put down their spoons. They didn’t look at me just yet. Unspoken questions trembled in the air around the table.

‘She wasn’t raped, the teachers said. But she could have been.’ Since eating was disrespectful in this situation, I too put down my fork. ‘Her parents were only the owners of a small grocery shop. Anjar’s friend – his dad was a member of the DPRD.’ A regional representative’s council. ‘It’d have been easy for him to hush things up.’

My mother’s fingers balled into a fist. ‘So you went to Pak Eko’s house that night. To seek out Anjar.’

Sweat glistened on my father’s forehead. My mother’s cheek pulsed as she gritted her teeth. I smiled at my parents.

‘I did,’ I replied. ‘Fifteen years too late.’

My mother leaped to her feet. ‘Are you sure that’s not just an excuse?’ she sputtered. ‘That all you wanted was to eat?’ She spoke in Bahasa Indonesia instead of Javanese – in this house, an omen of storms to come.

‘Would you rather I went for one of my teachers, then? Good, dedicated, useful people that they are?’

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‘Don’t change the subject! Why did you do it?’

Standing up, I pushed back my chair. ‘Because he deserved it.’

‘Wiya,’ my father said, ‘sit down when your mother is speaking to you.’

I obeyed, and he went on, ‘Is it true? That what the boy did fifteen years ago is an excuse, and you’d have attacked him anyway?’

I stared at each of my parents in turn. ‘What is this fuss about? I bet the sub-district civil office can get a replacement for one dead employee in no time at all.’

They looked as though I had slugged them. My mother swallowed. ‘Is that how you think of him – expendable?’

‘My teachers said he and his friend also harassed other girls. One of them is my maths teacher now. Usually those boys just waylaid and intimidated the girls, slapped them on the arm or leg. Ratna was. . . . I guess the boys lost control because the previous victims had never told anyone.’

My mother sank back onto her chair, her anger subsiding. She didn’t ask why I cared about a girl I’d never even met. Neither did she repeat her accusation that the harassment had only been an excuse. She glanced at me, then looked away.

‘Finish your meal and wash the dishes.’ Her tone was flat. ‘We’ll discuss this again later.’

This was as good a truce as any. ‘I’m sorry,’ I replied, with what I hoped was convincing regret. ‘I know this isn’t what you two bargained for when you were at Progo River.’

A good daughter, I had promised them. I would do what daughters do.

Memorise the Pancasila principles at school. Join the Girl Guides. Help keep the house clean. I said nothing about not eating humans; in some places, daughters also did that.

The man arrived in our village driving a shiny black sedan. Attracted by the car, the little kids ran after it, following it all the way to Pak Eko’s house.

From the veranda, I watched the man as he got out of the car and accepted Pak Eko’s greeting. A few words here and there, and I deduced that the man was Anjar’s friend – the one he’d harassed girls with.

His father was a member of the regional representative’s council. Pak Eko’s guest was handsome and well-fed, with sunglasses tucked into his shirt

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pocket. I imagined him as a teenage boy, sneering at girls and hitting them across the shoulder. He and Pak Eko went into the house, while the kids gathered around the sedan to admire it.

An hour later, the man and his car left. Pak Eko stood on his porch, gazing into space. If I were an adult, I could sidle up to him, playing the curious neighbour card. Ask whether that man was Anjar’s old friend, and where he lived. Sadly, a twelve-year-old asking these questions would be deemed impertinent.

‘Hey,’ I said to Budi the next day, ‘did you know Anjar used to be friends with some official’s son?’ We were on after-school cleaning duty with three other kids, sweeping the classroom floor. Our friends paid us little attention, absorbed in their own chitchat.

‘Yes. The official was a rep on the regency level. Later he was promoted to the city DPRD.’ ‘You really do know a lot, don’t you?’

He grinned; I had pushed the right button. ‘My uncle told me. Anjar’s friend is a DPRD member too now. That is one nasty family, always paying their way out of trouble.’

We finished cleaning up and left for home. Strolling across the school yard, Budi shared his lelepah theory with our three friends. They speculated about where it might hide in the daytime, and why it had targeted Anjar.

They also joked that the lelepah might have been sent by someone with a grudge against Anjar’s family. I trailed quietly after my friends, nodding in the right places.

That night, almost half the village men were out on patrol duty.

Someone’s phone blared out golden oldies, loud enough for me to make out the lyrics. My parents weren’t watching their favourite show tonight.

They had gone to bed early, after warning me to stay in the house.

I parked myself in front of the TV, switching channels. The oldies came to a pause, which was filled with braying laughter. When the next song came on, I turned off the TV. My tongue probed a space between my molars. A sliver of Anjar’s flesh had been lodged there that night, undigested until I came home. A sliver of human, unspeakably succulent and delicious.

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What would my parents do if the villagers found another gnawed-on body? Perhaps they’d throw me out, tell everyone they’d sent me away to live with older relatives. While still a child, she needs to learn humility and hard work. Living with older, respected people would teach her those. Without a word or look that accused me of ingratitude.

Gratitude. For my parents and me, a convoluted word. Twelve years ago, Hanung, my father, worked in a factory alongside a friend – Teja, Budi’s father. One day the accounting department discovered that someone had tampered with the books. To Hanung’s shock, Teja accused him. Later, the real culprit was discovered, but the accusation had already severed Teja and Hanung’s friendship. It was also why my father had never fully approved of Budi as my playmate.

To recover from the experience, Hanung and Rukmi, his wife, took a short holiday trip to Magelang. In a secluded spot near Progo River, they stopped to rest and three robbers descended on them. I slunk out of the water, scaring the robbers away. The couple who were to be my parents gazed at me with a curiosity that emboldened me.

It’s been boring here by the river, I said. Can I live with you? See, I’m able to transform into a human. A baby who later grows up? I can do that too. Don’t worry, I’m never going to eat you.

Carried away with relief and, I boldly assumed, by my sincerity, Hanung and Rukmi agreed. They brought me home with them, claiming to have found a baby abandoned on the roadside. We barely spoke of what I had been and still was. Not even the Anjar incident made my parents fear my penchant for raw meat. Rather, they were concerned that their child had gravely misbehaved.

Anjar’s bone marrow and its intoxicating sweetness. His confusion when he sensed me hovering over him. The coppery taste of blood that lingered in my mouth as I sat down in class the next morning.

Tonight, one final bite. After that, the terror would gradually subside.

Children would repeat and embellish the tale, shivering with delight.

Meanwhile, I would remain just one of the many girls in this district, indistinguishable from the rest.

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Budi didn’t awaken when I entered his room. As I’d done with Anjar, I knocked him out with one blow. Later, I took my time returning to my house, idly listening to the patrolling men’s chatter and their music.

The commotion began barely an hour later. Budi’s screams jolted his family out of sleep, and drew a crowd to his house, while a golden oldie played on from the villager’s phone until it was cut off mid-song. I lay under my blanket, snug and sleepy.

My parents had gone as pale as Pak Eko on the funeral day. My father went to Budi’s house, presumably to check on his condition. When he got home and saw me, he couldn’t hide the anger in his voice. Was this, he asked, because of what Pak Teja had done all those years before?

I shrugged. If it hadn’t been for Pak Teja, I’d never have met my parents.

So I’d spared Budi from greater agony. After his legs were properly treated, he’d be able to walk again. And, since his hands were intact, writing, studying, and constructing water mills weren’t out of the question.

‘He’s the last,’ I said. ‘The other villagers are safe after tonight.’

At that, colour flooded back into my mother’s face. ‘Has this been your plan all along?’ she whispered. ‘Be friends with Budi to use him for payback?’

Budi had been the one to approach me first. Since I was quiet and patient with his stream of stories, I quickly became his favourite schoolmate. Year after year, his stories flowed on: of vacations, new toys, irritating cousins.

To him, I was the most convenient type of friend – both sounding board and loyal companion. Even though it had been my suggestion that we learn to make paper water mills, it soon became an idea he happily remembered as his own.

Our child is friends with Teja’s, my mother said to my father. Any chance you’ll rebuild the bridge with him? My father shook his head. Teja would never have accused me, much less so openly, if he’d thought of me as a friend. What’s gone is gone. The incident had never stopped making him unhappy, for he had been genuinely fond of Teja.

It had never been my intention to use Budi as a payback for anything.

The inspiration came after Anjar’s death: shake up Pak Teja’s world a little, twelve years after he betrayed my father. He might not even think Budi’s

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wounds were a result of the betrayal; might even count himself lucky that his son wasn’t dead. Sorry, Budi. Sins of the father and all that.

My father was watching me. ‘Budi is the last,’ he repeated in a slow, thoughtful voice.

‘He is. No one else will get hurt. Unless they hurt you two first.’

A look passed between my parents. It was one I couldn’t read, but wasn’t particularly worried about. We all understood that they accepted me as I was; they would never unmask me or do anything drastic.

Pulling back her shoulders, my mother held my gaze. ‘You won’t want to taste human flesh ever again?’

My craving for it tended to be sporadic. The next time might be far in the future, when my parents were already dead. I’d be responsible for my own desires, and nothing was more thrilling than this.

‘It won’t be a problem,’ I said. Then I smiled. ‘Can we have breakfast now? I’m hungry. Oh, and next time I’d like to eat some fish.’

‘Blood Like Water’ is included in Asian Monsters, published by Fox Spirit Books, www.foxspirit.co.uk.

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Poetry

Tishani Doshi

Tishani D oshi

Dinner Conversations We never talked about whether Jains were OK with electric crematoriums when I was younger. These days even the chairs have opinions on mortality, speak with certainty, like people who are convinced they know exactly which mosquito gave them dengue.

I’m not sure what to make of the world when someone opens the fridge for a carton of milk, greets his wife and daughters, Morning Girls! then drops to the floor.

I don’t know if falling asleep in Benares and never waking up is better than slamming your head on a San Francisco pavement by mistake. And how to respond to Father, who starts up about the little time he has left when I finally announce I’m getting hitched.

The years grow drowsy on antibiotics and you’d think we’d be counting the beloveds just to make sure they’ve still got teeth in their heads.

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Tishani Doshi

Never mind the floods, never mind the sludgetorn vessels. You’d think we’d be giving up on sugar and taking our lungs for a walk. I’m scared I’ll die in a stupid way, by choking on a cornflake, when what I want is to be prefixed by majesty – Her Majesty or her majestic hips could kill . . . but what I get might be a raft floating out to sea, nothing that is over indefinitely, because here is Brother, earlobes wet from a shower, hands full of friends – a gentleman’s navy sock, a kerchief of silk, robberies of restaurant serviettes.

He holds them at the table’s edge, swishing them this way and that till all our fears are a kind of hunger – belly of wolf, eyes of wolf kings, always asking for more more more

Poem for a Dead Dog I want to lift you from the sand the way a harmattan ploughs the hell out of a Nigerian street.

To know you the way lovers in the first blush of heat will speak of the animals they want to be in the next life – elephant, hippo, always grand in design. But life, even though it’s ours, is mostly small. Small the way I squash ants against a wall. I want to tie a rope around your neck and lead you

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somewhere, but the way you’re lying so close to the waves, your limbs in some complicated Pilates position . . .

Understand, I can’t have my dogs see you this way, it would ruin their self-confidence. Don’t think it’s because I don’t believe in hard work. I jog most mornings, and when I read, I beat my chin if it sags into submission.

This isn’t about resisting but about longing, how it enters the body, shimmying between ribs.

The body, always the body – of you, of my dogs hovering around you, sniffing, squatting, pissing, tearing away to play Cowboys and Indians because a herd of young bulls has just appeared over the dunes, their buff brown bodies glorious as applause on the horizon.

Even the stranger’s perfect body you must have imagined giving yourself over and over to in the dark, the way all of it creates a knob of desire.

The body left out in a week of rain, still parched, still longing for someone to crawl in and close the shutters.

The body offering itself to the sea.

Impossible to think there will be no more cool mornings or summer nights of wild moonlight loving.

Listen, someone is pounding the door.

Tell them to bring the roses in.

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Tishani Doshi

Ode to Patrick Swayze At fourteen I wanted to devour you, the twang, the strut, the perfect proletarian butt in the black pants of you. I wanted a man like you to sashay into town and teach me how to be an aeroplane in water. I didn’t want to be a baby. I wanted to be your baby.

I wanted revenge. I wanted to sue my breasts for not living up to potential. I wanted Jennifer Grey to meet with an unfortunate end and not have a love affair with a ghost. At fourteen I believed you’d given birth to the word preternatural, and when Mother came home one day, waving her walking shoe, saying, I lost my soul in the Theosophical Society, I wanted to dance as recklessly as the underside of that shoe. I wanted to be a pebble in the soft heel of you. To horse-whisper and live on a ranch in Texas and love my blonde wife forever and have creases around my eyes and experience at least one goddamn summer where I could be like the wind – sexy and untrammelled and dirty. And it was only after I found my own Johnny (and got rid of him), only yesterday, when I rescued a northern shoveler from crows on the beach, his broken wing squished against the crockery of my ribs, only after setting him down at the edge of a canal, where he sank in to the long patient task of dying, that I realised what I’d wanted most was to be held by someone determined to save me, someone against whom I could press

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my unflourishing chest, who’d offer me not just the time of my life, but who’d tear out reams of his yellowing pancreas and say, here, baby, eat.

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The Wall The Wall

Ho Sok Fong

Ho Sok Fong translated by Natascha Bruce

W

hen the developers said they were building a wall to keep out the sound, everybody thought it was a good idea. For the past few years, the expressway had been expanding closer and closer to our houses. It used to be a full sixty metres away, but now had come so close we were practically run over every time we opened our back doors.

One morning, a seven-year-old girl was hit by a car outside her back door. Late that very night, the developers started building a wall along the side of the road.

‘They’re laying bricks straight onto the ground,’ said the aunty next door.

From her upstairs window, she watched the workmen spreading a layer of cement, then positioning a line of bricks, then smearing more cement over it.

‘It’s got no foundations,’ she said to her husband, when she came back downstairs. He was watching a football game on television, and when they scored he clapped and cheered with the South American sports presenter, so didn’t hear what his wife was saying.

His wife wasn’t surprised. She went back to watching the workmen building the wall. She thought they looked thin, as though they were too feeble for a job like that. But their wall looked very thick, thick enough to hide a thin person. It grew higher and higher, until it blocked her view.

When it was over one storey high, she went to sleep.

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The next morning, all the tenants in our row woke to find the wall was finished. It cut off the sunlight, making our backyards and kitchens dark.

But everybody agreed that sunlight wasn’t much of a price to pay, considering the girl who’d been killed. The only thing was, the wall blocked our back doors too, and now they opened just a little wider than the sole of an adult’s foot. Wide enough for a cat, or a small dog, but too much of a squeeze for a human.

The next-door aunty wasn’t happy. Wasn’t this the same as having no back door at all? No back door meant no way out. Her husband agreed. ‘It’s like having a mouth but no arsehole,’ is what he said.

But, gradually, they got used to it. There’s nothing a person can’t get used to. It wasn’t too much of a hardship, anyway, not compared to what that girl’s mother was going through. Two days after the incident, the aunty and her husband saw a tiny coffin being carried out through the other family’s gate. A few days later, the mother lit a fire in a big metal dustbin by her front door and burned her daughter’s clothes and schoolbag. The thick white smoke reeked of melting plastic and choked up the whole street.

The aunty couldn’t remember if her husband had ever left the house. He sat glued to the football on the television. The light was gone from their windows, but they carried on as best they could.

The aunty had no kids to take care of and spent most of her time in the kitchen. If she closed the kitchen door, she couldn’t even hear the television.

Before the wall, the kitchen had been filled with the roar of cars hurtling along the expressway. After the wall, the noise was muffled, as if trapped inside the capsule of a pill, or like a person humming deep within their chest. After a few days, she was used to it, and didn’t much mind one way or the other.

She did things a little differently after the wall. It blocked out the sunlight, making her eyes too tired to read the newspaper. Instead, she turned her attention to her tiny yard, about the size of a toilet cubicle, just to the side of the kitchen. In the first week, she planted cacti, and later added dumbcanes, bush lilies, hydrangeas and gerbera daisies, filling the little space to bursting. You’d have been impressed, if you’d seen it – big fat leaves

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springing from such a tiny patch of soil, spreading out so that there was almost nowhere to stand. And it seemed to be because of the wall: the gloom meant the soil stayed moist and the plants flourished. In addition to the plants in her yard, the aunty kept a bowl of goldfish in the kitchen.

Her husband hardly ever came into the kitchen, so he didn’t know she also kept a tabby cat. He’d had a lung infection a while before, and had been wary of dog and cat hair ever since. The cat had snuck in the day after the wall went up. The aunty had been trying to push open the back door, and it had squeezed through that sliver of a gap. She guessed the cat belonged to one of the houses further down the row, and that because her slightlyopened door had barred its way, it decided it might as well come in. It leapt boldly onto a chair, then strolled right into her little yard, where it relieved itself. After that, she couldn’t bring herself to put it back out again. She hugged it close, a fluffy tabby cat, feeling its weight against her, like the weight of the loneliness in the pit of her stomach.

Because of the goldfish, she had to keep the cat shut away in the yard.

She couldn’t let it inside, but neither could she let it leave. It often fell asleep out there. When it woke up it would prowl around in circles, and when it was hungry it would rub against the door, meowing. She was careful never to feed it too much: if it was hungry, it needed her. She felt there was an invisible rope between them, and when the cat was hungry, the rope pulled taut. At first, she’d thought about finding a real rope to tie the cat up with, but then she’d decided that so long as she made sure to shut the door tight, things would be fine as they were.

One morning, while she was out shopping, her husband went into the kitchen. He opened all three doors – to the back alley, to the little yard, and to the rest of the house – and then went back to the living room, where he sat contentedly reading the paper. When his wife came home, she found the goldfish bowl smashed into pieces and water all over the floor. Her husband was just sitting there, without a care in the world.

‘What happened to the fishbowl?’

Her husband glanced up, but said nothing.

‘And the cat?’

He shrugged. She glared at his expression, hating the way he acted as though this had nothing to do with him. A chill swept through her chest;

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bit by bit, she felt her heart turn to ice. And so, when she spoke again, she was even frostier than he had been: ‘Cat get your tongue?’

‘What are you talking about? Have a cat if you like! Don’t ask me!’

He went back to reading his paper, flicking from international news to the sports pages.

‘Brazil won!’ he exclaimed, delighted. But his cheery tones weren’t for his wife’s benefit. It was as if there were an invisible crowd in front of him, eagerly awaiting his reaction.

She went back into the kitchen, where she slowly washed radishes and chopped greens. Methodically, she threw pork bones and medicinal herbs into a pot, to brew into soup. Once she’d finished, she sat down at the table.

She felt she needed to think things through. There seemed to be nothing else she needed to do other than think. In the afternoon, she put a saucer of fish and rice in the back alley and left the door open. She waited for a whole day, but the cat did not come back. She strained her ears, but couldn’t hear even the faintest meowing.

A few days later, she thought she heard the cat crying, the way it did when it hadn’t had enough to eat. She sat in the kitchen but couldn’t figure out where the sound was coming from. For a while, she suspected it might be right there in the little yard, because the cries seemed to be coming from the cluster of dumbcanes and bush lilies. She stayed in the kitchen for a long time, with the doors and the back window open, but saw no sign of the cat.

She closed the doors.

After a while, her husband came into the kitchen. He had the feeling it’d been quite some time since he’d seen her. He stared at her blankly and, after a long pause, said, ‘You got thin.’

She didn’t react. He walked over to the back door. He’d been planning on opening the door to let the breeze in, but the moment he tried, his face puckered in disgust. ‘It stinks! What is it, a dead rat?’

He slammed the door shut.

After her husband left, she studied herself carefully and discovered it was true: she was thin. She walked to the back door and found she was almost

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thin enough to squeeze through the gap. This was not bad at all, she thought – a few more days and she’d be able to flit right through.

And a few days later, that’s exactly what she did. She walked along the back alley, which was not much wider than the gap in the door, and felt happy and carefree. She pressed an ear to the wall, and could feel it shake as the cars rushed past, rumbling like waves against a shore. Endless numbers of cars were hurtling past on the other side of the wall. She could hear their engines, their wheels grinding against the tarmac; they seemed to thrum within the wall itself like the surge of blood inside a body. She pressed her emaciated palm against the wall and felt the vibrations coming through, beating against the veins on the back of her hand. She pressed her other palm to the wall and felt the fingers of both hands trembling like withered dumbcane leaves. She inched her whole body up to the wall, pressing her bony legs against it. She shook like a feathery bamboo, caught in the blast of a car horn.

She continued along the alley and looked up: the sky was a murky grey.

The alley itself was a hideous mess. She hadn’t expected that it would accumulate so much litter in so few days. She saw Styrofoam take-away boxes, chicken – or fish – bones, eggshells, cooked rice, bread, sticky clumps of discarded meals, nails, clothes, school bags, pencil cases, leather handbags, bricks, shovels, cassette tapes, CDs, soup spoons, flowerpots, glass bottles, pillows, shoes, tyres, magazines, newspapers, flies. She couldn’t bear the thought of the cat picking through all this rubbish. She began to feel like she was in a graveyard with no one in charge and rotting corpses strewn all over the place. She realised that this must be the source of that stink her husband had complained about.

As she stepped over the pieces of litter, she noticed the lightness of her body; not even the Styrofoam boxes were crushed beneath her feet. She stooped to peer inside the tyres, thinking they’d be a likely place for a cat to hide. Feeling frail, she moved very slowly, worried her bones had become too fragile and might snap. Those bones still needed to hold her up. Her whole frame felt on the verge of collapse.

She no longer shared a bedroom with her husband, but put a thin mattress on the kitchen floor. A thin bed for a thin person. Too thick and soft a mattress would have made it hard for her sit up. But because she was

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The Wall

so thin, she was more aware than ever of the feelings in each part of her body. A sensation of hot or cold in her chest spread rapidly to her back, then swiftly through her limbs to her fingers and toes. Nothing stayed in one place. She felt everything more thoroughly and intensely than before.

She quite liked it.

The aunty kept looking for the cat, but found her memories evaporating, becoming increasingly less defined. Did the cat have three patches on its forehead, or four? Was the tip of its tail black, or yellow? Sometimes she even wondered whether she’d really been out of the house the morning the cat went missing. And which had come first, the cat or the goldfish? The cat or the wall? Did the goldfish bowl have goldfish in it? How many? She couldn’t remember the details. But as the memories grew hazier, she found herself less and less sad – quite relaxed, to tell the truth. It felt nice.

One day, the aunty sneaked into our house like a cat. My mum had opened our back door. She was holding a bag of rubbish, ready to chuck it into the back alley, as the aunty walked by. The door blocked her way, so she stepped inside. My little brother and I watched, wide-eyed, as she strolled casually into our kitchen. She was the thinnest person we’d ever seen, like one of the paper figures we used to shut inside our books and hide in our desk drawers at school, except she was as tall as we were, and she wasn’t pretty. The paper dolls were all little girls with blue eyes and blonde hair, but she was old and ugly, with a face full of wrinkles.

‘Such sweet children, how nice!’ she said to our mum, her eyes sliding over me and my brother. We were playing with our toy trains.

She said this, but she stood away from us and didn’t come closer, as though afraid we’d snap her in two. When she spoke, we could see the air passing magically along her throat, making her vocal chords quiver like a violin string. Concerned, our mum asked how she’d got so thin, and the aunty answered that she wasn’t sure herself. Maybe because she’d been chasing after a cat, she said. She remembered loving the cat, but sadly not what colour it was.

They were still talking when our dad came home from working at the hospital. When he saw the state the aunty was in, his jaw seemed to drop so far, he could barely close it again. He led her into his office, where he

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took her blood pressure and listened to her heartbeat. He said you could hear her heart just as clearly through her back as through her chest, and you could almost see it beating, even through her clothes. It was inconceivable.

‘The Creator works in mysterious ways,’ he said.

The aunty came to our house a few more times after that, and told us something different each time. She said she’d been planting things. She talked about how enormous spiders lurked in their cobwebs between the plants. She said she’d just planted a carnivorous pitcher plant, and the soil back there was so moist that the plant had sprouted pitchers big enough to swallow a person.

When she came over, my brother and I held our noses because she reeked like a dead rat. Our mum and dad put up with it, but after she’d left they always said they felt sick. Dad tried hard to convince her to come to the hospital for a check-up, but she claimed she couldn’t be bothered. ‘I’m OK,’ she said. ‘I’ve lived enough.’

Dad frowned. Once, I heard him grumbling to our mum, saying that sooner or later they’d have to set up a video camera in the aunty’s house because it was truly a mystery how she stayed alive at all.

We never found out whether he followed through with this plan because what happened next was completely unexpected. One evening, a truck smashed into the wall, sending it crashing down. We’d been asleep upstairs and felt our beds and the whole house shake. Our yard was buried under little mountains of bricks, and half the kitchen was gone. Dad was afraid the rest of the house would collapse too, and sent us to spend the night with our grandma. As we were leaving, we saw workmen arriving, dispatched by the developers.

We only stayed with our grandma for one night. When we came back the next afternoon, there was no sign of the wall, not even a fragment of brick. They’d cleared it all away overnight. Once again, we had an unobstructed view of the traffic racing down the expressway. A stray dog came running down what used to be the narrow alley alongside the wall. It was hard to imagine this empty space as the filthy alley the aunty was always talking about. We couldn’t see her pitcher plant. The aunty herself had disappeared.

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When the aunty had been gone for several months, an old stray dog raked the soil with its front paws, howling in excitement, and pulled out a ball of fluff, crawling with maggots. At first, we couldn’t figure out what it was.

Then we saw the mud-yellow and black striped fur, and we shouted in alarm: ‘Cat! Aunty’s dead cat!’

An old man poked his head out of an upstairs window. He hurried down, exclaimed in surprise, and said, as though it had just occurred to him: ‘So that’s it! That’s where she had the pitcher plant.’

He bent over, leaning close to us with his liver-spotted face. There were cobwebs stuck to his collar. He said, ‘A pitcher plant can eat a person! It ate Aunty. You scared?’

We slipped back into the house. The aunty had been eaten by her own pitcher plant. We couldn’t form the words to tell anyone.

When she appeared in our dreams, she was as thin as a moth’s wing. She insisted she wasn’t dead.

‘Your husband says you are!’ we said, and she snorted in contempt.

Her complexion slowly merged into the grey of the wall and it seemed that the gloom all around us was her camouflage.

Later, we dreamt about her being devoured by her pitcher plant.

After that, we never dreamt of her again.

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Poetry

Indran Amirthanayagam

Indr an Amirthanayagam

A Trunk Call, Colombo We learned to say trunk calls, long-distance minutes with the lost boy or uncle in England, mufflered, sharing a bed and hot-water bottle with a girl from Southampton, or Leeds or London, the mystical man, solitary occupant of a flat venturing out into local pub and company. When I think of Colombo I remember the family who left: Tambi, poet and publisher with his pisspot of gold, naming Fitzrovia, that artist

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Poetry

retreat in Chelsea, London, vital landmark in my Colombo, English wagged and lobbed, highland Scotch imbibed, poetry learned from the tradition in English – my dad who wrote the Marriage of Continents told me when we left the island, that if the English bigot calls me a wog, not to worry, he means I am a Western Oriental Gentleman. Not the case back home where the Tamil kept quiet, on his guard, aware of the minority’s precarious fortune, perceived to have money, or luck, or discipline, or success in school and business. That latent disquiet is also Colombo, named after the explorer, whose mistaken discovery

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of India occurred in the island where I write about that lost city, as far away as a trunk call, a telegram, McCarthy Nursing Home, 1960, a baby, composing now from memory, Colombo, a dream, a metaphor, a city by the sea, white-porched, white-walled, white coats and tails, tropical evening dress, the Grand Orient Hotel, father in a cream suit, mother in long white silk, a wedding, a child, before expulsion from paradise.

‘A Trunk Call, Colombo’ is included in Capitals, edited by Abhay K. and published by Bloomsbury India. The anthology includes a poem on every capital city in the world.

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The Shoe The Shoe

Kim Soom

Kim Soom translated by Jason Woodruff

1

M

arc Quinn made self-portraits using his own blood. To create Self, he steadily extracted his blood over a five-month period until he had saved up four and a half litres, the amount normally found in the body. He then poured the blood into a silicone mould of his own face. Once the blood coagulated, it had to be kept permanently at minus-fifteen degrees, thereby endowing it with an inherent fragility. In 1996, famous British art collector Charles Saatchi was in possession of the second iteration of Self when a caretaker accidentally unplugged the freezer it was in. The work melted and was nearly destroyed. The re-coagulated pieces remained like a persistently open wound. Ironically, though, it was that ridiculous mistake that best demonstrated the artist’s intended message about the frailty and impermanence of life. Quinn himself said that he hoped his series of self-portraits, like Rembrandt’s, would be endowed with his own ‘life’.

Several years ago, when Marc Quinn held his first exhibition in South Korea, I went to see Self. The moment I saw that glob of coagulated blood, I couldn’t help but retch in disgust. Having held back the vomit and regained my composure, the first thing I thought was this: if this work were to be damaged or lost after Marc Quinn dies, how could it possibly be restored?

Blood is a profound medium for an artist, forming and circulating through a living body as it does. If the work were to spoil at the wrong

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temperature or be lost, there would need to be a transfusion of more blood to repair it; but the problem is, how does one come by the blood? Because it is not just any blood, but Marc Quinn’s blood. If it were the Self that he’d made in his late thirties, wouldn’t it need to be repaired with his blood from that time? If blood from another person were mixed in, could we still say that it was still his self-portrait?

Marc Quinn himself answered the question when talking about the difficulty of preserving his work during exhibitions, saying that it was important that the work be made of his blood from that time of his life; from the blood that pumped through his veins when he decided to make it.

Whenever I think about blood, I think about my mother’s sister. When she was in her late thirties, she had a mastectomy. At the time, her husband, a minister, was overseeing the construction of a new church in a poor area of Seoul. My mother, who had spent so much time helping my aunt proselytise, surprised me one day by abruptly ceasing to attend church. I remember what she said when I asked her why: ‘Your aunt, you see, asked me to donate all the money your father is killing himself to earn in the Middle East to the construction of the church. Can you believe it?’

To my mother, that unreasonable request was enough to refute the existence of the god she had believed in. She said that my aunt had changed after receiving a blood transfusion, that her kind and giving sister had become greedy and materialistic. And my mother simply believed that it was all because of the blood. Once a different person’s blood began to flow in her body, my aunt became a different person. She had lost such a critical amount of blood during her surgery that she had had to receive nine packs of blood. Her theory applied not just to blood: my mother also believed that a person could be changed after receiving a new liver or kidney.

I doubt that it would be very difficult for modern science to create a substance that has the same colour, smell, and chemical properties as blood.

However, wouldn’t it be impossible to recreate exactly the same substance as the blood of a specific person named Marc Quinn? That is if, as my mother’s blind conviction asserts, blood is not simply a material substance, but rather something that carries a person’s innate disposition and personality.

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2 Lee’s shoe, she called it.

Mrs Chae, the curator of the memorial exhibit, was holding the photograph of the shoe that she had brought to show me in place of the actual shoe itself. It was clear from the photograph that the shoe had deteriorated into a state that made picking it up and bringing it impossible.

I understood two things from the picture of Lee’s shoe. One, that it was a simple ‘material’ with the physical attributes of mass, density, and elasticity. And two, that while being an artefact, a work of art, and a personal effect left by the dead, it will never be more than a material object.

Inevitably, no material can help but be affected by, be damaged slowly or even quickly by, the various elements that constitute the environment around it, be they invisible gases like CO2, or steam, or infrared light, or UV rays, or even vibrations.

It takes oil-based paints roughly ten years to harden fully after exposure to the air, which is why a tube of oil paint can remain liquid for years and years even if the lid isn’t on properly. And so, oil paintings that collect dust as they slowly dry will be irreparably damaged as the dust bores into the paint. I know several artists who prefer acrylic paints purely for this reason.

‘I heard you have experience restoring modern art made from material similar to polyurethane,’ Mrs Chae said.

I lifted my eyes from the photograph of the shoe and looked at her.

‘No. I am merely familiar with a precedent.’

‘Ah, I see.’

‘The precedent being the work Prière de toucher by Marcel Duchamp, which was restored in America.’

Polyurethane is a very poor medium for art because of the speed at which it deteriorates. It has an unavoidable limit to its ‘shelf-life’, just like Mark Quinn’s blood. In the contemporary art world, however, there are many media that have a much shorter lifespan than polyurethane. I mean, is it not this generation that uses umbilical cords, elephant shit, sperm, dead butterflies, living flies, and bleeding cow heads to make works of art?

The Italian artist Piero Manzoni used his own excrement in his artwork entitled Artist’s Shit, contained in over ninety sealed cans with a label that

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reads, in four languages: ‘Artist’s shit. Contents thirty grams net. Freshly preserved. Produced and tinned in May 1961’. It is said he wanted to convey the message to society that it should focus on assigning meaning, that nothing is meaningless, that all things have meaning.

Things that have precedents and things that do not.

I didn’t take the trouble to explain to Mrs Chae the huge difference between the two when it comes to art restoration.

‘How is Lee’s shoe currently being stored?’

‘It’s in a specially-built display case.’

She went on to tell me that Lee’s other effects, his clothes and notebooks and the like, had all received preservation treatment, but due to the fragile condition of the shoe, and the fact that there was only one, it had not received any treatment.

I suddenly remembered having read in a newspaper, several years before, about the opening of the Lee Han Yeol Memorial Museum in Seoul.

‘I should be able to decide whether the shoe can be restored after I see it myself,’ I said.

‘You can see it if you come to the memorial.’

‘Where was Lee’s shoe kept before? Before it was put into the special display case, I mean.’

‘It had been kept in an acrylic display case on the fourth floor of the museum.’

I was about to ask where it had been kept even before that but stopped myself. If we kept moving back in time I would be forced to picture in my mind the foot that had worn the shoe.

After several further questions, I learnt that that there was a large window on the fourth floor through which the sun shone directly onto the shoe. I had a sense that Mrs Chae felt a sense of guilt about the damage the shoe had received from being placed there, but I may have been reading too much into her responses.

‘And how long was that? How long was it in the acrylic display case?’

‘Um, from 2005 to 2013 so . . . eight years,’ she mumbled, her face growing dark as she herself realised the length of time. I suddenly began to wonder just what relationship this forty-kilogramme woman had had with Lee in

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The Shoe

the first place. The way she said his name, without any formal prefix, led me to assume they must have been in the same class or group in college.

Exposed to sunlight for eight years, the shoe would have suffered persistent and continuous damage from the UV rays. Light doesn’t just damage skin; it will destroy art as well. It is of the utmost importance for paintings to be protected from light so the colours don’t change or fade.

Unfortunately, it seemed that the shoe had been kept in the worst possible place.

An octogenarian art lover once asked me to describe the best location in which to keep a work of art, so as to preserve it most effectively. I told him that the best place for a person is also the best for a work of art; that if you spend the day hanging out in one place, your body would by itself let you know if it was a comfortable place or not. This art lover, so strict with himself that he never ate anything after six in the evening, then sent his most loved works to our restoration lab as if to receive a check-up, as if he were sending them to the dentist for a cleaning and to make sure there were no new cavities.

‘As I told you,’ Mrs Chae went on, ‘in 2013 we had all the items in our collection except the shoe go through restoration and preservation treatments, though of course because of the damage from sweat, blood, tear gas, and emergency medication, they could not be fully restored. We were told that to prevent any further damage or change, we must immediately construct completely airtight display cases to keep out UV rays and control the humidity and temperature. We did that. All the items passed through three stages of restoration and preservation and are now kept in a secure storage room. The relics we currently display are all reproductions, apart from the shoe. For only one month each year, we bring out the original items for display. . . . It’s not too late, is it?’ ‘. . .’

‘How much longer will it last?’

‘Well. . .’

‘A year? It will last another year, won’t it?’ ‘. . .’

‘It has lasted twenty-eight years, so surely it can last one more. . . .’

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Though not meaning to put pressure on me, she was indeed doing exactly that. How much longer would Lee’s shoe last . . . wouldn’t she herself know better than anyone else? Therefore, it was clear to me that her reason for asking was to let me know that the shoe had lasted as long as could reasonably be expected.

After Mrs Chae left me with the pictures of the shoe, I asked myself several questions.

Am I going to fully restore Lee’s shoe?

Am I going to do as little restoration as necessary?

Am I going to forget about it and do nothing?

Am I going to make a replica?

These questions, however, were premature. These were questions that I should ask after I had decided whether I would agree even to consider restoration of Lee’s shoe in the first place.

Nevertheless, the questions had to be asked, because even doing nothing, even merely analysing the situation and deciding that there was nothing to be done, even that is part of an art restorer’s work.

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Poetry

Norman Erikson Pasaribu translated by Tiffany Tsao

Norm an Er ikson Pasar ibu

Update on The Left-Behind Woman Every time she returned to her rented room after nearly twelve hours of working non-stop, her body would demand a bar of white chocolate.

The woman always wondered why this was. If her body felt hungry, shouldn’t it whip up a meal, something hearty and healthy, and not munch instead on something so fattening and not even real chocolate, just emulsified sugar and milk? And if her body couldn’t be bothered to budge again, couldn’t she order take-out from the Chinese restaurant nearby, for hadn’t she moved there specifically to be in the midst of it all, the hustle and bustle, close to practically everything her body could need – including its favourite beauty salon, café, and dental clinic – and furthermore, the woman knew perfectly well that her body had the hots for the body of one of the delivery guys at the Chinese restaurant, well-built, with glasses and slightly tousled hair, and does a body need reminding that the restaurant had three delivery guys and therefore, the odds of her body seeing her body’s favourite body was one in three and everybody knows that something that has a one in three chance of happening is something that’s certainly worth a shot.

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Norman Erikson Pasaribu

The woman also wondered, Why white chocolate? Why now? Her body never answered and she also felt frustrated at her body for never hankering for white chocolate when she drove past the minimarts on her way home. Often the woman would stop at a minimart anyway and march her body up and down the aisles, perusing every shelf, every need, every want; counting every second, every minute; waiting for the white chocolate craving to make its appearance.

But the craving never did. Not there.

She would have to return to her room before the physical craving set in.

She would always shake her head in frustration. She felt she didn’t know her body any more. It was a stranger enshrouded in mist.

And yet what was happening to her body was clear enough: unconsciously, she was remembering her first date with you – back when you still wanted her – for, consciously, she had tried to forget that night entirely. She had gone to the salon to fix her hair, nails, and face; to the café to feel less lonely and to read her favourite books; to the dental clinic to see her favourite dentist and make love, and make love, and make love, before returning to her room, turning off the light, thinking about her mother and father who were no more, and crying herself to sleep. In the morning, she would feel strangely refreshed, and think, I’ve moved on! I’m ready! I’ve turned over a new leaf! And then she’d get ready to go to work. She’d dive into a sea of documents and tasks, dive into a sea of books and coffee, dive into a sea of her dentist’s hot steamy breaths on her neck. And yet everything about that night, from when you offered her white chocolate and poured her wine, to when you read her poems by Wislawa Szymborska, to the very sweetness of that chocolate on her tongue and in her soul, had already transformed into tens, hundreds, thousands, millions of beta-actin proteins incubating in the seahorse in her brain. She had no idea that what was happening these days, what she was doing these days, were the lingering effects of that night’s enchantment.

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She felt she’d forgotten and moved on. Her body on the other hand remembered and stayed put.

And so body and soul began to diverge on the sly.

One morning when she emerged from the shower, she discovered her self eyeing herself askance. Have I done something wrong? she snapped.

Don’t look at me like that! she wanted to say, but what her lips uttered instead was, ‘Stop moping.’

Moping? What do you mean? Her body’s behaviour was most disturbing.

Day by day, it grew worse.

It reached its peak when the woman discovered a can of her body’s favourite pork luncheon meat in her shopping cart. She stood at the check-out counter frozen to the spot. When did I put this here? she thought. And why did I put this here? What was I thinking? Didn’t I swear off meat just two days ago? And haven’t I always wanted deep down to give up meat? Why does everything I do take me farther away from what I actually want? What’s wrong with me? Abandoning her cart at the counter without paying, she fled to her car in the parking lot and cried for a very long time. The cashier came after her. She went back inside and paid for her items. She never went back to that supermarket again and now takes a more roundabout route to work.

And that is why, sometimes, when she is back home and her body demands a bar of white chocolate, the woman strips her body naked and extinguishes the lights and lies face up on her bed and gropes for the air-conditioner remote and when she finds it, turns the temperature of her room down to 16˚ C, so her body can feel what she feels every day, so her body will stop blaming her for every pang of grief it deems excessive, and preventing them from running at peak efficiency, so her body will understand why they’ve gone through everything that they’ve gone through and all they haven’t gone through and all they’ll never go

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through – that these feelings are perfectly normal, endured by every soul within every human being.

You see how it feels, she says, to her freezing breasts, to her chattering teeth, to her shivering shoulders. Why don’t you see how I feel every day.

And why don’t you tell me how to be happy.

On a Pair of Young Men in the Underground Parking Garage at fX Sudirman Mall Is there anything more moving than two young men in a Toyota Rush parked in the corner of level P3, stealing a little time and space for themselves, exchanging kisses wide-eyed – keeping watch as one for security guards or janitors, in each other’s arms, escaping the loneliness of another week living someone else’s life. A friend dismissed their feelings as unnatural urges but each of them knows who he is now. Both are sure the longing they feel is genuine longing and the love in their hearts is the same love that made Sergius and Bacchus one, and the loneliness they feel in their vacant rooms is no different from John Henry Newman’s from 1876 to his death, and isn’t it the rest of the world that has it all wrong?

Aelred of Rievaulx said there is nothing more exquisite than to love and be loved – it’s true, even though they also know that the world’s just not ready for us.

Thérèse of Lisieux was baffled by how God played favourites, why some souls were chosen over others, why a sinner like Augustine of Hippo got to wear a white robe,

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all shimmering and spotless. Even the two young men sometimes wondered why they were the ones who had to be there to show love could bloom anywhere, even in the dark, and that love growing in the dark was no less life-giving.

What the Dead Want from the Living So how did it all happen?

You refused to come home in a cab with me because you wanted to stay out and have fun.

The snazzy-looking guy bought us G&Ts and listened, told us stories about his own parents and, like a nice boy didn’t hustle you into a toilet stall. On the dance floor you two were like old friends. Later in the men’s room gazing into the mirror you said you wanted to go home with him and I said there was a midterm tomorrow, and you laughed – I laughed?

I think you didn’t believe me. How on earth could good grades be more important than finding the one guy who didn’t interrupt you when you told him about the hours you spent seeing a shrink, and the lies you told your parents – you’ve changed, you’re cured, you’re brand-new even though you’ll always be the same, even to me,

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still the same awkward teenager, still the wannabe poet who can’t write anything but depressing poems.

Then what?

You began cutting class. You were never in.

I remember thinking, Is this happiness? Being able to drop everything for someone? But then one night you showed up in tears. He gave it to me you said, your neck swollen with boils, like a piece of barbari bread.

Your face was so pale, like a beansprout germinating in darkness so perfect. You vanished again some days later.

I didn’t look for you. Around Christmas, I heard you died, the blood from your wrists pooling on your parents’ bathroom floor.

You didn’t look for me?

Did you ever look for me? College kept me busy, gnawing my life away. My father found out and stopped sending me money. I tutored rich kids every day in order to eat. I moved to cheaper lodgings where everyone shared a toilet. I had to save myself first, you know. But once I had fled far from the abyss I lost sight of your trail.

It was buried beneath the footsteps of strangers.

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Scenes from a Beautiful Life The new mayor built an imaginary park in the heart of the city. We all can see it from the latticed windows in our tiny rooms: the giant iron gates, the brick-paved paths, the grove of pines, the grassy lawns dotted with all kinds of flowers, the small lake in the northeast corner complete with swan boats and algae floating in the shallows and ducks and their little sign too: ‘Warning: Don’t Feed the Ducks’.

In the lake swim the mujairs and in the mothers’ mouths swim their kids.

Whom they don’t eat. Whom we don’t eat.

The lake gives it all a nice blue touch.

The grass gives it all a nice green touch.

The fireflies offer themselves as lights.

Every night. We set up a big screen.

Men and women come to watch movies about themselves, filmed with hidden cameras.

The street lamps glow, the moonlight shimmers across the lake. The rain falls.

The water seeps between the bricks, deep into the earth to the river beneath.

All the waria in the city work there.

Male-to-females as gardeners and street sweepers, security guards, vets, and arborists, landscape architects and accountants, recreation managers and lifeguards too – ready to dive in after anyone who can’t figure out how to get back

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to land. They’ll never go hungry again, never have to wait for the cars that slow, then stop. Every full moon, a magical unicorn leaps out from behind the curtain of pines – shining like the North Star – showering blessings on the park, showering blessings on the city.

Another hard day over and before we turn in, we all dream about that park the mayor made just for us. We feel better.

We feel better.

Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s poems are translated from his collection, Sergius Mencari Bacchus [Sergius Seeks Bacchus], published by Gramedia Pustaka Utama.

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from Star Sign from Star SignShibas aki Tom oka

Shibasaki Tomoka translated by Laurel Taylor

I

t seemed that the two people perched on the railing of the second-storey balcony were looking at me, pointing, and I wondered if, from where they were, they could see me. The car heater was off and the cold was creeping in. A shiver started from the core of my body, and I hunched my shoulders. My right hand was pressing my phone to my ear, but for a moment, I missed what my boyfriend was saying.

The main road cut through the mountains and continued through the housing developments around the family restaurant where we’d stopped; its parking lot was packed with cars – people with nowhere else to go on New Year’s Day. I surveyed the green slopes on either side of the road. On one corner of the development – all evenly-spaced, new two-storey houses – there was an empty lot where they would probably build another house, and across the road was a brand-new, two-building apartment complex.

Each building also had two stories, and each storey had seven balconies.

The young man and woman sat facing me on the railing of the second-floor balcony on the far right. Their bare feet dangled into empty space.

The woman was wearing a pink track suit, and the man a black one, but when I squinted, it looked like he was wearing a kung fu outfit. Though I knew they were more than a hundred metres away, it felt like they must be closer, because I could clearly make out the woman’s long hair as it blew and twisted in the wind. I wondered if they were cold. The temperature had plummeted a few days ago, and in Nara, I’d seen snowflakes dancing in the air.

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Rain clouds had appeared after noon, and though this whole area was covered with houses, there wasn’t a human shadow to be seen. I couldn’t even tell if there were people in the other apartments. In the absence of sunlight, the houses and the road and the mountains had become a damp colour. The woman climbed up onto the iron railing and grabbed the drainpipe. It was a quick movement, fearless. The man’s left hand pointed up at her face. She thrust out her free arm and pointed back. I turned toward the restaurant and looked at my friends sitting inside by the window. I suddenly felt afraid, all alone, watching the pair on the balcony. But my friends hadn’t noticed anything; they were busy waving down the waiter.

My boyfriend was with his family in Okinawa and would be back on the fifth, so I vaguely promised I’d drop by after that and then hung up. The two on the balcony hadn’t moved, didn’t even tremble. The only thing moving was the woman’s hair. I opened the passenger door and got out.

After crossing the parking lot, I looked back and saw that the woman had sat down on the railing again, feet dangling, and then I went through the two sets of doors into the restaurant. I was instantly surrounded by the sound of laughing children and clinking silverware, and I felt like I’d entered a completely different world.

I passed a family waiting on the bench by the register, walked by the No Smoking sign into the non-smoking section, and saw Katsuo’s shaven head sticking out from the window booth. He noticed me and waved.

‘Kae, what do you want? I ordered a mushroom and cheese hamburger steak.’

From his seat on the yellow cushions, Katsuo opened the colourful menu and showed it to me.

‘You ate so much yesterday and you’re still having meat?’ I said. I laughed and pushed back the ‘Hamburger Steak Fair’ menu Katsuo had thrust toward me before sitting down next to Minako. She and I would probably end up paying for his meal anyway.

‘What are you having, Kae?’ This time, it was Minako who asked. I pointed out the single-pane window.

‘There’re some weird people on that balcony. See ’em?’

‘Pink and black,’ Katsuo answered immediately, surprising me.

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‘Huh? Where?’ Minako’s gaze wandered in the wrong direction.

‘There’re two of them, on the right . . . on the very last one.’

‘About to jump. Second floor, so I guess it wouldn’t hurt too bad.’ Katsuo planted his elbows on the table and stared out the window. Maybe his eyesight was better than mine.

‘What? Where?’ As Minako spoke, both the man and the woman spun around, got off the railing, and went inside.

‘Oh. They’re gone.’

‘Bet they were drunk. It’s New Year’s, after all. You notice weird stuff, Kae.’ Minako didn’t seem particularly interested; she picked up Katsuo’s menu and placed it in the holder. I stared out at the balcony, expecting the two to return, but they didn’t.

‘Before, they were pointing like in E.T. They had their arms out, like this.’

‘They were calling a UFO, definitely,’ Katsuo said, looking at me with his round eyes. Katsuo was ten years younger than both Minako and me, and his face was oily, as though he hadn’t washed it this morning. ‘There are lots of UFOs on New Year’s Day.’ ‘What are you talking about? What have aliens got to do with anything?’

Minako asked, shocked. A waiter in uniform arrived to take our order.

Late last night, Minako and I had visited our recently-married friends from high school at their new house. It was on the border between Kyoto and Nara, in a housing development much like the one here – it also had two stories and was painted a light yellow.

Katsuo, who’d been staying at my boyfriend’s house since the thirtieth, was a student with a stomach of steel, so poor he was liable to follow you anywhere. The moment he heard there’d be food, he’d show up at anyone’s house. For example, if he heard there would be Matsuzaka beef and snow crab, he’d invite himself along to the house of some newlyweds he’d never even met and stuff himself. Last night, he gorged on beef hot pot, fell asleep at five in the morning, woke before noon, then tagged along in Minako’s car when we went to Kasuga Shrine for hatsumode. It was so packed we almost didn’t find a parking spot, and then we were swept along by the wave of revellers. Jehovah’s Witnesses shouted, their voices like background

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music, warning us about the coming of the Messiah and urging us to repent.

We continued up the long path lined with tall trees and threw our coin offerings through the gaps between people’s heads. While Minako and I talked about how we wanted the wisteria hair decorations dangling over the shrine maiden’s foreheads, Katsuo searched the ground for stray coins, but there were none to be found. He began to complain about being hungry, so we decided to stop at a restaurant.

By the time Minako and I had eaten about half our meals, I noticed two girls sitting at a table across the centre aisle, peering at a laptop screen. The girl sitting on the same side as me had brown hair done up in light curls, and I couldn’t see her face. Across from her, the other girl had glossy, straight hair and flawless makeup and nails, and looked like she was in her mid-thirties. Her big eyes were looking down at the A4-size laptop screen, on which there was a round chart and some numbers on a blue background.

I never worked weekend overtime at my job, and I never had to bring work home with me, so I was stupidly wondering if it was OK for them to be sitting with an open laptop earning their living over the New Year’s holiday, but then I realised that the girl on my side of the booth had tarot cards lined up on the table.

‘They’re telling fortunes,’ Minako said, leaning close to me. Katsuo had finished his mushroom and cheese hamburger steak in the blink of an eye and, now bored, was drawing a panda on the paper mat under his plate, but he stopped and looked over at the table next to us. He stared at the girls and their line of tarot cards, and without turning back, quietly said to me, ‘Her new boyfriend is different from her ex-husband, and he just started a new job, right?’

The restaurant was too loud for me to clearly hear anything the girls were saying. Minako, sitting next to the window, could probably hear even less.

‘What?’

‘She’s starting with her compatibility with the new boyfriend. I can read lips. Cool, right?’ He paused to listen. ‘She’s asking whether she ought to remarry.’

Katsuo smiled with only the right corner of his mouth, took a sip of water – all the ice had already melted – and then focused his eyes and ears on the neighbouring table again.

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‘She shouldn’t move in with him yet. Maybe come summer or a little after that. That’s what she says.’

‘I thought you were just an idiot, Katsuo, but it turns out you have your uses,’ Minako said, looking at Katsuo’s face as though mesmerised. I wasn’t sure if Katsuo could really read lips or if he was making it up or if my hearing was just bad.

‘I am amazing. I’ve still got my secrets, though. Not that I’d tell you. Um, that woman, when she got married before, she consulted this lady then, too. Apparently, she told her to watch out for him cheating.’ He glanced back at the table with a sly grin and then looked at Minako’s plate. ‘Oh, if you don’t eat, your rice will go dry. Don’t worry about the fortune telling, I’ll listen for you.’ Katsuo’s smile was odd, maybe because he had a chance to make use of his special skill. In the seat behind him, two brothers squabbled over a hand-held gaming device. When I looked outside, weak sunlight was peeking out from the clouds, casting shadows on the roofs and the balcony where the man and woman had been, and somehow that made everything look farther away than it had before.

Minako continued staring at the woman having her fortune told and said, ‘I’ve really, I’ve seriously got to get out to a fortune-teller . . . it might be awful.’ About a third of her meal – pickles, salad, miso soup, and chicken and eggs over rice – remained, but she didn’t seem hungry anymore, and her runny yellow yolk had started to congeal.

‘What might be awful? You’re married, you don’t have to work, and I think you’re pretty good-looking, you can drive – you’re doing about a hundred times better than me.’

‘I guess so,’ Minako answered, without looking at Katsuo.

‘Want me to give you some advice? People tell me I’m a pretty good listener. You could even pay me a little for it?’

‘Nope.’

‘Why not? What would you do if I told you I was actually the heir of a rich and ancient family, and I’ve taken the name of a poor man in order to gain wisdom?’

‘I’m going to the bathroom.’ Minako stood up, so I got out of the booth to let her out. When I sat back down, I tried to get a good look at the fortune-teller’s face, but all I could make out was her mouth with its thick,

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dark lipstick. As I took a bite of rice mixed with ketchup and spices, Katsuo lowered his voice and reported, ‘She’s got a daughter in elementary school who’s hit that rebellious age. But after July, the fortune-teller says their relationship’s going to improve. Do you go to fortune-tellers, Kae?’ ‘Never.’

‘Want me to tell your fortune?’

Katsuo stared at me. His eyes were big and round, and only a little of the whites showed at the corners, like a child’s eyes.

‘I can sense the supernatural, so I think I’d be pretty good at it. I’ll even give you your first consultation free. Well, actually, just pay for my dinner.’

‘Maybe,’ I said, using the exact same tone as Minako, but I was still looking at the neighbouring table. The woman wondering about remarriage traced the cards on the table with her finger, as though to make sure they were still there, but she was watching the fortune-teller’s face. After a moment, she finished her iced coffee in one gulp – the ice had melted. As I blatantly stared at the table across the way, Minako returned. And then she seemed to make her decision.

‘I’m going to have my fortune told.’

‘By her?’

‘No, a friend of mine works at a place. You want to go with me, Kae?’ ‘Is there something you’re worried about, too?’ Katsuo asked, looking straight at me. He was grinning like he was having fun.

‘Well, who doesn’t?’

‘I guess so, I guess women who are going on thirty have all sorts of things they worry about. Love, work, marriage, raising kids, in-laws, getting old. . . . It’s like a mountain of worries.’

‘That’s right, I guess I am turning thirty this year.’ I answered without really wanting to talk about it, but I could feel Minako staring sidelong at me.

‘Ever since we were kids in middle school, you’ve always seemed older than me, but lately it doesn’t seem like that anymore. In fact, lately you seem younger than me. My husband says so, too.’

Thanks to my narrow face and my above-average height, I’d always looked three years older than I actually was, and I’d hated that even in my teens, people were already calling me ‘ma’am’, but it was true that recently

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some people thought I was two or three years younger. I looked at Minako, comparing how her round face and small body contrasted with mine, and said, ‘I’m an idiot.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m lost. It’s just like Katsuo said. I’m about to turn thirty and I’ve got all these problems, don’t I?’ ‘You decided not to marry what’s-his-name, so I wouldn’t say you’re lost.’

Minako patted my head. The shrubs just outside the window shook, and I realised the wind had picked up again.

‘But that was. . . .’

‘What’s this, what’s this? Kae’s secret hidden past?’ Katsuo asked and, as he did, I realised my phone was vibrating in my bag. Glancing at the sign that said ‘Please No Phones at the Table’, I turned toward the back of the booth and answered. ‘Hello?’

‘Where are you right now?’ My mother’s voice was sharper than usual, and I figured she was angry about something, but then she told me that my paternal grandfather had just been taken away in an ambulance.

We found the hospital on the other side of a bridge over a slow-flowing river, just inside Osaka’s borders on the Nara side; we arrived less than thirty minutes after my mother’s call, but the sky was already starting to darken.

My mother was normally quick to panic at anything that wasn’t part of her plans, but all she’d said was to hurry to the hospital, and then she’d hung up, so I figured she didn’t know what was going on. It would probably take her more than an hour to arrive, but Nobuko, my father’s younger sister, lived in the same city, so I thought she’d already be there. Minako flipped on her right indicator, even though she was turning left, but she kept her eyes trained straight ahead, so I thought maybe she was even more worried than I was. Katsuo was getting a ride with a friend to his parents’ house in Shizuoka, so we dropped him off at a station on the Gakkentoshi Line. He wished us ‘Happy New Year’, though I thought it wasn’t really appropriate, given the circumstances, and waved both hands at us while walking away backward.

The hospital was being remodelled, so half the building was draped in construction sheets, but it was a smaller building than I’d imagined when

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I’d heard its name. A rusted chain-link fence was wrapped around the sparsely-populated parking lot; compared to the building, it was much too large, so much so that I couldn’t see either the neighbouring shipping company’s delivery centre or the hospital entrance. The darkening sky seemed to create a kind of synergy with all the negative aspects of the word ‘hospital’, amplifying them. New Year’s pine boughs stood on either side of the main entrance, where there was a sign that read, ‘Please use side entrance’. The lobby I could see beyond the automatic doors was bathed in green light from the emergency exit signs.

The door to the side entrance was propped open, and a security guard sat behind a pane of glass at the reception desk.

‘Excuse me. My name is Nomura. Around noon an ambulance. . . .’

The wrinkle-faced guard checked a sheet of paper in front of him, and said, ‘Oh yes, of course, just a moment,’ before calling to a man eating a bento further down the hallway behind him. ‘Mr Eguchi!’ Next to the security monitors there was an oversized wall clock that clearly read 4:30.

The door to the left of the security window opened, and a man who looked to be in his fifties came out, a khaki-coloured windbreaker draped over his shoulders.

‘Are you the family of Nomura Yukichi? Let me show you the way. We have to go outside to the basement entrance to get to the morgue.’

‘Morgue?’ I blurted, and then I looked at Minako. She was watching me.

She looked like she was about to cry.

‘Did he die?’ I heard my own voice echo down the hallway, and thought I should have said ‘pass away’ instead.

‘What? You haven’t heard? I’m so sorry. I thought you were the person I’d spoken with on the phone earlier.’ He bowed his head. ‘His heart had already stopped by the time they got him here. Are you his granddaughter?’

‘Yes.’ ‘I’m sorry. Let me show you the way. The person from the Centre is waiting.’

Mr Eguchi pushed open the glass door as though it were very heavy – maybe the wind was too strong – and continued down a wide hallway. As he opened another steel door that led outside, I thought, ‘The person from

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the Centre’, that’s probably someone from the old people’s home. It was all my mind could process.

A concrete ramp led below ground to a sliding metal door. Inside, the floor was bare concrete, the ceiling low, and the whole basement was packed with plastic bins, cardboard boxes, overflowing linen carts and K-cars plastered with pharmaceutical logos. Mr Eguchi pulled back the unmarked, steel slab door and, as we walked in, Minako and I exchanged glances, each with the same thought – this place felt was like a rubbish dump.

On the other side of the door, everything was white. The ceiling and walls were white, and two rows of white fluorescent lights glared from the ceiling. In the centre of the boxy little room was a table draped with a sheet, also white. A woman in a light pink track suit stood at the head of the table, and she looked at us with puffy eyes. Her brown hair was tied back in a ponytail.

‘The family is here,’ Mr Eguchi said, and the woman bowed deeply. She worked at the nursing home where my grandfather had lived.

‘I’m so sorry. With the New Year’s meal, we were busy preparing and serving all the food, and I looked away for just a second and by the time I looked back, Mr Nomura had lost consciousness. . . .’ She was pale, but her nose was red, and she pressed the sleeve of her track suit to it as she spoke.

She told us that during the meal, something had caught in his throat. I couldn’t think of anything to say besides, ‘Oh. I see.’

‘Would you like to step closer?’ Mr Eguchi asked. I nodded and slipped between him and the caretaker to the head of the table. Minako remained frozen at the door.

The sheet covered only my grandfather’s body, not his face. His narrowbladed nose looked the way I remembered, but – maybe because his face was expressionless – there was nothing inside me that recognised him. I’d been wondering about it before we got to the hospital, but I still wasn’t sure if the last time I’d seen him was last year or the year before.

My grandfather’s eyes were completely closed, and there was the barest gap between his upper and lower lip. He didn’t have any teeth. Before he entered the nursing home, he’d had a beard, but now there was no hair on his jaw or his head, and all his wrinkles and liver spots were stark.

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‘Shall we wait to do the identity verification until someone else arrives?’

I nodded, so Mr Eguchi explained how to use the nearby phone, spoke to the woman from the nursing home – whom he seemed to know – and then returned to the waiting room.

‘He really was . . . a really . . . a great man, and last month, when we celebrated his ninetieth birthday, he gave me flowers. Paper flowers, though, a decoration, he stole them from the wall.’

She spoke about my grandfather and kept apologising, constantly wiping her nose with her fingers and sleeves. After about five minutes, she told us she was going to call the nursing home, bowed so deeply I thought the tip of her long ponytail might just hit the floor, and left the room.

Minako came closer to peer at my grandfather’s face. Tears welled up in her big eyes.

‘He made it to ninety. Such a long life.’

‘I guess so. I didn’t realize.’ I couldn’t remember the way he looked the last time I’d seen him, and that seemed inexcusable. ‘I guess I remember someone talking about how he’d turned ninety. In Tokushima, we. . . . My mum still goes back to the countryside sometimes, but Grandpa hadn’t been back in a long time.’

Minako nodded a little, as if to say ‘huh’, but she kept looking at my grandfather’s face. Suddenly, her phone rang with a clamorous melody. She panicked and answered, dashing out of the room – maybe the signal was bad. I took one deep breath and sat down in the folding chair. My grandfather’s face was in profile right in front of me. His crooked nose looked like my father’s. But my father almost never spoke about my grandfather.

The sound of the heavy door sliding open echoed in the room, and Minako came back in.

‘I’m sorry. My husband says he needs to use the car, so I’ve got to go. Are you OK? Someone’s supposed to be coming soon, right? Your aunt?’

‘I’ll call her. I’m sorry. It’s New Year’s and all this just. . . .’ I didn’t know why I was apologising, and Minako put both hands on my arm as if she were trying to support me.

I walked her up to the ground floor, and after that I called my mother.

Her composure seemed to have returned a little, and Nobuko had already

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told her that my grandfather was dead. Mum told me all sorts of things: Dad was back so they were headed out now, Nobuko and her family were travelling from Arima Onsen, and my uncle and his family from Kitakyushu might be staying at the house that night. I went back to the morgue through the cheerless underground hallway. With the heavy doors shut, all I could hear was the sound of air rushing from the yellowed air conditioner in the wall and the sound of water running in pipes somewhere in the ceiling; it made the room feel completely separate from the outside world. My grandfather’s bare calves and feet poked out from the bottom of the sheet.

His legs were dry and white, with lots of wrinkles so deep his skin looked like cracked wax. I thought, His toenails look black. I put out my right hand to touch him and saw that the tips of my middle three fingers were shaking.

Of course he wasn’t warm, but I was surprised by how cold he actually was, just like my grandmother, his wife, in her coffin; I’d touched her face at her funeral when I was a child. It felt completely different from touching a living human, and I thought, It hasn’t even been that long since my grandfather was breathing. He’d been alive at least until lunch today if not later. The words ‘freshly dead’ popped into my head and I quickly banished them. I had never looked at a dead body for such a long time before.

There was a square table in the corner of the room with an old-fashioned telephone on it, and on the shelf below that, a phone book. On the wall just above the telephone, there was a piece of paper with contact information for morticians and crematoriums, and below it several advertisements for funeral homes. There was nothing else. No windows. Nothing.

I sat in the chair, hands in my pockets to stave off the cold, and looked at my grandfather’s face. Compared to his feet, there was a little more lustre left. Since he’d choked to death, I’m sure he’d suffered, but nothing of that was left in his expression. The corners of his lips looked as though they might still be a little wet.

I started thinking about what I knew of my grandfather, as if I were making a checklist. He was born in Kagoshima, but he moved around to places in Kansai and Tokyo, and he lived in Hokkaido for a while, too. In addition to never holding a job long, he had a bad habit of disappearing and was always in debt, so the family suffered. He couldn’t get along with his three children, particularly his two sons. After my grandmother passed

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away twenty years ago, there was no one to rein him in anymore, so from the time I entered middle school until I graduated high school, we cut all ties with him. Seven or eight years ago, he entered a nursing home in the same city Nobuko was living in, but whenever I spoke with her or my uncle in Kitakyushu on the phone, I could tell that there was still friction between them.

Amidst all the second-hand information, the thing I kept remembering was the few years they’d lived in Shiga and the house and the area around it, back when my grandmother was still alive. It was a green place surrounded by flat fields, and my grandfather was always sitting on the edge of the road.

Ms Kae. That’s what he called me. He started calling me that when I was in primary school, and when my friends found out, they thought it was funny.

Do you hate bugs, Ms Kae? That’s what he said.

They’re scary, my seven-year-old self answered. My grandfather moved his tightly-closed fist closer to me and set an unfamiliar brown bug on my knee.

The door opened and Nobuko entered with her family, her hair still tousled by the wind.

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In the Name of the Father In the Name of Sun t heYisheng Father

Sun Yisheng translated by Nicky Harman

1

W

inter is coming and a bitter cold assails us. It’s carried on the wind.

The winds have carried something else too: malicious gossip that Fuhai fucked someone else’s woman. What amazes us is not that he did something so vile but that he could get it up at all. He’s a wrinkled old man, with a prick that shrivelled up a long time ago. We have no idea who leaked the rumours, or whether they’re true, but they just get louder and more vicious. We look around us and see only Fuhai’s unmoving face, like winter’s coming. A bitter cold assails us, carried on the wind. The jagged gusts slam into the old house, bang open the door, sweep inside, make it lurch heavily to one side.

The old house had never had an owner or a courtyard. It squatted at the back of the village, knocked about by the wind. Lamplight could burst that old house apart. In the puddles in front of the house we could see bits of sky reflected, a uniform leaden grey. There were cracks and crannies in the walls, and a rotten smell leaked out and into the village. That wind taught the weeds that grew between the tile cracks what struggle meant, sweeping them flat like corn, never to rise again. Fuhai’s grandson used to play outside the house. The little brat was a complete nuisance, grabbing your leg and wiping mud or snot all over it. You couldn’t pry him off. If Fuhai wasn’t around, we used to kick him out of the way. But now, the boy was nowhere to be seen. We splashed through the puddles, and went inside. The roof let

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in the sun and the rain, depending on whether it was a clear day or a wet one. With a bit of light, we could just about make out Fuhai, a wizened figure with clouded eyes, which made him look like he was aging right before our eyes.

We’d known for all our lives that Fuhai never went far from home. But one day he was up early, dragging the boy out of bed with him. Then he left, the child pattering behind him, his footsteps sounding like dripping roof eaves after rain.

Grandpa, where are we going?

To Zhengzhou.

Will my dad be there?

My son will be there.

Fuhai left Sun Hai Village, Cao County and, finally, Shandong province behind, and arrived in Zhengzhou City. It was still autumn and the vile thing had not yet happened.

None of us was aware of Fuhai’s departure. It was too early; we were asleep; the village was asleep. Fuhai and his grandson walked down the dirt track behind the house, where the mud flow funnelled from the fields threatened to knock them over if they were not careful. As they followed it around one bend, then another, and turned into one road, then another, the sky lightened and brightened and wheat fields appeared in Fuhai’s line of sight. The road ran straight and shockingly wide, cleaving the wheat fields in two. The layer of hoarfrost on either side seemed to want to imitate the whiteness of snow, but it was a thin cold, and the effect was only the whiteness of flayed skin. Above them, no blue sky or clouds, only a dense grey that would not pale to brightness or thicken to the darkness of night; something like the dismay we felt, the colour never deepening even when we were awake and could see it.

Fuhai and his grandson happened on a cluster of graves. It was utterly still. The path-before and the path-after seemed intent on holding their fear in check, deepening the graves’ eerie gloom. Here and there, a scholar tree stripped bare of leaves, or a grave mound on its way to the horizontal, forced the path to swerve. Eventually they arrived at the path-after, where fear was held in check. I’m going to be lying in this place one of these days, Fuhai thought. And he quickened his pace.

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They soon reached the end of the road. A dried-up riverbed ran through a grove of scrubby trees and there was a bridge. Zhao Mingde’s homestead was the first one on the other side. This was Shen Village, oddly-named because its families were all surnamed Zhao, not Shen.

From far off, Fuhai could hear a repetitive scraping, but the day was so murky that he could not see what Zhao Mingde was doing. He imagined Zhao’s two hands gripping a plane, shaving a wooden plank smooth. He went into the yard, where Zhao Mingde’s three-wheeler was parked with two chairs sitting on the back. Now he could see Zhao Mingde was hewing timber, the entire yard covered in sawdust underfoot. Rows of coffins were piled neatly against the wall. Fuhai did not know which was his. He leaned against the three-wheeler and coughed. Zhao glanced at him, spat accurately to one side, carried on chopping; then, after a few blows, spat again, this time to the other side. His backbone bulged like hemp rope.

It’s going to rain, said Fuhai.

Panting for breath, Zhao put down his axe and looked up to the sky: You wait, it’ll fall as snow.

I can’t wait.

No one can.

When you’ve got a moment, send one over, all right?

If I send it too soon, it might make you sick.

Don’t put ants in your mouth.

My body knows what it needs. It’ll come in handy today.

Zhao found this a bit odd but decided he shouldn’t let on.

Today?

Not today. I’m going somewhere.

Where?

We’re going to Zhengzhou City, the grandson interrupted.

Don’t put ants in your mouth.

What are you going on such a long journey for, at your advanced years?

I’ve nothing else to occupy me these days. Why shouldn’t I go for a ramble?

I’m going to Zhengzhou City, the grandson said.

Fuhai squashed the ants on his grandson’s face, making black smears, then squashed one more.

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2 There was a time, around then or possibly a bit before, when the others were eleven years old (and I was only ten), and I was always being bullied because I was the youngest and if I put up any resistance that only made it more fun for them. Our days were lacklustre and, as dusk drew on and darkness fell, it robbed the earth of all colour. It dissolved everything around us, like a chemical solution, eliminating the hesitations that surfaced in the light of day. In the village street, the children stopped being so open and straightforward with each other and became skittish, bouncing around so that the funny old village houses looked dignified in contrast. In many of the houses and yards, the lights went on, ripping open seams in the darkness, creating wavering shadows of the boys and girls, making me feel that I didn’t fit in. They had an unerring sense of where I was and what I was doing and baited me mercilessly. They never tired of their games: their shouts and laughter stung more sharply than the biting, enshrouding cold. When I tried to follow them into abandoned houses to play, they dumped me in the cornfields. These were full of deep, dark places, the lairs of wild animals; and when the wind blew, the full ears of corn clickety-clicked and the beasts rustled through the stalks, right up to my toes. I ran . . . and ran . . . I smashed my way through, trampling the stalks flat so they’d never rise again.

In my wake, the endless corn fell smoothly, darkly to the ground. Swept along by terror I finally shot from the field, dropped onto the embankment and rolled down it to the edge of the village. I passed Fuhai’s tumbledown homestead, which never had a lamp lit. Today, as usual, it was pitch dark so I never saw him, not even his outline. If I was unlucky enough to see his shadow, well, it was just a shadow, and then only if the moon was bright that evening. Though I could not see him, his shadow climbed the mud wall. Sometimes, his shadow met that of his son; more often, both shadows were swallowed up in the darkness.

Fuhai was a charitable, forgiving man, but he was still always the butt of the villagers’ jokes. Then, when the vile thing became known, he was the talk of the village. No one respected him anymore and, if the more timid ones held back from condemning him, it was not because of Fuhai but

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because they were afraid of those brutes from the woman’s family. Normally, Fuhai swallowed all the anger they directed at him, and then they had to shut up. He only cared about his son, as much as my father did not care about me. Fuhai’s caring about his son and my dad not caring about me, were equally balanced, I realised. When my dad looked at me, he never asked me why I’d done something, he just swore at me. After he had sworn at me for a bit, he’d get himself so worked up that he’d want to lay into me.

The only thing that would stop him was not having a stick at hand. I’d go into my room and lie on the bed, heart in my mouth, listening to things going on outside, confused shouts, crashing and banging, shaking the whole house.

Once, without any warning, I fell asleep and dreamed a dream I did not remember afterwards. I was woken by a lot of noise, got out of bed, and peered through a crack in the door. Of those present, the faces of my dad, Sun Guodong and Sun Guoliang were brightly lit and shone as white as freshly-hewn tree trunks. Not Fuhai; he had his back to me, so as usual I could not see his face.

Sun Guoliang was blank-faced and silent.

You shouldn’t have smashed up my house, said Fuhai.

Sun Guodong spread his hands wide and asked, What should we do?

Damn it! said my dad. There’s no way I want to be mixed up in this vile business.

Ten thousand yuan. At least 10,000 yuan, said Sun Guodong.

But you know Fuhai’s got no money, said my dad.

That’s his business. He should have thought of that before he did it. You be the judge! Sun Guodong said. If you give a girl a big belly, how can you look people in the face? Where’s she going to put herself, where are we going to put ourselves? That’s how I see it. And he slapped his own face to emphasise the point.

You shouldn’t have smashed up my house, said Fuhai.

Fuhai means, when the kid’s born, he wants it.

Bullshit!

Add another 10,000 – make it 20,000 yuan!

You shouldn’t have smashed up my house, said Fuhai.

What’s he chattering on about? Said Sun Guodong.

He’s saying you shouldn’t have smashed up his house, said my dad.

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3 Fuhai’s trip to the city this time was nowhere near as hasty as the one his son had made ten years before. We knew his son had gone off in a hurry, but we didn’t know Fuhai was desperate to do the same. Several days after he left the village, we were bored out of our minds as usual. Someone said, Ai-ya! Life’s so boring. And our thoughts turned to Fuhai, the butt of village jokes. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to us, (though maybe some people did know that he had gone to ask his son for the money) Fuhai and his grandson were already on a bus heading west. They rumbled along the tarmac road, which was so uneven that the bus seemed about to break apart, its innards shuddering and shaking, rattling like loose ice-cubes in a glass. Fuhai’s grandson slumped on his grandfather’s knee, looking out of the window at identical villages, inhuman colours. Straggling trees at the road-side were flung backwards as the bus tore past. Further away, the landscape ceased to flow by, with the most distant points looking as if they had not moved since time immemorial. This expanse of unmoving plain was less like a space and more like time, the kind of time that we all understand, that passes and will never return. It was midday, but the morning mist still hung in the sky overhead with the angry menace of a lion. Narrow tracks made jigsaw puzzles of the wheat fields. Fuhai determinedly said nothing, even if someone spoke to him, which they often did. The boy, however, never sat still for a moment, and Fuhai came in for a lot of stick for not doing anything about it. Fuhai was indifferent and remained mute. He couldn’t stop people berating him, though, and the shouts and curses rang out.

It was still raining when the bus arrived and Fuhai and his grandson got off. They took shelter under a tree, not that it kept much of the rain off.

Above them, a dense mass of electrical wires crisscrossed the sky. The rain did not seem to wet Zhengzhou, it just increased the smell of dust. If the plains outside the bus window had been like a tart’s rough talk, then this city space, with its surging crowds, hooting cars and trucks and towering skyscrapers, was like a tart’s urgent breathing. The tarmac road was so crowded it looked creased. They followed the driver’s instructions and crossed the highway, and then became hopelessly lost. Finally, they made it across the whole city to the outskirts on the other side, and came to the

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kind of village they were familiar with. The rain was unpleasant, though it was not coming down any heavier than before. Tower blocks were being thrown up and it was hard walking – the whole place was a building site, the only spots of colour provided by the workers’ yellow safety helmets, which bobbed like half-footballs in the sky.

The place was deserted. Fuhai and the boy wandered around until they came to a rudimentary wall and turned into a narrow passage. A fierce draught forced its way through and they slipped over branches of trees. The sound of snapping twigs could not distract from the stink of urine. They came to another, half-finished building, with its steel reinforcing bars stubbornly protruding. Fuhai turned as if to check something, then knocked three times on a plank of wood that served as a door. He was going to go in, then hesitated, and half-turned away. They half-heard a voice: I’m in the toilet. . . .

I’m looking for Wang Jisheng, said Fuhai.

Who are you?

I need to see you about something.

Well, my need’s more urgent!

I’m looking for my son.

Get lost! That lad’s been gone a long time!

Sun Laitian told me to come and find you.

You’re a fucker, Sun Laitian.

It’s not me. My name’s Sun Fuhai. Sun Laitian told me to come and find you. I’m looking for my son. His name’s Sun Zhoulin.

The corrugated iron shack was dark and stuffy inside, and the rain drummed loudly on the roof. Wang Jisheng lit the lamp. The circle of light was no bigger than a rice bowl, but it was enough to illuminate Fuhai’s anxious face. Fuhai squinted at Wang Jisheng.

I just want to see my son.

Granddad, there are no ants here.

Wang Jisheng made a show of softening up but after a few probing questions he could not repress his real nature and let off a pungent fart.

Finally, lost for words, he went out, then clattered back in, his head wringing wet but his clothes bone dry, carrying a box which he handed to Fuhai. A crackle of fear dispelled the stuffy atmosphere in the room.

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Fuhai cradled the casket in his arms. His lips went slack and he caught his breath. He did not make a sound. His grandson sprawled on the floor, making conical mounds of dirt. Wang Jisheng was not going to spin him a lot of downright wicked lies. He just offered a few mournful words of comfort. Fuhai stood, head bowed, still wordless.

Then he turned to Laitian, Didn’t you tell me on the phone that he’d been knocked down by a car? How come he’s smashed to bits?

That was a hard question. Laitian had prepared plenty to say but now he was stumped.

Smashed to the ground, Wang Jisheng said, all of him smashed up. Who’d have thought that the truck was backing up just then and didn’t do it in the proper way?

I just want to see my son.

We’re all flesh and blood men here, Fuhai, we’ve all got to look out for ourselves. You take this, it adds up to 20,000. And Wang Jisheng tore off a piece of paper and signed his name. You take this money and go home.

Wang Jisheng’s eyes grew even smaller, and the lamplight took the light from them.

Granddad, there are no ants here.

Fuhai said, I just want to see my son.

4 This is the origin of the story but not its beginning. Before there was us, in the plural, there was just me, playing alone in the house. I cannot distinguish a single one of my memories of the darkness. The old house was situated at the back end of the village and I do not know when it became part of it.

The old folk say that someone once died there. No one knows how. This house played tricks on all the villagers, and no one was brave enough to pass near it. When I was very little and followed my equally small classmates home, we always went out of our way to avoid it. We had to take quite a roundabout route but no one minded. With time, there was a well-marked track that took us around a corner and into the fields. At first, I only played

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in the corn. Once I’d had enough of that, I waded the river, drenching myself and my clothes. Dripping water, I followed the river bank, overgrown with weeds, drawn onwards by a wall in the distance. There was a door in it, the lock rusted with the damp, and a great gash in the wall. I jumped through and picked my way over broken bricks and tiles. Cobwebs smothered everything; a tangle of tree branches forced apart the brickwork.

It was only when I was around the back of the wall that I discovered I was actually inside the house. The colour of the roof made it hard to see how high it really was, and the beam running along the end wall hung askew.

Shafts of moonlight filtered through the roof and took away some of my fear. In the middle of the room stood a double bed, the corpse long since gone. A piece of rotting jujube wood was all that was left of a table. No trace of the wardrobe door, just shards of mirror, reflected light that thrummed in my ears. A tangle of tree roots and branches had grown indoors and around the walls. A rusty bicycle wheel hung from the wall, the snapped spokes making a tangled lattice. This place was just the vestiges of a house. It looked defeated.

By the time they turned up, I had gone to sleep, dreaming a dream the same as my second one. But this place was no longer mine to enjoy alone, as they had invaded, with no good reason. I joined them in a stand-off with the old house, but it didn’t take long for them to spurn me again. They really did throw me in the cornfields. These were full of deep, dark places, and I thought I was asleep. When I woke up, I ran . . . and ran . . . I smashed my way through, trampling the stalks so flat they would never rise again.

Out of the fields and into the village, I kept bumping into Fuhai. Each time, it was like every other day – and I never saw him clearly.

Back home, I was even more afraid. My dad launched into swearing at me without stopping to ask questions. I got lost, I said. He didn’t believe me, said I was jabbering. He grabbed a stool and thumped me with it. (I only had purple bruises and scabs for a few days, nothing that would incapacitate me.) Then he chucked me into my room and I lay on the bed, my heart in my mouth, listening to things going on outside, confused shouts, crashing and banging, shaking the whole house.

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I peered through a crack in the door. There was a man hanging onto my dad, sobbing hoarsely. I had no idea what they were up to, and he had his back to me. Afterwards, when I thought back on it, I realised this was Fuhai.

Pull yourself together. Speak slowly, my dad said.

Your words can reach heaven, you’ve got to help me, said Fuhai.

What’s happened?

Guoliang’s missus’s been raped, and they’re blaming me! Blaming me!

Who raped her?

I . . . I . . . my son.

So, was it you or your son?

She says Zhoulin, my son Sun Zhoulin, but the son-of-a-bitch never touched Guoliang’s missus.

So if he didn’t do it, what you making such a fuss about?

But they keep saying he raped her. The son-of-a-bitch said he bumped into her a few months ago but he didn’t dare lay a finger on her. It was too dark to see and there were no witnesses, and even if there had been, no one wants to get involved in stuff like this. And now the missus’s got a big belly and he’s beaten her up, and she’s blaming Zhoulin. They’re going to beat him to death.

They? Who’s ‘they’?

Guodong and Guoliang. They’ve already smashed up my house.

What about Zhoulin?

He took off in the night, I don’t know where he’s gone.

Damn it! Damn it! said my dad. There’s no way I want to be mixed up in this vile business.

Then, without any warning, I fell asleep and dreamed a dream I did not remember afterwards. They made such a noise that they woke me up. I reached down and felt my thigh was wet. I thought I’d pissed the bed, but the smell was more pungent than piss. I didn’t want the smell to fade, and I mustered my energy and swallowed the smell. It was good. I heard more people and got out of bed and peered through a crack in the door. The table in the next room was brightly lit by a light bulb. People sat around it, but the lampshade narrowed the beam so they were all sitting in the dark. There was a fierce argument going on. They got to their feet and the light fell on them – my dad, Sun Guodong and Sun Guoliang – and their faces shone

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as white as freshly-hewn tree trunks. Not Fuhai: he had his back to me, so just as usual, I could not see his face or what he looked like.

5 We had a saying: ‘like father, like son’. It was right, too. It shouldn’t have happened like this, but no one knew how it should have turned out. We never knew when Fuhai came back from Zhengzhou. His coffin had been at his house for a while, so we thought he must have died while he was away; but then Fuhai chose a propitious day and buried his son behind the house, and ever after, stood guard over the pyramidal grave-mound, day in, day out. That was how we found out it wasn’t Fuhai who’d died. Fuhai got an old blind woman to sew him a red cloth bag, shook his son’s ashes inside it and put it in the coffin. And so, the thing he’d got ready for his own death was purloined by his unfilial son.

The days went by and the pattern of our lives went on repeating itself as before. We gave ourselves to the days, and the days formed up in lines and went back into the calendar. These days were not like new ones that bounce from the future into the present, they’re the same old days embedded again and again in every calendar and they go musty and mouldy. But one evening, Fuhai finally persuaded his grandson to go to sleep. Then he added firewood to the brazier until great gouts of flame leapt upwards. As they illuminated the old house, you could see its interior, like a bubble growing bigger. The shafts of moonlight filtering through the roof paled in the brightness of the flames.

The boy awoke, and said, I’m hungry.

You’ll have something to eat when you wake up in the morning, said Fuhai. Go back to sleep now.

Fuhai sat quietly for a short while, then returned to the tranquillity of the darkness outside the window. The wind was making a racket; it hadn’t let up since they moved in. But, Fuhai thought, the old house had been abandoned for so long without falling down, it surely wouldn’t collapse now. It grew light, and then was nearly noon, and his grandson slept on.

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Fuhai limped out of the door, stepping so gingerly it looked as if his feet were folding sheets of paper.

The sun loomed overhead like a great sulphurous balloon.

There was no one in the tumbledown yard, just Sun Guoliang’s missus guarding the house.

I’m looking for Sun Guoliang.

Sun Guoliang’s not at home.

I’ve been looking for him a long time.

What for?

I’ve got the money.

What’s that got to do with me?

You’re living in my house.

It was yours before, but you mortgaged it to us.

But now I’ve got money and I can redeem it.

I’m a woman, I can’t deal with this. You’ll have to talk to Sun Guoliang.

I’ve been looking for him a long time, said Fuhai.

You sound like it’s us who owe you money.

Can you get him for me? Because you were once friends with my son?

Sun Guoliang’s missus leapt to her feet. Who was friends with your son?

Tell me that. No one was.

Right, right you are, you weren’t friends, said Fuhai, my son never laid a finger on you.

What’s that? Are you trying to say we were blackmailing you? As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she must have thought she’d said something wrong, and fell silent.

But Fuhai was only minding what he was saying: My son’s dead, my son died in Zhengzhou, and I never saw him before he died.

What’s your son’s death got to do with us?

You know if it wasn’t for you, said Fuhai, my son wouldn’t have been too scared to come home for ten years. You know if it wasn’t for you, my son wouldn’t have run away to Zhengzhou. You know if he hadn’t run away to Zhengzhou, he wouldn’t have died away from home. And you tell me he didn’t die because of you?

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Fuhai said, It’s you, it’s you. You fitted him up – you accused my son of raping you.

Guoliang’s missus shrank away, dropped her gaze and said, What . . .

What are you going to do?

My son never did fuck you. He never did, said Fuhai.

After the words that Sun Zhoulin had fucked Sun Guoliang’s missus had been floating around for ten years, malicious gossip that Fuhai had fucked Sun Guoliang’s missus leaked out and took substance in our big talk. What amazed us was not that Fuhai had done this vile thing in place of his son, but the fact that he could get it up at all. He was a wrinkled old man, and his prick had shrivelled up a long time ago. We had no idea who’d spread the rumours, or whether they were true, but they got louder and more vicious. Gusts of wind were shaking the old house. The child slept on, dreaming still, despite his hunger. When Sun Guodong and Sun Guliang captured Fuhai, we didn’t dare go close until he had been tied up. Our eyes brimmed with a superior sort of sympathy. Fuhai accepted our sympathetic looks, and swallowed our sympathy down: the word, its form and its vector.

Fuhai knelt in the yard, gibbering wildly and incoherently. We were making noise in earnest and that earnestness put a stop to the noise. Eventually, the whole thing collapsed in disarray. Someone asked a question, another answered, the web of a dialogue was woven. What on earth was Fuhai saying? He was saying his grandson was hungry. Grandson? Or son? There was a roar of laughter. Like the roar of long-stoppered water bursting from a pipe.

The story begins here, and concludes here too. Fuhai lifts his head. We look all around us. Fury has ripped gashes in the village and the wind whistles through. There’s only Fuhai’s unmoving face, like winter’s coming.

Yes, take a look: winter’s coming.

Translated from Sun Yisheng’s collection How Many Dragon-Fields Has Your Family Got? Baihua Literature and Art Publishing House, June 2016.

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from Underground Fire from Unde rgr Yu oundJian Fire

Yu Jian translated by Simon Patton with Ellen Chow

I

n 1969, before I’d finished middle school in Kunming, the State sent me to a factory in the northern suburbs of the city that specialised in making various kinds of machinery for the mining industry. Here I worked as a riveter in the riveting and welding workshop.

When I wasn’t at work, I wrote poetry. In those early days, I composed a form of classical Chinese poetry known as gutishi, because in my Chinese classes at school only the classical-style poems of Mao Zedong were taught – I studied every single poem Mao wrote and could recite them off by heart.

Thanks to this influence, my first attempts at writing poems involved a kind of literary substitution, replacing some of the words in Mao’s poems with my own.

The factory was split in half by a broad aisle with workshops either side, and on both sides of this aisle, at the entrance to each workshop, there was a noticeboard for putting up dazibao or ‘big-character posters’. These were used during the Cultural Revolution for the public expression of opinions about current issues – a bit like the Internet today – and in the main streets and workplaces there were noticeboards everywhere where you could put up a poster. If you had some idea you wanted to get across, you wrote a big-character poster and stuck it on the board, unsigned if you wanted, although you would, of course, have to face the consequences if you were found out. It was a bogus attempt at freedom of speech: the number of people who actually dared say anything real was extremely small – people

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who sneaked out at night to put up a poster publicly expressing pessimism regarding the status quo were arrested at daybreak.

Every month, each of the workshops would have to stick up a few new things on their noticeboard, such as citations from Party leaders, extracts from newspaper editorials, expressions of gratitude written by workers, rhyming ditties of various kinds eulogising the Fatherland or singing in praise of scenes of prosperity and the overall excellence of the state of the nation. These were written in ink with a brush on a big white sheet of paper and accompanied by water-colour illustrations of the sun as well as flowers.

The noticeboard of every workshop had its own name: the one outside the machining workshop was called ‘Spring Rain’, while that outside the riveting and welding workshop had the name ‘The Red Riveter’. Not surprisingly, the casting workshop’s had been christened ‘Steel Flowers’. I had only just turned sixteen when I started work at the factory, and had written a poem in praise of International Labour Day and based on the form of one of Mao’s; this was my first ever composition, and the propaganda officer published it on ‘The Red Riveter’.

But this didn’t yet spark any special interest in writing on my part; it was just a one-off thing. Mao Zedong’s verse had merely led me to the Gate of Poetry, beyond which was concealed the vast realm of classical Chinese poems. The many Gates of Civilisation would prove to be as numerous as the thousand arms of Kwan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy. You could go through any one of them to reach a higher level of skill until you reached civilisation’s most profound inner chamber.

I spent the winter of 1970 at home recovering from an illness. At that time, my father was in exile in the village of Shuige in Luliang County, so I went to see him at the village temple where he was living. The statue of the Buddha there had already been destroyed, and the main building had been converted into a storehouse in which the production team kept all sorts of bits and pieces in piles on the floor. I stayed with my father upstairs.

Under a pile of rice-straw, I found a large bamboo basket containing several old books, one of them a selection of classical Chinese poems published in the 1960s, a restricted publication available only to Party cadres. More than thirty poems were printed in it. On that day, in our poorly-lit loft dwelling,

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I opened up this little book and the first thing I came across was a poem by Wang Wei entitled ‘Autumn Nightfall in the Hills’: In empty hills after recent rain The air fills with belated autumn A bright moon shines between the pine-trees And clear spring water runs over the stones.

It was if I had been struck by lightning and a blindfold of black cloth was torn from my eyes – at once I was plunged into full light. Later, sitting in the back of a large truck on the road back to Kunming, I sat in a daze the whole way, thinking of nothing but poetry. This little book was a restricted publication for organisations of the Chinese Communist Party provincial party committee, and I have no idea how it came to be hidden away in a remote village. It couldn’t have been my father’s – he was a scholar of the old school, steeped in classical literature, while this was only an elementary reader for beginners. Perhaps the god of the temple had made its presence felt; whatever the case, for many years it seemed to me that the discovery of this book in a pile of straw was altogether uncanny. I didn’t dare tell my father about it because I didn’t want to be deprived of it, so I hid it away and, when I left the village, I took it with me.

Within this book were Wang Wei, Su Shi, Chiang Pai-shi, Li Po, Du Fu, Wu Wên-ying, Hsin Ch’i-chi, Fan Ch’eng-ta . . . all of them closed up in darkness, and all of them people I had been forbidden to read. In the 1970s, after their wide-scale burning and banning in 1966, books were very hard to get hold of. But you could find them if you put your mind to it, and many literary classics circulated underground. My teenage years were spent secretly reading these banned works. Later, when I got hold of Wang Wei’s Wang River Sequence, it became my poetic Bible. I also managed to find a copy of a New Edition of Prosody and learned its rules by heart. In 1973, I read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass for the first time: it made an enormous impact on me. I stopped writing poems in the traditional style and switched to free verse instead, stuff and nonsense about breezes and flowers and snow and the moon, the sorrows of being young, falling in love, and so on. My

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first poem in modern Chinese was about my heartfelt responses to a spring scene in a park.

In 1975, the violent storms of the Cultural Revolution eased somewhat, libraries opened their doors again, and it became possible to borrow certain classics. In addition, many banned books hidden away in storage were retrieved by ordinary civilians and put back into circulation underground.

I read a great deal of Russian, French, English and American literature, but there was little poetry among all this clandestine material. My only access was to Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, and Leaves of Grass.

One day while riding my battered old bike along West Huashan Road not far from where I lived, I came across a rather flustered-looking middleaged man outside an old photography studio standing with two or three other people. He was waving a small book with a yellow cover in the air.

My eyes lit up and I jumped off my bike, walking it back to where he was.

Flicking down the kick-stand with my foot, I parked my bike and went over to him. He held the book in his hand and very hesitantly muttered something about wanting to sell it, frequently looking to his left and right up and down the road. Someone had already made him a counter-offer, thinking the asking price too high. One look was enough to tell me that what he was selling was a banned book. I said I wanted to take a look at it: reluctantly he handed it over, still holding onto one half which he would not let go of. I know he was worried that I wanted to report him to the authorities rather than buy his book. In those days, people were always reporting others to the authorities, or informing, or betraying people they knew – these were ‘glorious acts’ encouraged by the State. The man was taking an enormous risk: the private buying or selling of anything was forbidden, and he was selling a banned book. Anything might serve as a pretext to inform on people in those days: if you were seen looking out a window several days in a row, someone might report you to the authorities.

It was a way to earn the Organisation’s trust, to be given an important position, to win a bright future with boundless prospects.

I told him: Let me have a look first. I don’t have the foggiest idea who you are! He relaxed a bit and let go his grip. Because books had been banned for so many years, I was used to taking in ten lines in a single glance; no matter what kind of writing it was, a glance was enough to tell me. At that

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time, reading itself was an underground activity: if a friend lent you a banned book, you had to read it in secret in two or three days, and return it as quickly as possible. What counted as a banned book? The Dream of the Red Chamber, Resurrection, Goethe’s Faust, The Poems of Hsu Chih-mo. . . .

Unbelievable! Tolstoy’s War and Peace would be concealed inside a wrapper of thick brown paper with the word PHYSICS written on it. I am the holder of the record for reading the four volumes of Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe in five days – within that time I also filled a notebook with quotes from it while I ate, slept, and went to work.

I took the book from the man’s hand and skimmed through it at lightning speed. It was a thin book of only sixty pages and with a yellow cover, entitled Stray Birds, written by someone called ‘Rabindranath Tagore’. I didn’t have a clue who Tagore was, and there was a lot of red underlining on the pages – If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars – stuff that blew me apart when I read it! In the Chinese-language environment of those days, to come across lines of poetry like this really did blow you to smithereens – this was solid gold dancing on paper! To call it the music of the spheres really didn’t do it justice.

To give you some idea of what the Chinese around me was like, just around the corner were a couple of posters written in large characters criticising my father: FERRET OUT THAT KUOMINTANG SPY SO-AND-SO. When my father was a student at Nanjing Central University in 1948, he founded a literary club called the Camel Society with some classmates. This made him a ‘spy’, and for this reason he was sent into exile.

The recommended retail price of Stray Birds was fifteen fen. The middle-aged man wanted to sell it for three yuan, twenty times as much! Back in those days I only earned fifteen yuan a month, but without a moment’s hesitation I bought it. It was the most I had ever paid for a book. Tucking it under my jacket, I leapt onto my bike and pedalled off as fast as I could, afraid the seller would have second thoughts.

The book was full of reactionary phrases of incredible beauty and, once I’d finished reading it, I secretly passed it on to friends in the factory – everyone was bowled over by it. People wanted to read it over and over, so we decided to make copies. We bought stencil paper and each of us worked on cutting the stencils for our section of the book. One of my friends had

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a friend called Xiao Ping. She worked as a typist in the office of the factory and we passed the prepared stencils to her so that she could make ten copies using paper and a mimeograph that belonged to the State. Two copies each went to the five of us – me, Fuyuan, Jianhui, Tangping, and Chongming – and Xiao Ping made an extra one for herself. Once the copies were printed, we burned the stencils.

I still remember that night. As we lit a fire in a basin and burned the stencils we enjoyed the enticing smell of printing ink given off by the copies of Tagore’s poetry. Youthful faces were lit up by the flames, as if we’d conjured up a spirit. Love is a sacrifice, and we didn’t really think about anything we did then, but what that young woman did was sheer madness.

Many years later when we recalled the incident, we all accused ourselves of being shockingly irresponsible – but at the time we had no idea about the consequences. It was an incomparably beautiful book of poems, and poetry always enables us to forget the cruelties of reality.

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Corinne Elysse Adams

Corinne Elysse Adams

Dha Ladakh Dha, where the arrow landed in paradise shhht!

Unclear in legend – when the shaft flew from his bow did it pierce a green-bellied valley hung low and heavy amid Himalayas, or spark and scrape to a stop in a lucky crevice and sprout amongst fossilled rock, dropping the first apricots into infertile granite?

A valley cut by mighty Indus, mother of rivers swallowing seeds and accidental offerings indiscriminate in her hunger and her embrace.

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And later, after the truth of the beginning is no longer important, and apricots and apples overflowed from streams screams from Kargil ricocheted through trees, across roofs heaped in blankets of orange, apricots drying for winter, a mountain no different from any other marks the border with Pakistan.

Stillness in the ruin of rose gardens bombs lobbed over heads neither Muslim nor Hindu but collateral damage, echo of spinning prayer wheels, the grandmothers, hair down to their knees and looped back up again, grey in the roots and black strands saved and woven into the ends, scrap of youth – they remember this old sadness as they drop apricots into baskets and ancient coffee tins, flowered hats balanced over braids.

One young man makes jam all day long in the summer another smokes pot down in the apple trees a monkey child eats grapes in the canopy none of them legends yet.

Everyone claims they can’t remember the old stories, but a faraway focus comes into a father’s eyes as he rocks the sheep-hide full of milk to make butter, rhythmic roil of back and forth –

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shh, shh, shh, this is the story of how the arrow landed in paradise.

Manali Himachal Pradesh, 2012 i This morning I stole five apples.

They were so red I thought for sure I would die from the first sweet bite.

Licking piney rain from peel I devoured two with my hand still holding the branch, ecstasy of rain and root and bark and fruit all at once.

It seemed to me everything should be a gift. ii I couldn’t save the myna bird from the puddle of tar pooling out of a tipped-over barrel.

I saw it land, and must have hesitated because the second after I could have rescued it, its wing dipped and stuck. His relatives screamed from a sheath of pines as I coated my fingers and my lover’s ring trying to lift him free

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of the mess, shaking, tar trailing in black strings from my hands and the sticky down of his breast.

My fingers came away stuck with tufts of white as two men helped me bathe his struggling body in paint thinner. A pair of teenage boys joked in Hindi about myna for supper, and the mad foreign girl who wasted her time on a dying thing.

The bird cried with a wildness, yellow beak parted in gasps as his feathers peeled away with the pitch, skin underneath raw and burned.

We left him there, panting under an overturned laundry basket, too ashamed and weak to end it.

When is death a gift?

I scrubbed my hands red and cracked, but the sharpness oozed from my skin for days. iii Careening down from the mountains, goodbye apple orchards and dark sleep of pine forests, goodbye quiet shelter of needles that sometimes let the cold rain through.

Beyond the grey and streaming window, a flash of rainbow umbrella, twirled by a man as he waits at an omelette stand, his thin frame swimming in belted-up khakis and white dress shirt. He grins like a young girl from a different time flaunting her new parasol; no protection from cold downpour, a thing loved solely for its brightness and its colour.

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Harajuku, Ginza Tokyo Her patent leather shoes carry her on five inches of wood above wet asphalt. It’s rainy season, typhoon later, but crowds still bulge from the station.

Backdrop of dark temple pines, she holds her scalloped umbrella, tilting the lacy curve to frame brown ringlets of her wig. Her smile is coy, shy, then gone, a pout, a glare, and then timidly curves upward again as the camera clicks through rapid frames. The watching girls nod, smile, admire her.

Her stilettos will make it difficult to walk after the first bottle of champagne, but the night is early and she hasn’t had even a glass yet.

The sides of her red cocktail dress are slit to reveal half-moons of hips. Her day clothes are wadded away, soaked from the typhoon’s downpour. She brushes the silk curtain aside, drifts into the dim room.

Her smile invites as she moves towards a table and arranges herself on the couch. The men nod in admiration.

In a stall in the McDonald’s bathroom she is struggling to lace shoes over strawberry print stockings, pinning a Vivienne brooch to a frill of ivory dress, fluffing the pannier beneath pleated skirt. There is barely elbow room with all the girls crowding the mirrors to powder faces pale or darken lips and eyes. She straightens her wig, picks up her picnic basket, joins her friends

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on the bridge. They turn from tourists, ignore the gawking flash of cameras. Over rice balls and beers, tea and cakes, girls, boys, cross-dressers, ambiguous genders admire one another.

Her customers are laughing – she orders another bottle of the most expensive bubbly on the menu. It’s going to be a good night.

She’ll take them to another club after she gets off work, make some extra cash. She’s lost track of how many bottles she’s helped them drink now. She brings them to a new place where the staff know her. They drink until the men can barely stagger into the cabs that will take them back to wives, kids, work in a few hours. The trains aren’t running yet. She sits at the bar, staring into the distance, holding her almost-empty glass.

Swallows the last swig, ignores the bitter aftertaste.

Says goodnight to the bar staff and heads towards the station.

A man at the back of the bar watches.

She walks down the busy shopping street, eyeing her favourite brands behind glass. Thinks about which she can afford after she gets paid later tonight. It’s finally starting to rain. The magazines are out scouting street fashion today. A man approaches her. He asks for a few photos and some information. She is interesting, he wants to do a page on her in his publication. She agrees, loves the camera. Everyone walking by looks at her and admires.

Her head hurts. Other parts of her that shouldn’t ache ache. She opens her eyes to the underside of a table, arms sticky from the unwashed floor. Her purse is empty.

The tiny room is empty. Karaoke blares on the TV. She can’t remember how she got here, tries to clear her head, gets up, straightens her twisted dress stumbles outside – raining again.

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She drags herself onto the train, thinks about going home, sleeping, forgetting, but then slips off the train early. She knows a hospital near the station. Her feet hurt; she carries her shoes.

No one looks at her.

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Zach MacDonald

Zach MacDonald

S

ix years after the tsunami, the wreckage still washes up along the Kushiro coast.

There’s detritus from the sea with no connection to the Tohoku devastation, but Jun knows what he’s looking at when he finds a scratched and beaten-up kokeshi doll, reduced to driftwood, or a shredded book bag with sodden and indecipherable scraps of notepaper inside, or a plastic tiara, or a broken hair clip, or a sealed tumbler half-filled with acrid black coffee; there’s no mistaking the basic history behind sun-bleached sales banners and T-shirts, or balding plush animal baubles – pandas, penguins, frogs – that once hung from the phones of those who drowned or were made refugees in their own country.

Jun lives with his mother in a house on the outskirts of Konbumori. It’s a three-minute walk to the beach. When the wind is right he can hear the waves lap up to the shore; to him the sound of waves is like the sound of silence, except in storms, when the breakers thunder and pound and pull, like hands that slap upon a table cloth before tugging it at the edges. Storms remind Jun how easily the sea can change, how easily it could claim them, how grotesquely human it is in temperament.

Following the tsunami, the town performed a formal clean-up of the beach. Volunteers came in from other parts of Hokkaido, some from as far away as Sapporo: well-meaning urbanites whose bubbled lives had been untouched by the quake, who felt guilty and slightly restless, left out of the apocalyptic drama that had unfolded elsewhere – and they made pilgrimages to Kushiro’s shoreline over the course of a few months, collecting

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every non-natural item they could alongside the locals. Neat piles were made, separated by size and type of material, while items of perceived sentimental value, for which there was a chance a surviving owner or rightful inheritor might be located, were bagged and taken away to the community centre.

The washed-up items that Jun keeps for himself have no marks that would identify the owner (such items are exceptionally rare), yet for each one that he stows away in his collection, whether or not the town officials would approve his keeping them, he knows the former owner is dead. He can’t say how. He knows it in the way he knows, when he enters an empty room, that no one else has been there for quite some time.

Today Jun arrives at the beach hidden under the hood of his dark green windbreaker, and scans the shoreline to see if anyone else is there. An old man or woman strolls across the sand and broken shells in the far distance, but that’s all. Jun is effectively alone.

He goes down to the tideline and walks parallel to the water, combing for treasure. Within an hour he’s found the cap of a Pocari Sweat bottle with two neat holes in the top, like owl eyes, a Yu-Gi-Oh! card sealed in a plastic sleeve, a plastic tag with a purple bunch of grapes imprinted on it, probably once attached to actual fruit in a grocery store, and a small Hello Kitty keychain with five links of the chain itself intact but the metal ring missing.

Everything else that may or may not be tsunami debris is of little concern to Jun: shingles, warped boards, splinters of prefab wall; he’s interested in the things that were used, things that were held or fondled by warm hands, things that were noticed – not pieces of construction material, not the drab broken bits of furniture that could never be identified.

He examines his finds. The Pocari cap was barely worth picking up. It could have come from anywhere, anytime, and while the holes are too perfect not to be man-made, they suggest nothing more to him than a bored boy with a nail and hammer. He pockets it so he can throw it in the bin at home, if only so that it won’t catch his eye on some other day.

The Yu-Gi-Oh! card is not perfectly sealed in its sleeve. Water has leaked in and made it sodden, but the deterioration is minimal, and the sharpness of its colours suggest it’s been adrift for months at most, not years: this simply blew out of someone’s hands a few towns down the coast. The grape

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tag is also not old, its condition too pristine, and even if it had been at sea for six years, what of it? No one had ever valued a tag on their fruit. He pockets it along with the Pocari cap and Yu-Gi-Oh! card, destined for the bin.

But the Hello Kitty keychain is different.

A quiet surge of excitement wells in Jun’s breast. Kitty is depicted in samurai garb, albeit with a heart-shaped eye patch, and even with most of its paint gone the figurine is immediately familiar. After a moment’s thought he has it: Masamune Samurai, from Sendai. He owns the same one, or one that is nearly identical, tucked away in a bottom drawer where he’s stashed the relics of that hateful year of his life. This keychain, then, was almost certain to have come from Sendai, carried to Hokkaido by the waves. This is treasure.

He doesn’t announce that he’s home, but his mother hears him come in.

Today is her day off.

‘You’re bringing in more rubbish?’ she says, drifting wraith-like into the kitchen behind him.

Jun doesn’t say anything.

‘This house isn’t your rubbish bin. Do you understand that?’

The lines around her mouth are deep, her eyes beady and desperate, and at the same time nervous, like that of a wild animal encountering loud machinery – which Jun finds ironic, considering he’s the antithesis of anything loud. She doesn’t know what to do about him; she doesn’t know who or what he is, and Jun doesn’t have any answers to give.

‘Did you hear what I said? Jun!’ Jun sighs and forms a look of disgust without facing her, making sure she sees it from the side. He pulls the rubbish bin out from under the sink, drops the cap, card and tag into it, and stalks out of the kitchen.

‘You selfish boy, you . . . you man-child, how dare you ignore your mother like this?’

She sounds almost like she might cry, though she hasn’t wept in Jun’s presence for years.

‘I’m speaking to you. Don’t walk away like that when I’m speaking! I want to talk about this rubbish-collecting.’

She follows him through the living room, thin, short and shrill.

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‘Don’t just walk away from your mother!’

Then she’s on the other side of his bedroom door. His head is pounding from the interaction, brief though it was. If he could, he would speak to his mother only in text messages. Emails. Sign language.

There’s a very faint scent of salt in here, which he only detects when he’s been away for a while, and even then not always; the salt scent comes from the stack of cardboard boxes in the corner where he’s amassed years of little articles from the beach. He doesn’t wash anything before storing it there, only rinses it in the sea to get rid of the sand, then lets it dry in the sun on the back step. They all interest him in one way or another, but they aren’t treasure. Not like the keychain.

Jun was a normal child at primary school. At least it seems that way in his memories. In middle school, around the time his groin and underarms sprouted hair, his body groaned and lengthened, his voice changed and sore red pimples pocked his face, he ceased to be like everyone else. All the others hit puberty too, of course, but for Jun it was different. That was when he began to float away. His registering of nuance deteriorated. He gradually stopped noticing the minutiae of surrounding social interactions, how each filamentary encounter entangled itself in the larger web of things, supporting the mysterious whole of which he was supposed to be a part. And at some point it came to be that Jun couldn’t see that web at all.

At first he experienced moments of introspective clarity in which he perceived what was happening to him. Those moments became less frequent over time; and then he was too far gone, drifting into an open expanse in which the alliances and enmities, juvenile hierarchies and impassioned romances of a teenager’s world passed by his senses like infrared light.

In the first year of secondary school a senior named Ryu Ogawa had kicked Jun’s legs out from under him during an outdoor football match. It was after the final lesson of the day, on a secluded pitch down the hill and out of sight from the school, and there were a lot of students watching. Jun went down hard and felt the skin tear off his elbows in the dirt. Ryu and his teammate came to his side, but instead of helping him up, they each went down on one knee and punched Jun in the belly, the ribs, and tried to hit his face, though he’d rolled onto his front and blocked it with his

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arms. A third joined, a heavyset boy, and planted his cleated foot between Jun’s shoulder blades to hold him down, while the other two kicked his shins and thighs until he screamed in fear and outrage. He was left with angry black bruises that lasted for a month. His left knee, in the spot where one of their feet had connected with the side of the cap, still sends out twinges of pain on some winter mornings, and when the pressure changes before big storms.

When they’d finished and walked off without a word, Jun had to get up on his own; no one among his own team, or even those students watching, had spoken up or come to his aid. Enraged, he shouted at everyone gathered there, demanding to know why they weren’t reacting – he’d just been attacked! – but the only response he received, at last, was from one of his teammates lingering nearby, who told him to be quiet and that he’d talk to him after the game.

Later, that boy informed him, simply, that Ryu and his goons had given Jun the beating because he had been flirting with Shoko Imanishi. Everyone knew Ryu had his eye on Shoko, despite her being years younger than him.

Jun should have known that too – how, he was asked in all seriousness, could he not have been aware? The beating had been coming to him, said his teammate; it could’ve been worse, and Jun’s acting like a whiny baby about it, yelling at the crowd and playing dumb, was going to make everyone he knew look bad as well.

After that day, Jun stopped playing football altogether. Gradually, he gave up doing any kind of school activity besides attending lessons, and even that was wretched. Being surrounded by his peers filled him with a seething angst, enough to break pencils and pens in his bedroom at night, staining his hands blue or black or red; he needed to hear something snap in those days; he needed to destroy something that was whole. The floorboards in his room still bear flecks and splotches of ink which have permanently stained the wood.

He had flirted with Shoko Imanishi, a little, though it was hard to recall the specific details of it now. There had been words, glances, smiles – nothing more – yet he’d been completely oblivious to any transgression on his part. He hadn’t had the slightest inkling that seventeen-year-old Ryu

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Ogawa had feelings for her, or any notion of what Ryu was like to those who crossed him.

And yet everyone else had known. Everyone. They were all aware, tuned in, bemusedly watching Jun court disaster. No one had been the least surprised by what happened. Jun was the only one who’d been hollowed out, somewhere around puberty, when childhood moulted away like a cicada’s skin: he was that discarded exoskeleton, the transparent remains of the boy he’d once been.

It was his mother’s idea that he should go to school in Sendai, to live in Honshu for a time – get out of Kushiro and see another part of the country.

So he went, and his year of hell began – far from the little house in a town from which he’d once wanted nothing more than to escape.

There were too many people in the city. Too much noise, too many faces and voices. Too many garrulous individuals, hungry for someone to acknowledge the existence of their thoughts. Most people, Jun learned, needed hosts to lay the eggs of their musings in, unable or afraid to let them mature within the brain that bore them. They didn’t see Jun: they only saw a silent, receiving mind, a vague receptacle in which to incubate their opinions.

Little by little, Jun gave up speech altogether. He gave up trying to be heard. He had a voice, but it had been swallowed down into his lungs from the day on the dirt of the football pitch, when he’d cried out to his peers for justice and received none. Once Jun had faded he never quite came back into view. His transparency increased until he became invisible, and the full spectrum of life passed through him like light through a dusty window.

The only bright spot in Sendai, his only reprieve, had been a simple sensation that would come over him from time to time, always when he was in a public area and outdoors: a street, the little park near the Internet café he frequented, and especially the coast road, where he would ride his second-hand bicycle at weekends. It was the sensation of being watched.

Rather than being disconcerting or seeming eerie, it brought about a feeling like a warm hand suddenly entwining its fingers with his own, or a body lovingly embracing him from behind.

When that pleasurable warmth settled on him like the rays of a spring sun, Jun would turn and cast his eyes about to study his surroundings, but

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there was never anyone present who might be focused on him. Mostly, he found himself alone, especially on the long breezy stretches of the coast road, with only the company of soaring gulls and the indifference of passing vehicles.

But someone was following him all through that year, watching yet never making contact. He just couldn’t see where they were hiding.

Jun leaves his room in the late afternoon. He’s been listening for a while, ear to the door, and the house has been dead silent all that time. His mother must have left for town, though he didn’t hear the car start up.

His bedroom is at the back of the house. He passes through the living room and goes by the kitchen. He stops in the modest entryway, a few steps from the front door, because he now hears voices. One is his mother’s, the other a man’s. The two are in front of the house, talking in subdued tones.

The walls are thin, however, and their words are almost audible. Jun sneaks into his mother’s bedroom, keeping low, and sidles up against the front wall below the window. She and the man are just outside, and by the husky voice he identifies the visitor as elderly Mr Sasaki. ‘. . . since that’s all he does,’ his mother is saying. ‘Besides using the computer.’

‘Pathetic,’ sneers Sasaki. ‘What’s happened to this generation, is what I want to know. How old is he anyway?’

‘Twenty-seven.’

‘Twenty-seven already! Should be preparing for marriage by now. No girlfriend, I’ll take it?’

‘Of course not. What woman would want to be with . . . with a shut-in?

He’s barely even spoken for years. No friends. Doesn’t meet anyone. He hasn’t held a job since his months at the cannery after Sendai.’

‘He’s more than just a shut-in.’

‘I know what he is. I do. It’s just that. . . . Oh, the years are going by and I just wonder what we’re going to do. Sometimes . . . sometimes I. . . .’

Her voice dissolves into a sound that Jun knows well. A beat of silence on either side of a brief hitching sob, always heard through a wall or a door.

‘Now, now, stop that. That won’t help a thing, will it? Here. It’s fine, I don’t need it back. There now, you’re both going to be. . . .’

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Jun pulls away from the wall and drifts out of the room just as he had drifted in. He leaves the house through the back door, opening and closing it very slowly, careful of the upper hinge that squeaks. He crosses the patch of weedy earth that hosts his mother’s tiny garden at one end, and disappears at the other into the forest.

He passes the familiar beech trees that mark his usual route and after a few minutes comes to the babbling stream that wends its way down from the hills. Here the ground is flat, the water crystalline. Jun follows the stream until his marker comes into view: an axe handle he found washed up on the shore years ago, which he sharpened and drove into the soft soil at the top of the bank. He crosses the water with the help of a stepping stone, climbs the bank and passes the handle, touching it lightly out of habit to check that it remains firmly lodged.

Just past the handle is an ancient oak tree with a hollow in its base, and within this hollow is tucked an opaque Rubbermaid storage container. Jun pulls the container out and removes the lid. He draws from his pocket the Masamune Hello Kitty keychain and places it inside with the other treasures stored there, nestling it between a frayed burgundy ankle boot and the plastic cover of a ringed notepad, the rings still attached but all the paper pages gone. The cover has the cartoon outline of two young birds on it, beak to beak, and the line, in English: For when we found each other it was the loveliest day.

Re-sealing the lid, he returns the container to the hollow, pushing it to the back. He goes home and sneaks in through the back door, but finds the house empty. In the kitchen, he boils water for noodles and carries the steaming cup back to his room, where he jiggles the computer mouse on the floor to wake the computer from sleep. He slurps the noodles up, sets them aside and lays on his belly on the futon with his arms and shoulders over the edge, fingers poised above the keyboard resting on the floor.

Earlier, he’d seen something perplexing online, before he’d left to stow his treasure away in the forest. He brings up a map of the Tohoku tsunami debris field, divided year by year. In 2011, and even more in 2012, the debris field ranged further north up the Japanese coast. This makes sense, as those were the years when the shoreline here had been most extensively inundated and the concerted clean-up efforts took place. Debris had continued to

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appear long after, however, as Jun knew perhaps better than anyone, so the strange thing was that, according to the maps, the field hadn’t stretched to anywhere on the Hokkaido coast since 2013.

There had then to be some errant current, Jun concludes, some narrow course of ocean within ocean peeling off from larger ones, carrying with it a fraction of the wreckage from the main body. Was such a thing even possible? And if it were possible, how could it be that this current had carried these specific items, these treasures, all the way to his beach?

How, when they’d all belonged to the same person, could they have been delivered to this one spot over the course of years?

Jun doesn’t return to the beach for two weeks, roughly the time it takes these days for new debris to accumulate at the tideline. If there are items that don’t make it to the shore, but rather are brought close and carried away again with the outgoing tide, he doesn’t worry: what isn’t left behind on the sand isn’t meant for him.

He’s seen his mother less and less during these weeks. He’s growing transparent to her, too. Eventually she won’t notice his presence at all.

She meets Mr Sasaki more frequently. He visits their home often, occasionally coming into the living room to chat quietly, but more often speaking to Jun’s mother in front of the house, as he had done the day Jun eavesdropped on their conversation. His mother returns from work later than ever, and leaves the house for long periods, without a word, even on her days off. Jun suspects she’s meeting Mr Sasaki elsewhere as well.

He doesn’t think they’re having an affair – Mr Sasaki should be far too old and decrepit for her. It’s more likely that Jun’s muteness, his gradual fading, has made her desperate for conversation, for the sound of a sympathetic human voice.

This is what he finds on the beach: a square plastic plant pot, with a large crack down one side; a salt-hardened rubber bouncy ball (no longer bouncy); a nylon stocking twined tight with shining strands of black seaweed; and part of a varnished board with the character for yama carved into it – probably the last part of a surname, for a family which neither he nor anyone else will ever identify. He leaves the board where it sits, next to a shrivelling semi-translucent jellyfish.

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He finds the spout of a watering can, as though it had been housed in some distant greenhouse along with the plant pot. He finds a cartoonishly large red button, such as a clown might wear, and wonders mirthlessly whether he’ll come across a red nose to match. He finds a yellow clothespin, the empty case of a pornographic DVD, and a shredded carp windsock from a koinobori. Like the bare-chested woman on the DVD cover, down to her cascade of dark hair, her dark nipples, the dark line of her panties – like so many things Jun has come across on this beach, the carp’s colours have been harshly bleached by years of direct sunlight; observing it on its patch of sand gives the impression of looking at a washed-out photograph, as though the world itself has become a poorly composed snapshot.

He finds an open pencil case, filled with sand; it is immediately familiar in a way that raises a dull clamour at the fringes of recent memory. He squints at it in the bright light, turns it over, and there at the bottom in once-black text faded to ashen grey, are words in English: For when we found each other it was the loveliest day. Above the words, just as faded but still recognisable, is the outline of two birds, facing beak to beak.

For the first time in many years, Jun experiences a profound bloom of warmth – one caused by no sunbeam or fire – settling on his shoulders, tracing its way down his back, until it seems to play across his entire being.

It’s the beautiful sensation he had experienced in Sendai, on those occasions when he felt that, somehow, he was being watched.

The owner of the notebook, for which Jun had long ago found the cover, was the same person to whom this case once belonged. It had been toted along in the same bag. It had been held by the same hands.

Her hands.

A vague urge in his loins, glowing like a single orange coal, disappears, and Jun casts the DVD case to the ground. No use even considering the risk of throwing it in the bin at home: his mother might notice it and kick up a fuss in disgust. He gouges a shallow hole in the sand with his heel, nudges the case into it and fills the hole back in.

With the pencil case in hand, Jun gathers his other finds into a shopping bag, none of them special, all destined for the bin save for the piece of board with yama on it, which he doesn’t mind leaving to get swept away on the next high tide.

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He doesn’t enter the house when he reaches it, as the car is there and that means his mother is home again. Instead, he moves quietly and quickly past it and enters the woods, going to the stream and crossing it at the axe handle.

He retrieves the container from the hollow and opens it.

His treasures are just as he’d left them, and among them he nestles the pencil case, after shaking as much sand out of it as possible. He stands back, examining the contents of the container, then takes the notebook cover and slips it in next to the case. The two are now propped between a folded creamy-pink furoshiki, patterned with gardenia flowers, and the remains of a light blue book bag with an iron-on patch bearing the Date Masamune helmet logo of Sendai City Museum.

Next to the book bag, almost beneath it, is a black hairclip with three of its teeth missing. The hairclip is otherwise nondescript, and not the kind of thing that Jun usually keeps.

He’s long known that all his treasures belonged to the same person, but only today has he given her a name, in lieu of the one he will never know, as he’s not been able to find it on a single item kept in this container. The name he gives her is Sanami, little wave.

That night Jun has a dream. In the dream Sanami is cresting a small rise on a tree-lined street leading down to Sendai’s coast road. She turns a corner and the road is laid out before her beneath an iron sky, a section of the bike-and-foot path running parallel to it clearly visible. This is where, if she waited, the boy had once passed on the weekends: the same quiet and lonesome student she caught glimpses of elsewhere in the city, different like her, a bit strange and repulsed by the masses, like her. That’s why she’s always come out here, to catch sight of the boy, to observe; but it’s now two years since she’s seen him, cruising slowly by on his bicycle, staring out to sea.

He’s long gone.

She descends to the shore on the far side of a footpath, where only a stretch of sand and stone and shell separates her from the dark green water.

She makes her way to a concrete tetrapod, buried a third of the way up in damp sand. She scrambles up it easily, and, slipping her shoulder bag off, seats herself in a dry crook, her back resting against the slope of one its arms.

She’ll make a journal entry as she usually does, here in her favourite place of solitude.

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She pushes aside her empty bento box, wrapped in the gardenia-patterned furoshiki – her favourite – and takes out her notebook and pencil case, zipping open the latter with cold, bare fingers. An icy wind blows, the breath of winter still strong in it, and a fine spray, cast up from a wave striking the opposite side of the barrier, settles on her face. She shivers and snaps closed the upper buttons of her coat collar. She’s about to draw her hood up as well, but then her attention is caught by the curious wheeling and crying of a gull. Not just one bird, but several, are circling erratically in the air above.

With the force of an explosion, like the result of some great nuclear weapon detonating in the ground beneath, the very earth lurches with sudden upheaval, shuddering wildly. Sanami is nearly thrown from the tetrapod, scrabbling for fresh purchase with hands and feet against its smooth surface.

A dull groan is filling the world, becoming an unfathomable monstrous roar, so deep and powerful that it reverberates not just in her ears but her entire skeleton. Shaking her . . . shaking . . . but that is all she has time to experience, as the earth lurches again, throwing the tetrapod like a toy jack nudged by a child’s finger, and she slides off it backward, falling. The back of her head hits the half-buried arm of another tetrapod at the base of the sea barrier. Her life is saved by the black hairclip she’s wearing. It absorbs some of the impact, three of its teeth snapping off before it flies from her head, but nevertheless she strikes the concrete with enough force to be knocked unconscious.

Jun’s eyes snap open and he awakens at the very moment Sanami is consumed by darkness and unknowing. He’s breathing heavily. The sheet beneath him is damp and there are droplets of sweat on his chest, the likes of which he hasn’t experienced in a dream since the vivid night-terrors of his childhood. He kicks the blanket off his legs, needing the cool air against them, and lies still to slow his heart. As he relaxes, the tendrils of interrupted sleep return, winding around his mind and clouding it with drowsiness again. It’s still dark outside, but there’s a faint blue glow in the sky through the window. He guesses it’s about 4:30 a.m.

He becomes aware of voices, elsewhere in the house, speaking at a volume barely above a whisper. They’re coming from the living room: his mother,

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and someone else. He listens as she finishes speaking and then identifies, with little surprise, the gruff droning of Sasaki’s voice. It’s impossible to make out a single word, but the tone is grave, without humour or colour.

What is Sasaki doing here at this hour?

Jun isn’t sure he cares. That’s their business, and he doesn’t want to be a part of it. Sleep is coming on strong, with the tenacity of some colossal sea creature, determined to drag him back to the deeps.

Jun focuses on Sanami, tumbling from the tetrapod at the mercy of gravity. He needs to reclaim the dream. He must return to it at that moment, to know how it plays out – and perhaps even to exist within it lucidly, to be able to intervene and meet Sanami at long last, to reach out to her after all these long years, which in themselves feel like a bad dream.

But there is no returning. Jun sleeps in inky depths until he wakes with the mid-morning sun in the sky.

It’s Monday. The car is gone again, his mother already at work in town.

Silence reigns in the house, and even the ocean’s murmur seems to be absent.

Jun boils water and prepares noodles. He still feels groggy, half-awake, so he uses the rest of the hot water for green tea. Finishing the noodles, he alternates between sipping the salty broth and the tea until he feels some alertness return. The dream, fragmented and dissolving, must have disturbed the quality of his sleep more than he’d thought.

He decides to spend some time with his treasures. There’s not a breath of wind. He glides among the beech trees, lightly touching the ones that act as his usual guideposts, as though acknowledging old friends.

When he reaches his crossing spot over the stream, he pauses, thinking for an instant that he must have made a mistake: there’s no axe handle at the top of the opposite bank.

But this is definitely the crossing-place – the stepping stone in front of him confirms it. Jun crosses the stream, heart picking up its pace in his chest with worry and the cold stirrings of anger. At the top of the bank he spots the handle, out of sight from the opposite side of the stream, yanked out of the ground and cast down among the leaves and branches nearby, like any other piece of wood. Then he sees the hollow of the tree, and a small, distressed cry emerges from his throat: there’s nothing there.

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Jun falls to his knees, sticking his head through the opening in the vain hope that the container, or some trace of it, will somehow still be inside.

‘You’re not going to find it.’

Jun starts at the voice, coming from close by. He scrambles back from the hollow and rises to his feet in time to see Sasaki standing next to the tree.

‘I found your box,’ says the old man. ‘I’ve taken it away, Jun. It’s time for this collecting to end.’

Jun breathes hard, nostrils flaring with each inhalation.

‘Your mother . . . it’s just terrible what you’ve done to your mother. And I can see now that all this junk you’ve been keeping here has something to do with it.’

‘Where is it?’ Jun demands.

‘Oh, so you can speak after all! Well then, perhaps you and I can get some matters sorted ou—’ ‘Where’s the container, you old bastard? Where are my things?’

An expression of cold disgust creeps like dirty floodwater over Sasaki’s face. ‘There’s no need for that kind of language,’ he tells Jun. ‘We’re going to talk this out, man to man.’

‘I don’t want to talk with you. I want my things back, thief.’

‘We’ll get to that. But first we’re going to converse like two adults. You haven’t been a boy for a long time now. It’s time for you to show that you’ve grown up.’

Jun holds his tongue, glaring, waiting for Sasaki to continue.

‘Now I’ve spoken a lot with your mother these days, as you’re probably aware. She’s not a healthy woman, Jun. This sick life you’ve taken on, not working, not studying, barely speaking a word to her – it’s harming her, in both heart and mind. She can hardly support the two of you on her salary.

And what will you do when she’s gone? You’ve gained no experience, made no name for yourself anywhere, nothing. You just pick up rubbish on the beach and—’ ‘It’s not all rubbish,’ Jun blurts out, his voice trembling. ‘It’s not like that.

It comes . . . it comes from the tsunami.’

Sasaki waves his words away. ‘What does it matter? Rubbish is rubbish.

Even if it’s from the tsunami, it’s all forgotten waste. This box had – what?

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– your special pieces in it or something? A rotten old bag, some filthy cloth – what of them? It’s disgusting.’

‘It’s not like that. . . .’

There’s a lump in Jun’s throat. Helplessness is opening a sinkhole inside him, a dark, bottomless pit. His eyes grow hot; his vision blurs.

Sasaki is shaking his head. ‘I can’t believe what I’m seeing. A grown man, son of a good woman, crying over rubbish – and rubbish is what it is, every last bit of it.’ His voice grows in conviction, in sternness and strength, belying his age. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. You haven’t earned so much as the roof over your head or the food in your belly. Better men than you have perished in this very town just to keep their families warm and fed.’

‘And so what? The coast of Tohoku was filled with people like that, working themselves like ants – it was filled with those people, their homes, their families, everything they built, and the tsunami wiped it all away just the same. It’s like some of them were never even there.’

Sasaki grunts, his eyes narrowing to obsidian slits, studying Jun as he’d study a rotten fish left on his doorstep. ‘Just pathetic,’ he hisses. ‘I’ve never encountered a creature like you in all my years. You’ve gone half mad, and here I am trying to help you.’

‘Go to hell.’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

A tear streaks freely down the side of Jun’s nose, over his lips, coming to hang from his chin. ‘Just give me the box back,’ he pleads at last. ‘We won’t talk about this anymore. Please.’

‘Fine then. Fine. I’ll give you the box back if you need it so much.’

With a sigh, Sasaki bends over to reach a hand behind the wide tree, lifting the Rubbermaid container into view. He tosses it at Jun’s feet, and the lid, which hasn’t been properly sealed, flies off as it tumbles. The container comes to rest on its side at Jun’s feet, its emptiness gaping.

‘Where are my things? It’s the things I want, not the stupid box.’

‘Burned,’ answers Sasaki. ‘I had an old metal bin knocking around. I built a fire in it, nice and hot, and burned them at dawn. Right down there on the beach.’

‘No. . . .’

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‘The pencil case must have been a new addition – wasn’t completely dry.

I had to use a bit of gasoline to finish the job.’

‘You . . . I should—’ ‘You should what? Beat me? Kill me? You haven’t lifted a finger for years outside of your beachcombing, and you won’t start now.’

‘Listen to me!’

‘No, you listen here for just a minute. I’ve been around for seven decades now, so I’ve gleaned a few things about people. Seems clear enough to me, Jun, that you’ve been waiting for something, or think you have, but all you’ve really done is deteriorate. You’re falling apart while you wait for something that will never happen, whatever pointless event that might be.

And you imagine you’re the only person who’s ever felt like that, don’t you?

Well that’s your grand delusion right there, the big diseased root holding you back from getting anywhere – you thinking you’re so different, thinking your hopes and fears and regrets are so removed from everyone else’s, so irreconcilable with ordinary men. The difference between you and a worthy Japanese is that the worthy ones get busy, stay busy, and contribute something to society, while your snivelling self shrivels up and hides away, taking without ever giving, a parasite, waiting for the universe to deliver some meaning to your life, when the truth is that the universe doesn’t care – the gods act when they have something to act on.

‘Those like you, you damned hikikomori, have no place in society. That’s the reality of it. Your type is human flotsam. I suppose my pity should be for your ancestors, as it is for your poor mother. You don’t deserve a second thought.’

Jun stares distantly at the ground in front of Sasaki’s feet, and at the side of his empty container. He is silent, and when he speaks he is surprised at the calm in his own voice; a voice even he has rarely heard.

‘Why, then, are you still trying to talk to me?’

‘Because your mother asked me to,’ responds Sasaki. ‘Because she deserves far more from her son.’

Each time Sasaki speaks it clangs in Jun’s head like a cracked bell. Sasaki doesn’t know to whom the treasures in the container once belonged; he doesn’t know and doesn’t care, has never cared, will not be persuaded to care now. Those things are part of what Jun is, and he realises now that to Sasaki

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Jun is not recognisably a whole person: he’s an anomaly that takes up space, something there and not there in the same continuous instant.

Sasaki is like all the others – all the others in this world except one.

Jun closes his eyes. He isolates the anger coursing through his veins, tugging at his muscle and sinew – and plucks it away, piece by piece.

‘I’m sorry for the way I’ve spoken,’ he says. ‘I will try to change.’

Sasaki regards him with an expression that hovers, briefly, between surprise and mistrust.

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’ A moment of stillness. Then Sasaki produces a hesitant smile. ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

‘I’d like to go back to the house now,’ Jun tells him.

‘As you will.’ He nods down to the empty container. ‘I’ll take care of this thing. We’ll speak more later.’

Jun turns his back on the old man and returns to the stream, crossing it at the stepping stone. His body feels dense, heavy, about to sink uncontrollably to its knees. His tears flow unchecked but, not yet out of earshot, he stifles the single sob that accompanies them. He drifts among the beech trees, wandering through them for a long time.

It occurs to Jun that the only things of Sanami’s – the only things that had ever reached him by way of the ocean at all – were those that could float, and that Sasaki is partially right in his dismissive language, because the floating things are mere material: they were only ever pieces of cloth and plastic in a world choking on them. All that Sanami really was, her physical being, down to her bones, had sunk to the bottom of the sea.

After some time, Jun emerges from the woods and makes his way across the road to the beach. He stays there for the rest of the day, sitting on a ridge of smooth pebbles, watching the surf. Hunger claws at him, but he ignores it. He is repulsed by the idea of Sasaki coming down here to have another go at him, but as the afternoon wears into evening he realises that Sasaki would never notice him; if he took the time to look in this direction he would simply see sand and stone and water, as he’d always done.

His mother is home by the time he returns to the house. She asks him, as he passes down the hall, whether he has seen Mr Sasaki. Because she can’t

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see Jun nod from where she’s standing, he shuts his eyes and summons his willpower as he’d done when he dismantled his anger that morning, and answers, ‘Yes.’ ‘Really? Did he need anything?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well what did he say?’

‘He found some things he wanted to ask me about.’

‘What do you mean? What kind of things?’

‘Beach things.’

‘From the beach?’

‘Yeah. I’m tired.’

Jun goes to close his bedroom door, but pauses when his mother speaks his name from around the corner.

‘Yeah?’

‘It’s just nice to talk to you, is all. To hear you. Thanks.’

‘OK.’ He shuts the door and slides the lock, lays down on his futon, and descends uneasily into sleep.

Sanami blinks her eyes open, seeing only the metallic sky. The back of her head is a ball of white pain. She doesn’t remember where she is until she turns her aching neck and sees the tetrapods.

There’s a siren going off in the city, a ghostly rising wail, overlaid with an announcement from the emergency broadcast system. Sanami doesn’t need to hear the announcement, because she was taught well exactly what that siren means: Get away from the ocean – make for high ground.

But it’s too late. There is already a roar in her ears, different from that of the quake. This one comes from directly beyond the sea barrier, which will succeed in holding off nothing of what is to come.

The tsunami hits with terrible speed, consuming her in the space of a breath, and she is bowled over, twisted and swept along inside its sunless black heart. Her burgundy boots are torn from her feet; a keychain, keyless and clipped to the belt-loop of her jeans as decoration, snags on something in the path of the surge and is torn away.

She is swept miles inland before the tsunami starts to recede, and she rises to the surface now, carried along by the wreckage-strewn waters. She

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claws her way onto a patch of roof as it floats by, and is then drawn out to sea.

The days pass, endless azure over endless swells of dark winter ocean, and by night starry heavens the likes of which Sanami has never seen. The Milky Way is clearer than she ever thought possible, glowing bright with the promise of other worlds. Polaris is before her, steadfast above the horizon.

She is ferried along by hidden currents.

Half in, half out of the water, she no longer feels the cold. The fragment of roof breaks apart, becomes waterlogged, sinks. It seems to Sanami that she should sink with it, and yet she floats on.

Until one day there is land. The ocean bears her towards it for a day and a night – and, as the sun rises red and indifferent behind her, she is cast upon the shore.

And there is the boy, standing on the beach, watching her – yet less a boy now in appearance, but a man. He takes some steps in her direction, then runs, and she stands up, though she cannot feel her legs, or any other part of herself except her swelling heart, for here is the one whom she secretly loved. The one like her, waiting in this faraway place. Here is the man she once watched, as a boy filled with hope and longing, in a time when she was invisible.

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Poetry

Mona Dash

Mona D ash

The Skin of Tradition 1 The foreigner watches a wedding in fascination large bindi squatting on her forehead red saree colouring white limbs.

The elders enthuse at how she sits relaxed on the dusty ground reveres the sacredness of every chant embraces chaos in wondrous happiness.

The Americans, Germans, English, French, Italians flock here, hearts one with conch shells; cross-legged, slurp white rice and dal from banana leaves.

Yet I, I ask for my fork and spoon.

Yet I, born in a small town, tempered by heat, coloured with tradition, married saree-clad in front of the fire, complain of the fumes, my eyes burning. I, brought up within these walls make it a point to question too much:

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Why should I, why must I, bow in respect, hide in shame, follow rules and customs, forget myself?

I question for years.

Later, in London, that city I call home, forgetting that at home tulsi plants sit in courtyards white chita is drawn on Thursday to welcome Lakshmi. ‘A city without temples scratching its skyline cannot be home, ever,’ they pronounce.

I question for years.

2 The answer, thought but not mouthed: You can appreciate culture fold your legs in supplication bend your head, fast all day in a temple knowing tomorrow you will be home.

Today is a thrill, like climbing Machu Picchu like rowing down the Okavango Delta.

When the blood that runs in you today bled on a pyre hundreds of years ago soaking chrysanthemum garlands; when, had you lived in a village fifty years ago, you would be behind a veil waiting, watching; when not that many years back, a marriage marked you with blood red sindoor in black hair closeted rooms, opened legs breeding healthy sons if not white widows.

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Since you know all this, the legs don’t fold here in the dust, in the sacredness even though they do at yoga in the gym.

The heart that belongs, never accepting, runs, runs the farthest, to shed centuries of old skin.

Midlife Crisis Grow your own vegetables plant climbing roses, clematis write, complete a creative course travel around the world exercise, exercise, exercise eat salads only try for the first time, some cannabis learn to salsa learn to live?

Win the lottery have a baby.

Muddled, confused, thoughts milling together modern day fighting with the old Gaugin, Monet prisms, trapeziums the things never tried a threesome yoga?

Meditation, restlessness, hoping, killing, buy another house

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in millions this time, trademark en-suite bathrooms, tiled granite drive, and confidently.

When the questions are not asked the answers do not form.

When everything seems inadequate and futility grows, was this it?

Was this enough? Did I do myself proud?

Did I make anyone proud?

Or could it all have been different?

‘The Skin of Tradition’ and ‘Midlife Crisis’ are included in A Certain Way by Mona Dash, published by Skylark Publications UK, www.skylarkpublications.co.uk.

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from The Handymen of Mahoro from The Handymen Shion Miura of Mahor o

Shion Miura translated by Asuka Minamoto

Old Lady Soneda Makes a Prediction

‘Y

ou’re going to be busy next year,’ declared old lady Soneda.

It was a fine evening in late December. They were in the hospital lounge, which was very quiet. Outside the windows, a threadbare lawn and withered trees with naked branches could be seen. The two large-screen TVs in the room were turned on, but barely audible. One was showing a drama rerun; the other, a live broadcast of a horse race.

The elderly people gathered in the lounge naturally parted into two groups, and sat absorbed in their respective programmes. Occasionally, the creaking of a wheelchair was heard, or a rustling of someone digging into a bag of buckwheat crackers brought from their room.

‘Really? Am I going to be rich?’ asked Tada Keisuke, cutting the sponge cake he had brought into bite-size pieces. Old lady Soneda’s eyes were glued to the sponge cake. On a paper plate Tada placed two slices; the rest he put in a plastic container, saying, ‘Now, don’t eat it all at once, you hear? Save it till snack time, and share with your roommates.’

He poured some hot tea from the vending machine into a paper cup and handed it to her. The old woman soaked her sponge cake in the tea, and began nibbling.

‘Your business will stay the same,’ she said. ‘It’s your personal life that’s going to make you busy. Maybe you’ll end up divorcing that wife of yours.’

Wife? Long gone, Tada thought, as he listened in silence.

‘And you’ll travel, and cry, and laugh – things like that.’

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from The Handymen of Mahoro

‘Travel? Where am I going?’

‘Somewhere far, far away. A place as far as the inside of your mind.’

Old lady Soneda had been distrustful of her mind ever since the doctor told her it was where the ghosts she saw at night came from. To her, the mind was like a distant foreign land where nobody spoke her language.

‘Hey, it’s Kiku and her predictions again,’ a hoarse voice came from out of the blue.

Tada turned to see an old man he often spotted in the hospital, leaning on his drip pole like a cane. ‘What to do? What to do?’ the old man said, shaking his head and walking over to the TV. Old lady Soneda finished off the last drop of her tea with a slurp.

‘Anyway, you’re going to be so busy you won’t have time to come and see me anymore.’

‘That’s not going to happen, Mum.’ Having said that, Tada was at a loss for words. It wasn’t up to him to make any promises. Not knowing what else to say, he said, ‘I think it’s time to go back to your room.’ The old woman nodded obediently.

She inched down the hallway, Tada patiently keeping pace with her. At almost ninety, the old woman’s back was badly bent, her head at the level of Tada’s waist. Back in her room, Tada helped as she climbed laboriously onto her bed, the middle one in the first of two rows of three. Sitting up on the bed with her legs neatly folded, she looked small and round, like a daifuku rice cake.

Placing the plastic container on a steel sideboard, Tada was about to say goodbye when a nurse entered the room. She gave him a quick nod of acknowledgment, making it hard for him to leave.

‘Soneda-san, aren’t you lucky to have such a good son! He’s here to see you again!’ the nurse exclaimed cheerfully. She went over to the old man (or woman – it was impossible for Tada to tell) lying on a bed at the very back of the room, and shouted into his (or her) ear, ‘How’s your back? Let’s shift you a little bit, shall we?’ The curtain was drawn swiftly, and Tada could sense the patient being rolled over to prevent bedsores.

He stood there for a few moments, looking down at the top of old lady Soneda’s head. Her thinning hair was soft and white. Eventually, he opened his mouth.

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‘Bye, Mum. Have a happy New Year.’

‘Yes,’ the old woman replied in a whisper. She always grew quiet when it was time for him to leave. Tada made a speedy exit; when he turned around at the door, old lady Soneda remained hunched over on her bed, still resembling a daifuku.

A ‘good son’ wouldn’t dump his aging mother in the hospital and spend New Year’s without her, or pay a total stranger to visit her in his place, Tada thought. But he also knew that such righteous thoughts arose because the woman in question wasn’t his own mother.

Climbing into his white pickup truck in the parking lot, Tada felt immensely relieved. No matter how bright their cream-coloured walls were, hospitals had a depressing air. He started the engine and lit a cigarette, waiting for the truck to heat up. The smell of ammonia and disinfectant clung to his nose; he rolled down the window slightly to let it out, along with the smoke from his cigarette.

He took his mobile phone out of his jacket pocket. On the fifth ring, a middle-aged woman answered.

‘Soneda Construction.’

‘This is Tada, the handyman. Is Mr Soneda in?’

‘He’s out now. Have you been to see her?’

‘Yes, just now.’

‘Good work, as always. I’ll tell him you called.’

She hung up rather abruptly. He didn’t even have time to warn Mrs Soneda of her possible divorce next year. Oh well, he thought, putting his phone away. The old woman wasn’t predicting anything; she was just sounding off.

He had five New Year decoration appointments tomorrow, and one year-end cleaning job to do. Putting his pickup into gear, Tada headed in the direction of Mahoro Station, and his office.

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from The Handymen of Mahoro

Business Is Booming

J

anuary and February were slow months for a handyman.

In the winter, there were fewer moves to make and lawns in need of weeding. Especially in the first few days of the year, business was virtually non-existent; after all, there weren’t many people out there who wanted some stranger doing odd jobs around the house when they were relaxing with their family, basking in the freshness of a brand-new year.

So, under ordinary circumstances, Tada should have been indulging himself in laziness and sleep in the dingy apartment that served both as his office and his home. But things were a little different this year: he had been asked to look after a dog over the New Year holiday.

The woman who had come to his office had been in her early forties.

She had had a large bag in one hand, and a red plastic pet carrier in the other. When Tada offered her a seat in the reception area, she had timidly brushed the dust from the sofa before sitting down and, after some hesitation, placed the bag on her lap and the pet carrier on the floor.

‘My family is visiting the master’s parents for the holidays,’ she’d said. ‘It wasn’t planned. All the pet hotels are full, and we can’t take her with us because the master’s mother has asthma. And we don’t feel comfortable asking our neighbours and troubling them at New Year. We really don’t know what to do.’

‘I see.’

Tada hadn’t been too thrilled. He wasn’t fond of women who referred to their husbands as ‘master’. This meant that he had an aversion to most married women, because many still used this term. He had to put such thoughts aside, though, as most of his clients were housewives. He had shifted his attention to the small creature at the woman’s feet, whose movements he could sense through the pet carrier.

‘What type of dog is she?’

The woman had lifted the carrier so that Tada could peer inside: it was a Chihuahua. Fantastic, Tada had thought. He walked other people’s dogs all the time, but he didn’t like the small breeds that were so popular nowadays. They were so small they made him nervous. He never knew how long they had to be walked to get the right amount of exercise. And, to

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make things worse, children would giggle when they saw him – tall, ill-shaven, and clad in a worn jacket – walking a tiny dog.

‘She’s absolutely precious. Let me take her.’

He had handed the woman a simple request form and contract, which she filled out and signed. Name: Sase Kentaro. Age: 42. Address: 4-15 Hisao, Mahoro City. Tada was not fond of women who wrote their husbands’ names on forms instead of their own.

From her large bag, the woman had pulled out some essentials: dog food, a bowl, fresh toilet sheets, the Chihuahua’s favourite toy. After the woman had given him instructions on the appropriate amount of dog food and assured him that long walks weren’t necessary, Tada agreed to care for the dog until noon on January 4.

He always asked his clients to pay in advance, and in cash. The woman had obliged without a fuss and left in a hurry, barely giving him time to hand her the receipt. She hadn’t bothered to take the dog out of its container to hold it, or even to say goodbye.

Thus, Tada had ended up spending New Year with a dog.

Just like the dogs he had seen on TV, the Chihuahua had large, misty eyes, and it was constantly shivering. Thinking that perhaps it was cold, Tada spread a blanket in the cardboard box that served as its bed; when that didn’t work, he played with it using the toy the woman had brought, assuming it was frightened of its unfamiliar surroundings. The trembling persisted. Tada grew concerned about its health and woke up repeatedly in the middle of the night to make sure it was alive.

But no matter how hard he tried, the dog continued to shudder. Tada realised that that was probably just the way Chihuahuas were. Finally, on January 2, he decided not to let the dog’s constant quivering distress him.

His nerves strained from having worried so much, Tada spent the day drinking and dozing after he’d taken the dog for a brief morning walk. It was a docile animal. When he called, ‘Chihuahua,’ it would come happily running over, but otherwise it was content being left on its own indoors.

Faint, scratchy sounds could be heard every time it walked across the dusty wooden floor of his flat.

It had been a while since he’d last shared his home with another living being. Perhaps because of this, Tada had a dream. In his dream, the pages

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of a thick book were turning in the wind, as if to beckon him. Waves of nostalgia gave way to a sense of discomfort, and Tada opened his eyes slightly.

The street outside his building was usually busy with drivers who wished to circumvent the bustle of Mahoro Station as they headed to the city centre.

But it was New Year, and traffic was sparse. The sound of pages flipping that he’d heard in his dream must have been that of an occasional car passing beneath his window. Still drowsy, he looked around the room absentmindedly. Chihuahua was in its cardboard bed, fast asleep.

He was preparing instant ramen for dinner when the phone rang in his office. This can’t be good, he thought. He filled Chihuahua’s bowl with dog food and nudged it toward the animal with his foot. The phone continued to ring. Reluctantly turning off the stove, Tada opened the curtain that separated his living space from his office, and reached for the phone.

‘Tada Handyman Shop.’

‘It’s Oka, from Yamashiro-cho.’ Tada was about to wish him Happy New Year, but Oka proceeded briskly: ‘You free tomorrow? I need you from 5:30 in the morning till about 8:30 at night.’

All day, when the New Year’s holiday wasn’t even over? Tada grew suspicious. ‘What will I be doing?’

‘I couldn’t get around to cleaning my yard and shed at the end of the year, so I need you to do that. But what I really want you to do is monitor a bus.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘We’ll talk more tomorrow. See you at 5:30.’

‘Oka-san, Oka-san,’ Tada hurriedly called into the receiver. ‘I’m taking care of somebody’s dog now, so I don’t know if I’ll be available for that long. . . .’

‘Bring the mutt with you. Just let it run around in the yard.’

As soon as he’d uttered the last syllable, Oka hung up. Tada slammed down the receiver and returned to the stove. Chihuahua had licked the bowl clean, and Tada’s ramen noodles had swollen into an ominous lump.

‘We’re going to work tomorrow, Chihuahua. Make sure you get enough sleep,’ said Tada. Chihuahua looked up at him, shivering, then stretched and went back to its bed. You’re the only one that listens to me, Tada thought. ‘Oh, you sweet little mutt,’ he sang as he added dry soup-mix to

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the pot. Stifling his sense of taste and touch, he wolfed down the noodles, which had bulged into a brain-like mass.

The next morning, before sunrise, Tada headed for Yamashiro-cho in his pickup. His cleaning tools were in the back of the truck, and Chihuahua was beside him on the passenger seat, quietly inside the pet carrier.

Yamashiro-cho was about a twenty-minute drive from Mahoro Station. It was an area of apartment buildings and farms, and Tada’s eyes were drawn to the large farmhouses presumably owned by land-owners as he drove past.

Oka’s house stood along one of the main roads. A giant tree spread its branches in the yard, as if to display the family’s long history in the region.

Oka had destroyed all his fields and turned them into apartments, and enjoyed a life of retirement supported by his rental income.

Tada parked his truck in the gravelled front yard. Oka was standing in a corner engaged in some sort of exercise, but he stopped swaying his arms and came over when he saw Tada get out. Again, Tada didn’t get a chance to deliver his New Year’s greetings. Picking up a folder from a garden rock and pressing it forcefully against Tada’s chest, Oka began to bellow orders without pausing for breath. ‘Impressive. Right on time. Clean the yard and shed as you always have. While you’re doing that, keep an eye on the buses.

That’s the main reason you’re here today. Hold this folder.’

Tada took it, his eyes moving back and forth between the sheets of paper inside and Oka’s bald head, gleaming under an outdoor lamp. There were two sheets of paper, both with a handwritten list of what looked like bus times on the left; the right side was blank.

‘You see that bus stop in front of our house?’ said Oka, pointing toward the road. Tada didn’t need to turn around to see what Oka was talking about.

Right outside the Oka residence was the Yamashiro-cho 2-chome stop, the buses coming and going in full view of the yard. ‘I have a feeling they’re running fewer buses than they’re supposed to. It’s been bothering me since last year. Whether going to the hospital or the station, the bus is an important means of transportation for elderly folks around here, including myself.’

Oka’s tone was serious. The bus that passed his house transported passengers from the Yamashiro apartment complex to Mahoro Station, by

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way of Mahoro Municipal Hospital. Tada’s mind was elsewhere – geez, it’s cold today, his breath is so white – but he didn’t let it show. ‘So what exactly should I be doing?’

‘While you’re cleaning, watch the bus stop like a hawk. I’ve written down the holiday bus times for you, so just fill up the right side of the paper with what time the buses actually arrive. In due course, you’ll see for yourself how corrupt that bus route is, full of deception and delays.’

‘I see,’ said Tada.

Receiving his wage for the day’s work, Tada put on his work gloves and unloaded a rake, rubbish bags and other items from his truck. Then, remembering, he called out to the older man, who was about to go back inside his house: ‘Can I let the dog out in the yard?’

‘Suit yourself. The first bus is scheduled to come at 5:50. I’m busy, so I’m counting on you. Gather evidence against Yokochu so we can show them up for the lazy bastards they are.’

Though Mahoro was technically part of Tokyo, its bus routes were, for some unknown reason, monopolised by the Yokohama Chuo Kotsu Bus Company, or Yokochu for short. Placing the folder on top of the gatepost, Tada thought to himself: Rich people ask for the strangest things. Through a window facing the yard, he could see Oka sprawled out in the living room, watching TV. It wasn’t fair, but he wasn’t paid to complain. Knowing this, Tada murmured, ‘I see’ once more, and spent the day cleaning the yard and shed, jotting down the bus arrival times and keeping an eye on Chihuahua, who was delighted to be able to run around outdoors.

The last bus passed Oka’s house at 8:30 p.m., heading for the station. It had grown dark a while before. Tada was ready to leave, having loaded his truck with his cleaning tools and the rubbish he’d collected. Letting out a sigh of exhaustion, he opened the front door with the folder in hand.

‘I’ve finished. Could you come and have a look?’

Oka appeared from the back of the house, his face flushed; he had apparently been drinking. The neatly trimmed yard was illuminated by the outdoor lamp. Peering out, Oka gave a satisfied nod. ‘Well, how’d it go?’

‘I’m sorry to have to say this, but the buses seemed to be running more or less on schedule, at least for today. There were a few delays due to traffic,

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but the total number of buses that passed coincided with the timetable you’d given me.’

‘That’s strange.’ Frowning, Oka took the folder from Tada. ‘Are you sure you didn’t miss any? How do I know your record is accurate?’

Then do it yourself, moron. Mentally strangling Oka, Tada collected himself and put on a smile. ‘I’m quite sure I didn’t miss any. For lunch, I ate the rice balls your wife made, sitting outside the gate with my eye on the road. And when I had to take a piss – excuse me, answer nature’s call – I used a plastic bottle in the corner of the yard, with my attention on the road the whole time. Shall I show you the bottle as proof of my vigilance?’

‘That won’t be necessary.’

‘All right then.’ There was no bottle; he had pissed on the roots of a camellia tree. ‘Well, I should get going. If there’s anything you need, just give me a call.’

The old man doesn’t know what he’s doing, Tada thought as he walked over to his truck. Bus drivers probably got paid extra for working over the New Year’s holiday, and that makes manpower readily available. If Oka really wanted confirmation of Yokochu’s dishonesty, the surveillance should have been conducted on an ordinary weekday. But Tada wasn’t about to offer such advice. What a stupid job, he thought; the first job of the year, at that. As he opened the driver’s door, he realised that the dog was missing.

‘Chihuahua, where’d you go?’ he called out in the dark yard. He waited for the dog to emerge; it did not. The sound of the wind in the trees made it difficult to guess where the creature might be. This is bad. Tada circled the yard, calling, ‘Chihuahua, Chihuahua’ in a hushed voice. The dog was nowhere to be seen.

‘This is why I can’t stand dogs with small brains,’ Tada muttered to himself. Assailed by the disturbing image of an animal splattered unrecognisably on the road, he hastily left the Oka estate and looked up and down the street. Cars were passing, but there was no sign of a canine casualty.

Then Tada caught sight of a figure sitting on a bench by the bus stop.

He approached the figure and was about to ask, ‘Have you seen a Chihuahua?’ but stopped. There was Chihuahua, in the arms of this stranger, a man in a black coat who was about the same age as Tada.

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Sensing Tada’s presence, the man looked up. The headlights of a passing car lit his face. His gaze was unsteady, as though he were fumbling blindly for a switch in a dark room, but it now focused on Tada. ‘Got a cigarette?’ he suddenly asked. Tada pulled out a pack from his jacket pocket and handed it to the man along with his ninety-nine-cent lighter.

‘Lucky Strikes,’ said the man. Holding Chihuahua in his right arm, he used his left hand to put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. ‘This dog yours, Tada?’

‘Yes.’ ‘That’s surprising.’ The man got up from the bench and placed both the cigarettes and the dog in Tada’s arms. Seemingly troubled by Tada’s vague reaction, the man frowned and tilted his head to one side, his cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. ‘You don’t know who I am, do you?’

‘Yes, I do,’ said Tada. He hadn’t known at first, but now he remembered.

‘You’re Gyoten, aren’t you?’

Gyoten Haruhiko had been Tada’s classmate back when they were students at Mahoro Secondary School. They spent three years together in the same classroom, yet had never spoken to each other. In fact, Gyoten never spoke to anyone. He got good grades and wasn’t bad-looking, so he was popular among the female students of other schools, who would hang around and wait at the school gate for a chance to see him. However, in his own school, Gyoten was known as an eccentric. He didn’t talk. He was stubbornly committed to being silent; teachers who called on him and classmates who approached him to discuss school-related business were invariably ignored.

Gyoten’s reticence was so thorough that, to everyone’s amazement, his voice was heard only once in the three years that Tada knew him. They were making model houses out of paper in an art class, and Gyoten was using the guillotine. A few boys who had been fooling around crashed into him, sending his right pinky flying into the air. ‘Ow,’ Gyoten said. Blood spurted like fireworks from the wound, and the classroom erupted in panic. Gyoten picked up his own finger from the floor. Tada could still picture Gyoten on that day, bending down as casually as though he were picking up some change.

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The school nurse rushed to the scene, and Gyoten was taken to hospital in an ambulance. Acting quickly, the doctors succeeded in reattaching Gyoten’s pinky. A few days later, he was back in school. The students who had been responsible for the accident had tears in their eyes as they apologised. But Gyoten, his right hand swathed in bandages, had gone back to being his silent, eccentric self.

Gyoten’s brief utterance of pain was the first and last time any of his classmates heard him speak. Those who hadn’t been present pretended not to care, saying they were glad not to have witnessed such an inauspicious event; still, they seemed disappointed, like sailors who had missed out on hearing the song of the Sirens. Gyoten was avoided more than ever, an unfathomable organism no one could relate to.

‘Yup, it’s me,’ Gyoten said, raising his right palm in front of Tada’s eyes.

Even in the dark, a white scar was visible, forming a ring around the base of his little finger. ‘What are you doing here?’

Instead of answering, Tada asked, ‘What about you?’

‘I was visiting my parents for the holidays. They live around here. Now I’m on my way to the station.’

‘You missed the last bus.’

‘I know. I couldn’t get on it because I was holding your dog.’

Tada looked at Gyoten, who flicked his cigarette butt away and smiled, his mouth in the shape of a crescent moon.

‘You’ve changed, Gyoten.’

‘You think? Not as much as you.’

‘I’ve got my car. I’ll give you a lift.’

Tada led the way to his pickup. He had noticed a while ago that Gyoten, clad in jeans and the kind of coat sported by businessmen, had his bare feet in a pair of brown acupressure sandals. Though Gyoten’s appearance disconcerted Tada, he decided not to think about it: their encounter was a fleeting one, and would end the moment they arrived at the station. The warmth of the dog in his arms made him feel a renewed sense of relief at having found it. He tried not to pay attention to Gyoten, who was humming loudly as he trailed behind.

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Gyoten climbed into the passenger seat, with Chihuahua in the pet carrier on his lap. ‘So you own this truck, Tada? What kind of work do you do? Huh? What do you do?’

He wasn’t going to shut up until he received an answer. Surrendering, Tada took one hand from the wheel to pull out his business card case from the hip pocket of his work trousers. He handed the case to Gyoten, who took one out. On the front of the card were Tada’s name and the name of his shop; on the back, his address and phone numbers. Gyoten lifted the card, holding it against the light from the street lamps that whizzed past.

‘You own a ramen shop?’

‘Why in the hell would you think that?’ Tada decided he needed a smoke to steady his nerves, and puffed away intensely without even opening a window. Gyoten held out his right hand; Tada placed his pack of Lucky Strikes on the outstretched palm.

‘You don’t have the best name for running a business,’ Gyoten said, slowly breathing out smoke toward the car’s ceiling. ‘Don’t your customers say things like, ‘Hey Mr Handyman, your name’s Tada, just do it for me for free’?’

Tada responded with the cruel silence of a taut whip, but Gyoten, unabashed, went on. ‘So why’d you name it Tada Handyman Shop? The character you used for ‘shop’ makes it sound like a ramen joint. You should’ve called it Tada Handyman Services. But then again, combining Tada with the word ‘service’ really makes it look like you’d help people out for nothing.’

They were approaching a roundabout that led to the station. After enduring Gyoten’s babbling for almost twenty minutes, Tada finally opened his mouth. ‘Gyoten, I have a favour to ask.’

‘Your wish is my command.’

‘Keep your goddamn mouth shut until we get there.’

‘I’ll do my best to fulfil your request. But before I stop talking, will you do me a favour too?’

‘What do you want?’

‘Let me stay at your place tonight.’

‘Not going to happen.’

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‘Fine,’ said Gyoten. He shifted his gaze back to Tada’s card, thoroughly examining both sides. ‘On cold nights like this, my pinky hurts, like it’s going to get ripped off.’

The light turned red, and Tada hit the brakes. The only sound that could be heard was Chihuahua whimpering. Gyoten tapped the container lightly to console the animal, then pulled out the built-in ashtray to extinguish the third cigarette he’d taken from Tada’s pack.

The pickup curved around the traffic circle in front of Mahoro Station and came to a stop at the south exit. Swarms of people were pouring out: families that had been doing their holiday shopping, and couples probably returning from their New Year visits to shrines. Gyoten unbuckled his seatbelt, got out, and put the carrier with Chihuahua inside back on the passenger seat.

‘I was just joking, man. My pinky’s fine. No pain; moves like it used to.’

The door closed, but Tada stayed where he was. Gyoten was lying. When he’d pulled out the ashtray, Tada had seen his pinky stiffen awkwardly. It had also been hard not to notice its colour, strikingly pale compared to his other fingers.

The business card case had been tossed onto the dashboard. Reaching over to put it back in his pocket, Tada glanced at the red pet carrier on the passenger seat. Abandoned beside it was the card that Gyoten had pulled out.

Tada got out of the truck and ran up the stairs to the station. Pushing through the crowds, he rushed to the turnstiles: Gyoten wasn’t there. He also scanned the ticket vending machines, but Gyoten was nowhere to be found. Was he hidden in the flood of people descending from the platforms?

Tada went back to the turnstiles and called, ‘Gyoten!’

‘Looking for me?’ The voice came from behind. Taken aback, Tada turned around and saw Gyoten leaning against a column, both hands in his coat pockets. He dangled one sandal loosely from his bare toes, making it swing back and forth as if to tease Tada. ‘You’re so naïve. I didn’t think you would really come after me.’

Tada wasn’t angry that he had been tested. He was more relieved at having found Gyoten in time. Letting out a deep breath, Tada said, ‘Remember, just for tonight.’

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‘If you hadn’t turned up in ten minutes, I was going to go crash at your office anyway,’ said Gyoten unemotionally, leading the way back to the pickup.

‘How were you going to find it when you forgot to take my card with you?’

‘I didn’t forget. It seems you’re the one that’s forgotten. I was born and raised in Mahoro too, you know. An address near the station? All I need is one look to figure out where it is.’

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Poetry

Mehvash Amin

Mehvash Am in

Islamabad There are the gentrified mountains, not Enough to unsettle, no, but enough To be a logical foil for the gleaming city Construed for a new nation.

Climb them, and you see it spread-eagle Its green grid all the way to the lake Beyond the brume and smoke of progress.

(They are clawing out dark earth to Make way for a new air-rail, after all.)

I think of decades ago, when I used to Trek up here and cycle on the smooth tarmac Of new roads; I also remember Heartache, and the loss that Destroyed the neatness of Geometry and grids, pummelled

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Order into an ordinary chaos.

Beyond that, memories of my parents Taking me home as the streetlights Dipped and rose luminously, the visible path Of a heavenly comet – a child’s imagination Enmeshed with sleep. Then our new house, On the same road as the Field Marshal’s.

And seeing his handsome face rise balloon-like Over the high wall of his estate – He had built his garden above ground level, You see, so he trod a higher earth than us.

Well, naturally, he had been President.

Then tales of fire and brimstone Singeing the sky, when the army ammunition Dump spit out death, cancelling out lives there, But here, simply torpedoing a steel dolphin Into our garden. It chose not to explode With the desultory casualness of fate.

Twin towers fell elsewhere, and journalists Rooting in the lobby of a hotel Rushed to the rooftop when it was time To pitch practised stories.

Later, that same hotel would explode, Shock waves sculpting plastics Into furious artworks of destruction And extending their clever skills to our house, To morph glass into jagged waterfalls

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And doorknobs into missiles. Too soon, Our city became another city, loops of wire Crisping its horizon, painted barricades Brutalising its roads insistently. Afghans Who had hawked lapis and silver and Wondrous kilims by the stream were Herded off to their camps; grenades Were tossed into smart restaurants And diplomats went deep into fortified Enclaves. That innocence of a new city, That should have fetched hope, fought off Doom instead, its encircled cancers Spreading sly shoots beyond.

What happened in this city did not Stay in the city, we all knew. Still, Every time I ascend from my new Home in the plains to my hometown, Every time the blue mountains Into which the aircraft had slammed Rise like some stone memory My heart rekindles joss-sticks of old loves And I wait to be returned to That house on the hill, amidst poplars – City of hope. City of embers. My city.

‘Islamabad’ is included in Capitals, edited by Abhay K. and published by Bloomsbury India.

The anthology includes a poem on every capital city in the world.

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from The Comedian from The Comedian Kim Seong Joong

Kim Seong Joong translated by Stella Kim

T

he man I love is on TV. He is a comedian. Like a professional pool player who carefully plans his shot, he waits for the right moment between sentences and makes people freeze in place. Slow speech and lackadaisical movement. Then, words spoken out of nowhere that baffle the audience for a moment, followed by erupting laughter as realisation dawns on them.

It took a long time for people to appreciate his jokes.

I met him when he was still unknown to the world. It was in a bar that resonated with the pitter-patter of raindrops on the tin roof. A small, grubby bar with rather expensive snacks, if I remember correctly. The comedian sat watching the falling rain and occasionally jotting something in his notebook. I hadn’t read a single poem since I’d closed my textbooks for the last time, and I merely assumed that he was a poet. But actually, what he’d written down in that bar was a catchphrase that later became his trademark and even featured in a commercial.

At the time, I was bored out of my mind at work. I’d first turned up at what would become my workplace after coming across a help-wanted ad.

When I arrived, the person who was to become my boss simply pointed to a corner in the office, where there was a phone on a desk enclosed by a glass partition that reminded me of a fish tank. The only reason he hired me was because he believed customers wouldn’t trust a business where the owner himself answered the phone. There were only three or four calls a day. I sat

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confined behind the glass partition and grew bigger and bigger with all kinds of thoughts and daydreams, like rising muffin dough in a paper cupcake liner.

I went to a different fish-tank on paydays – a small bar whose tin walls had holes for windows and where artists and musicians floated around like tropical fish. I was a girl trying hard to make it seem as if I belonged. Me – an unlit light bulb with no electricity running through it. A nineteen-yearold frozen in place like something affixed to a wall. Then, at last, someone offered me a hand.

‘The zoo, you want to go?’

I can’t remember his first words or the topic of the conversation we’d just had, but I vividly remember the shape of his open mouth when he uttered those six words (and paused at the comma). That day, I went on to spend a considerable amount of my pay on drinks and was released from the wall.

I was the first person to hear the words that have now become his slogan.

I’d kept this memory until now for my vanity.

The zoo was a strangely shaped fish tank. Captives of different species sat in the cages – half still with pride, and the other half without. In the primate house, we gaped at the deep wrinkles on orangutans. One that had sat motionless like a piece of old furniture suddenly began to bang its head against the wall. Startled, I jumped back from the glass, and the comedian let out the laugh that is now famous.

‘Scared?’

Terrified, I answered in my head. There was something marvellous about the orangutan’s struggle as it continued to bang its head, sending vibrations across the glass pane. I’d never thrown my body against something. I had always feared that one day the fish tank that encased me would shatter and I would be spilled out, fragile and old.

The comedian liked to crush the coarse grains of brown sugar in his mouth, and he liked to take his pet fish for walks. They never lived very long. As if he were buying new flowers when the old ones withered, he threw out his pet fish when they died and went to buy new ones. On those afternoons, he always came to see me.

The image of a twenty-seven-year-old man, holding a plastic bag and waiting for me, is still vivid in my memory. Fish swam leisurely in the

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transparent bag. We either walked or took the subway. The fish added tension to our otherwise ordinary dates. Our pace naturally slowed to keep the water from churning about, and I liked that. When we ran out of things to say, we gazed at the fish in silence. It was strangely addictive to watch their supple movements, and I’d even asked him once what type of fish it was.

‘Well, they sell them at E Mart for about seventy won each,’ he replied and scratched one of his small ears, which had helices bent slightly inwards.

Pricked-up ears would be more appropriate for a giraffe, I thought. If I had to pick an animal that he resembled, apart from the ears, it would definitely be a giraffe. A giraffe with a face neither young nor old at the end of its long neck. Because of its long neck and legs, the tall creature ambled and glided slowly; it could never become agile. It was the same for the comedian when he was carrying his fish.

‘I think I love you,’ he whispered to me one day, as if nibbling on the leaves at the tip of a tall tree. My face reddened like a flamingo.

That was the summer of the year I turned twenty.

It is now summer for the thirty-nine-year-old me as well.

When the days of his anonymity were over, he asked me to take care of his fish. I cleaned the tank, put it on top of my vintage TV and pressed the power button on my remote control.

And there he was. It was a quiz show where twenty or so celebrities competed for the viewers’ entertainment. I saw him, half hidden behind another celebrity. As soon as I spotted his small ears and slowly blinking eyes, I almost felt tears come to mine.

In his first appearance, he sat without uttering a word. Then abruptly he stood up and left the set. Upon his return, the bewildered host asked him what happened, and he answered unperturbed, ‘I had to pee.’

Then he slowly blinked. Laughter gushed out from the audience like a strong stream of piss.

Like a giraffe eating all the leaves of a tree from the bottom up, he slowly and patiently expanded his territory in the performances that followed. I could see the expectation in his face as he waited for people to laugh at his wittily self-deprecating yet not-at-all uncomfortable remarks. If no one

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laughed, his face betrayed a certain anxiety for a split second before he regained his composure and moved on.

I was more surprised by the tiny black dot I spotted on the left side of his chin than by the fact that he was on TV. I’d always walked on his right, so I’d never taken a close look at his left side.

Once, he appeared on TV dressed as a beggar. Clad in ragged clothes and with a wig on his head, he drew bursts of laughter from the audience.

Watching the people laugh the world away, I felt tears roll down my cheek.

It was strangely touching to watch him desperately cast his net of comedy, and see the audience laughing with mouths open like a school of fat fish.

As someone who kept even the most trivial feelings of shame buried deep in my heart, I thought him the most courageous person in the world, engaging in a tug o’ war with the audience by using himself as the butt of the joke.

And how wonderful the TV was, broadcasting my lover’s charms just as they were in real life. I was able to smile and laugh for different reasons than the audience when I noticed his trembling eyelashes in moments of distress or his nostrils expanding and contracting as he stifled a yawn. It was also fascinating to see people repeat his catchphrase. Everywhere I went, there were so many people mimicking him that it seemed as if I’d only imagined our breakup.

One night, I spent a long time watching the occupants of the flat directly across the street from mine. The whole family sat in the living room, watching a comedy show and laughing hysterically. When I thought about how my lover was on all the screens of all the TVs in all the rooms behind all the windows I could see from my own, I felt a more intimate connection with this city where I had no friends.

While the comedian enjoyed his heyday, I kept several fish as pets.

My boss made and sold simple wooden furniture that was easy to put together, and it became quite popular. As orders started pouring in, he hired two more people to split the workload. He always called for me after his first cup of coffee. Although I’d worked for him for several years, he still appended kun to my name. He said he first started doing it because he thought I looked like a boy when we first met, and then he kept on doing

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it to distract himself from thinking I was a girl because he felt a bit self-conscious spending all day in the small workshop with a woman. And now, he’d just got used to it. He was a simple and honest person, and his personality was visible like the grain of a tree. He was always immersed in his work, but one night when I was working late, he said something to me that sounded like a proposal. I hung my head and moved into another small fish tank: marriage.

The comedian’s neck grew longer and longer as his wealth and popularity soared, and I felt ever more distant from him. He starred in several adverts as a character who never smiled at anything. Holding a plateful of fried chicken and with a huge frown on his face, he didn’t look funny to me but rather flustered.

By that time, our relationship had worn down to something blunt, like friendship, but the connection had not yet been completely severed. He called me once or twice a year to remind me that he hadn’t forgotten about me.

‘You still have my fish tank, right?’ He answered with a question when I told him I was getting married soon. In the small aquarium, a fish flicked its tail and changed direction.

‘I only wanted to make other people laugh because I couldn’t laugh myself. Funny, isn’t it?’

A clicking sound travelled from his end of the line to mine. I knew what it was. It was the sound of him clicking a pen because he couldn’t think of anything to say.

A few months later, a drug-related scandal made headlines around the country, and he was the most prominent celebrity involved. A picture of the comedian with his cap pulled down over his eyes appeared in the newspaper, and that was the last I saw of him. A fish doesn’t leave its track in the water after it has swum away. And just like that fish, the comedian disappeared without a trace.

The next year, some tabloid magazine published an article about him, saying that he was now living on a different continent with a woman who had borne his child. The tabloid was not a particularly reliable one, but I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about his child. At times, I asked the fish in his aquarium about him, but it only swayed its tail sideways.

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‘You know, they say a carpenter’s wife becomes a knot in a tree in her next life,’ my husband said one day as he prepared a piece of wood. There was a mean knot, protruding in the centre of the piece of wood he was holding.

He explained that there once was a carpenter who was always away, building other people’s houses, and that his wife was always sad that her husband never came home. Resenting her husband for abandoning her, the carpenter’s wife died and was reborn as a knot to annoy him. ‘Or maybe it’s because she was so lonesome that her loneliness felt like a knot in the wood.’ Gentle wrinkles formed around his eyes as he flashed an embarrassed smile. Around that time, he was often away on business trips, and this was his way of apologising instead of saying so outright.

My husband and I were married for fourteen years. Every day, when I woke up in the morning, my life flowed into the next day and moved to the same beat, like wallpaper with an endlessly repeating pattern. I liked that kind of order. When he passed away, I wept a lot, but it was because I despised myself for having acted the part of the faithful wife despite bearing another knot in my heart.

The end of my married life meant I no longer had to make a cup of vegetable juice and place it on the glass table top every day, as there was no longer anyone there to drink it. It also meant the order that had held up my daily life was now gone. When it disappeared, the time I hadn’t even noticed passing by jumped out from the wall and started shoving a mirror at me. You will soon be a middle-aged woman. Without memories to cherish, you won’t even get to old age, just middle age. I wanted to stop living like a ghost, but I didn’t know how.

Then one Sunday morning, I heard the comedian’s voice on TV for the first time in many years. It was coming from some unknown comedian doing an impression of him in his heyday. His voice was surprisingly close to the comedian’s, but he looked nothing like him. His impression was not quite there yet, but it was great to learn that there was someone who made a living by doing an impression of the comedian. And I prayed for the show to be replayed over and over, even if it was just an imitation.

It was then that I received a postcard from him.

*

*

*

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After over twelve hours on the plane, I landed on another continent. Foreign languages pouring out from people around me rang in my ears like speaking in tongues.

Kiki, the person who came to greet me, wasn’t a woman. She wasn’t a man either. As she approached me from afar, with her champagne-coloured hair and in a paisley-patterned dress, I thought she was a woman. But her square shoulders, the protruding ridge between her eyebrows, and her big, strong hands hinted that she’d been born a man. She was holding a small sign with my name on it.

When I said hello, Kiki flashed a big smile. The wrinkles hidden under heavy makeup creased around her eyes. She seemed like an old woman, but her brisk and agile movements were full of youthful vitality. It was difficult to tell how old she was.

‘Welcome! My car’s outside.’

In her small car, she began to ask me questions: Are you tired from the flight? Have you travelled a lot? or something to that effect. I picked up a few words from her rapid-fire English, pieced together the rest of the sentence in my head, and stammered out short answers. Realising that I wasn’t very fluent in English, she made an effort to slow her speech and even took her hands off the wheel to explain with gestures. Our conversation continued in an oblique but polite manner.

As we drove through the town, I was overwhelmed with contentment, as if I’d just finished a beautiful book. The scenery outside reminded me of the pages of a pop-up book I’d read as a child. It had been a present from my father when he came back from a trip to some foreign country, and every time I turned the page, something new popped up and startled me.

A picture of golden-haired Alice jumped out at me from the first page. Then trees popped up on the next page, followed by a rabbit wearing a jacket with a pocket (you could even take out his watch and chain from it). Sometimes, the mean queen and her soldiers, each with a trumpet for a body, appeared in a line. Outside the window, the scenery of the city changed again and again, and interesting people who looked like the Mad Hatter or the Cheshire Cat passed by. Like Alice with an outstretched neck, I widened my eyes.

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A problem arose when we arrived at the hotel. The room I’d booked was already occupied. The travel agency apologised about the mishap and offered to give me a refund or find me a new hotel within a few hours.

Recognising my predicament, Kiki shrugged and declared, ‘Come stay at my house.’ As if this were the obvious solution to the problem. ‘I have a guest room.’

When I waved my hands in protest, she said, ‘Why stay somewhere else when you have a friend’s place to crash?’

A friend of a friend, to be precise. It was less than two hours since we’d met, and she was already calling me her ‘friend’. Unaccustomed to refusing an invitation, I meekly followed Kiki as she started ahead with my luggage.

No matter how closely I looked around her flat, there was only one room.

‘I started sleeping in a tent because of severe insomnia,’ Kiki said nonchalantly, pointing to the prism of her escape from sleeplessness pitched in the corner of her living room. ‘It’s a lot cosier,’ she added with a giggle.

During my stay, Kiki did her best to make me feel at home. Frankly, I was being cared for as though I were a neurotic mess or a dim-witted child. It was rather fitting since I couldn’t really understand what she said; I wasn’t skilled enough at using a fork and knife to separate the meat from the bones, and I wasn’t good at reading people. Whenever I felt uncomfortable about these things, I kept silent. I believed it would protect me like a heavy coat from the cold air outside.

The Birdcage, where the comedian had worked, was in an alley a good distance from the main street. It was four blocks from Kiki’s flat. The alley led to the back of a building and the staircase of a fire escape, and it was dark even during the day. On the way to The Birdcage, I noticed dogs licking wounds on their legs and immigrants with skin as black as the night sky selling handicrafts. As though there might be subtle traces of the comedian hidden everywhere, I scrutinised the surroundings and tried to memorise it all.

The steel door, spray-painted with the name of the venue, was locked.

When Kiki opened the door and flipped on the switches, the store lit up and the fan began to hum lazily. There were about twenty wooden tables, and a small stage in the corner. The tables were glossy, burnished by elbows,

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and the cushions on the chairs were flattened from years of use. It felt like a place for long-time regulars.

‘If you hadn’t come, we would’ve been really disappointed,’ said Kiki, pointing to a photograph of an eccentric group of people on the wall. ‘All of us here . . . I really liked Joe. He was a quiet kid.’

The comedian had just been summoned by an unfamiliar name. Little by little, the part of his life I’d never seen began to emerge.

‘He was like a set of two books with the first volume missing. He never mentioned anything about his life before coming here.’

The light coming in through the window cast a shadowy net across Kiki’s face. With a slight frown, she focused on whatever emotion she was feeling.

The light continued to change, flowing and gathering across the pattern on the windows.

‘Would you like to take a look?’ Kiki asked, and I finally felt like I could breathe again.

‘He told me to put them in here,’ she said as she placed a coffee tin on the white linen tablecloth. Unable to comprehend what she meant, I merely stared at it. It had a wrapper featuring a coffee plant and something written in English. Using body language and hand gestures, Kiki explained to me that, according to his wishes, the comedian’s remains were stored in the coffee tin.

When he’d come in one day as a customer and told her he wanted to perform on stage, Kiki said, she wondered what this Asian man with his slow and awkward speech could possibly do. In his first performance, the comedian was naked but for a pair of faux-fur leggings and a bow tie and presented himself as ‘Paul with a failing sex life’. The louder the applause grew, the more fleshed out Paul’s life became. Paul, from Buenos Aires; Paul, nervous yet curious about one-night stands; old-fashioned Paul in the modern world; Paul, who fills his failed adventures with lewd fantasies; Paul, tenacious as a desert plant.

This was the second volume of his life.

I wrapped my hands around the coffee tin containing his remains. It was strange: I didn’t feel anything. Disappointment rushed over me as I confirmed once again that my heart was incapable of feeling despair or sorrow, even in such a dramatic moment.

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Like two relatives discussing a funeral, Kiki and I talked about what to do with his remains. Kiki did most of the talking, and I merely nodded.

From the moment I arrived at the airport, the years I’d left behind in Korea seemed to have faded, like a sand painting blown away.

After about twenty minutes, Kiki’s car stopped in front of a mobile home painted the colour of the earth around it. Sitting on top of the hill overlooking the town, this was the place the comedian had called home until his death.

I half-opened the creaking door but didn’t go inside. White cloths covered the furniture, and the place gave off an old, dusty smell – a smell infused with death, like the scent of chrysanthemums in a morgue. I looked around at the rusty window frame, the withered ivy, and a coffee cup turned upside down on the counter inside. I then closed the door.

‘Come up here,’ Kiki’s voice called out from somewhere above. ‘It’s a great view.’

There was a ladder leaning against the side of the trailer for access to the roof.

The roof of the trailer was blinding as it reflected the rays of the sun. It was a clear, dry afternoon with feathery clouds floating across a blue sky.

Sitting in the sun on top of a trailer with a drag queen with polished fingernails, I felt as though my life had become too complicated to deal with.

‘Oh, I almost forgot.’

Kiki took a brown notebook with worn-out corners from her bag and handed it to me. I opened the cover to reveal familiar handwriting. On the first day we met, the comedian had been writing down his ideas in a notebook much like this one.

‘I found a postcard addressed to you in the notebook. There was a Korean customer here at the time, so we were able to send it to you.’

I took the postcard from my inside pocket and put it in the notebook.

The postcard that would never have reached me had I not continued to live in the same place was dated five years ago. Suddenly I recalled a story he’d once told me, about how the stars we see in the night sky might have died

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a long time ago. He said that the only thing that was eternal was neither the stars themselves nor us watching the stars, but the light.

I imagined the comedian writing me a postcard as he entertained aliens on a faraway planet. I couldn’t believe that he was dead or that I was thirty-nine. The only thing that felt real was the sun’s rays as they toasted the roof. The light penetrated my skin and lips, travelled into my mouth, permeated membranes and ribs, and pushed into my heart. My heart had probably begun to beat five years before, at the moment when he wrote my name on the postcard. Like a child trying to push myself higher and higher on a swing, I stretched my legs before me, out into the empty air.

When we climbed down from the roof, Kiki asked me where I wanted to go. I pointed to the picture on the postcard. The picture of an observation deck along a roadside overlooking a canyon. It had faded a bit, but the scenery was still beautiful. I told her that I wanted to scatter his remains there.

Since it wasn’t too far, Kiki suggested we walk. Silence. A few words, and more silence. As these moments accumulated like sediment, I learned more about her – Kiki liked old films, she continued to plan a trip that she had never been able to take, and she was about four months behind on her rent.

She would get all excited about her travel plans, and then occasionally fret about the money in her bank account. Like a ledger in a spring-loaded book that jumped out occasionally and lifted its cover to reveal the poverty scribbled on it. But all of this might be a lie. After all, I was only able to understand her from her tone and the few English words that I recognised.

We walked past the town at the foot of the hill and continued along the road. The sunlight shone diagonally, lengthening our shadows until they became giants. We walked past huckleberries, wild cyclamen, bushes with black fruit that Kiki didn’t know the name of. Then we came to a skinny cat on a wall with chipped paint and, beyond it, cars that zoomed along the highway. The observation deck was at the end of the wilderness that jutted out from the side of the road like a large fragment of a shipwreck.

The wind roared like a giant beast trapped in the canyon. I realised that nature can look terrifying rather than magnificent in its vast enormity. After pondering where to scatter the comedian’s remains, we finally stopped at a

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certain spot. Kiki straightened her clothes and began to brush off mine, saying I was covered in dust. Then she let out a shriek.

‘Oh, my God! What the. . . .’

Only then did I realise that the comedian’s remains were trickling out of the coffee tin. There was a tiny hole in the rusted part of the can, barely noticeable, and his ashes were leaking through it.

Like Hansel and Gretel leaving behind a trail of breadcrumbs, we’d left a trail of the comedian’s remains from the hill, around the outskirts of the town, and along the road. A third of the ashes were already gone. Kiki scurried around, trying to gather the spilled remains, her face ready to burst into tears any second.

I imagined the ashes being swept up by a gush of wind and filling the air, every particle then catching fire and lighting up the whole city with flying sparks. In moments of emotional devastation, I focus on whatever images first come to mind. I developed this habit when I confronted at once the corpses of both my parents, and have since made use of it throughout my life. When I saw my husband dressed in hemp clothes and lying in a coffin, I thought of a Barbie doll in a glass case. I didn’t have the courage to look at my husband’s face, pale and yellow like the clothes he was wearing.

Instead, I quickly immersed myself in thoughts of the doll’s big eyes, its lips that I’d coloured red with a pen, the doll asleep under a yellow glass-cleaning cloth. The images spread in my imagination like wildfire and numbed my senses to the pain.

I put my hand in the coffee tin, scooped up a handful of the comedian’s remains, and scattered them in the air. The ash cloud changed form as it flew up and away. Kiki followed suit and began to scatter the ashes with me. At that moment, a gust changed the direction of the wind toward us, and we ended up covered in the ashes we’d released a moment ago.

Watching Kiki cough, I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. It was like . . . the comedian’s last joke. I thought of him, making people laugh by saying something even more awkward in every awkward situation. It felt as if Kiki and I were two supporting actors in his last comedy sketch.

Everything felt surreal, but my work here was done.

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Poetry

Zilka Joseph

Zilka Joseph

Watchers on a Working Day 7 a.m. Dressed for work, my sari draped tightly around me, a jute jhola full of Class Twelve papers weighing down my shoulder, I wait at the window. The blue Nissan minibus full of antsy schoolboys arrives, the driver blasts the horn. I rush downstairs, climb the high first step into the cab. My sari rides up, starched pleats catching my ankle as I swing into the seat, tug my folded pallav in around my waist. The usual idlers near the barber under the banyan tree turn to stare, as do the tiffin-toting office-goers at the bus stop. Eyes gleam. What will they see today? A glimpse of midriff? A curve of cholicovered breast, a flash of knee or calf?

Anything. Anything.

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No Place Like A nursing home? Hell, no! I’ll never go, my father says, damned waiting room for death. But my mother says she’s ready, she’s tired of endless chores, the thieves, the cockroaches. Let me rest, please, she begs. He snaps back, you go if you want. I’ll die here! – to the woman married to him for sixty-two years, who never takes a step without him, and he – near-blind, refuses to feel his way around the house but instead slams into walls in broad daylight. We’re fine, they say, stop worrying. I nod into the phone, but I know that’s impossible. In their familiar darkness they move like tortoises, worn carapaces heavier than they can carry, step painfully through rooms that shudder with the passing of truck and bus on the broadened road below. I see their silvery tracks gleam

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for a second in the moonlight or in the sweep of garish headlights. Backs stiff, they watch in the living room, listen for footsteps, ears tuned to pick up the sound of my uneven

TV

gait on the landing. Instincts honed to hear the slightest stir above the constant din, our not-so often arrivals at the turn of the concrete stair, the thump of luggage, trip of tired feet. But wary always of strangers, drug dealers at the door, the landlord’s henchmen, the night’s given dangers, their sleep is restless. Goodnight, I say, sleep well, my darlings, I say, as I imagine them turning out the light, settling the sheets to cover their bodies, mouths moving, softly praying. Sending blessings to each other, and to me – across the oceans. How desperately I pray that the heaviest knock will never fall upon our doors.

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Contributors Contribut ors Contribut ors

CORINNE ELYSSE ADAMS is a story-collector, writer, folk musician, and teacher. She completed her undergraduate degree at Sophia University in Tokyo and her master’s in poetry at the University of Edinburgh. When not assaulting the keys of her typewriter, she plays Irish fiddle, studies Japanese folk singing, performs with traditional music projects, and works on her multimedia storytelling project at threadwhispers.wordpress.com.

MEHVASH AMIN is a writer, poet, editor and publisher (Broken Leg Publications). Her poems have been published in journals such as Vallum, Sugar Mule and The Missing Slate, as well as in Abhay Khanna’s anthology, Capitals. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her poem ‘Karachi’. She is the force behind The Aleph Review, a yearly anthology of creative writing from Pakistan and elsewhere.

INDRAN AMIRTHANAYAGA writes poetry in English, Spanish, French, Haitian Creole and Portuguese. His Elephants of Reckoning won the 1994 Paterson Poetry Prize in the United States and his poem ‘Juarez’ won the Juegos Florales of Guyamas, Mexico in 2006. His latest book in English is a poetic history of the Sri Lankan war, titled Uncivil War. In French, his most recent book is Aller-Retour Au Bord de la Mer and, in Spanish, Ventana Azul. A new book in Creole, written with Alex LaGuerre, Pwezi a Kat Men, will appear in April 2017.

NATASCHA BRUCE has translated stories for Wasafiri, Pathlight, PEN Atlas and BooksActually’s Gold Standard (Math Paper Press, 2016). She was joint winner of the 2015 Bai Meigui Award and recipient of ALTA’s 2016 Emerging Translator Mentorship for a Singaporean language. She lives in Taipei, where she’s working on Lonely Face, a novel by Yeng Pway Ngon, for Balestier Press.

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ELLEN CHOW currently teaches in the Department of Translation at Lingnan University. She is also studying for a PhD on the English translation of Hong Kong Chinese poetry at Durham University. She is interested in literary translation and has been a freelance commercial translator for ten years. As a native Hongkonger, Chow loves movies and the city’s literary gems.

MONA DASH is of Indian origin and is settled in London. She writes fiction and poetry and her work has been anthologised widely and published in international journals. Dash has a Masters in Creative Writing (with distinction) from the London Metropolitan University. Her work includes two poetry collections, Dawn-Drops (Writer’s Workshop, India, 2001) and A Certain Way (Skylark Publications, UK, 2017) and a novel, Untamed Heart (Tara India Research Press, 2016).

TISHANI DOSHI is an award-winning poet, novelist and dancer. In 2006, her book of poems Countries of the Body won the UK’s Forward Poetry Prize for best first collection. She is also the recipient of an Eric Gregory award and a winner of the All-India Poetry Competition. Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods (poems), is forthcoming.

NICKY HARMAN is based in the UK and translates fiction, literary non-fiction, and occasionally poetry, by a wide range of contemporary Chinese authors. She is co-chair of the Translators Association (Society of Authors, UK), gives translation workshops and organises translation-focused cultural events. She also works on Paper Republic, mentors new translators, and judges translation competitions.

HO SOK FONG is the author of two short-story collections in Chinese, Maze Carpet (Aquarius, 2012) and Lake like a Mirror (Aquarius, 2014). Her literary awards include the Chiu Ko Fiction Prize (2016), the 25th China Times Short Story Prize, and the 30th United Press Short Story Prize. Originally from Kedah, Malaysia, she is currently a PhD candidate in Chinese Language & Literature at NTU Singapore.

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Contributors

ZILKA JOSEPH has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review Online, Quiddity, Review Americana, Gastronomica, and Cheers to Muses: Works by Asian American Women. Lands I Live In and What Dread, her chapbooks, were nominated for a PEN America and a Pushcart award respectively. Her book of poems Sharp Blue Search of Flame was published by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, in 2016.

KIM SEONG JOONG was born in Seoul in 1975. She made her debut in 2008 with the short story ‘Please Return My Chair’, which earned her the Joongang New Writers Award. After her debut, she published two short-story collections: Comedian in 2012, and Border Market in 2015. Her first novel was serialised in the renowned Korean literary magazine, Munhakdongne, and will be released in 2017.

KIM SOOM was born in 1974. She has published numerous novels and short-story collections including Noodles, Iron, Liver and Gallbladder, The Women Who Sew, The Shoe, and One. She debuted in 1997 as the winner of the Daejeon Ilbo New Writers Award. Her other awards include the Hyundai Literary Prize and the Yi Sang Literary Award.

STELLA KIM is an avid reader who works as a freelance translator and interpreter. She is the recipient of the 2014 Korean Literature Translation Award for New Career Translators and the 47th Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards. Her translations have appeared in ASIA (Magazine of Asian Literature) and the Asia Literary Review. She is currently working on her first book-length translation.

PINGTA KU grew up in Tainan, Taiwan. He completed a PhD thesis on James Joyce’s Ulysses at University College London and his translation of Yijun Luo’s Tangut Inn received a PEN Presents Award in 2017. He is currently teaching English literature at National Taiwan University and establishing himself as a Chinese-to-English translator with a focus on contemporary Taiwanese literary fiction.

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YIJUN LUO was born in 1967 in Taiwan to a ‘mainlander’ father and an ‘islander’ mother. Since his acclaimed debut work, Corps of Scarlet Letters, Luo has gained renown for his witty prose, labyrinthine narrative, and idiosyncratic hybrid of I-novel and magic realism. Luo received the prestigious HKBU Red Chamber Award in 2012 for his magnum opus Tangut Inn.

ZACH MACDONALD is a native of Canada who taught English in Japan and South Korea before moving to his current home in Bangkok, Thailand. He is working on a collection of East and Southeast Asia-based short fiction, and plugging away at a novel set in his home province of Nova Scotia. His work has previously been published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.

ASUKA MINAMOTO is a freelance translator currently based in Seoul, South Korea. She works in English, Japanese and Korean, and has more than twelve years of experience translating material for clients including Sony and Samsung.

In 2016, she won second prize in the second JLPP (Japanese Literature Publishing Project) International Translation Competition.

SHION MIURA is one of the most prominent writers of contemporary Japanese literature. Born in 1976, she began writing while still a student at Waseda University, encouraged by an editor who recognised her talent. In 2006, she was awarded the prestigious Naoki Prize for The Handymen of Mahoro. She is also the author of Fune wo Amu, winner of the 2012 Japan Booksellers’ Award.

NORMAN ERIKSON PASARIBU was born in Jakarta in 1990. He holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting from the Indonesian State College of Accounting and worked for Indonesian’s tax office for almost six years before resigning in 2016 to pursue writing. His debut poetry collection Sergius Mencari Bacchus (Sergius Seeks Bacchus) won first prize in the 2015 Jakarta Arts Council Poetry Manuscript Competition. The book was also shortlisted in the 2016 Khatulistiwa Literary Award for Poetry.

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Contributors

SIMON PATTON translates Chinese literature. He lives with his partner, two cats and Sealyham the Terrier near Chinaman Creek in Central Victoria, Australia. He recently spent two months in Tuen Mun, Hong Kong, as translatorin-residence at Lingnan University.

EVE SHI is Indonesian, a lifelong fangirl and a writer. She has published five novels in Indonesian, with more coming in 2017, and has written several short stories in English. Since 2011 she has been the Indonesian municipal liaison for NaNoWriMo. You can follow her on Twitter at @Eve_Shi.

SUN YISHENG, a young writer currently living in Beijing, is a keen autodidact whose reading ranges from classical Chinese literature to the works of William Faulkner and other Western writers. Despite having published only one book, Dragonfields, a collection of short stories (Bai Hua Wen Yi Publishers, 2016), he has already attracted considerable attention, both within China and beyond.

Sun’s work has now appeared in Chutzpah!, Words without Borders, Asymptote and other literary journals.

LAUREL TAYLOR is a second-year MFA candidate at the University of Iowa’s Literary Translation program, where she is a recipient of the Iowa Arts Fellowship. She is currently the Editor-in-chief of Exchanges magazine and has also contributed to Asymptote. Her work on Ainu poet Yaeko Batchelor was presented at the 2016 American Literary Translation Association Conference.

SHIBASAKI TOMOKA is the author of more than twenty novels, short-story collections and essay collections, and has co-authored two additional books. Her novel Sono machi no ima wa won the Minister of Education’s Newcomers’ Award in 2006, and her acclaimed novel Haru no niwa was awarded the Akutagawa Prize in 2014. Its English translation, Spring Garden, is now available in the UK through Pushkin Press.

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Contributors

TIFFANY TSAO is a writer, translator and literary critic. She holds a PhD in English from UC-Berkeley and currently lives in Sydney, Australia. Her writing and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including The Sydney Review of Books, LONTAR, Cordite Poetry Review, and Asymptote. Her translation of Eka Kurniawan’s story ‘Caronang’ was nominated for the 2017 Pushcart Prize.

Her debut novel The Oddfits was published in 2016.

JASON WOODRUFF is a literary translator based in his home town of Salt Lake City, Utah. His translations have appeared in Asia Literary Review and Asymptote Journal, where his translation of Kim Kyung-uk’s story ‘Spray’ won runner-up in the 2016 Close Approximations translation contest.

ISABEL YAP writes fiction and poetry, works in the tech industry, and drinks tea. Born and raised in Manila, she has also lived in California, Tokyo and London. In 2013, she attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared on Tor.com, Book Smugglers Publishing, Uncanny Magazine, Shimmer Magazine, Year’s Best Weird Fiction: Vol. 2, and elsewhere. She is @visyap on Twitter and her website is www.isabelyap.com.

YU JIAN is one of China’s major contemporary poets. He has published several collections of poetry and a five-volume collection of poetry and essays. His poems have been awarded prizes in China and abroad, and widely translated. In late 2017, a new collection of poems dealing with the Cultural Revolution will be published in Taiwan.

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BooksActually

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est. 2oo5 BooksActually is an independent bookstore located in Singapore. We specialise in Fiction and Literature ĪLQFOXGLQJ REVFXUH DQG FULWLFDO ZRUNVī ,Q RXU ERRN store, you can often find literary trinkets in the form of stationery and other lovely tchotchkes.

We publish and distribute books under our imprint 0DWK 3DSHU 3UHVV :H DOVR KDQGĥVWLWFK QRWHERRNV and produce stationery under Birds & Co.

9 Yong Siak Street Singapore 168645 | +65 6222 9195

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Sun Yat-sen University Center for English-language Creative Writing The Sun Yat-sen University Center for English-language Creative Writing is the first and currently the only one of its kind in China for teaching and promoting creative writing in English as a second/foreign language. It combines the teaching of English with creative writing techniques to enable students to write about China from an insider’s perspective.

Under the Sun Yat-sen University Creative Writing Education Program, the Center organizes readings by international writers and a book club to promote the reading and writing of world literature. From October 2015, it will start the Sun Yat-sen University International Writers’ Residency, which moves from the campuses of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and Zhuhai to Jiangmen in Guangdong Province and Yangshuo in Guangxi Autonomous Region, and gives between ten and fifteen writers the time and space to write as well as providing them with the opportunity to get to know Chinese people and culture. Contact: daifan@mail.sysu.edu.cn

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Asia House Bagri Foundation

The Asia House Bagri Foundation Literature Festival is the only pan-Asian literature festival in the UK. Join us this year to meet poets inspired by social issues; short-story writers engaging with the human condition; historians surfacing long-forgotten pasts, journalists living on the edge and novelists taking on the world‌ Asia House | 63 New Cavendish Street London W1G 7LP +44 (0)20 7307 5454

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This issue of the ALR pays tribute to the indispensable but unsung heroes of the literary world – translators. Their efforts encourage readers to expand horizons, open hearts and make connections. We and English PEN jointly organised a competition that invited translations of noteworthy authors who have not yet had a complete work published in English. This volume features five of the finalists and captivating works by other writers in the region.

No. 33 SPRING 2017

Featuring: Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong, translated by Natascha Bruce Tangut Inn by Yijun Luo, translated by Pingta Ku Star Sign by Tomoka Shibasaki, translated by Laurel Taylor Sergius Seeks Bacchus by Norman Erikson Pasaribu, translated by Tiffany Tsao The Shoe by Soom Kim, translated by Jason Woodruff Chilling stories selected from Asian Monsters, compiled by Margrét Helgadóttir ‘The ALR fills an important gap. We’ve grown used to reading about Asia. But through a kaleidoscope of stories, essays, poems, polemics and photographs, finally we can hear Asians talking about themselves.’ – David Pilling, former Asia Editor, Financial Times

Fiction | Non-fiction | Essay | Poetry

Asia Literary Review | Essential Reading

asialiteraryreview.com

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