I’ve always wanted to expand Tarō’s story, but it’s not the kind of thing you can make longer. So I’ll first tell you another story—one that naturally comes to mind whenever I think of Tarō.
Once upon a time, near the entrance to our building’s underground parking garage, there was a stray white dog. Nobody knew how that dog got there, and no one knew who kept on feeding it. Anyway, it was on this sloped driveway that this dog lived and grew. Everybody got in the habit of calling out to the dog as soon as they saw it: “Little Whitey!” Whenever anyone drove in or out of the garage, as they ascended or descended the slope they would never fail to either honk their horn or, like my mother, swerve from left to right, as if they were afraid Little Whitey would be flattened under their tires.
And then there were those few days—I don’t think anyone remembers exactly which days of which month of which year it was, but anyway, it was just for a few short days, that another even smaller stray dog appeared from God knows where. This second stray dog’s fur was half light black—but not really gray, and half light gray—but not really white. Hell, even if we knew what color the thing was, there was no way to describe it. And so during those few short days no one knew what to call this tiny stray dog. However, for convenience’s sake, I’ll refer to him as Little Mutt.
What happened couldn’t have been more simple: Little Mutt became the adopted puppy of Little Whitey. During those few days Little Whitey often would sit beside Little Mutt, watching him eat or sleep. As far as I can remember, Little Whitey never once played with Little Mutt. Perhaps that’s because Little Mutt was too weak; he couldn’t show his teeth, wag his tail, and dance around like other dogs. As for Little Whitey, he was a bit different from before: he would bark a few times at all the cars that came in and out of the parking garage. Sometimes he would even stand in the middle of the driveway, fiercely wagging his tail at all the cars on both sides of the slope.
The conclusion to this story is even simpler. I’m not sure which day it was, but Little Mutt suddenly disappeared—he probably died. Little Whitey stopped barking and went back to his old ways, with no one ever being able to tell just where on the slope he was or what he was doing. And so people driving in and out of the parking garage once again had to be extremely careful.
This is the story of a stray dog adopting another stray dog.
Was Tarō’s real name Tarō? We actually didn’t know. We called him Tarō because we had to give him some name—so we named him after Peach Tarō, that Japanese boy born from a peach.
The day of the big downpour, when Tarō ducked into the junkyard bathroom with the sheet-iron door, he scared the shit out of Old Bull. From that day onward, Old Bull was really strange. He would always manage to think of some event or some person at the most improper of times. Little Horse said his brain was fried, completely fucked; I think he’s right. Maybe there’s still hope and one day something will happen that will scare the shit back into him and he’ll be okay, you never know.
But Tarō was far worse off than Old Bull. We had no idea how long he had been out in the rain; we only heard him speak a few sentences. One of them was: “It’s so cold. So cold!” Another was: “I don’t want to go back to the slaughterhouse.” And then he said: “Don’t want to go to the slaughterhouse.” Everybody suspected that he was a child laborer who’d escaped from a slaughterhouse.
The first thing Little Horse, Little Xinjiang, and I did was bring Tarō to Ma Jianren Hospital. The woman on duty at the hospital asked us, “What is his name?” At the time we still hadn’t given Tarō a name, so we all just stared at each other in confusion. After that the woman said to Little Horse, “The hospital director said for you not to keep bringing in these derelicts you pick up from God knows where. When you do this you make things really difficult for us.” Little Horse rushed into the hospital to find that “despicable man,” but he wasn’t there. Little Xinjiang said, “Then let’s take him to the shipping yard—it’s close and it’s warmer there.” Little Horse said he wanted to stay behind and have a little talk with his old man.
Little Xinjiang and I temporarily adopted Tarō; all together we adopted him for what, twelve hours? And then Tarō died. After Tarō died I told Little Xinjiang the story about Little Whitey and Little Mutt. Little Xinjiang said, “It sounds like Little Whitey was a more able foster parent than us.” I replied, “It seems that way.”
That afternoon I myself went to work. I placed Tarō’s body inside some abandoned car of unknown make and crushed that car into an iron box. Afterward, Little Xinjiang, Old Bull, Annie, and I buried that box behind the sheet-iron outhouse. The air back there wasn’t bad—if you took a deep whiff, you could even smell the scent of the cosmetics section of a department store.
By the time Little Horse got back to the junkyard it was already dark out. Standing before Tarō’s gravesite, he said that there was something he had to do before he began his military service; he had already made up his mind. We asked him, “Just what is it?” “Can you let us in on it now?” He shook his head.
“He wants to fuck our big sis!” Old Bull joked.
Annie’s face instantly lit up with a smile as she replied, “Both Apricot and I would be happy to offer our services.”
“You’re crazy!” I was a bit unhappy.
This is everything that I remember about what happened with Tarō. It’s all true, if I were to go and lengthen the story, you probably wouldn’t believe it anyway. From that point onward, every time there was a heavy rain, I liked to stand in a wide open space and let the rainwater soak my body from head to toe—it was also a convenient way to wash my clothes. Each time I did this I couldn’t help but think of Tarō’s short shadow, and that white hat on his head—you can see that kind of folded paper hat being worn in almost any slaughterhouse. I would then watch as streams of bloody water seeped from the edges of my clothing. Oozing down from the corners of my sleeves and cuffs of my pants, the blood would trickle into a nearby puddle.
