Bakamonotako

I was thinking of changing my name to Bakamonotako. It meant The Stupid Little Octopus Girl, she was a character from an old Japanese folk tale. I read her story on a plaque outside the Little Sea Monster Museum Sculpture Garden. I thought she was a lot like me.

From a good family of upstanding octopi, Bakamonotako felt she did not need her eight appendages, she only needed four. Two to wash and work and two to walk and wander.

To the embarrassment and horror of her family, she let her other four limbs fall into such disuse that they withered and fell away. So she resembled a human being, with two arms, two legs, except that her mouth and genitalia were the same orifice.

Like all stupid little girls who believe they can best become themselves by being unlike themselves, she eventually came to miss her lost limbs. At times, fully tattooed people feel so about their lost original skin.

When Bakamonotako matured and tried to have sexual relations as an adult octopus, the limbs she cast off with her mind wrapped around her and bound her, keeping her from any feeling.

Embittered and maddened by this, she consulted a wise starfish about her future. The starfish said “You must find the other half of yourself, of your private and deepest feeling, and you might have to double yourself to do it.”

The starfish asked Bakamonotako for twice her usual fee for this advice, and the stupid little octopus girl paid half in sand dollars and half in sand dollars she hoped to collect in the future.

With only half her limbs, she would need to spend twice as much time scrambling in the sand on the ocean floor to find these dollars. She could see already how her fate of constantly halving and doubling was playing itself out, never to be whole, clear, even.

She had spent her future already, searching for sand dollars to pay the starfish for advice about her future, which had already been determined by her past.

“At this rate,” thought Bakamonotako, “I’ll spend my whole life looking backwards, neither living nor not living. Unless I can figure out how to accomplish the seemingly impossible task set forth by the wise starfish.”