My chin cupped in my hands and my elbows on my bedroom window sill, I could look down on dozens of telephone cables and wires that streamed to and from the junction point on the telephone pole just outside my parents’ butcher’s shop. From my north-facing vantage point in Sangenjaya I would follow them meeting and multiplying, converging and diverging all the way to the horizon.
Pushing myself up on my hands, tilting my head and crossing my eyes, I could manage the trick of moving one of the now two poles and one of the now two junction boxes closer to me, so close that I could imagine them emanating from my chest. I thus became wired to a web, hooked up to countless possibilities, plural lives and a multiplication of options. All I would have to do one day was to choose which telephone wires to follow and to decide where to have them take me.
How do swallows decide which telephone wires to sit on? They flock at sunset and darken the sky prematurely before settling on a small number, so that some wires have hundreds of swallows on them and others none. On one occasion, I saw a wire with just one bird on it and I thought, That’s me.
Plane trails are visible in cloudless skies; unthinkingly, I would seek their parallels in the telephone cables and wires and always find one, one black cord among dozens, that was exactly parallel with the white jet stream above it.
The telephone wires hummed with conversations and spoken lives. I listened at my open window in the hope of overhearing confessions and shared secrets; occasionally, cheek in palm, I came to with a start after having drifted into reverie, thinking I had heard something only to realise that indeed I had but it was only the chatter, the voices from the pavement immediately below. Leaning out over the wide sill, I could look down on the heads of the passers-by and of my parents’ customers. From directly above, they were distinguishable from one another only by virtue of a hat or umbrella. Stationary as they waited to cross the road, they seemed like bacteria in a Petri dish. In motion, they resembled amoebae under the microscope. My heart swelled with a sense of superiority; I could not conceive of any resemblance I may have had to them.
When I raised my eyes, I would see, across the road from me, a baker’s shop. My mother turned her nose up at what she told me was reproduction Louis XVI furniture in the café section by the shop window and, after she had explained to me who Louis XVI was, she and my father would giggle about the sign over the shop front: Fresh Cakes. Since 1872. My friend Michi had the first-floor bedroom above the shop. Her father was the baker and her mother, as my mother would say ironically, the pâtissière. Michi would occasionally serve customers or take her turn behind the till. My parents suspected her of being the shop’s greatest source of leakage: she was as round as the pastries she packed into paper bags. On most days, Michi and I would wave to each other from our open bedroom windows. Next to Michi lived my other friend, Keiko, above her parents’ electrical supplies shop. She was tall for our age, and thin.
Over a dinner of whatever meat my father had failed to sell that day, he would tease, once we had finished reviewing the day and I had recounted everything my friends had said and done, and say something like, ‘So, what do you think they say about you? That you’re as tender as Kobe beef? Or that you’re as red as a sirloin steak? Or that you’re a silly old moo?’ Then he would laugh heartily out of one side of his mouth – the other still chewing a wad of, more often than not, shabu shabu – before slowly wagging my cheek between thumb and forefinger. His hands smelled of disinfectant and were red and rough, but he was never anything other than gentle with me.
My mother would smile and, anxious to assure me that my father was only jesting, would squeeze my arm with, ‘She’s as sweet as a lamb!’ or, ‘She has the heart of an ox!’
She needn’t have worried.
One particularly hot summer, my parents took me to a swimming pool complex, having packed the picnic hamper we typically only used once a year for hanami, when we’d picnic under blooming cherry trees in the spring and remark on the intoxicating smell of the blossom, so sweet after the metallic odour of cold meat and bleach. We carried rice balls, pickles, fried chicken, and cucumber and egg sandwiches, green tea and fruit juices and our towels, swimming costumes, tanning lotion and, for my mother and me, inflatable rings and arm bands.
We queued for the train and we queued for access to the swimming pool grounds. Tickets in hand, we stood in line for the changing rooms and then joined the mêlée for the swimming pool.
The crowd had a mind of its own; we couldn’t fight it, we could only follow where it led, a succession of rubber rings and perspiring backs and shuffles of flip-flops under a sun unchallenged by any cloud. From a vantage point, we saw teeming people surrounding other people corralled in a rectangular space that, my father guessed, contained the principal swimming pool. We were three among thousands of identically dressed – or undressed – hot, thirsty, sticky bodies. By two in the afternoon I was crying with hunger and thirst and with shame at having wet myself, as, I guessed, others had too, perhaps counting, like me, on their urine mixing with the sweat and suntan lotion that ran down backs and stomachs into swimming trunks and down legs to form puddles around our feet. The smell was overpowering, especially to children, whose nostrils are that much closer to the ground and to crotch height; my eyes were level with sweaty navels and hairy backs, the sweat-saturated tops of swimming trunks and clutched inflatables and picnic lunches. I held my parents’ slippery hands tightly, terrified that in this nightmare throng they might mistake another child’s hand for mine.
My parents’ hope of finding a patch of grass by a swimming pool had long evaporated but it wouldn’t do to turn back, not that one could. Slowly, the wide eddy we were in got caught up with the one comprising people leaving the main pool so that, without our realising it initially, we found ourselves drifting back to the changing rooms. Suddenly, we found ourselves traversing a paddling pool with no space for a toddler to sit in and I saw my relief reflected in other people’s smiles as, yes, we could indeed later tell our friends we had gone swimming and found a pool. The warm water lapped our ankles; lost flip-flops and discarded tissues and plastic bottles nuzzled and bumped our toes and heels.
We had our picnic at four o’clock on a shaded patch of earth outside the train station. The onigiri had disintegrated, the tsukemono had wilted, the karaage had dried and the sandwich edges had curled and hardened, but we ate them all.
We had three coldrooms that were set at a temperature of one degree Celsius and a fourth, a walk-in freezer, that was set at minus twenty degrees. The freezer contained a mix of prepared foods and uncommon cuts of meat; one of the two coldrooms held chicken and the other prepared foods and marinated meats. My favourite was the last and largest in which hung game and sides of beef, pork and horsemeat and in which Michi, having asked to be shown the coldrooms at about the age at which one learns that the meat on one’s plate comes from an animal that bears little resemblance to the fluffy, stuffed and stitched package one hugs to sleep at night, had burst into tears.
Michi and I had come closest to falling out shortly after that visit, when we had attempted to play with our cuddly toys and dolls together. While she and Keiko were content to enact tea ceremonies, happy families and school lessons with the dolls, I favoured stripping them, disjointing them to the extent possible and hanging them from a piece of string extended from a door handle to a drawer knob, like sides of meat we could then offer for sale in a game of ‘butcher’s shop’. While they treasured their manicured, anthropoid puppets, I loathed mine for the audacity they had to mimic human form, however inadequately. When still very young, I demanded my mother rid my room of the insultingly empty, humanoid shells my friends saw fit to amuse themselves with.
The back room of our house on the ground floor, the one directly behind the shop, was the butcher’s proper, the preparation room in which joints were filleted and meats generally prepared for presentation in the shop in metal trays. On the walls above the prep room’s marble tops, wooden chopping blocks, mincers and many steels, cleavers and boning knives, were pinned posters of drawings of animals in profile that detailed, by means of dotted lines, the precise anatomical cuts of beef, pork and horsemeat – simpler, consumer-friendly versions of which decorated the shop walls in order to help my parents’ customers with their orders. As a joke, Takumi-san, my parents’ shop assistant, tacked a large sheet of paper to the prep room wall on which had been printed a stylised, heavily inked frontal outline of a man tattooed with his own dotted cutting lines that denoted fingers, hands, arms, chest, stomach and so on. The frontal, featureless outline had been very well drawn and the sheet laminated so that the whole held its own against the professionally executed posters of animal silhouettes. I found it strangely compelling and would stand there staring at it until I could see myself filling the thickly delineated space entirely and looking out at the prep room from the wall. One day, quite unexpectedly, it felt as though the outline had stepped off the poster and onto and around me, like a new, thick additional layer of skin. This sensation delighted me; I felt both highlighted, more real than others in the real world, and, too, the lead cartoon character in my own anime world.
‘Does it amuse you?’ asked my father. I hadn’t noticed him watching me.
‘I am invincible,’ I replied happily.
My father appeared nonplussed.
‘I am me,’ I added helpfully.
‘Of course you are!’
He squatted and hugged me, keeping his arms straight and his unwashed hands away from me, and kissed me on the forehead. I could feel his strength and the depth of his affection despite my newly acquired squidgy second skin.
I’m not sure that my father had welcomed having that picture of a dissected human being on the wall, but he had left it there in recognition of Takumi-san’s efforts; my liking it gave him an additional reason for retaining it, so there it stayed.
Not long after, Takumi-san lost the tips of two fingers in an accident in the prep room. My father teased that the outline of the man was Takumi-san and that he had been intending to use it as a guide to his own cannibalisation, starting with his fingers. Our customers joked that Takumi-san had lost his finger tips in the mincer when serving a customer, who had returned the following day to ask for more of that quite delicious-tasting mince.
My parents allowed me to wander in and out of the shop on quieter weekdays; my only instructions were never to touch a knife and never to run, for fear that I might slip on the prep room floor where, invariably, bits of meat, fat and gristle would be spilled like landmarks around miniature lake-like drops of blood. I liked the singsong greetings and farewells that accompany shoppers in my home country and loved adding my shrill soprano to my father’s bass and Takumi-san’s baritone and to the ding-dong of a bell that signalled the shop door opening. On hot days, I would enter the coldroom that housed the disassembled herbivores and walk among them as they hung there in their declining, reducing state. Live and whole once, they had been killed, skinned, disembowelled and bisected after their heads and hooves had been cut off. From here, they would be butchered neatly in our prep room, quartered, filleted and reduced to manageable sizes and recognisable portions, cut into ever-smaller pieces until, soon, we’d hold a morsel of them between our chopsticks before digesting them in an irreversible reduction that ensured their elimination. As they hung there, pink and purple in the grey-blue light of the walk-in fridge, I couldn’t help but consider them at the start of their lives, not so much in vitro but in limbo, this room an ante-chamber from which they’d be released into the world and would grow heads and hooves and gambol, graze and gallop in rich green fields. I knew I was just confusing them with me as I hung in a stasis of seasons, school terms, play dates and homework, waiting for my real life to begin.
‘Mie-chan! What are you doing?’ The panic and incomprehension in my father’s voice startled me so that I nearly lost my balance on the pile of boxes and crates I had stacked in the midst of the thicket of hanging meat. I saw him through the animal corpses, framed in the open doorway, and I saw myself through his eyes and felt foolish, although I didn’t think I had actually done anything wrong. He pushed his way through the sides of beef and horsemeat that thudded as they hit each other and made the butchers’ hooks jangle. His livid, pallid face looking up to me in the artificial light was ghastly and his hair stood on end.
‘Come here.’ He held his arms out to me and felt around my neck – finding no rope, to his relief. Helping me off the rickety stack, he exclaimed, ‘You are freezing to the touch!’ He walked me upstairs, wrapped me in his coat and sat me on his lap. ‘What on earth were you doing?’
I could detect no hint of reprimand in his voice; just anxiety, fear and a desire to understand.
‘I was just wondering what it was like to be one of them. You know, what it’s like to be hanging there, waiting for your life to begin, waiting for that next step in your life. There’s no need for you to be so worried.’
Later, at the coldroom door, I would understand my father’s concern, his visceral fear. The overhead light failed to penetrate the tangle of carcasses so that the lower part of the room remained in shadow and the boxes I’d been standing on must have been quite invisible to him. That night, I hugged him ever so tightly and said, ‘I’m sorry to have frightened you, Otoo–san. I would never, ever…’ I didn’t know how to finish the sentence, how to tell my father that his daughter was so arrogantly certain of herself, of her being, that she would harm others before she’d harm herself.