Cannibals E-Book

Shinya Tanaka

• Herausgeber: Honford Star
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 95

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

During the hot, dry summer of 1988, in a forgotten neighborhood known as the riverside, seventeen-year-old Shinogaki Toma is entangled in a desperate struggle against what he believes to be his fate to become his sadistic father. Consumed by a fear that he will harm his girlfriend, Toma's downward spiral into depression and instability becomes increasingly intense. Toma's mother left his father long ago and now lives nearby as a fishmonger. Using the hook that replaced the hand she lost during wartime bombings, she guts the eels Toma catches in the sewage-filled river for his father to eat. Things come to a head when Kotoko, his father's live in girlfriend, becomes pregnant and makes the decision to leave the riverside for a better life. Translated from Japanese by Kalau Almony, Tanaka Shinya's Akutagawa Prize-winning masterpiece, Cannibals, sold over 200,000 copies in Japan and was adapted into a movie by Cannes Film Festival-winner Shinji Aoyama.

Leseprobe

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Cannibals

SHINYA TANAKA

Translated by Kalau Almony

Contents

Title PageCannibalsCopyright

5

Cannibals

in july of 1989, the sixty-third year of the Showa era, on the day he turned seventeen, Shinogaki Toma did not go home at the end of the day’s lessons. Instead, he headed straight to Aida Chigusa’s house. Chigusa was a year older than him and went to a different high school. They both, however, lived in the same area, the riverside, and their homes were less than a three-minute walk apart.

Toma got off the bus on the freeway and walked down a narrow road bordered by old homes and buildings filled with rented shops and offices until he reached the river, which he then walked along, following its current. The river was about ten meters across. It was low tide and the yellow earth of the riverbed was visible through the shallow water. Stones of all shapes and sizes; a broken bicycle that looked as though even if someone tried to ride it, it could do nothing but turn right for eternity; a black umbrella whose broken frame thrust out of the water like the mast of a ship; a tinplated bucket which, 6except for the bright crimson handle, was rusted into a shapeless heap; wooden fencing; plastic bags swollen with sand—these and other pieces of trash filled the river. Schools of young mullet swam through the water. The mud of the riverbank was covered in birds’ footprints that looked like swarms of giant spiders and pocked with piles of black slime in the spots where the birds had been digging for food with their beaks. Green algae clung to both the garbage in the river and the riverbank itself. The algae were evidence of the tide, proof that this was not fresh water. All of these things mingled with the rising sea, and what was left by the receding tide gave the river shape as they waited for the sea to come again.

Then came the smell. The riverside’s sewage system had not yet been completed. Houses did have indoor plumbing and flush toilets; however, the sewage was carried directly to the river. It had been decided that homeowners would shoulder some part of the cost of connecting each house’s sewage system to the main line, and construction was slated for next spring, so the intense stench of summer would also end this year.

The smell was awful, and, what was worse, it meant home and his father. Whenever Toma smelled this odor, he felt as though he had arrived back home. This was not a joyous feeling, but nor was it an entirely unbearable one. Just as Toma 7simply accepted the river as the river and the bridge as the bridge, he accepted the feeling of arriving home as what it always was. Yet Toma also suspected that today might actually be the first time he noticed this feeling of what it was to come home.

Toma cut a path through the stagnant stink as he walked. When the tide was coming in, the smell of the ocean mingled with the smell of the river; the air vibrated and clung. A skinny red dog tied to the gutter of a warehouse facing the road ran to the end of its chain and started barking. Toma passed by a swarm of mosquitos.

He stopped in front of the fish shop. There were no customers. His eyes met those of Jinko-san, his mother. She was wearing her black apron and gutting a fish.

“Heading home?”

“Yeah.”

“Today’s your birthday.”

“Yeah.”

“Want a Coke?”

“I’m good.”

“All right then. Come stop by soon.”

Jinko-san’s right hand was out of sight, hidden behind the glass case full of fish. Diagonal from the fish shop, on the other side of the river, was an apartment building with 8heavy-looking, iron-framed windows, and there, sitting straight on the ground near a corner of that building, was a woman dressed in clothes so white and thin that one could just barely tell they were not her underwear. She was only about forty, but she looked as though she had been waiting like that for a man to return since before there was war.

Toma crossed the bridge. From what looked like a white balloon tied to the handrail rose a head; the balloon transformed into a heron and took flight. Someone must’ve been doing laundry. Water full of bubbles flowed out of an earthen pipe.

Jinko-san was Toma’s birth mother, and a woman called Kotoko-san lived with him and his father, Madoka.

Jinko-san the fishmonger was near sixty, and her right arm from the wrist down was gone. During the war she had got pinned under her burning, collapsed house in an air raid. They went and got the whole riverside all at once, it was an ocean of fire, I traded one hand to keep my life, Toma had heard her say once. That was the only time he had heard Jinko-san talk about how she had lost her right hand. Once was more than enough. The skin from her wrist up to near the elbow was still scarred with burns shaped like the brilliant waves of flame that had incinerated the riverside.9

About three years after the war, Jinko-san met a man whom she thought she would marry. One day that man’s mother said, She better not give birth to a kid with no hand, and Jinko-san, moving so quickly she never gave the man a chance to intervene, forced open his mother’s mouth with her left hand, which at that time could move with the same precision of her once dominant hand, and shoved in the tip of her right arm. Apparently she asked, perfectly calm, You want me to shove that tongue down to your stomach? Though the man begged her for forgiveness and pleaded for her to still marry him, she of course never saw him again. Because Jinko-san had lost both her parents in the war, she relied on other relatives to get by for a while and then wound up living and working at the fishmonger’s. Unlike the areas near the seaside or the train station, the riverside was left behind by most postwar development, and the people who had gathered there, intending only to temporarily avoid dire poverty, ended up stuck. It was that sort of backwater. One of those men who stayed was Madoka. He was ten years younger than Jinko-san, but the two met at the hilltop shrine overlooking the riverside at the annual summer festival, started dating, and then married. Jinko-san had apparently never even considered the possibility that another man who wanted to marry an old woman with no hand would ever appear. Only 10after moving to the Shinogaki home, crossing the bridge every day to go to work at the fish shop, did she discover that Toma’s father was involved with a slew of other women and that during sex he grew violent. When Jinko-san was pregnant, this tendency to violence receded, but in its place he spent even more time philandering. A year after Toma was born, Madoka started hitting her again, so she left without bothering to get a divorce and began living alone in the fish shop, which she had already taken over completely from the previous owner. Her reason for not taking her son was a simple one: You’re that man’s seed, aren’t you? When she left, Toma’s younger brother or sister was already growing inside her, but it was never born. I was past forty so I figured it’d be my last child, but one child from that man was plenty, I went and had ‘em go scrape it out of me at the hospital, she said. As he grew up and began comparing himself to his classmates, Toma did realize it was quite strange to be living apart from his mother, but he could always cross the river and visit her at the fish shop, so he never considered moving in with her.

Kotoko-san, who worked near the seaside in one of the many bars in the area, moved into the Shinogaki home about a year ago. While she was not exactly beautiful, she was well endowed in the chest and rear, and her skin made her look young for a thirty-five-year-old. Toma’s father, who liked to 11frequent bars but could not hold his alcohol, had gone repeatedly to the bar she worked at until he managed to seduce her. Sometimes there would be bruises around Kotoko-san’s cheeks and eyes. It seemed Toma’s father did not hit her until they started living together. When Toma asked, Why don’t you break up with him? You scared of him? she laughed and responded, He tells me I got a great body, and when he hits me he says it gets even more better. To Toma she looked like an incredibly stupid woman.

Even after Kotoko-san moved in, Toma’s father continued to walk the town. In particular, his affair with the woman from the apartment building never seemed to end. The entrance to her apartment was on the side of the building facing away from the river, so from the fish shop you could not see him arriving, but if the woman was not there sitting on the corner at the back of the building, that was proof that either Toma’s father or some other man was there.

Since Toma was young, his father had been part of some sort of business Toma did not really understand. All sorts of calls came to the house, as did people who, no matter how you looked at them, did not look like normal businessmen. He often went out on business as well. There was a truck, the owner of which was unclear, always parked in the garage, and in the back of it Toma would sometimes find piled metal 12assemblages that were probably used as parts for some sort of machine, or tons of one-liter cans so rusted they looked as though they would disintegrate any minute, sometimes stones so dusty they looked like they had just been mined from some mountain, TVs and sewing machines that could probably never be used again, gas-powered water-heaters, and sometimes cardboard boxes stuffed with brand-new collected editions of literary works. It seemed his father was in the business of buying or selling, or temporarily holding on to, and occasionally disposing of, this wide range of products. Once, someone had pulled back the tarp covering the bed of the truck from the inside, and a woman wearing heavy makeup peeked out and then hid back under. Toma had approached the truck quietly; he heard them speaking in a language that was not Japanese or English, and while he was not sure, it was probably not Chinese or Korean either. Their voices were monotonous and sweet and had a warmth to them, like notes from an instrument of shape and material Toma could not imagine.

At their earliest, Chigusa’s parents came home just before six. Birthday sex was rushed as always. At least things ended without catastrophe, unlike their first time, when upon touching Toma’s erect penis to put on a condom, he immediately came.13

They had known each other since they were young, but spring of this year Toma realized that he was doing something, saying something, in front of Chigusa. Afterwards, he had to ask her what he had done.