Cannibals E-Book

Shinya Tanaka

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

3

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