My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (71 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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One foot, one foot, two feet, one . . . With her hands in her pockets, the girl hopped forward. She hopped across the bridge and down a narrow path through cabbage fields, then past the only tobacco shop in the village.
“Oh, you have a lot of energy!” said an old woman who minded the shop. Panting for breath, the girl smiled proudly. In front of the candy shop, a large dog barked and bared its teeth.
“Who on earth drew a hopscotch this long?” the girl thought as she hopped. When she reached the bus stop, snow flurries began to blow. The hopscotch rings kept going. The girl kept hopping, her red face sweaty.
One foot, one foot, two feet, one . . . The sky had turned dark, and a cold wind blew. The snow started to fall heavily and left white spots on the girl’s red sweater.
“It may turn into a blizzard,” the girl thought. “Maybe I should go home now.”
Then she heard a voice from behind her: “One foot, two feet, hop, hop, hop.” Surprised, she turned around and saw a snow-white rabbit hopscotching after her.
“One foot, two feet, hop, hop, hop.” When the girl looked closely, she saw another rabbit behind that one. As the snow kept falling, many more white rabbits began following her. She gaped in amazement.
This time she heard a voice from ahead. “White rabbits behind you, white rabbits in front. One foot, two feet, hop, hop, hop.”
When she looked ahead, the girl saw a long line of white rabbits hopping. “Oh, I had no idea.” She felt as if she were in a dream. “Where are you going?” she asked. “Where does this lead to?”
The rabbit in front of her answered, “To the end, to the end of the world. We’re snow rabbits who make snow fall.”
“What?” The girl was startled. She remembered a story her grandmother once told her. On the first day of snow, a herd of white rabbits came from north. They went from village to village, dropping the snow. They moved so fast humans saw only a white line.
“You have to be careful,” her grandmother said. “If you’re caught in the herd of white rabbits, you can never come home. You hop to the end of the world with the rabbits and turn into a chunk of snow.”
When the girl first heard this story, a chill ran down her spine. Now she was about to be taken away by the rabbits.
“I’m in trouble!” the girl screamed inside her head. She tried to stop. She tried to stop her feet from stepping into the next ring.
Then the rabbit behind her said, “Don’t stop! We’re right behind you. One foot, two feet, hop, hop, hop.” Her body bounced like a rubber ball, hopping along the hopscotch rings.
While hopping, the girl remembered her grandmother telling a story. Her grandmother had stopped sewing for a moment and said, “Once there was a girl who came home alive after being taken away by rabbits. She chanted with all her might: ‘mugwort, mugwort, mugwort in spring.’ Mugwort is a charm against evil.”
“I’m going to do the same,” the girl thought. As she hopped, she imagined a mugwort field. She thought about the warm sunlight, dandelions, honeybees, and butterflies. She took a deep breath. When she was about to say, “Mugwort, mugwort,” she was interrupted by the rabbits’ singing.
“We’re snow rabbits white as snow
And snow falls everywhere we go
White as snow, we never stop
One foot, two feet, hop, hop, hop.”
The girl covered her ears with her hands. But the rabbits’ singing became louder and louder and spilled into her ears through the gaps between her fingers and kept her from chanting the mugwort charm.
The herd of rabbits and the girl went through a fir forest, crossed a frozen lake, and reached faraway places she had never seen. She saw villages lined with small grass-roofed houses, small towns strewn with sasanqua blossoms, and big cities crowded with factories. But no one noticed the rabbits and the girl. “Oh, it’s the first snow of winter,” people mumbled and hurried away.
As she hopped, the girl tried to chant the charm, but her voice was drowned out by the rabbits’ song.
“We’re the color of snow
One foot, two feet, hop, hop, hop.”
The girl’s limbs were numb with cold, as cold as ice. Her cheeks turned pale, and her lips quivered.
“Grandmother, help!” she thought. Then she hopped into a ring and found a leaf. She picked it up and saw it was a mugwort leaf, bright green. On the back, it had fluffy white hairs.
“Oh! Who dropped this for me?” the girl thought. She held the mugwort leaf to her chest. Then she felt someone cheering for her. She felt many small creatures rooting for her.
She could hear the voices of seeds under the snow, breathing, enduring the cold beneath the ground.
A wonderful riddle came into her mind. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and cried, “Why is the back of a mugwort leaf so white?”
Hearing this, the rabbit ahead of her tottered. He stopped singing and turned around. “The back of a mugwort leaf ?” he said.
“I wonder why?” said the rabbit behind her, stumbling. The rabbits’ singing broke off, and their pace slowed down.
Seizing the moment, the girl said, “That’s easy. It’s rabbit fur. Rabbits roll around in the field and shed their hair on mugwort leaves.”
“Yes, you’re right!” said the rabbits, delighted. They started singing a new song:
“We’re the color of spring
of the hairs on a mugwort leaf
One foot, two feet, hop, hop, hop.”
Then the girl thought she smelled the fragrance of flowers in the air. She heard the chirping of small birds. She imagined herself hopscotching in a mugwort field, bathed in the spring sun. Her cheeks turned rosy. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and shouted, “Mugwort, mugwort, mugwort in spring!”
When she opened her eyes, she was hopping alone along a strange path in a strange town. She saw no rabbits ahead or behind. Snow flurried. The hopscotch rings were no longer on the path, and the mugwort leaf was gone from her hand.
“Ah, I’m safe,” the girl thought. But she couldn’t take another step.
A crowd of strangers gathered around her and asked for her name and address. When she told them the name of her village, they looked at each other, muttering, “I can’t believe it.” They didn’t think a child could have walked from such a faraway place beyond many mountains. Then an old woman said, “She must have been led away by rabbits.”
The townspeople fed the girl warm food and put her on a bus home before dark.
—Translated from the Japanese by Toshiya Kamei
“First Day of Snow” borrows elements from different folktales about disappearance. In Japanese tradition, the mysterious disappearance of a person is often attributed to an angry deity. This is called
kamikakushi,
or “hidden by gods.” There are many tales in which this motif appears. The girl in “First Day of Snow” is almost spirited away. You might recognize this motif from the anime film
Spirited Away,
directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Rabbits also play an important role in Japanese mythology. They live on the moon and make
mochi
(sticky rice cake). In “The White Rabbit of Inaba,” a rabbit deity tells the fortune of Okuninushi, who is treated like a slave by his brothers. This is a lovely story, full of the delicacy and mystery of the fairy-tale tradition.
—TK
HIROMI ITŌ
I Am Anjuhimeko
THE LAUGHING BODY
I AM ANJUHIMEKO, THREE YEARS OLD.
In stories, it seems to me the person they refer to as father usually wasn’t around or was absence itself, no matter what story I happened to hear, the person called father would be dead in the house or out somewhere traveling or listening to whatever the stepmother was telling him to do, but in my house, there is someone called father, and he is intent on killing me, he is always doing his best to do so, but I don’t know what to do, I’ve had nothing but hardship since I was born.
My father said this baby’s mouth is so monstrously big it seems to stretch all the way to her ears, her eyelids have folds in them, her face is flat, she’s got moles and birthmarks all over, her ears are big, big, big, something is wrong with her, it’s like she’s the freakish baby of some old priest, no way she’s mine, no way, I’ll call her Anjuhimeko, after those Anju—those lowly priests living in little cells for hermits—that’s what I’ll call her, and I’ll bury her in the sand, and if she can survive for three years then she can be my child.
Something’s the matter with me, he says, look, I was born and here I am now, who cares if I’ve got one or two heads, who cares if I’ve got one or two hands, one too few or one too many? none of that really matters anyway, but that’s not what father says, he says let’s try burying her in the sand and waiting for three years, mother was willing to just go along with that, that was a big disappointment, but, well, here’s the problem, I’m just a newborn who can’t even see, and I can’t even utter a word to talk back, so I was wrapped in my mother’s silk underclothes and buried in a sandy spot near a river.
Speaking of which, the sandy place near the river is the place where everybody buries their babies.
To both the right and left of the place I was buried, there were so many buried babies that they jostled against one another, some were breathing, some weren’t, some had struggled partway out of the sand and then dried up, some had managed to escape all the way out of the sand and crawl away.
Just crawl a little bit and there is a big bush, mosquitoes and flies sting any baby who tries to get there, but if they are able to escape from the fierce sun and take shelter from the rain and wind, they can pluck grass or leaves to eat, and if they manage to make it to the river, they can just go right in and live in the water, even though I was still buried in the sand, I watched the others around me, I watched the babies as they died, the ones who were already dead, and the ones who managed to survive and get away.
 
That’s right, how could anyone possibly have karma as bad as mine?
In only three years I gave birth to three children, but my husband buried one of the babies I’d gone to all the trouble to bear, he buried her in the sand, and now my swollen breasts are too much to bear, the holes in my breast where the milk should come out are plugged up, feverish, and swollen, just a simple touch and my breasts hurt so badly I think they’ll rip open, but between the pain in my breast and the sorrow at having my child buried, I spend every day weeping from dawn to dusk, and in the process of all this weeping, I have ruined my eyes, when that happened my husband said to me he didn’t want me in the house any longer because I’d gone blind, you’re the one who gave birth to the baby that wasn’t fit for anything except burial, no doubt you’ve got something deep and dark in your karmic past that made you give birth to that child and made you go blind, if you stay here, your deep, dark karma will rub off on me, so before that happens, do me the favor of dying or at least getting the hell out of the house, shit, I wish I could have buried you in the sand, too, that’s what he said.
Then, the next day, I check that the two children on my right and my left are still asleep, and I hold my breath as I quietly sneak out, I creep out of the house as quietly as I can, I’m going to dig a hole in the sand and hide myself in it, where was it that baby was buried? every day more and more people come to bury their babies so I don’t have any idea where mine is, I have no idea, but I dig a hole in the sand and bury myself in it anyway, and as I do so, the cries of the children reach my ears, I feel the faint warmth of the bodies of the buried babies, as long as I stay buried here in the sun, I can’t forget what has happened to me, if I’d known this was what fate had in store for me, I wouldn’t have obeyed my husband and buried the baby, that wasn’t a good idea, if things were all that bad, there must have been some other way, there must have been something I could’ve done, but no matter how much I regret it, no matter how much, no matter how much, no matter how much, it still isn’t enough, and I weep hysterically.

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