Oh Tama! Read online

  “Now, about this cat: you agreed to keep her, didn’t you?”

  “Right. Her name’s Tama, by the way. That’s true, but . . .”

  “So why’d you bring her here?”

  “That’s exactly what I wanted to talk about.”

  “You seem to be very fond of her.”

  “Right, right. That’s true. She’s real smart, and she loves me, don’t you, Tama-chan? Meow? Meow?”

  “Then why?”

  “Anyway, Natsuyuki, look after her. I’ll come to see how she’s doing once in a while.”

  Having gobbled up the canned food, Tama jumped lightly onto Alexandre’s lap, lay down, and started to wash her face, completely settled in.

  “You know about my chick, right? Well, I had to evacuate to her place—a lot of unpaid rent, skipping town—you know—but she’s allergic to cats. Cat hair makes her sneeze and gives her a rash. So it’s no good. ‘Give away the cat and stay, or take the cat and leave: choose one or the other,’ she says. Not that I’m in love with this woman, but I’m so broke that I can’t find anywhere for me and Tama, with her belly full of kittens, to go. Sis can’t keep the cat. In fact, it all started with her, like I said. And my aunt says ‘Oh, not with the cat, Kanemitchan.’ My mom, you ask? Oh, didn’t I tell you? I think it was the end of last year—she ran off with the bartender from her place, leaving all her debts unpaid. You remember, don’t you? The would-be playboy, that sad old leftist, with the funny fashion sense? You had a fight with him once, remember? So I thought about asking you to let me and Tama stay with you for a while. But if the two of us are too much for you to handle, at least look after Tama for me. Think of her as a substitute for Tsuneko’s baby. You know, they say it’s good to be kind. Help other people. And cats. I can’t trust just anyone with her, you know. There are some sickos around. When they see posters and classified ads for free kittens, they pretend they love cats and say things like, ‘I promise I’ll take good care of it. Oh, what a lovely kitten!’ And then that night they slice off the kitten’s ears with a utility knife in the bathroom of their apartment. It’s true!”

  * * *

  Having picked Tama up and planted a kiss on her nose, Alexandre went off. The cat nervously walked around the room, crying helplessly with an anxious look on her face, so I shut all the windows to keep her from escaping. As I worried about this and that, the phone rang. “Thanks for looking after Tama. I really appreciate it,” said Tsuneko.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” was all I could say, but I thought, Why on earth have I got myself involved with this weird brother-sister pair? I had a really odd feeling.

  “So you are gonna have the baby, right?” I couldn’t help asking as if to make sure.

  Her response was: “Yeah, this time I’m going to. You know, lots of things happened this time, for sure. But anyway, somehow I feel it’s not yours, so you don’t need to worry.”

  Meanwhile, trying to get out the window, the cat reached out to the aluminum sash with her front paws, her claws making a horrible screeching sound, and mewed in a scared, hysterical way. On top of it all, she was going to have kittens in maybe a week or two. With the cat foisted on me like that, “You don’t need to worry” didn’t sound quite right to me. I had very mixed feelings.

  There were some economic issues, for example. If I pawned my camera equipment, what would I do when I got a job offer? This thought worried me only for the first few days. There was no work, not even one phone call, so there was no problem with having no camera. I decided to sell some books and arranged for a nearby secondhand bookshop to come and get them.

  If I sold the complete set of The Collected Works of Miyazawa Kenji and the box full of paperback mystery novels in the closet, I’d get a reasonable amount (only twenty or thirty thousand yen at most, though, because I’m sure the bookstore owner would say, “OK with the paperbacks ’cause they’ll sell, but this won’t sell. It’ll just take up space.” “Wouldn’t some girl majoring in Japanese literature at Japan Women’s University or Gakushūin choose Kenji for her graduation thesis and buy the set?” I’d say. But then: “No way. You’re being naïve, Kobayashisan. No one’s gonna buy it ’cause students don’t read books nowadays, so they don’t come to my shop.”

  And after this exchange, The Collected Works of Miyazawa Kenji would be bargained down to a ridiculously low price, which, combined with the five thousand yen Alexandre handed to me with the words “This’s from Tsuneko, for Tama’s food” (I bet she’d given him ten thousand and he pocketed half of it), would help me get by for a while. Besides, once the secondhand bookshop took the paperbacks away, the box in the closet would be empty, which would be handy, since it could be lined with an old bath towel and turned into a place for Tama to have her kittens. So I said to Tsuneko, “How about if I put a box in the closet with a towel inside?”

  “That’d be fine,” she said, “since Tama’s an expert in postal matters. She knows just what to do all on her own. But she is fat, isn’t she, for a postal expert? Just like some middle-aged lady.” For quite a while after this telephone conversation I couldn’t figure out what she meant by postal expert. Did she mean Tama knew how to “post” things—like, leave her things in the right places, or what? Then, thinking hard, I realized she must have said postnatal, not postal, expert.

  * * *

  Since Alexandre’s morning visit had awakened me early, I had quite a bit of time before the book dealer was supposed to come. So I checked City Road to see what was on. The Ikebukuro Bungeiza movie house had John Huston’s musical Annie and Robert Aldrich’s All the Marbles, and the Takadanobaba Tōei Palace was showing Daniel Schmid’s La Paloma and Hécate. Though I’d seen all four of these films before (actually, I’d seen La Paloma six times, Hécate three times, Annie five times, and All the Marbles twice), I wouldn’t mind seeing them again, I thought. But the Bungeiza would charge only seven hundred yen, while the Takadanobaba Tōei Palace would cost twelve hundred, though you could get a hundred-yen discount at either place if you presented a copy of City Road. So, considering the current state of my wallet, Annie and All the Marbles might be the better choice, I thought.

  In Annie (about Little Orphan Annie) the businessman played by Albert Finney, who’d adopted her on a whim, and his secretary, played by Ann Reinking, sing “Let’s Go to the Movies” on their way to Radio City Music Hall to see Greta Garbo’s Camille. I actually bought an LP of Annie and memorized this song. When a photographer who used to work in the same company as I did came around and saw me singing along with the record:

  “Fred and Ginger spinning madly . . .

  Songs and romance.

  Life is the dance,”

  he shook his head and said, “This won’t bring you work, you know. You can’t just wait in the doorway doing nothing, Kobayashi. It’s just like with girls. And what’s with this ‘bread and ginger’ stuff, anyway?” Still, he did help me find a little work, and it was there that I met Alexandre.

  A few years ago I applied for a job in the photography department of a publishing company that was pretty difficult to get into. I took the exam even though I thought I had no chance, it being so competitive. For some reason, I was chosen. Later I found out why: It was because the executive who conducted the job interview was such a sentimentalist. This probably wasn’t due to the executive’s sentimentality, but two years after I started working for the company, it went bankrupt, and they called for people prepared to take buyouts. I had no wife or children, no elderly parents, no dog or cat to support, no housing loan or other debts, so I was the first one to be tapped on the shoulder. And, since I found the work in the photography section a bore, I took their tiny buyout, and ever since I’ve been a freelance photographer, leading a relaxed sort of life.

  Oh, yeah. Now for the reason I managed to get a job at this publishing company that was so conscientious about its business that it eventually went bankrupt. Well, this executive named Tōdō told me some time after I started work there, “You kn
ow, when I looked at your CV, I thought it might just be the case . . . and I was right! You see, a long time ago, my older brother was married to your mother. So even though you did poorly on the exam, I let you in—out of nostalgia. It was odd, but maybe it’s karma, I thought. My brother died about fifteen years ago, and I wouldn’t dream of criticizing your mother at this point, but when she left, she left behind what’s-his-name.” (Tōdō mentioned the name, but I’ve forgotten what it was.) “And he was raised by his grandparents. He’s now in the psychiatry section of a university hospital in Kyoto. No, not as a patient, though it wouldn’t be at all surprising if he was, but as a doctor.” etc., etc.

  All this was news to me and I was taken aback, so I talked to my mother about it. Actually, I started by asking, “You know a Tōdō, don’t you?”

  “A tōdō?” she said. “A dodo is some kind of extinct bird but . . .” She didn’t seem to remember him (and she wasn’t faking it) until she heard my explanation. “Oh, yes, of course! I completely forgot. Sorry, sorry. That’s right, of course. Before I married Kobayashi, I was married to this man called Tōdō, wasn’t I? Forgetful me!”

  She laughed, which irritated me a lot. “Didn’t you have a kid from that marriage? Tche! You’re unbelievable. Forgetful doesn’t half cover it! I guess it’s none of my business, but he’d be my half-brother, you know.”

  “That’s right,” Mom said. “He’d be your elder brother. What was his name, now?” I knew that was the kind of woman she was, but I couldn’t help feeling annoyed with her, even so.

  Kobayashi is my dad, but Mom left him when I was in first grade and then got married for the third time to her present husband, a real estate agent.

  * * *

  The photographer who quit the company about the same time I did was a shrewd businessman, so he changed directions and made a big splash in the spread-your-legs-and-show-it branch of the profession—the one that specializes in making you wonder if what you’re seeing is pubic hair or spots on the skin or just shadows.

  “I’m gonna make an adult video this time,” he said. “Do you wanna work on it? It’ll only take two days to make. You’ve seen a lot more movies than I have, so gimme a hand.”

  “They say making videos is easy, but the lighting and everything’s completely different from stills. I’ve never even used an 8mm camera, so I doubt I’d be much help,” I answered.

  “You’ve seen videos, haven’t you?” he went on. “Even the lighting isn’t high-tech at all. An adjustable desk lamp would do, but since this is a commercial product, we’ll use two or three five-hundred watt lights. Remember, we’re not Godard. Don’t try to be arty. We’re not filming Passion.”

  “Of course not. I wouldn’t dream of doing that,” I assured him.

  “OK, as long as you know it’s not art but just a live-action sex video catering to rental shops,” he insisted. So I ended up agreeing to assist, or rather, work part-time for him, not only with the actual shooting but also by editing the unbelievably bad script written with total enthusiasm by an ex-radical student activist and present freelance writer. It was a weird mixture of that idol of the leftists Takahashi Kazumi plus Last Tango in Paris plus Nakagami Kenji.

  “As long as there’s fucking scenes, the script doesn’t matter,” said the successful pornographer. “But this one is over-ambitious, and the relationships among the characters are totally confusing. We’re gonna shoot it in two days and record at the same time, and none of our actors would be able to speak such long lines. So why don’t you just leave in the porn bits and take out everything else? I’ll pay you extra for doing it.”

  Since it was just a matter of crossing out everything except a few “lick its” and “stick it ins” with a red ballpoint pen, which only took me an hour, I earned a total of one hundred and fifty thousand yen (some of which must have come out of the pornographer’s own pocket) for two days plus one hour’s work. And during the filming, I got friendly with the lead actor, a Eurasian guy named Alexandre Gō.

  Alexandre, talking in a rather feminine way, opined that, judging from the color of his hair (reddish brown) and eyes (light gray), his father would seem to have been a Caucasian; but he might have been a light-skinned Negro, or a Jew. He was an unspecified person whose very ethnicity was unclear.

  “Can you believe even my mom has no idea who fathered her own baby!” complained this young man, who sometimes called himself an actor and at other times a fashion model or a photographer—always something different. He was what used to be called a juvenile delinquent, or in today’s terms, a dropout.

  “It’s tough with this face and this hair to get the lowest marks in English in your junior high school. They don’t take it lightly, you know,” he said. Then: “Let’s go to the bar my sis runs in Shinjuku!”

  That’s how I met Tsuneko, and one thing led to another. We didn’t fall in love or anything, and after a while our relationship died down. We were just a bar owner and her customer who came in for a drink every now and then until a month ago when I was about to leave the bar and she whispered to me, “I’m five months pregnant, and I’m going to have the baby.”

  I said, “Wow, brave girl!” It was only when I got home that it dawned on me that it might possibly have something to do with me.

  If only Tsuneko could be as forgetful as my mom! was the wishful thought that kept me awake that night. Then the following morning Alexandre, who, unusually for a delinquent, is an early riser, came by on his motorcycle and said in a knowing way, “There is a possibility that it’s yours, but Sis is basically the same as Mom, in my view.”

  I wasn’t just trying to make excuses when I told him what I suddenly and quite conveniently remembered—that I’d had mumps when I was in junior high, and I might, you know what they say, have become sterile as a result.

  He said, “Yeah, that’s quite possible. And you’re—how shall I put it?—not the father type really.” Then, wolfing down the jelly doughnuts he’d bought for me in Takadanobaba, he added, “This apartment’s on the ground floor, and there’s a garden right there. It’s ideal for keeping a cat!” And he nodded to himself.

  “So, this place is called the Red Plum Villa? And sure enough, there’s a plum tree in the garden. It’s well named! D’you know this haiku by Issa:

  ‘On the red plum tree

  laid out to dry

  the newly washed cat’?

  It was in the Japanese textbook we used in junior high. It’s the only thing I still remember, for some reason. Don’t you think the cat drying on the red plum tree should be black and white in this case? Ideal color coordination, eh?”

  “Yeah, that’d be quite a cute scene,” I found myself saying. “The kind of Japanese cat that’d look good with a little red silk band around its neck.”

  “Yes—exactly! Her eyes would be glossy green like ginkgo nuts, and the pads on the bottom of her paws’d be a beautiful pink. Her muzzle would also be a moist pink, and her tail would be long and black,” said Alexandre.

  “Tama would be a perfect name for a cat like that,” I said.

  “Of course it would. Some people give pretentious names to their cats, like Mick Jagger for a tabby, or Madonna for a white cat. There’s all types. Actually, I named myself Alexandre, even though my real name is Ureo. When I was born, my grandma—oh, she was a geisha in Fukagawa—probably the type that sleeps with her clients. Anyway, she was shocked because I had blue eyes, but then she said, ‘Oh, well, he might grow up to be a gorgeous man like Uzaemon or Egawa Ureo.’ And so they named me Ureo.”

  Alexander nattered on while seated on his motorcycle parked in the garden, until finally he said, “See you soon,” waved good-bye, and sped off.

  Being a mere mortal and not omniscient, I never guessed that this was the prelude to his bringing Tama here. And now Tama, having given up on the idea of going out, had curled up and fallen asleep, breathing peacefully. I had planned to go and see those films before the book dealer was due to come, but I changed my mind
since it would be terrible if the cat, having just been brought to a strange house, got nervous while I was away and sprayed the room with her pee, with its strong clinging odor.

  Even though she was a female, being this large and having both pre- and postpartum experience, she would have no compunction about lifting one hind leg like a dog and peeing away. Right now, though, she was curled up quietly on my cushion, with a blank look on her face, like that of the Virgin in Fra Angelico’s famous fresco of the Annunciation.

  * * *

  A few days later, there was a phone call from someone still hard at work in the photography section of the company that was, viewed from the outside, operating in just the same way, though on a smaller scale, even after the application of the Stock Company Reorganization and Rehabilitation Act that had been aimed at saving it from bankruptcy.

  “You’re quite deft in some odd specialties like producing photographic copies of plates. We have a new project that requires copies of plates—actually quite a lot of them—and I wonder if you’d do it for us.”

  On my way to this job, I bumped into the pornographer-photographer near the Kōjimachi intersection. “Hello! Long time no see, eh? Thanks for the work the other day.”

  “Hey, do you have some time? How about some coffee?” So we went into a nearby coffee shop.

  “How’re things lately?”

  “Same as usual, but today I’ve got a job copying plates.”

  “I see. So you don’t produce photographic works of your own?”

  “Actually, I do sometimes, but right now my camera’s in the pawnshop.”

  “Oh, that’s no good.”

  “Yeah, it’s a little inconvenient.”

  After chatting a bit this way, we started to talk about Tsuneko. He’d been a regular customer at her bar for quite a while.

  “Did you know she’s gonna have a baby?” he asked.