Bradley Johnson Productions Posts

Lynne Tillman’s new novel is Men and Apparitions, the looping, kaleidoscopic, and often hilarious monologue of a cultural anthropologist with an academic interest in family photographs, gender, and images. The novel is published in the UK by Peninsular Press.

On behalf of Granta, Emily LaBarge spoke to Tillman about photography, memory and what can’t be narrated.

 

I read that you shared a flat with the writer Heathcote Williams when you lived in London many years ago.

Yes, Heathcote and his wife, Diana Senior: for over a year we squatted a house on Westbourne Park Road. Very much of that moment.

 

In Men and Apparitions (M&A), Zeke also travels to London and Europe, a revelatory experience for him in terms of beginning to recognise his identity, which includes his nationality – his Americanness.

Zeke and his then-girlfriend Maggie go to Europe on holiday after they finish their PhD dissertations. My version was . . . getting away from my family for as long as possible and getting out of the States. I had also inherited the romantic idea from so many American writers of the early twentieth century, who went to Europe to find a place to write, to get away from America into the cultures of Europe, particularly Paris and London, T.S. Eliot being there.

Taking Zeke to Europe, first London and then Germany, I allow him to have very ‘other’ experiences. He is in a particularly vulnerable state, his defenses down, and things happen that would not happen at home. It’s one of the interesting aspects of living in one place then moving to another, which is what it was like for me when I moved between London, Amsterdam, Paris. In a foreign country, you feel other parts of your mind, or just other aspects of yourself emerging, because you are separated from the repetitive or the habitual that you do in what you call ‘home’.

 

Zeke is interested in ‘the New Man’, men who have grown up in post-women’s movement environments, and in how this experience might be reflected in their values and relationships to gender and equality. Can you say something about the genesis of Zeke’s character, and the other concerns and concepts you were grappling with in writing the novel?

I started working on M&A around 2008–2009, so it was about a ten-year project. I was interested in a sentence we’ve been hearing for many years: ‘we’re living in a glut of images’. How do you tell the story of living in a glut of images? And who would tell this story? My last novel, American Genius, A Comedy, was told from the point of view of a fifty-year-old woman, so I wanted to flip to a male narrator. This allowed me to get into my second set of thoughts, which had to do with men, masculinity, and changes in men who I was noticing. I have lots of male friends, aged twenty-five and up, and was very aware of the way younger men were dealing with questions around their masculinity and relationships with women or me. I realised that, post-women’s movement, a lot of them had feminist mothers. There were also many divorces from the 1960s on, so these people were growing up in a different zeitgeist. Having a male narrator, who is a cultural anthropologist studying family photographs, allowed me to bring all of this together. Zeke is curious about the image of men and how men image themselves. You see him throughout the novel trying to have different personae. I decided I would also do an ethnographic study myself, for him, and that became ‘Men in Quotes’.

 

Zeke’s voice is a huge part of his character – his consciousness, his thought process really is the narrative. In M&A there is a constant shifting: Zeke knows something and then all of a sudden this knowledge undoes itself; even your sentences do that. How do you use consciousness to construct a character who is also in the process of recognising that the self is relational and fluid?

I believe I do know characters by the way they think, which produces how they act and what kind of things they do. Zeke is in a certain place at the beginning of the novel: he is being undone and then he redoes himself and then he’s undone again, because he is in a sense using his theories, his ideas about human beings, to defend against his own ignorance about himself, or his ignorance about the world, which isn’t more than other people’s: we cannot predict what is going to happen, we live as if we can. When I’m reading Natalia Ginzburg, or Virginia Woolf, or Henry James, the consciousness of the characters makes those novels exciting to me. Zeke’s thought patterns, how he uses theories, all come to be part of his world, and it gets shaken. Also, I believe that what you study is always also psychologically determined, that we choose to study and be involved in things that are problems for us in some sense. Things that we love, things that we hate – we need to crack it open. That’s part of what I wanted to happen to Zeke: his intellectual cred is not going to protect him.

 

Core to Zeke’s voice is his sense of humour, which is self-conscious, sometimes deliberately corny, performative, but also genuine, as if it is an armour against seeming too serious or vulnerable. It is also very funny! Particularly his rhythmic, sometimes laconic speech and comedic timing.

Rhythms create propulsion, dynamics, and though M&A has a plot, in its way – it’s not an obvious one – the novel relies on rhythms. From fast and funny, to sombre, to colloquial, to theoretical speak, say. And I like jokes. Jokes are stories, and, as Freud told us, structured like dreams. Zeke does rely on humour to defend himself, to avoid being wrong, not to be vulnerable. In the US, ‘you know’ and ‘like’ are ways people can avoid making assertions. The English have the all-purpose ‘I don’t mind’, which took me a while to understand when I lived in London. Indefiniteness opens a door called ‘I don’t want to be rejected or wrong’. Zeke is funny and sad, he does stuff that is weird, comical, and upsetting. He’s alert and he’s not. He doesn’t see what’s before him. Photography is not only about looking, it’s about seeing, what you see. He looks but often doesn’t see.

 

Are there parallels between anthropology and narratology, or storytelling?

I studied Sociology in graduate school, not because I wanted to become a Sociologist, but because I wanted to study more. I had done English Literature and American History, as well as Studio Art in College, but I wanted to study new ideas and theories. In the Sociology department at CUNY (City University of New York) Graduate School, I read Michel Foucault, Hélène Cixous, Erving Goffman, Max Weber. Clifford Geertz and James Clifford – to whom Zeke often refers in M&A – both of whom were involved in how Cultural Anthropology is storytelling.

When an anthropologist goes out into the field, they hear stories, and they base their conclusions about cultures and societies on these stories. I’ve always felt that a story is a way people think, and I wanted to use that. Zeke knows certain things, on an intellectual level, and by knowing them he thinks he’s not part of them. In his own field, though, he becomes part of the storytelling. He tells his own stories through his theories. Zeke’s family is full of stories. The story of Clover Hooper Adams, his family story, which his mother is so intent on propagating. These are stories, and stories are true. Whether they’re factual or not is something else.

 

I read that someone once told you your characters didn’t speak like people in the real world, and you said something like, ‘they speak like people in the world I want to live in’.

The trouble is that people think there is a ‘reality’, and some sort of naturalism or realism asserts that reality. Yes, my characters speak to each other and say what people wouldn’t usually say. People also don’t usually write books! If you read Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies, one of the great novels of the twentieth century, her people talk in ways that you don’t expect. People in D.H. Lawrence talk in ways you don’t expect. In Kafka’s novels, people do things you don’t expect, events happen you don’t expect. There is a notion that the expectation should be satisfied, when in fact the expectation exists only because it’s been repeated, again and again and again. People can have all sorts of conversations, and I do have all kinds of conversations, and hear people say things that are usual and very unusual. And what do you reproduce, what do you represent in your fiction? Yes, for me it’s what I’d like to hear and that suits my characters. Also sometimes it’s what you wouldn’t like to hear.

My expectations, my hopes, when I read are to find what I don’t expect. To be in a world that I don’t necessarily understand or have a grasp of, not to see myself in a mirror. A friend once recounted a conversation he had with another friend of his, a guy from Texas who didn’t know very much about art. The Texan saw one of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup can works and said to my friend, ‘God, this is stupid.’ And my friend said to him, ‘What you expect to see there is just as stupid.’ Which may be one of the best art criticisms I’ve ever heard. It’s a fantastic way of understanding the work of the expectation and the stereotype. People write in ways that continue stereotypes, and often don’t even know it.

 

In M&A, fiction and non-fiction blur or are interspersed: in between Zeke’s stories and reminiscences of his family and his life are digressions – almost mini-essays – on a variety of touchstones including anthropology, photography, television, literature, political events, true crime, vernacular American culture, and more. How do you think about the weaving of fiction with non-fiction, and how did you go about creating this specific world of Zeke’s?

Narrativizing intentions and ideas is the work in a novel. Novels and stories can address the period and conditions we live in, or think about. Flaubert’s Sentimental Education does that so amazingly, Ginzburg’s All Our Yesterdays, also. Consciousness – sensibility could be added, though it’s a different flavour – builds in a time, your time. Memory, history and the present all live in characters, create them. I wanted to make that much more present. How do characters come about? For me, it’s what they think about, what and who they encounter, their backgrounds, educations, almost never what they look like, and mostly not what they say. I don’t use much dialogue, but when I do, it’s pretty strange stuff. Writers often rely too much on dialogue, in my opinion, to build their characters. An all-dialogue novel is different, that’s another form. What people say, what they think and do, can be and are extremely different. I like contradictions, people are tricky.

As for the mini-essays, as you call them: with M&A, I dared myself to be more daring than in previous novels, and expand my palette. Zeke is a cultural anthropologist, an uneasy one, and interested in families and photography. It’s all on his mind. And being a ‘man’. So he can expostulate, theorize, which was fun for me, and it’s ‘natural’ for his character. Also he’s a professor. Sometimes they can’t stop professing. Those touchstones you mention are necessary for him, because even if you didn’t live through them, they mark time. And novels hold time.

 

Zeke often speaks of his childhood and speculates about his formative years. At this point in his life, why is he looking back to his family and his ancestry? What is he hoping to understand, to remember, or to not forget?

In part it’s about recognising mortality. When you come to think about the fact that you will die, you might find comfort in the idea of continuity, and in having a family history. But it’s a curious thing: Zeke is on the threshold of a very different time, when parents are not going to have actual photo albums anymore, or if they do, they will be scant, or held in some virtual space. So when he finds photographs of a family that have been thrown out, it’s very striking to him. He recognises that they had done all of this work of preservation, and then it all gets discarded.

A human being’s childhood and period of dependency lasts a long time, particularly if you compare it with other animals that need to learn self-sufficiency immediately in order to survive. I don’t know if that period of dependency is understood well enough – to understand what, as human beings, that period of dependency does to us, and how vulnerable we felt. Some parenting is better than others, but everyone experiences stuff we don’t remember, and that dependency, say, is part of your psyche. That fascinates me.

 

Photography plays a huge role in Men and Apparitions, from Zeke’s own family album, to the many contemporary photographers who are mentioned. Zeke takes a class in which his professor urges him to consider photography itself as a way of seeing, of discovering the unseen. ‘You are seeing with your guts wide open to the sweet pain of an image that is part of your life,’ the professor says.

I don’t have an overriding theory or position about photography’s place in this world. We live in it, and can’t now separate from its effects. Loving images, falling in love with an image, the way an image is produced with a photograph. The way it can fake and be true to itself only. During this Covid-time, images on screens substitute, and don’t, for contact. Maybe this will affect how images, different from photographs, will affect our thinking.

‘Seeing with our guts wide open’ is such a romantic idea, similar to when writers say ‘I write with my guts’. To me that’s hilarious. I don’t think I’ve said this before, but photographs have a specific meaning for me. I was the youngest in my family, much younger than my two older sisters. I had a need to know what I didn’t live through, and often looked at family pictures and the family movies my father shot. I’d stare at them, strangers to me. I set up the projector to watch the little movies of the time before I was born. ‘Before I was born’ has a poignance to me. You can join that to my interest in history. It wasn’t nostalgia, but a desire for what I didn’t know.

Photographs can elicit a present about a past, you see it these days. Great photographers make pictures, which are different to me from records of faces and events. A picture assembles other realities. A picture is a way of seeing, to paraphrase John Berger, which can disrupt what a viewer has seen. It opens up sight to other registers. It does amaze me that photography came about. Why did its inventors think it was needed, what were they looking for? Photography implemented the image of the US, especially to Americans. And the two developed in the same time.

 

Zeke is interested in the ‘inenarrable’, what can’t be narrated, and also what is not pictured in family photographs. He speaks of secrets as ‘the family contract’. Throughout the book, his secrets – and the secret annals, shames, tragedies of his family – come out in fits and starts, but it still feels, particularly in his voice, as if something is wrong or being held back.

Shame is powerful, and operates harshly in psyches. People write about desire, but most desires are kept private. What gets told, that’s different. Let’s say, secrets are symptoms of shame. I found the word, ‘inenarrable’, and was grateful, because it did what I needed. What can’t be narrated? It’s an abstract idea. But dreams and jokes speak to it. The unsayable. Pictures are inenarrable. I do it, project into them, and make a story. But they don’t ‘tell’ stories, they let us tell stories. And silence, it comes out of all of this. Zeke’s sister, he calls her Little Sister, suffers from the inability to speak. There are reasons – women are silenced. But I wasn’t thinking only about that, but also other ways of ‘talking’. Not speaking is also a form of dissent.

 

Zeke is also interested in the discarded, what he calls ‘the rejectamenta’.

I was fascinated by how much gets thrown out, and how we live in a world in which people want to acquire. We’re trained to be consumers from jump: you buy something and then immediately something else comes along that replaces it, so you throw out the first. The idea of holding onto something, especially now with the cyber-world where things can be held forever in an invisible space, has altered significantly. We are now virtually hoarding, which is the opposite of rejecting. Purging and hoarding are both contemporary phenomena: those poles are so compelling. What does Zeke hold onto? He has these photographs of other people, his family photographs, and also images of specific people, like the image of Clover Hooper Adams, who was a photographer. The dialectic between holding onto and throwing out seems like the dynamic of the world in which at least I live.

 

You have spoken about writing ‘alongside’ or writing ‘to’ art, which is something the filmmaker and writer Trinh T. Minh Ha has said too – she writes of ‘speaking alongside’ or ‘nearby’ a subject. You also once told me that she has described her work – when asked the blunt ‘who is your audience?’ query – as being ‘for sensitive people’. This is a broad, beautiful way of speaking about sensibilities rather than content as something that generates a kinship with reader or viewer. Whom do you want your work to be for?

Great imponderables. Wittgenstein said, ‘Don’t explain, only describe’. A description can’t avoid opinions, judgments, because words denote and connote. But ‘writing alongside’ or ‘to’ attempts to be as much a subject as the object being described. In other words, why I developed writing to art the way I did was to foreground writing as writing. Like photographers have to get rid of the idea of a photograph as a window into somewhere else. Minh-Ha is an exceptional artist and intellectual. When I heard her answer (I was in the audience), ‘I make films for sensitive people’, I beheld a brilliant response to a belligerent questioner; he asked, ‘Who are your films for?’ Her answer made the question irrelevant. For sensitive people, she said. They can be any group, class, sex, gender, nationality etc. How beautiful. A different kinship. But whom do I want my writing to be for? Wow. People who care about writing. People who feel troubled by life. People who want to find more joy. And, yes, I suppose they can be called sensitive people. Thank you, Minh-ha. And I hope there will be more of them.

 

Zeke ends his ‘Men in Quotes’ anthropological study by saying that he will necessarily have selected that which appeals to him: ‘Unwillingly I participate in everything I may want to change. And, everything I am, and may not want to be’. There is a sense throughout the book that he is battling inheritance – family inheritance, ideological, cultural inheritance – while also trying to balance his identity as both an individual and as a member of a community (be it of academics, or of twenty-first century men). How do we challenge our inheritances, or are we to some extent forever beholden to them?

I love the way you said that. Inheritance, yes. What isn’t, in some sense? Born into everything, with little choice. Yet people try to find a way to be a self of their own. With all the issues about a ‘self’, if it exists, people still want to have one; they don’t usually imagine themselves a bunch of random bits, an assortment that really isn’t anything; friends expect each other to be consistent, which aligns with wanting a ‘self’ for others, at least. Inherited traumas certainly were on my mind. There’s fascinating work being done on how trauma travels generationally. In the DNA, also. What is the desire to avenge the past, to protect it? That fascinates me. I’m fascinated by so much that appears ‘natural’, and why? I think often about evolution, and how humans as a species are evolving, or will, and why. What do new patterns serve? What are we preparing for, unconsciously, or because of changes in our DNA and more? If I want to hang around, and often I don’t, it’s because I’d like to see this unfold.

 

I heard that you are writing an ‘anti-memoir’! Is this true? And what does it mean?

I’ve been told not to call it an anti-memoir. I don’t know what it is. Memoirs are made up of stories writers tell about their lives and themselves. They have to be, in part, fictions, because memory is weird and because writing is not life itself. I don’t want to tell people the same stories, because they bore me to tell them again. People ask writers, the more books you write, the more questions you get about ‘How did you become a writer’, and making it up, your life, starts there. I do want to be honest, and that includes not being certain. Lately, I’m not able to concentrate on this project, because I know the stories. When I do write it, I recognize how much I don’t recall. That’s why I want to say it’s an anti-memoir, and focus on the ambiguities, my constructions. Sometimes I have no idea if it is a memory, a dream. Many people feel that. And I can be wrong. Wrong about what happened. Or it’s my point of view only, not another’s. That’s why fiction is true. It allows for that.

The post Interview appeared first on Granta.

In 2010 I was working for a businessman on the Kings Road in London. He needed someone to research patents, the idea being that I was to categorise as many as possible ahead of the creation of some kind of online service. I don’t believe it ever launched. The task was vague and endless, and the businessman would constantly smoke cigars inside the office, but he was pleasant enough to work for and some of the patents were memorable. I remember finding a patent for a sex toy that looked like someone had fixed a dildo onto a railway pump trolley. The job also gave plenty of time to read, and in those months I read a lot of Kōbō Abe.

Abe was born in 1924, died in 1993, and in between those years wrote a series of novels, plays and poems that are among the strangest and most ingenious ever written inside or outside of Japan. He grew up in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, his father a doctor in the city of Mukden, now the Chinese city of Shenyang. Following the family trade was encouraged, so at the height of the Second World War he studied medicine at Tokyo University. It didn’t go particularly well. At one point he checked himself into a hospital from the stress, and poor grades meant he had to forge a certificate stating he had tuberculosis to avoid being drafted to the front. He never practised as a doctor but, after the war, did make a living as a street vendor, selling vegetables and coal. He also found a medic’s eye in his writing, the ordeals of his characters drawn with the clinical precision of a surgeon dressing a wound.

I found Abe by accident. I’d gone to the old Foyles on Charing Cross Road, made it as far as the letter A, and plucked a book from the shelf because of the title: The Woman in the Dunes. I’d never heard of the author but I was open to chance, the kind you find in bookshops. I don’t recall the weather or the time of day, but I remember the distinct feeling of being watched by someone in the room. I needed to keep my fingers busy. There’s an intimacy that comes from finding an author in this way, when a chain of moments brings you to a particular time and place, makes you susceptible to raise your hand and pull a book by its spine.

The Woman in the Dunes (1962) is probably Abe’s most famous book, a mystifying erotic nightmare that was made into a Cannes Festival award-winning film by Hiroshi Teshigahara. The story is about a teacher and amateur entomologist who travels to an isolated community in search of a particular species of sand beetle, but instead finds himself imprisoned by the villagers in a house at the bottom of a vast sand dune. In the house is a woman, and the captive must help her to shovel the ever-encroaching sand.

The sand gets in everything. It is a source of rot, breaking clocks and machinery. It strips and corrodes. It is when they are cleaning sand from each other’s bodies that sex first enters into the relationship. It wears away any understanding the captive has of the woman, any structure of meaning he can prop up about who she is and what she wants. She says the bodies of her dead husband and child are buried somewhere in the sand but she cannot remember where. Through E. Dale Saunders’ translation, the sand got into my mind. There is a fundamental terror at the heart of the novel, something formless. Perhaps it is formlessness itself. As the narrator says about the sand: ‘The very fact that it had no form was doubtless the highest manifestation of its strength, was it not?’

Around the time he was writing The Woman in the Dunes, Abe was expelled from the Japanese Communist Party. As the author David Mitchell writes in the Guardian, perhaps this event spurred the writer to eschew moral absolutes and certainties, to suggest that ‘no dogma, interpretation and no authorial intention is immune to the transforming effects of the future’. Perhaps. What I can tell you is that the past decade has seen the rupturing of so many perceived certainties, so many truths, and that Abe’s work of disorientation speaks so potently to these times we are living.

The shifting ground of The Woman in the Dunes takes different shapes in Abe’s other work. The Face of Another (1964), also adapted into a film by Teshigahara, is about a scientist who suffers facial disfigurement and sets about creating a lifelike mask to hide his scars. But with the mask comes an alternate self, and the scientist begins to seduce his estranged wife under the guise of this other. Early on in the novel the human face is described as a ‘roadway between people’, but the path soon becomes a labyrinth of uncertain directions and dead ends. The dunes are not literal, but instead the ‘thousand layers of masks’ the scientist comes to see in the face of his wife, constantly slipping and eluding his attempts at reconnection. His own face is an empty space, a masked void that sees but is never seen.

Here, as always, Abe denies access. To his characters, to any stable notion of interior truth. Like the protagonist of Luigi Pirandello’s One, No One and One Hundred Thousand (1926), the scientist searches futilely for an identity divorced from other’s perceptions. Like a Gillian Wearing artwork, an imitation of a face hides the promise of truths never quite seen. These acts, of seeing and being seen, the difficulty of both, are things that interest me too. I tend to write with a mirror close by, making faces and trying to name what I catch reflected back at me. If I can only understand a character’s expression, I think. If I can perfectly articulate the way they curl their lip or furrow their brow, then perhaps I can find a path into what they are hiding. Often, I fear I’ll find an empty space.

When I first read Abe, I had graduated into a recession, had struggled to find work, ended up categorising patents for a purpose I didn’t fully understand. The next year I would move to Tianjin in north-east China to spend two years teaching at a university. I brought some Abe novels with me. This was when the country was making a dramatic push to expand and develop its cities. There I saw whole fields of vast residential towers constructed for future investment, many of them uninhabited. They would look monumental in the daytime but if you returned at night not a single window would be lit.

The mask of the postindustrial city is built in this way, in ghost complexes and mock-historical facades, in advertisements for new developments hanging over crumbling communities. Abe was interested in the place of the individual in such a labyrinth. In The Ruined Map (1967), a detective is hired by an alcoholic woman to find her husband. With only a few clues he searches the sprawl of Tokyo, gradually losing grip of his own identity, coming to see himself as the missing man. It takes the sense-making machine of the detective, a force for unpicking the tangle of the modern city, and renders him lost. The lines between pursuer and pursued are blurred. Identity begins to seem a trick of memory; those pins we stick into our maps, trusting that the paper won’t move and tear beneath. How easy is it to forget who we are, asks Abe. How strong are the thumbtacks we press into the streets and buildings, into the faces of people we know?

These ideas are given their fullest expression in The Box Man (1973), my personal favourite of Abe’s novels. It tells the tale of a nameless man who has shed the trappings of identity to live anonymously in a cardboard box that he has fashioned into a portable shell. Inside the box is a shelf of simple belongings; a mug, a towel, a thermos and a radio. He busies himself with arranging a makeshift shelf. Eyeholes equipped with a protective vinyl curtain allow him to voyeuristically look out at the world. He is far from the only one living this way, we learn, and he was not always a box man, but his identity is in a constant state of slippage. We hear about a former surgeon, as well as an assistant that may or may not have stolen the surgeon’s identity. His identity, the source of the box man’s gaze, is less a fixed point than a series of echoes. At one point he peers at a young nurse undressing: ‘At the same time as I was looking at her, another was looking at me looking at her.’

I am writing this as England moves into its second national lockdown. Many of us have become horrifically acquainted with the walls that surround us. We sit at our computers, lift the vinyl curtain, and look out at a world that feels both remote and insidiously close, inescapable despite our best attempts. We watch events transpire on our screens, surrounded by our belongings and the small tasks that keep us grounded. We tick things off. We take regular walks.

The horizon is constantly slipping out of view and amongst this uncertainty, what can we hold onto? Habit. ‘The ballast that chains the dog to his vomit,’ as Samuel Beckett once described it. The protagonist in The Box Man survives by habitually considering what is at hand. ‘When I look at small things,’ he says, ‘I think I shall go on living: drops of rain, leather gloves shrunk by being wet . . . When I look at something too big, I want to die.’ In the latter, he counts Japan’s main governmental building and a map of the world. Against the immensity of things, look at what you can grasp, he seems to say. Grasp it tightly. Earlier today I passed through an empty shopping centre. The shops were shuttered but workers were still putting up Christmas trees.

But how long can the ballast hold? The ground is ever-shifting. The sand gets everywhere.

 

Thomas McMullan’s novel The Last Good Man is available now from Bloomsbury.

The post Kōbō Abe appeared first on Granta.

I used to be a mariner. Worked on boats since I was a lad and stopped at nearly every port in the world. Compared to all of you, I’m not the handsomest guy or the smartest, which might’ve caused me all sorts of grief if I was a landlubber. But I spent my life at sea, so I got by.

Seeing as I’m not the squandering type, I was able to save a good bit of money. The labor I put into smuggling on the side didn’t hurt neither. No doubt this line of work has a bad rep with you decent folk. I was trusted with all sorts of things, from narcotics to jewels. Took in enough loot to live it up if I wanted.

But a guy like me can blow as much cash as you please; he’ll never be as popular with them girls as all o’ you. So I chose to go on pinching my pennies, which I enjoyed, even without nothing in particular to use ‘em for. The day came round, though, when I had to give it up.

The whole thing started when I got a tattoo at this little port on the Mediterranean. Most of my mates had tattoos of women and boats and that, and seeing as I was the only guy who didn’t have a tattoo of his own, I figured I was due. That was big mistake number one. Big mistake number two was thinking that if I was gonna follow the crowd and get tattooed, I ought to go with a real odd one instead of something run of the mill like the rest of ‘em.

‘What sort of design would you like?’ this aging fortune teller asked me. We were in the back of her dark hut. She was turning the pages of one of them tattoo picture books.

Right then I surprised myself by coming up with a top-notch idea. ‘Make it a cabbage,’ I said.

I could not remember ever seeing a tattoo of a cabbage. I was proud of myself. Same time, I was worried the fortune teller would laugh at me for the strange request. But for some reason the lady’s face went white, and she tried to stop me.

‘Of all the tattoos you could choose, please forget about that one.’

I may not be brightest fish in the school, but I’m still like all of you, in that if someone tells me to quit, it just makes me want to do that thing more. So I told her a lie.

‘No way,’ I said. ‘I’ve been planning forever that if I ever get a tattoo, it has to be a cabbage. I only waited till now ‘cause no other artist could pull it off.’

‘They refused because it is something we must not do.’

‘I bet you’re just saying that ‘cause you don’t have what it takes.’

‘It is not beyond my skill. But you will meet with a terrible fate. You will regret it all your life.’

‘I don’t care. I want something to impress my shipmates. I’ll pay whatever you ask. Just do it.’

I talked the fortune teller lady into it, thinking I’d never find nothing better to spend my money on. In the end I had her tattoo the cabbage onto my left bicep.

Boy did she do a first-class job. It was so well done that if you took one peek, it looked like the cabbage was popping out at you. I went back to the ship and showed it off with pride to my mates. Their eyes went wide to a man, but not a single one looked impressed the way I’d hoped. I left off feeling kind of bummed.

Then the bad things just kept coming. That night the tattoo got itchy, and while I was scratching away it got infected, maybe ‘cause of the saltwater that went in the cut. After two, three days, I tried taking off the bandage, figuring it ought to be better by then, but turned out something funky was happening beneath. The cabbage had disappeared, and in its spot was the face of a girl.

She sort of popped out at you the same as with the cabbage, looking almost alive. When I tried giving the face a poke, she changed her expression like it hurt. This got me excited, and I hurried round showing my mates, but it was no good this time either. Every one of ‘em looked away without a word. I couldn’t understand how come no one had anything nice to say about it. To me a tattoo that could make faces was a real find. They just didn’t get it, and I figured it was ‘cause the girl was not exactly what you’d call a looker.

The next bad thing that happened was I got fired in a snap.

‘When we return to the port, you have to resign,’ the captain told me. ‘The men say they’re having trouble working with you around.’

No matter how much I begged it made no difference. This had to be what that fortune teller lady had warned me about. I’d gotten the boot without making no mistakes. What can you call that except bad luck?

I bought a small house and set to landlubbering for a while. Was around this time that the girl’s face began to bulge all gradual-like from my arm, turning into a lump, sort of swollen, though I didn’t feel pain or nothing. As the face got bigger, it started to blink now and then, which I did not find cute at all, ‘cause of the lady’s not-so stunning appearance. It made me angry thinking how I might’ve kept my job if only she’d been easier on the eyes.

Soon enough, I just plain flew off the handle. I grabbed a knife, and sawed away till I got her off – a real relief. Then I took that little nub, dug a hole in the corner of my yard, and buried it.

But it wasn’t over yet. After a while, when the cut healed up and I took a look, there was a girl’s face there again. A different face this time, but no less plain than the first. I decided to pinch her nose with a laundry clip, see if it improved her looks any. It seemed worth a shot. A week or so later, the face began to stick out, and I figured her nose had got longer. But when I took off the clip, it was back as stubby as before.

I could’ve tried plastic surgery, but I was scared of rumors spreading after the doctor got a peek at her. The last thing I wanted was a repeat of what’d happened on ship. So I bought a bunch of make-up, and tried putting lipstick on her, face powder and that. It was good fun for a while, ‘cause I’d never done nothing like that before, but somehow it never turned out right. Goes to show you that the face of an unbeautiful girl can’t be helped. In the end, I lost control and cut her out again. I was tired of it all, and afraid it was gonna go on for the rest of my life.

I chucked the nub into a wastepaper basket, and it dried up crispy, crumbling all over the place. That’s when a stroke of good fortune came my way. The face of the girl that appeared on my arm next time round wasn’t half bad. I told myself I was gonna take good care of this one.

I can guess what all of you’d have done in my shoes: just kept removing the face to make her looks get better and better. But I had to be realistic about who I was. My safest bet was to settle for what I could get.

A few nights went by with me sleeping carefully, so as not to rest on my left side. To give her nutrition for quick growing, I started eating lots. This looked to be helping, ‘cause she got bigger lickety-split, and bulged out a good way. Same time, she was becoming more and more beautiful, though that could have been all in my head from taking a liking to her. Her hair got darker and darker, and her long narrow eyes turned attractable.

‘Well, how’s that, eh?’ I said to her one day, for the heck of it.

‘Huh . . .’ she replied, all quiet-like, moving those cute lips. Now here was a discovery. I hadn’t felt like talking with none of the girls before her, so I never figured they’d talk back.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

‘Whatever you want to call me.’

This was the most easy-going girl I had ever met. The ones I’d dated in my mariner days did nothing but make fun of me. I was happy as a clam.

‘Then I guess I’ll call you Polly,’ I mumbled softly to her. ‘That’s it, Polly.’ My heart was beating fast.

‘Huh . . .’

‘I know I’m not handsome, but don’t you run off on me.’

‘No need to worry,’ she said with a smile, and then it hit me: being stuck to my arm, she could never leave. I smiled back. At last I’d got a girl of my very own. A dumb ugly guy like me.

I gave her a kiss. Polly wasn’t so pleased. I couldn’t tell if that was ‘cause it was her first time and she was shy, or if she didn’t like it on account of my looks. But I didn’t care. She was bound to get used to it by and by. Still I felt kind of guilty, so I said, ‘Polly – is there anything you want me to do for you?’

‘I need sweets.’

‘You got it. I’ll go get some for you.’

I put a candy in that little mouth of hers.

‘Thanks. Yum.’

From then on, I spent my days talking with Polly, smooching her, and feeding her sugary treats. She was a quiet, well-behaved girl. I gave her loads of sweets, and enjoyed seeing the satisfaction on her face. Little by little, she grew and grew. Started to eat a lot, and talk a lot, like she was getting used to it. She was asking for all sorts of foods, and I’d call shops to have them bring over whatever she wanted. I was glad that I’d built up some savings back in my mariner days, instead of wasting my money. There’s no better way to use loot than to spend it on your girl.

‘Don’t you be modest,’ I said. ‘I’ve got all the money we’ll ever need.’

When Polly heard this, she looked as happy as I was. I realized that the fortune teller lady hadn’t known what she was talking about. What more could a guy possibly hope for? My Polly kept getting more beautiful, and more bigger by the day . . .

 

*

 

I went into town after a long time away. I’d done nothing but tend to Polly for a good while, so it felt like forever since I’d been there.

Suddenly I heard someone whistle. When I turned my eyes in their direction, I saw one of my old shipmates walking towards us, drunk. I was pleased to see him after so long, and was about to call out to him, but he called out to me first.

‘Hey there missy. What’s your name?’

‘Polly,’ she replied, before I could get a word in.

‘Wanna have a drink?’ my old shipmate asked as he came over.

I shouted to Polly that we should go home right away, but my voice was too small, and she didn’t seem to hear. Then she took a Band-Aid from her handbag and stuck it over my face.

 
Image © The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art

This story is part of our 20 for 2020 series, featuring twenty timely and exciting new works from the Japanese published here at Granta.com. Find out more about the project here.

The post Pretty Polly appeared first on Granta.

For the 2020 November PAD Chapbook Challenge, poets write a poem a day in the month of November before assembling a chapbook manuscript in the month of December. Today’s prompt is to write a color poem.

For today’s prompt, write a color poem. You could make the title of your poem a color and then write a poem. Or you could just mention a color in your poem. Of course, an ode to a color would work. And feel free to liberate your poem with a variety of colors (why pick only one?).

Remember: These prompts are springboards to creativity. Use them to expand your possibilities, not limit them.

Note on commenting: If you wish to comment on the site, go to Disqus to create a free new account, verify your account on this site below (one-time thing), and then comment away. It’s free, easy, and the comments (for the most part) don’t require manual approval like on the old site.

*****

The deadline has been extended for the 2020 Writer’s Digest Poetry Awards. The extended deadline is November 16!

Calling all poets! We’re on the look out for poems of all styles–rhyming, free verse, haiku, and more–for the 15th Annual Writer’s Digest Poetry Awards! This is the only Writer’s Digest competition exclusively for poets. Enter any poem 32 lines or less for your chance to win $1,000 in cash.

Click to continue.

*****

Here’s my attempt at a Color Poem:

“gray scale”

for one thing I can’t remember
any color in the embers
of a long lost forsaken dream
only people and what they seem
to be telling me what to do
about a thing I can’t unscrew
during my conscious waking life
filled to the brim with doubt and strife

Write a scene inspired by a fortune from a fortune cookie.

I just ate three fortune cookies, which gave me the following fortunes. Interpret them how you will:

“Do you want to be a power in the world? Then be yourself.”

“Call an old friend today.”

“A close friend reveals a hidden talent.”

Write a scene or story inspired by one of the fortunes.

Post your response (500 words or fewer) in the comments below.

1

Sometimes Narumi would dream. Dreams of when she was still alive. She’d have just turned fifteen, her arms and legs slender, her belly flat as a sheet of drawing paper. If she twisted her body slightly, the gentle curve of her shoulder blades and backbone would appear. Supple enough to run any distance, as full of life as a new-born animal in the spring. The natural swell of her breasts, the nipples whose color and size she’d never give a second thought to. The slender curve of her waist. The light reflecting off her lightly-muscled thighs and upper arms, promising a shining future. She could be anything she wanted to be, go anywhere she wanted. She could hurt no one, and no one could hurt her. In the dream, Narumi is vitality itself.

Although that body had clearly belonged to her, in reality it had never been her own. People around her were always telling her how much every part of her was worth. Direct and aggressive, or more indirect and implicit – there were many ways of letting her know. None of these so-called values seemed to have any connection with Narumi herself. They were connected somehow to her sex, which cloaked her inner self. She was a woman first and foremost, Narumi second – this was what they were all trying to make her understand. And so, long before she had been given the chance to recognize herself as a human being, and her body as no one’s but her own, she was dropped into that bottomless well called womanhood. She struggled for breath in the darkness, submerged in the endless gush of other people’s desires. Even if she managed to crawl her way back up the wall, she could never quite get dry. Her body was always cold.

 

2

Emerging from her dream, Narumi blinks several times, flexes her hands and feet, and takes a few minutes to adjust her body to her other reality. The hamburger steak she ate just before going to bed weighs heavily in her stomach. She’d made too much food, but who else was going to eat the leftover meat? The sweet demi-glace sauce left over from the night before is beginning to harden around the edges of the frying pan. She considers scooping it up with a spoon and pouring it over some steamed white rice, but – she remembers – the rice is in the freezer. Scraping all the sauce from the pan and licking it directly from the spoon, she clears the table and piles everything in the sink.

It was about ten years ago that Narumi’s body began to take on its heavy layer of fat.

It happened over a relatively short space of time. Her body silently puffed up like a bread roll in the dark, orange glare of the oven. All she had to do was dedicate herself to eating whatever she could lay her hands on, at every hour of the day. People around her began to look uneasy when they saw the changes in Narumi’s body, teasing her, occasionally trying to seem sympathetic. When she was no longer able to recall her original body shape in the mirror she felt a deep sense of relief. She’d wanted to create a layer – even just a few millimeters – of distance between herself and the world around her. Even if someone were to touch her, they wouldn’t be able to reach the real her. Having created for herself a body that was gawked at by everyone she passed, Narumi could feel alone deep in its center. Reaching out from inside when necessary, she took care of her husband, who was rarely at home, and her nine-year-old daughter, who was quiet like her mother. She did housework. She studied her reflection in the full-length mirror, making sure that the flesh was still there. She ate carbohydrates, drank sweet juice, and slept.

Shopping bags stuffed and bulging, she enters the cafe in front of the station. I should have had the store double the bags, she thinks to herself. Plastic bottles of fruit-flavored juice had been on special offer today and she’d bought as many as she could carry.

The heat is searing, and the moment she sits down, sweat erupts from every pore in her body. Pressing a thick hand towel to her forehead, she orders a glass of cold milk and some green tea ice cream. Empty calories – she pours them into her body to be stored away. And she never stops sweating. The two women at the next table are hurling their voices at one another relentlessly. Children grown up and moved out, their husbands retired and hanging around the house with nothing to do, these two have escaped and been at the gym since the morning; now they’re painting the hours with endless conversation before shopping for the evening meal. One of them strokes her coarse, graying hair and laughs aloud. The woman opposite, still wearing her special sun-blocking sleeves, takes her iced tea and sucks vigorously on her straw. The drinks never last long enough. The woman glances across, notices the amount of sweat Narumi is producing, and her eyes with their heavy pattern of crow’s feet pop open. She takes in the hair plastered to the forehead, the flushed cheeks, the wet discoloration of Narumi’s T-shirt under the arms and around the chest, and finally her giant frame. A disgraceful sight. As if in doubt that the chair she is using could be the same as the one supporting Narumi’s body, so massive that it would be impossible to get two arms around her, the older woman shifts her own chair noisily and reseats herself. But the conversation never falters. The women are discussing a rape case that was recently in the news but then soon disappeared.

Narumi pulls out her smartphone and checks her Twitter page. She doesn’t write anything. There’s nothing to write about. The kind of things she follows are women’s gossip magazines, celebrities, food bloggers, anonymous housewives who tweet about trivial everyday stuff, cat pictures. She catches snippets of the conversation at the next table. Narumi knows of the case from Twitter and the morning tabloid news shows. She recalls the image of the young woman with big eyes fighting back tears during the press conference. While having dinner with a famous TV journalist, the woman had been given so much to drink that she lost consciousness, and was then taken to a hotel room and raped. There had been a warrant issued for the journalist’s arrest, but under political pressure the warrant was revoked and all charges dropped. The woman’s press conference had been broadcast, but after only a few days not a single newspaper or TV station was covering the case. Apart from a small online presence, the story had all but vanished.

‘Dreadful – if it’s true,’ says the woman sitting on the far side of the table. ‘But you know how it is – she asked that man to use his influence to help her get a job, and then she went drinking with him. Seems that kind of thing happens a lot.’

‘But you know, you should never go drinking alone with a man you have no intention of sleeping with. He’s going to get his hopes up. It’s just leading him on, really. And with her looks . . . she knew what she was in for.’

‘True, and headstrong too, you can tell from the way she looks. If she’d behaved more professionally to begin with you know things wouldn’t have turned out this way.’

‘Oh, but this wasn’t about work at all. Apparently, she was in that line of business. The man was the customer – that’s what was really going on.’

‘She brought it all on herself. And did you see what she was wearing for that news conference? That blouse! The buttons were open down to her breasts.’

‘I saw that! I saw that! She was asking for it, dressing that way.’

‘I told you, she’s a bar hostess by profession. Back in our day, women would never have behaved like that.’

Narumi takes a swig of her cold milk, then picks up the silver spoon and begins to carefully whittle away at the hard surface of her green tea ice cream.

‘Whatever happens, things are going to be tough for her now,’ continues the woman on Narumi’s side of the table. ‘Doesn’t matter who’s right or wrong, the point is she’s come right out and admitted in public that he’s had his way with her, let everyone know that she’s damaged goods. She’ll be talked about, have to carry that shame around with her for the rest of her life.’

The two women simultaneously reach for their straws and drain their glasses. Conversation quickly turns to the special offer at the new dry cleaner’s down the street.

Beads of moisture begin to form on the thin, icy coating of the ice cream. Narumi can’t tear her eyes away from these tiny droplets. She can no longer tell the difference between them and her own beads of sweat. The drops begin to swell and multiply in her eyes, reflecting multiple images, but Narumi makes no effort to determine what those images are. Colors and shapes become muddled and cloudy, and she waits, motionless, for the moment to pass. She shuts her eyes tight and pictures her own body, swathed in layers of fat. The stretch marks that run across her skin like healed-up fissures. The varicose veins that protrude like spiders’ webs. As the flesh grows steadily thicker, the world recedes further and further away. There she is, forever shrinking inside her ever-expanding body. No one knows that I am here. I am safe. Eventually Narumi becomes nothing but a tiny speck. To tell the truth, she wishes that speck would vanish too, but it somehow remains, stubborn. She can feel the eyes staring at her. Narumi doesn’t know how to escape their gaze.

 

3

She doesn’t recall all the details, can’t remember. Memories that she wished would die live on, while others she wished would live on have died. Sometimes she’s assaulted by a memory she doesn’t know what to do with; it catches her off guard like a bag thrown over her head from behind. Then . . . she would find herself in a totally different place. It was winter, she was fifteen, just before the high school entrance exams. She was on her way home from after-hours cram school in the freezing cold. Normally she would have taken her bicycle, but that day she had to go home on foot. Her breath came out in such thick white clouds, it seemed as if she could touch it. Watching the fluffy whiteness against the deep blue of the night sky, she imagined some kind of spirit floating there. It was at that moment that the man came up behind her. She felt him grab her by the shoulder, and the next moment, a thick arm encircled her neck and a large, rough hand was clamped over her mouth. She was dragged to a nearby parking lot and slammed against a concrete wall. Too terrified to make a sound, or escape. Thirty minutes later, she was released, and walked home.

She turned the shower up to its strongest setting and let the hot water gush over her head. Her body wouldn’t stop shaking. She rinsed her mouth until there was no feeling left in her inner cheeks. She crouched down and gritted her teeth, all the while desperately trying to control her breathing. She was too afraid to touch her vagina. For the next four nights, she didn’t sleep. Day by day, her thoughts become hazier and her mind more dazed, until she could no longer make sense of the words and thoughts and images that floated and vanished in her mind. On impulse she confessed the events to her mother. A man took me to a parking lot and touched me. Her mother was so shocked by her daughter’s revelation that she couldn’t find the words to respond. Although it had taken all the strength she could muster just to stand there, when she saw how her mother reacted, Narumi felt a sense of relief. She was glad that she had only told her mother that the man had touched her. Narumi’s mother comforted her without asking her any more questions. Then, she made sure that Narumi wouldn’t breathe a word about this to her father. ‘Also,’ she said, not meeting her daughter’s eyes, ‘I think you already understand, but you must never, ever, talk about this with anyone. Try to forget. If anyone hears that you had such a shameful experience, your life will never be the same again.’

As a high school student, Narumi began to encounter the gropers on the train. The hour-and-a-half commute to school was unbelievably crowded, and almost every morning she was molested. Her buttocks were groped both over and under her skirt, fingers were pushed into her vagina. They pressed their penises against her body, grabbed her breasts. Once in a while they left their semen on her. Their faceless breathing and anonymous appetites brutally destroyed the little that remained of her will to live, to continue breathing. Beginning with the places that had been touched, Narumi’s body began to turn rigid and darken to a deep murky color, and, despite still having a pulse, it began to fester. During those few years of her late teens, Narumi’s body became utterly alien to Narumi. She wasn’t alone. Her classmates, too, suffered the same treatment. It happened on such a routine basis that neither they nor the gropers recognized the behavior as criminal. Men would nonchalantly joke about how their hobby was groping women, and believed without a doubt that rape was just a variety of sex. That was the world in which Narumi and her classmates lived.

Narumi’s parents encouraged her to get married. Having no other plans, the slowly-dying Narumi couldn’t find a reason to say no. The man she married was of small stature and few words, two years older than herself. Often she had no idea what he was he thinking, and somehow she found that soothing. Because of this vacuum, the way he didn’t ask questions or try to get to know other people, Narumi was able to take the vague feeling of guilt that had been entangled with all of her pain and place it a little further away from herself.

The first time she and her husband had sex she was truly afraid. In her mind, she believed nothing could be more painful than sexual intercourse. It was something that would drag her down into the depths of terror and abandon her there, like being murdered with your eyes wide open. Every sexual experience she’d had so far in her life had been this way, so why would now be any different? These were Narumi’s feelings as she gave up her body to her husband. It turned out, though, to be nothing like she’d expected. Sex brought out no feelings whatsoever in Narumi; it brought back no memories, she felt neither pain nor pleasure. It was nothing more than empty motions. During sex, Narumi would picture herself as steamed rice being turned into mochi rice cakes. Lying in a mortar made of hard, grey stone, pounded with a pestle over and over, prodded and poked by countless different hands, kneaded into a shapeless mass, and finally torn into pieces – a white blob of rice, armless, legless, faceless.

A blob of rice can’t feel, therefore I can’t feel anything either. Anything at all. At least there’s no pain.

No pain – when Narumi realized this, she let out a deep sigh. Instead of the emptiness or fear that perhaps she ought to have been feeling, she clung instead to her sense of relief – there was no pain. She felt as if she had escaped something life-threatening, once and for all, made it to a new place. It wasn’t a happy or a joyful place. It was a place with no feelings, no emotion. Not a single drop. Still, there was no pain. There was that at least . . . and at that thought, she felt her throat close up and tears began to fall.

One night, several months into their marriage, her husband finally found the words to express his dissatisfaction.

‘Could you be a little more . . . you know . . . shy? The way you don’t seem to feel anything at all . . . it’s kind of a turn-off . . . Couldn’t you show a bit of shame? I don’t care if you’re faking it, just act like you don’t really want to do it. You know men get turned on by that kind of thing. I can’t get properly hard if you don’t seem a bit reluctant. Come on . . . women are supposed to be ashamed of sex.’

 

4

Narumi makes her way home, shopping bags in each hand, bulging with plastic bottles. As she walks the bags bounce against each knee – left, right, left, right, the dull sensation seems to be telling her to stop. Or is it telling her to keep on walking? The sweat that gushes with every breath is trying to melt her skin from the outside in. Narumi begins to feel how strange it is that she’s here now, walking. Who’s making this body move? Who, and why? Why is there so much sweat, why is this body so heavy? Where on earth is all this sweat coming from? Why am I sweating like this . . . or is it really me? Maybe it’s the flesh on my body that’s creating the sweat, not me at all. So who is it, then – who is it that’s sweating?

About ten minutes from home, she spots several elementary school children in the park. Narumi’s daughter is among them. Normally she doesn’t try to speak to her daughter if she runs into her outside their home, and her daughter doesn’t speak to her either. But today one of her school friends happens to notice Narumi and points her out.

‘Isn’t that your mom?’

Narumi pretends she hasn’t noticed the children, keeps her head down and continues walking past the park.

‘Good timing! You can go home now with your mom.’

The friend gives Narumi’s daughter a push.

‘Wow, that’s pretty amazing. From here, she doesn’t really look like a person. Like a great big ball. Instead of walking, she should try rolling. It’d be faster.’

Over the laughter, another girl pipes up.

‘My mom says that your mom’s sick. That she’s getting fatter and fatter, and eventually she’ll get so big that she can’t move her body anymore, and she won’t be able to breathe. My mom says that it’s a kind of disease. Normal people don’t put on that much weight.’

‘Poor you! Is that one of those diseases that run in the family? Is that what you’re going to look like when you’re older? The same thing’s going to happen to you? I mean, are you going to die? Like your mom?’

Narumi’s daughter makes a feeble attempt to join in the laughter and stay there in the park with the rest of them, but her friend pushes her again.

‘It’s okay. Go on home.’

It was only recently that Narumi’s daughter made friends with these girls, and it took a long time for her to manage it. She grips the shoulder straps of her school backpack and plants her feet, but now a whole bunch of hands propel her from the park. Lips pressed tightly together and head hanging low, her daughter looks as if the slightest whiff of a breeze would knock her down. As if she might break into pieces and turn to dust and be blown away. Inside her mouth, where no one can see, all the color has drained from her tongue. It quivers faintly.

Back at home, her daughter sits motionless on the sofa. Narumi has no idea what to say to her. Her daughter has always been quiet, often preferring to sit in complete silence. Withdrawn by nature, it took her a long time to express her feelings to other people. But she’s a sweet child. Narumi thinks about how, when her daughter was very young, they used to collect small rocks together and give each one a name. She fetches one of the juice bottles and a glass and sits down next to her daughter. The girl keeps staring down at her own lap.

‘Do you want some juice?’

Narumi can’t think of anything else to say, so she just repeats the question. Her daughter slowly shakes her head. As she shakes her head, tears fall from her eyes. Out of the gap between her lids the tears well up and overflow. As if trying to release something, as if trying to make their mark, the tears make a soft sploshing sound as they leave their tracks on her navy-blue skirt. One . . . three . . . six . . . I’m so sorry. Your friends said something to you, didn’t they? You must be so ashamed of your mother looking like this. I’m sorry. I’m sorry you have such an embarrassing mom. Really, I’m so sorry . . . The words were always there, churning in her mind and on the tip of her tongue; but as usual she can’t bring herself to say them. Her daughter sits there mute, motionless except for the tears that continue to fall. Next to her Narumi leans forward, hunching her broad back, and stays in this position with her hands clasped tightly together. Still she can find nothing to say. She sees her daughter’s legs, thin as sticks, her bony little knees. Sitting there next to the frail body of this girl, Narumi begins to dream with her eyes open. A dream of when she was still alive. Back when her own body could hurt no one, and no one could hurt her. A body that could be anything, go anywhere. A body that Narumi will never have the chance to know. A dream her own body had dreamed. Her daughter is crying. From that still-tiny body she lets the tears flow, summoning up all her strength in order to live. Narumi imagines the things that are yet to happen to her daughter’s little body. What will be taken from her, given to her, what will she lose? Narumi slowly reaches out and puts one arm around her daughter’s shoulder. She feels her heart about to break at her daughter’s tiny size, her helplessness. Narumi wants to cry too; from the depth of her soul she wishes she could weep along with her daughter. Weep loudly, together. But what pours from Narumi is sweat. It is all that her body can produce. From her back, her armpits, her forehead, between her thighs. Her whole body gushes sweat. The droplets multiply and crawl all over, covering everything. Narumi’s body is cold.

 

Image © Joy

This story is part of our 20 for 2020 series, featuring twenty timely and exciting new works from the Japanese published here at Granta.com. Find out more about the project here.

The post Shame appeared first on Granta.