Vaseline Buddha (26 page)

Now winter has passed, and so has spring, and summer has arrived. No, it's not full summer yet, but it's approaching summer. In the meantime (I finished translating
To the Lighthouse,
which ends with the death of some of the Ramsays and the guests who were invited to their home, and with the several who remain taking a boat to the lighthouse) I looked over what I've written, and added some stories and removed others, and corrected what could be corrected, and revised it on the whole. In the process, the story again moved in a direction I wanted or didn't want. And I still haven't put a title to this story, and again, I feel tempted to title it
Vaseline Buddha
or
A Cat Walking on Piano Keys.
But
Untitled
could be a fitting title for this story, which I feel says a lot about a lot of things, but hasn't really said anything at all.

Several days ago, I went out for the first time in a while, because I suddenly wanted to see the dog I named Baudelaire, which looked even more stupid with a tattoo on its eyebrows. But something must have happened to the dog in the meantime, for I never saw it. So I wanted to see the Christian fundamentalist who, standing with a cross in his hand, startled me by shouting loudly when I was walking down the street one day, but I didn't see any such
person. But I was startled because a beggar who was sitting on the ground on a street somewhere slapped my leg, and the beggar, a very old woman, asked me for money with desperation on her face, the kind of desperation I hadn't seen in a long time. I glared at her for a moment, upset that she had slapped me, but I was reminded of the woman I'd met in Amsterdam who had spinach stuck between her teeth, and in the end, could come home after giving her some money.

Now there are three cats walking on the roof of the house across the street. I'm not sure if they're the cats I saw walking on the roof last year at the beginning of summer. But cats liked to spend time on the roof, which was sunny, and you could often see a cat, awake from a nap, arching its back all the way and stretching.

Among the cats is one that I saw on a rainy day several days ago, wet and walking in the rain. It's hard to remember the face of a cat that doesn't live with you, but I'd studied the cat's face carefully and remembered it. The cat comes almost every day to the roof of the neighboring house that can be seen out my window, and leaves after taking a nap. We ran into each other a few times in an alley, and every time, the cat glanced at me for a moment and went on its way. One time I was holding an umbrella and I felt as if the cat were looking at me with ridicule, or contempt.

A gray mother cat takes its place on the roof, with a cat that looks like its baby, pretty big but smaller than its mother. I'm not sure if the mother cat is the kitten that had cried painfully, trapped in pumpkin vines, at the beginning of this past summer.

Cats lead a wandering life. No, they lead a roaming life. Perhaps they lead a wandering life, in their own way, as they roam.
Thinking about the roaming or wandering of cats makes me think about wandering again. Anyway, the best travel book of sorts I know, as well as autobiography of sorts, in a broad sense, is Beckett's
Molloy,
and in fact, when I travel, I take
Molloy
with me and read it in my hotel room, or lying in a lounge chair by the pool. But actually,
Molloy
is more of a story about wandering than about traveling, and perhaps one of the greatest misfortunes in the modern times is that the great spiritual human act of wandering has virtually disappeared, and wandering in the true sense is no longer possible. Now, travel is nothing more than an escape from everyday life, which is nothing more than an illusion. And travel is merely an expansion, as well as extension, of everyday life, not really an escape from everyday life. What I actually found during travels undertaken to break free from everyday life was everyday life that was somewhat unfamiliar, or not unfamiliar at all.

Now the cats on the roof are passing the time quietly. A magpie is sitting still on a persimmon tree, and I'm quietly staring at the cats and the magpie. I don't see anything that's vigilantly waiting for an opportunity to do something. There could be some such thing in the pumpkin vines, although I don't see it. The cats and the magpie and I are absorbed in our own worlds, irrelevant to each other. We will stay that way until there's a movement, a noise that catches our attention. After something like that occurs, we will again return to our own worlds and time. Like summer bugs that look like they're flying around heedlessly, or like the bodies of dead stinkbugs or spiders piled up on a windowsill in winter.

In any case, the fact that the cats and the magpie are unaware that I'm writing about them pleases me for no reason. They live
in their own worlds. The same is true of myself. And yet they're with me in my imagination and in my story. And I think that I too barely exist in the story I'm writing, and am with myself in the story.

What will I do now that I've written a story? With summer here now I could start writing about the difficulty of passing the summer season, and spend the summer writing.

But for now I don't want to go again into a story, into a deep tunnel.

Instead, I wind the spring of a music box on the table by the window, after the shamisen music comes to an end. I hear music. Like a child, I put words to the music in my mind. But I recite the words, not singing even in my mind, because I hate singing.

                
There's a moving island somewhere in Australia.

                
And the island continues to move.

                
The island moves the same distance every year, with the waves moving the sand.

                
The island remains the same size, with the same amount of sand piling up.

                
As the island moves, the lighthouse on the island, too, must be moved continuously.

Thinking about the island, which exists in reality but exists even more vividly in my imagination, I slowly make my way somewhere amid the sound of music. I think it's time to put an end to a long thought.