Koneko

Shiori found the kitten in her garden. It was tsuyu, the rainy season. The garden was washed in the downpour, the flowers’ heads and petals laden heavy with the damp, the squashes’ waxy skins made shiny by the wet. Shiori had awoken to the drumming and dripping of the torrent on her roof. In Chiba, the rains lasted through the hottest part of the summer.

Shiori put water on the fire for tea, slipped into her raincoat and rubber boots, and went out into her garden. The loquat and nashi trees were weighed with their fruits, their branches bending down to her as though asking her to take their burdens from them. She would pick them tomorrow. If she took the fruits now, they would rot before she could preserve them.

When she heard the mewing, she started at the noise, such an unusual sound in the midst of a rainstorm, and she squinted through the gray downfall for its source. By the spiky negi plants, she found the kitten, its fur matted with brown mud, its paws drawn up under its tiny body, huddled, eyes closed, against the rain. When it mewed, its tiny teeth were white against its curled tongue.

A moment passed wherein the back of her throat grew tight and the rainstorm and the kitten melted into a glaze. The kitten mewed. She lowered herself and with gentle fingers tucked its shivering body under her coat, where its small form clinging to her chest was not unfamiliar. Inside, she was quick to let the kitten down on her rug. It sniffed about the threads for a moment, but then began calling again, unsatisfied.

“Stay here,” she said.

In her kitchen, she rummaged for her orangish copper pot. She went to the fire, where the water for the tea had not quite begun to steam and tested it with her fingers, pressed her lips to it — it was warm, but not hot, just perfect.

She feared the kitten would give her trouble when she bathed it, but it slipped willingly into the warm water, where, under her gentle fingers, the mud came off, leaving the water cloudy brown, and revealed that the kitten’s matted fur was white. When the kitten was clean, she lifted it from the pot back onto the rug. It mewed indignantly, hooking miniature claws on the rim as though wanting to climb back in.

“You are a strange little thing,” muttered Shiori. “Let me look at you now.”

The kitten settled onto its back paws to lick its foreleg, draping it back over its ears and rubbing its nose. It could not have been more than a month or so old, for the ears were still much oversized, she decided, and the eyes, although still closed, were large and slanted and wide-set above a pink nose surrounded by wisps of whiskers. The kitten settled down on the rug, nestling its head between its front paws, and wrapped its tail about itself.

Shiori murmured with guilty lips, “Who do you belong to, little girl?” She knew she could not keep it. The kitten flicked a single ear in sleep, as though it had sensed something, and Shiori pressed her cold fingers to her lips for a long while, unable to draw her eyes away from its form. She wanted to reach out, to pull it to herself — but her hands were dangerous.

What did cats eat? Fish, probably. But this one was so tiny. It would need milk. All babies needed milk.

She put her coat back on.

Out into the rain she ventured with her market basket filled with negi, which Mako would sell for her in the market, and walked the slippery, jagged path down from the heights. For a long time after Aiya had gone, she had kept watch on the path, sitting on the rough steps, waiting for his familiar visage to appear, and whispered her repentance into the ancient, gray rock, but he had never returned. After a while, she had stopped watching, but she had never stopped waiting. Whenever she took the path, she tried to imagine where he had stepped as he’d gone — he’d probably set his foot in this flat spot; he’d probably lifted his shoe over this jagged spike — and it was in that faded trail — his trail — that she always made her way, stepping in his steps. The path leveled and the trees opened onto the Kujūkuri Plains, flooded fields occupied by rice and bent-back farmers in flat hats, and beyond the plains, by the sea, there was the market. This was where she went.

In the market, draped in her red raincoat and black boots, she blended with the crowd. By the sea, the smell of salt and fish was pleasantly rich, and the vendors laid out all their goods in precise, colorful arrangements and hung their cloth banners, which usually flapped in the sea breeze but now dripped with rain. She made her way to Mako’s stand. It was a ramshackle, wooden contraption with wheels and many colorful patches in its tented roof. The woman sat behind her goods, chubby fingers interlocked over her plump stomach, gray hair frizzing as usual from under her bonnet, and the tanned skin around her eyes and lips craggy with the evidence of many smiles.

Shiori lifted the cover of her basket to show Mako the negi. “I have these for you, Mako.”

The woman smiled and nodded. “I’m sure they are good, Shiori. They are always good.” Today, Mako seemed to study her a bit closer as she handed Shiori the parchment envelope sealed with red wax. Inside, Shiori knew, were her earnings. “Your daikon sold well last week,” said Mako slowly.

“I’m glad.”

The lines around the woman’s eyes crinkled a bit deeper. “Something is different about you today, Shiori.”

The kitten — she knew the heat in her cheeks would be obvious. “I — I am feeling better today, Mako.”

“You are strong, Shiori.”

She looked into Mako’s tan face, at the creases that knowledge had pressed into her skin.

“Grief fades like the sand into the ocean,” Mako went on. “It is only worn away by the passing of many years. But you are strong, shojo. You will find your way.”

Shiori blinked, bowed her head for a moment. She was glad that the rain had fallen on her face. The ocean was gray-white-blue in the distance, and she asked, “Do you know anyone who has lost a kitten, Mako?”

The woman frowned and shook her head, massaging her wrinkled jaw with a few fingers. “No, but I will tell you if I hear news.”

The relief softened her shoulders. “I will bring you some nashi next week, Mako. And maybe some loquat preserves.”

“Good.”

She turned to go.

“And, Shiori?” called the woman.

“Yes, Mako?”

“You are still young and beautiful. Your hair is still dark and thick — not gray like mine. And you are kind. Do not let your heart be hard. It was not your fault.”

Shiori bent her head in respect and thought of how Aiya’s back and strong, wide shoulders looked as he had disappeared down the mountain trail. “Thank you, Mako. I’ll see you next week.”

With some of the money in the envelope, Shiori bought oboro, a whitefish, tapping her foot as the man wrapped it in paper with weathered but capable fingers. She looked at the fruit stands, examining the shiny loquat and nashi, and thought about her own trees laden heavy with them. This vendor had picked his too early. They were too small and would not be as sweet. She breezed by another stand where a vendor was making futomaki, giant rolls of sushi that sagged oval with their own weight, sliced and arranged to show the flower patterns inside. Others sold peanuts with their greens still attached, bundled with twine, a little dirty.

In the center of the market, she went to the pole where the papers were tacked — cards for help wanted, for services, for lost pets. She searched for a drawing of a small white cat, perhaps belonging to a soggy-eyed little boy, but she was relieved when she found none. She paid a man to put a notice up and watched as he climbed on top of a stool to pin it to the pole. Perhaps the rain would make the ink run.

Her last stop was a vendor who sold her a glass bottle of goat’s milk. It was cold and heavy in her hand. She trekked home with her basket lighter than it had been on the way down. At the top of the cliffs, she paused, looking out through the trees at the ocean. It was clouded with rain and mist. She thought of Sachiko. The seafoam was white on the crests of the waves as they crashed distantly. She could remember how silent it had been, how calmly Sachiko had gone, without warning, without a fuss.

When she got back to her house, the kitten was still asleep by the door. She tiptoed, putting some milk on the fire to warm and some rice in a pot to grow thick. Outside, bent by her compost pile, she scaled the fish. The raindrops beat on her hood as her knife scraped the silvery, translucent gems away, and she watched how the forest was moved by the rain. She filleted the fish with expert palms, careful to pull all the bones out. Easily, easily, hidden slivers in the fat, pinkish pieces could catch in small throats.

The kitten awoke when she came back through the creaking door. Its white fur was now dry and fluffy, and it stretched, yawning with a mew.

“You are mismatched, koneko,” she observed. One of the kitten’s eyes was as blue as the sea in a storm, and the other was as yellow as the sun on a clear day.

It looked at the fish in her hands.

“No, you are too young for this,” she said, laughing. “Someday. But I have something else for you now.”

She put the fish in a pan, then filled a small bowl with the warm milk and set it on the rug. The kitten sniffed it once and tested the surface with its pink tongue. She reached out to stroke the small space between its ears — it was feather-soft. She drew her hand away. In the kitchen, she thought about the notice in the market as she cooked the fish, the fatty pieces crisping and sizzling softly in peanut oil. What would she do if someone answered it? What if someone would come to take the kitten away? With careful hands, she strained her rice from the boiling water, scraping each of the grains into her bowl, and ate it with the fish while she sat sat on the floor. The sign was on the pole in the marketplace, flapping in the sea breeze.

When she went to bed that night, she lay awake, staring at the splintered shapes of the rafters, listening to the drumming of the rain, and thinking about the tiny kitten that lay sleeping out by her door. Her hammock stretched diagonally across the room. Before Aiya had left, they had slept on a wide bed with soft blankets and many pillows, and Sachiko would often appear as a small shadow in their doorway and crawl up between them, her big dark eyes pleading. Shiori could never resist. “All right, little girl,” she would murmur sleepily. The sound of Sachiko’s soft sighs in the night would calm her mind. After Aiya had left, she had gotten rid of the bed and put up the hammock. She would often push off from the wall with her toes to rock herself to sleep.

She swung from the hammock, her bare feet padding across the floor to the other room, and found the kitten’s fluffy white shape in the dark. Her hands pulled it to her collarbone, sensing there the tiny rumblings. As she carried it back to her room and climbed into the hammock, she felt dangerous, as though something about her was a poison, as though her fingers were laden with a threat that she herself had no way of knowing. Was the kitten safe with her? She gazed at its miniature features — its pink nose, its wispy-thin whiskers, the pads on its paws smaller than the tip of her little finger, and she felt its tiny breaths on the skin of her face. Its purring set into her bones, tinglingly in her ribs, her chin, the bridge of her nose.

Over the next month, the kitten grew slowly.

Its fur filled out, growing fluffier and white like the milk it drank; its legs and tail became long and slender to match its body; its ears grew tufts, but they stayed too large for its face, and its eyes, still mismatched, grew vibrant. Its silent footsteps followed her everywhere, and the kitten replaced her shadow with a ray of flashing white light.

For a while, when she went with her basket to buy fish and rice and milk and bring food to Mako, she would glance at it on the pole. The days passed, and the card grew rumpled and wind torn, and in her heart was the fear of finding that someone had come to take the kitten away.

The rainy season gave way to days of the sun beating down hot on the humid earth and steaming rice paddies. She asked the man to take her sign down, and she was relieved when he climbed up and pulled the tack from it.

She went out into her garden every day. When she dug a new row and planted her seeds with care, the kitten went ahead of her, flicking the fragrant dirt about, as if it knew how to help, and its paws and nose became dark as though with ink. When Shiori used the wheelbarrow, the kitten rode on top, batting at fruits or vegetables that threatened to bounce out. Shiori would laugh — but she only allowed herself a measure of merriment — and then she would look to the mountain path and imagine Aiya hearing her and coming back. Or she would gaze out to the cliffs and think of how peaceful the bottom of the ocean must be.

She remembered when a different set of little feet had followed her, and when she had hummed lullabies for a different set of ears. After Sachiko had gone, she would often go to bed to find Aiya already there. He was never asleep. The lines of his face had always been tight, the skin around his eyes always taut as he had gazed up at the ceiling, and, always, no matter what she had done, she had never been able to comfort him.

“You always loved the sea,” he had said to her, and his eyes saw nothing. When she had lain next to him in the night, she had dreamed that she and Sachiko danced hand-in-hand in an underwater kingdom, and when she had awoken, her eyes had been crusty with salt.

Often, in the midday, when the sun was at its hottest, Shiori sat on the edges of the cliffs and sipped at cool mint tea, breathing in breaths of false ice and looking out to the murky rice fields and the churning blue ocean beyond. The first time the kitten followed her to the cliffs, it darted ahead before she could scoop it up. And, to her horror, it walked with wobbling paws along the precipice. Running, she scooped it up. In her arms, she held it, and the kitten stared out across the waters, as though those uneven eyes understood something more they they should. When she sat down on the rock worn smooth by the footsteps of the ages, it kneaded her flat stomach, purring, still gazing out over the ocean as her hands hovered about it, waiting for it to leap toward certain death. After Aiya had gone, she had tried not to love the ocean and the sun, but it seemed that the kitten loved them when it looked with her out over the cliff. She remembered the stories her own mother had told her, and she remembered telling them in quiet tones to Sachiko as she had brushed her daughter’s thick, dark hair.

Aiya had remembered the stories with anger. “You filled her head,” he had said to her. “She thought she could see the things you talked about.”

It was with hesitance that she began to tell the kitten the stories that she had told Sachiko, the stories about the sea and the sun, for the kitten would not try to visit underwater kingdoms and look with her own eyes upon the terrible beauty of the sea god, nor would a kitten plunge with wonder into the depths, chasing the warm, yellow robes of the sun goddess as she floated golden on the seafoam.

“Amaterasu and Susanoo were always fighting,” she told the kitten. “Susanoo was the sea. He was always wild and unpredictable. His father, Izanagi, banished him from heaven, and when Susanoo went to say good-bye to his sister Amaterasu, she doubted his intentions. Amaterasu was the sun, warm and beautiful, but she was always at war with the sea. She challenged him to a competition, and he lost. In retaliation, Susanoo whipped the waters into a storm and lashed the waves onto the shore, destroying the rice fields that Amaterasu had tried so hard to cultivate with her warmth. Angry and sad, Amaterasu hid herself in a cave, and the world went dark. She only emerged when she heard the laughter from a joke that Uzume, the jester, told, and so merriment brought light again to the world.”

Following the kitten’s uneven gaze, she looked out over the calm seas, lit like gold by the sun. “Sometimes they still fight,” she said, “but they get along better now.”

The kitten purred in her arms, its body pressed into the shape of hers, a shape that had once curled itself to welcome a different form. Her hands cradled its white fur with gentleness, but still they felt dangerous, as though they might suddenly move without her consent, or as though they would pass right through the kitten should they try to save it from the cliff. She examined them, the twine tendons, the whitish cuticles, trying to see what was wrong.

Later, in the market, she passed by the vendor who sold slabs of polished metal that shone in the sun, and she looked to see if her short, dark hair that sometimes fell in her face was hiding anything, but her face looked as it always had to her — her skin pale and smooth, her eyes dark and round under a fringe of black hair, her nose sitting above red lips that never stayed shut, always revealing the slightest bit of pearl beneath them.

Mako said that she was beautiful.

After Aiya had left, she had been convinced that there was a poison, a danger, lurking somewhere deep inside, under her cuticles, in the tendons of her hands as they pulled her long, slender fingers. He had seen it. She had been at once terrified and desperate to discover it for herself, for even if she looked upon the poison with clear eyes, she had no guarantee of knowing the solution, of being able to concoct the secret antidote. Now, as the kitten grew, as her hands helped it, she began to examine them again when she and the kitten walked together in the garden. Perhaps the danger was gone.

The season passed. The heat of the sun began to wane. The trees were again laden with their offerings, and when the kitten was big enough, she reluctantly allowed it to bounce about the branches while she reached up to slip the plump fruits into her waiting palms. She preserved the fruits in hot sugar water.

The season came for the unagi. The eels spawned in the ocean, growing until their slick bodies became transparent like glass, and the waters became broken by a million silver swords. Then the Kuroshio current carried them to the coast, and they took to the freshwater rivers, their bodies knifing through the water, and there, in the deltas, the fishermen set traps for them. During the unagi season, Aiya had always come home with his net full of the eels, and she had cooked them for a week — maybe more — but their dead, beautiful bodies had always been slimy, and their meat had never tasted quite right even when she seasoned it, even when she had dipped the pieces in tempura and fried them in peanut oil, even when she had chopped spicy, fragrant ginger and sprinkled salty-sweet sauce on them. But Aiya had liked them. She had not eaten the unagi since he’d left.

A day came when she took her fruit to Mako and the woman smiled at the kitten riding in her basket. The cat was grown now, but Shiori only saw the kitten. “I am glad you have let your heart feel again, shojo,” said Mako.

Shiori blushed. But Mako was right. Even though her hands still felt dangerous, the kitten was a cat now, and some dark shard had been dislodged from its place in her chest. “I am afraid still, Mako,” she said.

“You are a good mother, Shiori. It was not your fault. There was nothing you could have done.”

“I should have watched more closely,” she said, the words coming with sudden difficulty. She looked at the kitten asleep in her basket atop her brown paper packages. To think about how Sachiko’s soft words had moved with her name made rise within her visions of her daughter’s dark brown eyes, round and curious, and her small hands, reaching up to her from below. She looked at the cat asleep, then shifted her gaze away, finding it drawn to the sea. “Ah, sa-sen, Mako,” she said, wiping a tear from her cheek. “You do not want to hear this.”

Mako’s wrinkled eyes were sad. “I remember how you used to love the ocean, Shiori. I remember that you would look out onto it when you came to the market, and you would be held by its beauty.”

“It is still beautiful,” said Shiori. “It is I who have become ugly.”

“No,” said Mako, shaking her head.

She remembered how quiet Aiya had been the day before he had left. She remembered how she had caught him staring at her. His eyes had been tense, unfocused, almost as though his gaze pierced right through her own. The next day, she had awoken to a bed colder than usual. She had searched the house for him, the garden, and she had gone to the market to ask for him, trying to sound casual, pretending as if they had simply gotten separated momentarily, but even then, she had known he was gone. Every day, she watched the path warily, waiting for his return, but she was glad when his features never rose above the ancient gray steps again, and when she walked in his footsteps down the mountain path, she was glad that her shadow inked into the mountain stone in place of his.

“It was not your fault,” said Mako.

She put her basket gently down, reaching out to stroke the cat’s head once, and it slitted its uneven eyes in pleasure, pressed its face close to her fingers.

“Look at how it trusts you,” insisted Mako, gesturing at the cat. “Animals know when they are safe.”

“I don’t know what to do, Mako,” said Shiori. “I could not keep Sachiko safe, and I did not keep him from leaving.” Above the tops of the stalls, the ocean was lit on fire by the sun.

She remembered the day Sachiko had gone. She remembered sitting on the beach when the lightning strike of panic had come, and she remembered the sudden realization that Aiya was next to her reading and that small splashes were out in the surf. She remembered the way her white sundress had tangled in her legs as she’d lunged from her seat, her lungs spasming as she’d plunged from the warm sand into the icy waves, the plaintive desperation of Aiya’s shouts echoing from the beach. She remembering drawing near enough to see Sachiko’s tiny hands and dark eyes dipping below the edge of the waves. She remembered reaching out, her spine lengthening, hands and fingers extending themselves across an impossible distance. She remembered an electric shock of relief, a small, grasping palm brushing miraculously and transiently against her own. She remembered moving her hands, her last chance — and then the same riptide that had caught Sachiko wrenching her under, away from her child, turning all into tumbling navy, setting her eyes and throat afire. There, she had wished she would die, and she had screamed Sachiko’s name to the ocean, to the sun that had blazed so deceivingly warm and calm above the beach, but then the wave had buckled her back onto the sandbar, spitting her mercilessly back out onto land. Her eyes and heart had looked in vain for Sachiko, and she would have plunged back into the tide had not Aiya’s strong arms clamped about her shaking shoulders.

“She’s gone, Shiori,” he had cried, numb. “She’s gone.”

And her anguish had been complete. In the days that followed, she had mourned without ceasing, and she had sat in her garden and let her fingers trail in the dirt, her nails becoming black with the rich earth.

One day, when Aiya had come home from fishing, emerging from the mountain path, his eyes had set upon her with anger. “Why do you sit out here?” he had demanded. It had been the season for unagi, she remembered. “You would rather think of your plants than her!” She remembered the way he had looked, standing in the dip at the edge of her garden, his knuckles turning white on the handle of the rake, his shoulders breathing with anger, and behind him she could see in the distance the blue of the sea, calm and still. Her eyes had lingered there, watching how the sun admired herself in the mirror water.

Her hands had not been able to stop Aiya. He had taken like a typhoon to the plants, to the flowers, and the fruit trees still bore the wounds he had left in their trunks. After he had finished with them —

She was not expecting it. At first, it was a powerful, dragging weight on her shoulders and back — then the pain had come as searing lines, as though she had been flogged with fire. As she fell to the ground on her side, gasping and arched with her wounds, afraid to reach back and touch the rent flesh there, Aiya’s form had hovered over her for a second, the rake like a black claw in the sky, but then he had turned away, leaving her to her desolation. On the ground, she had curled her nails in the churned black earth, and she had turned it blacker with her blood and with her tears.

Inside, he had watched as she, hunched in pain, had warmed the water, dipped the cloth into it with trembling fingers, and held it over her shoulder to let it drip, and when she’d cried out as it ran in the red channels of her flesh, he had remained unmoved by any trespass of emotion. After that, when she came to bed, she would lay next to him on her stomach, and she would wait to cry until she was certain he had fallen asleep. For his form next to her had been a threat.

“I cannot look at you,” he had said to her the day before he left, “without seeing her.”

After Aiya left, she had tried to wash his scent from the bed, her fingers tracing the brownish scars that crisscrossed her side, and when she could wash away neither, she had taken the bed from its place and instead put up the hammock. She had replanted the garden, seeding it with care. She had laid her hands upon the trees, and she had pressed her healing lips into their scars and known with familiarity their pain. Every once in a while, when she watched the mountain path, her mind growing dark with the thought of his return, her back and shoulders would tingle, and she would think of her kitchen knife.

One day, when the thought of him and the remembrance of Sachiko’s last touch upon her palm had loomed impossibly large in her mind, she had gone to the cliffs to look out over the ocean and at the rocks below. There, she had danced with an intimate and certain darkness, and there she had known with surety that she had only two choices. Both of them offered their own kind of antidote. The waves had been calm, the sun gentle on her bare arms. To sleep one more night would be enough. Then she would be ready to decide.

The next morning, she had decided how much softer the rocks looked than the harsh edges of the scars on her back. It had been tsuyu, the rainy season. Her garden had been washed in the downpour, the flowers’ heads and petals laden heavy with the damp, the squashes’ waxy skins made shiny by the wet. She had awoken to the drumming and dripping of the torrent on her roof. In Chiba, the rains lasted throughout the hottest part of the summer. To walk one more time in her garden, to walk in the peace and fragrance of the rain — that was the last thing she had wanted. She had put water on to boil, slipped into her raincoat and boots, and outside gazed at the loquat and nashi trees, imagining that her whitish spirit would forever walk here to tend them.