after the quake

Katagiri stared long and hard at Frog, who sat there now wrapped in the thick cloak of sleep. As soon as I get out of this hospital, he thought, I’ll buy Anna Karenina and “White Nights” and read them both. Then I’ll have a nice long literary discussion about them with Frog.

Before long, Frog began to twitch all over. Katagiri assumed at first that these were just normal involuntary movements in sleep, but he soon realized his mistake. There was something unnatural about the way Frog’s body went on jerking, like a big doll being shaken by someone from behind. Katagiri held his breath and watched. He wanted to run over to Frog, but his own body remained paralyzed.

After a while, a big lump formed over Frog’s right eye. The same kind of huge, ugly boil broke out on Frog’s shoulder and side, and then over his whole body. Katagiri could not imagine what was happening to Frog. He stared at the spectacle, barely breathing.

Then, all of a sudden, one of the boils burst with a loud pop. The skin flew off, and a sticky liquid oozed out, sending a horrible smell across the room. The rest of the boils started popping, one after another, twenty or thirty in all, flinging skin and fluid onto the walls. The sickening, unbearable smell filled the hospital room. Big black holes were left on Frog’s body where the boils had burst, and wriggling, maggotlike worms of all shapes and sizes came crawling out. Puffy white maggots. After them emerged some kind of small centipedelike creatures, whose hundreds of legs made a creepy rustling sound. An endless stream of these things came crawling out of the holes. Frog’s body—or the thing that must once have been Frog’s body—was totally covered with these creatures of the night. His two big eyeballs fell from their sockets onto the floor, where they were devoured by black bugs with strong jaws. Crowds of slimy worms raced each other up the walls to the ceiling, where they covered the fluorescent lights and burrowed into the smoke alarm.

The floor, too, was covered with worms and bugs. They climbed up the lamp and blocked the light and, of course, they crept onto Katagiri’s bed. Hundreds of them came burrowing under the covers. They crawled up his legs, under his bedgown, between his thighs. The smallest worms and maggots crawled inside his anus and ears and nostrils. Centipedes pried his mouth open and crawled inside one after another. Filled with an intense despair, Katagiri screamed.

Someone snapped a switch and light filled the room.

“Mr. Katagiri!” called the nurse. Katagiri opened his eyes to the light. His body was soaked in sweat. The bugs were gone. All they had left behind in him was a horrible slimy sensation.

“Another bad dream, eh? Poor dear.” With quick, efficient movements the nurse readied an injection and stabbed the needle into his arm.

He took a long, deep breath and let it out. His heart was expanding and contracting violently.

“What were you dreaming about?”

Katagiri was having trouble differentiating dream from reality. “What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real,” he told himself aloud.

“That’s so true,” said the nurse with a smile. “Especially where dreams are concerned.”

“Frog,” he murmured.

“Did something happen to Frog?” she asked.

“He saved Tokyo from being destroyed by an earthquake. All by himself.”

“That’s nice,” the nurse said, replacing his near-empty intravenous feeding bottle with a new one. “We don’t need any more awful things happening in Tokyo. We have plenty already.”

“But it cost him his life. He’s gone. I think he went back to the mud. He’ll never come here again.”

Smiling, the nurse toweled the sweat from his forehead. “You were very fond of Frog, weren’t you, Mr. Katagiri?”

“Locomotive,” Katagiri mumbled. “More than anybody.” Then he closed his eyes and sank into a restful, dreamless sleep.

honey pie

1

“So Masakichi got his paws full of honey—way more honey than he could eat by himself—and he put it in a bucket, and do-o-o-wn the mountain he went, all the way to the town to sell his honey. Masakichi was the all-time Number One honey bear.”

“Do bears have buckets?” Sala asked.

“Masakichi just happened to have one,” Junpei explained. “He found it lying in the road, and he figured it would come in handy sometime.”

“And it did.”

“It really did. So Masakichi the Bear went to town and found a spot for himself in the square. He put up a sign: Deeelicious Honey. All Natural. One Cup ? 200.”

“Can bears write?”

“No, of course not,” Junpei said. “There was a nice old man with a pencil sitting next to him, and he asked him to write it.”

“Can bears count money?”

“Absolutely. Masakichi lived with people when he was just a cub, and they taught him how to talk and count money and stuff. Anyway, he was a very talented bear.”

“Oh, so he was a little different from ordinary bears.”

“Well, yes, just a little. Masakichi was a kind of special bear. And so the other bears, who weren’t so special, tended to shun him.”

“Shun him?”

“Yeah, they’d go like, ‘Hey, what’s with this guy, acting so special?’ and keep away from him. Especially Tonkichi the tough guy. He really hated Masakichi.”

“Poor Masakichi!”

“Yeah, really. Meanwhile, Masakichi looked just like a bear, and so the people would say, ‘OK, he knows how to count, and he can talk and all, but when you get right down to it he’s still a bear.’ So Masakichi didn’t really belong to either world—the bear world or the people world.”

“Poor, poor Masakichi! Didn’t he have any friends?”

“Not one. Bears don’t go to school, you know, so there’s no place for them to make friends.”

“I have friends,” Sala said. “In preschool.”

“Of course you do,” Junpei said.

“Do you have friends, Jun?” “Uncle Junpei” was too long for her, so Sala just called him “Jun.”

“Your daddy is my absolute bestest friend from a long, long time ago. And so’s your mommy.”

“It’s good to have friends.”

“It is good,” Junpei said. “You’re right about that.”

Junpei often made up stories for Sala when she went to bed. And whenever she didn’t understand something, she would ask him to explain. Junpei gave a lot of thought to his answers. Sala’s questions were always sharp and interesting, and while he was thinking about them he could also come up with new twists to the story.

Sayoko brought a glass of warm milk.

“Junpei is telling me the story of Masakichi the bear,” Sala said. “He’s the all-time Number One honey bear, but he doesn’t have any friends.”

“Oh really? Is he a big bear?” Sayoko asked.

Sala gave Junpei an uneasy look. “Is Masakichi big?”

“Not so big,” he said. “In fact, he’s kind of on the small side. For a bear. He’s just about your size, Sala. And he’s a very sweet-tempered little guy. When he listens to music, he doesn’t listen to