At the Edge of the Woods Read online

  AT

  THE

  EDGE

  OF

  THE

  WOODS

  ALSO BY MASATSUGU ONO

  FROM TWO LINES PRESS

  Echo on the Bay

  Lion Cross Point

  Originally published as: Mori no hazure de

  by Bungeishunju Ltd., Japan

  Copyright © 2006 by Masatsugu Ono

  All rights reserved.

  “A Breast” and “The Cake Shop in the Woods” were first published in English in the Keshiki Series by Strangers Press at the University of East Anglia, through UEA Consulting Ltd.

  Translation copyright © 2022 by Juliet Winters Carpenter

  Two Lines Press | www.twolinespress.com

  ISBN: 978-1-949641-28-8

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-949641-29-5

  Cover design by Kapo Ng

  Design by Sloane | Samuel

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Names: Ono, Masatsugu, 1970– author. | Carpenter, Juliet Winters, translator. Title: At the edge of the woods / Masatsugu Ono; translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter. Other titles: Mori no hazure de. English Description: San Francisco, CA: Two Lines Press, 2022. | Originally published as: Mori no hazure de by Bungeishunju Ltd., Japan. | Summary: “A psychological tale of myth and fantasy, societal alienation, climate catastrophe, and the fear, paranoia, and violence of contemporary life” --Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021036650 (print) | LCCN 2021036651 (ebook) ISBN 9781949641288 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781949641295 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Novels. Classification: LCC PL874.N64 M6713 2022 (print) | LCC PL874.N64 (ebook) | DDC 895.63/6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021036650

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021036651

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  This book is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  A BREAST

  THE OLD LEATHER BAG

  THE DOZING GNARL

  THE CAKE SHOP IN THE WOODS

  A BREAST

  My wife had gone back to her parents’ home to have our second child, leaving me and my son to manage by ourselves for a while. He’s a talkative boy, we had radio and TV, and the house didn’t seem particularly quiet with her gone. The reverse, in fact—extra sounds began to mingle between us.

  The sounds seemed to be coming from the small woods behind our house. In truth, I don’t really know whether the woods are big or small. You can’t tell anything from just the map. I have the feeling that they’re small, that’s all.

  We would go into the woods. Then a copse of trees closely resembling one another would follow us and pass us by. The trees would pat each other familiarly on the shoulders and back and sometimes wriggle their hips as they hurried on ahead. They huddled their green leaves together, absorbed in whispering, paying us no mind. Their whispers spread through the woods like the sound of distant waves. As they traveled, the whispers blotted out not only gaps in consciousness but also the interstices between trees, between branches. Unable to penetrate into the depths of the woods, we would come to a standstill.

  But we weren’t the only ones left behind. The trees, too, would stand transfixed, their roots tangled in fatigue and loneliness. Under the ground, loneliness joined loneliness; a vast desolation filled the woods. Though it was daytime, as if groping for light from the depths of blackness the trees stretched their leafless branches skyward. Our white breath was no substitute for lost leaves. We’d turn and go back the way we came.

  Once we knew that my wife was pregnant with our second child, early every evening the three of us would walk for the better part of an hour through the woods. While we walked, she would talk continuously, addressing the unborn child. But it wasn’t only her voice that drowned out the whispers drifting through the woods. The boy would repeat his mother’s words, mimicking them exactly.

  He kept his eyes averted from her swollen belly. He walked looking down and now and then, as if struck by an idea, kicked up some fallen leaves.

  At this rough gesture, the whole woods would sharply draw in its breath.

  When he was tired out from walking, he’d get crabby. Monotonous whispers in the woods would begin again to fill everything. They stole across the back of his neck and into his ears. They beckoned him to sleep.

  “We have to walk a lot for Mommy and the baby in her tummy,” I would tell my son, who would be rubbing his eyes as he walked. My words only made him crabbier. He’d look at me resentfully. I had no choice but to pick him up.

  “When you were in Mommy’s tummy,” my wife would say, finally talking to him, “we used to walk a lot, too.”

  But he couldn’t hear her. By then he’d be asleep in my arms, his mouth moving.

  I would strain my ears to hear.

  * * *

  The murmur in the woods steadily deepened.

  That sound came back. My son and I went outside. We entered the woods, careful not to rustle the carpet of leaves.

  I stopped. He looked up at me, scarcely breathing. “Think it’s a fox?” he asked. “Or a badger? Maybe a squirrel?”

  “One thing’s for sure,” I said, widening my eyes. “It’s not a bear.”

  He realized this was a joke and put both hands over his mouth to keep from laughing. I did exactly the same thing, shrugging. His shoulders rocked with happiness. Fragments of suppressed laughter spilled from between his fingers.

  Leaves were falling, even though none of the branches around us had any leaves left to shed. I thought this was highly peculiar, but decided not to tell my son.

  Because he wouldn’t understand? Or because I had no explanation to give him?

  I put my hands behind my ears, the fingers aligned and pointing straight up, searching for a sound that I could not yet hear but that I sensed was lurking somewhere very close by.

  “A rabbit!” My son imitated my pose.

  Then from the darkening sky leaves fell without cease, like mutterings of broken words which, apart from their rejection of meaning, made no attempt to commune. For the most part they were drawn to fallen comrades lying dead on the ground. Some, perhaps unaware that from the moment they left the branch they themselves were dead, took their time falling, scrabbling at the air. Those leaves, due to the weight of the air they scraped away, might make a sound when they struck the ground.

  My son was watching me dubiously. Right. I shared his opinion.

  “No,” I said, “it’s not the sound of falling leaves, is it.”

  We stood there in the woods a while, waiting, but the sound didn’t come back.

  “What time is it?” he suddenly asked.

  I shook my head. I wasn’t wearing a watch.

  “TV show?” I asked.

  He nodded. We walked back to the house, hand in hand. I opened the kitchen door, and he ran into the living room.

  I looked at the clock on the wall and turned on the radio. Checking the program guide, I saw it was time for a special Janáček concert. The String Quartet no. 1, Kreutzer Sonata, had just ended, and the piano piece In the Mists was starting up. I turned up the volume and prepared to wash several days’ worth of dishes piled in the sink. The instant I twisted the faucet handle, a stream of cold water flowed into my body. I had trouble breathing. I rinsed the dishes over and over again.

  My son was sunk into the sofa, watching his show. His mouth kept moving, as if he were feverish.

  I picked up a picture book from the floor and sat down beside him. I opened the book on my lap. An owl twisted its head from the page and stared at me. Although its beak was as tightly shut as its eyes were wide, a hoot flashed through
me, a glimmer of light. Startled, I turned and looked behind me. Backed by darkness, the windowpane showed the living room. Only my son and I were in the frame.

  Engrossed in the television, he was oblivious to my presence beside him.

  * * *

  The sound reverberated. From eleven at night until two in the morning, it was especially noticeable. When I got out of bed, I picked up the book I’d been reading from the floor where I’d dropped it. Normally my wife put our son to bed in his room, but while she was away he was sleeping with me. The lights were on because if the room was pitch dark, he said he couldn’t sleep. What kept me awake, however, was the sound.

  Light bestows sleep: I think those are the words of the German Swiss writer Robert Walser. Whereas vast, powerful darkness awakens us. The inviolability of darkness makes us want to enter deep inside it, he said. Darkness shakes us, kindles desires we never knew we had.

  Standing by the window, I opened the book in my hand. In the encroaching darkness the letters filling the page formed an ever finer mesh, warding me off. The sound grew louder, harsher. The mesh on the white page shook. It rose and fell and stretched taut, as if to bounce back any fresh occurrences of the sound. Something captured and confined there was seeking to emerge. More was rent by that sound than the night that embraced our helpless selves.

  Then, for the first time, I thought I knew what the sound was. No wonder it made my heart ache. It was the sound someone makes who’s sick at heart. A sound like coughing. A rope tied unevenly in knots, trying to strangle you from the inside. Escape is impossible. Countless hands grip the ends of the rope and never give up. Whenever the hands menace, drive them away by coughing, that’s all you can do.

  The sound that came from the woods, piercing the night, was trying to strangle my heart, too. I knew it was echoing in the dreams of my son, asleep in the same bed. Every time the sound came, his small body couldn’t help wriggling under the sheets like a segment of earthworm.

  I looked out the window. The apple tree, the lone tree in the yard, was heavy with fruit. On the ground beneath it lay fallen apples, under attack by starlings scattering screeches as if scraping impure metal; the wounds on the fruit were the color of rust. Those remaining unfallen turned red all over, as if to say how annoyed they were with themselves for having let slip their chance to set off, and they kept on swelling, weighing down the branches more heavily each day. You need to prop those branches up, I’d been telling myself.

  But that night I was in for a surprise. The branch I’d thought at greatest risk of breaking already had two props, like an exhausted king with two faithful retainers supporting him by the shoulders so he could manage to stand. Who could have done it?

  Since the time my son and I began to live by ourselves at the edge of the woods, various strange things had been happening. The Origin of Species, which I was reading before bed, alternating with the Confessions of St. Augustine, disappeared. It should’ve been where I left it on the bedside table. Where could it have gone? I wondered if my wife might have put it somewhere, and I asked her about it when I called.

  “You know I’d never read that,” she said. And then, as if she found the notion hilarious, shrill laughter poured out of the receiver. I had to smile.

  My son had gotten up and now stood beside me. Rubbing his eyes with one hand, he clenched my pajama bottoms with the other.

  “Did you do it?” I asked him.

  “Do what?” he answered sleepily.

  I picked him up. “See that apple tree? See the props under the branch there? Did you do that for Daddy?”

  “No.”

  “No, I suppose not,” I said, still holding him.

  “I can’t sleep,” he said, his arms wrapped around my neck.

  “Why, because of the sound?”

  Before I heard him answer, I felt his warm, comfortable breath tickling the back of my neck. All at once the apple tree beyond the window shook violently. The props beneath the branch seemed about to slide out. The branch would break and the tree would topple over. Invisible wind shook it even harder. I held my breath, listening in the depths of my son’s quiet breathing for the sound of falling apples.

  * * *

  Like the breathing of a sleeping child, the hills gently rose and fell. The dark woods turned into a nightmare, encroaching on the orchards and pasturelands scattered on the hillsides. I drove the car amid that quiet breathing. Every time I came to the top of a slope, the view opened up before me. Village after village appeared, only to then be swallowed in the waves and quickly disappear.

  I was on my way to the shopping center. Open twenty-four hours, the giant shopping center rose like a castle before my eyes. The road went uphill all the way.

  From the parking lot, which was so big that it could easily have held a couple of soccer fields, you could take in the surrounding scenery far into the distance. It felt like being king of the world. In that sense, too, the place was castlelike. To go shopping at a place so high up, you really had to have a car. What were people who couldn’t drive supposed to do? Vassals unable to drive need not apply, eh? Or was this the message: “Let those who can drive help those unable to get around”? Were they trying to get each person to come to grips with his own morality?

  From this modern castle, the true castle couldn’t be seen. I knew there was a building called a “castle” in the depths of the woods we lived beside. It was the former residence of the feudal lords who ruled this area several centuries ago. It’s possible that the coughing from the woods was the echo of sounds made there long ago. Sounds of cannon fire to repel enemy troops who aimed to seize control of the land. Perhaps the woods trembled at the unexpected revival of memories of that sound, searing physical memories.

  * * *

  Whether the old woman came from the castle or not, I couldn’t say.

  When I asked my son, who returned from the woods hand in hand with her, all he did was shake his head.

  “You don’t know?” I kept my voice low so she couldn’t hear, bringing my face close to his. “But you’re the one who brought her here!”

  “No, I dunnooo!” he wailed.

  He wasn’t the only one in tears. The old woman, seated in a kitchen chair, stared with moist, unfocused eyes at the cup of tea I’d made for her.

  He was to come home before dark, and he was not to go too deep inside the woods; under those two conditions, I allowed him to play by the woods. The trees were sparse at the edge of the woods, so from the kitchen window I could watch him kick up dead leaves along with his soccer ball. That eased my mind, which was my mistake.

  Mistake? What could be mistaken about my son bringing home an old woman?

  But she wouldn’t stop crying, so I’d become concerned that perhaps there had been some mistake.

  When I saw him leading her by the hand, I couldn’t hide my confusion. She was wearing a long white garment like a bathrobe, but the sash was untied, the front open. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. And since her left arm wasn’t in the sleeve, her left breast showed. It hung like an empty leather bag, and from the tip drooped a black nipple like a clot of blood. Neither blood nor milk came from that dried-out breast. Tears, however, fell from her eyes.

  My son looked up worriedly at the old woman’s face. From time to time she patted his head. The breast swung. My son’s soft hair was thoroughly mussed.

  “Thanks, dear,” she said to him over and over.

  Not just her skin but her voice, too, was dry. Was it because all the moisture in her body had spilled out in the unceasing tears? Her voice seemed cracked; perhaps that was because I’d noticed she was trembling. I looked away from her pubic hair, which was shining as if wet.

  “Go on,” I said. “Drink it while it’s hot. Warm yourself.”

  She nodded. Lifted the cup to her lips and sipped the tea. From her pale neck down to the top of her breast, her skin seemed to flush a little.

  “Is it good?” my son asked shyly.

  “Yes,
dear, thanks.” She laid a hand on his head. “Thanks always for everything, dear.”

  Always? My son’s expression brightened when he heard the word.

  I began to understand.

  Both my parents and my wife’s parents were still living. But because they lived far away, our son saw his grandparents once or twice a year at most. Many of his friends lived with their grandparents, and when he went to someone’s house to play, he came home captivated by having been in the presence of a gentle grandpa or grandma.

  He was especially fond of the grandmother of the little girl who was his closest friend. The old woman returned his affection, often taking him shopping, making him tarts, or gathering mushrooms with him. He told us all about what he did with her, so absorbed in the story that he’d forget to eat his dinner. He chattered on like one possessed, till I wondered if he might have eaten a weird mushroom. Joy and excitement rolled around on his tongue instead of food.

  When my wife ran into the little girl’s mother at the shopping center, she thanked her, and the sharp retort was: “Nicer to strangers than to her own family, she is.” Mothers- and daughters-in-law never seem to get along.

  Anyway, for a while our son begged his mother for a grandmother and wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  “You already have a grandmother and a grandfather,” I said. “Two of each, in fact! You can have your pick.”

  “Nooo,” he whined, near tears. “I want a grandma that’s all mine!” He kept this up, tugging on my wife’s skirt.

  “They are yours, silly. Daddy’s mother and Mommy’s mother, both.” My voice was loud.

  “No, they’re not.” He looked at me.

  “Yes, they are. You just don’t get it, do you!”

  “No need to get so hot under the collar,” said my wife.

  “They’re not!” he cried. “They’re not all mine!”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “’Cause they’re not.” He pouted. “’Cause they’ll be my brother or sister’s grandmas, too.” He patted my wife’s burgeoning belly as gently as if it were marked FRAGILE.