First Person Singular Page 8

  Compared to the shabby building and facilities, the hot springs bath at the inn was surprisingly wonderful. The steaming bathwater was a thick green color, not watered down, the sulfur odor more pungent than anything I’d ever experienced, and I soaked there, warming myself to the bone. There were no other bathers (I had no idea if there were even any people staying at the place besides me), and I was able to enjoy a long, leisurely soak. After a while I felt a little light-headed and got out to cool off. Then got back into the tub. Maybe this shoddy-looking little inn was a good choice after all, I figured. It was certainly more peaceful than bathing with some noisy tour group like in the larger inns.

  * * *

  —

  I was soaking in the bath for the third time when the monkey slid open the door with a clatter and came inside. “Excuse me,” he said in a low voice. It took me a while to realize that this was a monkey. All the thick, hot water had left me a little dazed, and I’d never expected to hear a monkey speak, so I couldn’t quickly make the connection between what I was seeing and the fact that this was an actual monkey. My brain felt scattered as I gazed through the steam, uncomprehendingly, at the monkey, who slid the glass door closed behind him. He straightened up the little buckets that lay strewn about and stuck a thermometer into the bath to check the temperature. He gazed intently at the dial on the thermometer, his eyes narrowed, like a bacteriologist isolating some new strain of pathogen.

  “How is the bath?” the monkey asked me.

  “It’s very nice. Thank you,” I said. My voice reverberated densely, softly, in the steam. My voice sounded almost mythological. It didn’t sound like it came from me, but rather like an echo from the past returning from deep in the forest. And that echo was…hold on a second. What was a monkey doing here? And why was he speaking in a human language?

  “Shall I scrub your back for you?” the monkey asked, his voice again low. He had the clear, alluring voice of a doo-wop baritone. Not at all what you would expect. But nothing was odd about his voice, and if you closed your eyes and listened, you’d think it was an ordinary person speaking.

  “Yes, thanks,” I replied. It wasn’t like I was sitting there, hoping someone would come and scrub my back, but I was afraid if I turned him down, he might think I was dead set against having a monkey ever scrub me down. It was a kind gesture on his part, I figured, and I certainly didn’t want to hurt his feelings. So I slowly rose up out of the tub, plunked myself down on a little wooden platform, and turned my back to the monkey.

  The monkey didn’t have any clothes on. Which of course was usually the case for a monkey, so it didn’t strike me as odd. The monkey seemed to be fairly old, and had a lot of white mixed in with his hair. He brought over a small towel, rubbed soap in it, and with a practiced hand gave my back a good scrubbing.

  “It’s gotten very cold these days, hasn’t it,” the monkey commented.

  “That it has.”

  “Before long this place will be covered in snow. And then they’ll have to shovel snow from the roofs, no easy task, believe you me.”

  There was a brief pause, and I jumped in. “So you can speak human language?”

  “I can indeed,” the monkey briskly replied. He was probably asked that a lot. “I was raised by humans, and before I knew it, I was able to speak. I lived for quite a long time in Tokyo, in Shinagawa.”

  “What part of Shinagawa?”

  “Around Gotenyama.”

  “That’s a nice area.”

  “Yes, as you’re aware, it’s a very pleasant place to live in. Nearby is the Gotenyama Gardens, and I enjoyed the natural scenery there.”

  Our conversation took a time out at this point. The monkey continued briskly scrubbing my back (which felt great), and all the while I tried to puzzle all this out rationally. A monkey raised in Shinagawa? The Gotenyama Gardens? Fluent in human speech? How was that possible? This was a monkey, for goodness’ sake. A monkey, and nothing else.

  “I live in Minato-ku,” I said, which was basically a meaningless statement.

  “We were almost neighbors, then,” the monkey said in a friendly tone.

  “What kind of person raised you in Shinagawa?” I asked.

  “My master was a college professor. He specialized in physics, and held a chair at Tokyo Gakugei University.”

  “Quite an intellectual, then.”

  “He certainly was. He loved music more than anything, particularly the music of Bruckner and Richard Strauss. Thanks to which I developed a fondness for that music myself. I heard it all the time since I was little. Picked up a knowledge of it without even realizing it, you could say.”

  “You enjoy Bruckner?”

  “Yes. His Seventh Symphony. I always find the third movement particularly uplifting.”

  “I often listen to his Ninth Symphony,” I chimed in. Another pretty meaningless statement.

  “Yes, that’s truly lovely music,” the monkey said.

  “So that professor taught you language?”

  “He did. He didn’t have any children, and perhaps to compensate for that, he trained me fairly strictly whenever he had time. He was very patient, a person who valued order and regularity above all. He was a serious person whose favorite saying was that the repetition of accurate facts was the true road to wisdom. His wife was a quiet, sweet person, and was always kind to me. They got along well, and I hesitate to mention this to an outsider, but believe me, their nighttime activities could be quite intense.”

  “Really,” I said.

  The monkey finally finished scrubbing my back. “Thanks for your patience,” he said, and bowed his head.

  “Thank you,” I said. “It really felt good. So, do you work here at this inn?”

  “I do. They’ve been kind enough to let me work here. The larger, more upscale inns wouldn’t ever hire a monkey. But they’re always shorthanded around here, and if you can make yourself useful, they don’t care whether you’re a monkey or whatever. Being a monkey, the pay is minimal, and they only let me work where I mostly stay out of sight. Straightening up the bath, cleaning, things of this sort. Since most guests would be shocked if a monkey served them tea and so on. Working in the kitchen’s out, too, since you’d run into issues with the Food Sanitation Law.”

  “Have you worked here a long time?” I asked.

  “It’s been about three years.”

  “But you must have gone through all sorts of things before you settled down here?”

  The monkey gave a brisk nod. “Very true.”

  I hesitated, but then asked him, “If you don’t mind, could you tell me more about your background?”

  The monkey considered this, and then said, “Yes, that would be fine. It might not be as interesting as you expect, but I’m off work at ten and I could stop by your room after. Would that be convenient?”

  “Certainly,” I replied. “I’d be grateful if you could bring some beer then.”

  “Understood. Some cold beers it is. Would Sapporo be all right?”

  “That would be fine. So, you drink beer?”

  “A little bit, yes.”

  “Then please bring two large bottles.”

  “Certainly. If I understand correctly, you are staying in the Araiso suite on the second floor?”

  That’s right, I said.

  “It’s a little strange, though, don’t you think?” the monkey said. “An inn in the mountains with a room named Araiso—‘Rugged Shore.’ ” He chuckled. I’d never in my life seen a monkey laugh before. But I guess monkeys do laugh, and even cry, at times. I shouldn’t have been surprised, since he talked, too.

  “By the way, do you have a name?” I asked.

  “No, no name, per se. But everyone calls me the ‘Shinagawa monkey.’ ”

  The monkey slid open the glass door to the bath, turned, and g
ave a polite bow, then slowly slid the door shut.

  * * *

  —

  It was a little past ten when the monkey came to the Araiso suite, bearing a tray with two large bottles of beer. (Like he said, I had no clue why they’d name the room “Rugged Shore”—Japanese inns did tend to give names to each of their rooms, but still, it was a seedy-looking room, more like a storage closet, with nothing whatsoever to conjure up any element of that name.) Besides the beer, the tray had a bottle opener, two glasses, plus some snacks—dried, seasoned squid and a bag of Kakipi crunchy snacks—small pieces of rice crackers with peanuts. Typical bar snacks. This was one attentive monkey.

  * * *

  —

  The monkey was dressed now, in a thick, long-sleeved shirt with I♥NY printed on it, and gray sweatpants, probably some hand-me-down kid’s clothes.

  There wasn’t a table in the room, so we sat down, side by side, on thin zabuton cushions, and leaned back against the wall. The monkey used the opener to pop the cap on one of the beers and poured out two glasses. Silently we clinked our glasses together in a little toast.

  “Thanks for the drinks,” the monkey said, and happily gulped back the cold beer. I drank some as well. Honestly, it felt odd to be seated next to a monkey, sharing a beer, but I guess you get used to it.

  “A beer after work can’t be beat,” the monkey said, wiping his mouth with the hairy back of his hand. “But being a monkey, the opportunities to have a beer like this are few and far between.”

  “Do you live here, at your workplace?”

  “Yes, there’s a room, sort of an attic, where they let me sleep. There are mice from time to time, so it’s hard to relax there, but I’m a monkey so I have to be thankful to have a bed to sleep in and three square meals a day…Not that it’s paradise or anything.”

  The monkey had finished his first glass, so I poured him another.

  “Much obliged,” he said politely.

  “Have you lived, not just with humans, but with your own kind? With other monkeys, I mean?” I asked. There were so many things I wanted to ask him.

  “Yes, several times,” the monkey answered, his face clouding over a little. The wrinkles beside his eyes formed deep folds. “For various reasons I was driven out, forcibly, from Shinagawa and released in Takasakiyama, the area down south famous for its monkey park. I thought at first I could live peaceably there, but things didn’t work out that way. The other monkeys are my dear compatriots, don’t get me wrong, but having been raised in a human household, by the professor and his wife, I just couldn’t express my feelings well to them. We had little in common, and communication wasn’t easy. ‘You talk funny,’ they told me, and sort of made fun of me and bullied me. The female monkeys would giggle when they looked at me. Monkeys are extremely sensitive to the most minute differences. They found the way I acted comical, and it annoyed them, even made them irritated sometimes. It got harder for me to stay with them, so eventually I went off on my own. Turned into a rogue monkey, in other words.”

  “It must have been lonely for you.”

  “Indeed it was. Nobody protected me, and I had to scrounge for food on my own and somehow survive. But the worst thing was not having anyone to communicate with. I couldn’t talk with monkeys, or with humans. Isolation like that is heartrending. Takasakiyama is full of human visitors, but that didn’t mean I could just start up a conversation with whomever I happened to run across. Do that and there’d be hell to pay. The upshot was I wound up sort of neither here nor there, an isolated monkey, not part of human society, not part of the monkeys’ world. It was a harrowing existence.”

  “And you couldn’t listen to Bruckner, either.”

  “True. That’s not part of my world anymore,” the Shinagawa monkey said, and drank some more beer. I studied his face, but since it was red to begin with, I didn’t notice it turning any redder. I figured this monkey could hold his liquor. Or maybe with monkeys you can’t tell from their faces when they’re drunk.

  “The other thing that really tormented me was relations with females.”

  “I see,” I said. “And by relations with females you mean—”

  “To be brief, I didn’t feel a speck of sexual desire for female monkeys. I had a lot of opportunities to be with them, but never really felt like it.”

  “So female monkeys didn’t turn you on, even though you’re a monkey yourself?”

  “Yes. That’s exactly right. It’s embarrassing, but honestly, before I knew it, I could only love human females.”

  I was silent and drained my glass of beer. I opened the bag of crunchy snacks and grabbed a handful. “That could lead to some real problems, I would think.”

  “Yes, some real problems indeed. Me being a monkey, after all, there’s no way I could expect human females to respond to my desires. Plus it runs counter to genetics.”

  I waited for him to go on. The monkey rubbed hard behind his ear and finally continued.

  “So because of all this I had to find another method of ridding myself of these unfulfilled desires.”

  “What do you mean by ‘another method’?”

  The monkey frowned deeply. His red face turned a bit darker.

  “You may not believe me,” the monkey said. “You probably won’t believe me, I should say. But I started stealing the names of women I fell for.”

  “Stealing names?”

  “Correct. I’m not sure why, but I seem to have been born with a special talent for it. If I feel like it, I can steal somebody’s name and make it my own.”

  A wave of confusion hit me again.

  “I’m not sure I get it,” I said. “When you say you steal a person’s name, you mean that person completely loses their name?”

  “No. They don’t totally lose their name. What I steal is part of their name, a fragment. But when I do, the name becomes insubstantial, that much lighter than before. Like when the sun clouds over and your shadow on the ground gets that much paler. And depending on the person, they might not be aware of the loss. They just have a sense that something’s a little off.”

  “But some do clearly realize it, right? That a part of their name’s been stolen?”

  “Yes, of course. Sometimes they find that they can’t remember their name. Quite inconvenient, a real bother, as you might imagine. And they don’t even recognize their name for what it is. In some cases, they suffer through something close to an identity crisis. And it’s all my fault, since I stole that person’s name. I feel very sorry about that. I often feel the weight of a guilty conscience bearing down on me. I know it’s wrong, yet I can’t stop myself. I’m not trying to excuse my actions, but my dopamine levels force me to do that. Like there’s a voice telling me, Hey, go ahead, steal the name. It’s not like it’s illegal or anything.”

  I folded my arms and studied the monkey. Dopamine? Finally, I spoke up. “And the names you steal are only those of the women you love or sexually desire. Do I have that right?”

  “Exactly. I don’t randomly steal just anybody’s name.”

  “How many people’s names have you stolen?”

  With a serious expression the monkey totaled it up on his fingers. As he counted, he was muttering something. He looked up. “Seven in all. I stole seven women’s names.”

  Was this a lot, or not so many? Who could say?

  “So how do you go about stealing names?” I asked. “If you don’t mind telling me?”

  “It’s mostly by willpower. Power of concentration, psychic energy. But that’s not enough. I need something with the person’s name actually written on it. An ID is ideal. A driver’s license, student ID, insurance card, or passport. Things of this sort. A name tag will work, too. Anyway, I need to get hold of an actual object like that. Mostly I steal them. Stealing is the only way. As a monkey I’m pretty skilled at sneaking into pe
ople’s rooms when they’re out. I scout around for something with their name on it and take it back with me.”

  “So you use that object with the woman’s name on it, along with your willpower, and steal their name.”

  “Precisely. I stare at the name written there for a long time, focusing my emotions, absorbing the name of the person I love. It takes a lot of time, and is mentally and physically exhausting. I get completely engrossed in it, and somehow am able to pull it off—a part of the woman becomes a part of me. And my affection and desire, which up until then had no outlet, are safely satisfied.”

  “So there’s nothing physical involved?”

  The monkey nodded sharply. “I know I’m just a monkey, but I never do anything unseemly. I make the name of the woman I love a part of me—that’s enough for me. I agree it’s a bit perverted, but it’s also a completely pure, platonic act. I simply possess a great love for that name inside me, secretly. Like a gentle breeze wafting over a meadow.”

  “Hmm,” I said, impressed. “I guess you could even call that the ultimate form of romantic love.”

  “Agreed. It may well be the ultimate form of romantic love. But it’s also the ultimate form of loneliness. Like two sides of a coin. The two extremes are stuck together, and can never be separated.”

  Our conversation came to a halt here, and the monkey and I silently drank our beer, snacking on the Kakipi and dried squid.

  “Have you stolen anyone’s name recently?” I asked.

  The monkey shook his head. He grabbed some of the stiff hair on his arm, as if making sure he was, indeed, an actual monkey. “No, I haven’t stolen anyone’s name recently. After I came to this town, I made up my mind to stop that kind of misconduct. Thanks to which, the soul of this wee little monkey has found a measure of peace. I treasure the names of the seven women in my heart, and live a quiet, tranquil life.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” I said.

  “I know this is quite forward of me, but I was wondering if you’d be kind enough to allow me to give my own personal opinion on the subject of love.”