Читать онлайн «The Guest Cat»
Автор Eric Selland
•
Takashi Hiraide
A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK
1
At first it looked like low-lying ribbons of clouds just floating there, but then the clouds would be blown a little bit to the right and next to the left.
The small window in the corner of our kitchen bordered on a tall wooden fence, so close a person could barely pass by. From inside the house, its frosted glass looked like a dim movie screen. There was a small knothole in the wooden fence and the green of the bamboo hedge — which was about ten feet wide, to the north of the alley — was always projected on to the crude screen. Whenever someone walked by in the narrow alleyway, a figure formed, filling the entire window. Viewed from the dark interior of the house, sunny days seemed ever more vivid, and working perhaps on the same principle as a camera obscura, the figures of people walking past were turned upside down. Not only that, but whatever images passed by came from the opposite direction than the one in which the people were actually walking. And as the passersby approached closer to the knothole, their overturned figures would swell so large that they would entirely fill the window frame and, once they had passed, would suddenly disappear like some special optical phenomenon.
But on that day, the image of the ribbon clouds did not attempt to move past, and the image did not grow very large when it neared the knothole. Even when it should have expanded to an enlarged size, the image floating in the upper part of the window was only big enough to sit on the palm of one’s hand. The ribbon clouds hesitated, as if hovering in the street, and then the sound of a feeble cry arose.
My wife and I had decided on a name for the little alleyway. We called it “Lightning Alley.
” It was about twenty minutes from the teeming Shinjuku terminal on a private line heading southwest: you got off at a little station where the express didn’t stop and walked south for about ten minutes. There you hit a bit of an incline, and then at the top of the hill you crossed the only street with any significant traffic going east and west. Once you crossed that diagonally, the rest of the way was downhill, and after about a hundred yards down a wide, rambling incline, there was a house on the left with an old-fashioned fence, its bamboo slats attached vertically all along the bottom half of the plastered wall. Just before reaching its gate you turned in to the austere little alleyway on the left, while the road continued on along the wooden fence.Located within these same plastered walls and wooden fence, on the extensive grounds of an old estate, the place we were renting had originally been a guesthouse. A little more than halfway down the alley, a rickety gate in the wooden fence doubled as the landlady’s side entrance and the tenants’ front gate. Like an eye that went unnoticed, the knothole was located just beyond that gate.
Passing by behind the fence without knowing just how plainly your image was being projected on our window, you would first run head-on into the brick wall of the house jutting out from the left, and then you would turn to the right at an acute angle. And just as suddenly you would run into a house whose roof was concealed behind the dense growth of a huge zelkova tree, at which point the path turned sharply again to the left. The frequent, sharp turns created the lightning-bolt pattern one often sees in drawings, so we jokingly referred to it as “Lightning Alley. ”
