"Demon in a Bottle"
By Kaji Hikage
The year the most popular trend was collecting baseball cards, my Onee-san was twelve and I was nine. He told me to stay away from them and that if I touched them, giant snakes would come to eat me when I slept.
I told him to bugger off. (Though we were living in Japan and part Japanese, our mother was Caucasian and a native to the North American continent. Thus came about the interspersed lingo of America, Japan and Korea, our country's distant cousin). Depending on what mood I was in, by the blossoming age of eleven I could put my Onee-san, or rather older brother, down in all three languages, plus French, which was a benefit more than anything, courtesy of my pen-pal Eloise Marie-Liz. The hyphen in her name was there due to her rich mother's stature and her rich father's stubbornness. After all, when I was that age, only rich people had hyphens in their last names.
Everyone in Japan had hyphens in their first names.
In any case, when I was eleven, baseball cards were still a big deal with my brother and Onee-san told me not to touch his treasured baseball cards or else some ominous and unpleasant fate awaited me, like snakes biting my head off. However, since large snakes were not so very high in population in the suburbs of Tokyo, what he really meant was that if I laid a single finger on his cards that he would kill me and make it look like an accident.
My Onee-san is a very good actor.
Of course, when your older sibling tells you not to do something, as the younger sibling, it is your duty to do exactly what they told you not to. And so I did.
Interestingly enough, his cards were nothing amazing, simply two by one inch pieces of plastic printed with kanji that read the person's stats and name. What on earth did he see in them? I didn't know and frankly, didn't care. When I was finished flipping through his rather impressive collection, I placed them all meticulously back into their respective places. I didn't want to die before I saw sixteen.
Sighing, I trudged out of his room, unafraid of being caught; my Onee-san was at his archery class. Mother and father would not have let him play baseball for anything, other than a full University scholarship, which in inverse respect, they would have signed him up for all the peewee leagues this side south of Tokyo. Back to the subject at hand though, I was trudging.
Honestly! What was so wonderful about those cards? It was nagging at the back of my eleven and three months and two days old mind, among other things like: what's for dinner, I hope it isn't tuna. So very engrossed in my subconscious was I that it took a full knock of pure consciousness to bring me out of it; clearly said, I was literally knocked out of it because I ran conveniently into my grandmother, Kagome.
Now, grandmother was old. To say that when she moved in with us she thought my mother was an evil espionage from "that demon infested country across the large waters" would only have described part of her eccentricity and slight madness.
Even now she tends to go on a tirade about various bombs and while I might try to be sympathetic, it's difficult when one gets the feeling that the woman isn't even taking herself seriously. (Japanese grandmothers live forever, or so I've heard.)
Anyways, I ran into her, and this is what she said to me, a special direct translation:
"Why you run into me like a duck who has no webbed feet?"
Understand that it took me quite a while to digest this comment; I was only eleven after all. But, once I had convinced myself that what I believed it to be was true, I hastened to catch up with her fast retreating form. For a woman of sixty-nine she walked like a river flows and I was hard pressed not to jog with my short legs, which were only inches shorter than her own.
The question in my head was debatable as to whether or not I should actually pop it to her. On one hand she could answer me and spread the butter, but on the other side of things, she could burn me with one of those disturbingly insightful Japanese proverbs about rabbits in the moon or grasshoppers in the sun or goldfish in our backyard pond. I decided to pop it. What was the worst that could happen right? Or maybe, the best?
"Grandmother," I began as sweetly as possible. One had to, and still does, need to tiptoe around her because she is not one for buttering up and yet she likes to be shown respect and cordiality. There's a fine line between those things and empty flattery; I learned that when I was six and she hit me on the hand with her rolling pin when I said her cookies were the best in the world. I think she might have thought I was being sarcastic. Thing is, when I was six, I didn't even know what sarcasm was. Anyway, she looked at me, turning slowly enough to give the full stout impression of her height over me.
"What you want now Li?" she asked me with all the gruffness of a forty-year old biker and stared at me with those beady eyes that were so black they were almost brown. Those were the same eyes that could turn my father into jello back then. Except we didn't have jello, more correctly, we had pudding, so pudding then.
"Um, well you know how Toya has all those plastic baseball cards he protects like they're something really special?" I decided to ease my way into the conversation and see if that worked.
"Get to point Li-rei," she ordered, using my whole first name, which was a concrete sign of the danger zone I was in if I danced around the spiral of the subject any longer.
"What does he like so much? They're just plastic!" I stated this simply, but with enough of an emphatic touch that she got my point of confusion clearly. My grandmother took this moment to shuffle her feet arbitrarily and mumble something to herself, which simply by the manner in which she mumbled it, I could tell was not intended for my ears.
"Is trend now yes?" Her English could have been better but after living with mother, or as grandmother has only been recently convinced into not otherwise calling "foreign devil", it was more than I could ask for.
"Uh-huh," I nodded my affirmative in case she didn't understand the two- syllable slang.
"Is simple. Sit." Her order was swift and I obeyed, plopping unceremoniously down onto the wood of our hallway floor. She lowered down with less ease than I, but did manage to bend down well enough. Placing her surprisingly small and smooth hands on her knees, she stared at me.
And I stared back blankly, as blank as the pristine white sheets on my western bed frame.
"Well?" That one word she posed as a question to me and I answered the only way I could with eleven years under my belt.
"Well, um..." I paused and trailed off all at the same time and she gave me an exasperated sigh; the same I might expect to hear from mother after I didn't do the dishes.
"Well it is this. You see, when I was your age, big thing was to capture a snake and put it into a bottle and keep it in you room as sort of trophy." Her lack of articles here and there had me grappling for her meaning at times but by the end of it, I think I had the jist.
"A snake?" I played up the amazement, though I was truly surprised. She nodded sagely.
"Comes from old legend. One say girl's village have no water. They pray to gods to let the clouds fall upon their homes but only sun. Then one day a girl like you walk down to the river and collects water for the drinking and runs into a snake. It is large and fierce and strikes at her like fire on telephone pole. Clever girl waits until the next strike and throws the water pot over its head and bottles it up with a lid. Then the snake is caught in water and the next evening rains pour forth from heavens." Here she stopped, allowing me to sponge up all the "water" she had poured upon me and smiled.
"You see? The girl captured the evil drought demon and so rains could pour again and she save her village. So someone make a trend out of old legend and people like because other people like it and people like it because it is not old like me," and she paused and a sudden sincere look of nostalgia overtook her visage like a wave on the California coastline.
Reaching out to her, I placed my hand on hers, to find that it was not unlike mine; it was unusually small with tapered fingers, almost baby-like but not deformed. Mumbling again to herself, she told me only audibly, to get ready for dinner and stood up much faster than I would have put money on and walked to her room until dinner hour.
In the meantime, my brother had returned and he was in his room when there came from within a bloodcurdling scream.
Apparently I had placed one of the cards in the wrong order. He came storming out of the room like the true personification of Hell on Wheels, or rather, two feet, and pounded his presence directly in front of me. Only the flames in his eyes outdid his huffing and puffing and he reminded me briefly of a frazzled demon.
"Kaiju!" That was his term for me, which meant monster.
"I'm not a kaiju!" This was my customary reply and that was our basic segue into whatever argument was about to take place, this one centering around his beloved baseball cards of course.
"You touched my stuff! You never, ever go in my room! It's mine for a reason you know, you, you... kaiju!" he growled. I guess he thought he was menacing whereas I thought my grandmother was more intimidating than he was, and she was. I was about to fume right back at him when I recalled the story of the snake in the bottle grandmother had just told me.
"Onee-san...will you please come into the kitchen please?" I asked as sweetly as I could without hurling. The poor boy actually followed me, despite his incessant grumbling and all the way to the perfect place, right in front of the sink. Fast as anything beneath the speed of light, I dunked his head in the sink and sprayed him with the faucet. After a moment of glory, I released him and traipsed off to my room, yelling back to him that he wasn't a snake and so I couldn't keep him in a bottle and that the sink would have to suffice. And it did...until he was eighteen or thereabouts. Thereafter and henceforth I have used the bathtub.
Today I have a snake in a bottle. It reminds me that people don't necessarily all love the same things; my brother and I didn't after all. But when they do, sometimes there is a reason beyond literal explanation and that is perhaps one of the most important didactic lessons I have had in my life from grandmother. She is still giving me odd Japanese proverbs to this day but somehow I am more easily able to find the withered meanings in all of them nowadays. It's somehow both comforting and disturbing at the same time.
It makes me wonder if my eyes are as beady as hers at the age of twenty-one and if my hands are still as baby-like and if perhaps, my snake in a bottle has been captured.
After all, grandmother has since (two years ago Onee-san got married to an Italian), started calling mother her daughter. Now she has moved on to my brother's wife, and my brother himself to bring under her vindication of sorts. Of late her words to him have ranged from "You have no dignity," to "You will be the death of me."
I don't think she means it. She's just grandmother. She caught her snake in a bottle years ago, so to speak and now I think she is just living it up, toying with it as she so chooses.
I am twenty-one and I want to know, can you tell me: have I caught my demon in a bottle, my snake?
My personal guess is no. I have not, because I still feel the daily strain of right and wrong but in a way that gives my life some of its most interesting points and I would not trade the captured snake for those moments, ever.
I can wait a while longer for the drought to be over because for me, the drought is merely an interlude.
End.
By Kaji Hikage
The year the most popular trend was collecting baseball cards, my Onee-san was twelve and I was nine. He told me to stay away from them and that if I touched them, giant snakes would come to eat me when I slept.
I told him to bugger off. (Though we were living in Japan and part Japanese, our mother was Caucasian and a native to the North American continent. Thus came about the interspersed lingo of America, Japan and Korea, our country's distant cousin). Depending on what mood I was in, by the blossoming age of eleven I could put my Onee-san, or rather older brother, down in all three languages, plus French, which was a benefit more than anything, courtesy of my pen-pal Eloise Marie-Liz. The hyphen in her name was there due to her rich mother's stature and her rich father's stubbornness. After all, when I was that age, only rich people had hyphens in their last names.
Everyone in Japan had hyphens in their first names.
In any case, when I was eleven, baseball cards were still a big deal with my brother and Onee-san told me not to touch his treasured baseball cards or else some ominous and unpleasant fate awaited me, like snakes biting my head off. However, since large snakes were not so very high in population in the suburbs of Tokyo, what he really meant was that if I laid a single finger on his cards that he would kill me and make it look like an accident.
My Onee-san is a very good actor.
Of course, when your older sibling tells you not to do something, as the younger sibling, it is your duty to do exactly what they told you not to. And so I did.
Interestingly enough, his cards were nothing amazing, simply two by one inch pieces of plastic printed with kanji that read the person's stats and name. What on earth did he see in them? I didn't know and frankly, didn't care. When I was finished flipping through his rather impressive collection, I placed them all meticulously back into their respective places. I didn't want to die before I saw sixteen.
Sighing, I trudged out of his room, unafraid of being caught; my Onee-san was at his archery class. Mother and father would not have let him play baseball for anything, other than a full University scholarship, which in inverse respect, they would have signed him up for all the peewee leagues this side south of Tokyo. Back to the subject at hand though, I was trudging.
Honestly! What was so wonderful about those cards? It was nagging at the back of my eleven and three months and two days old mind, among other things like: what's for dinner, I hope it isn't tuna. So very engrossed in my subconscious was I that it took a full knock of pure consciousness to bring me out of it; clearly said, I was literally knocked out of it because I ran conveniently into my grandmother, Kagome.
Now, grandmother was old. To say that when she moved in with us she thought my mother was an evil espionage from "that demon infested country across the large waters" would only have described part of her eccentricity and slight madness.
Even now she tends to go on a tirade about various bombs and while I might try to be sympathetic, it's difficult when one gets the feeling that the woman isn't even taking herself seriously. (Japanese grandmothers live forever, or so I've heard.)
Anyways, I ran into her, and this is what she said to me, a special direct translation:
"Why you run into me like a duck who has no webbed feet?"
Understand that it took me quite a while to digest this comment; I was only eleven after all. But, once I had convinced myself that what I believed it to be was true, I hastened to catch up with her fast retreating form. For a woman of sixty-nine she walked like a river flows and I was hard pressed not to jog with my short legs, which were only inches shorter than her own.
The question in my head was debatable as to whether or not I should actually pop it to her. On one hand she could answer me and spread the butter, but on the other side of things, she could burn me with one of those disturbingly insightful Japanese proverbs about rabbits in the moon or grasshoppers in the sun or goldfish in our backyard pond. I decided to pop it. What was the worst that could happen right? Or maybe, the best?
"Grandmother," I began as sweetly as possible. One had to, and still does, need to tiptoe around her because she is not one for buttering up and yet she likes to be shown respect and cordiality. There's a fine line between those things and empty flattery; I learned that when I was six and she hit me on the hand with her rolling pin when I said her cookies were the best in the world. I think she might have thought I was being sarcastic. Thing is, when I was six, I didn't even know what sarcasm was. Anyway, she looked at me, turning slowly enough to give the full stout impression of her height over me.
"What you want now Li?" she asked me with all the gruffness of a forty-year old biker and stared at me with those beady eyes that were so black they were almost brown. Those were the same eyes that could turn my father into jello back then. Except we didn't have jello, more correctly, we had pudding, so pudding then.
"Um, well you know how Toya has all those plastic baseball cards he protects like they're something really special?" I decided to ease my way into the conversation and see if that worked.
"Get to point Li-rei," she ordered, using my whole first name, which was a concrete sign of the danger zone I was in if I danced around the spiral of the subject any longer.
"What does he like so much? They're just plastic!" I stated this simply, but with enough of an emphatic touch that she got my point of confusion clearly. My grandmother took this moment to shuffle her feet arbitrarily and mumble something to herself, which simply by the manner in which she mumbled it, I could tell was not intended for my ears.
"Is trend now yes?" Her English could have been better but after living with mother, or as grandmother has only been recently convinced into not otherwise calling "foreign devil", it was more than I could ask for.
"Uh-huh," I nodded my affirmative in case she didn't understand the two- syllable slang.
"Is simple. Sit." Her order was swift and I obeyed, plopping unceremoniously down onto the wood of our hallway floor. She lowered down with less ease than I, but did manage to bend down well enough. Placing her surprisingly small and smooth hands on her knees, she stared at me.
And I stared back blankly, as blank as the pristine white sheets on my western bed frame.
"Well?" That one word she posed as a question to me and I answered the only way I could with eleven years under my belt.
"Well, um..." I paused and trailed off all at the same time and she gave me an exasperated sigh; the same I might expect to hear from mother after I didn't do the dishes.
"Well it is this. You see, when I was your age, big thing was to capture a snake and put it into a bottle and keep it in you room as sort of trophy." Her lack of articles here and there had me grappling for her meaning at times but by the end of it, I think I had the jist.
"A snake?" I played up the amazement, though I was truly surprised. She nodded sagely.
"Comes from old legend. One say girl's village have no water. They pray to gods to let the clouds fall upon their homes but only sun. Then one day a girl like you walk down to the river and collects water for the drinking and runs into a snake. It is large and fierce and strikes at her like fire on telephone pole. Clever girl waits until the next strike and throws the water pot over its head and bottles it up with a lid. Then the snake is caught in water and the next evening rains pour forth from heavens." Here she stopped, allowing me to sponge up all the "water" she had poured upon me and smiled.
"You see? The girl captured the evil drought demon and so rains could pour again and she save her village. So someone make a trend out of old legend and people like because other people like it and people like it because it is not old like me," and she paused and a sudden sincere look of nostalgia overtook her visage like a wave on the California coastline.
Reaching out to her, I placed my hand on hers, to find that it was not unlike mine; it was unusually small with tapered fingers, almost baby-like but not deformed. Mumbling again to herself, she told me only audibly, to get ready for dinner and stood up much faster than I would have put money on and walked to her room until dinner hour.
In the meantime, my brother had returned and he was in his room when there came from within a bloodcurdling scream.
Apparently I had placed one of the cards in the wrong order. He came storming out of the room like the true personification of Hell on Wheels, or rather, two feet, and pounded his presence directly in front of me. Only the flames in his eyes outdid his huffing and puffing and he reminded me briefly of a frazzled demon.
"Kaiju!" That was his term for me, which meant monster.
"I'm not a kaiju!" This was my customary reply and that was our basic segue into whatever argument was about to take place, this one centering around his beloved baseball cards of course.
"You touched my stuff! You never, ever go in my room! It's mine for a reason you know, you, you... kaiju!" he growled. I guess he thought he was menacing whereas I thought my grandmother was more intimidating than he was, and she was. I was about to fume right back at him when I recalled the story of the snake in the bottle grandmother had just told me.
"Onee-san...will you please come into the kitchen please?" I asked as sweetly as I could without hurling. The poor boy actually followed me, despite his incessant grumbling and all the way to the perfect place, right in front of the sink. Fast as anything beneath the speed of light, I dunked his head in the sink and sprayed him with the faucet. After a moment of glory, I released him and traipsed off to my room, yelling back to him that he wasn't a snake and so I couldn't keep him in a bottle and that the sink would have to suffice. And it did...until he was eighteen or thereabouts. Thereafter and henceforth I have used the bathtub.
Today I have a snake in a bottle. It reminds me that people don't necessarily all love the same things; my brother and I didn't after all. But when they do, sometimes there is a reason beyond literal explanation and that is perhaps one of the most important didactic lessons I have had in my life from grandmother. She is still giving me odd Japanese proverbs to this day but somehow I am more easily able to find the withered meanings in all of them nowadays. It's somehow both comforting and disturbing at the same time.
It makes me wonder if my eyes are as beady as hers at the age of twenty-one and if my hands are still as baby-like and if perhaps, my snake in a bottle has been captured.
After all, grandmother has since (two years ago Onee-san got married to an Italian), started calling mother her daughter. Now she has moved on to my brother's wife, and my brother himself to bring under her vindication of sorts. Of late her words to him have ranged from "You have no dignity," to "You will be the death of me."
I don't think she means it. She's just grandmother. She caught her snake in a bottle years ago, so to speak and now I think she is just living it up, toying with it as she so chooses.
I am twenty-one and I want to know, can you tell me: have I caught my demon in a bottle, my snake?
My personal guess is no. I have not, because I still feel the daily strain of right and wrong but in a way that gives my life some of its most interesting points and I would not trade the captured snake for those moments, ever.
I can wait a while longer for the drought to be over because for me, the drought is merely an interlude.
End.