Darkness in Summer by Takeshi Kaikō

Author:Takeshi Kaikō [Kaikō, Takeshi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
Published: 1988-04-05T17:00:00+00:00

Summer festers on.

Summer has become diseased rather than ripe. Early in the morning, the chirping of birds is heard from the direction of the forest, and the sunlight is filled with buoyant excitement. But it lasts only until about ten o’clock, and after that the sky is filmed with a white sheen and soft-membraned clouds appear everywhere. I leave the door to the balcony completely open, but the breeze slackens and stagnates like lukewarm water, and there is none of the sword-blade freshness that was there a short while ago. A large shadow forms behind the curtain, and I roll myself in it like a crab crawling into a hole, but there is none of the coolness to be found in a deep pool. All through the long afternoon, the transparent shimmer of red-hot coal fills the room. After my afternoon nap, I get up for a shower. While the water runs down my skin, I recover my shape, but I begin to melt as soon as I return to the couch. All I can do is to travel between the couch and the bathroom through the hot, dense, shimmering air.

On the sofa, which, a packhorse no longer, is now even more miserably crumpled and limp, I continue to perspire and turn into a melting lump of butter. The pizza, which she bakes wearing her bra, wiping off her perspiration as she kneads the dough, is full of rich nourishment, starch, fat, and protein, and as I carry it piece by piece to my mouth, I feel that the dough is adding soft flesh to my belly; the anchovies giving bags to my cheeks; and the salami adding a bulging pouch to my chest. When I finish the meal and get up, my perspiring body is much heavier, and I feel as if my body is loaded with cumbersome burdens.

“Ingest and defecate, ingest and defecate. It’s just like a lugworm or earthworm. It’s the security of an earthworm. Pure consumption. No eyes, no ears, only get fat and there are no complaints. Sweet indolence. I wonder if dolce vita ultimately means to get fat.”

“It doesn’t matter, does it? I don’t mind. I’m happy if you get fat on what I cook. Don’t fret. You’re on vacation now; all you have to do is eat and sleep in my shadow and get fat. I’ll fatten you up so that you won’t be able to escape. I’m delighted. I feel like a mother cat.”

“How is the town?”

“Fewer people every day. The liquor and grocery stores are closing fast, and finding food is not easy. The store that was open yesterday is closed and locked today, and the sign says, ‘We’ll be away for three weeks.’ The paper says that twenty million people will leave for vacation this year. It’s a record-breaking figure, they say. All the roads both north and south are jam-packed, and in some spots traffic came to a complete halt for four hours the day before yesterday. Judging from this, we may see twenty-five million vacationers next summer, and break the records again.

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