KJ
Selections
TALISMAN
TAWADA YOKO (from KJ#31)
(translated from original German by Susan
Bernofsky)
This city is full of women who wear pieces of metal on their ears. They
have holes put in their earlobes especially for this purpose. Not long
after I got here, I wanted to ask someone what these pieces of metal
on people's ears meant. But I didn't know whether or not I was allowed
to speak openly about this. In my guidebook it says that you should
never, for example, ask people you don't yet know very well direct questions
concerning their body or religion. Sometimes I thought these pieces
of metal - especially when I saw one in the form of a scythe, bow, or
anchor - might be a kind of talisman.
At first glance,
the city doesn't strike me as particularly dangerous. Why, then, do
so many women wear talismans on the street? Admittedly it can be a bit
spooky at times walking around in the city alone. It's just that there
are too few people living here. Even during the daytime it often happens
that I walk home from the train station without seeing anyone at all.
If these pieces
of metal are a kind of talisman, why are they so popular among women?
I didn't know the name of the evil force these women were trying to
protect themselves against with this talisman's help. They never revealed
its name to me, and I still haven't made a concerted effort to find
out what it is. Where I come from, people say you should never speak
aloud the name of a dangerous being. If you do, this being will really
appear. It has to be named indirectly. For example, you can simply replace
its name with "it."
Gilda, a student
who lived in the same building as I did, always wore a triangular piece
of metal on her ear. The first time we had a real conversation, she
told me that a fifty-five year old librarian at the university had just
committed suicide the day before. Until her death, this librarian had
fought to keep computers from being installed in her department. Gilda
said the woman hadn't been intelligent and couldn't understand that
a computer was merely a tool, not a monster. But apparently the computer
wasn't the cause of her suicide. She had suffered from severe depression
for years. She'd lived alone, Gilda said, touching her triangular piece
of metal with her index finger.
"What is the meaning
of that piece of metal?" I asked her. She looked at me in surprise and
asked whether I meant her "earring." The word "ring" had an unsettling
effect on me. Gilda said indifferently that the earring was simply a
piece of jewelry and had no meaning at all.
As I had supposed,
Gilda was reluctant to talk about the earring's significance. Instead
she told me that highly educated women had holes put in their ears at
a relatively late age, whereas working-class women started wearing earrings
as girls.
I had read in a
book that there are cultures in which part of the sexual organ is cut
off during the initiation ceremony. A different part of the body can
be substituted, however; the feet, for example, or the ears. In this
case not the earring itself but merely the perforation of the earlobe
would be significant.
But why was Gilda
always so uneasy? One day she placed two porcelain dogs on her windowsill.
She wouldn't put the flowerpots I'd given her there. These dogs were
to sit on the windowsill all day and watch over her apartment; like
the stone dogs where I come from that watch over Shinto shrines. Gilda
said she often imagined - when she was alone in the apartment - that
a strange man was coming into her room through the window.
Once she knocked
on my door in the middle of the night and said there was something wrong
with her computer. I was very surprised she'd woken me up for this,
since she knew I didn't have the first idea about computers. But soon
I understood what the matter was: Gilda claimed there was an alien being
living inside her computer and producing sentences. She kept discovering
sentences in her essays that she most certainly hadn't written herself.
But she refused to give me any examples; she said the sentences were
indecent. I advised her to attach a talisman to her computer to make
the evil force leave and keep new ones from coming. I used the term
'evil force' because I didn't know what else to call it.
The talisman Gilda
came up with wasn't at all what I had in mind: I'd imagined something
like a doll made of rushes or a piece of snakeskin. But Gilda went to
a health food store and bought herself three stickers. Each sticker
bore an image that was no doubt intended to epitomize the evil force:
a car, a nuclear power plant, a gun. And above each image stood the
words: No thanks.
It struck me as
too polite to express gratitude at the same time as one was rejecting
an evil force, but perhaps the word "thanks" was simply intended to
avoid provoking the opponent's aggression.
Gilda pasted the
stickers on the front of her computer, beside the screen, and appeared
to be satisfied with them. A week later she bought three more stickers
and put them on her bicycle, the refrigerator, the door of her apartment.
But I don't think
she was completely reassured. Admittedly her computer now was clean,
but as if to make up for this, she began to feel as if an alien being
were forcing its way into her body. She bought herself a sweater adorned
with a large tiger's head. The tiger gazed severely at anyone who found
himself face to face with Gilda. She also bought herself a jacket made
of the skin of a dead animal. Gilda wore tight pants printed in a leopard
pattern and a belt studded with several triangular pieces of metal.
I wouldn't have been surprised if she'd put on a mask with a lion's
face.
Despite all this,
her misgivings persisted. At dinner, for instance, when she sate alone
in the kitchen eating her soup, she suddenly had the impression that
the soup contained everything she'd been trying to avoid all this time.
She told me she'd decided to fast for a week or two. There was so much
poison in food, she explained, and, besides, she had too much excess
flesh on her body. Gilda wasn't fat, but she was incapable of loving
her own flesh, because she sensed within it the presence of an alien
element. She called this element"chemicals."
Every culture has
its own purification ceremony, or several of them. In this city, however,
the day, time and opening prayer for this ceremony have never been determined.
There are no specifications, or at least no rules I could recognize
as such. One day Gilda bought herself a book on fasting, and a few days
later, when I met her on the stairs, she had already started. Her face
looked less narrow than usual: it was almost round, as though there
were water trapped beneath the skin. The piece of metal on her ear appeared
heavier and colder than before. I swallowed the words I'd meant to say
to her, for she seemed to me, all at once, like a stranger who - although
I lived in her language - was unable to understand me.
On her door flapped
a sticker that was trying to come unstuck from the smooth metal.
TAWADA
YOKO resides in Hamburg where she writes & lectures in the German
language. Her stories, "Canned Foreign" and "Where Europe Begins" have
appeared in previous issues of Kyoto Journal. "Talisman" was translated
from the German by Susan Bernofsky.
Copyright
held by the author
Back to Selections
Subscriptions
