Three Streets
THREE STREETS
STORYBOOK ND
CURATED BY GINI ALHADEFF
César Aira, The Famous Magician
Osamu Dazai, Early Light
Helen DeWitt, The English Understand Wool
László Krasznahorkai, Spadework for a Palace
Clarice Lispector, The Woman Who Killed the Fish
Yoko Tawada, Three Streets
FORTHCOMING
Natalia Ginzburg, The Road to the City
Rachel Ingalls, In the Act
Copyright © 2015, 2016, 2017, 2022 by Yoko Tawada
Translation copyright © 2022 by Margaret Mitsutani
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Publisher’s Note: These three stories, “Kollwitzstrasse,” “Majakowskiring,” and “Puschkinallee,” were selected from a volume originally published in Japanese as Hyakunen-no-sanpo (“A Century of Walks,”) by Shincho-sha in 2017. Published by arrangement with the author
Manufactured in the United States of America
First published clothbound by New Directions in 2022
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tawada, Yōko, 1960– author. | Mitsutani, Margaret, translator.
Title: Three streets / by Yoko Tawada ; translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani.
Description: First edition. | New York : A Storybook ND, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020012674 | ISBN 9780811229302 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780811229319 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Tawada, Yōko, 1960– —Translations into English.
Classification: LCC PL862.A85 A2 2020 | DDC 895.63/5--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012674
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, NY 10011
THREE STREETS
KOLLWITZSTRASSE
A child, still too little for school, is walking in an odd way, as if it’s making its way across the surface of the moon. That puffy down jacket full of feathers is a space suit; in place of a helmet, a white knitted cap is pulled all the way down over its ears. One foot goes up and the whole body seems about to slide off diagonally into the air. But when the heel hits the ground, the child’s whole weight comes down with a thud, threatening to throw it off balance—it stumbles, grabs the hem of its mother’s coat, and gawks around, wide-eyed. The mother looks calmly down on her child. I stop to watch them, pretending to search for something in my pocket.
Invisible sensors extend from the child’s forehead. The sensors move constantly, darting this way and that, trying to absorb all the stimuli from the outside world. Like those bicycles parked by the side of the road: they’re an important source of information. Some have handlebars shaped like sheep horns, others like a bull’s horns. Wondering if bicycles have zodiac signs, I look again and see one that resembles a goat, another a lion, and still another a scorpion.
The tiny lights on the child’s shoes start to blink. This is not a human child, but a robot. The moment this thought occurs to me I take a leap into the future. I’d just read a dystopian novel in which children were no longer being born and the human race was heading for extinction. People were starting to demand child robots. Although software enabling robots to converse with human beings had been perfected long ago, the development of “my-child-robots”—with the capacity to use outside data organically, mixing it with their programs to form their own personalities—was stuck at a rudimentary level without much hope for improvement. Company A’s robot, for instance, was very popular at first because it responded so sweetly to whatever its parents said, but in time the adults got sick of all that sweetness and stopped talking to it, leaving the child robot to gather dust in its own room, where it eventually stopped moving. Company B, on the other hand, came up with an intellectually curious type that peppered its parents with questions, storing up more and more knowledge. It was programmed with just the right amount of cheekiness and persistence, too. Unfortunately, it only asked things like “How many people live in this city?” and “What year was the French Revolution?” so the parents soon got bored and switched it off in irritation. There’d been something fascinating about the stuff real children had asked about long ago, but Company B failed to discover the source for questions like “Where is my dead uncle living now?” or “Why doesn’t our dog talk?”
One research group concluded that inputting knowledge through parent-child conversations alone would be too difficult, so they developed software that absorbed a little information each day through sensors. Parents were instructed to take their “my-child-robot” with them wherever they went. If they took it shopping, for example, it would learn not only about the products sold in human society but also the difference between days when its parents dragged their feet, gloomy and distracted, and days when they smiled as they briskly marched along. But a good mood didn’t guarantee that the parents would buy their child-robot whatever it wanted; sometimes, when they were too depressed to talk, they would buy it toys or chocolate cake. Little by little, the robot would have to learn how the weather affected people’s moods. For instance, at twilight on a winter’s day, when the sun, stubbornly hovering just above the horizon, suddenly drew a deep velvet curtain across itself, darkening the city, the parents’ moods darkened too, until they went outside and saw fresh, clean snow sparkling in the glimmer of streetlamps, shining on the reds and oranges of winter scarves, and they would be enveloped in a brightness and warmth that comes only in winter. This, too, was important information about human society that would be carved into the child-robot’s brain—information that couldn’t be translated into digits, which is why Company C decided to use visual images. People’s feelings, smells, the moisture in the air, the cold, and the light from streetlamps could all be captured in a single picture. But then they found that just putting a picture into a robot’s brain was useless. First they’d need to program the brain with the capacity to appreciate the picture. So about halfway through, this dystopian novel ran smack into the mystery of what it means to be human.
The mother and child in front of me started walking again, so I followed at the same pace. I saw a logo tag, small yet visible from a distance, sewn into the hood of the child’s white down jacket, for a company that once specialized in mountaineering gear for alpine climbers but was now known for its top-of-the-line children’s clothing. The jacket must have cost several hundred euros. In this area, there were people who thought nothing of shelling out a couple of thousand euros, or even five thousand, to get their child ready for winter.
Robots used to be naked, but now they’re all decked out in fancy clothes, I thought, and at that very moment the child swung around to stare at me. “Don’t go making me into a robot,” his eyes protested, “because I’m not.” Apparently he sensed how much fun I’d had been having, playing with the notion that he was a machine. Clinging to his mother’s coat, his neck still twisted around to glare at me, he walked several steps before stumbling and nearly falling. “Be careful where you place your feet,” his mother scolded gently. “Why are you always looking behind you?” I detected a slight southern, Swabian lilt in her speech.
I had read in the newspaper about young couples who, having inherited sizable fortunes, were moving from southern Germany to raise their children in this district of Berlin. They were not conservative the way wealthy people were thirty or forty years ago, but a new, green generation. Expensive cars were the sign of older wealthy people, but this new generation, who hated all sorts of cars, rode bicycles instead. While the old guard had feasted on thick steaks, the new wealthy class stuck to their vegetarian diets. All the food they cooked at home was organic and additive-free. Before buying coffee or chocolate, they made sure that the beans had been grown on farms where the workers’ rights were respected. This applied to clothing as well, so there’d be a pamphlet detailing the working conditions of everyone involved in the production of, say, a pair of knitted socks. This drove the price up but perhaps gave the buyers the satisfaction of knowing that the more they paid, the greater their contribution toward saving the world.
A “wealthy person” is apparently defined as someone who has enough money so that five generations, including his or her own, can manage without working.
Now about ten yards ahead of me, the boy shook off his mother’s hand and started walking backward with both arms stuck out for balance like a tightrope walker. The sidewalk had been shoveled; though bits of snow still stuck to the pavement like sugar, the ice had melted, so there was no danger of him slipping and falling. With high mounds of snow on either side to keep him from wandering out into the street, I suppose you could say the snow was actually keeping him safe. The mother still calmly followed him with her eyes. As a child, I myself had played at walking backward, but that was so long ago I’d forgotten there was such a game. Walking backward, your legs feel as if they don’t belong to you. They’re sticks—too long, and they only bend at strange angles. I used to wonder if this was what having wooden legs would be like.
Walking backward, you can never shake off the fear that the back of your head will suddenly bash into something hard. The skin back there gets very sensitive, and your hair rises. When you can’t stand not being able to see what’s behind you anymore, your skin opens, your hair parts, and a third eye appears.
This mother doesn’t yell, “Cut out this foolishness! Come on, we’re going,” and try to pull her boy along; patiently, she watches him walk backward. With a head full of terms like autonomy, creativity, and the importance of play, she’s probably educating her son in his own free private school. There’s some sarcasm in this interpretation of mine, but to tell the truth, knowing that my own mother must have had bright yet sad days, days like a deserted field lit by sunlight, has put me in a quandary. From the outside, it’s impossible to know all the complicated elements that make up a person’s inner feelings. No one can tell what this mother is really thinking, right at this moment. Maybe something terrible has happened, and she’s too sad to think about supervising her child’s behavior. Or perhaps she’s too smitten with him to concentrate on what he’s doing. She might secretly be hoping he’ll fall down and get what he deserves. Or that she’ll be the center of attention if he takes a tumble and starts crying. After all, there are parents like that. Unable to interpret them, children nevertheless remember all their parents’ looks, gestures, and words, carrying them on their shoulders like the night sky. Then, when they’re old enough to have a couple kids of their own, they put those fragments of memory together as if they were making connections between stars scattered in the sky, forming them into constellations like the Little Dipper or the Great Bear, and, remembering their mothers silently watching them as they walked backward in the snow, they come up with various possibilities as to how she might have felt that day.
Step by step, the boy walked into the endless space behind him. Only children know about these adventures into the unknown, right in the middle of everyday life. I stayed where I was, blocking his path, so he bumped into my stomach and then twisted his head around to look up at me, this time crackling with laughter. He looked happy to have found someone to run into. He certainly wasn’t hoping that nothing would stop him, that he’d keep getting farther and farther away from his mother. The moment I felt the warmth of his body, accepting it with the whole of mine, I felt strangely satisfied. I remembered the way children sometimes run toward their mothers, bumping straight into them just for fun, or that game where a group of kids press back to back in a circle knot, and each one tries to push all the others out.
The boy was still dissolved in laughter, but when his mother called his name, he stopped and ran to her, his shoes smacking the pavement. Mother-and-child time, endlessly repeated. Every day they go shopping. Today, and again tomorrow. And countless more times. Infinite repetitions. But not actually infinite, because they will end someday. The end is coming, nearer and nearer.
After the child leaves I am alone, feeling like a child myself. A child deserted in the middle of town on a snowy day. That’s me. If only she would come and take me by the hand. “Let’s go shopping,” she might say, or “Let’s go home and have dinner.” If only I had these repetitions to protect me. Then two hands reached out, looking for protection from a strong woman—the hands of a ghost-child wandering the streets. She doesn’t need me. And I’m fed up with being a child. I want to be someone people can depend on. I had been hunched over like a coward, but now I straighten up, throw out my chest, and stick my elbows out. That very moment my body changes into an Indian teepee, large enough to hold three children. There’s no telling when another attack might come. Two of the children huddle together, peering fearfully outside. The third, too young to sense the danger, looks happy, as if this were a game of hide-and-seek. This scene is a sketch by Kathe Kollwitz. The arms of the mother protecting her children look as thick and strong as logs. Like this mother, she would probably spread her arms over her daughter and grandchildren if war came, not flinching even if a bomb fell on her shoulders. Stretching a thin vinyl sheet to protect them from sparks would be all I could manage. Or would I be in prison by the time the bombing started, arrested for handing out antiwar pamphlets?
In front of a health food store a man was squatting down to unlock his bicycle when our eyes met. I was sure I’d seen him before. A child about the height of the saddle stood in front of the bike, off to one side. The streetlamp lit up his tearstained face in an odd way, making it look round and bright as the full moon. A child seat was attached to the back of the bike. Actually it was more like a two-wheeled trailer with a green tent on top, big enough for a smallish child of seven. When the snow’s piled up, you don’t see many bikes with trailers like this. Probably because the mounds of snow on both sides of the road narrowed the bike paths, making navigation more difficult. The man—probably the child’s father—was still young and not at all fat; nevertheless, he had a reassuring sort of fatherly fleshiness. I couldn’t remember where I had seen him.
“Come on, it’s time to go home.” The voice sounded strangely sad in the cold air. The child stood there, pouting, refusing to move. “Are you still mad?” the father asked. “I’ll buy it for you next time.” He reached out for his son’s arm, but the boy darted back and hid behind the bike. When the father moved sideways, the boy moved, too. With the bicycle between them, the father couldn’t catch his son. “We’ve got to go home now.” This time he tried to trick the boy, taking one step to the right and then swinging back to the left, but the boy, imitating his father’s movements perfectly, got away again. “It’s getting late.” The boy’s expression didn’t change. “Mama’s waiting for us at home.” Hearing this, the boy’s resistance disappeared like air seeping out of a balloon, and he obediently sat down in his trailer. His blond hair then turned into a prince’s crown, his red jacket into a velvet robe, and horses neighed as they pulled the royal carriage through the snow, heading for the palace. I suddenly remembered who the father was. The left-handed man who worked at the post office, the one who always took my envelopes in his left hand.