"Standing Woman by Tsutsui Yasutaka" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yasutaka Tsutsui)

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STANDING WOMAN

By Tsutsui Yasutaka
Translated from the Japanese
by David Lewis

I stayed up all night and finally finished a forty page short story. It was a trivial entertainment piece, capable of neither harm nor good.
"These days you can't write stories that might do harm or good; it can't be helped." That's what I told myself while I fastened the manuscript with a paper clip and put it into an envelope.
As to whether I have it in me to write stories that might do harm or good, I do my best not to think about that. If I were to go around thinking about it, I might want to try.
The morning sunlight hurt my eyes as I slipped on my wooden clogs and left the house with the envelope. Since there was still time before the first mail truck would come, I turned
my feet toward the park. In the morning no children come to this park, a mere eighty square meters in the middle of a cramped residential district. It's quiet here. So I always include the park in my morning walk. Nowadays even the scanty green provided by the ten or so trees is priceless in the megalopolis.

I should have brought some bread, I thought. My favorite dogpillar stands next to the park bench. It's an affable dogpillar with buffcolored fur, quite large for a mongrel.

The liquid-fertilizer truck had just left when I reached the park; the ground was damp and there was a faint smell of chlorine. The elderly gentleman I often saw there was sitting on the bench next to the dogpillar, feeding the buff post what seemed to be meat dumplings. Dogpillars usually have excellent appetites. Maybe the liquid fertilizer, absorbed by the roots sunk deep in the ground and passed on up through the legs, leaves something to be desired.

They'll eat just about anything you give them.

"You brought him something? I slipped up today. I forgot to bring my bread," I said to the elderly man.

He turned gentle eyes on me and smiled softly.

"Ah, you like this fellow, too?"

"Yes," I replied, sitting down beside him. "He looks exactly like the dog I used to have."

The dogpillar looked up at me with large, black eyes and wagged its tail.

"Actually, I kept a dog like this fellow myself," the man said scratching the ruff of the dogpillar's neck. "He was made into a dogpillar when he was three. Haven't you seen him? Between the haberdashery and the film shop on the coast road. Isn't there a dogpillar there that looks like this fellow?"

I nodded, adding, "Then that one was yours?"

"Yes, he was our pet. His name was Hachi. Now he's completely vegetized. A beautiful dogtree."

"Now that you mention it, he does look a lot like this fellow. Maybe they came from the same stock."

"And the dog you kept?" the elderly man asked. "Where is he, planted?"

"Our dog was named Buff," I answered, shaking my head. "He was planted beside the entrance to the cemetery on the edge of town when he was four. Poor thing, he died right after he was planted. The fertilizer trucks don't get out that way very often, and it was so far I couldn't take him food every day. Maybe they planted him badly. He died before becoming a tree."

"Then he was removed?"

"No. Fortunately, it didn't much matter there if he smelled or not, and so he was left there and dried. Now he's a bonepillar. He makes fine material for the neighborhood elementary-school science classes, I hear."

"That's wonderful."