Villa Incognito Villa Incognito Villa Incognito Read online

  In his animal body, he clambered up a flowery slope, climbed a crag upon which lichen gleamed like a rash, and stopped near the base of a waterfall. There, he commenced to cut bamboo and gather vines, obviously intent upon constructing some kind of raft. Alas, trimming poles and tying them together proved more labor intensive than the badger had bargained for, and after a sweaty hour, he gave it up.

  What he did then was to wade into the river and position his bulky scrotum upon its surface so that his testicles were like a couple of pontoons. Next, he leaned forward and gingerly balanced his weight atop this most improbable of boats. Banzai! He gave himself to the current. And the river, high and swift with snowmelt, carried Tanuki downstream. For fifty miles. All the way to Kyoto.

  Meet me in Cognito, baby,

  In Cognito we’ll have nothing to hide.

  Let’s go incognito, honey,

  And let the world believe that we’ve died.

  Incognito, disguised (to the bone) as a man, Tanuki spent his first day in Kyoto dodging trolley cars and rickshaws and ducking to keep his head from banging (he was unaccustomed to his newly acquired manly height) against both candle-hearted paper lanterns and raw electric lightbulbs. Kyoto was in a transitional state, mince-stepping from the feudal world into the modern, a contrastive state well-suited, in a sense, to this strange visitor, for Tanuki, an Animal Ancestor, lived outside of time. But while he might eat anachronisms for breakfast, urban life proved not his milieu. Unfortunately for every one of us, civilization and wild nature have never mixed, and in this case, you could take the quasi-badger out of the woods, but you couldn’t take the woods out of the quasi-badger.

  In the furtive way that he would slink about town, sniffing at the noodle carts and ogling the geishas; in the ferocity with which he lapped his sake and gnawed his meat; in the casual brashness with which he’d thump his belly or pick his teeth on those social occasions when he ought to have been praising the emperor or reciting a favorite haiku; in the sheer intensity of his gaze when he caught sight of the moon or a wedge of migratory geese passing overhead, Tanuki showed himself in Kyoto to be rather a rube.

  Sure, as cataloged earlier, he had his charms and wiles, attractions that survived the metamorphosis from beast to man, and there were high-bred city women for whom his backwoods manners were actually a kind of turn-on, a thrilling intrusion of the rustic into the overly refined. Rustic airs are one thing, patches of rank gray fur behind your lover’s knees, quite another; and many ladies and courtesans, once he’d disrobed for them, found themselves streaking back to refinement as fast as their trembling legs would carry them.

  But all was not lost. As the sages have warned us, there’s no accounting for taste, and evidently some women favor hairy men, favor them to the point where they might be fairly unfazed by the discovery of shaggy clumps, like misplaced doll wigs, blooming here and there on their bed partner’s flesh. There had never been any doubt—had there?—that Tanuki was a wild one. The furry outcroppings went with the territory. More or less.

  There was yet another problem, however, a veritable coup de grâce. Let’s say that a woman has succumbed to his crude charisma and that his errant tufts have inflamed rather than dampened her ardor. The woman has positioned herself on her silken pillows, ready to receive his opening thrust, when all at once his tail flies up: the stubby little appendage that in his carelessness he has neglected to transform and that in her heat she has heretofore failed to notice. But now, as excitement overtakes him, the tail pops out of its hiding place—and begins vigorously to wag! (A tanuki’s plasma, remember, fairly yaps with canine genealogy.) Well, that was usually the end—the tail end—of that. If coitus interruptus was a country, then Tanuki’s tail would have been its flag.

  Only one of Kyoto’s beauties, Lady Ogumata, ever allowed the play to proceed once Tanuki’s tail had burst onstage. Needless to say, that triumph elated him, and a few nights later he optimistically returned to her door, only to be informed by a servant that “Lady Ogumata has repaired to the seashore for a long, recuperative rest.”

  Tanuki grew sick of Kyoto. Its women were too finicky, its air too smoky, its streets too crowded, its crowds too noisy, and it had far too many rules. You couldn’t hear the crickets, you couldn’t see half the stars, and the trees were being chopped down to make way for more houses and shops. “Why,” Tanuki grumbled, “would they fell trees but leave men standing? Trees are a damn sight more useful than people, and everything in the world knows that except people.”

  Maybe he had a point. Trees do generate oxygen; men just breathe it up, stink it up, and generally misuse it. Trees hold the soil in place, men are constantly displacing it. Trees provide shelter and protection to countless species, men threaten the existence of those species. When in sufficient number, trees regulate atmospheric temperatures, men endanger the planet by knocking those regulations askew. You can’t rest in the shade of a human, not even a roly-poly one; and isn’t it refreshing that trees can undergo periodic change without having a nervous breakdown over it? And which has more dignity—the calmer spiritual presence—a tree or a typical Homo sapiens? Best of all, perhaps, what maple or cypress ever tried to sell you something you didn’t want?

  Trite? Probably, but so what? The point here is that our pal was getting a bit fed up. The evening that he learned of Lady Ogumata’s flight, he repaired to the outskirts of town, where, between a solitary pine grove and an old stone wall, he went through the now ten-minute process of turning back into a Nyctereutes procyonoides. It wasn’t the first time he’d reassumed his animal form since coming to Kyoto, but it had never felt more right. The instant that the transformation was complete, however, just as he was starting to glory again in the nimble toughness of animal sinew and the reassuring heft of ponderous balls, he heard a low whistle from the direction of the wall and a soft, feminine voice exclaim, “Well, well. Ah so. You really were some kind of otherworldly magician all along!”

  Tanuki bristled. Somebody, some shameless human, had spied on him and watched him change! That would never do. Spinning to face the voyeur, he reared up on his hind legs, bared his fangs, and hissed.

  “You weren’t so unfriendly the last time we met, Tanuki-san.” The voice was gentle but had a mocking tone.

  The badger could make out a figure standing in a narrow gateway that was recessed unobtrusively in the wall. “Do—do—do I know you?” he stammered.

  “Oh, indeed.” The woman stepped out of the doorway. “But it’s been twelve years, and I’m sure you’ve since done to many a poor girl what you did to me.”

  What the young woman didn’t realize was that for a being such as Tanuki, twelve of her years might be a full century. Or, about four minutes. She only knew that, at twenty-nine, she was a dozen years older than she’d been when he had laid her on the moss that dusk beside her family’s well.

  For, yes, this was Miho, the farmer’s daughter who’d been his very first conquest upon parachuting to earth from the Cloud Fortress, where the badger had been summoned for a reprimand by an irate council of divinities, presided over by a disapproving God of Moderation and a pretty pissed-off Goddess of Wet Noodles. (Incidentally, if his patrons—the Goddess of Petty Thievery, the God of Burps and Belches, and the Monkey Business God—had not helped him escape, Tanuki might have been banned from our world forever. Or, so the story goes.)

  Miho reintroduced herself and then as he came closer, helped her erstwhile seducer remember their wellside liaison. She told him how that encounter had left her pregnant, how she’d given birth to a wonderful baby, a lovely infant normal in every respect—except that it had been born with a full set of teeth. And its ears had been a teeny bit pointed. And it possessed what an overly critical person might infer was the faintest suggestion of a snout. And, yes, its scrotum was half the size of its head. But it was beautiful. Beautiful and sweet. And hers. Alas, her mother had cursed it, her brothers had laughed at it, and her father had hurled it down a ravine. The ravine whe
re the wild boars fed.

  “The ignorant yamhead,” growled Tanuki. “I should have hit him harder.” He paused. “But he does cook up an acceptable jar of sake.”

  In disgrace, Miho had fled the farm and made her way to Kyoto. “I’d hoped to find a career as an entertainer,” she said, “but each time the mama-san at a geisha house inspected me, she’d see the stretch marks that that big baby of yours left on my tummy, and she’d send me away. I was starving, I had no place to sleep, and I was on the verge of having to become a common prostitute when the monks at the temple here found me huddled in this very doorway and took me in.”

  “Monks?” For the first time, Tanuki noticed the familiar angular silhouette of a temple roof rising in the gloom behind the stone wall. “I didn’t think monks allowed women about.”

  “Oh, but these are Zen monks. Unlike those regular Buddhists, they aren’t afraid of temptation. And unlike those blue-eyed European devils who are ranting all over Kyoto these days, they aren’t scared to death of any idea that might be at odds with their own. Zen priests aren’t afraid of anything.” There was a measure of pride in Miho’s voice. Then she added, “But they work me very hard, scrubbing and cooking. I’m up at four every morning and seldom get to bed before midnight.”

  Although the light was dim, Tanuki could see the fatigue in her face. Her nose was a bit too lopsided, her mouth one pucker gene too akin to a persimmon for her to be considered a classic beauty, but she possessed the long, graceful neck so admired by her countrymen, and overall was most pleasing to behold. She’d be even prettier, Tanuki thought, if those monks weren’t so damned fearless when it comes to someone else’s manual labor. “I suppose you hate my guts,” he said. He was shuffling his feet, as if preparing to be on his way.

  “Oh, no,” she answered quickly. “Not in the least. If not for you, I never would have seen Kyoto, with its bright lights and street musicians and shrines and samurai and festivals and fine kimonos. I’d still be on the farm, feeding the chickens and serving some dull lummox of a husband night and day instead of a flock of lively Zen sensai. You disrupted the predictable pattern of my life, and although uncertainties and changes can be quite uncomfortable, a life is only a paper puppet show without them.”

  “Sounds like your monks talking,” Tanuki grumbled.

  Miho blushed. “Yes, I suppose they have shaped my views.” She hesitated. “Listen, Tanuki-san, I don’t wish to overstep my bounds . . . but I happen to have met a couple of other girls in Kyoto who also bore your illegitimate spawn, and they say the same thing. Each of us is heartbroken, naturally, that our babies were exterminated, it’s our everlasting sorrow, yet we’re also grateful that by taking advantage of our uncomprehending yearnings, you turned our lives upside down and rerouted us into new lives that we could not otherwise have imagined. I’m sure I speak for every one of us when I say that we’re thankful to you for having ruined us.” Smiling discreetly, Miho lowered her eyes.

  Tanuki, who a few minutes earlier had been as spitty with unwarranted arrogance as a spoiled child or a college basketball coach, now became uncharacteristically thoughtful. His face, which, with its long, rounded snout, must have reminded Miho of a bicycle seat, took on such a pensive, faraway demeanor that the “seat” might have been straining under the weight of the bountiful buttocks of Buddha.

  He was thinking about Kitsune and how the fox continually played mean tricks on human beings, yet claimed that his mischief was actually a benefit to men because, in the end, it forced them into the flexibility and resourcefulness essential to their advancement. Tanuki had always believed that the fox was merely rationalizing his behavior, and needlessly so, since, as far as he, the badger, was concerned, pleasure was its own excuse and the advancement of human culture was never a priority. Now, however, if Miho spoke the truth, his own careless indulgences had unwittingly precipitated positive change in several women’s lives.

  How should he feel about that? Tanuki was unsure. He was feeling something, however, an emotion so unexpected, so foreign that it was unprecedented in the annals of tanukidom. Before he could quite get a handle on it, Miho interrupted his reflection.

  “I have to go clear away the dinner dishes,” she said. “I’m happy to have had the opportunity at last to speak my mind to you. Now, Tanuki-san, I’d enjoy hearing sometime why an arboreal character such as yourself has ventured into the big city. Stop by again and I’ll serve you tea.”

  “Sake,” snapped Tanuki, although whether he meant that he was in the city for reasons of sake or wanted sake served to him instead of tea was left forever unclear.

  Tanuki had intended to return to his old stomping grounds (“belly-thumping grounds” might be more precise), those being chiefly in the mountain range that buckled along the length of Honshu’s spine, though he also was known to have frequented rural Hokkaido. He got no farther than the foothills west of Kyoto, however, before he chanced upon a shallow abandoned cave and crawled inside. To grieve.

  That’s correct. The strange, novel sensation that had blindsided Tanuki was nothing other than grief. Specifically, grief for his dead offspring. The emotion was as irritating to him as it was unfamiliar. He didn’t like it one bit, cursing the lack of drink with which he might have chased it away. Yet, rather than raiding one of the farms in the vicinity for a jar or two of sake, he remained at the cave and dealt with it.

  In the stiff black book that the “European devils” carried with them wherever they went, it was written, “God can forgive everything except despair.” The missionaries steadfastly avoided discussing such statements with the Zen priests who politely debated them (“The blue-eyed ones can attain neither wisdom nor tranquillity,” said one of Miho’s sensai, “because they’re too busy clapping their hands in glee over the suffering of the damned.”), and certainly the illiterate, disinterested Tanuki could not have come across it. Nevertheless, he possessed the instinctive knowledge (an intuition that, admittedly, had to be awakened from time to time by Kitsune) that despair is ultimately destructive to oneself and a burden to others; and that if one persists in it, the gods will sooner or later lose patience and give one something to really despair about.

  What portion of Tanuki’s grief was a sense of personal loss? What portion was a painful reaction to the general tragedy of infanticide (historically a common practice in parts of Asia)? And what portion was simply curiosity about the kind of children that might have sprouted from his cross-species union with women? We’ll never know. Even were it largely curiosity, however, it would not be uncommendable, for curiosity, especially intellectual inquisitiveness, is what separates the truly alive from those who are merely going through the motions. Among human beings, at any rate.

  Whatever the composition of the badger’s sorrow, he indulged it for only a week. Then, one sparkling October morning, he acted. With a great popping of tendon, crackling of tissue, snapping of muscle, and grinding of bone—a corporeal cacophony that sent every mouse, rabbit, and bird in the vicinity dashing for cover—he resumed human identity and took the main road back to Kyoto.

  Meet me in Cognito, baby,

  Of course we’ll have to color our hair.

  The best thing about life in Cognito

  Is that everybody’s nobody there.

  Knock! Knock!

  “Who’s there?”

  Before Tanuki could respond, the gate opened slightly, and Miho’s face appeared in the crack. She seemed puzzled. “Excuse me, sir, this is the tradesmen’s entrance.” Apparently, the likes of the rich Tokugawa kimono that Tanuki wore (he’d liberated it from a clothesline in an exclusive neighborhood) had never been seen at the back gate of the temple. “What do you . . . ?”

  “It’s me. Himself.”

  Tanuki’s voice could have been raked from a dry creek bed with a pair of rusty pot lids. It was a distinctive voice, to be sure, but she couldn’t quite place it, couldn’t connect it to the jaunty if somewhat disheveled gentleman who stood before her.


  “Me, damn it! Your ruination.”

  A lightbulb went on in Miho’s head. Or maybe it was a good old paper lantern. “Oh! Ah so! Tanuki-san! You’ve done your change-o change-o trick again.” For some reason, she was feeling the same discomfort talking to Tanuki in his human guise as she experienced when the abbot recited sutras to her from his seat in the privy. In spite of that, she invited him in.

  It seems abbot and monks had departed en masse that dawn for the mountains: their annual retreat to view the autumn leaves. Tanuki had doubtlessly passed them on the road. Miho and three teenage apprentices had been left in charge of the temple, and not long after finishing morning zazen, the boys had taken advantage of their new freedom, hopping a trolley into the pleasure district to attend some Kabuki performances. Tanuki and Miho had the temple to themselves.

  Knowing Tanuki’s proclivities and suspecting Miho’s susceptibilities, the reader can, within limits, imagine what transpired that late afternoon and evening. The one thing that may be surprising is that Miho refused to have anything the least bit intimate to do with Tanuki—would neither dine nor drink, dance nor diddle with him—until he snapped, crackled, and popped himself back into badger mode.

  Certainly Tanuki was surprised by her demand and, to the extent that he was capable of sentiment, touched by it as well.

  “A real villain is always preferable to a fake hero,” she said serenely, by way of explanation. Without question, her odd preference was a good deal more psychologically complicated than that, though she wasn’t about to elucidate.

  As for Tanuki, he believed she was just spouting more obtuse Zen philosophy but nevertheless took her statement as a compliment and was more convinced than ever that he’d been wise to select her above any other woman for . . . what he had in mind.

  Pla-bonga pla-bonga. The sound, large and round yet somehow hollow, resounded throughout the temple and its environs. Pla-bonga pla-bonga. For miles around. Sometimes it was his paws drumming his paunch, providing the rhythm as the couple danced in the courtyard; sometimes it was his big hard belly bouncing against her flat soft one as they. . . . Pla-bonga pla-bonga. She, five-three; he, almost two feet shorter; yet somehow managing to. . . . Pla-bonga pla-bonga. Nearby residents, those from rural backgrounds, glanced at one another gravely. “Looks like it’s going to be a long harsh winter,” they said. “The tanukis are moving into town.”