Salmonella men on Planet Porno: stories - By Yasutaka Tsutsui Page 0,31

and women all bowed back in silence. Luna, half hiding behind the middle-aged woman who looked remarkably like her, nodded to me from the earth-floored room.

I climbed back into the cable car. The young driver took me back down to the foot of the mountain, and from there to the little station at Deer’s Wood.

Just as he was leaving, the driver turned to me. “Would you kindly not say anything to anyone about this Bear’s Wood Main Line, or our Bear’s Wood clan, or the song just now?” he asked.

“Of course,” I replied. “I have no intention of telling anyone at all.”

Two days later, I finally returned home. And ever since then, I’ve been waiting, nervously waiting, wondering every day what terrible catastrophe will befall our nation. So far, to the best of my knowledge, nothing seems to have happened at all. Sometimes I think they were just making fun of me after all. But maybe, just maybe, something awful might just be about to happen. Or perhaps it already has happened, and I’m the only one not to know about it. Perhaps something really, really terrible is happening to our country at this very moment…

The Very Edge of Happiness

As I returned home from work one day, my wife looked up from her woman’s weekly magazine, opened her mouth until it was almost as big as her face, and started to scream at me.

“What a fool I was to marry you!”

“What?! What are you talking about?”

She smacked the open page of her magazine with the back of her hand. It was yet another ludicrous article – this time, ‘Measure your husband’s sex rating’.

“It says here your erection is the size of an eleven-year-old’s. Your staying power is no better than a chicken’s, and your technique is Grade C average. You do it as often as a fifty-year-old, yet you’re still in your thirties and I’m only in my twenties! What are you going to do about it?! You’ve been deceiving me until now, haven’t you! What a fool I’ve been!”

“Don’t be so bloody stupid! It’s just a lot of sex-obsessed nonsense!” I pulled the magazine from her hands and tossed it away. “Sex, is that all you’ve got left to think about? Shame on you! It was my payday today, and I’ve come straight home just to bring you the money. Well, I’m not going to buy you anything now. You can think what you like!”

She gasped, and a look of regret flitted across her face. Then, with a coquettish smile, she apologized most submissively.

“I’m sorry, dear. I had no right to say such things. Did I, dear?”

“No, you didn’t. You had no right to say such things,” I replied. “You’ve never wanted for food, nor ever had to cry because you’ve nothing to wear. We have everything that most other families have.

And all provided by me. You should be happy. That’s it! You’re so happy that you’re desperately trying to find a reason to be unhappy. So you try to find fault with your husband. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes, dear. I apologize,” she said, gazing at me with eyes full of expectation.

Faced with such unconditional submission, most husbands would lighten up, give a big smile and hand over the pay packet. But not me. I hate that sugar-sweet family sitcom behaviour. No, I’m not ready to sink into such phoney pre-fabricated happiness. If I suggested I was happy, I’d be falling into a TV drama stereotype of a husband, as other husbands do.

I was getting changed in the bedroom when my sixty-five-year-old mother came in from the kitchen.

“It was payday today, wasn’t it son,” she said, sidling up to me suggestively. “Go on, give us a bit of cash. Shigenobu keeps asking for a pedal car. Let me buy one for him!”

“No!” I shouted. Filial affection was not for me, either. “Go and get the dinner ready. Go on, you stupid cow! Before I kick you out!”

But still she stood there grumbling. So I kicked her out, and she shuffled off to the kitchen crying. Served her right.

I went back to the living room.

“Could you give Shigenobu his bath, dear?” said my wife.

Our son, nearly two, was sprawled across the floor watching a soap opera on TV. How much does he understand, I wondered. Ignoring his moans, I got him out of his clothes and carried him off to the bathroom. Shigenobu still spoke in a baby voice, and it was sometimes hard to know what he was on about.