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1.

A and B and C are gathered now for lunch at Trattoria Serena, a small restaurant about three blocks from the front entrance of Keio University in Tokyo. A is a Brit who teaches International Law at Keio, and pursues, surreptitiously, a second career as a real estate speculator. B heads a Volkswagen dealership in the Roppongi area of Tokyo and energetically carries on with various attractive women who intersect his administrative life. Both A and B have Japanese wives. C is an older resident of what the Japanese call “Silver Housing” in a place he has named The Compound. The three ex-pat men meet regularly (every forty days or so) to talk about death. They never plan to talk about death, but somehow the conversation always ends up there. A and B are in their early sixties; C is seventy-eight. C likes to think of himself as the “rapporteur” of the group and sometimes when back at The Compound he imagines that the discussion had significance and wisdom. For several months C has been sharing with A and B a novel he is writing about death in several, not-quite fictional families. A and B are not encouraging toward C’s writing. They find his texts overlong and lacking narrative tension, his tentative title: “The Riches of This World,” pretentious. As a result, they rely on what he tells them of his writing, not much on the actual prose. Despite their evident reservations, C often still reads his narratives to them. Today C has promised to reveal Lewis’s death.

The food at Trattoria Serena, like the discussion, is pallid, tepid, served in rather small portions, but always nicely presented, arranged carefully on the polished bone-white oval plates. At least twice at these luncheons B gets a phone call that requires him to go outside for privacy. A says to C: “She keeps him on a very short leash.” Both chuckle with envy.

Today C initiates the discussion with an illustration: two vertical lines drawn on his small pocket notebook’s third page. “Between the lines,” C explains, “Woody Allen says resides human consciousness. In front of the first line and after the second line, there is only infinite nothingness. Thus, we are alive between two infinities, empty voids. Now my question is, is that correct and perhaps better, what do you think about that illustration from your vantage point: that of a competent, truly bi-cultural person?”

B says, “I don’t think about it at all. It’s a silly notion. I doubt Woody Allen actually said it or drew it.”

After a while, A says, “I think I see what you’re getting at. Maybe the Japanese concept of Akai Ito, the red thread of fate, extending presumably back into the first void and forward into the second, has some relevance. Is that what you’re thinking?”

B continues, “It’s not worth thinking about. It’s silly.”

A asks of C, “If it’s truly silly why are you asking it?”

“I’m worried that human consciousness might just be an absurd flicker between two endless darknesses. How can we live knowing that, believing that? I mean, how could we? Hi there! I’m just flickering between two endless voids. Great meeting you! And now back to my endless void. I come out of void and after a brief interlude slip back into the pure void of nothingness. But I sure love it now-- lust after it, find in it the true meaning of my somewhat truncated life.”

A says, “Are you complaining about living? I mean about existing.”

“Was I complaining? I never meant to. Only to get at what was really important.”

“You mean the after-life?” B says, “Couldn’t you find solace and message in a dental office somewhere, among the magazines littering the place?”

A says, “I haven’t been able to, but I could tell you about the magazines at my Meguro Cat Clinic. They’re weird—pet magazines with how-to-trim-nails kinds of articles. How to brush kitty’s teeth, etc. How to soften kitty’s stools. Here we are, awaiting our angel hair pasta.” which A pronounces the British way, as ‘paster’. “So perhaps it is not of grave concern, pun intended.”

C continues, “I’m so much closer to the void than you both. That’s why I’m concerned.”

“Take Valium or some other happy pill,” B says. And then after a bit of a pause. “Once during a hockey game, I was knocked unconscious and I had the bizarre feeling that I separated from my body and was looking down, wondering why I couldn’t get up, but not much caring either, and despite the shock feeling pretty good, almost wonderful, actually thinking it’s sad I can’t get up, but it’s a whole lot better feeling good watching and wondering what might come next. Then someone shouted my name and I could get up. Is that what you are talking about? Wondering about?”

A says, “I don’t think that’s what he’s talking about, thinking about. Is it?”

“That could be it, if I knew what it is we’re seeking.” C answers.

A continues, “Let me tell you about my cat Daisy’s last moments. It’s the most vivid experience I’ve had with death.”

“I think I’m allergic to Daisy,” B says. “But I have no objection to hearing about her last moments. In fact, thinking about her passing has already cleared my nasal passages. So, tell us about her last moments.”

“Daisy’s last moments—perhaps too momentous a listing. —” A muses.

“Maybe, ‘The End of Allergy,’ is a better listing?” B says. “Or maybe, ‘The Daisy Cleanse.’ In the states everybody is mad for ‘cleanse’ or so it seems, that and some strange plant that guarantees weight loss.”

“You show little respect for a favored pet,” A says. “It could be construed as heartless. I’ll punish you by forbidding you from taking the next phone call.”

“Not your choice,” B answers.

“About Daisy’s expiration?” C says.

“It began with vomiting. Not the usual cat upchucking. Hair balls and the like. But rather extensive, continuous vomiting—a signal that something more fundamental was occurring. Enough accumulation and cleanup to signal a trip to Meguro.”

“You’ve ordered new tatami already?” B says.

“Of course,” A replies, “but our vet, Madame Vincouvier, about seventy years old and with an amazing stacked shock of grey and very curly hair, insisted a cleanse would restore Daisy to her peak health for an animal of ‘such advanced age.’”

“What we might ask,” C says, “was a French woman veterinarian doing in Meguro, unless of course, she’d been there for over six decades.”

“Of course, she had. Haven’t we all? Aren’t we all honorary Japanese with annual visas?

“Thank God for Seoul’s proximity,” A says. And for more than a moment conversation ceases as each relives the latest quick round trip to Seoul for a visa renewal. A recalls his miserable night at a Korean yogwan, adjusting his sitting on the fire-hot floor. B remembers the dazzling quickness of Wi-Fi in his five-star hotel, and C recalls his overnight with his wife’s oldest friend, a language teacher living an hour out from the Seoul; her two rambunctious sons, aged five and seven, kept him up well past midnight. C reflected it was such shared discombobulations of seeking permission to live in Japan that kept the group together past all imagining—a kind of desperation of companionship and shared inconvenience. And now, C thought, it is death itself that threads us together. The vaunted red thread A mentioned ties us to Seoul’s visa renewal and the certainty of expiration at some point, perhaps over the Japan Sea, could that be it?

A continues, “Ah Madame Vincouvier, surely the wisest of all the cat vets in Kanto and surely the most thorough. ‘A little cleanse for your Daisy and voila! She’ll be bright as new, as lithe as the lolloping leopards. And if the cleanse doesn’t work, we have lots of options, and we’ll explore them all till she’s as right as rain, as thrilled and thrilling as any kitten in Tokyo.’”

“And how much did the cleanse cost?” B asks.

“Five hundred dollars. Daisy spent two nights in Meguro.” A answers, betraying a miniscule flash of discomfort at the mention of price. “But that was just the start. The flush didn’t work, didn’t sweep into oblivion the shards of innards knotting. In a week I took her back to Meguro and Madame Vincouvier revealed herself to be compassion’s most blossoming agent, with, evidently, a near limitless sympathy for Daisy’s plight. Three more days of intravenous injections and finally a diagnosis that diabetes had complicated Daisy’s intestinal aggravations. But she was responding well to the antibiotics and the loving Meguro evening massages.”

“Massages?” B asks, incredulous.

“Yes. Cat shiatsu, ever heard of it? The gentlest and most expensive conceivable.”

“And Madame Vincouvier spent evening after evening reading about cat digestion in her linoleum-lined room above the clinic in Meguro? Say it isn’t so?” C says. Then answers himself. “Alone with her copy of Proust and her clinical studies while the Yamanote-sen rattles nearby and Daisy rests beneath her manipulating fingers.”

“Not at all. Vincouvier insisted on the best masseuse in Tokyo, a spry elderly Japanese woman named Yamaguchi, who cost only one mahn for each eight-minute treatment. And at the end Daisy, she argued, was purring. But I didn’t hear that ever. On the contrary when I brought poor Daisy home she continued vomiting and lying in the mock leather lounge chair I myself had used to recover after my rotator cuff operation. I remember leaning down toward sleeping Daisy and wanting, ever wanting, to hear the music of her purr, but nothing— only the rasp of uneven breath and an occasional very low moan. Nine mahn into massages and nothing like even a mild improvement.”

“Nine mahn?” B asks, “nine mahn for a cat?”

‘Madame Vincouvier is a very erai sensei, a very, very erai sensei.”

“I don’t give a damn. I’d hesitate to spend nine mahn on my mother, let alone my cat.”

“You have a cat?” C asks

“Am I nuts?” B answers.

“You ought to understand that Daisy has been with us from the very start, right after I met Sanae,” A says.

“Longevity is some kind of exoneration, justification for excessive care?”

“There is no escape from care—even you must sense that. Even you. But the point is extraneous. What is pertinent was Madame Vincouvier’s passion to heal Daisy, to prolong her tired existence on this mortal plain. Her devotion to Daisy’s well-being. That’s what I responded to, what inevitably I bankrolled.”

C says, “You thought, here is something I can care for, something worth devoting my life too? Was that it?”

“Of course, that was it. What else could anyone say?” B says.

A says, “I’m only saying that after a long time caring for Daisy I wasn’t prepared to simply walk away. Who could have? And Madame Vincouvier radiated such concern that anyone would have responded to that. And there was Daisy looking so pathetic and imploring for some relief, some gesture of continuing care.”

“Out of shame or guilt or both,” B says.

“But,” A continues, “even Madame Vincouvier failed to convince her staff, and that failure shifted opinion about Daisy’s future . . . It began with her suggestion that further tests were important, despite the expense already invested in the various rescue procedures—all of which had fallen short. So now she argued that Daisy needed an ambulance trip to Sendai for an MRI, yes, a cat MRI. Cost? Approximately ni jeu mahn yen. Yes, two thousand dollars U.S. to find out that Daisy was dying, had been dying, as do we all, from the moment she was born.” A looks around sheepishly, imagining he has enunciated the most obvious yet most hidden remark. “But to grant Madame Vincouvier some self-consciousness, she said to me, and loud enough for her staff to hear, ‘But I suppose, that is an expense more than you may be willing to undertake, given all that her illness has already inflicted on you.’”

“Perhaps you had informed her Daisy’s costs had already prevented your boat payment?” B asks smiling, then laughing.

“Not precisely,” A answers, “but spiritually quite correct. I muttered something about Daisy being at least twenty years old—for a cat in Japan, well beyond lifetime expectation. Far longer than my own. And Madame Vincouvier nodded, but seemed disappointed and with somewhat sharpness said, ‘Well, take her home and let God resolve the situation. I apologize for inflicting such unwelcome expenses on you already. I often misjudge an owner’s commitment to his pet. I suppose you have spent something like fifteen hundred dollars U.S. by now. It would be untoward to ask for more. Staff will help you get Daisy back into her travel cage.’ And there was exemplary gentleness in staff’s lifting of Daisy back into her towel-lined wire and wood travel cage. She cowered at the end of the box, on her green fluffy Turkish towel.

“And for a couple of days Daisy seemed better. She neither vomited nor moaned at all. But I noticed she bloated again and by the third day I began to worry that she was not normally excreting or urinating at all. I enticed her with green tea, even warm milk, but she stopped eating or drinking, as if trying herself to tame the bloating. She slept on her side and her visible limbs just extended straight out from her swollen body, as if directing an invisible tide, a wind from somewhere she alone could experience. And then a quiet, very quiet occasional whimper. So, it has come at last, I thought. And I face-timed with Nigel who, as the youngest, had been closest to Daisy. He was in pajamas (something he’d never worn as a child) and said sweetly, ‘She looks bad. Looks like the end. That must be tough for you, Dad. How does Madame feel about euthanasia?’ I was surprised he remembered Vincouvier. ‘She’s a fierce interventionist,’ I answered, ‘not inclined to give up for any reason.’ ‘How French,’ Nigel said, ‘argumentative to the end. So, here’s my advice—don’t deal with her at all. Seek out one of the Japanese assistants and say the following, I mean this, precisely. Say it just as I’m telling you now. Put Daisy in the assistant’s arms and say quietly but with absolute conviction and authority, ‘In my dream last night Daisy said to me that it was time and I should ease her into the next phase. She said that to me, and now you must help me. I put Daisy entirely in your hands and I need your help easing her out of this painful life. I’m so sorry, so very sorry, but you must prepare Daisy for exit from this life, and bring her back to me so I can hold her as she eases out of her misery.’ Emphasize how much you will be indebted to the assistant for this favor, and, if necessary, say that Madame has authorized it. That may not be necessary. I suspect the assistant will believe that, and act on it with visible relief.’ As I listened to him, his phrase, visible relief, flooded into me. ‘And how do you know all this, Nigel?’ ‘Mom told me before she left—she said, ‘your father won’t be able to snuff Daisy. You’ll have to show him, instruct him, each step of the way. He’ll need that, and you can do it. It’s natural for you and me, but not for him.’”

“Self-serving,” B says.

“Oh, doubtless so,” A answers, “but in fact Nigel was absolutely correct. I knew Madame Vincouvier was a late riser and came to her cat clinic in the later morning, but the assistants were there from 7:30. So I brought my swollen, bloated, moaning Daisy in by eight o’clock, and I spoke with Ms. Tomoko just as Nigel had instructed me. I said ‘gomen’ a number of times, and flashed my most humbling ‘ onegai shimasu’ again and again. We all understand, don’t we that in Japan apology precedes everything else. But here was an interesting case where apology apparently collided with authoritarian hierarchy. They were scared to act without Madame’s steady imprimatur. But Nigel knew, and I came to understand, the fundamental compassion of underlings would eventually triumph over remembered directives. The situation at hand would cloud over the rulings from all authority. Japan lives that every moment. Here I was with the pathetic and wonderfully moaning kitty. Who would not be turned toward helping? They carried poor Daisy directly to the young junior vet inspecting a tightly collared Dachshund at the far end of the reception room. . He felt Daisy’s bloated stomach, pinched a few places, and listened as the technicians rattled off the saga of previous treatments. And quickly the fellow got up from his haunch position, carried Daisy to a back room and in a trice reappeared with her right forepaw swathed in purple adhesive tape, holding an inserted IV tube. The technician behind him carried a large, ominous looking syringe, full, I presumed, of death. ‘Follow me’ the young vet said in a strangely un-Asian accent and I thought perhaps he’s a dark New Zealander or perhaps someone from Guam or Samoa. I followed him, and we went into a room with three club-like booths upholstered in a green Naugahyde. He slid into the first booth and put Daisy at the center of the table. I slid into the other side. Two attendants stood like waiters at the end of the table. ‘I will inject. You may pet her and watch her. Look at her eyes, if you like. It will be over very quickly.’ There was no time for me to say much of anything, arrange much of anything. I was thinking perhaps a towel under her would have been more comfortable, but in truth she seemed groggy and foggy, although she did turn her head toward me, plopped on her very inflated side. She licked momentarily toward her nose, blinked. He bent her leg to an angle more receptive for his syringe. He was moaning softly— apparently what he imagined were comforting tones. Were these Buddhist tones to accompany voyage to some next phase, next arena for re-appearance? Daisy as something else. I tried to think what else, but I imagined nothing for her. Could it be animals had no animus for transformation? It seemed I had read that some place. His moaning got louder, and I did stare into Daisy’s eyes, which already no longer seemed clear or focused. But it did seem she acknowledged me. He eased whatever was in the syringe into her IV tube, and within a second Daisy made the first sound I had heard her make on this last day. She gave out a miniscule sigh, a little tiny unimaginable rasp that momentarily filled the booth, the room, the very air we were breathing, and then, stone glare of eyes gone eerily clear and coldly marble. I continued to pet her side until he said, firmly, resolutely. ‘She’s gone.’” I thought but didn’t say, I’ve been with her for over 20 years.

B says, “And disposal?”

Before that inquiry could be answered the side door to Trattoria Serena opens and, most remarkably, a tall woman with a great shock of curly grey hair enters the tiny restaurant. “Madame Vincouvier,” A says in evident amazement. His voice is hushed and strangely reverent, even for a moment guilty, or so C imagines.

Madame Vincouvier recognizes A and comes over to his table. “You disappoint me often but never more so with your disgusting going behind my back to do what? To kill an innocent healthy creature who depended on you for life and sustenance over, what? Over twenty years, or so you told me— as if I cared. I never dreamed you were such a monster, such a grotesque version of humanity, such a dreg! And I see normal human commerce has not changed an iota for you. Here you are among so called friends, enjoying a rich repast while the ashes of your charge doubtless are littering up some children’s park in Ueno. It boggles the mind. How little we pay to the basic building block of all good life—the extension of existence. The very force that unites us you trample on so casually, so brutally, so sickeningly. I’ve heard very wonderful things about this place—so aptly named. But I could never eat here, not now certainly with you here and imbibing its fellow-feeling without a tidbit of affection for your ‘beloved’ Daisy.”

B interrupts, “I think that’s quite enough. Quite enough. We all live a sham life here and it’s silly the little huffs we generate to validate our continuing existence in this unfortunate milky milieu—I mean public kindness toward us. I know where your resentment comes from, and I share it. Share it. But I’m ashamed to say so. So, break off the crummy tirade. He’s suffered quite enough.”

Madame Vincouvier seems non-plussed by B’s outburst and cocks her head to get a better view of him, then straightens her orange scarf. After such adjustment she says quietly, “Better you than Daisy,” and leaves Trattoria Serena.

“Okay, then,” B continues, “Tell us now about Lewis’s death.”

2.

Madam de Vincouvier’s front room was perfumed heavily, the scent of lilac in an excess that did not quite shut out the fumes of cat urine, dog dandruff, or the salivation of creatures housed more elegantly elsewhere in Tokyo. How improbable, C often reflected as he sheepishly came through the genkan that a French woman in black bombazine would be the most cherished veterinarian in Kanto. How extraordinarily Japanese that she would have, beyond her ministrations to animals, a human service at once hyper closeted and liberating, relieving, gushing pain and ultimate deliverance. How he panted for her savage, severe touch.

“Is the room ready?” C asked between rushed, short breaths.

“In a moment. We must be patient. There should be an excess of light, a painful brightness, should there not?”

“Of course. Hot white light,” C responded. “It’s the beginning of banishing decrepitude.”

“Such flowery English. Perhaps not appropriate. Perhaps irritating.”

“I apologize.”

“Not yet accepted,” she gently laughed. “Let’s have some tea and again remember Daisy. I wasn’t here when A, how do you say it, ‘put her down.’ That wasn’t thoughtful of him, was it? No, it wasn’t. ‘Put her down,’ maybe I should do that to you? Would you like it? Why couldn’t you have waited till I came in at normal office hours? Why did you hide it from me?”

“I didn’t! He wanted to spare you. We knew you had affection for her, because of your long treatment of her.”

“Liar! You know of course I had to fire the technician—a really gifted practitioner. How could I have tolerated such insubordination?”

“He said you would have approved. We didn’t want him to lose his job.”

“You didn’t seem to think about the consequences of your selfishness, and yet you’ve lived how very long in this country where every action is measured in consequence and in soft language. It’s an insipid defense. Remind me to punish you for it.” She pushed the plunger of her tea plastic canister and filled two small bowls. They sat in two blue print wing chairs flanking the dark walnut door that led, he knew, to the stairs up to the all-white room.

“You really want to go up, don’t you?” she pointed to the door.

“Of course! You know that better than I do.”

“I know so much more than you know, especially about yourself—your tiresome needs.”

“I don’t wish to be tiresome.”

“Nor would I let you, mon petite choux.”

“I know that. I do know that.”

“So, we understand each other and can talk sincerely about going up. Don’t tell me again, how anxious you are, how full of expectations, anticipations, deliverances that always recede as we approach them. That discussion is tiresome, more than tiresome, boring. Useless and boring.” She took a long sip of the tea and then closed her eyes and rocked slowly back against the blue print of the wing chair. “I’m thinking today we need to take extreme measures, ones outside, well outside, our usual parameters. Explorations at the edge, beyond the simply extreme, rather at the cusp of the transcendent, on pain’s periphery, so that insight cannot be separated from anguish. Does it interest you? Spiraling anguish. Can you feel it? Endure it? What would it reveal? More likely, what would it set free in you, in us? I’d like us to ask the key question: what could reside beyond our abominations? What would passing through them suddenly illuminate? Could we pass beyond the tatemae of our investigation to the actual honne? I think we could, and what would we find? Daisy waiting for us? Could we sacrifice a bull as if we were killing a man? Kill a lamb as if breaking a dog’s neck? Burn incense as if worshiping an idol? Could we do it all?”

“Yes! Of course we could.”

“And at the end of it what would our abominations reveal?”

“Quick and joyous passage through the moat. Lolloping deliverance through thick thighs of hurt.”

“Offensive language again. Extra strikes against you, severe ones.”

“And deserved.”

“Don’t be frivolous, don’t be trivializing. You will suffer greatly for it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry either. It’s insulting and at the same time boring. So readily offered from your entirely manufactured and bogus sentiments. I’m here to show how disassociated your pain is, how trivial that is, compared to the searing I’m willing to inflict. Have you not seen how much you are a human being-manque?”

“Not manqué! I’m not a bogus person.”

“Such a phony objection. Unworthy of you, and garnering greater suffering no doubt. Yes, you have only a shell reality, a puppet of normality, performing normal sentiments on the mica edge of self-perceived mockery. A sham of feeling wandering after affirmation, anxious for a spanking or full-on flagellation. And yet through agonized tears recognizing its very phoniness, lack of substance, lack of conviction about anything, even the pain it wallows in. Begging to be set on fire, consumed with actual conviction, but ever never finding any.” She paused, looked strangely pensive. “Maybe I really can’t get you over the moat, can I?”

“You can. You have. You often have.”

“But not every time, is it not so? Don’t lie to me.”

“Yes, not every time, but often enough.”

“Often enough. . .” she mused a moment, as if counting the times. “Could we sacrifice a bull as if slaying a person?”

“Of course!”

“Kill a lamb as if breaking a dog’s neck?”

“Yes!”

“Burn incense as if worshipping an idol?”

“In our white-hot room, why not?”

“Good. Let us go upstairs. And while I work, tell me, tell me slowly, how Lewis died.