© Tetsuya Akikawa
This story comes from a new book, March Was Made of Yarn (Harvill Secker). Published one year on from the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown that struck Japan in March 2011, the collection explores the impact of the catastrophe through fiction, non-fiction, poetry and manga comic strips by contributors including the novelists Ryu Murakami and David Peace. All royalties from the book will go to reconstruction charities in Japan. The author of “Box Story,” Tetsuya Akikawa, is a writer, poet and professional clown. This unusual work of fiction deals obliquely with the bewildering aftermath of a suddenly shattered world. As the editors of the collection write, “In a tale lined with bureaucratic obsession, Tetsuya Akikawa suggests redemption where we least expect it.”
We’d been running short of boxes for quite some time. Families couldn’t cope, they couldn’t just wait around for a box to be delivered. Without boxes to put away toys and clothes, they couldn’t clean up. Wastebaskets had disappeared, the streets were a mess. Everyone was late for school or work trying not step in all the filth. The biggest problem was when someone wanted to give a present. Gifts went unwrapped, birthdays lost all their excitement.
Things looked bad. We all racked our brains for ways to get more boxes. Legislature deliberated Box Supplementation Schemes for days on end, the ruling and opposition parties bickering over one basic issue: namely, in order to draft a bill for increasing production of boxes, they first needed to define what a box was.
Four sides and a bottom, maybe a lid, some stated the obvious, surely that was a box? But break those down, what do you have but cardboard and wood? Did not a box refer in essence to a hypothetical space, others quibbled, the empty volume partitioned off by those materials?
While legislators locked rhetoric, the box shortage grew ever more dire. Ultimately, despite no headway, a Box Supplementation Scheme was put into effect. It seems a noted university professor had invented a method for breeding boxes.
Every household was to breed boxes. That was the bare bones of the Scheme. Each day they were to talk to the little box delivered from City Hall, then leave it under a light for two hours each night. That alone would make it grow and, once it exceeded a certain size, give birth to baby boxes.
Very well, let us now consider the case of a woman who received one such breeding box. Miss Sato lived alone, having lost her parents early on. A hard-driven achiever, mornings she magnetically combed the riverbanks for iron sand for the Mining Cooperative; afternoons at the Hamster Electric Power Plant—or Hampo for short—she minded tens of thousands of hamsters. Thankless, back-breaking work. Each floor of the multi-levelled structure was scarcely bigger than the hamsters’ treadmills, forcing humans to crawl on all fours to access the cages. Lying prone in that tight squeeze, she had to give the exhausted hamsters sunflower seeds and words of encouragement or if she found an expired hamster, replace it with a new one. Every day Miss Sato dragged out dozens of hamster corpses, her heart aching with each one.
Given this heavy emotional burden, Miss Sato was none too keen about having to breed boxes. Some people were happy to gain a pet, because boxes that bore boxes definitely were some kind of life form, and yet when those boxes grew too big, a collection crew from City Hall would come and cut them up. They’d become material to make new boxes, the staffer explained, but still Miss Sato had a bad feeling. Just thinking about where this all might lead gave her the creeps.
The box left by the staffer was light blue, twenty centimetres square and, lift the lid, inside it was a brighter blue.
“Like the sky,” Miss Sato said, admiring the pure hue. She flipped the flaps to steal a euphoric peek inside several times a day. None of the neighbours, it seems, had received such beautiful boxes.
“Ours was grey,” said Mr Yone, her supervisor at Hampo.
“A box is a box, mustn’t compare,” she put on a gruff tone, intent on distancing herself from a potentially rogue strain of doting parental pride.
“Once you’ve bred a few boxes, City Hall will come collecting. Can’t get too attached, sorry to say.”
But in actual fact, Miss Sato was quite taken with her light blue box. Just looking at it made her feel sky high, she could almost picture clouds drifting inside. She was so glad they hadn’t foisted a grey box on her.
Miss Sato put the box in the room next to her bedroom. As per City Hall’s instructions, she talked to the box every day. She didn’t mean to get friendly, but all too soon her words took on a familiar warmth. “What a nice box you are, a real beauty.” “I bet when you get bigger all the other boxes will be jealous how pretty you are.” “Such a lovely box, what’ll I ever store in you.” “Don’t worry, I’m here. You can have your babies in peace.”
The box never replied, but when she trained a light on it at night, something rippled over the blue insides and top flaps—making it tremble slightly. And then the following morning, the box was definitely a little bigger.
In the two months since she began her duties, the box doubled in size. Another month made it grow to some sixty centimetres square.
“I don’t believe it!” shouted Miss Sato, cuddling the blue box. “You birthed!” Inside were three small newborn boxes, red and yellow and green, each the size of her palm. City Hall would collect these, of course, though breeding households apparently had the option of buying them cheaply. “So cute! So cute!” she repeated adoringly. Maybe she ought to buy one—but which?
The blue box kept slowly growing and giving birth to baby boxes, until the room was littered with baby boxes. Far more than was indicated in City Hall’s breeding guidelines, this was one supremely fecund box. Miss Sato’s cheerleading softened into kind appreciation. “You don’t have to try so hard,” she cooed, petting its top and sides, “you’ve already given birth to plenty.”
Miss Sato carried the box into her bedroom, where she proceeded to confide all her problems. Why was she all alone in this world? And what about those poor hamsters fated to spend their entire lives spinning treadmills at the Power Plant? It pained her to see them each and every day. Moan and groan.
The box listened silently to all her complaints. Miss Sato felt much more at ease, as if untold toxins had leached from her being.
It was only after she’d talked out all her gripes that she noticed the box was rattling back and forth, flashes of light racing over the top and sides, enveloping it in wavelike patterns. A column of light shot up from under the lid and something exploded with a bang. Miss Sato cautiously lifted a flap to see—seven little newborn baby boxes in all different colours! At a loss for words, she gently rested her cheek on the box top and voiced an unspoken “well done” in her heart of hearts.
Actually, only a few days prior she’d received notification from City Hall to the effect that “First session boxes are to be collected shortly, together with all offspring boxes.”
The very next day Miss Sato took off from both her magnet mining and Hampo jobs, and headed to the river with the nearly meter-square blue box in her arms. The time of parting was at hand. Resigned to the inevitable, Miss Sato thought that just once she’d take the box out for a picnic. She wanted to show the blue box the real blue of the sky.
A nice thought, but no fun. She just couldn’t get in a happy mood. No, if anything she felt more and more like crying. But was she so sad simply because of the box’s impending departure? Miss Sato couldn’t tell. What was this box to her anyway? She hadn’t even named it. Yes, but how grateful she was to her blue companion for listening to her words and relieving her of so much grief. In spite of which, they were going to cut it up. Wipe it from this world, make it cease to be.
“Say something!” Miss Sato pleaded with the box. Passers-by strolling the embankment looked at the woman and the box. Verging on tears, yet aware of their stares, Miss Sato stood up, opened the box and held it upside-down with both hands. Suddenly the riverbank scene and all the windblown ways of the world seemed far, far away. Heedless of what anyone might think, Miss Sato pulled the box down over her and crouched to her knees.
The blue faded from inside the box, everything went black. Pitch black. And at last Miss Sato cried. She cried for her solitary existence and memories of when her parents were still alive. She cried thinking about all the hamsters who’d expired one after the next for the sake of humans and the fate of her box that was soon to be cut up.
Then strangely enough, after what seemed like ages, when Miss Sato had cried herself dry, the Milky Way and distant stars twinkled into view, now fleeting further and further away. There was nothing anywhere around. She reached out, but her arms and legs touched no box. She was a lone speck, adrift in vast, dark space.
Yet even now as she strained her eyes, Miss Sato discerned the emptiness was filled with faint flickering entities. Presences longing to be born, she realised, precisely because there was a void. She couldn’t make out what they were, baby boxes or embryonic stars, but that hardly mattered. Her own body now gone, Miss Sato slowly began to understand that in dematerialising she had become space itself looking on as beings came to birth from nothingness.
Everything existed within the box. That gut feeling was her last and ultimate awareness.
Citizens reported the abandoned blue box on the embankment, and a staffer came to collect it that very day. When they cut up the box, nobody noticed the single drop of water that dripped from inside. No one knew that in a far, far corner of the cosmos a galaxy had been born.
This story comes from a new book, March Was Made of Yarn (Harvill Secker). Published one year on from the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown that struck Japan in March 2011, the collection explores the impact of the catastrophe through fiction, non-fiction, poetry and manga comic strips by contributors including the novelists Ryu Murakami and David Peace. All royalties from the book will go to reconstruction charities in Japan. The author of “Box Story,” Tetsuya Akikawa, is a writer, poet and professional clown. This unusual work of fiction deals obliquely with the bewildering aftermath of a suddenly shattered world. As the editors of the collection write, “In a tale lined with bureaucratic obsession, Tetsuya Akikawa suggests redemption where we least expect it.”
We’d been running short of boxes for quite some time. Families couldn’t cope, they couldn’t just wait around for a box to be delivered. Without boxes to put away toys and clothes, they couldn’t clean up. Wastebaskets had disappeared, the streets were a mess. Everyone was late for school or work trying not step in all the filth. The biggest problem was when someone wanted to give a present. Gifts went unwrapped, birthdays lost all their excitement.
Things looked bad. We all racked our brains for ways to get more boxes. Legislature deliberated Box Supplementation Schemes for days on end, the ruling and opposition parties bickering over one basic issue: namely, in order to draft a bill for increasing production of boxes, they first needed to define what a box was.
Four sides and a bottom, maybe a lid, some stated the obvious, surely that was a box? But break those down, what do you have but cardboard and wood? Did not a box refer in essence to a hypothetical space, others quibbled, the empty volume partitioned off by those materials?
While legislators locked rhetoric, the box shortage grew ever more dire. Ultimately, despite no headway, a Box Supplementation Scheme was put into effect. It seems a noted university professor had invented a method for breeding boxes.
Every household was to breed boxes. That was the bare bones of the Scheme. Each day they were to talk to the little box delivered from City Hall, then leave it under a light for two hours each night. That alone would make it grow and, once it exceeded a certain size, give birth to baby boxes.
Very well, let us now consider the case of a woman who received one such breeding box. Miss Sato lived alone, having lost her parents early on. A hard-driven achiever, mornings she magnetically combed the riverbanks for iron sand for the Mining Cooperative; afternoons at the Hamster Electric Power Plant—or Hampo for short—she minded tens of thousands of hamsters. Thankless, back-breaking work. Each floor of the multi-levelled structure was scarcely bigger than the hamsters’ treadmills, forcing humans to crawl on all fours to access the cages. Lying prone in that tight squeeze, she had to give the exhausted hamsters sunflower seeds and words of encouragement or if she found an expired hamster, replace it with a new one. Every day Miss Sato dragged out dozens of hamster corpses, her heart aching with each one.
Given this heavy emotional burden, Miss Sato was none too keen about having to breed boxes. Some people were happy to gain a pet, because boxes that bore boxes definitely were some kind of life form, and yet when those boxes grew too big, a collection crew from City Hall would come and cut them up. They’d become material to make new boxes, the staffer explained, but still Miss Sato had a bad feeling. Just thinking about where this all might lead gave her the creeps.
The box left by the staffer was light blue, twenty centimetres square and, lift the lid, inside it was a brighter blue.
“Like the sky,” Miss Sato said, admiring the pure hue. She flipped the flaps to steal a euphoric peek inside several times a day. None of the neighbours, it seems, had received such beautiful boxes.
“Ours was grey,” said Mr Yone, her supervisor at Hampo.
“A box is a box, mustn’t compare,” she put on a gruff tone, intent on distancing herself from a potentially rogue strain of doting parental pride.
“Once you’ve bred a few boxes, City Hall will come collecting. Can’t get too attached, sorry to say.”
But in actual fact, Miss Sato was quite taken with her light blue box. Just looking at it made her feel sky high, she could almost picture clouds drifting inside. She was so glad they hadn’t foisted a grey box on her.
Miss Sato put the box in the room next to her bedroom. As per City Hall’s instructions, she talked to the box every day. She didn’t mean to get friendly, but all too soon her words took on a familiar warmth. “What a nice box you are, a real beauty.” “I bet when you get bigger all the other boxes will be jealous how pretty you are.” “Such a lovely box, what’ll I ever store in you.” “Don’t worry, I’m here. You can have your babies in peace.”
The box never replied, but when she trained a light on it at night, something rippled over the blue insides and top flaps—making it tremble slightly. And then the following morning, the box was definitely a little bigger.
In the two months since she began her duties, the box doubled in size. Another month made it grow to some sixty centimetres square.
“I don’t believe it!” shouted Miss Sato, cuddling the blue box. “You birthed!” Inside were three small newborn boxes, red and yellow and green, each the size of her palm. City Hall would collect these, of course, though breeding households apparently had the option of buying them cheaply. “So cute! So cute!” she repeated adoringly. Maybe she ought to buy one—but which?
The blue box kept slowly growing and giving birth to baby boxes, until the room was littered with baby boxes. Far more than was indicated in City Hall’s breeding guidelines, this was one supremely fecund box. Miss Sato’s cheerleading softened into kind appreciation. “You don’t have to try so hard,” she cooed, petting its top and sides, “you’ve already given birth to plenty.”
Miss Sato carried the box into her bedroom, where she proceeded to confide all her problems. Why was she all alone in this world? And what about those poor hamsters fated to spend their entire lives spinning treadmills at the Power Plant? It pained her to see them each and every day. Moan and groan.
The box listened silently to all her complaints. Miss Sato felt much more at ease, as if untold toxins had leached from her being.
It was only after she’d talked out all her gripes that she noticed the box was rattling back and forth, flashes of light racing over the top and sides, enveloping it in wavelike patterns. A column of light shot up from under the lid and something exploded with a bang. Miss Sato cautiously lifted a flap to see—seven little newborn baby boxes in all different colours! At a loss for words, she gently rested her cheek on the box top and voiced an unspoken “well done” in her heart of hearts.
Actually, only a few days prior she’d received notification from City Hall to the effect that “First session boxes are to be collected shortly, together with all offspring boxes.”
The very next day Miss Sato took off from both her magnet mining and Hampo jobs, and headed to the river with the nearly meter-square blue box in her arms. The time of parting was at hand. Resigned to the inevitable, Miss Sato thought that just once she’d take the box out for a picnic. She wanted to show the blue box the real blue of the sky.
A nice thought, but no fun. She just couldn’t get in a happy mood. No, if anything she felt more and more like crying. But was she so sad simply because of the box’s impending departure? Miss Sato couldn’t tell. What was this box to her anyway? She hadn’t even named it. Yes, but how grateful she was to her blue companion for listening to her words and relieving her of so much grief. In spite of which, they were going to cut it up. Wipe it from this world, make it cease to be.
“Say something!” Miss Sato pleaded with the box. Passers-by strolling the embankment looked at the woman and the box. Verging on tears, yet aware of their stares, Miss Sato stood up, opened the box and held it upside-down with both hands. Suddenly the riverbank scene and all the windblown ways of the world seemed far, far away. Heedless of what anyone might think, Miss Sato pulled the box down over her and crouched to her knees.
The blue faded from inside the box, everything went black. Pitch black. And at last Miss Sato cried. She cried for her solitary existence and memories of when her parents were still alive. She cried thinking about all the hamsters who’d expired one after the next for the sake of humans and the fate of her box that was soon to be cut up.
Then strangely enough, after what seemed like ages, when Miss Sato had cried herself dry, the Milky Way and distant stars twinkled into view, now fleeting further and further away. There was nothing anywhere around. She reached out, but her arms and legs touched no box. She was a lone speck, adrift in vast, dark space.
Yet even now as she strained her eyes, Miss Sato discerned the emptiness was filled with faint flickering entities. Presences longing to be born, she realised, precisely because there was a void. She couldn’t make out what they were, baby boxes or embryonic stars, but that hardly mattered. Her own body now gone, Miss Sato slowly began to understand that in dematerialising she had become space itself looking on as beings came to birth from nothingness.
Everything existed within the box. That gut feeling was her last and ultimate awareness.
Citizens reported the abandoned blue box on the embankment, and a staffer came to collect it that very day. When they cut up the box, nobody noticed the single drop of water that dripped from inside. No one knew that in a far, far corner of the cosmos a galaxy had been born.
