A PERFECT DAY FOR KANGAROOS
There were four kangaroos in the cage—one male, two females, and a newborn baby kangaroo.
My girlfriend and I were standing in front of the cage. This zoo wasn’t so popular to begin with, and what with it being Monday morning, the animals outnumbered the visitors. No exaggeration. Cross my heart.
The whole point for us was to see the baby kangaroo. I mean, why else would we be at the zoo?
A month before in the local section of the newspaper we’d spotted an announcement of the baby kangaroo’s birth, and ever since then we’d been patiently waiting for the perfect morning to pay the baby kangaroo a visit. But somehow the right day just wouldn’t come. One morning it was raining, and sure enough, more rain the next day. Of course it was too muddy the day after that, and then the wind blew like crazy for two days straight. One morning my girlfriend had a toothache, and another morning I had some business to take care of down at city hall. I’m not trying to make some profound statement here, but I would venture to say this:
That’s life.
So anyhow, a month zipped on by.
A month can go by just like that. I could barely remember anything I’d done the whole month. Sometimes it felt like I’d done a lot, sometimes like I hadn’t accomplished a thing. It was only when the guy came at the end of the month to collect money for the newspaper delivery that I realized a whole month had flown by.
Yep, that’s life all right.
Finally, though, the morning we were going to see the baby kangaroo arrived. We woke up at six, drew back the curtains, and determined it was a perfect day for kangaroos. We quickly washed up, had breakfast, fed the cat, did some quick laundry, put on hats to protect us from the sun, and set off.
“Do you think the baby kangaroo is still alive?” she asked me in the train.
“I’m sure it is. There wasn’t any article about it dying. If it had died, I’m sure we would have read about it.”
“Maybe it’s not dead, but sick and in some hospital.”
“Well, I think there would have been an article about that, too.”
“But what if it had a nervous breakdown and is hiding off in a corner?”
“A baby having a breakdown?”
“Not the baby. The mother! Maybe it suffered some sort of trauma and is holed up with the baby in a dark back room.”
Women really think of every possible scenario, I thought, impressed. A trauma? What kind of trauma could affect a kangaroo?
“If I don’t see the baby kangaroo now I don’t think I’ll have another chance to. Ever,” she said.
“I suppose not.”
“I mean, have you ever seen one?”
“Nope, not me,” I said.
“Are you so sure you’ll ever have another chance to?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s why I’m worried.”
“Yeah, but look,” I shot back, “I’ve never seen a giraffe give birth, or even whales swimming, so why make such a big deal about a baby kangaroo?”
“Because it’s a baby kangaroo,” she said. “That’s why.”
I gave up and started leafing through the newspaper. I’d never once won an argument with a girl.
The kangaroo was, naturally, still alive and well, and he (or was it a she?) looked a lot bigger than in the photo in the paper, as it leapt all around the kangaroo enclosure. It was less a baby than a kind of mini-kangaroo. My girlfriend was disappointed.
“It isn’t a baby anymore,” she said.
“Sure it is,” I said, trying to cheer her up.
I wrapped an arm around her waist and gently stroked her. She shook her head. I wanted to do something to console her, but anything I might have said would not have changed one essential fact: the baby kangaroo had indeed grown up. So I kept quiet.
I went over to the concession stand and bought two chocolate ice cream cones, and when I got back she was still leaning against the cage, staring at the kangaroos.
“It isn’t a baby anymore,” she repeated.
“You sure?” I asked, handing her one of the ice creams.
“A baby would be inside its mother’s pouch.”
I nodded and licked my ice cream.
“But it isn’t in her pouch.”
We tried to locate the mother kangaroo. The father was easy to spot—he was the biggest and quietest of the foursome. Looking like a composer whose talent has run dry, he just stood stock-still, staring at the leaves inside their feed trough. The other kangaroos were female, identical in shape, color, and expression. Either one could have been the baby’s mother.
“One of them’s got to be the mother, and one of them isn’t,” I commented.
“Um.”
“So what is the one who isn’t the mother?”
“You got me,” she said.
Oblivious to all this, the baby kangaroo leapt around the enclosure, occasionally pausing to scratch in the dirt for no apparent reason. He/She certainly found a lot to keep him/ her occupied. The baby kangaroo leapt around where the father stood, chewed at a bit of leaves, dug in the dirt, bothered the females, lay down on the ground, then got up and hopped around some more.
“How come kangaroos hop so fast?” my girlfriend asked.
“To get away from their enemies.”
“What enemies?”
“Human beings,” I said. “Humans kill them with boomerangs and eat them.”
“Why do baby kangaroos climb into their mother’s pouch?”
“So they can run away with her. Babies can’t run so fast.”
“So they’re protected?”
“Yeah,” I said. “They protect all their young.”
“How long do they protect them like that?”
I knew I should have read up on kangaroos in an encyclopedia before we made this little excursion. A barrage of questions like this was entirely predictable.
“A month or two, I imagine.”
“Well, that baby’s only a month old,” she said, pointing to the baby kangaroo. “So it still must climb into its mother’s pouch.”
“Hmm,” I said. “I guess so.”
“Don’t you think it’d feel great to be inside that pouch?”
“Yeah, it would.”
The sun was high in the sky by this time, and we could hear the shouts of children at a swimming pool nearby. Sharply etched white summer clouds drifted by.
“Would you like something to eat?” I asked her.
“A hot dog,” she said. “And a Coke.”
A college student was working the hot dog stand, which was shaped like a minivan. He had a boom box on and Stevie Wonder and Billy Joel serenaded me as I waited for the hot dogs to cook.
When I got back to the kangaroo cage she said, “Look!” and pointed to one of the female kangaroos. “You see? It’s inside her pouch!”
And sure enough the baby kangaroo had snuggled up inside his mother’s pouch. (Assuming this was the mother.) The pouch had filled out, and a pair of pointed little ears and the tip of a tail peeked out. It was a wonderful sight, and definitely made our trip worth the effort.
“It must be pretty heavy with the baby inside,” she said.
“Don’t worry—kangaroos are strong.”
“Really?”
“Of course they are. That’s how they’ve survived.”
Even with the hot sun the mother kangaroo wasn’t sweating. She looked like someone who’d just finished her afternoon shopping at a supermarket on the main drag in upscale Aoyama and was taking a break in a nearby coffee shop.
“She’s protecting her baby, right?”
“Yep.”
“I wonder if the baby’s asleep.”
“Probably.”
We ate our hot dogs, drank our Cokes, and left the kangaroo cage.
When we left, the father kangaroo was still staring into the feed trough in search of lost notes. The mother kangaroo and her baby had become one unit, resting in the flow of time, while the mysterious other female was hopping around the enclosure as if taking her tail out on a test run.
It looked like it was going to be a steamy day, the first hot one we’d had in a while.
“Hey, you want to grab a beer somewhere?” she asked.
“Sounds great,” I said.
—TRANSLATED BY PHILIP GABRIEL