Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
by Haruki Murakami
Translated by Christopher Allison
Inside the fence, there were four kangaroos: one male, two females, and one baby that had just been born.
In front of the fence, there was no one but her and I. It wasn't the most popular zoo around under any
circumstances, but to make matters worse, it was Monday morning. Animals outnumbered visitors by a fair
margin.
Our objective was, of course, the kangaroo baby. It didn't occur to us that we should look at anything else.
We had read in the local section of the newspaper that a kangaroo baby had been born about a month
before. So, for one month we had continued to await a morning suitable for going to see the new kangaroo.
One morning, it rained. The next morning, naturally, it continued to rain. Then, the next day after that, the
ground was too muddy, and for a couple more days an annoying wind was blowing. Then, she had a painful
cavity, and I had pressing business at the ward office.
Somehow, I had lost an entire month. When I tried to think of what had happened to it, I couldn't remember
a thing. I felt like I'd done a lot of things, but I also felt like I'd done nothing at all. Until the guy had come
around collecting for the newspaper at the end of the month, I didn't realize that a whole month had gone
by.
But at last a good kangaroo-viewing morning arrived. We got up at six, opened the curtains, and confirmed
in an instant that it was a fine day for kangarooing. We washed our faces, finished breakfast, fed the cat,
did a little laundry and, putting on our sun visors, we went out.
"Hey, I wonder if the kangaroo baby is still alive," she asked me while we were on the train.
"Yeah, I think so. If it had died, there would have been a newspaper story or something."
"The baby?"
"Of course not. The mother. They probably have her locked up inside some dark room with her baby."
I'm always quite impressed by the range of possibilities that occurs to girls.
"I just have this feeling that if I let this chance escape, I won't be able to see a baby kangaroo ever again."
"Well, what about you? Have you ever seen a kangaroo baby before?" "No."
"Up to now, did you ever believe that you would see one?"
"But wait a minute," I protested. "While everything you 知 e said is true, I've never seen a giraffe being
born either, or a whale swimming in the ocean. Why is it that now only the baby kangaroo is a problem?"
I gave up, and glanced through the newspaper. I have yet to win a single discussion with a girl.
The kangaroo baby was, of course, still alive. He (or she) had grown much bigger than in the pictures in the
newspaper, and was hopping around energetically in the kangaroo enclosure. He wasn't so much a baby
anymore as a small kangaroo. This fact seemed to disappoint her a little.
I went to a small shop and bought chocolate ice cream, and when I came back she was still leaning on the
fence staring at the kangaroo.
We spent a moment trying to discern which was the mother kangaroo. The father kangaroo we identified
immediately. He was by far the biggest and quietest kangaroo there. He had a talent for staring at the green
leaves in the feed box with an expression like a washed-up composer. The other two were females and had
almost the same build, were almost the same color, had almost the same expression. Which one was the
mother was no laughing matter.
"So, one of them is the mother, and one of them is not," I said.
"Right."
"Humans," I said. "Humans kill kangaroos with boomerangs and eat their meat."
"So they can run away together. Babies can't run that fast."
I should have gotten all my information concerning kangaroos from an animal picture book. Then I would
have known everything from the start.
"OK, so that one's still only one month old," she said, pointing at the baby kangaroo. "It must still get in its
mother's pouch."
"I wonder."
The sun had gotten really hot. You could hear the cheers of the kids playing in the nearby pool. Billowy
clouds floated in the summer sky.
When I returned to the kangaroo pen, she said "Look!" pointing at one of the female kangaroos.
Sure enough, the baby was tucked away in its mother's pouch. The stomach pouch was pretty swollen, and
just its little pointy ears and the tip of its tail poked out from the top.
"Really?"
The mother kangaroo, standing in that blistering sunlight didn't have a single drop of sweat on her. She
reminded me of a mother going to pick up the groceries at a supermarket on Aoyama-dori, and then
stopping by the coffee shop for a quick break.
"Yeah."
"Maybe."
We ate our hotdogs, drank our Cokes, and hung out in front of the kangaroo cage. When it came time to
leave, the father kangaroo was still searching around in the feed box for a lost note. The mother kangaroo
and the baby rested their bodies together as one, and that mysterious other female kangaroo hopped around
in the center of the cage as if she was testing the condition of her tail.
It was the hottest day we had had in a long time. "Hey, you wanna go drink beer?" she said.
"Great," I said.