At Kinosaki: Kusaka Kyorai (Part 1)

Not a lot of people know that once upon a time, Kinosaki Onsen was home to a zoo with a panda.

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Got a friend in Kinosaki, one of my dad’s brothers says to me, If yer lookin’ for a job, Daisuke, why don’t you go ask around there? He lived in the Kitakatsuragi district in Nara, in Ōji town, so all of us Tatsumis used to call him Old Ōji. His real name was Tsuguhiko, but there’s no real need to call him by his given name, so Old Ōji it is.

Now Old Ōji used to get himself in all sorts of trouble in his younger days. Just as soon as he could leave home he went to Osaka and got tangled up in some dodgy line of work. Later on he set up his own business, but when it fell apart around his ears he went on the run from loan sharks. Borrowed a lot of money from the family, which of course no one ever saw a yen of again.

For over a decade after that he kept his nose clean, but on even days he’d be drunk by noon, and odd days he wouldn’t get out of bed until the sun was going down. Never seen a deadbeat like that before or since.

Even when he was sober hardly a thing came out of his mouth that wasn’t a lie, fable, or tall tale, if it wasn’t a cloud of tobacco smoke. Small wonder not a person in the family gave him the time of day.

We Tatsumis are a hard working bunch, and plenty of us end up working for the city or as teachers, so you might call Old Ōji the black sheep of the clan. And who was it that looked like he might just follow in Old Ōji’s footsteps but little old me: unemployed at twenty-eight, sitting around drinking with him all day. Real shame, but that’s how it was.

Now I never exactly planned on turning into him, and if I didn’t want that to happen the first thing I had to do was look for a job. But that’d mean I’d have to be interviewed by my father’s students, or my old classmates, or even my little sister’s friends, and that just seemed like a real bummer. So I can imagine how hard it was to drag myself to city hall or Hello Work. Maybe some of you can sympathize, and if you can I think we’ll get along just fine.

So you see the bind I was in, and unreliable as Old Ōji was, I was in no position to be picky. I’d been sitting around with nothing to do for over six months as it was. I could practically feel my mother―a professional homemaker of thirty years―and my sister―who’d landed a job with the prefectural government the year before last―breathing down my neck. Every time we sat down to dinner their gazes all but saying, You even turned rōnin all so you could go to your fancy private university, and this is all you have to show for it? I could never tell what dad was thinking because he never said anything about it, which just made things all the more awkward.

“Mm, I guess I could give it a go…but how do you know anyone in Kinosaki, anyhow?”

Old Ōji stroked his stubbly chin.

“I lent a little help a while back, and now he’s made something of hisself. Says he needs a helper for his triumphant homecoming. Patient fella like you, you’re exactly what he needs.”

“Not sure I follow.”

Hell, neither do I. Just make a fair shake of it, and if it don’t work out you can always come back home and find a job at the sock store in Kōryō. Hear the envelope factory in Shinjō’s looking too.”

He’d been swigging casually from a sake bottle like it was barley tea, but now he set it down with a thunk on the damp tatami and went poking around in the shelves behind him, coming up with an envelope. Handed it to me and said it was for the travel expense. Inside there were two ten-thousand yen bills, as well as a business card on coated paper stock, which said

So this was the fly-by-night operation I’d be working at.

“Yoshiyan’s got all sorts of ideas in his noggin,” said Uncle Ōji, pointing at his head and finishing off his bottle with an outrageous belch. “Plenty you can learn from him, ghurrp.”

Aren’t you the one who owes my parents a whole lot of money? I thought to myself.

“Thanks. I’ll give it a try,” was all I said.

I hated to admit it, but Old Ōji was throwing me a lifeline. As a baby I was so adorable that the gateball club at the old folk’s home went gaga for me; in kindergarten I’d memorized my times tables so fast that everyone called me the Boy Genius of Chūwa. But it’d been all downhill ever since I failed the Nishiyamato Middle School entrance exam.

The economy had tanked when the bubble burst, and it wasn’t getting any better, so it didn’t matter much whether I went to Kinosaki or Inubōsaki or Makurazaki: I just had to go.

I didn’t tell my family that it had been Old Ōji who had given me this lead. I packed a few sets of clothes, some half-read paperbacks from my shelf, and both volumes of Saitō Mokichi’s Selected Poems from the Manyōshū, and with duffel in hand I boarded the Kintetsu.

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Officially, the office―though really it was a warehouse―that housed the headquarters of Daikichi Enterprises was located in Kinosaki, but it was a little ways from the onsen district near the mouth of the Maruyama River.

“No, that ain’t right, ain’t right at all…panda tails ain’t black.”

That was my first impression of (President) Yoshiyan. He was standing in the dark recesses of the warehouse with his arms folded, mumbling to himself. To save some cash I’d taken the slowest train I could find and boy was my butt sore. I should have cushioned the seat with some of my clothes.

“Hello?”

“No use crying over spilled milk…just have to start over, buy me another white bear…”

“Excuse me. I’m Tatsumi,” I said, rubbing my bottom. After a few more tries he finally noticed me.

“Ah, there you are! Daisuke, the new kid. Old Ōji tells me you’re the cleverest of all his nephews. Pleasure to have you on board!”

“Um, thanks. I’m looking forward to it.”

He reminds me a whole lot of Uncle Ōji, I thought to myself as I shook his hand.

“Could I ask what you were doing?”

The president proudly led me over to the wall as if he’d been just waiting for me to ask.

“…Is that a onesie?”

It certainly looked an awful lot like a giant white onesie, mottled with splotches of black paint.

“Get this: this is gonna be a panda. I’m bringing a zoo to my hometown, and this panda’s gonna be the star of the show. And you’re going to be inside!”

“Uh-huh…”

Wasn’t that a scam?

But my new middle-aged boss just insisted with a gleam in his eye, “Kids in Kinosaki have never had a chance to see a panda before. I say we show ‘em one!”

He wanted me to prep the habitat―an empty room in an onsen ryokan―and told me it’d pay a little better than the average part-time gig.

“I’ve already bought some rabbits, marmots, ducks, goats: you’ll need to take care of them too.”

I figured that he’d be better off just opening up a bog-standard petting zoo, but he wouldn’t budge on the panda.

So that was how my life in Kinosaki began.

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That night I headed to a nearby bar, where I picked up some scuttlebutt about President Yoshiyan. Apparently he was Kinosaki born and bred, but after he started hanging with a bad crowd he dropped out of high school and moved to Osaka, where he spent his days getting up to no good. After a series of misadventures, including feuding with Old Ōji over the top hostess in Kitashinchi, he finally settled down at Ōji’s company (which as I’ve already mentioned would go on to implode in spectacular fashion) before striking out to found his own venture, which he sold upon his father’s death to come home to Kinosaki.

With the funds from the sale he bought out a resort which had gone bankrupt when the bubble collapsed…well, he bought the parking lot anyways, and that was where he intended to build his zoo. He was just living out of the warehouse temporarily, and once the zoo opened he’d move over there.

He and Old Ōji were two peas in a pod, and it was just as hard to tell with him where the truth ended and the lies began. But most of it seemed pretty farfetched to me. There were only two things that I was sure about: one, President Yoshiyan was trying to open a zoo, and two: I was going to be wearing the panda suit.

While I waited for the white onesie to be delivered from Russia, I sat in my room and obsessively watched the panda videos that President Yoshiyan kept sending me. Now that I think about it, we could probably just have ordered a panda onesie direct from China.

The unrelenting rains that signalled the beginning of autumn left a thick fog hanging over Kinosaki, and the stinkbugs came out in droves. After three days I got sick of going around trying out all of the open air baths in Kinosaki, so I just watched panda videos in my room and imagined myself inside the suit, rolling around on the tatami and pretending to eat bamboo leaves.

I finished the books I’d brought in no time at all, and since there weren’t any bookstores in the area there was nothing else to do but re-read Selected Poems or practice being a panda. I sprayed insecticide on the screen door, yet somehow every time I went outside I’d find a cluster of stinkbugs stubbornly clinging on.

I’d later learn that convincingly “eating” bamboo leaves and stalks and shoots while wearing the suit was much harder than it seemed. But even so, all of my imagined rehearsals still ended up paying off.

It was another two weeks before I could put on the finished suit.

“Well I’ll be darned! This really your first time? That was way better than I was expecting. Man, I can’t tell where the man ends and the panda begins!”

President Yoshiyan’s gushing compliments took me back to April of second grade, when I got the nickname “Prep King” after I read all my textbooks cover to cover on the day of the opening ceremony. That had been a glorious time, and now I felt a little of it coming back to me.

The trees were bare and snow was drifting down from the sky on the day that Daikichi Enterprises opened the doors of its first, last, and grandest project: the Kinosaki Zoo.

The fliers which President Yoshiyan created brazenly featured photos of the pandas in Adventure World at Nanki-Shirahama.

“Don’t see the harm, the fliers don’t say anything about there being real pandas.”

The tourism board refused to allow us to distribute fliers, so whether it was a problem or not was really a moot point. But I didn’t know that at the time, so as I put the suit on all I could think of was all the people that would come to see me.

On opening day, there were exactly three customers: the mama from President Yoshiyan’s favourite bar, and two of the regulars.

“Don’t you worry, we’re just getting started. We made it to opening day, didn’t we? Now drink up!”

Glug-glug-glug went the bottle of Nikaidō shochu as President Yoshiyan filled up my glass. In his other hand he clutched a microphone, while all the grey-haired regulars in the aforementioned bar shouted and cheered along. A yakitori place had opened up recently in the neighbourhood, pilfering all of the younger customers for whom karaoke was less of an institution. Times change. That’s just how it goes.

As I sipped sparingly at my almost neat shochu and listened to President Yoshiyan butcher an Ozaki Kihoyiko number, the mama came and sat beside me. Her hair was dyed way too dark for a woman her age.

“You know, that wasn’t a half-bad panda impression.”

I was semi-gratified to receive the compliment.

“Ahm, thank you.”

Apparently she used to be classmates with President Yoshiyan.

“I can’t believe how respectable Yoshiya’s gotten…you wouldn’t believe what a rascal he was in the old days!”

Seeing a tear well up in her eyes, I couldn’t help but think what a messed up place the world was. But when I thought about the fact that I myself was part of this messed up world, I felt a headache coming on that wasn’t just coming from the booze.

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Winter is the busiest time of year at Kinosaki Onsen.

The tourism industry may have been in the dumps in the aftermath of the bubble bursting and the long recession, but domestic travel was still chugging along. Kinosaki was just barely in range of a day trip from the Kansai area, and it boasted a respectable stable of attractions, what with crab and onsen and Shiga Naoya. So that winter, just as any other, tourists descended in their droves upon the town.

On the other hand, the Kinosaki Zoo may as well have been in the throes of the Great Depression. We counted ourselves lucky if we saw three groups in a day; on plenty of days not a single visitor walked through the door.

The entrance fee was 500 yen for adults, 200 for kids. 100 yen in the tin can would get you a paper cup full of thinly cut carrot sticks to feed to the goats and rabbits. The same 100 yen would get you a bag of bread crusts for the duck, which President Yoshiyan got gratis from a bakery, so those were particularly cost-effective: that is, if anyone came in to buy them. Even at a generous estimate of three groups every day, we were deep underwater.

By the way, we advertised a yearly pass for 5000 yen, which President Yoshiyan called, “A hell of a bargain!” but naturally we hadn’t sold a single one.

Being the only staff member apart from the president, I was in charge of taking care of the marmots and the rabbits and Quacksuke the duck as well as the two goats Donkichi and Hanako, on top of plastering heat pads all over myself and doing my panda impression. Some days I didn’t talk to a single solitary person besides President Yoshiyan from opening at 10 in the morning until closing at 5 in the evening. I spent more time talking to the animals than I did to people.

Life was so monotonous that whenever I was in the suit I started to believe that I’d always been a panda all along.

The panda I portrayed was named Janjan, which comes from the sound of falling pachinko balls, or as President Yoshiyan put it, “like money pouring in.”

They say that pandas steal the spotlight, so I’m pretty sure President Yoshiyan must have been banking on that, but I’m sorry to say that after three months it was clear that his expectations had been misplaced. The most customers we ever had in a day was at the end of the year: 7 groups, 12 people in all, for a grand total of 3200 yen. We were sunk. Some pachinko machines give you a jackpot once you’ve put in enough balls, but we never got so much as a pity payout.

By the time the buds on the plum trees began to sprout, the Kinosaki Zoo, which is to say Daikichi Enterprises, was apparently running deep in the red.

That was all too predictable. But I wasn’t the one running the show here anyhow, and at that point I’d spent so much time inside the suit that I was getting a little too comfortable in; life felt pretty bleak whenever I was Tatsumi Daisuke instead of Janjan the panda. So not once did I ever get as far as thinking about how the business was doing. That alone should tell you that I was cracking.

President Yoshiyan would hand me my pay at the end of every month, and now that I think about it each time the envelope would be a few thousand-yen bills thicker than the previous month. I suppose he could have been selling off his household belongings, but there was also the possibility that it had something to do with his trips to the pachinko parlor. Maybe he was selling everything he had worth anything and turning it into his pachinko war chest. Yeah, that would probably explain it.

Anyways, the business was in a nosedive, and I was totally immersed in Janjan: it was all up to President Yoshiyan. But of course it was, he was the president.

“We’ve gotta cut costs somewhere, may as well start here,” he ruminated. He’d borrowed a light truck and a lawnmower, and talked a friend into letting him mow a vacant lot for animal feed. The result: Saneatsu, one of the bunnies, got the runs, and the vet bill probably ended up costing him more than he’d saved.

“Damn rabbit’s got no survival instinct,” said President Yoshiyan with a scowl. “Don’t even know what it can and can’t eat.”

I didn’t know what he’d expected, considering he’d bought them from a pet shop. And I had to step in to keep him from feeding the goats old newspapers. Ink can’t be good for their stomachs.

His next bright idea was to lower the price of the yearly passes. A whopping 50% discount, just like that..

“Once we’ve got the cash in hand we can always hike the price back to normal for the second year. Foolproof, eh!”

Spoken like a true businessman. But the question remained: was a yearly pass to see marmots, rabbits, ducks, goats, and Janjan the panda (me) worth even 2500 yen?

If you had 2500 yen in your wallet, it’d probably be better spent on a CD. That’s what I would do. A classic album is something you can listen to for the rest of your life.

You can pick up Western music for even cheaper. The Beatles and the Stones are a given, but I also give two big thumbs up for the Byrds, the Kinks, Buffalo Springfield, and Neil Young.

Books are another good choice. With 2500 yen you can pick up a whole armful of classics from the discount rack. You could probably net yourself five whole sets of Selected Poems from the Manyōshū.

So I wasn’t expecting what happened next.

“We’re in the money, Daisuke!” shouted President Yoshiyan, doing a little skip into the room as I took off the suit and prepared to close up for the night.

“You’re serious, a yearly pass? Wow, how many?”

“Just the one, heh.”

One measly pass? I thought to myself, but a sale was a sale.

“Next, let’s find us another low-maintenance animal. How about a turtle?”

Why a turtle?

“I don’t think that’ll bring in the customers.”

“You think so? Well, alright.”

I had to wonder: what kind of overly curious soul would want to buy something like this?

It wouldn’t be long before I found out.