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  As we neared the jungle, night fell once more.

  “I refuse!” exclaimed Mogamigawa, who’d been trailing behind with little enthusiasm until then. He parked his backside on the ground and started to fret like a spoilt child. “Of course I’m tired anyway, but going through that jungle at night would be my vision of hell. Who knows what hideous monstrosities will appear? I’m not going in there, and that’s the end of it. Why don’t we just sleep here for two hours until it grows light again? Eh, Sona? Won’t you?” In the end he was almost begging.

  “All right, let’s do that,” I said. “To be sure, I don’t think the jungle will be any less terrifying than it was before.”

  We decided to take a nap at the foot of a frizzly acacia tree, from whose branches hung a line of relic pods, in a hollow just ahead of the jungle. I knew that having frequent catnaps would merely deprive us of deep sleep. That was particularly bad for the brain activity of scientists such as ourselves, not to mention our physical well-being. But it really couldn’t be helped in our present situation.

  I was starting to doze when Yohachi shook me awake.

  “What is it? I’m trying to sleep! I was just about to drop off!”

  “You’ve been asleep more than two hours already, mate!”

  I opened my eyes to find that it was already broad daylight.

  “I can’t find Dr Mogamigawa,” said Yohachi.

  “He must be collecting something in the vicinity.”

  “I don’t think so.” Yohachi took me to the spot where Mogamigawa had been sleeping, and pointed at the ground.

  The footprints of several creatures had disturbed the sandy surface there. The buttons from Mogamigawa’s clothing lay scattered around, but the bag containing his electron microscope lay undisturbed in its original position. I was convinced that creatures from the jungle had abducted Mogamigawa during the night.

  “Hurry!” I shouted, almost screaming at Yohachi. Mogamigawa may have been a pig-headed old man, but I admired his enthusiasm for research and his virtuous morality. It would have been just too awful if he’d been gang-raped by large creatures and his internal organs had burst. I felt sorry for him. We quickly lifted the baggage onto our backs and headed towards the jungle. “Look there,” I said. “The tracks continue this way. Don’t lose sight of them.”

  We immediately lost sight of the tracks under a deposit of dead fern leaves. We then turned towards the dead centre, where we’d seen the creatures having their orgy on our outward journey.

  Mogamigawa’s bloodstained clothes lay torn to shreds in the middle of the dead centre.

  “His pants are here too,” said Yohachi with an air of insouciance. “The animals must have taken turns to use his ageing body as the object of their pleasure.”

  “Could you stop talking like that?” I snapped as I surveyed the scene around us. “I just hope to God he’s not dead.”

  For the next half hour or so, Yohachi and I searched the vicinity of the dead centre, occasionally calling out to each other to prevent us from getting separated. Wherever they’d hidden themselves, we could see no sign of a single creature, let alone our dear colleague.

  I returned to the dead centre, wondering how I was going to explain it to Mogamigawa’s wife on our return, and how I would berate the Team Leader for forcing an old man on such a dangerous mission. Yohachi was just standing there, looking up vacantly into the trees.

  “He’ll obviously be lying on the ground naked,” I said. “There’s no point in looking for him up there.”

  Yohachi ignored me and started talking, as if to himself, still looking up pensively. “He must have been stark-naked… There was blood on his clothes… In that case, if one of them spiders had found him lying on the ground unconscious, what would it have thought?” He slowly turned to face me. “It would have thought he was a big animal that had just been born. In that case, what would it have done? Wrapped him up in one of them cocoon things, of course. Wouldn’t it?”

  For a moment I was flabbergasted. “What on earth gave you such a far-fetched idea?” I asked. Then I realized. I hurriedly turned my eyes to the object of Yohachi’s gaze.

  Above our heads, a massive relic pod, large enough to contain a collapsible cow, was hanging down from the middle of a stout branch.

  “You’re saying that could be Dr Mogamigawa?” I leant backwards, held my breath and stared up at the relic pod.

  “Let’s climb the tree together,” I said after coming to my senses a few moments later. Yohachi remained as unperturbed as ever. “We’ll pick it up together and bring it down carefully. If he’s inside, we obviously won’t want to drop it.”

  Yohachi pushed my heavy backside from below as I climbed up ahead. I really had put on a lot of weight in middle age. I crawled along the branch in a snail-like fashion and, on reaching the little air hole of the relic pod, peered into it. It was pitch-dark inside and there was nothing to be seen, nor any sign of movement.

  I shouted into the air hole. “Doctor Mogamigawa! Are you in there?”

  At that, the swollen base of the huge relic pod suddenly started to squirm and wriggle restlessly. A sound like the obscene cry of the frequently heard wife waker, but several times louder, was emitted from the air hole like a steam whistle, reverberating all around us. The sound was so intense that I instinctively put my hands to my ears and nearly fell from the branch.

  “Yeeuurrgghuuukkkmmmaunnnnngghhherereeuurghhhhh! Yeeeeuurrggh! Yeeeeuurrggh! Yeeeuuurrrnnnnnnnggghhherereeuuurghhhhh!!!” The wife waker continued to scream what sounded like obscenities for several minutes, before at last starting to speak in intelligible earth language. “Oh, so sorry. Is that you, Sona?” It was the voice of Dr Mogamigawa. “When I tried to speak just now, nothing but that funny noise would come out. I even surprised myself, to be fair.”

  “Dr Mogamigawa!” Relieved to hear him speaking with such apparent good cheer, I signalled to Yohachi to come and join me in the tree.

  “Well, I am glad you found me, I must say. I suppose you’ve imagined what happened, but I’ve had a pretty rough time of it, I can tell you. Wahahahahaha!” Confined there in the pod, Mogamigawa spoke with a blithe gaiety that suggested the opposite of a “pretty rough time”. “Now, would you let me out of here sharpish, as it were? Otherwise the stimulus from the liquid in here will transform the rest of me into a nursery spider, and we wouldn’t want that, would we!”

  The rest of me?… I had a terrible foreboding. With Yohachi’s help, I quickly hoisted the relic pod up onto the branch, cut the thread that tied it fast, and brought it down from the tree. We were soaking in sweat. “Are you all right in there?” I called. “I’m going to open the pod with my scissors now.”

  “Yes, would you mind? I’m fine, have no worries there. My desire to return to the womb has been sated, and I’ve had a good sleep inside the old amniotic fluid. Perhaps that’s why I feel in such high spirits! Wahahahahahahaha!”

  I cut open the relic pod with the scissors, then watched open-mouthed as Dr Mogamigawa crawled out. In no more than two hours, his metamorphosis had advanced with astonishing speed. Only his head remained unchanged. In fact, it would be truer to say that he was now a nursery spider with the face of Dr Mogamigawa. Four spindly limbs protruded from the side of his trunk and bent under his belly in the fashion of a four-legged spider. His trunk was flat, and his whole body was covered with soft-looking light-brown hairs. Wart-like protuberances, probably his silk-spinning organs, had already broken out near his anus. His penis had shrivelled to the point of non-existence.

  “Dr Mogamigawa…” I at last managed to squeeze out in a strained voice. “W-what’s happened to you? W-what hideous thing have you become?”

  “Pardon? Oh, this.” Mogamigawa started to crawl around like a spider as he surveyed the changes in his appearance. They didn’t appear to shock him so much at all. “Well, as long as I still have my mind, I really don’t care what happens to my body. Actually, I feel jolly good and fresh, as if I’ve bee
n reborn. After all, there’s nothing more precious than one’s health, is there! You arrived at just the right time, old chap. If the transformation had advanced any further, my mind would have become the same as a nursery spider’s. What simply perfect timing! Heeheehee!” His flippant tone suggested that even his personality had changed. He hopped onto the trunk of a nearby tree with a sprightly leap and turned his head downwards. “Look! I can even do this.”

  In utter confusion, I turned to Yohachi for help. “Yohachi. What shall we do?”

  Yohachi calmly returned my stare. “Do about what, mate? If you mean the professor, what can we do but take him back to the Base?”

  That was the problem. Taking him back would be all right, but how would we explain it to his wife? If she saw her husband transformed into a spider, she might have an apoplexy. She might drop dead on the spot. Then again, it would be next to impossible to explain his condition without letting her see him. “I’m very sorry, madam, but your husband has been turned into a spider.” She was never going to believe that – she would think we were joking.

  Mogamigawa was frolicking about, revelling in his ability to move his reborn, flexible body just as he wished. “Dr Mogamigawa?” I called.

  “Yeeeeuurrggh! Yeeeeuurrggh! Oh, sorry! Mea culpa. It comes out like that when I start talking suddenly. What is it, my friend? You’re wondering whether you should take me back to the Base? But of course you should. You needn’t worry one jot about my wife. She can cope, I assure you. The main thing is that I’m so full of energy! My mind is crystal-clear. Now that I’ve lost my sexual functions and my sexual desires, I’m liberated from obligatory sex with my wife, not to mention concern or jealousy over her infidelity. That means I can devote myself to my research and enjoy life on this wonderful planet. So yes, my dear Sona, I can hardly wait to get going! Carpe diem, as they say! Wahahahahahaha!” He climbed the tree as he spoke, then roared with laughter as he slid back down in front of our eyes, on a thread that emerged from his backside. “Wahaha! Wahahahahahahaha! Wahahahahahahahahahahaha!”

  This was no longer the Mogamigawa of old. That’s how it seemed to me. It was someone else. Or perhaps some new species of creature.

  The three of us, or should I say the two of us and one spider, set off for the Research Base in accordance with Mogamigawa’s wish. The now arachnid Mogamigawa scurried along the ground ahead of us. It may seem hard to believe, but he didn’t appear to see anything remotely wretched or absurd in his condition. Paying no heed to my muddled thoughts, he continued to speak without pause.

  “You know, this may be a kind of retribution against my former self, a kind of quid pro quo. I used to think that the humanoids and animals on this planet, even the natural phenomena, were all obscene. But what splendid retribution! This planet has transformed me, a conservative, opinionated old man who abhorred anything erotic, into a nursery spider, a creature that has no sexual capacity and is, at it were, the ideal host for me. In doing so, it has released me from sex and incorporated me into the ecology of this planet – mirabile dictu! That’s right. I am no longer human. I am a creature. Well, Sona my friend? What name would you give to this new creature? Hmm?”

  I could find no words with which to reply, and simply continued walking in silence. Instead, Yohachi, whose face now exuded a kind of sublime saintliness, answered on my behalf. “Mutatis mutandis,” he said in the austere, solemn tone of a divine revelation.

  “I see, yes, I see. Mutatis mutandis. Indeed yes, I have mutated into a spider and the spider has mutated into me, yes indeed. Wahahahahahahahahaha. What an excellent name. Oh look. We’ve left the jungle now. Soon we’ll be in the field of forget-me-grass. What fun. How wonderful it is to walk as freely as this, to hop and jump like this. But more than that, I’m no longer burdened by the pressures of sex, which were clinging to me doggedly and refused to desist even in my sixties. I will never again be troubled by mistress bine, fondleweed or the itchy scratchy tree. This planet is exactly like heaven to me now. No, no. This planet really is heaven, is it not? Newdopia may be a paradise where totally naked deities have created a country. This planet is a paradise of love! It has the magical power to make not only Yohachi and myself but all humans adapt and conform, sooner or later, provided they live here long enough. From now on, I can continue my research without constraint. But occasionally I will go out to the jungle to save unfortunate newborn hybrids that have been separated from their dead parents. I will cocoon them with my silk and change them into relic pods. Yes – I will dedicate myself to the instinct of love! I will live here for the rest of my life. Look! Is that a field of forget-me-grass I begin to see in the distance? What joy. What joy. And after the forget-me-grass, there’s Lake Turpitude. What fun. What fun. Wahahahahahahahahaha. Wahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Waha. Waha. Wahahahahahahahahahahahah. Wahahahahahahaha-hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Wahahahahaha-hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.”

  Yasutaka Tsutsui

  One of modern Japan’s most renowned writers, Yasutaka Tsutsui has won the Tanizaki Prize, the Kawabata Prize, and several other awards. He was decorated as a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. He lives in Japan.

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