July to October 1984

July to October 1984 is the period identified for the second book, “Bird as Prophet.” Within this frame, scenes of an aquarium visit and a cat’s return are set against a remembered wartime zoo slaughter and a later account of watching ducks. The sequence makes animal life more than a passing motif: animals are encountered as creatures with particular habits and vulnerabilities, even as human observers seek meaning in them.

Encounters with animals

At the Ueno Zoo aquarium, Kumiko and Toru spend their first date viewing a special exhibition of jellyfish, from tiny specimens to those more than three feet across. Toru would rather see ordinary fish: as a boy, he had been surrounded by jellyfish while swimming and retained a lasting fear of them. Kumiko, by contrast, pauses at each tank, absorbed by the animals’ movement and vivid colors. Their different responses make the same display both a source of apprehension and an object of fascination.

A return without explanation

The missing cat comes home after an absence of a year, its fur clotted with dried mud and its body somewhat thin but otherwise apparently unharmed. Toru feeds it sliced mackerel and water; once it has eaten, the cat settles into his lap and sleeps. Its quiet trust brings back Toru’s awareness of the animal’s soft warmth and its small, quick heartbeat, which he compares with his own allotted time. The return is concrete, but its cause remains unanswered: Toru cannot learn where the cat has been, what it did during the year, or why it came back then. The episode offers reunion without explanation, leaving the gap in the animal’s history intact.

Remembered violence and its limits

A wartime memory shows Japanese soldiers ordered to kill dangerous animals at the zoo as Soviet forces approach Hsin-ching and the Kwantung Army’s position weakens. The soldiers kill the leopards, wolves, and bears, but leave the elephants alive after the lieutenant concludes that their size makes the rifles ineffective. The men are relieved; the decision also exposes a reversal in the perceived difficulty of killing, as they reflect that killing people on a battlefield had been easier than killing animals in cages. Chinese workers remove the dead animals and clean the cages, while the veterinarian is left facing the practical problem of disposing of the bodies as the city prepares for battle. The scene places animal deaths within military collapse and civic disorder, rather than treating them as detached spectacle.

Watching the duck people

In a letter from the place where she works, May describes a pond on the factory grounds where about twelve ducks live. In December, thin ice has begun to form, and she expects that heavier ice may force them elsewhere when people come to skate. On weekends she walks through the woods, sits for hours watching them, and sometimes brings old bread. She attends to their actual difficulties—especially their slipping on the ice—while acknowledging that her account of what they think is only her own interpretation. For May, their unintentional falls are funny without making their lives a performance for human amusement; their serious attempts to get by are part of what she values. The solitary routine leaves her with a happiness she says she has not felt for a long time, giving the period’s animal encounters a quiet counterpoint to the zoo’s imposed deaths.