The Yakushima Monkey

“When did you first start to believe you were a monkey?” I asked.

I was living in Yakushima, a forested island in the Kagoshima Prefecture, some 60 kilometers off the southern tip of Kyushu. I’m originally from Aoshima, one of the many cat islands scattered throughout Japan, but a teenager visiting the island with her parents took me as a pet when I was two.

I was sunbathing near a shrine when she approached. The island received scores of tourists each day, so I wasn’t afraid of her. Humans were just a natural part of the environment at that point. Nothing to do with me if they wanted to gawk or give me a snack. There were some creeps you had to watch out for, but she seemed nice enough with her pink backpack. She walked over cautiously and sat next to me on the concrete without saying a word.

“Who does she think she is?” I remember thinking.

Despite her tiny body, she had managed to block the sun from my spot which I took personally. I began cleaning my paw (which I would later realize was actually a hand) to give myself something to do, but she just kept sitting there. Every now and then she would glance down at me and smile. I’d stop my licking and look up at her, waiting for something to happen. But it never did. She’d simply go back to looking at the sky or the cats meandering about. The songs of birds swirled around us, carried by a light breeze, and, in spite of her carelessness, I still felt the warmth of the sun soaking into my body from the concrete beneath me. It was a good day. And a part of me, I think, liked that I was sharing it with someone else.

Unlike me, my mother was a cat. I don’t think she ever knew her mother or father. There are hundreds of cats on Aoshima Island so new-born kittens are often misplaced and, if lucky, adopted by some other nursing molly. I often wished this is what had happened to me. My mother was cold and distant. All on my own I had learned to scavenge food from tourists and the occasional scampering rodent. All on my own I had learned the best springs and basins of accumulated rainwater to drink from. All on my own I had learned which cats not to go near and which were friendly. I didn’t need a thing from her, and yet I would find myself waiting around her all the time wherever she went. I think I just wanted to hear her say she loved me too.

At night my mother would leave me and my siblings and drift off into the darkness. I was afraid of the dark back then, so I never followed her. But I always listened to the sound of her voice as it grew more and more distant. Cats don’t have the same kind of language that humans do. It’s more like a few universal phrases and idioms that cats and even a select few humans can understand. The meaning of my mother’s meow, which I heard her tirelessly repeat into the night until either I fell back asleep or she had walked so far her voice no longer reached me, could best be translated as “I’m here!” or “It’s me! I’m here!”

I think she was looking for her mother. And I was looking for the part of her that loved me. I guess neither of us ever found what we were looking for.

All of this is just to say that I had a pretty lonely childhood. I didn’t know who I was or what I should do with my life. So when the tiny girl with the pink backpack turned to me and asked kindly, “Do you want to come home with me?” I thought, “Why not?” I was still relatively young. Life was a gigantic book I had yet to read. Might as well flip to a random page and start reading, I figured. For me, that page just so happened to be curling into this girl’s pink backpack as she carried me back to her parents and the departing ferry.

I could smell the salt of the sea through the crack in the zipper which she had left for me. Often as a kitten I had mistaken this scent for the smell of my mother. On an island sea-salt is pervasive, you see, and so was my mother. So I naturally put two and two together: she must be the source of that comforting scent. But as I left my home forever on that sunny day, the true source of the comfort that smell had given dawned upon me. I was the one who had made it meaningful. It had come from me. She had nothing to do with it. Nor would she as I lived out the rest of my years in this brief interval before death. Big words from a monkey, I know, but I mean it.

The bag swayed slowly, matching the rhythm of the first ferry which took us to the mainland, and then the second ferry which headed south towards Yakushima. After three hours or so I began to get restless and paw at the bag encasing me. That was when Suzuki’s parents discovered what she had done.

“What have you done?” they asked. But there was nothing to be done. We were hours away from Aoshima and the ferry had hours yet to go on its journey. This had been a spontaneous vacation, and Suzuki’s father had to work early the next morning. They chastised her behavior but nonetheless accepted me into their family. That is how I came to live in the forested island of Yakushima, where it is not uncommon to see a band of monkeys swinging through the nearby trees.

“Accept the limits of your life I proclaim to you, loved ones,” the motivational monkey preached. “Blessed is he who calls a spade a spade. Blessed is she who nurtures honesty and truth in her life. Break free from your delusions, my children. We are here but a short while, grasp it while you have the chance! Cursed is he who outwardly speaks ‘carpe diem!’ but inwardly speaks to his heart ‘I am the exception’. Foolish is he who thinks he will live forever! Seize the day! Accept the limits of your life! Bring one banana or a minimum of seven nuts to the Yodogawa Mountain Trail Entrance at 11am this Sunday to take part in my exclusive course on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger!”

The crowd of monkeys, birds, and cats cheered his speech and slowly began to disperse. We were standing in an isolated clearing in the middle of the forest around 12 minutes from my house. I had heard about the monkey’s speech from a neighborhood cat I talked to sometimes and had come to see whether or not he was the real deal. To be honest, I was impressed. His message resonated with me. It had been five years since Suzuki had taken me in her backpack to this strange new home.

“What did you think?” the neighborhood cat asked me the next day as I sunbathed at my usual spot on the front porch of Suzuki’s house.

“To be honest, I was impressed.” I told him, licking my hand nonchalantly. “His message resonated with me.”

“I’m hoping for salmon tonight.” The neighborhood cat said. He was always going on about his culinary hopes and dreams.

“I don’t care.” I told him as I stood up and stretched my body.

“Talk to you tomorrow hopefully!” he said cheerfully. He had probably been too busy thinking about salmon to hear anything I’d said.

“Talk to you tomorrow.” I echoed and sauntered inside.

To answer your question, I went to the monkey’s course that Sunday. I stole a banana from the fruit bowl on the kitchen counter and made my way to the Yodogawa Mountain Trail Entrance as instructed. I learned about this Heideggerian term called Being-Towards-Death, have you heard of this term?

“I haven’t.” I responded.

Well basically it’s related to this idea of authenticity — how can I be my authentic, true self? The answer, according to Heidegger, is to embrace the limitations of our lives and to act creatively and meaningfully within them. So the most important limitation we all face is death; we’re all going to die. And yet, almost everyone lives as if their lives are infinite. We put off important projects and goals with the excuse that we will do them later. We accept bad substitutes for love, meaning, and happiness under the false premise that at some point in the vague future everything will work out. But it won’t! At least, not unless we do something about it right now. That’s what the monkey taught those of us who attended his course.

“‘What is love?’ asks the fool.” The monkey lectured. His voice seemed to bounce off the towering trees surrounding us, and the brisk morning air began to feel almost electric as his words went on. “What is meaning?’ asks the deluded. ‘What is happiness?’ asks the idiot. The wisdom I give you, my children, is not new answers but new questions: ‘What and whom do I love?’ asks the wise. ‘How do I generate my own meaning and can I do it once more again and again?’ asks the learned. ‘What is my happiness?’ asks the well-advised. Each person has their own limitations. You do not choose where you were born nor do you choose who you were born to. You do not choose which interests and activities spark joy for you nor do you choose which gifts you are given and which gifts you may cultivate. You do not choose when you will die any more than you choose which music sounds the sweetest. It is your task to venture into the unknown, as all heroes do, and discover your limitations and henceforth your purpose. We seek our limitations not to escape them, as some would have you believe, but to embrace them. This is the wisdom I give to you, my children, and see how it has manifested itself in my own life.”

“I was born a poor, nameless monkey. Still I have no name, but I am rich in knowledge and generous at heart.” He was saying all of this so confidently. There wasn’t a trace of self-doubt behind his words. I thought to myself how nice it would be to feel that kind of self-assurance myself. “I realized from a young age my own gift for language and philosophy. I was chased and hunted by every librarian on this island for the simple act of educating myself. But did I give up? No, my children. I embraced this limitation. Accepting that my time on this earth would soon be cut short if I didn’t turn away from stealing books, I turned, instead, to the spoken word. I used the unique climbing ability gifted to me by nature to scale university buildings and eavesdrop through the windows to the lectures within. I devoted myself to absorbing knowledge in this way for many years before I realized that it was my gift not just to learn but to teach. It made and makes me happy, my children. Once I had found my happiness, I pursued it as fervently as those angry librarians of my childhood had pursued me. I am a monkey who was born to give motivational speeches. Go out yourselves, my children, and discover who you are and what you were born to do.”

It was at this moment that the electricity in the air around me reached its apex. Every hair on my body stood upright. A seed of an idea entered my ear and traversed the circuits of my brain before blooming into a revelation: “I am a monkey who was born to give motivational speeches.” I heard myself think. And it was true. I am a monkey and my purpose in life is to give motivational speeches.

The silence lingered for a few moments before I cleared my throat and looked down at the reams of miscellaneous papers strewn upon my desk. I was waiting for him to go on, but he seemed to have answered my question, at last, to his satisfaction.

“I guess…” I tried to figure out the right way to word what I wanted to say, “I want to be as respectful as possible to you,” I prefaced, “but you know you’re not literally a monkey, right? Like it’s just some kind of metaphor or something?”

“Your reaction isn’t foreign to me and I’m happy to address it.” He responded. “At first, I’ll admit, I did think I was what you call ‘literally’ a monkey. I thought I had two feet and two hands which I could use to swing from the branches of trees. I enjoyed bananas and nuts and the occasional lizard or bird egg. I made “ooh ooh ah ah” noises, or at least my best imitation of them. But I eventually came to understand, as I sense you yourself are now thinking, that this was all a delusion. To be clear, I was and still am a monkey. Nothing has changed on that front. But I accept my anatomy is that of a cat. I am just a monkey who happens to look exactly like a black cat.”

Again I waited for some kind of clarification that would make me understand, but he seemed to have finished his answer. “I’m sorry.” I struggled, “I guess I just can’t quite wrap my head around what you’re saying. How can you be a monkey if you look exactly like a black cat? And if your mother was herself a cat?”

“I can explain to you the metaphysics behind it, but at the end of the day it comes down to the brute fact that I know I am a monkey. I know it in the core of my being. I am as certain of it as I am that I am conscious and talking to you now. So if the meaning of the word ‘monkey’ doesn’t include me in your mind, perhaps your understanding of the word is flawed rather than my inclusion within its definition. As Heidegger wrote: ‘Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.’ I think, in this case, you are letting your own sense of language confuse you from the reality of the situation, which happens to be that I am a monkey.”

I took a moment to absorb all he had said. It made no sense, and yet he seemed so confident in it. I couldn’t tell if he was crazy or if I was stupid. “I’m sorry,” I concluded, “I just can’t accept that you are a monkey. I understand you think you’re a monkey, but that doesn’t make you one. It’s just too strange for me to wrap my my mind around at this point.”

He nodded. “I can accept that,” he said. “There are all kinds of strange things we don’t think to question in the course of our day to day lives. Why is it that you seem to be so persistently curious about how I can be a monkey when I look like a cat and not how I can talk to you? Isn’t a talking monkey — cat, whatever you want me to be — far stranger than a cat who thinks he’s a monkey? That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. There’s all kinds of strange rules and events happening all around us, every day, which go unnoticed. There’s this hidden underbelly to reality which, if you took a moment to appreciate, might amaze you. It also might terrify you, that has nothing to do with me. All I’m saying is that it’s this built in uncertainty to the universe, this hidden source or decision-making process, which happened to allow me to talk to you today and which also makes me a monkey. It also decided that the ground you’re standing on right now is solid. Isn’t that strange? How is it that you don’t just fall through the earth? Something which you don’t understand is holding you up. You may spin stories about atoms and forces, but none of that makes any more sense to you than a talking monkey who looks like a cat does. If anything, my situation makes more sense. At least you know what cats and monkeys and talking are! What is an atom? Have you ever seen one? What does it sound like? Perhaps right now it is crying out, “I’m here! It’s me! I’m here!” into an indifferent night.”

I closed my office door behind me and let out a deep sigh. “KYUSHU UNIVERSITY LIBRARY” stretched itself across a nearby wall in a colorful design some art students had painted several years ago. At the time I had just started working at the library and remember walking through the gigantic wooden doors to start my shift only to see these young college students painting on the wall. Did they have permission? Perhaps they were graffiti delinquents or activists hoping to make a bold political statement, both of which were obviously against the rules. My heart sunk in my chest. I hated confrontation. Thankfully, I looked to my left where the front desk was and saw my manager smiling, wishing me a good morning. They were just art students working on their senior project, he explained. I felt an immense relief at the removal of that uncertainty from my life. It was as if I had been lost in some forest in the dead of night only to have my manager arrive with a flashlight and escort me back to the well-lit cabin I had strayed from. Fire crackled in the fireplace. Steam rose from the teapot on the oven in the corner and the warm bed of my computer behind the front desk called to me.

What in the world was going on? I sat down on that same front-desk office chair I had been assigned to all those years ago. I craned my head backwards to confirm that I had closed my office door completely. Giving myself permission to close my eyes for a few precious moments, I pondered the absurd situation I now found myself in.

The library had just closed. I had been doing my usual rounds putting returned books back onto the shelves where they belonged when I had turned the corner and almost stepped on a pure black cat carrying an abridged version of Heidegger’s Being and Time in its mouth. The cat looked up at me and I looked down at him.

“That doesn’t belong to you!” I had joked, astounded and slightly amused at the sight of a cat carrying a book in its mouth. I thought it was adorable. But then I remembered the inventory discrepancies I had been noticing in the system. We expected and planned for several dozen books to go unreturned each month, however, lately books had been disappearing which had never been checked out. This was strange, because you had to scan your student ID to enter the library in the first place and we had top of the line, full-body scanners at each exit which logged every book that left the building and who had taken it. We examined the video footage to see if any students had perhaps lifted their stolen books above the scanners as they exited, but had found nothing. There was a security guard seated just beside the scanners any time the library was open, so this would have been almost impossible to pull off. The books at our library were mostly first or second editions and held immense monetary value, so the university had no problem diverting a fraction of its immense funding to pull out all the stops for security. It was my job as the newly appointed manager to ensure this system worked flawlessly. With each book that disappeared I feared for my job more and more. Like I said, I hate uncertainty. That forest was returning to me each day. Towering, claustrophobic trees were sprouting up, hogging a portion of the sunlight which had previously heated my comfort. With each book that disappeared, I felt more and more helpless to the darkness of that void. So when I saw this cat and the book he was attempting to steal, something snapped inside of me.

My first thought was that he was just a cat who had happened to pick up a book, but I couldn’t take that chance. Perhaps he had been trained by some book thief to steal inconspicuously. I had to rule out every possibility before releasing him back into the world. So I had taken him and locked him in my office where he now sat. That was when he started talking. Three hours of questioning later, I was just as confused as when I’d started. I didn’t know what I should do. I was the manager now. There was no higher up for me to appeal to. I was the one who had to make a decision.

As I sat in that chair, exhausted after a long day’s work, a kind of red anger swirled up inside of me. I hated this cat, I realized, as if the thought had fallen into my hands from above. I would never call him a monkey. I didn’t care how much esoteric, pretentious philosophy he quoted to me. My life had been comfortable before he showed up. I was cozy going to work each day in my office with its gigantic window overlooking the campus buildings in the distance. Some days I would pause from my work and gaze out that window, wondering what knowledge was being taught in all of those classrooms; what minds were being brightened; what good was being done. I was a part of that good, I felt. Students needed the books I provided for them. I was helping. I had never received an education myself, but through hard work I had arrived at a place where I could contribute to thousands of others’. I didn’t mind this disparity. I was a part of something much bigger than my individual life.

I missed the warmth this cat had so selfishly stolen from me; first by stealing the books my job and life depended upon and next by confusing me with his mere existence. I was now completely and utterly lost in that dark forest. I couldn’t even see my own hand in front of my face. I felt my breath bounce off the trees surrounding me. I could sense their presence by the electricity in the air which only made me itchy.

I would have to kill the cat. There was simply no other solution to my problem. I could ship him away or have him locked up in some animal shelter, but he was too clever for that. He would inevitably escape and steal again. Regardless, it was much deeper than material retribution now. His mere existence made me uncomfortable. Why did he think he was a monkey? How did he talk? These unanswerable questions buzzed in my ear like a mosquito. As long as he existed in the world, I concluded, I would never again experience the warmth of that small, cozy cabin I had enjoyed for so many years.

Yes, the world is a great place. There’s a chance that somewhere, out in the darkness, an even bigger cabin or castle or city awaited me. Maybe if I had kept wandering through that uncertainty, dawn would have eventually broke through and I would have been heated not by a crackling fire but by the power of the sun in the wide, blue sky. But right then I was cold and alone and frightened. I wanted to go back, to forget. I prepared my hands for what they were about to do, and stood up from my chair. Walking towards the office, I heard a commotion coming from the inside. I quickened my pace and burst through the door. The wind whipped through the room from the open window, scattering my papers like confetti. The silent university buildings stood in the distance. Here and there occupied classrooms lit up the night like sparkling candles. The cat was gone. But to this day it is said that if you are lucky, you may spot the tips of two black ears peaking through a classroom window, eavesdropping on the lectures within. Cats, too, it turns out, are excellent climbers.