Meditations On The So-Called “Purrito” – A Moment Of “Cultural Exchange”

Dear Worrywart. I try, as a self-styled “ambassador” for things Japanese, to be selective about what types of “cultural sharing” might qualify as “constructive,” “mutually beneficial,” and/or “enriching.” I turn your attention carefully toward aspects of Japanese culture that will further these goals — toward tentacle porn, toward campy Mishima porn, toward Robogeisha porn.

As surely you must know, every choice to share involves another choice, one of equal, or indeed even greater, importance: the choice *not* to share.

But some aspects of culture will always resist the benevolent hand of brokerage, it seems. And some participants in this exchange will always stray starry-eyed into the wilderness, just clicking away at whatever looks “fun,” or “cute,” or [shudder] “kawa-ii!”

And so here we are. Face-to-face with what has been termed, in a misguided but well-meaning act of “taking the edge off” of what would otherwise be a dead-eyed stare into the whistling abyss, a “purrito.”

How “fun.”

How “cute.”

How [shudder] “kawa-ii!”

So now the time has come for little “cultural sharing,” a little “translation,” if you will.

I’ll wait until you’re back with your deliciously ironic box of “Men’s Pocky” you picked up in Chinatown and your “bubble tea” that I know you know is not particularly Japanese but is irresistible anyway and besides you get the “red bean” flavor so how non-Japanese can it be?

I’ll wait until you get settled and comfy, until the initial zazen position you assumed to impress me makes your legs tingle enough that, groaning and smiling sheepishly, you stretch your legs into the more comfortable “Indian-style” position on your square, indigo-blue zabuton cushion. Okay? Ready?

Okay.

Look at the title card on that video. It clearly states that the spectacle before us is not, in fact, a “purrito.” Nor is it an “en-cat-lada,” a “kittychanga” or a “tabby wrap.”

The title card, in stark black-and-white, in fact warns us of what lies ahead, in the plainest terms possible. And yet you blunder forth, grasping at the promise of “purritos,” of “fuzz-jitas.” But wait. Read it again. What does it say?

That’s right. It tells us that we are about to be confronted not with an adorably literal and purring approximation of “comfort food,” but rather an “imomushi na neko.”

Yes, you read that correctly. “Imomushi na neko.” “Caterpillar cat.” Or, if you will, a “CATerpillar.”

“Kawa-ii,” right?

I’ll remind you of a little story you may have heard of, by an author named Edogawa Rampo. An author of lurid and popular tales, Edogawa styled himself a Japanese Edgar Allan Poe – to the point that his very penname is a riff on his dour predecessor’s. Sharing Edgar Allan’s instinct for storytelling, Edogawa otherwise diverged from his inspiration in career trajectory and thematics, leading a long and richly rewarding career in publishing by satisfying a public with dark tales that substituted voyeurism, dismemberment, and slithering sexuality for Poe’s obsessions with live burial, ghostly return, and shuddering romanticism.

And in 1929, Edogawa unveiled one of his most enduring – and disturbing – tales.

One called “Imomushi” — “Caterpillar.”

The caterpillar in the story is in fact a man, a great General returned from an unnamed war decorated and mutilated – no legs, no arms, his face blasted into near-unrecognizability, his vocal cords obliterated, he is unable to communicate save via a pencil clutched between his teeth and the expressive power of eyes stripped of the context of any other features.

Naked. Imploring. Wet.

This general-turned-worm is tended to by his wife, who feeds and cares for him and yet is a boiling cauldron of unfulfilled desire. She fattens the general until his bandages strain against his bulk, and she caresses his silky, limbless body until he writhes with desire himself, his eyes rolling, his cries inchoate and as desperate as those she cannot allow herself to vocalize aloud.

In the end, it’s the eyes that break her. In a fit of madness, she plucks them out and flees the house. To stop the staring. To get some peace.

She returns, guilt-ridden and weeping, with a doctor who dresses the wounds and leaves. “Forgive me,” she traces with her finger on his shuddering skin. “Forgive me.” She writes it invisibly again and again across his chest as it grows wetter and wetter from her tears. “Forgive me.”

And one day, she returns home, and finds his room empty and a message scrawled clumsily across the paper doors. Reading it, she runs out into the garden – and sees her husband, the decorated general, the war hero, as a shadowy lump wriggling across the ground, burrowing blindly into the soil: a caterpillar finding its home at last, beyond desire, beyond speech, beyond humanity. Where there’s peace at last.

And of course, his last message to her, scrawled laboriously with a pencil clutched in his teeth across the wall he could only sense through the bandages covering the sockets where his eyes once were, engulfed in an unending darkness brought on by the ruthlessness of desire: “I forgive you.”

“I forgive you.”