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The Wasps · Shimaki Kensaku Lane Dunlop · translator Some lively visitors to my sickroom in early summer were the wasps. Certainly the stately, dashing appearance ofthe waspsbefitted the forerunners ofan active, prosperous season. Even the melancholy sickroom seemed suddenly to acquire an air of gaiety. The wasps were never still. Of course not when they were flying around, but even when they alighted a brimful energy kept their bodies pulsing as they moved about in short, mincing steps. A waist narrow as a thread connected their chests and abdomens. At first sight their bodies seemed all an elegant slenderness, but in fact they possessed a flexible toughness and durability. Judging from their exiguous midriff, you might think they could be easily pulled apart or snapped in two like a twig, but I doubt ifthey could. They had a steely luster about them, which rather than of iron blackness partook of a beautiful, gleaming blue. Their wings, too, as they took the light, were a lovely glistening purple. There was a persimmon tree that reached down its branches an arm's length away from my sickroom window. Its small white flowers were falling now. The honeybees hummed about it busily, as if the time were short. Compared with the wasps, they seemed like hard-working, honest citizens. Those mountain bandits, the hornets, were more like good-natured peasants. The wasps were like mettlesome samurai, out for glory. Once a wasp that I had just seen zoom up to the ceiling, with a resonant buzz that I couldn't believe was his, dive-bombed my pillow. No time to think that it was the wasp ofjust now—it was like a black pebble flung hard at me. It seemed to fly straight at my face. I threw up my right hand. I knew it was the wasp when it levelled off with a droning noise. It landed with a corpulent horsefly, that lay on its side with its legs loosely bunched. As I watched, the fly gave a few spastic twitches. After a while it could not move at all. Embracing the big horsefly with its whole body—head, legs, and stinger—the wasp gave it the coup de grace. They rolled over together like a burr. Another time I saw a wasp caught in a spider's web under the eaves. It was a freshly made web, as yetunbroken. "Now you're caught," I thought. Just then the wasp, with a violent shuddering and buzzing, adroitly made its escape from the web. As if nothing had happened, it flew up toward the high summer sky. The spider, who had instantly glided down from its hiding place in the upper part of the web, seemed as surprised as myself to find its likely prey gone. That sort of resolute quickness was just like the wasps. But there were so many ofthem! Busily spelling eachother intheir labors—not even the flies, whose numbers abruptly increased at this time, could compare with them. "So many wasps! " myhumanvisitors would say, their eyes widening as they suddenly noticed them all. Was there a reason why the wasps liked my The Missouri Review · 69 In the lintel and window-posts ofthe paper door, there were a lot oflittle round holes. Up to now, I had not cared at all what they were, or when and why they'd been made. This was an old, remodelled farmhouse and they were just naturally there. Why they were naturally there had never occurred to me. It was only as I lay in bed day after day that I saw there was a special relationship between those holes and the wasps. When they flew in the room and alighted on the lintel or the sides of the window, the wasps walked around as iflooking for something. When they found one of those holes, they always went inside it. Not once but four or five times, they came out and went back in. They seemed to conduct a minute inspection tour around each and every hole. Then they went inside. Then they came out again. The wasps were clearing some kind of trash out of the holes. In it was mixed what looked...

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