Greetings 12
My first memories are not real memories; they are not in my head but in the photos that my mother used to keep with great care in the night table, together with my father’s medals and other mementos. Among these faded, black and white pictures, there is a series that was taken on the balcony, in my home, when I was about one year old.
That was a nice balcony, on the seventh floor of our apartment building, and when I grew a little bit older, it became one of my favorite places in the house. It was there that I learned to spit on the passing people’s heads (not an easy feat from seven floors up), and how to give the right spin to the hundreds of bottle caps that I kicked down on the parked cars.
It was also on that balcony that I became an ant-hunter.
That building was always full of ants, but they were too shy or too afraid to venture inside my apartment. They didn’t need to: my parents had the habit to keep the garbage in the far corner of the balcony, near the potted plants.
So we didn’t really have problems with them. It was just that when I was a kid, I was a plain little bastard, always prone to harass, kill and destroy. I knew all the hidden paths that those poor ants where using to bring the food home, and I used to spend the time devising new ways to get rid of them.
Mosquitoes are by far the Italians’ enemy No. 1. Every summer, we stock our houses with tons of zampironi, lotions, sprays - you name it. I consider myself rather lucky because mosquitoes apparently don’t find my blood sweet enough. When I lived in Italy, they usually preferred to concentrate on my mother and sister. Now that I live in Japan, I have even less problems, because my wife catches all the flying objects that come too close to us. You should see her. She is faster than a chameleon. And no, she doesn’t catch them with her tongue. She uses her bare hands.
This said, I’ve seen my share of bloodbaths in the past. The scariest incident in which I was involved, happened in 1989. It was a very hot and humid June, and I was about to graduate from college. My then-girlfriend had just arrived from Japan, and she was staying with me in the tiny flat that I was renting in Pisa, the town where I was studying.
One night, we came home very tired and fell asleep as soon as we touched the bed. The hot air was so oppressive that we decided to keep the windows open. After a couple of hours, my girlfriend’s moaning woke me up. I turned the light on and saw with horror that her body was totally covered with red dots. She had been stung so many times that it looked as if she had a bad case of chicken pox. Even more surprisingly, I was almost untouched. I immediately closed all the windows and killed as many monsters as I could. Then I wrapped a bed sheet around my girlfriend, mummy-style.
Moving to Japan introduced a completely new and different flavor to the bug experience. Apart from the ubiquitous mosquitoes, that apparently manage to annoy everyone everywhere, cockroaches began my new enemy No.1. They come in different types and sizes and infiltrate your house through every possible opening.
One of them once dared fly into my kitchen through the open window. It landed on the dustbin (how appropriate…), and there remained…squashed by the frying pan I happened to have in my hand.
Although my wife is a fearless mosquito hunter and has no real problems with other bugs, she can’t stand roaches. That’s why I’m always called into action every time one of them decides to take a walk in my kitchen. Hunting roaches is a fine art that requires tremendous skill, patience, and a strong stomach. And it’s nearly not as un-pc as fox hunting.
I consider myself lucky to live in Japan. A fellow teacher of mine is married to a guy from Ghana. When she first visited his country, she stayed in his parents’ house. One night she went to the toilet, and when she turned the light on, she saw a large black blot in the sink. As soon as she took a step inside, the blot disintegrated into an army of scrambling roaches frantically running for cover.
Alright, enough with horror stories. I’d like to finish this brief excursus into bug-ness with one of my favorite animals: the spider. I can understand why so many people are horrified by these cute eight-leggers, but I must say that I’ve never had problems with them. Besides, I’m a great Spiderman fan, so how could I possibly hate them!
When I lived in Italy, spiders weren’t a common sight. Here in Japan, however, I’ve changed house four times so far, and the last two are located in areas full of trees and cultivated land, so that, as you can see from my posts, we are surrounded by any kind of bugs, big and small, especially spiders.
Some of them have a rather small body but looooong thin legs. Another one that used to be my neighbor was really huge, the biggest spider I’ve ever seen. It had built its web just above my entrance door, near a light that at night attracted all the insects. Some bastard used to destroy its web day in and day out, but the spider invariably rebuilt it again and again, meanwhile adding to its collection of cocooned preys.
We were on friendly terms. I would greet it every evening when I came home from work.
All these years in Japan have given me the opportunity to see several outstanding insects first-hand. I’ll never forget the biblical monster I saw one night. Again, it was a hot summer night, and my wife and I decided to take a walk near our apartment. The street lighting was very sparse to say the least, and the vending machines, located at regular intervals along the road, offered most of it.
At a certain point, we looked down and saw a fast-approaching millipede (sort of) that was riding the white painted line of the road. It was a grotesque apparition, something that would have looked right in David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch. Its many legs were much longer that a typical millipede. They were bent like the grasshopper’s, and the fast-moving creature all but looked like a steam engine. We had to jump out of the way because this thing never seemed to notice our presence and kept running in a straight line, fast disappearing into the night.
Do you like bugs? Do you hate them? Any interesting stories to share? Please do tell me.
No more bugs for now. Next time we are going to talk about a different kind of monster…
I once half-woke up in the middle of the night in a hot, sticky Japanese summer, to the sound of someone playing the guitar. "Who on earth is playing a guitar at this time of night?" I thought. As I became more awake, I realized that the guitar playing was very bad and tuneless. Then, as I became fully awake, I figured out where the sound was coming from — the electric fan. I turned on my bedside torch, and there was a huge cockroach running over it, strumming the metal cover wires with its feet!
I love the large spiders and their webs in my local park, especially in the very early morning when the dew or rain glistens on the Web.