The Summer of Owls - James Sullivan

I woke with the 5-something a.m. sunrise to find another owl waiting for me. Digging into the heel of my foot was a bottle cap from a Hitachino Nest White Ale. It bore an image of a stylized, red owl character, staring blankly with eyes like big cartoon breasts. At first, I was not sure if I had made it to the morning or if it was still the previous day. The light relentlessly filtering through the paper panes of my shoji window reminded me of a late afternoon, the last inning of baseball on a dusty Midwest field. As the summer marched toward its most intense weeks, the glow of morning had gradually stretched its greedy fingers out to meet the fading light of evening, leaving precious little time for sleep, were one fortunate enough to find it. The summer heat and humidity of the Kansai region had soaked into every hour of the day, bloating each moment like a boiled vegetable. I felt like I was soon to be served with steaming rice.

This summer, like an undulating desert horizon, seemed to stretch out endlessly before me, dissolving, through tremendous, terrible heat the boundary between here and some other there, too blurry now to make out—at least with my eyes. (But what about an owl’s?) There was so little I could even perceive through the fog of summer, and what I could perceive, I could not trust. 

I had been a funk since the beginning of the season when a strange virus took hold of me with full force and wrung me out. I was a hollow man for two weeks, dehydrated and on the verge of losing my voice to some phlegmy devil. This virus took my body to the edge, and when my health returned, I still felt as if some part of me had been irretrievably lost. The illness had reached to some deep part of my being and shaken something fragile, like how even a slight misconfiguration in the inner-ear canal can put the most solid, gargantuan body off-balance. I was vulnerable, weak, and without an inner spark. My enthusiasm for life itself seemed to have been flushed away, and I was left only with the fear that this was the new normal. Is this what happened with age? I wondered. Could a virus rock a body to such an extent that a person could be emotionally neutered until death?

When had the first owl appeared to me? When had the first one seen me? When had the first one silently swallowed its prey in the depths of a black night? I suppose that’s a matter of when one picks an arbitrary starting point. In that case, I select childhood.

In first grade, my class had, as part of some science project, picked apart owl pellets, black-gray, dusty chunks of undigested fur and junk falling over our tools as we worked, piling up bones into tiny piles like crime scene investigators excavating the victim of a long unsolved murder. Whatever we were supposed to have learned from this macabre exercise, what stuck with me was the tangibility of death held in these revolting little capsules and the feeling that the core nature of this world was to chew up and spit out the littlest creatures.

That’s what I remembered when Mimi contacted me out of the blue and invited me to the owl café.

On a lonely night after work, searching online chat profiles for clues about where the missing part of myself had gone, I had struck up a conversation with a young woman who lived nearby. Mimi, her screen name read below an up-close, filtered photo of her eye, encircled by thick, black frames.

Meitantei1984 (10:41): What are you doing tonight?

Mimi (10:42): Drinking in a bar!

Meitantei1984 (10:42): Alone??

Mimi (10:46): All alone!

Meitantei1984 (10:47): Are you lonely?

Mimi (10:44): Well, I’m alone after all. (lol)

We gambled shots of Jägermeister, groping and fondling as we lost our balance, and 20,000 yen later, I woke up on the floor of my laundry room, glasses bent, still fully clothed, joints creaking as I struggled to my feet, body bone dry.

When Mimi invited me to the owl café, her text seemed to come out of a different world, as if a friend from a past life had somehow traversed the highway of history to find me and have coffee just one last time before the long goodbye. So it was that we time travelers went into Kobe city for a sober afternoon.

You may have heard of cat cafés, those places lonely, cat-loving apartment dwellers go for their fix of feline affection with a jolt of caffeine (usually cat-themed, with cute cate faces of cream adorning fresh brewed coffee). I’d always wondered if cat hair got into the drinks, but Japanese businesses tend to be extremely fastidious, so never fear.

This owl café, though, boasted no specialty drinks was not a hot spot for pet tourism. Although it did host a few resident owls, the café catered to owl owners who simply wanted a space to spend time with their birds in public and allow them to mingle with their peers, owned by other owl enthusiasts who brought the big-eyed predators into the shop on leashes.

Have you ever considered the immense variety of owls? If I asked you to picture one, you’d probably imagine a pretty standard creature, but when I entered this café, swimming with wing-propelled coffee aroma, owls of all shapes, sizes, and colors welcomed me. Small, lightly-colored, gentle-looking ones with soft feathers; foot-tall monsters with jagged profiles and big, drooping ear feathers and thick, imposing, talons; short, round owls with perfectly circular heads rotating in curiosity; wide-eyed owls with faces like big bowls, pulling the universe toward their all-seeing black holes, sucking the entirety of human existence into a swirling miasma and down an interstellar drain into nothing. These owls’ feathers were patterned with ancient code, hieroglyphics beyond my comprehension, and some bore ear feathers that took the shape of horns. Some owls cuddled their owners, while others watched me, tilting their heads, puzzled eternally.

Mimi was exploding with revelation. They say three women are a comedy troupe, but Mimi was one all on her own. A bebop jazz conversationalist, she slammed her hands on the table when the mood got hot.

“Why births, though?” I asked. “Do you need to confirm something?”

“Wouldn’t it be a perfect paradox? Watching your own birth.”

“I saw a video of one in middle school. Once was enough.”

“I could watch it again and again,” she said. “So if I could travel in time, I wouldn’t care about the dinosaurs or the Edo period or hover boards in the future. I want to see my birth—and then my parents’ births and all of my friends’ births.”

“Why not perform a birth or two while you’re there. At least lend a hand cutting the cord.”

“Not a bad idea!” she boomed, her tiny palms beating a rhythm on the table, teacup rattling on its porcelain cymbal. “And I wanna see yours, too.”

All owl eyes on us. I couldn’t relax. Something about birds that had been caged put me on edge. I always sensed a hint of an imminent potential for violence in their eyes, like prisoners waiting for one lapse in the guards’ vigilance to make their escape by any means necessary. Did these owls born into human ownership dream of nights spent in trees, scanning the ground for vulnerable prey? Or was the scope of even their dreams predestined to be confined to cages?

Once I’d become attuned to the omnipresence of owls, I noticed them everywhere. A t-shirt in a thrift store read: “The Happy Owls!” A high school acquaintance—who had taken my hand in hers during a geography class and, while telling me she was free after school while her boyfriend was at wrestling practice, gently fellated my pointer finger and teasingly bit down until her fangs mingled with bone—uploaded photos of herself at her community college painting class. What had she painted? Owl after owl, of course. She looked happier than the face I saw reflected in shop windows on steamy Kansai afternoons, a sweaty face imposed on ghostly mannequins. An ad for TripAdvisor (green and red owl mascot eyes merging with mine) beckoned me on journeys abroad, to somewhere cool, remote. I’d meditate deeply on the lives of Eskimos. Did they have owls there? How many licks did it take to get to the center of those lollipops, anyway? Why did Brian Wilson have that owl on his piano in that famous video when he was singing “Surf’s Up” for the TV viewers? Owl statues lined city streets alongside nude musicians in bronze. In a Yiyun Li story I read, an older woman chases a strutting owl down the street, and so I chased them—or they chased me—from moment to steamy moment, stalking silently.

Obon holiday arrived, bringing with it an even heavier layer of humidity, ectoplasmic, a reminder of the ancestral souls said to return to the world of the living in that week. Japanese people were busy with family. Attending reunions, holding ceremonies for the dead, and visiting grave sites to clean off headstones, burn incense, and leave offerings, sometimes to deceased ancestors they’d never even met. Crouching down in the August inferno, even those among the many elderly Japanese, some on the verge of death themselves, would suffer through this routine, some lamenting that, with their passing, there would be no family members left to maintain the family’s resting place—and their own graves, presumably.

With Japan’s famously aging population, the mood of funeral ceremonies varied considerably on the age of the subject. At one I attended, held in memory of a 90-year-old woman, we took part in the perverse pleasure of singing along to Christmas carols in lieu of the “And he will raise you up on eagles’ wings” and “Christ has died, Christ is risen” I had been used to in the States. But, when in Rome, Jingle All the Way.

As for myself, I felt no great debt or connection to my ancestors and almost just as few to anyone living, so when my vacation started I picked up a copy of the Best of the Beach Boys from Tower Records along with a collection of New Orleans jazz to listen to while I sailed away on an ocean of beer all afternoon, running up my electric bill to condition the air. The sounds and tastes of summer. Surf’s up.

One particularly dull, beer-less afternoon, I wandered into a thrift store and picked out a vintage Chipp tie in great condition with its original box. It was funeral black with orange owls keeping vigil from within the fabric night.

A brief word about owls.

My chief association with owls prior to that summer was wisdom. Owls seemed like the type of animal to accompany an eccentric professor or to bestow an important message to a hero wandering in the woods. The symbol of Athena, the bird of knowledge resting on the shoulder of the goddess, spreading its wings once the day has passed.

But don’t those wings conjure a sinister atmosphere? The owls fly soundlessly in search of prey and rest patiently in the high, sprawling branches of dead trees, seeing you before you see them. Don’t forget: these are killers.

I’d interrogate my students about owls during their English lessons and, after work, I’d soar over the vast fields of digitalized information of the internet, scanning far and wide for juicy morsels of information. Just what does an owl signify? There are a few noteworthy outlying cultural opinions, such as the Finnish who simply regard the owl as a moronic creature, standing in stark contrast to the wise Owl of Minerva. And as for the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, the owl served as a mount. Across North America and in Africa, they are ominous. In Japan, good fortune.

So just where did that leave me and the owl? Still licking for the center.

One muggy morning, Mimi called me.

“What ya doing today?”

“I’m going to Sosha Shrine.”

“Eh? If you want to pray for your ancestors, you need to go to a temple, not a shrine. Buddhism.”

“No, I’m going for the owls.”

A long silence floated over our conversation.

“I guess there is an owl statue there, now that ya mention it,” she said.

I knew that already, of course, having researched the shrine long before. Not only was there a statue but also an owl shrine mascot. Few people in the area knew about the character, as he was not particularly cute nor distinctive enough to stand out from the countless city, prefecture, company, and shrine mascots that populated souvenir shops across Japan. Still, the shrine would on special occasions pay a city employee to horse around in a fluffy owl suit and spook children, and they still sold character goods to raise funds. You definitely got the feeling this bird’s popularity was on the verge of extinction, but that endeared it to me all the more.

We made plans to meet at the shrine. I showered and gave myself a close, careful shave before selecting a blue oxford and my Chipp tie. Every step, even in mid-morning, was like wading through the hot breath of a lusty giant. By the time I had reached the shrine, my shirt was completely soaked through with sweat.

“Going to a funeral?” she asked.

“It’s a special occasion.”

“Eh?”

We walked under a large, stone gate at the entrance. No one was around. No one minding the shrine, no one selling owl goods. No city employees suffocating in costumes, no owl owners come to say a prayer for their pet’s health. But there were at least two owl devotees that morning, standing in sweaty reverence before a small, bronze statue of an owl, realistic and austere, the polar opposite of a cartoon character mascot. It sat with wide, concentric eyes like perfect storms under a severe brow the shape of a stealth bomber.

“Maybe you can touch it for luck,” Mimi said. I had been standing there soaked like a man caught in a downpour, lost in the dull, metallic shine of the owl’s feathers.

“Touch it?”

“Sure. Sometimes we rub statues at special spaces, for luck or to heal a particular part of the body.”

“But what part would I touch?” I asked, wiping my brow with the back of my hand. “And what would happen?”

“How should I know? Maybe you’ll grow feathers. Maybe nothing. Say, how about lunch?”

We ate yakitori, skewered chicken parts with salt and sauce, drank beer until we were ready to burst, flew back to my apartment, blasted the AC, and fucked until my cheap futon was flattened. I woke after a brief nap feeling mummified, ready to be picked apart by some Martian grad student in homo sapien studies. Slipping on pants and a shirt, I stepped on another Hitachino Nest beer cap and stepped out, leaving Mimi snoring gently in the cool air.

Outside, the sun was just setting. Near my apartment door, I found the body of a cicada lying on its back, black and white patterns on its belly like a bone suit at Halloween. I remembered collecting cicada exoskeletons from the trees in my family’s backyard, and I remembered the cicada killer, a wasp that preyed on the noisy bugs, a wasp that couldn’t compare to the famous Japanese hornet, which killed even grown men. Bodies piled everywhere. In Japan, there were sometimes so many dead cicadas that they’d have to be shoveled away like snow. Soon the weather would change, and the male cicadas that had surfaced to breed would die. For now, a chorus of the living continued on in a meaningless cacophony.

I reached down to turn the cicada over, wanting to see its top side. A shock ran through me as the cicada, rising from the dead, let out a defiant chirp and took flight.

Originally published by Blotterature, 2016

James Sullivan is the author of Harboring (ELJ Editions). His stories and essays have appeared in Cimarron Review, New Ohio Review, Third Coast, Fourth Genre, The Normal School, and Fourteen Hills among other publications. In 2022, he was a finalist for the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction. Connect on X @jfsullivan4th