MOUSE

Packets of convenience store cheese stacked neatly on the desk next to the computer. Slices, blocks and bite-sized morsels. Always from PeopleStore, always late at night. Lees people around then. Less competition for the cheese. During the day stores might impose limits due to the overwhelming demand for their processed dairy products. At night I can take my time, selecting only the best and the freshest cheeses without being jostled or having my tail stood on. I used to coil it up inside the back of my jeans, but I got the most awful chafing whenever I did that, and there are some parts of a tail you just can’t scratch with four feet, especially when your legs are a short as mine. Walking on my hind legs is hard enough without the denim chafing my skin as well. Far better to let it out and let things take their course. It isn’t such a long tail, anyway. I find that people rarely even notice it; they are so set in their programmed ways, looking straight ahead to admire the prescribed scenery at the correct level. The only ones who see it are stumble drunks and small children. The drunks can’t believe what they are seeing and the kids can’t get anyone to listen to what they say. The only downside is that people who don’t see it will step on it. From what I understand, the pain is something like being kicked in the shin by a leather boot while wearing shorts.

Forgive me; the tale is more important than the tail. That is my little joke. I roll up a slice of American cheddar and stick it in the corner of my mouth like a yellow cigar, testing its resolve with the tip of my tongue as its odour seeps into my nostrils. A shudder of olfactory orgasm and the temptation to wolf it down returns as strong as ever, but there is so much work ahead of me, and my rations must last until night falls again. There was a time when I was addicted to cheese, eating Edam with the morning paper, chewing camembert as I floated in the bath, and gorging myself on Gouda during the evening television window. The problem with short legs is that if your belly gets too large, they can no longer touch the ground, and for one tortuous day in 2005, when my cheese addiction was at both its peak and its nadir, I was literally stranded in my living room, balancing on my belly, my toes flailing desperately to regain contact with the floor. It was gas brought on by a half-wheel of Danish blue cheese that left me swollen and immobile, but my increasing girth was a willing accomplice and that day of stagnation was compounded by my inability to even change the channel on the television, with the result that I was forced to endure seventeen straight hours of inane celebrity cooking shows and their accompanying advertisements.
Never again, I swore to myself, and my days of cheese rationing began. The situation may have been even worse had I been forced to endure the scorn of workmates whose tongues are rarely coated with grace or inclined to form merciful sounds.

There is too much competition out there for any sign of weakness to become visible, not to mention a lack of motion making it quite difficult for any kind to commuting. Luckily, due to the obvious but incredibly never publicly comprehended copyright violation and appropriation of my species’ good name by the world’s computer industry, and the combination of Japan’s stringent copyright legislation with a low-profile but astronomically financed court settlement, I never have to leave my apartment to earn money. The settlement terms agreed between the Federation of United Rodents and the giant computer manufacturers ensured that we would each be paid a monthly retainer for their use of our name for their accessories, and all we had to do was ‘be as quiet as mice’, as one rodent journalist remarked tongue-in-cheek. The world’s rodents were divided into zones, with the compensation for each paid by one of the conglomerates. Like all other Japanese mice, my cheque from Apple arrives on the first of each month, no fortune by any stretch of the imagination, but more than enough to keep me in cheese and to pay the bills. They also gave each of us a computer (complete with a two buttoned motion sensor accessory featuring a click-wheel and laser-guided wireless precision – so much more sensible than their ‘name’ for it, don’t you think?), and this, more than the money or the five-fold reduction in my cheese intake, has changed my life.

With more money than I could spend arriving in an anonymous brown envelope on the first of each month, and only so much depth in the daytime television scheduling for those who have no interest in household cleaning products and are naturally limited in their ability to use chopsticks, I needed something to do. Cheese was my inspiration, more specifically, the catering pack of plastic-wrapped Kraft slices that occupies a permanent place in both my heart and fridge. 144 segregated slices, all isolated, all far from whichever cow somewhere in America deposited their raw materials into the pre-warmed suction cups of a throbbing milking machine. From teat through tube into canister to factory, then processed and refined and added to and mixed and solidified and refrigerated and flattened and cut and wrapped. So many phases, until even the cow itself would not recognise its progeny, flatlining with 143 others in the kitchen of my Tokyo apartment.

Any one slice of cheese has flown further than me, has been touched by more hands than me, has had, in its own nearly two-dimensional form of existence, experienced more than I have, but for all that, it is powerless to do anything if I decide to unwrap and eat it. It is powerless because it doesn’t know where it has come from, or indeed what is going to happen to it. It doesn’t remember or appreciate all that it has seen as it moved across oceans and continents. It doesn’t resist in any way except for the slightest exertion it requires from my teeth to bite through it. There was more difficulty in opening the packet it came in, or in carrying the ‘Family Pack’ home from PeopleStore, a dairy brick swinging against my hip as I walk. From Nature through human interaction with the help of refinement and technology then encountering the world of retail and consumption before coming to an unanticipated end. There aren’t so many differences between us and cheese slices, save that we don’t come wrapped in plastic. On second thoughts, perhaps I should reword that as: we don’t exist wrapped in plastic.

We are on the same production line, churning through our days as quietly as possible, treading water in the same blissfully ignorant way. One cheese slice is flimsy, but 144 of them grouped together have the ability to bruise or even, given the right circumstances and aim, to fend off a mugger with a well-aimed blow.

Cheese slices don’t know anything. Cheese slices get eaten. One cheese slice means little. A block of cheese slices is substantial. Cheese has the ability to focus the consumer’s attention on nothing else for the brief moments in which it is savoured. It shares this ability with chocolate, wine, and the best culinary efforts of a mother with above-average cooking ability. Dairy products have never been popular in Japan, except on rare occasions when ‘celebrities’ inadvertently endorse them on talk shows, leading to a national buying frenzy that abates only when the shelves become lactose-free. We have become a lactose intolerant nation, without the strength in our bones to decide where we are going next, mired in a soya-based apathy because we simply do not know what is happening around us. We eat the odd slice of cheese, like placing lone jigsaw pieces in a massive puzzle, but can never find the blocks that would show us the rest of the picture. The nation needs more cheese, cheese in bulk, greater ease of cheese, and as much as it goes against my mousely instincts, I have the time and the means to provide it.