Lizards, or Japanese Grass Lizards

I have loved lizards since I was a child.
I loved them so much that every time I found one on the side of the road, I would catch it and bring it home.
I believed that if I loved something, it had to be mine, no questions asked. It had to be where I could see it, where I could touch it at any time. I didn't love things that were far away.

I put the lizards I caught into a paper box printed with a wood-grain pattern that had once held high-quality kuzumochi. For a child whose hand was big enough to cover the box, it was a very precious item because it had held my favorite treat. It was fitting for storing my favorite lizards.

"They'll die if they can't breathe."

My mother tried to stop me, but there was no way I would listen. These lizards were mine, and my mother's orders were meaningless. I was a stubborn child who would never bend.
As expected, the next day, the little lizard wasn't moving. It wasn't even limp. It had shrunk a size. It wasn't even flipped over. It was just stiff, in the exact shape I had placed it in yesterday. Its belly wasn't pulsing, either.
Perhaps this is what death is. Ah, so I shouldn't lock up the things I love.

I would catch lizards again.
Some would cut off their tails and run away, but I wasn't looking at their tails to begin with. It was pointless for them to wiggle their tails to distract me. What I was looking at was never the tail, but always the lizard itself.
But I didn't bring them into the house anymore.

"Let them go in the garden."

This time, I decided to listen to my mother. If they were in the garden, maybe I could see them again.
From then on, day after day, I caught lizards and kept releasing them into our not-so-large garden.

My mother's hobby was gardening. She would replace annuals every season as if they were disposable, and she didn't like fruit-bearing trees or perennials. The only exception was the goumi tree, which she planted solely because it attracted birds. Even though the red berries were cute and plump, the branches had sharp thorns. My father would complain every time he got pricked while pruning it.
On days when my mother was in a good mood, she would take me to the home center and let me choose the colors of the pansies. I hated the metallic, intense smell of the tacky bright pink petunias in the flower section and the red geraniums that had just been pruned.

My mother loved birds. I heard she had kept two pairs of budgies, and then a hill myna. I have a faint memory of keeping a white and light blue female bird and a yellow and yellow-green male bird. They were probably those budgies, but I was told that before I was old enough to remember, I had let them fly away into the sky twice. I was a child who locked up her own lizards but let other people's birds fly away.
Since then, my mother gave up on buying birds. That was why she planted the goumi tree instead. Sometimes she would stick apple cores onto the thorns of the goumi tree or place a cast-iron bird feeder in the garden. She must have really loved birds. Even though it seems the hill myna, Kyu-chan, only took a liking to my father.

In my mother's prized garden, there were still lizards. And, without learning their lesson, they would get caught by me again, just like always.
I would peer into their tiny faces and stroke their heads. I would flip them over and trace the soft, squishy part of their white bellies. I was enchanted by the lizard as it let me do as I pleased. Their light brown backs were slightly rough. If I stroked them from the head down, the scales wouldn't stand up, and it felt good. I could feel the lizard's heartbeat pulsing through the thin skin of its belly. A joy would well up in me, and I never grew tired of it.
When I was satisfied after stroking them for a while, I would set them down on the ground. Surprisingly, the lizards wouldn't run away. They would just exist, looking at nothing in particular, right beside me as I worked on weeding.
Even so, where did this lack of a sense of danger come from? I see. These creatures had inherited the fate of being caught by me in this garden, generation after generation.

My classmates would look on with disgust as I crawled on the asphalt, completely absorbed in the lizards. I didn't care. I had a lizard in my hand, after all.

"You're gross, Yoko-chan."

That said, I didn't like every reptile. I liked lizards, geckos, newts, and (only the small ones) frogs. Of course, I liked dinosaurs too. But I just couldn't stand snakes.
I realized this when my mother gleefully picked up a dead snake. We found a snake that had been run over by a car on the road along the river near my elementary school, and she put me on the back of her bicycle and forced me to grab the tail of the flattened snake, which hadn't even dried of blood yet. My mother was determined to skin the snake and keep it in her wallet as a charm. I was more afraid of my mother herself than the flattened snake with tire marks on it.
The next day, when I left the snake's carcass on the porch tiles to dry, a crow apparently took it away. Thank you, crow. Was it delicious, the snake?

My mother's hobbies were shrouded in an inexplicable darkness. On the bay window, there were clown figurines and replicas of the swan ornaments from Neuschwanstein Castle. Venetian masks and other such masks hung on the walls, and a bottle of habu sake sat in the alcove.
Inside the bottle, a snake was coiled uniformly. Its eyes were cloudy white, and its mouth was wide open, showing its fangs. I heard that my mother, who was from Okinawa, had received it from a relative as a wedding gift, but I never saw it opened.
Right above the door to my room, she stuck a colorful, gaudy frilled lizard mask—red, orange, green—and made it watch me all day long. The plastic mask with its eyes and mouth cut out in circles was creepy and unbearable. I liked living, plain brown lizards, and I didn't want any part of such a fake.
When my mother died, the first thing I got rid of was this mask. The frilled lizard, which had been left alone for over 15 years, was covered in dust and had become dull by the time I took it down. It was rough, whether from dust or the degradation of the plastic. It scattered gray dust inside the trash bag as quietly as a death rattle. I tied the handles tightly. The frilled lizard's eyes would no longer reflect anything.

In the garden that had lost its master, there were still lizards.
They say lizards eat pests, but honestly, I haven't felt that to be true for many years. Even if I burn mosquito coils, mosquitoes still fly, and the garden is still full of insects. It would be nice if they caught at least one insect in front of me once in a while.

Even so, lizards are everywhere. Among the weeds. In the swaying shadows of the splinters of the rotting veranda. At the edge of the dappled sunlight.

When I am weeding in the scorching heat, they always show themselves. They appear like the only reward for a chore I hate. They defenselessly wiggle their long tails.
As if it were a ritual, I quickly catch the shadow moving in the corner of my eye.

"You're cute, little lizard."

I say that and stroke them.
The individuals don't have names. They are alllittle lizards. Occasionally, only the obviously small ones become "little tiny ones," but even those little tiny ones soon become "little lizards."
Lizards in early spring are even cuter. They have just woken up from hibernation and are dazed. Their eyes aren't fully open, and their movements are sluggish. They already have genes that make them easy to catch, and I wonder if they don't even realize they've been caught by me. The heartbeat in my hand is also slow and clumsy.

I still don't know how to gauge my distance from lizards.
If this were a rare, endangered lizard, I might have become a king serving a sacred lizard, like the Barbary lions that were kept in the paradise of the Moroccan royal palace and spared from extinction. But what I am chasing around is the common Japanese grass lizard found everywhere. It's not even a true lizard.

However, it is said that Japanese grass lizards are rarely seen in cities anymore. In well-maintained parks and neatly paved roads, there is no longer a place for them.

In my mother's unkempt garden, there are still lizards today. Living carefree lives. They have it easy.

If it weren't for the lizards, I would never do any gardening. You are the king.