Creepy Crawlies in Kamakura
Only 45 kilometers from the concrete jungles of Tokyo, Kamakura is a wild, green place. The mountains rise abruptly from the ground and are covered with deep green moss and ferns, surrounded by tall trees and stands of creaking bamboo. Wildlife thrives there with an enthusiasm I've only seen in Florida. Brown kites (a kind of hawk) trill high overhead. Huge, deep-voiced ravens raid garbage cans and mug passersby for food. The wild carp swimming in the shallow, polluted water of the Kashio River are large enough to snag low-flying sparrows from the air (not that I've ever seen them do it). At the end of the summer season, three-inch-long Japanese cicadas, or semi, thrash in enraged death throes and can raise a welt if they hit you. Well, I imagine that if I incubated for seven years, then spent only two weeks singing and mating before I died, I'd be upset too.
For the most part, I had no quarrel with the local wildlife. At least until I encountered the local spiders. Now I'd seen plenty of big bugs in Florida. The Florida state animal, the palmetto bug, is a winged roach large enough to carry off a small child. But these spiders... I swear, the brown house spiders ("Schizocosa humongous") in Kamakura were large enough to bring down and eat pigeons. If you think that's an exaggeration, then how about this: when they run across the floor, you can actually hear the pitter patter of their not-so-tiny feet.
But spiders are beneficial animals. They eat harmful bugs, and with the exception of the black widow and brown recluse, are not poisonous to people. These particular spiders were only capable of scaring a person to death, appearing out of nowhere, sprawling across a wall, ceiling or floor like a giant brown inkblot of doom. And they're formidably fast, capable of racing across a wall and into a hiding place at the first sight of a frantic human wielding a slipper.
I tried my best to live and let live, gently herding out the monsters when they tried to seek refuge in my house on cold or rainy days. "You'll starve," I'd tell them. "I've never seen so much as a roach in here." Gee, wonder why? When I found one particularly large spider on my bedroom wall, I held back with the slipper smacking, and we coexisted peacefully for the next few days. A week later, I found a second, smaller spider. Okay, it was getting crowded but I could live with two. I ignored them. A few days later, I found the second spider, curled up and dead, in my sock drawer. Hmm, this meant either a territory war or a wedding. I dumped the corpse and forgot about it. For a couple of weeks.
Then one evening, I arrive home and go to my bedroom to find the tatami floor--where I sleep, thank you--covered with skittering baby spiders. Now this was pushing my hospitality waaay too far. I spent a good part of the night picking up baby spiders with Kleenex and sweeping out the rest. From that point on, it was back to the slipper.
The most monstrous spider I ever encountered appeared on my wall in May of 1996, hiding discreetly behind my kitchen door. I shut the door, spotted the monster with its five-inch legspan, and my feet didn't touch the floor until I was fifteen yards outside the apartment. Swift application of the slipper shattered the creature into five pieces, which took several flushes to dispose of. Again, I felt bad about killing it, but no way would I pick it up or attempt to herd it outside.
In March of 1995, I was commuting to work, packed tightly on the JR Tokaido Line from Ofuna to Yokohama. At Totsuka Station, a woman wearing a red coat crowded next to me and stood reading a magazine. Looking over, I noticed that she was wearing an interesting brooch on her lapel. I'd never seen anything that looked quite so realistic. But at about three inches in span, it was too big to be real.
Then it moved.
Sprawled across her lapel was a very sleepy brown spider. It moved slowly, still stiff from the cold outdoors. After a moment, I got the woman's attention. "Excuse me," I tried to say discreetly in Japanese. "You have something on your shoulder."
If this had happened to me, you would have heard my reaction in New York. The woman reacted admirably; she didn't scream, just brushed at it quickly with her magazine. It hung by one leg from the wool for a moment, then fell to the floor of the train where a man in a business suit stepped on it. But it wasn't dead--it had gotten trapped in the arch between the heel and front sole of his shoe. And as we watched, the spider warmed up and waved its legs languidly. The three of us--I, the woman and the salaryman--looked from each other to the legs waving on both sides of the man's shoe, and we smiled weakly. Watched the legs waving from beneath the shoe, looked at each other, smiled. All the way to Yokohama.
Once there, the salaryman walked with a peculiar scraping step to the platform, then shook his shoe. The spider popped off, landed on the concrete right side up, and sat, glaring quietly at us, apparently unharmed. I don't know whether it got off the platform safely. I hope it did, for all that it went through.