This has become a ritual when I visit the city. I sat on a couch next to Pisuke, who stared ahead with the two eyes perched atop his enormous head connected to his coconut-shaped body, generating what seemed like friendliness and calm across the room, which was filled with his equally substantial brother Kohaku and about ten human admirers from around the world. I stroked his straw-like fur and the pinkish skin beneath, thick as sailcloth.
His ears looked like morel mushrooms, and sometimes they would twitch, to the delight of my fellow human visitors. I scratched under his chin, and he half closed his eyes and lifted up his head to give me better access to this source of pleasure. I sipped my coffee and then passed him a carrot stick. He did not grab the carrot with his mouth the way, say, a dog would but turned slowly and delicately toward me and chomped down on it with his long, discolored rodent teeth, his tiny, almost human tongue flicking between his massive jowls.
I picked up one of his pawsโsmooth-furred, unlike the rest of himโand marvelled at his seemingly slapdash assembly. The human tongue, the powerful buckteeth that never stopped growing, the giant muscular haunches and posterior, and these dark-colored paws, partly webbed because the capybara is a semiaquatic creature.
A capybara can weigh up to two hundred and twenty pounds, though most hover closer to a hundred and forty. The unreality of the capybara is partly responsible for its cultlike following.
The past years have seen the rise of capybara TikTok and Instagram. If you have been following the beast on your socials, you might know that capybaras get hiccups; that they carry large oranges and yuzu on their heads; that they allow birds to eat the schmutz out of their fur, which brings them almost orgiastic levels of delight; that they try to help injured corgis escape from their protective cones; that they cuddle with monkeys and lick baby kangaroos; that a group of them adopted a cat named Oyen into their social group at a Japanese zoo.
