I read Yagibonzu by Kuruneko Yamato.

The book shows the daily life of two goats, Bokuchan and Orechan. They wag their tails when they are happy, they show the place where they want to be petted, they hate rain and they are shy with strangers, but they lean their whole body on the people they trust. They were so cute that I finished the book very quickly.

“Kindness” is a concept made by human language. But when I saw that the goats stopped giving strong headbutts after they made Oyabin fall, I really felt their kindness. It was a kind of kindness they learned, and that surprised me.

Living with goats must be difficult. But including that difficulty, they seemed to have rich expressions and emotions.

While reading Yagibonzu, I felt that “sharing feelings with another species” is not an illusion.

Animals do not have human language. But they communicate with their voices, posture, eyes, breathing, distance, smell, and rhythm. They really share emotions through their bodies.

Humans organize emotions with words, so we sometimes think emotions cannot exist without language. But even babies have feelings before they learn words. So it is natural that we feel with our bodies first, before language.

The idea “we can think because we have language” is partly true. But it is not the whole truth.

Thoughts are born before words, and words are only the explanation. The many “feelings I cannot put into words” I have experienced are emotions before they are cut down or simplified by language.

At the same time, it is interesting that some emotions appear only when words are reduced. Like in poetry, feelings rise when we use fewer words. The space around the words also carries meaning and warmth.

The world of animals is full of mixed emotions and empty spaces. Human emotions are originally the same. That is why we can understand animals even without words.

The two goats in Yagibonzu showed me a world of straight, mixed, wordless emotions.