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 pawsβsmooth-furred, unlike the rest of himβand 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.
