A little while back, I met a capybara, the world’s largest rodent, for a coffee-and-carrot date at a café in Tokyo. 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 paws—smooth-furred, unlike the rest of him—and 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. “How is this animal even real?” a friend asked me after I showed her a selfie of me and Pisuke, whose weight looked to be fast approaching my own. (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. You might have heard the catchy anthem of the capybara, which consists mostly of “ca-py-ba-ra” sung in sultry and tropical tones, along with some Russian lyrics too ridiculous to print (the song was written by a random guy from Moscow). You might have heard of $TUPI, a dubious meme coin launched to celebrate the birth of a particularly cute San Antonio Zoo capy. (The zoo denies any association with the coin.) And, if you’re like me, you might have journeyed to one of the capybara hot spots around the world, including Japan, where capybaras can be found in cafés and onsen, or hot-spring baths, which, unlike cafés, are a perfect place for the creature to enjoy immersion in water. The country even has a capybara hotel for closer communion with the animals.
On my previous trip to Japan, I brought my son to the Tokyo café—he was nine years old at the time and is now eleven, and trades capybara swag with a friend at his school—but we found out that getting a thirty-minute date with a capy was, in the words of one aficionado, “harder than getting Taylor Swift tickets,” and required logging on to a Web site at the right time and hitting the Purchase button before the competition could. My son was allowed a brief pet of one of the rodents and then we had to leave. On my most recent visit to the café, the room held people from several continents, some of whom had come to Tokyo just to hang out with the two animals. A woman from Atlanta talked about the capybara yoga that was now being offered in her city. A man from Montreal was enthusing about the capybaras found in his home town’s bio-dome. Young couples were forming throuples with the ear-flicking Kohaku. “I think I could live my life as one,” a man declared, of the capybara. Someone else added, “I think we all could.”
I had started my day hungover and melancholy after a long night of Tokyo highballs and a morning dose of middle-aged ennui, but after my half hour with Pisuke was over I felt immersed in tantric levels of well-being. (“They regulate you down,” my shrink told me a few weeks later, as we watched a video that featured superimposed capybaras sashaying down a fashion runway.) Time flowed differently, and my vision felt soft and the world around me pure and unaggressive. After I left the café, I bought a peanut-butter sandwich and a jelly sandwich, and I mushed the two together and sat on a commuter bench and ate both sandwiches at once and never had I tasted anything so sweet and good, and every passing salaryman and woman was my brother and sister, and the world’s biggest city was just an Amazon riverbank, and we were all living our lives as giant rodents that never meant anybody any harm. I wanted to cry soulfully to commemorate the moment, but contentment this complete affirmed itself.
I fell in love with capybaras at least two decades before the recent craze. Around 2001, I had sold my first book and was dating a woman after half a decade of loneliness that had followed a breakup with my college girlfriend and the rejection of said first book by both an agent and the Iowa writing school. There was a newfound happiness, maybe even a swagger, to my life as my novel neared publication and my arms found someone to embrace at night. My then girlfriend and I lived in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and we would visit the Prospect Park Zoo, where we quickly became enamored with the resident capybara. Of course, I was taken with his ridiculous shape and size, but I was also projecting my past loneliness onto him, the many years I had spent in the cage of unreciprocated love. Finally, I thought, here was a being with a body as ridiculous as my own, and a sweetness that made me nostalgic for a past self.
The nascent Internet of the age had told us that the capybara was a social creature—as many rodents are—and that having a single capy, without access to other animals, much less to his own kind, was unusual. (I don’t know why the zoo had only one.) It was sad yet unsurprising when the animal I so loved passed away—perhaps, I thought, from heartbreak. Of course, it is quite possible that he simply died of old age, but, as I said, there is something about the capybara that invites projection. Having endured years of apartness myself, I wondered if the animal had been unable to survive without an outpouring of tactile love.
“The Lululemon again today, Madam?”
Cartoon by Sophia Glock
Our relationship with these creatures is somewhat suspect. “Thank you for changing my life,” a cartoon woman in an Instagram meme says to a capybara, to which the animal replies, “I’m literally a giant rodent.” Is this what the deceased zoo specimen, or Pisuke or Kohaku, stuck in a small Tokyo room without a body of water to swim in, might say to us if they could speak with their funny tongues? “I’ve changed your life,” each of them might have added. “But what good has it done me?”
The only oversized rodent in New York City at the moment is in the Staten Island Zoo. I took my son to see it at the close of 2023, and here, too, the capybara was all alone in her enclosure, although the zoo did have two capybaras at one point. The capybara was very shy and barely came out to meet us. Meanwhile, two other female capybaras, named Cheesecake and Pumpkin, who feature on an Instagram account called Dark Wings Wildlife, had become one of my obsessions. For around thirty-five dollars, you can get the six-month-old Cheesecake or the two-year-old Pumpkin to munch on a piece of edible paper containing any message you like. (I ate some of the paper myself, to test its safety.) Requests flow in from all over the world, including a French “Capy birthday mon cœur! ” and German parents wishing their son good luck on his driver’s exam. I reached out to the account’s owner, Marina Somma, who invited me to visit Cheesecake and Pumpkin.
Dark Wings Wildlife is a six-and-a-half-acre property on the eastern coast of Florida which, in addition to the two capybaras, is home to an African pied crow named Trixie, three goats, two dogs, a cat, an old chicken, and a blind goose. Many Americans, including me, dream of having pet capybaras, but few can truly accommodate them. Somma has a degree in animal psychology and has worked in zoos. She has installed a small pool for her capybaras, and there are plenty of other animals for them to play with, including the two boisterous dogs, and acres of grass for them to feast upon. The Florida climate is similar to that of the capybaras’ homelands—they are found in every country in South America except Chile, usually in places where dense forests and grasslands meet water sources, such as rivers and swamps. Capybaras have suffered from frostbite in more northern locales. Two capys now housed at a sanctuary in Indiana called the Pipsqueakery had to have their toes removed after being left in the snow at their former home.
Somma and her husband, Vinny, picked me up at the Daytona Beach airport in their storm-battered Tesla—Hurricane Milton had ravaged Florida about a month before my visit—and we rolled past a typical Floridian Panda Express landscape with the occasional head-turning concerns, such as Gospel Garden Landscape and Nursery, and Rehab Sports Bar. Somma and Vinny, both in their thirties, met when they were high-school students living in the area, though Vinny originally hails from Staten Island. We drove up to their tidy little farm, which consists of a main house, where Cheesecake and the dogs and cat live—its living room is centered around an enormous television that plays football coverage at most hours—and a barn, where Pumpkin lives in a stall with the goats, the chicken, and the blind goose. There is also a surprisingly large and intricate aviary for the highly intelligent pied crow, who is friends with Pumpkin and the dogs, with whom she sometimes stages impromptu races, or “zoomies,” the animals running along the length of the aviary’s screen.
“One of the biggest misconceptions is that they’re so chill,” Somma said, of capybaras. She told me that the capybara is a prey animal in its native habitat, and that, unlike dogs or other common animals that people keep as pets, it has prey reactions, especially when cornered. “They’ll get panicky and freak out,” she said, adding that “some are well socialized and do well.” In Tokyo, Pisuke and Kohaku spend the bulk of their days with human strangers who pet them and ply them with a never-ending supply of carrots. Pumpkin and Cheesecake are rarely subject to human visitors, and I could sense their innate distrust of me as soon as I approached, even though I do not resemble their traditional enemies, which include the jaguar, the anaconda, and the alligator-like caiman. Of course, humans often hunt the capybara for its meat and skin. The Catholic Church in Venezuela bent the rules for the semiaquatic animal, allowing it to be eaten during Lent. Capybaras, as prey animals, instinctively situate themselves in groups along lakes and riverbanks—the water, in which they can be submerged for up to five minutes, serves as a means of escape from land animals, and the land can provide refuge from the nefarious caiman.
Inside the stall, Pumpkin, the two-year-old—capybaras can live for about twelve years with proper human care, and for about ten years in the wild—eyed me warily, even as I lowered myself to her level to appear nonthreatening. “They’re very suspicious of new things,” Somma told me. “Which is a good way to behave if you don’t want to be eaten.” Pumpkin sleeps in a makeshift bed that is composed of a trough, a dog bed, and an old Tempur-Pedic mattress. As capybaras enjoy pooping in water, there is a large bucket for her; despite my infatuation with all things capybara, I could not quite stomach its smelly greenish contents.
Cheesecake, like most teen-agers, likes to sleep a lot—Somma compared her to a cat in this regard—and she can often be found beneath a blanket in her comfortable glass-and-steel enclosure in the main house, impersonating a ghost. Often, I forgot she was there until the blanket stirred and assumed the barrel shape of the capybara. When roused from her slumber, she enjoyed playing with Stevie, a Shetland sheepdog, and barking (one of capys’ many vocalizations) at the robot vacuum. Capybaras are known to be gregarious, and social media certainly plays up their affable qualities, but within this menagerie it was Stevie who served as the social glue.
Capys, who are often suspicious of interlopers like me, can also be unfriendly with members of their own species who are not part of their family group. The relationship between Cheesecake and Pumpkin, who are not related, has been complex, with the younger animal following the older one around. During the worst encounters, Pumpkin will try to nibble on Cheesecake’s butt. “In the wild, there’s rarely a mixing of different capybara groups,” Somma said. Since the house is Cheesecake’s domain and the outdoors is Pumpkin’s, the large porch serves as a meeting place, with Stevie the Sheltie, in her instinctual herder’s role, acting as chaperon. I witnessed one such scene, in which the two capybaras regarded each other warily at first, then commenced friendly sniffing. When Pumpkin moved away, however, Cheesecake couldn’t help but trail behind. “Don’t follow her, Cheese!” Vinny warned the younger animal. “She’ll get annoyed.” And soon enough Pumpkin scampered off the porch and ran toward her home in the stall. Later, I watched videos of further progress between the two rodents, with Cheesecake and Pumpkin spending semi-unsupervised mornings together, eating grass just a few feet apart—what parents of toddlers call “parallel play.”
