城のある町にて English

One afternoon

"The view from up high — ahh! (with a cough) — now that's something special, that is."

In one hand he held an umbrella, in the other a fan and a hand towel.

His head was cleanly bald, and with the straw boater perched on it, he looked just as if a cork had been fitted into place. ——

Such an old man, having cheerfully tossed off those words, walked on past Takashi's side.

Having spoken, he did not so much as turn toward him; his eyes stayed fixed on the distant prospect, and with an air of well, that's that, he lowered himself onto the bench at the edge of the stone wall. ——

For about two ri beyond the edge of the town, the land lay flat and green.

Beyond it spread the deep indigo of I Bay.

A thunderhead, its base blurred and its whole form none too distinct, coiled quietly above the horizon. ——

"Ah, yes indeed."

He felt as though the aftertaste of his own voice, faltering slightly as he had answered, still lingered about his throat and ears, and that self of a moment ago sat strangely at odds with his present self.

With a warmth toward that old man, who seemed to know no cares at all, still etched upon his cheeks, Takashi was drawn once more into the quiet prospect before him. ——

A little wind was blowing; it was afternoon.

For one thing, moved by a youthful longing to sit quietly and think over his sister, who had died just as she was becoming most lovable, Takashi had left home before even the thirty-fifth-day rites, and had come to stay at his elder sister's house in this town.

Lost in a daze, until he realized it was some other child's crying, he had felt it was the voice of his dead sister.

"Who is it? Making a child cry in this heat."

He had even gone so far as to think that.

More than at the moment she breathed her last, more than at the crematory, it was in an experience like this one, come to a strange land, that the word "lost"

— that thought was etched more deeply upon him.

"A great many insects gather around a single dying insect, grieving and weeping."

So he had written to a friend — and it was only after coming to this place that the painful experience surrounding her death at last began to be felt as if from beyond a thin veil.

And as that feeling settled, and his heart grew accustomed to his new surroundings, a calm rare for Takashi began to come over him.

Having always lived accustomed to the city, and especially after a recent stretch with no respite for his mind, he grew all the more reverent amid this stillness.

Even in walking the roads, he took care to tire himself as little as possible.

He would not let so much as a single thorn prick him.

He would not so much as jam a single finger.

The merest trifle could decide the happiness of a day. ——

He thought such things almost to the point of superstition.

And even in that summer of much drought, the rain came once, came twice, and each time it cleared, the weather grew such that something faintly autumnal seemed to brush the skin.

That stillness of heart, together with these faint forerunners of autumn, would not let him stay shut up with books and idle fancies in his room.

To set grass and insects and clouds and landscape before his eyes and let the heart he had secretly held in check catch fire — that alone seemed to Takashi worth doing.

"Near our house there are the ruins of a castle, and I think it will be just the thing for Takashi's walks."

So his elder sister had written in a letter sent to his mother.

The night after he arrived.

The four of them — his brother-in-law, his sister, her daughter, and himself — climbed up to the castle ruins together for the first time.

Because of the drought, planthoppers had swarmed thickly in the rice fields, and they were being killed with insect-lure lamps.

Since it would be only two or three more days of this, they had climbed up to see it.

The plain, as far as the eye could see, was a sea of insect lamps.

Farther off, they twinkled like stars.

In places the gap between the hills glowed faintly, and from it the lights seemed to pour out like a great river.

He grew so excited at this extraordinary sight that his eyes welled with tears.

It was a windless night, and the castle ruins were crowded with townsfolk who had come both to cool off and to take in the sight.

Out of the darkness, the town's girls, their faces thick with white powder, let their eyes flash with high spirits.

Now the sky was clear to the point of sadness.

And beneath it the town spread its ranks of tiled roofs.

The whitewashed elementary school.

The storehouse-built bank.

The roof of a temple.

And here and there, like curls of shaved wood packed in among Western confections, green plants sprouted up between the houses.

Behind one house hung the leaves of a banana plant.

The curled foliage of a cypress could be seen too.

A pine pruned into the shape of layered cotton wadding was visible as well.

All of them, with their darkened lower leaves and fresh new growth, formed pleasing masses of green.

Far off, a red postbox could be seen.

A roof with something about baby carriages painted on it in white paint could be seen.

Catching the sun, a drying board with red cloth stretched over it showed small among the roof tiles. ——

When night came, young men from the villages, riding in on bicycles, went in noisy groups along the lit main street toward the pleasure quarter.

The young clerks from the shops too, in their summer yukata, swayed their bodies about in a manner quite unlike how they looked by day, teasing the powdered women as they went. ——

That part of the town, too, was now hemmed in among the roof tiles, and could only be guessed at by the many banners standing there, marking where a theater stood.

Somewhat nearer stood an inn where, to keep off the western sun, every window on the first, second, and third floors had been fitted with awnings.

From somewhere came the sound of timber being struck — a sound that seemed not very loud to begin with — but into the sky over the town it echoed "Kaan, kaan"

again and again.

One after another, without a moment's pause, the tsukutsuku-boshi cicadas cried.

"It sounds like they're going through the inflections of grammar."

Struck by that thought, as he listened he found himself strangely drawn in.

"Chuku-chuku-chuku"

it would begin, then "Oshi, chuku-chuku"

would repeat itself, until presently it became "Chuku-chuku, oshi"

or turned back into "Oshi, chuku-chuku,"

and at last into "Suttoko-chiyo,"

"Suttoko-chiyo,"

and then into "Jii——"

before it fell silent.

Partway through, from the side, another would start up with "Chuku-chuku,"

beginning its own cry.

Then another one, having finished its "Suttoko-chiyo,"

was just moving into "Jii——"

as it trailed off.

Threefold, fourfold, even fivefold and sixfold, the cries overlapped.

In these days past, Takashi had also watched a tsukutsuku-boshi cicada crying from scarcely a foot away, on the cherry tree by the shrine that stood within this same castle ground.

He watched in wonder that so small an insect, with such delicate wing-ribs stretched with membranes thin as soap bubbles, could produce so shrill a sound.

If anything could be said to relate to that high sound, it was only the contracting and expanding from belly to tail.

That segmented part, thick with fine down, moved with the precision of some part of an engine. ——

He could still recall its shape in that moment.

The taut, swollen curve running from belly to tail.

A contracting and expanding as if every corner of it were fit to burst with force. ——

And all at once he was struck by the feeling that the life of a single cicada was a thing of supreme worth, not to be wasted.

From time to time someone would come, as the old man had done earlier, to cool off and look out at the view before rising and going on.

The man Takashi often saw whenever he came here, who napped in the pavilion or gazed out at the sea, had come again, and today he was talking familiarly with a nursemaid girl.

Children with cicada-catching poles wandered here and there.

A child made to carry the insect cage would stop now and then to peer inside, then look toward the pole and trot along after.

Without a word being spoken, there was a strange, theatrical charm to it.

Elsewhere, girls caught rice-pounder grasshoppers and, saying, "Negi-san, pound the rice, such-and-such,"

made them pound away.

"Negi-san," in the speech of this region, meant the Shinto priest.

To Takashi it seemed a leisurely sight — the grasshopper, with its mild, elongated face and its two short antennae, which now that he thought of it did look rather like a priest, held fast by the hind legs in the girl's grip and made, unable to move, to pound out its rice.

Through the grass the girls chased after, grasshoppers sprang up one after another, legs stretched out, their wings full of sunlight.

Here and there a smokestack let out smoke now and then, and from around it the fields and countryside opened out.

Scattered about was scenery like a Rembrandt sketch.

A dark grove of trees.

A farmhouse.

A highway.

And, amid the green paddies, a smokestack of faded ochre brick.

A little light railway came along from the direction of the sea.

The wind rising off the sea blew the train's smoke landward, in the direction it ran.

Watching it, it looked less like smoke than as if a toy train were running along with the shape of the smoke held fixed, reversed in place.

In a quick, rustling flicker, the sun dimmed.

The complexion of the landscape changed visibly, moment by moment.

Far off, along the coast, an inlet could be seen cutting in at a slant. ——

Every time Takashi climbed up to these castle ruins, it had become a habit of his to look, again and again, at that inlet.

Trees unusually large for a coastline grew thick in places.

In their shade, the roof of a house peeked out, just a little.

And in the inlet there was the feeling of a boat lying moored.

It was, simply, that much of a view and no more.

There was nothing in it that stood out as especially compelling.

And yet, strangely, it drew him.

Something was there.

Truly, something was there.

Yet the moment he tried to put that feeling into words, it turned hollow and false.

Suppose he were to call it, say, something like a faint, groundless longing?

If someone were to ask him, "Isn't that it?"

he might well have agreed with that way of naming it.

But by himself, the feeling that "there's still something more"

remained.

People of some different race seemed to live there, carrying on a life apart from this world. ——

It seemed like that sort of place too.

And yet that felt too much like something out of a fairy tale — it did not quite fit.

He wondered whether it was that he could not recall some foreign painting that had depicted a place resembling it.

In connection with that, he recalled a certain painting by Constable.

Yet that was not it either.

Then what on earth was it?

This panoramic view lent a kind of beauty to anything within it, whatever that might be.

But the view of the inlet went beyond that.

There alone, a certain resonance of spirit seemed to move with life.

So it seemed to him. ——

On days when the sky cleared to an autumnal blue, the sea took on a deep blue somewhat warmer than that of the sky.

When white clouds were out, the sea too seemed to shine white.

Today the thunderhead from before had spread out above the horizon, taking on the color of the inner rind of a pomelo, and the sea, right up close to the inlet, had taken on that same color.

Today too, the inlet lay still as always, keeping its riddle hidden.

Watching it, he felt, as he always did, an urge to let out a sad, animal-like howl from the edge of this castle.

It struck him as strange, almost to the point of taking his breath away.

In a dream one goes to some strange place and thinks, I have been here before. ——

With just that sort of feeling, some unaccountable memory would well up in him.

"Ah, such a day, such an hour as this"

"Ah, such a day, such an hour as this"

Words he could not recall ever having prepared flickered through his mind, fluttering. ——

"Hurricane Hutch's motorcycle!"

"Hurricane Hutch's motorcycle!"

The voice that sounded like the girl from before rang out, again and again, high and clear, from below where Takashi stood.

The roar of a motorbike could be heard, apparently passing along the Marunouchi road.

It was the hour when a certain doctor of this town rode home on it.

Whenever they heard that roar, the girls in the neighborhood of Takashi's house would compete to be first to shout, "Hurricane Hutch's motorcycle!"

so they would cry.

"Otoba!"

some children said, garbling the word.

At the three-story inn, the awnings had, before he knew it, been taken down.

The red drying-board on the distant clothes-rack could no longer be found either.

From the roofs of the town, smoke.

From the distant mountains, the higurashi cicadas.

Conjuring Tricks and Fireworks

This was another day, now.

Having finished supper and his bath, Takashi climbed up to the castle.

In the twilight sky, now and then, fireworks could be seen going up from a town several ri away.

He noticed a faint sound, as if muffled in cotton wool.

Because it came from so far off, it sounded at oddly delayed, ill-matched moments.

What a fine thing to watch, he thought.

Just then three boys came along, the eldest of them about seventeen.

They too seemed to be out cooling off after their meal.

Mindful of Takashi perhaps, they talked quietly among themselves.

Feeling too self-conscious to point it out to them aloud, he made a show of gazing eagerly toward where the fireworks were going up.

Far off within that panoramic distance, the fireworks flared and vanished with a brightness as faint and clear as some jellyfish drifting among stars.

The sea was growing dark, but in that direction some brightness still lingered.

After a while the boys noticed it too.

He was pleased, inwardly.

"Forty-nine."

"Ah — forty-nine."

Saying such things back and forth, they were counting the time between one burst going up and the next.

He listened to their talk without quite meaning to.

"Hey, so-and-so. The flower —"

"Flora."

The oldest of them answered so. ——

Recalling that scene at the castle, he made his way home.

As he came near the house, a person from next door caught sight of Takashi's face,

and then, as if flustered,

"He's come home now, he has!"

called in to the house.

They had been talking of going to see a conjuring show playing at such-and-such theater, and there had been a small fuss because Takashi had wandered off without a word.

"Ah — sorry about that."

When he said this, his brother-in-law laughed and said,

"It's no good if you don't tell us plainly where you're off to."

— laying the blame on his sister.

His sister too laughed, and began getting out clothes.

While he had been up at the castle, both his sister and Nobuko (his brother-in-law's younger sister) had put on heavy makeup.

His sister said to her husband,

"Where's your fan?"

"It's in my pocket, but..."

"Ah, right. That one's dirty too, though..."

While his sister nodded to herself and began slowly searching, his brother-in-law, smoking his tobacco with a sizzling hiss,

said, "Never mind the fan. Hurry up and get ready."

— fretting all the while over his clogged pipe.

His mother-in-law, who had been in the back room helping Nobuko get ready,

"Well now, how about these?"

she said, gathering up two or three fans and bringing them out.

They were the sort of fans a sugar shop or the like had handed out as giveaways.

Watching his sister try on this and that as she dressed, he found his mind drifting to the back room, wondering with what feelings, and in what manner, Nobuko might be dressing herself.

Presently, once everyone was ready, Takashi went down ahead and put on his geta.

"Katsuko is around somewhere — do call her along, won't you."

his mother-in-law said.

Katsuko, dressed in a long-sleeved kimono and mixed in among the neighborhood children, though called, went on arguing about something with them.

"Are you going to the place that starts with 'Ka'?"

"The movies!"

"The movies, the movies!"

two or three of the girls chanted, teasing.

"Uh-uh."

Katsuko shook her head and said,

"Going to the place that starts with 'Yo'?"

and on it went again.

"Kindergarten?"

"Silly. There's no kindergarten at night."

His brother-in-law came out.

"Come along now — we'll go off and leave you behind, we will."

His sister and Nobuko came out.

Their faces, thick with white powder, floated pale in the dusk.

Each of them carried one of the fans from before.

"Sorry to keep you waiting. Where's Katsuko? Katsuko, have you got your fan?"

Katsuko flashed her small fan and pressed close against his sister.

"Well then, Mother, we're off..."

When his sister said this,

"Katsuko, you won't go on saying 'let's go home, let's go home,' will you now."

her grandmother said to Katsuko.

"Won't say it, will you now."

Instead of answering, Katsuko echoed the words back and slipped her hand into Takashi's.

And Takashi set off, leading her by the hand.

Neighbors who had set out cooling benches along the road called out, "Good evening, good evening," as they passed.

"Katsu-chan, what's this place called?"

he tried asking her.

"Shosenkaku."

"Chosenkaku? The Korea Pavilion?"

"No — Shosenkaku."

"Chosenkaku?"

"Sho — sen — kaku."

"Cho — sen — kaku?"

"Uh-huh."

she said, and slapped his hand smartly.

After a while, from Katsuko,

"Shosenkaku"

came the words again.

"Chosenkaku,"

he echoed back, matching her exactly, syllable for syllable, as though it were he who found the mismatch maddening.

It turned into a kind of game.

In the end, even as he was saying "Shosenkaku,"

Katsuko, without realizing it, kept saying "Chosenkaku"

all the same.

Nobuko noticed and burst out laughing.

Being laughed at, Katsuko went sulky.

"Katsuko."

Now it was her father's turn.

"It's certainly different, and it brackens."

"Nnh."

Making a nasal whine, Katsuko made as if to hit her father.

Her father, feigning ignorance, said,

"It's certainly different, and it brackens. Now what was it again? Katsuko, say it once for Takashi to hear."

On the verge of tears, sniffling now, Katsuko had her hand taken by Nobuko, who walked on with her.

"'This...' — and then what were you meaning to say?"

"She meant to say, 'This is different from bracken,' didn't you."

So Nobuko said, coming to her defense.

"And just who in the world did you say that to?"

— this time he was asking Nobuko as much as Katsuko.

"To old Mr. Yoshimine, wasn't it."

Nobuko laughed and peered into Katsuko's face.

"There's more! There was one other real doozy."

When her father said this teasingly, both his sister and Nobuko burst out laughing.

Katsuko now began to cry in earnest.

A large electric light burned on the castle's stone wall, shining bright and clear on the trees behind it.

The trees in front of it, by contrast, lay in deep black shadow.

From that direction a cicada cried, "Jii-ji, jii-ji."

He walked along alone, a little behind the rest.

This was the first night, since he had come to this place, that he had gone out walking together with them like this.

To go out walking with young women.

That, too, was in his experience an exceedingly rare thing.

He felt, for no particular reason, happy.

In the way she got along with his somewhat willful sister there was not the slightest strain — and not because she managed it with any skill, but because it came from a peaceableness that was simply in her nature.

Nobuko was that sort of girl.

When, out of her mother's faith and the like, she was told to go and be prayed over by the Tenri teachings, she obediently went and let herself be prayed over.

It was on account of an injured finger, and because of it she had given up playing the koto she was known for.

She was making a plant specimen collection for school.

Whenever she went into town on some errand, she would come back with a great bundle of weeds wrapped in a furoshiki.

Since Katsuko wanted some too, she would share a few with her, and by herself she diligently kept pressing them flat.

Katsuko had pulled out her photograph album and brought it over to him.

Without the least sign of embarrassment, she answered whatever he asked, calmly and clearly. ——

Nobuko had that kind of likable quality about her.

Now, walking ahead of him leading Katsuko by the hand, Nobuko looked quite grown-up — utterly unlike the girl at home in her shoulder-tucked kimono, legs sticking gawkily out from under it.

Beside her walked his sister.

He thought his sister had grown a little thinner than before, and that her way of walking had, if only a little, improved.

"Now then. You. Walk on ahead..."

His sister suddenly turned around and said this to him.

"Why?"

He understood well enough, given how he had been feeling all along, without needing to ask — but he pretended not to.

And he ended up laughing at himself.

Having laughed like that, he could no longer very well go on walking behind.

"Come on now. It's unsettling. Isn't it, Nobu-chan."

"..."

Laughing, Nobuko nodded too.

Inside the theater, it was just as sultry as he had expected.

Some sort of usher, perhaps — an elderly woman with her hair done up in an icho-gaeshi knot — carried in cushions for the whole party and, going ahead, laid them out in quick, flapping motions.

At the very back of the pit seating, Takashi took the left end, his sister came in the middle, Nobuko the right end, and his brother-in-law sat behind.

It happened to be an intermission, and the floor below was about seventy percent full.

The same woman from before brought over a smoking tray.

The charcoal was banked and smoldering low — thoughtless of her, in such heat.

She lingered without leaving, dawdling.

With that sly look peculiar to women of her trade — however one ought to put it — her eyes kept darting about.

With looks alone she pointed toward the brazier, then looked away, then stole a glance at his brother-in-law's face.

Thinking that he understood perfectly well what she was after, and fumbling in his sleeve pocket to fish out a silver coin from his purse, he found himself growing angry at her impertinence.

His brother-in-law, meanwhile, sat perfectly composed, utterly unmoved by any of it.

"Ah — the brazier."

the woman said fidgetily, rubbing her hands together in a busy sort of way and looking off again.

At last the silver coin came out, and the woman went off.

Presently the curtain rose.

A man who did not look Japanese, his skin somewhat darker, carried in the props with little enthusiasm, glancing now and then at the audience with a staring look.

It was all slapdash, and he found none of it interesting.

When that was done, an Indian man with some dubious-sounding name came out, wearing a rumpled, ill-fitting frock coat.

He spoke in some language no one could make out.

He seemed to spray spittle as he spoke, and white flecks of saliva had gathered at the corners of his pale lips.

"What did he say?"

his sister asked, just like that.

At that, even the stranger sitting next to them looked over at his face.

He was at a complete loss.

The Indian man came down among the seats, looking around for a volunteer.

One man, seized by the arm, gave an uneasy, embarrassed laugh.

In the end he was led up onto the stage.

His hair combed forward, wearing a yukata with the starch gone limp, he had on black tabi despite the heat.

As he stood there smiling, the earlier man brought over a chair and sat him down.

The Indian man was a wretched fellow.

Saying he wanted to shake hands, he held out his hand before the man.

The man hesitated, but at last worked up the nerve and put out his own.

Whereupon the Indian withdrew his hand, turned to face the audience, made an ugly show of mimicking the man's gesture, hunched his neck down, and jeered.

It was a vicious, poisonous sort of thing.

The man looked toward the Indian, then toward his own seat, laughing uneasily.

It was a laugh that seemed to carry some circumstance behind it.

Might he not have a child, or a wife, waiting?

It was unbearable.

Takashi thought.

The handshake gag turned rude, and the Indian's mischief grew ever more malicious in nature.

The audience laughed each time.

And then the magic tricks began.

There was a length of cord — the trick where, though it is cut, it turns out still to be joined.

There was a metal pitcher — the trick where water pours out of it endlessly. ——

They were exceedingly dull tricks, and one by one the things on the glass table dwindled away.

An apple still remained.

This one was the trick where you eat an apple and the pieces you have eaten come back out of your mouth breathing fire — and, as a trial, that same man was made to eat it.

Because he ate it, skin and all, this too drew laughter.

Every time the Indian gave that impossibly crude laugh of his, Takashi found himself wondering why the man did not do something about it.

And he himself had grown quite disgusted by it all.

Before long, quite suddenly, he found himself recalling the fireworks from before.

"I wonder if those fireworks are still going up."

So he thought.

Out over the dimly lit plain, the fireworks of that distant town, flaring and vanishing with the faint clarity of a jellyfish among stars.

The panorama of sea and cloud and plain seemed, to him, an altogether beautiful thing.

"The flower —"

"Flora."

Definitely, "Flower"

was not what she had said.

Both that child and that panorama — it seemed to him they amounted to a piece of conjuring so fine that no magician alive could match it.

Thoughts like these gradually washed away his displeasure.

By his usual habit of watching an unpleasant scene with detachment — which had the effect, instead, of making it seem interesting — that feeling was beginning to take hold.

He thought that his earlier self, growing angry all alone at some low buffoonery, had been rather comical.

On the stage, amid an atmosphere just like that of the poster illustrations, the Indian man was breathing great gouts of fire from his mouth.

There was even a strange sort of beauty to it.

When it was finally over, the curtain came down.

"Ahh, that was fun."

Katsuko said this, a little unconvincingly, as if the words had been tacked on.

The way she said it was so amusing that everyone laughed. ——

A beautiful woman suspended in midair.

Feats of strength.

An operetta.

An Asakusa sort of mood.

Sawing a beautiful woman in half.

With a program like that, they came home late in the night.

Illness

His sister fell ill.

Her side ached, and she ran a high fever.

Takashi wondered if it might be typhoid.

At her pillow, his brother-in-law said,

"Shall I send for the doctor, then?"

— he said.

"Oh, it's fine, really. It might just be roundworms."

And then, addressing neither Takashi nor her husband in particular,

"Yesterday, hot as it was, not a drop of sweat came out of me the whole way walking home."

she said, weakly.

The afternoon before, she had been seen coming home from a distance with a somewhat gloomy face, and he and Katsuko had teasingly hooted at her from the window.

"Katsuko, who's that over there?"

"Oh! It's Mother! It's Mother!"

"Liar. That's some stranger's auntie. Just watch — she won't come into our house."

Takashi recalled her face from that moment.

It had, in fact, been a little strange.

Takashi had thought it was simply the novelty of glimpsing, out on the street, as if a stranger, a family member he was used to seeing only indoors — but she had also seemed somehow lacking in strength.

The doctor came, said there was indeed a suspicion of typhoid, and left.

Downstairs, Takashi and his brother-in-law exchanged troubled looks.

On his brother-in-law's face a pained smile had frozen in place.

It turned out to be a kidney ailment.

Saying something about a coating on her tongue, and that he could not say clearly whether it was typhoid or not, the doctor too went off in good spirits.

His sister said that, since coming to this house as a bride, this made the second time she had been laid up with illness.

"Once it was in Kitamuro."

"That time really did us in. There wasn't any ice to be had nearby, so around two in the morning I rode a bicycle some four ri, banged on a door to wake someone up and buy some — that part went well enough. But wrapping it in a furoshiki and tying it on behind the saddle, by the time I got back it had worn away, down to about this much."

His brother-in-law showed the size with his hands.

Coming as it did from a man who, even with his wife's fever chart, insisted on taking readings precisely every two hours, the story had that particular flavor of his, and Takashi found himself laughing too.

"And what was it that time?"

"She'd got a bellyful of roundworms boiling around in her."

— For one thing, owing partly to his own dissolute way of living, Takashi had once fallen ill with a lung ailment.

At that time his brother-in-law, in Kitamuro, had gone and prayed at a shrine that the illness might be cured.

Once his illness had improved somewhat, Takashi had gone, on one occasion, to visit that house in Kitamuro.

It was a poor mountain village, its people farmers and woodcutters, who also kept silkworms.

When winter came, wild boar would come right up to the fields near the houses to dig for potatoes.

Potatoes made up, for the farmers, roughly half of their daily food.

Katsuko had still been small then.

An old woman from nearby would come and, poring over Katsuko's picture books, explain them to her, calling an elephant a "trunk-coiling elephant" and a monkey a "young man of the mountain" or a "wild monkey."

There was a child said to have no family name, and when he asked about it, the villagers said, with quite matter-of-fact faces, that it was because he was a woodcutter's child.

At the elementary school, a teacher called Kaoru, the village headman's daughter, whom the pupils addressed by her bare given name with no honorific, taught the classes.

She herself was only about sixteen or seventeen at the time. ——

Kitamuro was that sort of place.

Takashi found himself interested in his brother-in-law's stories about Kitamuro.

While they had been living in Kitamuro, there had been a time when Katsuko fell into the river.

That story now came out of his brother-in-law's mouth.

— It happened while his brother-in-law had been laid up with cardiac beriberi.

His grandmother, past seventy — Katsuko's great-grandmother — had taken Katsuko down to the river to rinse some bowls.

The river there ran swift; it was narrow, but its bed lay fairly deep.

Even though the family always told her to just leave it be, whenever his sister happened to be out the old woman would insist on carrying Katsuko about herself.

That time too his sister had been out.

Ah, she's gone out, then.

So he had been thinking to himself in his sickbed, when, after a while, some strange cry reached him, and with a start, as though pulled up by it, the seriously ill man rose and went out.

The river was close by.

When he looked, his grandmother, her face gone strange, said, "Katsuko —"

— that much she got out, and though she strained with all her might to say more, the rest would not come.

"Grandmother! What's happened to Katsuko!"

"..."

Only the tips of her fingers spoke it, violently.

Katsuko could be seen — being swept away down the river!

The river, having just had rain, was swollen and running high.

Ahead stood a stone bridge, the water grazing right up against its slab stones.

And beyond that, the river bent, at a spot where a whirlpool always turned.

There the river bent and flowed into what was almost a deep pool.

Had she struck her head at the bridge or the bend, or been carried on to sink into that pool, there would have been no saving her.

His brother-in-law leapt straight into the river and went after her.

He meant to catch her before the bridge.

He was, at the time, a sick man.

Even so, he just managed to catch her before the bridge.

But the current was too strong; however much he tried to haul himself up by the bridge, it was simply no use.

The gap between the slab stones and the water was just barely wide enough to pass Katsuko's head through, so, holding her up above him, he ducked under the water himself, and only managed to climb out further downstream.

Katsuko had gone limp.

Even held upside down, she brought up no water.

Beside himself, his brother-in-law called her name over and over, striking her on the back.

Katsuko came to, as if nothing had happened at all.

No sooner had she come to than she stood up and began dancing about.

His brother-in-law felt oddly as if he had been made a fool of.

"What happened to this dress of yours?"

he asked, tugging at her wet clothes, but all she said was, "Dunno."

— that was all she'd say.

It seemed that at the moment her foot slipped she had simply fainted, and had not actually drowned at all.

And there she was, of all things, dancing about with her usual face on. ——

That, in outline, was his brother-in-law's story.

He added that it had happened to be the hour when the neighboring farmhouses were all taking their afternoon nap, so that if he himself had not gotten up and gone out just then, there was no telling how dangerous it might have been.

Both the teller and the listeners had been drawn in, and when his brother-in-law fell silent, a stillness settled over them.

"When I got back, the three of them were waiting for me at the gate, Grandmother and all."

So his sister said.

"Somehow they just couldn't stay indoors. Changed her clothes and said she'd wait for her mother, and all."

"It was after that, wasn't it, that Grandmother started going soft in the head."

His sister lowered her voice a little and turned toward her husband a look heavy with meaning.

"After that Grandmother did turn a bit soft in the head. On and on, no matter how long it went, she kept saying to this one here" — he pointed at his wife — "'I'm sorry, Yoshi-yan, I'm so sorry, Yoshi-yan.'"

"And I kept telling her, 'Now, Grandmother, there's nothing to be sorry about,' but still."

From then on, Grandmother visibly grew more and more senile, and died about a year later.

To Takashi, the old woman's fate seemed somehow a cruel one.

And precisely because it had happened not in her own home village, but out in the mountains of Kitamuro, where she had gone meaning only to look after Katsuko, that feeling weighed on him all the more.

Takashi's visit to Kitamuro had come before that incident.

The old woman had often mistaken Katsuko's name for that of Nobuko, who by then must already have entered girls' school.

Nobuko had at that time been over here, with his mother and the others.

Not yet having met Nobuko, Takashi found that every time the old woman mistook the name, a girl of fourteen or fifteen bearing the name Nobuko rose up, familiar and vivid, in his imagination.

Katsuko

Takashi leaned against the window that faced the open field, looking out.

Gray clouds hung over the whole sky.

They seemed at once to stretch far back into some deep distance, and to hang low, drooping down near the earth.

Everything around had lost its light and lay still.

Only the lightning rod on the distant hospital, by some chance, shone white.

Children were playing out in the open field.

Watching, he saw that Katsuko was among them.

There was one boy, and it seemed they were playing some rough sort of game.

Katsuko was knocked down by the boy.

No sooner had she gotten up than she was knocked down again.

This time she was being pinned down, hard.

What on earth were they doing?

It looked like something awfully rough.

Thinking so, Takashi fixed his eyes on them.

When that was over, this time the girls — there were three of them — lined up in front of the boy as if at a ticket gate.

A strange game of ticket-punching began.

The boy would give a hard, reckless yank at the hand each girl held out.

The girl would be flung down onto the ground.

The next one would offer her hand too.

That hand too would be yanked.

The girl who had been knocked down would get up and go to the back of the line again.

Watching, this was how it went.

The boy varied the force with which he pulled.

For the girls, the fun seemed to lie in nervously anticipating just how hard or gentle it would be.

Just when you thought he'd pull hard, he'd put on a show of strength with his body while pulling only lightly.

Then the next time she'd be flung down without warning.

And the time after that he'd let her through so gently it was scarcely more than holding her hand.

The boy, small as he was, was the sort of child who now and then took on the look of a grown man — a sawyer's, say, or a stonemason's — and just now too he seemed to be doing it while humming some little tune under his breath.

And he looked thoroughly pleased with himself.

Watching, it seemed to him that Katsuko alone was, after all, being treated the roughest of them.

He took it badly.

Katsuko was being bullied, he thought, in some roundabout way. ——

Part of the reason he thought so was that Katsuko was willful, and even when playing with other children, would never make herself out to be a "good girl."

Even so, could Katsuko really not see how unfair it was?

No — there was no way she could fail to see it.

Rather, it seemed likelier that Katsuko understood perfectly well, and was simply gritting her teeth and putting on a brave face.

Even as he was thinking this, Katsuko was flung down hard again.

If she really was putting on a brave face, then what must her expression be, he wondered, in that instant when she lay staring the ground in the face after being knocked down. ——

By the time she stood up again, though, her face already looked just like any of the other children's.

It was a wonder she didn't burst into tears.

Thinking the boy might happen to glance up at this window at any moment, he did not leave his place beside it.

Something passed across the fathomlessly clouded sky, flashing now and then as it went.

A dove?

Blurred into the color of the clouds, their forms could not be seen — only the flash of reflected light — but there seemed to be three birds or so, wheeling about in that aimless way peculiar to doves.

"Ah — could it be that Katsuko herself had gone and asked, on her own, to be handled roughly?"

The thought suddenly struck him.

Once, when Takashi had hugged her tight, she had said, "Tighter, tighter,"

and made him squeeze her again and again.

He found himself recalling that moment.

Thinking of it that way, it did seem exactly the sort of thing Katsuko would do.

Takashi left the window and went back into the room.

That night, some while after supper was over, Katsuko began to cry.

Takashi, upstairs, listened to it.

In the end his sister's voice, trying to soothe her, grew louder, and Katsuko wailed on without regard for anything around her.

The noise was so great that Takashi went downstairs.

Nobuko was holding Katsuko.

One of Katsuko's hands had been drawn directly under the electric light, and his sister, needle in hand, was trying to bring it to her palm.

"She went out and got a splinter in her hand. Didn't even notice till supper, when the soy sauce got into it."

his mother-in-law explained to Takashi.

"Hold it out farther, tighter."

His sister had lost her patience, and pulled at the palm roughly.

Each time, Katsuko's crying flared up higher, as if catching fire.

"Fine, I don't care anymore — I'll just leave it be."

In the end his sister flung her hand away.

"There's nothing for it now — let's just put on some such-and-such salve and bind it up."

his mother-in-law said, trying to smooth things over.

Nobuko went to fetch the medicine.

Worn out by Katsuko's crying, Takashi went back upstairs.

Even as the salve was being applied, Katsuko's crying still would not settle.

"That splinter — surely it must have happened back then."

Takashi found himself recalling the afternoon.

The thought came back to him again: what must Katsuko's face have looked like, in that instant when she was flung flat on her face against the ground?

"Perhaps that brave face she'd been putting on then was finally bursting out now."

Listening with such thoughts in mind, that fiery crying of hers struck Takashi as something inexpressibly sad.

Day and Night

One day he came upon a fine old well, in the shadow of a cliff beside the castle.

The place seemed to be the ruins of some old samurai residence.

On ground that was neither quite field nor quite garden stood an old plum tree, along with plantings of pumpkin and shiso.

From the castle's cliff, stout, sturdy trees and old camellias formed a green screen, and the well sat sheltered in their shade.

A great well-frame, its stonework laid with real dignity — sturdy and splendid.

Two young women were rinsing laundry in a great tub.

From where he stood he could not see it, but the mechanism seemed to be a swape well-sweep, and the water drawn up overflowed a great wooden bucket, in which the green of the trees was reflected, fresh and vivid.

When the woman at the tub made as if to wait, the woman at the well-sweep let the water pour out.

The water in the tub leapt and danced, throwing up a rainbow of droplets.

There too the green cast its reflection, and the water flowed richly over the beautifully washed granite paving stones, and over the women's bare feet.

It was an enviable sight, one that looked wonderfully, splendidly happy.

The cool-looking shade behind that green screen.

Water, unmistakably clear and cold, and abundant.

He felt, somehow, quite entranced.

Today the sky is blue, fine weather —

at the house in front, at the house next door too —

drawing water, washing, hanging out, drying.

Whether it had been in a national textbook or a school song, he found himself recalling the words of a song he had sung as a boy.

There was no cleverness at all to be felt in the words, and yet the truly bright, fresh imaginings that song had once stirred in him as a boy came flooding, unexpectedly, into his heart.

Caw, caw, the crows go crying,

over the temple roof, to the shrine grove,

caw, caw, the crows go crying.

There had been a picture that went with it.

And also, under a title like "The Four Directions,"

a memory of a picture showing a child facing the morning sun with arms spread wide — memories like this came back to him, one after another.

The typeface of the national textbooks, in a block script that looked almost handwritten.

And the illustrations too, done by some painter or other, whose feel matched exactly that rounded, cornerless lettering — the sort where any child pictured always had the round, model-student face of a star pupil.

"Copyright reserved by such-and-such" —

which, though he never read it aloud as "gonshoyu" in front of anyone, he had privately, provisionally, decided to read that way in his own head.

And the name attached to that "copyright reserved" — a name which, now that he thought of it, suited a national textbook perfectly, sounding just like the addressee in some sample letter.

Even the look of that colophon page came back to him.

— As a boy he had felt that a place exactly like that picture must exist somewhere.

He had felt that a child so simply, plainly honest must exist somewhere too.

Such things had seemed real to him.

They had been, in some sense, objects of longing for him in those days.

A simple, plain, wholesome world. ——

Now that world lay before him.

Unexpectedly, here in the shade of the green trees of this countryside, that world existed still, in a form even fresher than before.

In that textbook-flavored sentiment, he felt as though something of the life he ought to lead had been quietly suggested to him.

— A fondness for scenery so intense he wanted almost to devour it, together with recollections of childhood and imaginings of some new life, set his moments, now and again, ablaze.

And once again, sleepless nights came to him now and then.

After such a sleepless night, the smallest thing would set off in him a deep, feverish excitement.

And when that excitement subsided, an exhaustion would come over him that made him want to lie down at once, right there by the roadside, it hardly mattered.

Such excitement could rise in him even at the mere sight of a maple's bark. ——

The bark of the maple tree was cool.

It stood behind the bench where he always sat, in the castle's main enclosure.

At its foot, pine needles had fallen.

Over them an ant crawled, clean and bright.

Looking at the cool bark of the maple, the pattern of moss clinging to it, like some scabby rash, looked beautiful.

A memory from childhood, of playing on a straw mat — above all, its very touch — came back to him.

It too had been under a maple tree.

Pine needles lay scattered, and ants crawled over them.

The ground was uneven, full of little bumps and hollows.

Onto ground like that, a straw mat had been laid down.

"Children surely know the particular pleasure of the sole of the foot feeling the ground's bumps and hollows through a cool straw mat. And no sooner is the mat spread than they leap onto it, delighting in the freedom of rolling about, clothes and all, right there on the bare earth."

Thinking such things, he felt an impulse to press his cheek right then against the maple's bark and cool it there.

"I really am tired, aren't I."

He noticed that his hands and feet held a faint warmth.

"I think I'll give you something like this.

One is a jelly.

At the mere sound of someone's footstep, ripple after ripple runs through it, and when the wind blows, it raises little wavelets.

Its color is the blue of the sea — look, there are fish swimming inside it, any number of them.

The other is a curtain.

Though it's woven cloth, it's a thicket thick with autumn grasses.

And though you can't see it there, there's the feeling of a ginkgo tree, just beginning to color, growing up above it.

When the wind comes, the grasses rustle.

And, look.

An inchworm crawls from branch to branch.

I'll give you these two things.

They're not finished yet, so you'll just have to wait.

And whenever you're bored, just try suddenly remembering them.

You're sure to feel cheered up."

One day he had gone and written something like this on a postcard — a kind of game, of course, but still.

And in doing so, he felt he had managed to relieve, at least a little, that itching, restless feeling he found himself suddenly seized by these days, day or night alike.

At night, lying awake unable to sleep quietly, he would hear a night heron cry as it passed overhead.

Now and then that cry would seem, oddly, to be coming from somewhere within his own body.

The cries of insects too sounded, strangely, as though they were right there in the room.

"Ah, here it comes."

So he would think, and then some unaccountable feeling would rise up in him. ——

This had become, these days, the regular course any sleepless night took.

That strange feeling made him sense, before his eyes — closed, with the light turned off — a vivid presence of things in violent motion.

The presence of something enormous would, even as he watched, turn itself inside out and shrink down to the merest speck.

It was a motion he felt sure he had touched somewhere before, or once held in his mouth.

It seemed to turn ceaselessly, like some rotating machine, and if he tried to picture the tips of his own feet as he lay there, he would at once find himself swept up in the feeling that they lay off at some impossibly remote distance.

It resembled, a little, the feeling one sometimes has while reading, when the characters suddenly seem to shrink smaller and smaller.

When it grew severe, it even brought with it a kind of terror, until he could no longer bear to keep his eyes shut.

These days he sometimes thought that this was what it must feel like to be on the verge of being able to work some sorcery.

It was a sorcery of this sort.

As a child, when he shared a bed with his younger brother, he would often lie face-down and make a fence with his two hands (meaning it to be a pasture),

"Yoshio, look — I can see cows in here."

he would say, tricking his little brother.

Enclosed by his two hands, capped over by his own face, in the darkness above the bedsheet — indeed, if you said so, you could imagine any number of cattle and horses there. ——

Now it seemed to him that such a thing might really, truly be possible.

Countryside, plains, city streets, marketplaces, theaters.

Harbors and the sea.

If only such vast scenes, scattered through with people and carriages and horses and ships and living things, would somehow appear within this darkness.

And it seemed as though it might, at any moment, come into view.

He felt as though even the noise of it were reaching his ears.

That impulse of his, to scribble idle things onto a postcard, came from that same strange, itching restlessness.

Rain

August was drawing to a close.

Nobuko, it seemed, was to return the next day to her school dormitory in the city.

Since her finger had healed, her mother had told her to go and give thanks to the Tenri deity, and, taken along by a neighbor, she had gone and offered her thanks.

That neighbor was the most devout believer in the area.

"Where's the luggage tag?"

So said her father, who had been tying up Nobuko's big wicker trunk.

"What are you standing there gawking for?"

he teased her, feigning irritation, and Nobuko went off, laughing, to search for it.

"It's not there."

she said, coming back.

"Couldn't you make one from an old cuff-link box or something..."

When Takashi said this, her father said,

"No, there ought to be plenty left still. Did you look in that drawer?"

Nobuko said she had.

"Katsuko's probably gone and hidden them away again. Take another look."

her father said, and laughed.

Katsuko was in the habit of picking up even the most worthless little things and hiding them away in her own drawer.

"Here's the luggage tag, if that's what you want."

her mother said, bringing it over with a light, I-told-you-so sort of smile.

"See, you really can't do without your elders."

her father said, something warm and affectionate in his words.

That evening his mother-in-law was roasting beans.

"Takashi, dear — how about some of these?"

she said, and pushed the freshly roasted ones toward him.

"They're the ones Nobuko's taking back to the dormitory as a gift. Even if she brings a whole sho of them, they say it all vanishes in no time..."

As Takashi listened, chewing on the beans, a sound came from the back door and Nobuko came in.

"Did they lend it to you?"

"Yes. I left it out back."

"It might rain, so bring it all the way inside."

"Yes, I've brought it in."

"Old Mrs. Yoshimine asked if I was leaving tomorrow..."

Nobuko broke off her words there, as if finding something funny.

"Asked if you were leaving tomorrow?"

her mother asked back.

Old Mrs. Yoshimine had asked her, "When are you leaving? Are you leaving tomorrow?"

and Nobuko, flustered, had answered, "Yes, I'm leaving tomorrow"

— that was the story.

When her mother and Takashi laughed, Nobuko blushed a little.

What she had borrowed was a baby carriage.

"She's leaving on the first train tomorrow, so we're loading her trunk on it and seeing her off to the station."

her mother explained, telling him the reason.

What a lot of trouble, Takashi thought.

"Is Katsuko going too?"

When Nobuko asked,

"She says she's going, and she's gone to bed early tonight for it."

her mother said.

Takashi thought that, since it would be such a bother to send the luggage out early in the morning, it would be better to buy the ticket tonight and send the trunk on ahead as checked baggage, and so he said,

"Shall I take it over now?"

— he offered.

For one thing, being something of a fussy sort himself about appearances, he had meant to anticipate the feelings of Nobuko, now at that age.

But her mother and Nobuko said, again and again, "No need, no need,"

so in the end he left it to them.

A mother, a daughter, and a niece, the three of them together in the summer dawn — one pushing the baby carriage, one dressed and ready leading the other by the hand — heading toward the station: he pictured that departure in his mind.

It was beautiful.

"Might it not be that, deep in each of their hearts, they were each secretly counting on the pleasure of just such a departure?"

And he felt his heart washed clean.

That night too, sleep did not come easily.

Around midnight a sudden shower fell.

He lay there, waiting eagerly for it to continue.

After a while he heard it, from far off, come walking near again.

The cries of insects gave way to the sound of rain.

After a spell it passed on again toward the town.

He lifted the mosquito net, got up, and slid open one of the rain shutters.

An electric light shone in the castle's main enclosure.

The tree leaves, glossy with rain, gave off under that light a glitter like countless fish scales.

The shower came again.

He sat down on the threshold and let the rain cool his feet.

Below him, the door of one house in the row opened, and a young woman in her nightclothes came out to draw water at the pump.

The rain fell harder, and the gutter began gulping, glug-glug, like a throat.

He noticed a white cat crossing beneath the eaves of some other house.

Nobuko's kimono still hung on the drying pole, out in the rain.

It was a straight-sleeved yukata, the everyday one she always wore, the garment his eyes had grown most used to seeing on her.

Perhaps for that reason, as he looked at it, the shape of Nobuko's body came back to him with an almost uncanny vividness.

The shower went off again toward the town.

Its sound could be heard far away.

"Chin, chin"

"Chin, chin"

— mingled with the crickets that had begun to sing, another insect started up too, its cry like some fine-grained bead struck against a hard metal.

Still feeling the heat in his forehead, he waited for one more shower to come, over the castle.