坊っちゃん English

I

Thanks to the reckless streak I inherited from my parents, I have been getting myself into trouble ever since I was a boy.

Back in grade school I jumped out of a second-story window at the schoolhouse and could not walk for a week.

Someone may well ask why I did anything so foolish.

There was no particular reason for it.

I was sticking my head out of a window in the new building when one of my classmates said, in fun, that for all my swaggering I would never dare jump down from there.

"Coward, coward!"

he jeered — and that was that.

When the school janitor carried me home on his back, my father glared at me with his eyes wide open and said, what kind of fool throws himself out of a second-story window and cripples himself? So I told him that next time I would jump and land on my feet.

A relative once gave me a foreign-made knife, and I was holding the beautiful blade up to the sun to show it off to my friends when one of them said that it shone well enough, but it did not look as though it would cut.

Not cut? I said, and swore I could cut anything with it.

Then cut your own finger, he demanded — so I said, a finger? Like this — and sliced diagonally into the back of my right thumb.

Luckily the knife was small and the bone of the thumb was hard, so I have my thumb to this day.

The scar, though, will not fade as long as I live.

Twenty paces east across the garden, where the ground rises toward the south, there was a scrap of a vegetable patch with a single chestnut tree standing in the middle of it.

Those chestnuts mattered more to me than my own life.

When the nuts were ripening I would go out the back gate the moment I got up, gather the ones that had fallen, and eat them at school.

On the west side of the vegetable patch the garden ran up against a pawnshop called the Yamashiroya, and the pawnbroker had a son of thirteen or fourteen named Kantaro.

Kantaro was a coward, of course.

Coward though he was, he would climb over the lattice fence to steal our chestnuts.

One evening I hid in the shadow of the folding gate and finally caught him.

With his escape cut off, Kantaro came at me with everything he had.

He was a good two years older than I was.

A coward, but strong.

He put his broad flat head against my chest and shoved and shoved, and in the scuffle his head slipped and went right up the sleeve of my lined kimono.

With his head in the way I could not use my arm, so I flailed it about wildly, and Kantaro's head swung this way and that inside the sleeve.

At last, half smothered, he bit into my forearm through the cloth.

That hurt, so I pinned him against the fence, hooked my leg behind his, and threw him over the other side.

The Yamashiroya's ground lay a good six feet below the level of our patch.

Kantaro brought down half the lattice fence with him, landed head first on his own property, and let out a grunt.

As he fell, one sleeve of my kimono tore clean away and my arm was suddenly free.

That night my mother went to the Yamashiroya to apologize, and while she was there she got the sleeve back.

I got up to a good deal of other mischief besides.

Once I took Kaneko the carpenter's boy and Kaku from the fish shop and we wrecked Mosaku's carrot field.

Straw had been spread over the whole plot where the carrot shoots had not yet come up, and the three of us wrestled on top of it for half a day until every carrot had been trampled flat.

Another time I filled in the well in Furukawa's rice field and had to answer for it.

It was a contrivance of thick bamboo with the joints knocked out, buried deep, and the water welled up out of it to irrigate the paddies around it.

Not knowing at the time how the thing worked, I rammed stones and bits of stick down into the well until I had satisfied myself that the water had stopped, and I was home eating my supper when Furukawa came storming in, red in the face.

I believe the matter was settled with a fine.

My father never showed me the slightest affection.

My mother favored my elder brother in everything.

This brother of mine was disgustingly pale-skinned, and his great pleasure was playing at theatricals and taking the women's parts.

Every time my father laid eyes on me he said that this one would never amount to anything.

He is so rough, said my mother, that I fear for what will become of him.

And sure enough, I have not amounted to anything.

You can see for yourself what I have come to.

It was reasonable enough of her to fear for me.

The only thing I can say for myself is that I am alive and have never done time.

Two or three days before my mother died of her illness, I turned a somersault in the kitchen and struck my ribs on the corner of the stove, and it hurt a great deal.

My mother was furious and said she did not want to see my face, so I went and stayed with relatives.

And then word came that she had died after all.

I had not thought she would go so soon.

If she was that gravely ill, I thought on the way home, I might have behaved myself a little better.

Whereupon that brother of mine told me I was an unfilial son, and that our mother had died before her time because of me.

That stung, so I slapped him across the face and was scolded within an inch of my life.

After my mother died, the three of us lived on together — my father, my brother, and I.

My father was a man who did nothing at all, and whenever he saw my face he would say, as though it were a habit with him, that I was good for nothing, good for nothing.

To this day I do not know what it was I was good for nothing at.

He was a strange sort of father to have.

My brother, saying he meant to go into business, was forever studying English.

He had a womanish nature to begin with, and he was sly, so we never got on.

We quarreled about once every ten days.

Once when we were playing chess he laid a cowardly trap of a move, and when I was stuck he sat there jeering at me, delighted with himself.

It made me so angry that I flung the rook I had in my hand straight at the middle of his forehead.

It split the skin and drew a little blood.

My brother told my father.

My father announced that he would disown me.

By then I had resigned myself and was quite ready to be disowned as he pleased, when Kiyo, the maidservant who had been with us for ten years, went in tears to beg my father's pardon, and at last his anger passed.

Even so, I was never particularly afraid of my father.

What I felt instead was sorry for this maid Kiyo.

I had heard that she came of a family of some standing, but that they were ruined in the collapse of the old order, and that this was how she had come down to going into service.

So she was an old woman.

By what turn of fate I cannot say, this old woman was extraordinarily fond of me.

It is a curious thing.

My own mother had given up on me three days before she died; my father found me a trial the year round; the neighborhood pointed at me as a rough young good-for-nothing — and Kiyo made much of me for no reason at all.

I had long since given up any hope of being liked, and it meant nothing to me to be treated by other people like a stick of wood; what puzzled me was being coddled the way Kiyo coddled me.

Now and then, when there was no one else in the kitchen, Kiyo would say, "You have a fine, straightforward nature."

That was her praise, and she gave it more than once.

But I could not understand what she meant by it.

If I had such a fine nature, I thought, then people other than Kiyo would treat me a little better.

Whenever Kiyo said such things I always answered that I had no use for flattery.

And the old woman would say that this was precisely what made my nature so fine, and gaze at my face with delight.

She looked as proud as if she had manufactured me herself.

It made me a little uneasy.

After my mother died, Kiyo grew fonder of me than ever.

Sometimes, with a child's mind, I wondered why she should be so fond of me.

It was pointless; I thought she would do better to stop.

I thought it a shame for her sake.

And still Kiyo doted on me.

Now and then she would buy me bean-jam cakes or plum-blossom crackers out of her own pocket money.

On cold nights she would quietly lay in a stock of buckwheat flour, and before I knew it there would be hot buckwheat gruel at my pillow while I slept.

Sometimes she even bought me a pot of hot noodles.

And it was not only food.

She gave me socks.

She gave me pencils, and she gave me notebooks.

This was a good while later, but she once even lent me three yen.

It was not that I had asked her for it.

She brought it to my room herself and said I must be short of pocket money, and that I should use it.

Of course I said I did not need it, but she insisted, so I took it.

The truth is I was very pleased.

I put the three yen in my purse and tucked the purse inside my kimono, and then I went to the privy and dropped the whole thing straight down the hole.

There was nothing to be done, so I shuffled out and told Kiyo what had happened, and she went off at once, found a bamboo pole, and said she would get it out for me.

After a while I heard water splashing by the well, and when I went to look she had the purse hooked by its cord on the end of the pole and was washing it off.

Then we opened it and examined the one-yen notes, and they had turned brown and the design was almost gone.

Kiyo dried them over the brazier and held them out, saying they would do now.

I gave them a sniff and said they stank, so she said in that case to hand them over and she would have them exchanged — and by some sleight of hand or other she came back with three yen in silver instead of the notes.

What I spent those three yen on I have long since forgotten.

I said I would pay her back one day, and I never did.

Now I would give ten times the sum to pay her back, and there is no way to do it.

Kiyo never gave me anything except when my father and my brother were both out of the house.

If there is one thing I hate above all others, it is getting something for myself behind other people's backs.

I was on no good terms with my brother, naturally, but I did not want to take sweets and colored pencils from Kiyo behind his back.

Sometimes I asked her why she gave things to me alone and never to my brother.

And Kiyo would answer, cool as you please, that his father bought things for him, so there was no need.

This was unjust.

My father was a stubborn man, but he was not the sort to play favorites like that.

To Kiyo's eyes, though, that must have been how it looked.

She must simply have been drowning in her own affection.

She may have come of a good family once, but she was an uneducated old woman, and there was no helping it.

Nor was that the whole of it.

Favoritism is a fearful thing.

Kiyo was convinced that I would make my way in the world and become somebody grand.

And she had decided, all on her own, that my studious brother had nothing to recommend him but a pale complexion and would never be of any use.

There is no arguing with an old woman like that.

She believed that anyone she was fond of was bound to become a great man, and anyone she disliked was bound to come to nothing.

At the time I had no particular notion of becoming anything.

But since Kiyo kept saying I would, I supposed I must be going to become something after all.

Looking back on it now, it was absurd.

Once I even asked her what sort of thing I was going to become.

As it turned out, Kiyo had no clear idea either.

All she said was that I would surely ride in a carriage and build myself a house with a splendid entrance hall.

And Kiyo meant to come and live with me once I had a house of my own and was independent.

Please let me stay with you, she begged, over and over again.

Somehow it seemed to me too that I might come to have a house, so at least I answered yes, I would keep her on.

This woman had a powerful imagination, though, and she would run on by herself with plans of her own: which district did I like, Kojimachi or Azabu, and would I be so good as to put up a swing in the garden, and one Western-style room would be quite enough.

At the time I wanted a house no more than I wanted anything else.

Western style or Japanese, I had no use for either, and I always told Kiyo that I wanted nothing of the kind.

Whereupon she would praise me again, saying that I had few wants and a clean heart.

Whatever I said, Kiyo found a way to praise me for it.

For five or six years after my mother died, this was how I lived.

Scolded by my father.

Quarreling with my brother.

Taking sweets from Kiyo and, now and then, a word of praise.

I had no ambitions.

I thought this was quite enough.

I supposed that other boys, one and all, lived much the same way.

Only, since Kiyo kept telling me at every turn that I was to be pitied, that I was unfortunate, I concluded that I must indeed be pitiable and unfortunate.

Beyond that, nothing troubled me in the least.

The one thing that did put me out was that my father gave me no pocket money.

In the New Year of the sixth year after my mother's death, my father too died of a stroke.

That April I was to graduate from a certain private middle school.

In June my brother graduated from his commercial school.

He had been offered a post at the Kyushu branch of some company or other and had to go.

I still had my studies to finish in Tokyo.

My brother announced that he would sell the house, settle the estate, and set out for his new post.

I answered that he could do as he liked.

I had no intention of living off him in any case.

Even if he did look after me, we would quarrel, and he would be certain to start complaining sooner or later.

It was only by accepting his protection that I would have to bow my head to a brother like that.

I made up my mind that I could keep myself alive delivering milk if it came to that.

My brother then called in a dealer and sold off the junk our ancestors had left us for next to nothing.

The house and grounds went, through somebody's good offices, to a rich man.

That seems to have brought in a fair sum, but I know nothing of the details.

For a month already I had been lodging in Ogawamachi in Kanda while I waited to see which way my future would turn.

Kiyo was bitterly sorry to see the house she had lived in for more than ten years pass into other hands, but it was not hers, and there was nothing she could do.

If only you were a little older, she kept saying, you could have inherited this place.

If I could inherit it by being a little older, then I ought to be able to inherit it now.

The old woman knew nothing about such matters and believed that if I only grew older my brother's house would be handed over to me.

So my brother and I parted; the trouble was where Kiyo was to go.

My brother was in no position to take her with him, and Kiyo had not the faintest wish to trail after him all the way down to Kyushu; and as for me, I was shut up in a cheap four-and-a-half-mat lodging that I might have to give up at any moment.

There was nothing to be done.

I asked Kiyo about it.

When I said, do you mean to go into service somewhere? she answered, as though she had just brought herself to the decision, that until I had a house of my own and had taken a wife there was no help for it and she would go and be a burden on her nephew.

This nephew was a clerk at the courthouse and was comfortably enough off for the present, and he had urged Kiyo two or three times already to come and live with him, but she had refused, saying that even as a servant she preferred the house she had grown used to over the years.

Now, though, she must have decided that being a burden on her nephew was better than changing service to some strange household and having to learn a whole new set of deferences.

Even so she went on telling me to hurry up and get a house, get a wife, and let her come and keep it for me.

She must have been fonder of me, who was nothing to her, than of her own flesh-and-blood nephew.

Two days before he left for Kyushu my brother came to my lodgings, laid out six hundred yen, and said I could use it as capital to go into business, or as school fees to go on studying — whatever I liked — but that after this he would take no further responsibility for me.

It was admirable of him, I thought; six hundred yen or no six hundred yen, I would have managed — but the clean, unfussy way he did it was so unlike him that I liked it, and I thanked him and took the money.

He then produced fifty yen more and asked me to pass it on to Kiyo while I was about it, and I agreed without objection.

Two days later we parted at Shimbashi station, and I have not seen my brother once since.

I lay in bed thinking over what to do with the six hundred yen.

Business was too much bother and I would never be any good at it, and six hundred yen was hardly enough to start a business worth the name.

And even supposing I could, as things stood I could not face people and boast of having been educated, so it would come to nothing but a loss.

Never mind capital — I would use it as school fees and study.

Divide six hundred by three, spend two hundred a year, and I could study for three years.

Work hard for three years and something would come of it.

Then I considered which school to enter, and the fact was that I had never in my life cared for any branch of learning.

Languages and literature in particular I would not touch at any price.

As for the new-style poetry, I could not make out a single line in twenty.

Since I disliked it all equally, I thought, it made no difference what I took up; and as luck would have it I passed in front of the Physics School and saw a notice advertising for students, so I took it for a sign, got a copy of the regulations, and enrolled on the spot.

Looking back on it now, this too was a blunder brought on by the recklessness I inherited from my parents.

For three years I studied about as hard as anyone else, but as I had no particular gift for it, my place in the class was always easier to find by counting from the bottom.

Strangely enough, though, at the end of three years I graduated after all.

It struck even me as odd, but as there was nothing to complain of I let myself graduate quietly.

Eight days after graduation the principal sent for me, and thinking he must want something I went along, and it turned out that a middle school somewhere in Shikoku needed a mathematics teacher.

The salary was forty yen a month; how would I like to go?

I had studied for three years, but the truth is I had no wish to become a teacher and no thought of going out to the provinces.

On the other hand I had no prospect of doing anything except teaching, so when the offer was put to me I answered on the spot that I would go.

This too was the curse of the recklessness I inherited from my parents.

Having accepted, I had to take up the post.

For those three years I had lived shut up in my four-and-a-half-mat room and had not once been nagged at.

I had got through without a single quarrel.

As my life goes, it was a comparatively easy time.

But now even the four-and-a-half-mat room would have to be given up.

The only time in my life I had ever set foot outside Tokyo was on a school outing to Kamakura with my classmates.

This time it was a good deal farther than Kamakura.

I had to travel a tremendous distance.

On the map the place looked like a pinprick on the coast.

It could hardly be much of a place.

What sort of town it was, and what sort of people lived there, I had no idea.

Not knowing did not trouble me.

It gave me no anxiety.

I would simply go.

Though it was, I admit, something of a nuisance.

Even after the house was broken up I went to see Kiyo from time to time.

Her nephew turned out to be a surprisingly decent fellow.

Whenever I called, if he was at home, he would put himself out to make me welcome.

With me sitting right there, Kiyo would treat her nephew to all manner of boasting about me.

She once announced that as soon as I graduated I would buy a mansion somewhere around Kojimachi and go to my office from there.

She settled it all by herself and talked away by herself, and I sat there wretched and red in the face.

And it happened more than once or twice.

Now and then she would go so far as to bring up how I had wet the bed as a small boy, and that finished me.

What the nephew made of Kiyo's boasting I cannot say.

Kiyo was a woman of the old school, and she thought of her relation to me as that of retainer to master in feudal times.

Since I was her master, she seemed to have concluded, I must be her nephew's master too.

Hard luck on the nephew.

When the arrangement was finally settled and there were three days left before I was to leave, I went to see Kiyo and found her in bed with a cold in a three-mat room facing north.

The moment she saw me she sat up and asked, Master Botchan, when are you going to have a house of your own?

She imagined that once a man graduated, money simply welled up in his pockets of its own accord.

And to call a man that great "Botchan" — little master — was more foolish still.

I told her plainly that I would not be having a house for the time being.

When I said that I was going to the provinces, she looked terribly disappointed and kept smoothing the loose ends of her pepper-and-salt hair at the temples.

I felt so sorry for her that I comforted her: "I am going, but I shall be back soon. I shall certainly come back next summer holiday."

That was how I tried to console her.

She still looked odd, so I asked, "What shall I bring you back? What would you like?"

"I should like some of the bamboo-leaf candy from Echigo," she said.

That was her answer.

I had never so much as heard of bamboo-leaf candy from Echigo.

In the first place, it lies in quite the wrong direction.

"I doubt there is any bamboo-leaf candy where I am going," I said.

When I told her so she asked back, "Then which way is it?"

That was her question.

"To the west," I said.

"Beyond Hakone, or this side of it?"

she asked.

She was a great deal to cope with.

On the day I left she came in the morning and fussed over me in a dozen ways.

She had stopped at a notions shop on the way and now packed tooth powder, a toothbrush, and a hand towel into my canvas bag.

I said I did not need such things, but she would not hear of it.

We took rickshaws side by side to the station, and when I had boarded and she was standing on the platform, she looked hard at my face and said in a small voice, "This may be our last parting. I wish you very well."

That was how she said it, quietly.

Her eyes were brimming with tears.

I did not cry.

But I came very close to it.

When the train had gone a good way and I thought it was safe, I put my head out of the window and looked back, and there she still stood.

Somehow she looked very small.

II

The steamer gave a blast and stopped, and a lighter pulled away from the shore and came rowing out to us.

The boatman was stark naked but for a red loincloth.

A barbarous sort of place.

Though in heat like this a man could hardly wear clothes.

The sun was fierce and the water glared with it.

Staring at it made my head swim.

I asked one of the ship's clerks and he told me that this was where I got off.

It looked to be a fishing village about the size of Omori.

The nerve of them, I thought — as if anyone could put up with a place like this — but there was no help for it.

I jumped down into the boat first, with a will.

Five or six others must have followed me in.

Four or so large crates were loaded in besides, and the red loincloth rowed us back to shore.

When we landed I was the first out again, and I collared a snotty-nosed boy standing on the beach and asked him where the middle school was.

The boy looked blank and said he didn't know, so there.

A dull-witted country brat.

In a town no bigger than a cat's forehead, how could anyone not know where the middle school was?

Just then a man in a strange narrow-sleeved coat came up and told me to follow him, and when I did he brought me to an inn called the Minatoya or some such.

A pack of unpleasant women chorused at me to come in, which put me off going in at all.

Standing in the doorway I told them to direct me to the middle school, and when I heard that it was a good five miles off by train I was less inclined than ever to go in.

I wrenched my two bags back from the man in the narrow-sleeved coat and shuffled off.

The people at the inn stared after me.

The station was easy enough to find.

Buying a ticket was no trouble either.

When I got aboard I found a train the size of a matchbox.

It rattled along for about five minutes and then it was already time to get off.

No wonder the ticket had been cheap.

It cost all of three sen.

Then I hired a rickshaw and went to the middle school, but classes were over and there was nobody there.

The janitor told me the master on night duty had stepped out on an errand.

A very easygoing sort of night duty.

I thought of calling on the principal, but I was worn out, so I told the rickshaw man to take me to an inn.

He pulled up smartly at a place called the Yamashiroya.

Yamashiroya was the same name as Kantaro's pawnshop, which struck me as rather amusing.

For some reason they showed me to a dark room under the stairs to the second floor.

It was too hot to bear.

When I said I did not want a room like this, they said that unfortunately every other room was taken, and with that they dumped my bags down and went out.

There was nothing for it, so I went in and sat sweating and put up with it.

Presently they told me the bath was ready, so I plunged in and got straight out again.

On my way back I peered about and saw plenty of cool-looking rooms standing empty.

The impudence of them.

They had lied to me.

Then a maid brought in my dinner tray.

The room was stifling, but the food was a great deal better than what I had had at my lodgings.

While she was waiting on me the maid asked where I had come from, and I said I had come from Tokyo.

When she said Tokyo must be a fine place, I told her, naturally.

When she had taken the tray away and reached the kitchen, I heard a great burst of laughter.

It was all too stupid, so I went to bed at once, but I could not get to sleep.

It was not only the heat.

It was the racket.

About five times noisier than my lodgings.

When I did doze off I dreamed of Kiyo.

Kiyo was munching away at Echigo bamboo-leaf candy, bamboo leaves and all.

When I told her the leaves were poison and she had better stop, she said no, the leaves were the medicine, and went on eating with relish.

I was so astonished that I opened my mouth wide and laughed, ha ha ha ha, and that woke me up.

The maid was opening the shutters.

The weather was the same as ever, as though the bottom had dropped out of the sky.

I had heard that when one travels one gives a tip.

I had heard that if one does not tip, one is treated shabbily.

Being crammed into a narrow, dark room like this must be because I had not tipped.

It must be because I was shabbily dressed and carrying a canvas bag and a cotton-satin umbrella.

Country people, and taking my measure like that.

I would give them a tip and see how they liked it.

I had left Tokyo with about thirty yen in my pocket, the remains of my school money.

After the train and steamer fares and sundries there was still some fourteen yen left.

I could hand over the lot and it would not matter, since from now on I would be drawing a salary.

Country people are stingy, so five yen would certainly be enough to make their eyes start out of their heads.

Let us see what they do now, I thought, and washed my face composedly and went back to my room to wait, and last night's maid came in with the tray.

She held the tray and waited on me with a horrid smirk on her face.

The impudence of her.

There was no festival parading across my face, was there.

Such as it is, it is a good deal better looking than the maid's own.

I had meant to wait until after the meal, but it so irritated me that halfway through I took out a five-yen note and told her to take it to the office afterward, and the maid gave me a strange look.

Then I finished my meal and set off at once for the school.

My shoes had not been polished.

I had driven up to the school in a rickshaw the day before, so I had a fair idea where it was.

Two or three turns at the corners brought me out in front of the gate.

From the gate to the entrance the ground was paved with granite.

When the rickshaw had rattled over these flagstones the day before, the outrageous noise it made had rather unnerved me.

On the way I passed a great many students in cotton-drill uniforms, and every one of them turned in at this gate.

Some of them were taller and looked stronger than I was.

When I thought that I was to teach fellows like that, I began to feel a bit uneasy.

I sent in my card and was shown to the principal's office.

The principal was a dark-complexioned man with a thin beard and big eyes — a regular badger.

He gave himself insufferable airs.

Well, he said, work hard for us, and with great ceremony he handed me my letter of appointment, stamped with a large seal.

That letter of appointment I crumpled up and threw into the sea on my way back to Tokyo.

He informed me that he would introduce me to the staff presently, and that I was to show this letter to each of them in turn.

An unnecessary performance.

Rather than go through all that bother, it would be simpler to paste the thing up in the staff room for three days.

The teachers would not all be assembled in the common room until the bugle sounded for the first period.

There was a good deal of time to fill.

The principal took out his watch and looked at it and said that he meant to talk things over with me at leisure by and by, but that in the meantime he would like me to grasp the general principles — and then he treated me to a long sermon on the spirit of education.

I was listening with only half an ear, of course, but partway through I began to think I had come to an extraordinary place.

There was no possibility of my doing what he described.

To collar a reckless fellow like me and demand that I be a model to the students, that I be looked up to as the moral standard of the whole school, that a man cannot be an educator unless he exerts a personal moral influence beyond his subject — the demands were wildly beyond reason.

A paragon like that would hardly come all this way to the provinces for forty yen a month.

People are much of a muchness.

I had assumed that anyone would get into a quarrel now and then when his temper was up, but by the sound of this I could scarcely open my mouth or go out for a walk.

If the post was as difficult as all that, they should have said so before they hired me.

I hate telling lies, so I resigned myself: I had been taken in, and there was nothing for it — and I made up my mind to refuse then and there and go home.

I had given the inn five yen, so there was only nine yen and some odd coins left in my purse.

Nine yen would not get me back to Tokyo.

I should never have given that tip.

A waste of good money.

Still, nine yen was not the end of the world.

Better to be short of travel money than to tell a lie, I thought, and I said that I could not possibly do as he described and that I was returning the letter of appointment — at which the principal blinked his badger eyes at me and stared.

Presently he laughed and said that what he had just given me was only an ideal, that he knew perfectly well I could not live up to it, and that I need not worry.

If he knew that much, he might have spared me the intimidation to begin with.

While we were at this, the bugle sounded.

A sudden clamor rose from the direction of the classrooms.

He said the teachers would all be in the common room by now, so I followed him in.

Desks were arranged around the walls of a long, wide room, and everyone was sitting at them.

When they saw me come in, every one of them looked at my face as though by agreement.

I was not a sideshow.

Then, as instructed, I went to each of them in turn, produced the letter of appointment, and paid my respects.

Most of them merely rose from their chairs and bowed, but the more thorough ones took the letter I held out, examined it duly, and returned it with great ceremony.

It was pure village theatricals.

By the time I came round to the fifteenth, the gymnastics teacher, doing the same thing over and over had begun to wear on me.

For them it is over in one go.

For me it is the same performance fifteen times running.

They might spare a thought for how a man feels.

Among those I greeted was the head teacher, whatever his name was.

A Bachelor of Arts, apparently.

A Bachelor of Arts means a university graduate, so he must be somebody important.

He had a curiously soft voice, like a woman's.

What astonished me most was that in this heat he was wearing a flannel shirt.

Thin stuff it may have been, but it was bound to be hot.

Trust a Bachelor of Arts to put himself to such needless trouble over his clothes.

And a red shirt at that, which was adding insult to injury.

I heard later that the man wears a red shirt all the year round.

A strange disease to be afflicted with.

By his own account red is good for the constitution and he has them made specially for his health, but it is a needless anxiety.

In that case he might as well have his kimono and trousers made red too.

Then there was an English teacher named Koga, a man with a very bad complexion.

People with pale faces are usually thin, but this man was pale and puffy.

Long ago, when I was at grade school, there was a boy in my class called Tami Asai, and Asai's father had just this coloring.

The Asais were farmers, and when I asked Kiyo whether becoming a farmer gave a man a face like that, she told me no, it was because he ate nothing but the runt pumpkins that grow at the end of the vine, and that was what made him pale and puffy.

Ever since then, whenever I see a pale, puffy person I take it for the wages of eating end-of-the-vine pumpkins.

This English teacher must eat nothing but end-of-the-vine pumpkins himself.

Though to this day I do not know what an end-of-the-vine pumpkin actually is.

I once asked Kiyo, and she laughed and gave me no answer.

I dare say Kiyo did not know either.

Then there was a teacher of mathematics like myself, named Hotta.

He was a burly fellow with a bristling close-cropped head and the face of one of those warrior monks from Mount Hiei.

When I politely showed him my letter of appointment he did not so much as glance at it, but said, "Ah, you're the new man. Come round and see me sometime. Ha ha ha ha."

Ha ha ha ha indeed.

Who would go round to see a fellow with so little idea of manners?

From that moment I gave this shaven-headed fellow the nickname Porcupine.

The teacher of Chinese classics was properly correct, as one would expect.

"Arrived only yesterday, and doubtless fatigued, and yet beginning your lessons already, and with such diligence—" he ran on without a pause: an agreeable old gentleman.

The drawing master was pure entertainer.

In a flimsy gauze-silk haori, snapping his fan open and shut, he said, "And where might you be from, eh?"

"Tokyo?"

"Delighted — now I have company. I am a son of old Edo myself, you know."

If this is what a son of Edo is, I thought to myself, I would rather not have been born there.

I could go on like this about each of them one by one, as long as you please.

But there would be no end to it, so I shall stop.

When the introductions were over, the principal said I might go for the day, but that I should settle the matter of my lessons with the head of mathematics and begin classes the day after tomorrow.

When I asked who the head of mathematics was, it turned out to be the aforesaid Porcupine.

Confound it — so I was to work under this fellow. My heart sank.

Porcupine said, "Say, where are you staying? The Yamashiroya? Right, I'll come round and we'll talk it over,"

and with that he took up his chalk and went off to his classroom.

A department head coming to me to talk it over — the man had no sense of his own position.

Still, it was better than summoning me to him.

After that I went out through the school gate meaning to go straight back to the inn, but there was nothing to do there, so I decided to take a turn about the town and wandered wherever my feet happened to carry me.

I saw the prefectural office.

An old building left over from the last century.

I saw the barracks.

Not so fine as the regiment at Azabu.

I saw the main street.

The road was about half the width of Kagurazaka, and the shops along it were poorer than those.

A castle town of two hundred and fifty thousand koku does not come to much.

How pitiable, I thought, are the people who live in a place like this and give themselves airs about their castle town — and while I was thinking it I found myself in front of the Yamashiroya.

Wide as it looks, the town is small.

I had probably seen most of what there was to see.

I went in at the door meaning to have some dinner.

The mistress of the house, who was sitting at the desk, saw my face and came flying out and pressed her forehead to the boards — "You are back, sir…"

When I had taken off my shoes and stepped up, a maid told me a room had become free and showed me upstairs.

It was a fifteen-mat room at the front of the second floor, with a large alcove.

Never in my life had I been in so splendid a room.

There was no telling when I might be in one again, so I took off my Western clothes, put on a single cotton robe, and lay down spread-eagled in the middle of the floor to try it out.

It was a fine feeling.

After lunch I sat down at once and wrote to Kiyo.

My writing is poor and I do not know many characters, so I detest writing letters.

And I have nobody to write to, besides.

But Kiyo would be worrying.

It would not do to have her imagining I had been shipwrecked and drowned, so I made an effort and wrote her a long one.

It ran like this.

"Arrived yesterday. Dull place. Sleeping in a fifteen-mat room. Gave the inn a tip of five yen. The mistress rubbed her forehead on the floorboards. Could not sleep last night. Dreamed you were eating bamboo-leaf candy, leaves and all. Shall come home next summer. Went to the school today and gave everyone nicknames. The principal is Badger, the head teacher is Redshirt, the English teacher is Pumpkin, mathematics is Porcupine, and drawing is Clown. I shall write you all sorts of things by and by. Goodbye."

When the letter was finished I felt so comfortable that I grew sleepy, and I stretched out spread-eagled in the middle of the room as I had before.

This time I slept soundly, without dreaming of anything at all.

A loud voice asking, "Is this the room?" woke me, and in came Porcupine.

"Sorry about earlier. Now, your classes are—" and he opened negotiations the instant I sat up, which threw me into complete confusion.

When I heard what my classes were to be there seemed nothing especially difficult about them, so I agreed.

For work of that order, never mind the day after tomorrow — I would not have turned a hair if he had told me to start tomorrow.

Once the business of the lessons was settled, he said I could hardly mean to stay in an inn like this forever, and that he would find me good lodgings and I should move.

They would not take anybody else, he said, but if he spoke for me it would be arranged at once.

The sooner the better — look at the place today, move tomorrow, and start at the school the day after; that would be tidy. He settled it all by himself.

He was right that I could not go on occupying fifteen mats indefinitely.

My whole salary might not have covered the bill.

It was rather a shame to have laid out five yen in tips and then move straight away, but if I was going to move in any case it would be more convenient to shift early and settle in, so I asked Porcupine to see to it.

He said I had better come along and look at it, so I went.

It was a house halfway up a hill on the edge of town, and perfectly quiet.

The master was a dealer in antiques called Ikagin, and his wife was some four years older than her husband.

At middle school I once learned the word "witch"; this wife was a witch to the life.

Witch or no witch, she was another man's wife and none of my business.

In the end it was settled that I should move in the next day.

On the way back Porcupine treated me to a glass of iced water on Toricho.

When I met him at the school I had thought him an insufferably high-handed, rude sort of fellow, but seeing him take all this trouble on my account, he did not seem such a bad man after all.

He was simply impatient and hot-tempered, much as I am.

I heard later that he was the most popular master in the school with the students.

III

At last I began at the school.

The first time I walked into a classroom and climbed up onto the platform, it felt very strange.

As I lectured away I wondered whether even I could pass for a teacher.

The students were noisy.

Every so often one of them would bawl out "Sensei!" in an enormous voice.

"Sensei" was too much for me.

Until now I had been calling out "Sensei, Sensei" every day at the Physics School, but calling a man Sensei and being called it yourself are as far apart as heaven and earth.

It made the soles of my feet itch, somehow.

I am not a cowardly man.

Nor am I timid; but the pity of it is that I lack nerve.

When they bawled "Sensei!" at me it was like hearing the noon gun go off in Marunouchi when you are hungry.

I got through the first hour somehow, more or less at random.

But I came out of it without being asked any awkward questions.

When I got back to the common room, Porcupine asked how it had gone.

I answered simply that it had gone well, and he seemed relieved.

When I took up my chalk and left the common room for the second hour, I felt as though I were riding into enemy country.

In the classroom this time the whole class was made up of bigger fellows than the last.

Being a son of Edo, I am slight and small-built, and I carry no weight even standing up on the platform.

In a fight I would take on a wrestler and show him something, but I have no gift for lining up forty great louts like these and cowing them with nothing but my tongue.

Still, I thought that showing weakness to country boys like these would only encourage them, so I pitched my voice as loud as I could and lectured with a bit of a Tokyo roll to my tongue.

At first the students were smothered by it and sat there blankly, and I grew more pleased with myself and laid the Tokyo swagger on thicker — until the strongest-looking fellow, sitting in the middle of the front row, suddenly stood up and said, "Sensei."

Here it comes, I thought, and asked him what it was, and he said, "It be too fast, us can't follow it — couldn't ye go a bit slower, now?"

That was how he put it.

Couldn't ye, now — a soft, lukewarm way of talking.

If it was too fast I would say it slowly, I told him, but I was a son of Edo and could not speak the way they did; if they could not follow it, they could wait until they could.

At this rate the second hour went better than I had expected.

Only, on my way out one of the students cornered me with a geometry problem I had no hope of doing — "Would ye just explain this one for us, now?" — and it brought me out in a cold sweat.

There was nothing for it, so I said I did not know and would teach it to them next time, and beat a hasty retreat, and the students set up a great jeer.

Among it I could hear voices saying he can't do it, he can't do it.

Damned fools — of course there are things a teacher cannot do.

What is so remarkable about saying you cannot do a thing you cannot do?

If I could do problems like that, I thought as I went back to the common room, I would hardly have come out to a place like this for forty yen.

How was it this time? Porcupine asked again.

I said it had gone well, but "well" did not satisfy me, so I added that the students at this school were a thick-headed lot.

Porcupine gave me a strange look.

The third hour, the fourth hour, and the one after noon were much the same.

In every class I took that first day I came a small cropper of one kind or another.

Teaching, I decided, is not the easy business it looks from outside.

The lessons were over, but I still could not go home; I had to sit about idly until three o'clock.

At three, apparently, the students of one's own class clean their room and come to report, and one goes and inspects it.

Then one looks over the attendance register, and at last one is free to go.

Bought and paid for by the month I may be, but what right have they to tie a man to the school through his free hours and set him to staring down a desk?

Still, all the others went through it meekly, according to the regulations, so I thought it would not do for the newcomer alone to make a fuss, and I put up with it.

On the way out I complained to Porcupine that keeping a man at the school until past three, come what may, was idiotic, and he laughed and said, quite so, ha ha ha — but then turned serious and said, look here, you had better not go about grumbling too loudly about the school.

If you must say it, say it to me alone; there are some very odd people about, he said, in the manner of a man giving advice.

We parted at the corner, so there was no time to hear the details.

Then, when I got back to my lodgings, the master of the house came in saying he would make me some tea.

When he said he would make tea I supposed he meant to treat me, but he helped himself freely to my tea and drank it himself.

By the look of it he may well be carrying out this offer to make tea, all on his own, while I am out.

The master told me that he was fond of paintings and antiques and had at last taken to carrying on this trade of his quietly on the side.

"And you, sir, if I may say so, look to be a man of considerable taste yourself."

"Why not take it up as a hobby?" he said — an outrageous proposal.

Two years ago, when I went to the Imperial Hotel on an errand for somebody, I was taken for a locksmith.

When I went to see the Great Buddha at Kamakura with a blanket over my shoulders, a rickshaw man called me boss.

I have been mistaken for a good many things in my time, but no one until now had ever collared me and told me I was a man of considerable taste.

You can generally tell by a man's dress and bearing.

Men of taste, as you see in pictures, wear a hood on their heads or carry a poem-card in their hands.

Anyone who could call me a man of taste with a straight face was no ordinary rogue.

When I said I had no liking for the sort of thing an idle old pensioner does, the master laughed, heh heh heh, and said, no, nobody likes it at the start, but once a man enters upon this path it is not easy to leave it — and poured himself another cup of tea and drank it with a curious flourish of the hand.

The fact was that I had asked him the night before to buy me some tea, but I do not care for tea as bitter and strong as this.

One cup of it seems to hit the stomach.

When I told him to buy something less bitter next time, he said certainly, sir, and squeezed out another cup and drank it.

The fellow drinks it recklessly because it is somebody else's tea.

When my landlord had withdrawn, I prepared the next day's lessons and went straight to bed.

After that, day after day I went to the school and worked according to the regulations, and day after day when I came home the master appeared, saying he would make me some tea.

After about a week I had a general grasp of how the school worked, and a fair idea of what the couple I lodged with were like.

From what other teachers told me, in the week or month after receiving one's appointment a man frets terribly over whether his reputation is good or bad; I felt nothing of the sort.

When I came a cropper in class it was unpleasant at the time, but half an hour later it had vanished completely.

I am a man who could not worry over anything for long even if he tried.

What effect my blunders in class had on the students, and what reaction that effect produced in the principal and the head teacher, was a matter of complete indifference to me.

As I said before, I am not a man of any great nerve, but I am uncommonly quick to make up my mind.

I was prepared to go elsewhere at once if this school would not do, so neither Badger nor Redshirt frightened me in the least.

Still less could I bring myself to charm or flatter a pack of boys in a classroom.

That was all very well for the school; my lodgings were another matter.

If the master had only come to drink my tea I could have borne it, but he brought all manner of things with him.

The first thing he brought was a lot of seal-stones; he laid out about ten of them and said that at three yen for the lot they were cheap and I should buy them.

I told him I was not some third-rate painter making the rounds of the provinces and had no use for such things, whereupon he brought a hanging scroll of birds and flowers by a man called Kazan or some such.

He hung it in the alcove himself and said, is it not a fine piece? and when I answered vaguely that I supposed it was, he told me there were two Kazans, one So-and-so Kazan and one Such-and-such Kazan, and that this scroll was by the Such-and-such Kazan — and after this worthless lecture he said, well, sir, for you I shall make it fifteen yen.

Do buy it, he pressed me.

When I refused, saying I had no money, he said, oh, the money will do at any time, sir — obstinate as they come.

I told him that even if I had the money I would not buy it, and that time I drove him off.

The next thing he lugged in was an inkstone the size of a ridge-end tile.

This is Tankei, he said, Tankei — and he Tankei'd away two and three times over, so half for the fun of it I asked what Tankei was, and he launched straight into a lecture.

Tankei has an upper, a middle, and a lower stratum, he said, and everything you see nowadays comes from the upper, but this is certainly from the middle. Look at these eyes.

Three eyes is a rarity.

And the way it takes the ink is excellent; do try it, he said, thrusting the great inkstone in front of me.

When I asked the price he said the owner had brought it back from China and was anxious to sell, so he would make it cheap at thirty yen.

The man is a fool, beyond any doubt.

I seemed likely to get through my duties at the school one way or another, but under a siege of antiques like this I could not hold out for long.

Before long the school began to pall on me as well.

One evening I was walking in a district called Omachi when I saw, next door to the post office, a signboard that read "Soba" with "Tokyo" added underneath by way of a note.

I am very fond of buckwheat noodles.

Even in Tokyo, whenever I passed a noodle shop and caught the smell of the seasonings, I could never resist ducking under the curtain.

Until now mathematics and antiques had put noodles out of my head, but seeing that sign I could not walk past.

I thought I might as well have a bowl while I was there, and went in.

Inside it did not live up to the sign.

If you are going to advertise Tokyo you might keep the place a little cleaner, but either they had never seen Tokyo or they had no money — it was filthy beyond belief.

The mats had changed color and were gritty with sand into the bargain.

The walls were black with soot.

The ceiling was not only smoked with lamp oil but so low that I found myself ducking my head.

The one thing that was brand new was the price list, with the names of the dishes written out grandly and pasted up.

They must have bought an old house and opened for business two or three days before.

First on the price list was tempura noodles.

Hey — bring me tempura, I called out in a loud voice.

At this, three fellows who had been huddled in the corner slurping and sucking at something all this while turned and looked at me together.

The room was dark and I had not noticed them, but when I saw their faces they were all students from the school.

They greeted me, so I greeted them back.

It was the first buckwheat I had had in a long while, and it was good, so I put away four bowls of tempura noodles.

The next day I walked into the classroom without a thought in my head and found TEMPURA SENSEI written across the blackboard in letters big enough to fill it.

They all roared with laughter when they saw my face.

It was absurd, so I asked whether there was anything funny about eating tempura noodles.

Whereupon one of the students said, "But four bowls be a bit much, now."

Whether I eat four bowls or five, it is my money and I eat it — what business is it of theirs? I got through the lesson briskly and went back to the common room.

Ten minutes later I went to the next classroom, and there it was: ITEM — FOUR BOWLS OF TEMPURA NOODLES.

PROVIDED THAT LAUGHTER IS PROHIBITED.

So it stood on the blackboard.

The first time it had not particularly angered me, but this time it got under my skin.

A joke carried too far is simply mischief.

Like a rice cake burned black, there is nobody to praise it.

These country people have no feeling for where to stop and imagine they can push a thing as far as they like.

Living in a town so cramped that an hour's walk exhausts the sights, with no other accomplishment to their names, they go about proclaiming the tempura affair as though it were the Russo-Japanese War.

Pitiable creatures.

This is the education they get from childhood, and this is why they turn out stunted little men, like a maple in a flowerpot.

If it were innocent I would laugh along with them, but what is this?

Children, and already there is a nasty streak of poison in them.

I wiped off the word tempura without a word and said, do you find mischief of this kind amusing? It is a coward's joke.

Do you know what the word coward means? I asked — and one of them answered, "Getting angry when folk laugh at what ye did yourself, that be the cowardly thing now, surely."

An unpleasant fellow.

When I thought that I had come all the way from Tokyo to teach creatures like this, I felt wretched.

Never mind the back talk, get on with your work, I said, and began the lesson.

Then I went to the next classroom, and there it was written: EATING TEMPURA NOODLES INDUCETH A DESIRE TO TALK BACK.

There was simply no dealing with them.

I was so angry that I said I would not teach such impudent fellows, and walked straight out and went home.

The students, I hear, were delighted to get a free hour.

At this rate the antiques were better than the school.

But when I had gone home and slept on it, the tempura noodles stopped grating on me so much.

When I went to the school the students were there too.

I could make nothing of it.

Three days or so passed without incident, and then on the evening of the fourth I went to a place called Sumita and ate dumplings.

Sumita is a hot-spring town about ten minutes from the castle town by train, or half an hour on foot, and besides restaurants and hot-spring inns and a park it has a licensed quarter.

The dumpling shop I went into stands at the entrance to the quarter and has a great reputation, so I stopped in on my way back from the baths to try them.

This time I had not run into any students and thought nobody could know of it, but when I went to school the next day and walked into my first class, there it was: DUMPLINGS, TWO PLATES, SEVEN SEN.

I had in fact eaten two plates and paid seven sen.

An impossible lot, these fellows.

I expected something in the second hour too, and sure enough: THE DUMPLINGS IN THE LICENSED QUARTER ARE GOOD, VERY GOOD.

Astounding creatures.

I thought that was the end of the dumplings, and then the Red Towel became the talk of the school.

I wondered what it meant; the origin of it was trivial enough.

Ever since I came here I have made a point of going to the hot spring at Sumita every day.

Nothing else in the place comes anywhere near Tokyo, but the hot spring is a splendid thing.

Having come all this way I meant to make use of it every day, so I set off before supper, partly for the exercise.

And whenever I go I take a big Western-style towel dangling from my hand.

The hot water has stained this towel and the red stripes have run, so that at a glance the whole thing looks crimson.

I carry this towel with me always — going and coming, on the train and on foot.

And that is why the students call me Red Towel, Red Towel.

Living in a cramped place is a tiresome business.

There is more.

The bathhouse is a new three-story building, and for the first-class bath they lend you a cotton robe and scrub your back, all for eight sen.

On top of that a girl brings you tea on a lacquered stand.

I always took the first-class bath.

Whereupon they began saying that taking the first-class bath every day on a salary of forty yen was extravagant.

None of their business.

There is more.

The bath itself is built up of granite and partitioned off to about the size of a fifteen-mat room.

There are usually thirteen or fourteen people soaking in it, but now and then there is nobody at all.

It is deep enough to come up to your chest when you stand, so swimming about in the hot water for exercise is a great pleasure.

I used to watch for a moment when nobody was there and swim happily round and round the fifteen-mat bath.

Then one day I came briskly down from the third floor and peered in through the low doorway to see whether I could swim again — and there, pasted up, was a large notice in bold black letters: SWIMMING IN THE BATH IS PROHIBITED.

There cannot be many people who swim in a bath, so the notice may have been made specially for my benefit.

After that I gave up swimming.

I gave up swimming, but I was startled to find, when I went to the school, SWIMMING IN THE BATH IS PROHIBITED written on the blackboard as usual.

It began to seem as though the entire student body were keeping me alone under surveillance.

It thoroughly depressed me.

I am not a man to give up something I have set out to do because of anything the students say, but when I asked myself why I had come to such a cramped place, where a man's nose is always up against something, I felt wretched.

And when I got home there was the siege of antiques as ever.

IV

The school has a night duty, and the staff take it in turns.

Badger and Redshirt, however, are exempt.

When I asked why these two should escape a plain obligation, I was told it was because they hold rank equivalent to imperial appointment.

Very amusing.

They draw a large salary, they keep few hours, and on top of that they get out of night duty — where is the justice in that?

They make up whatever rules suit them and then look as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

How anyone manages such brazenness is beyond me.

I had a good deal to say against it, but according to Porcupine, one man airing his grievances by himself will never carry the day.

One man or two, if a thing is right it ought to carry.

Porcupine quoted the English phrase "might is right" and read me a lecture on it, but I could not follow him, so I asked again and was told it means the right of the strong.

I have known about the right of the strong since I was a boy.

I do not need Porcupine to lecture me on it now.

The right of the strong and night duty are two different questions.

And who would ever agree that Badger and Redshirt are the strong?

Argument aside, my turn at night duty came round at last.

I am a fussy sleeper by nature, and unless I am comfortable in my own bedding I never feel that I have slept at all.

Even as a boy I hardly ever stayed the night at a friend's house.

If I dislike it at a friend's house, I dislike night duty at the school still more.

Dislike it or not, if it is part of what the forty yen covers there is nothing to be done.

I would put up with it and do my duty.

Sitting about alone after every teacher and student has gone home is a thoroughly foolish way to spend an evening.

The night-duty room is at the western end of the dormitory behind the classrooms.

I went in for a moment, but it takes the western sun full in the face and was too stifling to endure.

This being the provinces, the heat lingers on in no hurry even after autumn has come.

I had them bring me the students' fare for supper, and the badness of it appalled me.

That anyone could eat such stuff and still riot the way they do is remarkable.

And they gulp their supper down and have done with it by half past four, so they must be heroes.

I had eaten, but it was not dark yet and there was no going to bed.

I began to want a trip to the hot spring.

Whether going out while on night duty is right or wrong I do not know, but sitting there vacantly, suffering something very like solitary confinement, is more than anyone can bear.

When I first came to the school and asked for the master on duty, the janitor said he had stepped out on an errand, and I thought it strange; now that my own turn had come round I understood.

Going out is the right course.

I told the janitor I was going out for a bit, and when he asked whether it was on business I said no, I was going to the baths, and off I went.

It was a pity I had left the red towel back at my lodgings, but today I would hire one there.

I took my time, getting in and out of the water, until at last it grew dark, and then I boarded the train and got off at Komachi station.

From there it is four blocks to the school.

Nothing to it, I thought, and set off — and there came Badger toward me.

Badger must have been planning to take this very train to the hot spring.

He came bustling along at a brisk pace, and as we passed he looked at my face, so I gave him a brief greeting.

Whereupon Badger asked, with a perfectly straight face, "Were you not on night duty today?"

Were you not on night duty, indeed.

Two hours earlier he had said to my face, "So this is your first night on duty.

Thank you for your trouble."

Had he not thanked me in those very words?

When a man becomes a principal he takes to talking in these disgustingly roundabout ways.

It made me angry, so I said, yes, I am on night duty.

I am on night duty, and I am going back now, and I shall most certainly sleep there — and with that I left him and walked on unconcerned.

At the crossroads on Tatemachi I ran headlong into Porcupine.

What a cramped place this is.

Go out for a walk and you are bound to meet somebody.

"Say, aren't you on night duty?"

he asked, and when I answered, "Yes, I'm on duty,"

he said, "Isn't it a bit irregular for the man on duty to go wandering about?"

That was what he said.

"Not in the least irregular. It would be irregular not to go out,"

I said, giving myself airs.

"Your slovenliness is a trial. It'll be awkward if you run into the principal or the head teacher,"

he said, which was not like Porcupine at all, so I said, "I met the principal just now. He praised me for it — said that in this heat a man on duty would find it hard going without a stroll,"

and since it was all too much bother I went straight back to the school.

After that darkness fell quickly.

For a couple of hours after dark I called the janitor into the duty room and talked with him, but I tired of that too, and thinking I might as well get into bed even if I could not sleep, I changed into my nightclothes, lifted the mosquito net, kicked aside the red blanket, dropped down flat on my backside and lay on my back.

Dropping down flat on my backside when I go to bed has been a habit of mine since I was a boy.

It is a bad habit, and when I was lodging in Ogawamachi a law student on the floor below once came up to complain about it.

Law students are feeble creatures with uncommonly ready tongues, and he went on at foolish length, so I told him that the thump when I go to bed is not the fault of my backside.

It is the fault of the shoddy way the house is built.

If you want to lodge a complaint, lodge it with the landlord — and that flattened him.

This duty room is not upstairs, so I could come down as heavily as I liked.

Unless I fall with a good deal of force I never feel that I have gone to bed at all.

Ah, that's better, I thought, and stretched my legs out hard — and something leapt onto both of them.

It felt rough and not at all like fleas, so I started up in alarm and shook my legs about two or three times inside the blanket.

Whereupon the rough things suddenly multiplied — five or six places on my shins, two or three on my thighs, one squashed with a crunch under my backside, and one that sprang as high as my navel — and now I was thoroughly alarmed.

I got up at once and flung the blanket back behind me, and fifty or sixty grasshoppers came flying out of the bedding.

While I did not know what they were I had felt a little uneasy, but once it was settled that they were grasshoppers I was suddenly furious.

Grasshoppers, and startling a man like that — let us see what you make of this, I said, and snatched up the bolster and beat at them two or three times, but they were too small, and for all the force behind it the thing had little effect.

There was nothing for it, so I sat back down on the bedding and thrashed away at everything within reach, the way one rolls up a mat and beats the tatami at spring cleaning.

The grasshoppers were startled, and the force of the bolster sent them flying, so that they clung to and collided with my shoulders, my head, the end of my nose.

The ones on my face I could not hit with the bolster, so I caught them in my hand and hurled them away with all my might.

Infuriatingly, however hard I threw, what they struck was the mosquito net, which merely swayed a little and gave me nothing to strike against.

The grasshoppers hung on to the net where they had been thrown.

They would not die, either.

At long last, after about half an hour, I had the grasshoppers subdued.

I fetched a broom and swept out the corpses.

The janitor came and asked what the matter was, and I said, what the matter was, indeed — in what country does a man keep grasshoppers in his bedding?

You blockhead.

When I had scolded him he protested that he knew nothing about it.

Knowing nothing about it will not do, I said, and threw the broom out onto the veranda, and the janitor shouldered it timidly and went away.

I sent at once for three of the boarders as representatives.

Six of them came.

Six or ten, it made no difference to me.

Still in my nightclothes, I rolled up my sleeves and opened negotiations.

"Why did you put grasshoppers in my bed?"

"What be a grasshopper, then?"

said the one at the front.

Disgustingly cool about it.

In this school it is not only the principal — even the students talk in these roundabout ways.

"You don't know what a grasshopper is? Then I'll show you one,"

I said — but unluckily I had swept them all out and there was not one left.

I called the janitor again and said, "Bring me those grasshoppers from just now."

"I have already thrown them on the rubbish heap, sir. Shall I go and pick them up?"

he asked.

"Yes, go and pick them up at once,"

I said, and the janitor hurried off at a run and presently came back with about ten of them laid out on a sheet of paper. "I am very sorry, sir, but it being night I could find only these. I shall pick up more in the morning,"

he said.

Even the janitor is a fool.

I showed one of the grasshoppers to the students and said, "This is what a grasshopper is. Great hulking fellows like you, and you don't know a grasshopper — what do you mean by it?"

At which the round-faced one on the far left said, "That there be a locust, now."

That was how impudently he answered me back.

"You blockheads, a locust and a grasshopper are the same thing. And in the first place, what do you mean by tacking namoshi onto a teacher? Nameshi is greens and rice, and a man eats that only with bean-paste skewers,"

I said, turning it back on him, and he said, "Namoshi and nameshi be not the same thing, now."

That was his answer.

Whatever happens, the fellow goes on saying namoshi.

"Locust or grasshopper, why did you put them in my bed? When did I ever ask you to put grasshoppers in it?"

"Nobody put them there, now."

"If nobody put them there, how did they get into the bed?"

"Locusts do like a warm place, so likely they went in on their own."

"Don't talk rubbish. Grasshoppers going in on their own, if you please — I'll not have grasshoppers doing me the honor. Now then, tell me why you played this trick."

"Tell ye — we can't explain what we never put in, now."

A mean-spirited lot.

If they cannot own to what they have done themselves, they had better not do it at all.

So long as no proof can be produced they mean to brazen it out, and there they stood, thick-skinned about it.

I got up to a bit of mischief myself when I was at middle school.

But not once, when I was asked who had done it, did I do anything so cowardly as to hang back.

What you have done, you have done; what you have not done, you have not done. That is the whole of it.

For all the mischief I got up to, my hands were clean.

If I were going to lie my way out of a punishment, I would never have played the trick in the first place.

Mischief and punishment go together.

It is because there is a punishment that mischief can be enjoyed with a clear conscience.

In what country do they suppose a base disposition thrives that wants the mischief and begs to be excused the punishment?

The people who borrow money and beg to be excused paying it back must all be doing the work these fellows will go on to after they graduate.

What do they come to middle school for at all?

They enter a school, tell lies, cheat, play sly, impudent, spiteful tricks behind people's backs, and then graduate with their faces held high, under the delusion that they have received an education.

A worthless rabble.

Negotiating with fellows of such rotten disposition sickened me, so I said, "If you won't tell me, then I have no wish to hear it. It is a sad thing to enter a middle school and be unable to tell the decent from the base,"

and with that I drove the six of them out.

My language and my manners may not be very refined, but I flatter myself that my heart is a great deal more refined than theirs.

The six of them withdrew at their leisure.

On the surface they looked a good deal grander than I, their teacher.

In truth their composure only made it worse.

I could never have had that much nerve.

When I got back into bed and lay down, the inside of the mosquito net was humming from all the earlier commotion.

Lighting a candle and burning them one by one was too much bother, so I unhooked the net, folded it up long, and swung it about the room, crosswise and lengthwise — whereupon one of the rings flew off and caught me a fearful crack on the back of the hand.

When I got into bed the third time I was somewhat calmer, but sleep would not come.

I looked at my watch: half past ten.

When I thought it over, I had come to a troublesome place.

If middle school teachers everywhere have to deal with creatures like this, they are much to be pitied.

It is a wonder the supply of teachers has not run out.

It must take remarkably patient blockheads to become one.

I could never stick it out.

When I think of that, Kiyo is somebody to look up to.

An old woman with no education and no standing, but as a human being she is thoroughly admirable.

All the while she was doing so much for me I never felt particularly grateful, but now that I have come alone to a distant province I understand her kindness for the first time.

If she wants bamboo-leaf candy from Echigo, it would be well worth going all the way to Echigo to buy it for her.

Kiyo praises me for having few wants and a straightforward nature, but the one who does the praising is a finer human being than the one praised.

I began to want to see Kiyo.

While I was tossing about thinking of Kiyo, there came all at once from directly over my head — thirty or forty of them, by the sound of it — a stamping of feet on the floorboards, keeping time, thud, thud, thud, as though the upper story were coming down.

Then a war cry went up, as loud as the stamping.

I sprang up in alarm, wondering what had broken out.

The instant I was on my feet it struck me: aha, the students are rioting to pay me back for what happened earlier.

Your guilt is not wiped out until you have said outright that what you did was wrong.

They knew well enough in their own hearts what they had done wrong.

By rights they should have lain awake regretting it and come to apologize in the morning.

Even without apologizing, they ought at least to have been ashamed and gone quietly to sleep.

And instead — what is this uproar?

The dormitory was not built to keep pigs in.

They might keep their wild, senseless behavior within some sort of bounds.

Let us see what they make of this, I thought, and rushed out of the duty room in my nightclothes and bounded up the stairs to the second floor three and a half steps at a time.

And then, strange to say, the tramping and rioting that had certainly been going on over my head fell dead silent — not a voice, not even a footstep.

This was odd.

The lamps were already out, so in the dark I could not make out clearly where anything was, but you can tell by the feel of a place whether anyone is there.

In the long corridor running from east to west there was not so much as a mouse in hiding.

Moonlight fell in at the far end of the corridor, and away in the distance it was sharply bright.

Something was certainly wrong. Ever since I was a boy I have been given to dreaming, and I have often leapt up in my sleep and talked nonsense and been laughed at for it.

When I was sixteen or seventeen I dreamed one night that I had found a diamond, and I actually got to my feet and demanded of my brother, who was beside me, with tremendous urgency, what had become of that diamond.

For three days after that I was the joke of the household, which mortified me.

Perhaps this too was a dream.

But there had certainly been a riot — and while I stood in the middle of the corridor puzzling it out, from the moonlit end there came "One, two, three — yah!" in thirty or forty voices together, and before the echo had died the whole lot of them began stamping the floorboards in time, exactly as before.

There, you see — not a dream after all, but the plain fact.

Quiet, there — it is the middle of the night! I shouted, in a voice as loud as theirs, and ran off down the corridor toward them.

The way ahead of me was dark; the only mark to steer by was the moonlight at the far end.

I had not run more than a dozen feet when I struck my shin against something big and hard in the middle of the corridor, and while the cry of pain was still ringing through my head my body was pitched flat on its face.

Damn the thing, I said, and got up, but I could not run.

My mind was in a hurry, but my leg would not obey me.

It was maddening, so I came hopping along on one foot — and by then the footsteps and voices had fallen silent again, and everything was still as death.

However cowardly a man may be, there is a limit; nobody could be as cowardly as this.

They are pigs, nothing less.

Very well, I said to myself, I shall not give way until I have dragged the ones in hiding out and made them apologize; and I made up my mind and tried to open one of the bedroom doors to inspect the room — but it would not open.

Whether it was locked, or whether desks or something had been piled against it, push as I might it would not budge.

Then I tried the room opposite, on the north side.

It would not open either.

While I was fretting to get a door open and lay hold of whoever was inside, the war cry and the stamping began again at the eastern end.

The scoundrels have arranged it between them, east answering west, to make a fool of me — so I understood, but what to do about it I had no idea.

I will confess it honestly: for all my courage, I am short of wit.

At a time like this I have no notion at all what to do.

No notion — but I had not the least intention of losing.

To let the thing pass would be a slur on my name.

I should hate to have it said that a son of Edo has no backbone.

To be thought of as the man on night duty who was baited by a pack of snotty-nosed boys, could do nothing about it, and cried himself to sleep for want of any better course, would disgrace me for life.

Such as I am, my people were once bannermen of the shogun.

And the bannermen descend from the Seiwa Genji, from the line of Tada no Manju.

I am of different stock altogether from clodhopping peasants like these.

The pity of it is only that I have no wit.

The trouble is only that I do not know what to do.

Trouble or no trouble, I do not intend to lose.

It is because I am honest that I do not know what to do.

If honesty does not win in this world, then tell me what does.

If I cannot win tonight, I shall win tomorrow.

If I cannot win tomorrow, I shall win the day after.

If I cannot win the day after, I shall have my meals sent up from my lodgings and stay here until I do.

Having settled on this, I sat down cross-legged in the middle of the corridor and waited for daybreak.

The mosquitoes came humming round me, but they were nothing to me.

When I felt the shin I had struck earlier, it was slippery with something.

Bleeding, I suppose.

Let it bleed if it wants to.

Before long the fatigue of the night caught up with me and I dozed off.

Some noise woke me, and the moment I opened my eyes I sprang up with a curse at myself.

The door on the right of where I had been sitting was half open, and two students were standing in front of me.

I came to my senses, and in the instant of realizing it I seized the foot of the student nearest my nose and gave it a mighty pull, and down he went flat on his back.

Serves you right.

The other one faltered for a moment, and I sprang at him, pinned his shoulder, and cuffed him about two or three times, and he stood there dumbfounded, blinking.

Now come to my room, I said, hauling him along, and being evidently a coward he followed without a word of protest.

It had been light for some time.

When I began questioning the fellow I had brought to the duty room, a pig is a pig whether you strike it or beat it, and he stuck to "I know nothing about it" and plainly meant to hold to it to the end; he would not confess.

Meanwhile one came, and another, and gradually they gathered from upstairs into the duty room.

Looking at them, every one had sleepy, swollen eyelids.

A mean-spirited lot.

One night without sleep and they call themselves men, with faces like that?

Go and wash your faces before you come and argue, I told them, but not one of them went to wash.

I had been going back and forth with the fifty-odd of them for about an hour when Badger turned up out of nowhere.

I heard afterward that the janitor had gone specially to report that there was a disturbance at the school.

To call out the principal over a thing like this is feeble beyond words.

Which is why the man is a janitor at a middle school.

The principal heard my account of it through.

He listened briefly to what the students had to say as well.

Until the matter is dealt with in due course, he said, come to school as before.

Wash your faces quickly and eat your breakfast or you will be late — be quick about it, he said, and let all the boarders go.

Feeble stuff.

In his place I would have expelled every last boarder on the spot.

It is because things are done in this leisurely way that the students make fools of the masters on night duty.

And then he said to me, you must be worn out with worry; there is no need for you to teach today — and I answered him thus.

"No, I am not in the least worn out. If this happened every night it would not worry me so long as I was alive. I shall teach. If one night without sleep left me unable to teach, I should pay back the salary I have received to the school."

What the principal made of it I cannot say; he stared at my face for a while and then observed that it was rather swollen.

Indeed it did feel somewhat heavy.

And it itched all over besides.

The mosquitoes must have bitten me a great deal.

Scratching away at my whole face, I answered that however swollen my face might be, my mouth still worked perfectly well and there would be no difficulty about teaching.

The principal laughed and complimented me on my spirit.

To tell the truth, I doubt it was a compliment; he was making fun of me.

V

Would you care to come fishing? Redshirt asked me.

Redshirt is a man with an unpleasantly gentle voice.

You cannot tell whether he is a man or a woman.

A man should have a man's voice.

And he a university graduate, no less.

If even I can produce a decent voice, and I only from the Physics School, it is a disgrace for a Bachelor of Arts to sound like that.

I answered without much enthusiasm that I supposed I might, and then he asked, rudely, whether I had ever fished.

Not often, I said, but when I was a boy I caught three carp at the fishing pond in Koume.

And at the fair at the Bishamon temple on Kagurazaka I once hooked a carp about eight inches long, and just as I was congratulating myself it dropped back in with a splash — a loss I regret to this day. At this Redshirt thrust his chin forward and laughed, ho ho ho ho.

There is no need to laugh in so affected a manner.

"Then you have yet to learn the true flavor of fishing. If you like, I shall instruct you a little."

He was tremendously pleased with himself.

Who would accept his instruction?

People who fish and hunt are heartless creatures, every one of them.

If they were not heartless they could hardly take pleasure in killing.

Fish and birds alike must surely find living easier than being killed.

If a man could not make a living without fishing and hunting that would be another matter, but for someone who wants for nothing to be unable to sleep unless he has killed something living is sheer self-indulgence.

That is what I thought, but he was a Bachelor of Arts with a ready tongue, and knowing I could not beat him in argument I held my peace.

Whereupon the gentleman mistook my silence for surrender and said he would instruct me at once.

If you are free, how about today? Come along with us.

It is dull with only Yoshikawa and myself, so do come, he pressed me.

Yoshikawa is the drawing master — the fellow I call Clown.

What this Clown is thinking I cannot imagine, but he is in and out of Redshirt's house morning and evening and follows him wherever he goes.

They are not colleagues at all.

It is more like master and man.

Wherever Redshirt goes, Clown is certain to go, so there was nothing surprising in that; but when the two of them would have done perfectly well on their own, why call on unsociable me?

He must have invited me out of some conceited fisherman's notion of showing off his angling to me.

I am not a man to be impressed by that sort of thing.

He may land two or three tuna for all I care; it will not move me in the least.

I am human too, and however bad I am at it, something will take the line if I drop it in; and if I refused to go, Redshirt being what he is would certainly suspect that I stayed away because I was no good at it, not because I disliked it.

Having thought it over, I answered that I would come.

So when school was over I went home, got myself ready, met Redshirt and Clown at the station, and we went down to the shore.

There was one boatman, and the boat was long and narrow, of a shape I had never seen anywhere near Tokyo.

I had been looking about the boat for some time and could not see a single rod.

How can you fish without a rod? What do they mean to do? I asked Clown, and he stroked his chin and said, with the air of an expert, "For fishing out at sea one uses no rod, sir; only the line."

If I was going to be put down like that, I should have kept quiet.

The boatman was rowing slowly, slowly, but skill is a formidable thing, and when I looked back we were already so far out that the beach looked small.

The five-storied pagoda of the Kohakuji rose above the woods, sharp as a needle.

Looking the other way, Aoshima lay floating on the water.

Nobody lives on the island, they say.

Looking closely, it is nothing but rock and pine.

With nothing but rock and pine, no wonder nobody can live there.

Redshirt kept gazing at the view and saying what fine scenery it was.

Clown said it was a matchless prospect.

Matchless or not, it was certainly agreeable.

Out on the wide sea with the salt wind blowing on me, I thought it did a man good.

It gave me a tremendous appetite.

"Look at that pine — the trunk perfectly straight and the top spreading like an umbrella. It might be out of a Turner,"

said Redshirt to Clown, and Clown said, "Turner to the life. That curve of it — there is nothing like it. The very image of a Turner,"

with a knowing look.

What a Turner might be I had no idea, but as I could get along perfectly well without knowing, I said nothing.

The boat came round in a circle with the island on our right.

There was no swell at all.

It was so flat that it was hard to accept it as the sea.

Thanks to Redshirt I was enjoying myself immensely.

I should have liked to get up onto that island if I could, so I asked whether we could not put in where the rocks were.

It could be done, said Redshirt, raising an objection, but for fishing one should not be so close to shore.

I said nothing.

Then Clown made the unnecessary proposal: "I say, sir, why don't we call that island Turner Island from now on?"

Capital idea, agreed Redshirt; from now on that is what we shall call it.

If I was included in that "we," it was a nuisance to me.

Aoshima is quite good enough for me.

"And how would it be to set Raphael's Madonna up on that rock, sir?"

It would make a fine picture, said Clown; and Redshirt said, let us leave the Madonna out of it, ho ho ho, with that unpleasant laugh of his.

Oh, there is nobody here, it is quite safe, said Clown, glancing for a moment in my direction, and then he deliberately turned his face away and smirked.

It gave me an unpleasant feeling.

Madonna or young master or whatever, it is nothing to do with me and they may stand her up wherever they please, but to say things another man cannot follow and then behave as though it does not matter whether he asks about them or not—

A vulgar performance.

And this is the man who calls himself a son of old Edo.

I gathered that Madonna must be the nickname of some geisha Redshirt was on familiar terms with, or something of the sort.

Standing a favorite geisha under a pine tree on a deserted island and gazing at her — there is nothing to be done with such a man.

Clown might paint the scene in oils and send it to an exhibition.

This should do, said the boatman, and he stopped the boat and let down the anchor.

How many fathoms? asked Redshirt, and he said about six.

Six fathoms will make sea bream difficult, said Redshirt, and threw his line into the water.

The gentleman evidently means to catch a sea bream. Bold of him.

Oh, with your skill, sir, they will bite.

And it is dead calm besides, said Clown, flattering away, and paid out his own line and cast it in.

There seemed to be nothing on the end of it but a lump of lead for a sinker.

No float.

Fishing without a float is like taking a temperature without a thermometer.

I could never manage it, I was thinking as I watched, when he said, come along, you have a try; have you a line?

I said I had line and to spare but no float, and he said that only an amateur cannot fish without a float.

You do it like this — when the line reaches the bottom you take the measure of it with your forefinger against the gunwale, and the moment one bites you feel it in your hand—

There it is, said the gentleman, suddenly hauling in his line, and I thought he had hooked something, but there was nothing on it at all: only the bait was gone.

Serves him right.

What a pity, sir; that was certainly a big one. If they get away even from a hand like yours, we shall have to be on our guard today.

But even losing one, you know—

It is better than being one of those fellows who sit staring down a float.

It is much the same as not being able to ride a bicycle without a brake, said Clown, chattering on with these peculiar remarks.

I very nearly gave him a thrashing.

I am human too, and the sea is not chartered by the head teacher alone.

It is a wide place.

Surely one bonito at least would bite out of common courtesy, I thought, and dropped sinker and line in with a plop and worked the end of it with my finger as best I could.

After a while something began twitching at the line.

I considered.

This must be a fish.

Nothing that was not alive could twitch like that.

Got him — a catch! and I hauled the line in hand over hand.

Well, well, you have caught something — the younger generation is to be feared, jeered Clown, and by then I had drawn in nearly all the line, with only five feet or so still in the water.

I peered over the gunwale and saw a striped fish like a goldfish fastened to the line, swaying right and left as it rose to my hand.

Splendid.

As I lifted it clear of the surface it gave a flap and splashed my face all over with salt water.

I got hold of it at last and tried to work the hook out, but it would not come.

The hand that held it was slimy.

It was thoroughly unpleasant.

It was too much bother, so I swung the line and dashed the fish against the bottom of the boat, and it died at once.

Redshirt and Clown watched in astonishment.

I washed my hands in the sea, splashing them about, and held them to my nose.

Still stinking of fish.

I had had quite enough of it.

Whatever I catch, I have no wish to take hold of a fish.

And the fish, I dare say, has no wish to be taken hold of.

I wound in my line and had done with it.

First blood to you, sir, but it is only a goruki, said Clown with another of his impudent remarks, and Redshirt made a joke of it: goruki — that sounds like the name of a Russian writer.

Quite so, exactly like a Russian writer, Clown agreed at once, confound him.

Gorki is a Russian man of letters, Maruki is a photographer in Shiba, and the rice tree is the parent of us all — and much good may the lot of them do him.

This Redshirt has a thoroughly bad habit.

Whoever he is talking to, he must trot out foreign names in katakana.

Every man has his own field.

How is a mathematics teacher like me to know a Gorki from a carter? He might show a little restraint.

If he must, let him use names I know too, like Franklin's autobiography, or Pushing to the Front.

Redshirt sometimes brings a bright red magazine called Imperial Literature to school and reads it with an air of reverence.

When I asked Porcupine about it, he said all of Redshirt's katakana comes out of that magazine.

Imperial Literature has a good deal to answer for.

After that Redshirt and Clown fished away in earnest, and in about an hour the two of them landed fifteen or sixteen.

The comical part was that every single one they caught was a goruki.

Not a sea bream to be had for love or money.

Today is a great day for Russian literature, Redshirt was saying to Clown.

If a hand as skilled as yours takes gorukis, sir, there is no help for it if I take them too.

It stands to reason, Clown was answering.

When I asked the boatman, he said these little fish are full of bones and taste so bad that nobody can eat them.

They are fit only for fertilizer.

So Redshirt and Clown were fishing away in deadly earnest for fertilizer.

The pity of it.

One fish had cured me, so I lay on my back in the bottom of the boat and gazed up at the wide sky.

This is a great deal more elegant than fishing.

Then the two of them began talking in low voices.

I could not hear them well, nor did I wish to.

Looking up at the sky, I was thinking of Kiyo.

If I had money and could bring Kiyo out to a beautiful place like this, how pleasant it would be.

However fine the scenery, it is worth nothing in the company of a man like Clown.

Kiyo is a wrinkled old woman, but I should not feel the least ashamed to take her anywhere.

A creature like Clown, on the other hand — in a carriage, in a boat, up the Ryounkaku tower — is not fit to come near one.

If I were the head teacher and Redshirt were me, he would certainly be fawning on me and flattering me and making fun of Redshirt.

They say sons of Edo are shallow, and if this is the sort that goes round the provinces repeating "I am a son of Edo myself," then country people are bound to conclude that shallowness is what a son of Edo is, and a son of Edo is what shallowness means.

While I was thinking these things the two of them began snickering.

Between the laughs they said something, but it came in broken snatches and I could make nothing of it.

"Eh? I wonder…"

"…quite so… because he does not know… it is rather cruel."

"Surely not…"

"The grasshoppers… it is quite true."

I had not been listening to the rest of it, but when I heard Clown say the word grasshoppers I stiffened in spite of myself.

For some reason Clown put a particular weight on the word grasshoppers, making sure it reached my ear distinctly, and then deliberately blurred what came after.

I did not move, but went on listening.

"That fellow Hotta again…"

"He may well have…"

"Tempura noodles… ha ha ha ha ha."

"…stirring them up…"

"The dumplings too?"

Broken as the words were, judging by the grasshoppers and the tempura noodles and the dumplings, they were unquestionably having a private talk about me.

If they mean to talk, let them talk louder; and if they mean to talk in private, they had better not invite me along.

A thoroughly distasteful pair.

Grasshoppers or sandals, the fault is not mine.

The principal told me to leave the matter with him for the time being, so out of regard for Badger's face I am holding my hand for now.

And here is Clown, of all people, offering his unwanted comments.

He would do better to go and suck on his paintbrush and keep out of it.

My own affairs I shall settle by myself sooner or later, so that is no matter; but the phrases "that fellow Hotta again" and "stirring them up" stuck in my mind.

Whether they meant that Hotta had egged me on and made the affair worse, or that Hotta had egged the students on to torment me, I could not tell.

As I gazed at the blue sky the sunlight gradually weakened and a slightly chilly wind began to blow.

A cloud like the smoke of an incense stick stretched quietly across the clear depth above, and before I knew it it had flowed away into the depth and hung there like a thin haze.

Shall we go back? said Redshirt, as though it had just occurred to him, and Clown said, yes, it is just about time.

Are you seeing the Madonna tonight? asked Clown.

Don't talk nonsense, said Redshirt, someone will misunderstand — and he lifted himself a little from where he had been leaning against the gunwale.

Heh heh heh heh, it is perfectly safe.

Even if he hears — and as Clown turned round I fixed him with eyes like saucers full in the face.

He recoiled as though dazzled, and said, well, well, I surrender, and drew in his head and scratched it.

The impertinence of the man.

The boat rowed back across the quiet sea toward the shore.

You do not seem to care much for fishing, said Redshirt, and I answered that I preferred lying down and looking at the sky, and knocked the cigarette I had been smoking into the sea, where it hissed and went bobbing away on the waves parted by the oar.

"The students are delighted that you have come, so do make an effort for them,"

he said, striking off onto something with no connection to fishing at all.

"I doubt they are so very delighted."

"No, it is not flattery. They really are delighted — isn't that so, Yoshikawa?"

"Delighted is not the word. They are beside themselves,"

said Clown with a smirk.

It is a curious thing how every single remark of his gets under my skin.

"But you must be careful, or it may turn dangerous,"

said Redshirt, so I answered, "Dangerous it is, then. If that is how matters stand, I am prepared for danger."

That was what I told him.

In fact I had made up my mind on one of two things: either I would be dismissed, or I would make every one of the boarders apologize.

"Put like that there is no getting hold of you — but the fact is that I say it as head teacher, for your own good, so please do not take it amiss."

"The head teacher is genuinely well disposed toward you. And I, for what little I am worth, being a son of Edo like yourself, want you to stay with us as long as possible so that we may be of use to one another, and I have been quietly working to that end in my own way,"

said Clown, saying something almost human for once.

If I were ever to be beholden to Clown, I would sooner hang myself and be done with it.

"So — the students are delighted that you have come, but there are various circumstances involved. There will be things that anger you, but consider this the point at which to bear it, and be patient. I shall never do anything that is not to your advantage."

"Various circumstances — what sort of circumstances?"

"That is a little complicated, but you will come to understand it in time. You will see it for yourself without my telling you — isn't that so, Yoshikawa?"

"Indeed, it is a very tangled business. It cannot possibly be grasped in a day. But you will come to understand it; you will see it for yourself without my telling you,"

said Clown, saying exactly what Redshirt had said.

"If the circumstances are so troublesome I have no need to hear them; I ask only because you brought the matter up yourself."

"That is quite fair. It is irresponsible of me to open a subject and then not follow it through. Very well, I shall say this much. You have, if I may say so, only just finished your studies, and this is your first experience of teaching. But a school is a place of a good many private interests, and things cannot be settled as simply as a student would settle them."

"If they cannot be settled simply, how are they settled?"

"Well — it is precisely because you are so direct that I say you are still short of experience…"

"Short of experience I certainly am. I put it in my application: twenty-three years and four months."

"There, you see — and so a man may be taken advantage of from a quarter he never expected."

"If a man is honest, he need not fear anyone taking advantage of him."

"Of course he need not fear it — he need not fear it, and yet he is taken advantage of. Your predecessor was, in fact, and that is why I say you must be careful."

It struck me that Clown had gone quiet, and when I turned round he was at the stern, talking about fishing with the boatman.

With Clown out of the way it was a good deal easier to talk.

"Who took advantage of my predecessor?"

"To name him would touch that person's reputation, so I cannot say. And as there is no clear proof, saying it would put me in the wrong. At any rate, you have taken the trouble to come, and if you were to come to grief here there would be no point in our having called you. Do please be careful."

"Careful — I cannot be more careful than I am. It is enough not to do anything wrong, surely."

Redshirt laughed, ho ho ho ho.

I was not aware of having said anything to be laughed at.

To this very day I firmly believe that what I said was right.

When I think about it, most people in the world seem to encourage a man to turn bad.

They appear to believe that one cannot succeed in society without turning bad.