春の鳥 English

I

Some six or seven years ago, I was employed as a teacher of English and mathematics in a certain provincial town.

In that town there was a hill called Shiroyama — a hill densely shaded by great trees, not especially tall, but richly scenic — and I would climb it whenever I went out for a walk.

At the summit the ruins of an old castle remained.

Ivy and creepers twined around the tall stone walls, and where those vines had turned deep crimson the effect was beyond all words to describe.

The ground where the tower keep had once stood was now open and flat; in time, scattered dwarf pines had taken root, summer grasses had filled every gap with dense growth, and the whole gave a sorrowful aspect that could not but evoke the past.

I cannot count how many times I lay down upon the grass there, and, gazing across the gloomy deep forest untouched by an axe for hundreds of years, looked out with pleasure over the fields and villages beyond.

I remember it was a Sunday afternoon; it was late autumn, the sky clear as water, yet a wild gale was blowing and the forest on Shiroyama roared fiercely.

I had climbed to the summit as usual and was reading a book I had brought, watching the sun — now tilted somewhat to the west — dye distant villages and nearby fields a reddish gold, when I suddenly heard voices and stepped out to the edge of the stone wall to look down.

There was nothing alarming: three young girls were gathering fallen branches below.

The wind being so strong, there must have been plenty of deadwood to find; though they already carried large bundles on their backs, they were still picking about the ground for more.

They gathered together, talking cheerfully, singing as they worked — each of them perhaps twelve or thirteen years old, probably farm children from some nearby village.

I watched them for a time, then turned my eyes back to the book, and before long had forgotten all about the girls.

Then came a shriek from one of them; startled, I looked down and saw the three children, frightened by something, bolt away in a panic with their bundles of wood still on their backs, and in an instant they had vanished behind the stone wall.

Thinking it strange, I kept watch over the spot, and then I saw someone coming toward me through the undergrowth, pushing through the brush from deep within the dim forest, making his way along where there was no path at all.

At first I could not make out who it was, but when he emerged from the forest and appeared at the foot of the stone wall, I could see it was a boy who appeared to be eleven or twelve years old.

He wore a dark-blue short-sleeved jacket and a white cotton sash, and his appearance was that of neither a farmer's child nor a townsman's.

He held a thick stick in his hand and was looking about in all directions; when he happened to glance up toward the top of the stone wall, the two of us, quite involuntarily, found ourselves face to face.

The boy fixed his gaze on my face for a moment, then broke into a grin.

It was no ordinary sort of smile.

His pale, round face and the rolling, staring quality of his eyes told me at once that this was no ordinary child.

"Teacher, what are you doing?"

He called up to me, which gave me a small start; but when I thought about it, the town where I was teaching at the time was a very small castle town, so while I myself hardly knew anyone beyond my own pupils, the local people all knew more or less who the young teacher from the capital was — and so it was really no mystery that this boy should address me.

That occurring to me, I softened my voice and said,

"I'm reading a book. Won't you come up?"

No sooner had I said it than the boy seized the stone wall with both hands and began climbing it like a monkey.

It was a wall five ken or more high, as sheer as a cliff, so I was alarmed and thinking to stop him — but already he had reached the midpoint, and when his hand caught a creeping vine nearby he hauled himself up hand over hand and in a moment stood right beside me.

He was grinning broadly.

"What is your name?" I asked.

I asked him.

"Roku."

"Roku? You're called Roku-san, are you?"

When I asked, he nodded and, with that same strange smile, left his mouth slightly open and stared at my face with an unsettling intensity.

"How old are you?"

When I asked, he looked puzzled, so I asked him once more.

Then he made an odd movement of his lips, moving them soundlessly, and suddenly opened both hands and bent down his fingers one by one — hi, fu, mi — then skipped to ju, juichi, and looked up with a serious expression.

"Eleven."

The whole manner of it was exactly like a child of perhaps five who has just barely managed to learn to count.

Without thinking, I said, "My, you know it well."

"Mother taught me."

"Do you go to school?"

"I don't go."

"Why don't you go?"

The boy tilted his head and gazed off into the distance, and I thought he was considering the question and waited for him.

Then suddenly the boy let out a loud wailing cry, like the voice of a mute, and ran off.

"Roku-san! Roku-san!"

I called out in surprise, trying to stop him, but

"Karasu! Karasu!"

he shouted, not looking back even once, and ran down off the keep-platform, and in an instant he had vanished.

II

At that time I was living in lodgings, which I found very inconvenient, so I asked around and eventually arranged to rent two upstairs rooms in the home of a man named Taguchi, leaving all matters of food and lodging entirely to his household.

This Taguchi was of the old chief-retainer class; he maintained a fine estate at the foot of Shiroyama much as it had been in former days, and lived in comfortable prosperity — so to lend me those upstairs rooms and see to my needs was no small act of kindness on his part.

What surprised me was this: the morning after the day I moved to Taguchi's house, I got up early and was about to go out for a walk, when I found the boy I had met on Shiroyama sweeping the garden.

I said,

"Good morning, Roku-san."

I called out to him, but the boy only flashed that grin at the sight of my face and went on sweeping fallen leaves with the grass broom, saying not a word.

As the days passed, the background of this strange boy gradually became clear to me — because, one supposes, I was paying close attention to what I saw and heard.

The boy was called Rokuzo; he was the nephew of the master of the Taguchi house, and had been an idiot from birth.

His mother was a woman of forty-five or forty-six who had been widowed early, returned to her family home, and was living under her elder brother's care with her two children.

Rokuzo's elder sister was called Oshige; she was seventeen at the time and, by my observation, was herself no less than what one might honestly call an idiot.

The master of the Taguchi household had at first seemed to be concealing the matter of the children's idiocy, but as it was not something that could be hidden, one evening he came to my room and, at the end of a conversation about education, brought up the fact that his nephew and niece were idiots, asking me whether there was any way to give them some degree of schooling.

According to what the master told me, the father of these two unfortunate siblings had been an excessive drinker — someone who through drink had shortened his own life and squandered the family's entire fortune.

Both the sister and younger brother had been sent to primary school at first, but neither could learn a thing; no matter how hard the teachers worked it was all in vain, and they could not be taught alongside the other pupils; they merely became objects of mockery for the mischievous children, so out of pity they had been made to withdraw from school.

Indeed, on hearing the details, it became all the more clear that both the sister and the younger brother were complete idiots.

The master himself did not say it, but his sister — that is, the mother of the two children — was herself a person of markedly limited understanding, as was obvious at a glance; and I quickly perceived that the cause of the children's idiocy lay not only in the father's heavy drinking but also in heredity from the mother.

I knew that there was such a thing as education for idiots, but since it requires specialized knowledge, I did not rashly agree to the master's consultation.

I only told him how difficult it would be, and left it at that.

But thereafter, as I watched Oshige and Rokuzo more closely, I could not help feeling deep pity for them.

I thought that among all manner of afflictions, theirs was surely among the most pitiable.

Those who cannot speak, those who cannot hear, those who cannot see — all are certainly unfortunate.

Yet those who cannot speak, cannot hear, cannot see — they can still think.

They can think and feel.

An idiot, on the other hand, is mute, deaf, and blind in the mind — and for that reason is barely distinguishable from the beasts.

Since he still takes human form, he is not entirely without feeling; yet compared to an ordinary person, he falls not even to one-tenth.

Moreover, even if the mind's workings were incomplete but somehow still in harmony, there would be some relief — but when the very structure of the mind is warped from the start, the manner of the person is quite strange: the weeping, the laughing, the joy, the grief are all, seen by ordinary eyes, out of tune, and so the pathos is greater still.

As for Oshige — leaving her aside — Rokuzo was after all a child, and there was an innocence in him that made me feel doubly sorrowful; I came to wish that if any human effort could help, I wanted somehow to develop his mental faculties, even a little.

Then, about two weeks after my conversation with the master of the Taguchi house, around ten o'clock at night, just as I was thinking of going to bed,

"Teacher, are you still awake?"

came a voice, and into my room stepped Rokuzo's mother.

A short, slight woman with a small head and a face somewhat prominent in the center — a woman of the old fashion who always blackened her teeth.

It was her habit to wear an expression at the corners of her eyes and mouth of a vacant, good-natured smile, her lips slightly parted.

"I was just thinking of going to sleep," I said,

while the woman sat down by the brazier and said,

"Teacher, I have a small request to make."

She seemed to find it difficult to begin.

"What is it?"

"It is about Rokuzo. He is such a fool, and I worry so much about his future — and thinking of it, I set aside my own foolishness and find I cannot stop worrying about him."

"I quite understand. But perhaps there is no need to worry quite so much."

I found myself instinctively offering words of comfort — which is simply human nature, I suppose.

III

That night I listened at length to what the mother had to say, and what moved me most was the love between parent and child.

As I said before, it was plain to see at a glance that this woman herself was quite deficient in understanding, and yet her anxiety for her child's idiocy was no different at all from that of any ordinary parent.

And precisely because the mother was herself close to an idiot, I felt the more keenly moved.

I was almost moved to tears myself.

So I promised to do my best with Rokuzo's education, sent the poor woman back to her room, and spent late into that night turning over various plans in my mind.

From the next day onward, I made a habit of taking Rokuzo along on my walks and, as occasion allowed, tried to develop his mental faculties bit by bit.

The first thing I noticed was that Rokuzo entirely lacked any sense of number.

He simply could not count from one to ten.

If I repeated and repeated, he could manage to recite the numbers from one to ten by rote, but when I picked up three pebbles from the roadside, lined them up, and asked how many there were, he would only stare and never answer.

If I pressed him he would at first give that strange uneasy laugh of his, but in time he would look as though he were about to cry.

I applied effort upon effort, working with patient persistence.

Once we climbed the stone steps of the Hachimangu shrine counting aloud — hi, fu, mi — and stopped at seven steps, and I told him, "seven," and then asked how many steps we had just climbed, to which he answered in a loud voice, "ten."

Whether I counted the rows of pine trees, or tried rewarding him with sweets when he got the number right, the result was always the same.

The words hi, fu, mi, and the concept of number those words were meant to convey, had no connection whatsoever in this child's head.

I had heard that idiots lack any sense of number, but I had never imagined it would be as complete as this; at times I felt like weeping, and there were moments when, gazing at the child's face, tears fell of their own accord.

Yet for all that, Rokuzo was quite a mischievous creature, and when he set his mind to a prank he could give people quite a fright.

He was skilled at climbing hills; running about Shiroyama, he moved as if on level ground, flying along whether there was a path or not.

And so it had happened before: the people at Taguchi's would worry about where Rokuzo had gone; then he would have been gone since midday, and at dusk he would suddenly drop down into the back garden of the Taguchi house from the cliff of Shiroyama and come home.

The girls gathering firewood had run from the sight of Rokuzo because they had been startled by this mischievous idiot on more than a few occasions, I now realized.

But then again, Rokuzo would burst into tears at almost nothing.

His mother, minding appearances before her brother, would scold him severely from time to time and sometimes strike him with her open hand; at such times he would clutch his head, curl up his body, and cry out.

But to see him laughing again moments later, as though he had completely forgotten he had been struck — seeing that, I felt all the more the painfulness of this child's condition.

Given all this, one would not expect Rokuzo to know any songs — and yet he did.

He had committed to memory the sort of folk songs that woodgathering children might sing, and would hum them quietly to himself from time to time.

One day I climbed Shiroyama alone — I had thought to bring Rokuzo along, but he was nowhere to be seen.

Though it was winter, Kyushu is a warm region, so on a fine day the air is quite mild, the air clear and bright, and for climbing hills winter is actually the better season.

I trod through the fallen leaves and reached the summit, and as I came near the base of the old castle keep, in the silence of the mountain with not a sound to be heard, I caught the sound of a gentle voice singing; looking up, I saw Rokuzo sitting astride the corner of the stone wall of the keep, swinging both legs idly to and fro, his gaze cast far away, singing a folk song.

The color of the sky, the light of the sun, the old castle ruins, and the boy — it was like a painting.

The boy was an angel.

In that moment I could not see Rokuzo as an idiot at all.

Idiot and angel — what a sorrowful contrast.

Yet at that moment I felt deeply, with a kind of awe, that even an idiot, being a boy, was nonetheless a child of nature.

One more strange habit of Rokuzo's should be mentioned: this boy was fond of birds and, whenever he saw one, would become flustered and excited, his eyes lit up.

But whatever bird he saw, he would call it "karasu" —

and no matter how many times you told him a bird's name, he could not remember it.

When he saw a "mozu" —

when he saw a "hiyodori" —

he would call it "karasu."

He would call everything "karasu."

What was amusing was that once he saw a white heron and called it "karasu" —

the saying that calling a "sagi"

a "karasu"

to blacken it into a crow — that old proverb was simply a matter of course for this child alone.

When a mozu called from the top of a tall tree, Rokuzo would gape open-mouthed and stare up at it, transfixed.

And his way of gazing vacantly after the mozu as it flew away was altogether peculiar; it seemed the bird moving freely through the sky must have struck this child as something quite extraordinary.

IV

Now, I had put considerable effort into helping this pitiable child, but there was no visible improvement whatsoever.

In the course of all this, spring of the following year arrived, and an unforeseen misfortune fell upon Rokuzo.

It was the end of March: one morning Rokuzo was nowhere to be seen; by early afternoon he had not returned; and at last when dusk came and he still had not come back, the Taguchi household was greatly alarmed, and his mother in particular could not keep still.

So I thought it best to search Shiroyama first, and with a servant from the Taguchi house, lantern in hand, carrying in my heart a strange and painful presentiment, I climbed the familiar path and reached the castle ruins.

With a feeling that can only be called an instinct, I came to the base of the old keep, and

"Roku-san! Roku-san!"

I called out.

And then the servant and I, as if by agreement, held our breath and strained our ears.

The place being castle ruins, and the one we were searching being no ordinary child — there was a horror about it all that I cannot quite describe.

We climbed up to the keep platform and went along the edge of the stone wall looking down, until at the base of the highest northern corner we discovered Rokuzo's body lying below.

It may sound like the telling of a ghost story, but in truth, from the moment I learned that Rokuzo had been gone so very long, I had somehow felt that he must have fallen to his death from these high stone walls.

I may be laughed at for too much imagining, but to confess it: it seemed to me that Rokuzo must have flung himself from the corner of the stone wall, intending to soar through the sky like a bird.

If a bird had come and perched on a branch right before his eyes and flown from branch to branch, freely showing off its flight, Rokuzo would surely have tried to leap to that branch himself — of that I am certain.

Two days after the burial, I climbed the keep platform alone.

Thinking of Rokuzo there, I was overwhelmed by all manner of thoughts about the mysteries of human life.

The difference between human beings and other animals.

The relationship between humanity and nature.

Questions such as these — life, and death — stirred in my young heart a profound, profound sorrow.

There is a poem by a celebrated English poet titled "There Was a Boy" —

it goes like this.

A boy would stand at the edge of a lonely lake every evening, interlace the fingers of both hands, and hoot like an owl; and the owls in the mountains across the lake would answer him — this was the boy's delight, but at last he died and was laid in a quiet grave, and his spirit returned to the bosom of nature — that is the feeling the poem conveys.

I had always loved that poem and read it often; but when I witnessed Rokuzo's death, thought upon the course of his life, and reflected on his idiocy, I felt that Rokuzo's story was somehow even more full of meaning than that poem.

Standing atop the stone wall and looking out, the birds of spring are flying free.

Might not one of them be Rokuzo?

Even if none is Rokuzo, how much different from those birds was he, really?

⁂

The poor mother wept, even as she said that her child's death was perhaps a blessing for the child himself.

One day, intending to visit Rokuzo's fresh grave, I went to the cemetery on the north side of Shiroyama, and found the mother already there, walking around and around the grave without stopping, murmuring something to herself.

She seemed entirely unaware of my approach, for

"Why did you go and imitate a bird, eh — why did you jump from the stone wall? … But the teacher said so himself — he said Roku-san jumped from the top of the keep meaning to fly through the sky. Even a fool — does anyone imitate a bird?"

she said, then paused a moment in thought, and added, "But you know, it's better that you died. It is better for you to be dead …"

Noticing me,

"Don't you think so, Teacher — it's better that Roku is dead, isn't it?"

she said, and tears streamed down her face.

"It is not necessarily so — but at any rate, since it was an unforeseen accident, there is nothing to do but accept it …"

"But why did he go and imitate a bird?"

"That is only my conjecture. Whether Roku-san really died imitating a bird — that is not something one can know for certain."

"But Teacher, that is what you said yourself."

The mother fixed her eyes on my face and stared at me steadily.

"Only because Roku-san was so very fond of birds, I thought perhaps it might have been so — that is all."

"Yes, he was fond of birds. Whenever he saw a bird he would spread his arms out like this, like this —"

and the mother imitated the flapping of a bird's wings, saying, "like this he would fly about the place. Yes, and he was good at imitating the cry of a crow"

— and seeing her tell it so, her eyes alight with animation, I found myself closing my eyes without thinking.

From the forest of Shiroyama, a single crow flew with slow and easy wingbeats, calling two or three times as it flew toward the shore; and the idiot's mother abruptly stopped talking and, forgetting herself entirely, watched it go.

What did Rokuzo's mother see, in that one crow?