たけくらべ English

I

Go around and there stands the Return Willow of the Great Gate, trailing long and low; the revelry of the third-floor rooms is mirrored in the blackened drainage ditch as clearly as if one could reach out and touch it, and the ceaseless traffic of rickshaws day and night bespoke an unimaginable prosperity — yet the place was called Daionji-mae, a name smacking of Buddhism, though those who lived there said it was, for all that, a lively sort of town; past the corner of the Mishima Shrine not a single imposing mansion was to be seen, only the leaning eaves of tenements running ten or twenty houses in a row, and since trade was sluggish there, from behind the half-shut rain shutters came a curious sight: paper cut into strange shapes, coated with white pigment and colored like grilled tofu on a skewer, their bamboo-stick backs also a comical touch — not one house only, nor two, but all of them, morning after morning setting them out to dry in the sun and evening after evening taking them in, the whole household engaged in this with great care; and when one asked what these things were, came the reply: do you not know? — on the day of the Rooster in the eleventh month, at the customary shrine, these are the lucky rakes that the God of Desires lifts aloft, these are what we prepare in advance.

From the time the New Year's pine gate-decorations are taken down, this work carries on straight through the year — these are true tradespeople; as a sideline, from summer onward they color their hands and feet, counting on this to cover their New Year clothes as well. Namu Otori Daimyojin — since even those who buy these rakes are said to receive great fortune, the makers pray all the more for manifold profit; so says everyone, and yet the returns seem less than one would hope, for no rumor of great wealth had been heard among the residents here. Most who lived in the area were connected to the pleasure quarter: husbands worked at one of the latticed establishments in some capacity or other, clattering away with footwear-check tokens, busy from dusk onward throwing on a haori coat and heading out, while the wife behind them struck sparks at their back — was this perhaps her last glimpse of him? Ten-person double-suicide gone wrong, resentment of such a life's dangerous end, and then a moment's alarm and off to work that looked for all the world like an excursion; the daughters served as junior attendants at one of the grand houses

or as errand-runners for the teahouses of the seven establishments, learning the trade with a paper lantern swinging as they trotted about — and when their apprenticeship was done, what would they amount to? It was all rather amusing to think they aimed for the great cypress stage. Women past thirty and thoroughly city-polished, neatly turned out in matching striped cotton kimono with dark-blue tabi socks, sandals clinking busily, parcels tucked under their arms — the nature of their errand was plain without asking; they'd call out at the teahouse: what a roundabout way, I'll pick them up from here — these were the 'seamstresses' known in the neighborhood. The general style of dress was different from elsewhere; few women wore their sashes properly tied in back, preferring wide wrap-around sashes in bold patterns, and though this was somewhat understandable in older women, girls of fifteen or sixteen sucking on ground-cherries in this getup were a sight that made some cover their eyes. Such was the nature of the place — there was no help for it. Yesterday at the riverside establishment this woman went by such-and-such a court name, yet today, back in everyday life as plain old Kichi, she set up an unfamiliar grilled-chicken

stall at night, and when her fortune was utterly spent, she returned once more to the old nest as a married woman — somehow she appeared more practiced than an ordinary woman, and there was no child in the area who did not absorb this atmosphere. Look at the main street around the time of the September niwa-ka festival: how skillfully the children had learned — mimicry of Rohachi, the mannerisms of Eiki, enough to make even Mencius's mother marvel at the speed of their attainment. Praised with 'wonderful!' they wanted to do another round, and so their precocity grew from age seven or eight onward; before long they'd have a towel slung over a shoulder and be humming half-songs to themselves — the degree to which boys of fifteen were worldly-wise was alarming. Even at school singing lessons they would beat time to 'gicchon chon,' and at the athletic meet it seemed not beyond them to break into a woodcutters' chant — as if teaching were not already difficult enough, one could well sympathize with the teachers' hardships. Near Iriya there was a private school called Ikuneisha; though private, it had nearly a thousand students, and the cramped schoolrooms were packed to bursting — which only showed how great the teachers' popularity had grown.

Even to say simply 'the school' was enough for people in this area to know which one was meant. Among the many children who attended were some whose fathers were firemen or day-laborers — 'Papa lives in the guardhouse at Hanebashi,' they would say, knowing such things without being taught, precociously wise in those ways. They'd imitate ladder-climbing and then come complaining 'I broke the bent nail' — and among them were perhaps children of lawyers charging three hundred yen a case. 'Your father's a horse' — when teased thus, even a child's heart, unable to bear the shame of the name, would flush red with a touching sensitivity. The pampered son of a licensed brothel, lodging in a private residence and putting on airs like a nobleman, moving about lightly in Western clothes with a tassel-adorned hat and a well-fed look — the way the other children fawned on him was also amusing. Among all these children was one called Shinnyо of Ryugaji temple: his black hair in its thousand strands was in the full bloom of youth for however many more years, and soon those sleeves would change to the color of monk's robes — whether the calling came from conviction or not, the young priest was, by his parents' example, diligent in his studies, and his naturally gentle temperament made his friends

find him dull, so they played all manner of tricks on him — once they tied a dead cat to a rope and threw it at him, saying 'this is your duty, please recite the prayers' — but that was long ago; now he was considered the top student of the school, and no one dared treat him with contempt. He was fifteen, of medium height, his close-cropped hair somehow, one felt, different from that of ordinary boys; his name was read as Fujimoto Nobuyuki in the Chinese reading, yet his bearing had a distinct air of one who might better be called Shaku.

II

The twentieth day of August was the festival of Senzoku Shrine, and the festival floats and portable stages of each neighborhood vied proudly with one another, the spirit of the young men high enough, it seemed, that they might press right through to the interior of the pleasure quarter — one could well imagine their eagerness. Since children in this neighborhood were hardly children in the ordinary sense of the word, their matching yukata went without saying, and each contrived to show as much impertinence as possible — if one heard what they were planning, one's courage might fail. The unruly boy-leader who called himself the captain of the Yokocho gang was sixteen, and ever since he had stood in for his father at the niwa-ka festival's iron-bar ceremony he had grown insufferably arrogant, wearing his sash at the very tip of his hips and delivering his words as if through his nose — an insufferable manner, and the women of the day-laborer families muttered behind his back that if he weren't the gang leader's son he'd be nothing. He had his way in everything and stretched his reach well beyond his standing, but in Omotemachi there was one Shotaro of the Tanakaya — three years his junior yet with money in his family

and a likable manner that made enemies hard to come by — a real rival. Chokichi attended the private school while Shotaro attended the public one, and Shotaro put on a superior air as though his school owned the right to the same school songs they both sang. Last year and the year before, the other side had adults backing them up, their festival displays were more splendid than his, and things were arranged so that it was difficult for him to start a fight. If he lost again this year, people would say 'so this is the famous Yokocho Chokichi' — his usual bluster exposed as empty boasting — and even at the swimming hole at Benzaiten Bori his side would have fewer supporters. In terms of sheer strength his side was stronger, but they were deceived by Tanakaya's mild-mannered appearance and in part cowed by his learning; what galled him most was that some of his own Yokocho men — Tarokichi and Sangoro and others — had secretly gone over to the other side. The festival was the day after tomorrow, and if it looked like his side would lose, he would run wild, go on a rampage

and rampage, leave one scar on Shotaro's face, and if he himself lost an eye or a leg — easy enough when he thought of it that way. His supporters would be Ushi the rickshayman and Bun the cord-maker, and Yasuke from the toy shop — with them he wouldn't lose. More importantly — that person, that person's matter — if Fujimoto of the temple were there, he'd lend his good wisdom. So in the dusk of the eighteenth, waving off the mosquitoes that buzzed around mouth and eyes whenever he tried to speak, Takemura Shigeki slipped through from the garden of Ryugaji and appeared at Shinnyо's room, peering in: 'Nobu-san, are you there?'

People say what I do is rough, and rough it may be, but what's shameful is shameful — hey, listen to me, Nobu-san: last year my little brother and that pip-squeak Shotaro's bunch got into it starting with a lantern-smashing, and before you knew it his crowd came flooding out, and can you believe it — they smashed the little ones' lanterns and tossed them up in the air? 'Look at the state of Yokocho!' one of them said, and this tall idiotic dolt from the dumpling shop who stands there with his face looking all grown-up and half-witted pipes up, 'Head? He's no head, he's a tail — a pig's tail!' — that's what they said, so I hear; I was pressed into the Senzoku Shrine procession at the time, so when I heard about it later I said let's go hit back right away, but Father scolded me roundly and again I had to swallow my tears. The year before that, you know

— as you know, the young men of Omotemachi gathered at the stationery shop to do some sort of comic skit; when I went to see it, they said something clever like 'Yokocho has its own entertainment,' and only had Shota's bunch as customers, and that sticks in my craw. Never mind how much money they have — what's a moneylender's failed pawnshop to me? It'd be better for the world to beat a fellow like that to death than leave him be. I intend to cause real trouble at this year's festival and get some of my own back, so Nobu-san, as a friend — I know you hate this kind of thing, but please, take my side. It's a matter of washing out Yokocho's shame. Hey, come on — won't you give that Shotaro who swaggers about saying their school songs are the originals a piece of his mind? If they call me a sleepy private-school student, it's the same as calling you the same,

so please — help me out, swing that big festival lantern around. I'm burning up with shame from the bottom of my heart, and if I lose again this time Chokichi has no more standing — he shook his broad shoulders in utter, unhinged vexation.

But I'm weak, you know.

Weak is fine.

I can't swing the lanterns.

You don't have to swing them.

If I join, you'll lose — is that all right?

Losing is all right, I'll accept that as unavoidable — you don't have to do anything, just stand there as a member of the Yokocho gang and hold your head up; that alone does wonders for morale. I may be an ignorant fellow, but you're learned, so if those fellows over there try to mock us with some Chinese phrase, give it back to them in Chinese — ah, what a relief, I feel clear-headed at last; if you agree, I have the strength of a thousand men. Nobu-san, thank you — and from the usually rough Chokichi there came, for once, a gentle word.

One wore a three-shaku sash and slip-on sandals, the son of a laborer; the other wore a pale-brown cotton haori with a soft purple sash, dressed in the manner of a young priest. Their thinking was opposite, their talk constantly at cross-purposes, yet Chokichi had announced his birth at the temple gate, so the head priest and his wife had a certain fondness for him; and since they attended the same school and being called 'private school' stung, Chokichi, who was not naturally likable, had no one who was truly on his side — a pitiable thing. The other side had the young men of the neighborhood backing them, and it was no mere grudge but a genuine injustice that Chokichi kept losing, and much of the fault lay with the Tanakaya side. Having been asked in a spirit of obligation, Shinnyо could hardly refuse, and said: all right then, I'll join your side — and if I say that it's no lie; but it's best not to fight if at all possible, and if the other side truly comes at us, there's no help for it. What, when it comes down to it, was Tanakaya's Shotaro

but a little finger's worth? — his own weakness forgotten, Shinnyо took from his desk drawer a penknife he had received as a souvenir from Kyoto, made by a master bladesmith, and displayed it; 'that looks sharp,' said Chokichi, peering in — but it was dangerous. Was this thing to be brandished about?

III

Her hair, which let down would have reached her feet, was drawn tight at the roots with a big sweep of front hair, and the knot done up heavy. Akaguma is a fearsome-sounding name, but that knot is the fashion of the day, and even young ladies of good families wear it. Fair-skinned, with a straight nose, and a mouth not small but firmly set, so that she is not ill-looking. Taken feature by feature she is far from a model of beauty, but her voice is thin and cool, there is charm brimming in her eyes when she looks at you, and the liveliness of her movements is a pleasure. She wears a large-patterned yukata dyed persimmon with butterflies and birds, a day-and-night sash of black satin and tie-dye tied high at the chest, and on her feet lacquered clogs so high that even hereabouts one seldom sees the like; coming back from the morning bath, the nape of her neck showing white, a towel hanging from her hand as she stands. "I should like to see this child three years from now," said a young man on his way back from the quarter. Midori of the Daikokuya, born in Kishu, her speech a little accented—

which is charming too; and above all everyone delights in her open, decisive, clean-cut temper. That her coin purse should be heavy for a child is no wonder: it is a remnant of her sister's days of glory, and further, the attendants and the young courtesans, flattering her sister, give her money without making a favor of it—"Buy yourself a doll, Mii-chan; this is only for a ball"—so that she can take it easily. Well, giving matching rubber balls to twenty girls in her class was no great matter. She once bought up all the shopworn toys at the brush shop she frequented, to the shopkeeper's delight. Even so, this spending morning and evening is not what a girl of her years and station could do. What is she to become? Her parents look on and say nothing, never a harsh word to her, and the master of the house treats her with a care that is strange. She is not an adopted daughter, they say, nor a relative of course; when her sister was sold, the man who came to appraise her—

at the invitation of the master of the house, the three of them, parents and child, came out in traveling clothes to make a living in this district; that is the reason of it. What lay beyond that, who knows. Now they keep the villa for him; the mother sews for the courtesans, the father has become clerk at a small lattice-fronted house. The girl is sent to schools for the arts and for needlework, and for the rest does as she likes. Half a day in her sister's room, half in the streets; what she sees and hears is the shamisen and the drum and nothing but bright showy clothes. At first she went about with a lilac tie-dyed collar on her lined kimono, and the girls of the quarter laughed at her for a country creature; she was so vexed that she wept three days and nights. Now, on the contrary, she mocks people herself, and speaks her mind about dowdy dressing so freely that nobody can answer her back.

"The twentieth is the festival, so let's do something really amusing," her friends begged; and "Any scheme will do—let each of us think of something; what everyone can enjoy is best. I'll pay whatever it comes to," she undertook, as usual without reckoning. Being queen of the children's company, and generous beyond compare, she has quicker effect than a grown-up. "Let's do a comic play, borrow some shop and let it be seen from the road," said one. "Nonsense—rather make us a portable shrine, a real one like the one on show at the back of the Kamataya; never mind the weight, it's easy enough with a wasshoi, wasshoi," said a boy tying on his headband; and from beside him the girls said, "Then it's no fun for us. Midori won't enjoy only watching everyone else make a noise. Have whatever you like best"—

and the way they said it, as if they meant to skip the festival and go to the Tokiwaza theater, was amusing. Tanaka's Shota rolled his pretty eyes and said, "Why not magic lanterns? I have a few slides, and Midori can buy what's wanting, and we'll do it at the brush shop. I'll work the lantern and get Sangoro from the back street to do the patter. Midori, shall we?" "Oh, that would be fun; nobody could keep from laughing at San-chan's patter, and it would be funnier still if we could put his face on the screen too"—and so it was settled. Shota's part was to go and buy what was lacking, and he flew about in a sweat, comical to see; and by the eve of the day the talk of it had reached even the back street.

IV

Even in a place where drums are beaten and shamisen never lacking, a festival is another thing. Apart from the Cock Fair it is the one great stir of the year. Mishima Shrine and Ono-teru Shrine, side by side, each determined not to be outdone—the rivalry is amusing. Back street and main street alike had matching coats of the same Moka cotton with the ward's name dyed in a broken pattern, and some grumbled that it was a poorer design than last year's. The hemp sleeve-cords dyed with gardenia were liked thick, as one would expect; children of fourteen or fifteen and under hung all sorts of toys from them for show, the more the better—daruma, horned owls, papier-mache dogs—some with seven or nine or eleven on them. The sight of them running off in tabi without clogs, big and little bells jangling on their backs, was gallant and comic. Apart from the crowd, Tanaka's Shota in a marked coat with red stripes, a dark-blue chest-cover against his fair neck—an outfit not seen before; and the pale blue of the soft sash he had tied was, look you, fine crepe of the best dye, and the crest on the collar—

had come out strikingly too; a headband tied behind with a sprig of festival-cart flower stuck in it, and leather-thonged sandals that he let ring, though he did not join the noisy music band. The eve passed without incident, and the day itself drew toward evening. Twelve of them gathered at the brush shop; the one missing, Midori, was long over her evening face, so that Shota went in and out of the gate saying, "Isn't she coming yet?" "Go and call her, Sangoro. You've never been to the Daikokuya villa, have you? Call from the garden and she'll hear. Quick, quick." "Then I'll go and fetch her. I'll leave my lantern here; nobody will steal the candle. Shota, keep watch for me." "You mean fellow—get along while you're arguing," and being scolded by a boy younger than himself, off he ran—well, here goes—like Idaten himself. "Look at him run,"

the girls laughed as they watched him go, and no wonder. Broad and short, with a mallet-shaped head on a short neck; and when he turns his face you see the jutting brow and snub nose and buck teeth from which the nickname Sangoro Buckteeth is easily guessed. Dark he is, needless to say; but the good of him is that his eyes are comical through and through, with dimples in both cheeks, and even the set of his eyebrows like a blind-man's-buff face is thoroughly funny and harmless. Being poor, perhaps, he wears a tube-sleeved coat of Awa crepe, and tells friends who don't know that the matching coat did not come in time for him. His father, who keeps six children with himself at their head, hangs on the shafts of a rickshaw. Even with good customers in Gojikkenmachi, having no cart of his own is useless for anything but hire; and reckoning that at thirteen the boy would be a right arm, he sent him to the printing works in Namiki the year before last, but being idle he could not hold out ten days—

and never kept the same work a month. From the eleventh month to spring he made battledores at home; in summer he helped at the ice shop by the inspection station, and being clever at drawing customers with a comical cry, he is found useful. Since he went as a cart-hauler at last year's makeshift festival, his friends have looked down on him and the nickname Man-nen-cho still sticks; but everyone knows Sangoro for a clown, and it is one gain to him that nobody hates him. The Tanaka house is the lifeline of his family, and the debt they owe it is not small. It is money at daily interest and no cheap rate, but how can one hold cheap a moneylender one cannot do without? When he is called—"San, come and play in my street"—there is an obligation that will not let him say no. And yet he was born in the back street and bred in it, and lives on land belonging to the Ryugeji, and his landlord is Chokichi's father, so that openly he cannot turn against that side. So when he runs errands for this side in secret—

the part he must play when he is glared at is a hard one.

Shota sat on the shop bench and, to pass the waiting, hummed "Hidden Love" under his breath; "Well now, one can't be off one's guard with you," laughed the shop woman, and the roots of his ears went red for no reason, and to cover it he shouted, "Come on, all of you," and ran out into the street with them. Just then his grandmother came by. "Shota, why haven't you had your supper? Lost in your play, and never hearing me call you all this while." "Well, everyone, play with me again later. Thank you kindly," he said even to the brush shop woman; and since his grandmother had come herself to fetch him he could not refuse, and was led away. After that it went suddenly dull; the number was hardly changed, but with that boy gone even the grown-ups felt it flat. He does not romp, nor joke as San-chan does; but to be liked so is a charm rare in a rich man's son. "By the way, what do you think of that odious widow of the Tanaka house? For all that—"

she is sixty-four. That she wears no powder is a mercy, but the size of that married knot! And that wheedling voice, and no care if a body dies; likely she'll end by dying with her money. Still, what makes us bow to her is the majesty of that money. Ah, I'd like some. They say she has lent a good deal to the big houses in the quarter too"—so two or three wives, standing in the main street, reckoned up other people's fortunes.

V

A foot-warmer at midnight is hard on one who waits; that is what love is. On a summer evening with a cool wind blowing, the day's heat washed off in the bath, she looks at her dress in the mirror. Her mother with her own hands puts up the stray hairs, and, though it is her own child, thinks her beautiful, and looks standing and looks sitting, and says besides, "Your neck has grown thin." A single robe of pale blue Yuzen for coolness, a round sash of pale brown and gold brocade a little narrow tied on her, and by the time she set her clogs on the garden stone and came out, a long while had passed.

Sangoro, having gone seven times round the wall wondering when she would come, having yawned himself out, and having been bitten again and again on neck and forehead by the mosquitoes this district is famous for, however he brushed at them, was at his last gasp when Midori came out and said, "Come, let's go." Sangoro without a word caught her sleeve and set off at a run, so that she gasped and her chest hurt. "If you must hurry so I'll have nothing to do with you. Go by yourself," she scolded, and they arrived separately. By the time they came to the brush shop, Shota, it seemed, was in the middle of his supper.

"Oh, it's dull, it's dull. If he isn't here I don't want to begin the lantern show. Aunt, don't you sell puzzle boards in this shop? Sixteen Musashi, anything—my hands are idle," said Midori in her boredom; and "There, there," and at once they borrowed scissors and the girls set to cutting out shapes. The boys, with Sangoro in the middle, went over the makeshift festival songs. "Look over the glory of the northern quarter—eaves of lanterns and electric lights, the five wards forever busy"—and when they all took it up comically, his memory was so good that he went back to last year and the year before, with never a gesture or a beat changed. It was a rowdy party of a dozen or so, so that people stood at the gate in a wall to see what was afoot; and out of them Bunji, a hair-cord maker, called, "Is Sangoro there? Come here a moment, quick." With no preparation at all he sprang up—"Right you are"—and made to vault the threshold—

and at that moment: "You two-faced wretch, take that! Disgrace to the back street—I'll not let you off. Who do you take me for? Chokichi! Don't be sorry for your impudence"—and a blow on the cheekbone. As he cried out and fled in, the back-street gang seized him by the collar and hauled him out. "There—beat Sangoro to death! Drag Shota out! Coward, don't run! We'll not spare the dolt at the dumpling shop either"—and the uproar boiled up like a tide. The hanging lanterns under the brush shop eaves were easily knocked down, the hanging lamp was in danger, and the shop woman's cries of "Don't fight in front of my shop" were not heard. There were some fourteen or fifteen of them, headbands twisted, waving great lanterns, doing whatever violence came to hand, tramping in with their shoes on, insolent past all bearing. Not seeing Shota, their real enemy, they surrounded Sangoro—"Where have you hidden him? Where has he run to? Speak, will you not? We'll make you speak"—

and beat and kicked him. Midori, in her indignation, pushed aside those who would hold her back. "Here, you—what has San-chan done? If you want a quarrel with Shota, quarrel with Shota. He neither runs nor hides—he simply isn't here. This is my playground; I'll not let you lay a finger on it. Hateful Chokichi, why do you strike San-chan? There, you've knocked him down again. If you have a grudge, strike me; I'll be your match. Aunt, don't hold me," she cried, struggling. "What's that, you whore? Impudent talk. Beggar who'll follow her sister's trade—this is good enough for the likes of you"—and from behind the crowd Chokichi flung a muddy sandal. His aim did not fail; the filthy thing struck Midori full on the brow. She sprang up with her color changed, and the shop woman caught her—

lest she be hurt. "There, take that! We have Fujimoto of the Ryugeji behind us. Come for your revenge whenever you like, you gaping half-wits, you cowards, you spineless things—we'll lie in wait for you on the way home; mind the dark of the back street"—and having flung Sangoro down on the earthen floor, at that very moment came the sound of boots: someone, it was now understood, had run to the police box. "Now then," Chokichi called, and Ushimatsu and Bunji and a dozen more scattered in different directions, quick on their feet, some no doubt crouching in the back alleys. "Vile, vile, vile, vile! Chokichi, Bunji, Ushimatsu—why don't you kill me, why don't you? I'm Sangoro too; I'll not die for nothing. I'll haunt you as a ghost. Remember it, Chokichi!"—and the tears rolled off him like drops of boiling water, and at last he burst out crying aloud. His whole body must have ached; his tube sleeves were torn in several places, and his back and hips covered with sand.

They could not stop it, and, overcome by the fury of it, everyone had simply stood cowed. The brush shop woman ran and lifted him and rubbed his back and brushed the sand off. "Bear it, bear it. Say what you will, they were many and we are all weak here; even grown men could hardly put out a hand, so it was hopeless from the start. Still, it's a mercy you're not hurt. What's to fear now is an ambush on the way. Luckily, if the constable will see him home we shall all be easy; this is how it was, sir"—and she told the whole business in short to the constable who had come up. "That is my duty; I'll take him home," he said, and took his hand; but the boy shrank away—"No, no, I can go home without being taken; I'll go alone." "Come, there's nothing to fear; I shall only see you to your house. Don't worry"—and being patted on the head with a smile he shrank the more, and—

"If I say I've been fighting, my father will scold me; the head of our house is our landlord"—and being coaxed out of his drooping, "Then I'll see you to the gate; I'll not have you scolded," and he was led away, while the neighbors breathed again and watched from a distance. And yet, for some reason, when they reached the corner of the back street Sangoro shook off the constable's hand and fled for his life.

VI

"A wonder—will it snow in this blazing weather? For Midori to hate going to school she must be badly out of humor. If breakfast won't go down, shall we send for sushi later? It's no cold, for she has no fever; likely it's yesterday's tiring. I'll go to Taro-sama's shrine for you this morning; leave it today," said her mother. "No, no; I vowed it for my sister's prosperity, so I shan't be easy unless I go. Give me the offering; I'll be off," and she ran out of the house and rang the bell at the Inari in the middle of the fields and pressed her palms together. What she prayed for, who knows; going and returning she came back with her head down along the field paths. Seeing her from afar Shota called out and ran up and caught her sleeve. "Midori, forgive me for last night," he said all at once, apologizing. "There's nothing for you to be sorry for."

"But it was I they hated, and I was the one they meant to fight. If my grandmother hadn't come for me I'd not have gone home. I'd never have let them beat Sangoro so. I went to see him this morning, and he was crying with rage too. It makes me wild only to hear it. They say Chokichi threw a sandal in your face. The fellow's violence passes all bounds. But forgive me, Midori. I wasn't keeping out of the way on purpose. I'd bolted my supper and was going out when my grandmother said she was off to the bath. It must have happened while I was minding the house; truly I knew nothing of it"—and he apologized flat, as if the fault were his own, and looking up at her brow said, "Does it hurt?" Midori smiled and said, "It's nothing to make a wound of."

"And, Shota, whoever asks, you mustn't say Chokichi threw a sandal at me. If my mother heard of it by any chance I should be scolded. Not even my parents raise a hand to my head, and to have the mud of a sandal put on my brow by the likes of Chokichi is the same as being trodden on"—and the face she turned away was pitiful. "Truly, forgive me; it's all my fault, so I beg your pardon. Won't you be friends again? If you're angry with me I don't know what to do," he said as they walked; and before they knew it they were near the back of his house. "Won't you come in, Midori? There's nobody at home; my grandmother will be out on her collecting round, and I'm lonely by myself. I'll show you those prints I told you of; there are all sorts," and he held her sleeve and would not let go, so that Midori without a word—

nodded; and going in by the forlorn little folding gate she found the yard not large but set tastefully with potted plants, and a hanging fern under the eaves—bought, it seemed, by Shota on the Day of the Horse. Anyone who did not know the reason would wonder: the richest house in the ward, and the family only the grandmother and this boy. She holds every key and has cares without end; the whole row of tenements is in sight while she is away, and yet nobody ever broke a lock. Shota went up first and chose a place where the air came through—"Won't you sit here?"—and fanned her; a manner too grown-up for a boy of thirteen, and comical.

He brought out one old print after another and was delighted to be praised. "Midori, let me show you an old battledore. They say my mother was given this when she was in service at a great house. Isn't it funny, the size of it? And people's faces were different from now. Ah, if only my mother were alive. She died when I was three, and my father is living but has gone back to his family in the country, so now there's only my grandmother. I envy you"—and when he spoke suddenly of his parents Midori said, "There, you'll wet the print; a boy mustn't cry." "Perhaps I'm weak-hearted. I remember all sorts of things sometimes. This season is well enough, but on a moonlit winter night, going round Tamachi on the collecting, I've cried more than once by the time I reached the embankment. No—I don't cry for cold—"

I don't know why myself; I think of all sorts of things. Ah—since the year before last I've gone on the daily collecting too. My grandmother is old, and nights are dangerous for her, and her eyes are bad so she has trouble stamping the seals and the rest. She has used several men before now, but they made light of an old woman and a child and wouldn't work as she wished, she said. When I'm a little bigger she means to set up a pawnshop and hang out the Tanakaya sign again, not as it was in the old days perhaps; that's her pleasure. People call her a miser, but she's saving for my sake, and I can't bear it. On the collecting rounds too, in Torishinmachi and such places, there are wretched people enough, and they must speak ill of her. When I think of that—"

my tears come. I am weak-hearted after all. This morning too I went to San's house to collect, and there he was, working with his body aching, so as not to let his father know. When I saw that I couldn't speak. Isn't it absurd for a boy to cry? That's why the roughs of the back street make light of me," he began, and his color showed shame at his own softness. The look of his eyes as they met Midori's without meaning to was charming.

"Your festival dress suited you so well I envied you. If I were a boy I'd like to wear it too; you looked better than anyone," she praised him. "What, me? It's you who are beautiful. Everyone says you are handsomer than Omaki of the quarter. If you were my sister how proud I should be. I'd go everywhere with you and put on great airs. Having not one brother or sister, there's no help for it. I say, Midori, shall we have our photograph taken together next time? I'll be in my festival dress, and you in the coarse-striped silk gauze looking smart, and we'll go to Kato's at Suidojiri. It'll make that Ryugeji fellow envious. Truly it will; he'll be angry, angry and white with it—being a coward he won't go red. Or perhaps he'll laugh. Let him laugh. We'll have it taken big—"

and hang it out for a signboard. Don't you like it? You look as if you didn't," he complained comically; and "If it comes out an ugly face you'll dislike me," said Midori, bursting out laughing; and at that fine ringing laugh her humor was quite restored.

The cool of the morning had passed unnoticed and the sun grown hot. "Come again this evening, Shota, and come to our villa too. We'll float lanterns and chase the fish; the bridge over the pond is mended, so there's nothing to fear," she said as she went out; and Shota watched her go with pleasure and thought her beautiful.

VII

Shinnyo of the Ryugeji and Midori of the Daikokuya are both at the same school, the Ikueisha. Toward the end of last April, when the cherry had scattered and one saw wisteria in the shade of green leaves, there was a great spring sports day held in the field at Mizunoya; and with tug-of-war and ball-throwing and skipping to give it savor, they forgot that the long day was ending. It was then, was it not, that Shinnyo, somehow unlike his usual composure, tripped on a pine root by the pond and put his hands in the red clay, so that even the sleeve of his haori was ugly with mud; and Midori, who was there, could not bear it, and took out her own red silk handkerchief and tended him—"Wipe it with this." Whereupon a jealous one among their friends found it out. "Fujimoto is a priest's son and yet talks with a girl, and thanked her so gladly—isn't it comical? No doubt Midori will be Fujimoto's wife—"

and if the wife of a temple, why then she'd be called the Daikoku lady," and so they gossiped. Shinnyo, who from the first hated even to hear such things said of others, and was of the sort to make a sour face and turn aside, could hardly endure it of himself. From then on, whenever he heard the name Midori he was afraid, and his breast grew thick with the fear that it would be brought up again, and it was a wretched feeling past telling. Yet he could not fly out at everything, so he meant to feign as much ignorance as he could, and to keep an unmoved and difficult face and let it pass; but the confusion of being asked something to his face! For the most part he got by with "I don't know"; but a painful sweat ran within him, and he felt forlorn. Midori gave no thought to any of this, and at first spoke to him familiarly as Fujimoto, Fujimoto—

and on the way home after school, if she went a step ahead and found some rare flower by the road, she would wait for the lagging Shinnyo and say, "Look, such a lovely flower blooming, and the branch too high for me to break. Shin, you are tall and can reach it; do break it for me, I beg you," picking out the eldest of the party. Shinnyo could not well shake off his sleeve and pass by; but the thought of what people would say grew harder still, so he would draw down the nearest branch and, good or bad, break off just enough to answer, and go striding on as though flinging it at her. She was astonished at first at so charmless a fellow; but as it happened again and again she came to feel it was deliberate spite—that he treated her alone harshly though he was not so with others, that he had never once answered her civilly when she asked him anything, that if she came near—

he fled, that if she spoke he grew angry; gloomy and constraining, and there was no knowing how to please him. If such a difficult creature wanted to be crooked and angry and spiteful as he pleased, then it was waste of words to speak to him at all if he would not be counted a friend—so Midori grew somewhat vexed, and unless there was need she never spoke though they passed, and to greet him if they met on the road was not to be thought of. Only, before they knew it, one great river lay between the two, and neither boat nor raft is allowed there, and each walked along his own bank by his own path.

The festival was over yesterday, and from the next day Midori stopped going to school altogether; the reason needs no asking—she felt to the quick the shame of the mud on her brow that no washing would take off. Main street or back street, they sit at desks in the same classroom and are of one company; and yet to make so strange a division, and to be always so stubborn, and to take advantage of the weakness of her being a girl who could never match them—what cowardice that night's work was. Chokichi the blockhead is known to everyone for a ruffian past compare; but without Shinnyo behind him he could never have raided the main street so boldly. To play the knowing one and seem meek before people, and behind the scenes to pull the strings of the puppet—that is Fujimoto's doing, certainly. Grant he is in a higher class, and clever at his books, and the young master of the Ryugeji; Midori of the Daikokuya has not had so much as a sheet of paper—

of his help, and to be called a beggar so, when she owes him nothing! How grand the parishioners of the Ryugeji may be I don't know; but my sister has had Mr. Kawa of the bank three years, and Mr. Yone of Kabutocho, and a certain member of the assembly said he would redeem her and make her his lady, and she disliked his spirit and would not take him—and even he, they say, was a man of great name in the world. If you doubt it, ask; they say that without Omaki the Daikokuya would be in the dark. So even the master of the house treats my father and mother and me with care and never slights us; and when I was playing battledore in the room and knocked over the vase that stood beside the china Daikoku on the alcove shelf and broke it all to bits, the master, who was drinking in the next room, only said, "Midori—"

you are too much of a tomboy," and never a scolding beyond that. Anyone else would not have got off so lightly, the maids said enviously long afterward; and that too, in the end, is her sister's glory. Though I keep the villa, my sister is Omaki of the Daikokuya, and I am not one to be worsted by the likes of Chokichi, and to be bullied by the priestling of the Ryugeji is beyond bearing—and so going to school became distasteful to her. Vexed that her willful nature had been made light of, she broke her slate pencil, threw away her ink, put book and abacus by as useless, and played idly with the friends she liked.

VIII

Against the hurrying evening—drive on, hurry—there is the parting at dawn, and the loneliness of the carriages that carry dreams home. There are gentlemen who pull their hats low to escape being seen, and one with a towel over his cheeks who, feeling to the quick the parting blow the woman gave him for a keepsake, grins uncannily the more he remembers it, so glad is he of the smart. Take care as you come out at Sakamoto; the vegetable carts back from Senju are dangerous to your feet; as far as the corner of Mishima-sama it is a madman's road. Every face is slack, and, saving your presence, the space beneath the nose looks long indeed; "So there goes a very fine gentleman," said some who stood at the corners and were rude, "and not worth a sen."

There is no need to bring up the Song of Everlasting Sorrow and Yang Kuei-fei winning the emperor's love; daughters are prized everywhere nowadays, and there are many instances of a peerless beauty born in the back tenements hereabouts. There is a woman called Yuki, now removed to a certain house at Tsukiji, who waits on great gentlemen and is a famous dancer. In her parlor today she says such childish things as "Where is the tree that money grows on?"—but she was once of the sash-and-apron company of this ward and made playing cards at home. Her fame was high then; and as they say, the departed are daily forgotten, and when that one great sight was gone, the second flower was the youngest daughter of the dyer's. She is in Senzokumachi now, with the Shintsudaya's paper lantern hinting at her, and Kokichi, the choice of the park, was born and bred in this same place. In the daily talk it is the women who rise in the world; the men look as useless as the tail of a black-spotted dog rooting in the rubbish heap. In this quarter—

the sons of the shopkeepers, called "the lads," at the cocky age of seventeen or eighteen, in gangs of five or seven. They wear no flute at the waist for swagger, but follow some boss with a formidable name, with matching towels and long lanterns. Until you have learned to throw dice, they say, you cannot even venture a bold joke at a lattice front. Honest work at their own trade is for the daytime only; a bath, and when the sun goes down, clogs slipped on and a showy kimono—"Have you seen the new girl at such-and-such a house? She's like the thread-shop girl at Kanasugi but with a flatter nose"—and with heads full of nothing else, they cadge tobacco and beg tissue paper at every lattice, and count it the honor of their lives to strike and be struck; so that even the heir of a respectable house will rename himself a rough and go out to pick quarrels by the great gate. See the power of women—

the five wards keep up a stir that knows neither spring nor autumn. Lanterns to see guests home are out of fashion, but with the tea-house runners' sandals ringing come the songs and music, and if you ask what the merry-makers who go in are after, it is the red collars and the great knots, the trailing hems of the outer robes, and the mouths and eyes that smile. Where the goodness lies is hard to say, but the courtesans are honored here. Leave this district and you would never guess it. Passing morning and evening among such things, it is no wonder that a white robe should be dyed crimson. To Midori's eyes men were neither dreadful nor frightening, nor did she think a courtesan's a mean calling; and the day long ago when she left her home country and wept to see her sister go seemed like a dream, so that in the splendor of these days she envied the filial duty done to father and mother, and, knowing nothing of the count of her sister's hardships as chief courtesan—

even the squeaking charm at the lattice for a slow guest, and the secret trick of measuring a parting slap on the back, she heard and learned as amusing, and used the quarter's speech in the street so freely that she felt no shame in it at all, which is pitiful. She is barely fourteen by the count, and the heart that hugs a doll and rubs its cheek is no different from a nobleman's daughter's; but the lessons in morals and the whole of housekeeping were learned at school and nowhere else. What truly comes to her ears morning and evening is talk of which guest is liked and which is not, of how the new clothes and the bedding are sent round to the tea-houses, of splendor done handsomely and the poor sort done shabbily. Of others and of herself, it is too soon to look for judgment. To a child's heart the flowers before her are the only bright things, and the willfulness she was born with ran where it pleased and built dreams shaped like clouds. The madmen's road, the drowsy road. When the morning-going gentlemen have all gone by, and the late-sleeping street has its doorways swept in wave patterns and water sprinkled—

look down the main street when that is done, and here they come. Roosting in Man-nen-cho and Yamabushi-cho and Shintani-cho, all with one art or trick and not to be denied the name of performer: candy sellers, acrobats, puppet men, lion dancers, Sumiyoshi dancers, Kakubei tumblers, each in his chosen dress; some in the swagger of crepe and gauze, some in washed Satsuma cotton with narrow black satin sashes; good-looking women among them and men as well. There are great troops of five or seven or ten together, and there is a thin old man going alone and forlorn with a broken shamisen under his arm. There is one with little girls of five and six in red sleeve-cords, meaning to have them dance the Kii dance. Their customers are guests who stay on in the quarter for amusement, and courtesans easing their gloom; and knowing that whoever enters there has a profit not to be given up in a lifetime, here they come and come. The small pickings of this street they do not stop for. Even the wretched beggars with seaweed trailing at their hems—

pass by without standing at the gates. When a good-looking woman minstrel goes past with cheeks too fine to be hidden by her hat, "Listen to that voice, listen to that skill; how spiteful of her not to let this street hear it," said the brush shop woman with a click of her tongue; and Midori, sitting on the shop bench back from the bath and watching the road, swept up her falling forelock with a boxwood comb, said, "Aunt, shall I call the minstrel back?" and ran fluttering to catch her sleeve and slipped something in—she told nobody with a laugh what it was—and had her sing "Akegarasu" through, and then the coquettish "Come again, sir"; a thing not to be bought so easily. That a child should do it! The people who gathered marveled and looked at Midori's face rather than the minstrel's. To stop the performers who only pass through in their finery, and have the shamisen and the flute and the drum, and singing—

and dancing, and to do what nobody else does—so she whispered to Shota from time to time; and Shota was astonished and dismayed. "I shouldn't like it."

IX

"Thus have I heard: the Buddha preached the Amida Sutra"—the sound of the sutra blends with the wind in the pines and seems to sweep the dust from one's heart; and from the kitchen of that temple the smoke of grilling fish drifts, and in the graveyard a baby's napkins are hung to dry. By some sects this is no matter; but to eyes that take a priest for wood and stone it somehow smells of flesh. The abbot of the Ryugeji has a belly that has grown fat along with his fortune, and for the fineness of his color, what praise could one offer? Not cherry pink, nor the scarlet peach; from his newly shaven crown to his face and neck there is a coppery sheen without a speck of dullness. When he raises his thick eyebrows, part white, and laughs his fill, one fears the Buddha in the hall may be startled off his pedestal. The wife is not many years past forty—

fair-skinned, with thin hair, her married knot small and her person not unpleasing. She is civil to the worshipers, and since even the sharp-tongued wife of the flower shop at the gate says nothing behind her back, no doubt worn-out yukata and leavings of the side dishes find their way to her. She was once one of the parishioners; losing her husband early and left without support, she came here to be as good as a hired needlewoman, saying only that if they would let her wet her mouth she would do the washing and the cooking, and cleaning the graveyard, and helping the men besides; and so she was caught in the abbot's pity, reckoned up from profit and loss. Twenty years apart in age, the woman knew well enough how it looked; but having nowhere to go she thought it a good place to die in after all, and ceased to mind people's eyes. It is a distasteful thing; but since the woman's heart was not bad, the parishioners—

did not much blame it. About the time she carried her eldest, Hana, the retired master of the oil shop at Sakamoto, well known among the parishioners as a man fond of arranging things, urged it on them and made them husband and wife openly—an odd sort of go-between. Shinnyo was born of this woman too, and there are two children, a boy and a girl. The one is an utter oddity, of a gloomy nature who sits all day in his room; but the elder sister, Hana, is a pretty child with fine skin and a double chin, not a beauty exactly, but of a good age and well spoken of, and reckoned too good to be left an amateur. Still, to put a temple daughter into service in the quarter—it is not a world in which Shakyamuni plays the shamisen, and appearances had to be a little consulted; so a tea-shop was got up prettily in the Tamachi street, and the girl set inside the counter lattice to sell her charms; and whatever the weight in the scales, young men who do not count their money—

somehow come drifting in, so that most nights the shop is not empty of customers till twelve is struck. It is the abbot who is busy: collecting his loans, going the round of the shop, seeing to memorial services, with certain days a month set for preaching besides; keeping the accounts and reading the sutras, and no body could stand it, he says, and so at dusk he has a flower mat laid at the veranda's edge, and with one shoulder bared and a fan in his hand has a great cup filled to the brim with awamori, and for a relish his beloved grilled eel, ordered from the Musashiya on the main street—"and let it be fresh." It is Shinnyo's part to take the order, and how he hates it, to the bone: he never looks up as he walks, and when he hears children's voices at the brush shop across the way it is wretched to think they may be speaking ill of him, so he passes the eel shop with a blank face, watching for a gap in the passersby, and comes back and runs in—and what he feels then—

is that he at least will never eat flesh.

His father the abbot is a thoroughly worldly man; there is some talk of his greed, but he is not so small as to listen to what people say, and being of a mind to make rakes for extra income when he has time, he of course sets up a stall of ornamental hairpins on the empty ground before the gate at the Cock Fair in the eleventh month, and has his wife put a towel over her head and cry them—"Here's luck for you." At first she thought it shameful; but hearing that the amateurs whose stalls stood in a row made enormous profit, and reckoning that in such a press nobody would think of it and that after dark she would not be noticed, she had the flower shop wife help her by day and stood and cried the wares herself at night; and whether greed did it, the shame vanished at some point and she came to call out loud without meaning to—"Cheaper, cheaper"—all but chasing the customers. Buyers pushed about in the throng were dazed—

so that they forgot they had been at that gate two days before to pray for the next world, and when three hairpins were asked at seventy-five sen, they beat her down to three sen for five and went off. The world is pitch dark, and there must be other profits taken by that darkness besides. Shinnyo found all this bitterly hard: even if it never reached the parishioners' ears, there was what the neighbors thought, and the children's talk—that the Ryugeji had set up a hairpin stall and Shin's mother sold them with a face like a madwoman's—and he was ashamed at the thought, and once tried to stop it: "You had better not do such things." But the abbot laughed it off with a great laugh—"Hold your tongue, hold your tongue; it's no affair of yours"—and would not take him seriously at all. Prayers in the morning, accounts in the evening; the look of him smiling with the abacus in his hand was, his own parent though he was, a mean sight, and the boy came to resent it—why—

had he shaved that head of his?

They are all of one womb and no outsider among them, and the household is quiet, so there is no particular cause to make this child a gloomy one; but being meek by nature, and finding that what he says is never heeded, everything is unpleasant to him, and his father's business and his mother's doings and the way his sister is brought up all seem to him wrong; and when he gives it up as a thing that will not be listened to, he is left sad and helpless and forlorn. His friends make an enemy of him as a crabbed and spiteful fellow; but it is the weakness at the bottom of a heart naturally sunken. If he hears that anyone has spoken the least ill of him behind his back, he has not the courage to go out and quarrel or argue, but shuts himself in his room and cannot face people—the most cowardly of creatures. And yet, with his standing at school and his birth being no low one, nobody knows him for so weak a thing, and some, it seems, hated Fujimoto of the Ryugeji as a half-boiled rice cake with a hard core—

a fellow with something in him that stuck in the mind.

X

On the night of the festival he had been sent on an errand to his sister at Tamachi and did not come home till late, so that he knew nothing of the uproar at the brush shop; and when the next day Ushimatsu and Bunji and the rest told him it had been so and so, he was startled afresh at Chokichi's violence. But the thing was done and there was no use in blaming it; only that his own name had been borrowed made him feel utterly put upon. Though it was none of his doing, he felt as if he alone bore the apology owed to everyone. Chokichi too must have been a little ashamed of his blunder, for, fearing a scolding if he met Shinnyo, he did not show himself for three or four days; and when it had blown over at last: "Shin, you may be angry, but it was the heat of the moment, so forgive me. Nobody knew Shota was out, did they? It wasn't that I wanted to beat Sangoro just for the sake of one whore—

but once we'd waved the lanterns in there we couldn't go home for nothing. It was a silly thing done just to keep the spirit up. Of course it's my fault throughout. It was wrong of me not to do as you said, but if you're angry with me now I've nowhere to stand. With you to back me I feel as though I were in a great ship; if you cast me off, where am I? Say what you will, you must stay the captain of this gang. I'll not go so wild again"—and being apologized to so shamefacedly he could not well say he would not; "There's no help for it. Do what you must; but bullying the weak is our own shame, so there's nothing to be got by making Sangoro or Midori your enemy. If Shota gets a following, that will be the time—but never—"

lay a hand on them first," he warned him; and though he did not scold Chokichi roundly, he prayed there might be no second quarrel.

The innocent one is Sangoro of the back street. Beaten and kicked his fill, for two or three days it was pain to him to stand or sit; and when in the evenings his father hauled the empty cart to the tea-house eaves in Gojikkenmachi, a kitchen man who knew him remarked, "What's the matter with San? He looks badly done up." But his father is called Tetsu the Bower, who has never lifted his head to a superior; needless to say to the gentlemen of the quarter, but to landlord and ground-owner he answers "Quite so" to any unreasonableness; so that if the boy complained that he had quarreled with Chokichi and been so roughly handled, the father would certainly scold his own child—"There's no help for it; isn't he the landlord's son? Whether we're in the right or they're in the wrong, you must never make a quarrel of it. Go and apologize, go and apologize, you shocking boy"—and send him to apologize to Chokichi—

so Sangoro chewed down his vexation, and as seven days and ten went by and the sore places healed, the resentment too was forgotten at some point; and he carries the landlord's baby for two sen and is glad of it, and goes about singing lullabies on his back. Ask his age and he is sixteen, at the cheekiest of ages, and yet is not ashamed of that great body of him, and comes ambling out to the main street too; so that he is forever the butt of Midori and Shota—"Where have you left your wits?"—and yet is never left out of the playing company.

Spring begins with the stir of the cherry blossoms; then the lanterns for the dead Tamagiku; then the new makeshift festival of autumn, when they counted seventy-five carriages flying past in ten minutes; and even the second theater program has passed unnoticed, and when the red dragonflies swarm over the fields the season for quail crying in the outer ditch draws near. The autumn wind of morning and evening goes to the bone; the mosquito coils at the Josei shop give place to the ash of hand-warmers; the sound of the mill grinding at the Tamuraya by the stone bridge grows forlorn; and when the striking of the clock at the Kadoebiro begins to carry a mournful note, even the light of the fires at Nippori that never fails in any season seems sad, and one wonders whether that is the smoke of burning men; and when you look up at the shamisen that seems to fall onto the narrow road below the embankment behind the tea-houses, and hear the crisp playing of a Nakanocho geisha with "On the borrowed bed of your kindness," even a phrase of no account has a deep pathos. Those who begin to come at this season are not the merry-makers, but men—

with true feeling in them, so a woman who had once been a courtesan used to say. Of these days it would be tedious to write; but for a rarity before Daionji, one might tell of the blind masseur's daughter of about twenty who, resenting her helpless state in a love that could not be, threw herself into the pond at Mizunoya—that is passed on as fresh news. When you ask what has become of Kichigoro the greengrocer and Takichi the carpenter, who are not to be seen at all, they point to the middle of the face and say, "This business has taken his nose"; and it is said without the least reserve and nobody makes a story of it. Look down the main street and three or five innocent children go hand in hand—"Open, open, what flower has opened?"—and even their heedless play is naturally quiet, and only the sound of the carriages going to the quarter is as gallant as ever.

A lonely night when the autumn rain falls softly and then comes with a rush of sound. Not being a shop that waits on passing customers, the brush shop woman had shut the front from early evening; and gathered inside were Midori and Shotaro as usual, with two or three little children besides, playing the child's game of flicking shells. Then Midori pricked up her ears—"There, hasn't someone come to buy something? I hear a step on the drain boards." "Oh, is it so? I heard nothing at all," and Shota too stopped his "chu-chu tako kai na" and was glad, thinking one of the company had come; but the person at the gate had come as far as the front of the shop, and after that stopped dead and there was neither sound nor sign.

XI

Shota opened the wicket and put his face out with a "Boo!"—and there was the figure of the man from behind, going slowly on under the eaves two or three doors along. "Who is it, who is it? Here, come in," he called, and slipped his feet into Midori's clogs and made to run out careless of the rain; and then "Ah, it's that fellow," he said in a word, and turned back—"Midori, calling won't fetch him. It's the usual one"—and he made a sign of shaving his own head.

"Shin, is it?" she took it up. "A more hateful priestling there never was. He must have come to buy a brush or something, and stood listening because we were here, and went home. Spiteful, crooked, cross-grained, stammering, gap-toothed, odious creature. If he'd come in I'd have plagued him well; it's a pity he's gone. Here, lend me the clogs; I'll have a look," and taking Shota's place she put her face out, and the drip from the eaves fell on her forelock—"Oh, how horrid," she said, drawing in her neck; and under the gas lamp four or five doors off, with a great oiled umbrella on his shoulder and his head a little bent, Shinnyo trudged away; and she watched his retreating figure on and on and on, so that Shota wondered and poked her back—"Midori, what is it?"

"Nothing," she answered without interest, and going up she counted the shells and said, "Truly there was never such a hateful boy. He can't quarrel openly and boldly at all, and only puts on that meek face while his heart is all crooked in the dark. Isn't he odious? My mother used to say that people who are open-handed are good at heart. So Shin, who is all in the dark, must have something bad in his heart. Isn't it so, Shota?"—and she abused Shinnyo to the top of her bent. "Even so, the Ryugeji has some sense in him; as for Chokichi, he's past praying for," said Shota, aping a grown man's talk so pertly that Midori said, "Stop it, Shota; a child talking so old is comical. What a droll fellow you are," and poked his cheek—

and at his solemn face she went off into peals of laughter. "I too shall be a man before long. I'll wear a square-sleeved overcoat like the master of the Kamataya, and get the gold watch my grandmother has put away, and have a ring made, and smoke cigarettes; and as for shoes—I like sandals better than clogs, so I'll wear three-soled ones with figured silk thongs. Will they suit me?" And Midori, laughing, said, "A short man in a square-sleeved coat and leather sandals—how comical that would be. Like an eye-lotion bottle walking." "Nonsense; by then I'll be big too. I shan't stay this little," he boasted. "Then there's no telling when that will be. Look at the rat in the ceiling," she said, pointing—

and the brush shop woman and everyone there rolled with laughter.

Shota alone was serious, and rolling those eyes of his said, "Midori is making a joke of it. Everyone must become a man, so why is what I say so funny? I shall get a pretty wife and take her about with me. I like everything pretty; so if a pockmarked face like Ofuku of the cracker shop, or a jutting brow like the firewood shop's girl, should ever come to me, I'd turn her out at once and never let her in the house. I detest pocks and rashes," he said with force; and the woman of the shop burst out—"And yet, Shota, you come often enough to my shop; can't you see your aunt's pocks?" she laughed. "But you're old; I meant a wife. Old people don't matter," he said; and "That's a bad blunder," said the brush shop—

woman, amused, and humored him.

"The good-looking ones in this ward are Oroku of the flower shop and Kii of the fruit shop; and better than either, far better, is the one sitting next to you. Now which have you chosen, Shota—Oroku's eyes or Kii's singing? Well, which?" she was asked; and Shota went red and said, "What's Oroku's face, or Kii? What's good about them?" and slipped a little out of the lamplight and backed toward the wall, tapping the wainscot with his finger and singing under his breath, "Turn, turn, water wheel." "Then it's Midori you like. Is that settled?" she was hit on the mark; and "How should I know? What's all this?" he said, and turned right round. Midori gathered up all the shells and said, "Come, once more from the beginning"—and she for her part—

did not blush at all.

XII

When Shinnyo goes to Tamachi he need not pass that way, but on the near side of the embankment, which is a short cut as it were, there is a small latticed gate; and looking in you see a Kurama stone lantern and a fence of bush-clover prettily set, and the rolled blind at the veranda's edge is charming too; and behind the glass-paneled screens one half expects a modern lady in her widowhood to sit telling her beads and a little Murasaki with bobbed hair to come out. That whole enclosure is the Daikokuya's villa.

Yesterday and today the sky had threatened rain. The long padded coat his sister at Tamachi had asked for was finished, and out of the motherly wish to have her wear it a day sooner, "It's a trouble, but will you take it in the little while before school? Hana will surely be waiting for it," his mother told him; and being too meek to refuse outright, he only said yes and yes and took the parcel under his arm, and set out with his umbrella raised, his magnolia-toothed clogs with the gray Kokura thongs clacking as he went.

Turning at the corner of the black ditch and following the narrow way he always took, by ill luck just as he came before the Daikokuya a gust of wind caught the top of the great umbrella and blew so hard that one might have thought it would be lifted into the air; and as he braced himself against it—this is too much—the front thong, which he had not thought much about, slipped clean out, and that, more than the umbrella, was the disaster.

Shinnyo was at a loss and clicked his tongue, but there was nothing for it now; so he leaned the umbrella against the Daikokuya gate and, sheltering from the rain under the eaves, set about mending the thong. But being a priestling never used to such work—what is this?—he only fretted, and could not for the life of him get it through, and it was maddening. Fretting and fretting, he pulled out of his sleeve the sheet of half-paper on which he had drafted an essay, and tore it into strips and twisted a cord of it; and the spiteful gale came down again and the umbrella he had leaned there went rolling off. "Confound the thing," he said angrily, and reached to catch it—and the parcel he had laid on his knee dropped untidily, and the wrapping cloth was in the mud, and the sleeve of his own clothes was dirtied too.

What was pitiful to see was not only that he was in the rain without an umbrella and had broken his thong on the way. Midori, looking out through the glass from within, saw it from afar—"There, someone has broken his thong. Mother, may I give him a scrap?"—and pulling a piece of Yuzen crepe from the drawer of her needle box, she ran out as if she could not wait to put on her garden clogs, and came quickly over the stepping stones without stopping for the umbrella at the veranda's edge.

The moment she saw who it was Midori's face went red, and her heart beat as fast as if some great matter had befallen her; and she looked back to see whether anyone were watching, and came fearfully toward the gate. Shinnyo too glanced round, and he too said nothing, and a cold sweat ran down his side; he could have run away barefoot.

The Midori of other days would have pointed at Shinnyo in his trouble—"There, there, the poor spiritless thing"—and laughed and laughed and laughed her fill, and said every hateful thing she had a mind to: "How could you set on Shota on the festival night and spoil our play, and have poor San-chan beaten, while you looked on from a height and gave the orders? Come, will you apologize or not? It was you who set the likes of Chokichi to call me a whore. And what if I am? I've not had a speck of your help. I have a father and a mother, and the master of the Daikokuya and my sister. I want nothing of a flesh-eating priestling like you, so you may leave off your talk of whores. If you have anything to say, say it here and not muttering behind my back. I'll be your match—"

any time you like; well, what of it?"—and she would have caught his sleeve and let fly. But now she said nothing, half hidden behind the lattice, and yet did not go away, and only stood there fretting with a beating heart, and it was not Midori's usual manner at all.

XIII

From the moment he knew he was before the Daikokuya, Shinnyo had been afraid of everything, and had meant to walk straight on without looking to right or left; but with the ill-timed rain and the ill-timed wind, and the thong broken besides, and no help for it, twisting a paper cord under their gate, his feelings were hard in a hundred ways and past all bearing—and then the sound of feet on the stepping stones came like cold water down his back; and knowing without turning that it was she, he trembled and felt his color changing, and turned his back and made a show of still being taken up with the thong, and half in a dream saw that these clogs would never be fit to wear, however long he took.

Midori in the garden peered out—"Oh, how clumsy; what can come of such hands? That's no paper cord but a bungle; stuffing wisps of straw into the front hole will never last. There, there—doesn't he know the skirt of his haori is on the ground and muddy? There goes the umbrella; if he'd fold it and lean it up—"—and every one of these things fretted and vexed her; and yet she did not call out, "Here is a scrap; mend it with this," and she too only stood still, careless of the rain forlorn on her sleeve, watching secretly from her hiding place. And then her mother, who knew nothing of it, called from far off, "The iron is hot. Whatever is Midori playing at? You mustn't go out and get into mischief when it's raining; you'll catch cold as you did the other day"—so that she answered loudly, "Yes, I'm coming"—

and was ashamed that Shinnyo had heard her voice, and her breast throbbed and burned; and unable by any means to open the gate she stood there, and yet could not pass by his trouble, and after casting about a hundred ways she thrust the scrap in her hand out between the lattices without a word. Shinnyo saw it and pretended not to see. "Ah, the same heart as ever," and all her helplessness gathered in her eyes, and her face was reproachful and near tears. What has he to hate in me, to show so cold a manner? It is I who have things to say; he is too cruel—so it surged up in her; but her mother's repeated calling was wretched, and she took a step or two despite herself; "Oh, how mean-spirited I am; it shames me to be so thought of"—and she turned and went clattering away over the stepping stones. Shinnyo looked back then in his loneliness, and there was the red-figured Yuzen wet with rain, its maple pattern beautiful, lying scattered close to his own—

feet. Something in him was drawn to it; but he did not take it up, and only looked at it emptily and sank into sorrow.

Giving up his own clumsiness, he took off the long cord of his haori and tied it round the clog, and having made a shabby makeshift of it he tried a step—"This will do"—and it was as awkward to walk in as could be. To go all the way to Tamachi in such clogs seemed hard indeed, but there was nothing for it and Shinnyo stood up. With the parcel under his arm, he had gone barely two steps from that gate when the Yuzen maples stayed in his eyes, and he could not bear to leave them and pass on; and as he looked back with regret, "Shin, what's the matter? Broken a thong? What a state you're in—it looks bad," said someone suddenly.

He turned in surprise, and there was Chokichi the ruffian. He seemed to be on his way back from the quarter, in a striped kimono over a yukata with a persimmon-colored sash hooked as always at the point of his hip, a new short coat with a black-lined collar, a marked umbrella held up, and high clogs whose toe covers, by the color of the lacquer, had plainly been put on new that morning. He stood out, and looked proud of himself.

"I've broken my thong and don't know what to do; I'm truly at a loss," said Shinnyo in his helpless way. "So you would be; you could never mend a thong. Here, wear my clogs; these thongs are sound," he said. "But then you'll be badly off."

"What, I'm used to it; you do like this, and this," and hurriedly tucking his skirts up seven parts to three—"this is far tidier than a tied-on bungle"—he took off his clogs; and "Will you go barefoot? That's too bad for you," said Shinnyo, quite at a loss. "Never mind; I'm used to it. The soles of your feet are soft, Shin; you can't walk a stony road barefoot. Come, put these on and go"—and the kindness with which he set them out! Hated as a bringer of ill luck though he is, it was comical to see gentle words come out from under those thick caterpillar eyebrows.

"I'll carry Shin's clogs; there'll be no trouble if I throw them in the kitchen. Come, change and hand them over," he said, seeing to it; and taking the broken-thonged clogs in one hand—"Then off you go, Shin; I'll see you at school later"—so they arranged it. Shinnyo went toward his sister at Tamachi and Chokichi toward his own house; and the red-figured Yuzen on which his heart had stayed was left lying piteously outside the lattice gate.

XIV

That year there were three Cock Days, and though the middle one was spoiled, the fine weather before and after made the throng at the Otori shrine tremendous; and the force of the young men who poured in through the gate of the inspection station on that pretext was such that one thought the pillar of heaven would break and the cords of earth part with the roar of their laughter. The Nakanocho street seemed suddenly turned about; and from the drawbridges at Sumicho and Kyomachi there were parties who split the crowd with the boatman's swagger—"Push on, push on." From the chirping voices of the little houses on the bank to the upper rooms of the great houses piled high in state, the shamisen and the singing that came boiling up in all their variety must be a thing most people remember and cannot forget.

Shota that day was let off his collecting round, and went to see Sangoro at his landlord's shop, and then looked in on the cheerless sweet-soup shop kept by the tall boy of the dumpling house. "Well, is there any profit?" he said. "Shota, you've come at a good time. I've run out of bean paste, and what am I to sell now? I've set more to boil, but I can't turn customers away meanwhile. What am I to do?" he was asked; and "You witless fellow—there's that much left clinging round the big pot, isn't there? Pour hot water round it and sweeten it well and you'll get ten or twenty helpings out of it. Everyone does it; yours isn't the only shop. Why, who in this crush is going to talk of the taste? Sell it, sell it," he said, and went first and drew the sugar jar over; and the boy's half-blind mother looked astonished—

"You are truly made for a tradesman; you're fearfully clever," she praised him; and "What, is this cleverness? I saw the Shiofuki in the back street do it just now when his paste ran short; it's no invention of mine," he said; and then, "Do you know where Midori is? I've been looking for her since morning, but she hasn't come to the brush shop and I don't know where she's gone." "In the quarter, perhaps?" he asked. "Aye—Midori passed my house just now and went in by the Ageyacho drawbridge. Truly, Shota, it's something today: she's got her hair up in a shimada like this"—and making an odd gesture—"isn't she beautiful?" he said, wiping his nose. "Better than Omaki herself. But it's a pity she should become a courtesan," answered Shota with his head down—

and "What's wrong with being a courtesan? I'm going to be a fancy-goods man from next year and make money, and I'll go and buy her with it," he said, showing his foolishness; and "You talk like a fool. Then she'd be sure to refuse you."

"Why? Why?"

"There's a reason why she'd refuse, that's all," he said, coloring a little and laughing; "then I'll take a turn myself and come back later," and with that parting shot he went out at the gate, humming in an odd wavering voice the tune then in fashion there—"Till she was sixteen or seventeen she was reared like a butterfly, like a flower"—and repeating under his breath "and now the service goes to her heart," and with his sandals ringing as usual he mixed with the excited crowd, and his small figure was soon lost to sight.

Pushed out at the corner of the quarter, he saw coming toward him, walking and talking with the attendant Otsuma, none other than Midori of the Daikokuya; and truly, as the fool had said, her hair was in a fresh great shimada with a cottony puff of unpressed tie-dye hanging soft about it, tortoiseshell combs thrust in and a tasseled flower pin flashing, dressed more brilliantly than ever, so that she looked like a Kyoto doll; and Shota stopped without a cry and stood watching, not running to cling to her as he always did. She, on her side, ran up—"Is it you, Shota? Otsuma, if you have shopping to do let us part here; I'll go home with him. Goodbye," she said with a bow; and "Well, Mii-chan, how sharp you are—no more escort needed, is it? Then I'll do my shopping in Kyomachi," and off she trotted into the narrow lane—

of the tenements; and Shota then pulled Midori's sleeve for the first time: "It suits you well; when was it done, this morning or yesterday? Why didn't you show me sooner?" he coaxed reproachfully; and Midori was downcast and slow to speak—"It was done in my sister's room this morning. I hate it," she said, looking down, ashamed before the people in the street.

XV

When a bitter, shamefaced modesty is in one, even praise sounds like mockery; and taking those who turned to look fondly at the shimada knot for people who despised her, she said, "Shota, I'm going home." "Why won't you play today? Have you been scolded for something? Have you quarreled with Omaki?" he asked, as a child would; and she answered nothing at all, and only reddened. As they passed the dumpling shop together the fool called from within, "Is your stomach in good order?"—so grandly that at the sound of it Midori looked ready to cry, and said, "Shota, I don't want you to come with me," and left him behind and hurried on alone.

They had said they would go to the Otori shrine together, but Midori took another road and hurried toward her own house; so Shota coaxed after her as usual—"Won't you come with me? Why do you go home that way? It's too bad of you"—and she went on without a word as though shaking him off; so that Shota, not knowing what was the matter, was astonished and ran after her and caught her sleeve and wondered; and Midori, with her face crimson, said only, "It's nothing," and there was something behind the voice.

When they went in at the villa gate, Shota, who had long been used to coming there to play and needed no ceremony in that house, followed her in from the veranda; and her mother, seeing him, said, "Oh, Shota, how good of you to come. Midori has been out of humor since morning and we are all at our wits' end. Do play with her." And Shota, gravely, like a grown man, asked, "Is she unwell?"—and "No," said the mother with a strange smile; "she'll mend before long; it's her usual willfulness. She has quarreled with her friends, no doubt. She is truly a hopeless young lady," she said, turning away. Midori had at some point dragged bedding and a padded quilt into the little room and, having thrown off her sash and outer dress, lay face down and said nothing.

Shota went timidly to her pillow. "Midori, what is it? Are you ill? Do you feel bad? What is it, then?" he said, without coming very close, his hands on his knees and only his heart aching. Midori gave no answer at all, and there were tears of quiet weeping in the sleeve she pressed to her face, and the forelock not yet dressed into the knot was wet; and though he saw there was some reason in it, Shota with his child's heart had no word of comfort, and was simply at his wits' end. "What can be the matter? I've done nothing to be scolded for; what makes you so angry?" he said, peering at her, quite lost. Midori wiped her eyes—"Shota, I'm not angry."

"Then what is it?" he asked; but her troubles were many, and this was a thing she could not tell, a hidden matter she could open to nobody; and without speaking her cheeks flushed of themselves, and though there was nothing she could name, she felt more and more forlorn. Feelings that Midori until yesterday had never known were budding, and the shame of it was past telling. If she could, she would pass her mornings and evenings alone in a dim room where nobody spoke to her and nobody looked at her face. Then, whatever hard thing happened, she need not mind people's eyes, and she would not be brought to such misery as this. If only she could go on forever and forever with her dolls and her paper figures and her games of house, how glad she would be. Oh, hateful, hateful—it is a hateful thing to grow up; why do I grow older so? I want to go back seven months—

ten months, a year, and more, she thought, with an old woman's thoughts; and paying no heed to Shota being there, she rebuffed everything he said—"Go home, Shota, go home, I beg you; if you stay I shall die. When you speak to me my head aches, and when I answer I grow dizzy. I don't want anyone at all to come to me, so please go home"—a coldness quite unlike her. Shota could not understand it, and felt as if he were in smoke: "You are very strange today; you'd never say such a thing; what an odd creature you are," he said, coming to a somewhat aggrieved settlement of it, though the tears of a weak heart rose to his eyes—and how should she notice them? "Go home, go home; if you stay here forever—"

you're no friend of mine any more; I hate you, Shota," she said hatefully; and "Then I'll go home. I beg your pardon for troubling you," he said, and without so much as a word to her mother, who was seeing to the bath, he got up abruptly and ran out from the veranda.

XVI

Running straight as an arrow through the crowd, darting and weaving, he flung himself into the stationery shop — Sangoro had already sold off his stock for the day and was jingling some coins in his belly-band pocket, his younger siblings in tow, treating them to whatever they wanted as the great big brother in a moment of great good fortune; into this Shota came flying, and Sangoro said: 'Hey, Shota-san, I was just looking for you — I made some good money today, shall I treat you to something?' 'Don't be a fool — I'm not a person who takes treats from you; shut up, don't be impudent,' Shota said rougher than usual, and 'this is no time for that,' he said, brooding; 'what is it, a fight?' and Sangoro stuffed the half-eaten sweet bread into his breast and said: 'Who's the opponent — Ryugaji, Chokichi? Where did it start — inside the quarter or before the shrine gate? This is different from the festival time — if it doesn't catch us unawares, we won't lose; I'll be the front man,

Shota-san, brace your courage and come at them,' he said eagerly; 'ugh, what a rash fellow — it's not a fight,' Shota said, and as he spoke he fell silent at what he could not yet say; 'but you came flying in so wildly I thought for sure it was a fight; still, Shota-san, if it doesn't start tonight it won't start anymore, will it? The man Chokichi says one of his arms will be gone — what does that mean, why would one arm go missing?'

'Don't you know? I just overheard my father talking with the priest's wife at Ryugaji — Nobu-san is to enter some monks' school very soon; once he puts on the priestly robes his hand won't reach us — there's nothing as alarming as those long flapping sleeves that need to be rolled up and tucked; when that happens, from next year onward all of Yokocho and Omotemachi will be under your thumb,' he goaded; 'stop it — for two sen offered I'd join Chokichi's side; having a hundred of your sort as allies is no pleasure at all; go join whichever side you like — I don't ask for people's help; I wanted to have it out one real time with Ryugaji using my own strength, but if he goes away there's no help for it. They say Fujimoto isn't going until after graduation next year — how has it come to be so soon? What a hopeless fellow' —

he clicked his tongue saying this, but it hardly stayed in his thoughts; Midori's manner kept recurring to him, and Shota could not summon his usual song; even the tremendous bustle of the main street felt lonely to him — not lively at all. From the time the lamps were lit he lay about in the stationery shop, and the day's Rooster market turned everything here and there strange and wild.

From that day onward Midori seemed to have been born anew in the manner of her bearing: she went to her sister's in the quarter when there was reason, but she no longer played in the town at all; her friends, missing her, would come to invite her, and she would give empty promises of 'soon, soon' without end; close as they had been, she no longer grew familiar even with Shota, always looking bashful with only her face reddening, and the lively hand-dances seen at the stationery shop became hard to see again. People were puzzled and feared she might be ill; but her mother alone smiled and said 'soon her true spirited nature will reappear — this is just a middle pause' with an air of knowing the reason; those who did not know could not imagine what it meant. Some praised her for becoming more girllike and well-behaved; some lamented that such an interesting child had been tamed. Omotemachi became suddenly, as if a fire had gone out, lonely, and even Shota's lovely voice was rarely heard; only

the bent-bow lantern going along the embankment night after night was clearly for the daily account-collecting rounds, looking vaguely chilled, and the only thing unchanged in its manner was the occasional accompanying voice of Sangoro, ever clowning.

The rumor that Shinnyо of Ryugaji was to go to some monastery to train in his sect's practice was something Midori never heard at all; keeping her old spirit just as it had been, sealed inside her, in this strange interval of time she could not feel herself to be herself — only everything filled her with shame; and then one frosty morning someone placed a paper flower of narcissus in through the lattice gate. Who had done it there was no way to know, but Midori found herself filled with a fondness she could not account for, and placed it in the single-flower vase on the staggered shelf, quietly admiring its lonely and pure form — and when she heard, without particularly listening, the next morning after that was the very day Shinnyо was to change the color of his sleeves at some seminary.