銀の匙 English

Part One

I

In a drawer of the bookcase in my study — the one crammed with all sorts of odds and ends — there has lain, from long ago, a small box.

It is made of a corky wood, its seams papered over with a peony-patterned print, and it seems originally to have held some imported powdered tobacco.

There is nothing especially beautiful about it, but the wood's dulled color, the softness of it to the touch, and the soft pan of a sound the lid makes when closed, have kept it among my favorite things even now.

Inside it are crammed cowrie shells, camellia seeds, and all sorts of small things I played with as a child, but among them there is one small silver spoon of a curious shape that I have never once forgotten.

It has a dish-shaped bowl about half an inch across, with a short, faintly curved handle, and being thickly made, feels a little heavy when you hold the end of the handle between your fingers.

Now and again I take it out of the box, carefully wipe away its tarnish, and gaze at it without ever tiring.

The day I chanced upon this little spoon was, looking back now, a very long time ago.

In our house there had always been a tea cabinet.

From about the time I could just reach it on tiptoe, I loved opening its doors and pulling out its drawers, delighting in how each one felt different in the hand and creaked with its own particular sound.

Among its drawers were two small ones fitted with tortoiseshell pulls, side by side; one of them stuck badly and would not open easily for a child's strength, which only stirred my curiosity all the more, until one day, after a great struggle, I finally forced it open.

My heart pounding, I tipped its contents out onto the tatami, and there among scroll-weights and inro netsuke I found that silver spoon; wanting it at once, for no particular reason, I carried it straight to my mother and said,

"Please may I have this."

I said.

My mother, who was at her sewing in the sitting room with her spectacles on, looked a little taken aback,

"Keep it carefully, then."

but she gave her permission at once, unusually so, which made me glad, and yet left me a little deflated too.

That drawer had broken and stopped opening when the family moved from Kanda to this part of the Yamanote, and the storied silver spoon had, in time, been forgotten even by my mother.

My mother told me its history as her needle moved.

II

When I was born, my mother's labor was unusually hard; the celebrated midwife of those days gave up on her, and a doctor of Chinese medicine named Tokei was called in, but even his herbal decoctions gave no sign at all of bringing me into the world, and my short-tempered father, working himself into a fury, spoke to him as though he might bite him, so that Tokei, thoroughly at a loss, read aloud from his medical books this way and that, defending the correctness of his prescriptions, all the while simply waiting for the right moment to come.

After tormenting my mother so, I was at last born, but the sight of poor, harried Tokei wetting his finger to turn the pages of his book one by one and scooping medicine from his box remained, in the vivid mimicry of the droll aunt who raised me, a story we never tired of laughing over.

I was frail by nature to begin with, and soon after birth broke out in dreadful sores, which my mother described as being "like a pine cone" —

eruptions covering my head and face all over, so that I had to remain in Tokei's care.

To keep the sores from turning inward, Tokei made me drink a pitch-black medicinal paste and powdered rhinoceros horn every day.

An ordinary spoon, I was told, was awkward for spooning medicine into so small a child's mouth, so Aunt had found this spoon from somewhere and used it always to give me my medicine; hearing this, though I myself had never known it, I felt an inexplicable fondness for it and could not bring myself to let it go.

The eruptions covering my body itched so that I could hardly sleep, day or night, and they say that when my mother and my aunt took turns wrapping red beans in a bran bag and tapping it over the scabs, my nostrils would flutter as though it felt wonderfully good.

Long afterward, well into my growing years, I remained weak and highly strung, and was troubled by headaches every third day or so, which the household put down to that bran-bag tapping having damaged my brain, and told everyone who came to visit.

Having caused my mother such trouble in being born, and since her recovery afterward was poor and there were not hands enough to spare, I came to be raised, except when nursed now and then, entirely by the aunt who was at that time living on our family's charity.

III

Aunt's husband was called Soemon; back home he had been a samurai, of low rank, but the two of them, husband and wife, were kind-hearted people with no head for making a living, so that at the Restoration they fell badly into ruin, and when, some Meiji year or other, cholera swept through and Soemon died of it, the household could no longer hold together at all, and in the end they say Aunt came to live on our family's charity.

Back home, people took advantage of the couple's good nature — not only those genuinely in trouble but even those not in trouble at all would come saying they were in trouble and borrow money, and Aunt and her husband would lend it even at the cost of going without their own food, so that their already poor household was reduced, in no time, to something as good as ruin; and once they had borrowed the money, the debtors would not so much as set foot near them again, and behind their backs

"They're much too good-natured for their own good."

they would jeer.

When they themselves were truly hard pressed, the two of them were not above going to press someone they knew for repayment, but if the other party so much as said something pitiable, they would come home weeping right along with them,

"Poor thing, poor thing,"

they would say.

Aunt and her husband were also great believers in omens; once, on the strength of the notion that white mice are the messengers of the god Daikoku, they bought a pair from somewhere and raised them with the utmost care, calling them "Lady Fuku, Lady Fuku," and when, breeding as mice do, the creatures ended up crawling in swarms all through the house, they took it as a wonderfully auspicious sign, and on any day of note they would cook red rice or heap roasted beans into a masu box and set them out as offerings.

In this way what little money they had was borrowed away and never repaid, and the rice in their bin was eaten away by Lady Fuku, until, with literally nothing but the clothes on their backs, they came all the long way from home to rely on my family, who had just then moved here in the retinue of our lord; but soon after, Soemon died of cholera, and Aunt was left a widow with nothing at all but herself.

Aunt used to tell of that time — that the epidemic had spread because the foreign Christians, meaning to kill off the Japanese, had let loose evil foxes upon the land, and that there had been two such visitations, the "one-day cholera" and the "three-day cholera."

Soemon caught the one-day cholera and was taken off to the isolation hospital, where, she said, they let patients who had turned black with the fever die without even giving them water.

All the sick, she said, died with their bowels burned away.

Raising me was Aunt's one and only joy in this life.

Partly this was because she had no home of her own, no children, was growing old, and had no other pleasure left to her; but there was, besides, one more curious reason why she doted on me with such superstitious devotion.

It was this: an elder brother of mine, who would now, had he lived, have been just a year older than I, had died of what they called "infant convulsions" not long after his birth,

and Aunt had grieved over it as though her own child were dying,

"Come back to us reborn, come back to us reborn,"

she had wailed, weeping aloud.

Then, the very next year, I was born, and she became utterly convinced that, by the Buddha's grace, that earlier child had come back to life in me, and so she cherished me above all things.

Even if I was this filthy, sore-covered child, when she thought of me as one who had not forgotten a helpless aunt's plea and had cast aside his lotus-throne in Paradise to come to her, how happy and dear I must have seemed to her.

And so, from the time I was four or five, whenever Aunt made her morning offering to the Buddha — this was the happy office of her devout heart —

she would from time to time bring me before the family altar and make a child who could not yet read the first letter of his primer learn by heart my brother's posthumous name — which, by Aunt's reckoning, was none other than my own name from my days in Paradise — Ikkan-Sokuo-Doji.

IV

Indoors it hardly mattered, but the moment I stepped even a single foot outside, I always clung fast to Aunt's back, and though she complained of an aching hip or a numbed arm, I think even she was loath to put me down.

Until I was about five I had scarcely once been set down on bare ground, and if for some reason — retying her sash, say — I was ever taken off her back, the earth itself seemed to sway and reel beneath me, so that I had to cling desperately to the end of her sleeve.

In those days I wore a pale-blue sash tied high about my chest, from which hung a little bell and a charm from the temple at Narita.

This was Aunt's own device: the charm, of course, was to keep me from harm, from falling into a ditch or a river; the bell was because Aunt's eyes were failing and she could not see far, so that if ever we were separated, she might hear its sound and come searching for me.

But for a child who was never once let down from her back, year in and year out, both bell and charm were, in truth, entirely useless.

Owing to my frailty I was slow to develop, and grew, besides, deeply melancholy; I scarcely ever showed a smiling face to anyone but Aunt, and far from speaking up on my own, I would hardly even answer when a member of the household spoke to me, and even at my very best moods I would do no more than nod silently; I was a spiritless child, painfully shy of strangers, and it was my habit, at the mere sight of an unfamiliar face, to hide my face against her back and burst into tears.

I was so wasted and thin that my ribs showed, with an overlarge head and sunken eyes, so that everyone in the household called me "Octopus-head, Octopus-head," but I myself, mangling my own name, ——bo, called myself ——pon.

V

The place I was born might be called Kanda within Kanda itself, a place never without its fires, its brawls, its drunkards, and its thieves.

The neighboring houses that left their shadow on my sickly mind were the rice dealer across the way, the penny-sweet shop, and after them the tofu seller, the bathhouse, the timber yard, and the like, along with the black fence of the doctor's house diagonally opposite, and our lord's residence — my own family's house stood within its grounds —

whose gateway stood out above the rest.

On fine days Aunt would carry me out on her back, clinging to her like some genie out of the Arabian Nights, and walk me wherever she thought might please me, as far as her old legs would hold out.

Just behind us, at the back of the alley, there was a shop that made horaimame beans, where men tattooed with dragon-and-thunderbolt designs, clad in nothing but loincloths, headbands knotted at the brow, roasted the beans as they sang, but I disliked the place, both because the men frightened me like demons and because the clattering noise rang straight to the core of my head.

If I was ever carried past such a disagreeable place, I would at once pull a tearful face and twist my whole body.

Then I would silently point in the direction I wanted to go.

And Aunt, well used to reading her little genie's moods, would always carry me, without fail, exactly where I wished.

The place I loved best was the Inari shrine at Izumi-cho, which stands even now on the bank of the Kanda River.

Early in the morning, when no one else was about, I loved to play there, throwing stones into the river or ringing the great nut-shaped bell.

Aunt would set me down on some stone that looked free of dust, or on the shrine steps, and say her prayers.

I loved the clatter of the pierced coins as they fell.

Wherever we went, whatever god or Buddha it might be, her first prayer, before all else, was always the same: that this child's body should grow strong.

One day, held from behind by my sash, I was gripping the wooden railing and looking out over the river when a white bird went back and forth over the water, fishing.

The sight of it circling quietly, its long, soft-looking wings beating in slow, swaying strokes, was a truly fitting spectacle for a sickly child who so often knew pain.

I was in unusually high spirits over it, but, as luck would have it, a woman peddler came along just then to rest, carrying eggs and wheat-flour sweets on her back, and as always I clung straight to Aunt's back.

The woman set down her load, took off the towel that covered her head, wiped her neck with it, and, chattering away pleasantly all the while, coaxed even so timid a child around, so that by the time I was ready to be lowered from Aunt's back she had already opened her box of wheat-flour sweets and set about luring me in.

The woman took out an oval, koban-shaped wheat-flour sweet, richly fragrant, and turned it round and round on her fingertip,

"Here, young master, young master,"

she said, and pressed it into my hand, so that Aunt had no choice but to buy it.

Even now, when I am shown a peddler's oil-paper basket wearily lifted from a shoulder, its inside packed in rice husks with white and pale-red eggs, and its wheat-flour sweets giving off that rich fragrance, I cannot help wanting to buy the whole lot.

The shrine has since grown grander and livelier, but the very willow of those days still sways there, cool as ever.

VI

On days we did not go to the shrine, Aunt would put offering money and small change for the gate fee into a grimy purse and take me to the Prison Field.

This was the site of the famous Denma-cho prison, and all manner of sideshows were forever being staged there.

Small peddlers, too, lined the street with their stalls, selling turban shells grilled in their pots, popped beans, orangeade, and, in season, corn on the cob, roasted chestnuts, and acorns.

At the gate of a sideshow hung with red-and-white striped curtains, a man sat cross-legged with his wooden clappers and shoe-check tags, cupping a hand to his mouth and calling out, "Step right up, step right up."

In one there was a chained wild dog, a chicken thrust before its nose to make it shriek.

In another, a suspicious-looking kappa with a dish set in its head splashed about in a tub of water.

The derorenzaimon chanters blew great honking blasts on their conch shells and clanged something like a golden rod, singing "derore-e-e-n, derore-e-e-n," which I found not the least bit interesting, but Aunt loved them herself and took me there again and again.

Once, unusually, a puppet play was being staged, and the painted signboard showed a hillside covered all over with cherry blossoms, on which a figure like a princess out of a picture-book stood dancing with a hand drum.

I went in delighted, but at once there came a terrible clanging noise and out sprang some creature, its face and limbs all crimson, a twisted sash slung across its chest, so that I was startled into loud, wailing tears.

I heard afterward that it had been the fox Tadanobu from the play Senbon-zakura.

One sideshow I did enjoy was a wrestling match between a man and an ostrich.

A man with a twisted headband and a fencer's breastplate would spring at the bird, hopping this way and that as if he too were challenging it to a fight, and the ostrich, its temper up, would kick out at him again and again.

Sometimes the ostrich would have its neck pinned down and lose the bout, and sometimes the man would be kicked about and run off crying, "I give up, I give up."

Meanwhile another man, waiting his turn, was eating his lunch box in a corner, when a second ostrich, left with no opponent and wandering idly about, crept up on him and suddenly tried to swallow his lunch, sending the man leaping back in alarm.

The sight of it was so comical that the onlookers burst out laughing.

Aunt said,

"The poor ostrich is hungry and doesn't even get his rice — how pitiful."

and shed tears over it.

VII

For a child like me to have been born in the very heart of Kanda was a more unfortunate thing even than a kappa hatching in the desert.

The neighborhood children were, every one of them, budding little Kanda toughs, who not only would not play with a spiritless child like me but, given half a chance, made things hard for me.

Chief among them was the tabi-shop's son across the way, who, whenever Aunt's attention wandered, would come up from behind and slap me hard across the cheek before running off, again and again, so that I grew badly timid and drew more and more into myself.

At home Aunt would set me up on the high window facing the street, letting me hold on to the lattice while she braced me from behind, teaching me the names of horses, carts, and whatever else caught my eye.

At the rice dealer diagonally opposite there was a lame chicken, once run over by a cart, its feathers and tail all ragged and grimy, forever standing on one leg whenever I saw it, and Aunt pitied it so much every single time that in the end even I came to dread the sight of it.

The place I usually played in was a gloomy little three-mat room where the family altar stood; at night it became my bedroom, and sometimes it served as a study for my sisters as well.

I remember my two sisters, twelve or thirteen at the time and attending primary school, taking blackened copybooks from an envelope shaped like a Western one and spreading them out on an old wooden desk to practice their writing.

One of the desks, about three shaku long, had two drawers, and into the hole left where a pull had come off, a brush shaft wound round with paper had been stuck; the other, barely large enough for a child's knees to fit under, had a shallow drawer of its own; and these desks came to be handed down in turn, from elder brother to elder sister, and from me to my younger sister, over the course of some decades.

Using it as a step-stool, I could be lifted up to the window facing the garden, from where a great clump of azaleas beside the black fence could be seen.

In summer its crimson blossoms piled up in profusion, and though we were in the middle of the city, a butterfly would now and then come flying by to sip its nectar.

I loved to watch it flutter its wings so busily, and Aunt, peering over my shoulder from behind, would say that black butterflies were an old man from the mountain village, while all the white and yellow ones were princesses.

The princesses were dear to me, but I was frightened of the old mountain man flapping his great black wings about.

Aunt would also take out all sorts of toys from a wicker basket carefully papered over, and let me play with them.

Of all my many toys, the one I treasured most was a little black-lacquered clay dog picked up out of the gutter in front of the house, whose face somehow seemed to me a gentle thing.

Aunt called it "the Honorable Dog," and would set it inside a little shrine made from an empty box and show me how to worship it.

Then, too, there was that clumsily made ox of Ox-Day rouge, which I also cherished.

These two were the only friends I had in all the world.

VIII

Besides these I had a whole array of war-gear as well — swords, halberds, bows, and guns.

Aunt would dress me in a court cap, have me wear a dagger at my belt, turn me into a proper warrior from head to foot, and then tie a headband at the back of her own head, take up a halberd under her arm, and station herself at one end of the long corridor while I took the other, and we would play at war.

Once ready, we would both put on grave faces, take up our stances, and edge slowly toward one another.

The instant we met in the middle of the corridor, I

"Shioden, is it?"

would call out.

The enemy,

"Kiyomasa, is it?"

would say.

And then, in one voice,

"Well met, indeed,"

we would say, and in the same breath

"Yah! Taka-taka-taka-taka!"

we would cry, keeping time with our mouths, and cross blades for a good while with neither of us gaining the upper hand.

This was the Battle of Yamazaki, in which I was Kato Kiyomasa and Aunt was Shioden Tajima-no-kami.

Before long the two of us threw down our weapons and grappled with one another.

After a great flurry of fighting, Shioden, judging that Kiyomasa was good and tired,

"Ahh, I'm done for—!"

would cry, most convincingly mortified, and fall flat.

When I, nose held high, straddled her and pinned her down, Aunt, sweat streaming down her, would say from underneath,

"Spare me the rope — just take my head."

staying Shioden to the very last.

Then Kiyomasa would draw his short sword and make as if to saw roughly at her wrinkled neck, and the moment Shioden, grimacing but enduring it, shut her eyes and went limp in a pretense of death, the bout was, by our rules, decided; but on rainy days we would repeat the whole thing seven or eight times over, until Shioden was made to keep at it till she was quite worn out and tottering.

Aunt would say,

"Oh, there's no help for it, no help for it,"

in a voice near tears, and yet she would keep it up forever, until I myself grew tired and called a halt.

Sometimes Aunt would be so worn out that even after her head was cut off she would not get up again for a long while.

Then I would begin to wonder, half in fright, whether she had really died, and shake her, uneasily, to wake her up.

IX

At festival time for the god Myojin, the whole quarter grew tremendously lively, being what it was; the young men of the neighborhood decked every eave with red and white blossoms and walked about with lanterns bearing the tomoe crest and the rising sun.

It delighted me that our own eaves too were hung with blossoms and lanterns.

On that day there was a house that spread red felt over its shop floor and displayed a set of shijin-ken — ceremonial swords adorned with the emblems of the four guardian gods.

Two great bulging lion-heads were reverently set upon a dais, and beside them stood tall sacred sake bottles with sprigs of shaved bamboo wrapped in folded ceremonial paper standing stiffly up from their necks.

The golden lion glared with silver eyeballs, a sacred jewel set atop its head, while the crimson guardian-dog flashed golden eyes, its mane tossed wild.

Aunt, with the same skill by which she had made friends of the Honorable Dog and the Ox-Day ox, made friends even of the lion and the guardian-dog, so that even at the sight of their terrible faces I never once burst into tears.

Everyone from the young men of the quarter, all in matching summer robes, down to children just able to toddle, wore headbands knotted at the brow and crossed their chests briskly with turmeric-yellow hemp sashes — I loved those sashes hung with little bells and roly-poly dolls —

and, barefoot in white tabi, showing their sturdy shins, walked about waving the biggest lanterns they could carry.

Candle flames flickered inside every lantern along the eaves, and inside every festival lantern bobbing about the streets.

It was a fine sight to see the top-heavy lanterns, dyed red and white, their thick paper streamers hanging down, spun round and round through the air.

At key spots in each quarter, bands of men and boys together surrounded barrel-shrines, plotting out their plans for a coming brawl.

Aunt, who loved all this, dressed even me in a sash and headband like everyone else and took me out into the street.

With my kimono hitched up to show red flannel underclothes beneath, my long sleeves tucked into my sash, I held a small lantern on Aunt's back.

Then one of the young toughs gathered round a certain barrel-shrine caught sight of us and called out,

"Hey, look at that! Riding on a woman's back, waving his lantern!"

and, saying so, suddenly flung two or three stones at us.

Aunt, in a fright,

"He's a weak child, do forgive him,"

she said, hurrying to turn back, but two or three of the toughs came scattering after us, grabbing at my legs to try to drag me down, so that I clung to her neck with all my strength and burst into tears as if I had been set on fire.

Aunt, prying loose again and again the hands choking her throat,

"Forgive him, forgive him,"

she said, and fled home.

And when at last she caught her breath, she found that in all the trouble she had dropped my hard-won lantern and, clattering, my clogs as well.

And those clogs, tied with their pale-blue cords, had been ones I so treasured.

X

Being so sickly, there was scarcely a time when I was free of some doctor's hands, but fortunately, since my rhinoceros-horn Tokei died before long, in his place, a "Western doctor,"

Kosaka, came to look after me, and the sores that Tokei had worked so hard to bring to a head were cleanly washed away with Western medicine and healed completely before long.

This man, for all his frightening face, was skilled at putting a child at ease.

And so I, who until then had been thoroughly sick of Tokei's foul-tasting paste, came gladly to drink his sweetened liquid medicine.

Before long, on Kosaka's advice that for my health and my mother's we absolutely had to move to some place in the Yamanote with good air, my father — whose duties to our lord had, luckily, just then been mostly settled, leaving him free — resolved to hand his post over to someone else and move to the high ground of Koishikawa.

On the day we finally moved, everyone took great pains to explain to me that we could never come back to this house again, but I found it great fun watching the tradesmen come bustling in to help, and was so delighted at riding double with Aunt in a line of rickshaws that I chattered away in high spirits.

After a while the road grew steadily lonelier, until at last we climbed a long slope of red clay — until then I had not even known what a slope was —

and arrived at an old house ringed with a cedar hedge, which we were told was to be our new home.

XI

Everyone hereabouts lived quietly in old houses ringed with cedar hedges.

Most were samurai families who had lived there for generations since the old shogunate days; though the times had changed and brought them down in the world, they had not yet fallen so low as to be driven by the needs of each day, and lived out their quiet, untroubled lives.

And since it was an out-of-the-way place with few houses, the neighbors all knew not just each other's faces but the goings-on inside each other's houses too, and were easy and familiar with one another.

Within the crumbling, untended cedar hedges there was, everywhere, some patch of open ground planted with fruit trees, and between one estate and the next, where there was no vegetable field, there was a tea field, which served as a playground for children and birds alike.

Fields, hedges, tea plantations — there was nothing that met the eye that was not new and delightful to me.

My family was building on a fairly large plot of open ground next door, and we were to live in this house only until the new one was finished.

Beside the dark, gloomy entryway stood a yuzuriha tree, and I loved both its leaves and their red stems.

I would pluck its smooth leaves and press them to my lips, or rub them against my cheek.

The day after we moved in, someone caught a cicada and put it in a birdcage that happened to be lying about.

It was something I had never seen or heard before, and so was fascinating, but when I came near it thrashed about with such a jangling racket that it frightened me.

Every morning I was woken early and made to walk barefoot through the weed-choked open ground.

Just learning the names of the shepherd's purse, the mosquito-net grass, and all the other plants growing there was a considerable undertaking in itself.

My grandmother, close to eighty at the time, her shaven head covered with a woolen hood, walked beside me too, treading the dew, leaning on her cane.

Grandmother buried some fine triple chestnuts along the back hedge, saying that by the time her grandchildren were grown they would be able to pick and eat them.

After Grandmother died, we called them "Grandmother's chestnuts" and cherished them; nowadays all three have grown into fine trees, and every autumn those same grandchildren, grown up long since, gather basketfuls of fallen chestnuts to peel for their own children.

Before long the building work began.

On Aunt's back, half in fright, I would go to look at the horses and oxen that had hauled the timber, tied up along the hedge.

The horses, breath streaming like rods from their great nostrils, tore off cedar leaves and ate them, while the oxen belched something up and chewed it over slowly.

I liked the placid, round-faced oxen, forever licking their lips, better than the restless, long-faced horses.

At the building site, chisels, adzes, and hatchets each rang out with their own sound, enough to set even so subdued a sickly child's heart racing.

Among the craftsmen, a man named Sada was gentle and kind-hearted; whenever I stood beside him as he planed wood, gazing entranced at the shavings curling up out of the plane's hollow and spiraling to the ground, he would always pick out the prettiest-looking ones and hand them to me.

If I sucked on a shaving of cedar or cypress so fresh it seemed almost to bleed, it left a taste that puckered the tongue and cheeks.

And I loved, too, the ticklish feeling between my fingers when I scooped up sawdust in both hands, plump and soft, and let it spill through.

Sada always stayed behind after the others had gone, and clapped his hands with a fine, sharp sound to worship the moon.

I loved to linger about the workshop watching for it, but the other craftsmen had nicknamed Sada "the odd one," and used to say that a fellow like that was sure to die young.

Looking round the workshop after it had been neatly swept, one saw, in place of all the day's bustle, only a hushed stillness settling in with the evening mist.

Reluctantly called indoors, I would wait for the next morning to come round again.

In this way, half-drunk on the rising scent of fresh wood and feeling, somehow, wonderfully refreshed, I watched, as though it were some marvel, our new house rising day by day.

XII

Across a small tea field to the south stood a Zen temple called Shorin-ji.

Its grounds were spacious, and to Aunt, so devout as she was, a temple was somehow a dear and familiar sort of place, so that she would sometimes take me there.

From the gate to the entrance hall, over some twenty ken, two rows of paving stones ran between untended tea fields, with here and there a cedar or some other tree standing.

I was often given tea-flowers picked for me; so lightly did they cling to the branch that plucking one sent several more scattering down to the ground at once.

And after rain, every single tea bush was heavy with glittering drops of water.

Unremarkable as it is, the tea-flower, with its faint touch of quiet beauty, is a flower well suited to the memories of childhood.

Its rounded white petals bloom plumply about a yellow center, half hidden in the shade of dark, crinkled leaves.

It was a habit of mine to press one whole against my nose and breathe in its scent.

The osmanthus by the well on the left gave off a sweet fragrance when it bloomed, and the creak of the well's pulley wheel carried clear across the quiet tea field to our house.

On the great standing screen at the entrance to the main hall was painted a peacock in brilliant colors.

Beside the cock, perched somewhere with his straw-cape tail hanging down, a somewhat smaller hen crouched as if pecking at something.

All around them peonies bloomed in riotous profusion, with several butterflies at play among them.

From time to time, too, Aunt took me to play at the nearby shrine of Dainichi.

I would take hold of the thick, twisted rope and clang the gong-bell, while Aunt tossed in her offering coin and said her prayers.

Then, so that my headaches might be cured, she would stroke my head and the head of the Binzuru statue by turns, and afterward rub her own eyes.

Binzuru sat cross-legged on his pedestal, his bare wood worn shiny with the touch of countless hands, glaring with great round eyes.

At the Dainichi shrine, as at temples everywhere, there was a dug well hung with dedicated hand-towels, persimmon-colored and lavender, and floating in it was a bent-wood dipper of the kind carried by O-tsuru of Awa no Naruto in the picture-books.

Aunt would gratefully take the water in her cupped hands, cool her eyes with it, and then, opening her shrunken eyes wide, say,

"Thanks to Lord Dainichi, they do seem a little better."

she would say.

The fortune-slips at this Dainichi shrine had a reputation for being remarkably accurate, and there were even people who came a long way just to draw one.

And so Aunt once tried asking whether my sickliness would ever get better.

Going to where the sliding paper door stood at the side of the hall,

"I have a favor to ask,"

she said, and

"Yes?"

came the answer, as a young monk with a freshly shaven blue-black head put out his face.

Aunt told him the whole story and asked for a fortune-slip.

The monk went before the main image, bowed for a while in prayer, then shook the fortune-box again and again in rhythm — clatter, clatter, clatter-clatter-clatter — before drawing out a single slip and carefully writing out its verse on paper for her.

Aunt, unable to read "square characters" —

meaning kanji — the monk explained its meaning to her point by point, and since it said that this child would grow strong in future and know happiness, she came home beaming with joy.

XIII

About a cho further into the lonelier part stood a patch of open ground ringed with a rose-of-Sharon hedge, where an old man and woman kept five or six chickens and sold penny sweets.

The thatched roof, the crumbling mud wall, the creaking well-sweep — all things I was seeing for the first time — delighted me enormously, and going there with Aunt to buy sweets became one of my great pleasures.

The old couple were hard of hearing, and however much we called, they were slow to come out.

After a great deal of calling, one of them would at last shuffle out and open the lids of the sweet-boxes one after another to show us.

Kinka candy, kingyoku candy, tenmon candy, mijin-bo sticks.

The bamboo-shaped yokan, when I put it in my mouth, smelled of fresh green bamboo and slid smoothly out onto my tongue.

The little O-ta figure inside the candy laughed or cried, showing her face at every turn.

If I bit off a piece of the blue-and-red-striped candy and sucked on it, a sweet little puff of air came out from its honeycombed inside.

The one I loved best was called cinnamon stick.

It was a stick of hard candy dusted with cinnamon powder, and beneath its rich sweetness lurked the sharp, stirring scent of cinnamon.

On one dreadful rainy day, I was suddenly overcome, for no reason I could say, with pity for the old couple, and at the same moment seized with a craving for cinnamon sticks that would not be denied, so that Aunt bundled me on her back under a padded coat and went out; but as luck would have it there were no cinnamon sticks to be had that day, and I came home crying with disappointment.

"Cow's milk" —

on days when I drank it quietly and played without fussing, I was rewarded with a rattling paper ball bought as a treat.

Shaped like a peach or a clam, dyed half red and half white, I would delight in shaking it on Aunt's back all the way home, and when I broke it open, out would come a little paper hand-drum or a tin whistle.

I treasured it like some priceless jewel.

There was another kind too, wrapped triangularly in mud-colored paper, its seam sealed with a print of an actor's face.

XIV

Frail by birth and, from lack of exercise, poor of digestion besides, I was, like some queen bee, apt to forget to eat at all until food was pressed to my very lips, and there is no telling how much trouble I gave Aunt over it.

There was a time we packed rice balls into an empty yokan box and made a game of a pilgrimage to Ise, with Aunt leading the way round and round the garden's artificial hill, clapping her hands in worship before the stone lantern at the end, and then sitting down on a rock in the shade of a pine to eat our lunch.

Another time my little sister and her nurse came along too, and we carried nori-wrapped rice out to a meadow where evening primroses were in bloom, and ate it there.

Looking out from the top of the bluff, lined with great cedars, hackberries, and zelkovas, one could see, bright and clear, the mountains of Fuji, Hakone, and Ashigara.

I was eating my lunch with unusual pleasure when, as ill luck would have it, someone came into view approaching from the distance, and I threw down my chopsticks at once and said I wanted to go home.

Of all living creatures, people were the ones I disliked most.

In this way, whenever nothing I ate seemed to taste good to me, Aunt would season it skillfully with her own peculiar eloquence and get me to eat it after all.

I liked simmered clams because of the story of how those dear little clams crawled along, tongues stuck out, before the Dragon Princess of the Sea; and I liked bamboo shoots simply because the tale of filial Meng Zong was so delightful.

When I washed a plump bamboo shoot, along its base I found short roots and purple bumps lined up in rows.

Held up to the light, its sheath showed fine golden down, and its inner side was streaked white as ivory.

The big sheaths I would put on my head like a hat, and the small ones, their fuzz rubbed off, I would have wrapped round a pickled plum.

Sucking on it for a while, the sheath would turn a deep red as the sour juice seeped through.

I liked hachiku bamboo shoots too.

Watching Aunt, with a look of the greatest relish, taste-test the bamboo shoots as they bubbled and boiled in the earthen pot, even so fastidious a little queen bee as I felt the saliva start at the back of his jaw.

Sometimes, when I grew willful and would not pick up my own chopsticks, Aunt would hold a small painted bowl to my lips,

"Here comes the baby sparrow, here comes the baby sparrow,"

she would say, and feed me by hand.

The sea bream was beautiful to look at, and I loved that it had its "seven tools" hidden in its head, and that it was the fish cradled in the arms of the god Ebisu.

Its eye was delicious.

The outside was soft and crumbly, but the core was chewy and tough, and however much I chewed I could never bite through it.

When I spat it out, a small, half-transparent bead clicked down onto the plate.

Its white teeth, too, I liked.

XV

In those days there was a madman known as Mr. ——.

According to what the older people said, he had, in his youth, thrown himself so obsessively into study, reading nothing but books, that his pride had swelled and his mind had come unhinged.

His hair grown out wild, his body scaled with grime and soot, wrapped in scorched, filthy rags, leaning on a thick bamboo staff, he wandered about, sunk in thought, quietly, endlessly, barefoot alike in summer and winter.

People who had known him in the old days pitied him and would give him a rice ball now and then, which he would carry off carefully cradled in his hands as if it were a monk's begging bowl; and if by chance someone gave him something to wear, he would put it on reluctantly for a day or two and soon change back into his old rags.

He had dug himself a pit beside a farmhouse some two cho from my home, and there he kept a fire burning all year round.

When the mood took him he would climb out of the pit and go wherever his feet led him, as far as he pleased, and when he tired of it he would simply turn about and come back.

In this way, rain or wind, he was forever wandering the area over and over again.

So that if for some reason he was not seen for a whole day, people would say, "Mr. —— must be out of sorts today," and if he failed to appear for three or four days running, they would say, "He can't be feeling well," and pity him for it.

Oddly enough, if he passed a woman in the street, he would step back two or three paces and spit, again and again, as though at something filthy.

Aunt, who was fastidious by nature, had been bothered by his filthy smell from the very first time she saw Mr. ——, and would turn back herself before he had even taken his three steps away; but one day, carrying me on her back on the way to the usual sweet-shop, we ran into him unexpectedly, and this time Aunt could not restrain herself,

"Here, I'll give you five sen — please, won't you wash your face?"

she said, and began drawing her purse out from her sash.

Even Mr. —— seemed a little startled at that, and stopped short, but then, shaking his head as if thoroughly put out, forgetting even to spit, he hurried away.

This madman lived on until I myself had grown into a proper young rascal, but one day word went round that Mr. —— had burned to death in the night, and, half in fright, I went to peer into his pit, where nothing remained but his familiar bamboo staff, half-burned along with the kindling, and no sign of Mr. —— at all.

XVI

Aunt said we would play at "seed-fellows" —

and would knock down white-camellia seeds for me, but her poor eyesight and weak arm made her miss her aim, so that she brought down mostly just branches and leaves.

Seed-fellows was a game from Aunt's home province: each player chose out a set number of camellia seeds of a fixed shape, contributed the same number as everyone else, shook them all together in cupped hands in turn, and spilled them out onto the tatami; whoever had the most seeds land with their white sprout-scar facing up won, and the players took each other's seeds accordingly.

Depending on a seed's shape and the placement of its center of gravity, some seeds were stronger in the game than others.

Some players, it was said, lacquered their seeds for decoration, or slyly weighted them with lead to make them stronger.

Gathering up the fallen seeds and cracking their shells, one found, fitted snugly within their inner walls, seeds shaped like little boats, others like arrow-tips, others glossy and smooth.

Depending on their shape, they were given names like "mo," "ja," "toko," and "kai."

In this way I once gathered fifty or sixty seeds and spent a whole quiet rainy day doing nothing but playing seed-fellows.

In summer, as clouds of every shape drifted across a sky ablaze with dazzling sunlight, Aunt would tell me, most solemnly, that this one was the Bodhisattva Monju, and that one Fugen.

One day, tired out from play, I lay down alone and watched for clouds shaped like the guardian Buddhas who watched over me.

Just then a cloud passing overhead, shaped like Kannon lying face-up, suddenly crumbled into some terrible form, and I, thinking some monster had taken on Kannon's shape to come and seize me, fled in a panic to Aunt's side.

From then on I called clouds of that sort "corpse-Kannon," and at the very sight of one I would hide myself away at once.

In the wicker basket, besides the war-gear for our Battle of Yamazaki, there were toys as well, and among them the hand-drum and the sho pipes were my most treasured possessions.

The sho's black-lacquered bowl was decorated with a gold-inlaid arabesque pattern.

The soft, jumbled sound — hyu-hi-i — that came from its ring of long and short pipes gave my weak nerves just the right measure of pleasure.

The hand-drum was just the right size for my small shoulder, and I loved everything about it — its scarlet cords, the curious shape of its body.

Aunt, so wonderfully handy at everything, having dabbled in a bit of it all, would have me beat the hand-drum while she matched her taiko-style large-drum strokes neatly to my rhythm.

Besides these, small odds and ends — a rabbit's paw made into a face-powder brush, a crane's beak for stroking one's throat when a fish-bone caught, a brass mallet for fixing sword-hilt ornaments and the like — were kept in what we called "——pon's drawer," one of the many small drawers of a chest.

I never once said which of them I wanted; Aunt would take them out one by one, this one and that, and until she happened to guess right I would shake my head and grumble on, though as a rule my mood would mend the moment she brought out the familiar Honorable Dog and ox.

If something displeased me and I flung away whatever was at hand, she never grew angry, but worried at once that I might be unwell somewhere, and felt my forehead straightaway.

If I had a fever, I would be taken to the doctor at once.

Dreading that, the moment my forehead was touched I would go quite meek and still.

When the chrysanthemums were in bloom, Aunt would say,

"I'll make you a chrysanthemum rug, so be a good boy now,"

and go pick chrysanthemums from the back field to make it for me.

She would arrange the petals of various chrysanthemums into an arabesque pattern on paper, press it for a while, and when she took it out again it had become a sweetly fragrant little rug.

I loved that chrysanthemum rug dearly.

Sometimes, too, I would tip out all the picture-books crammed in the bookcase and have endlessly patient Aunt tell me the stories in them, one after another.

Whenever I had been scolded for something and cried myself out, sulking on and on until even the coaxing that came to soothe me only made me angrier, I would withdraw alone into a corner of the room and console myself by spreading out my picture-books or fiddling with my toys, and the Honorable Dog, the ox, the little mallet, and the princesses in my picture-books, though they said not a word, comforted me all the same, most kindly.

And being comforted so, the tears of resentment I had just stopped crying would well up again without end, and, sobbing,

"Never mind — I've got friends like these on my side,"

I would think to myself, resenting the rest of the household all the while.

XVII

At night, while I played, tipping out my toys beside everyone gathered in the sitting room, once drowsiness began to creep over me everything started to irritate me, and I would rub and rub my itching eyes and fuss, and Aunt would say,

"Ah, getting sleepy now, are you?"

and, tidying away my scattered toys, half by force she would press my head down to make me say good night to everyone, and I, insisting stubbornly that I would not sleep, would be dragged off to the bedroom all the same.

There it was settled that Aunt would sleep holding me, and the nurse holding my little sister.

As soon as it grew dark, the andon lamp was lit and the bedding laid out, so that the moment my temper turned I could be put straight to bed.

In winter my several layers of nightclothes would be draped over the foot-warmer until they were warmed through to steaming, and Aunt, blowing on them with great show, would wrap them snugly, warm, about my thin body.

One of my quilts had a chrysanthemum pattern; another was some imported-looking chintz, its reddish-brown ground scattered with clustered chrysanthemums and branches, and I loved the sun-baked smell of it, burying my face into its plumpness face-down to breathe it in.

Since I was afraid of the light growing dim, once I was in bed Aunt would take a fresh wick from the andon's little drawer and add it to the flame.

Dipping its tip lightly in the oil, she would lay it alongside the old wick sunk deep in it, and with a crackling shower of sparks the flame would catch.

Then, her hand trembling, she would carefully draw up the loose end that dangled wobbling out past the dish, and from the spout of the oil jar pour in amber rapeseed oil with a soft gurgle.

The soft, fluffy wick, the way the oil soaked slowly into it, the shape of the wick-holder, the smell of the oil simmering —

the one thing I hated above all was the sight of dead insects sunk black in the oil, and the charred wick-ends clinging to the rim of the dish.

And so every day Aunt would change the oil and scrape the charred bits away with the blunted blade of a paper-knife.

To this timid child, the andon lamp itself always seemed somehow eerie.

Straining my sleepy eyes to watch from bed, the spindle-shaped flame, rising with its charred wick-tip at its core, looked to me like some long, slit single eye, and when I saw Aunt's shadow, her face thrust in close enough to singe her nose as she tended the wick, cast monstrously huge upon the paper of the lamp, I felt certain that something had come and taken on a fearful shape.

As she put the matches away in the drawer, Aunt would recite a prayer for the souls of the insects that had been lured to their deaths by the flame.

There were times, too, when I felt certain some demon lurked in the ceiling above the alcove, beyond the reach of the light, and could not sleep.

Then Aunt would say,

"Up we go, then,"

and lift the andon lamp to shine it up at the ceiling,

"There's nothing there, nothing there at all,"

she would say, to set my mind at ease.

I imagined a demon as some pitch-black thing with its hair hanging down in a wild mass.

Aunt would say,

"If you're frightened in the night, just call out — Aunt's fierce enough that they'll all run off,"

and she would tell me all manner of stories to lull me to sleep.

Aunt could not read kanji, but she had an astonishing memory and a store of knowledge, and her supply of stories seemed almost inexhaustible.

Besides, whenever she happened to forget a part, she had a real knack for filling it in smoothly with whatever her imagination supplied.

And whether it was a samurai or a princess, she would put on each one's proper expression and voice, until at last she even acted out the face of some monster, and lit as she was by the dim light of the andon, it looked terribly real.

XVIII

The saddest of all were the story of the children piling stones on the riverbed of Sai, and the story of the Hatsune drum in Senbon-zakura.

Aunt would sing a verse of that mournful pilgrim's song in a grieving voice, and then add her own explanation.

I could not fully grasp the whole of it, but the gist was this: because they had given their mothers such trouble in the womb and died before they could repay that debt, the children built towers of stone to atone for their sin, trudging back and forth on the desolate riverbed of Sai, and demons would come and smash the towers down with iron rods, treating them cruelly.

And gentle Jizo, I was told, would shield them and hide them away beneath the sleeve of his robes; and every time I heard this, I was overcome by a gloom so heavy it seemed to choke my breath, and, moved to the depths of my heart by the poor children's fate, I would sob and sob, until Aunt, stroking my back, would say,

"There, there — Jizo will come, he'll come,"

she would say.

Whenever I thought of Jizo, I pictured him exactly as that stone image standing by the roadside, leaning on his pilgrim's staff.

Raised as I was, entirely by the hand of my Buddha-hearted Aunt, I drew no distinction whatever between beasts and human beings, and so I listened with my whole heart pierced to the story of the pitiful fox cub whose mother's skin was stripped from her while she lived.

The mother white fox, they said, cried out even as her skin was being torn away, "My child, my dear child, my dear child," again and again.

This is the saddest of the three drum-stories I knew.

It was not the drum wrapped in mysterious clouds that fell from heaven, nor the silent drum that some heartless man had strung with damask silk, but an ordinary drum, strung with the hide of a fox that lived on the plains of Yamato, which, drawn by the bond of love, gave voice to its longing for its child.

Even now, whenever I recall this story, I feel the same old emotion well up in me, unchanged.

Aunt also knew the Hyakunin Isshu poems entirely by heart, and once I was in bed she would set them to her own uniquely mournful melody and patiently teach me one or two poems every night.

Aunt

"Tachi-wakare—"

would say.

And I

"Tachi-wakare—"

would echo.

"Inaba no yama no—"

"Inaba no yama no—"

"Mine ni ouru—"

"Mine ni ouru—"

Going on like this, before long I would drift off to sleep.

On nights when I had learned it well,

"I'll give you a treat for it tomorrow, so go to sleep now,"

she would say, patting me gently until I slept.

Aunt, thinking it made me out to be some remarkably clever child that I learned the poems so quickly, would boast the next day to my mother and the others,

"He learned two whole poems again last night, just like that,"

she would say, proud as could be.

Though I understood little, I would gather up whatever words in the poem I did know and dimly imagine the meaning of the whole, adding to it the feeling that came from the sound of the recitation, and in this way I was moved to a deep, private delight.

At that time I had an old set of poem-cards, each card printed with a poem and a picture to match it; the prints were worn and fading, but I could still faintly make out things like snow piled on a pine, or a deer standing beneath red maple leaves.

There was also a bound book of the Hyakunin Isshu.

Which poems I liked or disliked was decided as much by the card's picture and the poet's figure and features as by the poem itself.

Among my favorites were the poem of Sue no Matsuyama, the poem of Awaji Island, and the poem of Oe-yama.

The poem of Sue no Matsuyama carried to my ear some soft, indescribably mournful ring, and its card showed waves breaking beautifully on a pine-lined shore.

The poem of Awaji Island brought tears to my eyes.

A boat sailed over the sea, and plovers flew across it.

Whenever I heard the poem of Oe-yama, I could not help thinking of the picture-book tale of a princess carried off by demons deep into that mountain.

I thoroughly disliked wrinkled old monks like the Archbishop Henjo or the Former Archbishop Gyoson, but Semimaru alone I found endearing, if only for his name.

XIX

On snowy nights, Aunt, stirring up the charcoal balls in the foot-warmer, would frighten me by saying things like, "There's a snow-boy standing outside the door in white clothes."

In hot weather, when I lay restless and unable to sleep, she would fan me, and even the picture on the fan mattered to me — unless I liked it, I would not fall asleep easily.

Inside the sweet-smelling mosquito net, listening to the whine of mosquitoes flying outside, idly bending one of its ribs just to see, I would hear an owl come to cry in the thicket of the temple next door.

Aunt would say,

"The hoot-owl's a wicked bird — they say every cry of his spits out a thousand mosquitoes. There'll be a terrible lot of them tomorrow."

she would say, or something like it.

By the time the cool autumn breezes rose, the crickets would begin to sing.

Once, meaning to keep and love them, I put some in a firefly cage, but after two or three chirps they fell silent, and when I peeked in carefully I found they had gnawed a hole through the gauze stretched over the cage and every one of them had escaped.

Hearing their song, even a child's heart could feel some nameless autumn loneliness rising.

Aunt said they were singing, "Grown cold now, mend your rags, mend your rags," while the nurse told my sister they were crying, "Milk-eye, milk-eye, drink your milk or I'll bite."

If for some reason I woke early in the morning, I would hear the cry of the crows nesting in the yew tree at Shorin-ji, and Aunt would say,

"That's only the first crow — sleep a little longer,"

and would not let me get up for a long while.

Only once the second crow had called, and then the third, would she finally let me rise.

In this way she kept me abed until just the right time.

Toward evening, a great flock of sparrows would come seeking their roost in the thick sango-ju bush before my bedroom window, shaking their heads to sharpen their beaks, squabbling and pecking over branches, filling the air with noise.

Once the sun had set and even its last faint light had faded away, one or two stragglers, still chirping "chiuku, chiuku," late to bed, would at last fall silent too.

I thought of those sparrows almost as friends, and if I was still abed even after the third crow had cried, and heard them start up their chirping as they left their roost, I felt as though they were laughing at my laziness, and scrambled hurriedly out of bed.

The sango-ju bush bore berries of a crimson worthy of its coral name.

I loved, too, picking up the ones that had fallen onto the soft moss below.

XX

The open ground out back, some thirty or forty tsubo, was half flower-bed, half vegetable plot.

Come early summer, a seedling-seller would pass by outside the hedge, calling out in a cool, clear voice.

Aunt would call him over and buy vegetable seedlings.

In his straw box, fine soil, damp with moisture, held all manner of seedlings putting out their first bright pair of leaves.

The seedling-seller, in his sedge hat, would scoop them out with the greatest care.

Aunt would buy a few eggplant seedlings, a few melon, and plant them in the vegetable patch.

Morning and evening the two of us would water with a watering-can the purplish eggplant seedlings and the pumpkin and loofah seedlings, pale and powdery-looking, their oval first leaves stirring in the breeze.

Every time I looked the seedlings had grown a little more, putting out tendrils, then leaves, until at last they sprawled all over the plot and hung heavy with great fruit.

I looked forward to it and went out to inspect them.

Aunt, who loved to fuss over such things, grumbling all the while, would set up bamboo poles and train the vines by hand, and day by day the tendrils would wind round them once, twice, more, until yellow and purple flowers bloomed among the rough-textured leaves.

Plump bumblebees would come and fly about them as if they owned the place, burrowing down into the flowers.

As the barren blossoms dropped away one by one, a swelling formed at the base of the true flowers, flattening out or growing long and slender, until they took on the familiar shapes of pumpkin and squash.

The eggplant's little drawstring-purse shape, the loofah's long, lumpish form, the cucumber, bumpy and disagreeable-looking —

there was nothing like the joy of pushing aside the leaves and finding some fruit had grown there unexpectedly.

Sword beans, hyacinth beans, the little brush-tip flowers of the green onion.

Once we bought and planted a pumpkin seedling, but as it grew its shape kept changing, until in the end it turned out to be a gourd.

I was delighted at the sight of so many gourds hanging there, but Aunt, furious at having been so thoroughly cheated by the seedling-seller, would hardly tend to it after that, so that every last one fell to the ground.

After that we bought seedlings from the greengrocer down in the town instead, but Aunt eyed every seedling she saw with suspicion, wondering if it might turn out to be a gourd again, and warned the greengrocer sternly that if it grew up into a gourd-vine after all, she would be bringing it straight back.

Along the cedar hedge around the plot, Grandmother's chestnuts had sprouted, and beside them a walnut I had picked up and planted myself.

Grandmother had also loved balsam flowers and planted their seeds, which had scattered themselves and now bloomed here and there of their own accord.

It is an unremarkable-looking plant, but I too am fond of the balsam.

I would idly pick its blossoms and stain my nails with them.

Crushing four-o'clock seeds to bring out their white powder was another amusement.

Apricot blossoms, crimson peach blossoms.

There was an old almond tree that bloomed with pale, cloud-like flowers, and it was, for us brothers and sisters, a joy above all others; we would watch anxiously for crows and run out to chase them off.

The great fruits hung so thick that the branches bowed right down to the ground.

Those within reach we picked by hand, and the ones on the high branches we knocked down, then carried home heavy baskets between us.

In the flower-bed, tiger lilies and white lilies bloomed.

I habitually felt some stifling pressure at the sight of colors too bright or too rich, and among flowers, the scorched-brown pollen clinging heavily to the tip of a lily's stamen was just such a thing.

XXI

Close by there was a temple to the god Emma, judge of the dead.

When the day came round on which the lid of Hell's cauldron was said to open, and the gloomy tolling of the bell began, as if urging people onward, Aunt would dress me, reluctant as I was, in a light-blue summer kimono, tie a Chinese crepe sash high about my chest, and take me to worship there.

Because I was invariably dressed in that same kimono every year at Obon, even the color itself came to seem gloomy to me.

From the cramped temple grounds out to the gate, shaved-ice stalls at a rin and a half a cup stood crammed together with stands selling oden and sushi, and the squeal of balloons, the cries of peddlers, made an unbearable racket amid the dust.

Shop-boys in their aprons ran wild through it all as though Emma were their own private god.

I particularly disliked that sort of person.

Climbing two or three stone steps and passing through the red gate, plastered thick with pilgrims' name-slips, one found on the right a small hall where Emma sat enshrined, wearing, as always, his coarse, forbidding face.

Amid the thick, stifling smoke of incense, some town child would clang away without pause on the gong, gyan-gyan-gyan-gyan, until my head throbbed as though it might split, and yet Aunt would always borrow the striker and insist I strike it two or three times myself.

Only after making sure I had gotten a good look at Emma's face would she finally let us leave.

No sooner had I caught my breath than she would take me next to see the old woman of the River of Three Crossings, enshrined in the main hall.

There sat a sickly-pale old woman with round, staring eyes, layers of red and white cotton piled upon her head.

Between the unpleasantness of it all and the blazing sun beating down on me, I was invariably left with a splitting headache, and yet, superstitious as she was, Aunt never once failed to find some reason to take me there every single year.

On the day of Nehan-e, the memorial for the Buddha's death, a smoke-darkened scroll of the Reclining Buddha would be hung, a small table set before it, and incense and flowers offered up.

This moth-eaten scroll, together with the jet-black statue of Daikoku above the family altar, were the only two remaining pieces of Aunt's own family's former wealth.

Aunt would sit before the little table reciting the nenbutsu, have me light the incense, and tell me all manner of stories about the Buddha.

Gathered about the Buddha were elephants, lions, ashura, kinnara, dragon-folk, and heavenly beings, and under the skillful storytelling of this dear, superstitious woman, they would come alive before my very eyes and begin to weep.

The beautiful figure looking down from a cloud trailing above the twin sal trees, she told me, was Lady Maya, the Buddha's own mother.

She told me how Lady Maya had thrown down a bag of medicine from heaven, which caught in the branches of the sal tree unnoticed by anyone, and spoke of the Buddha's death as though he were being parted from his own mother, so that I felt so sorry for the Buddha that I cried.

XXII

On the three festival days of Dainichi each month, so long as it did not rain, Aunt never once failed to take me.

Because I clung to her sleeve as I walked, her haori would end up pulled crooked, and she would have to stop in the road to straighten it, though in crowded places I clung so fiercely she had to pry me loose finger by finger.

I would tie Aunt's haori-cords in a simple knot, and she would tie mine in a fancy koto-knot.

At the Dainichi shrine, she would have me toss in my offering coin and say,

"A candle, if you please,"

she would say.

From somewhere in the glittering depths of the hall,

"Yes,"

would come the answer, and a young monk would light a candle and set it up before the main image.

Aunt would recite the nenbutsu with her whole heart, and then say,

"There now, that's done,"

she would say, and, taking my hand in her sleeve, lead me out through the temple gate.

She would spend the days leading up to each eighth-day festival storing up all sorts of wishes — that this child's sickliness might be cured, that he might come to no harm walking about — and offer them all up to Dainichi.

On festival days, great numbers of beggars would turn out and line up all along the temple wall.

By the time we arrived they had not yet all gathered, and among the lame and the crippled, two or three of the quicker-footed ones would already be spreading their straw mats and getting settled.

Under Aunt's influence, without quite realizing it, I came to feel, after giving alms to such people, a faint but deeply satisfying sense of a child's own compassion fulfilled.

Among the beggars was a blind woman, fine-featured, who played the koto.

In those days the koto was not the common instrument it is now, and Aunt and the nurse often gossiped about her, agreeing she must once have been the daughter of some hatamoto family, or else a woman who had served in some great household, come down in the world.

She sang koto-songs in a voice so cracked and worn it was almost impossible to make out the words.

The way her plectrums slid rustling and rippling over the strings, and the way the goose-shaped bridges stood scattered across the cloud-grained body of the instrument, all looked to me strange and beautiful.

XXIII

If we went a little early, we would find the showmen setting up their stalls like spiders spinning webs.

Beside them stood boxes holding the props and creatures for the show, which I would gaze at, brimming with curiosity, until at last the painted signboard was raised.

Most were dreadful, unsettling things — a mermaid with huge eyes swimming through the sea, a great serpent with a forked tongue about to swallow a chicken — but among them there was sometimes a mouse show, its sky-blue signboard painted with countless little performing mice dressed in all sorts of costumes, some holding rising-sun fans as they went through their tricks.

I loved that one enormously, and went in every single time it was showing.

A number of fancy mice would come out and pull little carts or draw water from a toy well.

At the very end, they would carry tiny rice-bales in their mouths out of a papier-mache storehouse and stack them up.

The brown-spotted ones and the pure white ones, scurrying about every which way, were unbearably dear to me.

The mouse-trainer was a woman of about thirty, her hair done up in the Western style still quite rare in those days, wearing a hat and dressed up like a foreign lady.

Every time a mouse carried out a bale, the woman

"Heave-ho, heave-ho, carry it, hup-hup!"

would call, keeping time.

If some careless mouse dropped its bale and it went rolling toward the audience, the other children would snatch it up at once and throw it back.

The woman

"Much obliged,"

she would say, smiling pleasantly and bowing her head.

The bale came rolling toward me too, many times.

I wanted so much to pick it up, but for some reason, however anxious I felt, I could never quite bring myself to reach out my hand.

Once the mice's tricks were done, the woman would take a parrot out of a cage dyed blue and red and have it mimic speech.

The parrot would perch obediently on her palm and say all sorts of things exactly as she told it to, but when it was in a bad mood it would only raise its crest and shriek, saying nothing at all.

At such times the woman would tilt her head, at a loss, and say,

"Now why is Taro-san behaving like that today, I wonder?"

she would say.

Thinking of the parrot's picture-like form, its hooked beak, its clever-looking eyes, I would leave the stall reluctantly.

XXIV

Among the night-stalls, the ground-cherry seller was one that drew my heart.

Whirring a bamboo tube fitted with a little gear,

"Ground-cherries, ground-cherries here!"

he would call.

On a bed of hiba leaves spread over a bamboo lattice he arranged ground-cherries of every color — red, green, white — drops of water falling from them one by one.

There were fan-shaped sea whelks, Korean whelks shaped like will-o'-the-wisps, tengu whelks, halberd-shaped whelks — all of them sea-shells with a leathery pouch inside holding a briny, sea-smelling grime.

Tamba ground-cherries, thousand-fruit ground-cherries.

The old man would whirl his bamboo tube,

"Ground-cherries, ground-cherries here!"

and call out.

I could never make the other kinds squeak, so I always had a sea whelk bought for me instead, and carried it home clutched carefully in my hand.

The Tamba ground-cherry looked like a monk in scarlet robes.

When we peeled one open and found a mosquito bite in it, my sister, furious, would smack it down onto the tatami.

Mosquitoes are wicked creatures.

They sneak their sweet juice out of the fruit while it is still green.

A fruit like that has a tiny spot on its shaven head, and its skin splits as soon as you start working it soft.

In summer, the insect-seller's stall was a temptation.

In cages shaped like fans, boats, and waterfowl, scarlet tassels hanging from them, pine crickets and bell crickets sang, rin-rin, ren-ren.

Katydids rasped like a door being slid open, and the bit-crickets creaked and rustled.

I always wanted a pine cricket or a bell cricket, but was only ever bought a katydid, so that once, out of spite, I deliberately had Aunt buy me a great green cricket, which she hated, and it kept her from sleeping the whole night through.

They came in cheap little bamboo cages with red and blue posts at the four corners.

If I tucked a piece of melon between the bars, it would wave its feelers about and gnaw away at it.

It wore a baffled-looking face, and its absurdly long hind legs, bent backward, were comical too.

Sometimes, too, we bought potted flowers.

At bedtime we would set them out under the eaves, saying they needed the night dew.

How can I describe the feeling in a child's heart at the sight of those flowers?

It was a joy of a purity and innocence I have never once been able to feel again since.

Lured on by them, I would get up early the next morning, still in my nightclothes, and, rubbing my dazzled eyes, find dewdrops gleaming on flower and leaf, the velvet-soft pinks, the topknot-shaped pansies, the marigolds, all vividly awake.

When I bought a picture-book, it would be rolled up tight and tied round the middle, and I would carry it home carefully in my hands, peeking into the tube of it now and then along the way.

And when I got home, everyone would say, "Show us how pretty it is," so I would unroll it slowly, making a great show of it.

Everyone's eyes would go wide, and they would all say, "I want it, I want it."

Outside the border, in red ink, was written something like "A New Edition of All the Beasts."

The long-nosed, smiling elephant, the rabbit with its jar-mouth face, the deer, the sheep — all of them were dear to me.

All the other beasts stood quietly by themselves, but the bear alone was wrestling with a crimson Kintaro, and the boar, its snout jutting out like a bamboo shoot, was pinned down by Nitan no Shiro.

Once I had shown it off all round, I said good night and went to bed, and, listening to Aunt's grand, exaggerated explanation of every picture, looked it over again and again before laying it beside my pillow to sleep.

XXV

Spiritless child that I was, I could never speak up in front of people, and whenever something I wanted caught my eye, I would simply stop and stand there in silence, clutching Aunt's sleeve.

Aunt, understanding at once, would look about and ask, was it this, or that?

I would go on shaking my head until she guessed right, but if she truly could not guess, I would at last, unwillingly, point a finger, then draw it back in embarrassment and put it in my mouth.

I loved the toy of the three mutually fearing creatures, but Aunt hated snakes, and before I knew it she had put it away out of sight.

The bamboo rabbit would give a hop.

On warm days its glue would soften, and instead of a lively hop it would only slowly raise its haunches and topple over sideways.

I loved, too, the toy where a bird in a cage twittered and spun round when you blew on the handle fixed to the cage, and the sea-bream-on-a-bow toy that came sliding down, its tail shivering.

On nights when the winter wind howled, the flames of the stall-lamps hissed with a lonely sound, and their wicks looked like bloodshot eyeballs.

At such times, the one I could not help pitying was the old woman who sold grape-mochi.

I have no idea to this day what grape-mochi actually was.

A withered old woman, close to seventy, would light a shabby, peeling andon lamp lettered "grape-mochi" and set out on a little stand only a countable few paper bags, but I never once saw anyone buy from her.

I pitied her for it and begged endlessly, but it looked so filthy that even Aunt hesitated and would never buy it for me.

Years later, after I had grown old enough to go to the festival by myself, the old woman was still setting up her stand at the corner by the soba shop, just the same as ever.

Every time there was a festival, I would pass by her again and again, tears welling in my eyes.

But I could never bring myself to buy any, and always went home unsatisfied, against my own wishes.

And yet one evening I finally worked up my resolve and stopped beside the grape-mochi lamp.

The old woman, taking me for a customer,

"Welcome,"

she said, and picked up a paper bag.

Not knowing what to say, I threw down my two-sen copper coin in a mad rush and fled without looking back, all the way to the shadow of the bamboo thicket at Shorin-ji.

My heart was pounding, and my face burned as though it might catch fire.

I would never once go near the clown-band music at the Hachiman shrine.

It was because that flat-nosed fool's mask, the cross-eyed face of the Hyottoko, and the persistent, coarse buffoonery of it all made me sick at heart.

But the household, out of a well-meaning if unthinking kindness, forever trying to cure my melancholy, would join forces, even Aunt siding with the rest, and try one way or another to drag me out to it.

Even once I was nine or ten, I pleaded again and again how painful it was for me to go to such places, but everyone took it for nothing but an excuse and, as always, pushed me out the door with a heavy hand.

At such times I would go off to the nearby meadow, lie down atop the bluff lined with great trees, and spend hours gazing at the mountains.

XXVI

The children hereabouts were, by comparison with the young toughs of Kanda, decidedly gentler, and the streets were quiet besides, so that for someone like me it was truly a fitting world to live in.

And so Aunt worked hard to find some child who might make a good playmate for me, and in time she found one — a girl across the way named Okuni-san. —

Okuni's father had been a samurai of Awa, and it was only recently that I learned he had, in his day, been a well-known man of the loyalist cause. —

Aunt, before I knew it, had found out that Okuni was frail and quiet and even prone to headaches, and decided she would make just the right friend for me.

One day Aunt carried me on her back to the open ground within the gate where Okuni and the others were playing, and,

"He's a good child — won't you let him play with you?"

she said, and set me down there, reluctant as I was.

The children looked a little put off at first, but soon started up their lively play again.

That day I did nothing but make my appearance, clinging to Aunt's sleeve, and after watching them for a while we went home.

The next day I was taken there again.

In this way, after three or four days had passed, we grew a little used to one another, and if something funny happened and they laughed, I too would let a small smile show.

Okuni and the others were always playing "the lotus flower opens."

After that, Aunt patiently taught me the song at home and had me practice it, and once I could do it perfectly, one day she took me across to the gate again.

There she forced me, sulking, into the ring right next to Okuni, but neither of us spiritless children would put out a hand for shyness, so Aunt, coaxing us skillfully this way and that, drew our two hands together, laid palm upon palm, bent our fingers, and pressed them tight from above until at last our hands were joined.

I, who had never once had my hand held by anyone before, felt somehow frightened, and worried besides that Aunt might slip away, so that I kept my eyes fixed on her the whole time.

With this awkward newcomer added to their circle, the other children's spirits were quite dampened, and the ring would not begin turning no matter how long we waited.

Seeing this, Aunt stepped into the ring herself and, clapping her hands briskly, began,

"Ahh, it's opened, it's opened, what flower has opened?"

she sang, stamping out the beat as she showed us how to turn.

Before long the children were drawn in and began singing softly along, and I too, urged on by Aunt, looked round at all their faces and followed the song under my breath.

"It's opened, it's opened, what flower has opened? The lotus flower has opened……"

Seeing the little ring at last begin slowly to turn, Aunt cheered it on without missing a beat.

The singing grew steadily louder, and the ring turned steadily faster.

I, who had scarcely ever properly walked, felt my heart pound until my head seemed to spin.

Though I wanted to let go, the others, lost in the game, only dragged me faster and faster round.

Before long,

"Just when it opened, all at once it closed again,"

the children sang, and all of them closed in around Aunt at once, so that Aunt cried,

"You got me, you got me,"

and slipped out of the ring.

"It's closed, it's closed, what flower has closed? The lotus flower has closed……"

We sang on, swaying our still-joined, outstretched hands to the beat.

"Just when it closed, all at once it opened again,"

and the closed lotus flower burst open, my arms wrenched so hard in both directions that they nearly came out of their sockets.

After we had done this five or six times over, worn out utterly from the unaccustomed exertion and the strain of it all, I had Aunt free my hands and went home.

XXVII

Okuni-san was the very first friend I ever had.

At first I could not play at all unless Aunt stayed close by, and Aunt, worrying over so newly-arrived a child, would not leave my side either; but once she had satisfied herself that, unlike the Kanda of old, this was a quiet, safe world that might almost have been made for a child like me, she took to lecturing me at great length with careful warnings — step inside the gate if a cart comes, keep away from the edge of the ditch — before leaving me there alone and going home.

When the two of us were left face to face, Okuni, following the proper etiquette by which children become acquainted, asked me my father's name, my mother's name, and even my date of birth.

And when she asked what year I was born in, I answered obediently that it was the Year of the Rooster,

"I'm a Rooster too, so let's be friends,"

she said, and the two of us walked about together crying "cock-a-doodle-doo, cock-a-doodle-doo," flapping our sleeves like wings.

There is something inexplicably dear and comforting about being the same age as someone.

Okuni complained, too, that her family called her a skinny thing, a daddy-long-legs, and since I myself had always resented being called Octopus-head, I felt real sympathy for my new friend's troubles.

Talking things over, we found we agreed on everything, one point after another, and before long we had become the best of friends.

Okuni was a dark-skinned, thin child with a high-bridged nose, her forelocks hanging down and her braid tied at the root with a red cord.

We would lean against the worm-eaten gatepost, or crouch and play in the mud, our heads pressed so close together our faces nearly touched, chattering about nonsense — which tooth had fallen out yesterday, which finger had gotten a splinter — and whenever we found ourselves in perfect agreement, we would burst out laughing, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, for no particular reason at all.

Okuni, I remember, had lost one of her incisors, and every time she laughed the gap showed like a little cave.

I, who at home had only ever had Aunt for company, suddenly grew wise in all sorts of ways, good and bad, once I made friends with Okuni, but though we were the same age I was still so far behind her that I played along and did whatever she told me.

Nearby there was a girl called O-mine-chan, a year older than the two of us.

O-mine was not only spiteful but a terrible jealous type besides, and everyone disliked her, but since we saw her face every day, in the way children have of getting along, there were times we simply had to play with her whether we liked it or not.

One day, when the subject of ages came up again with Okuni, and we were crying "cock-a-doodle-doo, cock-a-doodle-doo" and flapping our arms, O-mine said,

"Well, I'm a Monkey,"

and, screeching, scratched at the two of us.

XXVIII

Okuni's comb was lacquered red, decorated with a gold-inlaid chrysanthemum design.

She also had a hairpin fashioned into a medicine-ball charm out of scarlet and pale-blue crepe.

Whenever Okuni got something new, she would show it off proudly, but the moment I tried to get a good look at it she would hide it in her sleeve, driving me to distraction.

Every time I saw such things I regretted not having been born a girl, and wondered why boys were not allowed to make themselves as beautiful as girls did.

Whenever Okuni wanted to play hide-and-seek, she would always frighten me first — a three-eyed goblin had come out of the thicket out back yesterday, a grass snake had been coiled up somewhere — before making me shut my eyes under the plum tree while she went off and hid.

I would go all the way round the house, searching toward the back.

Just where the path turned into the garden, two geese were kept behind a bamboo fence, and I was dreadfully afraid of them.

The moment I tried to slip quietly past, they would thrust up their heads, crested like the god Ebisu's crown, and come honking after me.

Once I had struggled through and reached the tea field, the neighbor's dairy cow would stretch its neck over the fence and go "moo."

That frightened me too, so I would only half-search the tea field and go looking in the garden instead.

With so many big trees about, I could hardly ever find her.

Looking all around, there was no one anywhere, and the cow and the geese lay in wait along the way back, so, growing anxious, I would call,

"Ready or not?"

I would call.

Into the hushed stillness only my own voice would echo back, and nothing else answered.

Wondering whether Okuni might have tricked me and gone off somewhere entirely, I grew lonelier still, and, wishing Aunt would hurry up and come fetch me, called out once more,

"Ready or not?"

I called.

Even to my own ears, my voice had gone thick with tears.

Then, from somewhere near the bamboo thicket,

"Ready,"

came a small voice.

Thinking, she's there, I went as far as the entrance to the bamboo grove, but just beyond the single hedge stood the temple's ginkgo tree, black as pitch, and among the bamboo, camellias and honey-locusts grew in a dense tangle, making the whole place unpleasantly dim.

Wondering whether that story about the three-eyed goblin might actually be true, I stood frozen, when from somewhere deeper in came the sound of stifled giggling.

And so, gathering my courage at last, I went in, but with bamboo stumps and roots sticking up everywhere and stinging nettles growing thick all around, it felt to me — used as I was to Aunt fussing over even the smallest pebble in my path — like walking through a mountain of needles, with nowhere safe to set my foot.

On top of that, I could not shake the eerie feeling that grass snakes lay coiled everywhere about me, but I pressed on step by careful step, and just as I was about to find her at last, Okuni sprang out from a dark corner,

"A ghost—!"

her eyes rolled up white.

Even knowing perfectly well it was only Okuni, my hair stood on end, and,

"Stop it, stop it!"

I would cry, running away, while she, delighted, chased after me without end.

Then it would be my turn to hide.

But I could never bring myself to hide in the thicket, and besides, she knew the lay of the land far too well, so I was always found out at once.

But sometimes, when for some reason she could not find me right away, Okuni would go inside and eat sweets, and I, not knowing this, would wait and wait for her without her ever coming, until finally,

"All right then, dawn has broken,"

I would say, and come out, whereupon

"There, found you,"

she would come out mumbling, mouth still full,

"Here, I'll give you one too,"

and hand me a broken piece of sugar candy.

XXIX

We both loved transfer-pictures.

There was nothing quite like the feeling of smelling their oily scent.

Whoever's stuck first wins, we said, and, spitting wetly all over the pasted picture,

"Stick fast, stick fast,"

we would say, rubbing it with our fingers.

We loved lining up the backs of our hands, printed with birds and beasts of every color, and idly stretching and shrinking the skin to watch the pictures warp.

After a while it would dry and start to itch, and we would carefully scratch around the edges and bear with it.

Sometimes we would put matching pictures on our upper arms, promising to keep them forever, and take great care not to let our sleeves rub them off, but by the next morning they would always be found in tatters, worn into something unrecognizable.

The moment breakfast was over, I would go, half in dread, to Okuni's house and say,

"Look, it's gone and turned into this — forgive me,"

and she, feigning offense, would roll up her sleeve for me to see, quite deliberately.

And finding hers just as ruined, she would open her eyes wide and say,

"Mine's gone and turned into this too,"

and laugh as though it were the funniest thing in the world.

When the cherry blossoms began to scatter, we would string the petals onto thread and compete over who had strung the most.

One day, in front of Okuni's entrance, we were playing house, heaping bowls with red pigweed grains for rice and pretending sorrel-seed pods were cucumbers, when O-mine

"Let's play,"

said, and came over.

Okuni

"She's so hateful, let's give her a hard time,"

whispered in my ear, and, quietly picking some chickweed growing in the hedge, suddenly

"Here's some chickweed thrown at you!"

she cried, and flung it at her.

O-mine, not to be outdone, flung it right back.

Okuni handed me half of what she had gathered in her hands, and I too, venting all my usual grievances, threw it at her with all my might.

"Here's some chickweed thrown at you!"

"Here's some chickweed thrown at you!"

"Here's some chickweed thrown at you!"

Taken by surprise and outnumbered, she turned and ran, and we chased after her, pelting her without mercy, until in no time her whole back was covered in it.

O-mine glared at us with a terrible look, then went off home still trailing chickweed all over her, and I watched her go, half in dread that she would go tell on us, when she suddenly turned back, thrust out her chin at us most spitefully, and ran off.

It amused us to suck on broad-bean leaves and puff them up like a tree-frog's belly, and we were forever getting scolded for picking them from the field.

If you laid a sasanqua petal on your tongue and drew in your breath, it made a sound like a hichiriki flute.

When spring came, the plum tree before the scholarly-looking entrance would bloom cloud-white, its pale blossoms dazzling in the sunlight, filling the air with a cool, clean fragrance.

The neighborhood children would all gather in its shade to play all sorts of games.

Whenever their voices reached us, Aunt would take me over, have a quiet word in each of their ears, and go home.

They were all three or four years older than I, but they grew fond of doting Aunt and came to call her "——chan's auntie, ——chan's auntie," and so, naturally, they looked out for me, played with me kindly, and fussed over me the way children do.

Oddly enough, big as they were compared to me, whatever we played, they were soon beaten.

At tag, no one could ever catch me, and at spinning tops, no one's top would strike mine, no matter how they tried.

And somehow, without my even understanding how, I would end up the winner.

When I went home and told the story, my nose held high, everyone would say,

"Well done, well done,"

and praise me.

It was no easy thing for so slow-witted a child to realize that they had simply been letting me win all along.

XXX

There also lived hereabouts an old man who sold barley-malt syrup, half farmer and half tradesman.

Whenever the weather was fine, he would come pulling his cart, blowing his little charumera horn.

That discordant blare, shattering every harmony around it, set children's hearts racing all the same, and those indoors would come bursting out, those at play would drop their games and come running, and boys with sticks tucked in as swords, or mud-caked tops shoved into their bosoms, would surround the cart in a noisy crowd.

Besides the malt syrup he also carried lottery-games and penny sweets, and everyone scrambled to be first to flip up the red and blue papers and try their luck.

The old man would pull up, with a squeaking sound, the amber syrup pooling in his tub and shape it round the tip of a wooden stick into a glossy little bald head.

Stuffed whole into my mouth and turned round and round, its rich sweetness dissolved slowly into my spit, growing smaller bit by bit.

The yoka-yoka candy-man came too.

Round the rim of what looked like a tub bound with many brass hoops stood a ring of little rising-sun flags, each flagpole tipped with a red-and-white candy shaped like a pair of mandarin ducks.

The candy-seller, in a summer robe printed with carp climbing a waterfall, came beating a drum — undo-dondon — swaying his shoulders and hips in time, followed by a woman, her head wrapped in the ane-san style, strumming a shamisen, jan-jaka jan-jaka.

If enough was bought from him, he would put on an okame mask and dance, and the children would crowd round in a ring to watch.

Twisting his head this way and that, waving his sleeves, dancing to whatever rhythm the shamisen gave him, he would come chasing after us with strange, shuffling steps, and we would shriek and scatter, running for our lives.

Once the dance was done, the candy-man would say,

"Well, sorry for the racket,"

and, setting the tub on his head, would let it deliberately tumble off for a laugh, and go off pretending to cry.

Okuni's father was a big-boned, frightening man, often away on official duties, but on the rare days he was home he would shut himself up in an upstairs room all day, writing something or other.

Since the least bit of noise would earn a scolding, I never went over to play on days her father was home, and Okuni herself kept meek and small about the house.

Once, not knowing this, I went over and,

"Okuni-san, come out and play,"

I called, and Okuni cracked the entrance door open just a little, stuck her thumb to the tip of her nose, and waved her fingers to show, with a look of real fright, how she couldn't.

Once I was invited over to Okuni's for the Peach Festival.

In the sunny parlor, a tall tiered stand had been set up at the front of the room, and splendid hina dolls arranged upon it.

Ours at home were tiny things, hardly big enough to see, but Okuni's were five times the size.

I, who was quite convinced the dolls were alive, felt my whole body freeze, and bowed to them again and again in a row, at which everyone burst out laughing.

Just then, unexpectedly, her father, whom I had thought away, came into the room, and I, uncertain what might happen, shrank back looking from the dolls' faces to his, on the verge of tears.

Seeing me so frightened, her father, unusually, laughed and wrapped up some roasted beans in paper for me, asking all sorts of things — how old was I, what was my name.

And then,

"Of everyone here, who's the one you're most afraid of?"

he asked, and when I honestly pointed straight at him, everyone burst out laughing all over again.

Her father, laughing too, said,

"So long as you're a good, quiet boy, I won't scold you,"

and went off upstairs, at which I finally let out a breath of relief.

XXXI

I look back with all my heart on the quiet play of those childhood days.

Among them, the most enjoyable of all was our evening play.

Especially in early summer, watching the sun set red and lingering in the evening clouds, we would think, we'll have to go home soon, and, loath to leave, throw ourselves all the more into our games.

Okuni, tired of hide-and-seek, blind-man's-buff, hopping tag, and hopscotch, would push back her forelocks to let the breeze cool her sweaty brow, and say,

"What shall we play now?"

she would say.

I too, wiping my face with my sleeve, would say,

"Let's play kagome, kagome,"

I would say.

"Kagome, kagome, the bird in the cage, when, oh when will it come out……"

After rain, drops of water would gather glittering on the drooping young shoots of the cedar hedge, and it was great fun to shake the hedge and send them scattering all at once.

After a while they would gather again just as before.

In a corner of our playground stood a great silk tree, blooming with fluffy pale-pink flowers, and toward evening, just as its strange leaves began to fold themselves to sleep, enormous moths would come flying in, quivering their thick, tawny wings, darting madly from flower to flower, in a way that frightened me.

It was said that if you stroked the silk tree's trunk it would feel ticklish, and Okuni and I once rubbed it until the skin of our palms nearly came off.

As the color faded from the sunset clouds, the moon, which had been quietly waiting its turn, would come shining faintly out.

The two of us would look up at its gentle face and sing "How Old Is the Moon."

"Moon, moon, how old are you? Thirteen, seven — still so young……"

Okuni would make a pair of spectacles with her two hands and say,

"If you look through like this, you can see the rabbit pounding rice cakes,"

so I too would copy her and peer through.

That a rabbit should be pounding rice cakes all alone in that faint, round little world was, to an innocent, endlessly curious child's heart, a joy beyond telling.

When the moonlight grew bright, we would chase after our own soft, wavering shadows and play "shadow lantern."

Aunt would come to fetch me and say,

"Come home now, it's suppertime,"

and when I dug in my heels with all my might, refusing to go, she would sway on purpose as though staggering, and say,

"I can't manage this, I can't manage this,"

and coax me along, little by little, all the way home.

Okuni would say,

"Let him come play again tomorrow,"

to Aunt, and, saying good-bye, on the way home

"The bat has cried, so home we go,"

she would call out.

I too, loath to part, would call out the same.

And so, calling it out turn and turn about, we kept it up all the way until I went in through my own door.

XXXII

While we passed our peaceful days in this way, a great crisis arose for the two of us.

We had both turned eight, and the time had come when we had to start school.

I already knew what school was like, having once ridden on Aunt's back to bring my sister her lunch box.

How could I possibly go to a place swarming with children who looked so ill-tempered?

Every night, when I brought out my toy box to play in the sitting room, my father and mother would lecture me on and on about it, but I stubbornly shook my head.

My mother said that unless I went to school I could never become a fine, successful person.

I said I didn't need to become any such thing.

My father said that a child who wouldn't go to school could not stay in this house.

I said that then I would go out with Aunt, taking my toy box with me.

Both my small, hard-wrung protests and my sickly pleading were laughed off at first, but as the day school began drew nearer, the torment grew steadily harsher, until the poor child took to bursting into tears every single night, and being led off to bed by Aunt.

All the while, heedless of my feelings, a satchel was bought for me, along with a cardboard pencil-case, a great fat writing-brush for practice, and everything else besides, until it was all complete.

My sisters said how they envied me getting such fine new things, but I did not even want to look at them.

I wanted nothing but the Honorable Dog and the Ox-Day ox.

I only wanted to play outside with Okuni and, at home, play seed-fellows with Aunt.

I could not understand why they would force me to go somewhere I hated so much.

One day, unable to bear it any longer, I told Okuni all about it, and she said,

"I get scolded about it every day too,"

said.

My friend, it seemed, hated school just as much, and was suffering the same fate.

So the two of us sat down at the foot of the plum tree, confessed our shame to one another, and took comfort in it.

And when we parted, Okuni said,

"I'm absolutely not going, so you shouldn't go either,"

and I made a solemn promise and went home.

XXXIII

The day itself finally came, but from morning on I

"If Okuni doesn't go, I won't go,"

kept repeating, and somehow the whole day passed.

That night I was dragged forcibly from my hiding place in the bedroom out into the sitting room, before the family's judgment, and pressed with threats and coaxing by turns, but I had made up my mind and held firm, until my brother suddenly seized me by the collar, did something strange to me, threw me down onto the tatami again and again, and finally struck me across the cheek, blow after blow.

Aunt cried,

"What are you doing to this weak child, what are you doing?"

she said, and

"I'll talk sense into him myself,"

she said, shielding me and hurrying me off to the bedroom.

My brother practiced jujutsu at his higher middle school.

The next day, my cheek swollen, I refused to eat and shut myself up quietly in the bedroom, and Aunt, worried, secretly fed me the offerings from the Buddhist altar.

And from that very day a sudden, terrible fever came over me, and I, high-strung enough even at the best of times, could hardly sleep the whole night through, while Aunt, reciting the nenbutsu again and again, nursed me without closing her own eyes at all.

For four or five days, while I lay ill, nothing was said about school, but the moment my headache finally cleared and my fever broke and I got up again, the torment began all over again that very night.

I had entirely made up my mind, and held to my old line — if Okuni doesn't go — but this time, for some reason, I was spared any harsh treatment, and was simply asked,

"If Okuni does go, will you go for certain?"

and, being asked this,

"I'll go for certain,"

I declared.

The next day, Aunt carried me, pale-faced, on her back to stand before the school gate just as the day let out.

The school was no more than a cho and a half away.

When the sound of the bell rang out — jangle, jangle — before long the students came streaming out.

And then, to my astonishment, Okuni herself came out too, a bundle under her arm, walking along cheerfully, and when Aunt praised her, saying, "Well done, well done," she grew proud and launched into a whole account of what school was like.

I, up on Aunt's back, thought: how could Okuni do this to me.

That night, with no choice left, I agreed to go to school.

The next morning, dressed in haori and hakama, I walked through the school gate together with my father.

I was taken to the room where the teachers sat, and there, in cabinets fitted with glass doors, were a globe, specimens of birds and fish, wall-charts of strange animals, and any number of things that caught my heart —

though these are all names I learned only later. —

I was mortified beyond words as my father went on at length about my poor brain, my frailty, my timidity.

The teacher, listening, nodding as he studied my face closely, said gently,

"How old are you?"

"What is your name?"

"What is your father's name?"

"Where do you live?"

and asked all manner of things.

I had already been taught the answers to all this at home, and, reassured by how surprisingly gentle the teacher was, I somehow managed to answer without mishap.

The teacher, perhaps having taken "poor brain" to mean something like simple-mindedness, tested me with all sorts of questions, and then, at last,

"This will do very well,"

he said, and admitted me to the school.

That day I simply went home, and spent the rest of it being taught by my sisters how to behave at school, how to bow properly, how to sling my satchel's strap.

And the next day, wearing a cap with a cherry-blossom badge and my unfamiliar satchel slung diagonally across my body, feeling an indescribable confusion of feelings, I went to school with my hand in Aunt's.

Ashamed at the thought of anyone seeing how unaccustomed I was to it all, and anxious besides over the unknown life of school ahead, my small heart ached, and I walked along slowly, staring only at my own toes.

My sisters took me into the classroom and sat me down at the very front desk.

It was Class B of the First Year, the class for those among the first-year students who were younger or less bright than the rest.

XXXIV

The children who had started earlier were already used to school, and since not one of them was as timid as I was, they carried on as noisily as they pleased, as if the place belonged to them.

Before long, the bell I already knew so well from before rang out — jangle, jangle.

Heard up close, it rang shrilly to the very depths of my ears, and I hated it.

My sisters said they would come back at the next recess, and Aunt, promising she would stand watch just outside the door the whole time until lessons were over, went out too.

Left all alone, I looked timidly about, and found only tough, ill-tempered-looking boys, staring back at me with strange expressions of their own.

I shrank into myself and did nothing but peer into a knot-hole in my desk.

It was then that our homeroom teacher, a Mr. Furusawa, came in.

His face, pitted all over with pockmarks, made him look frightening at first glance, but he was in truth a teacher famous for his kindness, and every student in the school adored him, calling out "Furusawa-sensei, Furusawa-sensei" wherever he went.

The textbook was different from the picture-books I had learned at home with Aunt — "chin, woof; neko, meow; chu, squeak" — or the primers with "dog, bridge, book, desk" — but it was so easy that I hardly bothered to look at it, gazing instead only at the teacher's graying hair, blowing loose in the breeze.

Before long the lesson ended.

Young toughs came pouring out of the classrooms all around, and under the wisteria trellis that filled the schoolyard, played leapfrog, tag, and war-games.

To me, so sheltered, having known nothing but the small world of Okuni's household, it was almost unbearably dizzying, and as I stood there looking about in bewilderment, my sisters' friends came crowding over, as if to say, "So this is the little brother we've heard so much about," and in a moment had surrounded me completely.

Showering me with their precocious pleasantries, they let fly the usual questions from every direction — how old are you, what's your name.

This poor timid child could only quail like a donkey set upon by a pack of leopardesses, and, without ever raising my face, shake my head this way and that.

Then, as ill luck would have it, a teacher came by, suddenly caught hold of my sash, gave a shout of "Hup!" and hoisted me up into the air, at which the tears that had been welling up behind my eyes since morning all overflowed at once, and, legs dangling, I burst into loud wailing sobs.

The teacher, thoroughly startled,

"Oh dear, this is bad. I'm terribly sorry,"

he said, and set me down on the ground, wiping my tears with his handkerchief.

I learned afterward from my sister that he was her own homeroom teacher, and had only meant to show me affection.

She told me I mustn't cry the next time something like that happened, so that I finally understood, and resolved I would not cry again; but the teacher, it seemed, had learned his lesson, for he never once lifted me up again after that.

The commotion at the next writing lesson was something else again.

One boy knocked over his inkstone and cried.

Another drew nothing but round blobs on his paper and was scolded for it.

Through it all, Furusawa-sensei moved among us as though he had forgotten such a thing as trouble even existed, tending to everything and everyone, rubbing his aching back as he went, taking each child's hand in turn to guide their writing.

When his chalk-covered hand closed over mine as I held the brush, my whole body would freeze and the brush-tip would tremble, so that he had to write out the iroha over and over again for me.

Between the overwhelming excitement and the unaccustomed work of it all, my head began to ache and I felt sick, and that was the end of school for me that day, and I went home.

Aunt cooled my head with water and said,

"Well done, so well done,"

and took a cinnamon stick out of the drawer of her wooden pillow for me, and my sister made me a little amulet bag strung with glass beads as a reward, so that my headache soon cleared up entirely.

Everyone in the household praised me, saying, "Well done, well done."

When I went to play at Okuni's after school let out, everyone there said the very same thing — "Well done, well done" — so that I came to believe I really had become something splendid, and felt quite proud of myself.

XXXV

After some days had passed, I came to be able to manage on my own once I was seen to and from the school gate.

Aunt would put my favorite penny sweets into a clam shell and seal it with red paper, and the moment I threw down my satchel after coming home from school, she would take it out of the drawer of the family altar for me.

It was one of my great pleasures, picking out this one or that one, agonizing over the choice.

Before long I was moved up into Class A.

The others crowded around this newcomer promoted up from Class B, whispering their opinions of me, until one boy, spotting the German letters my brother had written on my satchel, said,

"Hey, there's English written on this!"

and came over.

The other boys too came crowding round, craning their necks, saying, "Ooh, ooh."

And when they asked what it said, I answered, just as I had been taught at home, that it was my own name, and they looked on enviously, until one of them said,

"Hah! A Japanese kid writing his name like some foreign barbarian."

he said.

Another boy spotted my amulet bag and bell and began pawing at them with his grimy hands.

I hated it terribly, but I was too frightened to do anything but let him have his way.

The amulet bag was strung crosswise with pale-blue and white glass beads, the bell was patterned with bell-crickets, and at the other end of its purple cord hung a tiny glass gourd.

The boy asked what on earth I was carrying a bell around for, and when I explained that it was so Aunt could hear the sound and come find me if I ever got lost, they exchanged looks of pure contempt.

Before long, from all their pawing at it, the flimsy thread snapped and the glass beads scattered everywhere.

I began sniveling, on the verge of tears.

They, with the look of boys who had done something terrible, each quickly pulled back and,

"It wasn't me, it wasn't me, it was the three-year crow's doing,"

they chanted, watching anxiously from a distance.

I did not know what to do, and no one came to help, and, unable even to cry properly, I stood staring at the scattered beads, sniffling, until, as luck would have it, my sister came by, and all my grief welled up at once, and I burst into loud, unrestrained tears.

Afraid of being scolded by my sister, they

"Crybaby, caterpillar, pinch him up and throw him out,"

chanted, stamping their feet to the rhythm, and vanished off somewhere.

My sister said she would string it again for me, and when I stubbornly insisted on going straight home, she finally managed to calm me, wiping my tears and my nose, until the bell rang, and, saying she would come back at the next recess, she went out again.

The troublemakers, who had been secretly watching the whole business unfold from outside, came piling back in the moment my sister was gone, saying,

"The crow that was crying just now is already laughing,"

and danced round and round me, chanting it.

The teacher in charge of this new class was a bearded man named Mizoguchi-sensei.

He was, like Furusawa-sensei, so good a man that he seemed almost to have been born for the sole purpose of caring for children, and he took particular notice of quiet, gentle me and treated me kindly.

Sharing my desk was a boy named Iwahashi, the son of a tile-maker, a notorious bully.

He would draw a pencil line down the middle of the desk, and if my elbow so much as strayed into his territory, he would jab me with his elbow at once or smear his snot on me.

In the middle of a lesson he spoke to me about something, and though I hated it, I answered him half-heartedly, when the teacher caught us and wrote both our surnames side by side on the blackboard, with a great black circle above each.

The moment Iwahashi saw it, he slumped forward onto his slate and burst into tears, but I, understanding nothing of what it meant, only stared blankly at the teacher's face.

When the lesson was over, my sister came and, laughing, said I must have been talking during class.

Wondering who could possibly have told on me already, but feeling somehow that I had done something wrong, I said I hadn't been talking at all, and my sister said, you can hide it all you like, but there's your black circle up on the blackboard for everyone to see.

Understanding at last that the black circle was given only for wrongdoing, I was suddenly overcome with sadness.

XXXVI

Iwahashi's textbook had been scribbled all over in red pencil, a total mess.

In the illustration of a policeman leading a lost, crying child by the hand away from a fire, the child's head now sprouted a wild, scribbled halo, and the policeman's eyes had been made huge enough to burst.

He drew the faces of one-eyed and three-eyed goblins on his slate, and,

"Look, look!"

he said, showing them off.

Having learned my lesson from the black circle the other day, I pretended not to notice, so he shook his fist threateningly under the desk instead, glaring sideways at me with rolling eyes.

And once the lesson ended and the teacher was gone, he would come at me, breathing hot on his fist — hah, hah — so I slipped out into the corridor and stood quietly somewhere he would not find me.

There, a grimy, red-faced boy, another old hand in the same class, came up to me and said,

"I'll give you something good,"

and, holding something clenched in his fist, told me to put out my hand.

I thought I was surely being tricked, but I was too frightened not to obey, and put out my hand meekly, and he set two or three red berries onto my palm.

I did not want any such thing, but I was glad of his kindness, and,

"Thank you,"

I said, and smiled.

It was not until five or six years later that I learned they had been the berries of the binankazura vine growing out back.

On account of his red face, he was nicknamed "Monkey-face," and, from his given name Chohei, was also called "Choppei"; he was the son of the fishmonger in front of Denbo-in.

From then on, Choppei became my one and only acquaintance; for my part I would rather not have spoken even to him if I could have helped it, but he, for reasons of his own, kept talking to me all the same.

One day Choppei said,

"Let's go for a piss together next lesson,"

he said.

"I don't want to — we'll get scolded by the teacher,"

I said, and

"Fine, don't come then, you weakling coward,"

he said, making such a frightening face that I hurriedly said,

"I'll go, I'll go,"

I said.

He at once cheered up and said,

"Just do what I do and you'll be fine,"

he said.

Not long after the lesson began, he raised his hand and said,

"Sensei, may I go to the toilet?"

he said.

The teacher said,

"Do you really need to go? I'll know if you're lying,"

he said.

Without flinching in the least,

"I really do,"

he said.

The teacher, not wanting an accident on his hands, said,

"Very well, off you go then. Come straight back when you're done — dawdle and it's a black circle for you."

he said.

Other boys, too, each raised their hand crying, "Sensei, sensei," and five or six of us were let go to the toilet together.

Choppei, filing noisily out, glanced my way, and I, catching myself with a start, timidly

"Sensei,"

raised my hand in imitation and said,

"Please may I go to the toilet,"

I said.

The teacher, not knowing I had been coached by Choppei, gave his permission at once.

The toilet stood some way off from the classroom, right below the bamboo-grass thicket of the neighboring Hachiman shrine.

Choppei was there waiting for me, and said,

"Let's wrestle,"

he said.

Looking around, I saw the other boys had climbed over the corridor railing and were digging up sweet roots from the bank, or making mud balls and throwing them at each other.

They used the excuse of the toilet to slip out for a little breather.

Choppei,

"Come on, let's wrestle, let's wrestle,"

urged, and I, who until that very day had never wrestled anyone but Aunt in our Shioden-and-Kiyomasa bouts, was thoroughly at a loss, but with no way out,

"Careful now, it's dangerous,"

I said feebly, and grappled with him half-heartedly.

Choppei, strong as he was,

"Hakkeyoi, hakkeyoi,"

cried lustily, spinning me round and round, until, pitifully, even Kiyomasa himself tripped on the hem of his hakama and landed flat on his backside.

He, nose held high,

"You're weak. Let's do it again next time,"

he said, and walked off ahead of me back to class.

I too straightened my twisted kimono and followed after him.

The moment we entered the classroom, he, with an utterly innocent face,

"Sensei, we're back,"

said, and bobbed his head.

I too bowed my head in silence.

The other boys came trooping back too, but the one who had been digging up sweet roots had gone on gnawing at his for so long that the teacher made him stand as punishment, and, worse still, his sweet root was spotted poking out of the front of his kimono, and he was given a terrible scolding.

I resolved I would never go to the toilet again.

XXXVII

Of all our subjects, the one everyone loved best was moral instruction.

This was because the teacher hung up beautiful wall-charts and told us fascinating stories to go with them; one picture showed a mother bear, shot dead, lying there still clutching the stone she had lifted so as not to crush her cub, who was out hunting crabs, and another showed a general, chin propped on his hand, watching a spider spin its web.

The students would gaze entranced at the beautiful pictures, listen spellbound to the stories, and beg for more, one after another.

The teacher would say,

"So long as you all behave, I'll tell you as many as you like,"

he would say, and turn the pages one by one, telling the story of each.

In this way he would usually get through the whole book of charts, but oddly enough, he always skipped over the very first picture, which showed a foreign woman fallen in the snow, clutching a child to her.

The other students, seeing this, never once begged him to tell that one.

I, for my part, loved that picture above all the rest, and kept waiting, is it now, is it now, but he never once told its story.

When the bell rang, everyone would swarm noisily round the teacher's chair, climbing onto his knees, clinging to his shoulders, begging him to tell the same story over again, once more, once more.

I could never be so bold as they were, and stood a little apart, gazing vacantly at the pictures.

The teacher turned toward me and said,

"Shall I tell Mr. —— one too? Which one would you like, Mr. ——?"

he said, and, seeing my face go red,

"Go on, tell me, tell me,"

he urged.

Summoning up all the courage of my life,

"This one,"

I stammered, pointing at that same picture.

The others, plainly displeased, said,

"That's a boring one, that's a boring one,"

they said.

The teacher too said,

"This one isn't very interesting, you know. Are you sure?"

he pressed, to make certain.

I nodded silently.

The teacher, realizing I did not yet know the story, talked the others round despite their grumbling, and told it for the sake of the newcomer.

It was the story of a mother who lost her way in the snow, and stripped off her own clothes, layer after layer, to dress her child in them, until at last she froze to death herself.

The picture had none of the bright coloring that delighted a child's eye, and the story itself was nothing more than that, so the others found no interest in it at all, and the teacher always skipped it, but for me it was interesting enough just as it was.

I listened to it, moved to pity, just as I was when Aunt told me the story of Lady Tokiwa.

When the story was finished, the teacher said,

"Not very interesting, was it?"

he said, and when I honestly shook my head to say it was, the teacher looked surprised, and the others giggled contemptuously.

XXXVIII

Around that time, I often felt a longing to slip away from everyone's eyes and be alone, and would hide anywhere at all — under a desk, inside a cupboard.

Tucked away in such places, thinking over all manner of things, I felt an indescribable peace and contentment.

Of all my hiding places, the one I loved best was the space beside the chest of small drawers.

It was the gloomiest room of all, lit only by the light coming through a north-facing window near the storehouse, but between that window and the chest there was just enough space for me to fold myself in, knees drawn up, and fit snugly.

Crouched there, I would gaze at the radiating cracks in the window glass, the kaya tree just outside, the binankazura vine twining round a rotten log, its red tendrils, and the cockroaches sucking sap at the tips of the vine.

And so, whether for half a day or a whole one, I would sit muttering something to myself, and before I knew it had fallen into the habit of writing, one or two at a time, with a pencil, the hiragana character 'wo'

on the chest, until in the end countless 'wo's, big and small,

formed a whole procession there.

Before long my father, growing suspicious of how much time I spent shut away in that corner, peered in and discovered the whole procession at once, but, taking it for nothing more than idle scribbling, only said that if I wanted to practice writing I ought to do it in my copybook, and did not scold me severely.

But it was, in truth, no mere scribbling at all.

The hiragana character 'wo'

somehow resembles the shape of a woman sitting.

Whenever something weighed on my small heart, on my frail body, I sought comfort in those

'wo's, and they always seemed to sense my feelings and comfort me kindly in return.

Even after we moved here, I was tormented by frightening dreams every third night or so, and had to run about the whole house in the middle of the night.

In one, a black spiral, about a foot across, hung in the air, pulsing like the mainspring of a clock.

It frightened me terribly, but I forced myself to endure it, and eventually some monstrous crane came flying in from nowhere and seized the spiral in its beak; in the other dream, something like a mass of entrails writhed and churned in the darkness.

And then it would turn into a woman's face, its mouth hanging foolishly wide open, its eyes flying open, stretching itself into a long, long face.

And then, the next moment, it would close its mouth and widen it sideways instead, scrunching up its eyes and nose until it became an impossibly flattened face.

In this way it kept stretching and shrinking, on and on, until I burst into tears.

Since it was suspected that these constant nightmares were caused by Aunt's bedtime stories, and it was also thought worth trying a change of sleeping arrangements, it was decided that I should sleep beside my father instead.

But it did no good at all, however many nights my father told me tales of valor about Miyamoto Musashi, or Yoshitsune and Benkei — the monsters, caring nothing whatever for my father, came just the same as ever.

In my old room, the demon had lived in the ceiling above the alcove; in this new room, the octagonal clock hanging on the pillar turned into a single eye, and the four sliding paper doors became a great gaping mouth.

XXXIX

Following the doctor's advice, for the sake of my mother's health and my own — both of us being generally frail — my father decided to take us both to the seaside.

Along the way, seeing the natural scenery that a child's heart had only ever longed for in the pictures on my poem-cards or in painting-manuals appear now, exactly so, before my very eyes, I was overcome with a wild delight.

I saw, too, the sea itself — a wonder no small jar of imagination could ever hold, however deep one drew from it.

It lay clear and indigo-blue, and over it the sails of fishing boats glided by, gleaming like silver.

When we passed between sheer, straight-cut cliffs, I felt an unbearable loneliness, and pitied the grasses clinging precariously to their faces.

At a shrine belonging to the Chinese community, like something out of the Dragon Palace, an old Chinese woman dropped pebbles onto the paving stones and murmured some prayer.

And I thought how beautiful it was to see a doll-like child, her hair parted and oiled, walking along on unsteady, adorable little feet.

The shop that sold shellcraft displayed treasures from the bottom of the sea, heaped high.

My father bought several hairpins as souvenirs for my sisters, and a packet of vinegared shellfish for me, and I wondered why, with such beautiful things all around, my father did not simply buy every single one.

Riding by rickshaw through the pine grove along the shore, however far we went, there were always more pines.

There were pines, too, in the Takasago scroll hung at New Year's, and I had always heard from Aunt that the pine was a sacred tree, so that I loved pine trees with something like superstitious devotion.

Before long we arrived at the inn.

I had been so enjoying the quiet of the pine grove, but the inn was full of noisy bustle, and I cried out that I wanted to go straight home, until the clerks and the maids came running and coaxed me, calling me "young master, young master," as if I were some old, familiar guest.

Reassured, I stopped crying at once.

And so, breathing in the sea breeze all day long, I forgot everything else, entranced by the waves crashing beyond the little pines.

When night came, the lamps were lit.

Their shades were made of paper pasted over cylindrical bamboo frames, set upon elegant black-lacquered stands.

Drawn by the lamplight, leafhoppers would come flying in and settle there.

I found them unbearably dear, beautiful green things with their wide-set eyes.

When I tried to catch one with my finger, it would dart sideways in an instant and escape through the mesh of the next lampshade.

Ladybugs came too.

One night, out on the veranda watching fireworks set off in the garden, a beautiful woman came over with sweets wrapped in paper and said,

"Here, have some,"

she said.

I had overheard that she was a "geisha,"

but as far as I understood it, a "geisha"

was some frightening creature who went about deceiving people.

That "geisha"

came close beside me, saying what a dear child I was, how old was I, resting her hand on my shoulder and leaning her face in as if about to press her cheek to mine.

Wrapped in the sweet smell of her sleeve, unable even to answer, my ears burning red, I clung to the railing, until it suddenly struck me — she's come to trick me — and, seized with sudden terror, I forced my way out from under her sleeve and fled back to my mother.

When, my heart still pounding, I told my mother about it, she laughed a little and scolded me gently for my bad manners.

After that, every time I watched fireworks, I resolved that if she asked me anything again I would answer properly, and if she gave me sweets I would thank her, but the woman, perhaps offended, never came near me again.

I regretted, with all my heart, that I never had the chance to let her know how sorry I was.

One day I went with my father deep into a pine forest.

It smelled of pine, and pine cones lay scattered everywhere.

My father walked along slowly, but I, stopping to gather pine cones, had constantly to trot after him to catch up.

Chattering away in my heart with the pine cones I had gathered, filling both sleeves and the front of my kimono, I toddled along after him, until we came to a little pavilion where an old man with snow-white eyebrows was raking up pine needles.

I was foolishly delighted, thinking it was the old man of Takasago himself — I really did believe it —

and, unlike my usual self, I chattered away to my father about all sorts of things, quite of my own accord.

When my father got back to the inn, he said to my mother,

"Old Octopus-head said the most wonderful thing today,"

and laughed.

XL

When we got back from our trip, I found that Okuni's family had moved far away while we were gone, on account of her father's official post, and I felt a strange, deflated sort of loneliness.

After that I was no longer tormented by frightening dreams, and my body began to grow visibly stronger, but my innate absent-mindedness, and my habit of shirking school, remained just the same as ever.

It was not only my frailty; school life was, for so innocent a child, far too complicated and painful a thing, and it made me hate it.

The one happy thing was that my homeroom teacher at the time, Nakazawa-sensei, was a wonderful man I loved dearly, and, what's more, my seat was right in front of his desk.

Nakazawa-sensei never said a word however often I was absent, and however poorly I did, only ever laughed softly to himself.

But once, when I got into a fight with a boy named Ando Shigeta who sat next to me, he scolded me — just that one time.

For some reason the two of us simply could not stand each other, and were forever at odds, and one day, during an arithmetic lesson, he drew a one-eyed face on his slate, wrote my name beside it, and,

"Look, look!"

he said, showing it off.

So I drew a great clog with eyes and a nose beside it, and wrote "Shigeta" next to it.

At that he suddenly kicked me in the shin, so I, not to be outdone, jabbed him in the ribs.

While we were carrying on our secret feud like this, we were finally caught by the teacher, and the two of us were made to stay behind after school let out.

The teacher, with an unusually stern face, asked why we had been fighting.

I told the whole story and insisted I was not at fault, but Shigeta lied and said I had started it by teasing him first, so the teacher said both sides were equally to blame in a fight, and would not let either of us go.

All the other children gathered up their things and hurried cheerfully home.

Some of them, out of pure nosiness, peered in at the door and laughed.

Once every last student in the school had gone home, an unpleasant hush settled over the place.

What if night fell and I was still here?

I wouldn't be able to eat dinner, I wouldn't be able to sleep, wouldn't Aunt hurry up and come and apologize for me — all sorts of thoughts whirled through my head, and the tears welled up on their own.

The teacher, glancing back and forth every so often between our two half-tearful faces, chuckled quietly to himself while pretending to read a book.

Shigeta, plainly desperate to go home, kept fiddling with the strap of the satchel on his shoulder, until at last he burst into tears and,

"I'm sorry,"

he apologized.

The teacher said,

"Since you've apologized so nicely, I'll forgive you,"

and let Shigeta go home.

I too wanted desperately to go home, but it galled me so to be kept behind when I had done nothing wrong that I kept starting to cry and holding it back, starting to cry and holding it back, again and again.

But in the end there was nothing left to do but cry.

Once I began to cry, it was my habit to rub my eyes with both fists and go on sniveling shamelessly, and all the while, mulling over right and wrong bit by bit, if I decided I was in the wrong I would stop at once, but if not, I would sob and sob, resenting bitterly that I was being unjustly crushed simply for being small and weak, thinking, just you wait.

After crying my fill, my chest would feel cleared out, and I would feel a strange, raw sort of pleasure somewhere around my windpipe.

In any case, the teacher, at his wit's end, said,

"Apologize and I'll let you go home. Apologize and I'll let you go home,"

over and over, but I insisted I had done nothing wrong, and would not apologize for anything.

But listening to his lecture bit by bit, I gradually came to understand that although starting the fight had been Shigeta's fault, it had been wrong of me to take the bait during a lesson, and so,

"I'm sorry,"

I said, bowing my head, and was let go.

At home, they treated it as some kind of miracle that spiritless Octopus-head had actually gotten into a fight, and laughed about it.

XLI

The wages of not studying came due at once, and by the time exams finally arrived, I knew almost nothing at all.

Watching the others finish quickly and go home while I alone sat there floundering like a boiled octopus was no easy thing to bear, believe me.

The hardest of all was the reading exam.

I was called up to the teacher's desk last of all.

The passage was the chapter on the Siege of Ulsan.

I had never once seen the characters for "Ulsan" in my life.

I only stood there in silence, so the teacher, with no choice, taught me one or two characters at a time, all but holding my hand to help me read, but I did nothing but gaze, entranced, at the illustration of Kato Kiyomasa surrounded by the Ming army, and understood nothing whatever of the text itself.

The teacher, his patience finally exhausted, said,

"Just read whatever part you can,"

and tossed the reader down in front of me.

Quite unabashed, I said,

"There isn't any part I can read,"

I said.

Even after the exams, I stayed on in the same class, right where I was.

I believed that, since I sat at the very front, I must be at the top of the class.

That my name-tag hung at the very bottom of the list, that I was always called last at roll call, that I could not, in fact, actually do anything — none of it raised in me the least shadow of doubt.

Kept close beside a teacher I loved, never once scolded — if that was not being top of the class, what could be?

Besides, I had never once had to go up for a certificate, and whenever I came home from school and boasted of being top of the class, everyone would laugh and say, "Well done, well done," so that I, for my part, lived in a state of perfect, untroubled peace.

As that term drew toward its end, new people moved in next door.

Their house was separated from ours only by the back vegetable plot and a single cedar hedge, so that one could go freely back and forth.

I went round to the back and stole a look, and found a young girl about my own age coming out to the hedge, who at once ducked out of sight on the other side, and seemed to be peering quietly back at me through the gaps in the cedar.

After a while the girl came out again and glanced at me, so I glanced back at her too, and then both of us, all composure, looked away elsewhere.

After we had done this several times over, I found myself taken with her, somehow, seeing how slender she was, and how sickly she looked.

The next time our eyes met, she gave the faintest hint of a smile.

And so I smiled back a little too.

She turned away, as if averting her face, spinning round on one foot.

I too spun round.

She gave a little hop.

I hopped too.

Whenever she hopped, I hopped.

As we went on hopping back and forth like this, before I knew it I had left the shade of the almond tree, and she the side of the hedge, until we had drawn close enough to speak to one another.

But just then,

"Miss, dinner is ready,"

someone called, and,

"Coming,"

she answered, and ran off at once.

I too, reluctant, went home, hurried through my meal, and went back to look, only to find the girl had already come out ahead of me and seemed to be waiting, and,

"Let's play,"

she said, and came up to me with easy familiarity.

I had expected we would need at least five or six more rounds of hopping before we became properly acquainted, and, taken aback, my face went red, but

"All right,"

I said, and went over to her.

She, with no trace of shyness left, said briskly,

"How old are you?"

she asked.

"Nine,"

I answered.

And,

"I'm nine too,"

she said, laughing a little, and

"but I was born in New Year's, so I'm older for my age,"

she said, precociously.

I said,

"What's your name?"

"Kei,"

she said clearly.

Once we had exchanged names in the proper manner and finished our first introductions, Kei-chan said,

"I'll be starting school soon, so let's go to the same one,"

she said, and, delighted, I racked my small brain listing off all the good things about my school — how interesting the moral-instruction stories were, how kind the teacher was — trying with all my might to draw Kei-chan to the same school as me.

Kei-chan was a headstrong, socially confident child, with wide, bright eyes and jet-black hair.

A beautiful flush of color showed faintly through her pale, smooth cheeks.

With her temperament and her precocious mind, she had a certain tendency to lord it over a spiritless, absent-minded younger boy like some little queen, but I, quite content, resolved to give myself over entirely to the commands of this newly reigning queen.

XLII

One day I saw Kei-chan, brought along by her grandmother, coming in through the school gate, and my heart, quite unexpectedly, began to pound.

From the next day, Kei-chan came into the very same classroom, bundle under her arm, and, being new, was seated right at the front, beside me.

I could not put my mind to the lesson at all, and stole a sidelong glance to find Kei-chan sitting demurely, eyes fixed downward.

At recess, too, not yet knowing anyone, she stood about alone, absent-mindedly, and though I wanted badly to speak to her somehow, dreading being teased by the others I kept silent, while she, for her part, though she plainly knew perfectly well who I was, kept up a face of perfect indifference.

In an indescribable state of confusion, I somehow got through the day's lessons, and all the way home kept thinking, I'll tell her this today, I'll ask her that, and the moment I got home and went round to the back, there she was already, tossing bean-bags all by herself.

"Kei-chan,"

I called out, and ran up to her, all but flinging myself upon her.

At that, Kei-chan, with a look of pure contempt, said,

"I don't play with the bottom of the class,"

and went straight inside, and I, utterly taken aback, trudged dejectedly home and told Aunt all about it.

That night, when the whole household gathered as usual in the sitting room, I was told, for the very first time, that I really was at the bottom of the class.

At first I stubbornly insisted I was top of the class, but when I heard that the teacher had recently sent word that, while he did not wish to press too hard a child with a poor brain, at this rate I could not possibly be allowed to pass, and asked that a little more care be taken before the next exam, I burst into loud tears.

I felt, all at once, the full shame of having been at the very bottom of the class for so long.

The teacher had thought me a child with a poor brain, and had let me stay away from school as often as I liked, and never scolded me however badly I did.

I had, after all, been treated as a fool.

Even I knew well enough how shameful it was to be at the bottom of the class.

It was only because I believed myself top of the class that I had not studied, however lazy I was.

If only someone had told me sooner, I would have done my review, and never played truant.

Thinking of it, I resented everyone.

My head burned as though it might boil over, and I cried and cried, remembering it again and again, while Aunt, weeping right along with me,

"There's no need to cry, no need to cry,"

said, and led me off to the bedroom.

After that I was given a little desk of my own, and made to review each day's lessons, prepare for the next day's, and go carefully back over everything I had learned so far; Aunt took charge of what she herself could manage, the abacus, penmanship, and my two sisters took on the rest.

Facing Kei-chan in the classroom every single day was both painful and infuriating, but from then on I never once missed school.

Kei-chan, for her part, played with her friends without a care in the world.

I grew timid even around my own classmates and withdrew more and more into myself, but the misery of coming home and being made to sit at my desk was something else again.

I am ashamed to say that I had understood nothing at all of what we had already been taught.

There is no telling how many times I nearly gave up in despair, but coaxed along again and again with sweets and other rewards, I kept at it, and little by little, as if peeling away one thin sheet of paper after another, things began to make sense.

Learning one character in my reader, then two, solving one problem in arithmetic, then two, my knowledge advanced, one thing leading to the next, almost geometrically, until at last I gained confidence, and interest besides, and came home and brought out my own desk without being told — though the main motive, of course, was still wanting to be praised.

There was little time left before exams, but my studying paid off, and the next term I came in second.

Kei-chan was fifth among the girls.

XLIII

Suddenly grown wiser, as if I had shed some old skin, the world seemed to brighten anew, and at the same time my once-frail body grew visibly sturdier, until in sumo, in capture-the-flag, in whatever we played, I came to be counted among the two or three strongest.

By the time I became class monitor, succeeding a boy named Shoda who had held the top rank and then left, my shame and resentment toward Kei-chan had already faded away, and I found myself hoping that this young shoot of friendship, which had budded so beautifully and grown almost to the point of putting out leaves, only to wither at the root before ever flowering, might once more meet the light of spring and come sweetly back to life; and Kei-chan, too, seemed to feel much the same, though somehow neither of us could find the thread to pick it up again, and we each simply waited for some good occasion to arise.

A society of children is like a society of dogs: one strong individual makes all the rest tuck their tails at once.

Once Shoda was gone and I reigned alone, I took advantage of everyone's obedience and threw my weight around a good deal, though I will allow myself the credit of having been, as boy-tyrants of that age go, a fairly reasonable one.

Once, Choppei was left out of something over some matter or other and teased with cries of "Monkey-face, Monkey-face," and, flushed red, lashed out wildly at them, but, outnumbered, finally burst into tears and collapsed face-down onto his desk.

Seeing this, I marched straight into the noisy, jeering crowd and issued a stern decree: from now on, no one was ever to call Choppei "Monkey-face" again.

And from then on, he was spared that shameful nickname.

This was my small way of repaying, without ever having forgotten it, the kindness of those red berries from my very first day at school.

Iwahashi, in the meantime, remained just as much a ringleader of bullying as ever, forever tormenting the girls.

One day, when the teacher led us all out as usual for exercise on Sorrel Hill, Iwahashi went alone into a thicket and set about diligently gathering burrs, and I thought, he's up to some mischief again, and sure enough, before long he came out with both hands full of burrs, striking a pose like the villain Mitsuhide, his eyes gleaming.

The girls, always thoroughly frightened of him, never went anywhere near him, but as ill luck would have it, the one who happened, without thinking, to pass by just then was Kei-chan.

He, as good as saying to himself, what fine game has come along, at once blocked her path and flung two or three burrs at her.

Kei-chan cried,

"No! Stop it, stop it!"

and, warding them off with her sleeve, tried to flee, but he chased her down with relentless persistence, hurling more at her, until, twisting to dodge, she fell to her knees and burst into loud tears.

Seeing this, I flew at once at the triumphant Iwahashi and knocked him flat, and, sparing not a glance for his howling face, went straight to Kei-chan, who had risen without even brushing off the dust, her sleeve pressed to her face, and picked off, one by one, the burrs clinging thick to her hair and her clothes.

Kei-chan, not even knowing who was tending her so, sobbed on bitterly, letting me do as I liked, but at last, stopping her tears, she peeked out from behind her sleeve as if to see who it was, and when our eyes met, broke into a smile of unmistakable joy.

Her long lashes were wet, and her large eyes were beautifully flushed with color.

After that, our friendship, like a peony bud, swollen and fragrant, just on the point of blooming, that needs no more than the faint stirring of a butterfly's wing to burst open, soon opened out into an easy, affectionate closeness between the two of us.

XLIV

Coming home from school, we could hardly sit still through our review and preparation, and, rushing through it, would head out to the back garden, so full of memories for us.

When I got there first, I would play hopscotch or jump rope alone, waiting, is she coming yet, is she coming yet.

When she got there first, she would bounce her ball loudly on purpose, so I would be sure to hear.

That ball was wound about beautifully in stripes of red and blue wool.

The moment we saw each other's face, before anything else, we played rock-paper-scissors.

Kei-chan had a habit, when she lost, of shrugging her shoulders in irritation.

"O-nenjo-saama, o-yonejo, ten now,"

"O-nenjo-saama, o-yonejo, twenty now,"

I was good at ball-bouncing, and rarely dropped mine.

Kei-chan, unable to wait, would throw scraps of rope at me or jab out a stick to make me drop it.

"O-nenjo-saama, o-yonejo, ten now,"

"O-nenjo-saama, o-yonejo, twenty now,"

Kei-chan, her flushed face bobbing along with the ball, spun round and round with all her might.

Each time, her thick braided hair whipped about her shoulders, and her two feet whirled like a pair of tops chasing one another.

Determined not to lose, she would catch the ball under her chin or clutch it to her chest, going on and on until she staggered with dizziness.

"Ho-ho-kekyo, bush warbler, warbler, chancing to go up to the capital, up to the capital, took a midday nap on a plum branch, dreamed of the boy from Akasaka, a letter came out from under my pillow, a letter came saying, O-chiyo, come to me……"

Lost in the game, she bounced on, not even noticing the hem of her kimono trailing in the dirt.

Her two hands leapt over the ball, playful as rabbits, and from her round, open lips a bright, piping voice came tumbling out.

That innocent song, sung in so beautiful a voice, lingers still in my ears with a dear, unfading echo.

When the sun set beyond the meadow and the moon began to rise, wavering, in its wake, small moths that had been hiding among the leaves of the flower bed would take wing, fluttering their ash-gray wings and rising in little flurries.

In the yew tree at Shorin-ji, crows flocked together, quarreling over branches, and in the garden's sango-ju bush the sparrows went chiuk-chiuk, chiuk-chiuk.

At such times we would look up at the moon, its gold slowly fading, and sing the rabbit song.

"Rabbit, rabbit, what are you looking at as you hop, looking at the full harvest moon as you hop. Hop, hop, hop."

The two of us, hands resting on bent knees, hopped along, stooping low.

Our legs, already thoroughly tired, would lose all their spring after two or three hops, and we would tumble backward onto our seats without meaning to, and, finding it hilarious, dissolve into laughter all over again.

In this way the two of us, forgetting everything else, lost ourselves in play until called home from our respective houses, and Kei-chan, obedient as she was, no matter the moment,

"Miss, it's time to come home now,"

whenever she was called,

"Coming,"

would answer obediently, and, though clearly reluctant to go, would head straight home all the same.

When we parted, we would hook our little fingers together and pledge, tugging hard enough to nearly pull the finger off, to play again tomorrow, saying that if either of us broke the promise this finger would rot away, and though I told myself, that can't really happen, it always left me with a faint, inexplicable dread.

XLV

As the distance between us shrank day by day in this way, small, trivial quarrels would sometimes break out between hot-tempered, sore-loser me and quick-to-resent Kei-chan.

One day we were bouncing the ball out back as usual, but as ill luck would have it, the more we played the further behind Kei-chan fell, until at last she complained I was cheating or some such, and, crying, struck me again and again with both sleeves.

In the scuffle, the bean-bags tucked in her sleeve spilled out and scattered onto the ground.

Kei-chan, without so much as trying to pick them up,

"I'm never playing with you again,"

said, and covered her face.

And, without listening to me apologizing for I hardly knew what, she went off.

Left behind, I gathered up the bean-bags without thinking and took them home, but this only became a fresh source of trouble, and I turned it over and over in my mind — what if Kei-chan, out of spite, said I had stolen them, should I quietly put them back where they were, should I slip them into her desk at school tomorrow —

but in any case, having someone else's belongings sitting there in my drawer worried me terribly.

In this way I spent an anxious, sleepless night.

The next morning, feeling somehow frightened of facing her and yet anxious not to, I went to school before anyone else and sat dejectedly at my desk, turning over yesterday's events and everything that had happened so far in my mind, while one by one the others arrived and the classroom gradually grew lively.

But Kei-chan was nowhere to be seen.

What if she was so angry she had stayed home, though it wasn't yet her usual time to arrive so there was no telling — I fretted like this, and finally, when Choppei, always among the late arrivals, showed up, the hour was at hand.

Unable to bear it any longer, I went to the gate and peered out from behind its post, and before long saw her coming down from the top of the slope, bundle under her arm, and finally, for the moment, let out a breath of relief.

She, not knowing I was there, was just coming through the gate when I too stepped out casually from behind the post, and when our eyes happened to meet, she showed the faintest, awkward smile, and, without a word, went on inside.

It's all right.

She doesn't seem all that angry after all.

Through that whole agonizing day, Kei-chan played cheerfully with her friends.

After I got home and sat down at my desk, wondering whether to go out back today or not, the lattice door at the entrance slid quietly open, and,

"Excuse me, please,"

came a small voice.

I leapt up at once, and from behind the standing screen

"Kei-chan,"

I called, and went to stand at the entryway.

At that, Kei-chan, a little shy perhaps because this was her first visit, showed her usual bright, clear smile, and the heavy weight I had been carrying all this while dropped from me at once.

I welcomed this rare guest into the study room beside the entrance.

Kei-chan, restless, looked all round the room, and leaned against the low window to gaze at the enkianthus by the lantern, but once she had settled down a little, she said,

"Yesterday it was my fault,"

and, hands placed properly on the tatami, apologized with what looked like real remorse.

Her apology was so grown-up and so precisely done that it flustered me all the more, and, thinking of how much worry she had put me through, I even felt a little resentful, and thought: she needn't have apologized like that.

Kei-chan said that after that, she had gone home yesterday and been scolded.

And she begged me, please, to give her back her bean-bags, so, after teasing her a good long while, I finally took them out of my drawer and gave them to her.

The yuzen crepe scraps had, she said, once been a fine formal kimono, and showed fragments of paulownia blossoms and phoenix wings.

The two of us took up those fateful bean-bags and played together.

As the bean-bags flew up and down like butterflies, Kei-chan's head bobbed along with them, and each time it did, the red-and-white striped tassel of her hairpin fluttered loose about her temple.

"Change horses, change palanquins, change horses, change palanquins,"

Determined not to let the one balanced on the back of her hand fall, she resorted to every sly trick imaginable.

"Under the little bridge, under the little bridge,"

she chanted, forming a bridge on the tatami with her slender fingers and sending the bean-bag gliding smoothly underneath.

Kei-chan's earlobes glowed a beautiful flush.

The more frustrated she grew, the stiffer she became, so that she kept fumbling at the crucial moment and flinging the bean-bags away or burying her face in her sleeve in vexation, but from that day on, she came every day, bean-bags in hand, to play.

XLVI

When we had finished a whole reader, the teacher, for the sake of review, had us play

what was called "reading tag."

The class was divided into boys and girls, and whenever one side misread something, the other side would quickly correct it and carry on reading, the side that had read through the greater number of pages by the end being declared the winner.

The boys were forever bragging about one thing or another in ordinary life, but when it came to actually reading, they had no spirit for it whatever, and always lost, without fail.

Besides, once it really came down to it, everyone grew flustered, and was quickly caught out on some mistake and had the reading taken from him.

I, as the first reader, understood this, and began reading slowly and carefully.

The others, seeing me so unusually slow, laughed at me with contempt, but as luck would have it, however long it went on, I never once misread a single character, and kept dragging steadily on.

Through the passage where Yamato Takeru cuts down the grass, through the one where several horses are described — chestnut, dun, dapple-gray — through the one where a dark-skinned man rides a camel across the desert, page after page, I read on until I reached, near the very end, the chapter on the Mongol invasions.

There was a picture of small Japanese boats rowing up to a Chinese war fleet smashed to pieces, and the text read that on the night of the thirtieth of the leap seventh month, a divine wind had blown, leaving only three men out of an army a hundred thousand strong.

The girls' side, regretting now how carelessly they had let things slide, raised their hands to seize the reading from us at the merest pause for breath.

Their flustered scrambling struck me as comical, and I kept my composure all the more, until at last I reached the chapter on pottery, but as ill luck would have it, I had never taken much interest in how pottery was made, and had always skipped over that very passage in my review, so that I finally grew hopelessly tangled up, and the reading was taken from me without the least difficulty.

And so, reluctantly, I had to hand my place over to the girls, and when I looked to see who this hateful rival was, it turned out, to my astonishment, to be Kei-chan.

I felt an odd mixture of delight and vexation.

She looked as though she had cried tears of frustration, her eyes rimmed red.

And though she stood up, book in hand, she was sobbing so hard she could not read a single character.

Before long the bell rang, and that day, unusually, ended in a complete victory for the boys.

When school let out, Kei-chan came to play as usual, her eyes still a little swollen, and, looking somewhat embarrassed, said,

"But I really was so frustrated,"

she said.

And, taking a cord out of her sleeve, she said,

"Let's play cat's cradle,"

she said.

With our small knees pressed together, the pretty cord wound about her pale wrists, and, stretched taut between her slender, curved fingers, took on shape after shape.

Kei-chan said,

"Water,"

and passed it to me.

I took it carefully and said,

"Diamond,"

Kei-chan, hooking all ten fingers in turn, said,

"Pen-pen, is it a koto?"

and made a koto shape.

I said,

"Monkey,"

"Drum,"

and so we played the day away together, close and affectionate, as though our very friendship were being woven from hand to hand.

XLVII

One day, during moral instruction, the teacher said,

"Today, instead of me, each of you will tell a story,"

and, drawing his chair up beside the brazier to warm himself, called up those among us who seemed bold or amusing and had them tell their stories.

Even boys who were, in ordinary life, splendid little tyrants or class charmers found, once they stood at the front and had every face in the room turned upon them, their cheeks tightening and their tongues tangling until they could say nothing at all.

A boy named "Tokoro" —

a lanky fellow who was usually made to be everyone else's packhorse in games — was called up first of all, and, knees shaking violently, said,

"I'll tell the story of the tabi,"

he said.

The teacher said,

"Oh, a story about tabi? That sounds promising,"

he said, egging him on.

Tokoro, stammering,

said, "A tabi came floating from over there, a tabi came floating from over here, they collided in the middle, and it was tabi-ta-bly kind of them both,"

and, cutting it short, sat back down.

Next was an honest, guileless boy named Yoshizawa, whose lower teeth overlapped his upper ones, and, giggling helplessly — heh-heh, heh-heh — he said,

"I'll tell the story of the spear,"

he said.

The teacher said,

"A spear story this time? This ought to be good too,"

he said.

"A spear came floating from over there, a spear came floating from over here, they clashed in the middle with a clang, and it was spear-y kind of them both,"

he said, and sat back down.

All the easy, quick little stories had already been used up by others, and I, quietly shrinking into myself, was, as ill luck would have it, called on last of all.

I knew any number of stories from Aunt, but not one of them was short and easy to tell.

So, with no choice, I told the story of the kappa whose dish was left to dry out, and, once I began, found myself unexpectedly steady, and got through it bit by bit, glancing now and then at Kei-chan, whose reaction I could not help caring about.

And when I bowed to the teacher and was about to sit back down, the teacher said,

"You've got quite a thick skin, you know,"

he said, laughing, and gave me one tap on the head.

Then it was the girls' turn, but every one of them clung fast to her desk and not a single girl came forward, so they were called up in order of their seats, starting from the first.

Even so, some of them still would not come forward, and burst into tears instead.

And so the turn finally came round to the fifth seat.

Kei-chan, who seemed to have already resigned herself to it, answered obediently,

"Yes,"

and stood up at the front of the class.

Even so, her neck flushed red right up to the collar, and she stood there looking down, but after a while, moving her hands as though swimming in a dream, she began speaking, one halting word at a time, and I was so anxious with worry and sympathy for her that I could not even bring myself to look straight at her face.

But as the story went on, her wide eyes grew steady and composed, taking on a grown-up, spirited look, and in that unmatched, clear voice of hers she went on telling it briskly and in perfect order — and the story was the one about the Hatsune drum, which I had told her myself so many times.

The students, captivated by her unexpectedly assured manner, drawn into a story so unusually engaging, fell silent before they even realized it.

When the story was finished, the teacher said,

"Today every one of the boys told a good story, while not a single girl came forward, so the girls should have lost — but that one story from Mr. —— just now was enough to turn the win over to them. I'm quite impressed."

he said.

The girls could not help beaming.

Kei-chan too flushed suddenly red and went back to her seat, eyes downcast, and I watched her go with a strange feeling, half delight, half jealousy.

I ought never to have let her tell that story.

XLVIII

The games we played on winter nights were, in their quiet way, a deeply felt pleasure.

Kei-chan would come with her hands numb from the cold, and the moment she entered the room she would huddle right up to the brazier.

Aunt made a point, every single night, of piling the charcoal high for this dear little guest of ours.

While Kei-chan hunched her shoulders against the cold and leaned in over the brazier for a while, I, impatient, would tug at her braid or poke my finger through the ring of her child's hairpiece.

And she, being just as quick-tempered as I was, would sometimes get worked up and burst into tears.

When that happened, I would surrender at once, without argument, and apologize over and over.

Putting my mouth close to her ear as she lay face-down, I would say,

"Forgive me, forgive me,"

but she would only shake her head, and refuse to listen for a long while.

But once she had cried herself out, she would say,

"It's all right now,"

her mood clearing all at once, and show a lonely, faintly reproachful smile.

At such times I would sometimes wipe the tears from her softly flushed eyelids myself.

Kei-chan was skilled at pretending to cry.

In the middle of some trivial exchange, she would suddenly seem to flare up in a huff, and the next instant bury her face in my lap and wail aloud.

Feeling the warm weight of her against me, I would try one thing after another to cheer her — taking out her hairpin, tickling her — and the more I tried, the harder she cried, so that, even while telling myself I had done nothing wrong, I would apologize with all my might.

And then, after thoroughly wearing me out, she would suddenly lift her face, stick out her tongue, and burst into triumphant laughter, as if to say, serves you right.

It was a smooth, slender little tongue.

Having been taken in by this trick so many times, I finally learned to tell real tears from false ones by whether or not a certain vein of temper showed itself on her forehead.

She was skilled, too, at staring contests, and always beat me.

Kei-chan's face moved however she liked, and could take on the most outrageous expressions at will.

"An-gari-me, san-gari-me," she would chant, using both hands to stretch and squash her eyes as if they were made of rubber.

I hated that staring game more than anything.

It was not because I always lost, but because it truly pained me to see her lovely face rolling its eyes white, twisting its mouth into a great gaping grimace, becoming, for a moment, a grotesque, mangled thing to look at.

In this way, before I knew it, I had come to think of Kei-chan, alongside the Honorable Dog and the Ox-Day ox, as something of my very own, so that any word of praise or blame that touched her, any turn of fortune good or bad that befell her, struck straight through to my own heart.

I began to think of Kei-chan as a beautiful child.

How proud that made me.

But at the same time, my own looks became a burden I had never once thought to worry over before.

I wanted to become a still more beautiful child, and win Kei-chan's heart.

I wanted the two of us alone to be the best of friends, and to go on playing together forever.

Such thoughts began to occupy me.

One evening, the two of us sat side by side at the low window, singing songs, bathed in moonlight filtering through the leaves of the crape myrtle.

Just then, glancing idly at my own arm hanging out over the windowsill, I found it, even to my own eyes, beautiful enough to gaze at, a pale, translucent white.

It was only a passing trick of the moonlight, but I thought, what if it were really true, and, feeling suddenly heartened,

"Look, doesn't it look this beautiful,"

I said, and held my arm out before Kei-chan.

"Oh,"

my sweetheart said, and, rolling up her own sleeve,

"Mine too,"

she said, and showed me.

Her supple arm looked just like polished soapstone.

The two of us marveled at it, baring first our upper arms, then our shins, then our chests to the cool night air, going on and on in wonder, forgetting entirely how much time had passed.

XLIX

Around that time, a family that took in embroidery work as a side trade moved in to the west, and their son, a boy called Tomikou, became newly enrolled in my class.

He was a hopeless student, but with his glib tongue, being two years older, and stronger than the rest of us, he quickly became the class tyrant.

And so, naturally, not only could I no longer wield the authority I once had, but for the sake of my own pride I could not very well go bowing and scraping to him either, and I found myself pushed out on my own, left out of things entirely.

Having no friends nearby, he would come to fetch me the moment school let out, and we would play together out back.

I did not like him much, and would far rather have played with Kei-chan, so I had no wish for it at all, but, afraid of earning his ill-will, I kept him company all the same, for lack of any better choice.

Kei-chan, always fond of rough-and-tumble play, watched our games over the hedge with obvious interest, and before long came out herself and, copying us as best she could, took to jumping rope and spinning hoops with us too.

Tomikou, ever the smooth talker, fawned over her, calling her "Miss, Miss," and showed off doing handstands, somersaults, and all manner of tricks.

Kei-chan, who loved that sort of thing, followed after him everywhere, calling "Tomi-chan, Tomi-chan."

I, raised by Aunt's hand alone and having played only with Okuni, had never had the training for such feats and could not perform any of them, and, cutting a poor figure, could do nothing but watch, sucking my thumb, as Tomikou monopolized the favor of this little queen entirely.

When Kei-chan came to my house in the evening, she talked of nothing but Tomikou, and would not even glance at the picture-books I brought out to try to please her.

Even when the three of us played together, if Tomikou, full of himself, called me clumsy or spiritless, she would join right in and make fun of me too.

I found myself, of all things, resenting Aunt now, for having raised me into someone with no talent for handstands or somersaults.

In this way, though I could not stand Tomikou, I held my tongue and swallowed it down without protest, but even that patience finally snapped, and once, when he said something too outrageous to bear and I, angered, talked back, he cursed me coarsely at length, and then, whispering something meaningfully into Kei-chan's ear, glanced back at me sidelong,

"See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya,"

he said, and started off briskly for home.

And even Kei-chan copied him, saying,

"See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya,"

over and over, and followed along after him.

He had surely taken her home with him.

After that, Kei-chan stopped coming altogether.

Even when we happened to meet, she would not so much as smile, and hid herself away.

Tomikou put her up to it, I thought, and could not help but feel jealousy and rage boiling over in my small heart.

At school, too, he stirred everyone up and singled me out for constant, needling torment.

In glibness, of course, but in sheer physical strength too, I had to concede he was clearly my better.

Now, the one small consolation left to me was simply that I was still first in the class.

And yet, without Kei-chan, was that not, in the end, nothing but an empty title?

L

Days went by that felt as though they might drive me half mad.

One day, shut up alone once more in the study room, brooding over my troubles, I suddenly heard the clip-clop, tinkling sound of pokkuri sandals.

I started, but, pressing a hand to my chest, did not open the window.

Then a beloved voice, one I could never have forgotten, said,

"Excuse me, please,"

at the lattice door.

"Now, who could that be?"

Aunt, feigning ignorance, went out and said,

"Oh! Oh! And here I wondered what fine visitor we had, and it's this dear little lady,"

she said, making as if to scoop her up in her arms, and, knowing nothing of what had happened, asked whether she'd caught a cold, or been off staying somewhere.

Kei-chan came in quietly through the door Aunt had opened, and,

"I'm sorry it's been so long,"

she said, placing her hands demurely on the floor in greeting.

I, who had held myself in check for so long, felt the taut string of my nerves snap at those words, and, before I knew it,

"Kei-chan,"

I called out, and at the same instant tears of bitter relief spilled over.

She, seeming not to take much notice of it, began taking bean-bags out of her sleeve, and I asked,

"Why didn't you come?"

and she, quite unconcerned, said,

"Because I was at Tomi-chan's,"

she said.

Pressing on, I asked,

"Then why not go there today?"

and, quite unruffled, she answered,

"Because Mother scolded me and said I mustn't go to Tomi-chan's anymore,"

she said.

Somewhat deflated, I aired a little of my old grievance all the same, and Kei-chan,

"I'm sorry,"

she began, and explained that it was because Tomi-chan had told her there was no need to play with a child like me, since there were plenty of interesting things to do at his house instead,

"but now that Mother's scolded me, I've come to hate Tomi-chan, so let's be friends again,"

she said.

How can I put into words what I felt in my heart?

Kei-chan was mine after all.

Not knowing this, Tomikou must have spent the whole day waiting for her, worn out with impatience.

The next day at school, not noticing I was watching, he crept up beside her and started to say something, but Kei-chan cut him off with a blunt, "I hate you now," and would have nothing more to do with him.

Ever since her mother's scolding, Kei-chan seemed to hold him in genuine, heartfelt contempt.

LI

Tomikou, cunning as he was, seeing himself now spurned, came up to me with brazen, false friendliness, and, after currying favor with me in various ways, began saying disparaging things about Kei-chan, telling me he had decided not to play with her anymore either, and that I must never play with her again either — to which I gave some noncommittal answer, laughing inwardly all the while.

But the moment he sensed that Kei-chan and I had gone back to being as close as ever, he began plotting a terrible revenge.

Every day at school, the moment recess came, he would stir the whole class up to jeer at the two of us.

And whenever the others grew tired and the fire began to die down, he would go round whispering some outrageous, made-up thing into each of their ears in turn, stoking it back up.

We were shut out from the rest, surrounded by knowing looks, and reduced to a truly miserable state.

But if anything, it only drew us closer, and once the wearisome day's lessons were over and we came home to play, we each felt an indescribable happiness and comfort welling up in our hearts.

Tomikou's spitefulness grew more vicious day by day, and my own hostility rose to match it.

I gave no thought at all to his rank-and-file followers, and, besides, I was fairly certain he himself was not, in fact, all that strong.

As proof of it, whenever I flared up and went at him directly, he never fought me man to man, but slipped cleverly away, preferring to torment me from a safe distance, surrounded by his gang.

I began at last to hold him in contempt, and, at the same time, felt a fierce urge building in me to pay him back in full, given the chance.

Then one day, as school was letting out, Choppei came sidling up to me furtively and said,

"He says he's going to ambush you tomorrow,"

and, seemingly afraid of being caught telling me, dashed off at once.

I was moved by Choppei's good heart.

The next morning I hid a knobby, two-shaku length of hotei-chiku bamboo under my haori and went off to school, ready for anything.