Modern Japanese Literature

by Donald Keene

  How lonesome it seems when that child leaves. Almost as many as before, and yet even we grownups feel it. He isn’t a noisy child, and he’s not as good at clowning as Sangoro, but you won’t find many rich boys like him.

  And did you see that nasty grandmother of his? She’s sixty-three if she’s a day, and there she is done up like a young girl. It’s a wonder she doesn’t put on rouge. She purrs like a cat, but even when someone’s just died she’s around collecting her money. Probably die with a bag of it in her arms, that’s how fond she is of it. But we could use a little ourselves—why, we can’t lift up our heads to her. They say she even has some lent out to the big houses in the quarter.

  5

  “The midnight hearth is cold to one who waits alone”—but are we concerned with love?

  The wind was cool in the summer evening. Midori had been to the bath to wash away the sweat of the day, and now before a large mirror she was getting ready for the evening. Her mother personally saw to retouching the damaged coiffure. A beautiful child, she had to say—what if it was her own? Again and again she stepped back to look. Still not quite enough powder on the neck. Midori’s kimono was a cool azure, and her straw-colored sash was embroidered in gold. Not for some time yet would they be able to think about the sandals she would wear.

  “Still not ready?” Sangoro had walked around the block seven times, he had quite run out of yawns. The notorious mosquitoes attacked his neck savagely no matter how he tried to brush them away. His patience was very nearly exhausted when at last Midori appeared.

  “Well, let’s go.”

  He tugged at her sleeve, in too much of a hurry to answer.

  “Stop it. I’m all out of breath. If you to have to run all the way you can just go ahead by yourself.”

  Sangoro arrived at the paper shop first, but Shota had already left. He was probably even then in the middle of his dinner.

  “This is no fun, no fun at all. We can’t start till he comes. Have you got any cutouts? Maybe fox-and-geese. Or anything you have. I need something to keep me busy.” Midori was dejected.

  Quickly as ordered the shopwife brought cutouts down from the shelf, and the girls set to work on them. The boys, with Sangoro at their head, launched into a performance of the dances from the Yoshiwara carnival.

  “See how the north quarter6 prospers,

  A light, a lantern at each door,

  And the Five Streets roar with life.”

  So the chorus went. And on back to the dances of two and three years before, not a mistaken gesture or a false beat, ten performers and more quite carried away with themselves. A wall of curious onlookers grew up in the street outside.

  A voice called in from the crowd. “Is Sangoro there? We want to see him—quick.”

  “Right with you.” The unsuspecting Sangoro ran out the door, and a fist struck him square in the face.

  “Double-crosser. Dirty the name of the back street, will you? Who do you think I am? I’m Chokichi, that’s who I am. Play around with that crowd and you know what’s coming to you.”

  Sangoro turned to run back into the shop, but someone from the back-street gang grabbed him by the hair and pulled him out again. “Kill him, kill him!” The attack roared up like the incoming tide. “Don’t think the Moose from the Dangoya is going to get off either.”

  The paper lantern in front of the shop was smashed up in no time. “Watch out for the lamp. You’re not to fight in front of the shop.” But it was not likely that anyone was listening to the shop-wife’s protests.

  There were perhaps fourteen or fifteen in the attacking gang, each with a festive headband. Lanterns were swinging, arms flailing, let the blows fall where they might. Grimy sandals tramped in on the clean straw mats.

  Shota, the real object of the attack, was not in sight. “Where’s he hiding? Where’s he run away to? You won’t tell? You think we’ll let you off?” They gathered in closer to kick and pound Sangoro.

  “If you want to beat up Shota, why don’t you? What have you got against Sangoro?” Midori was furious. She tried to shake off the shopkeeper’s wife. “He hasn’t run away and we haven’t hidden him. He just isn’t here. Can’t you see? This is our place. You stay where you belong. Damn you, Chokichi—why are you hitting Sangoro?” There—they’d knocked Sangoro down. If they wanted to hit someone, let them hit her. She’d fight them. “Let me go, let me go.” She tried to squirm loose.

  “What’s she howling about?” Chokichi knew all he needed to know about her—a tramp, going right after her sister. “Here’s one for you.” He stripped off his sandal. It landed with a splattering of mud on Midori’s forehead.

  Midori paled and started forward. “You’ll only get hurt.” The shopwife held her back.

  “Look at ’em, look at ’em! Who do you think is on our side? Nobu, that’s who. Any time you want to get even, just come around. Look at Sangoro, the sissy. Look at him—sissy, coward.” Sangoro fell to the ground. “Watch out going home tonight. We’ll be waiting.”

  There were footsteps at the gate. Someone had been to the police. Chokichi gave the warning, and Ushimatsu and Bunji and the rest melted off into the darkness, some of them possibly to hiding places up the alley.

  “Damn you, damn you! Damn you, Chokichi! Damn you, Bunji! Damn you, Ushimatsu! Kill me! Come on, kill me! I’m Sangoro. I’m no girl. I’ll come back and haunt you, I’ll get you all. Don’t you forget it. Damn you, Chokichi.” Sangoro was sobbing, and hot tears streamed down his face. His kimono was torn, his hips and chest were covered with gravel. The others drew back at the violence of the outburst.

  “There, now.” As the wailing grew louder the wife of the shopkeeper ran to help him up. “There were so many of them and they were all so big.” She patted his shoulder and brushed away the dirt. “We couldn’t do anything ourselves, and what could you do? But it’s lucky you weren’t hurt. They might still be waiting for you somewhere. Suppose we ask the officer here to take you home. Then we’ll all feel better. It’s this way, officer ...” she turned to the policeman who had just come up.

  Sangoro drew back, suddenly quiet, as the policeman reached for his hand. “Thank you. You don’t need to. I can go by myself.”

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of. I’ll just take you home. What are you worried about?” The policeman smiled and patted his head, but Sangoro only shrank back farther.

  “My father won’t like it when he hears I’ve been fighting. Our house belongs to Chokichi’s father.”

  “Well, then, suppose I just take you as far as the door. I won’t cause you any trouble.”

  The policeman led him off by the hand. The others sighed with relief as they watched them go off down the street, but at the corner Sangoro shook loose and scampered off into the darkness.

  6

  How strange. Like snow from a clear sky. Why should the child refuse to go to school? And she had no breakfast this morning. Possibly we should order something special for her? It is not a cold, she has no fever. Too big a day yesterday, I suppose ... “Why don’t you stay home this morning? I’ll go to the shrine for you.”

  No, Midori had petitioned Tarō-sama for her sister’s prosperity, and she would not feel right unless she went herself. “Give me some money for the collection. I’ll be right back.”

  At the shrine, out in the paddy fields, she rang the bell, clapped her hands, and bowed. But what was really on her mind? She seemed pensive both on the way out and on the way back.

  “I’m sorry about last night, Midori.” Shota had recognized her in the distance.

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “But I was the one they were after. I wouldn’t have left, oniy Grandmother came. And Sangoro wouldn’t have gotten beat up. I went around to see him this morning, and he was crying, he was so mad. I got mad myself just listening to him. And you got hit in the face? Damn that Chokichi anyway. But you don’t hold it against me, do you, Midori? I didn’t run away. I didn’t know a thing about it, honest I di
dn’t. I ate in a hurry, and then just when I was on my way out Grandmother said she was going for a bath and I had to stay and watch the place. That must have been when it happened. I didn’t know a thing about it.” Shota apologized as though the crime had been his. He peered solicitously at Midori’s forehead. “Does it hurt?”

  “Hurt? That?” Midori smiled. “But listen, Shota. You aren’t to talk about it. I’ll get scolded if Mother hears. She’s never laid a hand on me, and neither has Father, and now I get mud on my face from that Chokichi’s foot ...” Midori turned away.

  “It was all my fault. I’m sorry. But don’t be that way, Midori. Please.” They had come to Shota’s back gate. “Come on in. There’s no one at home but me. Grandmother’s out collecting the interest, and I don’t like it here by myself. Come on in and I’ll show you the prints I told you about. All sorts of prints.” He pulled at her sleeve, and Midori nodded silently.

  The wooden gate had taken on a pleasant coating of age. The garden was not large, but the arrangement of dwarf trees showed imagination. From the eaves hung a fern that Shota had bought at a summer market. An outsider might have raised an eyebrow on learning that this was the wealthiest house in the neighborhood—and that in it lived but an old woman and a child. The place could be watched perfectly by anyone in the tenement across the way, and it had never been broken into; but every chest and door had a chilly lock dangling from it.

  Shota went in first and picked a spot where Midori could enjoy the breeze. Passing her a fan, motioning her to her place, he might have struck one as a little too mature for a twelve-year-old.

  The color prints were family treasures, and Shota beamed when Midori praised them. Would she like to see an old battledore? 7They had given it to his mother when she worked in the big house. Wasn’t it funny? Feel—wasn’t it heavy? And the face on it—people must have looked different in those days. ... Shota was becoming sentimental, rather against his will. If only his mother had lived. He was only three when she died. His father had gone back to the country,8 and now there were only the two of them, he and his grandmother. “I wish I had a family like you, Midori.”

  “Stop it. Boys don’t cry. And you’ll get the pictures wet.”

  Did Midori think he was like a girl? Sometimes he got to thinking about things. Not now, especially, but on moonlit winter nights when he went down toward Tamachi collecting the interest. As he walked back up along the ditch, he would stop on the bank and cry. “It’s happened lots of times. Not because of the cold. I don’t mind the cold so much. I don’t know why it is, but I just think about things. ... What did you say?”

  Yes, he had been making collections himself the last couple of years. His grandmother was getting old, and soon she would no longer be able to go out at night, and then her eyes were so bad that she had trouble with the papers. There used to be men around to help, but his grandmother had said that she could not get them to work. They were making a fool of her. “But when I get a little older I’m going to open the shop again. Not the way it used to be, maybe, but the Tanakaya sign will be up, anyway. I. can hardly wait.” People said his grandmother was selfish, but they shouldn’t. She was doing it all for him. Some of the families she had to collect interest from were having a hard time, and they blamed everything on her. Shota would cry over that too sometimes. He was a sissy, there was no doubt about it. This morning at Sangoro’s, for instance: so sore he could hardly move, Sangoro was out working just the same, afraid his father might find out about the fight; and Shota had not been able to say a word. “Boys aren’t supposed to cry. That’s why Chokichi thinks he can get away with it.”

  Now and then, artlessly, their eyes would meet.

  “You looked better than anyone yesterday. You made me want to be a boy. That’s the way I’d dress if I were a boy.”

  “I was good-looking—why, you were beautiful. Better looking than your sister, everyone said. I wish you were my sister. We’d go out together, and I’d brag and brag. It’s no fun without brothers and sisters. I know. We’ll have our picture taken together. I’ll dress the way I was yesterday, and you can put on a striped kimono, and we’ll go over to Kato’s. Won’t that Nobu be jealous? He’ll burn when he sees it. He’ll go white like a sheet, and he’ll be boiling inside. But maybe he’ll laugh—well, let him. We’ll have a big one taken, and maybe Kato’ll put it in his window. What’s the matter, Midori? Don’t you like the idea?”

  “But what if I look funny in the picture? What will you do then?” Midori’s clear laugh rang out, and her spirits seemed to be quite mended.

  The morning coolness was giving way to the heat of the day. “Come over this evening, Shota,” Midori called back as she left. “We’ll float a lantern on the pond and chase fish. They’ve fixed the bridge.”

  Shota stood smiling after her. Wasn’t she beautiful, though.

  7

  Nobu of the Ryugeji Temple and Midori of the Daikokuya went to the same school, the Ikueisha. It was at the last athletic meet, toward the end of April, when the cherries were past and the wistaria was blooming in the shade of the new leaves. Evening came on unobserved, so lively were the ball-throwing, the jumping, the tugging of ropes. Nobu seemed less in command of himself than usual. He tripped over the root of a pine by the lake and fell with one hand on the ground. His sleeve was a painful smear of red mud.

  “Here, wipe it off with this.” Midori, who happened to be passing by, offered him a scarlet silk handkerchief.

  A jealous acquaintance saw them, and the gossip spread. “Did you see Nobu and his girl? A fine priest, smiling all over when he thanked her. Daikoku for the Ryugeji9—it was made to order.”

  Nobu did not like gossip. He turned aside in disgust when anyone tried to pass along rumors about other people, and it was intolerable that he himself should now be the principal. He took fright whenever he heard Midori’s name. Please, not that story again. Still it did not seem wise to go into a rage each time someone mentioned Midori, and he did his best to feign indifference or to turn his tormenters off with a stern look. But there Midori herself would be, asking him a question, and he would feel a cold sweat breaking out all over his body even though he could generally escape by saying he did not know the answer.

  Midori noticed none of this. She was friendly as ever. Once on the way back from school she picked him out from a group of younger boys he was walking with. “See that flower? I can’t reach it, but I’ll bet you could. Would you break it off for me?”

  Nobu could hardly walk off and leave her standing there. But he was more and more sensitive to what people were saying. He reached for the nearest branch—let others worry about whether the blossoms were good or not—tore it off with the coldness of one who performs an unpleasant duty, and almost threw it at her as he turned to flee.

  Midori was taken aback, and when similar incidents piled up she came naturally to think that he was making a special effort to be disagreeable. He was not rude to others, only to her. If she asked a question he refused a decent answer, if she went up to him he ran away, if she talked to him he became angry. He was stiff, sullen. There was no possible way to please him. If he wanted to be difficult, to flare up as his moods took him, to insult her time after time—well, he need be no friend of Midori’s. Midori was rather hurt. She saw no further need to speak to him. Unless there was something they had to discuss, the two of them passed silently in the street. Neither thought of calling out a greeting to the other. A broad river grew up between them, a river which boat or raft was forbidden to cross. Each walked his own way along his own bank.

  From the day after the festival Midori stopped going to school. Her chagrin did not wash away so easily as that mud on her forehead. Children from the main street and children from the back street sat side by side as usual, but there was a stubborn division between them.

  It was cowardly of that Chokichi to single out a girl that night, a girl he knew could not fight back. Everyone knew that Chokichi himself was an ignoramus whose viole
nce went to extremes, but he would probably not have stormed in on them with quite that enthusiasm if he had not had Nobu behind him. That Nobu, pretending to be so wise, so mild—if you could look backstage you would find he had managed everything. Very well: he was an upper classman, his marks were good, he was heir to the august temple; but Midori of the Daikokuya was not in his debt by so much as a scrap of paper, she need not submit to these insults.

  Let the Ryugeji Temple have its illustrious followers, thought Midori. Her sister Omaki had well-placed followers too. For three years now she has had the steady company of good old Kawa the banker and Yone the stockbroker from Kabuto-chō;10 and Tiny who sat in the Diet once even offered to pay off her debts and marry her, but Omaki did not much care for him. He’s well thought of, too, people who ought to know will tell you. Just ask if you don’t believe it. Why, if it weren’t for Omaki the Daikokuya would be out of business today. That’s why the gentleman who owns it is so good to her mother and father and to Midori herself. That porcelain statue of Daikoku he was so proud of and kept in the alcove—one day when Midori and a friend were playing battledore in the house they knocked over a vase and smashed the statue to bits. The gentleman was drinking sake in the next room when it happened. “Sometimes you’re a little too lively, Midori,” he said, and not another word. The girls at the Daikokuya couldn’t get over it. Anyone else would have been scolded up one street and down the next.

  All this kindness because of Omaki. Midori herself might be no more than a girl kept around to help in the house, but her sister was Omaki of the Daikokuya. Midori had no cause to feel inferior before the likes of Chokichi, and she had no intention of taking any insults from the reverend priest of the Ryugeji.

  School would be no fun any more. Midori’s inborn willfulness came to the fore. She broke up her crayons, threw out her ink, and put away her books and abacus. She had no further need for them. Nothing would keep her now from playing with her good friends.