by Kansuke Naka
36
Iwahashi’s books were smeared with red pencil. In an illustration that showed a patrolman coming away from a house on fire, leading a lost child by the hand, shafts of light ran wildly in all directions from the child’s head, and the patrolman’s eyeballs bulged as if about to burst. Once he drew things like a One-eyed Boy and a Three-eyed Boy on his slate and showed them to me:
“Look! Look!”
Remembering the black mark from the other day, I ignored him. This prompted him to make a fist under the desk and, flexing it, he glared at me sideways. As soon as the lesson was over and our teacher went away, he breathed on his fist and came toward me, so I went out into the hall and stood alone in a spot where he was unlikely to find me. An older member of the same class, a red-faced, dirty kid came by.
“I’ll give you something nice.” He had something in his hand and asked me to hold out mine. I was afraid he’d trick me, but I also feared him, so I held out my hand without fuss. He dropped a couple of red berries into it. I didn’t want anything like that but, happy that somebody was being kind to me, I smiled.
“Thank you.”
It was only five or six years later that I learned they were the berries of “handsome-man’s vine”113 at the back of the school. Because of his red face, the student was nicknamed Monkey-faced Footman; also because his name was Chōhei, he was called Choppei as well. He was the son of a fishmonger in front of the Denpō-in.114
After this Choppei became my only companion and, though I wouldn’t have even spoken to him if that had been possible, he must have found something in me, for he often talked to me. One day he said to me:
“During the next lesson let’s go and piss together.”
“I don’t want to. The teacher will scold us,” I said. At once he chanted, making a fearsome face.
If you don’t want to,
Don’t even try to,
Who’s that in the reeds!
“I will, I will.” I hastened to say. He at once recovered his good humor and said, “It’ll be all right if you do what I do.”
Soon after the lesson started, he raised his hand. “Mr. Mizoguchi, may I go to do number one?”
“Do you really need to? I’ll find out soon enough if you’ve lied to me,” the teacher said. This didn’t deter Choppei. “Yes, I really need to.”
Mr. Mizoguchi had to be concerned about a pupil losing control in the classroom. “All right then, go. Come back as soon as you’re done. Dawdle on the way, and I’ll give you a black mark.”
Several others raised their hands, asking to be allowed to go to the bathroom in a group. As he was leaving the room with them, Choppei gave me a quick glance. Startled, I fearfully raised my hand and, copying what the others had done, said, “Mr. Mizoguchi, may I go to do number two?”
Mr. Mizoguchi, not knowing that Choppei had instigated it, gave permission on the spot.
The bathroom was some way off from the classrooms, located as it was right under a thicket of bear bamboo115 belonging to the next-door building, the Lord Hachiman’s. Choppei was waiting for me there.
“Let’s wrestle,” he said.
I looked around. The other kids had climbed over the railings of the passageway and were digging for sweet-roots116 on the embankment or making balls out of crumbly mud and throwing them at one another. For them, number one was an excuse to have a break. Choppei pressed me: “Come, come on.”
I, who until that very moment had done only the Shiōten versus Kiyomasa’s combat scene with my aunt as my opponent, didn’t know what to do, but there was no getting out of it.
“It’s dangerous. Please be gentle,” I said plaintively and unthinkingly grappled Choppei. Choppei, who was strong, pulled me round and round while calling out lustily, “Fight! Fight!”
Alas, this was too much for the reputable Kiyomasa; stepping on the hem of his own hakama, he fell right on his haunch.
“You’re weak. We’ll do it again,” Choppei snottily said, and started back. I adjusted my twisted kimono and followed him.
As he entered the classroom, he gave a quick bow with an innocent air.
“Sir, I’m back.”
I bowed without saying anything. The others also returned, one after another. The kid who’d dug sweet roots kept chewing on one for so long that he was made to stand in a corner. Worse, the sweet root he had in the chest of his kimono edged out and was spotted, eliciting a fine rebuke. I decided not to go to the bathroom again.
37
Among the subjects for study the one that pleased everyone the most was ethics. This was because our teacher hung a scroll of pretty pictures on the wall and told us interesting stories. One picture showed a mother bear who had been shot with a bullet and had died while still holding up a rock to enable her cub to keep looking for crabs underneath it; another showed a general watching a spider make a cobweb, chin in hand. Enchanted by the beautiful pictures and fascinated by the stories, the pupils always asked for more. Mr. Mizoguchi would turn the pictures one by one and say:
“As long as you behave, I’ll tell you any number of stories.”
Most times he would end up going through the whole scroll of pictures. Strangely, though, he always skipped the picture that was at the very beginning, which showed a foreign woman fallen in the snow with a child in her arms. The pupils, though they saw that it was there, never asked to be told its story, either. But I, especially attracted by that picture, each time waited expectantly, in vain.
When the bell rang, the pupils would noisily surround the teacher in his chair, one climbing on his knees, another holding on to his shoulder, and so forth, crying, “Tell us that story again! Tell us that story again!” forcing him to tell the same stories over and over again. Unable to be as bold as they were, I would stand a little apart, vaguely looking at the pictures. But once, Mr. Mizoguchi turned toward me and asked, “Naka-san, shall I tell you a story, too? Which is your favorite?”
I merely blushed, so he urged, “You must tell me.”
Feeling as if my life were about to end, I finally mumbled, “This one,” pointing at the picture in question. No one seemed pleased, for they all said, “It’s no good.”
“That’s not interesting,” Mr. Mizoguchi said, adding, “Is that all right?” I nodded in silence.
Mr. Mizoguchi realized that I didn’t know the story yet. So, persuading the other pupils who complained, he told the story for the newcomer. It concerned a mother who, lost in the snow, kept taking her clothes off to cover her child until she finally froze to death. The picture was not colorful enough to delight children, and that was all there was to the story, so they weren’t excited by it, which was why Mr. Mizoguchi had skipped it. But to me, it was more than interesting. I listened to it with as much pity as I felt when my aunt told me the story of Lady Tokiwa.117
When the story was over, Mr. Mizoguchi asked, “It wasn’t interesting, was it?” In all honesty, I nodded yes. The teacher looked surprised, and the pupils giggled contemptuously.
38
It was around that time that I often felt the desire to escape people’s eyes and be alone and hid myself under a desk, in a closet, wherever it might be. While withdrawn into such a place and thinking about various things, I would feel an indescribable peace and sense of satisfaction. Among the hiding places I liked most was the space by a chest of drawers. It was in our gloomiest room, illuminated only by the light that shone in through the north window facing the storehouse. Between that window and the cabinet there was just enough space for me to install myself, knees tucked up. Squatting there, I looked at the radiating cracks on a windowpane, the kaya tree118 right next to it, the “handsome-man’s vine” entwining a dead tree, its red vines, and the aphids sucking the sap at their tips.
There I would spend half a day, even a whole day, mumbling to myself, acquiring, I know not when, the habit of writing with a pencil the hiragana representing the sound wo on the side of the cabinet; in the end countless wo, large and small, formed l
ines. Becoming suspicious about my proclivity to get into that corner, my father eventually looked in and in no time discovered those lines. But he just thought they were no more than idle graffiti and did not scold me much, merely saying that if I was doing writing exercises, I ought to do so in a notebook. But for me they were not, heavens, mere graffiti. The hiragana wo somehow resembles a seated woman. With my tiny heart, with my feeble body, whenever something happened, I sought consolation in that character, these characters surmised my thoughts well and consoled me with kindness.
Even after moving to the new place, I was assaulted by frightening dreams as often as once every three days and would run about the house in the dead of night. One such dream was that of a black swirl hanging in midair, about a foot in diameter, which pulsated like the spring of a clock. That was spooky enough, but even as I tried to hold myself in check, a monstrous crane would fly in from somewhere and hold the swirl in its beak. Another was something like intestines pushing against one another making a splat-splat noise. Then these would turn into a woman’s face that kept its mouth wide open like a fool, suddenly opened its eyes and made a long, long face. Or else it would close its mouth, extend it sideways, crimping and shrinking its eyes and nose, turning itself into an extraordinarily flat face. It would go on extending and shrinking until I burst out crying.
The suspicion arose that I was assaulted only by such dreams because of my aunt’s fairy tales. Also, the suggestion was made that I try a new bedroom, so it was decided that I ought to sleep by my father. Yet the tales of military exploits of such men as Miyamoto Musashi119 and Yoshitsune120 with his Benkei121 that he told me every night proved to be of no use, with the ghouls thinking nothing of a mere father and still visiting me as in the past. In the previous bedroom there was a demon in the ceiling of the alcove; in the new room the octagonal clock on the pillar turned into a One-eyed Boy and the four sliding doors scared me by becoming gigantic mouths.
39
Following our doctor’s recommendation, my father decided to take me and my mother, both of us prone to being sickly, to a certain seashore for our health. On our way I was extremely happy to see nature unfold before my eyes exactly as I had longed to see it, child though I was, having only seen it in the pictures on poem cards and in picture copybooks. I saw the mysterious sea, which I could not possibly ladle into my small vat of imagination. It was transparent indigo, with sailboats running on it, their sails gleaming like silver. When we passed between steep cliffs, I felt an unbearable loneliness and pitied the straggly grasses that grew on them.
At a shrine for Chinese people that looked like the Dragon Palace,122 an old Chinese woman was praying for something, dropping a pebble on the pavement for each of her prayers. And a doll-like child with her hair parted with pomade, walking unsteadily on her lovely legs, was, I thought, pretty. A store selling trinkets made from seashells was packed with displays of treasures from the bottom of the sea. Father bought several hairpins as souvenirs for my older sisters and a bag of “vinegar shells”123 for me, but I wondered why he didn’t buy all of them, everything being so beautiful. As we rode a carriage through a seashore pine grove, the pines were endless. Pines were in the hanging scroll of Takasago124 that we hung during the New Year and, because my aunt had often told me that the pine is a divine tree, I was superstitiously fond of pine trees.
In a while we arrived at our inn. I had just enjoyed a quiet pine grove, but here there was the hubbub of people, so I started crying, saying, “I want to go home.” At once the manager and maids rushed to me and, calling me “Little Master,” coaxed me into feeling that I was an old acquaintance of theirs. So, I was relieved and soon stopped crying. And for the rest of the day, smelling the fragrance of the salt wind, I remained entranced, watching the waves crashing noisily beyond the low pine trees, oblivious to everything else.
At night the lamp was lit. Its shade was a tubular bamboo basket with paper pasted on it, and it sat on a black-lacquered, elegant box. Longing for light, “side-crawlers”125 flew in and perched on it. Of a beautiful green and with a wide space between their eyes, they were terribly cute. When you tried to press on one with your finger, it suddenly crawled sidewise, escaping to the next segment of the basket. “Dove insects”126 also came.
One night I was out on the verandah watching the fireworks shooting up, when a beautiful woman came by with candies wrapped in paper.
“This is for you,” she said.
I’d heard that she was a “geisha,” that geisha are scary people who deceive you. The “geisha” came very close to me and said, “What a lovely child! How old are you?” She put her hands on my shoulders and looked into my face, her cheek almost touching mine. Enveloped in her fragrant sleeves I was unable even to respond, ears burning, as I clung to the rail, when I suddenly realized she’d come to deceive me. Terrified, I forced myself out from under her sleeves and ran back to my mother. When, my chest thumping, I told her about it, she chided me, with a little smile, on my bad manners. After that, each time I saw the fireworks, I would tell myself that the next time the geisha asked me something I’d reply to her, that if she gave me candies I’d thank her. But she must have been offended, for she wouldn’t even come near me after that. I was truly sorry I did not have a chance to tell her of my regrets.
One day I went into the depths of a deep pine grove with father. There was the scent of pine, and pine cones lay everywhere. Father walked slowly, but since I was picking up pine cones, from time to time I had to rush to catch up with him. As I scurried after him while talking intimately in my mind with the gathered pine cones that filled my chest and sleeves, we came upon a gazebo and an old man with snow-white eyebrows raking pine needles. I was overjoyed, taking him to be the old man of Takasago—I really did—and, unusually for me, said various things to father. Back at the inn, father said to mother, with a laugh: “Today our Octopus Boy babbled quite a bit.”
40
Back from the trip I felt a loneliness resembling betrayal when I found out that while we were away O-Kuni-san and her family had moved to a distant place because of her father’s assignment. From then on I ceased to be assaulted by terrible dreams and, besides, my body began to grow visibly. But my innate slow-wittedness and neglect of school remained unchanged. This was not only because of my feebleness, but also because school life, too complicated and filled with too much pain for an innocent child, made me dislike it. Except, happily, Mr. Nakazawa, who was in charge of our class at the time, was a good teacher whom I liked a great deal and, on top of that, my seat was right in front of his desk. No matter how often I failed to show up, he did not say anything and no matter how poorly I did in the class he merely giggled.
Still, he scolded me once, and that was when I had a fight with the kid seated with me, Andō Shigeta. For some reason we hated each other’s guts and were always at odds. One day, during an hour on arithmetic, he insisted that I look at his slate on which he’d drawn a face with one of its eyes blinded and my name scribbled by it. So I drew a large wooden clog, attached eyes and a nose to it, wrote “Wall-eyed” next to it, and showed it to him. He suddenly kicked me on the shin. Not about to accept submission, I elbowed his side. We were engaged in this private fight for some time before our teacher noticed; when school was over, he made us stay behind. Looking angry as he seldom had, he asked, Why did you have a fight? I told the whole story, insisting that I wasn’t to blame, but Shigeta lied by saying that I made fun of him first, so our teacher refused to let us go home, saying, It’s a case of “the two parties in a fight are equally punishable.”127 All the others were happily going home holding their belongings wrapped up in cloths. Some of the more curious kids were looking in the door, laughing.
When all the pupils of the school were gone, everything turned quiet, which I didn’t like. What would I do if it went on like this and night fell? I wouldn’t be able to eat, and I wouldn’t be able to sleep. When will aunt come to get me and apologize? Such thoughts swirled in my head, an
d tears slowly began to well up in my eyes. Our teacher from time to time looked at us, from one to the other, now both almost whimpering, while he pretended to read, giggling. This kid Shigeta, who’d been fingering the strings of his satchel hanging from his shoulder, obviously eager to go home, finally burst into tears and said, “I’m sorry, sir.”
“So you apologized. That’s fine. I forgive you,” Mr. Nakazawa said, and let him go home.
I myself would have rather gone home too, but deeply offended as I was that I was made to stay though I wasn’t to blame, I persisted, holding back the tears each time I started to sob. In the end, though, I had no choice but to sob. And once I started sobbing, I whimpered helplessly, for that was my habit, rubbing my eyes with my fists, even while slowly reflecting on the right and wrong, the fairness and the unfairness of it all. And whenever I decided that I was to blame, I would stop sobbing at once, while when I did not, I would sob audibly, bitter that I was unreasonably oppressed just because I was small and weak, and thinking, Wait until I get back at you all. There is also the fact that, after you’ve sobbed to your heart’s content, you feel as if your chest were aired, a sort of unbearably pleasant sensation down in your windpipe.
Mr. Nakazawa in the meantime was at a loss.
“If you apologize, I’ll let you go,” he would repeat, but I wouldn’t, insisting that I wasn’t to blame. As I slowly began to listen to what he had to say, however, I could finally see that, even though it was Shigeta’s fault to start a fight, it was wrong for me to have responded to it during a lesson, so I bowed to him and said, “I am sorry, sir,” and he let me go.
Back home, on hearing that their timid Octopus Boy had had a fight, my family all laughed, as if it were a miracle.
41
