I O N O

五百野

By Takuya Kawata

Translation : Takuya Kawata

1

  I found myself being on my grandfather's lap.

  I was reading a newspaper with Jicha (so I called him)and staying snugly in his tough crossed-legs, felt his beards tickling on top of my head.  However, I was　made to browse only hiragana according to his finger-order.

  In front of my eyes, there was a fireplace trenched in the middle of the 10-tamami family room, where the iron kettle hanging from a trammel was lively boiling.   There was printed the year of 1954 on the calendar handing down on the wooden wall.   A medicine-bag with a trademark of the Dharma doll was depending from a short nail on a pillar, and a household Shinto shelf which was unsuitable for the atmosphere which remind me the Jicha was a wild and worldly man, was fixed near the ceiling in the corner of the room.

 “Wo(を)”

 “Good.  Then, what's this letter?”

  Yoshikazu, who was son of Jicha's oldest son, was squatting silently down by grandfather's side, straining his ears.  While I was privately pleased with the intensity of Jicha's love for me, and yet had a little guilty conscience.  　

“Ha(は)”

 “Good.  And next, what's this?”

“Ga(が)

“Excellent!”

  His cheerful voice wrapped up my head softly.   Yoshikazu was left in the house in the circumstances as mine.   Though he felt that I was too free with Grandfather, perhaps knowing it was best to keep quiet, he was just staring at me with a wistful look.   In those days, we were always made to wipe the veranda.

 “You are a quick worker.   If you don't work more slowly, I must be scolded.”   

  I didn't dislike him, but somehow I felt uneasy about him in the sense that he gave me a strange stress when I was beside him.   And, whenever he was with me, I had to try to find out every single one of merits of his personality.

 “Try me too, Jicha.”

  At last, he impatiently nestled up to Jicha's arm, pushing me away, tried to climb on his lap.   Looking at Yoshikazu’s green snivel, Jicha drew his eyebrows sourly.

  Jicha was a cleanly man.   His head, for instance, was only just covered with white hair, through which his skin showed, and yet went out to get his hair cut once every ten days, brushing his teeth all his wants every morning and evening, never letting Bacha(my grandmother) wash his dishes and chopsticks.   So he did not like Yoshikazu's cuff of Tanzen(the country anorak), to which he gave so a nice polish by mopping snivel that shone as if it was a magnificent velvet.   

 “I want to learn hiragana, too.”   

　Everyone in the family knew that he didn't have an eagerness to do that.   Grandmother quickened ashes in the fireplace rubbing her nose.   I sidled off from Grandfather's lap.

He stuffed his pipe with tobacco, and said bluntly,

 “You are older than Taku by two years, but however hard I may teach, you have learned nothing, have you?   How bad brains you have!   You can't be compared with Taku.”

  When being called names like that, Yoshikazu wore a sour face and became silent obstinately, deploring his folly of snuggling up to Jicha theatrically for the purpose of pleasing him.   I didn't miss sorrowful and brutal expression wavering on his profile.

  Jicha was a father of my mother.   He had returned from ‘Invasion of Siberia’ to his hometown, and worked as a stoker of a locomotive for a long time.   But soon after going over the age of 40, he had suddenly quitted his job without talking over with anyone, pulling down new roots at the top of the fireplace.   Since then, he had been living all day long in front of the trammel reading a newspaper, a current journal, and Chinese poetry.   Yet he was respected as ‘a wise man’ by his neighborhood, and sometimes wrote a letter for them taking small reward.

  Bacha fell in love with Jicha who had returned from Siberia and was roaming in the town at a smart pace, so beat a circle of friends who were giving the eye to him, and served in his parent's home as a maid without delay.   After being loved by him and bore a first son, she stayed on at his house as a lawful wife, a matter of course.   Then she gave birth to nine children one after another.

  After Jicha retired, she just had to rebuild an 8-tatami room facing the road into a rice cracker stall and start selling ‘senbei.’   Bacha was from a merchant family, but her secret savings were cleaned up because of the business.   Children in their prime had to help peddle rice crackers by turns, but the business was not going.   Bacha quitted the business soon.   Jicha was sitting by the fireplace as usual.

  Since then Bacha’s outward behabior had completely changed,　there came a kind of sneaking antagonism between them.   Her curses at him, though he looked as if it was none of his business, continued in the same manner, from then on to the day of his death.

  Talking of Yoshikazu ―

  Their oldest son Zentaro who had been married to a girl from a city who had graceful manners, was left by her within a few years, and covered up his tracks thinking there was no tomorrow.   The rumor was that he was after the bride.   Because of that, Yoshikazu was deserted by his parents.   

  My mother, who was their first daughter, after coming back from Tokyo, left me with her parents, going to some town a long way off to work for sending a remittance, and hardly ever returned home.   I was told my mother was teaching at a gradeschool near ‘Jusanko Lake.’

  Such is the difference between Yoshikazu's place and mine.   

  Writing down in brief what I hears, the Satos in Aomori in which I was left, was commomly known as ‘Gahenba,’ and was one of the lineage of the samurai.   Then there remained only four samurai families in Noheji.   The style ‘Gahenba’ was the remnant of Jicha's father running a shipyard by a business meyhod of ‘shizoku(samurai).’ The dock had now been passed to other person, and only the style lived.

  In the Satos then, there lived Jicha(Zenkichi) who had just reached his 60 years, Bacha(Hagi) a few years younger than he, the third son Zenji, the youngest son Yoshio, and my cousin Yoshikazu.   Apart from the missing oldest son, the second son Hideo, two sisters other than my mother, all of them had gone to the big cities.   Now the Satos lived on the remittance from volunteers of them.   

  “I gave all the children a higher education,” was Jicha's boast.   Perhaps, that was Bacha's one, for, though she had the playful temper which made her do much sightseeing, after Jicha's death, not joining her neighbors drinking tea for gossips, she often spoke of past memories about Jicha to her grandchildren,

  “The only great thing Jicha did is have given every warashi(child) a good education above an average level.”

  Bacha meant what she said, though she didn’t forget to add this regularly,

  “When he didn't earn much money, he was sitting by the fire arrogantly.   Remembering it, I'm tingling with anger.   In fact, elder children and I managed to pay for their school expenses.”

  Yoshikazu was two years older than I; Yoshio, seven years; Zenji, just even ten years. I was brought up, believing them real brothers, while my recollection of living in Tokyo was fading away.   So I was satisfied that I was taken good care of by Jicha because I was the youngest son.   Yet, when Yoshikazu and I called Grandfather Jicha and Bacha, Zenji and Yosio called them Tocha and Kacha.    That’s why the situation Yoshikazu and I were placed in dawned upon me soon.   But there was no air in which grandparents or brothers were having a secret conversation.  Even if I came to know such a situation, the relationship between us warashi had never broken down.  

 Zenji used to order Yoshikazu and me to wrestle with each other, encourage us to hump a pannier and go out stealing apples.   That was a Zenji's innocent pastime.   When I was wrestling with Yoshikazu, he jumped at me in a dammed serious way, with his eyes sparkling under his gathered brows.   I took him with all my muscle hard.   Zenji was very much pleased, jeering at us.

 Yoshikazu had never defeated me in wrestling or the number of apples.   Zenji are not particularly care which one won, pretending to be our brother, exciting his nephews' rivalry, and seemed glad to see it.   I loved his merry smile which was contagious.

 Yoshio was always racketing arounding with neighbors, seldom treating Yoshikazu and me as his playmates.   I sneaked his batta(card toy) out of the secret attic where he hid a pair of skis, some marbles, and a few birdlime rods to play with Yoshikazu.   Though I saw some uneasy expressions on his face while I repeated such mischief, I didn't care about them.   Yoshio, I think, might have reproached Yoshikazu alone with the mischief, and bullied him secretly.   Yoshikazu, who was a reporting-boy, had never complained to me about it.   Come to think of it, he might have so hated Yoshio that it was offensive for him to talk about.   Thus, although I did not know the situation, when I saw Yoshio being forced to sit on his heels by the fireplace, shouted at, and hit with a piece of wood by Jicha, I somehow felt quite relieved involuntarily.

2

I went to a Catholic preschool with a big cross spire, not knowing when I had entered it.   Its name was ‘Jone Yochien.’   When I woke up again from a short slumber of remembrance, I had already mingled with a group of lively children, jumping out of Jicha's lap.

My road to the school was called Shinmichi, as was the name of the block in the town.   I went to it having canvas shoes on in seasons free from snow, while on boots or skis in snowy seasons.   

Where I came to the end of Shinmichi, there was a crossroad which met the main street, and crossing along it, was a narrow street leading to Jone Yochien.   On the corner of the crossroad, there was a barbershop.   Mishima Heigoro, one of my friends, and his family lived in the house.   He was the only friend with whom I went to the school.   There is not the very reminiscence of him, but I just remember his name and his drab face with big round eyes fringed with heavy eyebrows, rare in the northern part of Japan.   In after many years, I heard a rumor that his family had come down just after his father died by hanging himself who once was a military policeman, and they left Noheji without telling where they would go.  Then, I didn't get any particular impression then as well.   I remember ― after saying good-bye to each other on my way home from the school, I sometimes looked into the window of the shop, and could see his father cutting a customer's hair with a gloomy face.   In a summer day, I also remember, he was burying his head in hands, sitting on the shop front bench with his legs crossed.  I would always gaze at such his figures, somehow, in different tones from those of some other people.

At the entrance of the school, there was a big boot cupboard which was fixed on the wall, passing by it, was a large hall made of oily parquet.   There was a tall stage for the school plays and concerts at the bottom of the hall.   I felt it, as a whole, too spacious.

What would I be up to in that school every day?   I don’t remember having played with my fellows fawning upon one another like small creatures.   I can visualize Mrs. Machiko who was always reserved and wearing an ebony nun-dress, and another Mrs. Onna wearing ordinary clothes and forever talking amusingly.   I can recall her clean-cut prim nose and sweet beautiful smile.

A nap-time (Ohirune) was my secret one.   After drinking a cup of habitual hot milk, all the boys and girls tried to go to sleep along by one another on the floor of the hall, when Mrs. Onna somehow checked up on our sleeping faces striding over them.   How fast my heart was beating as an odor of her coming up!  And I also remember vividly that I opened my eyes slightly when she strode over my face and I saw a strange thing between her legs.   That was a big voluptuous swallowtail, dancing silently in the dead lukewarm dim light, which was quite different from her smile ― a black panties sticking to her plump white thigh.

It was true the black butterfly woke up my erotic sense, but I was unable to adapt myself to her fishy pale-yellow dark lurking crotch.   I felt indescribable filthiness which interrupted keener inquiring mind.   Then, I began to look for a more intimate and cleaner sexual object.

In the same school there was a girl named Keiko, who had round cheeks and big eyes slant upward like a cat.   She was always smiling, and her lower teeth which peeped through her ever-open mouth glistened with saliva.   She did not fix her eyes on anything, so looked rather weak-headed.

I whispered a plan to her when we were playing.

“Let’s show the privates to each other ― ”

 Keiko nodded obediently.   We hurriedly came home hand in hand that day.   Turning to the police station from the main street, we went along the seashore of Kanezawa beach away from Shinmichi.   She hummed cheerfully, and sometimes turned her wet under teeth to me.

At the end of the beach, there was a place where some houses gathered round, where stood a big lofty whitewashed warehouse of a miso store.   Keiko walked into the side of the warehouse at an accustomed pace.   

In the vacancy between the warehouse and a excellent two-story house, there was a spacious garden.

She squatted at the place in the shade of shrubs and suddenly pulled her underwear down from her skirt, making pure white water at me.    The spatters beat the earth and some splashes hit my ankle.   I looked inside her skirt, tilting my head.   I looked there a white, flat, seemingly tender object.   When I tried to touch the thing in spite of myself,

“You…too….”

She said in a shameful way, and looked up my face.   I pulled down my pants hurriedly.   To my shame, my penis which had usually been deflating like a Chinese lantern, swelled bigger before her, painfully pointing to the sky.   So I couldn’t possibly make a piss.   She opened her eyes wide and kept squatting still for a minute.   Then, in a moment, coloring her cheeks red, she reached out her hand to mine.   Her fingers fluttered about in the air, going back from it hesitatingly.   Soon she stood slowly and pulled her panties up carefully to her stomach, and then somehow gathered grass in the garden to make a bunch,

“Well, I can stroke like this…, and like this….”

She caressed all over my furious other self delicately shaking the tips of the grass.   As my heart beat so violently, I lost the sense of distance.   Every bit of sound around me began to dash against my eardrums randomly but clearly, as if the stopples came out of my ears.

“Keiko ―”

Unexpectedly, above us, there was a clear sound made by a sliding window, and her name was called naturally.   She threw a bunch of grass away, turned her chin up, and replied sweetly to the voice.   A beautiful face was looking down from the window of the upstairs.   It seemed smiling.   It was then that I noticed the garden was a part of the premises of her family.

Dozing off on Jicha’s lap, I was listening to the temple bell ringing out the old year.   Yoshio and Yoshikazu had already caved in sleepiness, and drew back into Bacha’s room.   It was high time for her to go down to Hama to take draw the first water.   This year, Zenji, who had overcome sleepiness, was chosen to accompany her.

After getting first water, Bacha would go up Hamasaka and dropped into Hachimansama in Shinmichi, reporting to the spirit our ancestry that we had been able to see the old year out and the new year in, then came home to light a fire to the oven for cooking Zoni(rice cakes boiled with vegetables), when Zenji was set free from his duty.   Bacha would lie down by the fireplace through the night so that she might keep the oven-fire burning.   She nevertheless was always working hard when we got up in the morning.   When on earth did she sleep?

About thirty minutes after Bacha and Zenji went out for taking first water, I heard the train whistles blow successively from a distance.

Pooo, pooo!

  Po!  po!  poo!  pooo!

The whistles became shriller and shriller and didn’t cease.   I kicked Jicha’s lap and ran out to the outside.   Big drops of snow were thickly falling down on my eyelashes and stuck to them.

“It seems like there’s an accident.”

Urged by Jicha’s loud voice from the door of the earth floor, I dashed for a railroad crossing of Shinmichi.   I was somehow exhilarated.

Silver rails embedded in snow ran along the coast from Noheji Station, crossing Shinmichi and turned toward Chibiki, where a train towered in the dark emitting pure white steam with hissings.

“That’s a child, child!”

Men in black raincoat who appeared train crews moved about in confusion carrying a lantern around the crossing with no toll bar.

“At such midnight, it would be tough to gather a Maguro(dismembered corpse).”

As soon as the nuance of “Maguro” hit home with me, the excited feeling blew off.   Before long some policemen in uniform came running.   Their foreheads were sweating though in midwinter.

“Why did you cross from the school ground?”

“You could hear the sound of the bell-alarm, couldn’t you!”

They put a fire of censures to some people, but not to her.   The voices urged her to own up, but she stood in a dense steam with her hair disheveled, opening her eyes wide.   On the snow under her feet, red blood was blotting sinisterly.

She did not give any answers to all the voices around and not budge by even a fraction, hunched her shoulders bending her head.   Maybe a shudder of the nerve had reached the highest point, and because of it, she looked still.   Or because of incredible grief, had she frozen up on the right spot eternally?   There was a serious tense atmosphere that she would immediately break into pieces if you touched her even slightly.

Without notice, Yoshikazu ran and stood sniffing behind me with a hood on and a scarf around his neck.   There was Jicha and Yoshio, too.   Onlookers who had just come from Hamasaka jammed the banks of the railroad, standing like ghosts.

“That woman is Kacha(mother) of the miso-store?   The girl who was run over must be her daughter.”   

I wiped snow off my eyelashes.   Through the reflection of snow, I focused on the woman whom I should have once looked up from that garden.   Then, her dim smile and gentle voice, “Keiko…,” revived in me.

Jicha mumbled above my head.

“They must have been on the way home after getting first water.   ― If they come up from the ground of a junior high school, it is a shortcut; but it’s too dangerous because the rails curve just at that spot and obstruct the view.”

“Keiko was dead?”

“Maybe….   I think she was an only daughter.”

“What did they mean by Maguro?”

“You’d better not say such a thing in a loud voice.”

I looked up Jicha’s face and cling to his arm, and shifted my eyes from his face to, over the rails, the ominous copse standing still in the dark which settled over the ground of Noheji junior high school.   I remembered Keiko’s wet lower teeth and slightly white flat thing.   Fresh snow was continuously falling and melted into my eyes, then pushed out my tears.

“Here it is!   A head!   That’s her head!   It got much damaged!”

A deep loud voice went up from under the bank.   Keiko’s mother fell down in the snow.   Jicha and Onji(uncle) of Tashima-Ironworks ran up to her clattering their boots.

“Taku, to that way, along there, come with me.”

He pointed at something, twinkling his eyes.   At his fingertip, behind the bamboo grass covered with snow, there was lying a pair to her snow-geta, scary and blurred with tears.   Yoshikazu approached timidly and kicked it tenderly as if he sounded out.

Chi…chi…ri…nnn….

I heard a clear sullen tones.   The tones wobbled slightly like a quiver of the grass tip which Keiko’s fingers held at that time, and faded away in my ears.

                                      3

Yoshikazu, who was ignored by Jicha at Gahenba, was also sniveling and quiet in the preschool.   Though he was in a senior class named Ohisama-gumi, he had a weaker frame, and avoided coming near to me if possible.   So he was always taking shelter secretly in the corner of the playground.   But, on the way home, as soon as I said good-bye to Heigoro, Yoshikazu came up from nowhere when we didn’t make a promise to meet, and pulled my arm.   If I had refused, he would have burst out crying.

Thanks to Jicha’s special training, it was only I among my fellows of Ohisama-gumi, Otsukisama-gumi, and Ohoshisama-gumi who could read Hiragana.   And before I wasn’t aware of it, I became a man of a picture-story show, commonly acknowledged by every mate at Jone preschool.   Once a month or two, I was ordered by Mrs. Michiko to mount a platform and read picture-cards written only in Hiragana beating a big drum before my fellows.   Yoshikazu was looking at me with an up-glance.

At an annual ensemble meeting, I was also at the center of the kindergartners to beat the big drum scraping a drumstick up and down.   Yoshikazu played castanets.   

Still, I was cheered up by association with him, as if it was a welcome rain during dry weather.   For, nobody in the school liked me possibly because I often roughly exposed such shallow ideas as Grandfather gave me, natural feelings, and self-assertion.   I was, in a sense, resigned to loneliness peculiar to ‘the emotional’ among ‘the intellect’ that were gentle like a herd of sheep.   Even Heigoro went to and left school with me without saying a word except when he said good-bye.   Grandfather often said, whether he knew such my feeling of gloom or not,

“You are the only eccentric child of my family….”

He caressed my head.

Yoshikazu, who was dexterous in everything, made me an insect net, a Menko fringed by iron, a rubber gun, etc. at every opportunity.   He was also good at painting.   He would tenderly offer me a picture of battleship named Yamato, or Dharma-priest, as a proof of big friendship he kept in his bosom.

As I didn’t understand the meaning of something like hieroglyphic attached at the side of the picture, I asked him,

“What can this be?”

“That’s a spell.”

He replied.

There was only one theater in Noheji.   His best specialty was to poke in the dim passage from the restroom window round the back of the theater.   He notched a thick bamboo tube into a bar of ladder so as to climb through the window.   Of course, I followed him.

The movie that I had seen for the first time in my life was Seki-no-Yatappe starring Kurokawa Yataro.   For some reason or other, a villain who chopped at Yataro with a sword made a false step and gained momentum to fall off a cliff with a horrible cry.   I saw him sucked into the bottom of a ravine.   I was so scared of his figure diminishing into the size of sesame in an instant ― very sorry for him, I sniveled with a shudder.   While the second film was showing, trying to get off the helplessness, I went to the restroom again and again and squeezed water I didn’t feel like making.   And I asked reluctant Yoshikazu to kill time by playing Menko with me on the dim concrete floor under the screen.   When the movies came to end, following the back of other audience, we swiftly ran away through the front entrance where a ticket taker in nenneko-banten was watching over.

“Don’t tell about this.”

As soon as we ran into Shinmichi and began to walk slowly, Yoshikazu suddenly lowered his voice.

“Why should I!”

Though I was very much pleased with such escape, I could not tell the fun to Yoshikazu.   That’s why I might just be seen by him as a glib man who would give a report, waiting for a chance which was disadvantageous for him.   What a shame!

“It’s me who would be scolded.”

His sharp look relaxed.   I tried to understand his simple words of soothing tone the way he apologized me; I thought he didn’t blame me but lamented over himself and his misfortunes.

Yet, whenever Yoshikazu said to me, “Let’s go to the movies,” I always followed him.   For the movies fitted perfectly into my emotional life which had never satisfied me very much so far.   I preferred modern heart-warming story, or comedy, or horror movies to the samurai movies.   I disliked social movies which got human beings in a mass.   I would be sensitive to love without the political background, to friendship, to love for a family, and vengeance.   On the screen I was watching, fantastically beautiful men and women were soaked in various emotions all they wanted.   Words they spoke were thoughtful and deep, but the spirit in them surely communicated itself to me.   The movies enabled me to reconfirm, in the form of beautiful lies with laughter and tears, the existence of the world which I secretly had felt better reality than that on earth.

After that, of course, including when it was inconvenient to Yoshikazu, I for myself climbed up the bamboo-ladder tens of times.   And I had never been caught by a ticket taker.

4

In Gahenba, I kept a male cross-eye tortoise-shell cat.   Though nobody called his name, I myself called him ‘Misuke’ and loved so much.   Whenever I thought of him, his figure had disappeared from the house.   I didn’t know who fed him.   In spite of the fact he was a pet, I had never seen his feed-bowl.

“He is a master at stealing fish.”

Yoshikazu told me.

Thus Misuke did not interest anyone in the family except me, sometimes popped in and was patted on the head in a loose manner at the fireplace.   When I caught him out, I always gave him herring from Namasu(fish salad) in the kitchen, or a biscuit.

When it was about time for me to come home from preschool, he wouldn’t fail to come out of nowhere to jump nimbly on my shoulder.   And the moment I opened the front door, he ran away to nowhere.

The cat had not been home for many days.   I began to make a fuss first, after that Jicha was concerned.   Yoshio went out to find him, but in vain.

“He probably stole fish and was hit with a stick and died.”

Yoshikazu said with a sensible, smart look.   Since I expected it, I replied, assimilating my opinion to his, “You said it,” and yet I felt down.   And still I was concerned about Misuke all the time, but I pretended not to care about him as best I could.   Although I did not have a passive nature in which I felt what I meant unsaid, not knowing when, maybe it was when I came to understand myself an outsider of the house, I grew up to be a child who felt it guilty to reveal my own pain to everyone when nobody did not care, who had a disposition to play the percentages.

After we climbed into futon at night, Yoshikazu sometimes made me feel ominous, saying, “I found the cat dead,” with a sympathetic expression which backed up my reservation completely.   And he withdrew his gaze from my questioning face, smilingly showing his white teeth,

“It’s a lie,” he consoled me.

At such nights, when I began to feel easy and fall asleep, Misuke’s never failed to appear in my dream.   

“I found him!”

A few days after, Yoshikazu rushed into the house breathlessly.   Opening his eyes wide, he seemed to want to say something else.   I anxiously asked;

“Where ―?”

“He was killed….”

At the moment, since a faint sly smile wrinkled up his lips, I thought to myself that Yoshikazu was going to deceive me into trouble again.   But he said in a hesitant but hasty way,

“His eyes were torn out.”

He shot me a terrified look.

I ran after Yoshikazu’s back.   There was a mushroom grove at the end of a leek field, and the grove was surrounded with a currant hedge.   Since there was a night-soil reservoir in the field, we seldom went near the hedge except when trying to steal currants.   Misuke was hanged on the hedge.   We approached straight the carcass, which was mysterious, beckoning on.   He was torn both eyes out.    A wire was threaded through hollow eye-socket, and twisted together sturdily.   The bottom of his white hollow orbit which had lost cross-eye was fastening its gaze right at us.   His drooping tongue was infested with flies.   I was so frightened by such a cruel carcass that I forgot to cry.

“He missed running away, I think.”

Yoshikazu said as a critic did.    Then he stroked dry fur sticking flat to the carcass.   Suddenly a strange anger came up.   I somehow thought it so unnatural and abominable humbug to give up unchallenged.

“I’ll kill, too.”

“Kill who?”

Yoshikazu asked awkwardly.

“The creature who killed Misuke ―.”

“Don’t be foolish!   You, too, could be torn eyes out.   …You should give up, because we can’t tell who did it, can we?”

Yoshikazu tried to bring our talk to an end by showing temporary sympathy.   I couldn’t handle the deep grief.   I was just chagrined.   And, for the first time in my life, I recognized a feeling of hatred.

In the evening, I asked Yoshio who came back from school to cut wire and burry Misuke’s stiff body at the root of a plum tree in the backyard.   It was also he that dug a pit.   I was watching his quiet way of working, as I often shifted from one foot to another.

5

It was August in the Bon Festival that we couldn’t wait.

“It’s a Day of Kama-no-Kuchiake,” said Bacha.

The lid of hell and heaven open, and the deceased leave from the Beyond.   By the evening of August 13^th when they arrive in this world, all the family members have to decorate a Bon rack or clean a grave.   Bacha at once boiled red rice, started preparing Nishime(vegetables boiled hard with soy).   Potato, radish, carrot, shiitake-mushroom, burdock, kombu, and Koya-tofu…, of which I liked Koya-tofu best.   Anyway, aside from it, Nisime and red rice I had with my family tasted very nice.   Yoshikazu and I called ourselves ‘helpers of Bacha with her cooking oven,’ and went out in the backyard to split wood.   And we sometimes came back into the house and checked how she was getting on with Nishime by calling to her back.   

“You are drugs to work.   Go and swim in the beach.”

Yoshio yelled at us from the porch, angry about our work with no efficiency.   Wood chopping was always his share.

“The sea has already been cold.”

Yoshikazu resisted, because he was done out of a chance to eat Nishime secretly.   

“This is still an ideal day for a swim.”

“I’m so busy that I can’t attend to you.   Go swim the last stroke.”

Bacha also packed us off.

We couldn’t help running for the beach.   We took a run to Hamasaka.   A slight scent of a salt breeze pervaded the slope down toward the sea.   When we jumped a brrok, a large dragonfly, which was a tribute to a clear stream, rose from the grass of the brook to the blue sky like the bottom of the sea.   And it turned a somersault and fluttered toward the wind from the sea.

The shingle beach was all over laid with shells of scallops.   A strong smell of the sea rose from russet dragnets drawn around.   While we cast our shoes off and were approaching the beach stepping on the shells, our treads dried warmly in a moment.   Children driven out of their houses like us rushed together to the beach in all directions―.

I saw red loincloths, waves falling down from the sky, snow-white spindrift, some crops seen off and on among waves.   The waves surged in, and went out again lessening their thickness.  I watched a wave border leveling the sand.   The ‘principal’ of the beach, a junior high school boy, was guarding us from the deck of a ship exposing its broadside on the shore.   Watched by him, Yoshikazu and I paddled in the shallows.   The whole body dipped in seawater at the end of summer became numbed.   We went out of water for our lives, and called back a boiling sense of happiness into the frozen body.

The flames went up vigorously from driftwoods dried in the sun, heaped up on a chikko(a jetty made of concrete).   Children encircled the flames and stamped, saying,

“I’m very cold!”

Seven or eight Shurikes(monster mussels), which elder pupils had dived and collected by order of the principal, were thrown into fire.

“OK!   You can eat!”

At the principal’s command, we nimbly scraped the open-mouthed Shurikes out of fire with a stick, too much exhilarated, and chewed them, shouting loud, “It’s too hot!”      …Delicious!   After eating to their hearts’ content, children felt refreshed and ran toward the waves again.

In that evening, Bacha, Yoshio and Yoshikazu went to the temple in order to rake fallen leaves, water the gravestone; a visit to forefathers’ grave would begin from tomorrow.   There would be another happy event.   They said my mother would take only one day off in the bon festival to come back home.

As soon as I knew it, contrary to my joy of meeting her again, I remembered some unsatisfying feelings were clinging to every scene in my life which I had ever lived posturing as a barbarian with a lack for nothing; going on a hike, swimming in the sea with elder cousins or uncles.   And feeling somewhat guilty to them, I thought that a sort of new hopes would arise from my mother’s coming home.   Though nobody was unkind to me at all, my mind began to leave them as naturally as any.   Just as the thaw released from winter opened the brook, which headed toward the sea raising the river level all too soon, so, not knowing when, my displeasure was gradually growing within me because I understood my position and it was making a murmur of a stream day by day, seeking for a direct maternal love.   Because of it or not, I didn’t know, even when I was romping about freely mingling with my relatives, I felt wretched, and lonely, about myself who was searching their faces with constraint, somehow.

“I’m going to have my mother let me out of this house.”

If I should follow her, I thought, more different kind of happiness would wait for me.   Or, more than that, I instinctively missed my very mother.

It’s the old story: about a year after I started to live in Gahenba, I had run away from home with Yoshikazu, because he had approached me on the matter.

“I want to see my mother,” said he.   “I’ve heard she is in Hachinohe.”

He told earnestly, sniffling, in a muffled voice, that just when his mother disappeared, his father bought him a pair of skis though he didn’t request, and it was very costly, but he felt his father reserved and somehow dangerous, so he was sort of discontented, and that his father also disappeared somewhere, since then, he had not taken kindly to Jicha and Bacha and uncles.   It was because, he told, he was sure he liked his mother best in the world.   Overlapping my own personal affairs, I felt more anxious to hear his story, but he made an expression of having told everything.   And, assuming shyly that he had told in a sissy manner, he seemed to feel humiliated and somewhat irritated because he could not behave just like an elder man.   Which was beyond all expectation; contrary to his irritation, I was somehow moved by his words and willingly agreed with him.

“Let’s go where Kaz’s mother lives.”

And Yoshikazu let me in on the boarding ‘operation’ in detail, though his stories seemed indifferent to me who was very simple and innocent; such as how to get on a train without a ticket, how to cheat station attendants or conductors, and so on.   I felt like being lit up by different light while I was going with Yoshikazu, so I couldn’t hear his stories at all.

Next morning, in the fleeces of falling snow, we cut preschool, passed through a wire fence at the platform of Noheji station, and boarded a local train bound for Ueno.   Because of fear, perhaps, I felt that a ticket examiner seemed surprised to look after our figures.   Controlling a feeling of excitement, we looked for an empty coach as slowly as possible, and stuck near the window of the corner seats facing each other, as if hid under cover.

In contrast with the night before, Yoshikazu was low-spirited in a timid way.   Before him, I was trying to behave as lively as possible, bouncing on the seat or rubbing the window.

“Don’t bother me.”

Yoshikazu said like a grown-up, and looked around restlessly.

The train whistle blew resonantly.   It began to move, shaking its whole body violently.   I put my fists on the laps, made up my mind thoroughly.   When I bent my head, I saw the snow, which was sticking to my rubber boots, melting and gathering on the dark moist floor.

I asked Yoshikazu a question which had been kept in my mind all day.

“Hachinohe is near Jusanko Lake?”

“I don’t know, but why?”

I replied nothing.   The view from the window was receding from Noheji at fraught speed.   I felt I’d never be able to come back again.   Yoshikazu grinned at me with self-scorn, wiping his nose with an ear of a Dambo-cap.

“After seeing my mother, I won’t come back to Noheji.   If so, Bacha wouldn’t give me a spank on the bottom because I wore underpants dyed with urine.”

Seeing his serious expression, I unexpectedly found out something like a truth of a life I couldn’t understand.   But, I can’t say well, it seemed to me a grain of truth, for I immediately remembered Bacha’s mild face.   I wondered why such gentle Bacha slaps him on the buttocks.   I withdrew my gaze from his face into a flat snowscape out of the window.   There was something about his countenance which somehow struck home to my heart.   I returned my eyes to him.   And, becoming embarrassed vaguely, I said cheerfully,

“Both Jicha and Bacha aren’t stern.”

“With you, are they?”

He turned his face away from me in a superficial cold manner.   It seemed to me that he liked me but didn’t like the position I was in.   I didn’t think Jicha and Bacha were partial to me.   I loved them very much and I had no fear which sank into my heart from an everyday life, but to Yoshikazu ― he seemed to feel that the best part of his soul would be lost if he was leading such a hard life.   I also felt somewhat out of place, from the preschool to a life in Ghenba, and got mentally tired in my own way, so I was conscious to something which touched my heart because of his expression.   

“Don’t you want to see your mother?”

“I’ll also meet my mother, after your meeting your mother.”

I didn’t do my duty to him.   For a long time, especially, since yesterday, there was something in the bottom of my heart.   I thought he had guessed it right, and so I unexpectedly felt pressure in the chest.

“OK.   I’ll follow you.”

I didn’t know where Jusanko Lake was, but I had a fancy that it was near Hachinohe.   The train came to a slope and I heard a wheeze of the steam.   We silently looked far or near at the beech wood.   

We passed by some stations never heard before.   Moving in the snow, I sometimes looked up the gray sky from the window, but I didn’t know where in the sky the sun was going around.   Soon a ticket inspector came round.   Yoshikazu and I more and more flattened ourselves against the window.   The conductor nearly passed by us, feeling someone lurking, turned back again.   And he spoke to us, gathering sweet lines in his eyes’ corner.   

“You are with your father and mother, aren’t you?”

I tried to remember ‘operation,’ but it couldn’t have occurred, for I didn’t mean to keep it in mind from the first.   Yoshikazu, operation executive, also lost color and was upset by the incident realized suddenly.   He looked at me in tears.   The conductor’s look turned severe.

“Do you both have a ticket?”

We revolted from the conductor who was tensed up helplessly, not taking any measures, and remained silent stubbornly.

“If you stay silent, I’ll hand over you to the police.   Hey, don’t you have a ticket!”

“No.”

Surprised at his fierce look, we shook our head together.   He frowned in a moment, and said in a gentle tone,

“You two alone boarded the train?”

“Yes.”

I replied, looking up him as if to make an appeal for mercy.   Since I expected we would be forgiven because of special conditions that we were children, running into his severe cold face, my heart beat fast.

“My mother will pay for it.”

Yoshikazu nailed his shaky voice to him.

“Where’s your mother?”

“She’s in Hachinohe.”

“Hachinohe?”

“Jusanko Lake.”

I answered following him.

“Jusanko?   That’s in Tsugaru, you know.”

“You are wrong.   It’s near Hachinohe.”

Yoshikazu tugged me by the sleeve hurriedly, it’s too late.   But then, a suspicious look disappeared from the conductor’s eyes and the whole face wearing a hat brightened up with a smile, perhaps because he was shocked at our absurd responses.

“You, come with me.”

Smiling proudly and satisfactorily, he put his big hand on our shoulders.   Then we were took to the conductor’s room at the back of the car, and questioned by two men with much circumstance.   Yoshikazu sobbed and I joined him.

They left us in the stationmaster’s room in the station of Furumagi, after reporting closely, saluted and went away.

“Sato Zenkichi?   In Noheji ―.   I’ve heard of the name.”

The stationmaster, smiling sweetly at our faces, telephoned Noheji station.   Laughing or nodding, he had a long talk.

“So the man, yes …Sato Zenkichi, yes, at Shinmichi …yeah, a well-known locomotive driver, you know.   It’s a long time after he retired, isn’t it?   Yeah, yeah, two kids.   I’ll remand them back by the next train, so I leave it entirely to you.”

We were made to sit by the coke stove, and questioned about our circumstances again.

“You are grandsons of Mr. Zenkichi, are you?   Why did you do this?”

“Yoshikazu, you know, said he wanted to see his mother.   So I came to see my mother in Jusanko Lake, too.   It’s true.”

“Don’t you live with your mother?”

“Yeah, Kazu and I live with Jicha and Bacha.”

“Don’t tell Jicha, for God’s sake.”

Yoshikazu began to sob again.

“I know, I know, but I had already telephoned.   Your Jicha will never scold so much, I think.   ― I can remember well Mr. Sato.   He was a very much brilliant man.   Excellent person, you know.   He passed a navy examination in which only two men were supposed to be admitted in the prefecture.   It was said to have been sent to Siberia on a warship.   When he returned, he got a job to drive a locomotive.   He was a little senior to me, and a remarkably skillful driver.   In a happy visit of Mikado to Tohoku district, he drove the glorious train.   He was an honorable locomotive driver, you know.   ― Don’t cry.   Don’t worry about anything.”

He then ordered two noodles and treated us with them.   Since I felt as if he were a warm supporter of us, I ate it willingly.   Yoshikazu seemed utterly to lose his appetite, glancing at me out of the corner of his eye.

“This tastes good, Kazu.   Eat it.”

Yoshikazu reluctantly start to eat the noodle as if he persuaded himself that the stationmaster had enough sense to understand what he really meant, casting him an up glance.

Jicha was, with a straight back, waiting for us at Noheji station.   I was moved by his gentle smile.   Yet Jicha hit us on the head very hard with his fist.   Yoshikazu did not cry any more.

“You are a disgrace to the family ― .”

It seemed that his words were incompatible with his feelings.   Trying to hide a quiver of cheeks, I refrained from tears.   I was very happy to be scolded together with Yoshikazu.

  At the night, we were treated with kid gloves by Zenji and Yoshio, and specially entertained by Bacha for sweet rice balls.   She told us that it was useless to look for Yoshikazu’s mother because she had left Hachinohe and covered up her tracks, and that my mother had already quitted teaching in Jusanko Lake and now was working in a big hotel in a suburb of Furumagi.   I happened to get off at the station of the town where my mother lived!

  “You don’t want to stay at this house, do you?”

  Jicha tapped the edge of the fireplace with his long pipe and made a sour face, perhaps because his presence of mind which he kept during the day was quickly lost while listening to Bacha’s talk.

  “That’s what children did.   They are to blame for nothing.”

  Bacha bent her head and sipped a cup of green tea, putting her hand on her chest.   She looked a little forlorn.   Jicha hit the edge with his pipe again.

  “Both parents and children are having their own way.”

  “We are brothers, you know.”

  Yoshio, listening silently to their talk at a lower seat, said in tears as if he were enraged by Jicha’s sharp tongue.

  ― Six months has already passed since then.   Summer came, and unexpectedly I was told that I’d soon meet my mother, when suddenly my strong determination flowed out from my heart and hardened.   The thought did not come from a wish that I tried to pretend to have a secret or wanted to have my own secret furtively, but from the very bottom of my heart.   For what reason were there such secretive bad feelings?   Even if I had confided the feelings to anyone, they could not at all have explained the reason to me well.   In any case, I was burning for the moment of my mother’s arrival and thinking that, if I should miss this opportunity, the chance of happiness of my living with Mother would no longer come around.

6

The first day of Bon festival, in the morning, Zenji was sent on an errand to buy flowers and incense sticks.   There was a hum of lively conversation around the house, and the decoration of a Shinto shelf became gorgeous.   Yoshikazu and I, taking no account of the buzz, were listening to Jicha’s reminiscences of the Navy days.   It was the first time that Jicha spoke of it.

“Though I was but an engineer, I was forced to run on the deck every day.   Honestly, I was exhausted.”

“The other day, the stationmaster praised you for your intelligence or brilliance.”

“You said the stationmaster?”

“Yes.   I met him when I went to Furumagi with Kazu.”

Jicha grinned at me.

“Oh, yeah, the stationmaster of Furumagi…his name is Takahashi.   He was my junior partner.   When we were running in the Shimokita Peninsula, I would burn coal and he was engaged in the conductor.   He is businesslike to the bone.”

“Businesslike?”

“Such men will make a success of life.   Such men say everything clearly.   As long as they continue saying something, they can’t fall behind current trends as a man like me.   Anyway, they are smart, you know.”

I didn’t understand well Jicha’s message, but remembering all the details of his friendly countenances which the stationmaster wore that day, I was listening to it.   And, although I did not have ill feeling against the stationmaster, when I looked back the difference of the brightness as a man between Jicha and the stationmaster, I felt that the odds were in favor of Jicha and I was relieved vaguely.

“Didn’t the stationmaster go to war?”

“No, he didn’t.   He is younger than I by five or six years, so was not in time for war.   ― It was good for him not to go to war.   Russians are nasty and scary.   Just when I was boarding a ship, there was N-port case and they killed 500 or 600 Japanese.”

“You were almost killed, too?”

“I was always on the sea.   I never joined war.   I was but an engine driver in a boiler house, you know.”

“Your battleship was Yamato?”

Yoshikazu asked, with a happy twinkle in his eyes.

“Idiot, that’s of a different time.”

Yoshikazu languished immediately.   It was very bitter for me to look at a spiritless profile of him.

Rather late in the evening, , Bacha came back from the kitchen after finishing washing up supper, when there was a noise someone made in entering the earth floor.   I dashed for the shoji and opened it.   Mother was standing there with her hands full of souvenirs, withholding her laughter.

“Kacha!”

A smile which sprang naturally in spite of her withholding was flying about around her face, and I felt dazzling.   But, watching her not from outside but from inside, I realized in a moment that she was not what she really had been when I lived together in Tokyo.   For, Climbing on the doorsill and coming up to the light, her appearance which once seemed neat and clean was wrapped a fluffy dress which was associated with a city life, and there was something unsuitable for her atmosphere in my memory about it.

Yet I was supremely happy.   Her souvenir for me was a pair of gloves hung on a neck, which seemed too early for the season.   It was not something sturdily knitted by hand but flimsy one which was on sale.   It was not somehow satisfactory to me, but was busy expressing great happiness body and soul.

“I didn’t have enough time.”

She sensitively sensed the sign of my displeasure and smiled as if she apologized to me.   Even the common excuse, when it was said by Mother, sounded like one which has a special meaning.   I did not cling to my mother, feeling constraint before Yoshikazu, but was watching Mother’s lips when she spoke, leaning against Jicha’s lap.   Her souvenirs for Yoshikazu and Yoshio were both a box of chocolates.   They compared the number or the variety of each other’s chocolates at the corner of the living room.

“Give some to Taku.”

Jicha called them.

“What’s your souvenir, Jicha?”

“I don’t know.   It is a great treat to open it later.”

“I’m sure it’s a radio, transistor radio.”

“I can’t buy such an extravagance.”

My mother gave a bitter smile and looked hard at Jicha’s face.

“What’s yours, Bacha?”

“If your mother leaves enough money to buy rice with, I have no complaints.   I don’t want any souvenirs.”

“Don’t be stupid!”

Jicha rebuked sharply for her spiteful talk.

“How frivolous you look!   If you have enough time to buy souvenirs, you should send more money instead.”

Bacha said in a high-pitched voice as though her patience had snapped.

“I’m sorry….”

A vein rose on Jicha’s forehead, and his patience also nearly had snapped.   I smiled as best as I could to animate the silent occasion for fear that my mother’s precious visit should spoil.

“What about Zenji?”

Mother answered instead of Zenji as if she were saved by my question.

“It’s a baseball glove, made of America.   Well, it is a bit old.   An American soldier of the Occupation Forces gave it to me.   I’ve heard that Zenji is around in a baseball team in high school.”

Zenji repeatedly drove his fist into the dark brown glove proudly.   But Zenji and Yoshio were delicately away from my mother following Bacha.   Yet they sometimes called my mother, “Anecha(sister),” fawningly.   So I knew that, on this special occasion, they were not necessarily diffident with Bacha and me at bottom.   

Soon gradually the air eased off, and the subject exchanged between Mother and Bacha shifted to brothers or sisters who had died earlier.   They spoke of difficult posthumous Buddhist names, and sometimes Bacha was moved to tears.   Presently Bacha called the tune and they all, except Jicha, leaped up.

We walked in the dark night led by Bacha’s lantern.   People in the town, who lived sticking to this locality and knew each other, also lighting the road with a lantern or a flashlight, gave some greetings to us and passed on.   Mother was following with her hands in her skirt’s pockets, I walked holding her wrist.   It was very cold, as if she differed with my plans.

“Well, Mother.”

“Yes?”

“When will you go back?”

“Tomorrow….”

“When will you come next?”

“I wonder when I can come.   New Year or this time of next year again.”

I thought it was improper to the occasion, but I ventured to ask her.

“Can I go with you?”

“Where?”

“Furumagi.”

“You can’t, because I am too busy with my job and must work far into the night.   I can’t take good care of you.”

I didn’t accept it as a fatal pronouncement.   I didn’t give up.   There was one more day left.   I would speak to Mother, tonight and tomorrow, little by little, patiently, in the mood to visit a shrine a number of times.   But, while I was looking for the next tonight’s words, the precincts of a temple was already just around the corner.

The paths, which partitioned off the graveyard into a large or small burial ground, were all full of people having prepared for the Bon Festival and enjoying a sociable atmosphere.   Most of them came only for this day.   Acquaintances, who had never met for some time, came from the places they married into or from the cities they emigrated to, and were exchanging greetings here and there before the gravestones.   Among them, only my mother was beautifully sparkling.

We put our hands together in front of the gravestone of forefathers’ according to the ancient custom, and then sat on the unfolded newspapers, eating delicious Nishime depending on the dim light of the moon which had risen from behind the cedars.   Mother sorted out Koya-tofu which was a weakness of mine and dished it up.   Her hair came close to me, and I faintly caught a quick scent of perfume mixing with a smell of grass.

During the night, even after four children climbed into futon, my mother and grandparents were speaking in a whisper.   I was able to get ‘grade school’ or ‘remittance.’   Sometimes, I stealthily slipped out of futon and looked at the nape of her beautiful neck or at her buxom shoulders from a chink in the shoji.

Before long, Mother said weakly to grandparents,

“I’ll go to bed.”

She came into the children’s room which was our special bedroom only for the day.   I gazed, from a futon with glowing eyes with pleasure and determination, at her silhouette which slid a shoji open and stole into the room.   But Mother did not look at me, and quickly crept into a prepared futon, making a silent breathing she seemed to be consciously controlling, until Jicha’s footsteps faded away in the room where Buddhist alter was placed(Butsuma) ― he then put his bed in Butsuma and slept there.

And at last there was no chance for us to talk with.   I opened my eyes wide in the dark, speculating as to my tomorrow’s fortune.

In the middle day of Bon Festival, I had diarrhea.   I felt as if my bowels melted into a pulp and ran down.   Looking sideways at Mother’s getting ready to return, I went to the bathroom many times.

“Don’t go back till my diarrhea stops.”

Mother gave a puzzled smile.   Zenji said to her, “See you again, Sumi,” and went out hurriedly in baseball uniform.

“Don’t be selfish.   Your mother works because of you, doesn’t she?”

Bacha said in an irritated voice.   Jicha was silently smoking a pipe.   Both Yoshio and Yoshikazu remained in their room and didn’t come out.

“Well, I must be going.   I’ll come and see you again.   Stay healthy.”

Prompted by grandparents, my mother put her shoes on and tried to leave.   Her back brought me a miserable feeling.   I clung to the shoji which divided the living room from the earth floor, and called out to her at the top of my voice.

“Take me out!”

Mother, who opened the door and was about to go out from the earth floor, looked back as if to show a lingering attachment for me.　

 “I’ll go to Furumagi, too!”　　

I was crying not at my mother or grandparents but at the whole world which seemed to leave me.

“Don’t be silly!”

Yoshio was watching the run of events holding his breath, but unable to control his temper any longer, rushed out from the children’s room.     He held me by the arm and tried to drag me into the room.   I continued to cry clinging to the frame.   I couldn’t give way.   It was the crunch when I could get out of an uneventful and unpromising days like a dead pond (after seeing Mother who came from another world, I especially felt that way) and my life could come across good luck.

“Take me, please.   I’m sure to be a good boy!”

My cry alone rang in the living room.   Jicha, Bacha, Yoshio, and all of them did not say a single word.

“Take him along ―. ”

Jicha said, hitting the long pipe as usual, to my mother who could not leave in the dark corner of the earth floor.

“That’s surely right.   If you get sucked into the mire, you’d better bring him back again.   It is more challenging than to live alone.   When you live with a child and feed him, it will be one of the things that give you the enjoyment in its way.”

Calming herself down, Bacha said philosophically.   She did not look depressed.   Yoshikazu’s rolling eyes looked at us through the chink in the shoji.

7

Giving way to her only son’s prayer, Mother was forced to take him to her den before recovering confidence in her life.   It was less than two years since she left Jusanko.   She had already quitted teaching, and was working at Kokusai Hotel which was on the fringe of Furumagi(Misawa), like a dance hall where soldiers of the Occupation Forces gathered.   There were not many rooms in the hotel, which was canalizing their energies into business as a place of amusement for soldiers rather than that of lodging.

Her main work was to attend to visitors at the front desk, but when short of hands, she was made to serve foreigners with drinks.   And dealing with big tall men who wore blue shirts and khaki pants, she laughed, poured drinks for them, or clung to their arms.   She seemed to get into the habit of smoking while passing such unpleasant gaudy and exciting days.

I got to sleep while Mother was away, and when I woke up in the morning, she had already disappeared without notice.   Though I walked around the hotel for her, usually I couldn’t find her, and retuned to our room feeling empty.   In the room whose fittings were just hangers, a bed, and a leather easy chair, I experienced a taste of a stick of chocolate with peanuts and that of solitude while I was hearing a hum of conversation and music in the distance.

One day, late at night, Mother was carried into the room where I was staying up for her.   Two coworkers laid her on the bed.   In a second, the room was filled with a sickly smell of alcohol.   They rubbed her gasping back, took turns to dip a towel in the water and cooled her forehead.

“Is Mother ill?”

“She’s just got drunk.”

They waved to me and got out of the room.   Mother, who was speechless, and I were left behind in the dark room.   I sat on a stool alone by her bedside, looked at her open-mouthed sleeping face.   Loneliness welled up in me severely.

Is this a happy life which I have long dreamed of?

―But there was something interesting about the life in Kokusai Hotel.   Officers and soldiers with blue eyes strode along corridors and stairs one after another, when our eyes met, they winked at me cheerfully, came closer and gave chocolates.

Not becoming on good terms, I sometimes saw children on the bench of the hallway, whom I couldn’t communicate with in Japanese.   They came in my lonely room out of curiosity without my invitation, jumping up and down on the bed, glancing through the kanji drills and picture books, looking over circular menkos, and got out with a look of weariness.   In spite of it, the life in the hotel was more peaceful and pleasant than that of Noheji.   For my mother was always there for me to reach, and each person here was open, not interchanging complicated feelings with one another, and was never scented with an odor of working his or her guts out and only to suffer.   They understood by tacit agreement that just as people following a gay trade should do, so should human beings live for themselves.   Of course I only a child could not analyze such matters, but I, who has a disposition to seek for a homelike affection, keenly realized such free human association.

After nearly one hour, Mother’s moan became severe.

“Basin…Takuya, bring me a basin.”

I rushed to the bathroom.   A groan which a man seemed to give shook the air of the room without the break.   Running back to the bed, I put the basin to her mouth, in which she threw up yellow liquid giving off a sour smell.   I sat on a stool again and began to watch her mouth which was moving like lips of a goldfish.   ―What on earth she had to suffer for?   I didn’t understand.   It was for money Bacha spoke of?   Or because of being bullied by someone in the hotel for some reason or other, she was so sad that she forced herself to fall ill?   Or, was she trying to tame her own grief, which I could not guess and she wanted to keep private thoroughly?   It might be concerned with the fact that there was no father who accompanied every family.

Suddenly the conclusive thought gripped me that my mother was suffering because of me.   As I continued having my own way to follow reluctant Mother, she was dying.   So she always kept away from me almost all day long, was forced to work to forget me, and at last she fell ill and carried into the room.   ―I must be back.   I would go back to Noheji again, and be a good boy by my grandparents, and stay patient until Mother would meet me some day.

Then, I found a white hair in her side locks.   I thought it a symbol of death rather than that of life.   A bottomless fear hung over me.   Tremendous beats went up to my ears.   I stood up from a stool, clinging to her arm, put my face to her pillow and called her out.

“Don’t die, Mother!”

I could hear her faint moan.

“I ‘m so sorry, Mother, don’t die!   I’m returning to Noheji.”

She just continued to groan knitting her brows.   But few minutes later, she opened her dirty red eyes and whispered.

“You don’t have to go back….”

And then, nodding slowly at my forehead, she managed to persist in her independent determination just by smiling on her lips.   I shed tears.   And said again and again;

“Don’t die.”

Presently the thaw had set in.   I entered a grade school at Oka-misawa.   One morning in April, I had a memorial photograph taken with fellow students.   There were sandy mountains behind us and sometimes the vague sun shone blotting warmly.   The wind blew softly, and clouds in the sky above suddenly gathered and darkened the schoolyard.   I sat on a stool at the right end in the front row, spreading legs wide, sticking right shoulder and bit lips firmly as if I ventured something.

Shortly after I became seven, my mother went up to Tokyo with me.   To my simple mind which, for the first time, was aware of sentiment of parting from beloved people (who especially were people of Gahenba waving their hands forever at the platform of Noheji station), all the landscapes from the train window approached before me with a deep spiritual sense.

“At last, I knew where your father is.”

When the scenery was dyed by twilight, Mother uttered shortly and gave a sigh.   I was surprised afresh at the fact that she was tracing my father, at the same time, without connection, I remembered Jicha’s gentle eyes as a forbidden secret, who was standing at the platform.

“I’ve got to settle with him this time.”

Her preparation for something communicated itself well to me.   I also understood that she would go to Tokyo for the something.   But I didn’t know what kind of showdown it was.

8

On the soaring cliff, there was a row house under the same roof.   The foot of the cliff was a tussock as far as the eye could sweep.   In the grass, a shaft of silver rails ran as if to be spanned by the use of the reflection of faint light falling on the grass.

In a room of the apartment, there lived an old man who had a precious expression as if to suggest that he was the biggest man in the world, and an old woman who always persistently put the bad mouth on society.   There wasn’t a person there who seemed like my father.

To start with, I gave a greeting to them sitting on my heels and bowing down deeply as told to by Mother.   And then she told me that they were parents of my father.

“I’m sorry to trouble you for a while.”

After that, she went out somewhere without any explanation, and didn’t come back for a few days.   The old woman in kimono of good texture was sitting still hunching her shoulders all day except while reciting a sutra, and didn’t want to approach me.   The old man was out all day long and I rarely saw him.   Once in a long while, he came back drunk in his carpenter’s tabi.

“I feel sorry for you.”

Patting me on the head, he shed cheap elevated tears.

I hated them.

One day the old man’s table made of birch was scratched on the top, and I fell under suspicion for it.   The old man raised a long pipe like a sword bean to urge me to confess.

“It was that old woman.   She did it.”

The old woman who was sitting in a flagging posture winced at my surprising words and lifted her head.   She showed signs of anger hotly in her eyes.

“What are you talking about, this stupid boy?   How dare you tell a lie without hesitation.   That’s devious of you.   You scratched with a pencil, didn’t you?”

“Tell a lie and I’ll shut you out of this house.”

“I told you a truth.   She did it with this.”

I took out a white plastic pallet for sewing from a work basket on the drawers, showed it to him out of display.

“Like this, she marked a line hard on a cloth.”

Hanging over the table, I gestured.

“It is not I but she that tells a lie.   She said, ‘Damn!’ and put spittle on her finger to rub the table with.   If you tell lies, you know, you are pulled your tongue out by Enmasama.”

They felt disgusted with my primitive ardent assertion and became silent with a rotten look.

“I’ll tell on you when my mother gets back.”

I flung a parting shot at them and went outside.   Although I had no object, anyway, I wanted to leave the apartment.   I walked on and on down the unfamiliar road.   Only one road ran along the cliff and it simply descended down.   It was getting dark.   The sound of a bugle of a tofu vendor came up the path.   It was a time for the old woman to begin to make supper.

―I won’t eat such supper as that girl made.

There was a fire water tank on the road looking down over the grass.   Some diving beetles were floating on and sinking in the water.   When I tried to scoop it up, it easily went in my palm.   I became gloomy and stood on the edge of the cliff to look at the rails.   An olive train of the Toyoko Line was just coming toward the foot of the cliff at Tanmachi.   There was some feeling fermenting at the back of my mind.   I just kicked a fist-size stone down at the train approaching the tussock.   The stone rolled away crushing the grass, speeding up in a sliding way, bouncing high last and hiding in the grass on the verge of swooping the body.

“Takuya, aren’t you?”

Looking back, I saw my mother standing.   She looked haggard.

“Where have you been, Mother?”

“I was looking for a job.   And… I had to talk with your father.”

I caught her arm right away, talking that they had wronged me in a false charge and been defeated miserably.

“Things will not really succeed, won’t they?”

She muttered vague impression which I’m not sure consoled me or herself, then hugged me by the head.

From the next day on, she didn’t go out.   She worked hard cooking in the kitchen and washing outside.   The old woman sat down on tatami and was bending by the Buddhist alter, while the old man drinking at one place after another as usual.   Ａ　man who described himself as my father’s brother, though I didn’t know where he heard about me, sometimes came and gave me a ride on the luggage carrier of his rakish bicycle which did not seem to be a man’s one, ran about along the streets of Yokohama, which had many slopes.   Sending out a sour smell from his muscular body which might not have experienced weariness, he ran up and down the similar roads over and over again.   His radius of action was surprisingly small.   Every time he found a bicycle shop, he pumped air into one tire after another with his natural strength, which was his pastime.   One day, at last, he burst a tire at a storefront after making a tour of some shops.   He threw up the air pump over his head and got into a fury with a horrible kook.   I cleaved my way through the onlookers and ran away back to that apartment.   Since then, I was very much afraid of him, and did not play with him if he asked me to.

Two weeks after coming to the apartment by the cliff, Mother and I alone moved to a house for rent which was in a position for looking down at Tanmachi tunnel of Toyoko line and which slanted like a wrecked ship.   And we lived there for twenty days.   Neither the old man, the old woman, the air-pump man, nor anybody came.   I was happy.

“We alone together must go on living, mustn’t we?”

Every night, after going to bed, she mumbled at the dark ceiling and always hugged me to cry.   I terribly wondered why she cried though I was happy with her alone.

Only once, I saw in a dream Mother handling something with her leg lifted high under a miniature bulb, rustling a piece of paper after crying for a while.   A deeper and clearer red than that of the bulb-light soaked through the paper by which she wiped that something.   Mother noticed that I was watching her behavior and threw me a fierce look.   I rolled over in a hurry, for I felt that I had peeped in the secret of her sorrow.

9

  Just turning June, I transferred to Aoki grade school which was at the foot of the hill where it took me twenty minutes to walk from Tanmachi tunnel.   On entering the school, we moved to the edge of a high-class residential area on the top of the slope leading to Aoki Bridge.   They called the whole hill Takashima Terrace.

  A wasteland spread around some twenty private houses in the terrace, on whose corner there was barracks of the bullpen of K Construction.   My mother’s new job was to take care of daily meals of laborers in the construction camp, who were building a housing development on top of the hill.   The men respected my mother who was a former teacher, and treated me, her only son, with perfect tenderness.   I somehow felt awkward.   Mother began to work with her hair in a bun, her chin up.

  One day, when I was introduced as a transfer by a woman teacher named Shinomiya who wore glasses, I quickly found a pretty girl among the new classmates.   She reminded me of Keiko who was killed at the railroad crossing.   She wore a light pink dress and had a noble, beautiful appearance I had never seen in Noheji or Misawa.   The bobbed hair up to her shoulder wove as often as she turned to her side, then her big drooping eyes twinkled.   She looked rather unyielding.   When her eyes met mine by chance, she looked firmly at me a little while, soon the strong-minded look faded away, and she hanged her head.

  After school, I happened to see her name, Fukuda Masako, in the name card on her chest.   

  The lonely days had continued for some time in Takashima Terrace as well.   It doesn’t mean that there were no children around me, but that, since I left Noheji, grown-ups, who scented out a danger in my way, were always surrounding me with great care like buoys which informed me of the position of the fishing net.   And I did not think of the situation as extraordinary at all.   

  Another reason why I had been alone was that a migrant from the country, among the rich, was ashamed to speak words with a country accent, in the terrace or at the school.   Tokyo accent had completely replaced Tohoku one within a few years.

  “Unda, unda, usopattsu ― Your accent is very funny.”

  Classmates hooted at me with laughter.   That is, they mimicked my dialect, “Yes,” or “I can’t believe.”   It was at this point that I became conscious how I had been leading a life detached from the culture of cities, protected by reserved sun and cold wind and artless noise of the country, or how the way of life was curious and deserved to be made fun of.   In the country, nature, grass and trees were appareled earlier than human beings.   But in the city, humans tried to be dressed earlier than nature.   As a result, I just began to look into people’s face for fear of feeling humiliated in public.

  A conveyer belt went just from the back of the camp up to the construction site and disappeared in the way beyond a heap of mud.   I lonesomely played crawling on my stomach on the belt.   I sometimes pretended to be an airplane spreading my arms wide.   The belt reached the top of a heap of earth and sand and then I jumped from on it just before it turned, which was thrilling beyond expression.

  “Ho, there!   That’s dangerous, naughty boy, get down!”

  One day when I played with the belt, a man who wore a headband shouted out from the driver’s seat of a cement mixer car.   Responding to his voice, a manager of the site rushed from behind the car and held me in his arms.   And he carried me on his shoulder to the canteen of the company’s office.

  In the presence of my mother who made a humble apology, he repeatedly exhorted her that the site was dangerous.   Just before we moved here, he said, the wire rope which operated the belt pinched a laborer’s calf and dragged him, but he was barely rescued.  His injury being aggravated, he had his leg amputated for saving his life.   Yet he finally died in spite of it.

  “It’s tetanus.   It’s prevalent around here.”

  The manager spoke in a soft voice and went back, clearly reminding me not to get at the site any way.

  At the night Mother bought the radio of foreclosure.   She put it in our room.   She must have had an ulterior for drawing her son’s curiosity to a safe indoor pastime.   As for the radio, Zenji had one in Noheji, and I had listened to dramas, ‘Utena-no-To’ or ‘Fuefuki-Doji.’   The pleasantness at that time came back to me and I had been rejoiced for a few days since then, but I became somehow dissatisfied, so went out to breathe the blue sky, and walking with the conveyer belt in confidence, I played as usual with black dirt which was carried away.

As to the city of Yokohama, there lived the poor in lowland and the highland was symbolic of the rich.   In the sense that it was a symbol, the highland was the existence too high for the people to reach beyond the physical distance.   The image of the social system fully penetrated into my naïve mind.   Here in Takashima Terrace the bourgeois were making one another’s lots in order to cohabit, only that bullpen of K Construction was mixed in the luxurious space as a foreign object.   I avoided approaching them who looked something modest beside laborers, and always played around the bullpen, if possible.   When going and leaving school, I kept away from the residential zone.   In the evening, alone, I climbed up the cliff beating my way through green grass.   The scenery of the urban district from the highland was refreshing for the eyes of an étranger.   A line of fresh lights of Yokohama station, a string of bright lights through the windows of a train which is approaching into the lights of the station from the dark ― a strange ambition rose in my body.   And the track glowing in the setting sun ran longer and longer not to extinguish it.

Yet, as time went by, such a lonely boy as me got some friends of my age.   Hiroyuki, Sabu, Kyoko…all of them were inhabitants in Takashima Terrace.

Hiroyuki, the president in my class, produced a thoroughbred atmosphere from his generous manner.   When our eyes met by chance, however, he withdrew his gaze in a confused way and made a intricate face; as if he looked sideways at a rare animal with a glass between us, or felt pity for difference of origin between us.

He took care of his things well.   A bicycle of 24 inches, an electric locomotive miniature, stationary of various colors, large-sized notebooks, a cup-and-ball, menko, marbles…anyway he had everything.   Whenever invited in his room, I tried not to behave wistfully.   And every month I borrowed new comic books from him and read.

“Why don’t you drop by?”

When leaving school, he often invited me to supper, but I avoided following him at meals.   I disliked a refined woman whom Hiroyuki called “Mama” at first sight.   The affected way she set the dishes, her custom to call everything adding a prefix of ‘O’, and the hypocritical smile she wore when pressing for another bowl of rice, which I abhorred.   Though they could spin their own life directly out of what they had in mind even if they didn’t know at all what kind of fashion there was in the world or if they didn’t care which tide their life came under, she seemed to learn a lesson from an indirect life which existing fashions had already made up.   Anyway why didn’t Hiroyuki call her mother ‘Kachan’ when he was Japanese?   From the woman who made him call herself ‘Mama’ and the corner of whose lips slanted upward to wear an admirable smile, I sniffed out shrewd cruelty of human beings who pretended to have the shady authority.

I liked Sabu very much.   There was no odor of ‘money’ in him, but was a kind of balminess like the sunshine which appeared through green leaves in the early summer.   He didn’t put on grand manner, stood straight like a Japanese cedar, didn’t withdraw his gaze from the other’s eyes, and spoke in a careless way without sarcasm.   He did not belong to my class, but when someone bullied me in the playground he always appeared from somewhere and gave it to him.   When I thanked him, he always smiled shyly.   It was he that asked me to play softball for the first time.

Sometime when we went into a bamboo grove and played cutting the leaves with a Higo-no-Kami (a small folding knife), I cut his arm accidentally.   He rolled his eyes up and said,

“I don’t care this.”

And then he applied his spit to the bleeding cut as if nothing had happened.

The garden of Hiroyuki’s house was lapped in a shabby clump and bamboo grove, which were like a copse.   Kyoko’s family rented a detached house at the bottom of the copse.   They seemed to have long been living there as a sort of pioneering peasants.   Their old miserable bungalow, which stuck to the edge of the bamboo grove, looked like a wood-guard hut from a distance.

Kyoko was a kind of common girl, who always wore a pair of dirty canvas shoes and revealed panties yellowed by pee through a short skirt.   She came to our bullpen almost every other day, observing a dining room or a recreation room for laborers with her inquisitive eyes glittering, and secretly gave a scornful laugh in a relieved way.   When my mother served her a snack, Kyoko didn’t eat it but got up hurriedly as if she had remembered a sudden engagement, bowing her and went back.

Kyoko had once asked me to steal into a bicycle-shed of Hiroyuki’s with her, when I was made to finger a slimy thing under her dirty panty.   When I looked her face without intention, Kyoko was taking a thin labored breath with her eyes closed and her shoulders quivering.   I remained doing so, not understanding the meaning of time which was gliding by listlessly.

“Between ourselves….”

I could hear Kyoko’s sweaty voice, when she tried not to show her face and turned her rich hair away from me.

The train whistle came back to me from a distance.   Keiko’s snow-white tinkle which splashed about my feet and a caress with grass ― and the vivid dazzling color of her blood which dyed snow, the ominous atmosphere of a vague purple grove…they flooded to me as though it was blowing up a storm.   Yet, contrary to my profuse sentiment, a remote sense of happiness caught me afresh.   I somehow had a fancy that Keiko grew up to be a long-hair girl and lay down before me, and then allowed me to fondle her thing which she didn’t let me touch at that time.

But the little happiness, when Kyoko’s tense voice overlapped with Keiko’s hesitant voice; “Like this, you now…,” and her blood overlapped with Mother’s sad secret which was rustling in the house by the cliff, suddenly slipped on my skin and disappeared as if to be sucked into the real breathing of woman- creatures.   I quietly withdrew my hand.   And I left her in the shed.

Both Kyoko’s family and Hiroyuki’s one became believers in a communion in which they gathered at night to pray.   Even my mother was sometimes invited to pray with a crowd.   Since I felt sad to be left alone in a four and half-tatami room in the bullpen, I worried at her to take me there whenever the gathering was held.   There was a lecture, a prayer, announcements about a miracle, and a prayer again.   Even when the clock struck eleven, nobody stood up.   I felt terribly sleepy and telling to death, and when I was about to lie down, a believer next to me shook my shoulder severely not to sleep.   I wished I had not followed her.   In such an occasion, Mother would often fall into anemia and faint, then somebody would nurse her.

“She is leading a life full of worries, isn’t she?”

 Hiroyuki’s mother said so, but the tone of her voice was so cordial that I somehow smelled a rat.

10

  There was a big temple of the Obaku Sect by Aoki bridge.   The brick road of the temple surrounded a thick forest was our secret school zone.   In the precincts, there was a wire-netting cage about twice the height of ours.   When we passed by it, a monkey always threatened us, raising a grievous voice and shaking the net.   We picked up a stone and threw it at the monkey.   He jumped off from the wire net and we burst into laughter at once.   It was a pleasant autumn afternoon, when cirrocumuli were gathering around high up in the sky.   I was playing menko in the yard of Sabu’s house.

  “A monkey’s taking a walk.”

  Kyoko asked us out in haste.   I had tried not to be lured by her since the occurrence in the shed.

  “A monkey can’t take a walk.”

  Sabu turned his nose up at her.

  “A young bonze, you know, is trailing the monkey on a chain.”

  She gave a hard look at me as if she seduced me to.   Sabu and I paused to smile at each other.   From under her skirt like an ancient costume, crusty shins sticking out dismally.

  “Where?”

  I asked, bitterly and weakly smiling.

  “In a hill behind the temple.   Let’s tease it.”

  “The monkey is very ferocious, you know.”

  Sabu lifted his eyebrows as if to take precautions.

  “I said a bonze walked him, didn’t I?   That’s all right.”

  Guided by Kyoko, we went down a slope.   On the way, there was a clay path plowed sharply on the grass cliff of the cut.   Kyoko did not hesitate to creep up the path.   We followed her.

  Going up the path less than ten meters, a brisk outlook opened.   There was nothing but grass as far as the eye could reach.   I saw in the distance a butch haircut wearing a bonze costume.   He was somewhat bridling and leading something on a twinkling chain with his right hand.   My eyes tickled because of the twinkling.   From time to time a small figure jumped up from the grass.

  “Ho!  Little monkey.”

  We called together.   The young bonze laughed.   He quickly approached us at a smart pace drawn by the monkey.   We waited with long grass bunched.   When coming up to us at about two meters, he slowed down.   I saw that he had an unsophisticated smile, but, before I knew it, the smile had changed into competitive one.   Somehow, I lost my nerve.   The monkey on a chain looked thoughtful and watched us with his shifty eyes.

  “A monkey is savage, you know.”

  He said in an eccentric sharp tone.

  “I don’t care.   It is a pet monkey anyway.”

  Kyoko concluded easily.

  The hesitant time glided by.   We felt we reached a point of no return, and we three together stuck the bundle of grass out at the monkey.   Slowly ringing in an arc, straitening the arc, and shook the grass as if to aim at its face.   It opened its eyes wide and tried to jump at us baring its fangs.   We again began turning the grass slowly to discourage the monkey.

  Then, I didn’t know what he intended, the bonze quickly unlocked his fist to let go hold of the chain.   I didn’t think he could not help doing that as a result of being dragged by it.   The shape of his palm the moment it opened burnt vividly into the bottom of my eyes.   Sliding on the grass, a black object bumped against my face, smacking the cheek, and ran over my head.

  What happened?   I was lying at full length and gaping at the sky.   I felt that the grass carpet, where I was sinking myself silently, was cooling my back comfortably.   Suddenly from the sky pale death-like blue pressed my face and I was sick to the stomach.

  “Ahh!   Blood!”

  Kyoko screamed.   Holding up my head to look at my chest, I found my shirt dyed in rich red.   I seemed to continue bleeding and felt bad in the stomach because of my shirt being drenched with blood.   I could see the back of the little bonze running like a rabbit.   There was something falling on my chest.   It was Sabu who spread over to try to raise me in his arms.

  “That’s terrible, Taku.   You must go to the doctor as soon as possible!”

  He hugged me by the sides and raised me up with his face pale.   Struck with extraordinary fear, I cried out in the grass field all around.

  “I see the bone!”

  Kyoko pointed at my nose.   Sabu humped me who was crying bitterly, sliding down the grass slant, and ran up the long upward slope.   No pain came over to me.   But nevertheless I didn’t stop falling tears.   When Sabu ran into the bullpen with bloodstained boy on his back, laborers, who noticed unusual picture, suddenly began to make a noise.

  “Taku!   Who did it!”

  “The monkey…the monkey….”

  I did nothing but cry loud.   A man of sinews unburdened Sabu of me.   I held on to him.   Sabu, turning paler, remained standing with his bloodshot eyes.   The blood which soaked through his shirt was ominous.   Kyoko disappeared without notice.

  “Monkey!?”

  “The bonze let go of it.”

  “Mrs. Kawata, Takuya was badly hurt!”

  A big rough palm supported my neck.   It became darker and darker in an instant, and I passed out on the spot.

  …………

  Happily my wound was sewn up only a stitch, but unhappily tetanus germs entered through it and I hovered between life and death for a few days.   It was a thread of hope of returning safely that I had got a shot of serum in time.   I know everything during the time only by a sequel to the incident, though, according to Mother, my whole face swelled like a balloon, hair like kelp sticking to it miserably, eyelids drooping over like those of Oiwa, and I showed a grotesque look which was seemingly impossible to come to life.

  When I was in critical condition, my mother sent telegrams to my father and grandparents on his side many times.   Yet neither Father, nor grandparents who sometimes turned up on my mother’s payday, didn’t come.   

  “They are the devils of avarice, aren’t they?   Shit!   They are genial only when they snatch pay from their bride.   Like father, like son.   I don’t know how he is living, but can’t he be worried about his son’s life?   Go home.   Go, go, go and go.   Don’t come again.”

  Long after the incident, I don’t remember when, I once saw the director of the bullpen calling grandparents’ name in such a theatrical and stern manner.   Grandparents, cringing away, reversed their steps at the front door of the office.

  A Korean surgeon who, they say, treated me with his all soul said, shaking his head, “Of course I can cut off an arm or a leg, but can’t cut off a head….”

  I also heard the story from my mother in after years that the surgeon gave a diagnosis in such a way which we couldn’t decide whether it was serious or a joke, but I don’t believe the story.   For doctors couldn’t possibly say such a thing.   Probably she told a magnificent fiction, much to her relief, when looking at her son who smiled after having waked from death.

  As an expression of sympathy for me from the temple, only two cans of Eitaro-Ame, with a flavor of brown sugar and peppermint, were brought by the bonze personally in no less than one week, long after my passing the crisis.   He made a very deep artificial bow, dug in the back by the laborers, at the foot of my futon laid in a four-and-a-half-tatami room.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  He murmured reluctantly in an intentional voice, and constantly casting a nervous glance at my profile packed with gauze.   I kept silent and squirmed fiddling with a border of futon.   Mother didn’t come out of the kitchen at all.   I can remember that well.

  “Kill the monkey!”

  The director said to him in a deep menacing voice.

  After then we couldn’t find the monkey in the cage.   They said that it was killed by using poison.   The dim daylight lit the ground of the vacant cage.   Somehow, I was very sorry about both the monkey and the bonze.

  At the day when supposed to be removed the stitches, I was pulled by my mother down the slope.   A remnant stitch hung from between my nose and cheek, and I felt comfortable whenever it trembled as the wound was pulled by the breeze.   I was playing cup and ball with a hand which was not gripped by Mother.   I saw our clear shadows on the road.

  Sabu and Hiroyuki came up from Aoki Bridge.   I smiled at Sabu.

  “Are you all right, Taku?”

   I nodded smiling.   Hiroyuki watched the trembling stitch curiously.

  “At that time we got a lot of kindness from you.”

  My mother gave a deep bow politely to Sabu.   He came nearer to me and gazed at my scar with a tender but concerned look.

  “This stitch is going to be removed?”

  He timidly touched the end of it with his fingertip.

  “Sure.”

  “It hurts.”

  He threatened seriously.

  “I’ll play cup and ball then.”

  Sabu smiled wickedly as I put on a bluff.   Then they said to me, “Aba,” and came up the slope again waving to us.

11

  Hiroyuki rode around on a glittering bicycle.   The premium of “Shonen” fell on to him.   There were some pangs within me.   A fair nape of his neck badly stood out when the enchanting body of a bike smartly passed by ringing a bell.

  He always had another bicycle bought by Papa.   Even his brother, who was just out of four, had an eighteen-inch-wheel bike with assistant ones.   I was envious of him.   I wondered why someone who had been born lucky was always congratulated.    It was all I could do to have won a boy detective group pocketbook as a prize offered by the magazine “Bokura.”   Hiroyuki was a stingy boy.   Even Sabu, who was the closest friend of mine, couldn’t possibly say; “Lend me your bicycle.”

  It was not that he was reluctant to say it, but that Hiroyuki had an air which prevented him from saying it.   But this time, adding new bicycle to old one, he didn’t need to call it a ‘treasure.’   If I said, “Lend me the old one,” though jeering at my request, he wouldn’t say wildly with a nervous lightning between his eye-brows in his usual way, “You are too insistent!”   Yet, since his ‘treasure’ which other boys don’t have is something like a capital of his, he has to guard it carefully not to lose.   Then there wouldn’t be a possibility of stingy Hiroyuki lending me a bicycle.

  The more I thought in that way, visualizing the refreshing image of wheels as if to rotate reversely, the more my wish to ride a bicycle was growing day by day.

  That day I left school with Hiroyuki, after saying good-by, and I called naturally at his house, playing with him until a supper time.   I couldn’t bring up the subject about a bicycle easily.   So I declined an invitation to dinner as usual, and couldn’t bring myself to lend it till we said Bye-Bye again.   The reason why I made such a mess of it was, perhaps, not only that I was afraid of his stingy temperament but there was another reason.   That is, I couldn’t ride a bicycle.

  Hiroyuki closing the front door behind him, I sank down in thought for a while lounging over the hedge of his house in the warm light sunset.   It seemed like half an hour, but it might not have been more than one minute.   I made up my mind.

  ― I borrow that brand-new bicycle for a little while.

  I felt my eyes shining.   I approached the shed in the bamboo grove with a restless step, straining my ears around; Hiroyuki always carefully lays his bicycle there.   Looking about me for a second again, I ventured to open the shed door.   I saw, through the narrow darkness, three bicycles lining up in order.   My heart leaped up.   I pretended to think a moment without a meaning of showing anybody, and slowly took the brand-new bicycle out, which Hiroyuki won as the first prize.   

The ridge of the heights was clearly silhouetted as if it were washed by orange-colored water.   I stepped away from the Hiroyuki’s house down the wide bank along the slope, keeping my balance by kicking away the earth on one foot.   The long shadow which looked like a pillar dissolving the bicycle and me was swaying on the bank.

I grasped the handlebars, leaned my elbows against the saddle not to fall down.   As often as I kicked against the ground and away from it, yellow dust sprang up at the feet, and I was lapped by the feeling of indescribable exaltation.   Happy!   Only just controlled the desire to laugh, I began to lengthen the time of pedaling.

Going along the bank and back a few times, the frequency of successful rises increased, a feeling of guilt when I took the bicycle out from the shed faded away.   There being a dull pain in the corner of my mind, I was penetrated with a strange excitement.   Soon it changed into an uncontrolled adventure.

I’ll try straddling!

But since I was shorter than Hiroyuki, the level of the saddle seemed extraordinarily high.   I was sue I didn’t even wish to straddle.

Then, suddenly a wonderful idea floated through my mind, and I smiled.   I didn’t need to straddle the saddle.   I’d try to fold up my foot and put it into the triangular bars; to do ‘woman-ride.’   It would be an easy way.   Even Hiroyuki’s brother sometimes managed to ride a bicycle in that way.   If a child of four could do it, I could do it as well.

 I started to run, kicked hard against the earth and held on, quickly trying to put my foot into the opposite pedal ― in a moment the dusk in front of my eyes reversed,  and I was strongly gravitated together with the bicycle toward the ground.   I tried to escape the danger instinctively and kicked the bicycle to the other side.   By reaction my body was thrown on a grass slant, after a short while, the bicycle I should have kicked followed me.   It bounced irregularly, scraped my heel, rolled down and was flung on the hard road without grass.

Clinging to the grass, I stared at the bicycle lying in the gloom below.   And, slowly went down the grass slant with my stomach pressing on the grass.

The bicycle looked safe from a distance.   But when I reached the road and approached to fix my stare at it, the handle was twisted in a wrong direction, a few spokes which struck a rock broke away from the wheel.   I was flooded with despair.

“......I did horrible thing.   I’m sure I won’t escape some punishment.   I must keep this close absolutely.   But how I try to make it undone?”

Before feeling remorse, I desperately thought of the way in which I could take refuge in telling lies.   But I just felt pressure in the chest as if all blood danced there, and couldn’t think of anything.

I have no choice.   Anyway I just have to draw the bicycle to Hiroyuki’s house, have the good grace to knock at the front door and show the broken bicycle to him who comes out ― perhaps the first person who comes out may be his father or mother ― and then apologize saying timidly, “I’m sorry.”   Would it be better?   It is shameful because I might start to cry.   Hiroyuki will surely throw dirt words at me, chin in air, looking down on me, twitching his cheek in a fussy way.   It would be better if that was that.   His father or mother might say cool and collected, “Recompense it.”   If that happened, it’s a serious matter.   My mother has no power to compensate whatever.   Even now, those old people in the house near the cliff often come to the construction camp and beg money from Mother.   Besides she sometimes has to raise money for school lunch from some workmen.

I repeatedly speculated about the fact that Mother was poor as if to go around the magic circle from which I couldn’t escape.

I can’t possibly tell my mother.

……Hiroyuki got the bicycle as a prize winner of a magazine.

Bad feelings flitted through my mind.   Leave it as it is.   Hiroyuki has another bicycle.   Even when he search for tomorrow and finally find out this one, he will not be too shocked.   He may get angry a little but not bother to trace a suspect and take the bicycle to a bike shop to get it repaired.   And I can’t ride a bicycle.   Nobody could suspect that I took it out.

I kicked it deep into the grass.   A rear wheel spun slowly and stopped.

I left the bicycle and run heavily to our bullpen along the bank with complete dark.   There were lights in the canteen and laborers returning from the site were already beginning to have the booze.   I saw Mother’s slight head bending over a sink like a pigeon’s one.   Avoiding her eyes, I tried to pass through the canteen hurriedly.

“Supper is ready, Takuya.”

Mother’s voice ran after me closely.

“Yes, I’ll soon be back after listening to Akado Suzunosuke.”

Workmen laughed loud at my answer for a while.

Now I did not want to see anybody’s face, for I didn’t want to be questioned about the change of my countenance which subtly began to appear while I was having dinner at the corner of the table among them.   In addition, I was not hungry at all.

…………

By habit, I curled up on the mat and was listening to the radio placing my ear to it.   While I am doing that, as usual, Mother soon comes back to make my bed leaving her washing half-finished, but I simply do not become sleepy on this particular day.   It is maybe because I haven’t eaten supper.   Somehow, I feel as if I have a headache.

“I say supper, you know?   Until when will you be listening to the radio there?”

Mother impatiently came and urged me to eat supper.

“I had a snack at Hiroyuki’s house, so I’m not hungry.”

“What’s happened?   It is bleeding.”

She looked at my ankle.    On top of it there was caked with black blood.   I was upset and got up.

“That’s all right.   It’ll soon heal up.”

I softly moistened the scrape with spittle in a theatrical way.   And, cool as a cucumber, continued listening to a comic storytelling on the radio.

“Come on….   Don’t sleep on the mat.   Make your bed before you get sleepy, OK?”

“Yes, Mother.   I’ll see.”

She sat sniveling on the rail of a four-and-a-half-tatami room and smoked a long while, as if she healed her weariness from suiting herself to a coarse conversation with laborers.   After she went away, I spread futon on the mat turning my thought toward the bicycle which must breathe secretly in the grass now without being known about by Hiroyuki.   When I was staring at the ceiling, pillowing my head on the end of futon, my stomach which cannot have been empty rumbled.

I remember I had a sort of pleasant dream that night.   The dying sick feel happy all the better for their sick and always has a dream where he makes a recovery.   Yet the next morning, when shaken roughly awake rather earlier than usual, I woke up foreboding that something bad would certainly happen.

I was, with just briefs on, led by Mother, who knitted her brows painfully, to the bullpen doorway.   Rubbing sleepy eyes, I fixed my eyes on a pair of large and small figures standing in front.   They were Hiroyuki and his mother.   A large person attended upon a small one like a guard, a small person was standing quietly clinging to a large one.   My mother made a deep bow many times in an apologetic manner.

“The bicycle was hidden in the grass.   You are the sneakiest creature I’ve ever met!”

I returned my look to Hiroyuki in an absent way.

“If you had asked us to, we would’ve lent it anytime.”

Trying to turn the story in the safe direction, Hiroyuki’s mother said in such an airy manner.

“The saddle was twisted.   I can’t ride it anymore.   It’s annoying!”

He asserted hurriedly.   I looked his way.

“How do you know I’ve done it?”

Suddenly Mother gave me a slap on the cheek.   Hiroyuki, hiding behind his mother, slapped me down elegantly.

“Kyoko was watching it all.   She came to tell me this morning.   It’s no use trying to dissemble.”

“I didn’t do it.”

I writhed perversely with tears in my eyes.

“Come off it!”

I was given another slap on the cheek.   A view of the early morning shook faintly through a film of tears.   My mother then, like a bent nail, deeply bowed down to Hiroyuki’s mother.

“Normally I must make my apologies to you by compensating for this with buying a new one, but as you see, we live in such a small way and I can’t possibly think of the way to apologize.   Well, I’ll pay, preferably, for money to repair….”

A milk-white haze was gradually clearing up and the time of going to school was coming.   I didn’t want to go.   Laborers gathered in a dining room.   Mother began fidgeting.

“It’s OK, as long as he thinks about himself.   I think there has generally been something thoughtless in Hiroyuki as well.”

They reached a compromise full of fraud.   If she had really thought so, they must not have visited me in such an early morning.

“Don’t have a grudge against Kyoko.   She didn’t do it for the purpose of hurting you.   Not knowing what to do, she came this morning….”

Hiroyuki’s mother feebly smiled at me, but the smile did not make her face beautiful.   What she wanted more than compensation ― was our moral submission to her, respecting her overlooking.

“Damn!   You miser!”

I proudly gave them tit for tat.   Hiroyuki’s mother’s eyes appeared to flash.   My mother, neglecting my words, continued to bowing entirely.

Indeed I was a criminal, and it was I that was really deploring my guilt, but I myself refused a supple patience which is a criminal’s duty, pressed it on Mother, and found myself in the place farthest from morality.

“I won’t play with you anymore, you know.”

Hiroyuki closed his complaint, pretending to be out of patience.   I nodded, for I felt there was the fated gap between us which we couldn’t go over.   Or rather, I felt that between me, immoral irritable child who is not favored with a chance of having things by the irony of fate, and people on the other side who realize afresh by losing things that they are rich.

I don’t remember at all both a day after that incident and the length of the day.   I just can recall the backs of a parent and a child which got back into a strong smell of grass in the milky air as if to step away from my soul.

12

In class, without any reason, I made Masako Fukuda cry by pulling her ribbon from the back.   But thanks to by Mrs. Shinomiya’s arrangement; I was barely able to get her forgiveness.   Since then, I made friends with dear little Masako.   At recess, we always went hand in hand out in the playground.   When I sat with Masako wearing a beret in the rocker (I called so, but I don’t know its real name now) in the corner of the playground, classmates would regularly come nearer to us and said,

“You do OK, Kawata-kun, don’t you?”

Or,

“When will you get married?”

In such a way, they would tease me separately.

Narita-kun alone was different from the rest of the classmates.   He was always looking at us with a smile from a distance, and took the opportunity to come nearer to me shyly when I parted from Masako.   I didn’t like so much his habit of stammering something.   I wanted to leave the conversation with him as best I could.   And, in fact, I often did so.   However short I was with him, I underestimated, he would not be disappointed.

He made some strong impressions on us which were necessarily noticeable.   It was one of them that he had curly and kinky hair, but there was an inexpressible rueful feature on his lip.   Because he might always be nervous of it, the outline of his upper lip which should have least force in the face completely stood out.   That is, the outline of it bent surprisingly delicately and notched in the center of his nostril, hanging a wedge like an arrow against his resolute down lip.   They were, what they call, ‘three lips’.   Owing to his useless effort, there were those like dimples on the sides of his lips.

He asked me to go to the sumo wrestling ring in another corner of the playground, and trained me eagerly again and again.   I didn’t appreciate it very much.   But, as a lubricant is needed for wheels to turn, so flattery or admiration is needed in any beautiful pure human relations.   I made an pretense to be happy and was willing to bump against his chest.

He had magical skills of throw.   However hard I might challenge, he threw me softly on the ground like a feather as often as I tried.   “Next time,” I made up my mind and grabbed his belt.    When panting, heaving a belly up, I saw his dirt bony shins sticking out of the humble knee breeches.   Somehow, I saw there not a defect but an honest simple force.   At the moment, I was thrown in the ring again.

“I know for sure you’ll be strong.”

He feebly said, trying to cushion his victory.

One day, leaning against the wall of the school, I asked him with my heart pulsing.

“What happened with your lips?”

He continued smiling and, in the amazingly firm way, answered at once as if he were preparing to.

“I have once leaned against the school wall like this, when I heard a clash and looked up, a piece of glass fell from above.”

He had said so when he flushed.   I immediately noticed how hard he encouraged himself in order to say this.   I admired him with a smile.

“Then, it hit your lip?”

“Yes, it did.   So, you’d better not look up at the window.”

I admired his explanation.   And I didn’t accuse his lie.   Rather, though I had known from the rumor among classmates that it was congenital for his upper lip to part under the nostril like a rabbit, I was ashamed of my ugliness of having made bold to ask him, pretending not to know.

Thus, since then, to make atonement for my sin as best I could, I always wrestled with him a few times whenever he asked to.   Though I played fair with all my strength in a pushing or throwing manner, not in a crafty pulling manner, I didn’t win any game.

Narita-kun was a singular living person of all the fellows at Aoki grade school, along with Sabu-chan.   Now, when I see a lanky skillful wrestler on television, I always heartily remember Narita-kun, who leaned against the wall and laughed with his wedge lip up at the sky.

13

The construction of a housing development was over, and workers began to retreat from the newly-developed district.   In addition, a suit for divorce between Mother and Father being officially settled somewhere I didn’t know; and my mother and I left the bullpen at Takashima Terrace in order to renew our life.

We moved to the old town of Sengenshita where we had to go south by streetcar, about five stops from Aokibashi.   Stores lined shoulder to shoulder, houses and people were mixed together, and the sky above the town seemed humming.

The smallest room with a wooden floor in the raw house at the backyard of an owner named Sakamoto, was our new home.   Besides us, two families lived, partitioned off by thin wall.

A wood bed, one tatami’s worth in the three-tatami room, was built into the floor, and there were big 2-stage drawers under the bed.   I put menkos and a kendama stained with dirt from hands in one of the naked drawers, and Mother used the other as a robe.   I filled the short bookshelf, which I plundered from the bullpen, with comic books at hand.   On the side of the shelf, Mother set her full-length mirror, and next to it a small cupboard.   The furniture was our lot in the room.

A window faced the garden planted with some young cypresses, and it was rather dark in the room.   But when I got up to go wee at night and saw the cool blue moonlight getting in through the window, the small room looked like a surprisingly beautiful strange space.

There was a rather big grade school called Miyagaya Elementary School, within easy reach of the row house.   I thought I was sure to transfer to it, but fortunately, my mother’s pressing demand prevented my transference.   I was relieved.   Though not having so lingering an attachment for Aoki grade school, once I left it, I missed Sabu-chan or Narita-kun very much.

At first, to know the school zone was a hard work.   So I begged of Mother to go to school by streetcar, and began to commute school in the crowded swollen streetcar which was jolting along.   I got a commuter pass for the first time.   When I got off the car at Aokibashi showing it to the conductor, I felt myself to have become a bit more important.

My mother walked to work in the ironworks at next stop every morning, coming home at about seven or eight after twilight.   She smelled like turpentine all over her.

Some day, after supper, Mother said to me lighting a cigarette;

“I kept your father’s family name on you as it is now, but you can change it anytime you like.”

She said regrettably, taking a puff on her cigarette.   I couldn’t somehow feel relaxed, for I thought she stroked my fur the wrong way when I adored only her.   Though I was not able to know her deep thought lurking at the bottom of the words, “anytime you like,” I could imagine, if I changed the second name, it would forcefully take the side of her morally.   But I, who originally was reluctant to do the complex things which did not make sense, replied;

“I’ll see.”

She lapsed into silence discouraged a little while.

“Even if you leave it as it is, there’s nothing good at all, I think.”

“My father is a bad man?”

She didn’t seem to hear what I said and was thinking of something silently.

“Well, you’d better judge it one day.”

She answered bluntly scowling her displeasure.   Trying to put on an appearance of having bad feelings in the mind, she cleverly encouraged me to respect her rather than Father.

There always was 15 yen on the low dining table as ‘the charges for snack’ every day.   I seldom bought a snack with it.   Instead, I went out on the crowded downtown in Sengenshita two times out of three.   I was going to borrow books in the lending library of old lady who had fair skin and wore glasses.

As for books I borrowed by choice, a couple of 5 yen comic books published by Hinomaru-Bunko, such as ‘Kage,’ or ‘Kaidan,’ and some one-or-two yen supplements of magagines.   Compared with whole books filed the shelf, they belonged to a cheaper ones, kind of.   Yet I carefully searched in every nook and cranny of the whole shelf while she repeated hand and foot the job of covering the books with cellophane wrappings at the watching rack.   And I handed in some books on the rack which I decided to borrow.

“Only two days.   Are you all right to borrow this lot?”

The old woman always reminded me doubtfully over her glasses.

“Sure.   I can read them only a day.”

I replied in a tongue-tied and sweet tone as best I could.

“I’m going to read all of these books in the shop.   Till then, grandmother, don’t die.”

“Oh, you are good boy!   I never die.   Read many books to be a great man.   Well, my child, since you are the best of all the customers, I’ll lend supplements for nothing from now on.”

She bowed from the rack in the recess, shining her gray hair, in a manner of doing to adults when I pulled the glass door shut to come home.   I returned her greeting with a generous smile.   Then I walked along the evening road throwing my chest out with fortitude.   It was my routines to read books and flatter the old lady.

When returning to the room, I wiped hard a wood floor with a damp cloth for Mother who was cleanly, making bed, switching on a kotatsu, and arranging for her to come home.   Then I piled the books at the bedside poor lit, closely turning over pages in the light, and spent a long evening till she came back.

As soon as Mother came home, she ground rice and put a dingy 2-go kettle on the gas range of an empty communal kitchen.   As for me, she gave me 20 yen on my palm and made me run hurriedly to Sa-chan’s liquor store to buy side dishes for dinner, since his shop might have closed if I didn’t run.

There always are a few side dishes on the collapsible dining table.   What I usually bought were croquettes and potato salad.

At night ―

A couple in the next room is speaking in whispers.   Finishing all the books, I’m dozing away, when Mother who finished needle work gets into our bed.   I always slept putting my feet between her warm legs.

Once in a long while, I picked up my mother at the works.

Crossing a streetcar rail leading to Aokibashi, the other rail ran twisted from the crossing at Sengenshita to Sakuragicho, in the opposite direction of Mitsuzawa ground.   I walked another 10 minutes from the crossing, crossed the milky ditch, where Mother’s factory was.

― The smell of metal and oil!

The armlets of the feverish ditch were pushed back, stood still, and smoking on the milky surface.   In the narrow red earth between a wilderness of factories and the ditch, there was green grass sparsely which was out of season.

Mother, at the door of the office away from a workshop, sorted bolts out, picked them up, gathered them in the wire netting basket, and washed them.   Behind her, a belt like a sash was humming.   Men ground the iron, carried it, and sometimes they cried something out.   Nobody looked around at me.   I watched my mother alone, crouching by the water pipe sticking out at the opening in front of the office, waited entirely for her to finish the work.

   Before long, workers returned by twos and threes to wash oil out of their hands, and mingling with them Mother called her work quits.   Her white face wearing tenugui like a woman in the farm did not match the dusty factory building behind.

   “Hungry?”

   “No.”

“Me, neither.   I’d rather sleep than eat.”

She must take this kind of work trying.   If she always continues to do a thing like this, all good precious things in her will soon die ― I always concluded so from our short dialogue, but I didn’t have words I could offer her which were suited to the occasion.

“It is easier for the rich to go to heaven than for a camel to go through a needle’s eye.”

On our way home, Mother always said something of a wise saying, and at the corner of the street in Sengenshita, bought me cheap crusts of senbei at a rice-cracker store.

14

Seeing the old year out and the New Year in, soon I became a second grader.

There was a cut cleft through the hillock at the edge of the yard of the row house’s owner, on top of which an apartment stood where only construction labors lived.   Supper time coming, a song ‘Yanbo-Mabo weather report’ came from the room in first floor to my ears and tickled them sentimentally, for it always ran out from the living room door kept open of a Hiroyuki’s house in Takashima Terrace in the evening.

One day I climbed a steep grassy slope and approached the window of the apartment out of curiosity.

A flattop laborer was thickly using chopsticks watching black-and-white TV.   He repeatedly stuck the chopsticks into laver in bottle and spread it on rice to carry the chunk into his mouth.   His munching jaws looked virile.   Settling his eyes on me, he beckoned.   Then, smirking, he suddenly put 10 yen coin in my palm.

At night, I told the story to my mother.   She said:

“Give it back tomorrow.”

Next day was Sunday.   The man was sleeping late in his room along by another man who seemed to be his fellow person.   He recognized me and got up saying, “Oh, it’s you.”

“Mother said, give this back to you.”

He didn’t receive the 10 yen coin.

“Did she so?   Then I must scold her a little.”

The man said, having his fellow on his mind.   And, smirking like yesterday, he followed me.

I don’t know how they talked with then.   He soon came to stay at the three-mat room.   I was made to lie beside the bed.

“Don’t do that.   Kid wakes up!”

I often heard Mother’s low voice dreamily.

   Whenever we had a morning or evening meal, she put bottled ‘Edo-murasaki’ on the low dining table.   That was the man’s weakness.   He entirely stuck his chopsticks into it, and ate rice with relish.

   The man gave me 10 yen coin every Sunday, and said: “Play outside.”   I thought that he was a tree on which money grows.

   Mother began to see herself in a mirror many times.   At noon when the man was out, she skipped a factory to sit at a mirror all day long and was squeezing her black pimples.   I gazed at the mark of her nail.

   After a few weeks, the man disappeared.

   “What about uncle?”

   Mother said: “I kicked him out.   What a Lunatic!   He has a bad habit of sneaking everything out of this house.”

   Looking in the laver bottle he left, a grain of rice covered with the dry laver stuck the bottom of the bottle.   Mother said as if to discharge her pent-up emotions.

   “What a filthy guy!   He is not to be compared with your father.”

   After a few days, Mother took me to Nogeyama Zoo.   She sat on a thin cold bench and remained silent for a long time.   I continued to look at her profile instead of an elephant or a tiger, licking an ice-cream Mother bought me.

   “Something good will happen in the course of time, you know.   ……Bare it.   Don’t lose….”

   Suddenly she hugged herself and gave groans like those of a beast without a break.   And grasping my hand, she shed tears painfully.   I felt myself, who was staring fixedly at excited Mother, to be immoral and unimportant.

   Since then I didn’t approach his apartment even when I heard a song of a weather report.

   Afterwards I saw the flattop man only once at a public bath, but he was just looking at the surface of the water keeping a perplexed face.   I did not hate him very much.

15

   “Do you mind coming to my house?”

   “No problem at all.”

   In a summer afternoon, Sabu came to play with me at my house in Sengenshita accepting my invitation.

   He came into the room without hesitation, not disliking the dim three-mat space, looking around it with a cheerful expression,

   “It’s a nice room.   I think this is better than that of the bullpen.”

   Then he sat down easily to ask how I had been getting on, and to take a comic book out of the shelf and ruffle pages showing an interest.   Concerning about the time of his going back, I meandered about this and that.   He was patiently nodding his consent with a smile.

   “Huh, you are given no less than 50 yen in spending money, aren’t you, Taku?”

   He said, looking at a gleaming coin on the low dining table.

   “No, I’m not.   My mother said she didn’t have small one and left 50 yen coin particularly today.   I must not spend more than 15 yen.   …But, I’ll treat you to something?”

   I asked timidly with an up glance.

   “Don’t bother.   You can spend it with great care.”

Because I knew he was not what wouldn’t budge an inch, I was relieved and didn’t insist on it again.

It got quite dark and there came a silence.   I felt pressure in the chest.

“You can have a meal before going back.   …Mother soon be back.”

“No, thank you.   Maybe they worry about me now.”

I saw him off by the main gate of Miyagaya grade school, and reversed my steps.

On returning and putting the light on, the 50 yen coin I should have put on the table disappeared.   I tumbled out of the room and pursued Sabu.   Coming to the main street where streetcars ran, looking far at the rail in the dark, but his figure had already gone.

“I shouldn’t have said come on to my house.”

Regret was unified with sorrow.   A brilliant and graceful smile of Sabu’s came into my mind.

“But, Sabu is the last to do that―”

Then, where have the 50 yen coin gone?

Standing on the road lined with short street lamps, I shed tears.   They were not so much regrettable and suspicious tears against Sabu as self-pity ones.   In this close velvety summer evening, a child who normally should wait joyfully for his mother to come home in a childlike way, feels like bursting with sorrow, because he lost only one 50 yen coin; How miserable it is!   I thought of the harm to Mother I had done, or of myself who was suspicious of my friend without sure proof, and I was bowed down by grief.

I didn’t want to run after him any more.   Mother will soon come home.   She will surely make a fresh reason and a smile to console me.   But, what if I don’t see her smile as I wanted…?

I went home slumping over.   The playground of Miyagaya grade school sank in the remotest dark.   I wished I could mingle with the dark and disappear.

Reaching up to turn on the light, the illuminated room was chilly when it was summer.   The light threw a short shadow of mine vertically at my feet.   On the wooden floor there were some borrowed books which I had to give back within today, among the comic books Sabu read and cluttered up the floor with.   I picked up them gloomily.

― And I heard a fresh sound ‘clink,’ when a white coin rolled under the low table.   I was startled.   I flattened myself on the floor distraught with fears.   It was a 10 yen coin!

As the radiation of the light bulb was glaring, I felt the brightness of the room increase suddenly.   In a moment a tidal wave of laughter flooded, and I lay down on my back, gripping the coin.

Suddenly Sabu’s expression with a singular beautiful nature rushed into my mind.   I saw his pretty double tooth on his lips, and his large liquid eyes were looking far as though they wouldn’t catch my dirty mind.

Laughter going out, new tears were rising to my eyes.   They were, this time, those of cursing my disloyalty to suspect my friend.   Under the bright light, my poor shadow was dwindling.

“I’m sorry, Sabu….”

When I think to myself, the train for our life which I thought important on which I had been ridden with Mother stopped suddenly, and I clearly awoke to something like the core which controlled my feeling.   Then, my solitary face seemed painfully to contort with the guiltiness at sinking down in thought for the first time, neglecting my mother.

16

   Of congratulations on my passing on to the third grade, Mother proposed buying me a bicycle.

   Though I was not eager to solicit her to buy it, one Sunday, when I woke up from a nap, she approached me on the matter.

“Shall I buy a bicycle, Takuya?”

Of course, I knew well that Mother, who was always checking a bankbook, couldn’t such a luxury.   Fingering a run in futon, I said:

“I can’t fancy it’s true.”

In those days I had long learned to ride a bicycle, always borrowing it from nearby playmates, let the time of promise to return it go past and disappointed them.   I reckoned, at first, that Mother might have sometimes seen such my behavior, but I seemed to be mistaken.

“Your father came to the factory to pester me for money.   How shameless!   He has long left us, you know.   It was not I but he who was told by a court to pay the expense of bringing you up.   He’s keeping up appearance in front of his girl.”

“His girl?”

“Her name is Satoko, once a geisha girl….   She used a girl’s weapon as best she could to seduce your father.   Well, it makes no difference to me, but it would be much better to buy you a bicycle than to give money to your father, you know.”

Mother stared at the air.   The meaning of ‘geisha’ or ‘girl’s weapon’ was not clear to me, but anyway I was grieved because I began to be able to see, since the life train stopped the other day, that she got to develop a more exaggerating character opposite to her usual simplicity.

“But, I don’t want it.”

I was anxious to for her to reverse herself.

“Don’t make a bluff.   Have you forgotten breaking Hiroyuki’s bicycle?   I was ashamed to death, you know.”

Mother took me to a storefront, where I lost color to see the price tag she pointed at without hesitation.   The price topped well her monthly pay.

Before long I began to be picked on by neighboring children.

In the evening, when I got to Sengenshita after leaving school, rascals with bats or belts in each hand suddenly appeared by twos and threes out of the shade of utility poles or a school gate and stood in my way.

“Hey, Don-Taku, you are sassy.   Always telling lies.   How come you don’t go to Miyagaya grade school?   ’Cause you are a liar, they don’t let you in, do you?”

One didn’t lose any time beating my calf with a belt and another hitting my back with a bat.   Another scooped water of a gutter up with a big dipper and shower it over my chest.   I stood firm with a look of not budging an inch to receive their sanctions without any tears.

“You, peasant!   Scoop shit up.”

“Get back to your land.”

“If you tell a lie next time, I’ll stab your penis with a needle.”

“Sah would bury you alive.”

After every one of them went off in a grand manner expressing their parting shots, I lifted face and went home convulsed with ignominy.

Sanctions?

Yes, that’s dead right.   One of the reasons why I began to be bullied was that I proudly rode a new bicycle around whose treadles my feet could barely reach, disregarding playmates’ asking, but there was much more serious background.

There was a boy in the sixth grade who was a son of a liquor and grocery store a block away from our leasehold, who had long eyelashes, and whom we called Sah-chan.   He was long and tall enough for us to look up, and was a notorious expert on blows.   He controlled neighboring children with his notorious popularity, and without his permission, we were not able to pull the rope of the floats sent by Sengen Shrine during the festival.   Though I, a new boy, had happily belonged to one of his men belatedly and was favored by him to some extent, I was branded as a dishonorable ‘liar’ after an incident as late as last month, and was imposed sanctions to be driven away from his fellows.

The opening was a Mother’s pillow talk.

“Don’t play so often with the children in the neighborhood.   I tell you the truth.   Particularly, that child of the grocery store, you know; if his spittle sticks to your skin when he is talking, it begins decaying from the spot.”

The following day, I tell this to Sah’s surroundings right off.   They were surprised with their eyes wide open, and gave a sigh of gratefulness.   Although I felt sorry for Sah, I didn’t want to increase victims any more.   My heart filled with satisfaction of doing good behavior for the day, as I was single-minded and easy to be touched.

Next day, in contrast, nobody returned my eyes, which are looking for fellows, with a smile.   They left me alone and played together pleasantly.   I kicked the cypress in the owner’s garden with canvas shoes, and cursed at their attitudes lacking in gratitude.

Mother came back from work, and usually I was made to go to Sah’s store to buy side dishes.   Then, I approached the case at the store front as if to get at something dirty.

“Give me this.”

I pointed at an unsold croquette.   For I believed it would be all right because it had been sterilized by hot oil.   Sah’s father who was dealing with other customers stared at me with his tortoiseshell-glasses glittering, and drew back into the inner room in silence.   Sah’s mother, in turn, came out.   She bridled at me with her double chin in air and said coldly:

“Sorry to say, but we won’t sell our goods because Sah’s spit sticks to them.”

Her terrible revenge shook me badly.   For it was on me that she said the pointed words.   That was obvious.   When I faced the odd anger of the friendly couple who had rarely become in a bad humor, who had never talked too much about what was in their mind wherever possible, I understood all in a twinkle.   Just along with the understanding, the back of my eyes was tingling and suddenly tears poured out.

   ―Why did my mother tell such an inconvenient meaningless lie?

   “If you eat this, your mouth is going to be rotten; If you swallow this, your bowels become rotten.   It would be terrible for us to be arrested because of humanity.   We can’t possibly sell this to you.”

   She grinned at me, which she had not shown before.

   I couldn’t leave the storefront, hanging my lip.   Of course, it sure was an incident worthy of fear to miss buying side dishes and come home empty-handed, but I thought that before everything I had to apologize to Sah right now.

   “I’m sorry.”

   I spoke a little louder so that my voice could carry to Sah who was not there.

   “Go home, go, go.”

   Sah’s father, who came back from an inward room, said coldly beside Mother.   I showed my back to them in haste and ran out in the dark road.   And, rubbing my eyes dim with tears, ran to the shopping arcade in Sengenshita for no object.

   I have never said a word to my mother until today about long lonesome days following this sad incident.   But, from the evening on, I vaguely began to lose firm reliance, which seemed like that of branches adoring the trunk, on what Mother said and did.   Though I didn’t have a deep-rooted hatred, the childlike idea of ‘obligation’ which I had kept in my mind was gradually disappearing.   And I was impatient to keep away from Mother for most of the day, and to look for a reliable trunk of anybody else’s other than hers.

   It was from then on that the figure of my father I had never seen rushed large into my mind.   I began to fix his favorable image in me as a broad-minded person who was different from Mother, and had a direct and straightforward mind.

17

   When a long spell of rainy fall weather began, I learned to go to the movies leaving a note for Mother every Saturdays.

   There was no movie theater around Sengenshita, and I had to go on an outing to Hodogaya or Sakuragicho.   Both were equally a long way off and a bicycle helped me do it.   I mostly chose the dirt road to Hodogaya.   Early in the afternoon when I was supposed to go to a theater, nine times out of ten, the rain stopped and the sky entirely cleared up, and puddles in the wide road reflected the blue sky.   The smell of the moist dirt caught me, I heartily felt fresh mood of the outing.

   The name of the theater I first stepped into from the front at the corner of a city and which I soon became familiar with was ‘Hodogaya Nikkatsu.’   An admission fee for children was just the same as my allowance Mother always left me; fifteen yen.

   On the wall of a hallway there were pictures of young male and female stars, and when I was walking through the dim hallway looking up them with skipping not much interestedly, somehow at the moment, a moist thing came back to my dry mind, and I stood in front of a picture as if I got an electric shock.   A man looked down at me with passionate eyes.   He didn’t look like the complete rogue, rather like an unreasonable child.   He was laughing brightly, even with an air of roughness.

   ― He was Ishihara Yujiro.

   Somehow the young guy’s broad smile naturally overlapped with the impression of my father I had been making up.

   My cold cheeks became flamingly hot.   I felt fated to meet him.   At the moment, I fell sickness, for the first time, of yearning madly for a man who was not me.   Since then, whenever there was any picture on which he appeared, I went to the theater never to miss it.

   The incredible handsome, long and tall guy was running about freely with his long legs in the screen.   He laid wicked people right and left, as vigorously as the high waves tried to kick the sky, irrespective of the story.   Just when wicked deeds were about to be made good, he was never fail to appear and rustle wonderfully.   So rascals, whose characters or looks were contrastive to his, strove extraordinarily to cool down his anger.

   He was beautiful.   Above all, his face decorated with clear-cut eyes and lips and coarse short hair was gorgeous.   It was really to my taste, but nevertheless those features somehow had a clean sorrow which rose above the world of human beings.   At least, I did not feel innocent brightness of a child nor maturity of an adult.   I even caught the scent of unhappiness from them.

   I took my seat at the corner inside the dark theater, gazed at his movements, listened with all my ears to his lines whenever he appeared, and yearned sadly for the golden harmony between very simple form and sound which one tall man produced.   The habit of wrinkling up his nose, of walking along with dragging feet, expiring, “Don’t fool around!” in a husky voice unbecoming to his handsome face, and of laughing hoarsely, “Hah, hah,” each and every of which was most fresh to me.

   The closing time coming, I had to be pushed out in the dark outside the cinema.   Then I couldn’t fail to wrinkle up my nose with an up glance and walk along with dragging feet, which stuck out of breeches.   And I mumbled, “Don’t fool around,” laughing in a husky voice.   Because of my stand-up collar uniform, some passers-by burst out laughing, but I ignored them and crooned the theme song I had just memorized, when a stir came back to me like the echoes.   I had committed the whole words and the music to memory while repeatedly seeing the picture, twice or more, until the last show.

   I didn’t like pictures which had a roundabout story in a wise tone.   I disliked what made out only the common fact about society and families they knew best.   I hate the ones which exclusively treasured the framework or sensitiveness of human relations, while made light of personal emotions.   That was why I got the hot only for Yujiro’s pictures, which was most simple and absurd and sad.

   His movies were usually ended up in painful devotion or sad partings the way they traced the outlines of his air which was similar to the stars twinkling in the night sky.   Seeing such scenes, I always got a strange satisfaction.   Once in a great while, for one reason or another, the story would change into a comic manner which took the edge off his yakuza-like character, and the ending was rounded off with his cheerful smile or a vague sense of happiness, when I was somehow unable to identify myself with Yujiro who was not in his usual way and I was badly sad that I came back to the darkness outside.   Since I was arbitrarily aware of relationship to him, I was even ashamed of his not keeping calmness and having fun.

   The time outside the cinema did not pass quickly as that in the screen.   I walked at night and often reached Sengenshita around midnight.   I didn’t care Mother’s anxiety at all.

   “I could not possibly have supper at rest.”

   She never nagged me who, disregarding her voice, tried to clime under futon unsteadily like a drunk.

18

   One winter day, I came across a sepia photograph of my father at the bottom of the cupboard drawer.   He looked like a man in his late twenties.   On the reverse of the photo, there was “Noboribetsu Spa”, and this boldface verse was attached at the side of it:

   いく五百野(イオノ)こえさりゆかばかなしみのはてなむくにぞ

   That was not Mother’s handwriting.   The reverberation of the pronunciation of katakana “イオノ” written at the right side of kanji remained in my mind.   Not knowing the meaning of it, I was thrilled with deep sorrow.

   My father in the photo wore long thick pants tuck in his tidy shirt, having his long hair blown by the wind in a rocky landscape, with Japanese paper in his left hand and a writing brush in his right, jutting his chin in a grand manner.   By the appearance, I thought he was about to write a tanka poem.   He screwed up his eyes.   From the airy manner I sensed his dandyism like the surface of a stone which was well polished, and didn’t feel altogether bad.   He did not resemble Yujiro at all, and was full of more transparent sorrow than Yujiro.

   I cautiously put the picture back in the bottom of the drawer.

   It had still unknown to me how Father and Mother got to know, where they got married, how they led a honeymoon life, and in what complex circumstances they divorced.    Even though I had got fragmentary information about him from Mother’s voluntary telling, somehow I hesitated to ask about willingly and it was difficult to imagine what he really was.

   “Your father didn’t want to be an architect.   He often said he had wanted to write a novel but sacrificed himself for his house.”

   Setting her face like a flint before me, Mother described him as a clever man, then gave a deep sigh wagging her head;

   “But he was loose with money and women….   I don’t think he is a common type, although it perhaps damned him.”

   I thought she frankly wrote down him as a man who had already finished his life.   But her tone told how high a value she put on his talent.

   She did not in the least give a picture of his look or shape.   Thus I theatrically daydreamed about a stranger, and pictured him as a lean handsome man with a stern face like Yujiro’s.   Father in the realms of my imagination had a glossy dark skin, fuzzy eyelids given suitable shade by his short hair, and seldom laughed.

   ― The photograph I found was in a certain sense fell short of my expectations, but nevertheless it brought me more than expected.

   Mother also said this:

   Father had been falling into a gamble for two years by the time I was born since they got married.   He often came back home with mahjong friends.   Most of them were fellow architects.   Barked out by her husband, my mother devoted herself to making rice balls.   When they got clear of their debts, he demanded his share severely.   If someone was pressed for settlement, my father threatened him;

   “Even after you catch a robber you can twist a rope.   Raise money from now on.”

   But when it didn’t work, he said seriously;

   “Leave your suit at least,” or “I’ll keep your watch.”

   I felt that I could see his manner then.

   She said he had spent all the booty money on the luxurious play in geisha-houses, which, she told me, was like general managers’ houses of geisha girls.

   Once he broached the subject of gambling, “Good study of life,” and took unwilling Mother to a gamble place.   They were led by a man who greeted them to a simple Japanese-style room similar to that of a merchant house.   Easygoing people who seemed rich, laughing and rippling, sat face to face with a bon-mat between them, on which a dazzling white cloth was spread.

   The head of the gambling room leaning his elbows on a lacquered-desk, shortly after making a few remarks, started a game in bluish smoke.   Mother was watching her husband’s back in a bored way.   At the moment, a dealer who was also a banker violently slapped Japanese playing cards on the face with his three fingers arranged, and then knocked up the arm high.   One of the cards flew up dead straight and stuck to the ceiling with a slum, and didn’t fall for a few seconds.   She was horrified at the superhuman skillful trick a man used who lived in a different world from hers.

   Apart from gambling, he took to drinking.   He would often drink too much and came back late.   He often didn’t come home, too.   He was drunk and lost his way, didn’t know where he was walking, waddled in an earth floor of stranger’s house, and passed a night without being observed to enter the house.   Surprising at my father who got sober, in his underwear, sitting cross-legged, the landlord asked his name.

   My mother went to take him and saw him, dressed a padded garment, sitting quietly cross-legged on an earth floor, sucking green tea.

   “I said politely I was not a queer man, and I wanted to stay for the night.”

   Father on ahead warned her not to complain.   Mother bowed many times before the members of the house bothering about their temper.

   “I threw a coat and pants in a well on my way.   Bring my clothes at once.”

   He said in a fretful manner.   She barely felt relieved to see the family smiling at his words good-naturedly.

   I was supremely prepossessed by his personality like a motorboat which wildly kicked its way through the wave.   My vague impression of him was that, though he put on a large-mined manner, when we passed him, he would raise a gust of wind which was rather sad and cool.   That is, I listened to his episode as a moving story.   I was a child with such disposition.

   The story that my father took good care of me was not in Mother’s complaint.   She did not tell she was enlightened by him.   She sighed and said, “I ended up being landed with two ‘worries’ of Father and me.”

   But I nevertheless had an image that he was an openhearted natural man who played around hills and fields, which was an opposite image to Mother.   I had an urge to meet my father.   It was at the same time when I suddenly became bored in storybooks or life stories Mother bought me, not fired my fight, displeased rather than envious of, with the figures of fellow children playing at dusk, and not very often looked up clouds or trees on my way from school.

   I didn’t know why, but Mother often told the way leading to Father’s lodgings.   The word Hodogaya came out of her lips many times.   While talking, she never forgot to look down on a girl named Satoko, who lived with my father and was out of ‘Geisha.’   According to Mother, the girl at first saw drunken Father home, and then diffidently poked in the honeymoon house, made by Father to sleep between Mother and him, but in a few years she gradually behaved shamelessly, and soon, about six months after Mother gave birth to me, she went out with my father as if to take the opportunity of doing that….

   Why my mother allowed the girl to come often, why my father had to give up the job as an architect to run away, how Mother afterwards was able to locate his whereabouts, above all why Father and his parents lived in Yokohama instead of Kumamoto ― the question which should have occurred to a mature mind did not float through my mind then.   I forgot everything except that I wanted to see my father.

   “I’m sure your father’s purpose was to get her money.”

   While vituperating, Mother unfortunately didn’t purchase my pity on Mother and my antipathy against the girl she hated.   I couldn’t possibly associate Father with money owing to the immature control of my sensibilities.   The man who cleverly robbed others of money and goods couldn’t have been my father.   Or, at least, I intuitively found in Satoko who loved my father something of the nature of Man who has little to do with money and goods.

   Mother told me that the house where my father lived was by the road leading to the ‘Hodogaya Nikkatsu’ I often went to.   But to go further down I had to follow the unknown road.   My mother often said, “Kofukuji-temple grove” or “a dirty six-mat room on the second floor of a cycle shop.”   I memorized the unfamiliar name of the temple which seemed to be along the route.

   But, however hard I yearned for Father, it was a taboo to speak words to miss him.   If I made the slightest gesture of doing so, Mother said in an acrid nervous voice:

   “If you want to go where your father lives, you may go.   I have no right whatever to discourage.”

   The tone was one which seemed to cut my emotion just in two, Father or Mother.

   I was nine.   It was an enough terrible event to convulse my immature soul that I was exposed to a bad temper of a close adult only whom I depended on.

19

   One Saturday late afternoon, at last, I started for Sengenshita shopping mall.   I hesitated to ride a bicycle.   I felt it was not until I walked long way step by step that the substance of a drama of ‘reunion with Father’ became rich, which would wait for me beyond.   The opportune moment I visited him must necessarily be the evening, when obscure emotion flooded people’s chest.

   At dusk a row of houses along the street was speedily getting light.   The street of the downtown ran like a silver beam because of less effective lighting.   I was tramping, dodging the crowd which gathered round naked lights at the storefronts.   Gradually the street was getting thinner, and as soon as I passed through it, the vague light almost went out, I found myself on the dirt road in the twilight.

   The long rays of the sun were getting in the road through the grove which hung over the houses on both sides.   That was a winter light.   In the sunshine with cold gloss like stone, a row of low-eave houses were resting.

   I went up a lane leading to Sengen shrine to take a short cut.

   I passed through a flat lonely residential area with spacious garden, which was in the heights, and went down the lane again.   A crowd of people gathered in front of an appliance shop at the foot of the slope.

   I saw a sumo relay on the television in the window which was set above eye level.   A man with a square stern face which was familiar to me looked up into space and beat his sumo belt with great force.   A sticking plaster applied on the buttock of the sumo wrestler with spotty skin twitched together with his muscle, as if to show his great strength.   Some napes cried.

   “Tochinishiki!”

   I had fifteen yen in my pocket.   There was a candy store, which was about to close, alongside of the appliance shop in the row.   I bought two loves of amashoku-bread and a bottle of milk.   The crowd burst into cheers.   I filled my mouth with amashoku and washed it down with milk.

   Before my eyes utility poles turning on the light were strung in two lines.

   ― What if my father is not there when I visit him?   When turning back by the same road, I would have to walk incredibly heavily.   …Father being there, what if he curses at me, “I haven’t wanted to see you,” and turns me back, or to the contrary, he is extremely pleased and said, “Stay here and become my son.”?

   I remembered unexpectedly the insult suffered in front of Sah’s store.   And, as if to adhere to the memory, Mother’s occasional reiterative whining, “You are the living image of your father,” or her stabbing cold eyes which she showed at such moments, or her warm fishy smell which filled futon; they all recurred to my mind one by one.

   ― Then, I’ll have him adopted me into his family, better yet.   And I’ll live like a man and daringly as he does.   He won’t fail to like me.

   I swallowed the last bite of amashoku and started to walk slowly.

   If I went straight on, I could probably see my father easily.   He would be surprised, hug me who had grown up, and let me in his room.   He would begin to talk about the past, complaining a little, making some excuses, being moved to our reunion, and would forget time moving on.   I would be detained for a long time.   If I came home late, Mother might think that I was utterly infatuated with the impossible dream with a twinkle in my eyes in the dark of a theater.

   ― By the way, who is kawata Daikichi, whom Mother describes with a long face as “your double”?

   Come to think of it, I do feel that I have always been looking for an image of my father.   Especially since I found that picture, I could see any man who was lean, had fuzzy slit eyes and an air of grace, and wore his hair long, as my father.   Whenever I saw such a man, complete gentle emotion welled up in me and my heart filled with joy, till my eyes dimmed with tears.   And I was always looking forward to such a situation as Father would come nearer and spoke to me:

   “Are you Takuya?   How you’ve grown!”

   Then I could see his whole face.   He might smile and hold me tight.   I could smell his sentimental fragrance which I had long dreamed of, and feel his body’s rugged touch.

   Mother would often call Father “a brute” or “a failure,” but I couldn’t possibly believe in it; for I have been attaching to a vision of my father and waiting for him.   Above all, I felt his conduct of abandoning a five-month-old baby extremely manly.   I did not know why I nine years old felt his act manly.   Yet I strongly assumed that almost all men should have a favorite lifestyle, as Yujiro in the screen did, and they would live assured that, as long as they took such an attitude, their innate merits clearly made themselves conspicuous; my father was one of such men.   A bushel of longing for him made me shudder.

   I saw a Lane of many theaters in Hodogaya.   Three movie theaters lined the roadside which was built up with stores and restaurants.   I stopped, as usual, in front of the Nikkatsu-theater which was closest to me and always released new movies.   The bluish neon light removed darkness from the street.   The sign “The Sunny Slope” in the spotlight hung on the upper wall of its front, which was back from the road.   Hand-painted Yujiro who wore a grave expression looked into space.   I thought his eyes had meaning particularly today.   I came up to the picture-window and looked at some black-and-white shots one after another.   And then I glanced at the admission on the pane of its ticket booth ― ‘Child:15 yen’.   A deep sigh escaped my throat.

   I trudged again, passing by the signs “Earth Security Forces” and “The Chushingura,” looking at them from the corner of my eye.   The image of Kataoka Chiezo who beat a Yamaga marching-drum retreated from view with indifference, guarded by a pretentious atmosphere.   The next moment the road got dark.

   It was an unfamiliar area from there.   I turned toward the tram road for light and asked a passer-by the way; because, on account, I wanted to know the direction to “Kofukuji” temple.   My father should lodge on the second floor of a cycle shop, which was by the temple whose name had a strange sound.

   I knew soon where the temple was.   I turned back to the way I had come, there in the grove stood secretly a small stone gate.   The letters engraved on the stone were read; “洪福寺”.

   I walked on by the hedge of Kofukuji, crossing a bridge over a narrow ditch.   And from the end of it I began to find haphazardly the cycle shop one after another.   Since most houses didn’t light the front door, I often had to peer into the darkness.

   I passed under some street lamps along the ditch.   As often as I did so, I felt it dreary that my shadow grew long and bent down to the ditch.   Fine waves like chirimen were moving slowly on the surface of the water, which reflected my shadow.

I guessed that one ditch-side block was my goal, going for a round there, and after taking breath, I went through the side roads in a centripetal way.   I was not able to find the cycle shop.

Looking far, there were countless roofs dimly under the dark blue sky.

How many additional blocks must I walk around?   If I walk on, and do not locate, do I have to come back without any hopes, though taking trouble to visit here?

I visualized the sad face of my father.   The face suddenly focused on me and smiled, when it narrowly stopped me shedding tears.   Yes, my father is surely around here and waiting for me planning to hail his son….

I saw the light of a toy police box shining on the other side of the ditch.   I crossed a bridge to approach the reddish light.   A policeman, who threw his chest out because of a silhouette of someone, was waiting for me to come up.   The descriptions stuck on the windowpanes of the box came into sight ominously.   I stopped and called the man a short distance off.

“Well, is there any cycle shop around here?”

The policeman came closer to me, for he found that I couldn’t approach him any further.

“A bicycle shop?   Around here…?   Oh, I know.   Maybe it’s ‘Sakagami Cycle.’   It’s rather a long way to walk from here.   I’ll draw a map for you now.   The shop always closes early in the evening, so I think it’s hard for you to find where it is.”

I followed him in the box.   And I accepted the outline map drawn for me, bowing to him, and hastily went away from the light of the police box.

I walked according to the map and at last found the cycle shop rather away from the ditch.   Its storefront with a long white signboard, on which letters were written in Chinese ink, was sealed with sliding board doors; but the light escaped from the side door a yard in width which was kept open.   I looked inside the house and found the pale-lit stairs going up right from the one-tsubo earth front floor.   There was no sliding screen between the front floor and a living room.   Considering the whole plan of the house, the front floor seemed to lead to that of the shop.

My heart began to beat fast.

How can I call inside?   Will my father come out on my calling?   What an attitude can I take when he come out?   Smile, or droop my head seriously?   …No, I don’t have to worry.   Before I say something, my father will surely murmur, “Welcome,” and hold me close.   I’ll hold his waist like a big tree in my arms and remain silent.   But, if he won’t do that ― what if he says nothing and gives me a cold welcome?

Imagining his expression and words on meeting me, I fretted very much but hesitated to call inside the door.   Yet I didn’t excuse his son feeling daunted by his own act, who came to the front of his father’s house only to meet him.   I got very set on calling out.

“Good evening!”

“Hai.”

A deep voice returned.   Sliding a paper door of the earth floor leading to the shop, an elder man who I thought was a landlord showed his nose.   Then sitting in a cross-legged position, he pushed his head out of the shoji leaning his elbows on tatami, and reluctantly asked the purpose of my visit in a low tone.

“My name is Takuya.   I’ve come to see my father.”

He looked me in the face, soon a broad smile suffused his face as if he saw a familiar person.

“Blood will tell.   This boy has tender eyes.”

He hinted that my father was there by letting out his remark of which he only knew.

“I’ve come to see Kawata Daikichi.”

“Aha, you are as clever a boy as Dai-chan.”

“Is Dad there now?”

“Yes, he is.   ― Did you come alone?”

“Yes.”

I felt that somewhere in the house my father was listening to us.   At the mere thought of it, my heart pulsed and I was unable to breathe.   Tensed all over, I tried to find out a sign of his appearing.   Then, though it was only my imagination, I heard something like a cough given my father from a distance, and my knees quivered against my will.

“Where did you come from?”

The man would not call my father easily.

“From Sengenshita.”

“Ha, from that far.   That’s tough thing.   Did you take a streetcar shrewdly?”

“I walked.”

“Did you, indeed?   It was a lot of trouble, wasn’t it?   You must have thought so seriously.   Hey, Dai-chan, you have an unbelievable guest.”

At last the landlord threw his loud voice upstairs.   After a while there was a slight light at the dim landing, a man’s thin face with long hair came out.   The face squinted down at me for a second.   I smiled at it though unable to see clearly.   A roll of my heart came up to my ears.

A thin silhouette with long hair didn’t hesitate to come down the ladder slowly.   The mysterious eyes hidden by hair wouldn’t look at me.   In the course of the baggy pants coming near down to me step by step, I noticed immediately that the steps had no passion.

Father stopped before his son who was standing without movement on the earth floor.   Running fingers through his hair, with cold dark eyes, he asked without any feelings;

“Are you Takuya?”

It was a lonely hoarse voice.

“Yeah.”

I did not hide my smile and gave him a big nod.

“I see.   …Go home.”

The most unexpected words came out of his mouth.

But because I felt the order coming from his state of mind which was somewhat spiritual and never understood by my world view, I nodded in a hurry.   His eyes that responded to it were like a pickax feebly brought down on.

“You must go home.   …… Look, I’ll give this to you.”

He fished a coin out of his pocket and took my hand to put it in my palm.   It was a 50 yen coin with a hole.   When I took it, I thought somewhat I was mean.   He never knows, I fancied, that I am not a child who is held or tempted by such a thing.   For a split second, a thought that possibly he is a frivolous man as Mother said flitted through my mind.

“You mustn’t come anymore.”

…… My father added so before I said a word, and climbed back the stairs at the same pace again.   The landlord, who was curiously looking at everything about the father-son reunion, saw off my father’s back in an unsatisfactory way.   I didn’t give up completely, hoping for Father’s changing his mind, and was all the time watching him from behind till his figure disappeared beyond top of the stairs.   A woman met him and leaned out of the rail.   She had good posture and was well-made, didn’t withdraw her gaze as my father did.   Then, letting him go past, she rapidly climbed down the stairway.

“You must be Taku-chan?”

“Yes.”

“Did you get a letter or something from your father…?”

“No.”

“Really?   I’m sorry for your father’s blunt refusal when you came all the way to meet him.”

“I don’t care.”

I made a bluff.

“…… Let’s go outside.”

She knew that I had not called over by his letter and was a little relieved to lead me outside by the hand.   Led by her hand, I was disappointed as if I were absorbed into the ground.

Soon after we came outside, she let lose her hold of my hand and walked before me.   I followed her large back with no thought.   The throb of my heart was not put to rights easily.   Opening my eyes wide on the night street, I tasted the despair of not being given affection by a man I had long adored.

Trying to encourage my lonely heart anyway, I made myself speak to her back.

“I can’t take this, ’cause I must be scolded by my mother.”

She turned around and made a most disturbed face.

“He is a really bad father, isn’t he?   I’m sure he mightn’t know what to do.   …… But I can’t possibly accept it.”

She lapped my hand I stretched in her hands and pushed it back softly.

Strangely I did not feel contempt for my father.   On the contrary, the momentary doubt that he might be a frivolous man slipped out of my mind without notice, and I remembered his quiet manner again as that of a beautiful insect which breathed quietly in the dark.   Then, I was flooded with the loneliness that I could never meet my father again.

The woman began to walk again back on me.

“It’s been only a short time since we moved here by a person’s agent.   …… We were told to inform our destination of your mother…this and that.   I reckoned that your father already wrote a letter to you.”

“My father has never written to us.”

“I’m sorry….   Yes, your mother said you like books.   A book store is dead ahead.   I’ll buy you one.”

“Has Mother often been here?”

“Sometimes she’s been here, if not often.”

I felt without assurance that it was because Father had been asked not to by Mother that he avoided contact with me.   And, unexpectedly, I began to think of the wit of adults who united in keeping their word as disagreeable.

“I don’t want a book.   I must go now.”

“Then I can’t console myself, for I came by way of buying you a book.   Would you please go buy it with me?”

She didn’t stop and kept walking further.   I nodded reluctantly, saying yes.

“Are you Satoko?”

   “Yes, I am.   You have been told that I am a bad woman, haven’t you?”

   “No….”

   I hesitated to say a little.   Her fuller buttocks than my mother’s were moving one after the other under her skirt.   The tough image of Mother seemed to be crushed out by Satoko’s buxomness and fade out uneasily.

   I felt like taking Mother’s side one reason or another.   So I reply at Satoko’s back what I heard of and could remember in a sarcastic way.

   “My mother said Father’s object was your money.”

   “Did she?   Humph….”

   Satoko turned her clean smile to me.   And she was still brightly walking before me along the ditch.   She clearly told her own idea with all her might, and I felt it was not the thought worked out from artificial half motives but probably the heart spun from all the experiences in the loneliness of the escape journey with my father.   Ashamed of my frankness with spite, I felt in favor of this innocent fat woman from the heart.

   “It was not, was it?   My father is not such a man, isn’t he?”

   “Of course, he isn’t!   After all, I am not rich.”

   “What a relief!   I’ve been thinking so.”

   Satoko seemed to be surprised at my answer like a grown-up, walking slowly, turning to put her hands on my shoulders.   I was paralyzed with her serious eyes fixed in me.

   “Don’t have a grudge against your father.   He is a weak person.”

   “Weak?”

   “He is a good man, I mean.”

   Satoko tried to take my father under her wing.   I took a load off my mind and secretly paid my respects afresh to weak Father who was adored by this simple woman.

   Then I suddenly remembered the words “五百野” which was written on the back of the picture.   And I could remember the way of my heart had trembled primitively then.   The words perhaps meant many fields of sadness across which my father, a good man, had to pass.

   ― But he alone have to?   Mother?   And I?

“I don’t hate my father.”

Now the image of my father grew bigger in my chest.   Surprisingly enough, because of his philosophy of trying not to survive, devising this and that, in the course of his life which he believed was right, I found his personality polished.   It practically appeared to me an ideal of man, for I didn’t like a strong and energetic life.

Satoko stopped in the storefront of a bookshop, which was illuminated by a yellow light.   New colorful magazines arranged on the front rack showed vividly.   Among them there were a few fat special issues, whose rent was high even if we hire a month delay.   I stood shyly at her side, being nervous of not making a wistful face.

“What book do you want?   I’ll treat you to all books you want.”

From an inner shop where cheap toys and notions were put in disorder, an old man with glasses on his nostril came out rubbing his hands.   She urged me to choose and I pointed to “Bokura” and “Yonen-book”.   Looking into her face, the old man pushed them carefully into a paper bag.

Satoko, looking hard to part from, walked me to the end of the bridge where I first crossed.

“That’s all right.   I can manage to go home by myself now.”

She quietly patted me on the head and said in a cherishing tone:

“It may sound cruel, but don’t come any more.   Your second name will soon be changed to your mother’s.   ……Take care.   I’m going home from here, too.   If I’m late, Dai-chan ― your father will scold me.”

I stopped to hold the paper bag to my chest and gave a deep bow to her.   Then I thought it my duty or something not to move a muscle and strain to hear her slip-on sandals until her back turned around the corner and disappeared.   The chill at night returned at my feet when I began to cross the bridge alone, driving me startled and anxious.   Then I remembered my mother’s white face with a broad smile at me picking up bolts in a stay-down position, when I met her at the mill in payday.

I became dreadful.   I felt the weight of the bag under my arm to be a sign of a terrible treacherous act to my mother.   I stopped in the middle of the bridge and looked down the black surface of the stream.

  ― I’ll throw it away.

   But, even though I was so scared, I couldn’t stand to throw away the magazines I had just been bought.   Besides, words and a serious heart of a woman who loved my father were included in the bag.   Indeed there was more simple and urgent issue in my mind by just now than that Father and Satoko tried to teach; valuing the cause of Mother’s hatred above her ― but I was now forced to struggle with the result from a freak in the day.

I can’t bring this back.   If I should do so, it would just hurt Mother.

   I held the paper bag out to the dark stream from the parapet.   And, conscious of Satoko’s well-made figure, I let it go softly.   I could hear a dead sound when it hit the shallow mud.

   I started home with impatience.   I kept walking in haste longing for the light of Hodogaya.   One of the evidences about my calling on Father had already been thrown away.   The disposal of 50 yen coin was a problem.   But I felt it a pity to throw away the thing my father handed to me directly.

   I’ll spend it.   From today on I am not allowed to think of other things vaguely and fancy solemnly my position.   It’s only a game.   I must not, absolutely, hurt my mother any more.

   I saw neon lights on the movie district beyond the blue still of the night.   I ran to the big standing signboard of Yujiro.   Standing breathless in front of the signboard, the face, which was brighter differently and livelier than when I saw it a little before and didn’t doubt that it was doted upon by people, fascinated me harder than ever.   I stood at the ticket booth smoothing breath.

   The 50 yen coin had disappeared.   Searching one pocket of pants for the coin, there was a hole at the bottom of it.   I searched every pocket pulling a face, but didn’t find it anywhere.   I remembered the warmth of my father’s hand when I touched it for a second.   And I felt a pain in the chest as if to be constricted.

   I walked through the dark shopping street in Sengenshita.

   Turning to the foot of the slope leading to Mitsuzawa, I saw the security light of the main gate of Miyagaya grade school being on, away on the wide gravel road diverging from the slope, and the lamp threw a familiar little shadow against the ground.   The silhouette looked toward me and didn’t move in the manner of waiting someone.   The outline of disappointed shoulders connecting to her head with hair up characteristically was about to melt into the dark.   I noticed at once that the shadow was my mother’s.

   It approached me.   Mother’s impatient breathing, which tried to get to the core of the problem as soon as possible, touched my face.

   “Where have you been?”

   “Well….”

   “To your father’s place, haven’t you?   Since your bicycle was left there, I thought, it was not the movies but your father ― he took you out….”

   “No, he didn’t.   I walked there by myself.”

   “Did you go of your own free will?”

   “………….”

   When I began to walk again, she also walked beside me.   I moved a little to the roadside to avoid her heat.   There was a choking silence.   Her footsteps I could hear when she stepped on gravel produced sorrow.

   “I see….   Is he fine?”

   “There was a woman alone.”

   I told a lie.   Mother’s footsteps became more quiet.

   “Really?”

   “She was bigger than you.   Fat, you know.   …… She tried to give me money, but I said I don’t want it, and she said you must go home at once, because my family name will soon be changed.”

   I was going to say, “I’m hungry,” but I said nothing.   For I thought it was very unnatural, and she seemed crying.

   “I’m really relieved.   You had been taken and would never come back, I thought.   But I have parental authority.   If it should happen, I would take a strong measures against them.”

   “Would you…?”

   I nodded knowingly, though knew nothing, suited to her evident pride, when she said, “parental authority.”   Passing by the night light, Mother’s shadow walked beside mine.   As we walked on, my mother’s figure which I had grasped in my consciousness until then was magnified by light, moistened, and soon lapped me over.

20

   Since then I had lived with my mother for more than twenty years.   Yet the image of my father had not faded out and disappeared during such a long time.

   The beautiful meter he had written down on the back of the picture was in fact a close copy of tanka poetry attributed to Wakayama Bokusui:

   幾山河(やまかわ)越えさり行かば寂しさの終(は)てなむ國ぞ今日も旅ゆく

   But the melody that sounded within my chest at that time is still remaining there.

   I had the utmost respect for my father and perhaps felt sentiments on blood relation with which I was not able to be through, so I sometimes found my ideal of the father in his power over the family structure; in his suavity which had bulged in my imagination; and in his nobility ― if he were to fulfill his duty in an IF situation that he lived with my mother and me.   Above all, when I wanted to seek another quality from a man, dissatisfied with common surrounding men, his image bulged without limit in me.

   But, nevertheless, considering my mother’s sufferings for a long time, I was often indignant at the way he had been detached from daily lives, his wildness, his drunken days, or his bad habits of telling lies ( he had never sent my mother the expense of bringing me up ).

   Now I’m sure I don’t know at all how to answer the question whether I love my father or not.   Of course, more often than not, I do not so much hate as love a father in the sense of the structure of a family, so do people who have come in contact with good fellow men.   But I was unable to love or hate my father who was related by blood as someone special.   For I had lived the major part of my life apart from him and not only most of my own interests was not associated with him but I didn’t find any his influence of merits or demerits in me who was the other self of my father, thus I couldn’t think of myself in contrast with him.

   And, as a son of hers, as a mascot of her life or, above all, as a child of a quasi-father who wanted to be took advantage of, I had long lived with my mother under an intimate relationship; but nevertheless I did not have any definite views of a mother.   So, to the question whether I understood my mother, I must have been at my wits’ end with the answer, so must I when asked whether I loved my father.   If I answered I understood her, it verged on saying I understood human beings.

   I had always been observing all sorts of people around, setting my father at the top, and furbished up the knowledge of him little by little.   Among the people there was my mother.   Since I thought of her as alien and interesting person, I made up my new opinions on my mother by constantly finding new qualities in her or by modifying the views of her which I had built up since childhood.

   Mother gradually became an important part of my life, just when I made public my first anthology, a letter came to me.   In those days, separated from my mother, I lived with the girl in Matsuyama, Shikoku; because of a serious quarrel with my mother over my girl, I drew back into my girl’s parents’ home in the end and was quietly taken care of by her family as a potential bridegroom.