Wolf Children: Ame & Yuki

by Mamoru Hosoda

  But when it rained the next day, the roof that she had supposedly repaired leaked all over the place. Soon, she was in a fix, with every pot and dish in the house scattered across the floor catching drips. She looked reproachfully up at the ceiling.

  The next day was sunny, so once again she climbed up to the roof and fixed the boards, this time with greater care. But the day after that, it rained again, and again the roof leaked. There were fewer leaks than before, but apparently, she had missed some spots in her repairs. She sighed, stared up at the ceiling, and resolved to stubbornly wage her war anew. For a while, it seemed that was all she did.

  After she had gained a degree of success with the roof, she wiped down the whole inside of the house with rags. The place was so huge she felt the task would never end, but she continued undiscouraged. Thanks to her efforts, the floor was so clean it was practically unrecognizable, but in exchange, her own hands and face grew dirtier and dirtier.

  Ame watched, enthralled, as Hana thoroughly scrubbed the floor of the porch. He obeyed when she asked him to move so she could wipe the spot where he was sitting and didn’t cause a bit of trouble.

  Not so with Yuki.

  “Look, Mommy, look!” she cried, flying in from the garden and dumping a pile of frogs and worms and roly-poly bugs and whatever else she’d caught on the newly cleaned floor. When Hana looked up, dumbfounded, Yuki gave her a mud-covered grin, waiting for her mother’s praise.

  While Hana was battling the housework, the children explored every corner of the garden. Yuki buried herself in meadow flowers to solemnly observe the honeybees and scrambled up the persimmon tree to reach out toward little birds whose names she didn’t know. Ame watched timidly from a distance, running away as soon as anything happened.

  Yuki even tried to pet the stray tabby who hissed at them, obviously threatening.

  “Here, kitty, kitty!”

  The cat defended its territory with a series of feints, revealing a set of sharp claws entirely at odds with its plump body. A few of its swipes almost caught Yuki, but she was undaunted and changed into wolf form, barking sharply. The tabby responded to this impossible transformation with a shrill yowl before turning tail in a panic. Wolf Yuki laughed and chased the tabby round and round an abandoned field. After that, every time the cat saw Yuki, it meowed, tucked its tail between its legs, and ran away.

  Meanwhile, Hana had reached the final stage of cleaning. She patiently polished every last corner of the house, and the more she polished, the more the house’s original dignity shone through. Once the grime was gone from the old cabinetry, beautiful etchings appeared on the glass. Hana paused in her work, spellbound by the delicate patterns sparkling in the sunlight. And when she scrubbed the old sink with a brush, she discovered colorful tiles beneath the dirt. She gasped at the lovely mosaic pattern, tracing the tiles as if to convince herself their colors were real. She could sense all the love the former owners had held for this abandoned house. With great care, she repaired the cracks in the tea cupboard and the frosted glass with cellophane tape and patched the newly changed sliding doors with pieces of paper shaped like cherry blossoms.

  She found a post marked with lines measuring children’s heights. She promptly stood Yuki and Ame against it and carved their heights in, too, to record them at ages five and four.

  She put away the modest collection of household goods she’d brought from Tokyo, then plugged in the little refrigerator and set the bookshelf and low table in the main room. Here in this mountain house they looked smaller than ever, out of proportion. She set a jar of spring wildflowers on the bookcase and propped his driver’s license against it, choosing that spot so he could look out across the room and the porch to keep an eye on the children.

  At last, the house was livable. Her final act was to wrap bandages around her own battered fingers.

  She wrestled the old bicycle from the barn and headed into the village to do some shopping. As she cruised down the hill at a comfortable speed, Yuki was wild with excitement; Ame cowered in fear. Rice planting was finished, and in the terraced paddies, newly planted seedlings swayed in the breeze. Hana realized the seasons had changed while she was busy cleaning.

  She found the goods she needed at a little general store and paid for them, but the thousand-yen bills were vanishing from her wallet with disturbing speed. A good selection of vegetables had been set out for sale under the shop’s eaves, and as she casually looked them over, she heard a female customer whispering with the shopkeeper. Hana bundled Yuki and Ame onto the bicycle to hide them from sight and hurriedly pedaled away.

  They headed back the way they’d come, the bicycle handles weighed down with shopping bags. The road home was all uphill, and Hana broke into a sweat as she rode. The sun had set by the time they arrived. On the dark mountain, everything was black except the light from their house.

  Hana put the food away in the fridge, made a quick dinner, and set one of the grilled chicken-and-pepper skewers in front of his driver’s license. After dinner, all three of them took a bath together. The freshly scrubbed bathroom was wonderful to sit in. Hana sighed deeply as she soaked in the tub. She was relieved to have the house in order, but at the same time, she couldn’t help thinking about all the money she’d spent to do it. The small savings he had left behind wouldn’t last much longer.

  “I need to budget more…”

  “Budge it more?” Yuki asked, covered in soap bubbles.

  Hana giggled. “Hee-hee-hee. We’d better at least grow our own vegetables,” she said.

  “I wanna help!” Yuki said, her eyes sparkling as she flung the soapy foam everywhere.

  Every two weeks, a bus repurposed as a library on wheels arrived in the village center.

  “Wait here for a minute,” Hana said, pulling up the children’s hoods and leaving them outside.

  Inside, she pulled book after book on vegetable gardening off the shelves and flipped through them. She didn’t know a thing about farming, but she was eager to learn so she could save money. Of course, she hadn’t forgotten what Mr. Kuroda had said about the land being poorly suited to a self-sufficient lifestyle. Still, she hoped to grow at least a few things, and she wouldn’t get anywhere if she didn’t try. After carefully selecting some books for beginners, she stacked them on the counter.

  “I’d like to check these out,” she said.

  “These, too, please,” Yuki added. She was holding up a pile of picture books that she must have picked out when Hana wasn’t looking. Her hood slipped back as she stood on tiptoes.

  Her wolf ears were exposed.

  “Yuki!!” Hana yelped, pulling the hood over them in a panic.

  “Umm,” the librarian said, craning her face around the stack of books, “you can only check out eight at a time.”

  Somehow, she hadn’t noticed. Hana sighed in relief.

  She would have to remind the children never to show themselves in wolf form, even by accident.

  When they got home, she drew a picture of Yuki and Ame in a sketchbook with crayons.

  “Are you listening? You’re wolf children, but it’s a secret just for us, okay?”

  “Okay!”

  “Okay.”

  Hana added wolf ears and tails to the two figures. “If you suddenly turn into wolves, people will be very surprised.”

  She turned to a new page and drew some people looking startled.

  “Surprise!”

  “Surprise.”

  “So you must never become wolves in front of other people. Promise?”

  “Promise!”

  “Promise.”

  She turned the page again and drew a bear, a deer, and a boar. “One more thing. Humans like to think they’re better than the animals in the woods, but you must never disrespect the animals you meet.”

  “Why not?”

  On the next page, she drew their father with wolf ears. “Your father was a wolf, too. He would be very sad if you did that.”

  “Got it!”

/>   “Got it.”

  The children stared at the drawing of their father.

  Lastly, Hana told them they had the right to freely choose whether they would live as humans or wolves, just as their father had.

  Ame was studying a picture book by himself on the porch.

  It was one of the books Yuki had checked out from the library on wheels. On the cover was a picture of a strong-looking wolf, its mouth open wide and its fangs bared. Inevitably, Ame empathized with the wolf as he turned the pages. He wondered what role it would play.

  But as he read on, his hopes were dashed. The wolf in the story was ferocious and cunning, a despicable character who thought nothing of harming the good villagers—even enjoyed it. On the last page was a picture of the villagers chasing the wolf away at gunpoint. His tail was tucked between his legs, and the lips on his big mouth curled back as he promised tearfully never to do it again.

  Ame looked up, silently comparing himself to the wolf in the storybook.

  While Ame was reading, Hana was standing in the overgrown field next to the house.

  She looked again at the detailed notes she had taken from the library books on gardening. She had found the tools she needed in the barn and bought fertilizer and a few other things from the home center.

  After pulling up the rampant weeds covering the entire field, she awkwardly broke up the soil with a hoe, picked up all the stones she could find, and tossed them over the sloped bank. The process took her several days.

  Next, she mixed fertilizer into the soil and raised ridges for planting, checking her work against the pictures in the books. She sowed the vegetable seeds one by one and, with some help from Yuki and Ame, soaked them with watering cans. She scrutinized the field worriedly, reassuring herself that everything would be fine. The seeds and fertilizer hadn’t been cheap.

  A few days later, she was relieved to discover seedlings sprouting from the earth as the children romped around them excitedly. Since she was a novice, she hadn’t expected everything to go perfectly, but now she had hope that the garden would turn out better than she’d initially thought.

  In the following weeks, she followed the instructions in the books for thinning the seedlings and adding more fertilizer. The plants were growing well. If they kept on like this, Hana figured she would be able to start harvesting food before summer.

  One day after a rain, however, she went to check on the garden only to find that each and every plant had wilted.

  “No, no, no!!”

  “What happened?” Yuki asked, looking out at the field of limp leaves.

  Confused, Hana returned to her books, insisting to no one in particular that she’d followed all the instructions to the letter. Maybe I skimped on the fertilizer because of money, she thought.

  As the village elders weeded the terraced paddies, they heard someone calling to them.

  “Um, excuse me!”

  “Huh?”

  Mr. Hosokawa and Mr. Yamaoka straightened their backs and turned toward the voice. Belatedly, Grandpa Nirasaki looked up, too. Hana was standing on the far side of the hydrangeas blooming on the paddy banks, pointing toward the woods.

  “May I take some fallen leaves from the woods?” she shouted.

  “What?” Mr. Hosokawa asked, surprised.

  “Fallen leaves!”

  “No one asks before they take those!” Mr. Yamaoka answered disdainfully.

  “Thank you very much,” Hana said, heading into the trees.

  Mr. Hosokawa and Mr. Yamaoka shared a look.

  “Wonder how long she’ll last.”

  “Pretty soon she’ll be complaining about the lack of convenience stores and karaoke.”

  “Ten to one.”

  They smiled cynically and returned to their work.

  “…”

  Grandpa Nirasaki stared silently at the woods for a moment, then turned sullenly away.

  Hana pulled up all the dead plants, emptied the plastic bags stuffed with fallen leaves onto the soil, and mixed in the leaves with her hoe.

  Next, she worked her newly purchased tomato and eggplant starts out from their pots and carefully planted each one.

  “Second time’s the charm,” she said.

  Truthfully speaking, if she had to buy any more seedlings, she’d be cutting into their household budget. Plus, it was almost summer. If she failed again, she would have to give up on summer vegetables and wait for the fall season. As she pushed the dirt up around the base of each plant, her hands came together as if in prayer for their success. Just then…

  “…Mommy.”

  She looked up at the sound of a faint, sniffly voice beside her. “…Ame! What happened?!”

  He was whimpering in half-wolf form, his red, swollen face covered in scratches.

  Hana picked him up and rushed into the house.

  Yuki was stuffing her mouth with snacks in the living room and explained the situation nonchalantly.

  “It was the tabby. She’s been after him ’cause he’s a wimpy wolf.”

  Hana wiped Ame’s tears and dabbed ointment on the score at the tip of his nose. “It’s just a little scratch. Nothing to worry about,” she said.

  “He can’t get by out there if he doesn’t fight back,” Yuki said.

  “Yuki.” Hana looked at her reproachfully.

  Ame leaned against his mother. “Say it’s okay,” he whined.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she repeated, gently rubbing his back as if she was casting some healing magic. As he buried his face in the safety of her lap, his behavior seemed to bother Yuki. She stood up.

  “I can even beat a boar,” she said in a loud, taunting voice.

  “You saw a boar?” Hana asked.

  “Yup. I saw some monkeys and a serow, too. But I wasn’t scared at all. They just run away when you chase them. It’s funny.”

  “Yuki.”

  “And then I peed—”

  “Remember what I said? About not bossing around the animals?”

  “But…”

  “Please.”

  Yuki was clearly unsatisfied, confused as to why her mother wasn’t praising her. Still, she swallowed her feelings and sat down obediently.

  “…Yes, Mommy.”

  “Thank you, sweetie.”

  Ame looked up at Hana. “Say it again,” he complained.

  “…It’s okay, it’s okay.” She rubbed his back. “But Yuki’s not wrong…,” she muttered, more to herself than to him.

  Maybe he wouldn’t be able to get by out there like this. She might be able to teach him how to live as a human, but how could she teach him to live as a wolf?

  “How do wolf children become adults?”

  She looked up to their father’s picture.

  Hana took Yuki and Ame into the mountains near their house for a picnic.

  The abandoned hiking path was in its full summer glory, overgrown with bamboo grass so thick it threatened to block their way. But Yuki charged ahead anyway, pushing it aside with a branch she had found.

  “Slowpokes!”

  “Wait for us, Yuki.” Hana was pausing for Ame, who didn’t want to climb the path. “Come on, Ame.”

  “Carry me.”

  “Hmm? Already?”

  They had just started out, but Ame dug in his heels. “Carry me!”

  “Hurry up!” Yuki called down from the path ahead.

  Hana smiled at Ame, and he grudgingly trudged forward.

  When they stopped for a break, she read to them from a children’s book about wolf ecology.

  “‘Wolves begin to hunt about four months after they are born. They first practice by catching mice and other small animals, and when they get older, they form hunting teams with grown wolves.’”

  “Team!”

  Yuki grabbed Ame’s hand and linked arms with him. He shook free gloomily and hugged his knees, glaring at the ground.

  “I don’t wanna be on your team.”

  “Hmph. Fine.” Yuki sniffed the wind and r
an off, leaving Ame behind.

  “Don’t go too far,” Hana called.

  “’Kay!”

  Wolf Yuki disappeared into the forest, her dress wrapped around her neck and her water bottle clattering on the strap over her chest.

  “I wanna go home,” Ame pouted.

  Hana picked a leaf, hoping to placate him.

  “Hey, I think we can eat this,” she said, paging through her field guide to identify it.

  “…”

  Ame poked discontentedly at the ground with a stick.

  Brilliant summer sunlight filtered into the forest through the canopy overhead while wolf Yuki tried her hand at hunting.

  Letting her keen curiosity lead her, she observed the sap on different trees, studied the shapes of footprints, compared the smell of this dropping to that one, and strained her eyes and ears to find the animals initially hidden from view. When she spotted something moving, she chased it wherever it went. She didn’t even mind when a stag beetle pinched the tip of her nose. She crept up on quails, dug up several field mouse nests, ignored an angry rat snake’s threats, and scampered tirelessly through the woods in pursuit of a hare’s tail.

  It was all the more exciting to encounter these animals in real life after seeing them in illustrated encyclopedias at home. When she caught one, she investigated by putting it in her mouth and smelling it and touching it with her front paws. She thought the six-legged insects and no-legged snakes were especially peculiar. She marveled in awe at the color of a bird’s feathers when she stretched out its wing; she was spellbound by the beautiful movement of the muscles in a rabbit’s hind legs. As soon as she succeeded in catching one animal, she challenged herself to catch an even more slippery one.

  Yuki’s hunt was not at all about filling her stomach, and it was also quite different from the “hunting instinct” of vicious predators. She simply found the animals spectacularly curious and interesting as she encountered them for the very first time. She was bursting with desire to one day learn everything about the entire forest.