Toddler Hunting

by Taeko Kono

  A banner went up on the gatepost of a house in the neighborhood to mark a departure to the battlefront. Others soon followed. Every day on her way to school the girl would catch sight of yet another house that had given a family member to the war. Sometimes in the evenings, she heard cheers and shouts coming from two different places in the same neighborhood, celebrations for soldiers going off to fight.

  One day at morning assembly her teacher appeared before them in military uniform, his head closely shaven. Her class walked with him all the way to the main train station, and saw him off to war.

  In the spring two years later, the girl graduated from her grammar school and started going to girls’ secondary school. Her new school was in the city near the family shop. By now the war was in full swing. She and her sister and her brother (who was in grammar school by this time) weren’t collecting silver foil anymore. There was no more foil to be had.

  The girl, who now wore a wristwatch, began commuting to school by bus and tram, but she still had to wear her ­primary-school uniform. Finally, in May, the ­secondary-school uniforms, sailor tops and skirts, were distributed. Though they seemed at first sight like the real thing, the proper navy blue serge, they were actually made of rayon, a cheap synthetic material with a brown tinge, which soon grew fuzzy and developed a nasty shine. Her mother taught her to place the skirt under her mattress every night with layers of newspaper between the sixteen pleats. Sharp in the morning, by midday the pleats would be gone.

  All the students in the grades above her wore sailor suits made of proper navy blue wool. The girl felt so envious — of the deep blue of their material, of the way their blouses’ collars and cuffs crisply folded back and their skirts’ pleats opened and closed like a fan with each step. If only she’d been born a year earlier! Compared to theirs her version was miserable — and some girls in the next grade were her age by traditional count. If she had been born just one month earlier, in March, it would have been all right!

  Again and again, the girl bemoaned her fate, weeping, to her parents. After a few weeks, some of her classmates came to school wearing uniforms made of the real material. They were ­hand-­me-downs adjusted to fit, but they looked just like the ones the older girls wore. The girl couldn’t help begging her parents to let her have a uniform like these.

  Her father at last asked a tailor who was a friend of his whether he would make his daughter a uniform. The man said that he would. Her father had her drop by the family business one day after school, so that he could take her to the tailor to have her measurements taken.

  The family had moved to the suburbs three years ago. The girl had been coming into the city to go to school, of course, and she’d also accompanied her mother sometimes on shopping trips. But she hadn’t actually visited the family store, and she hadn’t visited O-ie-san, either, not even once, since they had all gone to say goodbye.

  Seeing her father busy with a customer, the girl told him she’d be over at Grandma Hotta’s, and went back out to the street.

  “Hey, wait.” Her father came out after her. “I’m ready now. Let’s go.”

  “But I want to visit Grandma Hotta.”

  “We don’t have time.”

  She hurried to collect her satchel, which she’d left inside the store.

  The girl could not take her eyes off the cloth that the tailor produced for her school uniform. She looked at it from far away, then peering at it closely, stroked its smooth edge. The more she looked at it, the more difficult it was to tear her eyes away.

  “It is a fine piece of cloth,” the tailor agreed. “And I’m afraid it’s my last.” As he occupied himself with taking the girl’s measurements over her shabby uniform, he remarked: “I see what you mean. No wonder you hate to wear this.”

  When they left the tailor’s, her father announced that he was taking her out to dinner. The two of them walked to a nearby traditional restaurant. To her surprise, however, when they went into one of the private rooms, somebody was already waiting there: Grandma Hotta.

  “Sorry we’re late,” her father said to the old lady, after greeting her.

  O-ie-san brushed this politely aside and turned to the girl, and gazed at her. “Oh, how you’ve grown. . . .” she said.

  The girl found it very strange that her father hadn’t said anything about inviting O-ie-san to dinner — and anyway, it had always been her mother who took care of the old lady. Her father hadn’t objected, but she had never seen him talk to O-ie-san, let alone do anything kind for her.

  But the girl knew better than to question him now.

  The waitress placed a brocade scroll of gold and purple in front of her father. The girl wondered what it could be. He took hold of it without any signs of surprise.

  “This place is still as nice as ever,” O-ie-san remarked to the girl’s father.

  “What shall we order?” he said, unrolling the menu and studying it.

  So O-ie-san must have come to this restaurant before, the girl realized. Quite a while ago, and more than once — when could that have been? Probably before the war began, maybe before she was old enough to go to school — perhaps even before she was born.

  When the dishes came to the table, the girl’s father pressed O-ie-san to eat.

  “Well then,” the old lady said, bowing her head. “I will accompany you, if I may.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Of course!” echoed the little girl.

  “What do you mean?” her father laughed at her. “You’re the one accompanying us.”

  That day, the girl’s father, who was fond of sake, didn’t drink a drop. The three of them first talked together about how the girl had been since the family moved to the suburbs. Soon, however, she found herself silently listening to the two adults. The names of people she’d never heard of cropped up, and some of them, it seemed, weren’t even living any more.

  Dinner came to an end, and it was time to say goodbye. They let O-ie-san take the first taxi and waited for a second, but none ever came.

  “It doesn’t matter,” her father said, beckoning to her as he stepped out of the restaurant. “We can walk. We’ll go for a stroll.”

  It was an evening in May, and only a little past eight o’clock, but even so, the streets and shops were almost totally deserted.

  “Everything’s gotten so dark and gloomy, Father,” the girl remarked, carrying her satchel, as she walked with him.

  “Hasn’t it. Are you surprised?”

  “I didn’t think it would be this gloomy.”

  Since the area was once a thriving entertainment district, its lack of excitement was stark. Neon signs were against the law these days, so nothing lit up the night sky in bright colors any more. Very few of the shop windows had lights on. The whole district looked about to fall asleep, as if it were making a futile effort to keep awake only because it was supposed to be a place people spent money and enjoyed themselves. The restaurant owners had all closed up for the night. And everybody out in the dark streets was walking at a strangely brisk pace — not hurrying to reach any destination, the girl realized, but only because the streets were so empty that nobody got in their way. The sight made the girl feel even sadder about all the changes that had taken place.

  “We should have telephoned Mother before we left,” the girl said, suddenly remembering.

  “It’s all right,” her father replied. “Mother knows we’re together. But listen. I don’t want you to go telling anyone at home that I invited Grandma Hotta out to dinner today.”

  “Why not?”

  “Just don’t.”

  “Not even Mother?”

  “Not even Mother.”

  “Well, was it a secret from me, as well, really?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “But you didn’t tell me anything before we got there.”

  “You fo
und out when we arrived. Now listen: today we went to Suehiro restaurant and had steak, just the two of us. Understand?”

  The girl nodded.

  They walked along for a while, when she suddenly asked: “But why aren’t I allowed to tell them anything about it at home?”

  “You really don’t understand, do you?” her father said, softly.

  Many years later, the girl learned that O-ie-san’s daughter had, in fact, killed herself. She had thrown herself into the sea, soon after finding out that Father was engaged to the woman who would become the girl’s mother. O-ie-san, who had already lost her husband and all her possessions, was left quite alone in the world. But even though he was the cause of this final blow, O-ie-san loved the girl’s father as if he were her own son.

  By the time she heard the true story, the girl was nearly thirty years old. The person who told her couldn’t say for sure if her mother knew of all that had happened. Of course, by that time, O-ie-san was long since dead. The girl’s father, too, had passed away. Only her mother was still alive, but the girl never dared to ask her.

  Walking through the deserted streets with her father, though, she still knew nothing.

  “You see,” her father explained to her. “I wanted to treat Grandma, just once, to something really nice, while she can still appreciate it. Everything is getting so scarce, now, with the war going on. Soon there won’t be anything nice to eat. It doesn’t matter for us. We’ll be able to buy anything we want once Japan has won the war. But that’s not the case for Grandma — that’s why I thought I’d like to treat her to something special, now, while it’s still possible. . . .”

  That didn’t explain why she should not tell her mother—after all, her mother had always lavished the old lady with kindness.

  But all at once, the girl was strangely moved by her father’s words.

  “All right,” she promised, as if she no longer cared about the reason. “I won’t tell anybody! Not even Mother!”

  Had she been moved by the intensity her father’s words seemed to contain? No, more likely it was the intensity of her own feelings about “war.”

  The girl and her father walked on until they reached a bridge, where they stopped for a while. The river, once full of shimmering reflections from the shining neon night sky, now lay in complete darkness. Only the faint rippling of the water could be heard as the river flowing out to sea rose slowly with the incoming tide.

  * * *

  * The “ie” of “O-ie-san” means “household/family.” The name means something like “Mistress,” and was traditionally used by the merchant class in Osaka.

  Toddler-Hunting

  ­Yoji-gari, 1961

  Hayashi Akiko couldn’t abide little girls between three and ten years old — she detested them more than any other kind of human being. If Akiko, like most women, had married and had babies, she might by now have a child just that age. And what, she often wondered, if she’d had a girl? What then?

  She knew that men often said they hated children, only to turn into doting fathers once they had their own. But Akiko couldn’t picture her own abhorrence ever yielding to maternal love, an emotion she scarcely possessed anyway. Foreign little girls, even at that age, were slightly more bearable, perhaps because their race was more glaring than their gender. If she’d married a foreigner, she might have been able to stand having a daughter of mixed blood, but if not, she was sure that she would have been a horribly cruel mother. She wouldn’t have been satisfied just being cold and harsh to her daughter: her loathing would have required more extreme measures.

  Akiko’s dislike of little girls was of an entirely different order than her disdain for happy, attractive, conceited women her own age, or for young men throwing their weight around, or for smug, complacent old people. It was more like a phobia, the repulsion some people feel when confronted with small creatures like snakes or cats or frogs.

  Akiko could not bear to remember that she herself had once been a little girl.

  But in fact her childhood had been happier than other periods of her life. She couldn’t recall a single hardship; she might have been the most fortunate child who ever lived, a cheerful thing when she was young. But beneath the sunny disposition, in the pit of her stomach, she’d been conscious of an inexplicable constriction. Something loathsome and repellent oppressed all her senses — it was as if she were trapped in a long, narrow tunnel; as if a sticky liquid seeped unseen out of her every pore — as if she were under a curse.

  Once, in science class, they’d had a lesson about silkworms, and with a scalpel the teacher had sliced open a cocoon. Akiko took one look at the faintly squirming pupa — a filthy dark thing, slowly binding itself up in thread issuing from its own body—and knew she was seeing the embodiment of the feelings that afflicted her.

  And then for some reason Akiko became convinced that other girls her age shared her strange inner discomfort. Grownups, however, did not feel this way, and neither did little boys and older girls.

  And sure enough, once she was past ten, this queasiness left her. It felt like she had stepped out of a tunnel into the vast free universe, where finally she could breathe. It was at this time, however, that she started to feel nauseated by any girl still passing through that stage, and her repulsion grew stronger as the years went by.

  The more typical a girl this age, the less Akiko could bear to be near her. The pallid complexion; the rubbery flesh; the bluish shadow at the nape of the neck left by the bobbed haircut; the unnaturally high, insipid way the girl would talk; even the cut and color of her clothes: Akiko saw in all this the filthy closeness she had glimpsed in the pupa. She could hardly bear to look at a little girl, still less touch one. Her horror remained undiminished to the present day.

  But little boys, now — Akiko found little boys extremely appealing at that age. She didn’t know exactly when her attraction for them first surfaced, but with every passing year she found their company more intoxicating. Lately, her encounters with little boys had been intensely pleasurable.

  Sasaki had taken the express to Osaka on business. When Akiko saw him off at the train station, he’d handed her a package, a new shirt. He’d found out it was poorly finished when he got it home, he said. His local tailor had tried to fix it, but Sasaki wanted Akiko to exchange it for him. So she headed for the department store where he had bought it, in Nihombashi.

  She ran her errand. It was nearly five o’clock when she left the store for the subway station, hurrying to get ahead of the evening rush. But her pace slowed as she passed a ­well-known store specializing in children’s wear.

  It was late in summer, still very hot: heavy afternoon sunlight flooded the pavement. But in the shady showcase window, autumn had already arrived. Pretty little shirts for boys were out on display, pinned up. The clothes leaned in various directions, sticking out their sturdy elbows and gesturing with their arms.

  One shirt almost seemed to be doing a headstand: its front with its little ­button-neck opening was folded so its square little chest puffed out. This was probably the only ­short-sleeved one, to judge by its lack of bulk, but the material looked heavy enough for autumn: it was probably a light woolen weave. Akiko was enchanted by the intensity of its broad red and blue horizontal stripes, and by the ­soft-looking, neatly folded collar in the same design.

  Nothing in the window was tagged, so Akiko tried guessing its price. The shirt probably cost at least fifteen hundred yen. Things she liked tended to be expensive.

  Her rapture made her an easy target. A clerk in a white ­short-sleeved shirt approached.

  “For your son, Madam? How old is he?”

  Ignoring the question, Akiko asked the price of the shirt.

  “One thousand seven hundred yen.”

  “Just what I guessed!” Akiko said, feeling if anything rather pleased.

  “Shall I get it out?” The clerk reached
toward the glass panels at the back of the showcase.

  “Oh, please don’t,” Akiko begged, hastily. “It’s all right.”

  At that moment, they were interrupted. To Akiko’s relief, the clerk was called to the telephone at back of the store: she knew that once she touched that adorably sweet shirt, she’d never be able to get out of the shop without it.

  But before going off to take the call, the clerk quickly took out the shirt and pressed it into her hands: “It doesn’t hurt to look.”

  Akiko stroked the garment tenderly — she could just see a little boy, about four years old, pulling on this cozy, lightweight shirt, his sunburned head popping up through the neck. When the time came, he would insist he wanted to do it by himself. Crossing his chubby arms over his chest, concentrating with all his might, he would just manage to grasp the shirttails. But pulling it up over his head was going to be difficult. Closing his eyes, wiggling his rear end, he would twist around struggling his hardest, revealing his tight round belly full to bursting with the food he ate every mealtime. The shirt, though, was not going to come off, however hard he tried.

  Drawn by the charm of little boys’ clothes, and especially by the scenes to which they gave rise in her mind, Akiko had several times ended up buying something — a pair of reversible shorts with ­brick-colored cuffs; a deerstalker cap of white terry cloth with a tiny pale maroon check; a miniature pea jacket about a foot and a half high. When she’d purchased something, she would seek out a woman friend with a toddler to dress. Once she’d settled on her prey, she would set out to bestow her gift. It didn’t matter that she normally never gave the woman a second thought — sometimes they’d even had a falling out — she would bewilder the recipient or make her cringe in embarrassment.