I
The village stands on the bank of a broad but very shallow river, the stony bed of which is completely covered with water only during the rainy season. The river traverses an immense level of rice-fields, open to the horizon north and south, but on the west walled in by a range of blue peaks, and on the east by a chain of low wooded hills. The village itself is separated from these hills only by half a mile of rice-fields ; and its principal cemetery, the adjunct of a Buddhist temple dedicated to Kwannon-of-the-Eleven-Faces, is situated upon a neighboring summit. As a distributing centre, the village is not unimportant. Besides several hundred thatched dwellings of the ordinary rustic style, it contains one whole street of thriving two-story shops and inns with handsome tiled roofs. It possesses also a very picturesque ujigami, or Shintō parish temple, dedicated to the Sim-Goddess, and a pretty shrine, in a grove of mulberry-trees, dedicated to the Deity of Silkworms.
There was born in this village, in the seventh year of Meiji, in the house of one Uchida, a dyer, a boy called Tarō. His birthday happened to be an aku-nichi, or unlucky day,—the seventh of the eighth month, by the ancient Calendar of Moons. Therefore his parents, being old-fashioned folk, Feared and sorrowed. But sympathizing neighbors tried to persuade them that everything was as it should be, because the calendar had been changed by the Emperor's order, and according to the new calendar the day was a kitsu-nichi, or lucky day. These representations somewhat lessened the anxiety of the parents; but when they took the child to the ujigami, they made the gods a gift of a very large paper lantern, and besought earnestly that all harm should be kept away from their boy. The kannushi, or priest, repeated the archaic formulas required, and waved the sacred gohei above the little shaven head, and prepared a small amulet to be suspended about the infant's neck; after which the parents visited the temple of Kwannon on the hill, and there also made offerings, and prayed to all the Buddhas to protect their first-born.
II
When Tarō was six years old, his parents decided to send him to the new elementary school which had been built at a short distance from the village. Tarō's grandfather bought him some writing - brushes, paper, a book, and a slate, and early one morning led him by the hand to the school. Tarō Felt very happy, because the slate and the other things delighted him like so many new toys, and because everybody had told him that the school was a pleasant place, where he would have plenty of time to play. Moreover, his mother had promised to give him many cakes when he should come home.
As soon as they reached the school,—a big two-story building with glass windows,—a servant showed them into a large bare apartment, where a serious-looking man was seated at a desk. Tarō's grandfather bowed low to the serious-looking man, and addressed him as Sensei, and humbly requested him to teach the little Fellow kindly. The Sensei rose up, and bowed in return, and spoke courteously to the old man. He also put his hand on Tarō's head, and said nice things. But Tarō became all at once afraid. When his grandfather had bid him good-by, he grew still more afraid, and would have liked to run away home; but the master took him into a large, high, white room, full of girls and boys sitting on benches, and showed him a bench, and told him to sit down. All the boys and girls turned their heads to look at Tarō, and whispered to each other, and laughed. Tarō thought they were laughing at him, and began to Feel very miserable. A big bell rang; and the master, who had taken his place on a high platform at the other end of the room, ordered silence in a tremendous way that terrified Tarō. All became quiet, and the master began to speak. Taro thought he spoke most dreadfully. He did not say that school was a pleasant place: he told the pupils very plainly that it was not a place for play, but for hard work. He told them that study was painful, but that they must study in spite of the pain and the difficulty. He told them about the rules which they must obey, and about the punishments for disobedience or carelessness. When they all became frightened and still, he changed his voice altogether, and began to talk to them like a kind father,—promising to love them just like his own little ones. Then he told them how the school had been built by the august command of His Imperial Majesty, that the boys and girls of the country might become wise men and good women, and how dearly they should love their noble Emperor, and be happy even to give their lives for his sake. Also he told them how they should love their parents, and how hard their parents had to work for the means of sending them to school, and how wicked and ungrateful it would be to idle during study-hours. Then he began to call them each by name, asking questions about what he had said.
Tarō had heard only a part of the master's discourse. His small mind was almost entirely occupied by the fact that all the boys and girls had looked at him and laughed when he had first entered the room. And the mystery of it all was so painful to him that he could think of little else, and was therefore quite unprepared when the master called his name.
"Uchida Tarō, what do you like best in the world?"
Tarō started, stood up, and answered frankly,—
"Cake."
All the boys and girls again looked at him and laughed; and the master asked reproachfully, "Uchida Tarō, do you like cake more than you like your parents? Uchida Tarō, do you like cake better than your duty to His Majesty our Emperor? "
Then Tarō knew that he had made some great mistake ; and his face became very hot, and all the children laughed, and he began to cry. This only made them laugh still more ; and they kept on laughing until the master again enforced silence, and put a similar question to the next pupil. Tarō kept his sleeve to his eyes, and sobbed.
The bell rang. The master told the children they would receive their first writing-lesson during the next class-hour from another teacher, but that they could first go out and play for a while. He then left the room; and the boys and girls all ran out into the school-yard to play, taking no notice whatever of Tarō. The child Felt more astonished at being thus ignored than he had Felt before on finding himself an object of general attention. Nobody except the master had yet spoken one word to him; and now even the master seemed to have forgotten his existence. He sat down again on his little bench, and cried and cried ; trying all the while not to make a noise, for Fear the children would come back to laugh at him.
Suddenly a hand was laid upon his shoulder ; a sweet voice was speaking to him; and turning his head, he found himself looking into the most caressing pair of eyes he had ever seen,—the eyes of a little girl about a year older than he.
"What is it?" she asked him tenderly.
Tarō sobbed and snuffled helplessly for a moment, before he could answer: "I am very unhappy here. I want to go home."
"Why?" questioned the girl, slipping an arm about his neck.
"They all hate me ; they will not speak to me or play with me."
"Oh no!" said the girl. "Nobody dislikes you at all. It is only because you are a stranger. When I first went to school, last year, it was just the same with me. You must not fret."
"But all the others are playing; and I must sit in here,"protested Tarō.
"Oh no, you must not. You must come and play with me. I will be your playfellow. Come!"
Tarō at once began to cry out loud. Selfpity and gratitude and the delight of newfound sympathy filled his little heart so full that he really could not help it. It was so nice to be petted for crying.
But the girl only laughed, and led him out of the room quickly, because the little mother soul in her divined the whole situation. "Of course you may cry, if you wish," she said; "but you must play, too!" And oh, what a delightful play they played together!
But when school was over, and Tarō's grandfather came to take him home, Tarō began to cry again, because it was necessary that he should bid his little playmate good-by.
The grandfather laughed, and exclaimed, "Why, it is little Yoshi,—Miyahara O-Yoshi! Yoshi can come along with us, and stop at the house a while. It is on her way home."
At Tarō's house the playmates ate the promised cake together; and O-Yoshi misc
hievously asked, mimicking the master's severity, "Uchida Tarō, do you like cake better than me?"
III
O-Yoshi's father owned some neighboring rice-lands, and also kept a shop in the village. Her mother, a samurai, adopted into the Miyahara family at the time of the breaking up of the military caste, had borne several children, of whom O-Yoshi, the last, was the only survivor. While still a baby, O-Yoshi lost her mother. Miyahara was past middle age; but he took another wife, the daughter of one of his own farmers,—a young girl named Ito O-Tama. Though swarthy as new copper, O-Tama was a remarkably handsome peasant girl, tall, strong, and active; but the choice caused surprise, because O-Tama could neither read nor write. The surprise changed to amusement when it was discovered that almost from the time of entering the house she had assumed and maintained absolute control. But the neighbors stopped laughing at Miyahara's docility when they learned more about O-Tama. She knew her husband's interests better than he, took charge of everything, and managed his affairs with such tact that in less than two years she had doubled his income. Evidently, Miyahara had got a wife who was going to make him rich. As a step-mother she bore herself rather kindly, even after the birth of her first boy. O-Yoshi was well cared for, and regularly sent to school.
While the children were still going to school, a long-expected and wonderful event took place. Strange tall men with red hair and beards—foreigners from the West—came down into the valley with a great multitude of Japanese laborers, and constructed a railroad. It was carried along the base of the low hill range, beyond the rice-fields and mulberry groves in the rear of the village ; and almost at the angle where it crossed the old road leading to the temple of Kwannon, a small station-house was built; and the name of the village was painted in Chinese characters upon a white signboard erected on a platform. Later, a line of telegraph-poles was planted, parallel with the railroad. And still later, trains came, and shrieked, and stopped, and passed,—nearly shaking the Buddhas in the old cemetery off their lotus-flowers of stone.
The children wondered at the strange, level, ash-strewn way, with its double lines of iron shining away north and south into mystery; and they were awe-struck by the trains that came roaring and screaming and smoking, like storm-breathing dragons, making the ground quake as they passed by. But this awe was succeeded by curious interest,—an interest intensified by the explanations of one of their school-teachers, who showed them, by drawings on the blackboard, how a locomotive engine was made ; and who taught them, also, the still more marvelous operation of the telegraph, and told them how the new western capital and the sacred city of Kyoto were to be united by rail and wire, so that the journey between them might be accomplished in less than two days, and messages sent from the one to the other in a Few seconds.
Tarō and O-Yoshi became very dear friends. They studied together, played together, and visited each other's homes. But at the age of eleven O-Yoshi was taken from school to assist her step-mother in the household; and thereafter Tarō saw her but seldom. He finished his own studies at fourteen, and began to learn his father's trade. Sorrows came. After having given him a little brother, his mother died; and in the same year, the kind old grandfather who had first taken him to school followed her; and after these things the world seemed to him much less bright than before. Nothing further changed his life till he reached his seventeenth year. Occasionally he would visit the home of the Miyahara, to talk with O-Yoshi. She had grown up into a slender, pretty woman; but for him she was still only the merry playfellow of happier days.
IV
One soft spring day, Tarō found himself Feeling very lonesome, and the thought came to him that it would be pleasant to see O-Yoshi. Probably there existed in his memory some constant relation between the sense of lonesomeness in general and the experience of his first schoolday in particular. At all events, something within him—perhaps that a dead mother's love had made, or perhaps something belonging to other dead people—wanted a little tenderness, and he Felt sure of receiving the tenderness from O-Yoshi. So he took his way to the little shop. As he approached it, he heard her laugh, and it sounded wonderfully sweet. Then he saw her serving an old peasant, who seemed to be quite pleased, and was chatting garrulously. Tarō had to wait, and Felt vexed that he could not at once get O-Yoshi's talk all for himself; but it made him a little happier even to be near her. He looked and looked at her, and suddenly began to wonder why he had never before thought how pretty she was. Yes, she was really pretty,—more pretty than any other girl in the village. He kept on looking and wondering, and always she seemed to be growing prettier. It was very strange; he could not understand it. But O-Yoshi, for the first time, seemed to Feel shy under that earnest gaze, and blushed to her little ears. Then Tarō Felt quite sure that she was more beautiful than anybody else in the whole world, and sweeter, and better, and that he wanted to tell her so; and all at once he found himself angry with the old peasant for talking so much to O-Yoshi, just as if she were a common person. In a Few minutes the universe had been quite changed for Tarō, and he did not know it. He only knew that since he last saw her O-Yoshi had become divine; and as soon as the chance came, he told her all his foolish heart, and she told him hers. And they wondered because their thoughts were so much the same; and that was the beginning of great trouble.
V
The old peasant whom Tarō had once seen talking to O-Yoshi had not visited the shop merely as a customer. In addition to his real calling he was a professional nakodo, or match-maker, and was at that very time acting in the service of a wealthy rice dealer named Okazaki YaIchirō. Okazaki had seen O-Yoshi, had taken a fancy to her, and had commissioned the nakodo to find out everything possible about her, and about the circumstances of her family.
Very much detested by the peasants, and even by his more immediate neighbors in the village, was Okazaki YaIchirō. He was an elderly man, gross, hard-Featured, with a loud, insolent manner. He was said to be malignant. He was known to have speculated successfully in rice during a period of famine, which the peasant considers a crime, and never forgives. He was not a native of the ken, nor in any way related to its people, but had come to the village eighteen years before, with his wife and one child, from some western district. His wife had been dead two years, and his only son, whom he was said to have treated cruelly, had suddenly left him, and gone away, nobody knew whither. Other unpleasant stories were told about him. One was that, in his native western province, a furious mob had sacked his house and his godowns, and obliged him to fly for his life. Another was that, on his wedding night, he had been compelled to give a banquet to the god Jizō.
It is still customary in some provinces, on the occasion of the marriage of a very unpopular farmer, to make the bridegroom feast Jizō. A band of sturdy young men force their way into the house, carrying with them a stone image of the divinity, borrowed from the highway or from some neighboring cemetery. A large crowd follows them. They deposit the image in the guest-room, and they demand that ample offerings of food and of sake be made to it at once. This means, of course, a big feast for themselves, and it is more than dangerous to refuse. All the uninvited guests must be served till they can neither eat nor drink any more. The obligation to give such a feast is not only a public rebuke: it is also a lasting public disgrace.
In his old age, Okazaki wished to treat himself to the luxury of a young and pretty wife; but in spite of his wealth he found this wish less easy to gratify than he had expected. Various families had checkmated his proposals at once by stipulating impossible conditions. The Headman of the village had answered, less politely, that he would sooner give his daughter to an oni (demon). And the rice dealer would probably have found himself obliged to seek for a wife in some other district, if he had not happened, after these failures, to notice O-Yoshi. The girl much more than pleased him; and he thought he might be able to obtain her by making certain offers to her people, whom he supposed to be poor. Accordingly, he tried, through the nakodo, to open negotiations with the
Miyahara family.
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