Besides the front yard, the children also played in vacant lots in the neighborhood. Their favorite one was diagonally across from our house, half hidden by what was left of an old hedge that you couldn’t see through from the street. The lot had thick clusters of tall, silvery pampas grass, and toward the back there was a small abandoned house with an air raid shelter. They dragged me there, tugging me by the hands. The dirt-floored entrance was overgrown with weeds, the raised wooden floor was full of gaps, the posts blackened in places by fire. It was a spooky place, which was exactly what the children liked about it. “The people who used to live here didn’t make it to the shelter in time and died in an air raid, so ghosts come out right in the daytime,” Yoko would say in a scary voice, and then Taro, hiding somewhere, would make an ominous sound, trying to frighten me. A shrine only ten minutes from there had a little playground in one corner where they could have fun on the slide and teeter-totter. Many were the times Yoko came home with dirt stains on her skirt.
When the weather was bad, they romped around the house. Looking on, it wasn’t always easy to say just what kind of game they were playing. Natsue was of the firm opinion that girls needed to sit on chairs, not on the floor, and sleep on proper beds at an early age or else they’d grow up “with those awful, bent Japanese legs”; so not long after Taro started coming to the house, two bedsteads showed up in the sisters’ tatami room—and were promptly used for games. Unlike the beds in Karuizawa, which had only straw mattresses on iron frames, these had actual springs. Yoko loved them. She and Taro would perch side by side, one at the foot of each bed, and bounce up and down as if holding reins in their hands, pretending to be stagecoach drivers. Sometimes they put what looked like scrolls in their mouths, tied long cloths to their backs, and jumped down the stairs to land on a heap of cushions at the bottom—like ninja or Superman, I couldn’t tell which. Other times they would line up the dining room chairs and teeter across, as if inching across a hanging bridge over a great ravine. For all I know they thought they were tiptoeing under towering cliffs wrapped in spring mist, with wild, thundering rapids below, but all I could see as I whipped around getting dinner on the table was the room in a shambles.
Now and then they would sneak into Takero’s study and play “English,” typing random letters on the typewriter there. They also played “poor family,” imagining that the tiny playroom was their house. Where she had picked up such notions I have no idea, but Yoko would announce, “There’s no more rice in the cupboard; I must go to the pawnshop,” and begin tying up one of her grandmother’s kimonos in a wrapping cloth. As Taro was genuinely poor, it always made me smile to see him play along with this, looking quite serious.
Before he came on the scene, Yoko used to enjoy typical girlish pastimes like making multicolored braids of silk yarn, flipping tiny ohajiki disks, or playing house. But Taro had never had any boys for playmates, let alone any toys of his own, so he knew nothing about marbles, cards, or tops. One day when I went out to do the marketing, I saw a boy his age by the hardware store playing cleverly with a kendama peg-in-the-hole, and I decided on the spur of the moment to stop at a toy store on the way home and pick one up for Taro. I handed it to him with instructions to keep it a secret from Mrs. Utagawa, who, I thought, would disapprove of a lowly little toy like this, but sharp-eyed Yoko spotted it right away. “Oo look, a peg-in-the-hole!” she shouted, and promptly showed it to her grandmother. After that they played with the toy openly in front of her, with instructions to keep it secret from Natsue instead. Yoko soon tired of the toy, but Taro, whose coordination was much better to begin with, would go on practicing for so long that she’d get bored and pout. Soon he could do tricks with the effortless skill of a circus performer. It made me think how much boys his age would have looked up to him if he had ever played with them. But Taro himself seemed to enjoy just being at Yoko’s beck and call.
One day the elder girl, Yuko, found the toy hidden away in the back of a drawer in the playroom. “Hey, look what I found!” Fortunately, she didn’t tell her mother. Her sister, Yoko, was a chatterbox, but she kept quiet about things that really mattered to her, and never told Yuko anything about Taro. Even so, perhaps because the girls were so close in age, Yuko seemed to know intuitively what was going on. She certainly had a better idea than Natsue of what was happening while the two of them were out.
At the first beat of the drum that announced the arrival of the kamishibai man, a picture-board storyteller, Taro and Yoko would rush through the front gate and watch enviously as neighborhood kids flocked to buy a variety of traditional sweets—candies made like paper cutouts, say, or drooping lollipops—which emerged like magic from the box on his bicycle. Unlike the other children, Yoko was not given any pocket money as a rule, and buying snacks was forbidden anyway. The two looked on from behind the crowd as the man told his tale.
The big drum for the autumn festival had a deeper, throbbing sound you could feel down in your belly. Festival day was a special enough occasion for the children to get some pocket money from Mrs. Utagawa. At one time I used to take Yoko myself, but after she had Taro as a companion, I could send them off to the local shrine after they’d had supper and tidy up the kitchen at leisure before setting out to keep an eye on them. Taro, I noticed, preferred games of skill like fishing for water balloons or scooping out goldfish, while Yoko concentrated on buying and eating goodies. By the time I arrived she’d have already made the rounds of the stalls selling cotton candy, peppermint pipes, and sauce-dipped crackers and be ready to go again. As soon as she caught sight of me she’d hold her hand out and wheedle. “I’ll pay you back at New Year’s, so don’t tell Grandma, okay?” I would give her five yen—then ten yen—and another ten yen. If we happened to run into Taro’s brother, the one with the pimply face, out with his pals from middle school, Yoko would panic; but with me there, all they could do was leer. Usually a play would be in progress on a stage thrown together in the middle of the compound. The part of the woman was taken by a young male actor in a wig and white makeup, dressed in a flimsy kimono, who shrieked and ran away when the man playing the warrior brandished his sword. The two children gaped at it all, peering between grown-up spectators.
I remember strings of lanterns hung between the pines, a shiny gold portable shrine, a mound of sake casks wrapped in rush matting, and the shrill piping of sacred kagura music in the background. The shrine itself, hidden away among trees so tall that sunlight never reached the ground, was normally cool and quiet, but on that day it was transformed, buzzing with color and activity, crowded with people in bright summer yukata. The children loved it.
“Grandma, I want to wear a yukata!” Yoko begged when she got home, draping herself around her grandmother’s hunched back where she sat at her usual place, near the hibachi. The three Saegusa sisters were too modern to dress their children in old-fashioned cotton kimonos, even for festivals.
“Well, then,” said Mrs. Utagawa, “one of these days I’ll sew you one. Next summer we’ll go and buy the fabric together, shall we?”
LATE IN THE autumn I took the children out to gather chestnuts and acorns. For chestnuts, we went as far as a stand of trees some distance away and knocked the branches with sticks to dislodge the nuts. When we got back, we peeled them and then I cooked them with rice. We picked up acorns at the shrine, where they covered the ground, and then we strung them together to make necklaces, just the way I used to do when I was a little girl.
Around the time the wind turned cold, we raked up the leaves in the yard and made a bonfire.
Sasanquas, sasanquas, blooming on the path.
A bonfire, a bonfire, a fire of fallen leaves.
Shall we stop now to warm our frozen hands?
Yes, let’s stop and warm our hands.
Yoko warbled this for us proudly, having been chosen as one of twenty children in the entire school to sing in a radio program. Once she got started, she’d get carried away and sing one autumn song after another: “Rabbit,
little rabbit, what makes you jump so high? It’s the harvest moon, so big and round up in the sky …” “Listen to the cricket sing, chinchiro chinchiro chinchiro-rin …” “In the light of an autumn sunset, in the shining golden light, see how mountain maples glow …” Out they came, song after song that she’d learned at school. In the meantime, the sweet potatoes buried at the bottom of the burning leaves cooked through, and we ate them together, peeling off the burned black skin and blowing on them to cool them.
At that same time of year, we trooped out to clean up clutter in the garden shed. Taro helped chop firewood as well. Since I was still far stronger than he was, I would stand a block of firewood on a tree stump and split it in two. His job was to carry the pieces to the shed and stack them neatly, though he sometimes picked up the hatchet and had a go himself. Mrs. Utagawa would be off at one side with a cloth wrapped around her head, grilling some mackerel pike on a portable stove for dinner, fanning life into the coals. Doing it indoors would have filled the house with the smell; so as not to offend Natsue, she always did it in the back yard.
Yoko, the only one with nothing to do, just stood behind her grandmother watching the thin plumes of white smoke rise high in the air.
When it turned cold, the kotatsu heater would make its appearance in Mrs. Utagawa’s room, and the two children would sit there with their feet tucked under the warm quilt cover, doing their homework. Once they were done, they went to play in the main room, so the stove that used to be lit there only in the evening was started earlier. Everything became a game, and they took turns throwing coal through the little slot in the stove. When they put in too much, the iron body would glow red, looking as if it might chug off like a locomotive.
AT SOME POINT every winter, Yoko would catch a cold and take to her bed with a fever and swollen lymph glands or tonsils. Much as Taro would have preferred staying there with her to going to school, he knew that Mrs. Utagawa would never approve, and so, reluctantly, he went. But as soon as school let out he was back. He’d draw up a chair to the head of her bed, and then it would start: “Need anything? Want me to put some more ice in the cold pack? Shall I change the water in your hot-water bottle?” Since Yoko was allowed to read manga only when she had a fever, he would head off to the book-rental shop by the station with some coins from Mrs. Utagawa and bring back several volumes of the sort that girls liked, then set off again to borrow new ones when she had finished them. Taro himself seemed to have a strong immune system: he never caught any of her colds.
Yoko’s asthma scared him stiff. During a long spasm her face would turn red, while his turned white. When her spasms were especially bad, he would sometimes stand and knock his head against the wall. One day when the spasms had finally calmed down and she was asleep, he picked a time when he must have thought no one was watching and went up to her pillow. I saw him put his head next to hers and whisper in her ear, “Yoko, don’t die. Please don’t die, okay?” He kept his face pressed into her pillow for a while without moving, as if he were breathing in the smell of her neck. I had never seen anything so touching. Having found a friend for the first time in his life, his heart must have actually hurt from the pressure of such love.
Another time, I went into the bedroom and found Yoko crying, her face buried in her pillow.
“Just go away and leave me alone!”
Taro was standing blankly by her side, holding a comb. His endless offers to do this or that sometimes got on her nerves.
Actually, they quarreled frequently. Not wanting her grandmother to know, Yoko would go outside by the kitchen door and sob convulsively, red-faced, smothering the sound. Taro’s affection for her was so intense it must have been a strain on her. When it made her cry, he would sulk, or apologize reluctantly, or cry like a girl himself. It varied.
ROKU’S FUNERAL TOOK place early in the new year. Toward the end, I was going over to the Azuma house nearly every day. By then he couldn’t get anything down his throat, so there wasn’t much I could do for him except to make sure he was warm and had clean underwear. After he died, it seemed that he’d managed to set aside a little money, much to the surprise of everyone in the Utagawa family.
With no need to support Roku anymore, Mrs. Utagawa herself had a little extra cash at her disposal every month. She had already been paying out of her own pocket for any expenses Taro’s presence incurred, but soon she began spending money on him more freely. The amount wasn’t much: she would buy him notebooks and pencils, and give him some money for school excursions. The Azuma family was no longer as badly off by then, yet O-Tsune was still happy to have the boy get whatever came his way. Natsue and Takero of course knew nothing about it.
Roku’s death freed up a room for the boys where Taro could have slept with his brothers, but he kept to his cushions in the kitchen, insisting—understandably—that he preferred it that way. When she heard this, however, Mrs. Utagawa got out some of her husband’s old kimonos, unstitched them, and sewed them into a narrow futon and coverlet, filled with layers of thick cotton, so that Taro could sleep a little more comfortably.
At some point he stopped wetting his bed.
IN THE FOURTH grade the two children were put in different classes, but the days went peacefully by. As the weather turned warm, once again they started to play outside. In the front yard of the Utagawa home was a concrete patio overhung with grapevines, and they would go there to draw pictures in white or colored chalk on the floor. In addition to the empty lot with its air raid shelter where they usually played, they found another close by that got more sun. They used to pick wild horsetails and bring them to Mrs. Utagawa for her to cook with sugar and soy sauce. I sometimes took them to paddy fields a little farther out, where we picked Chinese milk vetch, flowers of reddish-purple and white that grew along the paths in between. As with the acorns in the autumn, we wove them into necklaces—again, just as I used to do when I was a little girl.
Weekends were dreadful for Taro. Saturday afternoons, when Yoko went for her piano lesson in Seijo, were not so bad. After she got back from school and had her lunch, she would change into her good clothes and set off with her piano books, Taro tagging along at least as far as Chitose Funabashi station. I often went with them—it was a good way for me to get my shopping done. Whenever we passed somebody wearing glasses, they would say he was a monk and howl with laughter—some bit of nonsense they’d picked up reading a child’s version of the old comic novel Shank’s Mare. They tossed the music bag back and forth, playing as they went. Afterward Taro used to stand at the railway crossing, watching till her train was out of sight.
It was strange how Yoko never minded being seen with a ragamuffin like Taro back then. When other children from school spotted the two of them together and jeered, she didn’t like it, but she had no qualms about walking alongside Taro in his shabby clothes while she herself was dressed smartly in a wool blazer, skirt, and felt beret. To a lucky girl who had never once felt ashamed of her own clothes, his shabbiness didn’t seem to be a problem, though dirt was another matter. Occasionally Mrs. Utagawa would buy him something new, but clothes back then were expensive. Besides, if it attracted too much attention his brothers might give him a harder time. So in a way it was unavoidable that Taro should go on dressing like the rest of his family. Yoko, on the other hand, had plenty of fine clothes, the sort that would have made her stand out in any ordinary elementary school. Seijo Academy, where her sister and her two cousins went to school, had no uniform. There was so much material left over from Primavera that the three of them had clothes in abundance, and of course Yoko, getting everybody’s hand-me-downs, had the most of all. New outfits were continually arriving even before she had had a chance to outgrow or wear out the old ones, which were bundled up and sent to the Elizabeth Saunders Home, an orphanage for biracial children born during and after the Occupation. The injustice of it all used to bother me. Fortunately Taro, who helped send the clothes off, had no interest in clothes, being a boy, and was only intent on tying the
string as tight as possible around the bundles.
For Taro, Sundays were the worst. After a leisurely breakfast, Yoko’s father would usually set off for the university, but her mother was home nearly all day, so Taro had to stay away from the house. Even if I saw him hanging around the well, I had no choice but to ignore him. On weekdays after supper, Yoko poked at the piano for half an hour or so, but her sister Yuko took her music seriously, and on Sunday she would practice for hours at a time, the sound carrying through the surrounding space. At dusk Taro would sit with his arms around his knees on his favorite tree stump, looking as if he were listening intently. Sometimes the Utagawas spent the whole day out.
The Azuma family, for their part, had Sunday outings now and then, but usually they left Taro behind. Feeling sorry for him, Mrs. Utagawa had him carry her bags when she called on acquaintances in Kichijoji, visited her husband’s grave in the area, or went shopping at Mitsukoshi department store in the Ginza; there she would buy him a pair of trousers or something as a reward. Every other Sunday I had the day off, and I also took him out with me once in a while—sometimes to the Variety Restaurant in Isetan department store, where he would have the children’s lunch, sometimes to a Disney movie Yoko had seen with her family the week before. And I even took him to Korakuen Stadium to watch a Giants game.
One time we went together to visit my uncle Genji, who lived in Soto Kanda then. The husky-voiced woman was running a restaurant in Tamachi with his help; the restaurant was doing well, and they seemed to be leading a comfortable life in a small house they’d built. On hearing what a bright child Taro was, Uncle Genji told him solemnly, “Son, learn English. If you do, no matter what happens, you’ll always have food on the table.” Taro listened equally solemnly to this advice.
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