by Kansuke Naka
I’m switching horses,
I’m switching palanquins,
I’m switching horses,
I’m switching palanquins. . . .
Trying not to drop the o-tedama from the back of her hand, O-Kei-chan kept pulling mean tricks.
Pass under the small bridge,
Pass under the small bridge. . . .
With her slender fingers she formed a bridge on the tatami and let the o-tedama pass under it effortlessly. Her earlobes were beautiful, hot with excitement. The more exasperated the more stubborn she became and each time she made an error at a crucial point, she would throw the o-tedama at me or bite into my sleeve. Still, from then on she brought them to my house every day to play with me.
46
When we completed a reader our teacher would make us do “seize-and-read” on the pretext of review. The class was divided into boys and girls, and if someone in one group made a mistake in reading aloud, someone in the other group would quickly take over; this was continued until the book was finished, and the group with a greater number of pages read would be the winner. Boys were usually very boastful about various things, but when it came to competitive reading they became such weaklings and were always beaten. Also, when your turn came, you got nervous and stumbled, the turn seized.
AYATORI: CAT’S CRADLE
On this occasion, chosen to start the reading, I was mindful of this and began to read very slowly. Seeing that I was unusually hesitant, everyone was sneering with contempt, but unfortunately for them I didn’t make a single reading error, droning on and on in a most boring fashion. The passage where Prince Yamato Takeru sweeps down the grass sideways,139 the passage where there appear many horses and stories about a roan, a bay, and a dapple gray are told, the passage where a Negro crosses the desert on a camel, and so on and on—I kept reading one page after another, until I reached the chapter on the Mongolian invasion of Japan, which was near the end of the book. There was a picture of messily destroyed Chinese warships with Japanese skiffs rowing toward them, and on the night of the 30th of the intercalary Seventh Month, the writing said, a divine wind blew, reducing the 100,000-man strong military force to a mere three men.140
Sorely regretting that they’d been off guard, the girls would raise their hands even when I paused to take a breath, eager to take over. Amused by their bewilderment, I became even more composed and went on to the chapter called “Ceramics,” which, to my chagrin, made me falter. Because I wasn’t much interested in ceramics manufacturing methods, I’d skipped that section in my routine reviews. I was readily taken over. Yielding my turn to the girls with great reluctance, I looked to see who my hateful enemy was and unexpectedly saw it was O-Kei-chan. I felt at once half happy and half resentful. It appeared she had been weeping out of exasperation, for her eyes were red at the rims. And though she rose to her feet holding her book, she sobbed so badly she couldn’t read a single character. In a while the bell rang and the day ended with the boys’ total victory, a rare event.
After school was over, when O-Kei-chan came to play with me as usual, her eyelids still looked a little swollen, and she was embarrassed.
“But I was truly bitter,” she said. She then took a plaited string out of her sleeve and said, “Let’s play cat’s cradle.” Above our little knees, touching as we knelt together, she draped the beautiful string around her pale wrists, and the string, taut between her slender, arched fingers, turned into many shapes.
“Water,” she said, transferring the string to me. I took it carefully.
“Lozenge.”
Manipulating her ten fingers through the string one by one, she made a koto. “Pluck, pluck, here’s a koto.”
“Mr. Monkey.”
“Hand-drum.”
As if our mutual friendship were woven on our fingers and transferred back and forth, we would spend days intimately playing in this way.
SHŌ, TSUZUMI: MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS
47
One day, during the hour on ethics, our teacher said, “Today instead of me telling you stories, each of you will tell us a story.”
Pulling up his chair to the brazier and warming his hands over it, he called on some of the more brash or humorous ones to tell stories. Even someone who normally serves excellently as the general of brats on one side or loves to be a comic figure tends to stiffen or become tongue-tied when standing on the platform, with his face exposed to stares from all directions.
The first to be called on was a tall, skinny boy named Tokoro who always served as a “horse.”141
“I’ll tell a story about socks, sir,” he said, his knees trembling.
“A story about socks? Sounds very interesting,” the teacher said encouragingly.
“One sock floated by from over there,” Tokoro stammered, “another floated on from over here, and when they bumped into each other in the middle, they cried out, ‘Sock it to me!’” Thereupon he stepped down in a hurry.
The next one was Yoshizawa, a totally honest fellow whose lower front teeth almost covered his upper front teeth. Giggling for no reason, he said, “I’ll tell a story about spears.”
“This time a story about spears. Sounds interesting, too,” the teacher said.
“One spear floated by from over there, another floated by from over here, and when they clattered into each other in the middle, they cried out, ‘Spare me, sir!’” Yoshizawa said, and stepped down.
All such convenient stories were being exhausted and I was inwardly cringing when, unluckily, my name was called at the very end. I knew any number of stories because of my aunt, but I couldn’t think of a single one that was short and easy to tell. In the end I told a story “about a kappa whose plate dried up.”142 Once I started on it I gained courage and, glancing in O-Kei-chan’s direction from time to time, I finished my story, though in a somewhat halting way. As I bowed to the teacher before returning to my seat, he smiled and gave me a light rap on the head.
“I didn’t expect you to be so cheeky.”
Now it was the girls’ turn, but none of them was willing to step forward, clinging as they did to their desks. So the teacher decided to name them in the order of seating, beginning with the first. Still, no one was willing, some even bursting into tears. Finally he came to the fifth seat, O-Kei-chan, who had evidently made up her mind and obediently stepped up on the platform. Even so, understandably, she was blushing to the nape of her neck and kept looking down.
After a while, though, moving her hands as if she were swimming in a dream, she began to speak, pausing with each phrase. Overcome with anxiety and sympathy, I was so agitated I could barely look her in the face. Nevertheless, as her story progressed her large, clear eyes became steady and alert, her posture adult-like and sharp, and in her incomparably limpid voice she went on telling a story briskly, neatly—the story about the Hatsune Drum,143 one that I had told her. Enchanted by the unexpected poise of the narrator and drawn by the strange, fascinating story, the pupils became unusually quiet.
When her story was finished, the teacher said, “Today all the boys told stories well, while it was expected that none of the girls would come out, so they were supposed to lose, but with Kei-san’s144 single story just now, they won. I was impressed.”
The girls broke into smiles. O-Kei-chan blushed and walked back to her seat, eyes modestly lowered. I watched her with a strange feeling, half happy, half jealous. I hadn’t intended her to tell that story.
48
Games on winter nights are deeply felt and enjoyable. O-Kei-chan would arrive, hands frozen, and, upon coming into the room, cling to the brazier. For this lovely guest my aunt made a large charcoal fire every night. Her shoulders hunched from the cold, she would remain almost bent over the brazier for a while. Waiting impatiently, I would tug at her bangs or poke my fingers in the rings of her ochigo-style hair.145 She, being as temperamental as I was, would at times overreact and start crying. When she did I would immediately surrender without a moment’s hesitation and apo
logize unconditionally. Sometimes I would put my mouth close to her ear as she lay face down on the floor and repeat, “Forgive me, forgive me,” but she would continue shaking her head. After crying a while, though, she would abruptly change her mood and say, “That’s enough,” and give me a reproachful, forlorn smile. At such times I might wipe the tears off her slightly flushed eyelids.
She was good at faking crying. After exchanging a few trivial words she would suddenly pout, put her face on my lap, and cry ostentatiously. Feeling her heavy warmth, I would try various tricks to restore her good spirits, pulling out her hairpin, tickling her, and so forth. But if she continued to cry I could only apologize as best I could, even though I knew I’d done nothing wrong. After giving me a lot of trouble, though, she would abruptly raise her face, stick her tongue out at me, and, as if to say, “Serves you right,” triumphantly laugh and laugh. Hers was a slippery, slender tongue. I had this trick played on me so often that I finally learned to distinguish real crying from fake by seeing whether or not the veins on her forehead were bulging with tension.
She was also skilled at the glaring contest and always beat me at it. She could change her face freely, making any expression at will. Saying, “Eyes slanting up, eyes slanting down,” she would extend or shrink her eyes with her fingers as if they were made of rubber. I really hated the staring game. This was not because I was bound to lose, but because I was, to tell the truth, horrified to see her neatly arranged facial features brutally disfigured as she showed only the whites of her eyes or turned her mouth into an alligator’s.
In a while I came to regard O-Kei-chan as one of my possessions, along with the Divine Dog and the Rouge Ox, and to feel keenly any praise or disparagement, any happy or unhappy incident, that befell her. I began to think she was a pretty girl. How proud I was of this! But at the same time my own face became a painful burden in a way I had never expected it to be. I wanted to be a prettier boy to attract her. I wanted only the two of us to be friends and play with each other forever. That was the kind of thing I began to think.
One evening we were sitting by the elbow-high window side by side, singing, bathed in the moonlight shining through the leaves of the crepe myrtle. I happened to look down at my arm hanging outside the window and was enchanted to see it was so beautiful, so pale as to be transparent. It was a momentary trick our dear moon played, but tempted by the thought that I could be more confident about myself if it were true, I put my arm before O-Kei-chan.
“Oh, it looks so beautiful.”
“It does,” my lover said and, rolling up her sleeve, she showed her arm.
“Mine, too.”
Her pliant arm looked like alabaster. Mystified by it all, we exposed our flesh to the chilly night air—the upper arms, then the legs, from the legs to the chests, oblivious of time in wonderment.
49
Around that time a family whose second job was brocade stitching moved to the house next door, to the west of us, and their son Tomi-kō146 became my new classmate. He was no good at class work but he spoke well and he was two years older and strong besides, so in no time he became the boss of my class rascals. Naturally I ceased to be able to wield my authority and as I couldn’t just go to him and bow because of my own dignity, I ended up being left out of his circle. Because he didn’t have any friend in the neighborhood, he would come to take me out to play in the backyard after coming home from school. Not liking him much and eager to play with O-Kei-chan, I was not at all willing, but I feared arousing his antagonism and, unable to think of anything better, I kept him company.
A born tomboy, O-Kei-chan at first watched us play from her side of the fence with an amused look on her face, but soon she came out and learned to do jump rope and hoop trundling just by watching us. Tomi-kō, who was a real smoothy, humored her by calling her Missy and showing her various tricks, standing on his hands, somersaulting. O-Kei-chan liked such things very much and followed him everywhere, calling him Tomi-chan. Having been brought up by my aunt alone and having played only with O-Kuni-san before then, I was in no way trained in such fabulous tricks and could only watch helplessly as Tomi-kō, who wasn’t good-looking, monopolized the happy attention of the little queen.
O-Kei-chan continued to visit in the evening, but now only talked about Tomi-kō and paid no attention to the picture books and story books I’d take out to humor her. And when the three of us played together, if Tomi-kō in a triumphant mood called me clumsy or a weakling, she would join him in making fun of me. Belatedly I resented my aunt for bringing me up to be someone with no skills, standing on hands or somersaulting. All this made me dislike Tomi-kō intensely but I controlled myself, trying not to go against his wishes, until one day what he said was too much to take, my self-control snapped, and I talked back at him resentfully. Thereupon he threw a barrage of foul curses at me, capping them with a whisper into O-Kei-chan’s ear; then, eyeing me knowingly, he called out, “See you soon, you big baboon!” and started to go back home.
O-Kei-chan copied him and went away after him, repeating, “See you soon, you big baboon!” Tomi-kō must have taken her to his home.
After this O-Kei-chan stopped coming to see me. When on the rare occasion she spotted me she would hide herself without showing me a smile. Tomi-kō gave her that willfulness, I thought, and in my small heart I couldn’t help feeling a boiling jealousy and fury. At school, too, he incited everybody to get on my back in prickly ways. Not just in that ability but in brawn as well, I certainly had to defer to him. The only consolation was that I was the number-one pupil. Nonetheless, without O-Kei-chan, that was an empty position to occupy, wasn’t it?
50
Maddening days continued. One day, when I had confined myself in my study again, suffering, I suddenly heard “plonk-clogs”147 going plonk-plonk, jingle-jingle. I was taken aback but, calming myself down, refused to open the window. In no time that lovely voice that I hadn’t had time to forget was saying at the latticed door:
“May I come in?”
“May I ask who you are?” my aunt went out pretending not to know. In a while I could tell she was helping her up, saying, “Oh, oh, I was just wondering what kind of guest would visit us, and lo and behold, we have this lovely miss!” And she, apparently helping the girl up, went on to ask if she had had a cold or been away visiting someone because she didn’t know the reasons behind her recent absence. O-Kei-chan came in obediently through the sliding paper-door that my aunt opened and put her hands on the floor elegantly.
“I’m sorry I’ve neglected to come and visit,” she said.
That did it. All the tensions I’d held under control till then broke, and as soon as I involuntarily called out “O-Kei-chan!” tears of mortification gushed down. O-Kei-chan, though, didn’t seem troubled much by that and began to take her o-tedama out of her sleeve.
“Why didn’t you come?” I asked.
She was unexpectedly unperturbed. “I was visiting Tomi-chan.”
I shot back accusingly, “Why didn’t you go today?”
She was quite untroubled as she replied, “Mother scolded me saying I shouldn’t be going to a place like Tomi-chan’s.”
Flabbergasted though I was, I managed to express some of my resentment for what had happened some days ago.
“I’m sorry.” With this preface she offered an excuse by saying Tomi-chan had said she didn’t need to play with someone like me because he had a lot of interesting things in his house.
“After mother scolded me,” she added, “I’ve come to hate Tomi-chan very much. Let’s be friendly again.”
How could I express my feelings then? O-Kei-chan was mine after all. Not knowing this, Tomi-kō must have kept waiting for her the whole day. The following day, unaware that I was watching out for her, he stealthily went up to her and started to say something, but she peremptorily turned him down, declaring she no longer liked him. It appeared that she’d become truly contemptuous of him after she was scolded by her mother.
51
The cunning Tomi-kō, finding himself neglected, came up to me with a palpably fraudulent air of friendliness and, after humoring me in various ways, slandered O-Kei-chan and said that since he’d no longer play with her, I shouldn’t either. I laughed to myself and gave him nothing more than vague responses.
Nevertheless, as soon as he perceived that O-Kei-chan and I had gone back to being as good friends, he plotted a horrible reprisal. Every day during recess he incited everyone to taunt us. When they got tired and slackened their taunting, he went around whispering into each one’s ear outrageous things he had concocted to provoke them. Shunned by our friends and surrounded by knowing eyes we fell into a miserable circumstance. This made us even more intimate, however, and when, with the day’s unpleasant school work done, we went home and played, we felt an indescribable joy and consolation overflow our hearts.
Tomi-kō’s retaliatory acts grew nastier day by day, and my hostility intensified proportionately. I didn’t think anything of his foot soldiers, and I guessed he himself couldn’t be that strong. The evidence was that each time I got upset and started toward him, he ran away to avoid one-on-one combat and tried to torment me from a distance. In the end I made light of him even as I made a stirring decision to retaliate some day to my heart’s content.
One day, just when school was over, Choppei stealthily came to me and said, “He says he’s going to waylay you tomorrow,” and rushed away, fearful he might be spotted. I was happy with Choppei for his thoughtfulness. The following morning I hid a two-foot length of particularly knobby Hotei bamboo148 under my haori and went to school determined to take on anyone and anything.