The Silver Spoon

by Kansuke Naka

  I quietly closed the fusuma and, relieved, returned across the bridge. From then on I sometimes went to the monk in place of his family but, even though my only hope was to have a chance to speak to him, once I found myself in front of him I was unable to say anything. I would simply receive his cup silently, offer it back to him silently, and come away. He, too, would merely repeat “Oh, my” as if he were an owl or something and would not try to speak to me. Once while I was crossing the bridge holding the black-lacquered saucer, a bulbul that had come to eat nandina59 berries hastily flapped up, making me spill the tea. At other times, on moonlit nights, white flowers fluttered down to the bridge. And so I crossed the bridge often enough, but there was no way of breaking the ice with this hermit who was like a dead tree. However, once, when the bell had clunked yet again, I placed the tea cup before him, as always, and was leaving, when unexpectedly he called to me from behind.

  “I’ll do some painting for you. Buy some paper and bring it here.”

  Feeling as if tricked by a fox, I bought Chinese paper60 and put it before him. He rose from the spot by the armrest where he usually sat as if rooted, and took me to the next room, which was sunlit. Everything in the room had turned sooty-brown and there hung a small framed calligraphy with Camellia Age61 written on it. Made to sit a lot closer to him than I was used to, I became drenched with sweat even while watching closely, as if it were something mysterious, every move made by a person who till then I had assumed would ring a bell until his death as stiffly as a stone buddha.

  The old monk brought out a large inkstone, made me rub an ink stick, took up a brush, and drew a picture of a dishcloth gourd with casual ease: one leaf, one vine, and one dishcloth gourd. On it he wrote:

  Yo no naka o nanno hechima to omoedomo burari to shitewa kurasaremo sezu 62

  Regarding this world as no more than a dishcloth gourd, I still can’t make a daily living just hanging out

  He then drew a cipher that looked like a kettle, examined the whole thing from this way and that, and suddenly laughed a bright, dry laugh.

  “Now, I give this to you. Take it someplace.”

  He then put the inkstone on a shelf, washed his brush, and quickly went back to his diamond seat63 to turn himself into the stone buddha that he was. Like a monkey who has fallen from a tree,64 I was crestfallen as I went home with the picture of the dishcloth gourd.

  It was about three years afterward that the old monk passed away. I had gone up to middle school, Sada-chan had left home to become a live-in servant, and so my link to the temple had been gradually severed. But suddenly one night a messenger came to tell us the monk had passed away, so I went with father to offer condolences. The monk had had no special illness and had run his life span, so to speak, we were told. During his last days his past disciples, now resident monks in various places, had taken turns caring for him. For the first time in a long while I crossed the bridge, of which I had many memories. The detached quarters were thick with the smoke from incense, with many monks I remembered from Dai-Hannya rites65 gathered there talking. In a ritual chair placed in the room where he had once drawn a dishcloth gourd for me, the old monk was seated in utter quietness, legs ritually bent, clad in a surplice of gold brocade, a hossu66 in hand, like the stone buddha he had been in the past. As in the past I went before him, bowed, and offered incense. The bumpy-headed priest whom we had nicknamed Abbot Henjō67 was munching a wheat cake, saying, “That was a great rebirth, that was a great rebirth.” I felt even more like a monkey who has fallen out of a tree.

  16

  By then it must have been many years since my aunt, having luckily found a good traveling companion, had left our place to visit her ancestral grave, moved by old memories of her native place, thinking she’d be away only for a brief while. Soon after arriving there, though, she fell gravely ill and for a time she was certain to die, they said. But she must have had some more years left to live: she finally managed to make a full recovery. Still, because of her age she’d grown too weak to travel back to us. She herself had given up on the idea and became, by request, a house-sitter for a distant relative.

  Following my father’s old-fashioned notion, “Send the child you love on travels,” 68 I was made to travel, during the spring vacation of my sixteenth year, to the Kyoto and Osaka region to cure my inborn melancholy. It must have cured my illness for I remained away, doing as I liked, until I was called back home. On my way back I decided to visit my aunt, thinking it would be my last farewell. The place she lived in was a section crowded with small houses by a riverbank called Boat Crew, where during the shogunate the boat-crew unit of the fiefdom is said to have lived. I couldn’t find her house easily, continuing to make inquiries until the sun set, when I happened to walk in the gate to a temple-like place facing a hardware store. I couldn’t tell whether people lived there or not; it was all ancient and empty, with neither a single stalk of grass nor a tree, all denuded and parched. I stood at the open entrance and called out a couple of times, but there was no reply. I was in a strange town, it was night, and I felt diffident as I looked around. Then I noticed a small wooden door next to an empty plot on the left the size of four tatami, which didn’t exactly look like a garden. I quietly opened it and looked in and saw a grubby old woman crumpled up like a shrimp alone sewing at the end of the porch, with no lights on though it was dark. Feeling guilty that I’d walked into a stranger’s garden without permission, I stepped back and, bending forward over the wooden door, said, “Excuse me.”

  The old woman, unconcerned, went on moving her needle.

  “Excuse me.”

  Was she deaf? For some time now my hand holding the luggage had felt ready to drop off. I couldn’t take it any longer.

  “I wish to ask a question, ma’am,” I said and strode in. The old woman, finally noticing me, raised her face. I couldn’t see well in the dark, but terribly aged and harrowingly gaunt though she had grown, she was, unmistakably, my aunt. I was too startled to do anything but to stare at her face. She hurriedly put her work aside and placed her hands on the porch in a show of formal respect.

  “May I ask who you are, sir? Lately I can hardly see. . . . I’ve also become very hard of hearing. . . . And I always end up giving people trouble.”

  I remained silent. She leaned her upper body forward a little.

  “May I ask who you are, sir?” she repeated.

  Struggling with the lump in my chest, I finally managed: “It’s me.”

  Even then she continued: “Who are you, sir, if I may ask?” After closely looking me up and down awhile, she must have decided I was, in any event, someone she knew well. She rose to her feet, picked up a cushion as thin as a rice-cracker that was by a brazier in the inner part of the room, and laid it by the Buddhist altar.

  “Now please come in,” she said, stooping as someone inviting a guest inside. In the meantime I finally calmed myself down and laughed.

  “Aunt, can’t you tell? It’s me, Kansuke.”

  “Yes?” She hurried out to the edge of the porch, looked into my face for a while without blinking, and then, tears flooding and repeating, “It’s you, Kan-sa. Oh, oh, it’s you, Kan-sa,” she caressed me, who had grown much taller than her, from head to shoulder, like the Lord Pindola.69 And as though afraid I might fade away, she kept her eyes on me even while taking me in to sit me down next to the hand-warmer.

  “My, you’ve grown so big but you haven’t changed a bit.” And hardly finishing the routine greetings, evidently wanting to touch me more, and prayerful, she wiped away her tears.

  “I’m so glad you came. I had thought I might not see you again before I die.”

  17

  My aunt lit an ancient andon.70

  “Would you please wait here for a moment? I must run out for a moment.” Mumbling something about her unsteady feet, she awkwardly lifted herself down from the porch and went off someplace. Left alone by myself I thought, This is the last time I’ll see her. And I was thinking about her decl
ine that was much worse than I’d expected, how I’d grown big while not realizing it myself, and about things of the past, when there was a light clattering of footsteps and she came back with a couple of strangers. They were her old, still surviving friends, they all lived in the neighborhood and talked with each other about this and that, I was told. My aunt was so happy she’d impulsively called them together.

  “Kan-sa has come to visit me from Tokyo. Come meet him at once.”

  These people, who had nothing to do and were easy-going and good-natured, had come with some curiosity to see what kind of a boy the Kan-sa they had heard so much about was like but, finding that the Kan-sa of such great reputation was an ordinary boy after all, they kindly went back home, only to return and roast for me a great deal of corn crackers loaded with sugar that, when held over the fire, became hopelessly twisted. Realizing that I hadn’t eaten supper, my aunt, stubbornly turning down the offers from her friends to do it for her and, as if it was her happy privilege, went out to buy some food, holding an Odawara lantern71 with the family crest drawn on it.

  After she left, I learned that the mistress of the household had been away helping her daughter’s family for a long time now, that my aunt was there all alone, and that she said she felt bad about giving trouble to people and did the household chores herself even though she could hardly see. In a while she came back breathlessly, turned on the miniature lamp in the kitchen, and, while preparing supper with a quiet rhythm, asked me about this or that person in Tokyo. Seizing an appropriate moment, her friends went away.

  “Living in a place like this I can’t make much of anything for you. You must forgive me,” she said apologetically even as she put a large sushi plate right next to my tray. Then she brought over flatfish that were were raising puffs of steam from the pot on the heater, carrying each one, as it was cooked, with chopsticks. I said I had had enough, but she ended up lining them all across the plate.

  “Don’t say any such thing. You must eat a lot.”

  In utter agitation and with no time to think how to show her welcome, my aunt had gone to a fish store nearby and bought all the flatfish on offer. Truly happy and grateful, I gazed at the twenty-odd flatfish as I filled my stomach with them.

  My aunt twirled about so fast I was worried it might affect her later. When everything was done, she sat primly, so close to me as to make our knees almost touch each other, and talked about various things, intently gazing at me as if to store my figure in her tiny eyes so as to take it with her beyond the Ten-Thousand Billion Lands.72 I tried my best to tell her not to work if her eyes were so bad, but she wouldn’t listen.

  “I feel bad if I do nothing and give people trouble,” she’d say.

  Remembering the days when she was with us, I took a cotton needle73 from the grubby pin-cushion and threaded it ready for her work next day. Then, because I was tired and also because I was concerned about her health, I soon went to bed. But my aunt, saying, I must offer gratitude to the Lord Amida, reverently sat before the Buddhist altar and, fingering her crystal rosary, began to recite a sutra. Illuminated in the flickering candle light, her body, emaciated from illness, seemed to waver. My aunt who had staged for me those Shiōten/Kiyomasa fights, aunt who used to take out a cinnamon stick from my pillow drawer for me to wake up with, that same aunt had now become like a shadow. She finished her sutra at long last, closed the doors of the Buddhist altar, and came to the bed laid out next to mine.

  “Some time back when I became badly ill, I thought that was the last time I’d see the world, but it seems I had some more years left to live, and I’ve again been occupying a spot in this world. But I’ve lived to this age, I think I can take leave anytime. Before going to bed I plead with the Lord to summon me to be near him and I go to bed, but . . .”

  She saw me put a bedspread over myself.

  “You’re not cold, are you? I wouldn’t know what to do if you came down with a cold. . . . Every morning I wake up, I say to myself, Oh, oh, I’m still alive. . . .”

  Our talk seemed interminable, but I put it to an end at some point to go to sleep. Both of us, trying not to disturb each other, feigned sleep but neither slept well. The next morning I left while it was still not quite light. My aunt remained standing in front of the gate dispirited to see me off, for ever and ever.

  She passed away soon afterward. She must be sitting before the Lord Amida as she had dreamed of doing for such a long time, I imagine, and offering her gratitude to him reverently just as she did that night.

  18

  I spent the summer of my seventeenth year by myself at the country house of a friend with whom I was on good terms in those days. It was a thatched building on the beautiful, lonesome peninsula to which my older brother had taken me previously, and it stood shyly ensconced at the foot of a small mountain rising from its shore. A flower vendor, an old woman who lived by herself in the neighborhood, was to do all the chores for me. This old granny was from the same province as my deceased aunt and because for me, she, with her age and accent, was like my aunt, and for her, I understood the language of her province well and remembered what I’d heard about the way it used to be in the past, we soon found ourselves talking at ease with each other.

  Her older brother, who was her surrogate father, had ordered her to marry a certain gambling boss but she refused, so he gave her about thirteen ounces of raw cotton, telling her to do whatever she could with it to make a living. So she turned it into thread, took the thread to a wholesaler, and exchanged it for more cotton; then she turned that into thread again and exchanged it, and with the money she got for it being this much, the price of rice at the time being that much, she eventually managed to save some money from the difference. And so she bought some fabric and was sewing it into a kimono when her brother found out and scolded her terribly, saying, Why did you buy something like that without even speaking to your brother who’s like a father to you. And she carelessly walked out of her home thinking to go to the Zenkō temple74 to pay her respects, perhaps earning her way as a weaver or something.

  She was then seventeen. And once on the road she was followed by a fellow who looked like a pimp and she was spooked so decided, in Tsumago Station, Shinshū,75 to put up at an inn while the sun was still out. But then she saw the same guy arrive at the same inn and slink inside before her. She decided not to stay there, after all, and was about to leave when the owner, saying this and that, tried to force her to stay. Puzzled, she said to him, I’ve just sat down here and haven’t even talked about the inn’s rate yet; besides, the sun is still high, so why are you being so unreasonable trying to stop me? The guest you saw a minute ago asked me not to let you go until he leaves, the owner said, and he refused to listen to her. A man from the same province happened by and she had no choice but to explain to him what had happened and had him speak to the owner. And the owner, agreeing on the spot, said, I’ll let her go at once. But the minute the helpful man went away, the owner tried to stop her with a menacing face.

  So this time she spoke to an old man who happened to pass by, and he casually agreed to take care of her, saying, For now just come to my house and I’ll let you go to the Zenkō temple with a postal runner. She simply accepted what the old man said and followed him, but for as long as a month he just made her help with his peasant work, apparently with no intention of letting her go. Finally she found work as a live-in maid, managed to get hold of a travel companion, and left for the Zenkō temple. On her way there, at an inn, “by some mysterious karma,” and with the bearers of a palanquin she’d taken, an inn owner, and a station official serving as go-betweens, she married a sheriff’s assistant. But for some reason she couldn’t stand the man and she meant to run away from him but ended up living with him for years before she finally fulfilled her wish and went with him to the Zenkō temple to pay her respects. But by bad luck both came down with terrible measles and had to take to bed.

  Later, when she finally regained her ability to move about, she turned
umbrella-making, which she knew a little, into a business. She was repaying the debts in many places when she happened to make some decorative hats76 for a certain temple, so she thought to go back to her province making decorative hats in places on the way. But when she managed to reach a certain place she wasn’t allowed to pass the check-point and she drifted and drifted until she settled down in a town not far from here and started another umbrella business. Luckily it prospered and turned into a substantial store, and she even kept several apprentices. But because her old man’s eyes deteriorated, she gave up the business and started to plant the flowers she liked. With her old man’s death nine years earlier at age sixty-nine, her luck had begun gradually to decline until she became what she was now.

  On odd-numbered days she would get up early in the morning and, carrying a basket on her back, walk about selling flowers. Because everyone loved her, giving her cookies and dishes to eat, all she needed was five sen to buy a pint of rice a day. Besides, with an oracle saying she’d die in one and a half years, she had already arranged for eternal sutra reading,77 and because she could get her funeral expenses by selling the house she was in now, rundown house though it was, she had nothing to worry about now, she said. She brought out a grubby notebook wrapped in a purple wrapping cloth.

  “Everything is written here.”

  I opened it and saw dreams and other things from about the twenty-second year of Meiji jotted down messily by various hands. The cover said, “Record of Dream Moxa Treatments,” but it contained nothing about them. Since she couldn’t even read the i of the i-ro-ha syllabary, she didn’t know of the writers’ unkindness and thought they had written down everything she told them. Furthermore, she even had a carefully folded drug ad in the notebook that had happened to slip in. And though she couldn’t read, she looked into it by my side.