The Silver Spoon (10 page)

AMEYA:
LOLLIPOP VENDOR'S TUB

The “yummy-yummy lollipop” couple also came by. The man carried on his head what looked like a washtub bound with many brass hoops. It was rimmed with small flags, each tipped with a red and white wood-duck-shaped candy. Dressed in a yukata with the design of a carp leaping up a waterfall,
⁹⁸
he swayed his shoulders and hip rhythmically as he walked, beating his drum
udo-dong
. He was followed by a woman wearing a towel on her head in “big-sister” style,
⁹⁹
playing the samisen raucously. If you bought a lot, the man would put on an
okame
mask
¹⁰⁰
and dance, and the children would all circle round and watch. He would twist his head, wave his sleeves, and, dancing in carefree fashion to the woman's samisen, he would come with odd steps after the children, who ran about squealing. The dance over, he would say, “Sorry we've been too noisy.”

Then he would try to hoist his tub back on his head, but almost drop it to please the children, before going away, weeping.
¹⁰¹

O-Kuni-san's father was a big-boned, powerfully built, scary person. Often he was away on official duty; when he was home, he confined himself upstairs all day, writing. Because he scolded us at the slightest noise we made, I wouldn't go to play when he was home, and O-Kuni-san would stay home, cringing. If I went without knowing he was there and called to her, “O-Kuni-san, will you play with me?” she would open the papered sliding door of the foyer just a little, stick her thumb in front of her nose, and shake it most frightfully.

Once her family invited me over on the day of the Peach Festival.
¹⁰²
The doll dais was set up high on the formal side
¹⁰³
of the sunlit guest room, and the dolls arranged on it were splendid. My family's set was so tiny “you could almost put it in your eye,” but O-Kuni-san's was big, complete with all five shelves. Because I believed all the dolls were alive, I was cowed and bowed successively to each one of them, drawing uproarious laughter from everyone present. At that moment, quite unexpectedly, O-Kuni-san's father, who I had thought was not home, appeared. I didn't know what to do, and staring alternately at the dolls and at the man, I was about to start sobbing, cringing. Seeing I was scared, he smiled, something he rarely did, and wrapped popped beans for me, and asked how old I was, what my name was, and so forth.

“Who's the scariest of us all?” he said at the end. Honestly, I pointed at him. That drew another uproar from everyone. He too laughed.

“As long as you keep quiet, I won't scold you,” he said.

When he went upstairs, I finally felt relieved and heaved a sigh.

31

How I miss the games we played in those quiet childhood days! The most enjoyable were those in the evenings. Above all, in early summer as the sun was setting, leaving red, red reflections on the clouds, the children, pressed by the thought that they'd have to go home very soon, became all the more absorbed in their games. When she tired of “Hide Quickly,”
¹⁰⁴
Blind Man's Bluff, “Dare Not Catch,”
¹⁰⁵
and Hopscotch, O-Kuni-san would brush back her bangs to let the wind cool her perspiring forehead.

“What'll we do next?”

“Let's play ‘Coop-him-in,'” I would suggest, wiping the sweat off my face with my sleeve.

“Coop him in! Coop him in!

“Coop the bird in the cage!

“Guess when he'll dare come out!”

After a shower, the young buds on the drooping branches of the cedars by the fence sparkled with raindrops, and these, if you shook the fence, spattered down all at once, which was fun. In a while the raindrops would collect again as before.

At one corner of the playground grew a large silk tree that put out pinkish, feathery flowers. In the evening when the time came for the mysterious leaves to sleep, splendid moths flew in and, quivering their thick brown wings, ran madly from flower to flower, which was eerie. Once, in the belief that the trunk of the silk tree was ticklish, O-Kuni-san and I rubbed it so hard that the skin of our palms almost came off.

As the sunset reflections on the clouds faded, the moon that had been surreptitiously waiting for her turn began to cast a faint light. O-Kuni-san and I would look up at her gentle face and sing “Lady Moon, How Old Are You?”

“Lady Moon, how old are you?

“Thirteen'n'seven?

“Still so young! . . .”

O-Kuni-san would make tubes of her hands, put them on her eyes, and say, “Do this and you can see the rabbit pounding rice cakes.”

I would duly follow her example and peer upward. The idea that a rabbit is pounding steamed rice all by himself in the faint round land gives such delight to the innocent, curious mind of a child. As the moonlight became brighter, we would chase each other's floating shadows to play “Let's Catch Your Shadow,”
¹⁰⁶
until my aunt came to get me.

“Come home, supper's ready.”

If I held back, planting my feet on the ground refusing to go, she would deliberately wobble as she tugged, saying, “I'm no match for you! No match for you!” Eventually she would coax me into going home.

“Would you play with him tomorrow, too?” my aunt would call to O-Kuni-san. After saying goodnight to her, O-Kuni-san, now turning away, would repeat:

“The frogs are singing, we are going!”

Still reluctant to leave, I would call out the same note. And we would keep calling it out to each other until we reached home.

32

While we were spending such carefree days, a shocking thing happened to both of us. We both turned seven and had to go to school. As I had once been there on my aunt's back when she took lunch boxes for my sisters, I knew what school was like. How could I go to a place swarming with such mean-looking children? Every night when the time came for me to take out the box of toys and play in the dining room, my father and mother would explain at great length, but I kept shaking my head stubbornly. My mother said that if I didn't go to school, I wouldn't be able to become a great man. I said I didn't care about becoming a great man. My father said he wouldn't keep a son who didn't go to school. I said I would leave home with my aunt and my box of toys.

The protests wrung from my meager brain and sickly child's pleadings were greeted with generous laughter at first, but as the first day of school drew near, the torture became harsher, and soon I was weeping pitifully by the time my aunt took me to bed. In a while, against my wishes, a satchel was bought, then a cardboard pencil case, a large brush for calligraphy, and everything else that was necessary. My sisters said they envied me because mine were better than theirs, but I didn't even want to look at them. All I wanted was the Divine Dog and the Rouge Ox. And if I could play with O-Kuni-san when outside, and when at home play Which-Nut with my aunt, I would be perfectly content. Why did they have to force me to go to school when I didn't want to, I wondered.

I could not for the life of me figure that out. One day I told O-Kuni-san what was happening.

“I'm getting scolded every day myself,” she said.

So my good friend, too, disliked school and was suffering the same gloomy fate. We both sat on the root of the damson plum and consoled each other, confiding our shame.

“I'll never go to school,” she said as we parted. “Promise you won't, either.”

I was glad to make a firm pledge.

33

Finally the day came, but from the morning onward I kept repeating, “I won't go unless O-Kuni-san does,” and somehow the day passed.

That night I was pulled out of the bedroom, my hiding place, into the dining room, the court. They threatened me, cajoled me, but I held out with grim determination. At one point, though, my brother suddenly grabbed me by the collar, threw me down violently on the floor by a strange trick, and gave me a series of slaps on the cheeks.

ICHINENSEI:
FIRST GRADER

“What are you doing to this feeble child!” cried my aunt, shielding me with her body. “I'll talk to him,” she said, and escaped to the bedroom with me. My brother was doing jujutsu at higher middle school.
¹⁰⁷

The next day, my cheeks swollen, I didn't even go out for meals, but stayed in the bedroom. Worried, my aunt secretly fed me the offerings to the Lord Buddha. Then I came down with an acute fever. Even under normal circumstances I was hypersensitive, so with the fever I scarcely slept all night. My aunt tended me without a wink of sleep, murmuring her prayers.

This lasted for four or five days, and while I stayed in bed no one talked about school. But the first night after I'd recovered from the headache and the fever had subsided, they resumed the torture. My determination was, if anything, firmer than ever, and I repeated that I wouldn't go unless O-Kuni-san did. This time, for some reason, they didn't put me to a painful test, but simply asked, “Are you sure you will if O-Kuni-san does?”

I replied firmly, “I sure will.”

The next day, about the time school was over, my aunt carried my pale-faced self outside the gate of our house. The school was only about a hundred and fifty yards away. Soon after the clank-clanking of the bell reached us, throngs of children came out to go home. To my surprise, O-Kuni-san came out, too, in high spirits, carrying wrapped things like everyone else. And because my aunt praised her, “You're great, you're great,” she boastfully told us all about school. On my aunt's back, I decided that my friend was terrible. That night I had no choice but to agree to go to school.

The next morning, in
haori
and formal trousers
,
I entered the school gate with my father. I was taken to the teachers' room where in the cabinets with glass doors there were globes, specimens of birds and fish, picture scrolls of unfamiliar animals, and many other things that attracted me. (These were all things whose names I learned later.) As my father talked in great detail about how my brain was in poor condition and how I was physically weak and timid, I felt totally embarrassed. The teacher listened to him, eyeing me rudely, with an occasional nod. At length, he asked me in a soft tone:

“How old are you?”

“What is your name?”

“What is the name of your father?”

“Where is your home?”

Since I had been taught the answers to all these questions long before and the teacher proved unexpectedly gentle, I managed to answer all of them without a mishap. Perhaps because he was told that my brain was in poor condition, the teacher thought I was dumb. He asked me some more questions as if to make sure of this and gave me permission to enroll, saying, “I think he'll manage.”

That day I went home without doing anything else and spent the rest of the day with my sisters giving me instructions on manners at school, how to bow, how to fasten the buckle on my satchel, and so on. And the next day I put on a cap with a cherry-blossom insignia,
¹⁰⁸
strapped across myself the satchel I'd never worn before, and went to school, feeling indescribably confused as my aunt led me by the hand. I was so embarrassed that people were looking at my own unfamiliar appearance, and the worry about the still unknown school life was so painful, that I crept along beside my aunt, eyes glued to my toes. At school my sisters led us to the classroom and seated me in the front row.

It was Class C of the first grade where the physically underdeveloped and the mentally retarded were gathered together.

34

The children who had enrolled before me were already used to school and since none of them was a weakling like me, they were carrying on, making lots of noise. Before long the usual bell clank-clanked. Heard at close range, the metallic noise penetrated to the core of my head and was extremely annoying. My sisters left saying that they'd come again in the next recess and so did my aunt, with a promise that she would stay outside the room until all the lessons were over. So, left alone, I looked fearfully around and saw the other kids, looking definitely strong and mean, eyeing me rudely. I cringed and was looking intently at the knothole in my desk when the teacher of our class, Mr. Furusawa,
¹⁰⁹
came in. Because of the pockmarks that covered his face he looked scary, but he was a man known for his gentleness who was liked by all the children of the school.

The textbook was different from the illustrated story books such as the one with P
EKINESE, BOW-WOW, CAT MEOW, SQUEAL
,
¹¹⁰
that my aunt had taught me, or the picture books like the one showing
DOG, CHOPSTICKS, BOOK, DESK
,
¹¹¹
but it was easy. So I hardly looked at it but kept my eyes on Mr. Furusawa's graying hair loosen, fluttering in the wind.