The Silver Spoon (24 page)

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 decline 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 lantern
⁷¹
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 needle
⁷³
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 temple
⁷⁴
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 hats
⁷⁶
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.

“I have also met the Lord Kōbō,”
⁷⁸
she said. “I have met the Lady Kannon,
⁷⁹
too.”

After some days had passed I learned that she'd behaved so confidingly toward me not just because of the reasons I had thought and because I listened seriously to her stories, which, by today's standards, were so superstitious as to invite mockery. The first time she saw me, she said, she'd thought, “Here's a gentleman so deeply devoted to the Buddha he should have become a monk!”

What other things did you think, I asked. She wrinkled up her face and said, “No, sir, nothing else.” But she was by nature unable to lie or keep anything to herself and she followed her denial with, “You see, sir, you'll never be able to have a good bride.”

She explained that, though I was deeply devout, I was also unable to become a monk because people had put up obstacles against me and would continue to do so from now on, too.

“You mean being deeply devoted to the Buddha won't do me any good?” I said as if aggrieved.

She instantly made a serious face. “No, sir, not if you keep your single-minded faith. You see, the Lord Buddha's powers are vast!” she emphasized as if she'd forgotten everything.

“Unlike me you can read, so read the sutras,” so saying, she read my palm. “You see, all the lines for interference have disappeared. Yes, I have already had True Pledge
⁸⁰
for you but you haven't abandoned Self-Reliance
⁸¹
at all. You are a bad person,” she said and let my hand go.

19

One afternoon, while I was climbing the mountain behind us aiming for the large pine tree at its top, I lost my way and wandered into a pathless valley. Blindly pushing aside the bushes that were taller than I, cheeks whipped by the branches from bumpy shrubs, feet roughened by vine leaves like military fans,
⁸²
I barely managed to pull myself out of the suffocating depths onto a peak. The peak was shaped like a bull heaving itself out of the center of a deep valley that opened toward the sea. I followed a meandering trail along its back to its shoulder that rose up like a hump. Wizened short pines clung to reddish-brown fragments of granite that had coalesced into surfaces like shark skin, and droppings of birds who'd eaten tree seeds lay everywhere. Trying to prevent myself from sliding down toward the valley at any moment and holding onto the gritty rocks with my strength concentrated in the tips of my hands and feet, I finally managed to climb up on the hump that was the shoulder. In a sky brimming with glaring light the sun flew with waves of heat.

From there it was a languid downward slope along the neck for about a hundred yards, with the cliffs on both sides becoming steeper, the valley deeper, until I reached a tiny flat space that corresponded to the snout, a dead-end atop a precipice. There, along the coast for about seven miles, an odd range of mountains, each one to two thousand feet high, branched out everywhere into the sea, forming countless coves. One of the three main branches was eroded by the water at its base, creating a formation that looked as if a wedge had been driven into it. With a peak behind, a series of higher rocky walls lined up like panels of folding screens beyond the valley; the blue sky serving as a ceiling, the place formed a monstrous cathedral. A falcon above my head, with its rising calls, made a quick descent from time to time, cutting the air before my eyes to rise up high again into the sky.