Frail from birth and dyspeptic from lack of exercise, I would forget to eat unless food was pressed to my lips as though I were the king of the bees; there is no telling how much trouble I caused my aunt. Once she packed rice balls into an empty yōkan box and made a game of an Ise-mairi, a pilgrimage to Ise. With my aunt leading, we walked round and round the little hill in the garden, clapped our hands in worship before the stone lantern, and then sat on a stone beneath a pine to eat our lunch. Another time, my little sister and our nurse came too, and we took norimaki to a field where evening primroses were in bloom. From the top of a bluff lined with great cedars, hackberries, and zelkovas, the mountains of Fuji, Hakone, and Ashigara stood out clear and bright in the distance. I was eating my midday meal with unusual delight when, unluckily, someone came toward us. At once I flung down my chopsticks and said, "I'm going home." Of all living things, I disliked human beings most.

The next morning, dressed in haori and hakama, I entered the school gate with my father. I was taken to the teachers' room. There, in cupboards fitted with glass-paneled doors, were many things that drew my eye: a globe, specimens of birds and fish, and wall charts of unfamiliar animals—though these are all names I learned only later. I was unbearably ashamed as my father explained in detail that I was slow-witted, physically weak, and timid. The teacher, who had listened with nods while studying my face, asked gently:

"How old are you?"

"What is your name?"

"What is your father's name?"

"Where do you live?"

I had been taught all these answers at home beforehand, and the teacher's unexpected kindness reassured me, so somehow I answered without mishap. Perhaps, after hearing that I was dull-witted, he had taken me for a fool; at any rate, he tested me with question after question before saying,

"This will be fine,"

and admitted me to the school. I went straight home that day and spent the rest of it learning from my sisters how to behave at school, how to bow, and how to fasten the buckle of my satchel. The next day I put on a cap bearing a cherry-blossom badge, slung the unfamiliar satchel across my body, and went to school with my hand in my aunt's, my feelings in indescribable confusion. My little heart ached both from shame that anyone might see how unaccustomed I was to all this and from anxiety about the unknown life awaiting me at school. Looking only at my toes, I crept along behind her. My sisters led me to the classroom and seated me at the front desk. This was Class B in the first year of jinjō shōgakkō, the class to which the younger or slower children of the year were assigned.

Around that time, I often wanted to escape people's eyes and be entirely alone, and I would hide anywhere—under a desk, inside a cupboard. Withdrawn into such a place, thinking about one thing and another, I felt an indescribable peace and contentment. Of all my hiding places, my favorite was beside a little chest of drawers. It stood in the gloomiest room in the house, lit only by what entered through a north-facing window near the storehouse. Between the window and the chest was a space just large enough for me to slip neatly into it with my knees drawn up. Crouched there, I would gaze at the radiating cracks in the window glass, the nearby kaya tree, the binankazura twining around a dead trunk, its red vines, and the aphids drinking sap at their tips. Left alone for half a day or even a whole day, muttering softly to myself, I somehow acquired the habit of penciling the hiragana letter "を" (wo) on the chest, one or two at a time. In the end, innumerable large and small wo formed a procession. My father grew suspicious because I was forever creeping into that corner, and when he looked in he discovered the procession at once. Taking it for nothing more than idle scribbling, he merely said, "If you want to practice your letters, you must do it in your copybook," and did not scold me severely. Yet these were anything but idle scribbles. The hiragana wo somehow resembles a seated woman. Whenever some trouble pressed upon my little heart and frail body, I sought consolation from those letters; they understood my feelings and comforted me kindly.

Even after we moved to this house, scarcely three days passed without a frightening dream driving me through the whole house in the middle of the night. In one, a black spiral about a foot across hung in the air and throbbed like the mainspring of a clock. I would bear its loathsomeness as hard as I could; then, from somewhere, a spectral crane would fly up and take the spiral in its beak. In another, something like entrails churned and squelched in the darkness. It became a woman's face: the mouth hung stupidly open, the eyes opened wide, and the face stretched longer and longer. Then the mouth clamped shut and spread sideways, while the eyes and nose crumpled together until the face was absurdly flat. It went on lengthening and contracting until I began to cry. We began to suspect that my aunt's tales of ghosts and marvels were responsible for these nightmares; partly to test a change of room, I was made to sleep beside my father. Yet the heroic tales he told me each night—of Miyamoto Musashi, or of Yoshitsune and Benkei—did no good at all. The monsters came just as before and cared nothing for a mere old man. In the former room a demon had inhabited the ceiling above the tokonoma; in this one, the octagonal clock on the pillar became a single eye, and the four shōji became an enormous mouth.

Around that time, a family who took in nuihaku piecework moved into the house west of ours, and their son, Tomi-kō, became my new classmate. He was hopeless at lessons, but his ready tongue, his two extra years, and his strength soon made him the boss of the class. Naturally, I could no longer exercise my former authority; yet pride would not let me bow my head to him too readily, and I found myself left outside the group. Since he had no neighborhood friends, he came to fetch me after school to play out back. I disliked him, and what I wanted more than anything was to play with O-Kei-chan; but I feared provoking his hostility, so I kept him company against my will. O-Kei-chan, a born tomboy, watched our games over the fence with evident delight. Before long she came out and, copying what she saw, learned to skip rope and bowl a hoop. The quick-witted Tomi-kō curried favor with her with cries of "Young miss! Young miss!" and showed off handstands, somersaults, and every sort of trick. O-Kei-chan adored such things and followed at his heels, calling "Tomi-chan! Tomi-chan!" Brought up by my aunt alone, with no playmate but O-Kuni-san, I had had none of his training and could perform no such feats. All I could do was watch helplessly as Tomi-kō enjoyed the undivided favor of this little queen.

Even when O-Kei-chan came to our house in the evening, she talked of nothing but Tomi-kō and would not so much as glance at the picture books and kusazōshi I brought out to win her favor. When the three of us played together and Tomi-kō, full of himself, called me a clumsy coward, she joined in ridiculing me. I now resented my aunt for having brought me up into a boy so lacking in accomplishments that he could do neither a handstand nor a somersault. Much as I detested Tomi-kō, I swallowed my anger and did not resist him. At last my patience broke. One day, when he went too far, I bristled and answered back. He abused me roundly, then whispered in O-Kei-chan's ear and, looking knowingly at me from the corner of his eye, said:

"Abayo, shibayo,"

and briskly started for home. Even O-Kei-chan imitated him, saying

"Abayo, shibayo,"

and went after him. He must have taken her to his house. From then on O-Kei-chan stopped coming altogether. On the rare occasions when we met, she hid without even a smile. Tomi-kō had poisoned her against me—whenever I thought so, jealousy and rage boiled within my little breast. At school he incited the others to torment me by little degrees. I was no match for him in repartee, still less in strength. My one remaining consolation was that I stood first in the class. Yet without O-Kei-chan, was not even that, in the end, an empty throne?

Mr. Nakazawa was kind-hearted, but he had a formidable temper. If something made him flare up, he might strike a pupil on the head with his teaching cane hard enough to set it wobbling. Even so, I loved him. At no little trouble to myself, I would cut a frond from the shuro palm in our garden and give him a fresh cane, only for someone—possibly even me—to feel its sting. He would grin and say,

"Thank you. This is the best for knocking heads,"

and make a show of striking. Since I obeyed nothing he said and behaved exactly as I pleased, I must have tried him sorely; but I had decided, entirely on my own, that he was fond of me all the same. When the class misbehaved and his familiar temper made his face blaze like a ball of fire, the other pupils shrank into themselves and fell silent. Even then I remained heiki no Heiza—perfectly unconcerned—and watched him with a smile. One day, when the headmaster came on his rounds, Mr. Nakazawa complained that I was "hopelessly insensible." The headmaster came over to where I stood listening with amusement to this discussion of myself and asked:

"Aren't you afraid of the teacher?"

"No, not at all."

I answered.

"Why aren't you afraid?"

"Because I think the teacher is just a human being like the rest of us."

The two men looked at each other and smiled wryly; neither said another word. By then I had begun to see, through the solemn shells of grown-ups, the comical children hidden inside. It was therefore impossible for me to feel the special reverence for adults that children generally do.

An even greater misfortune was that I could not get along at all with the newly appointed Mr. Ushida. The pupils feared him because he knew jūjutsu, a skill of which he was so proud that, even without an opponent, he would tumble himself over by way of demonstration. Apart from the time he marked my drawing of a gourd with three concentric circles and said, "Better than the teacher's," there was nothing in him that I admired. Just as I disliked him, he probably disliked me. Before long we were almost enemies.

Meanwhile, ever since the war began, my companions talked from morning till night of Yamato-damashii and chanchan-bōzu. The teacher joined them, repeating the two expressions at every opportunity as though setting dogs on their prey. I found it bitterly distasteful. He never breathed a word of Yu Rang or Bi Gan, but talked without end of the Mongol invasions and Hideyoshi's invasions of Korea. For songs he gave us nothing but dreary war pieces, accompanied by dull dances like calisthenics. The others performed in deadly earnest, as though the hated chanchan-bōzu were upon them: shoulders squared, elbows thrust out, they stamped hard enough to split the leather soles of their setta and bellowed without regard for tune or rhythm amid clouds of dust. Ashamed to rank with such a crowd, I deliberately sang a degree higher and out of key. Even the cramped playground reeked of Katō Kiyomasa and Hōjō Tokimune; every weakling was made a chanchan-bōzu and had his head cut off in play. In the streets, chiyogami and sheets of anesama dolls had vanished from every ezōshiya, replaced by grubby pictures of shells exploding. Everything that met my eyes and ears made me angry.

Once, when a crowd gathered and made a great feast of lurid war stories based on scraps of rumor, I opposed them: "In the end, Japan will probably lose to China." For a moment this unexpected, daring prophecy left them merely staring at one another. Then their laughable yet, in its way, commendable patriotic hostility rose so high that even my authority as class monitor counted for nothing. One boy said with great exaggeration:

"Oh my, how bad, how bad."

A second boy rubbed the tip of his nose with his fist. Yet another imitated the teacher, saying:

"Too bad for you—the Japanese have Yamato-damashii."

Taking on their attacks single-handedly with even greater antipathy and conviction, I declared firmly:

"We will definitely lose. We will definitely lose."

Sitting in the midst of their clamor, I summoned all my wits and demolished their groundless arguments. Most of them had not so much as glanced through a newspaper, looked into a world atlas, or heard the tales in the Records of the Grand Historian and the Eighteen Histories. In the end, I alone talked them down, and they reluctantly fell silent. Their resentment did not subside, however, and in the very next lesson they told the teacher:

"Sir, [Name] says that Japan will lose."

The teacher, with his usual knowing look, said:

"The Japanese have Yamato-damashii,"

and badmouthed the Chinese in his usual foul language. Finding this impossible to stomach, as if I had been insulted myself, I said: "Sir, if the Japanese have Yamato-damashii, then surely the Chinese have a spirit of their own. If Japan has Katō Kiyomasa and Hōjō Tokimune, has China not Guan Yu and Zhang Fei? And you once told us how Kenshin sent salt to Shingen, and taught us that compassion for an enemy was bushidō. Why, then, do you do nothing but abuse the Chinese?" When I poured out my usual frustration all at once, the teacher looked grim, but after a while he said:

"[Name] has no Yamato-damashii."

I felt the angry vein at my temple begin to twitch. But since I could not take out this Yamato-damashii and show it to him, I merely reddened and fell silent. Japan's soldiers, peerless in loyalty and valor, crushed both the Chinese forces and my precocious little prophecy; they could do nothing to alter my distrust of the teacher or my contempt for my companions.

Because of this and that, I felt it was ridiculous to be associated with them. Without realizing it, I distanced myself from them and began to watch their foolish uproar mockingly from the sidelines. One day, I was standing alone in the hallway, leaning my elbows on the handrail that had been polished to a shine by the hands of mischievous boys over the years, laughing as I watched their antics jumping around under the wisteria trellis. A teacher who happened to pass behind me suddenly called out:

"What are you laughing at?"

I replied,

"The way the children are playing is funny."

The teacher burst into laughter and said,

"Aren't you a child too, [Name]?"

To which I replied seriously,

"I may be a child, but I'm not a fool like them."

"You're quite a handful,"

the teacher said, and went into the staff room to tell the others. I was, in all likelihood, a trial to my teachers.

Although I despised every one of my classmates as a hopeless fool, I felt a heartfelt, precocious sympathy for Kanimoto-san, who might have been called the captain of them all. He was almost an idiot, and to judge by his height he must already have been sixteen or seventeen. It seems that after spending two or three years in each grade, he was gradually pushed upward until those of us advancing behind him finally caught up. He did not know his own age, of course; and because, for all his years, he still wore the artless face of a little child, no one else knew it either. The broad-bean-sized mole on his plump round cheek was his trademark, and he was the pet of the whole school. If someone teased him by saying:

"Kanimoto-san, you've got ink on your cheek,"

he would chuckle "Heh, heh, heh" and reply magnanimously:

"I-t-s n-o-t i-n-k. I-t-s a m-o-l-e."

He wore diagonally across his chest an abacus absurdly small for his body and lacking even a single bead. He wandered in whenever the fancy took him and, when he tired of things, went straight home without the least concern for a lesson in progress. Human beings commonly reserve their mean, self-serving pity for those unmistakably beneath them; under the protection of that pity, no one on earth possessed a freer realm than Kanimoto-san. Yet since he was alive, he too had good days and bad. On bad days he usually did not appear. If by chance he came, he sat bent over his desk without a smile. Then, at some thought known only to himself, he would suddenly begin to sob, and nothing could stop him before he had cried his fill. Once he had poured out, loudly and without restraint, all the grief secretly risen and gathered in the darkness of his unhappy heart, he slung the old abacus over his shoulder and went home as if nothing had happened. On such days, if anyone spoke to him, he did not show the good-natured smile that was the one grace of his misfortune. Instead he drove the person away with a parrot-like shriek: "Higyaa!" Yet on the rare days when he was in splendid humor, he might offer without being asked:

"I'll be your horse."

As a horse he was tall, strong, plump, and comfortable to ride—a splendid mount. But when the mood left him, he became an unmanageable brute who would rear bolt upright even in the midst of a wrestling match between generals.

His unfathomable silence; the tears that overflowed from its depths—I resolved somehow to discover what lay behind them. From then on, heedless of the others' laughter, I made a point of approaching him. When he seemed in a good mood, I tried brief greetings such as "Good morning" and "Goodbye," but he returned not so much as the acknowledgment an emperor might grant a subject. Still I persevered, tirelessly and without wavering. One day he left the seat to which he usually clung like a louse, toddled over, and said in his familiar, halting speech:

"[Name] s-a-n i-s a g-o-o-d p-e-r-s-o-n."

Then he chuckled "Heh, heh, heh" and walked away. That one sentence made me so happy I could have leapt into the air. There was not a particle of falsehood in anything he said. I had already learned far too well that people's words could lie, and his artless, capricious remark went straight to my heart. Surely we could become friends; surely I could comfort this poor soul. I rejoiced as if the key to that dark door were already in my hand. Thinking, "Today is the day," I went to the neighboring desk and tried every way I could to draw him into talk. He only grinned, and I got nowhere. Presently he fell silent and bent over the desk. At length he played his last resort and delivered a magnificent "Higyaa!" All my patient labor vanished at a single parrot cry. Kanimoto-san was not alone because he had been denied a desirable companion such as myself. From the very beginning, he was a person who truly needed nothing.

There were a few mulberry trees left standing around our house. Partly for amusement and partly, in my father's view, as a practical education for the children, we obtained a small quantity of silkworm eggs from a neighbor and raised them. My mother and aunt said again and again what a nuisance it was; in truth they took some pride in it. Recalling labor from the old days that they could now be sure would never return, they cheerfully and busily chopped mulberry leaves, enjoying the work. At first the creatures hid beneath the leaves. Day by day they grew larger, swinging their bald heads as they ate inward from the edges. I too was given five or six in a little yōkan box. My aunt told me that the honored o-kaiko-sama had once been princesses. Accordingly, at bedtime I gave them a proper "Good night"; each morning I greeted them, earnestly asked them to behave while I was away, and went off to school. When I returned, my sister covered her head with a hand towel and tucked both ends of her apron into her obi, while I took up a bamboo basket, and together we went to gather mulberry leaves. Blackening our fingertips, we competed to pick the most appetizing leaves within reach. The beautiful luster of the thread from their cold lips had proved their undoing. Raised by human hands since remote antiquity, these insects never tried to seek food for themselves. They merely lined up their heads on the straw mat and quietly waited for mulberry leaves to be scattered before them. My aunt would say with perfect seriousness: "It is because they were princesses that their manners are so fine." At first their raw green smell and cold bodies repelled me. Once I thought of them as princesses, however, none of it troubled me, and the crescent markings on their backs came to seem like lovely eyes. After emerging from their fourth zenjō—their fourth molt—the princesses' bodies grew pure enough to be almost transparent. Refusing even mulberry leaves, they wandered this way and that in search of a place for their nyūjaku. When gently transferred to the cocooning shelf, each settled in a suitable spot and, moving her head quietly, began to weave a white kichō to hide her form. At first one saw only the head moving. Imperceptibly the princess faded, until nothing remained on the shelf but bale-shaped curtains, woven without a shuttle as if by supernatural power. Feeling abandoned, I insisted that we keep them forever. My mother and aunt paid no attention: they plucked the cocoons from the shelf and boiled them in a pot. As the pale yellow, dripping thread was wound round and round a reel, the kichō was cruelly undone, until at last there appeared the little corpse called a nishidotchi. My brother put the pupae in his bait box and ran off to the fishing pond. Thus the princesses' dream ended; their thread went to the weaver and became a curious rustic stripe.

A few of the cocoons spun in the yōkan box were kept for breeding. Perhaps my heart had reached through to the innermost chamber of their kichō, or perhaps the princesses could not bear to abandon the radiant summer world. Before long they appeared: beautiful brows above jet-black eyes, wings trembling with new delight, and dear little forms that recalled their former faces. Rarer to my eyes even than a person emerging from a bamboo stalk, they circled right and left in search of loving mates. Silkworms grew old and became cocoons; cocoons opened into moths; moths laid eggs. Having seen this, my knowledge was complete. It was indeed a ring of unfathomable riddles. I wish always to look upon the world around me with such childish wonder. As people grow accustomed to many things, they pass them by merely because they are familiar. Yet surely the buds that break from the trees each spring ought to astonish us afresh each year. If we say we do not understand them, it is because we do not understand even the little that is enclosed within one tiny cocoon.

By the time the eggs hatched, there were fewer mulberry trees and not enough hands to raise so many silkworms. With the shallow thought that "the sparrows will soon eat them," my family secretly threw about half into the field behind the house while I—since the year before, a brother to the princesses—was away. I happened upon them while gathering leaves, flew home in alarm, and demanded an explanation. Everyone evaded the question and refused to deal with me. When at last I understood, I all but put my hands to the floor in supplication, begging them to gather the silkworms up and raise them; no one would listen. Their seasoned sophistry could not cloud the compassion of a simple and innocent child, and at last they resorted to their usual method: frightening me into submission with loud voices. Choked with hatred and mortification, I glared at them all, raved abuse like a madman, then ran behind the house and wept. Had I possessed the strength to overpower them, I would have strung them together like prayer beads and fed them to the sparrows. From then on I claimed a headache and left school early each day to gather mulberry leaves for my brothers and sisters, who shook their heads in hunger. The frail creatures could not endure the alternation of cold nights and hot days; each day a few more fell into the dirt.

It was an evening when rain had begun to fall. I refused to come in, however often they called. When my aunt came out, she found me standing over the abandoned silkworms, holding an umbrella above them. The instant I saw her face, I burst into tears and clung to her apron. My aunt, compassionate and deeply devout, longed to help but could do nothing. Repeating the nenbutsu, she at last coaxed me indoors. Later my family discovered that I had erected a little monument of speckled stone on the spot and inscribed it in my own hand: "Ah! The Grave of the Loyal Retainer Kusunoki."

Partly because of my circumstances and partly because of my nature, I was a precocious child much given to anguish. My greatest consolation was drawing. My father had given me a scroll of funpon, said to have been bestowed by our former lord, who was accomplished in the Shijō school of painting. It was my most treasured scroll; at the same time, together with the toy dogs and the little ox from the ushibeni custom, it was one of the sovereign remedies my aunt would briskly produce to quiet my fits of temper. Egrets, cranes, pines, the rising sun—the scroll gathered beautiful images of beautiful things in beautiful nature, all beautifully drawn. It filled my heart, still empty and pure, with an indescribable intoxication of dreams and longing. By then, however, merely looking at the pictures no longer satisfied me. Knowing full well that it would displease my brother, who hated such things above all else, I finally persuaded the family to buy me a cheap paint set. It came in a flimsy navy cardboard box bearing the emblem of a leaping lion, and held only eight colors or so and a single brush. With these and a brush washer handed down from my sister, I began by tracing pictures from kusazōshi and went on to copy the easier figures from the funpon scroll. There was no one to teach me. Shut in my room, spoiling attempt after attempt, I struggled terribly; I had to devise for myself how to draw every line and mix every color. Yet for me this was, so to speak, creation in perfect freedom. When the God of the Jews created all things, could He have tasted the satisfaction I felt on completing a single bird or flower? The mere discovery that red and yellow made orange sent me leaping for joy. My brother, as expected, was furious. If I propped a particularly successful picture on the desk and admired it, he would come over and deliberately tear it to pieces with criticism. But nothing of that kind could break the courage of this little Creator, filled with joy and power. I chose the colors of the kimono worn by the oiran and princesses in my storybooks; I added a line beneath a chin, or altered the drawing of an eyebrow, introducing my own taste in one way and another. Like the gods of old, I cherished each of my creations as though it were my beloved, and carefully put it away in a drawer. Yet I was forever tormenting myself with the thought that the beautiful things I made on paper could probably never be found in the real world.

I also loved shōka, singing school songs. Since I was not permitted to sing when my brother was at home, I stole the hours of his absence. On clear nights especially, I gazed into the face of the perfectly limpid moon and sang quiet, quiet songs, until tears gathered beneath my eyelids and rays of light began to flicker from the moon like a halo. From time to time one of my sister's friends, a young woman with a beautiful voice, taught me. I was the best singer at school, but before her full, rounded voice I lost courage and followed in a murmur. These lessons always took place at the low window where I used to lean and play with O-Kei-chan. On many such nights the wind stirred the leaves of the Chinese parasol tree, insects sang, and flocks of night herons crossed the sky crying, "Gah, gah." ...

Several years had passed since my aunt, fortunate in finding a trustworthy traveling companion, left us for what was meant to be only a short visit to her native province. She wished to pay respects at the family graves, and an indefinable longing for the old memories of her birthplace had stirred her heart. Soon after arriving, however, she fell gravely ill and for a time was thought unlikely to live. Her allotted span had apparently not run out, and somehow she recovered; but at her age the illness left her too weak to return. Resigning herself to this, she took charge of a distant relative's empty house.

My father, with his old-fashioned belief that "the child one loves should be sent out to travel," dispatched me during the spring holiday of my sixteenth year on a journey through the Kyoto–Osaka region, in hopes of curing the melancholy I had been born with. Whether or not the cure worked, I wandered about quite happily until the family summoned me home. On the return journey I decided to visit my aunt, meaning to take what would surely be my final leave of her. She lived in O-funate, a crowded quarter of little houses beside a river in Nagoya, said to have been occupied under the old feudal regime by the domain's naval corps. Her house proved very difficult to find. I searched until sunset and at last entered a temple-like gate opposite a shop selling household wares. The place was so old and empty that I could not tell whether anyone lived there. It had not a blade of grass, but neither had it a tree: all was bare and parched. Standing at the open entrance, I called two or three times and received no answer. I was in a strange city, night was falling, and I began to feel forlorn. Looking about, I noticed a little wooden gate on the left, at the boundary of an empty patch scarcely worthy of the name of garden and only some two tsubo in area. I opened it softly and peered in. In the darkness, without so much as a lamp, a dirty old woman sat alone on the edge of the veranda, bent double like a shrimp and sewing. Guilty at entering a stranger's garden unannounced, I instinctively stepped back. But there was nowhere else to inquire, so I leaned over the gate and called,

"Excuse me."

The old woman ignored me and continued plying her needle.

"Excuse me."

Was she deaf? The hand carrying my luggage felt like it was about to drop off. Unable to bear it any longer, I said,

"I'd like to ask you something,"

and stepped right in. She finally seemed to notice, and suddenly raised her head. It was too dark to see clearly, but the haggard, emaciated figure, a mere shadow of her former self, was undoubtedly my aunt. I just stared at her face in shock. My aunt hastily pushed her work aside, placed her hands on the veranda, and assuming a respectful posture, said:

"May I ask who you are? Lately, my eyes have been failing me,"

"..."

"And I have become very hard of hearing, too."

"So I end up being very rude to people."

Because I remained silent, she leaned forward a little and repeated,

"May I ask who you are?"

My heart was so full that I barely managed to say,

"It's me."

Even then, she said,

"Who might you be?"

and peered closely, looking me up and down. At any rate, she seems to have decided I must be someone she knew. She rose, spread beside the Buddhist altar a thin senbei-buton that had lain near the brazier in the back room, and bowed at the waist to invite me in, saying,

"Please, come on up."

During that time, I finally calmed down, and smiling, I said,

"Auntie, don't you recognize me? It's [Name]."

She gasped "Eh?" and flew to the edge of the veranda. For a while, she peered into my face without even blinking, and then tears spilled from her eyes.

"Is it [Name]-sa? Oh! Oh! [Name]-sa!"

she kept saying, stroking me—now much taller than she—from head to shoulders over and over, as if I were an o-Binzuru-sama statue. Never taking her eyes from me, as though I might vanish, she said,

"My, you've grown so big, I didn't recognize you at all!"

She made me sit by the brazier, and dispensing with formalities, she seemed eager to stroke me even more.

"I'm so glad you came. I thought I might never see you again until the day I died,"

she said, practically worshipping me as she wiped her tears.

My aunt lit an old, battered andon and said, "Could you wait here a minute? I'll just run out for a bit." Complaining about her unsteady footing, she awkwardly slid off the veranda and went out somewhere. Left alone, staring blankly, I thought to myself, "This is the last time I will see her." As I pondered my aunt's deterioration, which was worse than I expected, how I had grown up without realizing it, and things of the past, I heard the pitter-patter of footsteps, and my aunt returned, bringing one or two people I didn't know. They were my aunt's old friends who were still alive; they all lived nearby and kept each other company, she said. Overwhelmed with joy and losing all sense of proportion, she had called them together, saying,

"[Name]-sa has come from Tokyo! Please, come over just for a minute!"

These idle, easygoing, good-natured people came with some curiosity to discover what sort of child this "[Name]-sa" might be, having been made to hear of him until they were sick of the name. When they saw that the celebrated "[Name]-sa" was an ordinary child after all, they kindly hurried home and returned with a heap of heavily sweetened morokoshi senbei, the troublesome kind that twisted into curls when toasted over the fire, and toasted them for me. Realizing that I had not yet eaten, my aunt stubbornly refused the others' offers to go in her place, as though the errand were her own happy privilege. Carrying an Odawara chōchin bearing the family crest, she set out to buy something for supper. In her absence, her friends told me that the mistress of the house had long been away helping a married daughter and had left my aunt there alone as caretaker. Though her sight was failing, my aunt did the housework because she could not bear to feel herself a burden. She returned breathless while they were speaking, lit a little oil lamp in the kitchen, and, amid the clatter of preparing supper, asked after one person and another in Tokyo. At a suitable moment, the others departed. My aunt said apologetically,

"Since it's a place like this, I can't offer you much, so please forgive me,"

and set a large serving plate beside my tray. As the little flounders simmered one by one in the pot on the charcoal stove, she lifted them out with chopsticks and placed them before me. When I said, "I don't need any more," she replied,

"Don't say that, eat plenty,"

and eventually lined them up all over the plate. Her mind in a dither, my aunt hadn't had the luxury to think of how to show her welcoming spirit, so she had gone to the fishmonger and bought every single flounder they had. Feeling both deeply happy and grateful, I ate my fill, gazing at the twenty-something flounders.

Afterward my aunt bustled about so tirelessly that I feared she would pay for it later. When all was done, she sat primly so close that our knees nearly touched. She gazed at me as though she meant to store my image in her little eyes and carry it with her even to the far-distant Pure Land^*, while we talked of one thing and another. I tried again and again to stop her, saying, "Your eyes are so bad—you needn't work," but she replied,

"If I don't do anything, I'll feel bad about being a burden to others,"

and would not listen. Remembering her days in our house, I drew a cotton needle from her grimy pincushion and threaded it for the next day's work. I was tired and anxious for my aunt's health, so before long I went to bed. My aunt, however, said, "I must offer thanks to Amida-sama," and seated herself reverently before the household Buddhist altar. Passing the familiar crystal beads of her juzu through her fingers, she began to chant a sutra. In the wavering candlelight, her body, wasted by illness, seemed itself to waver. The aunt who, in our mock battles, used to play Shiōten Tajima-no-kami opposite my Katō Kiyomasa; the aunt who had taken sticks of cinnamon from the drawer in her pillow to wake me—that aunt had become a mere shadow. When at last she finished the sutra, she closed the altar doors and slipped into the futon beside mine.

"When I was so terribly ill that time, I thought, 'Well, this is the last I shall see of the world.' But it seems my span was not yet spent, and here I am again, cumbering this mortal world. Having lived to this age, I am ready to take my leave whenever it comes. Each night before I sleep, I pray that I may be summoned to His side..."

Seeing me pull up my bedclothes, she asked,

"Are you cold? It would be terrible if you caught a cold."

"...."

"But when I wake up in the morning, I think, 'Oh, oh, I've been given another day of life'..."

Her talk seemed like it would never end, but I brought it to a close at an appropriate point and went to sleep. We both pretended to be asleep so as not to disturb the other, but neither of us slept well. The next morning, when I left while it was still dark, my aunt stood forlornly in front of the gate, watching me go until I was out of sight.

My aunt died soon afterward. No doubt she is seated now before the Amida Buddha of whom she dreamed for so long, offering thanks with the same reverence she showed that night.