that my aunt was going away and leaving me behind. I saw her standing in our front entranceway, totally occupying it with her bulk. Her breasts seemed large and red, and perspiration trickled down her skin. I can’t stand you, she hissed, prompting me to run over and press my cheek to her breasts. No, I begged, please don’t leave. Sobbing, I pleaded with her again and again. When my aunt shook me awake, I hugged her right there in bed and kept on crying. Even after I was fully aware, I wept quietly for a long time. Afterward I didn’t tell anyone of my dream, not even my aunt. I remember plenty of things about my aunt from those early days. But I don’t remember anyone else, even though there were surely many people in the house besides my father and mother. That’s because our family included my great-grandmother and grandmother, my three older brothers and four older sisters, and my younger brother too. Then there was my aunt and her four daughters. Except for my aunt, however, I was hardly aware of anyone. Not, at least, until I was four or five years old.
We must have had five or six tall apple trees in our big garden out back. I remember a cloudy day when some girls were climbing about in those trees. The garden had a chrysanthemum patch as well, and I vaguely recall a crowd of girls gazing at the flowers in full bloom. They were standing in the rain with umbrellas. I suppose they were sisters and cousins of mine.
From the time I was five or six years old my memories become quite definite. Around that time a maid named Také taught me how to read. She really wanted me to learn, and we read all kinds of books together. Since I was a sickly child, I often read in bed. When we ran out of books, Také would bring back an armful from places like the village Sunday school and have me read them. I learned to read silently too. That’s why I could finish one book after another without getting tired.
Také also taught me about right and wrong. Often we went to a temple where she would show me Buddhist hell paintings and explain the punishments they depicted. Sinners condemned to hell for arson carried flaming red baskets upon their backs, while those who had kept mistresses writhed in the grip of a green snake with two heads. The paintings depicted a lake of blood and a mountain of spikes, as well as a bottomless pit called “The Abyss” that gave off white smoke. Thin, pale wretches, wailing through barely opened mouths, were strewn over all these regions. Tell a lie, Také said, and you’d end up the same way—a sinner in hell with your tongue plucked out by devils. Hearing this, I screamed in terror.
The temple graveyard was on a small hill out back, with requiem posts1 clustered along the hedge-rose border. Besides the usual prayers in brush writing, each of the posts carried a dark, metal wheel. Fastened in a slot high on the post, each wheel seemed to me then about the size of the full moon. Spin the wheel once, Také explained, and if it clattered round and round and came to a stop without turning back, then you would go to heaven. But, she warned, if the wheel started back, you’d end up in hell.
Také would give a push and the wheel would spin smoothly until it slowed to a complete stop. When I tried, however, the wheel sometimes turned back. I think it was in the autumn that I went alone to the temple to test my luck. The wheels seemed to be in league with one another, for they all turned back regardless of which one I pushed. Though tired and angry, I kept myself under control and stubbornly pushed them time after time. As dusk fell, I finally gave up and left the graveyard in despair.
My parents must have been living in Tokyo about that time, and I was taken by my aunt for a visit. I’m told we were there a long while, but I don’t remember much about my stay. I do remember an old lady who came to the house every so often. I couldn’t stand her and cried each time she showed up. Once she brought along a toy postal truck painted red, but it merely bored me.
Then I started going to the village grade school, and that left me with different memories altogether. Suddenly Také was no longer around. I learned that she had gone off to marry someone from a fishing village. She left without telling me this, apparently out of fear that I might follow her. It must have been the next year that Také came to visit us during the Festival of the Dead.2 She seemed rather cold toward me, however, and when she asked how I was doing at school, I didn’t answer. I suppose someone else told her. She didn’t really compliment me. She just said, Don’t get too big for your britches.
At about the same time certain events led to my aunt’s departure as well. Having no son to carry on the family name, my aunt decided that her oldest daughter would marry a dentist who would be adopted to continue the family line. Her second daughter got married and left, while the third died while still young. Taking along her oldest daughter and the new husband, as well as her fourth daughter, my aunt established a separate branch of the family in a distant town. The move occurred in the winter, and I was to go along. As the time to leave drew near, I crouched in a corner of the sleigh next to my aunt. That’s when my next older brother came up and slapped my rump right where it pressed against the lower end of the hood. “Hey there, little bridegroom!” he sneered, thumping me time and again. Gritting my teeth, I put up with his insolence. Indeed I thought my aunt was adopting me as well as the dentist. But when school began once again, I was sent back to my village.
I ceased being a child soon after entering grade school. It was then that my younger brother’s nurse taught me something that took my breath away. It was a beautiful summer day, and the grass by the vacant house out back had grown tall and dense. I must have been about seven, and my brother’s nurse could not have been more than thirteen or fourteen. My brother was three years younger than I, and the nurse shooed him off. She said, “Go get some leaf-grass”—that’s our word for clover back home. Then she added, “And make sure it’s got four leaves too.” After he left, she put her arms around me, and we started rolling around in the tall grass.
Thereafter we would play our secret little game in the storehouse or in one of the closets. My younger brother was always in our way. He even started howling one day when we left him outside the closet, an event that put my next older brother on to us. Having found out from my little brother what the trouble was, my older brother opened the closet door. The nurse did not get upset; she merely said that we were looking for a lost coin.
I was always telling fibs too. On the Girls’ Festival3 day of my second or third year in grade school, I told the teacher that my family wanted me home early to help arrange the doll display. Having lied my way out of class, I went home during the first period and told everyone school was out for the Peach Festival. My assistance wasn’t needed, but I got the dolls from their boxes all the same.
I had lots of fun collecting bird eggs too. There were always plenty of sparrow eggs right under the tiles of our storehouse roof. But starlings and crows didn’t nest there, and I had to turn to my classmates for these eggs. (The crow eggs were green and seemed to glow, while the starling eggs were covered with strange speckles.) In return for the eggs, I would hand over a bunch of my books. Wrapped in cotton, the eggs in my collection eventually filled an entire drawer of my desk.
My next older brother must have suspected something. One evening he asked to borrow two books, a volume of Western fairy tales and a work whose title I’ve forgotten. My brother did this from spite, and I hated him for it. The books were gone, for I had traded them both for eggs. If I admitted this, my brother would have gone to reclaim them. So I told him the books were around somewhere and I would look for them. Lamp in hand, I searched my own room and then went all over the house. My broths laughed as he followed me about. He kept saying, They’re not here, are they? And I kept insisting, They are too. I even climbed up to the highest kitchen shelf for a look. Finally my brother told me to forget it.
The compositions I wrote for school were mostly hokum. I tried to portray myself as a model boy, for I believed people would applaud me for that. I even plagiarized. The essay entitled “My Younger Brother’s Silhouette” was a masterpiece according to my teacher, but I actually lifted it word for word from a selection of prize stories in a magazine for youngsters. The teacher had me make a clean copy with a brush and enter the work in a contest. When a bookish classmate found out what I had done, I prayed
