The House of the Dove, and even while dancing Kappore, I felt isolated and completely listless. Eventually I put on such plays as The Rustler, The House of the Broken Plate, and Shuntoku Maru, but Grandmother always looked disgusted.
Though I didn’t much care for Grandmother, I was grateful to her on sleepless nights all the same. From the third or fourth year of grade school, I had suffered from insomnia. Midnight would be long past, and I would still be lying awake in bed. Since I cried so often at night, the family tried to come up with remedies for my insomnia. Lick sugar before bed, I was told, or else count the ticking of the clock. I tried other suggestions, like cooling my feet in a pan of water or placing a leaf from the “sleeping tree” under my pillow. But nothing seemed to work. A bundle of nerves, I would anxiously turn over one thing after another in my mind. This only made falling asleep more difficult. I had a succession of bad nights after secretly playing with Father’s pince-nez and cracking the lens.
The notions shop two doors away handled several kinds of books and magazines. One day I was looking at the illustrations inside the front cover of a ladies journal, one of them a watercolor of a yellow mermaid. I wanted this illustration so badly that I decided to steal it. I had quietly torn the page out when the young manager sharply called out my boyhood name, Osako! Osako! I flung the magazine to the floor and rushed home. Blunders such as this one kept me awake for nights on end.
Sometimes I’d lie in bed needlessly worrying that a fire might break out. I wondered, What if the house burned down? and after that I couldn’t sleep at all.
One evening I was heading for the toilet just before bedtime. The room where the family accounts were kept was right across the hallway from my destination. The room was dark, and the student who kept the accounts was running a movie projector. The picture on the sliding door hardly seemed bigger than a matchbox, but I could make out a polar bear about to plunge off an ice floe into the sea. Observing this, I sensed something unbearably sad about the student. Back in bed, I thought about the movie scene and reflected as well on the life of this student, my heart pounding all the while. What would I do if the film caught fire? I wondered. Beset by these worries, I couldn’t get to sleep until almost dawn. On nights such as this, I would feel especially grateful to my grandmother.
Around eight o’clock in the evening, a maid would come to my room and lie next to me until I fell asleep. Since I felt sorry for her, I would lie still with my eyes closed. As soon as she left, I’d start praying that I could fall asleep. I would toss and turn until almost ten o’clock, then break into a whimper and get up. By that time the whole family other than Grandmother would be in bed.
Grandmother would still be in the kitchen by the large hearth, sitting across from the night watchman. Ensconced between them in my quilted pajamas, I would dejectedly listen to their inevitable gossip about people in the village. Late one night, as I leaned over to hear, the beat of a great drum echoed from afar. People were still up, celebrating the Insect-Expulsion Festival,7 an occasion when farmers try various means of ridding their fields of harmful pests. I have not forgotten how reassuring it was to know that others were still awake.
That far-off drumbeat brings other memories to mind. My oldest brother was at a university in Tokyo around then, and whenever he came back for a summer vacation, he brought word of the latest trends in music and literature. My brother studied drama, and he even published a one-act play in a local magazine. Called The Struggle, it was much discussed by the young people hereabouts. Along with my other brothers and sisters, I had listened to him recite the play just after he had finished the manuscript. Everyone had complained that it didn’t make sense. I alone understood, even down to the poetic curtain line, “Ah, how dark the night is!” However, I did think the title should be The Thistle rather than The Struggle. And in tiny letters I wrote this opinion in a corner of some used manuscript paper. Perhaps my brother didn’t notice, for he published the play without changing the title.
My brother’s large collection of phonograph records had both Japanese and Western melodies. I already knew the Japanese melodies because of the geishas who came to our house. Whenever he gave a party, my father would send word to a city some distance away to request their services. I remember being hugged by these geishas from the age of four or five. I recall watching them dance too, and listening to their songs, “Once Upon a Time” and “The Tangerine Boat from Ki Province.”
As I lay in bed one night, a fine melody filtered out of my brother’s room. I lifted my head from the pillow, listening closely. The next morning I got up early and went over. I selected one record after another and played every one on my brother’s phonograph. At last I found the melody that had so excited me last night, a samisen ballad about the ill-fated drummer Ranchō.8
Nevertheless, I felt much closer to my second oldest brother. After graduating with honors from a Tokyo business school, he had come back to work in the family bank. This brother was treated callously, just like I was. Mother and Father said he was the worst boy in the family (after me, of course), so I figured looks were the problem with him too. He would sometimes say to me, I don’t need anything now—but if only I’d been born good-looking. Then, turning to me, he would ask teasingly, What do you think of that, Shu?
Despite such bantering, I never thought my brother so ill-favored. I regarded him as one of the smarter boys in the family, too. He seemed to drink every day and then quarrel with Grandmother. Each time this happened, I felt a secret hatred for her.
With my third brother, the one just older than me, I was always feuding. He knew many of my secrets, and that made me uneasy. He looked quite a bit like my little brother, and everyone remarked how handsome he was. I was, so to speak, being squeezed from above and below, and I could hardly bear it. When this older brother went off to high school in Tokyo, I breathed a sigh of relief.
My little brother was the family baby. He had a gentle look as well, and this endeared him to Father and Mother. I was always jealous and would hit him now and then. Mother would scold me, and then I’d resent her too. I must have been about nine or ten when the problem with the lice occurred. They were all over me, scattered like sesame seeds on the seams of my underwear and my shirt. When my brother grinned about this, I just knocked him down—I really did. His head began swelling in several places, and that worried me. I got hold of some ointment labeled “For External Use Only” and applied it to his bruises.
I had four older sisters, all of them fond of me. The oldest one died, however, and the next one left to get married. The two youngest sisters went off to school, each to a different town. Whenever their vacation came to an end, the two of them had to go seven or eight miles from our village to reach the nearest train station. During the summer they could. take our horse-drawn carriage. When the hail was blowing about in the fall, however, or the snow melting in the spring, they had no choice except to walk. They might have gone by sleigh during the winter, but the sleigh happened to make them both sick. That’s why they ended up walking then too. Whenever they were due back in the winter, I’d go out to the edge of our village where the lumber was piled up. Even after the sun went down, the road remained bright in the snow. When the flickering lamps that my sisters carried finally emerged from the woods of the next village, I would throw up my arms and let out a whoop.
The school of the older sister happened to be in a smaller town. Because of that, the souvenirs she brought back could not compare with the younger sister’s. Once she took from her basket five or six packets of incense-sparklers and handed them to me. I’m so sorry, she said, a blush upon her cheeks. At that moment I felt my breast constrict. According to my family, this sister too was homely.
She had lived in a separate room with my great-grandmother until she went away to school, so how could I avoid thinking of her as the old lady’s daughter? Then, about the time I was finishing grade school, my great-grandmother passed away. I caught a glimpse of the small, rigid body dressed in a white kimono as it was being placed in the coffin. I fretted about what to do if this scene
