graduated from grade school in due course, but I was too frail for high school. My family decided to send me to a special intermediate school for one year to see if I got stronger. If I did, Father would send me to high school here in the province. My older brothers had all studied in Tokyo, but that would be bad for my health. I didn’t care much about going to high school, anyhow. But I did get some sympathy from my teachers by writing about how frail I was.
The intermediate school belonged to the county, a new unit of government back then. Five or six villages and towns had gotten together and put up the building in a pine grove more than a mile from my home. Many bright students from grade schools throughout the area were enrolled, and I had to maintain the honor of my own school against this competition. I had to strive to be the best, even though I would often be absent because of my health.
Nonetheless, I didn’t study there either. To one headed for high school, the place seemed dirty and unpleasant. I spent most of every class drawing a cartoon serial. During recess I would explain the characters to my classmates and even give impersonations of them. I filled four or five notebooks with such cartoons.
With my elbow braced on the desk and my chin resting in my palm, I would gaze outside for a whole hour. My seat was near the window where a fly had been crushed against the pane. Glimpsed from the side, the fly astonished me time and again. It almost seemed to be a large pheasant or a mountain dove.
I would play hookey with five or six friends and together we would head for the marsh just beyond the pine grove. While loitering at the edge of the water, we’d gossip about the girls in our class, then roll up our kimono skirts to stare at each other’s fuzz. It was great fun to compare how we were all doing.
I kept my distance from every girl at school, though. I was so easily aroused that I had to watch myself. Two or three of the girls had a crush on me, but I was a coward and pretended not to notice.
I would go into Father’s library and take down the volume of paintings from the Imperial Art Exhibition. As I gazed at a nude painting buried somewhere among the pages, my cheeks would begin to glow. Another thing I would do is put my pair of pet rabbits in the same cage, my heart pounding as the male climbed on and hunched its back. By doing these things I kept my own urge from getting out of hand.
I was really a prig and didn’t tell anyone about the massaging. When I read how harmful it was, I decided to stop. But nothing seemed to work.
Since I walked all the way to school and back each day, my body grew stronger. At the same time little pimples came out on my forehead like millet grains, much to my embarrassment. I would paint them with a red ointment.
That same year my oldest brother got married. On the evening of the wedding my younger brother and I tiptoed up to the bride’s room and peeked in. She was having her hair done, with her back to the door. I caught a glimpse of the pale, white face in the mirror, then fled with my younger brother in tow.
“What’s so great about her?” I swaggered. Ashamed of my forehead and the red ointment, I reacted all the more violently.
As winter drew near I had to start studying for the entrance exam to high school. I looked over the book ads in the magazines, then ordered various reference works from Tokyo. I arranged them on my shelves, but didn’t do any reading. The high school of my choice, located in the province’s largest city, would attract two or three times more applicants than it could admit. Now and then I was overcome with fear; I must get down to studying or else I would fail the exam. A week of hard work would restore my confidence. During these bouts of study I would stay up until midnight and usually get up at four the next morning. A maid named Tami stayed by me. I’d have her keep the charcoal fire going and make the tea. No matter how late she stayed up, Tami always came to wake me at four o’clock the next morning. While I puzzled over an arithmetic problem involving a mouse and the numbers of her offspring, Tami sat quietly nearby reading a novel. Presently she was replaced by a fat, elderly maid. When I heard that Mother was behind this change and thought of what her motive might be, I could only frown.
Early the following spring, while the snow was still deep, my father coughed up blood in a Tokyo hospital and died. The local paper published his obituary in a special edition, an event that affected me more than the death itself. My own name appeared in the paper too, on a list of people from the gentry.
Father’s body was brought home in a great coffin mounted upon a sleigh. I went along with a large crowd to meet the hearse near the next village. Eventually a long procession of sleighs glided from the woods. The hood of each vehicle reflected the moonlight, creating a lovely scene.
The next day our family gathered in the shrine room where the coffin rested. When the lid was opened, everyone burst into tears. Father seemed to be asleep, his prominent nose looking very straight and pale. Enticed by the weeping, I too shed some tears.
For the next month the house was in such chaos that one might have thought a fire had occurred. I forgot about my studies altogether. And, when the time for the final exam arrived, I could only give haphazard answers. The examiner knew about my family, though, and I was graded third highest among the group. I suspected that my memory was starting to weaken. For the first time ever, I felt I could not handle an exam without preparing for it.
II
Although my scores were low, I passed the exam for high school that spring. The school was in a small town on the coast and, when the time came, I had to leave my own village. I dressed quite stylishly for the trip—new hakama,9 dark stockings, laced boots. In place of the blanket I had been using, I threw a woolen cloak over my shoulders and deliberately left it unbuttoned. When I reached my destination, a dry-goods store with an old tattered noren curtain hanging in the front entrance, I took off this outfit. The shop was run by distant relatives to whom I became deeply indebted over time.
There are people who get suddenly worked up over anything whatever, and I’m one of them. Now that I was in high school, I’d put on my student cap and new hakama just to go to the public bathhouse. Catching my reflection in the shop windows along the way, I’d even nod my head and smile.
I couldn’t get excited about school, however. Not that the place wasn’t nice enough. The building was situated at the edge of town, with a park behind extending to the Tsugaru Strait. It was painted white outside, and inside there were wide hallways and classrooms with high ceilings. During class one could hear the hiss of the waves and the sough of the pines.
But the teachers in that school were always persecuting me. As early as orientation day the gymnastics instructor called me a smart aleck and started hitting me. That really hurt, since he was the very person who had been so gentle with me on the oral examination. Knowing that my father had passed away, he had understood why I wasn’t prepared for the entrance exam. When he had mentioned this, I had hung my head for his benefit.
Then the other instructors started hitting me. They gave all sorts of reasons for dishing out such punishment. I was yawning, grinning, or whatever. My unrestrained yawning apparently became a subject of conversation in the teachers’ room. It amused me to think what dumb things they talked about there.
One day a student from my own village called me over to the sand dune in the schoolyard. You’re bound to flunk, he warned, as long as they keep hitting you like that. And, he added, you really do act like a smart aleck. I was dumbfounded. That afternoon after class, I hurriedly set out for home along the beach. With no one else around, I sighed as the waves licked against my shoes. I raised my arm, wiping the sweat from my brow with my shirt sleeve. A gray sail, astonishingly large, wavered past my very eyes.
I was a petal quivering in the slightest breeze, about to fall any
