before long, I stood up for my honor so firmly that I could not allow even an adult to make light of me. That’s why failing at school would have been a disaster. From that time on I became tense in the classroom, so anxious was I to pay attention. During every lesson I believed myself in a room with a hundred invisible foes. I could not let my guard down in the least. Every morning before setting out for school, I turned up a playing card on the desk in search of my daily fortune. A heart was lucky, a diamond promising; a club was foreboding, while a spade meant certain disaster. At this time of my life, spades turned up day after day.
With an exam coming soon, I memorized every word of my natural history, geography, and ethics textbooks. I was finicky, and for me the exam was a matter of do or die. But my method turned out to be faulty. Inexorably I felt hemmed in and unable to adapt to the exam. Certain questions I answered almost to perfection. In other cases, however, I tripped over the words and phrases in my confusion and ended up soiling the test booklet with mere gibberish.
Nonetheless, my marks that first term were the third highest in the class. Even in deportment I received an A. I seized my report card in one hand and, holding my shoes in the other, dashed out to the beach. Having been tormented by the prospect of failing, now I was absolutely elated.
With the term over, I made preparations to go home for my first vacation from high school. My younger brother and his friends would hear of my brief experience in glowing terms. I stuffed everything I had acquired into the trunk, going so far as to include even the sitting cushions.
Tossed about in the carriage, I came out of the woods of the neighboring village. The rich green of the rice paddies spread out like the sea, and the familiar roof of my own home, with its red tiles, rose conspicuously in the distance. I gazed toward home as though I had been away for ten years.
Never have I been so elated as during the month of that vacation. To my younger brother I boasted of the school as something one might dream of. In my telling, even the small coastal town seemed part of a vision.
I was supposed to paint five watercolors and collect ten rare insects for my homework. I spent the whole month wandering through the fields and the river valleys, sketching the landscape and looking for insects. I took my younger brother along for help. He could hold the collector’s kit, with the tweezers and jar of poison, while I carried the net on my shoulder. I chased after locusts and cabbage butterflies all day long. When night fell, I would get a crackling fire going in the park and, as the insects flew by, flail away at them with a net or a broom.
My next older brother was enrolled in the sculpture division at art school. He was making a bust of my next older sister, who had just graduated from a girls’ school. While he fiddled with clay beneath the chestnut tree in the garden, I stood nearby sketching her portrait time and again.
She may have taken her posing quite seriously, but my brother and I merely poked fun at each other’s work. My sister was usually more impressed with my work, yet my brother only ridiculed my talent. When you’re young, he claimed, everyone says you’re gifted. He dismissed my writing too, calling it grade-schoolish. In return I was openly contemptuous of his abilities.
One evening this brother came over to where I slept and whispered, “Osa! I’ve got a bug for you!” Squatting on the floor, he slid a tissue wrapping beneath the edge of the mosquito net. He knew I was collecting rare insects. And when I heard the scratching noise inside the tissue as the insect struggled to get out, I realized what kinship meant. I undid the paper roughly, and my brother gasped, “He’ll get away! Look! Look!” I could see it was only a stag beetle, but I put it down as “sheathed and winged,” one of my ten types, and handed it in.
I was depressed to see the vacation end. Returning all alone to my second-floor room at the dry-goods store, I opened my trunk and almost burst into tears. At such times I always sought refuge in a bookstore. There was one close by, and I hurried there now. Just to see all the books lining the shelves would lighten my mood as if by magic. This particular store had one corner containing a half dozen volumes that I couldn’t buy even though I wanted to. Now and then I would linger there and peek inside the covers. I would try to act casual, but my knees would be shaking. Of course, I didn’t go to bookstores just to read articles on anatomy. I went because any book gave me comfort and solace at the time.
My schoolwork, however, became more and more boring. Nothing was worse than coloring in the mountain ranges, harbors, and rivers on an outline map. I was a stickler about things, so I would spend three or four hours at this. In history and certain other classes the teachers told us to take notes on the main points of the lectures. Listening to a lecture was like reading a textbook, so the students merely copied sentences straight from the book. Being attached to grades, I worked away at such tasks day after day.
In the fall there were various athletic events for the high-school students in town. Out in the countryside we had never played baseball, so I only knew such terms as “center field,” “deep short,” and “bases loaded” from books. Eventually I learned how to watch a game, but I didn’t get worked up about it. Whenever my own school competed in tennis, judo, or even baseball, I had to join the cheering section. This made me dislike high school all the more.
Our head cheerleader would look purposely shabby as he climbed the knoll in the schoolyard corner and, holding a fan with the rising sun insignia, give us a pep talk. Reacting to him, the students would cry out with glee, “Slob! You slob!” When a match took place, this cheerleader leaped up during every break in the action and started waving his fan. “ALL STAND UP!” he’d shout in his funny English. And we would get up, our tiny purple banners flapping in unison, and sing the fight song: “Our Foe is Worthy, But ...” It was quite embarrassing. When I spied an opportunity, I’d slip away from the cheering section and go home.
Not that I myself never played sports. My complexion had a faint darkness, which I blamed on the massaging. I became flustered when people mentioned my face, for they seemed to be indicating this secret vice of mine. Somehow or other I felt I must improve my color. That’s why I took up sports.
I had long fretted about my complexion. As early as my fourth or fifth year of elementary school, my next older brother had already spoken to me of democratic ideas.10 Then I heard certain complaints, even from Mother. She once told visitors to our home that democracy had meant much higher taxes and that most of the family harvest now went to the government. I was quite confused by the various things I heard. At the same, I tried to be democratic toward our family’s servants. In the summer I lent a hand to the men mowing the lawn, and in the winter I helped shovel snow from the roof. Eventually I discovered that my help wasn’t welcome. It even seems the men had to redo the part of the lawn that I had tried to mow. To tell the truth, I was actually trying to improve my color. But even hard work didn’t do any good.
During high school I got into sports because of my complexion. On the way home from school in the summer, I always took a dip in the ocean. I liked to use the breast stroke, keeping my legs wide apart, just as a frog might. With my head sticking straight out of the water, I could observe various things even as I swam—the delicate shading of the waves, the fresh leaves on shore, the drifting clouds. I kept my head stretched out like a turtle. If I could bring my face even a bit closer to the sun, I’d get a tan that much quicker.
There was a large graveyard behind the house where I lived. I laid out a hundred-meter course for myself and took up sprinting in earnest. Since the graveyard was surrounded by a dense row of tall poplars, I could loiter within the grounds and examine one requiem post after another whenever I got tired. I read some unforgettable phrases— “Moonlight Penetrates the Pool Bottom,” for example, or “Three Worlds, One Purpose.”
One day, on a dark, moist gravestone covered with liverwort, I made out some writing that said, “The Deceased, Jakushō Seiryō.” Ascribed to the dead man in accord with Buddhist practice,
