It drew near the end of the year. A man who had been a palanquin-bearer in the old days, lately reduced to making frames for paper lanterns in the slum at the foot of the hill, hung himself. At the top of Ando Slope, not far from us, a gang of five thieves broke into a pawnshop and killed a sixteen-year-old girl. An arsonist set fire to a secondary temple in the precinct of the Denzuin. A restaurant called the Tatsumiya, which had flourished on Tomi Slope in the days of Lord Mito, went bankrupt. We heard these stories in turn from such people as Kyusai, the family masseur, the fish dealer Kichi, and the fireman Seigoro, who frequented our back door, but they left hardly any impression on me. All I wanted was to attach a humming string to my nine-crested dragon kite with the old man Kansaburo, who was a porter at my father's office and who came to visit us only on New Year's Day. I thought only of such things as whether the wind would be blowing that day. At some point or other, however, the family greengrocer, Shunko, and our parlormaid, O-Tama, had become secret lovers. One night, hand in hand and carrying their clothes on their backs, they tried to elope. Tazaki nabbed them as they were going over the wooden fence by the back gate. The ensuing household uproar and the decision to send O-Tama back to her parents' house in Sumiyoshi, although I did not understand what was happening, seemed terrible to me. The sight of O-Tama's retreating figure, in tears as she was dragged through the back gate by her white-haired mother, seemed sad even in my eyes. After this, I felt that there was something grim and hateful about Tazaki. My father was well pleased with him, but my mother and the rest of us could not abide him. He was a lowdown person who had done a bad thing.
All of New Year's Day I did nothing but fly my kite. On Sundays, when there was no school, I would get up especially early to play. I begrudged the fact that the winter sun went down so soon. But before long it was February, and then came a Sunday when it was no use getting up early: there was snow. Out by the back door, where my father almost never went, there was the sound of his thick, husky voice. With him was Tazaki, doing most of the talking. There was also the voice of my father's rickshaw man, Kisuke, who'd come by as he did every morning. Not listening to the wet nurse, who was trying to change my sleeping kimono, I ran toward their voices. When I saw my mother, standing on the threshold with her back to me and her arms folded, a sort of sad happiness filled me. Clinging to her soft sleeve, I wept.
"What are you crying about so early in the morning?" My father's voice was sharp. But my mother, taking out one hand from her bosom, gently stroked my head.
"The fox has come back. He's eaten one of Mune-chan's favorite chickens. Isn't that terrible? Be a good boy, now."
The snow was blowing in fitful gusts through the back door into the dirt-floored entryway. Half-melted lumps of snow that had been tracked in under everybody's high clogs quickly made mud of the floor. The cook, O-Etsu, the new parlormaid, one other maidservant, and my wet nurse, all aflutter over their master's unexpected appearance at the back door and shivering with cold, sat as if glued to the floorboards of the raised part of the kitchen.
My father, putting on the snow clogs that Tazaki set out for him and taking the paper umbrella that Kisuke held over his head, started on a tour of inspection out in back of the house and around the chicken yard by the well.
"Mother, I want to go too."
"No. I can't have you catching cold. Please don't ask."
Just then the wicket of the back gate was opened and Seigoro, the head fireman, came in, saying, "It's been quite a heavy snowfall." Dressed in his firefighting outfit of quilted hood, livery coat, and old-fashioned Japanese gloves, he was making the rounds of the neighborhood on his initial snow inspection.
"What's that? Oh, how terrible. A fox took one of your chickens, you say? Why, it's the most exciting thing to happen since the Restoration. Just like the samurais, the fox-god was deprived of his stipend. And he couldn't smell the fried bean curd under all that snow. So he wandered over to your chicken house. It's no great matter. Your folks will catch him for sure."
Seigoro kindly carried me on his back to the side of the chicken yard.
Apparently that morning at daybreak the fox had craftily stolen with rapid strides across the accumulated snowdrifts, dug a hole under the bamboo fence, and crawled through it into the yard. Snow and dirt were scattered all about where he had scratched and scrabbled his way through. Inside the bamboo enclosure, on the snow that had blown into it, not only were chicken feathers mercilessly tossed about but a drop or two of bright red blood was to be seen.
"It'll be no trouble this morning. There are prints all over the snow. 'If you follow my tracks, you'll soon find me in the Shinoda woods,' as the old line goes. Eh—it's been living in the cliff in your garden since last year?"
Just as Seigoro said, a trail of fox prints was found that led from the garden down the cliff and vanished at the base of a pine tree. My father at their head, the band of trackers raised a spontaneous cry of triumph. When Tazaki and the rickshaw man scraped away the snow with a spade and a long-handled hoe, the fox's lair, that all the last year had been searched for without success, was nakedly exposed in a thicket of beargrass that grew densely even in winter. At length a consultation began on the best method of killing the fox.
Kisuke held that if they smoked it out with red pepper, the fox, unable to bear the pungent smoke, would come yelping out of its hole, and they then could dispatch it. Tazaki, saying that it would be a shame if the fox got away, was for setting a snare at the mouth of the hole or, failing that, gunpowder. But then Seigoro, unfolding his arms and tilting his head to one side, broached a difficult matter.
"Foxes usually have more than one hole. There's bound to be an exit somewhere. If we only stop up the entrance, we'll look like real fools when the fox sneaks out the back door."
This started everybody thinking again. To find the back hole, however, in all this heavy snow, would not just be very difficult but almost impossible. Finally, after another conference that lasted so long that everyone began to shudder with the cold, it was decided that all they could do was to smoke out the hole at this end with sulfur. Tazaki made ready for firing a gun from the house. My father laid an arrow on the string of his great bow. Kisuke with a shoulder pole, Seigoro with a fire axe, and the gardener, Yasu, who just then had come by a trifle belatedly to shovel snow and was pressed into service, also with a shoulder pole, were ready for action.
My father returned briefly to the house to change into some old Western clothes. Tazaki went to the apothecary's in front of Denzuin to buy sulfur and gunpowder. The others noisily whiled away the interval with a two-quart keg of sake, from which they drank with teacups. What with one delay and another, it was almost noon by the time they finally began smoking out the mouth of the hole. I said I wanted to watch the subjugation of the fox with all the others but I was sternly kept indoors by my mother. With her and the wet nurse, I turned over and spread out as usual the pages of a storybook at the sunken hearth. Unable to stay still, however, I got up and sat down again and again. The only sound of a gun that we heard was the muffled dun of the noonday cannon at Marunouchi. Although so far away, it surprised us on clear days by rattling even the translucent paper sliding doors of our parlor. And yet the sharp report of the gun, shooting the fox dead right at the base of the cliff, would have split both my ears,