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 that he would die.
“Autumn Evening,” composed about the same time, was also praised by my teacher. I began this sketch by mentioning a headache I got from studying, and then went on to describe how I went out on the veranda and looked at the garden. I gazed entranced upon the quiet scene, the moon shining brightly, the goldfish and the carp swimming about in the pond. When a burst of laughter came from a nearby room where my mother and some other people were gathered, I snapped out of the reverie and my headache was suddenly gone—that’s how the sketch ended.
There wasn’t a word of truth to this. I took the description of the garden from my older sister’s composition notebook. Above all, I don’t remember studying enough to get a headache. I hated school and never read a textbook. I only read entertaining books. My family thought I was studying as long as I was reading something or other.
But when I put down the truth, things always went wrong. When I wrote that Father and Mother didn’t love me, the assistant disciplinarian called me into the teachers’ room for a scolding. Assigned the topic, “What If a War Breaks Out?” I wrote how frightening war could be—worse even than an earthquake, lightning, fire, or one’s own father.4 That’s why I said that I would flee to the hills, at the same time urging my teacher to join me. After all, my teacher was only human, and war would scare him just like it would me.
This time the assistant disciplinarian and the school principal both questioned me. When asked what prompted these words, I took a gamble and said I was only joking. The assistant disciplinarian made a note in his book—Full of mischief! Then a brief battle of wits ensued between the two of us. Did I believe, he asked, that all men were equal? After all, the assistant disciplinarian went on, I had written that my teacher was only human too. I hesitated before replying that, Yes, I thought so. Really, I was slow with my tongue.
If, the assistant disciplinarian continued, he himself was equal to the principal, why didn’t they get the same salary? I thought about that awhile and said, Isn’t it because your work is different?
His thin face set off by the wire frames of his spectacles, the assistant disciplinarian immediately recorded my answer in his book. And then this man whom I had long admired asked whether or not he and