“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 moment. Even the slightest insult made me think of dying. Believing I would amount to something 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