Ōura went to Haruko. “We’re going to buy you a new desk. To celebrate your starting high school.”
“That’s okay. I like this one.”
“Why?”
“It’s still perfectly fine. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“Don’t you bump your knees?”
“No, the kneehole’s plenty big.”
Ōura sat down to try it out. His knees slid right in under the desk. There wasn’t any room to spare, but there was enough.
“Whadda ya’ know!”
“See? I told you.”
Ōura was amazed at how accommodating a desk built for grade schoolers could be. Here he was, a full-grown man who had finished grade school thirty years ago, and yet he could still sit down at this desk and use it.
But this was no time for marveling at the desk’s remarkable utility. The occasion called for celebrating, and they wanted to give Haruko a present. They may have asked her to put up with a grade schooler’s desk through junior high, but to keep her at that same desk even in high school might make it hard for her to keep her passion for scholarship burning.
“Well, they say a gift becomes more precious when you have to wait for it. We’ll get you a new desk one of these days.”
So Ōura had said, but another full year passed and Haruko entered eleventh grade without any further action. Gifts may be more precious when one has to wait, but the season for celebrating had by now slipped completely away.
Standing in his daughter’s room while she was away on her school trip, Ōura gazed pensively at the old desk. He realized for the first time that the desk no longer seemed out of place against the room’s walls and woodwork; it seemed to blend in perfectly with its surroundings. Sitting there without calling particular attention to itself, it helped give the room a composed, friendly atmosphere.
We can’t take this desk away from her now, Ōura thought. We’d best leave well enough alone.
He remembered going with his wife to buy the desk at a department store ten years before. It would have been in April, the year after they had moved from Osaka to Tokyo with their two small children. Among the large selection of desks on display for entering first-graders, they had chosen this one because it looked sturdy and dependable. They also liked its neat, trim finish, which was neither too dark nor too light.
Haruko was still at the age, then, when she begged for stories. Ōura could never think of any good stories to tell, so he would have to make something up:
“Once upon a time, a great big fish came crashing down from the sky.”
A beginning like that would get his daughter all excited, but then more fish would come falling from the sky, and the story would be over.
With Haruko still at such a tender age, buying her a desk for study had had a sobering effect on Ōura. Thoughts of ten years hence had not even crossed his mind.
Haruko still had a fondness for funny stories, but now she collected her own and brought them home to tell the rest of the family. One night during dinner (this was when she was still in junior high), she had this one to tell:
“In social studies today,” she began, “one of the boys suddenly shouted ‘Fire!’”
Ōura and his wife both looked at her in alarm.
“The teacher was writing some stuff on the blackboard, and we were all copying it into our notebooks, when suddenly I heard this really loud shout right next to me. I was so startled, I almost jumped out of my seat.”
“Where was the fire?” Mrs. Ōura asked with obvious concern.
“At first everybody thought maybe a fire had broken out at some farmhouse nearby, and the guy had been gazing out the window and saw the smoke or something, so we all automatically looked out the window. But we couldn’t see any sign of smoke outside, and there wasn’t anything burning inside the classroom either.”
“That’s strange,” Ōura said.
“If a fire had broken out a ways away from the school, you’d think that someone who was actually near the fire would raise the alarm first, but we hadn’t heard anything like that, and besides, in that case, no one in the classroom could have known about it, right?”
“That’s what I’d think,” Mrs. Ōura said.
“Our teacher just stood there at the blackboard with a piece of chalk in his hand looking puzzled, and the rest of us started looking around at each other not knowing what to think.”
“What about the boy who yelled?”
“He turned real red and hanged his head.”
“He dozed off and dreamed about a fire, I bet,” Ōura suggested.
“There’s a girl in my class who falls asleep and doesn’t wake up even when class is over,” Shōjirō broke in.
“A girl does that?” Yasuo said. “Wow!”
“So go on. Tell us what happened,” Mrs. Ōura pressed, eager to hear the rest of the story.
“Our teacher called the boy who yelled and the boy sitting next to him to the front of the class and demanded an explanation. The other boy was red and hanging his head, too. They said they’d been playing a game where they pinched each other on the arm, gently at first and then harder and harder, to see how hard they could pinch before it really hurt. With each pinch they were whispering ‘Fine’ to show they were still okay, but then all at once the second boy pinched a whole lot harder, and I guess the first boy’s ‘Fine’ turned into a cry of pain that somehow sounded more like ‘Fire!’ to everyone else who didn’t know what was going on, including our teacher.”
Haruko had an eye for funny things at home as well as at school.
One day Shōjirō finished his math homework and went to have his mother check it for him as he always did. Mrs. Ōura said she couldn’t interrupt what she was doing, so he asked Haruko instead.
Haruko started checking the answers carefully, one by one. Then all of a sudden she burst out laughing.
“What?” Ōura asked.
“Take a look at this,” she said, handing him Shōjirō’s work sheet and pointing to the problem:
“Seven tulips have bloomed. There are six more buds getting ready to open. How many blooms will there be when all of the buds have opened?”
Shōjirō had written out the equation 7 + 6 = 13.
“So what’s wrong?” Ōura asked in puzzlement.
“Of course his work and the answer are right, but look below that.”
Under the equation was a space marked “Answer” and in that space Shōjirō had written “13-tsu.” Because the story problem had used the all-purpose counting suffix -tsu to indicate the units when speaking of the seven tulips and six buds, Shōjirō had unthinkingly done the same for the answer—even though -tsu is only used with single-digit numbers.
Sometimes Haruko played a role in the silliness herself. During her last year in junior high, January was a particularly stressful time for her. Entrance exams for high school were right around the corner, and the light in her room burned late every night.
She had such a grim look on her face all the time that Ōura decided to try to cheer her up.
“You’ll pass,