“Next, number thirteen,” Mrs. Ōura said crisply. “Hang in there, now. We’re down to the last one. Let’s see, what would this be? I remember seeing lots of this kind.”
“Yeah, there was lots.”
“Here it is. It’s kajime. Write it down.”
“Ka-ji-me.”
“It belongs to the brown algae group.”
“Bro-wn al-gae.”
Besides this “Learning about Sea Plants” project, Shōjirō’s summer vacation workbook contained an assignment titled “Coloring with Flowers.” He had already finished this assignment at the beginning of August, so he didn’t have to worry about it now.
Needless to say, his mother had helped him with that project, too; he had not done it by himself. They got some spiderworts from the yard (these were the only flowers they had in bloom at the time), and in a vase on the table were some gladiolus that Mrs. Satake from the house right below them on the hill had brought, so they had two kinds of flowers they could use. When they mashed the petals up in a grinding bowl, though, they discovered that the colors were too faint, so they added some blue origami paper to the spiderwort and some red origami paper to the gladiolus, finally managing to produce some “colored water.”
Once that was ready, Shōjirō got some lily and maple leaves from the yard and laid them on a sheet of drawing paper. The idea was to make a splatter painting of the leaves by dipping a toothbrush into the colored water and rubbing it against a wire sieve held over the leaves.
“Be sure to get your own,” Mrs. Ōura called after Shōjirō as he dashed off to get the toothbrush. Otherwise there was no telling whose he might decide to bring back.
Tiny droplets of colored water splattered across the drawing paper, dimly outlining the lily and maple leaves. When he was done, the white shapes of the leaves were surrounded by the blue of the spiderwort and the red of the gladiolus—and in some places by a blend of both colors. The finished picture had a kind of ambiguous feeling about it, looking on the one hand as though perhaps some important step had been left out, on the other as though this was about all that could be expected.
At any rate, he had completed the assignment.
With the seaweed project also done, Shōjirō had finished all of his summer homework, so he could now take it easy (though not for long, since vacation was down to just one more day). But his older brother in junior high was not yet off the hook.
“I’ve got a great plan,” Yasuo had announced out of the blue with about ten days of vacation to go.
Each morning from then on, he would get up one hour before everyone else to work on his assignments, and each night he would stay up one hour later. That way he could go on having fun during the day and still finish all his homework with three days to spare, so he could spend the last three days of vacation doing whatever he pleased.
Normally the end of vacation is an unhappy time, but by systematically finishing off his homework this way, he could reclaim three full days that would be entirely his own, no questions asked. Even as the flame of his vacation faded like a dwindling lamp, another minivacation would light up brightly before him. How could you beat that?
If Ōura had been asked, this was how he would have explained the thinking behind Yasuo’s plan. But only the boy himself could determine whether or not it really was such a “great plan.”
Yasuo seemed to be getting really charged up about his plan. Every so often a voice like the trail boss in a cattle drive emerged from his room:
“All right, men! Let’s move ’em out!”
Three days later, Yasuo asked his sister Haruko to trade rooms with him just at night. Being in the same room with Shōjirō was hampering his after-hours efforts to get his homework done because Shōjirō kept wanting to talk. It wasn’t much fun going to bed when someone else was staying up.
“Shut up and go to sleep,” Yasuo scolded, but to no avail. Shōjirō might be quiet for a short while after that, but then he would speak up again. Or he would do something else distracting. So Yasuo made an agreement with Haruko: each night, when it was bedtime for everyone else, Yasuo would go to Haruko’s room to work on his homework at Haruko’s desk, while she went to the boys’ room to sleep in Yasuo’s bed.
“This is going to be great!” Yasuo exclaimed the first night. “Haru’s room is so neat and quiet, I’ll be able to zip right along.”
But his outlook seemed to change when he was done for the night and turned out the light. He was used to talking with his little brother after he got into bed (Ōura could always hear them chatting back and forth from where he lay in his own room). Now he found himself without his usual conversation partner, all alone, in the dark.
“Aaah-ahh,” he tried yawning exaggeratedly but got no response. “Boy, am I getting sleepy!” he tried next, only to be ignored once again. After a brief silence, he got out of bed and knocked softly on the wall between the rooms. Shōjirō’s bed was right on the other side of the wall, but he failed to respond. He tried again.
“Hey, can you hear?”
There was still no answer. Both Shōjirō and Haruko had long since fallen sound asleep. Finally giving up, Yasuo went back to his bed (that is to say, Haruko’s). What else could he do? He would simply have to go to sleep.
In the morning, an alarm clock went off in Haruko’s room, and it kept on ringing and ringing. Finally Yasuo woke up and turned it off. By that time, Ōura was wide awake as well.
“When you use an alarm clock, you’re supposed to shut it off as soon as it starts ringing,” Ōura later scolded.
“Yeah, I know. I try, but I just can’t get my arm to move. I guess I’m still half asleep.”
That’s a fine excuse for disturbing everyone else’s sleep, Ōura thought, but since Yasuo did proceed to get out of bed and set to work each morning, he needed to be commended for the discipline he was showing in carrying out his plan. On the day before his “minivacation” was to begin, however, Yasuo made a chilling discovery. At the very bottom of the very last mimeographed worksheet for math he found instructions to also do from page such-and-such to page so-and-so in their regular workbook.
This additional assignment amounted to seven full pages, enough to throw in doubt whether he could finish all the problems even if he spent the next three days on nothing but math. Yasuo lost all heart.
With his carefully laid plans shattered, Yasuo went back to sleeping in his own room—and to jabbering on and on with Shōjirō after their light was out.
“Simmer down and go to sleep!”
Ōura and his wife had to yell at the boys two or three times each before they finally settled down. The next morning the alarm clock no longer echoed through the house.
Yasuo said nothing more about the workbook. Ōura couldn’t tell whether he had recovered from his shock enough to start chipping away at it a little at a time, or had simply given up on it and cast it aside. In stark contrast to how fired up he had been earlier, the final days of his vacation would apparently pass by without any clear sense of purpose.