Little Yokozuna

First published in 2003 by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd., with editorial offices at 364 Innovation Drive, North Clarendon, VT 05759 U.S.A.

 

Copyright © 2003 Wayne Shorey

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without prior written permission from Tuttle Publishing.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

LCC Card Number: 2002075061
Shorey, Wayne.
The little Yokozuna / Wayne Shorey
1st ed.
Boston, Mass. : Tuttle Pub., 2003.
p. cm.

 

 

ISBN: 978-1-4629-0741-0 (ebook)

 

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North America, Latin America,
and Europe
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Tel: (802) 773-8930
Fax: (802) 773-6993
Email:[email protected]

 

Asia Pacific
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Singapore 534167
Tel: (65) 6280 1330
Fax: (65) 6280 6290
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Web site:
www.periplus.com

 

Japan
Tuttle Publishing
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5-4-12 Osaki, Shinagawa-ku
Tokyo 141-0032
Tel: 81 (03) 5437-0171
Fax: 81 (03) 5437-0755
Email: [email protected]

 

First edition
08 07 06 05 04 03 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

 

Design by Serena Fox Design
Printed in Canada

 

 

Chapter One
Something Happens to Kiyoshi-chan

Chapter Two
Night Sounds

Chapter Three
Knuckleball Takes a Swing

Chapter Four
A Little Hope for Little Harriet

Chapter Five
Breaking and Entering

Chapter Six
Owen Greatheart Explains Things

Chapter Seven
Sumo Lessons

Chapter Eight
The Way Out

Chapter Nine
Weaving a Net of Words

Chapter Ten
From Bad to Worse in the Dead End Mine

Chapter Eleven
Annie and Knuckleball Almost Miss Kyoto

Chapter Twelve
The Knock on the Gate

Chapter Thirteen
One Way Home

Chapter Fourteen
The Garden of a Thousand Worlds

Chapter Fifteen
The Arena

Chapter Sixteen
The Demon Warrior Makes Promises

Chapter Seventeen
Finding a True Rikishi

Chapter Eighteen
Kiyoshi-chan Does His Best

Chapter Nineteen
Finding Little Harriet

Chapter Twenty
Impossible Choices

Chapter Twenty-One
Under the Deep Green Sea

Epilogue
Epilogue

 

 

 

There was once a young boy named Kiyoshi-chan, who was born in a village called Kashiwa, in the ancient country of Japan, and who then had nothing happen to him for the first eleven years of his life.

If this sort of thing had gone on, of course, there would be no story to tell about Kiyoshi-chan, since for a story to be a story something has to happen. But as it came about, there finally was a certain rainy night when everything seemed to start happening to Kiyoshi-chan at once, changing his life forever.

At the time of this adventure, Kiyoshi-chan would have said that he was eleven years old. The reason for this is that from olden times, when the Japanese count age they include the year of life inside the mother's womb, before the child is born. Kiyoshi-chan liked this custom. American children would have called him ten, which would have hurt Kiyoshi-chan's pride a bit, but there it is.

By the time he was eleven, then, Kiyoshi-chan had learned to love several things above all else. First, he loved the great sport of sumo with a grand passion. Six times a year he watched the Grand Sumo Tournaments on the little black-and-white TV his father kept in the quilt closet, and he could never stop talking about his favorite rikishi, or sumo wrestlers. He had actually attended several of the great tournaments in person, awed by the pageantry and by the presence of some of history's most famous wrestlers. "I am one of the luckiest Japanese boys ever," he said one day, when he was much younger. "Why is that?" his mother asked. "Because I live in the days of Taiho, the greatest yokozuna of all time," he said. "Think of all the boys in olden times who never heard of Taiho, or the boys in the future who will wish they had seen him. I am in just the right time of history."

And how many people can say that, believing it?

Next to sumo, Kiyoshi-chan loved baseball, and in a very different way he loved his family. But sumo was his grand passion.

Speaking of Kiyoshi-chan's family, there were six people in it, living in a small warm space no bigger than sixteen tatami mats. There were his father, his mother, Kiyoshi-chan himself, and his little sister Izumi-chan. But there were also his obaa-san and ojii-san, his grandmother and grandfather, who had lived forever in their own tiny two-mat room, bent in half and full of wrinkles.

Kiyoshi-chan never noticed the inside of his home, just because he had always lived there. It would have been harder to describe for him than his mother's face, just because he knew it so well. Someone else would have noticed the four tiny rooms, the dark beams and white plaster, the sliding paper doors, the genkan or entryway for shoes, the tatami, which was just right for sitting on, neither too hard nor too soft. Someone else would have smelled the particular smell of the place, which by now belonged to Kiyoshi-chan as much as his nose did, the smell of tatami and rice and fish and miso, all blended together in a way that would have seemed perfect to Kiyoshi-chan, if he had ever thought about it.

As with all Japanese homes, Kiyoshi-chan's began at the gate to its tiny yard. Inside and outside were equally part of the home, with only a low threshold and sliding doors to separate them. The outside part of Kiyoshi-chan's home was only the size of eight tatami mats, and was mostly covered with mouse-colored dirt that his mother swept free of footprints every day. It was enclosed by a high bamboo fence and thick shrubs that reached almost as high as the red roof tiles, which made their home as private and secret as a woodchuck's.

Since Kiyoshi-chan's yard was no bigger than a medium-sized room, it might seem to have been too small to have a garden. But in the corner of the yard was an arrangement of rocks and tiny trees that his father had set up, with great reverence. He had explained carefully to Kiyoshi-chan how he was trying to show the whole universe in this one little garden, and how each stone was a mountain, and the tiny stream of white pebbles a rushing river, and a waterfall. He had explained the difference between a crane-shaped stone and a turtle-shaped stone, and how the arrangement of stones told a special story from long ago.

Kiyoshi-chan heard this well, and tried to understand it, especially trying to take it as seriously as his father said it. How could the whole Universe fit into one little garden? Even his school was too big to hold in his mind all at once. And he knew that the Universe also included Wakamatsu-san's market, the train station, the vacant lot where he played baseball, and all of Kashiwa, Tokyo, Japan, and the whole world besides. Kiyoshi-chan's face wore a philosophical squint as he wrestled with this, making his father laugh. Kiyoshi-chan laughed, too, but there were actually moments when he felt a little sorry for his father for suggesting the whole idea. It was the first time he had ever caught his parents in anything like a mistake, and it made him melancholy for a day.

One Monday, after school, Kiyoshi-chan walked home the usual way, through a steady March rain. The school was two streets away, one of them loud and blaring with bicycles and little three-wheeled trucks. The next street was quieter, running between two cementblock walls, and Kiyoshi-chan kicked his way along through the puddles and the dusk, comfortable in his yellow raincoat and bright blue boots. He passed a tiny restaurant that was just a bright door in the wall, and saw through it two men sitting at the only table, eating noodles with chopsticks and talking loudly. The warmth and smell of food spilled out onto Kiyoshi-chan, making him think of his mother and supper, so he began to run, up the street, over the roadside gutter, through the gate, along the narrow covered pathway between the houses, and into his yard.

There in his yard were the light of home and the smell of food again, and rain falling all around. Something made him stop and stand still as a stone, hearing and smelling the rain with his whole self, the water streaming off his hat brim and around his face like a veil. He lifted his hands out to either side and let the rain beat on the yellow sleeves of his raincoat.

Then suddenly he noticed his father's garden.

It was different.

Kiyoshi-chan looked at it, perplexed. What was different about it?

He went over and squatted down on his heels, with his bottom only an inch from the streaming steppingstones. He looked hard at the garden. There were the usual shrubs and trees, the river and pool of pebbles carefully raked into ripples, moss growing in little mounds and over the stone lantern. Everything was there, in its place. The stones were dark with rain, and three ancient little trees dripped into the moss.

Kiyoshi-chan shuffled forward on his boots, inch by inch, and peered behind the lantern into the shadows of the tiny garden. In the dusk and rain, the shadows under the old dwarf pine trees seemed deeper than usual, as if they were hiding mysteries. Kiyoshi-chan thought he felt a small piney breeze blowing out from under them, down the pebbly waterfall, through the rocks of the miniature ravine, into his face. He felt a pang of gladness again, as he had when he had first come into the yard. For a moment he could almost imagine tiny deer moving among the trees, hawks the size of gnats soaring around the mountaintops. He leaned forward until his nose was almost touching the dripping pine needles, and closed his eyes, using his nose to hunt for another breath of piney mountain wind.

He had no idea how long he stayed there. His soul seemed to go out from him through his nose and wander through the wilderness of the garden, a tiny pilgrim with a staff and a great straw rain hat. The dusk had almost turned to complete darkness when his worried mother finally came out and discovered him.

"Kiyoshi-chan," she said, touching him on the shoulder. He jumped to his feet and shouted. His mother held him tightly, now truly alarmed. "Are you all right, Kiyoshi-chan? What is wrong?"