The Silver Spoon (5 page)

“Damn!” he shouted. “He's on a woman's back and holding a
mandō
!”

My aunt was struck with fear.

“Please be nice to him, he's a sickly child!” she cried out, and tried to hurry away. But a couple of kids scrambled up to us, grabbed my legs, and tried to pull me down. At once I, clinging to my aunt's neck, burst out crying as if torched. Almost strangled, trying to remove my hands that were tightening around her throat, my aunt eventually managed to get back home. When she regained her breath, she noticed that I had lost the
mandō
she'd gotten me, as well as my wooden clogs—the clogs that I'd treasured, for I could tie them to my feet with pale-blue cords.

10

I was so sickly, I seldom stayed away from a doctor for long. Happily, though, Mr. Tōkei of the powdered rhinoceros horn soon died and I began to be cared for by Mr. Takasaka, the “Western doctor.” The rash Mr. Tōkei had tried so hard to reduce was beautifully washed away with a Western medicine and I was cured in no time. Despite his fearful face, Mr. Takasaka was very good at charming a child. I had developed an acute distaste for Mr. Tōkei's electuary, but it was with joy that I took to the sweetened liquid medicine the new doctor offered. In time, Mr. Takasaka suggested that, for my mother's health and mine, we move to some place in the Yamanote where there was fresh air. Luckily, because my father had finished most of his work with his lord and had time on his hands, he transferred his duties to someone else and decided to move to the Koishikawa heights.

When at last the day for moving arrived, everyone kept telling me again and again that we would never return to that house. But I was fascinated by all the hubbub made by the people we'd known who came to help. Also, I was happy to share a cart with my aunt in the procession, and I cheerfully prattled on. After a while, the road gradually became less crowded and eventually, after climbing a long clay slope—until then I didn't know what a slope was—we arrived at an old house surrounded by a cedar hedge, which was to be our new residence.

11

In the new neighborhood everyone lived quietly in old houses with cedar hedges encircling them. Most of them were gentry who had lived there for generations, since the former shogunate period. These were people whose status had declined as society changed but who had escaped the misery of falling to a hand-to-mouth existence and led modest but peaceful lives. In this rural district where there weren't many houses, neighbors not only recognized one another, but knew as well how someone's house looked inside. They were that friendly.

Inside the cedar hedges, which were left ragged and untended, there were always vacant lots where fruit trees grew, and the spaces between houses were cultivated either for vegetables or tea, making good playgrounds for children and birds. The vegetable gardens, hedges, and tea plants were all new and delightful to me. The house we moved into was to be only temporary, until a new one was built in a spacious adjacent lot. By the dark, gloomy foyer there grew a “yielding-leaf” tree,
²⁸
whose leaves and red leafstalks I very much liked. Sometimes I would take a slippery leaf from the tree and place it on my lips or cheek. The day after we moved in, someone caught a cicada and gave it to me in a bird cage that happened to be lying around. I had never seen or heard a cicada before and was curious, but whenever I drew near it, it turned violent and made such a jarring noise that I caught a fright.

Every morning I was awakened very early and made to walk barefoot in the grassy lot. For me it was a big job just to memorize the names of the plants growing there, such as shepherd's purse and galingales. My grandmother, then nearly eighty, walked in the dew with me, leaning on her cane, wearing a satin cowl on her hairless head. One morning she buried three choice chestnut seeds in the mound along the backyard fence and said that by the time her grandchildren grew up, they would be able to enjoy the chestnuts. After she died, we called them Grandmother's Chestnut Trees and took very good care of them. They have now grown into magnificent trees, and in autumn we shake down several basketfuls of chestnuts and peel them for our own children.

Soon the construction began. On my aunt's back I went, though somewhat scared, to see the horses and bulls that had brought the lumber and were now tied to the fence. The horses breathed rods of steam out of their large nostrils as they bit off leaves from the cedar, while the bulls vomited up something with a belch and munched and munched on it. I preferred the placid round-faced bulls that kept licking their slimy muzzles to the restive, long-faced horses. In the workplace, chisels, adzes, and broad axes made all kinds of noises, exciting even a depressed, sickly child. Among the artisans, Sada-san was a gentle-hearted soul. Whenever I stood beside him, mesmerized by the shavings that smoothly rolled out of his plane before falling to the ground, he would pick up the beautiful ones for me. If you put the shavings of cedar and cypress, as red as blood, into your mouth and sucked on them, you got a taste that made you feel as if your tongue and cheeks were being squeezed. Also, it was delightful to scoop up a puffy mass of sawdust with both hands and spill it, letting it tickle the fingers.

Sada-san always stayed on after the others left. Then he would clap his hands to offer prayers to the moon. I liked hanging around the work site to watch him do this, but his co-workers nicknamed him “Oddball” and used to swear that he would die young.

Then I would look around the worksite after it had been neatly cleaned up, with broom marks, and where now, in contrast to the bustle and din of the day, the evening mist was quietly beginning to settle. Reluctantly I allowed myself to be called back in, to wait for the morrow. I was intoxicated with the fragrance of the wood and felt refreshed as I watched with wonder the new residence growing more complete day by day.

12

Neighboring us to the south, separated by a patch of tea shrubs, was a Zen temple called Shōrin-ji.
²⁹
Because it had large precincts, and perhaps because my devout aunt felt more at home in a temple, she took me there from time to time. Along both sides of the path from the gate to the entrance of the main hall, which was about forty yards long and paved with two rows of stones, there grew tea shrubs that were untended, with cedar and other trees rising up here and there. I often asked my aunt to pick me a tea blossom. The blossoms, not being well attached to the branch, would fall to the ground, many of them all at once, when one was picked. After rain, every tea shrub contained a great many raindrops, sparkling. There is nothing remarkable about a tea blossom itself, yet it has a suggestion of loneliness that is appropriate for childhood memories. The roundish white petals generously enclose yellow stamens, and it blooms in the shade of roundish dark-green leaves. I made a habit of covering my nose with one and smelling it.

To the left, by a well, there was a magnolia tree that, when it bloomed, filled the air with a sweet scent. The squeak of the well's pulley carried over the quiet tea shrubs to my house. On the huge screen placed in the foyer of the main hall there were peacocks painted in brilliant colors. Next to the male bird who was perched up on something, with his tail drooping like a straw raincoat, the somewhat smaller female bird stooped in a pecking position. Around the various wildly blooming peonies surrounding them frolicked several butterflies.

Also occasionally, my aunt took me to the Lord Dainichi
³⁰
close by to play. As I shook the thick, twisted rope to strike the “alligator-mouth” gong at its top, my aunt threw in coins and prayed. Then she would alternately touch my head and the Lord Pindola's
³¹
head so my brain disease might be cured, before lightly rubbing her own eyes. The wooden base of the Pindola was exposed, made shiny and grubby with finger marks, as he glared with large eyes, sitting cross-legged on the dais. In that temple, as in any other temple enshrining the Dainichi, there was a well over which hung offertory towels in persimmon and flower colors. It also had a dipper made by warping a piece of wood floating in its basin, the same kind that was held by O-Tsuru of
Awa no Naruto
³²
in my picture book. My aunt would gratefully draw water from the well, cool her small eyes with it, and, as she opened them, say, “Gracious Dainichi, I think my eyes can see a bit better.”

It was believed that this particular Dainichi's oracles were very accurate, and there were people who came great distances to draw one. One day my aunt decided to find out what the Dainichi had to say about my illness. She went into the wing of the hall where a paper screen was erected.

“Excuse me, sir.” When she said this, from inside there was, a “Yes, ma'am,” and a young monk whose head was freshly tonsured popped out his face. My aunt told him the whole story in great detail and asked for an oracle. The monk went to the front of the principal image, offered prayers for a while, and shook the box many times with a big, rhythmical rattle. Then he drew out an oracle, came over to us, and carefully copied what it said on another sheet of paper for us. Since my aunt could not read “square characters,”
³³
he explicated each one for her. In effect, the oracle said this child would become healthy in the future and lead a happy life. On our way home my aunt was all happiness.

13

About a hundred yards away toward a more deserted area, there lived an old man and woman who raised several chickens in a vacant lot encircled by an althea hedge. They sold cheap candies. I became terribly fond of the straw-thatched roof, the first I'd ever seen, the torn mud walls, and the well-sweep that made a grinding noise. Going there with my aunt to buy candies was one of the things I really looked forward to. The old man and woman were both hard of hearing and were slow to come out. If you called out to them a number of times, one of them would trudge out and open the lids of candy boxes here and there.
Kinkatō, kingyokutō, tenmontō, mijinbō.
³⁴
If you hold in your mouth the bamboo tube filled with bean jelly, you smell the fresh bamboo before the jelly slips out onto your tongue. The Ota-san
³⁵
in a candy laughs and cries, turning her face this way and that. If you bite apart the one with blue and red stripes and suck, a sweet wind comes out of its spaces.

The one I liked best was called the cinnamon stick. It was an
aruhei
³⁶
stick coated with powdered cinnamon and had, within its rich sweetness, a provocative smell of cinnamon. One terribly rainy day, for some reason I felt a sudden pity for the old man and woman and at the same time wanted a cinnamon stick. I was so insistent that my aunt took me out, carrying me on her back covered by a half-coat. Unfortunately, they had no cinnamon sticks that day and I was so disappointed that I wept all the way home. If I drank “cow's milk”
³⁷
without protest or when I spent the whole day playing without whimpering, she would buy me a rattler
³⁸
as a reward. It was shaped like a peach or a clam and dyed in red and white stripes. I would come home on my aunt's back, shaking it, enjoying it, and crack it open when we reached the house. A little drum made of paper or a flute made of tin would come out. I would treasure them as if they were the most valuable things in the world. Some of them came in triangular wrappings of mud-colored leather, their joins sealed with a portrait of an actor.

14

Born feeble and lacking exercise, I was dyspeptic and prone to forget about eating until, as if I were a queen bee, food was brought to my mouth, giving a great deal of trouble to my aunt. Sometimes she put rice balls in a box that had once contained bean paste and, pretending we were on a pilgrimage to the Ise Shrine,
³⁹
she would lead me round and round the mountain-shaped mound in the garden, finally clapping her hands and offering prayers in front of the stone lantern, then sitting me down on a stone under a pine tree to eat from the lunch box. Once she took me, along with my younger sister and her wet nurse, to a field where evening primroses were in bloom, and we ate the rice rolls wrapped in seaweed that we'd brought along. From the cliff where stands of large cedars, Chinese hackberries, and zelkovas rose up, we had a sweeping view of glowing Fuji, Hakone, Ashigara, and other mountains. Unusually happy, I was eating my lunch when, with unfortunate timing, someone came walking toward us. I immediately threw out my chopsticks and said I'm going home. Of all living creatures, human beings were the ones I disliked the most.

TAKENOKO:
BAMBOO SHOOTS

So I did not find any food tasty, but my aunt, with her unique powers of persuasion, could impart a fine taste to anything. I liked clam preserves because those lovely clams were supposed to crawl, with their tongues out, before Princess Oto in the Dragon Palace.
⁴⁰
And I liked bamboo shoots because the story of Mōsō's filial piety
⁴¹
was interesting. If you wash off a chubby bamboo shoot, around the culm toward its base there are rows of short roots and purple warts. If you hold its skin up to the sun, you can see golden down, and white stripes like ivory on the other side. If the skin was large, I put it on my head as a cap; if small, the bristles were removed to wrap pickled plums. If I sucked on the latter for a while, the skin turned red as if dyed and the sour juice seeped out. I also liked black bamboo. Watching these shoots boiling in an earthen pot, turning round and round, looking truly delicious, and seeing my aunt tasting them, even my queen bee self would feel saliva flowing near my back teeth. If I sometimes acted spoiled, refusing to take up my chopsticks, she would put a tiny painted bowl to my mouth to feed me, saying, “You are a baby sparrow, a baby sparrow.”