The Silver Spoon (19 page)

PART TWO

1

Our teacher Mr. Nakazawa was a gentle soul but had a very bad temper; when enraged for some reason, he could lash you on the head with his whip until the ground beneath you started to quake. Despite this I was very fond of him and sometimes took the trouble of taking a stem from the Chusan palm in our garden to provide him with a new whip to experience more pain. Each time I did this, he would give an ironic smirk.

“Thank you very much. This is the best thing to hit a head with,” he would say and pretend to hit me with it.

I never followed his instructions, doing what I wanted, so he seemed not to know what to do with me. But I had convinced myself that he had a soft spot for me. When his pupils' bad conduct made his temper flare and his face turned into a ball of fire, they would all cringe and fall silent. Even at such times, I was completely unperturbed, surveying the scene with a smile. So one day when the principal came by on his round of inspection, Mr. Nakazawa complained to him about me, saying that I was utterly unfeeling. I was standing by them, looking amused to hear them talk about me.

“Aren't you afraid of your teacher?” the principal asked.

“No, not at all,” I replied.

“Why aren't you afraid?”

“Because I think my teacher is also a human being after all.”

The principal and Mr. Nakazawa looked at each other with sour smiles but didn't say anything. From around that time I had begun to see a comic child inside a grownup's stern exterior, and I was unable to have the kind of special respect for adults that ordinary children have.

At about this time, the Sino-Japanese War
¹
began. I came down with a bad case of measles and had to take days off from school. When I finally made it back our class teacher had unexpectedly changed. I was told that Mr. Nakazawa had been drafted. They said he was a former naval officer but had been put on the reserve list because of illness. No wonder he had often talked about warships. Sadness filled my heart when I thought of how he had told us those mysterious stories from the
Saiyūki
,
²
how he used to lick his paintbrush and paint neat pictures, how I had liked everything about him except his hitting a head with a Chusan palm whip, and how I could no longer see him. So, after school, I gathered together my friends and tried to learn in detail at least how he had looked when he came to say farewell. But, distracted as they were by their daily games, they just sat there as if they'd completely forgotten all about it even though barely half a month had passed since they parted with him. And they fidgeted, pouting, apparently dissatisfied that they'd been prevented from their games. Finally, though, after struggling to remember something, one of them blurted out: “He was wearing an overcoat with lion hair.”

“Lion hair! Lion hair!” several others echoed him.

These fools had been so entranced by the lion hair they saw for the first time—though that, too, was probably a mistake—they didn't remember anything else. Even so I tried to find out everything I could. After exasperating me no end, one of them spoke up.

“I am going to war now and may not be able to see you again,” the teacher had said. “You must listen carefully to the new teacher, study hard, and grow up to be great men.”

At these words tears suddenly welled up and rolled down my cheeks. Taken aback, my friends stared at me, some even sneering contemptuously, eyeing each other, tugging at each other's sleeves. They still didn't know one could cry like that, as they simply believed that the code our teacher taught us, that a man is allowed to cry only once every three years,
³
could not be violated.

2

An even more unhappy thing was that I did not at all get along with the new teacher, Mr. Ushida. He was known to be good at jūjutsu, so the pupils were afraid of him, and he was evidently proud of it himself, at times flipping backward all by himself to impress us. Indeed, there was nothing admirable about him, except that once, during a drawing class, he praised the gourd I'd painted, saying, You are better than me, and gave it three circles. Just as I disliked him, he must have disliked me. I couldn't tell from when, but in time we became enemies, more or less.

Aside from that, after the war started my friends' talk, from morning to evening, was all filled with the Yamato Spirit
⁴
and chinks.
⁵
Worse, our teacher joined in, repeating the Yamato Spirit and chinks at every turn as if he were inciting dogs to fight. I found it all so distasteful and unpleasant. He wouldn't make any reference whatsoever to the stories of Yojō and Hikan.
⁶
Instead, he only talked interminably about the Mongolian invasions
⁷
and the Korean conquests.
⁸
And when it came to songs, he had us sing bleak war-related things while making us dance utterly uninteresting calisthenic-like dances. Even worse, as though those chinks with whom we “couldn't live under Heaven”
⁹
had actually swarmed toward them, everyone, shoulders raised and elbows spread out, stomped their snow-slippers
¹⁰
with such abandon as to almost tear apart the leather pieces as they bellowed songs out of tune, out of rhythm, in the suffocating dust that swirled up. Almost ashamed to stand in line with these wretches, I deliberately sang even more out of tune. Also, now in the school yard, which was small in the first place, only Katō Kiyomasas and Hōjō Tokimunes
¹¹
snottily went about, all the wimps having turned into chinks to be beheaded.

If you walked in the town, you saw in every store for picture-books and children's books that all the origami paper and “older-sister dolls”
¹²
had been hidden away, replaced by dirty-looking pictures of bullets exploding now displayed everywhere. Whatever I heard or saw annoyed me. Once, when a number of boys gathered together somewhere were yet again cooking up outrageous war stories out of the rumors they'd heard here and there, I ventured an opinion opposite to theirs and said Japan would be defeated by China in the end. This unexpected, bold prediction left them eyeing each other for a while, but their laughable but admirable antagonism had heightened to such a point as to ignore the class-leader's authority.

“Wow, that's bad, that's bad!” one of them blurted out exaggeratedly.

Another lightly brushed the tip of his nose with his fist. Yet another mimicked our teacher.

“Sorry about that, sir, but the Japanese have the Yamato Spirit.”

With much greater antipathy and confidence than I'd ever had before, I took on their attacks all by myself.

“We are sure to lose, sure to lose!” I insisted.

And sitting in the midst of these clamorous boys I wracked my brains and defeated their groundless arguments. Many of them hadn't even perused the newspapers or looked at a map of the world. They hadn't heard the stories from
Shiki
and
JÅ«hachishiryaku
.
¹³
As a result, they were all argued down by me alone and with visible reluctance fell silent. But that didn't mean their indignation was quelled, for the first thing they did in the next hour was to tell the teacher.

“Sir, Naka-san says Japan will lose.”

Mr. Ushida, with his usual knowing face, declared, “The Japanese have the Yamato Spirit,” and then, as always, heaped various dirty curses upon the Chinese. I was incensed as if those words were personally directed against myself.

“Sir, if you say the Japanese have the Yamato Spirit, the Chinese must also have the Chinese Spirit,” I said. “If we have Katō Kiyomasa and Hōjō Tokimune in Japan, they have Kan'u and Chōhi
¹⁴
in China, don't they? Besides, sir, you once told us the story of Kenshin sending salt to Shingen
¹⁵
to teach us that being compassionate to the enemy is the Way of the Warrior. If that is the case, you can't badmouth the Chinese like that, can you, sir?”

With that said, I had poured out all my accumulated frustrations. Mr. Ushida made a grimace.

“Naka-san has no Yamato Spirit,” he said after a brief while.

I felt my temper quickly swell the veins of my temples but, unable to take out the Yamato Spirit and show it to them, I could only redden and keep quiet.

The Japanese soldiers, being “incomparable in loyalty and bravery,” smashed my clever prediction to bits. That, however, hardly changed my distrust of our teacher and my contempt for my peers.

All this made me feel that it was silly to spend time with the other kids, and I gradually began to distance myself from them and just stand by and watch their absurd carryings-on derisively. One day, standing alone in the corridor, my elbows on the railing rubbed shiny by the hands of brats over the years, I was laughing as I watched them romping about under the wisteria trellis, when a teacher happened to pass behind me.

“What are you laughing about?” he suddenly said to me.

“The way those children play is funny,” I replied.

The teacher burst out laughing. “Naka-san, you are a child, too, aren't you?”

“I may be a child, but I am not as silly as they,” I said seriously.

“That's troublesome,” he said. Then he went into the teachers' room where I saw him talking to other people. I guessed I was troublesome to the teachers.

3

Even though I regarded every one of the pupils of my class as a hopeless Santarō,
¹⁶
holding them in utter contempt, I nonetheless had a heartfelt, precocious sympathy for Kanimoto-san, who could be described as captain of all such Santarōs. He was almost an idiot, though judging from his height he was probably sixteen or seventeen already. What I had heard was that he had remained in each grade for two or three years and, as he was gradually pushed upward he had ended up with us latecomers. Naturally he didn't know his own age and because he had an infantile face common among morons, no one knew how old he was. His happily fat round face had a mole as big as a horse bean on one cheek, a kind of billboard for him that endeared him throughout the school.

If someone half-jokingly said, “Kanimoto-san, you have ink on your cheek,” he would respond with a slow giggle, saying indulgently, “It—is—no—i—nk. It—is—a—m—o—le.”

Carrying across his back an abacus that had not a single bead left on it and was disproportionately small for his body, he would saunter in whenever he liked and when bored would go home abruptly even if it was during a lesson. Human beings in general pity and love only those who are far inferior to themselves, and the sympathy so felt is despicably selfish. Attracting such sympathy, though, there was no one under heaven who enjoyed a world as free as Kanimoto-san's. Still, because he was alive, there were days he felt good and days he felt bad. When he felt bad, he seldom showed up, but when he did show up, as he occasionally did, he wouldn't even crack a smile, sitting at his desk, head bowed. Then, no one knows what thoughts prompted him, he would suddenly begin to weep loudly and wouldn't stop until he had wept his heart out. And when he had exhausted in loud unrestrained weeping the sorrows that had welled up unknown to anyone and accumulated in his dark unhappy heart, he would put his abacus on his shoulder and go home as though nothing had happened. On such days, even if someone happened to speak to him, he wouldn't even show his good-natured smile—one virtue in such a misfortune—but would invariably utter a guttural scream like a parrot and drive the person away.

If for some reason he was in an elegant frame of mind, though, he would offer, unasked, “I'll be your horse.” He was tall, strong, and corpulent, so made a fine horse to ride. But he was also an untamable wild horse, because the moment he lost interest he would stand up straight even in the midst of a grappling combat between two commanders.
¹⁷

I decided to grasp, in whatever way I could, the true nature of his unfathomable silence, the tears that overflowed from the bottom of that silence, and, ignoring everyone's sneers, I tried hard to befriend him. Every time I saw him in a good mood, I said brief words of greeting such as “Good morning” and “Good-bye.” But he was to me what an emperor would be to his subject, and wouldn't even respond with a smile. I did not mind this and persevered tirelessly, diligently, until one day he left the desk to which he had clung like a louse and shuffled over to me.

“Na—ka—sa—n—is—a—g—o—o—d—per—son,” he said, with his usual lisp. He then went away with a low, happy laugh.

I almost jumped for joy at that one remark. Whatever he said didn't have an iota of falsity. By then I knew more than I wanted that people's words contained lies, so I was deeply touched by that casual, arbitrary remark and was overjoyed as though I had finally gotten hold of the key to the door to that darkness, thinking I was sure to make friends with him and would be able to console this unfortunate person. So, deciding that I'll finally make it today, I went to a desk next to his and spoke to him in various ways; but he merely smiled his pointless smile, leaving me frustrated. In a while he even stopped doing that, and bent his head low over his desk. Soon he dealt me his decisive card, assaulting me with his guttural scream. At that one parrot call, all the trouble I'd taken came to nothing. It was not that Kanimoto-san was forced to be alone because he, like me, didn't have any desirable companions; it was that he simply, truly, did not need any.

4

My older brother—out of a curiosity and kindness heavily laden with the odor of self-aggrandizement that everyone at his age is bound to have at least once—took pains to twist me, a human being born to be shaped differently from him and destined to go in opposite ways as to the east and to the west, into his direction, against my will, through the power of a truly thoroughgoing, harsh education. And, because he liked fishing to the point, people said, of madness, it must have occurred to him that in order to save me, his poor younger brother, from falling further into evil ways every day, every month—to make me like him—he had, above all, to teach me fishing.