The following morning, to take my mind off my troubles

The following morning, to take my mind off my troubles, I went swimming in the pond just inland from our house amid a grove of pine trees. The children from the village went there most mornings when the weather was right. Satsu came too sometimes, wearing a scratchy bathing dress she’d made from our father’s old fishing clothes. It wasn’t a very good bathing dress, because it sagged at her chest whenever she bent over, and one of the boys would scream, “Look! You can see Mount Fuji!” But she wore it just the same.

Around noontime, I decided to return home for something to eat. Satsu had left much earlier with the Sugi boy, who was the son of Mr. Tanaka’s assistant. She acted like a dog around him. When he went somewhere, he looked back over his shoulder to signal that she should follow, and she always did. I didn’t expect to see her again until dinnertime, but as I neared the house I caught sight of her on the path ahead of me, leaning against a tree. If you’d seen what was happening, you might have understood it right away; but I was only a little girl. Satsu had her scratchy bating dress up around her shoulders and the Sugi boy was playing around with her “Mount Fuji!” as the boy called them.

Ever since our mother first became ill, my sister had grown a bit pudgy. Her breasts were every bit as unruly as her hair. What amazed me most was that their unruliness appeared to be the very thing the Sugi boy found fascinating about them. He jiggled them with his hand, and pushed them to one side to watch them swing back and settle against her chest. I knew I shouldn’t be spying, but I couldn’t think what else to do with myself while the path ahead of me was blocked. And then suddenly I heard a man’s voice behind me say:

“Chiyo-chan, why are you squatting there behind that tree?”

Considering that I was a little girl of nine, coming from a pond where I’d been swimming; and considering that as yet I had no shapes or textures on my body to conceal from anyone…well, it’s easy to guess what I was wearing.

When I turned—still squatting on the path, and covering my nakedness with my arms as best I could—there stood Mr. Tanaka. I could hardly have been more embarrassed.

“That must be your tipsy house over there,” he said. “And over there, that looks like the Sugi boy. He certainly looks busy! Who’s that girl with him?”

“Well, it might be my sister, Mr. Tanaka. I’m waiting for them to leave.”

Mr. Tanaka cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, and then I heard the sound of the Sugi boy running away down the path. My sister must have run away too, for Mr. Tanaka told me I could go home and get some clothes now. “When you see that sister of yours,” he said to me, “I want you to give her this.”

He handed me a packet wrapped in rice paper, about the size of a fish head. It’s some Chinese herbs,” he told me. “Don’t listen to Dr. Miura if he tells you they’re worthless. Have your sister make tea with them and give the tea to your mother, to ease the pain. They are very precious herbs. Make sure not to waste them.”

“I’d better do it myself in that case, sir. My sister isn’t very good at making tea.”

“Dr. Miura told me your mother is sick,” he said. “Now you tell me your sister can’t even be trusted to make tea! With your father so old, what will become of you, Chiyo-chan? Who takes care of you even now?”

“I suppose I take care of myself these days.”

“I know a certain man. He’s older now, but when he was a boy about your age, his father died. The very next year his mother died, and then his older brother ran away to Osaka and left him alone. Sounds a bit like you, don’t you think?”

Mr. Tanaka gave me a look as if to say that I shouldn’t dare to disagree.

“Well, that man’s name is Tanaka Ichiro,” he went on. “Yes, me…although back then my name was Morihashi Ichiro. I was taken in by the Tanaka family at the age of twelve. After I got a bit older, I was married to the daughter and adopted. Now I help run the family’s seafood company. So things turned out all right for me in the end, you see. Perhaps something like that might happen to you too.”

I looked for a moment at Mr. Tanaka’s gray hair and at the creases in his brow like ruts in the bark of a tree. He seemed to me the wisest and most knowledgeable man on earth. I believed he knew things I would never know; and that he had an elegance I would never have; and that his blue kimono was finer than anything I would ever have occasion to wear. I sat before him naked, on my haunches in the dirt, with my hair tangled and my face dirty, with the smell of pond water on my skin.

“I don’t think anyone would ever want to adopt me,” I said.

“No? You’re a clever girl, aren’t you? Naming your house a ‘tipsy house.’ Saying your father’s head looks like an egg!”

“But it does look like an egg.”
“It wouldn’t have been a clever thing to say otherwise. Now run along, Chiyo-chan,” he said. “You want lunch, don’t you? Perhaps if your sister’s having soup, you can lie on the floor and drink what she spills.”