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 bathing dress up around her shoulders and the Sugi boy was playing around with her “Mount Fujis,” as the boys 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’re 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.”
From that very moment on, I began to have fantasies that Mr. Tanaka would adopt me. Sometimes I forget how tormented I felt during this period. I suppose I would have grasped at anything that offered me comfort. Often when I felt troubled, I found my mind returning to the same image of my mother, long before she ever began groaning in the mornings from the pains inside her. I was four years old, at the obon festival in our village, the time of year when we welcomed back the spirits of the dead. After a few evenings of ceremonies in the graveyard, and fires outside the entrances of the houses to guide the spirits home, we gathered on the festival’s final night at our Shinto shrine, which stood on rocks overlooking the inlet. Just inside the gate of the shrine was a clearing, decorated that evening with colored paper lanterns strung on ropes between the trees. My mother and I danced together for a while with the rest of the villagers, to the music of drums and a flute; but at last I began to feel tired and she cradled me in her lap at the edge of the clearing. Suddenly the wind came up off the cliffs and one of the lanterns caught fire. We watched the flame burn through the cord, and the lantern came floating down, until the wind caught it again and rolled it through the air right toward us with a trail of gold dust streaking into the sky. The ball of fire seemed to settle on the ground, but then my mother and I watched as it rose up on the current of the wind, floating straight for us. I felt my mother release me, and then all at once she threw her arms into the fire to scatter it. For a moment we were both awash in sparks and flames; but then the shreds of fire drifted into the trees and burned out, and no one-not even my mother-was hurt.
A week or so later, when my fantasies of adoption had had plenty of time to ripen, I came home one afternoon to find Mr. Tanaka sitting across from my father at the little table in our house. I knew they were talking about something serious, because they didn’t even notice me when I stepped into our entryway. I froze there to listen to them.
“So, Sakamoto, what do you think of my proposal?”
“I don’t know, sir,” said my father. “I can’t picture the girls living anywhere else.”
“I understand, but they’d be much better off, and so would you. Just see to it they come down to the village tomorrow afternoon.”
At this, Mr. Tanaka stood to leave. I pretended I was just arriving so we would meet at the door.
“I was talking with your father about you, Chiyo-chan,” he said to me. “I live across the ridge in the town of Senzuru. It’s bigger than Yoroido. I think you’d like it. Why don’t you and Satsu-san come there tomorrow? You’ll see my house and meet my little daughter. Perhaps you’ll stay the night? Just one night, you understand; and then I’ll bring you back to your home again. How would that be?”
I said it would be very nice. And I did my best to pretend no one had suggested anything out of the ordinary to me. But in my head it was as though an explosion had occurred. My thoughts were in fragments I could hardly piece together. Certainly it was true that a part of me hoped desperately to be adopted by Mr. Tanaka after my mother died; but another part of me was very much afraid. I felt horribly ashamed for even imagining I might live somewhere besides my tipsy house. After Mr. Tanaka had left, I tried to busy myself in the kitchen, but I felt a bit like Satsu, for I could hardly see the things before me. I don’t know how much time passed. At length I heard my father making a sniffling noise, which I took to be crying and which made my face burn with shame. When I finally forced myself to glance his way, I saw him with his hands already tangled up in one of his fishing nets, but standing at the doorway leading into the back room, where my mother lay in the full sun with the sheet stuck to her like skin.