"Smartass little good-for-nothing!" He threw Hiyoshi into the storage shed and ordered Onaka not to give him any dinner. From then until it got dark, Hiyoshi's shrieking could be heard coming from the shed.
"Let me out! You fool! Stonehead! Is everybody deaf? If you don't let me out, I'll burn the place down!"
He went on crying, sounding like a howling dog, but around midnight he finally cried himself to sleep. Then he heard a voice calling his name from somewhere near his head. "Hiyoshi, Hiyoshi."
He was dreaming of his dead father. Half-awake, he called out, "Father!" Then he realized that the form standing in front of him was that of his mother. She had slipped out of the house and brought him some food.
"Eat this and calm down. Come morning, I'll apologize to your father for you."
He shook his head and clung to his mother's clothes. "It's a lie. He's not my father. Didn't my father die?"
"Now, now, why do you say such things? Why be unreasonable? I'm always telling you to be a good son to your father."
To his mother, it was like being cut by a knife. But Hiyoshi could not understand why she cried until her body shook.
The next day, Chikuami started yelling at Onaka from the time the sun came up. “You went behind my back and gave him food in the middle of the night, didn't you? Because you're so soft, his character will never improve. Otsumi is not to go anywhere the storage shed today either."
The trouble between husband and wife lasted almost half a day, until finally Hiyoshi's mother went off alone, crying again. When the sun was about to set, she returned, accompanied by a priest from the Komyoji Temple. Chikuami did not ask his wife where she’d been. Sitting outside with Otsumi and working on a straw mat, he frowned. "Chikuami," the priest said, "your wife came to the temple to ask us if we'd take your in as an acolyte. Do I have your consent?"
Chikuami looked silently at Onaka, who stood outside the back gate, sobbing.
"Hm, I suppose it might be all right. But doesn't he need a sponsor?"
"Happily, the wife of Kato Danjo, who lives at the foot of Yabuyama Hill, has agreed, and your wife are sisters, I believe."
"Ah, so she went to Kato's?" Chikuami's expression was bitter, although he did not object to Hiyoshi entering the temple. He tacitly agreed to the proposal, answering questions in monosyllables.
Giving an order to Otsumi, Chikuami went to put away his farm equipment, and worked for the rest of the day with a preoccupied air.
After he was let out of the storage shed, Hiyoshi received repeated warnings from his mother. All night long he'd been eaten up by mosquitoes, and his face was swollen. When he was going to serve at a temple, he burst into tears. But he quickly recovered.
"The temple'll be better," he declared.
While it was still light, the priest made the necessary preparations for Hiyoshi, and as the time for departure drew near, even Chikuami seemed a little sad. "Monkey, when you enter the temple, you must have a change of heart and discipline yourself," he told the boy. "Learn to read and write a bit, and let us see you become a full-fledged priest soon."
Hiyoshi mumbled a short word of assent and bowed. Once on the other side of the fence, he looked back time after time at the figure of his mother, who watched him disappear into the distance.
The small temple was on the top of a rise called Yabuyama, a bit removed from the village. A Buddhist temple of the Nichiren sect, its head priest was of advanced years and bedridden. Two young priests maintained the buildings and grounds. Because of the many years of civil war, the village was impoverished, and the temple had few parishes. Hiyoshi, responding quickly to his new surroundings, worked hard, as if he were a different person. He was quick-witted and energetic, and the priests treated him with affection, avowing that they would train him well. Every night they made him practice calligraphy and gave him elementary schooling, during which he displayed an unusual talent memorization.
One day a priest told him, "I met your mother on the road yesterday. I told her you're doing fine."
Hiyoshi did not understand his mother's sorrow very well, but whatever made her happy made him happy.
But when the autumn of his tenth year came around, he began to find the temple too confining. The two younger priests had gone to neighboring villages to beg for alms. In their absence, Hiyoshi got out a wooden sword he had hidden away, and a handmade staff. Then he stood at the top of the hill, yelling down to his friends, who were getting ready to play war games.
"You enemy troops, you're stupid. Come on, attack me from any direction you like!"
Although it was not at all the usual time, the huge bell suddenly rang out from the bell tower. People at the foot of the hill were taken by surprise and wondered what was going on. A stone went flying down the hill, then a tile, which hit and injured a girl working in a vegetable patch.
"It's that kid up at the temple. He's rounded up the village boys and they're playing al war again."
Three or four people climbed the hill and stood before the main hall of the temple The doors were wide open and the interior was covered with ashes. Both the transept and the sanctum were in a shambles. The incense burner had been broken. It looked as though the banners had been put to some questionable use, the gold brocade curtain had been ripped and tossed aside, and the drumhead was ripped.
"Shobo!" "Yosaku!" called parents looking for the children. Hiyoshi was nowhere to be seen; the other youngsters, too, had suddenly disappeared.
By the time the parents got back to the foot of the hill, there was some sort of tremor in the temple. The thickets rustled, stones flew, and the bell rang again. The sun went down, and the children, bruised and bloodied, limped down the hill.
Every night when the priests came back from begging for alms, the villagers would go to the temple and complain. But when the priests returned that evening, they could only stare at each other in shock. The incense burner in front of the altar had been split per fectly in two. The donor of this precious vessel was a man by the name of Sutejiro, who was a pottery merchant from the village of Shinkawa and one of the temple's few remaining parishioners. At the time he had made the gift to the temple, three or four year; earlier, he had said, "This incense burner was fired by my master, the late Gorodayu. I have cherished it as a keepsake. He decorated it from memory, and he took particular care in applying the blue pigment. In offering it to this temple, I assume it will be treatec as a treasured article until the end of time."
Ordinarily it was kept in a box, but just a week earlier Sutejiro's wife had visited the temple. The incense burner had been taken out and used, but had not been put away again.
The color drained from the priests' faces. Added to their worries was the possibility that if they reported this to the old head priest, his illness would worsen.
"It was probably Monkey," said one.
"Right," another agreed. "None of those other little devils could do this kind of evil.
"What can we do?"
They dragged Hiyoshi in and thrust the pieces of the broken vessel in his face. Hiyoshi could not remember breaking the incense burner, but said, "I'm sorry."
The apology made the priests even angrier, because the boy spoke calmly and seemed to be without a trace of remorse. "Heathen!" they called him, and tied his hands behind his back and bound him to one of the large pillars of the temple.
"We're going to leave you here for a few days. Maybe you'll get eaten by rats," the priests said.
This sort of thing happened to Hiyoshi all the time. When his friends came the next day, he thought bitterly, he would not be able to play with them. And when they did come, they saw he was being punished and ran off.