Pathway to Japanese Literature

Body

Author: Yokomitsu Riichi

I

As Suetsuo was reading a book, his mother came upstairs holding a measuring tape.
“Are you still going to wear that kimono?”

“It can still be worn, I suppose.”

He looked at his chest area.

“Why?” he asked back. His mother continued gazing at his kimono,

“I was thinking of making it into a swaddling cloth for the baby,” she answered.

“Whose baby is it?”

“Your sister is going to have a baby.”
His mother said this with a perfectly ordinary expression for some reason.

When he thought of his sister being in such a state, his face turned red.
Yet he felt truly happy.

“Really?”

“You don’t need that kimono anymore, do you?”
“I’ll make you a replacement instead, so you needn’t fret.”

“Can she really have a baby?”

Mother didn’t answer and simply went downstairs.
He felt slightly irritated.
But from that irritation, a smile began to surface as if spilling out.
No matter how much he tried to keep his face composed, it was no use.

He and his sister were the only two siblings, and she had become a married woman six years earlier.
Moreover, she still didn’t have any children.

II

On a clear day, he crossed over the mountain to his sister Orika’s house.
Because he felt too shy to ask about the baby, he remained silent and occasionally stole glances beneath his sister’s obi without being noticed.
However, his eyes could not discern anything.
Just somehow, his sister seemed full of life.
Before long, his sister suggested going to the mountain behind the house.
When the two of them came to the mountain, they sat down sprawling their legs on the moss.
Directly below, a lake was visible.
A rust-colored sail remained motionless as a single point on the horizon.
From the deep valley below came the sound of wood being sawn.

“Let’s uproot one quince and head back.”
“It’ll bloom soon.”

Saying this, Sister stood up and climbed toward the female pine grove.
He lay on his back alone for a long time, gazing at the sky.
It had been a long time since he and his sister had come to such places and spent time together like this.
He was very fond of his sister.

“This thing’s tough,” came Sister’s voice from above.

When he turned around to look at Sister, she was pressing both elbows against her lower abdomen as she tried to uproot an azalea, leaning backward in the attempt.
He noticed Sister’s precious unborn child and sprang to his feet.

“Stop it.”

He ran up, pushed Sister aside, and tried to pull up the azalea himself.
The roots were quite tough.

“It’s tough, right? If two people tackle it together, that’d work better.”

Having said that, Sister tried to take hold of the azalea again.

“Let’s go, let’s go.”

As he took his sister’s hand to lead her back to where they had been, Sister looked back over her shoulder with evident reluctance,

“They’ll bloom with beautiful flowers soon.”
“That’s a mochi azalea.”
“The leaves are sticky.”
“Ah, this is exhausting,” she said.

He peered at his sister’s lower abdomen.
When he pictured how Sister had looked while uprooting the azalea, he couldn’t shake the image of her elbow crushing the child inside her.
However, he didn’t know how to properly examine it.
He found himself too embarrassed to even try asking Sister about it, and thought this was a real problem.

Sister found another small azalea at her feet and,

“Suet-chan, this one should come out,” she said and leaned toward it.

“Quiet!” he snapped.

“It’s a waste to come all this way and not take home even one.”

“We’re going back now.”

“Leaving already?”
When Sister saw his face,

“What’s with you?” she said and burst out laughing.

He silently took the lead and walked.
In reality, he started to worry terribly about his sister’s abdomen.
He no longer felt like playing around anymore.

“Isn’t your stomach empty?”

And he suddenly asked his sister.
He had posed the question from such an absurd notion—that if she answered her stomach was empty, it would mean her elbow had crushed the child in her womb enough to create that emptiness—but Sister replied it wasn't empty.
Yet naturally, he couldn't accept this answer alone.

“I’ve got a bit of a stomachache.”
“Maybe something was off with the lunch at your place.”
“What about you, Sister?”

he asked.

Sister looked at him with a pinched expression,

“I’m perfectly fine—does yours hurt?” she asked back.

From the thought that if Sister were to say she felt pain too, it would surely mean her abdominal child had been affected, he posed such a probing question.
However, Sister’s abdomen was not in pain.
Just as he began to feel somewhat relieved, he realized once more that the sensations of the parent’s abdomen and those of the child were entirely separate.
Even if the parent’s abdomen wasn’t in pain, it was unclear whether the child’s body might be suffering.
He thought there was no other way but to have a doctor examine his sister’s abdomen.
However, if he were to have it examined, he would absolutely have to tell Sister about his manner of worrying at least once.
This was embarrassing and troublesome for him.
Even though Sister had become a married woman through formal matrimony, given that the child must have inevitably resulted from indiscreet circumstances, he found it unpleasant to mutually acknowledge this reality with her.
Because he remained silent, Sister too stayed quiet.

“Still hurt?” Sister asked after a while.

“I’m fine now.”

“Once you go down, there’s a pharmacy.”
“And Dr.Kodera’s place is nearby.”
“Does it hurt?”

Dr. Kodera was the name of a nearby doctor.

“It’s already healed,” he said,

“Even so, wouldn’t it be better to have a doctor check you?” This time, Sister began urging him to see a physician.

He pretended not to hear and hurried down the mountain.

III

In April, he was in Tokyo.
It was in May that he received the announcement from his sister’s husband that a girl had been born.

“Yes!” he thought.
And now, thinking how utterly foolish his long-concealed anxieties had been, he found it comical.

“I’ve finally become an uncle.”

When he thought that, he felt as though he had unquestionably grown a notch more substantial as a human being.

IV

In June, Suetsuo returned home.
When he arrived at his sister’s house, he immediately tried to go upstairs in silence.
But because his feet were terribly dirty, he crawled on his knees toward the back room where his niece seemed to be sleeping.
He saw something like a rolled-up yellow cushion.

(There she is.
What a tiny little thing.)

He grinned slyly while draping himself over his niece like a mosquito net.

(Wait—this one looks like me!)

He kissed his niece on the lips.
They were smooth, slippery lips that still carried a milky scent.
The niece tried to put her snail-like fist into her mouth while looking at her uncle but clumsily rubbed it against the side of her nose instead.

(This one looks just like me.)

He felt a strange sensation and, while laughing, thought, "She’s not my child."

(Alright. One more person!)

He wanted to praise something.
This one's truly my ally—no lie about that, he thought.

Orika came up from the veranda with a radiant face, laughing.

“What time’s the train—two o’clock?”

“This one takes after me.”
“Don’t you think she does?”

Orika looked down at her daughter, then silently blushed a little and removed the tasuki sash from her shoulder.

“Hey, she does look like me! What’s her name?”

“It’s Yuki.”

“Yuki?”

“The ‘Yuki’ from Yukimura’s ‘Yuki’.”

“The ‘Saiwai’ character?”

“Yep, yep.”

“That’s the character? I’d actually thought of that one myself, but…”
“Did he just drag it out of a dictionary?”

“He looked it up in that Kan-Wa dictionary or something.”
“I told him to let you come up with a name, but Brother-in-law just wouldn’t listen.”
“Ugh, such a name?”

“This one’s a cutie. If she takes after me, she’s a real beauty after all.”

“Hmm, at the bathhouse, the geisha ladies are all arguing over how such a cute child could even exist.”

“She’s a good kid. You're in for it, Sis.”

Suetsuo laughed as he looked at his sister, then suddenly found his own affected attitude unpleasant. He stood up and went to wash his feet by the well. Then, because he was tired, he slept close to his niece, but since his sister wasn’t watching, he pulled her hand and pinched her nose and couldn’t fall asleep for quite some time.

V

He woke from a dream of a baby crying in the distance.
Then, beside him, his niece was crying while moving both hands as if trying to untangle a knotted thread.

“Wah, wah, wah, waaah.”

That was how she cried.
He recalled a realistic novel by a renowned author he had read before—one that described a baby making this same crying sound before dying.
He grew uneasy and called for his sister.
His sister wasn't there.
So he picked up his niece and gently rocked her from side to side, and she immediately stopped crying.

She wasn't going to die.

Thinking this, he laid her down gently, and she began crying again with those “Wah, wah” sounds. He picked her up again. Then, as expected, she stopped crying. After patiently repeating this same routine about four times, he began to find it tiresome and let out a big yawn while tensing his body. The niece cried, heaving her stomach area with “Wah, wah.”

He grew irritated.
But the niece kept crying incessantly.

“Cry all you want.”

He said this while staring fixedly at the niece with resentment.
But amidst that，he could no longer endure it.
He stealthily slipped his hand under the niece’s yellow pillow and lifted her head，whereupon she abruptly stopped crying.
He had no intention of picking up his charge.
Then，with a sly smile，he gently released her again，whereupon she began wailing even louder than before，putting all her strength into each “Wah! Wah! Wah!”

He thought he had learned a clever trick and tried to repeat it once more.
But suddenly，he thought that perhaps Sachiko had been tricked for the first time since her birth.
(The first trickster was this uncle.)
When he thought about it that way，he could no longer consider what he had done to be such a small thing.
He picked up the niece.
And，with a feeling of apology，he continued holding her until Sister returned and fed her milk.

VI

The next day, he returned home over the mountains.

“Well, I thought you’d be coming back yesterday.”
“I’d made sushi for you, but it’s gone bad now.”

Saying this, Mother fetched water in a washbasin.

“I arrived yesterday, but spent the whole day lying around with Sister’s little girl. That little girl has such a lovely face.”

“Even so, her navel’s still big, isn’t it? Because it’s so excessively large, I keep worrying that it might get chafed and start bleeding—hasn’t that happened at all?”

“Oh—it’s really that big?”

He was washing his feet when he recalled a scene from *Hozo no O*, a work by a certain female author, in which an infant’s navel bled and led to its death, and his anxiety surged anew.

“Do children really die from something like that?”

“Certainly there are.”

“She won’t die... will she?”

Mother remained silent.

“How can it heal? Do you know, Mother?”

“I told Orika to wrap a two-sen coin in cotton and place it on the navel, but she’s still doing that, right?”

“I haven’t seen it at all.”

“I see. When she strains hard, the navel gurgles like your stomach. How’s your stomach? Has it gotten any better?”

He had finished washing his feet yet remained seated on the entrance threshold, staring at the water in the washbasin. After some time,

“I wonder if she won’t die,” he said again.

“How should I know? If you’d just slick your hair back properly, you wouldn’t look so gaunt.”

Mother furrowed her brows slightly as she said this and went to the back to discard the washbasin water.

He was on the verge of sinking into gloom when,

“Damn it, die!” he spat, flipping backward once before springing up with forced vigor.

VII

Sachiko’s navel gradually hardened after that.
When he first saw it, it appeared as if the edge of skin barely covering her abdomen had been twisted into a large fold and carelessly bundled up.
And when she cried, the navel would suddenly protrude, making her entire belly take on a helmet-like shape with it as the crown while producing gurgling noises.
It was an alarmingly unstable navel—one that might expose internal organs at any moment.
Yet Orika remained comparatively unperturbed.
Once he noticed an area on his niece’s navel where the two-sen coin was missing.
He scared his sister by recounting—with artful lies mixed in—how doctors in books he’d read described such navels as lethal hazards.

“Is that so?”

After saying that, the sister gave a small laugh and,
“She’s not going to die—look at this!” she said, striking her daughter’s navel with a light tap.

“Idiot,” Suetsuo sneered with a laugh.

Then Orika struck it two or three more times in succession and said, “Try putting your finger in here.”

He suddenly felt the urge to toy with it and gently pressed his index finger against the tip of his niece’s navel.
The fingertip sank about an inch into the navel without meeting any resistance.
The thought that pressing further might make it sink endlessly somewhere sent a shudder through him,

“No,” he said, withdrawing his hand.

However, such anxiety was soon dispelled.
Then, one day, Orika happily told him that Sachiko had started laughing.

As he watched—indeed—Sachiko sometimes laughed.
It was a sudden smile whose cause eluded understanding—a smile that vanished as swiftly as a bubble rising to the water’s surface, leaving only calm in its wake.
Yet whoever was shown that smile could not help but feel it was a magnificent smile—the most precious adornment one might encounter in a lifetime.

VIII

As dusk fell, while searching for chickweed to feed the chickens by the deserted streetcar tracks, a boy came kicking stones toward him.
He recalled that the boy’s house had a black noren hanging and asked who had died.
The boy remained silent.

“Who died?”

When he asked once more,

“It was a baby,” the boy answered.

“Hmm, a baby... How did it die?”

Then the boy made an embarrassed face and tried to dash away.
He quickly grabbed the boy's wrist.

"Why? Huh? Tell me and I'll make it worth your while!"

But the boy still didn't answer, twisting his mouth as he tried to shake free from his grip.

He made a slightly frightening face and released the wrist.
The boy didn’t run away but slowly made his way to the streetcar tracks, then straddled the rail and sat down.

As he crouched in the grass, deliberately avoiding looking in that direction, the boy from across the tracks—

“Shall I tell you, then?” he said.

“Ah! Tell me—why did it die?”

The boy remained silent for a while, scraping rust off the rail with a shard of glass, and then—

“No.”
he repeated.

He stared silently at the boy.
Then,
"The mother smothered her child with her breast," the boy said.
"How? With her breast?"
"Well... died during a nap."

He didn’t understand at all what this meant, so he continued to stare at the child’s face.
The boy squinted for some reason and glanced up at him briefly, then suddenly dashed off in the opposite direction.

After some time, he learned from a neighbor that the boy’s mother had blocked the infant’s nostrils with her breast while co-sleeping with the baby. Such a method of killing was unheard of by him. But now he understood. Then suddenly he started worrying about his sister’s breasts.

The next day he went to his sister’s house and immediately brought up that matter.

“Of course that’d kill them.”
“It happens all the time,” his sister said.

“Did you know?”

“How could I not know something like that? You think I’m still a child or something?”
“We know all about that sort of thing, or something.”

Having said that, his sister laughed.
He felt somewhat relieved.
But right after that, Orika told him how the neighbor’s baby—born just three days apart from Sachiko—had died of pneumonia three days earlier, and how Hisayoshi’s friend’s baby had now come down with pneumonia too, with doctors having already given up on them.

"Good grief," he thought.
The idea that continuing to live and grow was such an exceedingly difficult thing filled him with an oppressive weight.

Two or three days later, he left for the capital.

When he stopped by his sister’s house on his way to the capital, he heard that Hisayoshi’s friend’s baby had finally died.
He felt lonely.
As he stood on the veranda, the sound of a memorial bell for a baby came from the neighboring house.
It was a cool early autumn night.
Then,

“Long ago in Tanba’s Ōeyama,” came a child’s singing voice, and suddenly the bell was struck rapidly in time with it.

“What a fool,” came a scolding voice that sounded like a mother’s.

When he began laughing here, Orika too started laughing somewhere in the dark.

Nine

When he arrived at his sister’s house during the next spring vacation, Sachiko was on his mother’s lap, in the midst of tearing a single newspaper three times with both hands.

“There!”

He placed the package of toys on top of the kotatsu and then put his feet into the futon like his mother and sister.
Mother unwrapped the package and took out a celluloid doll from inside.

“There you go, Yu-chan. Brother got this for you.”
“Brother did.”

“It’s not Brother—it’s Uncle,” his sister said to Sachiko.

“Oh right, right! Uncle went all the way to a faraway place and bought such a nice thing for you.”
“Ah, what a good girl! There we go!”

When his mother held out the doll, Sachiko alternated her gaze between her grandmother’s face and the doll for a while, then tentatively reached out toward the doll.

“That face,” Orika said with a laugh.
And then she took out another small toy—a rubber monkey’s head—and brought it up to Sachiko’s nose.

“There you go, Yu-chan. This time it’s the monkey.”

Then Orika pressed the monkey’s head, and from its mouth shot out a long, thin red tongue shaped like a bag.
Sachiko blinked rapidly and arched back, but when her head was stopped by her mother’s chest, she closed her eyes and turned away.
Everyone laughed.
But he was tired and alone made a scary face,

“She’s gotten so big,” he remarked briefly.

“Oh? She’s gotten so big? Mother, Yu-chan’s gotten so big.”

Orika said this to Mother, who was beside her.

“Of course she’s gotten so big.”

“Do you think so? She doesn’t seem to have grown one bit to me—but then again, I’m with her every day,” his sister said cheerfully.

Ten

Two or three days later, a message came from his father—who had gone to Hyūga earlier—telling Mother to come quickly.
Mother disliked leaving the grandchild’s side but finally decided to go.

At departure time before her—leaning out from the train window—stood Hisayoshi and Orika, Sachiko peering over Orika’s shoulder, and then him. Neither he nor the rest knew how many days might pass before they could meet again if they parted now.

The train began moving.

“Bye-bye Yu-chan, bye-bye! I’m off now.”
“Bye-bye!”

His mother kept looking only at her grandchild’s face. He waited anxiously to see whether she might turn toward him.

Orika tilted one shoulder to thrust Sachiko forward, but Sachiko gaped open-mouthed at the departing train.

“Bye-bye Yu-chan, Yu-chan, bye-bye! I’m off now, bye-bye.”

In the end, Mother never once looked his way.
When the train disappeared from view, he separated from his sister and her husband and hurried ahead out through the ticket gate.
It seemed grandchildren were more beloved than children—when he thought this, he remained gloomy all day.

Eleven

When his vacation ended, he returned to Tokyo.
The day before, a printed notice stating that the vaccination for the baby born last year would be administered soon had been delivered to his sister’s house too.
Hisayoshi and Orika had talked about having it done at their regular doctor’s office, but he didn’t even want to permit that if he could help it.
It was because he somehow felt his niece would become tainted.

About two weeks later, a letter arrived at Suetsuo’s place from his sister. It stated that five days had passed since Sachiko’s vaccination, but her fever still hadn’t broken and she was weakening.
He knew children typically ran fevers after vaccination, but would it last five days? Had she caught another illness? Such worries began rising in him.
The way his sister wrote her letter left his imagination unconstrained, leaving him troubled.
And so in the letter where he immediately asked for an update, he wrote that they must send a reply right away.
But even after four days passed, no reply came.
Every time he returned from outside, he asked the maid if any letter had arrived.
Even when out, the thought that a reply might have already arrived would make him abruptly turn back to his boarding house.
But even after a week passed, the reply still didn’t come.
He grew angry,

He tried hard to force himself to adopt a "to hell with it" mindset.
But with a constant sense of being threatened by something, he waited another week.
That night, a letter arrived from his sister.
It was written in crude characters smudged here and there,

"Sachiko developed erysipelas from the vaccination, but her life was finally saved at the cost of one arm."

And that was all it said.

When he pictured Sachiko—her one arm severed—rolling around on the tatami like a broken toy, an anger with no clear target welled up within him.
He took up his pen and turned to the postcard,

“Leaving Sachiko in the care of a careless person like Sister has created such a sin.”

he wrote.
As he wrote, tears welled up, and when he dipped the pen into the ink bottle, the tip wouldn’t catch properly.

He took the postcard and went outside.

“It’s finally come.”

He felt as if he had clearly seen the true form of what had been threatening him all along. If that form were to appear before him, he thought he would desperately grapple with it. A strange violence welled up within him, but there was nothing he could do about it. Amidst this, when he thought of the misfortune that would torment Sachiko’s heart for her entire life once she grew up, he came to a halt in a dark alley.

"I’ll make her my wife."

Suddenly, when he thought such things, he measured the age difference between himself and his niece.
Then he had others judge his own face and abilities.

"Nonsense! What do I lack? I'll make sure to bring her happiness!"
"I'll love her more than anyone else."
"Alright! Nonsense!"

He started walking again.
But when the figure of his niece, like a broken doll, flickered before him, tears welled up again.

“A sin! Truly making light of this—a sin!”

He stumbled on the protruding head of a stone and staggered.

“Shit!” he shouted.

The soba shop apprentice came toward him with a vessel balanced on his head.
He felt himself glaring and advancing toward the apprentice, intent on knocking down the vessel.
The apprentice, his eyes crusted with sleep, laughed as he...

“Hey there!” he said, lifting one leg toward him.

He walked right past him.
After walking about three ken past him, when the image of the apprentice’s dumbfounded face from when he’d dropped the vessel surfaced in his mind, he suddenly burst out laughing.
And then, laughing, he felt an urge to walk freely swaying his body like a drunkard.
He wanted to drown his sorrows in drink.

Because he didn’t want to see his niece who had lost an arm, he decided he wouldn’t return home even during the upcoming summer break.
And when he informed his father in Hyuga of this, a reply came immediately from his father, stating that Sachiko having her arm amputated must have been some kind of mistake and there was no need to worry.
Then, coincidentally that day, a letter also arrived from his brother-in-law Hisayoshi, stating that Sachiko’s poison had only circulated to one arm and hadn’t reached her body, so her life was spared, and now she was crawling around as robustly as before.

He immediately took up his pen and began writing an angry letter to his sister that conveyed something along the lines of there being a limit to writing letters so carelessly.
But the strength drained from him, and he stopped midway.
He gazed vacantly at the white azaleas in the garden with a heavy, indolent mood.
After some time had passed, he thought that today he would eat his fill of delicious food and spend all his money.
Sushi was the first thing that caught his eye.

He left the lodging.
But he felt restless and was constantly flustered.
When people said one, it felt as if he was saying two.
He felt as if he might cause some calamity.

Twelve

When vacation came, he immediately returned to his sister’s place.

Sachiko was alone in the front room, gripping the lattice slats with both hands and shaking them with a clatter.
She was two.

“Yuki, I’m back!”

He plopped down noisily before his niece.
The girl made a frightened face and slipped across one slat to the far side.

Thinking his long hair looked terrifying, he yanked his hat low over his brow and shuffled forward.

“C’mere now.”

Sachiko flinched slightly, scrambling across two or three more slats before twisting around to peer at him.

“Hmm? What’s the matter?”

When he stood up to try to hold her, his niece, still gripping the slats, suddenly began to cry like a cicada that had been struck.
He was left dazed.

Thirteen

During his vacation, nearly all of his time was spent keeping watch over Sachiko.
Of course, no one had ordered him to take on this duty.
Yet despite his efforts, Sachiko remained strangely distant toward him.
He would contort his face in various ways to amuse her and ply her with excessive sweets, then—thinking this ought to suffice—timidly murmur “There now” while reaching for her hand.
At once she would snort through her nose—“Hmph! Hmph!”—and yank her hand away.
In those moments he felt desolate.
Sometimes he feared she might be detecting his inner ugliness through some childish intuition, as though it were a foul odor.

“I may indeed be a terrible person,” he thought, “but I just can’t help how adorable you are.”

While muttering such things under his breath, he suppressed the urge to hold her.
But there were times he impulsively wanted to hold her.

One time, he forcibly picked up his reluctant niece onto his lap.
The niece initially arched her back and snorted.
He, disregarding this, gradually tightened his embrace—and she began to cry.
But since her crying seemed like it would stop immediately if he let her go, he kept holding on—and as he did, her cries gradually transformed into a drawn-out wail.
He shoved her forward.
Sachiko hurriedly crawled far away as though escaping from some terrifying hand, then sat with her bare knees pressed together and cried endlessly.
When he suddenly shifted his body to show his intent to hold her again, she raised her crying voice even louder and scrambled backward in a fluster.

(What part of me does she hate so much? And why is this kid so damn cute?)

He immediately wrote the following on a postcard to a friend.

“Once the fiend called love has you in its clutches, you’re truly wretched.”
“Why, you ask? Because we are always calculating its reward.”
“But we cannot help but calculate it.”
“And within humanity’s unnecessary, peculiar nature—unable to comprehend why we must calculate yet incapable of refraining from calculation—love sits entrenched.”
“It’s the head clerk at the accounts desk.”
“Isn’t that so?”

In any case, he had to keep watch over Sachiko all day without touching her.
This task really took a toll on his nerves.
Even so, given that his sister was occupied with various tasks that had piled up while trusting him to watch her, he couldn’t abandon his niece.
If he became too absorbed in his book, she would immediately start searching for her mother, clinging to the wall and moving with precarious balance toward the edge of the veranda or raised threshold, all while peering into the unseen garden beyond and calling out, “Ma! Ma!”
Then, heedless of her crying, he would bring her back into the room.
She would go out again.
He would bring her back in again.
They would repeat this countless times a day.
Truly, when he was with Sachiko, he could neither play nor do his own work.
There was nothing he could do but sit restlessly in the room where she was visible, staring blankly.
When it became unbearable at times, he would raise his voice and run around Sachiko as long as his breath held out, leaping about.
Then Sachiko would blurt out something unintelligible and become cheerful.
When he collapsed onto his back, utterly exhausted, and said “Aah…,” she too lay down beside him in the same manner and said “Aa….”
However, when he so much as touched her, she would immediately make a tearful face, pout her lips, and sit up.

“There there, there there.”
He could do nothing but say that and watch.

When he left his sister’s house, he thought he would never return here again.

Fourteen

However, the following summer, he ended up returning to his sister’s place again.
When he arrived at his sister’s house and found no one there, he lay down alone in the tea room and read a book.
After a while, his sister returned and set Sachiko down from her back.

He suddenly felt happy.

“That’s right—who’s that?” his sister said, pointing at him.

Sachiko frowned, backing away while looking at him, and as she nearly fell from the raised threshold, she spread her hands.

“Careful!”
Orika entered and caught Sachiko.

“Don’t you know? That’s your uncle.”

Sachiko placed her hand on Orika’s shoulder and kept gazing at him.

“You’re such a forgetful thing—that’s your uncle.”

“Uncle,” Sachiko parroted.

For some reason, he felt embarrassed.
When he stayed quiet and smiled, Sachiko spun around and buried her face in her mother’s collar.

Fifteen

He would sometimes ponder the nature of his affection for Sachiko,

There were times when he seriously thought, “I’m in love.”

His modest wish was to hold Sachiko firmly just once—just once would suffice—and for her to cling tightly to him.
If he were to voice an even greater desire, it was that she would be held by him whenever he wished.
In reality, he was tormented by this.
However, the reward of love he received was just as cold as during the previous summer vacation.
The days when he felt hatred toward Sachiko gradually increased.

“Why won’t Sachiko let me hold her?”

When he asked his sister this, she—

“It’s because you’re too rough,” she said flatly.

However, that didn't seem to be the case. But judging from how Sachiko allowed herself to be held gently even by men she wasn't particularly close to—men other than him—he thought perhaps that might be the case. In any case, the person Sachiko disliked the most seemed to be this uncle. And, the person the uncle liked the most was Sachiko.

“I’ve had my fill of being Sachi’s guardian. It’s trouble if you get complacent just ’cause I’m around.”
“Especially with a guy like me—the more you trust me, the bigger softie I turn into.”
“But I’m done with it now—quit pestering me!”

Even after he made such a preface, Orika still trusted him and put him to work.
When trusted, he too would get into the spirit of it and complain while watching over Sachiko.
And enduring his desire to avoid touching her—twisting his face into various expressions and doing handstands—he wounded his own self-esteem in his attempts to make Sachiko laugh.
When she laughed, he became even more enthusiastic, his face turning red as he earnestly imitated a dog or pretended to pedal a bicycle up a slope while frolicking about.
But midway through, he suddenly grew sullen and fell silent.
Then Sachiko, all by herself, shook her head back and forth while miming pedaling and ran around the room chanting, “Ring-a-ling, ring-a-ling!”
To her, this uncle seemed nothing more than a wall.

“Just you wait.”
So he muttered to himself, looking at Sachiko.