Pathway to Japanese Literature

When did I first come to deeply realize the sorrow of being born a child of the mansion?

From the time when even the youthful heart of that boy who had awaited the future—believing each day brought him closer to a world brimming with boundless joy—had gradually, through time’s passage, come to toy with that ephemeral solace of wanting to cast both body and soul into the sweet melancholy of reminiscence over those carefree yesterdays that had slipped beyond recall, I would always ask myself this.

I was born within the Black Gate of the corner estate that stood atop the gentle slope where Uptown’s high ground was about to end—a slope I could never separate from my childhood self in memory. Atop the hill where my house marked the boundary, the dim-lit depths beneath estate gates seemed to harbor lurking shadows; prison-like houses with stern walls stood in rows, their gardens encircled by lush groves where plums, cherries, peaches, and apricots bloomed all at once in spring. On windy days, petals of unknown origin—fallen from which mansion’s treetops?—would carpet those gardens in scattered profusion. But more than this—what remains etched in my childhood heart even now, twenty years after leaving that hill—are the monotonous strains of antiquated koto music that seeped out from desolate mansions on moonlit evenings during blossom season, as if by secret accord, evoking lonely tears. I was born upon this hill. From its silent, oppressive edge—heavy with gloom—descending the narrow gentle slope brought an abrupt shift in the air: cramped outskirts lined with low-eaved houses stretched like a belt into downtown’s bustling heart.

If I quietly close my eyes and picture the past even now, the small, modest shops lining both sides of the slope emerge vividly in my mind—scattered yet distinct. The Chinese goods store called Nagasaki-ya was where a bald, portly old man with a ruddy complexion sat drowsily keeping watch, clutching a round brazier to his lap like a child. The shop that displayed Western hats, shawls, ribbons, and all manner of gaudy colors—items not yet familiar to people of that time—appeared rather uncanny through a child’s eyes. At that shop, I went to buy something called Western decalcomania—where I would cut out pictures of animals, plants, or comical dolls, float them in hot water, wait until the paper beaded with moisture, then press them onto blank sheets to transfer the images of beasts, flowers, and people in vivid detail.

“Young master.
“This time, we’ve received high-quality imported decalcomania from America.”

The bald-headed man took out the tightly rolled sheets from the glass case and spread them across the shopfront in a spiral.
How I must have gazed with longing at that strange curiosity that had crossed the sea from distant, distant America—a place beyond even a child’s imagination.
How I must have nostalgically yearned, imagining a foreign land where angels—like those seen in oil paintings—played with great white swans, a realm that gathered every conceivable beautiful flower and bird.
The mansion children, having grown weary of commonplace tops, kites, drums, and such things, had fallen into an intense fascination with exotic foreign styles driven by their love for novelties—they wouldn’t be pleased unless it was touted as a high-quality import.
At the toy store diagonally across from Nagasaki-ya, I was a good customer.
How enviously and resentfully must the children at the foot of the slope have watched the gallant figure of the Young Master, shouldering a Western sword, trumpet, and gun at his waist.
There was once when my parents had Grandmother and our caretaker purchase me a Western wooden horse as a reward during their travels—and even that came from that house.
When the small master straddled the large dappled wooden horse’s saddle, planting both feet firmly, the horse would rock back and forth, its white tufted mane swaying.

“Goodness, can there really be toys costing several ryō these days? Children nowadays are fortunate indeed.”

Grandmother smiled as she watched. As I gradually descended past the toy shop, there appeared at the slope’s base a picture book store. At this shop could often be seen my older sister O-Kappa-san going to buy chiyogami paper. Before Yoshitoshi’s Thirty-Six Ghost Selections—their bold yet dreadful depictions of spectral transformations—and triptychs of warrior prints, the Young Master’s feet, led by his wet nurse and maids, would time and again come to a halt. Most unforgettable among these was an old woodblock print: Taki-yasha-hime rendered by some unknown artist’s brush.

When asked what I wanted for my birthday gift and replying “that one,” then being taken by Father on an errand walk to the shop—after the stern-faced proprietor declared “This isn’t for sale”—rather than resenting him, Taki-yasha-hime’s beautiful figure in the print grew all the dearer to me. Other shops thereabouts—kimono dealers, pottery stores, tea merchants—left no particular memories worth cherishing.

Though most of the slope’s base too has faded from memory save for Kumano Shrine beside the picture book shop and the small tobacco shop across from it—its eaves-lamp hidden beneath willow branches—in that tobacco shop’s glass-fronted shelves lining its slightly raised wooden floor, my childhood self stands vivid and clear.

The inside of the Black Gate where I was born was damp and dark—both house and garden.
In an old mansion that once belonged to a hatamoto samurai in direct service to the shogun, even when viewed from the street, the thick growth of bluish-black trees atop the wall concealed the house.
Even the rather spacious garden was completely moss-covered in the shadows cast by large trees, so much so that even at midday, it seemed like night.
Yet even so, come spring, flowering shrubs would bloom unexpectedly in every corner of the garden—but once the rainy season arrived, the ceaseless rain would steadily seep into the moss, and even after a day or two of clear skies, nothing would dry. In the vast house where floors squelched like the sea when stepped upon, it became common to find slugs fallen and crawling across the tatami mats of room after room.
From the time I first became aware of my surroundings, I hated this gloomy house.
And on those rare occasions when I was carried out through the Black Gate on my wet nurse’s back, seeing the town children spinning tops and playing menko in the parched streets at the foot of the slope, I would only feel my desire grow stronger—to slip free from my wet nurse’s grasp and play with such a crowd of friends.
The wet nurse,

“You must not play with town children.”

With her emaciated, pale face made especially stern, she admonished.
Without any particular reason, I was so young that I believed I must not play with town children.
During that time, I would be held in my mother’s embrace every night, deeply moved—never as someone else’s affair—by stories like that of the tiny princess discovered by the Bamboo Cutter or the pitiful tale of Ochikubo bullied by her stepmother, often listening with tears spilling over until I would unknowingly fall asleep. But one night, I began being put to bed by my wet nurse instead.

“Since the little one will soon be born and you’ll become an elder brother, Young Master Arata, you mustn’t cling to Madam like this anymore.”

Having been told this, though I felt glad about becoming a little baby’s older brother, the sorrow of parting from Mother’s embrace brought tears to my eyes as I pressed my face against my wet nurse’s cold chest.

Before long, Mother became confined to her bedchamber.
The household members grew preoccupied with something, began speaking in hushed tones, and ceased keeping me company.
Even my wet nurse became absorbed in her duties, restlessly working while scolding the young maids prone to making noise, and paid me scant attention.
In the house thrown into chaos by childbirth preparations, I found myself profoundly lonely.
My older sister—Grandmother’s favorite who slept each night in the hermitage connected by the corridor—had even been forbidden from playing the koto she had just begun learning. Left clutching her dolls alone, she would summon even me—the brother she usually avoided for fear of my tantrums—to play house as her husband by Grandmother’s side. But soon enough I would grow bored and, in some sudden mischief, make her cry—invariably earning scoldings from Grandmother and the wet nurse.
The mischief-prone Young Master, having been told “Do keep quiet,” would arrange hand toys in a sparsely frequented corner of the room—yet before long grow weary of them and seek companionship from the busy household members, only to be driven out with “Why don’t you go play in the garden for a bit?”

The moss blanketing the black soil without a single gap had engulfed even the faint semblance of a path that once wound through the grove of trees—stepping on it would make water well up with a soundless squelch. The dim garden seemed like a dwelling place for all manner of terrifying creatures from stories I’d heard, and unable to muster any desire to roam freely, I found myself listlessly crouching near the veranda.
Yet as I gradually grew accustomed to it, the unseen depths of the garden grove began to tug at my heart. With trepidation, I stepped over decayed leaves untouched by brooms for years—like an adventurer probing uncharted lands—and day by day, driven by anxiety and curiosity, I wriggled through thickening branches to venture deeper into its recesses.
The untended old garden was permeated with the smell of decaying plants.
Countless winged insects flew everywhere like shadows.
In the silent darkness beneath the trees, the sound of my own footsteps crunching through dead leaves jarred my ears more than once.
Whenever my face became entangled in a spiderweb, I would recall the earth spider spirit and flee back.
However, by unwittingly forging a familiar path through repeated treading, I had finally reached the deepest recesses of my family’s garden.
Emerging from the dark green, damp grove into full sunlight, I found sparse bamboo fences that had long since collapsed, but beyond them lay a sheer cliff, and below my eyes stretched the roofs of the downtown district far into the midday light.
At its end, the sea of Shinagawa shone a deep blue.
In the joy of discovering an entirely new, wide view I had never imagined before, I began to appear at the cliff’s edge in my small form without fail once every day, so long as it wasn’t raining.
And as I grew accustomed, day by day I would discover something new and unusual each time.
I could also see the large torii of Kumano Shrine.
The time when I discovered several patron banners fluttering in the wind on the white walls of a small theater called Sankichi Theater among the uniformly black roofs was especially delightful.
Tōjirō, the play-loving rickshaw driver, would guard me on my father’s office holidays while,

“This is a secret from the wet nurse, you know.”

With that, he would hoist me onto his shoulders and take me to the standing-room area of that Sankichi Theater.
In stark contrast to the beautiful box seats with crimson carpets at Kabukiza and Shintomiza that I attended with my parents, the stage of the small theater—peered at through dim iron bars over people’s heads, brimming with flamboyant theatrics—seemed mysteriously fascinating to a child’s eyes.
Especially when not just the gallery but even the pit and box seats all at once erupted in cheers for their favorites, and if by chance a villain appeared, the disorderly commotion—filled with passionate jeers that made one’s heart leap—must have been utterly exhilarating.
I would often have Tōjirō take me there in secret from my wet nurse, just as he said.

When I left the still grove behind and stood atop the cliff, the theater's orchestral music seemed to ring so clearly in my ears that I felt profoundly lonely in my solitude, wishing I could soar down into that lively bustle below the slope.

It was indeed early spring.
At the cliff I visited alone each day, amidst weeds that had remarkably grown greener overnight, countless wildflowers bloomed as far as the eye could see.
To collect the Japanese knotweed that had sprouted vigorously amidst those weeds, children from the tenements below the cliff were rustling noisily through the grass on the steep slope.
Though grubby children with runny noses they were, their dog-like agility as they formed a pack and played at will—how nostalgically envious I, who had no playmates, must have felt.
Peering down at my feet, I stepped out to the cliff’s edge wanting those children to know I stood there alone—yet I lacked even the courage to call out.
As if observing inhabitants of an alien land in their unrestrained movements, wanting to behave like them, I yanked out a Japanese knotweed within reach with all my strength and tried chewing its tender blue stem as they did.
Throbbingly, the cold sour grass juice seeped into my decayed tooth’s hollow cavity.

Feeling this fleeting futility unique to a child’s heart, I stood in my usual spot day after day—a small figure in a white apron, the mansion child—until at last the tenement children below noticed me. By then, countless schemes as futile as stacking tiles only to topple them had churned through my young mind, desperate to make them aware of my existence. Yet in the end, without taking any action myself, one day a child from below spotted me. When another who happened to glance upward saw me standing in that unexpected place, they looked utterly surprised before whispering furtively to their companions.
The faces of the children who had been creeping through the dry grass all looked up at me with eyes as wary as untamed beasts.

The following day.
Feeling as though I had already become friends with the tenement children, I stood at the cliff’s edge waiting more eagerly than ever.
Eventually, even the children who had come noisily in a line did not find my presence suspicious.

“Young Master, come play!”

With a light melody in their voice, the child who had spotted me yesterday called out familiarly.
I didn’t know how to respond.
Recalling the Wet Nurse’s words—“You must not play with town children”—my heart ached as though I had committed some grave misdeed.
Even so,

“Young Master, come join us!”

Enticed by children who called out casually, I began to exchange a word or two in response, but even the mischievous ones couldn’t manage to climb up the high cliff, leaving us no choice but to call back and forth in loud voices.

On one such day after many like it had passed, Kin-chan the fishmonger—who had first spotted me atop the cliff—advised me to come out to town through the front gate.
For a while, I wavered anxiously, but driven solely by my desire to play, my small figure slipped out through the Black Gate while the wet nurse and maids—amidst midwives and nurses—were making their way to the birthing room.
I, who had never once walked outside without someone holding my hand, found the frantic traffic of carriages and horses so perilous that I clung to the pillar of the gate I’d finally exited and watched the bewildering bustle of the world through timid eyes.

The balmy spring noon announced itself even in the light dust raised by rickshaw wheels racing vigorously down the slope. As I gazed at the dizzying downtown district below, a shadow-like procession emerged from a side street into sunlight that flooded from sky to earth and began climbing the slope.

“Young Master, come play!”

When I saw up close the town children who had come calling from afar in unison, I instinctively dashed back inside the gate. There they stood—grubby kimonos, dust-caked faces, runny noses with eyes that gleamed—each clutching a stick.

“Young Master, come join us! We’ll all play together.”

Kin-chan, the eldest among them dragging his tattered sandals while leaning against the gatepost, called out to me as I hid fearfully in the shadow of the gate.
The Young Master’s small figure descended the slope surrounded by the swarm of tenement children.

Before long, I became their brother.
The immediate commotion granted me freedom to become one of the town children.
Perhaps our household members—thinking it preferable to have no nuisance present during such occasions—may have known yet kept silent.

The relatively timid uptown children could not play among the rough town children without losing, but they, finding me a novelty, would fuss over me. Though I found these quarrelsome children—against whom I could never hope to hold my own in anything—frightening, it was far more enjoyable to run freely across the earth without anyone scolding me than to remain in that stifling, gloomy house. And so each day, exhausted from play but heeding their calls of *“Be sure to come again tomorrow”* at parting, I would join their ranks.

The places that became our playground were the grounds of Kumano Shrine and the front of a tobacco shop called Yanagi Shop. At Yanagi Shop’s storefront, there was always a young girl sitting. I’ve forgotten what her name was, but she was a fair-skinned, plump, and kind woman. When I think of the daughter of Yanagi Shop, what remains imprinted is her wearing a yellow-striped kimono with a black collar and a red obi all year round. Kiyo-chan, who became my closest friend among them, was always neatly dressed compared to the other town children. Both I and Kiyo-chan were younger and shorter than anyone else. The Yanagi Shop siblings had no mother, and their sickly father was always coughing in the back. At the shopfront, a porch bench was set out regardless of season, and not only we but also sons and apprentices from nearby shops would make a ruckus while puffing on tobacco for amusement.

“They’re just coming to hit on Kiyo-chan’s sister, you know.”

Though I didn’t understand what Kin-chan meant by those words, I found myself concerned for the girl.
Yet the heart of my fleeting memories would not be this daughter of Yanagi Shop.

The capital too reached that season when the flowers of the High Ground would scatter despite there being no wind.

One day I slipped out through the Black Gate as usual and hurried down the slope at a half-run. On that particular day—since no one had emerged before me—I settled onto Yanagi Shop's veranda bench intending to wait awhile. The shopkeeper was nowhere to be seen, but soon Kiyo-chan came darting out from the back rooms. Right behind him emerged Kiyo-chan's older sister,

“Oh, Young Master—all by yourself?”

As she said this, she sat down beside me.
She wore a showy kimono with a cherry blossom hairpin in her hair.
The face that kept brushing against my cheek was thick with white powder.

“Isn’t everyone coming to play today?”

“Yeah—the whole neighborhood’s gone to Mukōjima for flower viewing.”
“So Young Master, come play again tomorrow.”

The girl peered into my face as if admonishing me.

Soon, with a playfully mocking “Good day!” leading the way, from the side street emerged what must have been townspeople—young men and girls mixed together—including Kin-chan, Tetsukō, and Senkichi, all wearing kimonos free of mud today.
There was also a man carrying a shamisen.

“Oh, I was just about to head out!”
“Thank you ever so much for going out of your way to invite me.”

Kiyo-chan’s older sister stood up briskly.
I felt self-conscious about people seeing my face and fidgeted awkwardly.

“I’m terribly sorry—these costume preparations are taking so much time.”
“Well now, shouldn’t we be off?”

The old man, having folded a red handkerchief into a square and placed it on his bald head, called out in a playful voice, making everyone burst into laughter at once.

“What a bothersome old man!”

The Yanagi Shop girl swung up her sleeve and shot a brief glare.

The girl, mingling with the clamorously departing crowd, turned to me and said, “Come tomorrow.”

“Aren’t you coming, Young Master? Come along with us.”

Though Kin-chan shouted, no one said anything in response.
As I stood watching their figures recede—raising clouds of dust in their clamorous departure—with lonely eyes, the girl who had lingered at the group’s tail end, whispering with Yanagi Shop’s daughter—the same one who had led them earlier with that mock-cheerful “Good day!”—kept glancing back at me intently before turning briefly to sweep me up without warning and press her powdered cheek to mine.
When I looked up startled, she laughed with flirtatious eyes and chased after the others hand-in-hand with Kiyo-chan’s older sister.
I would later learn this was Kin-chan’s sister O-Tsuru, but what imprinted itself then was how she’d hitched up her garish purple-and-white braid-patterned kimono to reveal a red underkimono clinging to her slender calves.
The matching cherry blossom hairpins in their ginkgo buns—hers and Kiyo-chan’s sister’s—and the dyed sakura hand towel knotted at her collar etched her figure indelibly behind my eyes.
I stood rooted there desolate until the neighborhood flower-viewing procession vanished around the springtime street corner—but when even that last glimpse disappeared, the sudden ache of abandonment clenched my chest and tears rose unbidden.

My life of lonely solitude—unable to share in joy or madness among the multitude—was an inescapable fate born of the fact that I came into this world as an uptown child.

The figure of the little young master climbed the slope alone in the opposite direction of the flower-viewing group, until at last he was swallowed into the detested Black Gate.

Just as a novel toy would be cast aside and forgotten after five or ten days, so too did the children who had once clamored “Young Master! Young Master!” eventually grow utterly bored with me by the time the willow leaves outside the tobacco shop had fully unfurled—leaving me, the Young Master, stripped of my commander’s respect and reduced to nothing more than one of Kin-chan’s underlings.

“What a damn coward you are!”

Saying this, the snot-nosed kid puffed out his chest and charged at me, but I had neither the strength nor any allies to resist.
But still, I went out to seek playmates in town nearly every day—not so much because I resented my household, where my younger sister’s arrival had stripped me of both familial affection and even my wet nurse—but rather because I yearned to see O-Tsuru, the fishmonger’s daughter.

In a child’s eyes, it was completely impossible to gauge the ages of those older than oneself—especially women.
Both O-Tsuru and the Yanagi Shop girl were merely girls to me, and it never once occurred to me to clearly define their ages.
O-Tsuru was the leading lady of the porch bench beneath the tobacco shop’s willow.
A woman pale of complexion with a face small for her height—I can now recall with particular clarity both O-Tsuru showing her slender figure from behind as she walked away, carefree wooden clogs clattering against the pavement, and O-Tsuru whose eyes held a coolness like water pooling in unfathomable depths even when silent.

The sparkling heat of early summer streamed straight down Gentle Slope’s thoroughfare, where geta clogs rang out with crystalline clarity through their wooden teeth.
Countless times each day, water wagons would emerge from street corners to dampen even the shop eaves, only to dry completely in moments and turn to white dust.
Under the sake shop’s eaves, swallow chicks cried in unison from their nest.
The ice shop stood slightly cool like a green oasis in a desert.
As day by day passersby’s kimonos grew paler, Yanagi Shop’s porch bench grew ever livelier.
O-Tsuru in her flashy summer kimono would invariably emerge from the side street when shadows began falling across town.
“Good day!” she called from afar before pushing through the group of young men to sit down without ceremony.

“Young Master.”
“Come here.”

O-Tsuru would always hold me in her lap and press her cheek to mine from behind while becoming the center of conversation.
I no longer tried to follow Kin-chan—who ran drenched in sweat around Kumano Shrine’s torii gate playing tag—instead listening to the porch bench talk though barely understanding it.
Of course, the conversations were neighborhood gossip laden with symbols.
“That’s not so simple, is it?”
There were times I returned home after catching fragments like “Thank you for the meal” only to be scolded by my wet nurse.
From the careless mouths of young girls arose frequent mentions of Sankichi Theater.
O-Tsuru would habitually,

“They thought’a O-Tofu bein’ dead…… Even Lord Buddha ain’t blind to that!”

Her slightly affected voice—delivered with an air of nonchalance—was met with the young men’s teasing cries of “Just like Yōyō Ume-chan!” and even I, in deserted garden corners, would occasionally whisper those same lines under my breath.
How the downtown girls must have thrilled when the young actor Onoe Umenosuke peered into Sankichi Theater!
Perched on Tōjirō’s back, I did not miss a single whispered word—not the young men’s hollers of “Handsome devil!” and “Ladykiller!”, nor the girls’ breathless murmurs of “Isn’t he dashing?” and “So gorgeous!”, their awe leaving them scarcely able to breathe.
I too had always liked Umenosuke when he became a handsome man in his roles, but whenever O-Tsuru praised him too lavishly, I harbored a faint resentment.

“From that furisode he wears like everyday clothes—Shimada hairstyle, Yui-ga-hama backdrop—transforming into a woman for his swindles…”
“Hey, Young Master.”
“Umenosuke’s the best, right?”

With this, O-Tsuru pressed her cheek to mine as always.
Flustered by the public attention,

“I hate Umenosuke!”

I would retort.
Truth was, they often teased me in fun because O-Tsuru constantly held me.

“O-Tsuru has a crush on the Young Master.”

I would turn crimson for some reason and try to squirm out of O-Tsuru’s lap, but she would deliberately tighten her embrace.

“Hmm, let’s see...”
“You’re my dear master.”
“They’re all green with envy!”

“Liar! Liar!”

Flailing my legs while attempting to strike the cheek pressed against mine, O-Tsuru seized that hand and pressed her lips to it with an audible smack.

“Oh no! The Young Master despises me now!”

She declared this as though utterly crestfallen.

Soon enough, finding ourselves lingering at the slope’s crest while dusk began seeping upward from below, someone among us started chanting—

“Evening glow, little glow—let tomorrow be fine!”

The children sang as they scattered their play-weary legs through the side streets and alleyways toward home—drawn by the scent of supper wafting through the air.

“Three little souvenirs and you’re satisfied!”

Chasing after the quick one who’d slapped my back and scampered off, O-Tsuru too said, “Come again tomorrow,” then turned into the side street after giving me today’s final press of her cheek at parting.

I always felt forlorn returning to that stifling home—where even sitting down to meals required kneeling properly before my parents according to strict rules—and as I climbed the slope alone toward the Black Gate, the receding voices of children sounded to me like some ephemeral farewell.
Since childhood, I had carried this sad habit: twilight would send unrestrained thoughts racing even to the distant clouds in the sky, dampening my heart until tears welled up without reason.

Stepping into the entrance, the smell of the old house struck my nose sharply.
In every corner of the vast house where lamplight hung fading at its center, wall crickets chirped with faint, dying voices.
The sound of footsteps walking within resonated coldly in my heart, as if rising from watery depths.
Even dinner time—said to be society's happiest hour—would end without laughter as we solemnly followed Father's example of propriety, until this musicless house's desolation became my very heart.
At night, I startled easily at faintest sounds, wondering if all the ghost stories told by Grandmother and Wet Nurse weren't actual events from our own home.
Naturally, I waited for morning.
I envied downtown children's carefree lives.

When I stepped out into the town where everything stirred beneath a crisp blue sky, my heart leapt as if revived and all the blood in my body coursed vigorously through my veins.
Summer had already flooded the town; white summer hats gleaming like fresh snow vanished up and down the slope, their wearers wiping away sweat as they went.
Deliberately choosing the sweltering midday hours, goldfish sellers in sedge hats competed with cries of “Medaka! Goldfish!”—their calls evoking cool water sounds in ears scorched by heat—while behind them trailed dogs with limp white tongues lolling dryly, as if their very bodies had become burdens too heavy to bear.

Summer came. Summer came.
That summer’s Kumano Shrine festival rituals too must occupy an unforgettable page in my memories.

Every house along the main street in town hung matching paper lanterns under their eaves, but while the lower slope—where roof after roof stretched on—blossomed with flower-like splendor, the upper slope—where wall after wall continued without even a sound from neighboring homes—stood desolate as a graveyard, its grand mansion gates clashing discordantly with the lanterns.
Not only that, but while my family’s home did nothing special even during festivals, merchant households would go so far as to close their businesses, line their storefronts with gold folding screens, lay out crimson felt carpets, and arrange twisting Enshū-style flower arrangements to await customers.
The girls too dressed themselves up so beautifully they became unrecognizable from their usual selves, raising their voices in showy exclamations at every opportunity.
Young men and children, each in matching yukata, dashed about with vigor.
The “Wasshoi! Wasshoi! Wasshoi!” chants of mikoshi bearers hung oppressively over the sweat-dampened town, weighing heavily on every main street and alleyway.
At such times, households that were usually disliked in the neighborhood or had been sparing with congratulatory gifts would receive unexpected retribution.
To the mansions atop the slope as well they came—first those who clanged iron rods threateningly against the ground, then all of them reeking of alcohol as they carried in the mikoshi with raucous *Wasshoi! Wasshoi!* shouts.
For this we would wait until their arrival seemed imminent before offering a modest gratuity, whereupon they would withdraw again with boisterous *Wasshō! Wasshō!* chants—but I recall one festival when our neighbors the Ōtakes had apparently given too meager a tip, resulting in their plank fence being smashed to splinters by the mikoshi’s front poles. With endless terror that our house might suffer the same fate, I would peer through a narrow gap in the entranceway’s shōji screens, hiding beneath the Wet Nurse’s sleeve as I watched fearfully while the mikoshi retreated through the Black Gate into the bright town beyond.
The children too hauled barrel mikoshi every which way, sparking quarrels that bloomed like festival flowers.
In matching yukata with sashes of yellow-dyed hemp thread adorned with bells, and brand-new tenugui cloths tied around their foreheads, they dashed about crying “Yatcho! Yatcho!”, sweat streaming down to their white tabi-clad feet as the bells on their backs jingled.
The mansion child, timidly led through the crowd by a maid in everyday clothes to watch the festivities from the town’s edge, must have gazed with equal measures of envy and sorrow at Kin-chan and Kiyo-chan’s figures darting about drenched in sweat.

Even after the festival ended, Yanagi Shop’s storefront remained filled with nothing but festival talk. I found the children’s heroic tales of clashing with the barrel mikoshi from the opposite alley so brave it was enviable. That O-Tsuru had appeared on the dancing float renowned among young men both delighted my heart—which yearned endlessly for beautiful things—and made my own regret at not having seen it immeasurably bitter. But I immediately linked O-Tsuru to that single-sheet print of Taki-yasha-hime at the picture book shop’s storefront—the very image that had been the object of my envy. While held on O-Tsuru’s lap, I asked.

“O-Tsuru, what did you do when you appeared on the dancing float?”

“What was it now? Take a guess!”

“Taki-yasha?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because Taki-yasha is the best one!”

O-Tsuru laughed happily and rubbed her cheek against mine once more.
Whether O-Tsuru had truly become Taki-yasha-hime or not—
I do not know if she had simply agreed to humor my words, but she seemed to me entirely identical to the Taki-yasha-hime from that old woodblock print who stood upon the festival float. Though I never saw the float itself, even now twenty years later I can still vividly see that beautiful image conjured as an illusion before me.

During Doyō, I lived at a southern beach near the sea.
The mystery of the ever-restless sea had already stolen away my child’s heart, so I passed those days without knowing any covetous feelings.
But as the unrelenting wind through the coastal windbreak forest grew fiercer each day, by August’s end—when even the villa town turned desolate—I had to return to the capital.
At first after returning, even my long-familiar home felt somehow novel, but unable to endure listlessly napping like an adult in rooms grown darker than usual with summer’s greenery, I visited the town again after a long absence.
In the town with scant shade, the lingering summer heat glittered on tile roofs, while the cracked streets would fall eerily silent at times, not a single passerby in sight—as if in a madman’s vanished wake.
As I stood at Yanagi Shop’s storefront, the one who greeted me was Kiyo-chan’s older sister alone, sitting in the shadow of shop shelves with a white uchiwa fan in hand.

“My, it’s been a while! Where’ve you been off to?”
“You’ve gotten so sunburned!”

The girl smiled, had me sit down in the shop, and spoke while fanning me with an uchiwa.

“Is no one here?”
“Not even Kiyo-chan?”

“Yeah.”
“It seems they all just went to the cliff to catch cicadas.”

“Is no one coming?”

I repeated listlessly.

“Who do you mean by ‘nobody’?
“Ah, I see!
“It’s Miss O-Tsuru—the young master’s dear friend—isn’t it?
“It just has to be Miss O-Tsuru for you, doesn’t it?
“Why don’t you get a little friendlier with me too?”

The girl laughed in amusement.

After dinner, while the household members cooled themselves with uchiwa fans on the veranda, I secretly slipped out to the still-bright town.

At Yanagi Shop’s storefront, where lanterns had already been lit, a few young men had gathered.
The children, finding me a novelty, eagerly asked about my time at the seaside—but once they grew bored of that too, even Kiyo-chan joined Kin-chan, the ringleader of the brats, in chanting in unison:

“Watch your behind! Watch your behind!”

With that, they began mischievously lifting one another’s kimono hems with wild giggles—but eventually, unable to restrain themselves, they started flipping up the skirts of passing children sent on errands—strangers they didn’t even know—and smacking their bare bottoms with open palms until they cried, while the young men egged them on with amused delight.
I sat silently watching at the storefront, but when even a little girl met the same fate and went off wailing, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her.

Before long, the town lit up, and as the sun sank swiftly from view, dusk began creeping in from nowhere. Stars twinkled one by one in the faintly glowing sky above the slope, and a cool wind swept through the willow at the tobacco shop—thus arrived a summer night.

“Watch your behind! Watch your behind!”

The emboldened children’s voices grew ever louder.

“Hey hey! That’s O-Tsuru-chan coming over there, right?”

One of the young men who had said this—ignoring Kiyo-chan’s sister’s attempts to stop him while his amused companions egged him on with “Go on!”—issued orders to the children.

“Whoever flips up O-Tsuru-chan’s kimono—anyone at all—gets shaved ice on me!”

Even Kin-chan refused when it came to his own sister, but Tetsukō the rickshaw man cackled as he ducked behind a utility pole.
I held my breath, my chest pounding for O-Tsuru.
O-Tsuru approached as always—her white yukata luminous in the dark, slender form flickering beneath shop lights while her fair-weather geta clattered against the stones.
Just as Tetsukō—overzealous from crawling through dirt to circle behind—grabbed her hem, crimson fabric billowed upward, baring her snow-white shin beneath the raised kimono.
In one fluid motion, O-Tsuru whirled around and smacked Tetsukō’s head twice with her palm before spinning away, geta clacking rhythmically until she disappeared into the alley’s shadows.
The stunned young men exchanged hollow glances and forced joyless laughs.
Overflowing with pride in my fierce ally—O-Tsuru’s terrifying beauty rivaling Taki-yasha herself—I nonetheless slipped from the lingering crowd and trudged homeward, disheartened at missing my awaited companion.

The mansion district atop the slope, shrouded in darkness, made me recall tales of the night cloak—a mythical creature said to emerge from somewhere to suck the living blood of young women or children walking alone after dark. Even in the wet nurse's hometown—she who had told me that story—the village's most beautiful girl had supposedly slipped out on a moonless night to meet someone, only to have her blood drained by the night cloak while waiting in the shrine's sacred grove, leaving her cold and lifeless. As I anxiously listened to my own footsteps—echoing through the cooling night streets like footsteps on ice—I trembled at the thought that a night cloak might appear at any moment, deeply regretting my decision to walk alone after dark. The Black Gate of my home, faintly illuminated by a bluish gas lamp through overhanging willow leaves, stood tightly shut, its iron-studded door glaring down like some demonic entity. How had I managed to slip through that heavy sliding door? When I rushed into the house through the brightly lit lattice entrance, the wet nurse came flying out from the inner room and clasped me tightly in her arms.

“Master Arata, my, where have you been playing until this hour?”

After she had repeatedly admonished me—“Why would you go to town when I told you so explicitly?”—

“You must never play with town children again. This wet nurse will be scolded by Mother.”

As she tearfully pleaded in a way that drew out my tears, I found myself unwittingly tearing up, fearing that her usual threat—“This wet nurse will return to her village”—might actually come true if I kept disobeying her,

“Shinji! Shinji!”

I ran toward the direction of Mother’s voice calling from the inner rooms.

The sorrow of being born a child of the mansion household was deeply engraved.

“If you play with base town children, you’ll gradually become base yourself and never grow into a great man like Father.”
“From now on, obey Mother and play at home.”
“If you still insist on playing with town children, I shall make you one of them.”

After being solemnly subjected to Mother’s admonitions, I found myself imprisoned once more within the rules.
For a time, even when I overturned every toy box in the house and lined up their contents, even when coloring picture books like *Chronicle of Three Sanada Generations* and *Military Tales of Kai and Echigo* with childish strokes, the gloomy atmosphere of our home could not long restrain a young master brimming with desire to play.
I became again that child who parted weeds and wriggled through the grove like a dog to reach the cliff’s edge, gazing upon the bustling towns below with ephemeral yearning.

"Why must the young master of the mansion not play with town children?"

I asked myself this, but no matter how I tried, I couldn’t understand. In later years, when memories of that time surfaced—of watching clouds drift across blue skies while bearing an insoluble mystery, of helpless emotions welling up like water as I first came to know mono no aware—there came a day during my boyhood when I opened my hand-raised canaries’ cage and released the two small birds into an autumn sky dyed so deeply with indigo it seemed to reach the very bottom of the season.

The sunlight striking the cliff weakened day by day; the cicadas’ cries, which had sounded like scorching oil, gradually faded; and as summer too began its decline, the wind blowing across the grassy embankment grew ever more unbearably mournful. The passing summer—precisely because it had burned so fiercely—was all the more poignantly regretted, its departure seeping into me through bodily exhaustion. As autumn drew near with its desolate falling leaves, and chill winds seeped into unhealed wounds like water through cracks, though I couldn’t articulate why, it seemed I had come to deeply understand—in that child’s heart of mine—the mournful sorrow of things departed never to return. Thus having welcomed autumn, I had to bid a fleeting farewell to O-Tsuru.

One day, lured by the voices of the children below the cliff, I broke my mother’s prohibition and was held on O-Tsuru’s lap—dearer to me than Mother herself—on the porch bench of Yanagi Shop.

“Why haven’t you come at all lately? You got tired of me, didn’t you—you hateful thing,” she said, pressing her soft cheek against mine. “Since you’ve grown bored of me and it’s no fun anymore, I’ll just become a geisha’s girl instead.”

How those words of O-Tsuru’s shocked me! How bitterly I listened as she spoke so merrily about being sent off to those distant downtown streets—all dazzling and decadent—as if it were some grand promotion! Yet even now, that too has become a memory I try in vain to forget.

O-Tsuru was already destined to be taken as early as tomorrow to the house where she was to be bought.

“It’s near the Sumida River—three hours by horse-drawn railway—a whole neighborhood packed with geisha houses,” O-Tsuru said. “When you become a geisha’s child, you’ll eat delicious food, wear as many pretty kimonos as you like, dance and play shamisen every day—nothing but fun!”

“I’ll make a fine geisha too, so you’d better grow up quick and become someone grand to visit me, young master.”

O-Tsuru spoke with a face that held no doubt about tomorrow’s happiness.
She laughed more brightly than ever, her voice free of shadows.

“Can I go visit you next time?”

When I said,

“Since when can a kid like you afford a geisha?”

Among the jeering children, even O-Tsuru’s resounding voice laughed.
Then, declaring she would leave earlier than usual, at the moment of parting—

“Don’t you dare forget me—you must become someone grand and come visit.”

After rubbing her cheek against mine several times, she finally sucked hard on my cheek like a Night Cloak.
“See ya,” she said, her figure walking away with a carefree clatter, remaining vividly with me.

Dejectedly returning inside the Black Gate, I never met O-Tsuru again. Regarding O-Tsuru, whom I could not forget, my recollections were repeated so often that I likely can no longer record my childhood feelings exactly as they were. Even knowing it was a memory colored by days long after I had grown up, I cannot forget the self of that twilight when I parted from O-Tsuru as a thing of nostalgia.

"O-Tsuru is going to leave."

The moment this thought came, my eyes grew misty until I could see nothing at all. All of it—the words of refusal O-Tsuru had whispered over and over until now, the lingering warmth and softness of her cheek presses and kisses—dissolved into my tears until nothing remained with me but sorrow, or so it seemed.
To distract myself from the tears that kept welling up despite my efforts to hold them back, I went out into the garden and stood at the cliff’s edge.
Where could O-Tsuru’s house be?
With only a faint slanting sunlight lingering over the uniformly black tenement-style buildings of the downtown outskirts—how could I possibly distinguish it?
The mansion child, bound by rules and admonitions that kept him from freely venturing into town even as he carried a heart filled with sorrow, found himself yearning endlessly for the distant downtown where O-Tsuru was to be sold off as soon as tomorrow.
"I want to become an adult as soon as possible so I can be with O-Tsuru—who will become a geisha children cannot afford—and play with her."

As the twilight of the setting sun swiftly faded away without a trace,

“The frogs are croaking—go home! Go home!”

The children’s voices too faded into twilight; as the early autumn evening mist flowed across the towns like water’s depths, lights flickered on here and there, and somewhere the faint sound of a shamisen began to be heard.
The notes that reached even the cliff’s top—sporadic, intermittent—I simply couldn’t help but believe it was O-Tsuru playing them.
And somehow, as if both body and soul were lured away by those strings, an intensely helpless feeling swelled fully within my small chest.
“O-Tsuru is going to leave.”
“I’m going to be all alone.” In the encroaching darkness of night thick with sorrow, I stood drenched in tears.

Suddenly noticing the maid’s voice calling “Arata-sama! Arata-sama!” from beyond the grove of trees, I became aware for the first time of myself standing there with bowed head, enveloped in darkness—and terror of the night assailed me.
Breathless and frantic, I dashed through the grove of trees, raced up from the engawa into the tatami room, and suddenly clung desperately to Mother—who had been sitting near the edge—weeping without restraint.
I cried until my tears ran dry.

Ah, the nostalgia of those memories!
Having vowed to grow up, become someone important, and go visit her, I—bearing the sorrow of being a mansion child—find solace only in looking back on those brief days bound and restricted by rules.
I do not know where O-Tsuru is now, but within the transient yet beautiful recollections of days gone by—even now at twenty years old—I can still deeply savor the feeling of clinging to Mother’s embrace and shedding tears on that twilight when I parted from O-Tsuru as a memory sorrowful and nostalgic yet dear.