Читать книгу Autumn Wind & Other Stories - Lane Dunlop - Страница 9

The sound of dry leaves racing through the garden, the sound of wind rattlingthe paper doors.

One afternoon in my winter study, by a dim little window, as if in memory of the autumn-evening field where I'd parted from my lover some years ago, I was leaning lonelily against a brazier and reading a biography of Turgenev.

One summer evening, when he was still a child without knowledge of things, Turgenev wandered through his father's garden, densely overgrown with trees and shrubs. By the weedy edge of an old pond, he came upon the miserable sight of a frog and a snake trying to devour each other. In his innocent, childish heart, Turgenev had immediately doubted the goodness of God ... As I read this passage, for some reason I remembered the frightening old garden of my father's house in Koishikawa, where I was born. In those days, already more than thirty years ago, the canal of the Suido district flowed through fields of spiderwort like a rural stream.

At that time the vacant residences of vassals and lower-grade retainers of the old shogunate were coming on the market here and there. Buying up a group of them, my father built a spacious new mansion, while leaving the old groves and gardens intact. By the time I was born, the ornamental alcove posts of the new house had already acquired some of the soft luster of the polishing cloth. On the stones of the garden, which was just as it had always been, the moss grew deeper and deeper, and the shade of the trees and shrubs grew darker and darker. Far back, in the darkest part of those groves, there were two old wells, said to be vestiges of the original households. One of them, during a period of five or six years from before my birth, had been gradually filled in by our gardener, Yasukichi, with all the garden trash, such as dead pine needles, broken-off cryptomeria branches, and fallen cherry leaves. One evening at the beginning of winter, when I had just turned four, I watched Yasu at work. Having finished the job of getting the pines, palms, and bananas ready for the frost, he broke down the sides of the well, which were covered all over with mushrooms dried white like mold. This is one of my many frightening memories of the garden. Ants, millipedes, centipedes, galley worms, earthworms, small snakes, grubs, earwigs, and various other insects that had been asleep in their winter home, crawling out from between the rotten boards in great numbers, began to squirm and writhe slipperily in the cold, wintry gale. Many of them, turning up their dingy white undersides, died on the spot. With a helper whom he'd brought along, Yasu gathered the day's fallen leaves and dead branches together with the chopped-up boards of the well and set it all on fire. Raking in with a bamboo broom the insects and wriggling snakes that had begun to crawl away, he burned them alive. The fire made sharp, crackling noises. There was no flame, only a damp whitish smoke, which as it climbed through the high tops of the old trees, gave off an indescribably bad smell. The wintry wind, howling desolately in those old treetops, seemed to blow down dark night all through the garden. From the direction of the invisible house, the voice of the wet nurse was calling loudly for me. Abruptly bursting into tears, I was led by the hand by Yasu back to the house.

Yasu neatly leveled the ground over the plugged-up old well, but during the spring rains, evening showers, stormy days, and other spells of heavy rain the surface of the ground would subside a foot or two. Afterward the area was roped off and no one allowed to go near it. I remember being told with a special sternness by both my parents to stay away from there. As for the other old well, it indeed is the most terrifying memory I have of that period, which I could not forget even if I tried to. The well seemed to be extraordinarily deep, so that even Yasu did not attempt to fill it up. I don't know what kind of house now stands on that property, but no doubt the well, with the old tree alongside it, is still there in a corner of the grounds.

All around in back of the well, like the precinct of a shrine that's said to be haunted, a grove of cedars stood in dense, dark quietude both summer and winter. It made that part of the garden all the more frightening. Behind the grove there was a black wooden fence with sharp-pointed stakes atop it. On the other side there was, on one hand, the unfrequented thoroughfare of Kongo Temple at the top of a slope and, on the other, a shantytown that my father had always disliked, saying, "If they would only pull that place down ..."

My father had bought up what originally had been three small estates. It was all our property now, but the old well was on a patch of wasteland at the base of a cliff that, since it was far down the slope from where the house had been built, was almost forgotten about by the people of the household. My mother often asked my father why he'd bought that useless piece of land. My father's reply was that if he hadn't, a slum would have gone up at the foot of the hill. We'd have had to look at dirty tile roofs and laundry drying in the sun. By buying it up and leaving it the same, he kept it nice and quiet down there. Probably for my father, the sinister forms of the old trees that howled in the wind, wept in the rain, and held the night in their arms were not frightening at all. There were even times when my father's formal, angular face seemed more vaguely alarming than the wen-shaped knot of a pine.

One night a thief got into the house and stole a padded silk garment of my mother's. The next morning our regular fireman, the foreman of the carpenters, and a detective from the police station came by. As they went along examining the footprints by the edge of the veranda outside my father's sitting room, they found more prints in the trodden and crushed frost that led clear through the midwinter garden. It became evident that the thief had sneaked onto the grounds from the black wooden fence in back of the old well. In front of the well, there was a dirty old towel that he must have dropped in his getaway. Taken by the hand by the chief carpenter, Seigoro, who in feudal days had served the house of Mito, for the first time in my life I walked around this old well off in a corner of the old garden. A solitary willow tree stood by the side of the well. Half-rotten, the trunk had become hollowed and many sad-looking dead branches hung down from it. Struck by an indescribable eeriness, I didn't so much as think of trying to peer down to the bottom of this well that was too deep to fill up even if one had wanted to.

It was not only myself who was afraid. After the robbery, that part of the garden at the base of the cliff and around the old well became a place of dread for everyone in the family except my father. The Satsuma Rebellion had just ended, and the world was full of stories of conspirators, assassins, armed burglars, and bloodthirsty cruelty. Dark, paranoid suspicions hovered everywhere in the air. One could not tell when, under cover of night, lurking under the veranda of the stately gated house of a well-to-do person or of a merchant with a big storehouse, listening for the sleeping breath of the master, a terrorist or assassin would thrust his sword up through the tatami mat. At our house, without the proposal coming from my father or mother, it was decided to have the regular fireman make a watchman's rounds at night. Night after cold night, as I lay in my wet nurse's arms, I heard the clacking of his wooden clapper sound out loud and clear all through the sleeping house.

There was nothing so unpleasant and frightening as the night. After having a Beniya bean-jam wafer from a shop on Ando Slope as my snack, I would have just started playing house with my mother when the yellow evening sunlight on the translucent paper sliding door would fade away even as I looked. The wind rattled drearily through the bare-branched trees and shrubs. It started getting dark first by the black walls of the ornamental alcove in the parlor. When my mother, saying that she was going to wash her hands, stood up and slid open the door, it was dusky all through the garden to the base of the cliff, where it was completely dark. Of anywhere on the grounds, the place where it became night earliest was at the base of the cliff, where that old well was. But wasn't it from the bottomless depth of that old well that the night welled up? Such feelings did not leave me until long afterward.

Even after I had begun to go to grade school, along with the tale of O-Kiki of the Plate House advertised on the notices for peep shows on temple festival days and the picture book Mysterious Lights on the Sea from which my wet nurse read to me, not merely the old well but the ancient, half-decayed willow tree alongside it took on the force of a natural spell. I could not tell how many times they had frightened me in dreams. I wanted to see the frightening thing itself. But when I timidly asked about it, the wet nurse snipped off the buds of my young awareness with the scissors of superstition. As for my father, when he scolded me for disobedience one of his worst threats was that he would drive me out of the house and tie me up to the willow tree by the well. Ah, what terrible memories of childhood. Even when I was twelve or thirteen, I was afraid to go to the bathroom by myself at night. But I dare say I was not alone in this among the children who grew up in that period.

My father was a government official. In those days the cabinet was called the Great Hall of Government, and a minister was addressed as My Lord. At one time my father had been passionately devoted to horsemanship. Four or five years later, when that enthusiasm had died down, he suddenly took up archery. Every morning, before going to the office, he would place a target halfway up the cliff. Standing by the side of the well with his back to the willow tree, he twanged the bowstring in the cool morning breezes of summer. Soon, however, autumn came around. One chilly morning my father, who practiced with one shoulder bare, having excitedly dashed up the cliff path and back down with the bow still in his hand, called out in a loud, hoarse voice, "Tazaki! Tazaki! Come quickly. There's a fox in the garden."

Tazaki was a youth of sixteen or seventeen who, by virtue of being from my father's native village, was living at our house as a student-houseboy. Because of an imposing physique and a way of throwing back his shoulders and giving loud harangues larded with many Chinese words, he seemed to me like a pompous adult.

"What is the matter, sir?"

"Damned nuisance. There's a fox in this garden. It was startled by the sound of my bow and jumped out of the beargrass at the foot of the cliff. It must have a hole around there."

Together with his rickshaw man, Kisuke, and Tazaki, my father searched the dense growth of low, striped bamboo from around halfway down the cliff. But soon it was time to go to the office.

"Tazaki, search this place thoroughly."

"Yes, sir. I will do so."

Tazaki prostrated himself in the entryway as my father's rickshaw, with a crunching sound over the gravel, went out through the front gate. The minute it was gone, he tucked up his formal divided skirt and with a shoulder pole in one hand stepped out into the garden. When I think of the student-houseboys of those days, it all comes back—the laughable distinctions observed between master and servant, just as in the old feudal days.

My mother, who was gentle and kind to everyone, seeing the preparations of Tazaki, said to him, "It's dangerous. The fox might well bite you, and then what would you do? Please don't go."

"Madam. Are you suggesting that I'm not a match for a fox? There's nothing to it. I'll beat it to death and have it ready to show the master when he gets back."

Squaring his shoulders in that way of his, Tazaki put on a blustering front. Later this man was to become an army officer, and in the Sino-Japanese War achieved a bloody death in the field. Perhaps he felt a natural affinity for slaughter. Our cook, O-Etsu, who was not on good terms with Tazaki and who was a country-bred person full of superstitions, paled and explained to him that it would be bad luck for the house if he killed the fox-god. Tazaki rejected this point-blank, saying it was not for the likes of a rice cook to poke her nose in where the master's orders were concerned. O-Etsu, puffing out her full red cheeks as she talked, and my wet nurse then told me all about fox possession and fox curses, instances of people being bewitched by foxes and of the miracles of the fox-god, Takezo Inari, whose shrine was in back of Denzu Temple. Although thinking uneasily of such things like the much talked-about method of divination called table-turning, I halfway sided with Tazaki's bravado and wanted to go with him on his fox conquest. But half of me doubted, wondering if there was anything in the world as strange as this.

Tazaki, thrashing about in the beargrass thickets until he was called back for lunch, his shins scratched and bleeding from the raspy-edged bamboo blades and thorns, his face all covered with cobwebs for nothing, came back without having found anything that even looked like a fox hole. In the evening my father returned, followed by an old man called Yodoi. Yodoi, who was my father's chess and drinking companion almost every night, was a lower-grade civil official who did some money-lending on the side, an underling from my father's office who made the maids cry because he stayed so long. He drew pictures for me of the horse-drawn trolley cars downtown that were coming into use at that time, and for my mother he had stories of such heroes as Tasuku Hikosaburo and Tanosuke. Accompanied by Yodoi as Tazaki led the way with a paper lantern, my father searched all around the garden twice. In the late evening air, the noise of myriads of insects sounded like falling rain. It was my first discovery of the purity, coldness, and pallor of an autumn night.

My mother told a story of having been awakened in the small hours that same night—it was no dream—by an unmistakable wailing sound in the garden. From the next day on the maids would not set foot outside the house after dark no matter what. Our devotedly loyal O-Etsu, believing that bad luck was in store for us, caught a cold from sprinkling well water over herself at daybreak and praying to the god of fire. Hearing about this, Tazaki secretly reported it to my father, and the upshot was that poor O-Etsu was harshly scolded and told that there was a limit even to making a fool of oneself. My wet nurse, after talking it over with my mother, just happened to get a dog from our regular fish dealer, Iroha. In addition, she now and then left out scraps of fried bean curd in the beargrass thickets at the base of the cliff.

Early each morning, paying no mind to the chill that deepened day by day, my father went out to the rear of the garden by the old well and practiced his archery. But the fox did not show itself again. Once an emaciated stray dog that had wandered in from somewhere had its ear bitten off by our dog, who set on it savagely as it was eating the fried bean curd. By slow degrees, a mood of relief had spread through the household. Perhaps the fox had escaped to somewhere. Or it hadn't been a fox at all, but some other stray dog. Already it was winter.

"Isn't there anyone to clean out the brazier in this cold weather? All the servants in this house are blockheads." One morning, these chiding words of my father's were heard all through the house.

Throughout the house the storm shutters, the paper sliding doors, and the openwork panels over lintels banged and rattled. At the edge of the veranda, like water poured out on the ground, the lonely sound of the wind in the shrubbery was suddenly heard and as suddenly not. When it was time to go to school, my mother, saying that I should wear a scarf, pulled out the drawers of the clothes chest. In the chill, empty air of the big parlor, the smell of camphor seemed to spread through my whole body. But it was still warm in the afternoons. When my mother, the wet nurse, and I went out onto a sunny part of the porch, the appearance of the garden, compared with the time of excitement about the fox, was as changed as if it were another world. I took it strangely to heart. The branches of the plum tree and the blue paulownia were bare and barren. The luxuriant growth of fall plants, such as the rose mallow and the chickenhead clover, had all faded away and died. Unfiltered by leafage, the brilliant sunlight fell full on the ground. From the filled-in well, where Yasu had burnt alive the small snakes and grubs, to the dark, scary grove of cedars at the base of the cliff, you could see everywhere in the garden through the wintry skeletons of the treetops. As for the maples among the pines on the lower slope of the cliff, their scarlet autumn foliage had turned into dirty old leaves that pell-mell flew and scattered in the wind. In the bonsai landscape tray, set out on a stepping stone at the edge of the veranda, one or two solitary leaves, dyed red as blood, were left on the miniature waxtree. Outside the circular window of my father's study, the leaves of the yatsude were blacker than any ink, and its jewel-like flowers pallidly glittered. By the water basin, where the fruit of the nandin was still green, the low twittering of the bush warbler was always to be heard. On the roof, under the eaves, about the windows, and everywhere in the garden, the chirruping voice of the sparrow seemed almost noisy.

I did not think that the garden in early winter was either lonely or sad. At least I did not feel that it was any more frightening than on a slightly overcast day of autumn. On the contrary, it was a pleasure to tread underfoot the carpet of fallen leaves, to walk about amid its crackling noise. But from the time that Yasukichi, wearing his livery coat dyed with the family crest, came with his helper to make the pines and banana trees ready for winter as he always did, it was not long before the first morning frost did not melt until the afternoon. After that, there was no setting foot in the garden anymore.

Before we were aware of it, our house dog had vanished somewhere. Various explanations were given, such as that he had been done in by the dogcatcher or that he was a valuable dog so somebody had stolen him. I begged my father to let us have another dog. But saying that if he did so, other strange dogs would hang around when it was in heat, breaking down the hedges and laying waste to the garden, my father refused to allow another dog in the household. Some time before this, a small poultry yard had been built by the well outside the kitchen. I used to love to feed the chickens every day when I got back from school. For that reason I didn't complain very much about not having a dog. It was the happy, peaceful season of midwinter seclusion. As for the mysterious affair of the fox, it faded out of the fancies of the maidservants and the other people of the house. There was no dog now to bark at the footsteps of a person going by late in the night. In the sound of the wind that swayed the tall trees of the garden, there was only the thin, distant peal of the temple bell of Denzuin. Sitting at the warm, sunken hearth with my mother and the wet nurse, I turned and spread out the pages of storybooks and of woodblock color prints under the quiet lamplight. My father, with his subordinate and crony, Yodoi, played go with a crisp, clinking sound of the stones behind the six-leafed screen that had been drawn around them in the inner hall. Sometimes he would clap his hands and shout at the maid for her faulty way of pouring the sake. My mother, saying that such things could not be left to the servants, would get up and go through the cold dark of the house to the kitchen. In my child's heart, I almost hated my father for his lack of consideration.

It drew near the end of the year. A man who had been a palanquin-bearer in the old days, lately reduced to making frames for paper lanterns in the slum at the foot of the hill, hung himself. At the top of Ando Slope, not far from us, a gang of five thieves broke into a pawnshop and killed a sixteen-year-old girl. An arsonist set fire to a secondary temple in the precinct of the Denzuin. A restaurant called the Tatsumiya, which had flourished on Tomi Slope in the days of Lord Mito, went bankrupt. We heard these stories in turn from such people as Kyusai, the family masseur, the fish dealer Kichi, and the fireman Seigoro, who frequented our back door, but they left hardly any impression on me. All I wanted was to attach a humming string to my nine-crested dragon kite with the old man Kansaburo, who was a porter at my father's office and who came to visit us only on New Year's Day. I thought only of such things as whether the wind would be blowing that day. At some point or other, however, the family greengrocer, Shunko, and our parlormaid, O-Tama, had become secret lovers. One night, hand in hand and carrying their clothes on their backs, they tried to elope. Tazaki nabbed them as they were going over the wooden fence by the back gate. The ensuing household uproar and the decision to send O-Tama back to her parents' house in Sumiyoshi, although I did not understand what was happening, seemed terrible to me. The sight of O-Tama's retreating figure, in tears as she was dragged through the back gate by her white-haired mother, seemed sad even in my eyes. After this, I felt that there was something grim and hateful about Tazaki. My father was well pleased with him, but my mother and the rest of us could not abide him. He was a lowdown person who had done a bad thing.

All of New Year's Day I did nothing but fly my kite. On Sundays, when there was no school, I would get up especially early to play. I begrudged the fact that the winter sun went down so soon. But before long it was February, and then came a Sunday when it was no use getting up early: there was snow. Out by the back door, where my father almost never went, there was the sound of his thick, husky voice. With him was Tazaki, doing most of the talking. There was also the voice of my father's rickshaw man, Kisuke, who'd come by as he did every morning. Not listening to the wet nurse, who was trying to change my sleeping kimono, I ran toward their voices. When I saw my mother, standing on the threshold with her back to me and her arms folded, a sort of sad happiness filled me. Clinging to her soft sleeve, I wept.

"What are you crying about so early in the morning?" My father's voice was sharp. But my mother, taking out one hand from her bosom, gently stroked my head.

"The fox has come back. He's eaten one of Mune-chan's favorite chickens. Isn't that terrible? Be a good boy, now."

The snow was blowing in fitful gusts through the back door into the dirt-floored entryway. Half-melted lumps of snow that had been tracked in under everybody's high clogs quickly made mud of the floor. The cook, O-Etsu, the new parlormaid, one other maidservant, and my wet nurse, all aflutter over their master's unexpected appearance at the back door and shivering with cold, sat as if glued to the floorboards of the raised part of the kitchen.

My father, putting on the snow clogs that Tazaki set out for him and taking the paper umbrella that Kisuke held over his head, started on a tour of inspection out in back of the house and around the chicken yard by the well.

"Mother, I want to go too."

"No. I can't have you catching cold. Please don't ask."

Just then the wicket of the back gate was opened and Seigoro, the head fireman, came in, saying, "It's been quite a heavy snowfall." Dressed in his firefighting outfit of quilted hood, livery coat, and old-fashioned Japanese gloves, he was making the rounds of the neighborhood on his initial snow inspection.

"What's that? Oh, how terrible. A fox took one of your chickens, you say? Why, it's the most exciting thing to happen since the Restoration. Just like the samurais, the fox-god was deprived of his stipend. And he couldn't smell the fried bean curd under all that snow. So he wandered over to your chicken house. It's no great matter. Your folks will catch him for sure."

Seigoro kindly carried me on his back to the side of the chicken yard.

Apparently that morning at daybreak the fox had craftily stolen with rapid strides across the accumulated snowdrifts, dug a hole under the bamboo fence, and crawled through it into the yard. Snow and dirt were scattered all about where he had scratched and scrabbled his way through. Inside the bamboo enclosure, on the snow that had blown into it, not only were chicken feathers mercilessly tossed about but a drop or two of bright red blood was to be seen.

"It'll be no trouble this morning. There are prints all over the snow. 'If you follow my tracks, you'll soon find me in the Shinoda woods,' as the old line goes. Eh—it's been living in the cliff in your garden since last year?"

Just as Seigoro said, a trail of fox prints was found that led from the garden down the cliff and vanished at the base of a pine tree. My father at their head, the band of trackers raised a spontaneous cry of triumph. When Tazaki and the rickshaw man scraped away the snow with a spade and a long-handled hoe, the fox's lair, that all the last year had been searched for without success, was nakedly exposed in a thicket of beargrass that grew densely even in winter. At length a consultation began on the best method of killing the fox.

Kisuke held that if they smoked it out with red pepper, the fox, unable to bear the pungent smoke, would come yelping out of its hole, and they then could dispatch it. Tazaki, saying that it would be a shame if the fox got away, was for setting a snare at the mouth of the hole or, failing that, gunpowder. But then Seigoro, unfolding his arms and tilting his head to one side, broached a difficult matter.

"Foxes usually have more than one hole. There's bound to be an exit somewhere. If we only stop up the entrance, we'll look like real fools when the fox sneaks out the back door."

This started everybody thinking again. To find the back hole, however, in all this heavy snow, would not just be very difficult but almost impossible. Finally, after another conference that lasted so long that everyone began to shudder with the cold, it was decided that all they could do was to smoke out the hole at this end with sulfur. Tazaki made ready for firing a gun from the house. My father laid an arrow on the string of his great bow. Kisuke with a shoulder pole, Seigoro with a fire axe, and the gardener, Yasu, who just then had come by a trifle belatedly to shovel snow and was pressed into service, also with a shoulder pole, were ready for action.

My father returned briefly to the house to change into some old Western clothes. Tazaki went to the apothecary's in front of Denzuin to buy sulfur and gunpowder. The others noisily whiled away the interval with a two-quart keg of sake, from which they drank with teacups. What with one delay and another, it was almost noon by the time they finally began smoking out the mouth of the hole. I said I wanted to watch the subjugation of the fox with all the others but I was sternly kept indoors by my mother. With her and the wet nurse, I turned over and spread out as usual the pages of a storybook at the sunken hearth. Unable to stay still, however, I got up and sat down again and again. The only sound of a gun that we heard was the muffled dun of the noonday cannon at Marunouchi. Although so far away, it surprised us on clear days by rattling even the translucent paper sliding doors of our parlor. And yet the sharp report of the gun, shooting the fox dead right at the base of the cliff, would have split both my ears, I thought. The women in the house were as agitated as myself. Wouldn't somebody get bitten by the fox? Wouldn't the fox-god come rampaging into the house? Some of the women were even intoning Buddhist prayers and putting on amulets. My mother, however, gave detailed instructions for the sake treat to be served to all the people of the house.

From time to time I went out onto the veranda but not a sound came up from the bottom of the cliff. It was as if nobody was down there. There was no sign of any smoke. There was only the lonely sound of the accumulated snow slipping off from the nearby shrubbery. Although the dark sky hung low over the tops of the groves, which were shrouded by a cloudlike mist, in the snow, scattered about or lying piled in silvery, gleaming drifts, the garden was everywhere a shadowy brightness that was more than mere twilight. After I had lunch with my mother, another short while went by. I was slightly tired of waiting, and also starting to feel a sort of heartweariness. All of a sudden, there was an indescribably piteous shriek, followed by a triumphant shout of many people. Almost kicking down the paper doors, everyone rushed from the house onto the veranda. From what I heard later, the fox, suffocated by the smoking sulfur, had timorously stuck its head out at the mouth of the hole. Seigoro, waiting for it with his axe, had struck the animal a single blow. It was a lucky hit. The blade had split the fox's head right between the eyes, and the fox had dropped dead on the spot. My portly father in the vanguard, carrying his great bow, then Tazaki and Kisuke between them shouldering the long pole from which the dead fox dangled by its paws, and Seigoro and Yasukichi bringing up the rear, an orderly procession appeared at the top of the cliff. As it tramped through the snowdrifts, I was reminded of the long file of warriors, the Treasury of Loyal Retainers, which I'd seen in my picture book. How manly and heroic they all looked, I thought. Tazaki, the intrepid student-houseboy, advanced toward me and in his usual high-flown, classical manner announced, "Young master. Thus it goes. Heaven's net is wide and slow, but lets none escape." With that, he thrust the fox right under our noses. When I saw the axe-cleft skull, the muddy drops of life's blood that dripped from between the clenched fangs onto the snow, I had to hide my face behind my mother's soft sleeve.

It was decided to hold a great sake banquet in the house that afternoon. Because the heavy snowfall had prevented the fish dealer from laying in supplies, my father resolved to regale the servants and regular tradespeople with some of our freshly killed chickens. Everyone was in a great good humor. In the little yard where the fox had crept in by stealth, they grabbed two chickens and openly dispatched them. The previous fall, those two black-and-white mottled hens, chicks then, had chirped to me each day as I set out for school and when I got back. Their bodies had been enfolded in fluffy golden wings like cotton puffs. Tossing them feed and giving them small plants to eat, I'd cherished them. By now they had grown into splendidly plump mother birds. Both of them, alas, with the same pathetic squawk, had their necks wrung by the hands of Tazaki. Their feathers were plucked by the hands of Kisuke, their stomachs were cut open and the guts pulled out by the hands of Yasu. The flushed faces of the feasters, who sat up until late at night drinking sake and licking and smacking their lips, seemed to me like those of the goblins that I'd seen in my picture book.

In bed that night, I thought, Why did those people hate the fox so? Saying it was because it had killed the chicken, they had killed the fox and two more chickens besides.

From the struggle of the snake and the frog, Turgenev in his child's heart had doubted the benevolence of God. As soon as I'd begun to read literature, I doubted the meaning of the words "trial" and "punishment," as they are used in the world. Perhaps it was that killing of the fox in the distant past. Perhaps those memories had, without my knowing it, become the source of my doubt.