Boyhood 2
Back side of the main house was a two-story old white-walled warehouse. According to the grandmother of the boy, this was a remnant of a time when his family was a prosperous shipping agent and wholesaler during the Edo Period. However, many generations ago it went bankrupt, and four of the five warehouses had been taken by the hands of creditors. His father was proud that the huge lanterns in the nearby shrine had the name of his ancestor engraved as a big donator to the shrine.
Various goods were still left in the storehouse. There were old coins from the Edo, Meiji, and Showa eras, a number of postcards during the Second World War, an elaborate doll house, ornaments for a doll festival, a medical herb crusher, a long handle sward, a spear or a violin, even a shell of hand granite. In the chests and large wooden tea boxes there were a lot of Japanese clothes that couldn’t tell who was wearing them. Later the boy’s father said he bought the violin and played a popular song. When the boy was small, he did always wonder why there were such things in his place. However, over time the boy’s grandfather sold it to one by one to a nearby antique dealer for his pocket money.
The father and his wife returned to the newly built main house and the boy still used to sleep in his grandfather’s bed, literally sticking to him in the adjacent room of the storehouse, but eventually found his own place on the second floor of the old storehouse. And that became his world. He made plastic models, drew a picture, climbed the roof of the main house through the window, and looked down at the garden spreading down. In the garden, various trees such as peach, plum, pear, persimmons, oak, and pomegranate were planted, and many chickens were running freely. Occasionally, one neighbor plowed the garden field with his house. The horse silently plowed the small ground in no time, like a dedicated old friend did.
Early in the morning, the boy used to play with neighbor kids in the street in front of the house, with cards or a spinning top. On one cold winter morning, he wondered that no one was there. So he went to one of his neighbor kids. He was still in the bed with his older sister. When they opened the window, warm and stuffy air flowed out from the room. it smelled like something which stimulates instinct in his body.
On Sunday, the smoke of the straw that the grandfather was burning in the garden early in the morning came through the gappy window of the boy’s room. As the large orange flame rose behind the glass window like heat haze, the boy rushed out of the bed, wearing a wadded outer wear, sat down on the wooden bench and stared at the fire with his grandfather. From time to time, the fire suddenly blew in the headwind to another direction, as if it tried to attack his face. The flame blown by the wind eventually grew as tall as an adult height, and when the raw wood in the fire exploded, the sparks were splattered around in the air, flying in a circle, and a number of small pieces of burning straw were floating around for a while, then they turned white and slowly fell to the ground. The frosty and white ground was slowly heated and turned into black radiating outward. Behind the fence of the garden, low paddy fields spread out like a frozen background image of a medieval painting. The grandfather roasted sweet potatoes in the fire for the boy. A few chickens ran around them and in the corner of the garden, an old, faint little peach tree was blooming in small flowers.
