Boyhood 3
“In the past, this area was our property and we could go to the shrine of the neighboring village without going through the land of other people,” said his great-grandmother to her grandson. She told him that there were sometimes plunders by village people in the famine during her house was still in power, and when the family was attacked by the people, family members were scared and hiding shakily behind the chests.
In the the village, there were swamps spread here and there, but they were successively reclaimed into paddy fields. The family had already gone bankrupt and became farmer. The grandmother of the boy was born into this famer-family and she got married the second son of a nearby tiler. She had an older sister, who had been married in Tokyo but divorced back, living alone in a separate house across the road. The woman, named Kuroda, used to give the boy a one-yen bill with Prince Shotoku every time when he visited her.
On a typhoon day the boy returned home early from school and a strong dull, lukewarm wind was gustily shaking the plum trees up, down and left and right. There were many trees on both sides of the street between Kuroda’s house and the boy’s, and plum fruits mixed with red and green color had fallen and filling the ground. The boy had some excitement in the lukewarm air which was brought by the intensifying storm.
On the left side of the entrance of the boy’s house, there was another small house separate from the main house. The boy’s father lived there at the time of his second marriage, but when Kuroda died, he moved to her house for a while to rebuild his old main house. The house near the entrance was vacant. The boy sometimes sneaked there with interest. The clothes of his stepmother were packed in chests, but the room was not cleaned and when he opened the backdoor, a gloomy air drifted in his nose. There was a simple kitchen in the corner of the room, but there wasn’t a slight sign that people lived in it. One day the boy heard a sound behind the ceiling, he looked into the ceiling above the closet, he found the carcass of a rat. Another day when the boy returned from elementary school, his two younger sisters were playing with matches and trusses of straws in front of the house were just in flames. The boy hurriedly poured a bucket of water to extinguish the fire, but the two were watching it with no movement. Large sunflowers and cosmos were in full bloom in the garden in front of the house just like his sisters, as if nothing happened.
