Kensuke, 5

Continued…

With all the classmates working together, they cleaned the classroom, and then the hallway. The best part was racing from one end of the hall to the other, bent over damp rags which they held pressed to the floor. Four boys in a line racing to one end and then back left the floor shining clean. They rinsed the rags and hung them on a drying rod, then pounded the blackboard erasers against the wall of the maintenance shed.

With books packed snug in the satchel slung over his shoulders, Kensuke danced his way neatly through the press of students heading for the front gate. Halfway there he met Yûki and Teiji. Fumio had beat them all and was by then on his way to visit his grandmother in Mitaka. The three friends passed through the gate and walked off toward the ice cream shop for an ice cream cone. On the way, Yûki and Teiji changed their minds half a dozen times over which flavor to have that day. Kensuke never varied his choice, having always the chocolate.

“Hey, look at the crabs!” Teiji had dashed over to the baskets of shellfish in front of the fish market. “Look how big they are,” he shouted.

The crabs were twitching and pushing themselves through a mass of tangled legs and pincers, trying to find the water. They were large and brownish red with big pincers and tiny black peppercorn eyes.

“I bet you won’t pick that one up by the claws,” Yûki dared Teiji.

Teiji was reaching out for the crab when the man inside shouted through the open door. “Hey, you boys! Get away from those fish or I’ll come out there and stretch your ears for you.”

The three of them tore off down the street laughing and imitating the old man. The ice cream shop was just a block away and they shouted bets at each other as to who would get there first. Dodging in and out of other people on the street, and almost knocking a woman off her bicycle, they tumbled in the door of the shop arguing over who had gotten there first.

Inside, Mr Yamada was leaning over the counter wiping milk spots from one of the stools, and without raising his eyes he offered a booming hello to the boys. And then without so much as a breath began to tell them about his sister’s problem cooking the rice just right. He lived in the rear of the store with his sister, a living arrangement that from all appearances added a great deal of excitement to his days. Kensuke and the other boys thought he was a little odd, but they were fond of him nonetheless. He always treated them well and let them read the comics without buying them.

The three boys squeezed into a corner beside the rack of comic books, each working on an ice cream cone, catching drips before they ran down the cone, enjoying probably the happiest minutes of the day. Mr Yamada’s complaints about sisters and rice rolled on, but the boys were unhearing, far away in a world of comic book heroes.

Kensuke sat there on the floor reading for half an hour, then got up to go home. He said goodbye, but the only response came from Mr Yamada, his friends too deep in their comics to pay much attention to his leaving.

“Aoki-kun, you the smartest boy in the class?” Mr Yamada leaned on the counter, his chinned propped in one hand, a soapy rag in the other.

Like many of the old man’s questions, Kensuke thought this one too was a little weird. He wiped his hands on a handkerchief, stuffed it back in his pocket, stammered for a moment and then answered.

“I don’t think so, Mr Yamada. There are some pretty smart students in the class, but it would sure make my parents happy if I can become one of them.”

Mr Yamada’s eyes slowly narrowed to a frown, and giving Kensuke a long perplexed look, he grunted and turned to the rear of the shop. “Chikako!” he roared.

Kensuke slipped as quickly as possible out the door of the shop and as the door closed he heard again Mr Yamada’s loud voice calling his sister.

Walking along without much purpose and in no particular hurry, Kensuke looked at the faces that passed him on the street, and at others in the open fronted shops along the way. Some he knew, some were strangers. Many had an expression that betrayed hurry and impatience, something he had failed to notice before and now didn’t understand. Why was everyone in a hurry to get somewhere, or to finish what they were doing?

At the tender age of twelve, Kensuke didn’t yet recognize these expressions as something shaped by the furious pace of Japan’s economy, and was still unaware that Tamade Primary School was only the first step toward thrusting him into that speeding and impatient cycle.

Final pages tomorrow…

Kensuke, 3

Continued…

Without Fumio there would be no after-lunch Indian wrestling that day, so Kensuke thought instead he would go to the school library. Maybe there would be some new magazines. He returned his lunch tray and passed on through the doors at the far end of the cafeteria. Leaving behind the shouts and laughter that filled that room every day, he dashed off to buy a drink from the vending machines near the nurse’s room.

After a second or two of indecision, he settled on coffee milk and dropped a hundred yen into the coin slot. Taking the carton of coffee milk out of the chute, he realized that he now had only enough money left for a small ice cream cone after school. Well, no matter, he thought, opening the carton and taking a big gulp, leaving a milky brown mustache over his top lip.

Turning and moving off toward the library, Kensuke noticed Sachiko Arai standing about ten paces away. She was pretending to read a book, but was in fact watching Kensuke closely.

“Hello, Sachiko! You haven’t been at school since Monday. You been sick?”

“Thank you for asking, but no, I have not been sick. My family had to go to Kobe. Our relatives live there.” Sachiko’s voice was soft, and today seemed more restrained than usual.

“Oh yeah? Did they have a wedding, or something?”

Staring at the ground between them, slow to answer, Kensuke sensed something wrong. He wondered if he had blurted out something impolite. He was about to say he was sorry when Sachiko spoke.

“No, not a wedding…it was a funeral. There is terrible sadness in my aunt’s house, because last week she lost her daughter.” Sachiko’s voice had become even quieter and Kensuke had to lean closer to hear.

For a moment he felt embarrassed, not knowing how to respond to Sachiko’s words. He moved a step closer and pulling from his pocket a Rocket Bar, he extended his hand offering her the chocolate. Sachiko smiled, but shook her head to say no thanks.

“Sachiko-chan, here… Share this chocolate with me while we walk over to see the fish,” Kensuke said, referring to the sixty-liter aquarium with a collection of tropical fish in the library.

Sachiko accepted the Rocket Bar this time. Kensuke had boosted her spirits a little, and she gave back a wan smile. As they walked slowly along the path leading behind the playground to the library, Sachiko debated with herself whether or not to tell her friend about the cousin in Kobe. A sense of family privacy warned her against speaking about such to anyone outside the family. At the same time she was deeply confused and wanted the help of a friend who might help her understand the terrible thing that had happened in Kobe.

The cousin in Kobe, an eighteen year-old girl had flung herself from the roof of her school. This happened not at a high school, but at a cram school, a large preparatory school where as many as one hundred students crowded into a classroom, all struggling to prepare themselves for the next round of university entrance examinations. All the students were making a second or third attempt to pass the examinations they failed the first time around. Each student attended class with the fervent hope that next time would bring success, and open the doors to university.

Before jumping from the seventh floor of the school building, Sachiko’s cousin had removed all identification from her clothing, and left her schoolbag and shoes neatly aligned at the roof’s parapet. On her white blouse she had pinned a note reading, ‘I have passed the examination to heaven.’

The girl’s mother had wept bitterly at the revelation that no one, neither teacher nor classmates could put a name to her daughter’s face.

Keeping her voice even, speaking almost as if it were about a stranger, Sachiko told Kensuke the story of her cousin’s suicide. It wasn’t hard for Kensuke to read the pain in those words, no matter how calm the voice of his friend. They had stopped walking and were sitting on a bench beneath a large pine tree near the doors of the library. The bench was old and tattooed on every surface with the scratched names of students long gone from Tamade Primary School, and as she spoke, Sachiko ran her fingers over and over the worn markings, as though looking for an explanation in those old names. Kensuke listened quietly to her words, words that had begun to separate him from the carefree beginnings of afternoon.

“I am confused about why my cousin did such a thing. My mother has explained it to me, but it only makes me understand it less,” her plaint reaching out to Kensuke in the hope that he might help her understand this terrible action.

Unknown to Sachiko, her story of this cousin’s death in Kobe had taken Kensuke’s thoughts far away. He sat without speaking, unaware for the moment of the girl beside him. Beneath the quiet mask of his face his head thundered at the memory of a friend in Namba, crushed beneath the wheels of a speeding subway. Just like Sachiko’s cousin in Kobe, Kensuke’s friend had found the pressures of entrance exams too much to bear. But in his case it was entrance exams to a private junior high school. The girl in Kobe had been eighteen, the boy in Namba thirteen.

Kensuke had been devastated by the death of his Namba friend. It had brought to him an acute awareness of pressures he had not imagined, and that now lay on his own horizon. For several weeks before his friend had killed himself, Kensuke has noticed something troubling him. The days and weeks of study all aimed at passing one examination had not gone unnoticed, and he watched his friend grow sullen and retreat from friends. Then he began to skip his cram school classes and to stay away from home. He fought bitterly with his parents, a scene Kensuke unwillingly overheard from the back garden of their home. The last time he had seen Hiro, Kensuke noticed that all the light and life of his friend had drained away.

For days afterward, Kensuke had badgered his mother for an explanation of his friend’s motives. He did not understand the depth of such difficulties, for it was not in his experience. He was happy at school and unfamiliar with something like the pressure of examinations. For the first time he considered the possibility of such an examination hell, fearing that it could happen to him. Both mother and father did their best to calm Kensuke, but he was nonetheless left with a dread of entrance examinations.

Continued tomorrow…

Kensuke, 2

Continued…

Kensuke and the other students washed their calligraphy brushes and tidied up the mess of crumpled practice sheets and the splotches of spilled ink, making the classroom and themselves ready for the next lesson of the day.

By the time everything was straightened and in its proper place, the blackboard was filled with math problems, and Mrs Wakita stood with chalk in hand. Kensuke never felt completely comfortable during the math lessons, not because of any particular weakness in the subject, but because his teacher was very demanding in this subject. For that small measure of discomfort though, Kensuke was benefitting from Mrs Wakita’s stern methods. And so, for the next forty-five minutes he set himself to the problems on the blackboard.

“Aoki-kun?”

Kensuke involuntarily jumped at the sound of his name, spoken in a manner that indicated a question about one of the problems was next. His throat tightened as he rose to his feet.

“Yes, sensei.”

“Please come to the blackboard and explain the solution to this problem.” She tapped the blackboard to indicate the first problem.

Solving the problem should have presented no difficulty to Kensuke. It was a problem in fractions, and to Kensuke was not especially complicated. But under the stern eye of the teacher he stumbled through the problem, erasing his results more than once, and taking twice the time it would have, had no one been watching. Finally, laying down the chalk and eraser, he turned reluctantly to his teacher, both hands now white with chalk dust.

“Perhaps a little extra time on your math tonight, Aoki-kun. Would that be time well spent, do you think?”

“Yes, sensei. I will study tonight and do better tomorrow.”

The remainder of the math study passed in relative ease, with other students going to the blackboard in turn to work out a problem and Mrs Wakita guiding them through the correct steps, or difficult sections. At the end of their study students turned in their notebooks to be looked over by the teacher.

Kensuke was sorry that his class couldn’t visit once more Fujitsu Computer. Last week Mrs Wakita, along with the new science teacher Miss Nakatani, had arranged to take the class to Fujitsu to tour their research and development department. At the sight of the computers, Kensuke’s eyes had been like two great saucers. He could hardly believe the speed at which processed information poured out of these giant “brains.” His favorite part had been the time given students to ask questions and tap keys on the one of the computers. Everyone had laughed when three students input several commands one after another, and after a loud ringing noise a message popped up on the screen saying, ‘Too many questions!’ Later, the students learned that Miss Nakatani had arranged with the Fujitsu engineers to have the computer do that as a joke.

He pushed on with the math problems, his mind moving quickly through the numbers. Kensuke looked at the problems as he would a puzzle, without drudgery, but with eagerness over how the numbers would fit together to make an answer. Near the end, his notebook showed a neat page of numbers and fractions all arranged into what he hoped were correct answers. For the remaining minutes before lunch he sat daydreaming about the day he would be a great baseball star and become good friends with Japan’s king of baseball, Oh Sadaharu.

He imagined himself together with the great man roaring down the highway in a neat little sports car, two beautiful girls laughing in the cramped rear seat. He had smashed two home runs in that day’s game, and now he and his friends were driving down to Misaki for an evening of dinner and dancing. One of the girls was Oh’s girlfriend, and the other was a glamorous movie star Kensuke had met at a party. He went to a party every night, and…

“Ken-chan! Hurry up! We’re going to be last in line for lunch.”

Fumio’s voice startled Kensuke back to the present. Mrs Wakita stood by the door waiting for notebooks to be turned in, and he quickly handed over his own.

Lunch on Thursday was often curry and rice, and a favorite among all the students. When Kensuke and Fumio reached the cafeteria there was a long line up of students at the serving line, but it didn’t take them long to get their lunch of curry with rice, and a small bowl of fruit cocktail.

Kensuke was jabbering away about a recent baseball game between the Yomiuri Giants and the Hanshin Tigers and not really paying much attention to what Fumio was doing. He didn’t notice that his friend was firing cherries and grapes across the room, using his chopsticks as a sling. Neither did Fumio notice the school Principal, Mr Nagasawa entering the cafeteria. Unfortunately for Fumio he walked right into the line of fire and caught a cherry broadside on the nose. Suddenly the cafeteria became deadly quiet as the Principal stood there with a line of red cherry juice running down his face, his mouth agape.

Almost before Kensuke had time to look up from his curry, Mr Nagasawa crossed the room and grabbed Fumio by the collar, pulling him out of his chair and onto tiptoes.

“Good day, young Mr Hattori. You are caught I’m afraid, and now we shall see what happens to boys who throw their food at other people!” Holding tightly to Fumio’s collar, Mr Nagasawa led him off toward the administration offices, dabbing at his cherry-stained face with a white handkerchief.

Continued tomorrow…