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  By the time Kazuo and Yasuo arrived at Hikari Yu, it was a quarter after seven. When they entered the changing area, they smelled cedar mixed with steam—the special odor of the bathhouse. The bathing area, separated from the changing room by a glass door, had only five or six people inside.

  Yasuo tossed his clothing into a bamboo basket and frowned as he looked around. “I bet everybody else is at home right now watching The Three Stooges.”

  “Nothing we can do about that, and you know it. Be a man and hurry up.” Kazuo figured Yasuo was more upset about having his Gourd Island model taken away than about missing The Three Stooges.

  Urging Yasuo along, Kazuo headed to the bathing area holding his basin with the soap and hand towel inside.

  The bathing area was filled with hot, humid air. They sat at a faucet near the center of the scrubbing area, which consisted of three rows of faucets. They poured hot water over themselves till they were warm, then rubbed soap on their towels and scrubbed themselves from head to toe. They could feel the pores all over their bodies gradually opening after being shut tight against the cold outdoors.

  Scrubbing: Before taking a Japanese bath, you completely wash your body outside the tub, soaping up and scrubbing vigorously, and then rinsing. After that, you go into the tub just to soak. In Japan, you never soap up in the tub and never bring your towel into the tub.

  “Hey, Niichan.” Yasuo poked Kazuo in the side. “Isn’t that Keiko-chan over there?” Yasuo jerked his jaw toward a faucet to their right. Through the steam Kazuo could see the back of a short man who had two girls with him.

  It was not unusual for girls to be brought into the men’s bath by their fathers. Kazuo had been taken into the women’s bath by his mother until early in first grade. When his classmates began to tease him, he went to the men’s side.

  But Keiko Sasaki was a fourth-grader just like Kazuo. Would a girl in fourth grade really come into the men’s bath, even with her father? Figuring Yasuo must be seeing things, Kazuo peered through the steam at the three figures. Immediately next to the man sat a tiny girl with a short, bobbed haircut, and next to her was a bigger girl whose hair was a bit longer. Perhaps because the two girls had just finished washing their hair, it was wet and gleamed dark black.

  Kazuo looked closely at the profile of the girl who sat on the end. Her hair fell to her pale shoulders, and he could just make out large eyes and thin lips. Perhaps because of the steam in the bathing area, her cheeks were slightly pink. She looked different than Keiko normally looked, but those eyes and lips were definitely hers.

  The instant he realized the girl was Keiko Sasaki, his heart began to beat so forcefully that he thought it might stop completely.

  I shouldn’t look! He quickly averted his eyes from her and her family. Looking at the floor, he continued to scrub his body with his soapy towel.

  “I wonder why Keiko-chan and her sister are here,” Yasuo said innocently.

  Not answering, Kazuo continued to look down and scrub.

  “Hey, Niichan, let’s wash each other’s backs,” Yasuo said.

  “Not tonight. Let’s each do our own.” Kazuo didn’t want Yasuo to sense the unease in his body.

  “Why? You’re weird,” Yasuo told him. Then he washed up by himself and headed to the main tub. Kazuo remained alone at his faucet, slowly continuing to wash. The soap he had first rubbed on his towel was almost completely gone now, so he rubbed on some more, his hand trembling a little.

  Good grief, what’s wrong with me? he thought, growing irritated with himself for getting so nervous.

  At last, Kazuo saw from the corner of his eye that Keiko’s family was leaving the washing area for the changing room. Her body, as she stood up, was white and slender, and looked a little like a small fish.

  As soon as her family disappeared, he breathed a huge sigh of relief. Then he poured basins full of water over himself to wash away the soap bubbles plastered all over him.

  The next morning, when he and Yasuo left the house for school, Kazuo saw Keiko standing at the entrance to company housing. He took a big breath and tried to walk casually by her.

  “Nakamoto-kun.” Keiko spoke to Kazuo as he passed.

  He stopped in his tracks and looked at her. He could see that she wanted to tell him something.

  “Oi, Yasuo, you go on ahead.” After sending Yasuo on his way, Kazuo stood in front of Keiko and kicked a pebble around. “Was there something you needed?”

  “It’s about yesterday.” Keiko spoke softly and didn’t look at him. “My mother had a cold and my father needed me to help look after Yasuko, so I went because I had to.”

  “Okay, got it.” He avoided meeting her eyes, concentrating on his feet instead. “You don’t have to worry about me saying anything. I don’t chatter on and on like girls do.”

  “Thanks.” She smiled, showing her white teeth. Then she began to walk off to school, her back straight as always.

  He sighed a little as he watched her go. He found himself wishing that he had looked just a little more at her white, fish-like body. But when he considered that he had intentionally decided not to look at her, he felt much better.

  Who in his right mind tenses up when seeing a body that looks like a fish anyway? he thought a second later. The racing of his heart yesterday might have been just a dream. He laughed to himself and kicked the pebble at his feet again.

  Then, thinking he would catch up with Yasuo, he ran as fast as he could down the road to school.

  Kazuo’s Typical Tokyo Saturday

  Every once in a while, Kazuo liked to walk around his part of Tokyo by himself. He would get in the mood to ramble without Yasuo or Nobuo along, and so he would head off without a destination.

  He often did this on Saturday afternoons, after school had adjourned in the morning and he, his mother, and Yasuo had eaten lunch together. He would leave the house with the excuse that he was “going to play with Nobuo.”

  Saturday: Japanese public schools held classes on some or all Saturday mornings for many years. Workers often also worked a half-day on Saturdays. Saturday has been a public school holiday since 2002.

  He loved Saturday afternoons. Everybody did, of course, because work and school had ended and Sunday was a holiday. To Kazuo, time seemed to pass more slowly. The whole town appeared to take a collective deep breath and sprawl out on the floor, forgetting the week’s troubles. Walking around Tokyo as it exhaled this way was something Kazuo deeply enjoyed. Sometimes, he crossed the Haneto River, with its stench of factory wastewater that made him want to plug his nose, and headed toward Hara. Other times, he walked past the big houses on the hill in District 4, where he had seen Minoru and his father hauling their scrap cart, and ventured as far as the next ward. Or he went through the West Ito shopping area, where Nobuo’s house was, and walked the maze of narrow alleyways behind it, which was where Nishino-kun lived.

  He had recently begun to realize that the streets of Tokyo were changing. They had been changing, it seemed, ever since the Tokyo Olympics the year before last.

  Tokyo: The main area of the city of Tokyo (population 13 million) is made up of 23 municipalities, commonly called “wards.” Shinagawa Ward, where Kazuo lives, is in the southeastern section of Tokyo and is considered a working-class area.

  Dirt roads that had filled with puddles when it rained had been paved over, and old wooden houses had been knocked down and replaced with new stucco homes. Tokyo Tower, whose red iron tip Kazuo had once been able to see from the District 4 hill, had become invisible, probably because so many new buildings now blocked it from view. Just as Father’s older brother Yoshio had said when he visited their family before New Year’s, construction had been going on all over Tokyo before the Olympics. Huge stadiums had been built, highways had been routed through the center of the city, and the fastest bullet train in the world had begun regular service between Tokyo and Osaka.

  Tokyo Tower: A tall communications and observation tower in central Tokyo. Inspired by t
he Eiffel Tower in Paris, it is 1,091 feet (332 meters) high. It was built in 1958 to host antennas for Tokyo’s growing broadcast industry in the postwar period. It is now a popular tourist destination.

  Then again, the construction of new buildings was not the only reason Tokyo Tower was harder to see. Kazuo had learned on the TV news that exhaust fumes from cars were dirtying the air. He himself had observed that the number of cars on the road was increasing at a very high rate.

  He used to be able to cross National Highway One, which intersected the south end of the West Ito shopping area, even with no pedestrian crossing signal. But now there were so many cars that walking across the highway without a signal was impossible.

  He did not feel that all this change was bad. Car fumes dirtying the air was certainly a problem, but the tall buildings and automobiles showed that Japan was becoming wealthier. At school, the students still had to drink that awful miruku, but that was a different story.

  A busy intersection in Shinagawa Ward.

  One Saturday, Kazuo finished lunch and told his mother that he was going to the lot to play. Then he began to walk in the direction of the West Ito shopping area, the January wind gusting around him. There was still plenty of time before the late-afternoon rush, when the area would bustle with shoppers. Only a few people passed him on the street now.

  He reached the center of the shopping area and saw Takahashi Meats, the shop owned by Nobuo’s family. He could smell the delicious aroma of croquettes and see Nobuo’s mother frying them at the front of the store. Nobuo was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he was in the back mashing boiled potatoes for the croquettes. Or maybe he was upstairs where the family lived, shirking his chores and getting lost in a comic book.

  Pachinko: A kind of vertical pinball machine. A steel ball is launched into the top, and as it drops down the face of the board it hits against pins and bumpers. If it falls into a pocket along the way you win additional balls, and the more balls you win the better the reward at the end. Pachinko machines are loud with flashing lights and are mostly found at pachinko “parlors,” noisy arcades that may have hundreds of machines all blinking and beeping at once.

  Whatever the case, Kazuo did not want to be noticed, so he crossed the street and walked quickly past the Takahashis’ shop. He glanced back. Still busy frying the croquettes, Nobuo’s mother did not seem to have noticed him. He exhaled softly and headed for the train station, feeling a little guilty.

  Next to the station was Chujiya, the bar where his father often stopped on his way home. Smoke would be billowing from the yakitori chicken barbecue by late afternoon, but right now the doors were closed. Two buildings down, at the pachinko hall, he could hear music and the constant clicking of metal balls.

  Until last year, the pachinko hall had been a cinema called the Ito Theater. It had shown movies for children during the school holidays, and it was here that the children of West Ito had watched, on the edge of their seats, as Godzilla took on Mothra and King Ghidorah and King Kong and wreaked havoc in the cities of Japan.

  Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Japanese movie monsters popular in the 1960s. Godzilla would destroy things by stomping on them or smashing them with his tail, or by burning them with his atomic fire breath. Mothra resembled a giant butterfly or moth. She (Mothra is considered a female) is sometimes a friend to and sometimes an enemy of Godzilla. King Ghidorah was a dragonlike creature from outer space with two legs, three heads on long necks, large wings, and two tails. King Kong: A giant ape from American films that became popular around the world. The movieKing Kong vs. Godzilla was produced in 1962.

  But in the spring of the previous year, the Ito Theater had suddenly closed. That had come as a big shock to Kazuo. Father said it was because everybody had gotten a TV set and stopped going out to the theaters.

  “Used to be we didn’t have any TV at all, so movies and plays were the best entertainment there was. Week in and week out, people would look up which movie stars were in which movies and then go out to see them.”

  Father spoke while staring at the TV’s tiny black-andwhite screen. A samurai was fending off his attackers.

  “Even the tiniest towns had a movie theater or two,” he continued. “So you could see a movie close to home, and it didn’t cost very much. But now there’s a TV set in every house. Nobody bothers going to the theater anymore, unless there’s a movie they really want to see. It’s no wonder the little local cinemas are hurting for business.

  “TV has its good points and its bad points,” he added, “but there’s nothing you can do about the times changing.”

  Now, listening to the clicking of metal balls through the glass in the pachinko hall’s front door, Kazuo found himself remembering how a kamishibai man used to perform on Tuesdays in a side street near company housing.

  Kamishibai: Japanese “paper theater.” Kamishibai grew popular in the 1930s and involved a performer/narrator visiting a neighborhood and setting up a wooden stage, where he would tell a story using picture cards to illustrate the action. Many times the story would end in a cliffhanger to make sure the audience would come to the next show. The performer sold candy and traveled from town to town or block to block. As Japan modernized and TV took over, kamishibai became old-fashioned and died out. (But TV itself was first called denki kamishibai, or electric kamishibai!)

  Those kamishibai performances, in which the man told stories while showing colorfully illustrated panels in a wooden stage, were one of Kazuo’s greatest delights.

  The kamishibai man always came at three o’clock on Tuesdays, carrying illustrated kamishibai cards and cheap sweets in a big wooden box on the back of his black bicycle. When he arrived, he would bang his wooden clappers together to summon the children. Then the children would pay five yen apiece for wafer-thin rice crackers spread with just the tiniest bit of apricot jam, syrup, or savory sauce.

  After a group of children had bought their sweets, the man would raise the top portion of his wooden box to create a stage. He would then slide his illustrated cards into and out of the stage as he performed a kamishibai. Sometimes, he told adventure stories about the young ninja Sarutobi Sasuke or the Golden Bat—“a friend of justice who fights evil.” Other times, the children heard about a young girl in search of her long-lost mother, or about the funny Happy-Go-Lucky Boy, or they enjoyed quizzes. The kami­shibai man had different voices for different characters, and the children would be completely drawn into the world of the story that unfolded before them. The performances probably lasted only ten or fifteen minutes, but to Kazuo, they were as thrilling as a one- or two-hour movie.

  Sarutobi Sasuke: A legendary ninja in Japanese folklore. Ninja are spies who dress all in black and perform amazing acrobatic feats to scale walls and trees. Known for his agility, Sarutobi Sasuke is said to have been raised by monkeys in the wild (the name “Sarutobi” means “monkey jump”). Golden Bat: A Japanese superhero from the 1930s. Golden Bat is perhaps the first Japanese superhero. He was said to have come from the lost culture of Atlantis to protect the modern world from evil. He had a very muscular body, a red cape, and a skull for a face, and he carried a powerful scepter that could create lightning and earthquakes.

  Around the time he started school, however, the kamishibai man had stopped coming. That was just before Kazuo’s family got a TV set, on which American shows such as Father Knows Best, Popeye the Sailor, and Tom and Jerry, and Japanese-made programs such as Moonlight Mask were being broadcast every day. These programs were not necessarily more interesting than kamishibai, but it was easier to stay home and watch the performances on the black-and-white screen.

  After he left the pachinko parlor, Kazuo walked along a road that followed the train tracks. Right next to him, a train of four cars sped off into the distance with its caution whistle blowing. The fact that Tokyo was quickly changing, and that the movie theater and kamishibai man had disappeared, was not something he could blame entirely on the Olympics or TV, he realized. He himself, and Nobuo and Yasu
o, and Mother and Father, and the many people living around them, had begun to prefer the new Tokyo over the old. He wondered if this was good or bad.

  And if he knew one thing for sure, it was that his city would continue to change.

  February

  A Farewell in the Snow

  That February brought fifteen centimeters of snow, which for Tokyo was a very heavy snowfall.

  It began snowing on February 3, which was Setsubun, the day before the first day of spring. On Setsubun, members of every household shouted, “Out with demons, in with good fortune!” Then they scattered dried soybeans around the house to ward off bad luck.

  Setsubun: Bean-throwing ceremony day, February 3. In the old calendar Setsubun was associated with the Lunar New Year, so it was a time for chasing away the evils of the past and welcoming in good fortune. Roasted soybeans are tossed at a family member wearing a demon mask while everyone yells Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi! (“Out with demons! In with good fortune!”). The “demon” then runs away, and the family munches on more beans to gather in the luck they hope to have in the year ahead.

  Kazuo’s family was no exception. Every Setsubun, Father would leave work promptly and come straight home, without stopping at the yakitori bar by the station. Then Mother, Kazuo, and Yasuo would face Father, who put on a demon mask that Kazuo and Yasuo had made, and they would shout, “Out with demons!” and toss beans at him. Father would cry, “Ouch, ouch!” very dramatically and run from the kitchen to Kazuo and Yasuo’s room, then to the living room, and then outside. Once the demon had been chased outside, Father would remove the mask and the entire family would stand in front of the open front door, chanting, “In with good fortune, in with good fortune,” inviting good fortune in by sprinkling more beans.