LITMIR.BIZ

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      When she became aware of my purpose in coming, she merely nodded and said, "I don't remember anything. But my mother's aunt is still alive, and she may have something to tell you." Mako herself guided me to the place in the city where Kichi Dai lived.

      Sitting beside me, Mako came up only to the shoulders of my five-foot-two-inch frame. The diminutive Mako told me quite frankly, "My daughter living in Tokyo has presented me with a grandchild. She's the daughter I left with my former husband, but nowadays she and I keep in touch with one another. Yes, the husband I divorced has already died. Well, I've had nothing but trouble from my parents." Saying this, Mako humorously made the pupils of her eyes spin around.

      From the time she entered school to the time she started working and then got married, Mako had been raised in an age when everything was tinged with militarism, so she had been subjected to unjust pressures and an unjust fate merely because she was Sakae Osugi's daughter. This I could fully imagine from having been brought up during the same period myself.

      "Like the time I entered a girls' high school. I had been staying with my grandfather here until I finished elementary school, but I went to high school from the house of an uncle on my father's side who lived in Yokohama. At that time I expected, quite naturally, to take the prefectural high school entrance examination, but my teachers wouldn't let me. Even though I might have passed with good marks, my teachers, needless to say, knew I couldn't get in because I was Osugi's child. That's why I entered the private Koran Girls' High School. So this event, you see, serves as a model for everything else in my life."

      Her talking so indifferently of her own affairs, as if she were speaking about someone else, struck home all the more forcefully to me.

      "Apparently I was doted on by my father, but I have no memory of that at all. Even those incidents I think I have remembered are from books I read afterwards or are 'images' I got from listening to others, so I feel as if my memories have been made out of them. According to what was written in a book of my father's, a man tailing him by keeping close watch from in front of our house would wonder if my father had given him the slip or not, and he would ask me about him while I was playing outside. When he asked me, 'Is your papa in?' I would say yes, and even when he asked, 'Is your papa out?' I would say yes. And then when he asked me if my father was at home or not, it seems I gave him two yes answers. I was told that the person shadowing my father complained to my parents that he was no match for little Mako. When I was told about such events, I somehow came to believe that I really had those experiences. When I saw my father's books describing those occasions he had taken me to an inn along the coast where he often went to do his work, a kind of vague memory loomed that I had walked along the same seashore with him. All my memories are of this sort. Since my sisters were much younger than I, they can't have had any memories, can they? But, you know, strangely enough, there's only one scene I remember clearly. It was when my father wasn't at home for some reason or other, and we were living in a two-story house. Every time we heard a crowd of people at our front door, my mother's face took on an unusually frightened look, and she forced me up to the second floor, saying, 'Don't come down, no matter what!' I heard Kenji Kondo continually shouting something at the entrance of our house. Mere child that I was, I became frightened, and stretching only my neck out from the upstairs landing, I secretly glanced below. I found my mother sitting resolutely in the very center of the lowest step on the staircase with a bucketful of ashes held tight across her lap.

      "That strange posture of my mother sitting smack down there and that bucketful of ashes have remained remarkably vivid before my eyes. I suppose my feeling of fear and my mother's somehow reliable figure and that bucket of ashes were strange even to a child. I guess she intended to defend us with those ashes if anyone broke into our house.

      "Oddly enough, my father left me at home the very day he was murdered. Perhaps he had a premonition after all, because wherever he went, he always wanted to take me with him. But on just that day, he left me behind with our neighbor, Mr. Roan Uchida.

      "My father was very kind to his relatives, so he was worried about his younger brother's family at Tsurumi, and he was anxious to visit them as soon as possible. He had gone out with my mother, intending to bring my uncle's family back to our house because they had suffered a great deal during the Great Kanto Earthquake. My uncle, though, was ill in bed, so for the time being they brought back only my little cousin Soichi. That was when the trouble occurred. If on that day my father had taken me along as usual, I would have been killed with all of them.

      "Thinking about the event afterwards, Mr. Uchida told me that in spite of the fact that I always left with my father when he went away, it was strange that I hadn't even run after him on that day. I was playing over at Mr. Uchida's every day, and I was really there more than I was in my own house."

      I couldn't bring myself to ask Mako, who was speaking to me in such a free manner, if she remembered anything further about the day her parents died.

      Roan Uchida, in his book The Last Days of Osugi, has left us some notes on Mako's condition during the days before and after her parents' murder.

      On the day they died, Osugi and Noe had departed from their house in clothing so European in style that Uchida mistook them for a European couple working at the Seisho Gakuin Mission School. But even then Mako, who was playing at Uchida's, said, "Oh, Papa and Mama!" and she jumped up and ran out, only to turn back immediately.

      "Papa and Mama are going to my uncle's in Tsurumi, and they may be staying there tonight," Mako said, and all through the afternoon she played on at Uchida's. But her parents never returned.

      Though practically everyone at home was almost convinced that Osugi and Noe had been assassinated, Mako was still playing cheerfully. Even in the morning, when the coldblooded murders of Osugi and his wife and nephew were finally announced, Mako came over to Uchida's house. He describes it thus:

      The members of my family, who already knew about the deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Osugi, finished their breakfast in silence. Since I felt Mako would probably come over to play today too, I warned my children, "Don't say anything about Mako's papa!" Even though they were too young to understand, they nodded wordlessly with an expression on their faces that something terrible had happened.

      After a while, just as we expected, Mako came in through the back door as usual. When she saw us, she said immediately, "My papa and mama are both dead. My uncle and grandfather went to get them, so they'll bring them back by car today." The person she mentioned as her grandfather was Noe's uncle, who had rushed up to Tokyo after hearing in his distant hometown in Kyushu about the Osugi tragedy, news of which had spread faster in the districts than it had in the capital.

      Coming into the parlor and seeing my wife there, Mako once again said, "Mrs. Uchida, my papa and mama were murdered. It's probably in today's paper."

      I had strictly bidden my children, "Don't say anything about Mako's papa!" thinking I didn't want to bruise her poor young heart even a trifle, but clever little Mako already knew everything. Yet she was only an unthinking child of six. Even though she knew about the miserable fate of her father and mother, she was playing innocently as usual. Sensing that Mako was miserable, my child who was the same age gave her all her treasured dolls and stacks of colored paper decorated with lively designs.

      Laughing, I asked Mako if she disliked her strange name, as I noticed that although she had retained the name she had changed the way of writing it from "Demon Child" to "True Child." In similar fashion, Ema had become Emiko ("Laughing Child"), and Louise, Ruiko ("Mindful Child").

      "Well, my parents' old friends in Tokyo still call me Mako when they see me. It's not a bad name," she said, a bright smile on her face.

      While we were carrying on this kind of conversation inside the automobile, we found ourselves at Tsunehiko Dai's house in Chiyomachi. Kichi Dai, the younger sister of Noe's father Yokichi, had married Tsunehiko's son Junsuke. She had taken charge of Noe in her primary school days, and even in those Tokyo days when Noe went to a girls' high school, Kichi Dai had let Noe commute from the Dai house. During her maturing period Noe had been more intimately connected to Kichi than even to her own parents. Now Kichi's home was managed by her grandchild.

      We found no one else at home that day due to her

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