He came by with the youngest Tendou girl, and I figured he had to be her new iinazuke. Tendou had been blabbing it around for days, he finally had a boy to marry one of his daughters and inherit his precious dojo, as if all young Akane’s years of training were worth nothing. He’s a fossil, that Tendou, just like my father. Shameful thing in a fellow young enough to be my own son; you’d think people would have learned a few things since the war but Tendou was always old-fashioned, not to mention that he hasn’t been able to cope with any kind of change or anything else since his wife died. And Kimiko was such a spirited little thing, too, I could never figure out what she saw in him.
Anyway, they came racing by just as I was out with my bucket and dipper. My neighbors think I’m old-fashioned and eccentric, but when I was young everyone dampened the street in front of their houses. It settles the dust and helps keep things clean, and shows respect to the kami. I may be progressive about things like marriage, and women working, but the older I get the more I value the old graciousness. Everything is so rush, rush, rush nowadays. Nobody cares about the old traditions except old ladies like me, and the young folks think I’m an old fool. He ran straight into a dipperful of water, and before I could say gomen nasai, he was… a girl!
If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it.
As if that weren’t enough, there were the others. The panda. The pig. The duck. The cat. The… I don’t know what that thing was. Some of the neighbors started getting scared, talking darkly of hauntings and monsters. That fool Kobayashi moved in with his son in Tomobiki-cho… out of the trap and into the fishmonger’s shop if you ask me, from the things I’ve heard about that place. But for me it was the answer to questions that had haunted me ever since I was a girl… ever since the war…
I had gone to a festival with my family. My parents started talking with some of the neighbors, and I went off with a few of my girlfriends. We decided to try to get some goldfish. I was never any good at goldfish scooping, and was about to give up, when I heard somebody say I’ll get you a fish if you want, and that was how I met Kawaru. He had eyes like a perfect summer day and when he smiled it warmed you all over like sunshine. I forgot all about my girlfriends and my parents and everything else, and we went all over the fair together, and when he finally took me home my arms were full of silly prizes he’d won for me, starting with the five goldfish. My father wasn’t very pleased, he didn’t like me having much to do with soldiers, but it was early in the war and we were all full of patriotic zeal, and anyway Kawaru shipped out soon after that. His unit went to China and that was the last I saw of him. There were a few letters, then nothing. I tried making inquiries, and I heard that he was missing in action, somewhere up in the Bayankalas, but I couldn’t find out anything more. By that time we were getting wise to the way the authorities tried to cover up defeats, so I figured they’d been soundly beaten by the Chinese or something. I cried so hard when those goldfish died…
Father died and I had to go to work. After the war I ended up working in a Red Cross office. Our job was to find out what happened to missing soldiers. But I could never find out what happened to Kawaru’s unit. Everything to do with operations in the Bayankalas was classified secret! One day, I went to a hospital to interview one of the patients on another matter and by sheer luck I met a man who had known Kawaru. He was very disturbed, and went on and on about a valley filled with little ponds that turned people into things. I thought it was some delusion. People don’t turn into animals or monsters just because they fall into water. But because the man had been in Kawaru’s unit I went back twice to see him anyway, on my own time, in case he remembered something else. The second time I went back an American army doctor told me the man had died. I had a feeling he was lying, but we were all a little scared of Americans in those days, and anyway, there was nothing I could do about it…
And that was that. I met Tarou and married him, and if he didn’t twist my heart the way Kawaru had done, he was still a good man and we had a good life together, and I never bothered much about might-have-beens. Except for the woman in the park…
I’d nearly forgotten about her. She was someone I used to see when I took my son there to play. She would sit apart from the mothers, staring at the children. Staring at me. Day after day. There was something oddly familiar about her, and then one day I realized she looked very much like Kawaru. A sister perhaps? I’d never known anything about his family. So one day I tried to speak to her, but when she saw me approaching she vanished. She never came back to the park, and I never saw her again.
And so the years passed. My son grew up, and Tarou died, and I grew old and stopped wondering, until the day I accidentally splashed young Akane’s iinazuke and he turned into a girl in front of my eyes, and I heard he’d been in China. In the Bayankalas. And I heard a new word. Jusenkyou.
And here he comes, late as usual, leaping down because there’s no fence in front of my house for him to run on, so like my Kawaru with his cocky grin and those blue eyes. So I do it on purpose now, because I wonder again after all these years, and because the girl I used to be is still buried somewhere inside this withered old body. I fill my dipper and wait for the exact moment…
He jumps into the air and triple-somersaults, landing on one foot, still male. Our eyes meet. He bows. I bow back.
He’ll be by again tomorrow… and I will be waiting.
NOTES, EXPLANATIONS ETC.
I figured the “water-splashing granny” had her own tale to tell. She’s old enough to be of the wartime generation, so maybe something that happened then? I stole the idea of a mission into the Bayankalas from Fall of the Eagle, this time Japanese instead of Allied. And Kawaru is a sort of pun: according to my reference material it’s a legitimate masculine name (written with a kanji meaning to keep watch at night), but kawari is another reading of hen meaning transformation.
And sprinkling water like that is a Shinto practice, a sort of ritual purification. It also does keep the dust down, and she’s probably old enough to remember when the streets weren’t paved.