The Teacher (Part 1, Middle, and End)

The Teacher - Part 1

This is a story I heard from my Master.

Long hair swaying by the window. The sound of cicadas, the croaking of frogs, the dazzling sunlight, and the heat radiating from the ground— A breeze laden with all those restless, buzzing things brushes against the teacher's cheek and blows past. The teacher's gaze is fixed straight out the window. Feeling somewhat restless, I chew on the end of my pencil. Even though it's so hot, the teacher's profile looks cool and composed. I wipe a drop of sweat trickling down my throat with my finger. The cicadas drone on in a steady, relentless rhythm. In the afternoon classroom smelling of dry wood, there are only the teacher and me. On the small blackboard, the chalk letters shine brilliantly. Inside a triangle is a square, and inside that is another triangle. Some sides have known lengths, while others are unknown. The lines the teacher draws stretch smoothly, bend sharply, and stop abruptly. They are lines so beautiful that I instinctively want to trace them. And then, the tail of the lowercase letter "m" curves upward in a very cool shape. Even though I'm told to find the area of the triangle inside the square inside the triangle, I find myself completely captivated by that. It's just a letter, yet it's genuinely cool. I even think it's almost a waste to attach a tiny little "2" to the tail of the "m." "Are you done?" At that voice, I snap back to reality. "Piece of cake." I hurriedly move my pencil. "I think," I add hastily. The teacher glances at me for a second, smiles faintly, and then turns back to look out the window. Remaining seated in a chair with peeling paint on the back. I keep my eyes cast down at my small desk, but I know it. The sound of cicadas, the croaking of frogs, the sunlight, and the heat radiating from the ground come blowing in with the breeze again. I know the teacher's long hair is swaying softly. I know the white clothes are gleaming. In the classroom with only the two of us, time seems to have stopped. As long as I am in the middle of it, I find it hard to remember that summer is something that will eventually pass us by.

It was the summer of the sixth year of elementary school. As soon as summer vacation began, I was sent off to stay at a relative's house. My mother's rural hometown was located far away, reached only after transferring through multiple trains. I had been taken there once or twice when I was very small, but it was the first time I was sent there all by myself. Naturally, it was also the first time I was told, "You don't have to come back until summer vacation is over." I knew I was being shipped off to get me out of the way. Having accumulated just enough experience not to have trouble buying a ticket on my own or asking for directions, I actually felt more relieved by the phrase "until summer vacation is over" coming before "you don't have to come back." As I trudged along a farm path surrounded by rice paddies, my sneakers caked in dust, I spotted a house with a large ibuki tree protruding from the hedge, its leaves growing thick and lush. The reddish-brown roof tiles, unique to this region, reflected the sunlight, making me squint. Living in that house were my uncle, my aunt, my grandpa, my grandma, and then Shige-chan and Yo-chan. Both my uncle and aunt were exceptionally kind to me, a visiting relative child. They even joked, "Wanna be our kid?" standing side by side with their faces tanned pitch-black from farm work and laughing. Grandpa had white hair, but his legs and hips were strong and straight, and he was tall. With a booming laugh, he would mess up my hair with his hand, which was both painful and embarrassing, so I ended up running away from his hands. Grandma had a cute little head shaped like a summer mandarin orange perched atop her tiny body. Whenever she lifted something or wrung out a dishrag, she would grunt, "Ehh-he!", putting all her spirit into it. I found it so amusing that I secretly mimicked her, and she caught me in the act. I thought she'd be angry, but Grandma just said, "Ehh-he!" and showed me the real thing, so I grew to adore her in no time at all.

Shige-chan's real name was Shigeru, a boy the same age as me. He remembered that when I used to visit this house long ago when I was much younger, he had made me his minion. I didn't remember it at all, but I figured it was fine, so I agreed to be his minion. Yo-chan's real name was Yoshiko, Shige-chan's younger sister by two years. She was an energetic girl with big, round eyes and a bob haircut. Seeing that the skin on my face and sticking out from the hem of my clothes was pale, she mocked me by calling me a "city boy," which forced me to spend the rest of the day covered in mud, running around in a game of tag until sundown to prove that wasn't the case.

City boy. The prickly, itching texture of this word was the first thing I felt upon coming to the countryside. I had never thought of myself as a city kid at all, but to the children of this small village, simply having more than three TV channels available besides NHK seemed to fully meet the criteria of being from the city. Shige-chan promptly introduced this "city boy" to his local gang of mischievous friends, and so every day we ran around, swam around, threw things around, and fled around together until we were utterly exhausted. It was the very last summer vacation of elementary school. Playing until your brains felt fried was a child's sacred duty. I became friends with Taka-chan, Toshibou, and Taro-chan, and I was immensely impressed by how blindingly fast every single one of them could run, and how their skin was baked dark brown, as if they'd all been laid out and grilled in a frying pan. I suppose I could understand why they wanted to distinguish themselves from a "city boy." They were a little different from the kids in my usual circle. The moment they headed into the mountains early in the morning carrying bug cages and nets, they wouldn't descend back to the lower world until the evening cicadas stopped singing. And when they finally came back, their handmade giant bug cages were packed full— even though that very night, after getting thoroughly chewed out by their respective parents for failing to come home early, the very next morning they would bravely dash back up into the mountains with their bug cages and nets once again, and so on.

Among them all, Shige-chan was an exceptional troublemaker, and quite the boss figure, too. He was bossy and quick to pick a fight, yet he was always the first to rush to the rescue when one of his minions was in a pinch, shouting fiercely to intimidate the enemy, or giving precise instructions like "Run!" or "Just run!" to pull us out of tight spots. He was about the same height as me, but muscles like a tightly wrung-out dishcloth clung to his entire body. When those legs kicked off the ground with all their might, he could easily clear large puddles, and he would look back over his shoulder, laughing through his nose, as the rest of us jumped after him and splashed muddy water at the edges of the puddles. However, whenever Shige-chan's natural love for mischief reared its head in the midst of his boss-like duties, we could only groan at its sheer eccentricity and nuisance. Like the time he found a strange mushroom in the mountains and told Toshibou—who naively believed him—that "mushroom poison is fine as long as you cook it," causing Toshibou to collapse holding his stomach and turning into a huge ordeal where we had to carry him to the doctor. And when it came to making pitfall traps, he was famous for preparing truly terrifying "contents for the hole."

Once, he gathered us in the bamboo grove behind the mountain, and while we wondered what he was up to, Shige-chan pointed toward the cliff and shouted, "Ah, someone's about to fall!" Looking over, sure enough, someone seemed to be slipping off the edge of the bamboo grove, clinging desperately to a thin shoot of bamboo no thicker than a hair. It looked like it was about to snap at any second. Crying out in panic, we rushed over, only to find that it was a scarecrow made of straw and cloth. Though we were mad at Shige-chan for tricking us, we were also deeply impressed by how well-made the doll was. Unfortunately, at that exact moment, a neighboring old woman who had come to gather mountain herbs overheard Shige-chan's shout of "Someone's about to fall!" and, panicking even more than us from afar, she rushed toward the doll. She tripped over a bamboo root halfway there, tumbled head over heels, and almost fell right off the cliff. We got scolded by that old woman, and then scolded again by our respective families—we were thoroughly chewed out in every possible way. As for Shige-chan, because the doll had been *too* well-made, Grandpa ordered him to create actual scarecrows, forcing him to remake every single scarecrow in the family's fields and rice paddies.

While that was going on, Shige-chan couldn't even go out to play, and he diligently made scarecrows with a drooping posture. Yet, deep in his eyes, a light flickered, already plotting his next prank. To us, that light was both dependable and a complete nuisance.

One day, when I had grown entirely accustomed to rural life and my body was beginning to show a noticeable tan—though not quite as much as Shige-chan and the others—an invitation was extended: "Let's go to the guardian deity's forest."

The guardian deity's forest lay deep within, stretching along the ridge of the northern mountains. Surrounded by high mountains, the sun never reached that area during the morning or evening, leaving it dark even in broad daylight. Even when the sun was directly overhead, the light was blocked by the thick branches and leaves of the thriving camphor and cypress trees, leaving only tiny fragments to spill down to us as we walked along the forest floor. Therefore, when I finally spotted the shrine standing quietly in the very center of the guardian deity's forest, following behind Shige-chan and Taro-chan, I felt a strange sense of solemnity. Until then, we had been playing in places where the heat of the sun raged wildly, but here, the ground was covered in black soil, the air was damp and humid, and I felt a chill seeping from deep within my body. It felt somehow different from any mountain or forest we had climbed before. "They hardly ever do any thinning here," Shige-chan remarked. Back then, I didn't quite understand what "thinning" trees meant, but I understood that the reason they didn't do it must be because this was the guardian deity's forest.

We walked along the hushed, silent approach— (though thinking back on it later, the cicadas should have been making a deafening noise, yet that was truly how I felt at the time)— and finally reached the modest main hall of the shrine. Light and shadow slanted across the roof and wooden walls, and it felt as though they had been stuck there unchanged for hundreds of years. Every now and then, the leaves swayed softly, rustling, and only in those moments did I regain my sense of time.

*Clink.* Hearing a sound, I turned to see Shige-chan standing in front of the offering box. It was battered and covered in moss, making it a bit doubtful whether anyone even collected the monetary offerings.

I peeked inside, wondering if offerings dating all the way back to the Edo period might be piled up in a massive hoard, but it was too dark to see well, and it didn't look like there was a massive hoard at all, leading me to think that people rarely ever came here to worship in the first place. Then, I pulled a ten-yen coin from my trouser pocket and tossed it in. No one knew what deity was enshrined in that shrine, but it made a very pleasant *clink* sound, so I put my hands together in prayer to that sound.

Before long, Taro-chan said, "Let's go back," and started getting restless, wanting to leave the shrine grounds. He was squirming with his legs pressed together. It seemed he needed to pee. Taro-chan, who was full of big talk but possessed a cowardly streak, seemed to feel a deep sense of awe and dread about defiling the sacred sanctuary of the shrine—deeply buried in the heart of this guardian deity's forest—with urine. In short, he was terrified. Shige-chan and I chose to leave the area rather than tease Taro-chan about it. Perhaps we, too, felt some intangible, unapproachable presence in that forest in our own way.

We walked out of the gloomy approach, where the camphor trees stretched out their branches like hands, and emerged once again onto the black-soil mountain path. As Taro-chan, in his anxiety, looked around frantically asking, "Wait, which way was it?", Shige-chan correctly pointed back in the direction we had come from, saying, "This way." My gaze drifted toward another path leading off in the opposite direction. The path curved immediately and was swallowed up by a cluster of trees, hiding where it went beyond. Where did this path lead? Curiosity welled up within me, swelling and growing. "What's down this way?" When I asked, Shige-chan said, "Nothing," and promptly started heading back along the correct path. I felt a strong temptation to go and see what lay deep down that way, but the uneasy loneliness of being left behind alone in the guardian deity's forest crept into my chest, and I froze in my tracks. Just as I stood there, a sudden rustling sound and presence—like something massive taking flight from the very top of the trees overhead—flurried above us. When I instinctively looked up, at that very instant, the overarching tree branches, leaves, and the threads of light spilling through them gave me the sensation that my field of vision was spinning in circles around a central point. Between dizziness and pure terror, my desire to explore the depths of the forest vanished, and I chased after Shige-chan and the others at full speed.

For about three days after that, we spent all our time swimming in the river. It was simply too hot. The river didn't make your body float as much as the ocean did, and because there was a current, you felt an overwhelming wave of exhaustion the moment you climbed onto the bank. A small bridge spanned that river, and jumping off it had become the standard test of courage for us kids. I was confident in my swimming, and the riverbed was deep, so after hesitating for a moment, I executed a magnificent header straight down with a *kaboom*. Puffing and blowing water, I surfaced just like everyone else, only to see Shige-chan standing on the railing of the bridge like a professional wrestler. "Watch this," he said, and soared through the air while drawing everyone's gaze. Cheers, light, and body heat melted into the water. Our summer existed right there inside the sunlight.

Before long, the day arrived when I had to play by myself. Shige-chan and the other sixth graders were all going on a three-day, two-night school camping trip. I wanted them to take me along too, but since it was a school event, there was simply no way. I watched Shige-chan put on his backpack and leave the house early in the morning, wondering what I should do with the next three days. Since the household was a family of farmers, my uncle, aunt, and grandpa would hop into the mini-truck and head off to work right after breakfast. Listening to Grandma pottering around with her chores inside the house, I finally opened the homework I had brought with me. In the wide, tatami-matted room, I rested my cheek on my hand right in the middle of a large desk. After turning a few pages, I was already bored. Homework was something meant to be done in the final three days of summer vacation, wasn't it? Wasn't there something else I needed to be doing before then? My pencil rolled across the desk in circles. The sun was shining brilliantly in the garden beyond the veranda, making the inside of this room feel strangely dim. I repeated the cycle of lying down, pushing through a bit of homework, and taking breaks, until I glanced at the clock and saw it was nine in the morning. It was only nine. There were still more than three hours until lunch. This was terrible. I was going to lose my mind.

I thought of places I could go by myself. I wanted somewhere we wouldn't usually go together. Like the library. As I pondered various options, the shrine in the guardian deity's forest suddenly popped into a corner of my mind. And the shadowed path beneath the unthinned trees. The path that had kept going beyond that point. The urge to go see what lay ahead welled up inside me once again. That feeling, which had withered away inside the forest, grew strong once more. I could go by myself. It was no big deal. That's right. I'll go right now, this morning. As long as the sun was high, it shouldn't be all that scary. Once the idea struck, my body moved on its own. I folded my homework notebook and prepared to leave. As I hoisted my backpack onto my shoulders, as if sensing my intention, Shige-chan's younger sister Yo-chan peered intently at me through the gap in the sliding paper door. "Where are you going?" In an instant, I wondered if I should take this kid along with me. But I immediately shook off the thought. You can't bring a girl on an adventure. After all, you never know what's waiting for you out there. "Just going to the post office," I said, and she walked away somewhere looking utterly bored with a "Hmph." Alright. I'd gotten rid of the obstacle. I left the house in high spirits. Heading north along the sun-drenched farm road, the lush green cluster of mountains gradually drew closer. The entrance was marked by a rotting wooden box, a remnant from the days when an admission fee used to be charged to enter the mountain. Without climbing up to the ridge, the path ran along the base of the mountain. Crunching the soil beneath my feet as I pushed forward step by step, the overhead space gradually grew dim beneath the shadows of the trees. Taking out the compass I had brought just in case from my backpack, I kept it in my right hand and walked on without stopping. Every now and then, the call of a mountain pigeon echoed, accompanied by the rustling sound of shaking leaves. Then came the sound of cicadas. It was a deafening chorus, enough to make you feel afraid. When I glanced up, rays of light were spilling sparkle-like through the gaps in the leaves. Looking straight up into that flood of sound, I began to lose track of where I was. It felt somewhat dangerous. I hurriedly forced myself to look forward and started walking again.

Along the way, there were several side paths leading up into the mountain, but I somehow managed to reach the shrine in the guardian deity's forest without getting lost. I decided I should pay my respects just in case. I walked along the tree-lined approach and passed under the small torii gate. Standing before the quiet, weathered building, I tossed a hundred-yen coin into the offering box with a *clink*. It was a great sound, just as before. There was no human presence inside the shrine grounds. Did anyone ever come by to maintain it? I spun around 180 degrees and retraced the approach I had taken to get there. Noticing a small pond along the way, I strayed down a side path. It was located right beside the torii gate. Water striders skimmed smoothly across the surface of the water, but the water itself was murky and hard to see through. It'll probably dry up completely whenever it stops raining for a bit, I thought as I raised my head and returned to the approach.

As I walked, listening to the crunching sound of the soil, I felt as though I had forgotten something important and turned back. There was nothing there except the torii gate, but then I remembered that I hadn't walked back *through* the torii gate on my way out. Oh well, I thought, and continued onward. Gradually, a strange, swirling sensation welled up in the corner of my mind, and it rapidly grew larger and larger. What was this? I felt sick. The scenery looked strangely bleached of color. Suppressing the urge to look around frantically in all directions, I hurried through the alternating patches of light and shadow along the approach. What should I do? Should I turn back? I thought about it, but then...