Kazuo’s Journey
In mid-March, Minoru moved away from West Ito like Nobuo before him, and Kazuo lost another friend.
Mr. Honda announced to the fourth-grade class that, due to a repatriation program for North Koreans in Japan, Minoru and his family had decided to return to their home country of North Korea, across the sea to the west. Then Mr. Honda asked Minoru to say a few words of farewell. Minoru looked a little self-conscious, standing up in front of the entire class.
“Everyone in grade four section three, thank you for everything. Even though I am returning to my fatherland, I will never forget West Ito Elementary School. I will be sure to write to everyone when I arrive, so please write to me as well.”
The class applauded for Minoru and sang the West Ito Elementary School song to cheer his departure.
Not long after that, a single letter arrived from Minoru and was posted on the back wall of the classroom. The name of the sender was written with different characters than Kazuo knew from before, but the handwriting was definitely Minoru’s. The letter said, “Dear Everyone at West Ito Elementary School, how have you been? I am studying very hard every day to contribute to my fatherland.”
Kazuo and Nishino-kun immediately sent a reply to Minoru’s address, which was written in difficult ideographs and that looked like strange symbols. They told Minoru all the news at their school and asked him whether there was sumo wrestling in North Korea. But another reply from Minoru never came.
In , a new term began, and Kazuo became a fifth grader. He was still in section three of his grade, but his teacher was a woman, Mrs. Yamazaki. Nishino-kun had been placed in section one.
Kazuo sat on a
patch of soft grass in the empty lot, which had finally begun to turn green. He gazed far off over the rooftops of nearby houses to a corner of the schoolyard, where a cherry tree was in bloom. Kazuo looked up at the sky. Its clear blue stretched on forever, as far as he could see.
From the autumn of 1965 through the winter months, many of the people closest to him had vanished. Mr. Yoshino’s tofu shop had been turned into a store that sold electric appliances. A new butcher shop had opened up where Nobuo’s family had lived (the croquettes weren’t nearly as good as Nobuo’s family’s). And the house that Minoru had left was still a vacant black skeleton, without any sign of life.
Kazuo spied some white clouds like wisps of cotton candy drifting in from the south. They were moving at a constant, steady pace.
To him, the clouds looked a bit like a camel making a journey through the desert. Astride the camel, between its two humps, sat a young man with a white cloth wrapped around his head in Middle Eastern fashion. No doubt, he had journeyed alone through the desert for many days, making his way to a land far off in the east.
The desert traveler probably feared that he would end up a pile of dried skin and bones, such as he had seen here and there along his path. Remembering the warm affection of the people he had left behind, he had to fight the urge to hurry back to the safety of his home. But like a movie hero, he continued his perilous journey. Around him stretched endless dry, cracked earth and craggy mountains. Ahead, he hoped to glimpse a magnificent palace decorated in silver and gold.
Kazuo gazed at the sky and pictured himself as a questing traveler.
Though he imagined that somewhere beyond the sky he could see the landscape of a foreign country, he knew that it was probably very different from the far-off countries shown on TV. In those images, each home had vivid green grass in the yard, a living room with a fireplace and roomy sofa, a private room and a bed for each person, and a huge refrigerator stuffed with more food than you could ever eat. There were jugs of milk so big that you would have to wrap both arms around them to pick them up, skyscrapers so tall that they stuck through the sky, gigantic cars, freeways that went on forever, and the hanbaagaa that Wimpy ate. . . .
But Kazuo was beginning to realize that foreign countries had disturbing as well as beautiful scenery. He thought of Vietnam, where there were air raids almost every day and people were running for their lives; of Africa, where children his own age were starving and dying one after another, their stomachs grossly swollen; and of North Korea, where Minoru had gone with his family, and had mysteriously fallen out of touch. Those were foreign countries, too.
And in those places, it was not true that everything was always pleasant and wonderful. Suffering and sorrow had existed, and probably continued to exist, as daily realities, just like they did in Japan—or even far more than they did here.
Kazuo stood and brushed the seat of his pants, sweeping away moist earth that smelled of new grass. The cloud camel and traveler had passed over his head and at some point had lost their shape. He stared in their direction.
“Someday, I will leave this city and this country. I’ll meet many other people who left the places where they were born, like me.”
Thinking about it made Kazuo’s heart leap a little in his chest.
Maybe by that time, his father would no longer get drunk and tell him to enter a national university, earn a degree at graduate school, and work at a top company. And maybe his mother would no longer say “during the war,” and would have mended her ties with Kazuo’s grandfather. And just maybe, Yasuo would finally be raising the dog he had waited and waited for. And as for Kazuo himself . . .
For now, he still lived in a world called Tokyo.
He looked out at his city. The small houses huddled closely together, like a group of animals still sleeping on a meadow in early spring. Soon, they would feel the warmth of the sun, and they would start their journey toward a new green field.
Kazuo felt he could run as fast as a four-legged animal, perhaps a gazelle. He took a breath of fresh spring air and sprinted off toward the horizon.