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On a hot August day Heitaro had just turned eleven when he made a discovery. He could dive down into the sea next to his village and see underwater just as clearly as the other kids with their face masks and snorkels. That wasn't all. He didn't even need to worry about air to breathe. But this wasn't every time. First of all, it had to be night, and he had to put on his old nemaki, so short by now that it didn't even reach his elbows and knees. Then to bed between his two futons on the tatami floor mats next to the back window. His house was tucked away between two round hills on the outskirts of the fishing village. The round harbor down below was just big enough for the fishing boats to come in, throw a rope out, and be dragged up to shore. His father's boat was resting there too in the painted row of white, red and green. Heitaro liked to play hide-and-seek inside it with the other bows his age, in the gunwales, under the nets, and between the line of boats with their sides baking in the hot sun. So he first went to bed that night, and waited. The house grew so quiet that all he could hear was a few crickets in the back garden, and once in a while there was a croak from a frog, who lived in the small stream out behind. The sky above the hills was blue-black as the shiny feather from a crow's tail that fell on the ground in the garden two days ago. Now it was on Heitaro's desk with a few shells and a perfectly round stone, jet-black too. But of course the sky wasn't all dark. The stars lit up softly with dim flickers of blueish white lights. They looked like the blinking flourescent lamp on his dest whose bulb needed changing. On some nights there was a big old faded-yellow moon hanging in the sky like the paper lantern on the nights of O-Bon. Underneath it on the sea stretched out a long tongue of light, which wiggled a little as the waves came in toward the shore. But on Heitaro's eleventh birthday night, the moon was somewhere on the other side of the round earth. It wouldn't push out of the water until late the next morning, when the hazy sky stained it light blue. Heitaro woke up with a start in the middle of the night, pulled his cotton nemaki belt tight, and stood on the tatami floor. The frog must have heard him move, because he suddenly stopped in the middle of a croak. Then there wasn't a breath of sound in the night air. He knew that he had to go outside, because he was going somewhere. Exactly where he didn't know. Out through the kitchen door into the back garden, he even forgot to put on his rubber zori. A few steps along the path next to the small stream, then across the narrow wooden bridge. On the other side the steep, dark green hill rose sharply, with the crumbling concrete stairway hugging tightly onto the side all the way up to the pass. The hill dropped off the right side in giant steps. Rows of mountain potatoes and daikon and sugar-beet plants with leaves like elephant's ears, poked up above stone walls that kept plants and earth from tumbling wildly down the hills onto the zinc-iron roof of the farmhouse below. Usually Heitaro climbed with his gang in the afternoon sun. They would run to see who could get to the top first, and he was bathed in sweat and out of breath by the time they all reached the pass at the top of the stairs. It felt like a thousand steps. But now he was rising up the steps without any efort at all, his feet hardly touching the concrete. Just a touch of his big tow and he sprung into the air up to the next step, so fast that his white cotton nemaki flew out behind him like a broad bird-tail stuck out from his belt-cord, even though there wasn't any wind tonight. And he wasn't even surprised. You would think that he did this kind of flying trick every day. |