My father was a dyed-in-the-wool Hanshin Tigers fan. When I was a kid, my father was in a foul mood whenever the Tigers lost. Even his facial expression would change. And if he had anything to drink, this tendency would get even worse. So on nights after the Hanshin Tigers lost, I’d be extra careful not to do anything to upset him. Possibly that’s why I never got to be—or never could be—a Hanshin Tigers fan.
My relationship with my father wasn’t what you’d call friendly. There were lots of reasons for this, but in the twenty years before severe diabetes and the cancer that had spread throughout his body put an end to his life at age ninety, my father and I hardly exchanged a word with each other. You could never label that a “friendly relationship.” At the very end of his life, we had a reconciliation of sorts, though perhaps it came too late to really matter.
But of course I do have some wonderful memories.
When I was nine, in the fall, the St. Louis Cardinals played a goodwill game against an All-Star Japanese team. The great Stan Musial was at his peak then, and he faced two top Japanese pitchers, Kazuhisa Inao and Tadashi Sugiura, in an amazing showdown. My father and I went to Koshien Stadium to see the game. We were in the infield seats along first base, near the front. Before the game began, the Cardinals’ players made a circuit of the whole stadium, tossing signed soft rubber tennis balls to the crowd. People leapt to their feet, shouting, vying to grab the balls. But I just sat in my seat, vacantly watching all of this happen. I figured that a little kid like me had no chance of getting one of those signed balls. The next instant, however, I suddenly found one of them in my lap. By total chance, it just happened to land there. Plop—like some divine revelation.
“Good for you,” my father told me. He sounded half shocked, half admiring. Come to think of it, when I became a novelist at age thirty, he said almost the same thing to me. Half shock, half admiration.
That was probably the greatest, most memorable thing that happened to me when I was a boy. Maybe the most blessed event I ever experienced. Could it be that my love for baseball stadiums sprang from this incident? I took that treasured white ball back home, of course, but that’s all I remember about it. What ever happened to that ball? Where could it have possibly gone?
.
I also included the following poem in The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection. I believe I wrote it back when Osamu Mihara had taken charge of the team as their manager. This was the period I have the most vivid and fond memories of, for whatever reason. I was always fired up to go to the stadium back then, sure that something fun and unexpected was going to happen.
A Bird’s Shadow
An afternoon day game in early summer.
Top of the eighth
The Swallows losing 9–1 (or something like that).
Their sixth pitcher (or something like that), someone I’d never heard of,
Was warming up.
Right at the instant
The clear-cut shadow of a bird
Raced quickly from first base
Over the green grass to where the center fielder stood.
I looked up at the sky
But couldn’t spot the bird.
The sun was too bright.
All I saw was a shadow, like a black cutout, falling on the grass.
A bird-shaped shadow.
Was this some lucky omen?
Or an unlucky one?
I gave it some serious thought,
But soon shook my head.
Come on, knock it off.
How could there ever be a lucky omen at a place like this?
.
When my mother’s memory started to get shaky, and she couldn’t live on her own anymore, I went back to her house in Kansai to get her ready to move out. I couldn’t believe all of the junk—at least, that’s how it seemed to me—that she had stored away in boxes. She’d bought an unimaginable amount of stuff for reasons I couldn’t fathom.
For instance, one empty candy box was stuffed full of cards. Mostly telephone cards, the kind people once used for pay phones, with a few prepaid railway cards for the Hanshin or Hankyu Railways mixed in. All the cards had Tigers players’ photos on them—Kanemoto, Imaoka, Yano, Akahoshi, Fujikawa…Telephone cards? Good grief. Where the heck are you supposed to use telephone cards these days?
I didn’t count them all, but there must have been over a hundred. I just couldn’t get it. As far as I knew, my mother had no interest in baseball whatsoever. Yet it was clear that she was the one who’d bought all those cards. There was solid proof. Had she become a rabid Hanshin Tigers fan before I realized it? For all that, she flatly denied ever buying so many Hanshin Tigers telephone cards. “What are you talking about?” she said. “I’d never buy those kinds of things. Ask your father—he’ll know.”
So what was I supposed to do? My father had died three years before this.
The upshot is that, although I have a cell phone, I’ve been walking all over, looking hard for the rare public phone, trying to use up these Hanshin Tigers telephone cards. Thanks to this, I’ve gotten to know their players’ names pretty well, though most of the ones on the cards have either retired by now or have moved on to other teams.
The Hanshin Tigers.
The Tigers used to have a player named Mike Reinbach, an outfielder, a high-spirited, all-around nice guy. I wrote one poem in which he was featured in a supporting role. Reinbach
