My younger brother worried about my pimples, too, and often went to buy the medicine in my place. This brother and I hadn't gotten along since we were small. When he took the entrance exam for middle school, I hoped he would fail. But being far from home, I gradually discovered his nice disposition. As my brother got older, he became bashful and quiet. Once in a while, he and I published short literary works in our fanzine, but they were all timid compositions. Unlike me, he constantly fretted over his bad grades. And my sympathy only put him in a bad mood. He was annoyed by a growth the shape of Mt. Fuji swelling on his face into a part of a woman's physique. He was convinced he wasn't smart because his forehead was narrow. I forgave this brother anything and everything. In those days, I either hid everything from people or confessed everything to them. That brother and I confided everything to each other.
One moonless night at the beginning of fall, we went out to the pier of the harbor and commented on a fluttering red thread in the breeze blowing across the strait toward us. A Japanese language teacher at school once told this story in class. An invisible red thread was tied to the little toe of your right foot. The string smoothly stretched with one end tied to the same toe of a girl. No matter how far the two of us were separated, the thread would never break. No matter how close we were, even if we met on the street, that thread would never become entangled. This determined the girl who would become your bride. When I first heard this story, I got very excited and immediately told my brother when I returned home. That night, we talked as we listened to the sounds of waves and the calls of seagulls. When I asked my brother what is your wife doing now, after shaking the handrail along the pier a few times with both hands, he awkwardly said, "Walking in the garden." I thought the young woman wearing large garden geta clogs, holding a fan, and gazing at the primrose seemed perfect for my little brother. It was my turn, but looking off at the black sea, I only said, "Her obi sash is red." A ferryboat crossing the strait floated out unsteadily from the horizon and looked like a huge inn with its many rooms lit by yellow lights.
Two or three years later, my little brother died. At that time, we enjoyed going to the pier. On snowy nights in the winter, we carried umbrellas and went to the pier. In the sea of a deep harbor, the silent falling snow was spectacular. Lately, Aomori Port has become congested with ships. This pier is buried under ships and no longer a scenic location. Tsutsumi River, a wide river like the Sumida River, flowed on the eastern side of Aomori and into Aomori Bay. The river flowed slowly like a reverse flow at a spot right before pouring into the sea. I gazed absent-mindedly at that sluggish flow. If I were a pretentious man, I'd liken my youth to that point immediately before the river flowed into the sea. Those four years in Aomori were times I found hard to forget. For the most part, those were my memories of Aomori. Another unforgettable place is the seaside Asamushi Hot Springs, nearly seven miles east of Aomori. The following paragraph appears in Memories:
Autumn came, and I left the city with my brother to go by train to the hot springs on the coast about thirty minutes away. After my mother fell ill, my youngest sister rented a house there to take the hot-spring cure. I stayed there the whole time and continued to study for my entrance exam. My troublesome reputation of being a prodigy required me to display it from my fourth year in middle school until entering high school. During that time, I came to hate school. It was horrible, but as a person being pursued by something, I studied with single-minded determination. I took the train from there to school. Every Sunday, my friends came to pass the time. I always had a picnic with them. On flat rocks at the shore, we enjoyed meat stew and drank wine. My brother had a nice voice and knew many new songs. He taught us these songs, and we all sang together. We wore ourselves out fooling around and fell asleep on the rocks. When we woke up, the tide had come in. The rock, which should have been part of the shore, was an island. We felt as though we had not awakened from our dreams.
In the end, my joke is my youth was poured into the sea. The sea around Asamushi was cool and clear and not too bad. However, the inn could not be said to be good. The charm of a desolate fishing village in Tohoku was to be expected and not a flaw. Was I just a little arrogant like the frog in a well who knew nothing about the big ocean and was confused? I am bold and scoff at the hot springs in my hometown but am not bothered by the anxiety I felt when in the countryside far away. I haven't stayed at any hot springs in this area recently. Fortunately, the costs of staying at the inns have not become exorbitant. Clearly, I'm saying too much, but I haven't stayed here recently and gazed through the train window at the houses of the hot spring towns. These are only the words of the shallow intuition of a poor artist and have no foundation. However, I don't want to force my intuition on the reader. Rather, the reader may prefer not to believe my intuition.
