before. But it wasn't me who was doing it.
Suddenly I noticed all the children there, staring at me. Some were standing, some sitting, all of them facing me. It was all right in front of them-me, pale, standing there, Nakata collapsed on the ground from all the blows, the bloody towels. It was a moment frozen in time. Nobody moved, nobody said a word. The children were expressionless, their faces like bronze masks. A deep silence descended on the woods. All you could hear were the birds chirping. I can't get that scene out of my mind.
I don't know how much time passed. Probably not so long, but it seemed like forever-time driving me to the very edge of the world. Finally I snapped out of it. Color had returned to the world around me. I hid the bloody towels behind me and lifted Nakata up from where he lay. I held him tight and apologized to him as best I could. I was wrong, please, please forgive me, I begged him. He looked like he was still in shock. His eyes were blank, and I don't think he could hear what I said. With him still in my arms I turned to the other children and told them to resume their mushroom hunting. They probably couldn't comprehend what had just taken place. It was all too strange, too sudden.
I stood there for a while, holding Nakata tight in my arms, feeling like I wanted to die or disappear. Just over the horizon the violence of war went on, with countless people dying. I no longer had any idea what was right and what was wrong. Was I really seeing the real world? Was the sound of birds I was hearing real? I found myself alone in the woods, totally confused, blood flowing freely from my womb. I was angry, afraid, embarrassed-all of these rolled into one. I cried quietly, without making a sound.
And that's when the children collapsed.
I wasn't about to tell the military people what had really happened. It was wartime, and we had to keep up appearances. So I left out the part about my period starting, about Nakata finding the bloody towels, and me hitting him. Again, I'm afraid this threw an obstacle in your path as you investigated the incident. You can't imagine how relieved I am to finally get it off my chest.
Strangely enough, none of the children had any memory of the incident. Nobody remembered the bloody towels or me beating Nakata. Those memories had fallen away completely from their minds. Later, soon after the incident, I was able to indirectly sound out each child and confirm that this was indeed the case. Perhaps the mass coma had already started by then.
I'd like to say a few things about young Nakata, as his former homeroom teacher. What happened to him after the incident, I don't really know. When I was interviewed after the war the American officer told me he'd been taken to a hospital in Tokyo and finally regained consciousness. But he wouldn't tell me any details. I imagine that you know more about this than I do, Professor.
Nakata was one of the five children evacuated to our town from Tokyo, and of the five he was the brightest and had the best grades. He had very pleasant features and always dressed well. He was a gentle boy and never butted in where he didn't belong. Never once during class did he volunteer an answer, but when I called on him, he always gave the correct answer, and when I asked his opinion he'd give a logical reply. He caught on right away, no matter what the subject. Every class has a student like that, one who'll study what he needs to without supervision, who you know will one day attend a top college and get an excellent job. A child who's innately capable.
But as his teacher I will say there were a couple of things about him that bothered me. Every so often I felt a sense of resignation in him. Even when he did well on difficult assignments, he never seemed happy. He never struggled to succeed, never seemed to experience the pain of trial and error. He never sighed or cracked a smile. It was as if these were things he had to get through, so he just did them. He handled whatever came his way efficiently-like a factory worker, screwdriver in hand, working on a conveyor belt, tightening a screw on each part that comes down the line.
I've never met his parents so I can't say anything for certain, but there had to be a problem back home. I'd seen a number of cases like this. Adults constantly raise the bar on smart children, precisely because they're able to handle it. The children get overwhelmed by the tasks in front of them and gradually lose the sort of openness and sense of accomplishment they innately have. When they're treated like that, children start to crawl inside a shell and keep everything inside. It takes a lot of time and effort to get them to open up again. Kids' hearts are malleable, but once they gel it's hard to get them back the way they were. Next to impossible, in most cases. But maybe I shouldn't be giving my opinions on the matter-this is, after all, your area of expertise.
I also sensed a hint of violence in the boy's background. Sometimes there'd be a flash of fear in his eyes that seemed an instinctive reaction to long-term exposure to violence. What level of violence this was, I had no way of knowing. Nakata was a very self-disciplined child and good at hiding his fear. But there'd be the occasional involuntary flinch, ever so slight, that he couldn't cover up. I knew that something violent had taken place in his home. After you spend a lot of time with children, you pick up on these things.
Rural families can be pretty violent. Most of the parents are farmers, all of them struggling to make ends meet. They're exhausted, doing backbreaking work from morning to night, and when they have a bit to drink and get angry, they're liable to strike out physically. It's no secret this kind of thing goes on, and most of the time the farm kids take it in stride and survive with no emotional scars. But Nakata's father was a university professor, and his mother, from what I could gather from the letters she sent me, was a welleducated woman. An upper- middle-class urban family, in other words. If there was any violence taking place in a family like that, it was bound to be something more complicated and less direct than what farm kids experience. The kind of violence a child keeps wrapped up inside himself.
That's why I especially regretted hitting him on the mountain that day, whether I did it unconsciously or not. I should never have acted that way, and I've felt guilty and ashamed ever since. I regret it even more since Nakata-after being dragged away from his parents and placed in an unfamiliar environment-was finally on the verge of opening up to me before the incident.
The kind of violence I displayed then may very well have dealt a fatal blow to whatever feelings had been budding inside him. I was hoping for an opportunity to repair the harm I'd caused, but circumstances dictated otherwise. Still unconscious, Nakata was taken to the hospital in Tokyo, and I never saw him again. It's something I regret to this day. I can still see the look on his face as I was beating him. The tremendous fear and resignation he felt at that instant.
I'm sorry, I didn't plan to write such a long letter, but there is one more thing I have to mention. To tell the truth, when my husband died in the Philippines just before the end of the war, it wasn't that much of a shock. I didn't feel any despair or anger-just a deep sense of helplessness. I didn't cry at all. I already knew that somewhere, on some distant battlefield, my husband would lose his life. Ever since the year before, when all those things I just wrote about took place-that erotic dream, my period starting ahead of time, hitting Nakata, the children falling into that mysterious coma-I'd accepted my husband's death as inevitable, as something fated to be. So news of his death merely confirmed what I already knew. The whole experience on the hill was beyond anything I've ever experienced. I feel like I left a part of my soul in those woods.
In closing, I'd like to express my hope that your research will continue to flourish. Please take good care of yourself.
Sincerely yours,
Chapter 13
It's after twelve, and I'm eating lunch and gazing at the garden when Oshima comes over and sits down next to me. Today I've pretty much got the library to myself. As always my lunch is the cheapest box lunch from the little shop at the train station. We talk for a while, and Oshima urges half his sandwiches on me.
'I made extra today, just for you,' he insists. 'Don't take it the wrong way, but you look like you're not eating.'
'I'm trying to make my stomach shrink,' I explain.
'On purpose?' he asks.
I nod.
'You're doing that to save money?'
