Long Belts and Thin Men: The Postwar Stories of Kojima Nobuo by Kojima Nobuo

Author:Kojima, Nobuo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Japanese literature, JLIT, Occupation literature
Publisher: Kurodahan Press
Published: 2019-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

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13 An old unit of weight no longer used. A hundred momme were slightly less than a pound.

The House of the Hooligans

It was a white-painted two-storey house, the kind you could see in any residential district of a mid-sized city in the American Midwest. From the porch ceiling hung a large swing, where an elderly couple might while away their remaining years absentmindedly swaying.

When I first came to stay in the town I would walk through the residential areas, along the tree-lined streets from block to block, envious of the seemingly prosperous aspect of the stately houses, but as I gradually became aware of how things really were, I realized that was merely arbitrary supposition on my part, an auslander who happened to be passing through.

Once you stepped inside one of these homes, you saw that—just as in any house in Japan—life could be difficult and complicated. In my case, I found the hooliganism of children in the house I entered.

The man of the house appeared to be in his mid-thirties, his wife two or three years younger; they had two boys, age three and four.

These two children would begin bellowing like bears in their beds in the nursery at five thirty in the morning, and after a good hour of this they would invade their parents’ bedroom to wake them. My room was across the hall from the parents’ room. The nursery was two doors from mine, on the other side of the bathroom.

After I was awakened by the children’s whooping I would listen to this two-hour morning ritual, riding it out by pulling the blankets up over my head and fitfully putting my hands over my ears.

When the bellowing in the nursery began I would hear shushing from the parents’ room, coming from each parent by turns.

“Hush up! Hush up!”

The calls for silence would continue unabated even after the children had laid siege to their parents’ bedroom. The shushing was most certainly out of concern the children were disturbing me, their boarder, but judging from the feeling they put into their voices, I could tell the couple, their eyes still closed, were directing their words to the children and to me. And I suspect that to ensure I was the ultimate recipient they repeated their calls for silence over and over again.

At night the boys were unceremoniously thrown into their cribs at 7:30 and were not permitted out of their room, no matter how much they cried or carried on. And a gate had been built at the head of the stairs; it could be locked. Doubtless the structure prevented the children from falling down the stairs when they were smaller, but now its purpose was to prevent them from going downstairs.

One morning, after screaming in their room for some time, the boys tried to go into their parents’ room, but found the door locked.

“Damn grownups!” one shouted, “I’ll turn you both over to the police!”

This was quickly followed by enticement from the other: “Yeah,

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