Once and Forever by Kenji Miyazawa

Author:Kenji Miyazawa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2018-08-03T12:27:20+00:00

THE MAN OF THE HILLS

The Man of the Hills, with his golden eyes as big as saucers and his body all hunched up, was walking through the cypress wood on Mount Nishine, after rabbits.

It wasn’t a rabbit he caught, though, but a pheasant.

The pheasant was just flying up in alarm when the Man of the Hills drew in his hands and pounced on it, so that the poor creature was half squashed.

With a bright red face and his great mouth twisted in a grin of delight, the Man of the Hills came walking out of the forest twirling the limp-necked pheasant in his hand.

Then, flinging his prey down on a sunny southern slope of dry grass and scratching at his untidy mop of red hair, he curled up on the ground.

A small bird twittered somewhere, and shy purple flowers swayed here and and there among the grass.

Turning over to lie on his back, the Man of the Hills gazed up at the blue, blue sky. The sun was like a red-and-gold speckled wild pear, and a pleasant smell of dried grass drifted about; on the mountain range just behind him, the snow formed a shining white halo.

“Now candy floss, I think, is delicious. But though old Sun spins plenty of it, he never gives any of it to me.”

He was idly thinking such thoughts when a fleecy, vague white cloud drifted purposelessly across the absolutely clear azure sky toward the east. The Man of the Hills made a rumbling sound deep in his throat and thought to himself again: “Clouds are funny things, if you ask me. Depending on the wind, they come and they go, they disappear—poof—and they suddenly appear again. That’s why they call the kind of man who just drifts around doing nothing a ‘cloud-head.’ ”

Even as he was thinking this, he felt his legs and his head going terribly light, and had a strange feeling as though he were floating upside down in the air. The next thing he knew, it was he who had become a “cloudhead.” Whether carried by the wind or moving on his own, he was drifting gently through the air, going nowhere in particular.

“Why, those are the Seven Hills,” he said to himself. “There are seven of them, all covered with trees—one of them all pines, another one bald at the top and yellow. . . . But at this rate, I’ll soon be in the town. And if I’m going there, I’ll have to change into something else, or they’ll beat me to death.”

Whereupon, he turned himself into quite a passable woodcutter. And in no time he found himself at the edge of the town. His head still felt very light, so that his whole body seemed to be out of balance, but he plodded on just the same.

Among the first houses he passed was a fish shop, with stands bearing messy-looking straw bags of salted salmon, bundles of sardines and the like, as well as five blackish red boiled octopuses hanging from the eaves.

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