The Secret of the Blue Glass by Tomiko Inui

Author:Tomiko Inui [Tomiko Inui]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782690795
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2015-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

The blind old lady, whom Yuri called Granny Oto, was sitting on the veranda grinding some buckwheat flour in a stone mortar for Tetsu to take back to Tokyo with him that night. Her daughter, whom Yuri called Aunt Toyo, was Tatsuo and Toko Moriyama’s cousin. She had already gone out to the mountainside fields early that morning, and so for the first time since they had arrived at this house, Tetsu and Yuri were at last left alone and could finish the Little People’s move.

“You’ll be starting school soon and can make new friends,” said Tetsu, deliberately nonchalant. In reality, he knew very well that it wouldn’t be easy for Yuri to fit in with life here in the countryside.

Little Yuri’s arrival at the home of the two women, with no man about the house, simply meant another mouth to feed in a household where food was already in pitifully short supply. It wasn’t just the food. Collecting firewood, drawing water from the well—everything had to include one more person, Aunt Toyo had explained to Tetsu. Although she was about the same age as Tetsu’s and Yuri’s parents, her hair was completely white and her front teeth were missing, and she looked much older than her years.

In Tokyo, even though everything was in short supply, Toko could still sometimes get hold of butter or sugar and they at least could scrape by. But here in the countryside, they had to do all the work themselves just to eke out what in Tokyo were considered the basics. There was very little to eat other than rice and potato porridge, or boiled barley and rice, and Aunt Toyo had to work hard just to produce that much. Even Granny Oto toiled the whole day grinding up flour and twisting straw into rope. Yuri wouldn’t be able to lead the pampered life of a city child here.

“The powdered milk won’t last until winter,” said Yuri, worried as usual about the Little People. “I wonder if I’ll be able to get that woman with the goat to give me some milk?”

“That goat doesn’t just belong to her, you know,” Tetsu replied. “She shares it with some friends. I went to see her yesterday, thinking she might let you have some milk. She’s called Katsuko, by the way, and she lives in a village called Hondo. She used to come to Nojiri every summer with other women in her working women’s club, and five or six of them were evacuated here in the spring of 1943 and are running a proper farm. They said that after the snow melted this spring they ploughed the fields and planted rice for the first time.”

“Is that far from here?” Yuri asked, listening to the faint rustling of the Little People as they moved their belongings into their new home.

“If you carry on past your school and walk about an hour up the valley, you’ll come to a secluded village with about five or six houses. That’s where they live.

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