A Rabbit’s Eyes
by
Kenjiro Haitani
translated by Paul Sminkey
INTRODUCTION: Published in
1974, Usagi no Me tells the story of a young teacher’s
attempt to reach the heart of a troubled young first-grader named
Tetsuzo, who raises flies. Through her interactions with her
troubled students, Ms. Kotani learns everyone has much to gain by
accepting the outcast members of society.
PROLOGUE
Tetsuzo’s story
begins with a tale about flies.
Ms. Fumi Kotani, Tetsuzo’s homeroom teacher, who had gotten
married only ten days earlier, was a recent graduate, and so was
completely blown away by Tetsuzo’s behavior. Rushing into the
teachers’ room, she threw up violently and burst into
tears.
The astonished Assistant Principal raced to the classroom to
investigate and found Tetsuzo glaring at something on the floor.
The other children were screaming and yelling. Glancing down at the
boy’s feet, he initially thought he saw some kind of colorful
fruit, but when he took a second look, he unconsciously let out a
yell: it was a frog crushed in two, the twitching innards scattered
upon the floor like a red flower. For a moment, he stood paralyzed,
but when he noticed a little girl crying and petrified with fear,
he realized he had to dispose of the mess immediately. When he
pushed Tetsuzo aside to get to work, however, he discovered another
crushed bullfrog under the boy’s right foot.
Ms. Kotani mulled over the incident for a long time. You
couldn’t kill something so cruelly if you didn’t have a
lot of anger. Wait a minute. Tetsuzo lived at the garbage disposal
plant right behind the school, didn’t he? With all that
garbage, there had to be plenty of flies. Perhaps he had had a
fight with one of his classmates about collecting flies to feed to
the frogs.
Ms. Kotani had good reason for her supposition: a recurrent problem
at the school was that the disposal plant children were often
called “garbage collectors” and other similar names.
Just the same, she couldn’t know for sure. Even if he had
been teased, why did he have to kill those frogs? She questioned
many students about where they had collected food for the frogs,
and two admitted that they had gone into the compound. One of them
had found four or five flies on a pile of garbage, and the other
had found thirteen flies “inside a bottle,” next to the
home of a family who worked at the plant. At the time,
Ms. Kotani thought the part about the bottle was strange, but
she dismissed her doubts for the moment and moved on with her
questions.
Certainly, it was strange to say that you caught thirteen flies
“inside a bottle.” Were the flies inside the bottle
already? Of course, it would be possible to collect them one by
one, from various bottles lying around, but even so, it sounded
strange. If only she had investigated further, she certainly would
have discovered the truth.
The two students said that Tetsuzo hadn’t shown them into the
compound. They said that he didn’t have any friends and that
he had stopped helping with the frogs at the start of using
“live food.” But they also admitted that he had never
fought with anyone. In the end, Ms. Kotani didn’t
discover a thing.
The next incident occurred about two months later, during a class
on observing ants. Ms. Kotani was explaining that the best way to
get the ants to nest was to wrap a black cloth around the
observation bottle. She indifferently picked up the bottle of a
student in the front row to demonstrate when, no more than a few
minutes into her explanation, she suddenly found Tetsuzo leaping at
her like a hunting dog.
Ms. Kotani shrieked instinctively, but having done so, she was no
longer a teacher: she was just a young woman named Fumi Kotani. In
a frenzy, she shook Tetsuzo off as if he were some kind of vermin.
The students were aghast at Tetsuzo’s sudden attack on their
teacher, but when they saw him snatch the bottle from her hand,
they understood.
The bottle’s owner was Bunji, and he became the next target.
By the time he started to scream, his face was already covered with
blood. With the skin hanging down in shreds, the scratches made his
face look like a rag splotched with red paint. As Tetsuzo’s
onslaught continued, Bunji tried to shield his face with his hand,
but Tetsuzo sunk his teeth into the boy’s hand. Bunji let out
a violent scream, and as Ms. Kotani tried desperately to pull
Tetsuzo away, she caught a glimpse of the white bone of
Bunji’s hand and fainted.
Afterwards, in the teachers’ room, the Assistant Principal
slapped Tetsuzo to the floor. The other teachers didn’t
criticize him for his violence, for they had seen Bunji carried
away to the hospital with blood dripping from his face and hands.
Tetsuzo refused to explain himself—no matter how many times
he was slapped. He didn’t even cry. Witnessing such
stubbornness, even the female teachers, who at first felt sorry for
him, began to think that the violence towards him was
unavoidable.
Ms. Kotani was recovering in the nurse’s office, so the
Assistant Principal took Tetsuzo home. He scolded the boy in front
of his grandfather, whose full name was Baku Usui but whom everyone
called “Mr. Baku” on account of his unusual last name.
Still, Tetsuzo refused to speak.
Ms. Kotani took the next day off. And the day after that. Three
days after the incident, she finally went back to work. Although
she had the reputation of being a pretty teacher, she didn’t
look at all attractive upon her return.
Shortly after noon that day, Mr. Baku came to the school to speak
with her. What he had to say disconcerted her, and she spent a long
time reflecting on his words. She could hardly wait for the
students to be dismissed before rushing to the hospital to see
Bunji. She woke him up and asked him whether the flies were already
in the jar when he found it at the disposal plant two months
earlier.
“Yeh, they were,” he said quietly.
“Why did you take them? They were Tetsuzo’s,” she
said, with an edge of annoyance in her voice. “It was a
Chinese jam jar and had a strange shape, so he recognized it right
away. You used it for your ant observation jar, didn’t
you?”
“I’m sorry,” said Bunji with shame, and his
teacher’s stern look softened.
Bunji admitted that he took the jar because it was full of flies,
but said that he hadn’t known it was Tetsuzo’s.
“I want you to apologize to him, understand?” said Ms.
Kotani, and it was as if she had decided something for herself as
well.
The next day, she called Tetsuzo to the teachers’ room.
“I really have to apologize,” she began. “You
were collecting flies, weren’t you? You saved them in a jar.
You were worried about the frogs not having any food, and when the
flies you collected disappeared, you got mad. I should’ve
tried to understand your feelings. I’m truly
sorry.”
Tetsuzo listened unresponsively in silence.
Like horseflies, misunderstandings often come flying from
unexpected places. The next day, Bunji’s father stormed into
the teachers’ room and created an uproar.
“Not only was he attacked,” he yelled, grabbing Ms.
Kotani by the collar, “but you’ve told him to apologize
to the kid who attacked him! What’s the meaning of
that!” Unaccustomed to such violence, Ms. Kotani turned pale
and lost her voice.
As the Assistant Principal rushed over to intervene, Bunji’s
father tried to punch him, and when a young teacher prevented that,
the father knocked a cup of hot tea on him. Finally, the enraged
father was maneuvered into the principal’s office, where the
Principal tried to talk to him, but the man was raging out of
control and wouldn’t settle down. Somehow or other they
managed to quiet him down with an explanation, by which time Ms.
Kotani’s makeup was running down her face, and she appeared
on the verge of a breakdown. The Principal knew that she had been
brought up as the sheltered only child of a small–town
doctor, and he worried that she wouldn’t be able to bear the
shock. That evening, the Assistant Principal escorted Ms. Kotani
home as if she were a small child.
In the morning, after a sleepless night, Ms. Kotani groaned like a
wounded animal that she was going to quit. The other teachers,
however, easily squashed her request, and one colleague teased her,
saying that if everyone who wanted to quit were allowed to do so,
in ten years there wouldn’t be a single teacher left.
But Ms. Kotani felt that working at this school had somehow made
her heart grow cold. When she realized that even students that she
had at first considered adorable might, over a slight
misunderstanding, hurt her, she knew she had to be on guard.
Everyday, she came to school feeling depressed.
The school was in an industrial zone. Soon after getting off at the
train station, as you approached the school, you were engulfed by a
haze, which all day long smothered the area in a gloomy gray. Ms.
Kotani always felt slightly dizzy when she arrived. Since the
school was located right next to a garbage disposal plant, it
suffered much damage. The disposal plant was constructed in 1918
and had barely received any improvements since. For that reason,
the smoke coming from its chimneys was intense, and the smell was
horrible. When the ash was being removed, white dust would rain
down on the school and the nearby homes alike. The
lower–grade students would sing laughingly about the
“falling snow,” but the situation infuriated the older
students, who had even submitted a letter of protest to the local
government.
Of course, there had been frequent plans to move the disposal plant
to another location, but the plans never seemed to materialize.
Before elections, every political party pledged to relocate the
plant, but since the plan was never once carried out, the
townspeople referred to the plant as the seventh natural wonder of
the town.
To give a short description of the plant, there were three furnaces
for burning trash, all of which were rather simple contrivances:
the openings to the furnaces were on the second floor, and the
garbage collected there was simply shoved down into the furnaces
below. Before incineration, the garbage was roughly divided into
burnables and non-burnables. Garbage more difficult to burn would
often smolder, and there was nothing to do but wait for it to burn
out. And so the furnaces’ efficiency would vary considerably,
depending on the type of garbage. Usually, it took twenty-four
hours to burn one load of garbage. The ash would drop down and
accumulate in some sort of underground room, which had a door
facing the street, so the ash could be easily taken away.
Ash-removal was carried out in the morning. The workers, who wore
nothing but loincloths because they were soon covered with ash,
appeared rather gallant to passers-by, but the work could be
extremely hazardous because aerosol cans would sometimes explode
and pieces of glass would sometimes cut the workers’ hands
and feet. Garbage that couldn’t be immediately disposed of
was collected in a large gymnasium–like building next to the
incinerators. During the rainy season, the heat of the rotting
garbage made the entire room stifling.
Standing slightly removed from this building was the housing for
the plant workers: a harmonica–like tenement house holding
fourteen or fifteen homes. Tetsuzo’s home was on the
easternmost end. Generally speaking, there were two groups of
people working at the disposal plant. One group, who were city
employees, did paperwork inside nice concrete buildings, or
supervised those working at the plant, and when evening came, they
headed off to their respective homes. The other group, who were
merely temporary workers, did the manual labor at the plant. These
people sorted and burned the trash, and took away the ash. They
were the ones who lived in the tenement house in the middle of the
compound.
Having come to the school next to this disposal plant, Ms. Kotani
could understand, when she considered all of the incidents that
occurred during the first four months up until summer vacation, why
the children living in this area were the way they were. There had
been four traffic accidents—an average of one per
month—and although fatalities had been avoided, one child had
been hospitalized for six months when he was hit by a car and
dragged nearly thirty meters.
There was also a serious non-traffic injury: a boy had fallen from
the roof of a steel mill while trying to get a pigeon that had
settled there. The incident made headlines in the local newspapers,
and the school’s responsibility was questioned. For the
school, it had been the major incident of the year. Every month,
there were several cases of shoplifting from the supermarket, and
one month there were as many as ten. There was one case of a
student running away from home, and many cases of parents
abandoning their children, so many that it was impossible for the
school to investigate them all. And there was another incident: a
catastrophe was once narrowly averted when a vagrant who had
entered the school grounds tried to abduct a female student.
Compared to all these problems, the scene caused by Tetsuzo was
quite ordinary and normally wouldn’t even have been
considered an “incident.” The only reason it attracted
so much attention was that Ms. Kotani was a brand-new
teacher.
It truly was a troubled school. Even some of the teachers were
strange. One day, Ms. Kotani wanted a second opinion on some
student essays. She considered asking Mr. Adachi because he had
written some poetry and composition books for children, but she was
hesitant because he had a bad reputation. He had long hair, and the
clothes he wore were far from the standard attire of a suit and
tie. She thought he was a bit of a slob. On top of this, there were
rumors that he gambled and that his personal life was in disarray.
And yet, for some reason or other, the other teachers respected
him. She vaguely remembered hearing that this was because he was
popular with the parents.
In the end, she decided to show him the essays. When she entered
his classroom, she found him lying across a string of small desks
that he had lined up in a row. She was shocked. She had heard that
he was called the “mafia teacher,” and the nickname
seemed to fit.
“Mr. Adachi, do you always sleep like that?” she
ventured to ask.
“Yeh, I guess,” he responded, spitting the words out at
her. But then, he sat down on a chair like a normal teacher and
began to read. He smiled as he read the essays. “These are
pretty good. There’s probably other undiscovered treasure,
too.”
“I’m not quite sure what you mean.”
“I mean your students probably got good stuff in them, even
though you might be overlooking it. And I don’t mean just
compositions.”
His comment disconcerted her.
“Oh, and by the way, you seem to be having a lot of trouble
with Tetsuzo Usui, but from my experience, he’s the kind of
kid who’s especially full of treasure.”
Ms. Kotani was surprised. It wasn’t particularly strange that
he had heard about the incident with Tetsuzo, but at a school of
nearly two thousand students, it was impressive that he would know
the name of a student in another grade. She was happy to hear him
praise her student, but she didn’t really understand what he
meant. He had said that Tetsuzo was full of treasure, but what
treasure could he have been referring to? Tetsuzo never wrote or
spoke, so where could his treasure be
hidden?
A
Rabbit's Eyes (Chapter 10)
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