E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten
Imamura This is Amiko, Do You Copy?
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-78227-980-8
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-78227-980-8
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Natsuko Imamura was born in Hiroshima Prefecture. She has won the Osamu Dazai Prize, the Yukio Mishima Prize and the Akutagawa Prize for her fiction, which in addition to This is Amiko includes The Woman in the Purple Skirt. She lives in Osaka with her husband and daughter.
Weitere Infos & Material
AMIKO GREW UP AS THE SECOND CHILD IN THE TANAKA FAMILY until the day she moved out at the age of fifteen. She had a father, a mother, and an older brother who became a juvenile delinquent.
Back when Amiko was in elementary school, Mother taught a calligraphy class at home. The classroom was small and simple, with three long rectangular tables arranged in an eight-mat tatami room where Mother’s mother used to sleep. Now the floor was covered with a red rug from corner to corner. Next to this room was the so-called Buddha room, where the butsudan was placed, and across the hall was the kitchen–dining room. The classroom was connected to a veranda, and that’s where the calligraphy students entered after removing their shoes. Mother had wanted it this way. Otherwise, if the students entered through the front door, they’d have to walk past the Buddha room and the kitchen–dining room and they’d see into the family’s living spaces.
In front of the veranda was a small yard, where Father parked his car. Whenever the car was there, the students had to step sideways in the gap between the car and the concrete wall of the house to get to the veranda, which resulted in Father’s navy-blue car getting scratched by the metal snaps on their school backpacks. When that happened, Father never complained but would apply a cream onto a sponge and rub it over the scratches, which made them vanish without a trace. “It’s a magic sponge,” he would say. Amiko begged Father to let her use the magic sponge, and from then on she would inspect the car daily for scratches before anyone else could discover them and rub them out with great enthusiasm. As a result, Father’s car always glistened. But some scratches were deep, and no magic could remove the words amiko the fool. Amiko tried valiantly to rub it out—“I almost got it,” she said, checking from different angles—but the etched words were never completely gone.
Amiko was in the first grade and could read her own name, but not the kanji for fool. When she asked Father what it said, he pushed up his glasses and replied, “Hmmm… I dunno.”
The next day, the navy-blue car was covered with a thick rain cover, which remained in place rain or shine.
Amiko missed the thrill of rubbing out scratches, but there were plenty of other fun things to do—like peeking into “the red room” (she called it that because of the red rug) when Mother was teaching a class. Amiko had been strictly forbidden to enter the classroom, so she had to be sneaky. How exciting this was. Yelling “Pee! Pee! Pee!”, Amiko would pretend to go to the toilet, tiptoe into the adjacent Buddha room holding her breath, and pry open the sliding doors to create a tiny gap. Sneaking looks into the red room with her left eye, she would see the back of Mother’s head, her long black hair pulled tight into a ponytail. Beyond, she would see students facing her way. Around the same age as she was, they were lined up in front of the tables, sitting upright on the floor with their legs tucked under properly. Her brother Kota, who was two years older, was one of the students. He had good posture and was holding a brush. Amiko didn’t know any of the other students, but she couldn’t resist the temptation of their whisperings and the alluring scent of ink mixed with the smell of newspaper they used for practice. The smell somehow made her want to pee for real, and she would have to go back and forth to the toilet after all.
One summer day, Amiko hid behind the sliding door as usual, occasionally slipping away to go to the toilet.
At one point, Amiko went into the kitchen and returned with a piece of corn cob that Mother had prepared for her. She got into position and began gnawing off one kernel of the sweetcorn at a time, when she noticed that a boy was looking directly at her. He was sitting perfectly still with a brush in his hand, staring at Amiko with big round eyes. The glass door to the veranda was slightly open, creaking gently as the breeze blew in and ruffled the boy’s bangs, which glowed in the evening sun. The only other sound to be heard was the crunching of the yellow kernels of corn, which echoed deeply in Amiko’s ears.
The boy put down his brush. He picked up the sheet of paper from his desk, turned it around, and raised it up to his face. Written on the white sheet was ??, the kana for komé, meaning rice. The calligraphy was neatly spaced and beautiful, so much more than Amiko’s writing. Then, perhaps because the boy had dabbed his brush too deeply in the ink, a drop began to form on the bottom edge of ?. It looked like drool trickling down from a smiling mouth. As Amiko watched, spellbound, the cob of corn in her hand grew hotter and hotter. Her overgrown fingernails dug into the kernels and penetrated the cob. Sweet juice oozed out, mixing with the sweat of her hands and becoming sticky. Her mind became foggy, filled only with the vision of the boy before her.
Then, suddenly, someone shouted, “It’s Amiko!”
The students all looked up at once.
“Amiko is watching us!”
One of the boys stood up, full of energy. He straightened his arm and pointed the tip of his brush toward her. “Tanaka-sensei, she’s right behind you!”
Mother’s head of black hair whipped around, and in the next moment her eyes, narrowed and pointed, landed on Amiko.
As Mother approached, Amiko glanced up at the mole under her chin. “But I didn’t go inside,” Amiko protested. “I was just looking!”
Mother stepped into the Buddha room, closed the sliding door behind her, and let out a deep sigh. She said to her daughter, “Go to the other room and do your homework.”
“Noooo!”
“Don’t argue. Hurry up and do as I say.”
“But I wanna learn calligraphy too.”
“You will not.”
“I will too!”
“No one can learn calligraphy until they finish their homework.”
“Then I’ll just watch.”
“You will not. You may learn calligraphy if you can do your homework, go to school every day, listen to your teacher, get along with your friends, and behave yourself. Can you do that, Amiko? Can you promise not to sing in the middle of class or scribble on the desk? Can you promise not to pretend you’re a boxer, or walk around barefoot at school, or eat curry rice with your hands? Can you do that? Can you?” After saying all that in one breath, Mother noiselessly opened the sliding door to the red room where her students were sitting, stepped inside, and shut the door in Amiko’s face.
It was a while before Amiko realized that the boy she’d seen in the red room that day—the boy who’d written ?? and lifted it up to show her—went to the same elementary school as she did and was in her class. Amiko often skipped school, so she hadn’t made the connection. When she recognized him at school one day, she exclaimed, “You’re the boy with the drooling kana!” He fixed his round eyes on Amiko for a moment, then turned away.
Later, it occurred to Amiko that maybe, on that day, the boy had been showing his calligraphy to Mother, his teacher, rather than to her. But instead she took it to be a show of affection that was meant for herself alone. During recess, Amiko asked her homeroom teacher how long the boy had been in her class. “Nori?” the teacher replied. “He’s been here the whole time. Even before you transferred to this school.” That was news to Amiko. “Nori,” she said the name aloud.
The first time Amiko said a word to Nori was toward the end of autumn. From the scratchy old loudspeakers at the community center came the familiar tune of “The Seven Children”, which was the sign to everyone playing outside that they should be going home. Kota was walking a few steps ahead of Amiko.
“It’s a grave. Amiko, hide your thumbs!” Kota yelled out. He would say this whenever they came by the cemetery, and Amiko would usually get her thumbs out of sight right away, but on this day she was too preoccupied—with Nori—to do so. She’d noticed that Nori had been walking behind her since she left the school gate, keeping a certain distance from her, and so she turned around every two seconds to make sure he was still there. No matter how many times she looked, Nori was there, with the same expression and at the same distance. The same face, the same silky bangs, the same round eyes, the same small mouth as when he showed her his kana for komé—all of that was within five or six steps of her.
“It’s the stinky church,” Kota called out when they approached the small, dilapidated church. “Amiko, hold your nose!” Normally Amiko would respond, “Got it!” and put her hand up to her nose, but today the hand remained by her side. “You listening?!” Kota kicked a pebble and turned around. “Oh, hey, Nori.”
Nori smiled at Kota and raised his hand....
