A Patch of Sky

Niwa Fumio

Ryokun and his friend walked along the path between the paddy fields. Ahead of them
stood the dark, luxuriant Heron’s Forest. It was about a kilometer from where the houses ended,
and stood out like an island among the fields—in time of the ripe-blossom, an emerald island
floating on a sea of yellow; in the barley season, an island in a green sea, itself a richer, more
brilliant green.
A plan to make it the center of a new park for the town had been drawn up, but nothing
had been done yet to carry it out. Even at a distance, the wood looked old and mysterious as though
it had a history of its own. It was surrounded by paddy fields. Just before reaching it, the path was
cut off by a ditch, dug centuries ago to protect a fortress in the woods. The ditch had been filled in,
but a perennial spring turned most of it into a bog, into which a man could sink up to his chest.
Ryokun loved the forest. Day after day he came back to it, as though to store up memories
of his childhood. To his childish imagination it was huge—it covered about five acres—and
reminded him of some vast, far-stretching range of mountains. Within its depths were valleys, hills,
open spaces, hundreds of giant trees hiding the sky—cryptomerias, that even Ryokun and two of
his friends together could hardly reach round. A Shinto shrine lay hidden in the dense foliage,
deserted except on festival days, when the priest would come from Tan’ami. No sound but the
chirping of birds disturbed the silence. Before them stood the stone tori of the shrine. With a shout,
Ryokun and his friend dashed into the woods making for a huge cryptomeria that grew aslant, at
an angle of nearly thirty degrees, as if it was falling over. It had been blown down by a typhoon long
ago, and had grown that way ever since. The first boy to reach the tree would climb it up; then the
game was to see who could climb higher.
Ryokun was first at the trunk. Shouting with excitement, he ran four fourteen or fifteen feet
up it and then, the impetus of his dash from the edge of the wood exhausted, stopped dead, gravity
pulling him back. This was the moment to bring his muscles consciously into play—to spin around
the instant body came to a standstill, without stopping to breathe, and race down the ground. The
least slip meant a fall or at best slithering down the trunk, one’s arms around it to avoid toppling off.
It was perfectly smooth, even the rubber sports shoes the boys always wore had been enough to
peel off the bark. A boy who was clumsy or frightened or hadn’t perfect control of his muscles would
fall off the trunk, or slip and collapse astride it, before he was six feet up.
Ryokun loved the thrill of the rush up the tree, the sudden turn, the dash to the bottom
again. His feelings during those few seconds were complex. The moment of turning, when his body
had lost its impetus, brought a stab of despair, for a split-second his head felt empty, like a
passenger in an airplane the moment it leaves the ground. Involuntarily, in that moment of panic, he would cry out. “Mother…!”
Then once more the headlong run down, carrying him thirty feet beyond the bottom of the tree.
Ryokun loved the thrill of the rush up the tree, the sudden turn. It made him feel lonely or sad or uneasy—such feeling, whatever
its immediate cause, resembling his original sense of desolation at losing his mother, so that it always made him think of her. At other
times she no longer existed for him.
Straining to beat his friend, Ryokun raced up the smooth round tree. At the end of the run, he was suddenly afraid. Till then,
there had been nothing but the thrill of the race, now, the height of the tree terrified him. If he let go his hands, nothing could stop him
from failing. Below, his companion was still shouting, egging him on. Clinging desperately to the trunk, Ryokun tried to look triumphant.
he wanted to cry, but of this, his friend knew nothing. How could he get down?
It seemed impossible now. He could not move. Gradually, his fingers were growing numb, and the bare foot he had pressed
against the underside of the trunk… Even if he managed to keep holding on for a while, his hands were losing their strength, and were
bound to start slipping soon. The voice below was still shouting its admiration… hot and red-faced, all confidence drained out of him.
Ryokun held on grimly with both hands and feet. He looked up a small patch of sky peered down through the trees.
“Mother!”
He was sorry he had come so high, and told himself he would never run up the tree again, or if he did, only so far so that he
would not have to go through this again.
Still he could not move. The shouting stopped. At last, his companion had realized apparently, that he was in difficulty. Holding
his breath, he stared up, suddenly aware of Ryokun’s terror.
“Ryokun!” The half-whispered exclamation showed his own fear. Ryokun began to slip. It was up to his hands and legs now to
save him. Little by little, a few inches at a time, the rigid body slipped. Only his head moved freely, as if with a separate life of its own,
looking to right and left, then straight down, trying to guess his height. Slowly, cautiously, he came down, controlling his own descent so
much as letting gravity take him down in short, sharp pulls on the slackening muscles of his hands and feet.
At last he was standing on the grass at the foot of the tree. His friend was relieved but did not speak for a while. Nor did Ryokun.
He was flushed and tense, too agitated even to look up at the tree he had climbed. He felt strangely uneasy too, towards his friend, as
though he had been deceived in something they had both expected. By every law of probability, he should have fallen from the tree, the
fact that he had not seemed a kind of betrayal. Yet his friend, of course, had not wanted him to fall. A lucky betrayal then: it was puzzling…
The two boys walked away quickly from the tree, leaving to silence the awkward feeling each sense in the other.
Then suddenly, one of them was running up a hill. “Ya-a-a-ah!” The other followed, shouting. In a moment, they had raced to
the top. Here and there below them, the camellias were in flower, scattering dots of fire in a carpet of deep green. Chasing each other
down the slope, the boys were soon clambering up two big camellia trees. Close-packed branches made climbing safe all the way up.
“Oh…sweet!”
“Lovely!”
“Sweeter than anything!”
Tearing flowers from the branches, they sucked the pistils noisily. The camellias, a haunt of bees and butterflies, tasted like
honey, but with a special sweetness of their own; cool, fresh, containing the very essence of a flower’s life. Ryokun chewed the white tip
of each pistil. Sucking, chewing one camellia after another, again he remembered his mother. There, perhaps, in the fugitive sweetness
of each dying flower, was the taste of a child’s loneliness, to which his mother had abandoned him.