Totto-Chan, the Little Girl at the Window (14 page)

The next few days Totto-chan stuck close to Mother in the kitchen and carefully observed how she used a knife, how she held a pot, and how she served the rice. It was nice watching her work in the kitchen, bur what Totto-chan liked most was the way Mother would say, "Ooh, that's hot!" and quickly put her thumb and index finger to her ear-lobe whenever she picked up something hot like a lid.

"That's because earlobes are cold," Mother explained.

Her gesture impressed Totto-chan as being very grown-up and evidence of kitchen expertise. She said to herself, "When we thunder-canyon-field-kitchen, I'm going to do that, too!"

Friday finally arrived. When they had reached Thunder Canyon after leaving the train, the head-master surveyed the children gathered in the woods. Their dear little faces glowed in the sunlight as it filtered through the tall trees. With their knapsacks bulging, the children waited to hear what the head-master had to say, while beyond them the famous waterfall fell in booming torrents, making a beautiful rhythm.

"Now then," said the headmaster, "first of all, let's divide into groups and make stoves with the bricks the teachers have brought. Then some of you can wash the rice in the stream and put it on to cook. After that, we'll start making the pork soup. Now then, shall we get started?"

The children divided themselves into groups by playing "stone, paper, scissors." Since there were only about fifty of them, it wasn't long before they had six groups. Holes were dug and surrounded with piled-up bricks. Then they laid thin iron bars across to support the soup and rice pots. While that was going on, some gathered firewood in the forest, and others went off to wash the rice in the stream. The children themselves allotted their various tasks. Totto-chan offered to cut up the vegetables and take charge of the pork soup. A boy two years senior to Totto-chan was also assigned to chopping vegetables, but he cut them into pieces that were either too big or too small and made a mess of the job. He labored manfully with the task, however, his nose glistening with perspiration. Totto-chan followed Mother's example and skillfully cut up the egg-plants, potatoes, onions, burdock roots, and so forth, that the children had brought, in just the right bite-sized pieces. She even took
it upon herself to make some pickles by slicing egg plant and cucumber very thin and rubbing the slices with salt. She gave advice, too, to some of the older children who were having trouble with their chores. Totto-chan really felt as if she had already become a mother! Everyone was impressed with her pickles.

"Oh, I just thought I'd try and see if I could make some," she declared modestly. When it came to flavoring the pork broth, everyone was asked for an opinion. From the various groups came startled cries of, "Wow!" "Gee!" and a great deal of laughter. The birds in the forest twittered, too, joining in the general uproar. In the meantime, tempting aromas rose from every pot. Until then, hardly any of the children had ever watched something cooking or had to regulate the heat. They had merely eaten what was put before them on the table. The joy of cooking something themselves, with its attendant traumas--and seeing the various changes the ingredients have to undergo--was a whole new experience to them.

Eventually, the work at each group's makeshift stove was completed. The headmaster had the children make a space on the grass where they could all sit in a circle. One soup pot and one rice pot were placed in front of each group. But Totto-chan refused to have her group's soup pot taken away until she had first performed the action she had set her heart upon. Taking off the hot lid, she declared rather self-consciously, "Ooh, that's hot!" and put the fingers of both hands to her earlobes. Only then did she say, "You can take it now," and the pot was duly carried over to where the children were sitting, wondering what on earth was going on. No one seemed at all impressed. But Totto-chan was satisfied all the same.

Everyone's attention was fixed on the bowls of rice in front of them and the contents of the steaming soup bowls. The children were hungry. But first and foremost, it was a meal they had made themselves!

After the children had sung, "Chew, chew, chew it well, Everything you eat," and had said, "I gratefully partake," all became quiet in the woods.

There was no sound but that of the waterfall.

“You're really a good girl, you know.”

That's what the headmaster used to say every time he saw Totto-chan. And every time he said it, Totto-chan would smile, give a little skip, and say, "Yes, I am a good girl." And she believed it.

Totto-chan was, indeed, a good girl in many ways. She was kind to everyone - particularly her physically handicapped friends. She would defend them, and, if children from other schools said cruel things, she would fight the tormentors, even if it ended with her crying. She would do everything to care for any injured animals she found. But at the same time her teachers were continually astonished at the amount of trouble she always got into as she tried to satisfy her curiosity whenever she discovered anything unusual.

She would do things like making her pigtails stick out behind under each arm while marching to morning assembly. Once, when it was her turn to sweep the classroom, she opened a trapdoor her sharp eyes had noticed in the floor and put all the sweepings down the hole. It had originally been for inspecting the machinery when it was a real train. But she couldn't get the trapdoor closed again, and caused everyone a lot of trouble. And then there was the time someone told her how meat was hung up on hooks, so she went and hung by one arm from the highest exercise bar. She hung there for ages, and when a teacher saw her and asked what she was doing, she shouted, "I'm a piece of meat today!" and just then lost her hold and fell down so hard it knocked all the wind out of her lungs and she couldn't speak all day. Then, of course, there was that time when she jumped into the cesspool.

She was always doing things like that and hurting herself, but the headmaster never sent for Mother and Daddy. It was the same with the other children. Matters were always settled between the headmaster and the child concerned. lust as he had listened to Totto-chan for four hours the day she first arrived at the school, he always listened to what a child had to say about an incident caused. He even listened to their excuses. And if the child had done something really bad and eventually recognized it was wrong, the headmaster would say, "Now apologize."

In Totto-chan's case, complaints and fears voiced by children's parents and other teachers undoubtedly reached the ears of the headmaster. That's why, whenever he had a chance, he would say to Totto-chan, "You're really a good girl, you know. A grown-up, hearing him say it, would have realized the significance of the way he emphasized the word “really.”

What the headmaster must have wanted to make Totto-chan understand was something like this: "Some people may think you're not a good girl in many respects, but your real character is not bad. It has a great deal that is good about it, and I am well aware of that." Alas, it was many, many years before Totto-chan realized what he really meant. Still, while she may not have grasped his true meaning at the time, the headmaster certainly instilled, deep in her, a confidence in herself as “a good girl.” His words echoed in her heart even when she was engaged in some escapade. And many times she said to herself, "Good heavens!" as she reflected on something she had done.

Mr. Kobayashi kept on repeating, the entire time she was at Tomoe, those important words that probably determined the course of her whole life:

“Totto-chan, you're really a good girl, you know.”

Totto-chan was very sad.

She was in third grade now and she liked Tai-chan a lot. He was clever and good at physics. He studied English, and it was he who taught her the English word for fox.

"Totto-chan," he had Said, "do yoU know what the English word for kitsune is? It's 'fox.' " "Fox."

Totto-chan had luxuriated in the sound of that word all day long. After that, the first thing she always did when she got to the classroom-in-the train was to sharpen all the pencils in Tai-chan's pencil box as beautifully as she could with her penknife. She didn't bother about her own, which she just hacked at with her teeth.

In spite of all that, Tai-chan had spoken roughly to her. It happened during lunch break. Totto-chan was sauntering along behind the Assembly Hall in the region of chat notorious cesspool.

"Totto-chan!"

Tai-chan's voice sounded cross, and she stopped, startled. Pausing for breath, Tai- chan said, "When I grow up, I'm not going to marry you, no matter how much you ask me to." So saying, he walked off, his eyes on the ground.

Totto-chan stood dazed, watching until he and his large head disappeared from view. That head full of brains that she admired so much. That head that looked so much bigger than his body the children used to call him "The Improper Fraction."

Totto-chan put her hands in her pockets and thought. She could not remember doing anything to annoy him. In desperation she talked it over with her classmate Miyo- chan. After listening to Totto-chan, Miyo-chan said, maturely, "Why, of course! It's because you threw Tai-chan out of the ring today at sumo wrestling. It's not surprising he flew out of the ring the way he did because his head's so heavy. But he's still bound to be mad at you."

Totto-chan regretted it with all her heart. Yes, that was it. What on earth made her beat the boy she liked so much She Sharpened his pencils every day! But it was too late. She could never be his bride now.

"I'm going to go on sharpening his pencils all the same," Totto-chan decided. "After all, I love him."

There was a jingle--a sort of singsong refrain—that was popular among elementary school children. They did it a lot at her previous school. As the children went home after school, they would go out the gate looking back over their shoulders at their school and chant:

Akamatsu School's a shabby old school; Inside though, it's a splendid school!

When children from some other school happened to pass by, these pupils would point their fingers at Akamatsu School and chant:

Akamatsu School's a splendid school; Inside though, it's a shabby old school!

And they would end by making a rude noise.

Whether a school was shabby or splendid in the first line depended on whether the building was old or new. The important part of the chant was the second line. The part that said what the school was like inside. So it didn't really matter if the first line said your school was shabby on the outside. It was what it was like inside that mattered. The jingle was always chanted by at least five or six children together.

One afternoon after school the Tomoe pupils were playing as usual. They could do anything they liked until the final bell, when they had to leave the school grounds. The headmaster thought it was important for children to have time when they were free to do whatever they liked, so this period after classes were over was longer than at other elementary schools. That day some were playing ball, some had made themselves all dirty playing on the iron bars or in the sandbox, some were tending the flower beds, some of the older girls were just sitting on the steps chatting, and some were climbing trees. They were all doing just what they wanted. Among them were a few, like Tai-chan, who had stayed behind in the classroom to continue a physics experiment and were boiling flasks and doing experiments in test tubes. There were children in the library reading, and Amadera, who liked animals, was scrutinizing a stray cat he had found, turning it on its back and examining inside its ears. They were all enjoying themselves in their own ways.

Suddenly, a loud chant was heard outside the school:
Tomoe School is a shabby old school;
Inside, too, it's a shabby old school!

"That's terrible," thought Totto-chan. She happened to be right by the gate. Well, it wasn't really a gate, as it had leaves growing out of the posts. But at any rate, she heard them very clearly. It was too much. Imagine calling their school shabby both inside and out! She was indignant. The others were indignant, too, and came running toward the gate.

"Shabby old school!" reiterated the boys from the other school, as they ran off making rude noises.

Totto-chan was so-infuriated she ran after the boys. All by herself. But they were very fast, running down a side sneer and disappearing as quick as a wink. Totto-chan walked back to school disconsolately. As she walked, she sang:

Tomoe School is a wonderful school; A few steps along, she added:
Inside and out, it's a wonderful school!

She liked it, and it made her feel better. So when she got back, she pretended she was from another school and shouted through the hedge in a loud voice, so that everybody could hear:

Tomoe School is a wonderful school; Inside and out, it's a wonderful school!

The children playing in the grounds at first couldn't imagine who it was. When they realized it was Totto-chan, they went out to the road and joined in. Finally they all linked arms and marched along the roads surrounding the school chanting together. It was their hearts that were in unison even more than their voices, although they didn't realize that then. The more they went around the school, the more they entered into the spirit of it.

Tomoe School is a wonderful school; Inside and out, it's a wonderful school!

The children little knew, of course, what happiness their chant was giving the headmaster, as he sat listening in his office.

It must be the same for any educator, but for those in particular who truly think about the children, running a school must be a daily series of agonies. It must have been even more so at a school like Tomoe, where everything was so unusual. The school could not escape criticism from people used to a more conventional system of education.

In such circumstances, that song of the children was the nicest gift they could possibly have given the headmaster.