Chapter 4 CHAPTER THREE THE CHILDREN LIVING WITH SEALS IN THE FOREST

CHAPTER THREE THE CHILDREN LIVING WITH SEALS IN THE FOREST 1 It was already twenty years ago, when I went to give a speech in a foreign country in China, I met a person who spoke to me.I do have an impression of this person, but I really can't remember where I saw it.This person's bones and muscles are well developed, but it makes people feel that his body is not cultivated through sports, but the result of long-term physical labor. When the speeches are over and crowded, generally speaking, only adults would do that to a child they like. I was slapped on the back of my neck by a big, powerful hand. I turned around and saw a People are staring at me.He kept his big hand on my neck and said with such an incredulous expression:

"Ah! Sure enough! It's on the street where the river flows! Didn't you raise a seal in the mountains? I heard that a novelist came out of that small village. I think it must be that child." .I don’t remember the name. Didn’t you wear glasses when you were young?” After speaking, the man laughed loudly, and walked into the quiet night street of the small town while laughing. At that moment, my heart was impacted by nostalgic but complicated emotions, which could not be restrained.Restore the bones of this sixty-year-old man to youth in his imagination, and his muscles to softness, and the image of a young man who looks like a goat emerges in his memory.What revived my memory completely was the sentence "Didn't you say you raised a seal in the mountains?" like an adult teasing a child.

2 First, let's talk about seals.These are things I slowly remembered later, from spring to early summer when I was ten years old.Japan was defeated that summer.Many things that happened in connection with the defeat made it difficult for me to survive as a child, although I knew I was of the type who looked childish for my age.The year before the defeat, grandma and father passed away within a short period of time.In the face of the painful, horrible things that kept happening, my mentality became closer to my chronological age.Or it can be said that the thinking problem is closer to that of adults.However, during this transformation process, I have never abandoned the childlike fantasies in my heart, and my childlike innocence has not aged.

Why do you say this way?This brings me to my reading of children's books published before the war.It was a thick children's magazine. The war in question here is the Pacific War between Japan and the United States, Britain, and other countries when I was six years old.But the war with China has been going on for a long time before that.According to my age, when I was two years old, the Japanese army already stationed in Chinese territory started the war.At that time, I didn’t know anything when I was a kid, but then I learned little by little words such as motherland, foreign country, and the world, and then I knew the fact that my country was fighting the world as its enemy.

During the long war, especially after the outbreak of the Pacific War, the new magazines became thinner and thinner, and there was nothing interesting to read in them.The number of magazines printed has decreased, and I even feel that there are no magazines in the small forest village in Shikoku where I live. An old magazine from a few years ago has me hooked.The magazine described how the children of Eskimos (Inuit as they are now called) who lived in the Canadian Arctic tundra, which is covered with solid ice for most of the year, hunted seals on the edge of the sea ice sheet thing. The method of hunting is very simple.It is to go for a walk on the ice sheet on a sunny day. When you are close to the ice sheet on the sea surface, you only need to find small ice holes on the ice surface.Because it is a sign of seal pups living under the ice, and the newly born pups breathe through it.The hunter watches through the thin ice, and when the little seal is about to raise its head under the ice cave, he pierces the thin ice with a steel drill, and the little seal is his prey.

Immediately, I began to imagine the tiny body of a seal pup impaled from eyes to nose by divisor steel rods.I don't want to do that kind of thing.After that, I began to think about the baby seal irresistibly. I wanted to make the small ice hole where the baby seal used to breathe little by little bigger, and feed it the frozen fish that I caught. It's addictive.Smooth the hair of the baby seals that climbed up the ice in the sun, and take the baby seals for a walk on the ice field. I don't know when it started, when I was walking in the woods, I also wanted to have a little seal behind me.I called him "Jorgen," after a place-name I had read in a newspaper.I can also talk to it about this and that.In the world of young children, such stories spread instantly, and even adults, including schoolteachers, made fun of me for being able to walk a baby seal like a dog.

3 At that time, some "preparatory training" young people came to the village, and they stayed in a hotel.They dug up the roots of the felled trees around the valley and transported them to the valley to make "pine root oil".Next, I need to introduce the two words "preparatory training" and "pine root oil". "Preparatory training" is an abbreviation for "Navy flight preparatory trainees".My eldest brother volunteered to join the "preparatory training" at the age of seventeen.It is a system that allows future pilots to receive pilot training while they are still young.But in the later stage of the war, there were no machines and equipment for their training, so the young people who were "preparatory" began to work in the manufacture of aircraft fuel "pine root oil".These people were scattered into the woods and came to our valleys.

The roots of pine trees contain a large amount of pine resin, which is distilled to produce "pine root oil", which is pine oil in terms of things around us.The factory that makes "pine root oil" is located by the river upstream of our village. For this reason, the valley is always full of volatile smoke. The young people in the "preparatory training" are warriors in the eyes of the village children.But I heard that sometimes the older ones made the younger ones line up behind the factory and beat them.Originally, every holiday, the "preparatory training" people played with our children, and the mothers of the farm children always took food to them to express condolences.They live on the second floor of the hotel.I don't want to be near the person who beats and gets hit, and for that reason, I don't go there anymore.

But one day on the way to the post office, a young man from the "preparatory training" called me from the second floor of the hotel. A child came down from the upstairs and brought me to the young man. The young man asked me to tell about the little seal. After so many years, this person is indeed one of the "young people" back then. This man in his sixties who has been engaged in manual labor all his life probably heard that in the valley where he spent his painful youth , there is a novelist out, so come to my lecture meeting.Maybe I want to see if I am still the same as when I was a child, when I speak in front of people, I must start with the funny beginning of "Deep in the mountains, I raised a little seal...".I think he still saw the old look of the boy "on the street where the river flows" who was passed down as a joke among the children.

4 At that time, during the day, when I talked about the little seal in my fantasy, several friends believed that I lived with the little seal, and they accepted me as an incredible and fun guy.But at night, I always couldn't sleep because of deep thinking, and stayed up all night alone.What kept me thinking about it so much that I couldn't fall asleep was that I would soon join the army and go to the battlefield.The climax of every war game with children is to charge, but when I charge, I run so slowly, what if I am pulled down by my comrades? From the narrow dormitory where my siblings and I were covered with quilts, we could see the staircase on the second floor where the stairs had been removed and no one in the family had gone up for many years. It opened like a black hole.I opened my eyes wide alone, imagining uncontrollably.The wall clock strikes once an hour.The time between the last strike and the next seemed to me as long as a man's whole life.

My imagination unfolds like this.After the comrades in arms charged, I did not give up chasing them. I ran step by step on the vast grassland alone with a rifle on my back.Army soldiers require people over the age of twenty, but my body is still like a little boy.Later, I chatted with the German novelist Gumter Grass and learned that he had the experience of being forced to go to the battlefield as a young soldier and then captured.During the conversation, I took a close look at the small, wrinkled-faced Glass, and compared my own assumptions with him.My imagination slipped in dire directions.I tried my best to catch up with the resting team at the end of the charge. They immediately said that I was deliberately pretending to be a laggard because of cowardice, and even said that I would run away from the field if possible. Günter Grass wrote a story about a young German soldier.When he was defeated in World War II (when Japan was allied with Germany and fought against a common enemy), he fled from the battlefield that captured France, separated from his own unit on the way, was later executed as a deserter, and was hanged. On street poles.During the later "those poor young soldiers are not deserters" rehabilitation campaign, Glass also got in touch with me, and I supported their actions. My more terrifying assumption is that a person is running step by step on the wide grassland, and suddenly the enemy rushes out of the tall wormwood and bushes behind him.I shot at the enemy because I thought I was going to be killed. ... As long as I keep my eyes open, my imagination must develop to this critical moment.After that, there was a suffocatingly terrifying dream. In the dream, I thought it was the enemy and I shot, but in fact the enemy was a soldier of the same unit and an American soldier who had fallen behind in the charge like me.The American youth I never saw when I was alive is now a dead body that I beat to death rolling around my feet... I also experienced other more terrifying things in my dream.However, when I woke up from the dream with tears streaming down my face, recalling the trembling dream, I could not reproduce it anyway.I know very well that I will have the same dream again... In summer, the war is over.On the night when I knew the end of the war, I no longer had the dream of falling behind during the charge.Moreover, even the fantasy about the baby seal in the Canadian tundra, which has always been with me, was also cooled by myself that fall because I thought "that's just a child's obsession story."