Free A Thousand Stitches by Constance O'Keefe Page B

should see. Take a look.”
    I walked closer and saw characters carved into the stone. They were worn down but I could read them, and they were all simple enough that I had no trouble understanding them: Namu Daishi / Ishite no tera yo / ine no hana. Praise Daishi / the temple at Ishite / rice plants in bloom.
    â€œNice, isn’t it,” said Father. “It was written by Shiki, a Matsuyama hometown hero and famous haiku poet. I’ve always liked our city’s romance with poetry in general and haiku in particular.”
    Before we got on the trolley, we toured the arcades around the hot spring. Shop after shop featured Dogo souvenirs. One cake shop was crowded with tourists, who emerged back into the arcade with big grins and shopping bags with the logo of the Dogo souvenir. Father gave me a little push and said, “We can’t buy any of them today, but go take a look.” I wiggled to the front of the crowd. The machine making the cakes clanked and whirred in mechanical splendor. After a few minutes, Father called to me over the crowd, “Isamu, come. Let’s go. We need to get on the trolley and start back.”

5. SAM
    Matsuyama, 1935–1937
    I was never as good a student at Bancho as Mother wanted me to be. So Mother, Father, and I were all pleasantly surprised when I passed the entrance exam for Matsuchu. I started in April of 1935, or Showa 10. The system of referring to years in terms of the length of the reign of the Emperor, which was something I had been taught but never really understood at Kimmon Gakuen in San Francisco, was now fully familiar.
    Matsuyama Chugakko—almost always shortened to “Matsuchu”—Matsuyama’s most prestigious secondary school, graduated its first class in 1879, Meiji 12 . But its real fame came in 1906, Meiji 39 , with the publication of Natsume Soseki’s Botchan. Botchan is one of Japan’s most famous novels, and every Japanese knows it, or at least knows about it, the way Americans know about Huckleberry Finn. Soseki is so famous that in 1984 the Japanese government put his picture on the 1,000-yen bill.
    As a bright Tokyo University graduate with no particular prospects, Soseki was recruited to teach in Matsuyama. He lasted only one year at Matsuchu, the school year 1895–96. Soseki was miserable away from the cosmopolitan capital. He had no talent for suffering gladly his foolish colleagues, pompous supervisors, and sluggish students. But he did have a talent for skewering all those local characters. The put-upon narrator of Botchan —a teacher at a higher school in a provincial backwater dissatisfied with his lot in life—spends the entire tale in a beleaguered why me mode. Botchan is endearing because some of its most hilarious scenes poke fun at the narrator himself.
    For Soseki, the best thing about Matsuyama was Shiki, a young poet with whom he formed a deep friendship. And just as the Midwest s­urvived Sinclair Lewis, Matsuyama survived Soseki and Botchan . In fact, by the time I arrived in Matsuyama, Soseki and Shiki were revered local heroes. They had put Matsuyama on the map, and made it famous for the whimsical characters of Soseki’s novel and the tiny perfect jewels of Shiki’s haiku.
    For me, there were lots of new things about Matsuchu. First, it was a boys-only school. The girls from Bancho who continued their education past the elementary years attended either the Prefectural Girls’ High School, or Saibi, a private academy. Officially, we no longer had any contact with them: there was a strict no fraternization policy, and boys and girls were completely separated. And that’s why one of the other new things about Matsuchu was so good. It was twice as far from Yanai-machi as Bancho, about a twenty-five minute walk. To get to Matsuchu, I had to walk almost the entire length of Okaido, Matsuyama’s main shopping street. I was usually in a group with my buddies. And we almost