Chapter 78

Hello again. Or in some cases, nice to meet you. I’m Yukako Kabei, the woman whose managing editor asked not long after we started working together, “So, do you hate punctuation marks?” No, it’s not that I hate them, particularly… Lately I’ve been letting my dog run in circles around the neighborhood park while I sit on one of those “swaying pandas” on a spring, squeakily swaying the panda back and forth while I stare at the sky in a daze. I’m quite fond of the washed-out blue-gray skies of Tokyo. The other day a group of girls, maybe first-graders, came up to us and squealed, “What a cute doggie!” as they picked up handfuls of playground sand and threw them at it. I…wasn’t sure what to do. Was that playing, or bullying? The poor thing looked put out, so I decided it was probably being bullied, so after a pause to gather my scattered wits, I picked it up and fled. That’s my life, I guess. I’ve been fortunate enough to have my fifth Kieli book published now, but…I’m sorry. I’m not sure what came over me, but it’s a two-parter. This time I used the past as a loose overall theme, and now I kind of feel as though a story that was never especially “forward-looking” in the first place has turned one hundred percent backward-looking…As usual, it’s a story about a stubborn girl with a complicated personality and an immature man with a tiresome personality, getting together and being separated, and about a man who’s tired of living struggling with various worries in between being hit by cars, bashing his head into signs, falling off walls, and whatnot. It ends in a pretty appalling place, so I…would like to keep you waiting as little as possible for the second part. It would make me very happy if you’d join me again for the conclusion of the story. Oh, right, and needless to say, the “tick tock” song that appears in this book is “My Grandfather’s Clock,” but it’s not the familiar Japanese version; I grabbed the original lyrics and loosely translated them using my sketchy English skills. These days the CD with Mr. Ken Hirai’s cover has the English version included as well, so many of you may know this already, but the line that says “one hundred years” in the popular Japanese translation is “ninety years” in the original, so actually the grandfather in the original song dies ten years before the Japanese grandfather. I imagine the translator changed it to “one hundred years” because in Japanese “ninety years” doesn’t fit the melody well. So anyway, basically what I’m trying to say here as I display my scant knowledge of folk songs is that if you try to sing the Japanese lyrics in this book to the tune of “My Grandfather’s Clock,” it won’t work! It won’t! I tacked on missing words as my fancy took me, with the result that the lines are now far longer even than the original English! I figured I should make those mumbled excuses here… Now then, this time I’ve broken off smack in the middle of the story, so I’d like to make my acknowledgments in Part 2, if I may…Oh! But I’ll make an exception for my beloved Taue-san, who yet again propped up my clumsy novel with his exceedingly wonderful illustrations, and write just a little bit to him. Taue-san, the drawing of the bear on the back cover was such a hit with me that I could hardly cope. I’m sorry for selfishly saying Kieli’s shorts would be cuter if they were a little shorter. I’m sorry I started ranting broken things like “Bare shins!” and “Gorgeous legs!” and “Clavicles!” and…I—I think
I’ll stop now before people question my personality…(it’s way too late, isn’t it?). Anyway! *coughs* Last but not least, to all of my longtime supporters and to all of you feeling interest for the first time—I give my very finest thanks to you who are holding this book in your hands. I hope we get a chance to meet again in The Sunlit Garden Where It Began (Part 2). Yukako Kabei