At this point, the middle sister, Sunko, who hitherto has demurely busied herself with crunching pickled radish, suddenly scooped from her brimming soup bowl a broken gobbet of sweet potato and slung that wretched object straight into her widely opened mouth. As my readers are no doubt aware, nothing can sear the mouth more painfully than sweet potato cooked in bean-paste soup. Unless very careful, even a hardened adult can give himself a truly nasty burn. It is thus understandable that a mere beginner in the art of eating such sweet potatoes should feel scorched, as certainly did Sunko, out of her tiny mind. With a fearful squawking, “Waa,” she spat the burning gobbet out upon the table. This slightly mangled object skidded across the table surface, coming at last to rest within convenient grabbing distance of Baby-dear. Now Baby-dear, as tough-mouthed as a carthorse, just dotes on sweet potatoes. Seeing her favorite goody skid to a steaming halt only a hand’s stretch from her rice-stripped face, she pitched away her chopsticks, snatched the sweet potato and gobbled it gladly down.
My master, a fully conscious witness of all these ghastly happenings, watches them as dispassionately as if they were occurring on some other planet. Without saying a word, he has quietly got on with eating his own rice and soup, and is now engaged in probing his jaws with a toothpick.
He seems to be following a policy of complete non-intervention, even of masterly inactivity, in the rearing of his daughters. One fine day in the not too distant future this trio of bright college girls may be fated to find themselves wild lovers with whom, for the sake of passion, they’ll run away from home. If that in fact should happen, I expect that, calmly continuing to eat his rice and soup, my master will just watch them as they go upon their ways. He is certainly a man of little resource, but I’ve noticed that those who are nowadays regarded as most admirably resourceful know nothing, in fact, except how to deceive their fellows with lies, how to sneak up upon the unwary, how to jump queues, how to create a sensation by bluffing, and by what tricks to ensnare the simple-minded. Even boys at the middle school level, influenced by such conduct, get the idea that only by such means can they expect to make their way in the world. Indeed they seem to think that they can only become fine gentlemen by the successful perpetration of acts of which they ought, in truth, to be thoroughly ashamed. Of course, these imitative loutlings do not display resource, and are in fact no more than hooligans. Being a Japanese cat, I have a certain amount of patriotic sentiment and, every time I see these allegedly resourceful creatures I wish I had the chance to give them a right, good hiding. Each new creature of that type weakens the nation to the degree of his presence. Such students are a disgrace to their school, and such adults a disgrace to their country. Nonetheless, disgraceful as they are, there are lots of them about. Which is really inexplicable. The human beings in Japan, shamefully enough, seem less mettlesome than the cats. One must admit that, compared with hooligans, my master is a very superior model of humankind. He is superior because he is weak-minded. His very uselessness makes him their superior. He is their clear superior because he is not smart.
Having thus uneventfully, and with a show of no resource whatever, finished his breakfast, my master put on his suit, climbed into a rickshaw and left to keep his appointment with the police. As he climbed aboard, he’d asked the rickshawman if he knew the location of Nihon-zutsumi.
The rickshawman just grinned. I thought it rather silly of my master to make a point of reminding the rickshawman that his destination lay in the brothel quarter.
After my master’s unusual departure—unusual, that is, because he left in a rickshaw—Mrs. Sneaze had her own breakfast and then started nagging at the children. “Hurry up,” she says, “or you’ll be late for school.”
But the children pay no heed. “There isn’t,” they answer back, “any school today,” and they make no effort to get themselves ready.
“Of course there is,” she snaps in a lecturing tone of voice. “Hurry and get ready.”
“But yesterday the teacher said, ‘We have no school tomorrow,’” the eldest girl persists.
It was probably at this point that Mrs. Sneaze began to suspect that the children might be right. She went to the cupboard, lifted out a calendar and checked the date. Today is marked in red, the sign of a national holiday. I fancy that my master was unaware of this fact when he sent a note to his school advising them of his absence. I fancy, too, that Mrs.
Sneaze was similarly unaware when she put his note in the post. As for Waverhouse, I can’t make up my mind whether he, too, was unaware or whether he simply found it diverting to keep quiet.
Mrs. Sneaze, surprised and softened by this discovery, told the children to go out and play. “But please,” she bade them, “just behave yourselves.”
She then settled down, as she daily does, to get on with her sewing.
For the next half hour peace reigned throughout the house, and nothing happened worth my bother to record. Then, out of the blue, an unexpected visitor arrived: a young girl, student aged, I would guess, perhaps seventeen or eighteen. The heels of her shoes had worn crooked and her long, purple skirt trailed along the ground. Her hair was quaintly dressed in two big bulges above the ears, so that her head resembled an abacus bead. Unannounced, she walked in through the kitchen entrance. This apparition is my master’s niece. They say she is a student. She’s always liable to drop in on a Sunday, and she usually contrives to have some kind of row with her uncle. This young lady possesses the unusually beautiful name of Yukie but, far from reminding its viewers of a snowy river, her ruddy features are of that dull normality which you can see in any street if you take the trouble to walk a hundred yards.
“Hullo, Auntie!” she casually remarked as, marching straight into the living room, she plonked herself down beside the sewing box.
“My dear, how early you are. . .”
“Because today’s a national holiday. I thought I’d come and see you in the morning, so I left home in a hurry about half past eight.”
“Oh? For anything special?”
“No, but I haven’t seen you for such a long time, and I just wanted to say hullo.”
“Well then, don’t just say hullo but stay for a bit. Your uncle will soon be back.”
“Has Uncle gone out already? That’s unusual!”
“Yes, and today he’s gone to rather an unusual place. In fact, to a police station. Isn’t that odd?”
“Whatever for?”
“They’ve caught the man who burgled us last spring.”
“And Uncle’s got to give evidence? What a bore.”
“Not altogether. We’re going to get our things back. The stolen articles have turned up and we’ve been asked to go and collect them. A policeman came around yesterday especially to tell us.”
“I see. Otherwise Uncle wouldn’t have gone out as early as this.
Normally he’d still be snoring.”
“There’s no one quite such a lie-abed as your uncle, and if one wakes him up he gets extremely cross. This morning, for instance, because he’d asked me to wake him up at seven, that’s when I woke him up. And d’you know, he promptly crept inside the bed clothes and didn’t even answer.