In the summers, Totto looked forward to visiting Daddy’s brother in Yuigahama, Kamakura, where the days were spent swimming at the beach. Her uncle, Shuji Taguchi, was a famous documentary cameraman known as Shu Taguchi. He traveled often to take footage of combat zones, and after the war he leveraged his photographic expertise to pursue a career in educational films.
Totto’s uncle once gave her a black-and-white stuffed bear as a souvenir from New York. She would learn much later that the animal was called a panda, and that these bears were a cultural phenomenon in America at the time. The panda craze began when an American woman decided to fulfill her late husband’s dearest wish. An explorer, he had longed to find the bear, which was then believed to be an imaginary creature. The woman traveled to Sichuan, China, in search of the panda and came upon a cub rather easily in a bamboo grove. She is said to have then disguised the little cub as a pet dog and flown it across the world to the United States, where the animal was placed in a Chicago zoo. It became an instant sensation, and panda merchandise soon flooded gift shops all over the country.
Totto, however, knew none of this. Her only thought was, “Oh, I suppose some bears are black and white.” But her stuffed panda would become a lifelong friend.
Mother always donned a bathing suit at the beach in Kamakura, even though the majority of Japanese women at the time simply swam in their undergarments. Their chests often showed through their garments when they came out of the water, but no one seemed the least concerned. Most of the women were middle-aged. Totto was awed that they weren’t afraid to show off their busts, but that was simply the norm back then.
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Are My Legs Different Lengths?
The year before she was to start elementary school, Totto awoke one summer morning with her right leg throbbing.
“My leg was hurting last night!” Totto cried.
Mother stopped making breakfast at once. “Goodness! We should see a doctor right away!”
Mother was always quick to decide at times like this. Totto, however, didn’t want to go to the hospital, so she racked her brain for any excuse to get out of it.
“Actually, um, I must have hit it on something yesterday when I was doing somersaults.”
But Mother would not hear of it. She clasped Totto’s hand and brought her to the nearby Showa Medical College Hospital (currently Showa University Hospital), where a high-spirited doctor inspected Totto’s leg. The longer he continued his examination, the darker his sunny expression clouded over.
“Let’s get you admitted at once.”
Without knowing what was happening to her body, Totto was rushed over to a bed and made to lie down. Quick as a wink, she was wrapped from the tips of her toes on her right foot all the way up to her waist in bandages soaked with a gooey plaster. Totto had apparently contracted a disease known as tuberculous coxitis, which meant the bacteria Mycobacterium tuberculosis had entered her bloodstream and caused inflammation of the hip joint. Left untreated, the disease would damage the cartilage on the joint surface and could eventually lead to bone destruction and the joint fusing in place.
Once the cast dried, the doctor proclaimed, “Top-notch! Top-notch work!” as he gently rapped Totto’s leg. Totto felt as though she’d been transformed into a doll. Not being able to move her body was a new experience, and at first she imagined that lying down all day would be rather easy. She didn’t take it very seriously until the doctor led her to a hospital bed and sternly warned her she must never leave it.
Totto didn’t know that he had told her mother, “Your daughter may need crutches for the rest of her life.”
This was Totto’s first stay in a hospital. Her cast prevented her from being able to turn over in bed, so when she couldn’t sleep, she had no choice but to stare at the ceiling the whole night. It wasn’t all bad, though. Daddy and Mother visited each day and took care of her every need, and Totto spent a lot of time reading the books that Mother brought her. She also kept a doll or stuffed animal in each arm and liked to have them tell each other stories on her belly.
At mealtime, either the nurse or Mother would cut up Totto’s food into bite-size pieces and bring them to her mouth. The hospital food tasted terrible, especially compared to Mother’s cooking. Totto most disliked the soy-simmered koya-dofu (freeze-dried tofu) that came as little cubes, but it was nutritious and so showed up quite often on her food tray. Whenever she heard that koya-dofu was on the menu, she would sigh and think, “Not again…” as she slowly lifted her head from the pillow to glare at the softened brown cubes. She would then ask the nurse for chopsticks and press them down on the tofu, squeezing out the soaked-in broth from the cubes while grumbling in her head about how much she didn’t want to eat them.
The nurse, seeing Totto earnestly draw out the broth from the tofu every time the dish was served, must have thought she loved it.
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Totto was in some ways a very unlucky child. During her stay at Showa Medical College Hospital, she also came down with scarlet fever, an infectious disease that often afflicts young children. With her leg still in a cast, she was transferred from Showa to the nearby Ebara Hospital, which specialized in infectious diseases, to be quarantined. The disease made her run a high fever. Red spots sprouted all over her body. Her throat throbbed. But even at times like these, Totto found ways to amuse herself. Once she began to recover, she took to peeling off her dead skin in big pieces, like a molting snake. The skin on her hand slipped off in the shape of a glove. It was tremendously itchy, but also quite entertaining.
Totto’s younger brother Meiji-chan soon caught scarlet fever as well, making things rather difficult for Mother and Daddy. Mother had to remain bedside to care for both children, so Daddy rode his bicycle every day to buy them food from one shop or another to eat at the hospital.
But Totto’s bad luck streak was far from over.
Almost as soon as she had recovered from scarlet fever and was transferred back to Showa, she contracted chickenpox. When it rains, it pours. Chickenpox is also infectious, which meant that Totto had to do an about-face back to Ebara Hospital. Her leg was still immobile, and it seemed like her cast would not come off anytime soon.
The chickenpox itched so terribly that Totto wanted to cry. It was summertime, too, which only made things worse. Red itchy spots appeared all over her body, and while she could scratch or apply anti-itch cream to other areas, the bumps under her cast, which became unbearably sweaty and sticky from the heat, were impossible to reach. She tried inserting a stick between her skin and the cast to get at them, but did not have much luck.
Daddy noticed his daughter’s distress and brought her a ruler from home. Totto slowly slipped the flat surface of the ruler under her cast. This time, she managed to get close to the itchy spots.
“Daddy! It works!” She clapped happily, grateful to her father for carving out time from his busy schedule as a violinist to help. She still couldn’t reach the spots that itched most, such as the backs of her knees, but she simply had to tolerate that.
The cicadas of late summer had already begun to cry outside Totto’s hospital window when at long last the day to remove her cast arrived. After being squeezed inside the cast for months, Totto’s right leg had become quite thin, and because Totto had grown while in the hospital, her left leg was now slightly longer than her right.
“Hmm, are my legs different lengths?” Totto asked when the doctor took off her cast. She looked at Mother, Mother looked at her, and the two burst into giggles. They had to do something, though, or Totto would not be able to walk evenly. Once out of the hospital, she frequented the chiropractor and visited the hot springs in Yugawara, Kanagawa Prefecture, to soak in the healing waters, concentrating on what would now be called rehabilitation.
Totto was accompanied to Yugawara by Daddy’s mother and a young caretaker. When Totto darted across the tatami-matted floors, her grandmother did not tell her to quiet down. Instead, she simply stated, “I cannot abide that sound.” This frightened Totto so thoroughly that she kept as quiet as a mouse for the rest of their stay.