The little girl dutifully fulfils her task but the world around the Moriyama family is changing. Japan is caught in the whirl of what will soon become World War II, turning her beloved older brother into a fanatic nationalist and dividing the family for ever. Sheltered in the garden and the house, Yuri is able to keep the Little People safe, and they do their best to comfort Yuri in return, until one day owing to food restrictions milk is in shorter supply...
The little girl dutifully fulfils her task but the world around the Moriyama family is changing. Japan is caught in the whirl of what will soon become World War II, turning her beloved older brother into a fanatic nationalist and dividing the family for ever. Sheltered in the garden and the house, Yuri is able to keep the Little People safe, and they do their best to comfort Yuri in return, until one day owing to food restrictions milk is in shorter supply...
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Overview
The little girl dutifully fulfils her task but the world around the Moriyama family is changing. Japan is caught in the whirl of what will soon become World War II, turning her beloved older brother into a fanatic nationalist and dividing the family for ever. Sheltered in the garden and the house, Yuri is able to keep the Little People safe, and they do their best to comfort Yuri in return, until one day owing to food restrictions milk is in shorter supply...
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781782690795 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Steerforth Press |
| Publication date: | 01/24/2017 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 10 - 17 Years |
About the Author
Translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori.
Read an Excerpt
The Secret of the Blue Glass
By Tomiko Inui, Ginny Tapley Takemori
Steerforth Press
Copyright © 1959 Shinya ShimizuAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78269-034-4
CHAPTER 1
PRELUDE
Everyone has their own special place, a place somewhere on Earth that is theirs and theirs alone — a magical place wherein dwell those important to them, those they love the most.
One such special place was a small valley amidst the sand dunes of the Sahara Desert, a magical setting out of bounds to anyone other than the person who created it, a little prince from an asteroid, a rose and a fox.
Another special place was the delightful riverbank shimmering with the silvery undersides of willow leaves where, far from the dusty world of humans, a small water rat had made his spotless home and a faddish toad had his grand hall — and where, one summer's night just before dawn, the water rat and his friend the mole heard the clear strains of a piper, and found themselves drawn along the river by the beauty of the music ultimately to encounter the luminous figure of Pan in the hush of daybreak.
My special place is a house built in the shade of a large zelkova tree, and home to a big boy, a younger boy and a very small girl of about five or six. The garden is a riot of fruit trees, apricots and chestnuts and figs and cherries.
On clear summer days when the afternoon sun floods the lawn with light, the children take out the hosepipe sprinkler to spray the lawn, and frolic about noisily under the shower of water. The boys are wearing black shorts and the girl a yellow swimsuit her mother made for her. Small rainbows dance over the green turf as the water sprays all around.
My younger self slips out of the house next door and sneaks into the garden. The older middle-school boy and the little girl wave to me in welcome, but the more reserved younger boy scowls. I suck in my breath, and charge into the spray of water.
Oh, the wonder of a cold shower under the dazzling sun on a hot day! Intoxicated by summer, we roll around the lawn like young braves. The fragrance of wet grass, the sweet smell of damp earth ... Finally the smaller boy pounces on me like a young bear and we start wrestling with all our might. The little girl's eyes glitter merrily as an imp's as she watches us, her happy laugh ringing high up in the branches of the big tree.
After a while the sky darkens and a real afternoon shower comes along, putting an end to our play. A loud clap of thunder rumbles through the sky, and the little girl and her two elder brothers vanish into the darkness. And so does my younger self.
It is always midsummer in my special place.
At times, little scamp that I am, I am up in the white fig tree in the girl's garden. Playing the part of a robber, I clamber over our cypress hedge, climb the tree and move from one fruit to the next, milky-white sap seeping from the stalks as I pick them, devouring them greedily as I go. The air is filled with the fragrance of the fig leaves.
The little girl comes out of her quaint Western-style house. Oh no! I hide my face under the big leaves, but she makes a beeline for the tree and politely calls up, "Pick one for me too!" The fearless robber is instantly transformed into an angel descended from heaven to pick a fig. "Thank you!" she says gratefully and, skipping over the short shadows, goes back into the house.
My mind full of the girl with a slim neck and beads of sweat on her nose, I sit on my fig branch drawing a castle in the blue sky, a daydream castle where one day the girl and I will live together. As the big summer thunderclouds amass and begin to tower high, so too my castle spreads throughout the boundless blue sky.
In my own special place there is no little prince from a distant star, nor a pleasant riverbank from where sound the clear strains of Pan's pipes. My special place is the house in Tokyo where I was born and grew up, which was destroyed in an air raid during the war. I can still recall how, when I joined the mass evacuation of primary school children leaving for the countryside, I kept looking back at it longingly over my shoulder as I was led away. No trace remains of that house now, nor of the house in the shade of the big zelkova tree next door. And I'll probably never again get to meet that little imp of a girl who lived there.
Or so I believed for over ten years, until one day I ran into an old friend by chance on the train and he happened to mention her to me. "She still remembers you, you know. She said she sometimes wishes she could meet up with that boy next door who was so good at the high bar. She sounded really quite wistful."
I was speechless. Paying me no heed, my friend went on, "It really took me back, talking about our childhood days with her. Although she didn't say much, really. She'd probably have talked more if you'd been there. She always did seem to like you better than me." As a boy he had always been kind, if a bit tactless, and he hadn't changed in that respect. "Why don't you pay her a visit? This where she said she's staying." He wrote an address on a scrap of paper and passed it to me.
He seemed to want to carry on reminiscing and if I'm honest, I did want to hear more about what the girl was doing now. However, I just couldn't bear the thought of someone else barging in on my special place, and so I took my leave from him.
As I made my way home, I ripped up the scrap of paper he'd given to me into little pieces. I wanted to remain for ever the lively, wild boy doing endless spins up on the high bar the way she remembered me! And I wanted her always to be the little imp of a girl in my special place.
The tiny shreds of paper scattered in the breeze.
A few months later, I came across a small package in the mail at work one morning. As I turned it over to see the name of the sender, thinking it must be a submission from a reader, my hands started shaking. Written there in blue Magic Marker was: "Yuri Moriyama," the name of the little girl in my special place.
I tore into the package, opened the large notebook and started reading. That little girl next door had had an altogether more magical place of her own! I felt I was being shown another, hitherto hidden, dimension to my own special place as I was drawn into her story.
CHAPTER 2THE LITTLE BOOK ROOM
There was once a small library on the first floor of a house. It was at the end of a long, dark corridor, in the most inconspicuous, quietest corner of all the house. Its heavy oak door was rarely opened, and for the most part remained firmly closed as if to discourage anyone from entering.
Whoever did push open the door would find a little room with three walls entirely covered from floor to ceiling with bookshelves stuffed full with all manner of books that lorded it over the room with a self-important air. Crammed in beside antiquated tomes written in classical Chinese were the Meiji-period works in foreign languages that the grandfather of the house had been so fond of, and next to them were around 200 small paperbacks covered with a light coating of dust.
In short, this was a place where old books, having completed the term of their employment, could peacefully sleep away their retirement.
And it was in this little book room, high up in the triangular space between the sloping ceiling and the top shelf of the bookcase to the right, beside the dormer window, that the Little People had made their home.
Just outside the window were the thick branches of the great zelkova tree in the garden. In summer their dense greenery served as a curtain against the strong rays of the sun, while in winter the bare treetop made way for the sunshine, converting the Little People's home into a warm sunroom.
Other than the rather solemn atmosphere, with its peculiar smell of a mixture of dust, mildew and top-quality paper, there really couldn't have been a better place for the Little People to dwell. It would have been hard to find anywhere else where they could live so quietly and so completely out of the way of prying eyes.
They had come to this house in a Tokyo suburb not long after it was built around the end of the Meiji period, and had remained here uneventfully ever since.
It had been during the summer holidays of 1913, to be precise, that the two British-born Little People had arrived at the house, shaken about in the basket carried by its present owner, Tatsuo Moriyama. Tatsuo had been in primary school at the time, and attended his year three classes every day dressed in a splash-pattern kimono with hakama.
Little Tatsuo had been handed the basket by his English teacher, Miss MacLachlan, just before she boarded a ship from Yokohama headed for home. Miss MacLachlan was an educationist who had come to Japan from England in the 1890s. She taught English at a girls' school in Yokohama, but instead of taking accommodation in the school dormitory, she lived on her own in the suburbs and taught basic English to the local schoolchildren in her spare time.
Now, after twenty years in Japan, she was returning to her home country. When the Moriyama boy, whom she had known since he was a baby, came to say goodbye to her, she immediately ushered him into her now empty house. The animal-patterned carpet that Tatsuo had delighted in walking on whenever he came to this house was now packed away somewhere. The framed pictures that had adorned the walls were all gone, and the room looked quite dreary.
Miss MacLachlan took an old basket from amongst the luggage piled up in one corner and pressed it firmly into the hand of her smallest pupil. "Please make sure the Little People in this basket always get their milk," she told him. "You should place a glass of milk on the window sill for them once a day. Can you do that?"
She looked steadily into Tatsuo's eyes as he stared at her in astonishment. Miss MacLachlan had come to Japan in her twenties, and now there were white strands appearing in her flaxen hair. She held the boy's gaze with eyes that were a mysterious deep grey.
"Tatsuo Moriyama, you're a boy who loves little birds and insects, and you can keep a promise. Now, will you promise to do as I ask?" She spoke with an intense earnestness.
"Yes miss, I'll give them milk. I'll give them biscuits too sometimes. My Mum's biscuits are really good, they'll like them."
Tatsuo's teacher had been telling him fairy stories ever since he was little, and so he knew just what she meant by Little People. And for the first time Miss MacLachlan smiled faintly, just as she did when she listened to Tatsuo's answers in class.
"No, no, they don't need biscuits. The only food these Little People take is milk, and that's the way it's always been. Every day you should fill this glass with milk and put it on the window sill for them. You mustn't forget now. The Little People cannot live unless humans do this for them. Do you understand?"
Miss MacLachlan took a small glass goblet out of her pocket. It was a beautiful blue, as if a piece of the sky had melted into the glass, and sparkled in the sunlight streaming in through the window, making the gloomy room suddenly seem bright and cheerful.
Tatsuo felt a very slight buzz coming through the basket handle. He stiffened, and looked up at Miss MacLachlan. The teacher abruptly reached out a hand and snapped open the clasps on the old basket. The lid creaked as she opened it a crack, no more than a couple of inches. As the blue light from the glass goblet filtered in, Tatsuo caught sight of two tiny doll-like faces. A barely audible tinkle, like the top keys on the piano, tickled his ears.
The brief, dreamlike moment ended as Miss MacLachlan closed the lid and told him, "They said that they don't mind being seen by you. They have agreed to go with you. Tatsuo, please don't let anyone else see them, and look after them well."
Before he knew what he was doing, Tatsuo had taken the sparkling sky-blue goblet from his teacher. "Goodbye! And have a safe trip!"
Miss MacLachlan gave Tatsuo a parting peck on the cheek and disappeared back into the house.
I'll get to why Miss MacLachlan left the Little People behind in the care of ten-year-old Tatsuo Moriyama when she returned to her country later in the story, but first I'll describe the Little People and their arrival in the Moriyama household.
There were two Little People in the basket. Balbo Ashe, with his sturdy hands, was a shoemaker by trade. His rather timid wife Fern was a stickler for cleanliness, and it was thanks to her good housekeeping that the book room at the Moriyamas' was always free of cobwebs.
Balbo and Fern were not settled into the little book room right away, however. To begin with, Tatsuo put their basket at the back of his toy cupboard where there would be no fear of them being seen by anyone else. But six house mice were also living in that cupboard and the basket proved to be a convenient teeth sharpener for them. The day passed uneventfully, but poor Balbo and Fern had to listen to the terrifying thunder of the mice gnawing away at it all night long.
When Tatsuo brought the milk the next morning and saw the tooth marks on the basket he was so shocked he could hardly breathe. He immediately peeked inside the basket and saw that Balbo and Fern were safe, but they were in such a state of terror that they looked half dead.
He had to find a safe place for them without a moment's delay, and went around the house in search of one. The ground-floor reception room with the piano smelt far too stuffy, but then he remembered the first-floor library where hardly anybody ever went.
Tatsuo ran straight upstairs and down the dark corridor, and pushed open the heavy oak door. Inside, the room was bathed in honey-coloured sunshine streaming in through the window in the roof. He soon found a very pleasant spot in the little triangular space between the top shelf of the tall bookcase and the sloping ceiling, bathed in shimmering light filtering in through the leaves of the zelkova tree.
He rushed back to his own room, wrapped Balbo in his handkerchief and took him to the little book room. Balbo, too, was much taken by its peaceful atmosphere, so Tatsuo went back to his room, gently lifted the basket out of his toy cupboard and carried Fern upstairs. Fern arrived in the little book room clutching onto the luggage that Miss MacLachlan had placed in the basket, pale and exhausted like a migrant who had just survived a rough ocean voyage.
Tatsuo took some books off the shelf and made some secret steps that nobody but he and the Little People would know about. Even if the maid did happen to come into the room to dust the shelves, as long as she didn't actually climb onto the books she wouldn't be able to reach the Little People's home.
It was a few more days before the Little People's home on the bookcase was ready. The basket was too big to fit on the shelf, so Tatsuo had to build their new house himself. When at last it was finished, all anyone looking up at it from below would see was a shelf full of tightly packed books.
Inside he had made comfortable beds for the couple with two empty Gelbe Sorte cigarette boxes that he had sneaked out of his father's study. He gave some pink and white scraps of soft silk from the drawer of his mother's sewing machine to Fern, who used her own needle to sew them into curtains for their bedsteads. With what was left over, she made some charming undergarments for her baby, soon to be born.
Tatsuo enjoyed spending the summer days devising ways to complete the house for the Little People. Balbo and Fern were still not entirely comfortable with being seen by Tatsuo, and so they busied themselves with their handiwork out of his sight.
Every day Tatsuo would fill the blue glass goblet with milk, climb to the top of the bookcase and place the goblet on the sill of the dormer window where there was no fear of it being noticed from outside. He never tired of seeing how the rather sombre interior of the little book room would suddenly brighten as the blue glass sparkled in the sunlight.
Thinking about how the lives of these Little People depended on the milk he brought them daily, his heart quickened and he was filled with a proud sense of responsibility. Fern was too high-minded ever to let Tatsuo see how she used the milk in the meals she prepared for the Ashe household, but their baby girl Iris, and then their boy Robin, thrived on the milk he brought them.
Tatsuo continued the milk deliveries for 1,477 days straight, but when he started middle school he handed the role over to his little sister, Yukari. Yukari had already found out some years earlier about her big brother secretly filling the blue goblet with milk and taking it upstairs to the book room, but being a self-effacing child she never asked him about it. Now, however, she saw how late he came home from school every day and realized that delivering the milk had become something of a burden to him, and so she offered to help.
Yukari was a sickly child and often off school, so for some time she had been going to the little book room when Tatsuo wasn't there to read books and magazines. When she started delivering the milk in his place, therefore, the Little People were not afraid of her. Indeed Balbo and Fern thought she was very well behaved and had grown quite fond of her. This new role was a welcome change for Yukari, too. Instead of always being looked after by others, for once she was able to do something for someone else.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Secret of the Blue Glass by Tomiko Inui, Ginny Tapley Takemori. Copyright © 1959 Shinya Shimizu. Excerpted by permission of Steerforth Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Prelude, 9,The Little Book Room, 14,
The Two Men, 27,
A Fairy Story, 39,
Yahei the Pigeon, Robin and the Tiger, 52,
Acorns Aren't from Zelkova Trees!, 61,
Farewell Little Book Room!, 72,
The House in the Mountains, 88,
A Day of Grass-cutting, 102,
A New Friend, 112,
The First Snow, 120,
Yahei and Amanejakki, 129,
The Last of the Milk, 138,
The Little People Go Away, 149,
At Amanejakki's, 153,
Come Home, Little People!, 163,
Dark Days, 171,
Yuri Goes Home, 180,