The Coughing Bell
Ni’imi Nankichi
March 8th
“We’ve decided to contribute the coughing bell,” Dad said. He had just come home from the town meeting.
Mom was shocked—really, everybody was, except for me. We had already contributed the school’s gate and fence, so the nunnery bell ought to go towards the war effort, too, I thought. But I felt a little sad as I thought about the fact that I had grown up listening to the old bell being rung each morning and night.
“Surely you’ll need the consent of the abbess,” said Mom.
“Well, at first she was giving me the run-around, saying I’d need the permission of the high priest, seeing as how it’s the mark of the faith of our ancestors and all. But eventually she saw the value of contributing it. She may be a nun, but she’s still patriotic.”
Before I go on, I have to tell you a lot about the bell.
First of all, there’s the name. The way old Kinosuke, the cooper, tells it, the bellfounder had asthma something terrible, so he was coughing all the time. Somehow that made it into the bell, so when you rang it, after the big clang there was the faint sound of coughing. Nobody knows who started calling it the coughing bell, but everybody does. But I had always found this story terribly suspicious. It’s bizarre to think that a bell could catch asthma. If that were true, a bell would be just as likely to catch typhoid fever, or diphtheria. We’d have to construct clinics for bells.
Once me and Matsuo decided to determine with scientific accuracy whether or not the coughing bell actually coughed. We settled on noon, because it would be quiet. The hydrangeas beneath the bell’s housing were in full bloom. Matsuo gave the bell a nice strong strike and it rung out clearly. We strained our ears, and it might just have been that it was drowned out by the reverberations of the bell, but we didn’t hear a hint of an asthmatic wet cough. We judged the bell to be in extraordinarily good health.
Monjirō and his grandmother tell a different story: that the smith who cast the bell was named Kōfu, and that’s why it was called that. He even carved his name into it, Monjirō’s grandmother would say. This version of the story seemed much more plausible than Kinosuke’s.
But my brother, who’s at university, has the most likely explanation. “The sound that the bell makes,” he said, “is kong, right? Everybody probably called it the konging bell at first. But you’re saying konging over and over—konging bell, konging bell, konging bell—and somebody slipped up and said coughing bell. And since coughing bell is more pleasant to say than konging bell, that’s the name that stuck.”
When I was little I thought the coughing bell was just so huge. But now that I’m almost in sixth grade, it doesn’t seem so big. It has a diameter of about seventy centimeters. So its circumference is (70 cm / 2) x 3.14 = 219.8 cm. My dad said he saw a bell in Nara with a diameter of two meters. The coughing bell’s practically a baby by comparison.
But for our little village, it’s something we’ll never forget. It’s where all my friends and I meet up. We’re not in school right now, so we go there every day to play. And even when school’s in session, we usually gather there after classes. At night, we wait for word from the abbess that we can do the nightly ring, and we all fight over who gets to hit the coughing bell with the wooden mallet. It’s endured countless impacts from our slingshots, and every time it takes a hit it gives off a faint, clear sound in response.
Now that I think about it, I can’t even remember all the memories I have of the coughing bell.
March 22nd
It’s the second day of spring break, and the coughing bell is going off to war.
When I was feeding dandelions to the rabbit, Yōkichi came running down past the mulberry fields. “They’re taking it down today! Hurry up or you’ll miss it!” By the time he came to Shirogorō’s grove, he was already hot enough to take off his jacket, though he had only run a few hundred meters.
I was surprised when I got to the nunnery. You’ve had thought there was a festival going on with all the people there. There might have been a bigger crowd than even what a festival gets. There were always tons of kids at the festivals, but you didn’t usually see this many old people. Old men leaning on their canes, old women so hunched over they looked like turkeys with their heads almost touching the ground, old folks who couldn’t even walk who were riding piggyback on their children or grand-children. All of these people were connected by an invisible thread to the coughing bell. I hadn’t realized how many lives this not-very-big bell was connected to.
One old man cried, “O Coughing Bell, are you too now leaving us?” “Lord have mercy,” chanted an old lady as she bowed before the bell.
Yoshihiko, who was in charge of the local youth group, had a great idea of what to do before the bell was to be taken down. As a send-off for this companion of many years, the kids would all be allowed to ring it. We all cried out in excitement at this. Yoshihiko had us all line up in front of the bell. We would climb the stone steps and each be allowed to strike the bell three times. It was funny; it made me think of being allowed three pieces of candy. But this was a much sweeter treat.
Yoshihiko was the last to ring the bell, and he swung the mallet with all his might. Koooooong, it went, and echoed on and on.
“To the valleys in the north!” Yoshihiko shouted, like he was beginning a riddle. “To the valleys in the south! To the valleys in the east! To the valleys in the west! To far-off towns! Ring, ring!”
“Hear, hear!” shouted Kinosuke the cooper, and a few of the old folks added their agreement.
I really didn’t have any idea what was going on, so I asked my dad about it later on.
“The coughing bell,” he explained, “was brought in a very long time ago, before I was born, when your grand-father was a little boy. In those days nobody had much of anything, and so even though everybody in the village pooled their money together it wasn’t enough for a bell. But the people who live out in the valleys to the north and the south and the east and the west, and even the people living in villages further out than that, they helped us out. And so the bell that was cast as a result of that is filled with the hearts and minds of the people in the valleys and the far-flung villages. So you can hear the sounds of those valleys and villages when the bell is struck.”
The gardener, Yasu, was responsible for taking down the bell. He was using a system of logs and pulleys that he used when he would move boulders. Me and my friends helped out. It took a long time, because we’d never done something like this before.
A mat was spread out on the bell’s housing and the bell was lowered onto it. It was weird seeing it lying on its side. I was so used to seeing it from the bottom. It was filthy; it was rusty all over and dust had collected in the top. The abbess and some of the old women who helped out around the nunnery took up a thick rope and started scrubbing away at the bell’s surface. This revealed the inscription on the bell clearly.
“It’s a holy verse,” Yoshihiko said, examining the inscription. And then: “Something something reign of An’ei. That makes the bell over a hundred and fifty years old!”
An old man named Kanta spoke up through clenched teeth. “T-that’s right. My f-father was b-born the year it was c-cast, and he was born d-during the An’ei era.”
Monjirō and his grandmother asked, “Is there anything says it was made by a Kōfu of Mikawa Province?”
“No,” Yoshihiko replied. “Says the smith is Sugekurō.” After that, Monjirō’s grandmother drew back, muttering to herself.
When Watarō came around with an oxcart, the abbess blurted out that she wanted to hold a memorial service for the coughing bell. The adults present said that there wasn’t much time, and besides the painful farewell had been drawn out long enough. But the young abbess glared at them through her spectacles and said, “No. Our bell is to be melted down and cast into the shape of a bomb. We are going to hold a memorial service.”
Clearly nobody wanted to be the one to cross the abbess on this one. They knew how stubborn she was. And there was reason in what the abbess had said.
How exactly did one conduct a memorial service for a bell? Wearing her best robes, the abbess planted sticks of incense in the ground, stood before the bell, clapped a small hand-bell, and began to recite the sutras. At first everybody stood watching in silence, but, out of boredom, the adults that knew the prayers began to chant along with the abbess. There was an air of melancholy to the whole affair, like it was a funeral. The old folks all joined their wrinkled hands together.
After the conclusion of the memorial service, Yasu once again hoisted the bell up, and with a smooth motion, Watarō pulled his oxcart in and got the bell into it. Just then, a yellow butterfly flew a circuit around the bell before vanishing behind the wall.
As Watarō was harnessing his oxen to the cart, everybody started talking.
“Without the bell how is everybody gonna know when to gather at the temple?” wondered the usually serious Tane.
“Just get a schoolkid over here!” replied Matsu, always willing to play the foil. “Give ‘em a bugle, have ‘em do the toot-toot-toot. Everybody’ll know where to go.”
Tane laughed. “You’re thick as a brick you think a bunch of old folks are gonna come runnin’ at the sound of a bugle!”
If our coughing bell is to be a bomb, perhaps it will be Masao who lobs it into an enemy vessel,” Yoshihiko mused. Shirogorō’s son Masao was one of the Wild Eagles, a fighter pilot. He was involved somewhere in the oceans to the south.
“But Masao’s foes won’t know a thing about the bell!” Shirogorō said. “It’s not like the bomb’s gonna tell them.” The strong, silent old man was smoking a cigarette.
“There’s maybe three bombs worth of metal in our bell,” somebody said.
“Yeah, but maybe more like ten!” somebody replied.
“No, three at the most.”
“You could totally make ten bombs out of the bell!” the second person insisted.
I was laughing as I listened to the dispute. They didn’t know how much a bomb weighed. It could have been fifty kilograms or five hundred. But even I didn’t know how many bombs you could make if the bombs weighed either fifty or five hundred kilograms.
Their hands clasped in prayer, the old people continued to chant as the bell was taken away. Yoshihiko was going to deliver it to the nearby town, where a mound of scrap metal had been collected outside the local elementary school.
My friends and I trailed behind the bell for a while, wanting to see it off. Though we passed the hill at the edge of the village, nobody turned back. We reached the foothills of Mt. Komatsu, but still nobody showed any signs of retreating. The look on everybody’s faces showed that they intended to see the bell all the way to town.
But we realized that the smaller kids weren’t going to be able to make it. So Matsuo proposed that fourth-graders and younger wound turn back at Shinta’s Ridge and the rest of us would go on to town.
We got to Shinta’s Ridge and left fifteen of the smaller kids behind. But there was a little bit of a fight. Hirao was in fourth grade and should have had to go back to the village, but he didn’t want to turn back. We older kids told him time and again to go home.
“I’m in fourth grade, yeah, but I’m as old as a fifth-grader!” (He had failed a year.) There was a logic to his argument, but it didn’t pass muster with the fifth-graders. Eventually it was decided that a fight would settle it.
Matsuo and Hirao grappled each other. Matsuo tried to knock Hirao down with a sweep to the leg, but Hirao, who was a wrestler, twisted away and pushed Matsuo down.
Next up was Yōkichi, who tried to grab Hirao by the neck. Hirao ended up putting him in a headlock until he was red as a tomato.
While this was going on, the oxcart carrying the coughing bell had already descended Shinta’s Ridge. The older kids were anxious. We were in danger of being left behind if they dawdled here. So we left Hirao there and started chasing after the bell. There were fifteen or so of us, with Hirao behind us in hot pursuit. We were all irritated with him, but in the end it was just his wild enthusiasm that made him want to keep going, so we pardoned him.
After leaving the riverbank, Monjirō broke off a branch of a pussy-willow and presented it to the bell as an offering. By which I mean he put it next to the bell. And then we all started presenting the bell with all manner of foliage: first branches of pussy-willow, then peach branches, pine branches, dandelions, lotuses, even shepherd’s purse. The coughing bell was buried in our offerings.
We were the only ones from the village to see off the bell.
March 23rd
We went to the nunnery in the morning for the meeting of the local youth group.
Before every meeting, we would spend some time cleaning the grounds of the nunnery, and today I decided to rake out the damp leaves in between the main temple building and the grove around the back of it. It was a place people usually forgot to tidy up, and I liked going back there anyway. There were really pretty camellias in bloom back there. There were so many layers of petals, and they were all casting shadows on one another so they were almost cream-colored. I could only imagine that there was some special limpid spring light that the gods employed in their creation.
The leaves were wonderful, too. They were so thick and stiff that it was like each one had been hand-crafted, and they were a glossy green so dark it was almost black. The ones in the sunlight were so bright it made you squint.
Japan has some really wonderful flora. My dad said once that there’s no place with as beautiful nature as Japan, and he must be right.
We finished cleaning, but just when we were getting ready to call to order the 20th meeting of the youth group, a mountain of a man crossed onto the temple grounds, pushing in a wheelchair an old man with a long face and protruding ears. We knew him well.
There was a village called Fukudani a little ways to the south, nestled in between some mountains. We would go there in the fall to hunt for mushrooms, and if we got thirsty, he would always give us a drink of water. His was the last of four houses. There was no electricity, so at night they still used lamps. I heard that there were still predators in that neck of the woods, so that if you wanted to use the outhouse in the winter, you might have to scare off a fox or a raccoon with a sharp rap before you opened the door.
By great misfortune, the old man had gotten the date of the bell’s shipping out wrong. He stared, slack-jawed, at the empty place where the bell had once been housed.
“You didn’t hear of all the children ringing the bell yesterday?” the abbess asked with sympathy.
“There’s days my ears work and days they don’t,” the old man replied. “Had a buzzing in my ears all day yesterday, like there was a fly trapped in there.”
The old man begged his son to wheel him into town so that he could take one last look at the coughing bell, but his son had to go to work, and so he wheeled his father out of the nunnery.
We heard the wheels of the wheelchair squeaking along past the wall. We all felt so bad for the old man.
Just as the meeting began, Matsuo said, “I have a new proposal!”
Everybody wondered what it could be.
“That is, we take the old man into town so he can see the coughing bell.”
Nobody said anything. We were all thinking it, after all. It would undoubtedly be a good thing to do. But it was only just yesterday we had gone into town. It didn’t sound particularly fun to do it a second time.
And yet…
“Yay,” said Monjirō, after a pause.
I gulped and said, “Yay,” as well. Then, everybody else voiced their agreement.
“Today’s meeting,” Matsuo shouted, “is closed!” He ran out of the gates, and the rest of us followed.
We caught up with the old man at Turtle Pond. We explained to his son what was going on, and he left the old man to us. The old man’s long face was extended even further as he erupted into childishly happy laughter. We couldn’t help but laugh along with him.
There was one spot of worry: there was something wrong with the wheelchair, and it was constantly drifting to the right. So whoever was pushing it had to readjust his course after ten meters or so. We all took turns pushing the old man.
We got to the elementary school around noon. The good old bell was sitting right where we had left it yesterday.
“There she is! There she is!” cried the old man when he laid eyes on the coughing bell. He asked us to wheel him close enough so that he could touch the bell. The old man reached out a trembling hand to stroke the surface of the bell.
None of us had thought to pack a lunch, so when we got back home our stomachs were rumbling audibly. It would be no easy task to take the old man all the way back to Fukudani. But admirably, nobody showed any reluctance. Limping, we brought the old man all the way back home.
At dinnertime, the old man told us what a good job we had done. “You know, that bell was made around these parts. There’s some valley around here still called Bellfounders’ Vale: they say that’s where it was cast. The kids those days, they’d have to work the bellows three days and three nights straight to work up a fire hot enough to melt the metal.”
So the old man had a deep connection to the bell.
Once again I recalled what Yoshihiko had said when he struck the bell: “To the valleys in the north! To the valleys in the south! To the valleys in the east! To the valleys in the west! To far-off towns! Ring, ring!”
Even though it was no more, the bell still echoed.
***
This is the original ending of the story. The following postscript was added due to wartime propaganda measures (it already seems supportive enough of wartime measures to me, but what do I know)
***
Just then, there was an announcement over the radio. Our Wild Eagles had scored a huge victory by bombing an enemy airfield. I imagined black bombs dropping one by one from the bellies of the bombers.
“Soon the coughing bell’s gonna be one of those bombs,” I said to my brother the next day. He was home from university. “An old thing like that is gonna be a brand spanking new bomb.”
“That’s what everybody’s saying! Old things are reborn again, and these new things are active for the first time.”
My brother was always saying mysterious things like this, and usually I had no clue what he was talking about, but this time I was pretty sure I did. He meant that old things are reborn as new things, and for the first time they can be useful.