The Singing Pocket-Watch
Ni’imi Nankichi
One February day, there were a handful of children and several dozen men carrying leather bags all walking along the same lonely path through the fields.
The air was still and the warm rays of the sun had melted the frost, leaving a sheen on the road.
The troupe was taken by surprise by two crows, which cast strange shadows on the dry grass as they flapped around. When they passed the embankment, the birds’ black feathers reflected the sun’s glare at them.
“Where d’yo think you’re going off all by yourself, kiddo?” one of the men asked.
The boy rocked back and forth, hands thrust securely in his pockets, before giving his questioner a big smile and saying, “Into town, of course!”
The kid seemed alright, thought the man. Wasn’t ashamed, or afraid of anybody. The two of them started to talk.
“What’s your name, kid?”
“Call me Mo.”
“Mo? What’s that short for? Mobara?”
“Uh-uh.” Mo shook his head.
“Mo… Moka?”
“Give it up, mister. It’s just Mo!”
“Hmph. Does it mean anything, at least?”
“It just means Mo. You want me to write it?”
“Never was much good with letters.”
Mo took up a piece of wood and scratched his name into the dirt.
“Can’t make heads or tails of it.” The two of them started walking again.
“It’s the same Mo that’s in the word ‘moral.’”
“Now what the heck is that supposed to mean?”
“That means that you’ve never acted in bad faith, so even if you’re sat before God or arrested by a police officer or something, you’ve got nothing to fear.”
“Even if you’ve been arrested.” The man laughed out loud.
“Those are some big pockets in that coat of yours,” said Mo.
“Yeah, well, a grown-up’s gotta have a big coat, and they come with big pockets.”
“Are they warm?”
“The pockets? Yeah, they do their job. Full of holes, but it feels like summer!”
Mo asked, “Can I put my hands in?”
“You’re a weird kid!” the man laughed. But maybe that was just the kind of kid he was. A too-forward weirdo who he didn’t want touching him and putting his hands in his own pockets.
“Yeah, sure.”
Mo put his hand into the man’s outer coat pocket. “Actually, this is pretty cold.”
“Well, I’ll be.”
“My teacher’s got warmer pockets. When I go to school in the morning, I always have one of my hands in his pocket. Mr. Kiyama. That’s his name.”
“Huh.”
“It feels like there’s something cold and stiff in your pocket, mister. What is it?”
“What do you think it is?”
“Hmm… It’s metal. Pretty big. Maybe a key?”
All of a sudden the two of them jumped at the sound of a beautiful song coming from the man’s pocket. The man clamped his hand around his pocket, but the music kept coming. He looked around in a panic, but when he saw that it was only him and the boy right here, he calmed down. The song continued. It was the sort of thing you’d expect to hear from a heavenly harp.
“It’s a pocket-watch!”
“Yeah. There’s something called a music box inside it. That key thingy you touched is what sets it off.”
“I love music.”
“D’you know what that song was?”
“I sure do! Can I take out the watch, mister?”
“I’d rather you didn’t.” The music came to a stop.
“Can I have it play one more time?” Mo asked.
“Just as long as nobody else can hear it, sure.” The man glanced furtively over his shoulder.
“What’s wrong?”
“If one of these guys heard this they’d think I was some freak! Me, a grown man, playing with a child’s toy.”
“I see.” The pocket-watch started to sing again.
The two of them walked for a while in silence, just listening to the pocket-watch.
“Do you take that with you wherever you go?” Mo asked.
“Yeah. That weird?”
“It’s weird.”
“Why?”
“I go over to my friend’s house all the time. His dad’s a chemist, and he’s got a pocket-watch just like this. But he always keeps it safely locked in the display case!”
“Wait, you say you go over to the chemist’s all the time?”
“Yeah, we’re related, I think. Do you know him?”
“I think I might. A little.”
“So the chemist, he keeps it nice and safe. He won’t even let us touch it… Oh, it’s over. Can I wind it up one more time?”
“It plays the same thing every time.”
“This’ll be the last time, I promise. Anyway, where was I— Oh! There it goes!”
“Sometimes it’ll go off on its own. Keeps you on your toes.”
“I barely touched it!”
“Keeps you on your toes. But you say that you go to the chemist’s all the time, kid?”
“Yeah, it’s right near where I live. I know him real well.”
“Hmm.”
“But he normally doesn’t let us listen to the pocket-watch in the summer. Whenever it goes off, he gets this real faraway look in his eyes.”
“You know why?”
“I think he said it’s ‘cause whenever he hears it, he thinks about Shūsaku.”
“Hmm…”
“That’s his son. But he fell in with a bad crowd, quit school, and then just up and left. But that happened a long time ago.”
“Did the chemist ever said anything about his son—about Shūsaku?”
“He said he was a complete moron!”
“Huh. Well, somebody who does something like that probably is a complete moron.” The music came to a stop. “You can play it again, if you want.”
“Really? Thanks! It sounds so nice. My little sis used to love this sort of stuff. Akiko wanted to hear the pocket-watch one last time before she died, so the chemist, and she cried so much that he let me borrow it.”
“She died?”
“Yeah, two years ago, right before the festival. She’s buried right next to Grandfather, in the forest. Dad found a round stone about this big by the river for her tombstone. Since she was still little. Every year I borrow the pocket-watch from the chemist and let it play in the bamboo. For Akiko. It sounds really pretty there.”
“I’ll bet…”
The two of them reached the edge of a large pond. A couple of ducks were swimming near the opposite shore. As soon as he saw the ducks, Mo took his hand out of the man’s pocket, cupped them around his mouth, and yelled:
“Dabchick, dabchick
Dive right down!
And be sure to say thanks
For the food you’ve found!”
“You kids still sing that song?” asked the man.
“Yeah. You know it, too?”
“When I was your age we’d tease all the ducks we could find with that song.”
“Did you go down this road all the time when you were a kid?”
“Every day on the way to school.”
“Are you on your way home?”
“Well… to be honest, I’m not quite sure.”
The road diverged into two paths.
“Which way you headed, kiddo?”
“Left.”
“Well then, take it easy, kiddo.”
“Bye,” Mo called out as he started skipping down the road, his hands in his own pockets.
“Hey! Hold on a minute, kid!” shouted the man from far behind him.
Mo skidded to a halt and turned around to see the man beckoning towards him.
Mo came back. The man’s face was screwed up as if in pain.
“The thing is, kid… last night the chemist did me a solid and let me spend the night at his house. And this morning, well, I might have gotten a little confused and taken his pocket-watch by accident.”
Mo said nothing.
“I hate to be a bother, but d’you think you could take this pocket-watch and— (here he fished a second one out of the pocket of his coat) –this one, too, that I took by mistake back to the chemist?”
“Sure.” Mo took the objects in both of his hands.
“And say hello to him for me. Anyways, see ya.”
“Bye.”
“What’s your name again, kiddo?”
“Mo. Like moral.”
“Well, that’s you in a nutshell.”
“Moral?”
“And don’t you forget it. Grow up and be a productive member of society. Now, see ya, for real this time.”
“Bye.”
His hands full, Mo watched the man leave. He got smaller and smaller, and then he passed by a rice paddy and he was gone. Mo trudged on towards town. As he walked, he felt like there was something he had failed to understand, something he had missed.
Before long Mo heard a bicycle coming up from behind him. “Oh! The chemist!”
“Is that you, Moriji?” The old chemist, his chin obscured by a scarf, got off his bicycle. As soon as he did, he was overtaken by a coughing fit. It was a dry, hollow, rasping cough.
“You’ve come a long way, boy,” he said at last.
“I guess.”
“You didn’t happen to see a man coming from the village, did you?”
“Yeah, we walked for a while.”
“My goodness! H-how did you get that watch…” The chemist’s eyes fell upon the pocket-watches in Mo’s hands.
“That guy said that he took them from your house by mistake and asked me to give them back to you.”
“He asked you to give them back?”
“Yeah.”
“That absolute moron!”
“Who is he?”
“He’s—“ At this the chemist broke into another fit of coughing. “He’s my son, Shūsaku.”
“Seriously?”
“He came to my house last night. I hadn’t seen him in ten, twenty years. All that time he’s been nothing but trouble, but he said that he’d changed his ways, that he wanted to work at the town factory, and that he just wanted to spend the night. But he was just up to his old tricks. When I woke up this morning he was gone, and my watches along with him! He’s nothing but a common criminal!”
“But he said he took them on accident. He didn’t mean to! And he told me I had to be a productive member of society!”
“Did he now?” The chemist’s face was troubled.
Mo handed the two items over to the old man. The trembling of his hands caused them to brush up against the key of the pocket-watch, and it started to sing its beautiful song.
The shadows of Mo, the chemist, and his bicycle grew a little longer on the grass as they stopped to listen to the song. Tears welled up in the old man’s eyes.
Mo lowered his gaze from the chemist down to the distant rice paddy behind which the other man had disappeared.
From beneath the horizon, a solitary white cloud drifted into view.