Schoolgirl

This novella follows a single day in the life of an unnamed teenage girl living with her widowed mother in wartime Japan, tracing her shifting emotions and restless thoughts from waking to sleep.

The narrator wakes reluctantly, comparing mornings to opening nested boxes only to find the smallest one empty. She softly calls out "Father," feeling strangely embarrassed and happy, then rises to fold her bedding. At the dressing mirror, she reflects on her glasses: Without them the world turns hazy and kind, but with them all emotional expression is obscured. She wishes for beautiful eyes rather than her own, which even her mother has called unremarkable.

In the garden, she notices strawberry flowers and is struck by the strangeness of her father's death, which she cannot fully comprehend. She misses her older sister and people she once knew. She interacts with the family dogs, including Poo, a dog with a disability she deliberately neglects because his pathetic state distresses her. She recognizes her own cruelty and calls herself "a horrid girl." While cleaning, she catches herself singing a popular movie song, embarrassing for someone devoted to Mozart and Bach. She changes into self-sewn underclothes adorned with embroidered roses, a hidden detail that delights her. Her mother left early to arrange someone's marriage, having long managed the social responsibilities her scholarly, reclusive father never handled.

While warming miso soup, the narrator experiences a recurring form of déjà vu in which past, present, and future collapse into a single instant. She describes a moment of near-transcendent insight while scooping rice, but pulls back, finding it frightening. She eats breakfast alone, noting that a cucumber's greenness carries "a sadness like an empty heart" (14). She locks up the house and leaves for school carrying an old parasol her mother gave her, briefly fantasizing it transports her to Paris before admitting it is tattered. In the shrine woods, she notices thin barley growing where soldiers' horses had camped, grain destined never to grow tall. Near the station, laborers direct crude remarks at her, and her chagrin lingers onto the train.

On the train, she reads a magazine article titled "Young Women's Shortcomings" and reflects on how dependent she is on books, absorbing each author's experience, then abandoning it. The article frustrates her: Religious commentators invoke faith, educators invoke duty, but none offer concrete guidance. She and her peers face immense pressure from family and society. She recalls her father once telling her mother, "That child stands apart." She confesses to growing obsequious with age and wishing for "a revolution in ethics and morals." Finding a seat, she observes fellow passengers and reflects on instinct, the enormous force she feels powerless against.

At school, she admires her teacher Miss Kosugi but finds her lectures stiff. In the afternoon, art teacher Mr. Ito asks her to pose by the roses with her parasol for a drawing he plans to exhibit. Standing still, she prays to be natural and genuine, considers giving up books to shed pretension, then catches herself recognizing this self-criticism as another form of posturing. She suddenly wishes for ten yen to buy Madame Curie, and then, unexpectedly, wishes for her mother to have a long life.

After school, she visits a hair salon called Hollywood with Kinko, a classmate and temple priest's daughter. The narrator is disappointed with her hairstyle, while Kinko plans gleefully for omiai, or arranged marriage meetings. On the bus home, the narrator is repulsed by a pregnant woman's appearance and, seeing no difference between this woman and herself, declares women disgusting. She wishes she could die as a girl or be purified through illness. Walking home, she plays a game of seeing everything as if for the first time, but the exhilaration collapses into sadness. She lies in a meadow and calls out to her father. The sunset fills her with rapture, and she declares for the first time that she believes in God. She resolves: "I want to live beautifully" (46).

At home, her mother is entertaining guests. The scent of a delivered fish transports the narrator to a visit two years earlier with her older sister in Hokkaido. She remembers wanting to be coddled but realizing her sister, now a mother, was no longer hers alone. Inside, she feels her father's absence as a gaping void. Washing rice, memories of their former home in Koganei overwhelm her. Her mother once said that without Father, joy was gone. The narrator considers marital love the strongest in the world and resolves to cherish her mother, but struggles with wanting to be treated as an adult while still behaving like a child.

She prepares dinner for the guests, inventing a dish she calls "rococo," an artful arrangement gorgeous to look at but devoid of substance. The guests are Mr. and Mrs. Imaida from Omori and their seven-year-old son Yoshio. She forces herself to smile, recognizing that her dishonesty may render the Imaidas innocent by comparison. Her mother calls her "more and more helpful," a comment the narrator perceives as performance for the guests. After the guests leave, she reads a letter from her cousin Junji, an officer, and envies military discipline. She thinks of Junji's younger brother Shin, her favorite person, who is blind and her age. Shin never complains, and the narrator recalls closing her eyes for five minutes to imagine his experience, finding even that brief darkness unbearable.

She prepares the bath, finishes schoolwork, and rereads A Strange Tale from East of the River by Nagai Kafū. In the bath, she avoids looking at her body, which develops without connection to her mind; she declares she wants "a doll-like body forever" (71). After bathing, she gazes at stars and remembers a walk when her ailing father taught her a German song. A lily on her desk fills her room with perfume, and she recalls a young miner in Yamagata who silently climbed a cliff to bring her more lilies than she could carry.

Her mother returns and offers to let the narrator see the movie The Barefoot Girl in exchange for a shoulder massage. The narrator recognizes this as her mother's intuitive way of letting her earn something she was too hesitant to request. As she kneads her mother's shoulders, she feels ashamed of her earlier resentment and silently mouths an apology. She reads aloud from Heart (Edmondo De Amicis's Cuore), and her mother weeps at passages about the characters Enrico and Garrone.

After her mother goes to bed, the narrator does laundry near midnight. Smiling at the moon, she becomes convinced that somewhere another sad girl her age is doing laundry and smiling at the same moon. She reflects that adults may someday call this pain ordinary, but no one teaches girls how to endure the time until adulthood. Some stray irreparably; some resolve to end their lives, and adults lament only afterward.

She returns to her room, greeted by the lily's perfume, and feels transparent to the bottom of her heart. Falling into bed, she reflects that happiness will never come her way but it is best to sleep believing it will arrive tomorrow. She hears Poo's lopsided footsteps in the yard and resolves to show him kindness in the morning. She covers her face with both hands and describes falling asleep as a repeated tug on a fishing line. In her final words, she calls herself "Cinderella without her prince" and tells the reader they will not see her again.