Totto-Chan, the Little Girl at the Window (12 page)

"I wish I could braid your hair, too," she said.

When she got on the train she held her head as still as she could for fear the braids might come undone. "How nice it would be," she thought, "if someone noticed them on the train and said, 'What lovely braids!' " But nobody did. When she got to school, however, Miyo-chan, Sakko-chan, and Keiko Aoki, who were all in her class, exclaimed in unison, "Oooh! Pigtails!" and she was awfully pleased and let the girls feel them.

None of the boys seemed impressed. But all of a sudden, after lunch, a boy from her class named Oe said in a loud voice, “Wow! Totto-chan's got a new hairdo!"

Totto-chan was thrilled to think one of the boys had noticed, and said proudly, "They're pigtails."

Whereupon he came over, took hold of them with both hands, and said, "I'm tired. I think I'll hang onto them for a while. Gee, they're much nicer than the hand snaps on the train!" But that wasn't the end of her trouble.

Oe was twice as big as skinny little Totto-chan. In face, he was the biggest and fattest boy in the class. So when he pulled on her pigtails she staggered and fell smack on her bottom. To have them called hand scraps was hurtful enough, without being dragged to the ground as well. But when Oe tried to pull her up by her pigtails, with a "Heave-ho, heave-ho!" just like at the Sports Day Tug of War, Totto-chan burst into tears.

To Totto-chan, pigtails were the emblem of an older girl. She had expected everyone to be very polite to her because of them. Crying, she ran to the headmaster's office. When he heard her knocking on the door, sobbing, he opened it, and bent down as usual so their faces were level.

"What's the matter?" he asked.

After checking to see if her pigtails were still properly braided, she said, "Oe pulled them, saying, 'Heave-ho, heave-ho.' "

The headmaster looked at her hair. In contrast to her tearful face, her little pigtails looked as if they were dancing gaily. He sat down and had Totto-chan sit down, too, facing him. As usual, heedless of his missing teeth, he grinned.

"Don't cry," he said. "Your hair looks lovely.

"Do you like it?" she asked, rather shyly, raising her tear-stained face. "It's terrific!" he said.

Totto-chan stopped crying, and got down from her chair saying, “I won’t cry any more even if Oe says 'Heave-ho.' "

The headmaster nodded approval with a grin.

Totto-chan smiled, too. Her smiling face suited her pigtails. Bowing to the headmaster, she ran back and began playing with the other children.

She had almost forgotten about having cried when she saw Oe standing in front of her, scratching his head.

"I'm sorry I pulled them," he said in a loud, flat voice. "I've been scolded by the headmaster. He said you've got to be nice to girls. He said to be gentle with girls and look after them."

Totto-chan was somewhat amazed. She had never heard anyone before say you had to be nice to girls. Boys were always the important ones. In the families she knew where there were lots of children,-it was always the boys who were served first at meals and at snack time, and when girls spoke, their mothers would say, "Little girls should be seen and not heard."

In spite of all that, the headmaster had told Oe that girls should be looked after. It seemed strange to Totto-chan. And then she thought how nice that was. It was nice to be looked after.

As for Oe, it was a shock. Fancy being told to be gentle and nice to girls! Moreover, it was the first and last time at Tomoe that he was ever scolded by the headmaster, and he never forgot that day.

New Year's vacation drew near. Unlike summer vacation, the children didn't gather at school at all but spent the whole time with their families.

"I'm going to spend New Year's with my grandfather in Kyushu," Migita kept telling everyone, while Tai-chan, who liked doing science experiments, said, "I'm going with my older brother to visit a physics laboratory." He was looking forward to it.

“Well, I’ll be seeing you," each said, telling one another their plans as they parted company.

Totto-chan went skiing with Daddy and Mother. Daddy's friend Hideo Saito, the cellist and conductor in the same orchestra, had a beautiful house in the Shiga Highlands. They used to stay with him there every winter, and Totto-chan had started learning how to ski from the time she was in kindergarten.

You took a horse-drawn sleigh from the station to the skiing area--a pure white snowscape, unbroken by ski lifts or anything but the stumps of trees here and there.
For people who didn't have a house like Mr. Saito's to go to, Mother said there was only one Japanese-style inn and one Western-style hotel. But, interestingly lots of foreigners went there.

For Totto-chan, this year was different from the year before. She was now a first grade pupil at elementary school, and also she knew one bit of English. Daddy had taught her how to say, "Thank you."

Foreigners who passed Totto-chan standing on the snow in her skis always used to say something. It was probably, "Isn't she sweet," or something like that, but Totto- chan didn't understand. And until this year she hadn't been able to reply, but from now on She tried bobbing her head and saying, "Thank you."

That made the foreigners smile even more and say something to each other. Sometimes a lady would bend down and put her cheek against Totto-chan's cheek, or a gentleman would hug her. Totto-chan thought it was great fun to be able to make such good friends with people just by saying, "Thank you."

One day a nice young man came over to Totto-chan and gestured as much as to say, “Would you like a ride on the front of my skis?" Daddy told her she could.

"Thank you," replied Totto-chan, and the man had her sit down by his feet on his skis with her knees drawn up. Then, keeping both his skis together, he skied with Totto- chan down the gentlest and longest slope at Shiga Highlands. They went like the wind, and as the air rushed past her ears it made a whistling sound. Totto-chan hugged her knees tightly taking care not to fall forward. It was a bit scary, but tremendous fun. When they came to a halt, the people who were watching clapped. Getting up from the man's skis, Totto-chan bowed her head slightly to the onlookers, and said, "Thank you." They clapped all the more.

Much later on she learned that the man's name was Schneider, and that he was a world-famous skier, who always used a pair of silver ski poles. But that day, what she liked about him was that after they had skied down the slope, and everybody had clapped, he crouched down beside her and, taking her hand, he looked at her as if she was somebody important and said, "Thank you." He didn't treat her like a child, but like a real grown-up lady. When he bent down, Totto-chan knew in her heart, instinctively, that he was a gentleman. And beyond him, the snow-white landscape seemed to go on forever.

When the children returned to school after the winter vacation, they discovered something wonderful and new, and greeted their discovery with shouts of joy. Opposite the row of classroom cars stood the new car, beside the flower bed by the Assembly Hall. In their absence it had become a library! Ryo-chan, the janitor, whom everyone respected and who could do all sorts of things, had obviously been
working terribly hard. He had put up lots and lots of shelves in the car, and they were filled with rows of books of all kinds and colors. There were desks and chairs, too, where you could sit and read.
"This is your library," the headmaster said. "Any of these books may be read by anyone. You needn't fear that some books are reserved for certain grades, or anything like that. You can come in here any time you like. If you want to borrow a book and take it home, you may. When you've read it, be sure and bring it back! And if you've got any books at home you think the others would like to read, I'd be delighted if you'd bring them here. At any rate, please do as much reading as you can!"

"Let's make the first class today a library class!" cried the children, unanimously.

"Is that what you'd like to do?" said the head-master, smiling happily to see them so excited. "All right, then, why not?"

Whereupon, the whole student body of Tomoe--all fifty children--piled into the library car. With great excitement they picked our books they wanted and tried to sit down, but only about half of them could find seats and the rest had to stand. It looked exactly like a crowded train, with people reading books standing up. It was quite a funny sight.

The children were overjoyed. Totto-chan couldn't read too well yet, so she chose a book with a picture in it that looked most entertaining. When everyone had a book in hand and started turning the pages, the car suddenly became quiet. But not for long. The silence was soon broken by a jumble of voices. Some were reading passages aloud, some were asking others the meaning of characters they didn't know, and
some wanted to swap books. Laughter filled the train. One child had just started on a book called Singing Pictures and was drawing a face while reading out the accompanying jingle in a loud singsong:

A circle and a spot; a circle and a spot;

Criss-crosses for the nose; another round and dot. Three hairs, three hairs, three hairs--and wow! Quick as a wink, there's a fat hausfrau.
The face had to be encircled on the word "wow, and the three semicircles drawn as you sang "Quick as a wink." If you made all the right strokes, the result was the face of a plump woman with an old-fashioned Japanese hairdo.

At Tomoe, where the children were allowed to work on their subjects in any order they pleased, it would have been awkward if the children let themselves be disturbed by what others were doing. They were trained to concentrate no matter what was going on around them. So nobody paid any attention to the child singing aloud while drawing the hausfrau. One or two had joined in, but all the others were absorbed in their books.

Totto-chan's book seemed to be a folk tale. It was about a rich man's daughter who couldn't get a husband because she was always breaking wind. Finally her parents managed to find a husband for her, but She was so excited on her wedding night that she let out a much bigger one than ever before, and the wind blew her bridegroom out of bed, spun him around the bedroom seven and a half rimes, and knocked him
unconscious. The picture that had looked so entertaining showed him flying through the room. Afterward, that book was always in great demand.

All the students of the school, packed into the train like sardines, devouring the books so eagerly in the morning sunlight that was pouring through the windows, must have presented a sight that gladdened the heart of the headmaster.

The children spent the whole of that day in the library car.

After that, when they couldn't be outdoors because of rain, and at many other times, the library became a favorite gathering place for them.

"I think I'd better have a bathroom built neat the library," said the headmaster one day.

That was because the children would become so absorbed in their books that they were always holding out until the very last minute before making a dash for the toilet beyond the Assembly Hall, holding themselves in strange contortions.

One afternoon, when school was over and Totto-chan was preparing to go home, Oe came running to her and whispered, "The headmaster's mad at somebody." .

"Where?" asked Totto-chan.

She had never heard of the headmaster getting angry and was amazed. Oe was obviously amazed, too, the way he had come running in such a hurry to tell her.

"They're in the kitchen," said Oe, his good-natured eyes opened wide and his nostrils a little dilated.

"Come on!"

Totto-chan took Oe's hand and they both raced toward the headmaster's house. It adjoined the Assembly Hall, and the kitchen was right by the back entrance to the school grounds. The time Totto-chan fell into the cesspool she was taken through the kitchen to the bathroom to be scrubbed clean. And it was in the headmaster's kitchen that "something from the ocean and something from the hills" were made to be doled out at lunchtime.

As the two children tiptoed toward the kitchen, they heard the angry voice of the headmaster through the closed door.

"What made you say so thoughtlessly to Takahashi that he had a tail?" It was their homeroom teacher who was being reprimanded.

"I didn't mean it seriously," they heard her reply.

"I just happened to notice him at that moment, and he looked so cute."
"But can't you see the seriousness of what you said? What can I do to make you understand the care I take with regard to Takahashi?"

Totto-chan remembered what happened in class that morning. The homeroom teacher had been telling them about human beings originally having tails. The children had thought it great fun. Grown-ups would have probably called her talk an introduction to the theory of evolution, it appealed to the children greatly. And when the teacher told them everybody had the vestige of a tail called the coccyx, each child started wondering where his was, and soon the classroom was in an uproar. Finally the teacher had said jokingly, "Maybe somebody here still has a tail! What about you, Takahashi!"

Takahashi had quickly stood up, shaking his head emphatically, and said in deadly earnest, "I haven't got one."

Totto-chan realized that was what the headmaster was talking about. His voice had now become more sad than angry.

"Did it occur to you to think how Takahashi might feel if he was asked if he had a tail?"

The children couldn't hear the teacher's reply. Totto-chan didn't understand why the headmaster was so angry about the tail. She would have loved being asked by the headmaster if she had a tail.

Of course, she had nothing wrong with her, so she wouldn't have minded such a question. But Takahashi had stopped growing, and he knew it. That was why the headmaster had thought up events for Sports Day in which Takahashi would do well. He had them swim in the pool without swimsuits so children like Takahashi would lose their self consciousness. He did all he could to help children with physical handicaps, like Takahashi and Yasuaki-chan, lose any complexes they might have and the feeling they were inferior to other children. It was beyond the headmaster's comprehension how anyone could be so thoughtless as to ask Takahashi, just because he looked cute, whether he had a tail.