The Third Son Read Online Free PDF

distracting him and Jiro from their work—”
    “On the contrary, he enlivens the discussion—”
    “That’s not what Kazuo tells me. I will not allow him to be slowed down any longer—”
    “And how will Saburo’s education be achieved? With all due respect, Mrs. Togo, not all firstborn sons get such preferential treatment.”
    “Some sons are more deserving than others.”
    The next day, the door to the room was locked, and I had no more tutoring sessions with Keiko Sato.
    W E STAYED IN the country house for three years. While Kazuo and Jiro were tutored, I roamed the fields and forests until well past the time my mother considered to be late; on rainy days and evenings I sat by the courtyard, carefully turning the damp pages of The Earth.
    Sometimes Keiko Sato came to the house early on rainy days, shaking the water off her umbrella and resting it against the courtyard steps, and I wondered whether she came to the courtyard on purpose to find me.
    “I’ve learned the names of the clouds,” I said, whispering so my mother would not hear me. I was ten and it was March. It always rained in March. “I’ve learned how they’re formed.”
    She leaned in close, also whispering, her curly hair streaked with gray. “Tell me.”
    But more often than not, when I returned from my outside adventures, Sato Sensei was gone and I was left by myself in the evenings to read and reread The Earth .
    The years passed, and I grew taller, thinner, fed as much from my growing knowledge of the stratosphere, the ionosphere, and the aurora borealis as from the berries and mushrooms and silvery fish that I gathered from the countryside. And as I did, those two days in Taoyuan—the day I had met Yoshiko, and the day the snake had bitten me—crystallized in my mind like two glittering windows into worlds I had never considered it possible for me to see. They created such longing in me that my dreary existence became almost too painful to endure. I had only this blue book, which proved that other worlds—other planets, even, and other galaxies—did exist, that our lives were infinitesimal in the face of the universe. That there might be no limit to what I could learn or where I might go some day.
    The Japanese surrendered. The war was over, and we could now return to Taoyuan. Sato Sensei came by to give Kazuo and Jiro her last lesson, and I waited in the courtyard for her to finish. My mother packed boxes in the entryway, pausing every few minutes to sigh or complain.
    Sato Sensei stepped into the courtyard. She put her finger to her lips and bowed hastily. Glancing toward my mother, she tapped my book, pointed mysteriously toward the sky, and, picking up her umbrella, disappeared forever.
    As we returned to our house in Taoyuan, I looked up from my seat in the rickshaw into the night sky. The rickshaw bumped and swayed beneath me while the stars shone down, their light piercing through the outer reaches of their own galaxies and through all the orbits of our solar system, through all the layers of oxygen and nitrogen, dust and heat, ire and disappointment, to reach me. I knew what Keiko Sato had been trying to tell me, and it was something I’d always felt—that the stars, the sky, the earth, would save me from this life. I just didn’t know how.

5
    A S FOR Y OSHIKO, I did see her again, on the day the Mainland Chinese soldiers—Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army—arrived.
    I had been reading The Earth and was as usual the last member of my family to get ready. I hadn’t heard them calling me or noticed them getting ready.
    “Saburo!” my mother called. “You’ll make us all late for the parade!”
    A parade, to welcome the Chinese Nationalist takeover.
    The jubilation over the departure of the Japanese and the imminent arrival of Chinese Nationalists confused me. We had been taught in school to identify with the Japanese and revere their culture. Hadn’t we bowed low before our classroom portrait of Emperor Hirohito