Saeko's Tadpole Story

Her father said, ‘She was an odd one.’ The child of his that most changed his perspective on the world; before her he was hard, unbending in his ways, brittle, even. Actions took place according to rules, and to defy them was to do it wrong. Saeko changed all that. She was his eldest daughter out of four.

‘I was the first girl!’ Saeko claims, opening and shutting her wide eyes, like two clam shells out of the sea. Her father says she behaved like an odd-ball, always speaking out of turn, living in make-belief and not playing with any toys, or other children. An un-favourite of the teachers, she would get picked on at school and get in the way at home - because of all this - Saeko would take herself off to the woods and play games on her own. Her family still live in the mountains, at the foothills of Mount Fuji, surrounded by tea farms and forests.

One time, Tetsurō her father, came across a glass tank made for insects filled with pond water and silvery fish in the middle of his corridor. These were fish you could fry and serve up as bar snacks, and he wondered about them, as he carried them into the kitchen for his wife to deal with. He then went and found Saeko and asked her where she had got all the silvery fish from. She replied she had caught them in the river, but Tetsurō was doubtful, ‘Surely not - they swim very fast. It would be difficult to catch one. How did you do it?’

She had gone down to the riverside with a butterfly net and some bonito flakes from the cupboard. She had placed a stone in the net and let it sink to the bottom of the riverbed, while holding onto the handle, then sprinkled some flakes into the net. When enough silvery fish had come to feast, she very slowly, incrementally, pulled the net upwards until all the fish were caught inside and couldn’t escape. Then she emptied them out into her tank of water, and repeated the steps again, and again.

That night her father ate the fried fish snacks with his cold beer, salty and crunchy, while reading a magazine in the lamp light. Many moths fluttered into the lampshade, sounding like the occasional ping of a rubber-band. Saeko slept soundly upstairs in her futon, in the room nearest to the rafters, where her family used to keep the silkworms.

At school Saeko kept herself to herself, to avoid being bullied by her classmates, or being called up in lessons to be made an example of, although she never studied hard, she was still coming top of her class. She thought big thoughts and roamed around freely. Her father was bothered about her attention span and wondered whether all girls were so weird, her mother didn’t mind so much, at least she seemed happy. When Saeko’s class went on an excursion to the river mouth, the teachers gave every child a bucket and spade and organised a competition. Who could catch the most tadpoles?

Children ran off in all directions, being told to stay near the shallows, which is where all the tadpoles were swimming anyway. Tetsurō recounted this story with a sense of held-back pride and a wide grin. The other children collected three or four, maybe, even six tadpoles. Saeko caught thirty-nine! The teachers and the other children crowded around Saeko’s teeming bucket to see how she did it. She cupped her hands under the surface of the water and waited, until one tadpole swam into her palms and she lifted it up. Everyone watched her calmly pick up tadpole, after tadpole, to place into her bucket. After the competition was over, everyone clapped as she released her colony into the waters, like nothing had ever happened.

‘I don’t know why they chased them. If you wait, they come.’