s, so that his mother came up with the idea of polishing the old running shoes with some half-penny chocolate, first she really cleaned them off and then smeared the chocolate on, and really they looked as if they could have been new, but he was distressed by this, and because he was not ashamed if, due to the family’s poverty, he was the only one not to get new running shoes before the big mountain-climbing event, he took the shoes and scraped off the chocolate, and he never went mountain climbing with the others, this is just one example of how difficult it was, he says, but an example, too, of how difficult it was for him to be with others; it wasn’t as if he didn’t long to be among them, there was nothing he desired more than to play alongside them, it was just that some obstacle or another was always in the way, which meant that he always had to renounce their companionship, so when he was in middle school he became even more solitary than he had been in primary schooclass="underline" just his mother and he, the two of them in the street that ran parallel with the Nanna-jo, while his father sat the entire day in the old business premises, smoking cigarettes and looking out the window, although nothing ever happened out there, he was completely alone, and so the years passed and the compassion within him for those who could not make friends grew ever deeper, or for those who could not be with the people they wanted to be with, because he was always at home, or at school, or at school or at home, and because he was so worried for his mother and the entire family, and what would happen to them if he wasn’t at home, during this time because of the worry he very often would not go out into the street to play, or go and join up with the others during school breaks, because there was only one thought in his mind, how to find an exit from this destitution so that his mother would not have to strain her eyes; he brooded over this incessantly, and of course in the meantime, he says, he did not have too much time to think about playing with the others; he could however have made friends, for example, with the boy who once complained that he felt very bad, and he was really afraid, because he couldn’t go like this to his singing lessons in the mornings; I said to him, he says, that I would go in his place, and I even went, I went, and in the meantime I learned everything that he was supposed to learn, then later at the singing lessons I explained the situation with my classmate; I sang everything that he was supposed to have sung, and I was praised greatly, and the teacher said that they did not reproach my classmate for his absences, that it was alright, and of course the boy in question was very grateful for this, and they could have even been friends, but well he had to go home, at the beginning he just walked normally, then he began to move quickly, but finally he was already running, so afraid was he that while he was gone something had happened with his mother’s eyes, and so it was not possible for him to be anyone’s friend, for even if this boy had invited him on another afternoon to come along and play with him, in this dark period of his life he only thought immediately of what would happen at home if he weren’t there, this was always his profound conviction, that no one would be there to help, as he was utterly certain, under this burden of continual suffering, that a larger catastrophe was looming; in the first place he thought of his mother, filled with concern for her, thinking that the catastrophe would be connected with her eyes, but it didn’t happen like that, something completely different occurred, something completely extraordinary that turned everything upside down and changed their lives; no one thought that it could happen but it did; everyone, and in particular he himself, was convinced that the catastrophe was here, about to occur, and everything seemed so utterly hopeless that one day — such was the sorrow that overwhelmed him from his mother’s and father’s fate — he made a decision and went to them in the upper room, and his advice was that they should commit suicide, together, the entire family, because in my view, I said to them, he says, this is the only solution, this is what I can recommend, because we are so bereft of any future, there is no future whatsoever for us, all of our time is completely taken up solving the problems of everyday life, of what we are going to eat; well, of course I wasn’t thinking of any future, I did not wish for any future, because there was no future at all, I went to the upstairs room, I knelt down before them, I bowed, and I said, let us all commit suicide together, but in the end we didn’t do it, because an extraordinary turn of events came about, something completely unimaginable: one day in school a big white dog suddenly got into the hallway, I was in the seventh grade, when a stray, bedraggled, white dog came in, and it was in such a bad state that everyone just yelled and screamed at it, but no one dared or wanted to try to grab hold of it, it was evident, however, that the dog was getting close to the end already, its entire body was trembling, its fur was scraped off, and it was so skinny that its bones literally stuck out, of course it was chased out of the classroom somehow, and chased out of the entire building onto the street, it’s just that the dog didn’t leave but stayed there near the school and stayed right underneath our classroom window, it didn’t move away from there for a whole week, it just trembled and cried and howled and whined, you could hear it very clearly, and in the end I couldn’t hear anything else, I heard it even at home: so the dog did not budge from next to the tree, they tried to chase it away with a cane, but it was simply impossible to chase it away, so it stayed, no one bothered it anymore, only you could hear it crying, and I — as the week went by — looked at the dog, and I saw how it wanted to die, and then I said to myself, I have to take it home, somehow it will get along with us, and so, the master relates, that’s exactly what he did, he took the dog home, he just said to it come, and at that one single word the dog came; but his mother said we can’t do this, we can’t have a dog here, whatever are we going to give him to eat, and this really did present a huge problem, as they had no meat that they could give to the dog, only rice, and moreover, dogs don’t eat rice; his mother advised him to take it out to the monastery, it can’t stay here, but, he says, he was not able to do that, he pleaded with his family, please let it stay here, he even made a doghouse secretly, he pleaded with his mother, but she said we don’t have enough even for ourselves, to which he replied that he would give the dog his own portion, which of course sounded a bit peculiar, because dogs don’t eat rice, but then he implored his mother so much that that night they gave the dog his nightly portion of rice, and the dog ate the rice, and then already his mother began to see things differently, and she allowed the dog to stay, fine, she said, we’ll keep it, and really it turned out like that, he says, we took in the white dog, and two weeks later, altogether two weeks after the day that we had taken the dog in — people began knocking at the front door saying they wanted to buy an oxygen mask, suddenly they were getting orders, my father’s business started up again, and even his business partner, the one who had caused the business to go bankrupt earlier, turned up again, and suggested that due to the change in demand they should go back into partnership again, and the telephone rang off the hook, and there were hundreds and thousands of orders, everything changed at once, the business flourished; at that time, the massive industrialization campaign was going on and due to the pollution, a huge demand for oxygen masks arose, and in addition, my father’s business partner came up with a new kind of mask, a yellow one that filtered out the pollution more effectively, and it became so successful that even the state television, the NHK, did a program about it and advertised it, everything got better, the master lowers his voice, and everyone knew, my mother knew, I knew, and my father knew as well, that the change in our fate was because of the dog, it brought us luck, my father announced sitting on his chair in front of the window, and from that point on he prayed for it, for the white dog, and ever since he, my father, died, I pray for it, and when I shall die, my first-born child, sensei Kimiko will pray for it too.