Uchouten Kazoku: Nidaime no Kichou Chapter 2 part3

I think the anime skipped this part in its entirety because it’s not plot-important (but still provides some character insight that will be helpful later on, particularly to better understand the exchange between Yasaburou and the Nidaime at the end of the novel that didn’t make it into the anime)

Chapter 2 (part ¾, pages ???)

〇

Late at night, with nothing better to do, I explored the tree I was in and found a big cavity in it. A look inside revealed that it was surprisingly clean and filled with small accessory cases and stuff. All pointed to it being my eldest brother’s secret closet.

“Let’s see if he has anything interesting in there.” Putting a hand inside, I rummaged through stuff stored there.

This being my straight-laced brother’s hiding spot, it contained not a single interesting thing, much to my disappointment. All it had were items desperately lacking any appeal, like a book in traditional Japanese biding titled ‘Furry child’ that preached tanuki’s history and guidelines, persimmons dried up to hardness he’d apparently forgotten to eat in time and spare parts for the automated rickshaw. “How boring,” I muttered, going through them and eventually finding a big box made of empress tree and wrapped in some high quality wrapping cloth.

It was our father’s favorite shogi board. A fine bulky board with 4 legs, one on each corner, exuding an air of grandeur that had you almost convinced that you could become good at shogi just by sitting in seiza in front of it. What ruined its splendor was the teeth marks on its surface, left there by my eldest brother.

'How terrible. Aniki sure did such an immature thing,’ I thought to myself. 'But then again, back at the time he was still only a kid.’

I, too, had some memories of my own about the day when my brother ruined this shogi board.

On that day, our father, usually very busy, was relaxing in the Tadasu forest, and about the time evening fell, Nanzenji Gyokuran came to visit. Those days, she would drop by every so often, coming all the way to the Tadasu forest specifically to play shogi with my father and brother. She would go as far as shapeshifting into a human and turning up at various shogi associations, freely wandering from one place where she could find a partner to play shogi with to another.

Our father took out his favorite shogi board, and my brother and Gyokuran sat down to play.

With our father watching, my brother was fired up more than ever. Trying to bite more than you could chew would never go as planned, and while my brother was focused on advancing his pawn, his overall situation turned clearly unfavorable. However, in the final stage, Gyokuran made a few surprisingly bad moves in succession, and the game was overturned, with my brother gaining a miraculous victory. Only, he wasn’t pleased with it. With the game over, the moment he raised his gaze from the board, he ended up shapeshifting into a tiger in a fit of anger and sinking his teeth into the board after losing himself to his fury.

My brother simply couldn’t tolerate the fact that he had been shown mercy by Gyokuran in the presence of our father. He was always prideful, and from where he stood, a crushing defeat would have been easier to accept than that, no doubt.

Since that incident, my brother banned himself from ever touching shogi.

No matter how our father encouraged him later on, he never played another game ever again.

〇

On the third day of my life in the tree in protest against my eldest brother’s inconsiderate statements, my mother nimbly climbed the tree with an intention to persuade me.

“We got this delicious youkan dessert [*1], so I brought some for you.”

Arranging the youkan on a tree brunch, she poured some green tea from a thermos flask around her neck. Then I and my mother sat down on the branch and got to eating the jet black youkan.

The incessant rain played the forest like a musical instrument.

Before long, mother abruptly declared, “I like Gyokuran quite a bit, you know.”
“Well, Gyokuran-sensei is one good tanuki, yes,” I nodded.
“Let’s have her as Yaichirou’s wife. Yes, that’s it, I’ve decided.”
“…That was so out of left field, mother.”
“What do you think of this?” mother whispered. “I personally think I’m onto something.”
“The red fur of fate, eh?”
“But bringing them together is going to be tough. Yaichirou is not the type to be any good at romantic strategizing, and Gyokuran seems like a shy maiden…” My mother savored a sip of her tea, then spoke up again as if talking to herself. “Then again, luckily, Yaichirou has a kind little brother who would figure something out to make it happen, I’m sure. No matter what people say, he is a very kind boy and he regrets causing trouble at the Tanuki Shogi tournament. I have no doubt he’s ready to do what it takes to make up for it. Yes, I have no doubt. Of course. A mother always knows these things.”

Coming to an agreement with herself, and herself only, mother started stuffing her cheeks with youkan again and grinning.

“Such delicious youkan. This youkan is high-end indeed.”

〇

Now that I had unwittingly partaken of the high-end youkan that mother had brought I couldn’t continue pretending to be a furry tengu anymore, so in the afternoon of the same day I said goodbye to my life in the tree and went to Nanzenji temple.

As I walked along the Biwako Canal, heading from Okazaki towards the higher area, I saw the rain-soaked Ferris wheel of Kyoto zoo on the opposite shore and heard the lonely chirping of foreign birds in the distance. The Nanzenji forest, sprawling opposite of the Biwako Canal Memorial Hall, being beaten by drizzle, looked swollen after soaking up so much rain water. Passing by a pretentious traditional Japanese restaurant, I entered the Nanzenji temple grounds.

Upon leaving wet red pines behind, the towering Nanzenji temple triple gate [*2], its top hazy with the rain, came into view.

Taking cover from the splashes of incessantly falling rain behind the old black pillars, Nanzenji Shoujirou, dressed in traditional Japanese clothes, was facing a shogi board in solitude. When he saw me, he smiled in delight.

I sat down in front of Shoujirou and crossed my legs. My butt immediately felt chilly.

“How is Gyokuran-sensei doing?”
“Still sitting in her Amno-Iwato cave [*3]. Once she’s decided to hole up, she won’t listen to anything her brother has to say at all. I don’t know if it’ll take a fool’s dance or what for her to come down.”
“I apologize for all the trouble I’ve caused.”
“Don’t worry about it. After a storm comes a calm, they say.”

The falling rain rustled against the roof of the gate.

“Sheesh, my big brother is so clumsy and dumb about things.”
“…But well, we are only tanuki.” Shoujirou chuckled and span the shogi board. “I understand Yaichirou’s situation pretty well; if my father were a tanuki as renown as yours and his, I would feel like I was being under his watch every second of my life, and that would cause me to make mishaps even where normally I wouldn’t. If you just kick back and let the flow stir you, you won’t make big blunders, but the moment tanuki like us try to put up a front and do something, we will only end up complicating things. That’s just the nature of creatures known as tanuki.”
“You may be right. Being soft and pliant is tanuki’s saving grace, after all.”
“That said, I still like Yaichirou.”

Nanzenji Shoujirou was always nice to the Shimogamo family. Unlike my eldest brother who, despite being so straight-laced, could easily transform into a tager and go on a rampage, Shoujirou remained a decorous and mild-mannered tanuki under any circumstances. Among the numerous tanuki who only decided in what way they should shake their butts after seeing the way other tanuki shook theirs, Shoujirou always allied himself with my brother. My brother trusted him, and Shoujirou placed faith in our eldest in turn.

Staring at the shogi board, Shoujirou muttered, “When my sister secldes herself like now, I can’t help thinking about the God of shogi.”
“The God of shogi?”
“You see, Gyokuran used to coop up on the second story of the gate often in the past, saying she was doing intensive shogi training. And at those times, she apparently saw the God of shogi.”

According to what Gyokuran revealed to Shoujirou, as she sat in front of the shogi board day after day, devoting all of her body and soul to the game and thinking so hard she even stopped breathing, one day, she felt like the 81-squares of the shogi board suddenly stretched out into infinity. The pieces lined up there, as well as all of their moves, linked themselves directly with her mind, and she understood with vivid clarity that the small shogi board was much bigger that she’d ever thought, not just bigger than Kyoto where she lived, but even bigger than Japan and even the whole of the world, and for a moment she felt like she was about to faint from the sheer delight and equal fright, sending chills down her spine, that the realization had brought.

She could swear she saw the furry God of shogi cross the board in that moment.

When he heard her talking about that experience, Shoujirou had a bad feeling about it.

Since having been awakened to shogi by Sakata Sankichi’s Nanzenji Showdown, the Nanzanji family had seen several of its members among those who were overly fanatical about shogi end badly. Too engrossed in thinking about shogi all the time, some fell into tanuki hot pot, others were hit by a car, still others left on a shogi pilgrimage and never came back. In the Nanzanji family, it was customarily said about those possessed by shogi who had disappeared from this world that they had been 'taken by the God of shogi’.

“So I started feeling uneasy, worrying that Gyokuran would be taken, too,” said Nanzenji Shoujirou to me, his gaze never leaving the shogi board. “And I always wished for someone to prevent it somehow. So you know, Yasaburou-kun, I can’t help thinking how great it would be if Yaichirou became that person.”
“Are you sure you’re okay with someone like him?”
“…It doesn’t matter if I’m okay with him or not. He’s the one my sister chose.”

I bowed to Shoujirou and started climbing the steep stairway illuminated by the murky light of street lamps.

The second story of the triple gate was a spacious chamber with wooden floor for enshrining a Buddha and was encircled by a balcony with a balustrade. Said balustrade was completely wet.

From there, you could have an extensive view of the Kyoto cityscape lying beyond the temple grounds, hazy with the rain. On the left, there towered Hotel Miyako on a hill of lush green that looked like it was wrapped in silk floss, and out in front was the beloved cityscape of streets and houses where tanuki, tengu and humans continued to go about their lives, crawling below. Farther away, there loomed Mt.Atagoyama, the turf of one Atagoyama Taroubou, and a row of other mountains that blocked the city off like a dark green folding screen.

I opened a stout wooden door decorated with metal tacks shaped like a breast with a nipple.

“Do not talk to me, Yasaburou-chan,” said Gyokuran from the dark. “I’m in the middle of reflecting right now.”

〇

Nanzenji Gyokuran sat on the wooden floor of the dark chamber all alone.

“Your butt must be hurting already, no?” I said.
“You shouldn’t speak about butts to a lady.”
“A freezing butt is the source of all illnesses. So how about coming down already, Gyokuran-sensei?”
“…Don’t call me sensei.”

As far as I could see, Gyokuran, in a dress, was sitting completely upright with her back straight and gazing at the shogi board in front of her.
The wooden room, wet and cold, was filled with a perfume scent and a grand presence unfit for a tanuki. The thick pillars were decorated with skillful pictures, the Buddha at the back next to the altar appeared like he glared at us, and the picture of a peacock on the ceiling seemed to be casting a sharp glance our way, too.

I went and sat down cross-legged opposite of Gyokuran, with the shogi board between us.

A glance at the board revealed that the neatly lined up pieces had yet to make any move. I reached my hand and, picking up the right edge pawn, advanced it forward, while trying to gauge Gyokuran’s feelings. Gyokuran kept staring at the board without a word, but before long, she raised her hand and advanced her own pawn.

And so, we started to play shogi to the beating of the heavy rain echoing through the room. I played in a reckless way driven to extremity, which little by little loosened Gyokuran, who found herself unable to resist much longer, enough to smile.

“You’re being completely absurd, Yasaburou-chan. There is no shogi like that.”
“Do I suck that bad?”
“I get a feeling that all of your pawns are constantly laughing.”
“When the player is an idiot, his pawns turn into idiots, too, I guess.”

I imagine I was one hopelessly tough student to handle for Nanzenji Gyokuran back when she served as Akadamsensei’s assistant. Despite that, Gyokuran never failed to be nice to me. She stood up for me whenever possible when Akadamsensei tried to bring his figurative iron hammer on my head, and when I sprouted a mushroom on my butt, leaving me embarrassed and at a loss, she took me to a proctologist specializing in tanuki. In the first place, the one to imprint the conviction that freezing your butt was the source of all illnesses into me was Nanzenji Gyokuran.

“We’ll keep playing idiot shogi until you decide to get down from here, Gyokuran.”
“Have mercy. I’ll die from laughter sooner.”
“In that case, let’s get down. Everyone’s worried about you.”
“…Our positions have switched, haven’t they.”

Gyokuran raised her face from the shogi board and smiled.

“Do you remember the time when you were left hanging from the big cedar in Kumogahata?”
“When Akadamsensei tied me up and then just left, forgetting about it, right?”
“You insisted that you would not come down at the time.”
“Did I, now?”
“Yes, you did. I still remember it like it was yesterday. Even when sun had set, you were still nowhere to be seen, so Yaichirou-san got really worried,and we went to Kumogata together to search for you.”

That night, my brother and Gyokuran crossed the dark plains looking for me.

To start with, tengu’s training ground in Kumogahata was not a place tanuki would be very familiar with, and with darkness falling, it turned even more spooky. Across the plains, as wast as the ocean, tepid stray wind blew, and if you looked up at the sky, it was so full of stars you’d never see in a city that it was scary.

When the two came as far as the center of those plains, Gyokuran had a sudden fear attack that almost rendered her unable to breathe. She knew she would never take a step out of grasslands without a very good reason for the rest of her life then. Even now, when the heaven and earth switched placed, she vividly experienced the sensation of sinking into the limitless starry sky. In those plains, as she stopped in spite of herself, my brother came to her side and held her hand tight. The suffocation from falling into the cosmos receded, and Gyokuran came back to the solid ground beneath her feet. But even after she did, she didn’t let go of my brother’s hand.

Some time later, they finally reached the towering lone black cedar.

“Yasaburou, heey!” they called, and “Heey,” came a careless reply from above.

Having climbed up the cedar, my brother and Gyokuran found the tied up and forgotten furry little me at the top. Apparently, they were so relieved they were ready to burst into tear, but I, very young as I was, only kept my gloomy silence like your veritable furry Jizou [*4]. And not just that, I even unreasonably declared that I had no intention to come down, flooring the two. “I’m going to train in the tree top and become a tengu. And then I’ll kick Akadamsensei down from Nyoigadake,” I announced my determined decision, quite unbecoming of a tanuki. I must have been really angry with sensei at the time.

Gyokuran was reminiscing about that night with a smile as she lined up the shogi pieces.

“We brought you back by force that night. You showed some eye-rolling obstinacy, I have to say.”
“Well, I was an idiot back then.”
“You haven’t changed much since though?”
“Well, me aside, what are YOU going to do, Gyokuran? Still going to be stubborn?”

When I said that, Gyokuran laughed. “No, I’ve had enough of idiot shogi.”

Following the narrow stairway, we went down, finding that the rain had gone into a lull before we knew it. Nanzenji Shoujirou still sat in front of the shogi board. “Nii-sama, I’m back,” said Gyokuran and lowered her head, while Shoujirou raised his and gave her a bright smile.

“I’m so glad to see that.”
“I’m going to go visit the Tadasu forest now. Is it okay with you?”
“…Of course. Go.”

T/N:

[*1] Youkan dessert (羊羹): a Japanese confectionery made with red bean paste (anko) and agar and solidified in a block shape (wiki). One of the most famous high-end youkan shops with long history is Kyoto’s Toraya.
[*2] Triple gate or Sanmon (三門) of a temple: usually two-storied, they symbolyze stages of enlightment and their size indicates a temple’s status (wiki)
[*3] Amno-Iwato (天の岩戸): a cave from Japanese mythology where the sun goddess Amaterasu secluded herself because of the bad conduct of her brother Susano'o, the god of seas and storms (wiki)
[*4] Jizou (地蔵): a bodhisattva of hell-beings, a savior of souls suffering in hell and protector of children and travellers, he is depicted as a shaved-headed monk with childlike features, and you can often find his statues by roadsides and graveyards (wiki) You should also know him as Enmdaiou’s alter ego if you watched Hoozuki no Reitetsu.

Chapter end