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This is the story of a boy called Seibei and his gourds. Later Seibei gave up his gourds, but he soon found something to take their place. It was drawing pictures, and he was now as enthusiastically absorbed by that as he’d once been by gourds…

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Both his parents knew that Seibei now and then came home with some gourd he’d bought. He must have brought as many as ten, with the skins on, ranging in price from three or four sen to as high as fifteen sen. By himself, he skillfully cut them open and removed the seeds. He made his own plugs. First taking away the bad smell with tea dregs, he assiduously polished the gourds with leftover sake of his father’s which he had saved.

Certainly, Seibei’s devotion was fanatical. One day, he was walking along the shore road, as usual thinking and thinking about gourds, when something caught his eye. It startled him. It was the bald head of an old man who had stepped out from a row of stalls that lined the road with their backs to the sea. Seibei thought it was a gourd. “What a magnificent gourd!” he thought. It was a while before he realized his error. When he did, he felt surprised at himself. The old man, wagging his finely colored head, entered an alley across the way. Suddenly amused, Seibei laughed out loud. Laughing like crazy, he ran for half a block. Even then, he couldn’t stop laughing.

Such was his devotion that, when walking in town, he would always stop to gaze at any shop with gourds hung from the eaves, be it an antique shop, a kitchenware store, a candy store, or a shop that specialized in gourds.

Seibei, eleven years old, was still in grade school. Often when he’d come home, rather than playing with the other children, he would set out alone for town to look at gourds. At night, sitting tailor-style in a corner of the parlor, he would work on a gourd. When it was ready, he would pour in the sake dregs, wrap it in a towel, and after putting it in a can place it in the sunken hearth. Then he would go to bed. In the morning, as soon as he got up he would open the can. After gazing insatiably at the gourd, covered all over with sweat, he would carefully attach a thread, hang the gourd from a sunny part of the eaves, and go off to school.

In Seibei’s town, there was a commercial district and a harbor so that it was fairly busy. But one could walk through the relatively small area of the long, narrow town in twenty minutes or so. Therefore, although there were many shops that sold gourds, Seibei, who’d spent nearly all his spare time walking around and looking, had probably seen all the gourds there were to see.

He didn’t have much interest in old gourds. His taste was for those with their skins on, that had not yet been cut open. Furthermore, those he chose were for the most part of the so-called gourd shape (scorned by connoisseurs) and of a comparatively commonplace appearance.

“This kid of yours, when it comes to gourds, only picks the ugly ones.” Watching as Seibei, off to the side, zealously polished a gourd, a guest who had come to visit his carpenter father made this comment.

“He’s always messing with gourds or something else, even though he’s just a kid,” the father said ill-humoredly, looking around at him.

“Sei-boy. It won’t do just to bring home that uninteresting kind of gourd. Why don’t you buy something a little more original?” the guest asked.

“This one is fine,” Seibei calmly answered.

The conversation of the guest and Seibei’s father turned to the general subject of gourds.

“At the exhibition this spring, there was a splendid gourd that’s said to have belonged to Bakin,” Seibei’s father said.

“Was it quite a large gourd?”

“It was big. and it was long.”

Hearing this kind of talk, Seibei smiled within himself. “Bakin’s gourd” was a celebrated object of the time. But just one look—Seibei didn’t know who Bakin was, but quickly deciding the gourd was a thing of no value, he’d left the exhibition hall.

“I didn’t care for that gourd. It was nothing but big,” Seibei put in.

When he heard this, the father, round-eyed with anger, barked: “What would you know about it? Shut up!”

Seibei was silent.

One day, walking along a back street, Seibei came to an unfamiliar place. In front of the lattice of a residential shop, an old woman had set up a stand of dried persimmons and tangerines. On the latticework, she’d hung out about twenty gourds. At once, saying: “Please, just let me take a look,” Seibei stepped up and examined them one by one. Among them was one about five inches around, at first sight of such an ordinary shape that he wanted to hug it, it was so good.

Heart thudding, he inquired: “How much is this one?”

The old woman replied: “For you, sonny. I’ll knock it down to ten sen.”

Breathing hard, Seibei said: “If that’s so, don’t sell it to anyone else. I’ll come back right away with the money.” After repeating this, he set off at a run for his house.

In no time at all, face flushed, gasping for breath, Seibei was back. Receiving the gourd, he went off again at a run.

From then on, he would not let the gourd out of his sight. He even started taking it to school. In the end, once, he even polished it under his desk during a class. The teacher detected him. It being the ethics class, he was all the more infuriated.

The teacher, who was from another part of the country, could not abide the fact that the people of this locality took an interest in such things as gourds. A devotee of the samurai ethic, he went to hear Kumoemon three of the days of his four-day engagement at a small theater in the brothel district, which ordinarily he was afraid even to pass through. Although he was not all that annoyed by the songs that the pupils made up about him on the playground, his voice shook with anger over Seibei’s gourd. “You are a person with absolutely no prospects in life.” he told him. The gourd to which Seibei had given such lming care and effort was taken away from him on the spot. Seibei could not even cry.

When, his face pale, he’d come home, he sat down in a daze on the edge of the sunken hearth.

Just then, the teacher, carrying his textbooks in a bundle, came to see Seibei’s father. Out on a job, the father was not at home.

“I must ask you to deal with this kind of thing yourselves…” Saying this, the teacher lit into Seibei’s mother. The mother merely cringed with shame.

Seibei was suddenly afraid of the teacher’s implacability. His lips trembling, he made himself small in a corner of the room. On the housepost, right in back of the teacher, hung many finished gourds. Thinking “Will he notice them now, will he notice them now,” Seibei was in a panic.

After he’d given the mother a stern talking to, the teacher, without having noticed the gourds, at last went away. Seibei breathed a sigh of relief. His mother, bursting into tears, commenced a long, grumbling scolding.

Before long, Seibei’s father came back from the construction site. When he heard what had happened, he abruptly grabbed Seibei, who was sitting off to one side, and beat him. Here also, Seibei was told: “You have no future at all, you brat.”

“A fool like you—get out,” he was told.

Suddenly noticing the gourds on the housepost, Seibei’s father took a big hammer and smashed them one by one. Seibei, simply turning pale, said nothing.

The teacher, as if the gourd he’d confiscated from Seibei was a dirty thing, as if throwing it away, gave it to the old man who was the school janitor. Taking it home, the janitor hung it up on the housepost of his small, soot-darkened room.

About two months later, the janitor, hard up for a little cash, had the idea of selling the gourd for whatever it would fetch. Taking it to the neighborhood curio dealer, he showed it to him.

The dealer looked at it with squinting scrutiny. Suddenly cold-faced, he shoved it back at the janitor.

”I’ll take it off your hands for five yen.”

The janitor was dumbfounded. But he was a shrewd fellow. His face expressionless. he answered: “I can’t possibly” let it go for so little.”

The dealer immediately raised his offer to ten yen. But the janitor still held out.

Finally, the dealer just barely managed to obtain the gourd for fifty yen. The janitor was secretly overjoyed at his good fortune at having gotten from the teacher free something worth four months of his salary. To the end, though, he kept on his know-nothing face, not only with the teacher, but with Seibei. So that nobody knew where the gourd had gone.

But even the crafty janitor could not have imagined that the dealer had sold the gourd to a local rich collector for five hundred yen.

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Seibei was now enthusiastically absorbed in his drawing. He no longer felt any resentment toward the teacher nor his father who had smashed more than ten of his cherished gourds with a hammer.

Before long, though, the father began to berate him for drawing pictures.