A Landscape with a Stone Wall

About thirty years had passed since I left my hometown. When I returned to Kagoshima, I was forty-seven years old.

Thrilled by the nostalgic scenery, I walked around visiting various places in Kagoshima City. I traveled not only within the city but also to various parts of the prefecture.

Among those places, I visited Tokiwa-cho, where I spent my kindergarten and elementary school years, many times, walking through every corner as if gathering traces of my memories.

However, it was some time later that I visited Takashi-cho, where I lived before moving to Tokiwa-cho, until just before I turned three.

I knew when I left my hometown that the house I lived in at the time was already gone. By the time I was three, my range of movement was limited to the garden and its immediate surroundings. That small space had also disappeared along with the house, leaving no trace of how it looked back then.
And because so much time had passed, I thought the entire Takashi-cho I knew had transformed and existed only in my memories.

However, as I began to write about it, my feelings changed. As I typed while recalling those days, my attachment to the town returned.

Even if the townscape has changed, the shape of the roads and the mountains in the background likely retain their old appearance. Perhaps some remnants of the past still remain. Even the slightest trace would be enough. I decided to go and see if I could scoop them up and gather them. It was about half a century after leaving the town that I set out with that intention.

I walked south from Shin-uebashi, heading toward the place where my house once stood. As expected, the town had changed completely. I walked, superimposing the townscape of my memories onto the transformed town. And then, I arrived at the place of my memories.

There, I saw something unexpected and stood frozen in place.

The stone wall I used to look at. That alone was standing there, looking exactly as it did in the past.
Back then, I often sat on the stone steps, watching the people and cars passing by. This stone wall was always visible on the other side. It had been left in the same form I saw long ago.
I crouched down and looked up from the same low position as I did back then.
What I saw was exactly the same scenery I had seen when I was two years old.

Memories of that time came spinning back to me.
On this side of the road, there was my small house.
I lived there with my young parents and my newborn sister.

There were small stone steps in front of the house, and I loved sitting there to look outside.
I would watch the people walking by and the occasional car passing through.
When a car passed, dust would swirl up,
and I would sit there with my chin in my hands, covered in white dust from head to toe.

My range of movement was strictly limited to 'the corner of the intersection,' and
I was told that if I went beyond that, I would be taken away by a kidnapper.

This is that intersection.

On the day we moved, the truck with my father in the passenger seat started up, kicking up dust, and it was at this intersection that it turned right and disappeared from view.
At that moment, I thought my father was going to a distant world, and I cried out loud.

Back then, the road surface was bare Shirasu soil. There were no paved sidewalks, no traffic lights, and no concrete buildings.

A town that had changed completely.

In the midst of it, only the stone wall waited for me, unchanged. And just like in the old days, it caught my gaze.

On a day of heavy snow, a giant snowman stood in front of this stone wall, too.
When the donkey bread vendor came by, this stone wall was on the other side as well.

As the roasted sweet potato vendor's cart was about to pass by, Junko-nechan chased after it and called out to them.
Beyond that, in the northern direction, the green mountainside could be seen.

Nowadays, buildings stand in rows like this,
and while the mountain is only slightly visible, back then, almost the entire view was visible.
A verse from a lullaby I heard around that time.
— Crossing over that mountain, going to the village —
I thought "that mountain" was the green mountain visible beyond the iron bridge.

Slowly crossing over the sky above it like a bird,
heading toward a mysterious place called "Sato" (the village).
I often had dreams like that. It was a somewhat scary dream.
When I headed toward "crossing that mountain to the village,"
I always woke up in the middle of it.
In the area where I thought "Sato" was, there is now a cemetery,
and there, along with my ancestors, my parents are also sleeping.
Back when I was listening to that lullaby, that cemetery did not yet exist.