"No," I would say with a smile, shutting my book. I would launch into some silly story, miles removed from what I was thinking. "Today at school the geography teacher, the one we call the Walrus . . ." One evening my cousins came to my room and after they had compelled me to clown at unmerciful lengths, one of them proposed, "Yozo, let's see how you look with glasses on." "Why?" "Don't make such a fuss. Put them on. Here, take these glasses." They invariably spoke in the same harsh, peremptory tones. The clown meekly put on the older girl's glasses. My cousins were convulsed with laughter. "You look exactly like him. Exactly like Harold Lloyd." The American movie comedian was very popular at the time in Japan. I stood up. "Ladies and gentlemen," I said, raising one arm in greeting, "I should like on this occasion to thank all my Japanese fans —" I went through the motions of making a speech. They laughed all the harder. From then on whenever a Harold Lloyd movie came to town I went to see it and secretly studied his expressions. One autumn evening as I was lying in bed reading a book, the older of my cousins—I always called her Sister—suddenly darted into my room quick as a bird, and collapsed over my bed. She whispered through her tears, "Yozo, you'll help me, I know. I know you will. Let's run away from this terrible house together. Oh, help me, please." She continued in this hysterical vein for a while only to burst into tears again. This was not the first time that a woman had put on such a scene before me, and Sister's excessively emotional words did not surprise me much. I felt instead a certain boredom at their banality
