A mountain valley in Shiga, 1974: when automatic signals retire the old tablet instrument at a country station, its forgotten bell circuit becomes the wire for a hunting game between a boy with a broken leg and a girl six kilometres up the line whom he has never met. A story about what a simple, well-understood thing can still do.
by Gunpei Yokoi, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
The relay cabinet arrived at Hataya station in the second week of March 1974, on a flat wagon, under a tarpaulin tied with blue cord. It was grey steel, the height of a man, and it hummed. Two fitters from the Maibara depot bolted it to a concrete plinth at the end of the platform, ran a cable from it into a trench beside the rails, and spent four days walking the six kilometres to Kamiōgi and back, testing. After that the trains ran themselves. A train entered the section, the rails told the cabinet, the cabinet set the signal at the far end to red, and nobody had to carry anything.
For thirty-one years Morita Sadao had carried the tablet. It was a brass disc the size of a rice cracker, with a hole cut through it in the shape peculiar to this section, and it lived inside the tablet instrument in the station office, a mahogany cabinet with a bell on top. No driver could enter the single line to Kamiōgi without a tablet in his hand. There was only ever one tablet out of the instruments at a time; the two instruments, one at each end, were joined by a wire and would not release a second while the first was loose. It was a very old idea. Morita liked it the way he liked a good pair of pliers.
Now the instrument stood in the corner of the office with a manila tag wired to its handle: DECOMMISSIONED. HOLD FOR RECOVERY. FY SHŌWA 49. The recovery crew would come before the end of the fiscal year, which was to say before the end of next March, which was to say whenever Maibara found the men. In October the station itself would lose its staff. The trains would stop at Hataya and open their doors to an empty platform, and the fare box would be screwed to the wall of the waiting room.
Morita kept the office as he had always kept it. He swept it at six. He wound the clock. On the first of each month he took the lids off the four glass battery jars under the instrument, looked at the zinc rods and the white crust of sal ammoniac, and topped them up from the kettle. He did this in April, and again in May, and was lifting the third lid in May before he stopped and asked himself why.
The bell had its own circuit. That was the thing. The tablet locks and the bell were separate: the bell was only a plunger, a coil and a gong, fed from the jars, sent down the line wire along the telegraph poles, and returned through the earth. The fitters had cut the lock circuit. Nobody had cut the bell, because nobody had needed to. Morita put his thumb on the plunger and pressed it once.
For eleven seconds nothing happened. Then the gong on top of the instrument struck once. Imai at Kamiōgi had heard him, and answered: call attention, attending.
Morita stood with his thumb in the air. Then he pressed it twice, which in the old code meant is the line clear, and which now meant nothing at all.
Two beats came back. Then, after a pause, one more, which was not in the code. Morita understood it perfectly. It meant: what on earth are you doing?
The boy was called Kawabe Tetsuo, and he was on the platform because his leg was in plaster from the ankle to the knee. He had fallen off the roof of his grandfather's barn in the last week of the spring term, and the school was across the ridge in the next valley, a forty-minute walk no plaster could do. His mother worked the tea-bottling line at the co-operative in the mornings. So he came down to the station with a bamboo crutch and a satchel of arithmetic, and sat on the bench under the eaves, and watched the trains, which were three in each direction, and the rest of the time watched the relay cabinet, which did not do anything he could see.
He was watching it when the bell rang in the office, and he watched Morita through the window, with his thumb up in the air like a man testing the wind.
"It still works," the boy said, when Morita came out.
"It works because nobody switched it off."
"What does it say?"
Morita told him the codes. One for attention. Two for is the line clear. Three pause one for a stopping train. Four for the tablet's release. Six for obstruction, which he had rung twice in thirty-one years, once for a landslip and once for a cow. The boy listened, and Morita saw him counting on the fingers of the hand that was not holding the crutch.
"But you can only say what's in the list," the boy said.
"That's what a list is for."
"You could make another list."
Morita did not answer him. He went back inside and stood in front of the instrument for some time. He was looking at the blackboard on the wall beside it, where for thirty-one years he had written the train numbers in chalk and rubbed them out. The trains did not need writing up any more. The board was clean.
It was the boy's game, but it was Morita who fitted it to the wire.
What they had was this: a plunger, a gong, and time between the beats. No letters. No numbers above what a man would bother to count. A wrong beat could not be taken back. And whoever was at the other end had to be at the other end, in Kamiōgi, six kilometres up the valley, and could not see anything they did.
What the boy wanted was a hunting game. He had played one at school with squared paper and a friend, ships on a grid, but ships were no good here; nobody in the valley had seen a ship. So Morita walked him to the end of the platform and they looked down at the paddies, which ran in terraces from the river up to the road. It was the end of May and the water was in them. They were the colour of the sky, with the young rice standing in rows like a comb.
"Five rows," Morita said. "From the river up. Five fields along each row, from here toward the mountain. Twenty-five paddies." That was nearly true. The real paddies were not square and there were more than twenty-five of them, but a map was only good if it was simpler than the ground.
"And what do we hide?"
There was a grey heron that fished the lower terraces every morning, standing on one leg in the water. It was the boy who said it.
The rules were written in chalk on the train board, where they stayed until October. Each player hid a heron in one paddy and wrote it down on paper, folded. Then they took turns to guess. A guess was the row, rung in beats, then a pause the length of a breath, then the field along the row, rung in beats. The answer came back as a single number: one beat, the paddy was empty. Two beats, the heron was in the next paddy, on any side. Three beats, it was the heron.
"Two beats is warm," said the boy.
"Two beats is warm," Morita agreed. The warm answer was what made it a game. Without it, it was only arithmetic; you found the heron by exhaustion and nobody's heart went any faster.
That was the design. Morita wrote the rules out again on a sheet of railway foolscap, in a clear hand, and put it in a registered envelope for the afternoon train, addressed to Imai Genzō, Kamiōgi station office. It went up the line on the 14:52 and cost nothing, because it was railway business, more or less.
The answer came the next morning at a quarter past nine, by bell: one beat, attending, and then three, pause, two.
"Third row," said the boy. "Second along." He was out of breath from hobbling in off the bench. Morita looked at the paper under the paperweight, where the boy had drawn his heron.
One beat. Empty.
It was not Imai who was playing. It came out slowly, over a week, through the envelopes that now travelled on the 14:52 as regularly as the post: Imai had a granddaughter staying with him, Sachiko, eleven, sent from Kyoto to the mountains for her chest. The doctor had said clean air. The clean air was all she got; Kamiōgi had nothing else, no children, no shop, a shrine and a sawmill. She did not play like Imai, who guessed methodically from the river upward. She played as if she could see the valley. Twice in the first week she found Tetsuo's heron in fewer than six guesses, and the second time she went straight from warm to the heron with no wasted beat, and Tetsuo sat on the bench with his plaster leg out in front of him and would not speak for most of the afternoon.
Morita made no rule against it. There was nothing to make a rule against. She had been listening to the silences: Tetsuo was slow on the plunger when a guess was close, and quick when it was far, and six kilometres of wire carried that as clearly as it carried the beats.
He did not tell the boy this. The boy found it out himself, in the second week, and after that he answered every guess after exactly the same pause, counting under his breath, one, two, three, before he touched the plunger. He began to win about half the time.
By June there were rules about rain. A heron would not stand in the top row after heavy rain, because the water came off the road there brown, and so a heron hidden in the top row after rain was worth nothing and had to be moved. That rule came down from Kamiōgi in an envelope, in pencil, in a child's hand, with a small drawing of a heron with one leg up. By July there was a rule that a heron could be moved once, secretly, if the other side had rung warm twice in a row. Morita wrote that one on the board. It made the game longer. It also made it better, which was not the same thing, and he was careful that it was the second.
In July the boy's plaster came off, and he kept coming.
The telephone was the uncle's idea, and it was a kind one.
Kawabe Shūji had an electrical shop in Nagahama, televisions and rice cookers and the repair of both, and when he came over for the Bon holiday and heard about the game he went quiet and interested in the way of a man who has seen a problem. "A bell," he said. "Children in 1974, ringing a bell at each other." He had a pair of army field telephones in the back of the van, green metal cases with a hand crank. He had taken them in against a debt. They would work on a single wire and an earth. He could have them on the line in an hour.
"Then they can talk," Shūji said. "Properly. Say what they like."
Morita looked at the telephones. He knew that wire. He knew what it did on a wet morning, how its note changed when frost was on the insulators, where the joint near the second bridge had been remade and was slightly worse than the rest. The prefecture had hung a six-thousand-volt power line on new poles beside the track that spring, for the sawmill, and nobody had ever put a telephone on the old wire in its new neighbourhood. He knew he did not know how it would sound. He nearly said so. The boy was standing beside the van, looking at the crank handles, and Morita connected the telephone himself.
It sounded like a kettle a long way off. Under the hum there was a voice, very small, saying moshi moshi with the rising end of a question, and then nothing, because the girl at the other end did not know what else to say, and neither did Tetsuo. He held the handset against his ear with both hands. He said his name. The hum said something that might have been hers. He said it was hot. Up the valley, a very small voice agreed that it was hot.
They tried again the next day, and the day after. On the third day the boy did not crank the handle. He sat on the bench and looked at the paddies, where the rice was up past the water now and the heron could hardly be seen.
On the fourth morning, at a quarter past nine, the bell rang. One beat, then four, pause, one.
Morita unclipped the telephone from the line, wrapped the wire around its case, and put it on the shelf by the door, where Shūji could collect it at New Year. He did not say anything to the boy, and the boy did not say anything to him. He went to the paper under the paperweight and looked, and then he rang the answer.
Two beats. Warm.
The recovery crew came from Maibara on the ninth of October, three men and a lorry, a week before the station was to lose its staff. They were good men and they worked neatly. They took down the train board and the lamp brackets and the old key cupboard, and they came to the tablet instrument last, and the foreman knelt with a screwdriver at the terminals where the line wire came in.
"Ten minutes," Morita said.
The foreman looked at him, and at the boy standing in the doorway with his satchel, and got up off his knees, and went out to the platform to light a cigarette.
It was Sachiko's guess. Morita had rung the office at Kamiōgi on the service telephone the evening before, the new one in the relay cabinet with the handset on a steel cord, which was not for children, and told Imai what time. At a quarter past nine the gong struck in the stripped office. One. Then three, pause, four.
The boy did not need to look at the paper. He had moved his heron in September after two warm answers in a row and it had not been found since. Third row up, fourth field along. It was the paddy below the persimmon tree, where the heron really did stand in the mornings, when there was water to stand in.
He put his thumb on the plunger. He counted under his breath, one, two, three, as he always did now. Then he rang it: three beats, clean and even, for the heron.
The foreman came back in and undid the terminals, and they wheeled the instrument out on a trolley with the four glass jars in a crate of straw behind it. Then he went up a ladder at the end of the platform and cut the line wire, and it came down the pole in a long slow curve and lay across the gravel.
The girl came down on the 14:52 on the last Saturday of October. The office was locked by then and the fare box was screwed to the waiting-room wall. Morita had come up from his daughter's house in Nagahama to see the station empty, because a man should see a thing when it is finished, and so he was there when she stepped off the train in a grey school coat too warm for the day, carrying a paper bag of persimmons from her grandfather.
Tetsuo was on the bench. He stood up. She was taller than him. They looked at each other for a while, as people do who have known each other a long time and never met.
Then she sat down on the other end of the bench, picked a pebble off the platform, and rapped it on the wooden slats between them: three, then a pause the length of a breath, then four.
The boy picked up a pebble of his own.
THE END
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, prīdiē Kalendās Octōbrēs (30 September 2026), ā Gunpeiō Yokoiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
Gunpei Yokoi, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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