Tag: The Friends

Title: The Friends
Japanese Title: 夏の庭 (Natsu no niwa)
Author: Yumoto Kazumi (湯本 香樹実)
Translator: Cathy Hirano
Publication Year: 1996 (America); 1992 (Japan)
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pages: 170

For one reason or another, I’ve never been a huge fan of Stephen King’s IT (it might be something about the gang rape of immense magical significance that occurs towards the end of the book), but I’ve always enjoyed the author’s descriptions of the characters as children. King’s characterization of the kids as occasionally cowardly and petty yet genuinely concerned for each other strikes me as fairly accurate. Kids are not innocent, and they don’t always do the right thing. They’re mean to each other, and they make decisions according to a logic that doesn’t always make sense to adults. And yet they notice things that adults don’t. They also put a lot of faith in their friendships, which seem to change quickly from an outside perspective but which mean the world to the kids involved in them. Kids aren’t embodiments of a romantic ideal of childhood, but they’re not adults, either. Therefore, when a book handles its child characters well, you have to give it credit.

One of the reasons I like The Friends is that it lets its three twelve-year-old protagonists think and act like twelve-year-olds. Another reason I like The Friends is that it treats adults like real people, too. Obviously the narrative focus is on the child protagonists and not the adult supporting characters, but these adult characters are not evil, incompetent, or strangely absent as they are in so many other works of fiction for children. Also, because The Friends is meant for a young audience, it does not dwell on issues like sexuality and abandonment that might be upsetting to a child reader – or at least to the adult reading the book to her child. What this book does address frankly is death, as well as adolescent fear and curiosity regarding death.

The Friends opens with a boy named Yamashita telling his friends Kawabe and Kiyama (our narrator) about a relative’s funeral. Kawabe reacts to Yamashita’s story by announcing that he would like to see someone die. He therefore convinces his two friends to help him keep watch over the house of an old man whom the neighborhood housewives have discussed as someone who is likely to die soon. Thus, over the summer before their last year of middle school, the three boys skip studying for the cram school classes that are supposed to prepare them for their high school entrance exams in order to hang around the old man’s back yard. They quickly notice that the old man isn’t taking good care of himself, and they finally come to his attention by taking out his trash. Even though the old man is not initially pleased by the fact that three middle schoolers are stalking him, he gradually forms a friendship with the boys by roping them into helping him clean up his yard. You can probably figure out how the story ends, but I promise it’s handled well and with a minimum of sentimentality.

One thing I like about The Friends is that, although the three boys are clearly misfits, their relative social position is never fetishized or glorified. This is how their friendship is introduced:

I’ll never forget Kawabe’s face. He was furious. Grinding his teeth, he glared at Sugita so hard that I thought his glasses would fly off his chalk-white face. Even his customary jiggling was stilled.

I feel a little guilty when I remember that incident, because when Kawabe leaped at Sugita, I grabbed him from behind and held back. I was sure that Kawabe was going to kill Sugita if I didn’t stop him. Just the thought of it scared me so much that every pore in my body seemed to shrink shut. What a coward I was. I should have punched Sugita myself, right in the nose, as hard as I could.

That was when Kawabe and I became real friends. A little later Yamashita joined us and our trio was formed. Four-eyes Kawabe, chubby Yamashita, and me. Once we all went over to my house to do homework together. When my mother talked to Kawabe, he couldn’t stop jiggling, and then Yamashita spilled some juice on the sofa. It was terrible. After they left, my mom said, “Next time maybe you could bring over some better friends.” I never brought anyone home after that.

In other words, these kids are a little weird, but they’re not that weird. It’s easy to sympathize with them and relate them to one’s own experiences, but it’s also easy to understand why they would spend their summer hanging around an old man’s yard instead of playing with other kids or working harder on their homework. The characterization feels very natural. The writing style also makes sense as being from the perspective of a teenager looking back on what happened to him when he was a year or two younger. Kiyama doesn’t know everything, but he’s not afraid to leave out his personal impressions.

Although the story is set in Japan, which means that the boys do things like eat tempura and go to cram school over the summer and ride public transportation unattended, I feel that it’s well written enough to have universal appeal. Perhaps a young reader wouldn’t understand why three normal thirteen-year-olds would need to take high school entrance exams, for instance, but she would understand the pressure of social expectations to do well in school and have a plan for the future. The behavior and psychology of the characters didn’t strike me as “quintessentially Japanese,” either. I think The Friends could be read out loud to an eight-year-old or a fourth-grade classroom just as easily as something like The Hatchet or The Indian in the Cupboard. It’s a story for children of remarkable depth and quality, and I think any library for young readers should have in its possession.