英語のエッセイ（小学生時代の体験から...）

アメリカの大学の課題から... 

Scary Song

In the 1970’s when I was in elementary school in Osaka, Japan, there was a weird rumor about a mythical woman called “Kuchisake Onna” (split mouth woman) whose mouth was so wide that she could eat you up. She is beautiful from the back with long black straight hair and a skinny figure. But when she comes up to you and turns around, she stares at you with black eyes slanting upward, opens her wide vivid red mouth and asks “Am I beautiful?” All the kids in Japan somehow believed that rumor, and we were scared all of the time. It became so phenomenal and some kids were so freaked out that police had to accompany them on their way to and from schools. Japanese scientists actually have discussed on TV programs how the rumor spread to the whole country’s kids because at the time we did not have computers or email. They have never yet figured it out, and we are still hearing about school ghost stories up to this day.

During that period, the summer of my third grade, my classmate, Keiko and I planned to listen to animation theme songs at my house.

I said to Keiko after class, “I’ve got a record which people have said has a ghost in it. You know, it’s Obon season, ghosts are going to come back anytime. Do you want to try to listen?”

“Oh, sounds like fun. I’ll come by,” Keiko responded.

It was almost the day of Obon, which is a typical Festival of the Dead, like Halloween or Day of the Death in the west in the US or Mexico, and we have the traditional Bon dance festivals and the food booths to celebrate the returning of the old ancestor’s souls. Children do not care about ancestors but ghost stories are told more during this time of the year.

It was a hot summer day. We were sitting on the floor near my grandfather’s old type Pioneer record player, which had a label of a dog with a phonograph on it. And I had to move the needle by hand. The sound was not as good as a CD player, but still, it had two speakers covered by mesh threads at both sides of the player. We were leaning against the back of a chocolate colored leather sofa. We both had black bobbed hair, wore short pants, and short sleeve shirts. My height was double her size; on the other hand, Keiko had eyes twice as big a mine and looked really like a doll. I can still recall now how the record sounds when you are watching the movie of the famous scene of Gene Kelly’s dancing and singing, “Singing in the Rain.” You could hear both the sounds of music and voice, and a noise from the needle crawling on the record at the same time. The noise gave it more of a sense of sadness.

I guess it was in one of the soundtracks of “The Galaxy Express 999 (Three Nine),” that we heard a sound like a woman’s moaning, “woooo,” behind of the sounds of the contrabass.

“Did you hear that?” Keiko asked me.

“I don’t know what it was. Let’s hear it again,” I answered.

Keiko always talked first even though both of us had the same thing in mind. We moved the stylus to the beginning of the song and listened to the voice over and over.

“Sounds like she is crying. Did you hear when she said Heeeelp meeee?” Keiko was getting excited.

“Shh, Listen. Here, here!” We stopped talking. Moving the needle. “Boooom! Woooo! Heeeelp!”

We were so excited, as if we had found a treasure like Rive Phoenix found the body in the movie, “Stand by Me.” Keiko and I looked at each other and after few seconds of silence, we screamed, “Ahaaaa!” Then Keiko said,

“You know what, I think we should go to our teacher.” I asked,

“Do you want to wait for my mother to come back? She is supposed to come back in the afternoon.”

“No, I wanna get out of here,” Keiko insisted.

Then all of the sudden, we turned off the player, put our shoes on and ran to our school. Cherry tree leaves in the park smelled like a wet mop because the weather was so hot and humid. The noisy cicadas on the tress were shrilling, “Meeeen, Meeen, Meeen.” They made irritating dissonant sounds that surrounded us. An old man was dragging a dog which had white fur that the looked like a white shag rug. A wet summer wind made the dog fur rustled. The eyes of the dog said, “What’s in the hurry?”