– Harriet "Bunny" Hill

My job during the English class of 3B was to entertain Sasaki Kenichi so that Ms. Aoyama had a mild hope of teaching the rest of the class. For ninth graders they were normally a rowdy group, but if Kenichi were ever left "free," teaching anything became impossible. On occasion Kenichi would bring his electric guitar to school, plug it in during English class, and play. He respected me; I was able to persuade him to keep the amp off – that was the extent of the mollification… I pause as I write this, feeling for Kenichi. Other memories return…

Ms. Aoyama suddenly bursting out, – "Look out! Look out!" Kenichi had, shirt off in the unforgiving white gale of Hokkaido’s winter, clambered across the outside wall from the neighboring classroom to ours, both on the second floor. I rushed to the window and pulled him in.

Hokkaido's slow summer would peel back the snow, removing it drop by drop from the roof. Kenichi liked to run around on top of the school. When it was time for the lesson to start the teachers would simply go to the window and call, “Kenichi! Time for class!” and he would come sliding in.

Sometimes I would join a teacher who was not on duty that hour for "Kenichi hallway patrol." He was fast. A flash of shoes and school uniform rounding the corner of the far end of the hallway was all I saw of him my first day at Furen Junior High. Ms. Ikeda, my guide, looked at me and smiled helplessly, "That student, oh… sometimes he escapes!"

At the end of each school year his desk was ruined – the top loose, holes drilled into it, the seat and its metal poles snapped off.

One teacher stood up to him. In recompense, a threatening scrawl on the wall near his desk read, – "Die, Ms. Ueno."

The teachers tried to pacify, never punish Kenichi. Mr. Yamagami taught him the piano, and he learned to play fairly well. The vice-principal invited him to school during New Year’s vacation to do pottery. One day, pulling me aside between classes, the older man summarized the problem, "Kenichi’s father does not love him."

What could I have done? This is not a rhetorical question for me. I was his friend at school, and the other teachers said he really liked it when I came to class. Still, Kenichi was difficult for me and everyone around him.

The bravest, longest shot, the least likely to have worked but best if it had succeeded only ever remained a personal mental fantasy of mine... Kenichi, maybe owing to his restlessness, was an excellent athlete. Every year Furen Junior High had a field day with races, spirit contests, and team dances. Every student’s parents attended, often with video cameras and picnic lunches. The school became a self-contained, well-orchestrated carnival, and everyone was happy. Kenichi always came alone.

"What if," I thought, "Kenichi’s father came to see his son?" I knew generally where he lived and so I could have found it on the town map. I knew enough Japanese to be persuasive. And my countenance as a foreigner would have been intimidating enough to pull Kenichi’s father from the house, drive him to school a kilometer away, show him his son and how he won the races. I could have even packed a picnic lunch.

Kenichi easily won the races that day – with anger he tore ahead of everyone else, then strutted the track in victory, stopping to show a wince at a passing teacher to demonstrate how his leg hurt. He always cried, in his way, for attention. I went to that field day alone. What if I had had the guts to ask his father?

When Furen High School accepted Kenichi’s application, I was appalled. I explained to my boss, Ms. Sato, that that I had been his babysitter for two years during junior high and felt no need to do so again.

I called up the high school, asked for my English teacher, Ms. Sakayori, and pleaded for half an hour for them to rescind his enrollment. My attitude was "American" in approach – we presented him with an opportunity for education, and if he did not accept, then that was his choice. But if Kenichi infringed on the right of others to take that opportunity, if he disrupted other students’ learning, then that was not to be tolerated. I remember planning every day of junior high to be Kenichi-proof, and I did not want yet another year of the same. After all, there was a school in the neighboring town that took troubled youth, and in Japan just because you apply to a particular high school doesn’t mean you get in.

Ms. Sakayori assured me that they knew of his problem and that he’d promised to be calm once he matriculated.

He was. It was almost like a new person had come into his body. Kenichi still loved it when I came to class, but I didn’t have to distract him on behalf of the teacher. Maybe a month passed, and he was no different from the other students, at least in demeanor. Then I heard that he was suspended for forcing a younger student to drink alcohol. A week or so later he returned. When I left Japan he seemed to be doing well enough, or at least much better than he had in junior high. It was comparatively difficult to get up on the high school’s roof, at least.

Two cold winters later I came back to my town to visit. Kenichi had gotten another student pregnant and dropped out – the high school wasn’t tolerant of minor transgressions like smoking (even outside of school), and this certainly surpassed their code of conduct. I didn’t see his baby, I didn’t see him. The other students told me his little girl was cute, though.

Kenichi liked the heavy metal group X-JAPAN and especially their lead, a punk, red-haired young man named Hide. Knowing this I brought my Led Zepplin CD to school and loaned it to him… Maybe we could find a deeper connection through music, I thought. X-JAPAN and Led sounded the same, at least.

Once during our many conversations in class I told Kenichi he looked like Hide. "How?" he asked. "Eyes," I said. He swelled proudly. I asked him why he liked the singer, and he intoned that Hide was a kind person, one who donated blood, for example.

They both had hurtfully sad eyes.

Hide’s fame outlasted him by years, however. Shortly before I had come to live in Japan, he’d committed suicide. This tragedy Kenichi lived.

Today I met Ms. Ueno, three years after I left my life in Japan to pursue my dreams at home. She had also followed her dreams and moved south to a warmer clime. We were eating an icy dessert in the Korean section of Tokyo. In the midst of our conversation, she interrupted herself. “Oh! I have some bad news,” she said. “Sasaki Kenichi was killed.” His girlfriend, growing more afraid of his violence, had told another man. And this man killed him.

I recall the lyrics to one of Hide’s plaintive ballads. Its lyrics disquiet my memory. – "Once again… alone."

"Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven…"

There’s nothing philosophical to pull from my reflection of Sasaki Kenichi’s journey. I just wonder what I could have done.

I pray a "thank you" that no one ever listened to my way of dealing with him. "But if Kenichi disrupted others' learning, then that was not to be tolerated."

He taught me.

"The one student we don’t reach out of the hundreds we do keeps us awake at night and haunts us forever."