| Chapter 1: | Autobiographical Self |
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Knowing not the dread
Harshly drinking mother’s milk
While war rages on
Two years before the end of World War II, on October 1, 1943, in Tokyo, weighing 3.3 kg, I became my parents’ firstborn child. I was breastfed early on, and I was said to have sucked so strongly that I caused my mother a lot of pain. My mother’s mother gave my mother waribashi (half-split wooden chopsticks) to bite into so that she would not make loud noises because it is considered shameful to express pain. My mother said that her lips turned purple and swollen from the experience.
He just smiles softly
Never crying for mother
My little brother
(Yoshimoto, 2005, p. 36)
The war became more intense, and my father was stationed at the training camp near Odawara. He was severely beaten every day because his commander hated rich, educated men. My father represented everything that his commander did not have, and I guess that his commander felt he could alleviate his stress and worries about the war by bullying my father. When the war ended, my father came home much thinner than when he left. Soon my brother was born, and he had the beauty of my mother and my father’s good looks. He looked like a female baby with white skin and big beautiful eyes and cute features. In contrast, people said that I was a very ugly child and wondered why I wasn’t born a boy, and my brother, a girl. In any event, my father was delighted that he finally had a son. He slept beside my brother and I slept be-side my mother. At that time in Japan, it was common to sleep side by side with children like the character meaning river, 
. My brother did not cry much at night; he always smiled and slept soundly.