Since he already believes that his son-in-law, and the younger generations more generally, are unpatriotic and bitter about Japan's role in the war, he is particularly alarmed by the idea that unpatriotic values are being passed on to his grandson. Instead, he is upset because he associates cowboys with American culture and the American occupation. His investment in Ichiro's choice of pretend game has little to do with which figures he thinks will be more interesting to his grandson. 30Īfter Ono's small grandson explains that he is pretending to be a cowboy, Ono reacts in a way that seems oddly desperate and dismayed. It's more interesting, more interesting by far, to pretend to be someone like Lord Yoshitsune. "Ichiro," I said, more firmly, "wait a moment and listen. Finally, the sentence is in the second person, which forces us to immediately come to terms with the fact that we, too, are a kind of character in this book, invoked through the word "you" to witness Ono's past and listen to his justifications of it.
The mention of the Bridge of Hesitation at this early point lets us know that the location will be important, but also hints at Ono's own hesitant attitude. Though he tries to project an air of authority here as he does elsewhere, giving instructions and showing that he is knowledgeable, his syntax says otherwise- the sentence begins with the word "if," a harbinger of our narrator's feelings of confusion and his inability to say whether anything is true beyond a doubt. At the same time, this sentence lets us know that Ono is a man in the throes of uncertainty.
He describes the route to his house as an artist would, attending to, for instance, the moment at which it comes into view. For one thing, the line turns us on early to the fact that we have an observant narrator with strong visual perception. This first sentence of the book tells us a great deal about the novel's narrator and style, making it a particularly famous line. If on a sunny day you climb the steep path leading up from the little wooden bridge still referred to around here as the "Bridge of Hesitation," you will not have to walk far before the roof of my house becomes visible between the tops of two gingko trees.
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