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Jiro had spoken of, the narrative of the father’s beating, Sotatsu’s possible recanting of the confession, the visit of the sister, etc., Mrs. Oda became very agitated. She said that Jiro meant no good for anyone, that he was against the rest of the family and always had been. She said that he was jealous of his sister’s good fortune, and that he had no sense of family responsibility. I was not to trust anything he might say. I asked her if she could speak of particular things he brought up, because I wanted to clear up the record. I wanted to make the record as clear as possible. Would she mind that?]
    [She said she would not.]

    INT .
    The first question is, what happened at the store?
    MRS. ODA
    You mean, when my husband had his accident?
    INT .
    Yes, the accident. How did that come about?
    MRS. ODA
    Everyone in the town had turned against us. They felt that we were just as guilty as Sotatsu. Maybe it was true, maybe it would have been true, that we were all equally guilty. That is what my husband believed. He thought it was his fault, in particular. All of a sudden, we were despised. We were the lowest ones of all. No one would speak to me. People I had spoken to for years, I would pass them in the street and they would do this thing, this stepping away. They would walka little farther away than usual. Maybe someone else couldn’t see it, but I could see it. It was very evident, this distance. Also, some would even, they would even spit on us. Children.
    INT .
    Children would spit on you?
    MRS. ODA
    It happened once. From a window, a child spat on me. Mr. Oda knocked on the door of the house, but no one answered.
    INT .
    But we were talking about the accident.
    MRS. ODA
    My husband went to buy some rice flour. We were out of rice flour and he wanted to buy some for me so I could do the cooking. At the store, the clerk, a mean little person, I had never liked him, never. He refused to sell my husband the flour. My husband put the money on the counter and took the rice flour. The clerk followed after my husband, saying his money was no good. He threw the money at my husband. I think he never liked my husband. He threw it on him, the money, and he shouted that he could never come in the store again. My husband tried to talk to him. He said,
You know he didn’t do it. Sotatsu does not do things like that. It is a mistake
. But the man wouldn’t hear of it. He just started hitting my husband with a stick, a cane of some kind. He started that, and then he was chasing him. My husband tried to run away, but others caught him and they held him down and hit him until the police came. The police didn’t even check to see who had done it. They told everyone to go. The police felt it was all right for this to have been done.
    INT .
    And then the hospital wouldn’t accept him?
    MRS. ODA
    The hospital wouldn’t accept him. He was bleeding all over. He wasn’t even awake. He was going in and out. The doctor looked at him, opened the back of the ambulance, looked at him and said that he would not receive him at that hospital, that everyone should know he would not do such a thing for the Oda family. I don’t know. I ask you, how can such a person be a doctor? My husband was taken to another place where there were real doctors, an actual hospital, not like this first one. There he was taken care of. In all the years since, I have never gone to that hospital, not once. I tell my friends, also, do not go there. That is not a good place.
    INT .
    But the main thing I wanted to ask you about was Sotatsu telling Jiro that he hadn’t done it.
    MRS. ODA
    We did not believe Jiro. He was always a difficult child, did poorly in school, was always lying. He was a lying child, every time he would say something it was likely to be something a person couldn’t believe. You had to look at everything from three sides and even then it would turn out to be false. So, he gets it in his head he would convince Sotatsu of something. We did not