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It seems my father was not really cut out to be a businessman. Whenever he got to be too busy, he would always get depressed and take time off from work. My mother, a teacher at an elementary school, was rather adept at smoothly balancing her career with her homemaking efforts. She is always so full of life. My parents have decided to live apart for a while. I am not sure whether the differences in their temperaments was a contributing factor in their decision. My father returned home and started to help his father, or my grandfather, with his farming work. At that time, I was wondering which of the two to live with: my father or my mother. Well, as I always enjoyed being in the company of many people rather than being alone, and because I was very fond of my grandfather and grandmother, I quit the city life of a latchkey child and came to the countryside to live with my father. To set the record straight, my parents weren't divorced, they were simply living apart. As my grandfather's farming work was not profitable, my father started working at a factory in the neighborhood. My father had also gotten involved in apiculture, which is the keeping of honeybees and selling the honey and royal jelly they produce. My mother, who lives in the city, sent us only the money to cover my living expenses. Two years have passed and I have gotten accustomed to life in the country. What is interesting is, although my father was even busier than he was when we lived in the city, he is never depressed. He would order numerous books on honeybees to conduct research on them, dream about how improvements to agricultural implements. He seems rather happy now. "Humph, I quit the job as a businessman because I hated to work hard like a worker bee, and now I make a living by making the bees do the work," he says with a melancholy smile which is just like him." I made a new discovery regarding my father: he is an excellent storyteller. His storytelling mesmerizes me, irrespective of whether the story is fictional or from real experience. A story he told about some crows he saw fighting was a real hit. I just made a composition out of it. My teacher, impressed with the composition, read it aloud before my class. My father also told me a tale about honeybees that was very interesting. He told me the tale a little at a time over the course of a year. I was moved by the story and suggested that he publish a book. He said, "Why don't you write it?" At that point it simply came to me, I would be a honeybee living in a beehive for an entire year. The worker bees would all be girl bees that never grow up to become adults. But I felt that a beehive sticky with honey would not be a very good place for a story. A beehive has some ten upright honeycomb panels. Honeybees build as many as 3000 or 4000 hexagonal honeycombs on each side of these panels. They store nectar they have collected and raise the eggs laid in the combs by the queen bee. But this is the kind of stuff you could read about in a picture book or in a science book. Then I thought: Oh! I'll turn the beehive on its side and assume that it is an eight-story castle! Then I thought about a honeybee story for days. I refrained from watching TV and reading comics and gradually began to write the story: "A Tale of a Girl's Transformation into a Honeybee." |
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I'm going to get stung!  |
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