/jp/ - Otaku Culture

There was a time when Eiki Shiki’s granddaughter, Komachi Onozuka, put her grandmother in a very awkward position. Like all granddaughters, Komachi thought that her grandmother was the most wonderful grandmother in the whole world. She told her friends that there was nothing the great judge could not do.

One day Komachi and her friends, Tenshi Hinanawi and Kasen Ibaraki, were playing in front of two enormous stone lions that guarded Eiki's gate. Komachi boasted that Eiki's lions were the biggest in all of Yedo. Tenshi, who came from a family of sculptors, replied, “My grandmother makes lions just as big as these.”

“That's nothing,” said Kasen. “My grandmother could make one twice as big if she wanted to.”

“Well if my grandmother wanted to,” replied Tenshi, “she could take a chisel and carve the whole world into a lion.”

Komachi did not know what to say. She knew her grandmother was greater than any of the others, but it was impossible to make a lion bigger than the world. So, determined to have the last word, she boasted that her grandmother was so wonderful that she could make their grandmothers' stone lions come to life.

Kasen and Tenshi hooted with laughter. “No one could do such a thing,” they said.

Angrily, Komachi declared she would prove it to them and dared them to accompany her to see Eiki.

Eiki was an old woman, but she had not forgotten what it was like to be four years old like Komachi. So when her granddaughter came into the house with her two little friends and asked him to prove that she could turn a stone lion into a living animal, Eiki was placed in a very awkward position. The judge was a wise and clever woman, but she was not a magician and could not perform an impossible trick. But she did not wish to admit this, for her granddaughter would appear ridiculous before her friends.