The Nose

Once upon a time, in a little village in Japan, there lived a famous schoolteacher named Mr. Naigu.
Why was he famous?
Because his nose was six inches long! And very thick! It hung down below his chin like a great big sausage.
For his whole life, Mr. Naigu’s nose had made him very sad.
He pretended it didn’t bother him, but he hated it when people knew that he felt ashamed of his nose, and he was always afraid that someone would say the word ‘nose’ in conversation.
Because his nose hung in front of his mouth, it was also hard for Mr. Naigu to eat. When he ate a bowl of cereal, for example, his nose would bob up and down on the surface of the milk.
So, at lunchtimes, one of the children in his class would sit opposite him at the table and hold up his nose with a long piece of wood.
Once, a little boy who was helping Mr. Naigu sneezed, and dropped the piece of wood, and Mr. Naigu’s nose fell down and splatted into his ice cream cone. All the people in the lunchroom laughed, and, by the end of the day, everyone in whole school had heard the story.
A part of Mr. Naigu believed that his nose wasn’t really all that big – maybe his imagination was making things worse. Sometimes, when there was no one else around, he’d hold a mirror up to his face and look at his nose from lots of different angles. No matter which way he held the mirror, though, he never thought that his nose looked any smaller.
He also looked at other people’s noses a lot. He knew it wasn’t nice to stare, but he couldn’t help it. He’d see a pretty big nose every now and again, but never one like his own, and this made Mr. Naigu sadder and sadder. When he was talking to someone, he’d sometimes grab his nose and start to play with it, and blush.
When he read books, he would hope to find characters with big noses. Once, he read that Liu Bei, a Chinese emperor, had long ears. ‘Oh, I wish he had a long nose’, thought Mr. Naigu. ‘That’d make me feel so much better!’
Once, he even tried to make his nose smaller with a strange remedy: He drank a liquid made from snake skin, then rubbed his nose with rat pee. It didn’t work.
One year later, he tried it again, with twice as much snake skin and three times as much rat pee. It still didn’t work.
Then one autumn, Rio, a little girl in Mr. Naigu’s class, told him that she’d invented a treatment for making noses smaller.
‘Would you like to try it?’ asked Rio.
‘No, thank you’, Mr. Naigu said. ‘I hope you didn’t invent this treatment just for me. I’m really not interested.’
Rio sensed that Mr. Naigu was lying. She thought he did want the treatment, but was just too embarrassed to admit it.
‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like to try the treatment?’
‘Absolutely.’
But Rio didn’t give up. She asked Mr. Naigu again, and again, and again. In fact, she asked him every day for a whole month.
‘Oh, alright’, he finally said. ‘If that’s what you want.’
‘Wonderful!’ said Rio, and smiled to herself.
Her treatment was simple: Boil the nose, then stamp on it.
That afternoon, Rio got to work. Out in the playground, Rio filled up a bucket with hot water and told Mr. Naigu to stick his nose into it. She set a timer, then went to play with her friends while he crouched over the bucket.
After an hour, the timer pinged and Rio gave Mr. Naigu a towel to dry his face. Then all the children in the class gathered around as she squeezed his nose.
‘Okay’, she said, ‘I think it’s cooked for long enough. Now I need to stamp on it.’
So, Mr. Naigu lay on the grass with his head turned to the side while Rio stamped her feet furiously on his nose.
At one point, Rio got worried and asked Mr. Naigu if he felt okay. He tried to nod, then realized that he couldn’t move his head.
‘I’m fine!’ he screamed. Mr. Naigu was grateful that Rio was trying to help him, but he still didn’t like having his nose handled as if it were a toy.
Eventually, Rio was done with the stamping.
‘Phew!’ she said. ‘That was hard work! Okay, now we just need to cook it again.’
Mr. Naigu pouted as Rio refilled the bucket.
But the second boiling did the trick. When Mr. Naigu lifted his nose out of the water, it was an ordinary size. Rio held up a mirror for him and he stared at his new face, breathing easily for the first time.
‘No one will make fun of me anymore!’ he thought, and couldn’t stop smiling.
For the rest of the day, Mr. Naigu kept touching his nose to check that it wasn’t growing back to its old size. It didn’t.
When he woke up the next morning, he immediately touched his nose again and found that it was still small. ‘Thank goodness!’ he thought. ‘Now I can relax.’
After just a few days, however, Mr. Naigu realized that people weren’t treating him the way he’d expected.
First, when he went for a meeting with the school principal, she stared at his nose more than she ever had before. Then the little boy—the one who had held up Mr. Naigu’s nose with the piece of wood—saw him again in the lunchroom, and burst out laughing. And whenever Mr. Naigu ran into one of the other teachers at the school, they would be polite while they spoke to him, but would start to giggle as soon as he turned away.
Now Mr. Naigu felt sadder than he’d ever been before the treatment. He started shouting at his students all the time. After a week of this, Rio whispered to one of her friends: ‘Mr. Naigu shouldn’t treat us this way. He’s being really mean.’
Mr. Naigu knew this too. He hated the way he was behaving.
Then one morning, Mr. Naigu woke up and went outside. The gingko and horse chestnut trees all around his house had dropped their leaves, making a golden carpet on the ground.
He took a breath of crisp, morning air, and suddenly his hand shot up to his nose: It was long and thick as a sausage again.
A warm feeling then spread through Mr. Naigu’s body. It was relief.
‘No one will make fun of me anymore’, he thought, his nose swaying gently in the autumn wind.