But my aunt was kind. “Don’t worry,” she said as she hung the mattress on the balcony outside their room to dry. Still, I was so embarrassed I could die. My mom had told me not to be a burden to my relatives and this was what I did on my first night?
Not to mention . . . I was twelve. Normal twelve-year-olds don’t pee the bed. Normal twelve-year-olds aren’t sent to the literal other side of the world by themselves either.
But there wasn’t much time to dwell on what happened in the night because it was morning now, and a weekend morning at that, which meant my cousins had time to play and who knew when I’d get the chance again? On Monday, I’d have to go to Obaasama’s and that probably meant my playing days would be over. Hina, Maki, and I wolfed down our breakfast and were about to head outside when Maki yelled, “Don’t forget your hat!”
I paused. I didn’t even bring a hat. Why would I need a hat?
“Don’t you have a hat?” asked Maki. “Don’t you wear hats outside in America?”
I shook my head. “I don’t, not really.”
“What?” exclaimed Maki. “Don’t you burn?”
I shook my head again. “Zenzen!” I said. Not at all. I just tanned. My red-haired, blue-eyed friend Annette desperately wanted to tan, but she never did. She freckled instead and was always totally jealous about how easily my skin darkened in the sun. Judging from my cousins’ reaction, though, my tanning superpower wasn’t anything to be proud of over here. So I borrowed one of my cousin’s hats before I headed outside.
There wasn’t much of a yard to my aunt and uncle’s place. In fact, if I stood right next to their home and reached my arm out, I could almost touch their neighbor’s house. It wasn’t like my American house was big or anything, but it did have a large, sloping backyard with trees big enough to climb and play hide-and-seek in. Sometimes Annette and I would roll down the slope in my yard just for fun, spraying ourselves with Off! beforehand so chiggers—those nasty little bugs that would leave their itchy bites inside our waistbands and socks—wouldn’t eat us alive!
Even though my cousins’ yard was small, there were pear orchards within walking distance. The orchards didn’t belong to them, but we ran up and down the orderly rows like they did, and no one stopped us. At first, I thought we were in an apple orchard since the fruit was round and yellow and hard and crisp like apples. But no, they were pears. Asian pears.
Every so often, we paused to rest. Maki dabbed at her sweaty forehead with a neatly folded handkerchief she fished from her pocket. “It’s hot, isn’t it? Is America this hot?”
I smeared the sweat from my own forehead with the back of my hand and then wiped it on my shorts. “It’s probably hotter,” I responded. Kansas could heat up to one hundred degrees before noon on a summer day. This was nothing compared to Kansas!
“Look!” Maki was pointing to a papery brown bug clinging to a tree trunk.
“What is it?” I asked. It looked like a bug, but when I examined it more closely, it was just a shell of a bug.
“Semigara da!” A cicada shell.
Semigara, semigara, I said to myself. Look at all the useful Japanese I’m learning already! Mii-n, mii-n, hummed the cicadas in response.
We collected as many semigara as we could find. To do what with? I wasn’t sure. But it was still exciting every time I spotted one. “Where’s Hina anyway?” I asked. I assumed she would join us after she finished practicing piano, but she was nowhere to be seen.
“Oh, she’s studying,” mentioned Maki.
Hina too? On a weekend? I thought only Maya had to study since she had exams coming up. At least I had Maki.
But the next day, it was Maki’s turn to get her schoolwork done, and I went shopping in town with Hina for school supplies. Although I wasn’t looking forward to school in Japan, boy, was I looking forward to this! Japanese stationery stores were the best.
“Ooh, could you get me some of those cool stickers?” Annette had asked before I left. Annette had the biggest sticker collection ever. Even so, when I gave her stickers from my last visit to Japan, nothing in her collection could top them.
If I picked out really cool ones again, I’d be able to trade one “only from Japan” sticker for three of her scratch-and-sniffs. I couldn’t wait to see what was new at the bunbouguya stationery store.
Even though I was twelve, I didn’t know how to ride a bike yet. When I tried to learn years ago, I careened out of control down a sloped driveway into a thorny rosebush. It left me with scars and zero desire to trust myself on a two-wheeler ever again. So I rode on the back of Hina’s as she zoomed through narrow streets filled with cars. She took the corners at speeds that convinced me I wouldn’t survive five days, let alone five months. I held on tight, squeezed my eyes closed, and tucked in my knees as much as I could so my legs wouldn’t scrape on a cement wall or a corner of a building when Hina swerved to avoid an oncoming car. But when we arrived in town and I opened my eyes, I knew it was worth defying death to get here.
We could hardly wait to burst through the glass doors of the stationery store—a paradise awaited us inside. Trinket-filled shelves bedazzled our eyes. So much cuteness—kawaii! Neatly arranged, row after row, items I didn’t need but wanted more than anything. Pencil boxes with the cutest cats, flowers, and dogs on the outside that, when opened up, were divided into different sections for your pencils and erasers. There were even removable compartments if you needed more room for pens or markers or whatever treasure you could fit in there. Pads of pastel-lined paper, with little bunnies in the top corner of each page. Every type of writing utensil under the sun, and in all the colors of the rainbow. Back home, I could hardly ever find a decent mechanical pencil, let alone one that was also a black pen (turn it), then a red pen (turn it), and then a mechanical pencil again.
Hina wasn’t as excited to be at the store as I was. She was all business, shopping for school supplies like a pro. “Maya needs more notebooks. Jun needs a protractor. You’ll need this. No, not that—the schools won’t allow that.” Although I could have spent the entire afternoon in just the pencil box section, we moved on to the eraser section. In Japan, the erasers were white and called “plastic” erasers, even though they were soft and not hard like real plastic. My mom said that simply meant they were better than the pink American ones that smudged more than erased. Near the erasers was a pad of paper for testing pens and pencils, so I tried one of the store’s many white thumb-sized no-nonsense erasers out on some pencil marks and it did work better. I barely had to rub at all for the line to disappear completely. I hoped the fancier erasers worked just as well—the ones shaped like flowers, or fruit, or even candy! Hina joined me and smelled one.
“Oooh, this one smells just like chocolate.” She handed it over and I sniffed. It did smell like chocolate, even through its clear wrapping. It even looked like chocolate. I moved on, sniffing and sniffing each: a banana-shaped eraser that smelled like banana, an ice cream–shaped eraser that smelled like ice cream. When I started to feel a little dizzy, I finally settled on an eraser that was shaped and smelled like a strawberry. I wanted to buy more, but my aunt had given us our spending money, so I didn’t want to take advantage of her generosity.
Even the checkout experience at the stationery store was awesome. After Hina completed her purchase, I paid for mine with a 100-yen coin. The cashier put my eraser in a small, pale-yellow paper bag adorned with pastel blossoms. She folded the opening over and sealed it shut with a small strip of cute tape with white kittens on it. She bowed when she handed the bag to me using both hands, and thanked me with a cheerful “Domo arigatou gozaimashita!”
As we biked back to the house, instead of focusing on whether we were going to get run over or not, I thought about Annette and her cousins. Whenever she couldn’t play with me, it was usually because she had gone to see them. She always told me what fun they all had together. I had never had that—an extended family who lived close by. But here I was with my cousins. I wrapped my arms tight
er around Hina as she pedaled hard to make it up a hill. Cousins were the best: friends who were also family.
When we arrived back at the house, red rain boots and red-and-white shoes had been set aside in the entryway.
“Tadaima!” Hina announced our arrival home as we stumbled in, sweaty from the ride. Even though Hina had biked for the both of us, she still looked less frazzled than I did.
My aunt scurried toward us from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron as she greeted us.
“Okaerinasai,” my aunt welcomed us back. “Waka-chan, can you wait right there?” She set the red rain boots next to me. “Try these on.”
I slipped my sneakers off. Were these really for me?
“Go ahead.” My aunt nudged the boots toward me. I balanced as I slipped one foot in and then the other.
My aunt pressed on the toe of one of the boots. “We’re entering tsuyu so I thought you could use them.” Tsuyu was the name for the Japanese rainy season. Back home, we often had thunderstorms in the summer, but we certainly never went and walked outside when it rained, so these would be my first pair of rain boots. “How are they? Too small?” asked my aunt.
I wiggled my toes inside. Plenty of room. “They’re fine,” I squeaked.
“Good! I’m so glad they fit. I have an umbrella for you too.”
Then she presented me with a pair of white slip-on shoes with red rubber accents. School shoes! Lots of kids back home got new shoes for school, too, but these were different. In Japan, students had shoes they literally would wear only inside the school.
I tried them on and they fit too.
“Very good.” My aunt was pleased. “We have a few more things for you upstairs.”
My aunt climbed the stairs, and Hina and I clambered up behind her.
On the floor of the girls’ room was a shiny red randoseru, or backpack. When we entered the room, Maki and Maya got up from their desks and joined us. “How’s the studying going?” asked my aunt.
“Good. But time for a break!” they responded with stretches and smiles. My aunt frowned at them.
I had seen girls shouldering these boxy, red leather backpacks on their way to school the last time we visited Japan, but I never had one of my own. I thought I would have to use the red-and-white canvas backpack I brought from home. But no, having a randoseru like all the other students would bring me one step closer to fitting in. My aunt handed it to me and I slid the straps on.
“There! Now you’re a proper Japanese student.”
I was really grateful to have the randoseru but the reminder that school was right around the corner made my stomach flutter. Not only school, but also the end of happy, fun cousin-bonding and the start of my time with Obaasama, who no one ever described as happy or fun.
The randoseru rattled as I took it off and set it down. Was there something else inside?
I opened the backpack’s metal clasps. My aunt had filled it with notebooks—brand new with nothing but my name on them. There were also sharpened pencils in a compartment made just for them, and a stiff sheet of plastic, a shitajiki, that you slide under your sheets of paper so you always have a hard surface to write neat, perfect kanji on.
“We also bought these!” piped up Hina, opening her bag from the stationery store.
My aunt, Maki, and Maya loaded up my backpack with more new pencils, erasers, and a couple more notebooks.
“Thank you,” I responded. I wished I could express how overwhelmed I was by so many new things, by their kindness . . . and by the thought that tomorrow, I would have to leave them to live with Obaasama. But I couldn’t find the right words, so a simple arigatou was all I could manage.
Japan wouldn’t be so bad if I could stay here.
Maki piped up, “Does Waka really have to go tomorrow?” See? My cousins and I were on the same wavelength too.
Aunt Noriko sighed. “I’m afraid so.”
That night, the phone rang.
“Waka!” Aunt Noriko called out to me. “It’s your parents!”
I ran, almost tumbling headfirst down the stairs.
“It’s been nice having her here. They’ve been playing nonstop.”
I almost bumped into my aunt in my excitement to get to the phone.
“Here she is, let me switch to her—”
I took the receiver from my aunt’s hands and spoke a breathless “Moshi moshi” into the phone.
“Ah, Waka,” answered my father. “Genki? How are you?”
“Un, genki, I’m good! How about you?”
“Good, good. Everything is fine here . . . Just a second, let me switch with your mother. She wants to talk with you.”
My dad wasn’t one to talk on the phone long. That was okay because I really needed to ask my mom something. Something important.
“Moshi, moshi. Waka? How are you? Are you having fun?”
It was so good to hear her voice—it felt like she was right here with me! Before I could let myself feel how much I missed her, I had to tell her of my awesome idea. “Yep, I’m having lots of fun.”
My mom paused, but then she said, “Really? Good!” She sounded surprised, but in a happy way. “Aunt Noriko says you’ve been a very good girl.”
Yes, I had! I had been very good, so . . . “Mom, do you think . . . do you think I could stay here?”
I hoped the slight hesitation before she answered was because of the long-distance connection, not because she was going to say no. “Stay? You mean with your cousins?”
“Yes . . . Do you think I could? Could you talk with Aunt Noriko and Uncle—”
Before I could finish, my mom stopped me. “I’m sorry, Waka, but you can’t.”
“But . . . why?”
“You have to understand, your aunt and uncle have so many kids. We’ve already—”
“I wouldn’t be any trouble, I promise! I could help.”
My mom’s voice was firm. “Waka, no. We’ve already made arrangements with the school and with Obaasama.”
I knew the battle was pretty much lost, but I tried one last time. “I think I could learn a lot if I stayed. I’d be able to practice my Japanese more, and—”
My mom cut me off. “Waka, your cousins need to go to school too, and not be distracted. You’re a nontraditional student, and the school near Obaasama’s said they’d be happy to have you.”
Not be distracted? Nontraditional? It was then I realized all these options had already been discussed. And decided against. “Oh . . . okay.”
We talked for a few more minutes, but I was so disappointed it was hard for me to focus.
“I’ll call again when you’re settled at Obaasama’s place,” she promised.
Suddenly my mom sounded so very far away.
Four
Businessmen and women in suits on bikes zoomed by us. Rin, rin, their bells rang as they alerted people in front of them to move. My uncle drove his car slowly through the noise.
“Your grandma’s neighborhood has grown more crowded,” my aunt explained.
“Tokyo,” my uncle muttered, shaking his head as he concentrated on the road.
As we rounded the corner, Ito-Yokado, the multistory department store, loomed on our right. The sign for it was a white bird on a blue-and-red background. “Ito Yokado” was written in English, too, which I thought was kind of interesting.
I remembered going to Ito-Yokado with my mom on previous trips and visiting floor after floor. “Japanese department stores are just better,” she told me.
We drove past the train station where hundreds of bikes were parked in front—rows and rows of an orderly tangle of wheels, handles, and baskets. Streams of people rushed up and down the steps into the station. Maybe it was just me, but it seemed way busier and more hectic than when I was last here.
“Just a couple more minutes,” announced my uncle. He sounded relieved. Funny, because the fact we were only a couple minutes away made my hands cold and sweaty.
We finally arrived at my grandmother’s ho
use. When we walked through the gray stone gate to her property, the busy, noisy, rushing Tokyo we had just driven through disappeared with a hush as the gate closed behind us.
Unlike my cousins’ home, my grandmother’s house actually had a yard. It wasn’t covered in a grassy lawn like mine back home. Instead, it had dark, mossy, rock-lined paths that meandered around trees and boulders. Some of the trees were tall, but they weren’t climbing trees. Even the lower branches were too high to reach, and they shaded the entire yard. Fan-shaped leaves covered one tree, and little greenish-orange, pumpkin-like fruits that hung way too high for me to inspect grew on another. Near the gate, a smaller tree had a large, red, apple-sized fruit with leathery skin hanging from a low branch. My uncle noticed it too.
“There’s a zakuro, how about that,” he said, leaning in to get a better look.
“Don’t pick it, it’s still sour,” responded a voice from behind the pond.
It was Obaasama.
She was dressed in a loose-fitting top and long pants made from a light, crinkled fabric. Her long, salt-and-pepper hair was controlled in a neat updo and held in place with a sheer, lavender scarf tied under her chin. She glanced at us through her thick glasses before turning her attention back to the plastic cup she was holding. With a pair of chopsticks, she extracted a worm from it and dropped it into the koi pond at her feet. Plop! Orange and white flashed as the koi fought over this tasty morsel.
I had built my grandmother up to be a huge, scissor-and-broom-wielding meanie. But she was just a little old lady. She grabbed another worm with her chopsticks. This one wriggled and fought. “No, please, no!” it seemed to say. But my grandmother didn’t hesitate as she dropped it into the pond to its death. Hmm . . . Maybe she wasn’t just some “little old lady.”
She turned her attention back to me. “Ah, Waka, ookikunatta ne.” You’ve grown.
I bowed. “Konnichiwa.”
“How are you, Mother?” asked my uncle.
My grandmother continued to pick worms out of the cup with her chopsticks and drop them into the water. “Not bad, my feet get cold sometimes. It usually happens before an episode . . .”
While I Was Away Page 4