by C. S. Elston
“It’s not only possible,” Rio countered, “it’s the truth.”
“Sota Tanaka and Mei Akagawa never had a child,” Ichiko maintained.
“My mother left the country, and my father, shortly after learning that she was pregnant with me.”
Ichiko was silent, at first, as she contemplated the possibility that Rio was telling the truth. “I suppose you’re about the right age,” she finally admitted. “Where did you grow up?”
“America,” Rio answered with a bit of hesitation. She glanced at Luke, knowing that he already had the particulars. But, then she looked back at Ichiko as she continued. “I don’t think my mother would want me getting much more specific than that. Do you know if I still have any family members in the area?”
“Sota Tanaka and Mei Akagawa certainly do. So, if you are who you clearly think you are, then yes.”
“Can you tell me where to find them?”
“I think opening old wounds is a bad idea.”
“You mean, because my mom left.”
“It goes deeper than that, young woman.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Tanaka Corporation was founded by Sota’s father who had left Shingu for riches that he felt he could only find up north in Osaka. But, the roots of both the Tanaka and Akagawa families here in Shingu go back many generations. It was Sota’s father who talked Mei’s father into relocating and going to work at the Tanaka Corporation once it became successful. Many years later, the bond of the two families was cemented when Sota married Mei. When she left, everything changed.”
“I had no idea.”
“How could you? Something tells me, although your mother knew the positive impact her marriage had on her family, she couldn’t possibly know the negative impact of her leaving. Not without staying in contact with someone in the Akagawa family.”
“She didn’t.”
“I wouldn’t imagine she did.”
“She was right to leave though,” Rio said in her mother’s defense.
Ichiko looked surprised and possibly even a little offended by Rio’s remark.
“How so?”
Rio thought for a minute. It wasn’t Ichiko’s fault she didn’t have the whole story. Her mother had left without telling anyone what Sota had done to her or how loveless the marriage was, even before he had gotten so drunk and abusive. No one knew her mother’s side of the story at all. And, Rio silently decided, she wasn’t there to change that. It wasn’t Rio’s story to tell.
“Never mind,” she finally said. “You say everything changed. What exactly do you mean by that?”
“From what I understand,” Ichiko started in a very somber tone, “Sota lost his mind. He searched everywhere for Mei. And, when he couldn’t find her, he disappeared in shame. Accusations of adultery, abandonment, even murder, flew forth. Both families blamed each other although neither had any evidence to back up their claims. No one has heard from Sota since probably about the time you were born. Most assume he took his own life. Either way, the Tanakas and the Akagawas haven’t spoken to each other since.”
Luke and Rio both sat back in their seats. Rio hadn’t thought a whole lot about the aftermath of her mother’s decision. Only the part where her father didn’t know she existed. Luke couldn’t believe the story he was hearing. It was like he was watching a real-life Japanese soap opera. And, he found it to be completely fascinating. Rio, on the other hand, mostly felt sadness. Of course, she already felt bad for her mother. But, now she found herself feeling deeply saddened by what her family, who she didn’t know at all and had never even met, had gone through. It all happened because of what her father had done.
Maybe her mother was right and her father was someone to get away and stay away from. Perhaps he was a horrible man that she was better off not knowing. Or, maybe he was a man who felt as trapped as her mother had in a marriage he hadn’t wanted. Perhaps he dealt with it by getting drunk and taking his anger out on his wife who he resented. Even if that were true, it didn’t excuse it. But, it could, possibly, explain the motivation behind the horrible thing he had done and the awful chain reaction it had caused.
Rio couldn’t help herself. She wanted to know more. She needed to know more. And, the only way to keep learning was to keep searching. So, she looked Ichiko in the eyes and made her pitch.
“I know you said that it’s better not to re-open old wounds. But, I have a right to know my family. I have a right to know where I come from. Regardless of the past, I want to know the people I’m related to who are still here. Clearly, my mom’s disappearance, and the events that led up to it, caused the Tanakas and the Akagawas to cut ties with one another. But, maybe that makes me exactly the person to bring them back together again.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Akagawas
Leaving the café, Rio now knew exactly where to find members of her family on both her mother’s and father’s sides. For that, she was thrilled. Of course, she was also overwhelmed by the sad news of how her family had been torn apart by the events leading up to her birth. The worst part of all of it was the, apparently wide-held, theory that Sota may have committed suicide a long time ago. While the possibility of suicide was only theoretical, it was all pretty upsetting and made approaching her family an even scarier proposition than it had already been.
What if they don’t want to talk to me? she couldn’t help but wonder. What if they hate my mom and, by extension, hate me, too? If they do, this quest just became much more intimidating.
“So,” Luke interrupted her thought process as he began to ask, “where to now?”
Rio stopped walking and looked at Luke as she spoke, “I can’t stop now.”
“I’d be stunned if you did,” Luke said with delight.
“I think I have a better chance of being welcomed by the Akagawas,” she said, finally answering his original question. “Let’s start there.”
“Let’s,” Luke enthusiastically agreed.
Rio shot back an artificial look of horror and they resumed their walk toward the van.
“You know,” Luke started to say as he tried to comfort his new friend, ”if you need a day to process what you just learned, that’d be okay. We could always go find that bench and then come back here tomorrow.”
“You really want to find that bench.”
“That’s not it,” Luke told her with a small chuckle. “I’m in no rush. I just want you to know you can take your time if you need to.”
“Thanks,” Rio said appreciatively. “Don’t you have work you should be doing or something? You can’t just keep running me all over Japan.”
“It’s a down time anyway,” Luke told her, working up the nerve to confess something he feared would make Rio feel bad even though he didn’t want it to. “I was actually supposed to be heading back to the airport tomorrow to hop on a plane to go see my family but, I cancelled my trip early this morning. So, I was already scheduled to be absent for a while.”
“What? Why’d you cancel?”
“I want to see this thing through with you.”
“Why? You just met me.”
“True. But, I also know it’s the right thing to do.”
“How?”
“Discernment.”
“What’s that mean? Like, God’s telling you, or something?” Rio’s layer of skepticism was detectable in her voice but, it was a lot thinner than it would have been just days earlier.
“Not exactly. Well, sort of. Maybe. I guess. It’s hard to explain. I just know that our meeting has a purpose and if I went home to see my family right now I’d be abandoning that purpose. I can’t . . . I won’t do that.”
Rio surprised Luke, just a few feet from the van, by stopping again. This time, she threw her arms around him and hugged him tightly.
“I can’t imagine doing this without you.” She let go and looked him in the eyes. “Thank you.”
“Of course,” Luke responded. Both felt butterflies, enjoying the inno
cent hug even more than they might have imagined. But, they each tried to hide that feeling, too. It showed, subtly, in the slight increase of their smiles.
“With all that’s happening right now,” Rio told Luke, “I think meeting you is the biggest miracle so far. And, that’s saying something.”
“Yeah, it is saying something. But, I couldn’t agree more.”
“Let’s go meet my family.”
“Let’s.”
Within minutes, Rio was knocking, only twice, of course, on her grandparents’ front door. She and Luke were greeted by a frail, old woman who was short in stature and sported a full head of white hair. When Rio introduced herself, the woman met her with severe skepticism. She kept furrowing her brow and shaking her head, refusing to believe that Mei Akagawa had a daughter.
It wasn’t until Rio produced a picture of she and her mother that the woman’s cold demeanor began to warm. She looked, repeatedly, back and forth between Rio and the picture. Tears began to form in her eyes and, without warning, the woman reached forward and embraced Rio as she began to sob. Rio suddenly realized that she, for the first time in her life, was embracing one of her grandparents.
As Rio caught the contagion of her grandmother’s tears, she and Luke were invited to come inside for a visit. The old woman, who eventually introduced herself as Emi, made tea, which tasted a lot better than the tea of tendaiuyaku they had shared with Ichiko less than an hour earlier. Rio’s faith in drinks, other than pure water, was quickly restored.
Emi had gone from cold and suspicious to warm and welcoming. She wanted to know all about Mei, her departure and what she had been up to in the more than twenty years since they had last spoken. Unfortunately, Rio felt that there was only so much she could say. A lot of the story, after all, was once again not hers to tell. She did, however, promise to pass Emi’s contact information along to her mother and suggest that she finally make a long overdue phone call. She also let her grandmother know that her daughter was in good health and happily married to a man she truly loved.
It was clear that all the news Rio was willing to share, was not only appreciated by Emi but, truly comforted her. Conversely, when Rio turned the conversation to questions for Emi, it was as if a dark cloud settled over the room. The last couple of decades had not been kind to the Akagawa family. And now, to add fuel to the fire, Rio learned something she briefly wondered why Ichiko had not informed her about. She must have known but ultimately decided, much like Rio had about Mei, that it was not her story to tell. Rio learned that her grandfather had been diagnosed with cancer of the jaw more than a year earlier. The cancer had likely come from decades of smoking a pipe and Eito Akagawa succumbed to the disease and passed away only three months before Rio’s arrival in Japan.
The joy of meeting her grandmother diminished slightly with the realization that the opportunity to meet her grandfather was already gone. Rio knew that not every story has a perfectly happy ending. If the suicide theory about her father proved to be true, this one could even be devastating. However, she was still determined to put all of the pieces of the puzzle together and find out exactly where on the happiness spectrum this story would end up.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Tanakas
Luke walked side-by-side with Rio as they left the Akagawa house. Rio was already dreading the fact that she had to tell her mother that the father she hadn’t spoken to or seen in more than two decades was gone and with him the chance for reconciliation. However, the excitement of having finally connected with an important part of her ancestry was nearly palpable in the air that surrounded her. She had left her grandmother with warm hugs, happy tears, the promise to keep in touch, and an invitation to return with some advanced notice that would allow Emi to gather some more family members for a significantly larger reunion.
The walk started with a final wave goodbye between Rio and Emi, continued in silence for a moment as they distanced themselves further from the van, and ended less than half a mile from the Akagawa residence. The conversation that was taking place when they passed, on their left, a one-story white stucco house with brownish red wooden trim and a matching terracotta roof that made it look like it could have just as easily been in Italy, was mostly small talk.
They walked the cobblestone street that had been nearly overtaken by weeds and turned right to approach the Tanaka residence. It was a two-story yellow stucco house with gray wooden trim and another terracotta roof that had been painted a dark green many years ago.
The residents of the Tanaka house were not, as Rio was warned by Ichiko, Rio’s grandparents. Those people had never moved back from Osaka. The couple who lived in the house were Rio’s cousins. However, they refused to talk to her. It was a man who answered. He never introduced himself and wouldn’t listen to anything Rio had to say. The mention of family names only seemed to make him angrier. He told them to get off his property and, ultimately, slammed the door in Luke and Rio’s faces.
“Two sides of the family,” Rio started as she looked up at Luke before turning to walk away, “two very different responses.”
“I’ll say,” Luke agreed.
“Kind of fits the narrative as far as where my mom comes from versus what I know of my dad and where he comes from,” she acknowledged as they re-entered the weed covered cobblestone street.
“Make you less anxious to find him?”
“Nope.”
Luke chuckled, getting exactly the answer he had expected. He suddenly noticed a man, who was about twice their age, working in the garden behind the white house they had passed a few minutes earlier.
“Maybe we should ask this guy if he knows your family.”
Rio looked at the man, then at Luke again as she asked, “Why would he know anything?”
“I don’t know,” Luke admitted. “Ichiko did.”
“Good point.”
They continued walking and stopped in the street, at the edge of the property, about fifteen feet away from the man. Each of them bowed respectfully as Rio announced their presence by introducing them in Japanese. She continued to speak as the man stood up and approached them.
“I’m searching for information about my parents. They were originally from here but, neither of them have lived here for a long time. I’m particularly interested in my father, Sota Tanaka.”
The man’s blank stare changed quickly. He was suddenly very interested in what Rio was saying.
“Do you know that name?” she asked.
“I do,” the man responded sadly.
“That’s great,” Rio exclaimed.
“He never had a daughter. He never had any children. Who do you think your mother is?”
“My mother is Mei Awkagawa,” Rio insisted.
“Impossible,” the man dismissed Rio with a wave of the hand as he turned around to go back to work.
“Not impossible,” Rio assured him. “Fact.”
“Mei Awkagawa disappeared over twenty years ago. Sota Tanaka disappeared shortly after that. They never had a child. You’re wasting your time searching for ghosts who are of no relation to you.”
“I don’t know about Sota Tanaka, but Mei Awkagawa is no ghost. She’s still alive.”
This caught the man’s attention. He turned around to face Rio and Luke again. Slowly walking back toward them, he asked, “How do you know?”
“I saw her yesterday. And, almost every day of my life before that. She was pregnant with me when she disappeared. Sota Tanaka is my father. I’ve never seen him. Never spoken to him. But, biologically speaking, Sota Tanaka is absolutely my father.”
Everything about the man’s demeanor changed as Rio spoke. He became softer and his eyes began to move around and blink as if they were trying to keep up with his brain. Suddenly, he spoke.
“Wait here.”
The man disappeared into his house for several minutes before returning with two old photographs. One was a black and white photo of a couple of young boys.
“That’s
me on the left, your father on the right.”
Rio’s eyes lit up and her mouth opened slightly as if she was going to say something but nothing came out.
“And this one,” he said as he slid another photograph on top of the first one, “I’m on the right, your father is the one on the left. He was my best friend then.”
Rio stared at the faded, color photograph of a couple of young men. They were probably no older than Rio was at that moment. It was the first time she had seen what her father looked like. She couldn’t believe she was finally staring at a picture of Sota Tanaka. Granted, if he was alive he was much older now but, this gave her an idea of who she would see if, and when, she finally found him.
She noticed that the picture of the two kids showed a couple of carefree children. But, the picture of the two young men showed that the man they were now talking to was still a happy young person while her father looked as if he had already become more stoic. She wondered what had happened between the two events and how it may have affected, or even led to his actions the night she was conceived.
She realized in that moment that, so far, answers only seemed to beget more questions. But, still, she was thrilled to finally be finding some answers. That fact spurred her on. And, she couldn’t wait to find out what answers would come next.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
New Direction
Almost as excited as Rio was, Luke did most of the talking directly following a goodbye with their new friend who they eventually found out was named Yoshito. And, before their final goodbye, they had promised to tell Sota, if and when they finally found him, how much Yoshito longed to see his old friend again. The meeting had started a bit cold but had ended up incredibly warm. The same was true of their meeting with Emi, and Rio wondered if the trend would continue.