Maybe home always being a part of you is how a compass is built to always spin north. It’s never forgetting how to ride a bike, or never forgetting the taste of something. One turn of the pedal and you’re automatically balancing; one bite and you travel back in time.
Except if this is true, it must only be on the grandest scale of things. Like Japan as whole islands, the makeup of your blood, the network of pathways that form your brain.
Because I can’t remember anything about this neighborhood.
But I hadn’t expected that I would (or even that I wouldn’t). Only that I’d wanted to see for myself where I spent the first three years of my life. Proof, I guess, that they’d happened here. How I once really lived in this country and had a dad who’d actually been around.
Standing here, feeling more lost than ever as I stand in front of this strange building on this strange street, the past stays a mystery. I thought it was smart, coming to see that I’d been real here once. But instead of finding some piece of the shore I need to land on, I’m continuing to just float around, no new answers for that box of tough questions I’m still trying to unload.
There’s a wall of mailboxes just beside the entrance. There won’t be a Hirano, but still I look.
All names of strangers.
The front door is the kind you need a key for. I press my nose to the window of the building. The lobby is small. Maroon elevator doors, gray concrete floors, silver-tone fixtures.
I have no memories of any of this, either.
The elevator opens, a lady leaves the building. For a handful of seconds, while the front door hangs open, I can choose to go inside. I can go up to the fourth floor and knock at the door of 44A and hope whoever answers might let a twelve-year-old kid with imperfect Japanese take a look around.
The door falls shut with a bang, and I move away from the window.
I’m heading back toward the station when I almost miss it.
A tiny residents-only playground tucked in between apartment buildings. It’s practically hidden by a thick front hedge the shades of celery and emeralds. There’s a small water fountain with rust in its bowl, a park bench, and one of those plastic horse-riding toys on a giant spring.
The memory comes fast, like lightning, so bright it leaves me blinking.
The feeling of being lifted by my armpits so I can reach the fountain to drink. The water had been lukewarm and had tasted of metal. There’d been no rust in the bowl back then, but a celery-green leaf had floated in, and it’d swirled in circles as I drank. An older boy’s laughing voice overhead, telling me to grow taller. But to not worry, because he’ll pick me up until I do, and he’d be careful never to drop me.
The past pounds behind my eyes as I keep walking, an ache that goes all the way down to my chest.
I thought I’d gotten used to the idea of Shoma deciding he didn’t need a brother—him going quiet for nearly ten years was message enough. But it was a fuzzy kind of hurt, the rejection a cobwebbed corner of a room where light never reached in the first place. Now it’s in-my-face reality, him being silent all this time after taking care of me as a little kid.
What had happened to make him stop caring? Did he see the same thing our dad did to make him turn away? The hurt is new and climbs all over. A thousand stings.
I see myself at the airport, three weeks from now. Watching Shoma walk away without a single look back, already on his cell to someone more important.
But then I remember Shoma’s voice telling me how Shinjuku is home to him, without mentioning our dad. Who lives in Nakano, just minutes away by train. Who, it seems, has become a person my brother can also never find, a person who is also never there for him.
21
The Yamanote Line is a large train loop that goes around Tokyo—as long as I stay on it, I’ll eventually get back to Shinjuku, no problem.
And it’s a good route to take to just sit and watch the city go by. You can blank out or do all your thinking. Which means you can kill a lot of time, sitting on a train in Japan, if you wanted. Either going in circles or riding all the way to the edges of the country.
I don’t know if I’m killing time. I don’t know if I need to think some more about this summer trip or if I’ve been overthinking it all along. I just know I’m more confused than ever about my family and nothing is going as planned.
Shoma’s nicer than he’s supposed to be, except he’s only supposed to be passing through.
Dad’s still missing, when he’s the one I’m here to see.
My stomach bobs up and down with nerves. I imagine the lake inside that it feels like, its surface rippled by wind and fingers and sea plants grown too tall. My questions would be the fish lurking around, all snapping teeth and whipping tails.
Outside my window Tokyo spins. I stare at the stations as we go by and try to remember what I know about some of them.
Ueno, famous for its park with all the sakura in the spring.
Akiba and its electronics.
Tokyo, which sees more trains pass through each day than any other station in Japan.
Shibuya and its famous scramble crossing.
I’ve been on the train for more than two hours, and I’m halfway through my third loop around. We’re coming up on Tokyo Station again when I decide to get off. I’m tired of being alone, which I am despite being surrounded by so many people. I want to find Shoma, so I can hear someone say my name. I think of how sidewalks seem to never empty, just as restaurants have plenty of tables-for-one. Japan is so full, but sometimes it seems to be a place built for the loner, how it’s an island of the lonely.
I transfer to the Keihin-Tohoku line, wondering when Shoma’s going to be done. The job’s supposed to take him nearly all day. But he asked me to come meet him, and hopefully not just because he thought he had to. Since it’s only half past four when I get off the train at Yokohama Station, I take the long way around to Analog’s office.
A few blocks into Chinatown and I don’t think I have to worry about getting homesick.
On the surface, the Chinatown here seems pretty close to the one back in Vancouver. Both have huge arched gates marking the different entrances. There are tons of restaurants and souvenir stores, and the sidewalks are busy with shoppers. Things are red and gold and decorated with silk, with images of dragons and giant carp and good fortune.
But most of the shoppers are visitors, too excited over everything they see to be locals. Egg tarts aren’t in every single bakery, and not enough shops are selling Styrofoam containers full of barbecued pork or fresh fish lying flat on slabs of ice.
But you can buy steamed buns with panda faces here, and I’ve never seen that before.
Baskets of dim sum are sold from sidewalk stands so you don’t have to go inside a restaurant.
The streets, like so much of the rest of Tokyo, are swept clean.
I guess that’s the biggest thing about this place. It’s Chinatown, but it’s also Japan—two maps side by side, so you see the shapes of both at once. With Vancouver’s Chinatown, you can almost forget you’re in Canada, if you let your eyes go unfocused and know where to look and where not to. There it’s more like two maps on top of each other, so their outlines become one and the same.
It could be I’m just missing the point, though.
How maybe it’s not about being okay by pretending you’re somewhere else.
Because it’s really about being okay despite where you are.
22
Analog’s office ends up being in a pretty nice part of Yokohama.
It’s a small building, but two whole floors are the magazine’s, and the outside is all red brick and huge windows. It reminds me of the old warehouses in Vancouver’s Yaletown area, how Mom told me they’ve been fixed up and so are worth a lot of money again.
I’m both surprised and not surprised that Analog’s way better than just some dive. I already know Shoma’s legit, his work real and everywhere in Japan. But sometimes, talking to him, he seems
younger than he is, like a kid playing adult. And I remember all over again that respected writer or not, he’s also just my brother. With blue hair and tattoos. Who can’t cook and likes sleeping above a café. Who’s got an old guitar in his closet that he never plays.
I’m sitting on the curb just outside the entrance, getting hungry and thinking about all the restaurants in Chinatown, when he finally comes out of the building. He waves, smiling.
“Sorry, Kaede.” He lifts a visitor’s pass from around his neck and stops in front of me. “How long have you been waiting?”
“Just got here, actually,” I say, getting up and brushing pavement dust off the seat of my shorts.
Here being Analog’s office, anyway.
I’d wandered around Chinatown for a while, watching all the tourists shop and eat and wondering if my mom had compared it to the one in Vancouver, if she’d ever come to see it. I called my dad’s cell again because I felt like I was supposed to be checking, and the same old silence had answered me. I followed a group of tourists as they made their way through the area, a couple of Bruins caps and Boston accents giving away where they were from.
I visited and learned about the temple that worshipped Mazu, the Chinese Goddess of the Sea, who protected fishermen on the open waters. I learned about the temple built to honor Chinese general Kwan Tai for his loyalty in war. I’d followed other visitors deeper inside and paid my respects.
My fingers still smell of the incense we’d been handed to burn.
And I’d pretended I, too, was thinking about sailors endangered by storms, about soldiers being brave in battle. When really I was just being selfish and praying for myself again.
Now me and Shoma are headed back toward Chinatown and its restaurants, both of us hungry. The sun’s blistering, too hot for us to talk about anything that takes much energy.
“How was Akiba?” he asks.
“It was fun.”
“Find any good souvenirs?”
“Not really. Hey, can we go eat?”
The thing is, it isn’t just the heat that keeps my answers short. A section of my brain is still in Ikebukuro, in that old playground remembering Shoma being a brother. It made me wish I could be mean to him, to be the kind of brother who could just walk away, exactly as he had. But his eyes are somehow like my mom’s again, telling me he cares.
I’m mostly distracted when I kick a series of rocks from the street into the mouth of a tipped-over recycling bin. I chant Goal! beneath my breath out of habit.
“You play soccer, too?”
I turn to see my brother watching me.
“Nope, only fooling around.”
“I guess it doesn’t compare to hockey.”
“I guess not.” I search for more rocks that need my attention, but there are none.
“Are you playing again in the fall?”
I slowly adjust the straps of my backpack. A part of me wants to tell him the truth about my suspension. To tell him whatever he wants to know about my life in Canada.
But hiding is what’s smart—I won’t have bits of myself needing to be collected at the end. The less of myself I leave behind, the easier I can forget about this trip.
“Yeah,” I lie. “Preseason starts in September.”
I hear Grandpa’s voice over the phone all over again, trying to convince Coach it’d been an accident. Then the silence that takes over as he gets filled in on why it kind of wasn’t one and that’s why I’m being suspended. The league is going to meet again to go over the situation, Kaede, he says after hanging up. They’ll be hearing from your friend and his mom, and they’ll want to hear from you, too. But for now, you can’t plan on playing in the fall.
Jory’s mom—since then, she’s looked at me like I’ve become a stranger. Or that somehow the universe has mixed me up with her son. How else to make sense of what happened? Jory lives and breathes hockey, while the person who takes it away from him is okay without it.
“That’s good,” Shoma says, sliding on his sunglasses. “I bet they tanked without you.”
“Maybe, yeah.” My sneakers scuff the ground as I keep walking. The truth is, I don’t know how my team’s done since I’ve been gone. I lost interest. I haven’t bothered asking Gemma or Roan or even Perry to tell me.
My brother’s too quiet, as though he can see right through everything I say, and my face gets hotter despite the sun staying the same.
“I didn’t know you play guitar,” I say, just to be saying something. It’s the first thing that pops into my head, but it’s also the worst thing, I realize soon enough. That guitar in the closet is supposed to stay forgotten.
Shoma laughs. “Oh, the one in your room. That’s a bass guitar, actually. Like drums, but with strings. Rhythm.”
“So how come you’re not in a band?”
“I only mess around for fun—too lazy to practice enough to be much good. And too busy.”
Too busy.
And he is. I’ve seen him, always writing or on the phone. And when he’s not working and he’s taking me somewhere, I know he could be doing anything else. Except that he has to say no.
“Sorry.” The word comes out angry sounding, when I don’t mean it to. Or maybe I do, just a bit. It’s no one’s fault but mine I’m here, but our dad being a no-show is just his. “You should have just told Dad you were too busy to watch me.”
Shoma freezes for just a second, then keeps walking. “It’s not about Dad. You’re my little brother. I want to spend time with you while you’re here.”
“You can’t fit nine years into three weeks.” The sun is getting low, right in my eyes so they want to water. I wish I had sunglasses to hide behind, too. “The whole time me and Mom were in Vancouver, you were just … gone. It was Dad who bothered to keep in touch.” At least in the beginning he did.
“‘It was Dad who bothered.’” My brother exhales heavily. “Kaede, I was fifteen when you guys moved away—barely older than you are now. I was just your average kid who spent most of his time on himself; a baby half brother living on the other side of the world wasn’t exactly a priority. Then I got older. I moved out and started working. And by then, you guys were strangers. I didn’t know how to ask what happened along the way. Isn’t that how you felt about me and Dad a lot of the time?”
I want to shout at him that they’re just excuses, but I don’t—because he’s right. He’d never called, but Mom hadn’t, either. She’d let my dad get in the way of asking her stepson how he was doing, how his classes were, if he’d joined new clubs.
And all my drawings, all my emails and letters—they’d all been for Dad.
“Was he home a lot when it was just the two of you?” I ask. There are more rocks on the road now, but I leave them alone.
“Not really.” Shoma shrugs and pushes his blue hair back. “But I was still used to his traveling for work, from before you and your mom were around, after my mom died. He used to arrange for me to stay with friends, since it was only overnight, or for a weekend. Then it got to be half a week, then a whole one. An entire month once—Alaska, all that snow, all those moose and caribou. He missed my high school grad.”
“That sucks.” It really does. Some kids in Vancouver rent limos for grad; that’s how big of a deal it can be.
“Well, that’s Dad for you. And he’s not going to change.”
It’s mostly gone now, my brother’s loneliness, but I still feel the ghost of it around us as we turn a corner so Chinatown’s just up ahead. It’s an invisible bruise that spreads from him to me, reminding me how we’re not so different when it comes to what hurts. And I’d always been so careful to keep our dad’s absence wrapped up around just me and Mom—I never left room for anyone else. I never thought about whether or not Shoma was wondering where we’d gone, too.
“Mom would like how you’re into music,” I blurt out, wanting him to know now. That he had no idea, but he and Mom had still been kind of connected, even over a huge ocean and over years of time. “She was
always listening to the radio at home.”
“Yeah?” Shoma’s smile is tentative, nothing like his normal one. “What did she like?”
“All kinds of stuff. English bands, though. I bet she would have liked your bands, if you’d been able to tell her about them.”
“I would have liked to, for sure.”
I keep scuffing my shoes along the pavement, uncertain of what else to say or of what comes next. On one side of the street there’s bubble tea for sale, on the other Chinese folding fans.
“So can we start over?” Shoma asks this carefully, and I can tell he’s worried I’m still upset. “You can pretend I’m a better big brother than I’ve been, and I’ll pretend I didn’t mind lugging you around for three years.”
Don’t worry, I won’t drop you.
“I guess I was attached?” I ask.
“Yeah, because I was already this cool, even back then.”
“I found some old photo albums in my room.” My smile is real. “You weren’t cool.”
I can’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses, but I can tell his smile, when it comes, is just as real as mine.
23
We decide on all-you-can-eat, and I’m already on seconds and stuffing more mapo tofu into my mouth when Shoma gets a call on his cell.
My first thought is that it’s Dad. That my call just hours ago somehow got through in the end, and he wants to let us know he’s on his way back to Tokyo. He’s calling back to say he can’t wait to reconnect with me. That he’s looking forward to helping me with our family tree. That while I have other, harder questions for him, he won’t run this time. How he’ll answer everything I might want to know.
But it’s someone from Shoma’s work, and my brother’s laughing as he agrees to something and starts making notes in a planner that he takes out from his bag.
“Hey, I forgot to tell you that we’re going to Osaka for a couple of days,” he says to me after he disconnects. “Sorry, I should have said something earlier. I’m not used to having to tell anyone about having to take off for work.”
All the Ways Home Page 8