All the Ways Home

by Elsie Chapman

  The back of the seat in front of me swims. Shoma is watching my face, and I can sense him freezing.

  “I think what you do helps,” I say. “I read your stuff and see how you’re in there. I listen to what you listen to and hear what you like about it.”

  “I didn’t say all that to make you sad.” He feels bad still, I can tell, unsure of what to say or do next. There’s an ocean of years between us, of people and things and life. But I also think that right now, we’re more alike than we’ve ever been. “I said it so you know I’m not like Dad. Not even close.”

  “I know you’re not like Dad.”

  “How?”

  “It’s simple.” And it is. It’s so simple that I’m mad at myself for always forgetting to look to see it. Even the way the world is racing by outside the window proves how true this is.

  How when we love someone, most of the time, we can’t help but want to go where they go.

  The difference between Shoma and our dad is that Shoma’s asked me to come along.

  While our dad doesn’t even turn around to notice he’s already left us behind.

  How do you know I’m not like Dad, Kaede?

  “I know you’re not like Dad,” I say to my brother, “because you’re actually here, while he’s always been missing.”

  27

  Hi, Mr. Zaher,

  It’s Kaede Hirano, from school. Grade 7.

  Sorry for the email and for disturbing your summer. But I have a question about my Summer Celebration Project. I know it’s for Ms. Nanda’s class, but I think this is a question I need to ask you first.

  Would it be okay if I don’t want mine to be included in the display?

  I think it’d be easier to work on it if I didn’t have to worry about the whole school reading everything. I know home is an important topic, and it’s why Ms. Nanda wants it shared. But now that I’m starting to write, parts of it feel important enough that I know it’s only really meant for me. I hope that makes sense.

  Please let me know.

  Thanks,

  Kaede

  28

  I read Shoma’s write-up about who we’re seeing tonight:

  A band that still proudly calls Kobe home, punk-rock Interpunct recently released their debut EP and watched it climb the charts. Described as a cross between ELLEGARDEN and Girl in the Sailor Dress, Interpunct then caught the attention of live houses throughout the Kansai area before playing a string of sold-out shows.

  Now they’re back to play at Osaka Reverb, in front of a very passionate home crowd.

  Singer and lead guitarist Eriko Arai confesses that while it’s nice to go back home again, it’s also tough.

  “I just think there’s a special kind of mental pressure that comes with playing at home, no matter how successful someone becomes. Home is the one thing that knows you from before things changed, when you were just you. It reminds you of where you come from, of all the things that came together to shape who you are now. Like, I get it when someone doesn’t want to remember home, because maybe their roots are too painful or uncomfortable to face. But I also think this is why it’s so important to always remember. Home means nothing is permanent, good or bad. It means things can change. It reminds us, I think, that we’re always still growing.”

  29

  Shoma had written that Osaka is Tokyo’s wilder, rougher younger brother.

  I hadn’t been sure what he’d meant by that, reading his interview in that magazine.

  I get it now.

  Two cities in the same country, bordered by the same waters and touched by the same winds.

  But Tokyo feels like an elegant, refined cat, and Osaka a messy, bounding dog. They live in the same house but don’t like to hang out together otherwise.

  I tell Shoma this as we head out for dinner before he has to go work. We have to eat okonomiyaki, he had declared as we walked out of the hotel. If you’re in Osaka, that’s what you eat.

  “Doesn’t Vancouver have its Osaka?” he asks, laughing, after I tell him about my cat and dog comparison.

  “I guess we make a lot of jokes about Toronto, which is out east, and they make fun of us, too. But I think most of it comes from just having separate hockey teams.”

  Shoma laughs again. “Ever been to Toronto?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe it’s awesome.”

  “Maybe.” The pavement of the streets and sidewalks is still hot and beaten from the day, sunshine and summer and footsteps baked right into this part of the Namba district. My brother is cool in his sunglasses and blue hair. He looks at home here, just as much as he does back in Tokyo.

  “Do you like one place more than the other?” I ask. “If you had to pick?”

  “Between Tokyo or Osaka? Nah, I couldn’t pick. Not for good. I mean, Shinjuku’s home, but it doesn’t mean I don’t get tired of it once in a while. Some days Tokyo seems so wrapped up in itself, I want to hop on the first train out here and never return. And some days I’m here, feeling as though I’ve lost something, and more than anything I want to get back.”

  I try to picture Shoma not at his place, gone from his little corner of Shinjuku that’s filled with all his stuff, everything that stands for who he is, and I can’t do it. Imagining him out of Tokyo is making him a stranger. He’d be the brother with parts that don’t fit, that don’t really work all that well together.

  I wonder if he thinks Vancouver means the same thing to me. How I could never leave there and fit in somewhere else.

  I don’t know if he’d be wrong.

  I also don’t know if maybe wanting him to be wrong is just stupid instead of being understandable.

  Around us, Osaka swarms, its energy a built-up storm. But the good kind, the exciting summer kind, when the rain comes down in hard sheets and the air is full of thunder, and everyone on the block opens their front door to watch and smell and feel.

  We reach Dotonbori, the area cut through by its own long canal. There are footbridges to cross the water, and all the buildings lining the canal are covered with lit-up billboards from floor to roof.

  The biggest bridge is Ebisu Bridge, and we climb it until we’re right beneath the famous Glico running man sign that marks where it ends. It’s dusk out, so the lights around us are bright and blazing, hundreds of electric bonfires the size of your hand. Below the bridge, the canal’s watery surface dances with color, all glimmering reds and yellows and purples.

  I’d gotten a glimpse of Dotonbori from the hotel, after we first checked in. We’re on the twelfth floor, so the view’s good, even though it’d still been light out as I’d peered through the window. The city looks different during the day, the sun-faded half of a too-vibrant painting.

  My brother says he stays at this hotel every time he’s in town because it’s near the live houses and venues and restaurants he likes most, without being too close to where most of the tourists stay.

  I’m not sure that’s the real reason, though. I’d looked up the rates and they’re pretty steep. Shoma seems to buy whatever whenever, but I don’t think most writers make that much. Which makes me think he booked it just for me, so I’ll end up loving the parts of Osaka he loves, too.

  Some of the ways the city is different from Tokyo are obvious, right there on the surface. Others are more hidden, like tree roots that only poke out of the ground with their knuckles. You trip over them before it occurs to you to look.

  The kansai-ben dialect is spoken here, custom made by the area, with words we wouldn’t hear in Tokyo. To my ear, the differences are slight, the way a language can be heard in different accents.

  And escalators are flipped, so you stand on the right and walk on the left. I’d caught on even faster than Shoma had remembered, and his small nod when he’d noticed had made me feel oddly proud.

  If you had reason to be invisible to the world, here you would hide your silence by joining in with all the noise. You’d talk your way along it, so no one could tell you weren’t saying much at al
l. In Tokyo, the crowd would help you disappear by smothering you up, by just slipping into one and becoming one out of millions.

  Dad hid from me and Mom after we moved to Canada. Maybe he’s still hiding from himself, his work a disguise for how he’s just not a family guy.

  Mom, too, had hidden how much she resented him. The way she simply stopped talking about him just so I would, so she could escape having to ask me.

  But maybe she created a monster, hiding how hard it was to be rejected, pretending we were both absolutely fine.

  There’s a coin on the top edge of the bridge, shiny beneath the lights as my hand comes to rest on it.

  I want to think it was just left there by accident, that someone hadn’t meant to toss it into the canal with a prayer and then somehow forgot, their wish left to drift, going nowhere.

  And it’s dark out. I can’t tell how many other coins are at the bottom, or if there’s any at all—the canal might not even be a place meant for wishes. The coin doesn’t have a hole in the middle, either, since it’s a one yen instead of a five.

  Single-yen coins are made of aluminum, which means they’re really light. They even float, if you place them on water carefully enough.

  I nudge it over the bridge with a finger and hope it sinks. Vague thoughts run through my head as it disappears into the dark without a sound.

  How I want everything fixed. How I wish my mom were also here visiting Shoma and Japan. How wishes of any kind aren’t mine to make. How maybe the goddess Kannon is watching me right this minute, remembering I deserve that bad luck after all.

  “Did you know Mom visited Osaka when she was little?” I say to Shoma. I’d forgotten until this morning, when I’d called Grandpa to tell him where we were going, and he’d brought it up.

  “It was only once, for a couple of days, a long time ago,” he’d said. “I think she’d been five or so, young enough to actually want takoyaki for breakfast.” He laughed, but the sound was too full of memory to not be more sad than anything else. I pictured him holding my mom as a tiny kid, navigating Osaka’s streets, the same way she would have once held me in our Vancouver neighborhood. It reminded me how I might have lost a mom, but Grandpa lost a daughter, so maybe in that one way we would always get each other. Just as me and Shoma would now stay connected, both of us without our moms.

  “It stayed one of her favorite foods,” my grandpa continued, “even after we moved and found out it didn’t exist in Canada.”

  “You can buy it in Vancouver now, and in Richmond.” I had to smile as I recalled my mom’s exasperation after taking a single bite of the fried octopus dumplings, always exaggerated to make me laugh. So shall we go, Kaede? Tell school you’re flying to Japan with your mom because she’s set on having real takoyaki? “She said the vendors at Richmond’s night market came the closest, but it still wasn’t the same.”

  “It’s not, I’m sure, though you have to give it to them for trying.” Grandpa laughed again, and this time most of the sadness was gone. The news playing on Mom’s radio was in the background, surprising me with how normal it’d begun to sound. How not strange. Mom would say it’s a good sign, I know, this adjustment. “Have fun in Osaka, Kaede, and I’ll see you soon.”

  “I think I might have known once that she visited,” Shoma says, “but it’s been a while. Still, it doesn’t surprise me, her having come here. Osaka’s great.”

  It’s not supposed to be easy talking about my mom with my brother. Except it’s become that way, and from Shoma’s smile, I can tell it’s easier for him, too.

  “It’s weird, thinking she might have once stood in this very same spot, seeing what we’re seeing,” I say. Did you ever make wishes from here, Mom? If so, what might you have wished for? “Though I don’t know if she ever came to this part of the city.”

  “I bet she did. It’s like eating takoyaki when you come—if you’re visiting Osaka, you’re going to visit Dotonbori. You’ll want to see the Glico ad, all the signs everywhere, the canal.” Shoma leans his elbows on the bridge and peers down into the water.

  I glance at the ad over his shoulder. It’s huge, over twenty meters tall, and all lit up. “If there’s a photo of her in front of that, I haven’t seen it.”

  “Maybe your grandpa knows. Maybe he was even the photographer. You can ask when you get back.”

  I could. I might. It’s weird to think of Grandpa outside of Canada, too.

  “I wonder how hard it was for her to leave Japan.” I run my finger along a crevice in the stone of the bridge, keep my eyes averted from Shoma’s. “When she was a kid, I mean. Not the second time, when she left with me.”

  “Well, she would have been around your age. So imagine leaving Vancouver now for some whole other country. Home, suddenly halfway across the world.”

  It wouldn’t be the same, though. Mom had left with her folks. They’d left and made a home as a family. I’d be leaving with Grandpa, who’s family mostly because it says so on the form my mom had filled in ages ago.

  I run my finger back the other way along the crevice. Home. The more I think about that word, the larger it keeps growing—more important, more vital. How can I hold on to all of it?

  What if my coming here means the world is being realigned? Being reset so some new fate is now waiting in store for me? So it turns out that Japan is where I’m supposed to be instead of with Grandpa back in Vancouver? There’s a strong and stubborn pull from this place, making me feel like I’ve been here for years. Like I never left.

  I glance up at my brother. “You think Mom would have found it easier leaving the second time, then?”

  Shoma nods. “Yeah, I do. She wouldn’t have been a kid anymore.”

  “I don’t know if her being older mattered all that much.” Mom would have been around the same age Shoma is now, but already a mom to two kids. I try again to picture him packing up his life here for somewhere else in the world, and it’s still impossible. He walks around all confident, making me doubt he’s ever unsure of himself. But take away everything he loves and knows, and I can wonder.

  “Sure it would have,” he says. “And she and Dad had just split. Your mom was probably happy to leave. She had nothing to keep her here.”

  I stare at my brother, see him as an awkward teenager in his old school uniform, and my heart squeezes. Suddenly I’m sad, and sorry, and there’s an expression on his face that says he’s feeling the same way. I wish my mom had let herself talk more about Shoma when she’d had the chance. That she would have let herself keep loving him, to dare to love him more.

  “She never said,” I start, trying to pick just the right words, “but I think leaving the second time was just as hard.”

  “Because she was a single mom?”

  “Because she couldn’t bring you with her.”

  My brother’s eyes change as his grin curls, telling me I was right about him being sad a second ago. “Like I said—cool even back then.”

  I grin back, liking having a joke that’s just ours. “You weren’t cool at all—like I said.”

  Before we leave, Shoma makes me stand in front of the Glico ad with him for a selfie on his cell. We throw up peace signs with our fingers, our grins ending up so wide they’re nearly the biggest things in the photo. He makes me take one with my cell, too. I think it takes real talent to take such awful selfies, Kaede. He swears to me that he sees lots more coins in the canal, all winking up at him, telling us to wish away. Neither of us have five-yen coins, so we send bronze and silver of all sizes through the air. They land in the water with splashes. We name each of them, the silly wishes they stand for—An Awesome Dinner, Band Don’t Blow It Tonight, Cooler Weather.

  When our pockets are empty of coins, we start walking again, weaving our way along the sidewalks. The lights of Dotonbori reflect off the canal in slow, colored ripples. We’re not lost, but if we were, they could be flashlights in the dark, helping guide us home.

  30

  Dear Dad,

  You a
nd Shoma are both artists, but I think he’s thought a lot more about you being a photographer than you have about him being a writer.

  When he was growing up and you were gone somewhere for a job, your absence was still at home with him. It reminded him of your work and why you weren’t there being a dad. It was like that until he got old enough to move out. And even if he was okay with everything by then, he was probably still glad not to be living with a ghost anymore.

  Now that I’m here in Japan, I know I’m dragging the past back up for him. For me, too.

  But not for you, and that feels kind of unfair. You’re still in Hokkaido, far away from where you promised to be, avoiding cell phone reception and the dull reality of us.

  Dad, sometimes I really do wonder—do you know what day it is, even? The month or the year?

  How deep do you need to go to escape?

  We have scales to measure things that don’t really matter. Everyday things like packages we need to mail, or how much weight we’ve lost overnight, or how much flour or milk to use when making breakfast.

  What about the things we can’t hold in our hands but that are about a hundred times more important? What about all those things we can’t touch that feel like they mean everything?

  If you think about how much space me and Shoma take up in your brain, how much energy you use up thinking about us, I bet it’s nothing compared to how much we give you in ours, how much energy we use up. It’s a grain of sand to a whole beach, a single flash of light to the sun’s million megawatts.

  Sand that’s really deep can be dangerous.

  We can burn our eyeballs if we stare directly at the sun.

  Sometimes I think it’s you who loses out. The way you decided to stop seeing us, even though we were always right there.

  And then I change my mind, and it’s me and Shoma who end up being the losers.

  Because here’s Shoma, trying to make up for you. He’s my brother, but sometimes he remembers you’re missing and tries to act like a dad.