The Waking

by Thomas Randall

  She’d make it. Kara wouldn’t allow herself to conceive of another possibility.

  Picking up her pace, she strode down the street. Now other students were streaming toward the school from all directions. A pair of girls ran past her in a grim race. Two boys stood leaning against a railing, talking excitedly about baseball. When one of them noticed her, he tapped his friend and their conversation stopped as they watched her walk by.

  A trio of girls stood on the corner across the street from the arched entryway to the school grounds. They wore their skirts too short and had their hair done up in high pigtails. One of them wore voluminous, loose, white socks that bunched around her ankles, a style that had gone in and out of fashion for years. The other two were listening intently to the third, a tiny, petite girl whose features seemed far more mature, in spite of her size. She spoke earnestly to her friends, but when they saw Kara, the tiny girl whispered something Kara could not hear and all three of them giggled, hiding their smiles behind their hands.

  Ignoring them all, she crossed the street and went under the archway.

  Kara paused and glanced back at the other students she had passed. None of them seemed in much of a rush except for a boy with glasses, who careened down the street on his bicycle and under the arch.

  Kara stepped aside as he rode past her. His expression was frantic, but he spared her a glance and a bright, brief flash of a friendly smile, which made her feel a million times better.

  Monju-no-Chie School had been built perhaps two hundred yards from the bay, set on a slight rise. The main building faced northwest toward the neighborhood where Kara lived, so as she approached she had the perfect view. The grounds were elegantly groomed, the paths meandering as though never intending to reach their destination.

  To her right, a long drive ran parallel to her path, toward the parking lot on the west side of the building. Jutting off to her left was a narrow, abbreviated road used as a scenic overlook; beyond that, a long stretch of uninterrupted bay shore that provided the school with an extraordinary view; and then thick woods that ran up the slope and bordered the school grounds to the east. Over there, between the school and the woods, was an ancient prayer shrine that had intrigued her the one time her father had let her go exploring the grounds after they had first arrived. She liked to think about the monks who might have brought offerings there and what spirit those offerings had been meant to appease.

  With a few minutes to spare, she followed the gravel walkway that led around to the left, where the woods came closest to the school building. As she walked, she noticed a secondary path she had not seen before, trampled by years of student feet. It cut away from the gravel and down toward the edge of the bay. She followed it toward the water, shivering as she entered the shade provided by the trees. Up ahead, she saw what appeared to be another shrine, but it didn’t look anything like the one she’d seen before.

  Intrigued, Kara kept walking, hoping she was not already breaking some school rule. The bay lapped against the shore here and the view made her smile. She felt as though she could see the whole of the Sea of Japan if she concentrated enough.

  As she approached the shrine, she noticed a scattering of flowers at the base of one tree. Descending the slope, she realized that there were other things there as well, drawings and photographs, small stuffed animals, and a Hello Kitty T-shirt. There were notes as well, many of them written to someone called Akane, and there were candles. At the center of this more recent shrine Kara saw a photograph. She crouched down to look at it, resisted the urge to reach out and touch it.

  The dead girl had been very pretty. Just like back home, a teenager had died, and her friends had come out to this spot to remember her. For several minutes, Kara studied the things that had been left behind, but then she began to worry that others might see her and think she was intruding. Propriety was so important, and she didn’t want to risk offending anyone because that would reflect badly on her father.

  She turned back up the path, wondering how the girl had died. With a glance toward the flow of students making their way up to the school, and the way so many of them still gathered at the front steps and on the grass, she decided she still had a few minutes and went along the path that ran between the school and the woods to check out the ancient monks’ shrine.

  Someone had burned candles there recently. It was a peaceful spot, and she took a couple of minutes to try to force herself to de-stress. Her father said everyone would love her. That might be too much to hope for, but she told herself the opposite was just as unlikely. They couldn’t all hate her.

  Kara had never been so nervous.

  She turned and stared up at the pagoda towers of the school, a fresh wave of anxiety crashing over her. She tapped the fingers of her right hand against her leg in time to a rhythm that played somewhere in the back of her mind. She chewed her lower lip, fidgeted with her ribbon tie.

  “You’ll be fine.”

  Kara glanced to her left and saw a figure standing in a shadowy, recessed doorway set into the side of the school building. At some point the door had been painted over, and whoever had done the job had painted the door handle and right over the lock. No one would be getting in that way, and it didn’t look like anyone used it as an exit, either.

  The girl who stepped out from that shadowed, arched doorway had her sailor jacket on inside out, revealing patches and badges she had sewn into the lining, some of which Kara felt sure said some pretty rude things in Japanese. Her hair was chopped short, a bit spiky and wild, and where it framed her face it hung several inches lower than at the back of her neck. In her left hand she held a cigarette, dangling it between two fingers.

  It took a moment before Kara realized the girl had spoken to her in English.

  “Do you think so?” she asked, in Japanese.

  The girl lifted her cigarette to her lips and drew in a lungful of smoke, then let it curl out lazily as she replied, still in English. “It does not matter what I think. They will leave you alone. More alone than you want to be.”

  “How do you know?”

  “That is what they do to anyone who is different.”

  “I would be grateful if you would speak to me in Japanese,” Kara said, in that language. “My name is Kara.”

  “Sakura,” the other girl said. With a great show of reluctance, she took a final puff of her cigarette and then crushed it out underfoot. Slipping off her jacket, she turned it right-side-out, then bent and picked up the cigarette butt, slipping it into her pocket.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Sakura.”

  But the girl was no longer looking at her. Instead, Sakura gazed down toward the bay, or perhaps at the newer shrine— the one for the dead girl—which Kara could sort of make out from this distance, now that she knew where it was.

  “Your Japanese is excellent, Kara,” Sakura said, without looking at her. But she had heard, because she no longer spoke English.

  Kara gave a slight bow of her head. She knew better than to thank the other girl for the compliment. In Japanese culture, to do so would be incredibly rude and arrogant, implying that she believed she deserved the compliment. Her bow would be the only acceptable show of gratitude.

  Sakura offered a thin smile in return. “We should go inside.”

  They fell into step together. Sakura seemed very distant, as though she had forgotten Kara was even with her. The girl wore the rebellious attitude like a mask, but Kara had felt for a moment that beneath the sharp edges and hard looks there might be something else, that maybe she might have found a friend here. Now that hope began to diminish.

  Sakura surprised her by speaking. “They haven’t caught the killers.”

  Kara shivered and blamed it on the cold breeze off the bay. So Sakura had been watching her while she was down by the bay, looking at the death shrine.

  They rounded the corner to the front of the school to see many other students going up the front steps.

  “That girl, Akane? She was
murdered?” Kara asked.

  Sakura stopped and looked back the way they had come. “Beaten, and then drowned. It happened in September. The police questioned every student and every teacher. No one knew anything. No one saw anything. But there were so many footprints in the mud that there had to be five or six of them, at least, so there are many liars here. And many killers.”

  Kara covered her mouth with one hand, horrified, wondering if her father had known about the girl’s murder, and if so, why he hadn’t said anything.

  “Did you . . . did you know her?”

  The breeze from the bay brushed away the slashed curtain of Sakura’s hair, and for the first time Kara saw that as tough as she pretended to be, the girl was very pretty, her features almost delicate. Her eyes were the color of brass.

  “She was my sister,” Sakura said.

  Then she walked on toward school and up the stairs, joining the orderly stream of students entering the building, leaving Kara staring after her and wishing she had worn her heavy coat after all.

  The first of April felt awfully cold.

  2

  Monju-no-Chie School managed to be both traditional and progressive at the same time. Though tourists were not uncommon in the Miyazu City area, according to Kara’s father, the school had only ever had a handful of gaijin students. Most westerners who attended school in Japan went to one of the international private schools that hosted students from all over the world, or immersed themselves in public schools in large cities.

  The school still insisted on fuku sailor uniforms for girls and gakuran uniforms, a military-influenced style, for boys. Perhaps the nearness to the ports of Miyazu City helped explain the embrace of the naval dress. Not that Kara minded. The fuku might be itchy, but she thought the uniforms were really cute.

  More than half of the students came from the Miyazu Bay area, and rode bicycles or took the train and then walked from the station. But Monju-no-Chie School had earned an excellent reputation, and privileged families from all over Kyoto Prefecture sent their children to live there. Boarding students resided in a second building located across a grassy sports field behind the main school.

  Her father had given her the choice as to whether she would live with him in the small house the school had provided or in the dormitory with the boarding students. Maybe next year, if this grand experiment of theirs worked, she’d live in the dorm. But for now, she wanted to begin and end each day with her dad. Besides, she’d have a lot more in common with the students who came by train and bicycle than with the privileged kids who lived at the dorm.

  Who are you kidding? You don’t have anything in common with any of them.

  Kara hurried up the front steps, merging with the flow of students. Sakura had already vanished inside the school, and though many of the boys and girls snuck glances at her, none of them seemed ready for conversation. Once again, she was on her own.

  Just inside the door, a group of girls clustered around, sneaking shy smiles behind upraised hands, whispering to one another. Kara would have thought their gossip was about her, were it not for the immediate reaction they had to her passing. Most of the Japanese students were far too respectful to outright stare at her, but not these girls. They appraised her frankly, and the tallest girl—her shoulder-length hair veiling one side of her face—cast a dubious glance at her. She turned to her fawning friends and rattled off a snide comment.

  “Look at the bonsai,” the girl said. “Cut away and moved far from home. No roots at all. How long before she withers?”

  The girls began to laugh, and Kara overheard the tall one’s name—Ume.

  She tried to breathe evenly, told herself to keep walking. How many times had her father reminded her how important this first day would be? She had studied local customs, understood that propriety ruled here. But this Ume girl had insulted her, and letting it pass would only make things worse in the future.

  Kara turned on her heel and strode directly up to the girl, who must have been a senpai—a senior. Ume had either assumed Kara couldn’t speak the language very well or didn’t care that she’d been overheard. She looked down quizzically.

  “Though she is cut away from where she grew, this bonsai is healthy and strong. She will survive, as long as she can keep her roots from being choked by weeds.”

  As soon as she had begun speaking, the girls had fallen silent and looked at her in surprise. Kara’s Japanese was not flawless, but her father had been teaching her the language almost since she began to speak.

  “Oo jyozudesune,” Ume replied.

  Skillful, a comment on her command of the language. She’d heard it a lot and understood that, though it might be a compliment, an element of condescension went along with it.

  Kara bowed her head slightly. At home she’d have called the girl a bitch. But this wasn’t home.

  “Grow tall, bonsai,” Ume said.

  Despite her earlier rudeness, she had abruptly become the most respectful, pleasant, and welcoming face that Kara had yet encountered.

  “Have you chosen a school club yet?”

  “Not yet,” Kara said.

  “If you like soccer, you would be welcome in our club.”

  The other girls looked surprised, even irked. As the other students continued to stream in through the main doors and gather in the corridor, Kara smiled thinly.

  “I don’t have the talent for the game. But I will cheer when you play.”

  Kara took a deep breath, reminding herself that not everyone would be like Ume. Japanese, her father had taught her, often consisted of saying things that were the precise opposite of what you actually meant.

  She followed the flow of students into the genkan—a large, square, functional room lined with lockers. With so many voices speaking Japanese at one time, she found it impossible to interpret what anyone said. But that was all right. Since none of them were talking to her, she’d only have been eavesdropping.

  All of the students were taking off their street shoes and stashing them in the lockers. From their backpacks, they all retrieved uwabaki—which meant “inside shoes,” though they were really more like slippers.

  A smile touched Kara’s lips. Ever since her father had first told her about this custom, she’d thought it so strange, but sort of fun, too. The idea of all of the students wearing slippers made her think cozy thoughts of home—though there was nothing cozy about the genkan. The boys wore blue slippers and the girls pink. If there’d been even a single other American at the school, she could’ve made a joke about wearing pajamas to school, or carrying the dusty old teddy bear that sat in a box somewhere in storage back home. But she couldn’t be sure the kids at Monju-no-Chie School would get the joke, or would think it was funny even if they did get it.

  Still, it amused her enough. She had a smile on her face when she looked up and caught two boys watching her intently. Kara gave them a nod of recognition, and they grinned, one of them waving at her.

  She let out a breath. All right, so not every kid here is going to be nasty or bizarre.

  Bizarre meant Sakura.

  Kara felt badly that she’d let herself start thinking negatively of the girl. She glanced around but saw no sign of her. With her hairstyle and attitude, the cigarettes and the patches and pins, Sakura was working hard to give off a rebel vibe. She might as well have tattooed Tough Chick on her forehead. But she’d been cool and accepting to Kara without putting up the walls that everyone else seemed to have built around themselves. So what if she seemed like trouble? Sakura’s sister had been murdered. Grief could cause a person to do all kinds of things they’d never have done before.

  Stashing her shoes in an empty locker, Kara leaned against it to put on her slippers. Now that the initial surprise of her arrival had rippled through the room and everyone had gotten a good look at the gaijin girl, they seemed to have gone back to their preparations for the start of the school year. She felt herself begin to exhale.

  As strange as it all felt—Kara could
n’t imagine any of her friends from home making it through an hour at this school without totally freaking out—an odd happiness began to spread through her. She and her father had talked about this adventure for years. It had taken her mother’s death to make it more than a dream, and so the feeling was bittersweet. But Kara had vowed to herself that she would make her father proud, and be the girl her mother had always told her she could be.

  I can do this.

  Live and learn.

  Someone bumped shoulders with her. She opened her eyes in time to catch the pained, embarrassed expression on the face of a tall, stocky boy with unruly hair.

  “Excuse me,” he said with a quick bow. “I’m very clumsy.”

  “We have that in common.”

  She’d said it only to make him feel better. The typical boy at Monju-no-Chie School was slender, even petite, compared to the guys Kara had gone to school with back home. To his schoolmates, the one who’d bumped her would seem like some kind of giant. She liked his face, and there was a sweetness in his eyes, but when he smiled, she felt a little tremor in her chest.

  “My name is Hachiro,” he said.

  She smiled in return. “I’m Kara.”

  Hachiro nodded. “Yes,” he said, in English. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  Kara smiled. Most of the students here could speak English to some degree. When Sakura had done so, it had been because she’d assumed Kara’s Japanese wouldn’t be very good. Hachiro did it as a kindness.

  “And you,” she said in Japanese.

  They walked together along the corridor, near the back of the herd of shuffling students. Kara had been concerned about finding her way to the morning assembly, but even without Hachiro, she could have simply followed the parade.

  “I’m looking forward to having your father as a teacher,” Hachiro said. “Last year we had several American scholars as guest speakers, but this will be the first American teacher we have for a full term.”