My Almost Flawless Tokyo Dream Life

by Rachel Cohn

  “I doubt it. He’ll be working and your new school is about an hour away.”

  He’d rejected me before I was even born, so I didn’t know why Kenji Takahara not making time to take me to a foreign school on my first day felt like a fresh burn—harsher even than sending me to a school with such a long commute. “Will you take me?” I asked Uncle Masa hopefully.

  “Sorry, no. I’m returning to Geneva early tomorrow morning. I’ll be back in a few weeks to check on you, and we can always FaceTime.”

  A few weeks? I’d only just reconnected with Uncle Masa, and now I was losing him again. My heart felt stomped all over. “So I’m on my own?”

  “Yes.”

  Just like back home.

  Aside from the fact that here no one was going to forbid me from taking a shower every day, had anything really changed for the better?

  I looked out over the Tokyo skyline beckoning from my forty-ninth floor. Even from that height, I could see people through the windows of the other nearby tall residential and office buildings, going about the start of their days. In this city of millions and millions, including my newfound father, I was still all alone. Just like back in my old world. There was odd comfort in realizing that.

  I survived there. I could figure out how to survive here.

  I had always loved reading about orphans. Being one was awful. Every day in foster care, I’d prayed for some magical escape from that life, never thinking it would actually happen. But it did.

  The next morning, I woke up in my new bedroom in a forty-ninth floor penthouse overlooking Tokyo. I took a long, hot shower in my own private bathroom, and that was already magic enough. I was about to go to my new school. I’d checked out the pictures in the International College School (ICS) Tokyo brochure that Emiko had put into my binder. It wasn’t quite Hogwarts. It looked more like Disneyland. I was starting the day jet-lagged and disoriented, still wondering how the hell did I end up here, but I didn’t care. I was too grateful to be awake inside this dream.

  Oh, and sayonara, Maryland public school bus from hell. Now my mode of transportation was a chauffeured Bentley to my first day of school in Tokyo, Japan. I would be sharing a morning car ride with a girl named Akemi Kinoshita who lived with her parents on the forty-sixth floor of Tak-Luxxe. Their idea of a “car pool” was the slickest and most regal car I’d ever seen, with no less than a black-suit–wearing chauffeur at the helm. Reggie would pass out when I told about the Bentley. Probably I’d leave out the part about how my own new father couldn’t be bothered to escort me to the driveway for my first day of my new school, but my car-pool mate’s father was there to greet me.

  “You are Elle?” an old man standing outside the ­Bentley asked me. I nodded. “I am Akemi’s father. I hope you will help her with her English.” His own English was halting and heavily accented. I looked inside the vehicle, where a girl who looked about my age was seated. The man who’d greeted me as her father looked old enough to be her great-grandfather. He wore an elegant business suit, but his face was wrinkled and his posture hunched.

  “I’ll try!” I said. “And thank you for the ride share.”

  “You’re welcome. Have a good day.” He bowed to me and left, as the chauffeur held the passenger-side door open for me. I stepped into the back seat of the Bentley.

  “Konichiwa,” I said to the private school girl sitting next to me. Hello was one of the few Japanese words I’d learned so far. The rear interior of the car was more like a luxury pod, lined with leather, including on the ceiling of the car. My car-pool mate’s seatback had a folding table with a tablet rising up from it, and she was watching an anime movie on that tablet.

  “Hey.” Akemi (pronounced ­Ah-kay-mee—I thought it was one of the most beautiful names I’d ever heard) didn’t seem too interested in me; her attention was focused on her movie. Emiko had told me that Akemi was a sophomore, but she barely looked old enough for middle school with her hair tied back in a bow, and pastel kawaii “cute style” ribbons and lace bedazzling her school uniform and backpack.

  I hoped Akemi wasn’t one of those supposedly innocent girls who the minute she was removed from her family’s sight let her hair loose, removed layers of clothing to show off a banging bod, and became a wild party girl. Or maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. Wild party–girl Akemi might be a lot more fun than drive-to-school girl Akemi, who hardly had two words to say.

  If Akemi’s English wasn’t very good, her collection of one-word responses didn’t give me much indication how to help her.

  Me: “Akemi, how do you like ICS-Tokyo?”

  Akemi: “Fine.”

  Me: “What’s your favorite class?”

  Akemi: “Art.”

  Me: “What do you like about art?”

  Akemi: “Blue.”

  Me: “Have you always lived in Tokyo?”

  Akemi: “No.”

  Me: “These school uniforms actually don’t suck. I didn’t expect that.”

  Akemi: “Sure.”

  I wasn’t kidding about the school uniforms. I’d never thought I’d want to wear one, but these designs were fun. Pleated, forest-green-and-navy-blue plaid skirts that were knee length but slit on the sides, with black safety pin latches instead of buckles holding together the slits, and white oxford shirts that had ICS-Tokyo spelled out in green-and-gold along the arms. The skirts could be worn with matching navy-blue knee-high stockings or leggings, and the oxford shirts had navy-blue cashmere not-ugly-at-all vests to wear over them when the weather was cold. The best part were the shoes: either saddle shoes or combat-style lace-up boots. I’d chosen the boots for my first day.

  Akemi pulled out a Japanese fashion magazine from her backpack, opened it to a particular page, and then handed the magazine to me. The photo spread featured a teenage girl named Imogen Kato. Her name was proclaimed in a bright font in English, but the rest of the article was in Japanese, so it wasn’t like I learned much about her, other than she had a half-Japanese face like mine, crazy hair colors, and an incredible array of clothes options in her bedroom closet. Akemi said, “Her mother designed the ICS uniforms.”

  Akemi said it like Imogen Kato’s mother was some big deal, so I asked, “Who’s her mom?”

  “Shar Kato.”

  “No way! Shar Kato designed these uniforms?” Why would a world-famous fashion designer with a global empire bother to design school uniforms?

  Akemi said, “Shar Kato went to ICS. She always tries to support the school. Now her daughter, Imogen, goes there, too.”

  Whoa. Was I going to school in Tokyo or Hollywood?

  “Is Imogen Kato nice?” I asked her.

  Akemi shrugged. “Imogen is a junior. I don’t have classes with her. She’s one of the popular girls. They don’t talk to me.”

  “Oh.” Got it. Understood. Been there. “How long have you gone to ICS-Tokyo?”

  “Since we moved to Tak-Luxxe last year. Before, we lived in Osaka and I went to Japanese school. My father wanted me to learn better English when we came to Tokyo, so he chose ICS-Tokyo.”

  “Your English sounds pretty good to me.” She spoke cautiously and with an accent, but she didn’t sound like she struggled with the language.

  “Thank you. I am comfortable with speaking, but English grammar and reading are hard for me.”

  “I’ll try to figure out a way to help you with that. Do you like ICS?”

  “I prefer Japanese school. They are not all about popularity and sports, like an American school.”

  Suddenly, I had a flash of inspiration. Konichiwa! I was starting a new school in a new country on a totally new continent. Thousands of miles and a whole ocean away from where I came from. No one here knew my social rank back home. I could be someone new here. Clean slate. Fresh start.

  Akemi said, “Maybe Imogen will like you. She’s hafu like you.”

  “What’s hafu?” I felt like I kept hearing that word since my journey to Japan, but always whispered, like it was a bad word or something.


  “Half Japanese, half something else. Imogen is only hafu in junior class. But now you, too.” There were plenty of multi-racial kids at the schools I’d gone to in Maryland, so I thought it weird that Akemi felt the need to point out that I was one of only two in my new class. I wondered if this was a particularly Japanese distinction to make.

  “Is the workload hard at this school?” I asked.

  “Neko no te mo karitai,” Akemi said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means ‘borrowing the cat’s paws.’ Like, you are so busy all the time, you would even borrow your cat’s paws to get some help. That’s what the homework at ICS is like.”

  “Neko no te mo karitai,” I repeated. Cool phrase. “You’re the cat’s meow,” I told Akemi.

  She scrunched her face, confused. “I don’t understand.”

  “It means, ‘you’re awesome.’ ” Her face brightened into a big smile. “Maybe we could exchange Japanese and English sayings?” I suggested. “Help each other learn the funny things in each other’s languages, not just the basic words.”

  “, yokatta,” she said. Now I scrunched my face in confusion. “It means, ‘Oh, good!’ ”

  “, yokatta,” I repeated. “It’s on.”

  “It’s on,” she repeated in an American accent. She yawned. “I usually nap on the way to school. Excuse me if I close my eyes for the rest of the trip?”

  “Go for it,” I said.

  “Go for it,” she repeated, again in an upbeat American accent. Then Akemi hit STOP on her movie and closed her eyes for the rest of the journey.

  The distance to school was significant, about twenty miles from the Minato district of central Tokyo out into the suburbs, if suburbs could be considered more tall apartment buildings, more industrial buildings, and less skyscrapers. As the car traveled west (according to the GPS on my new iPhone), I started to appreciate the vastness of Tokyo. It seemed more like a collection of small cities than one giant city.

  Living in a penthouse in the sky was cool, but I enjoyed my first opportunity to see beyond the Tokyo skyline. Here at ground level, I cracked my passenger window for fresh air, which I couldn’t do on the forty-ninth floor, and observed the streets where people hurried by foot to their destinations. I loved that there were cat symbols everywhere: feline figurines in window storefronts, cat posters, and cat ads. Even the construction signs were cats—pink-and-white Hello Kitty figures hanging off barriers, to keep pedestrians from stumbling into holes in the road. I hurt from missing my old cat, Hufflepuff. HuffleFurface would have felt right at home here.

  It turned out Uncle Masa was right. With traffic, the commute to ICS took nearly an hour. My pulse skipped in excitement as the Bentley entered the school grounds through a wrought-iron gate. OMFG! I’d seen photos of the school online, but they didn’t do justice to how big and beautiful the campus was. The grounds were expansive and luxurious, lush and green. The stone building at the forefront of the campus looked like it belonged on an old, storied British university campus. At the high schools I’d gone to in Maryland, there was always a modern, behemoth central building that had been expanded with unattractive additions to accommodate student over-enrollment. They all had crowded and decaying classrooms, smelly and gross bathrooms, and a football field. That was it. Already ICS-Tokyo felt magical to me.

  I gently nudged Akemi. She woke up, saw where we were, and then rolled her eyes. “Chikusho,” she mumbled.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Fuck,” she whispered.

  Already I liked my new neighbor and car-pool mate.

  A long car-pool line of cars waited to let out students in an orderly fashion, consisting of the soccer mom minivans I’d been expecting, but also more than a few luxury SUVs—Mercedes, BMW, Lexus. I felt like Rory Gilmore when she first went to posh Chilton, coming from a background that in no way mirrored this level of privilege. I’d always been a good student, at least before my life went to hell, so maybe ICS-Tokyo could be my launching pad to Yale, like Chilton was for Rory. An orphan can dream, right? Work hard, Elle Zoellner, I told myself. Take advantage of this opportunity. You landing here was no less than a miracle. Don’t screw it up.

  The Bentley pulled into the passenger exit lane, and I didn’t wait for the chauffeur to get out and open the door for me. I wanted to run, leap, and fly across ICS’s sweet green lawn. I started to open my door, but Akemi said, “Wait for the driver. It’s a rule.”

  New Elle didn’t care about this old rule. I opened my door anyway and instantly, something slammed into it so hard I let out a little yelp, thinking I’d broken the door. I got out and saw a guy my age on the ground. He must have been running along the curb because I hadn’t seen him before I opened the door. He looked like a Japanese character from the anime movie Akemi had been watching earlier, with a messy mop of black hair that had thick strands of icy-blue streaks and dark brown eyes that scowled at me.

  “Watch where you’re going,” he fumed. Once he stood up, he paused long enough to check me out, and his face turned weirdly red. “Great, now I’m late. Maybe don’t try to kill me next time you’re in the car-pool lane.” He scraped the gravel off his knees, slammed my passenger door closed, and ran off toward the pool area in the distance. (This school had a pool! Did I have time to check it out before the first bell? Wait, did they even have bells here?)

  “Nice to meet you too, asshole,” I murmured.

  The chauffeur opened the other passenger door for Akemi to get out. “Don’t worry about him,” she told me. “That’s Ryuu Kimura. No one likes him anymore.”

  I sat in the office of Chloe Lehrer, the dean of the Upper School, waiting to meet with her. The grounds of the school might have been lush and manicured, but her office drowned under a refreshing chaos of books, paperwork, and folders, which looked familiar to me from many visits in school administrators’ offices when starting new schools. On the dean’s walls, there were framed undergraduate and master’s degrees in education, and framed photos and commendations from the dean’s previous gigs at ICS-Hong Kong, Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut, and the Swiss International Scientific School Dubai. Her desk was decorated with framed photos from her college days at Harvard.

  “Hello and welcome, Elle.” I turned around and saw an older, late-thirtysomething version of the young woman whose college pictures I’d just been inspecting—red-haired, ivory-skinned, stern teacher face. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you, too, Ms. Lehrer.”

  “Call me Chloe. We go by first names here.”

  “Okay . . . Chloe,” I said reluctantly. Back in Maryland I was pretty sure I’d get detention for calling a school administrator by her first name.

  Chloe sat down and glanced through my file. “I’ve looked through your record. Your standardized test scores are top five percentile across the board. Honors everything. You had good grades back in Maryland, until last year. What happened?”

  “Life got a little crazy,” I said, defensive. I’d been through enough of these interrogations every time I started a new school, and I didn’t feel like telling the stupid story all over again.

  “I see you moved schools a few times.”

  “Like I said, crazy.” I saw a letter from my social worker back in Maryland in the file, so I knew this Chloe person must have known why I’d come to Tokyo. What was I supposed to say? And now Mom is in jail and my absent father magically appeared out of nowhere, so hopefully my good grades can resume?

  “I’m guessing you just need some time and consistency in your education to get back on track. You’ll have to work hard to catch up. Are you up for that?”

  “Totally,” I said, like a confident Rory.

  “That’s what I like to hear.” Chloe turned around from her desk to unlock a file cabinet below her wall of fancy university degrees. She extracted a brand-new MacBook still sealed in its original box and handed it to me. “Here’s your computer for school.”

  “
For serious?” Who just gave a new student a brand-new MacBook?

  “It’s included in the cost of tuition.” Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Best Kwanzaa ever to you, Elle Zoellner. “Any questions for me so far?”

  “Can anybody use the pool here?” I asked, balancing the precious Macbook box carefully across my knees.

  “The pool is for the whole student body. Of course you can use it.” She smiled but I felt like an idiot for having asked. “Your social worker in Maryland wrote to let me know you’re an excellent swimmer, so I’ve assigned you to swimming for your morning fitness class.”

  “Thanks. That sounds great.” I tried to sound casual, like getting to use a pool every morning was something that happened to me all the time. In the world of NEVER.

  “Are you interested in joining the swim team? Most students here participate in school sports.”

  I shrugged. “I guess.” The idea was exciting but intimidating. I hadn’t swum competitively since the Beast entered my life and I dropped out of the YMCA swim team.

  A teenage girl barged into Chloe’s office without knocking. She held out her MacBook. “It’s broken. I need a new one.”

  “What happened?” asked Chloe.

  “The boys were being assholes, standing up and rocking the boat in the Chidorigafuchi moat on the class trip to the Imperial Palace yesterday.”

  “You shouldn’t have brought your laptop on the boat.”

  “But I did because I have so much damn homework.”

  “Please don’t curse, Imogen,” Chloe said.

  Chikusho, I thought. This was the famous Imogen Kato, right here! She saw me and glanced down at the magazine I’d been looking at while waiting for my meeting with Chloe, open to the photo spread—of her. God, how embarrassing. I closed the magazine abruptly. It was definitely the same girl, although now her hair was platinum blond with dark roots instead of a mixture of auburn with honey and green apple–colored streaks. Beneath her plaid uniform skirt, she wore deep purple-and-blue-and-silver leggings that had prints of galloping gray unicorns, and over her blouse was a worn-out, oversize, cream-­colored cardigan sweater with the belt tied to the side instead of center. Apparently, the uniform dress code was not that strict at this school.