eyes down, he tells his secret
his family does
not know where he went today
his mom thinks gaijin
should stay in America,
Japan doesn’t need
our warring, arrogant ways
fighting back tears, I
pause before I can respond
“America? but I’m
Barbadian, different”
to her it’s the same
she won’t try to understand
he’s shaking his head
ignoring his mother’s will
“today is happy”
he pulls me into a hug
I wish for a kiss
I should have prayed at the shrine
too soon, I’m released
his ticket slides through the gate
and then so does he . . .
disappearing from my sight
fleeting, like a dream
leaving no proof he was real
he must feel the same
he returns, pulls out his phone
presses some buttons
“shall I send?” he asks softly
I take out my own
turn it on, many missed calls
my mother, father
security, agency
later I will care
now I turn on infrared
receive his details
wonder if he sends them all
if I will receive
Kou’s blood type and his birthday
so I can work out
our compatibility
I offer to send
he stops me, says it’s not safe
“but you’re my friend now!”
shakes his head, “maybe in time . . .”
breathes, “sayonara!”
I say, “mata ne”—later!
my promise to meet again
A Song for Benzaiten
by Catherine Rose Torres
The cherry-blossom season was even more fleeting than usual the spring I arrived in Tokyo, so my foster brother, Hiro, said. He added that I was to blame for it. “Rain is the worst thing that could happen this time of year,” he said, shaking his head at me. “We should think of a sunnier name for you.” So I became “Aya,” which means “bright” in Japanese. Mr. and Mrs. Nojima, my foster parents, must have been relieved to have something less troublesome to call me than “Rain.”
Three days after I arrived, Hiro flew back to California, where he was studying architecture at UCLA. It was as though he had stayed on just to baptize me with my Japanese nickname. “Don’t be too nice, all right?” he said as he got into the car with his father, who was driving him to Narita Airport. “My parents might decide to adopt you and boot me out.”
He shouldn’t have worried. I did my best to be polite and pleasant to the Nojimas, but something held me back from warming up to them. I couldn’t even bring myself to call them Otosan and Okaasan even though they immediately took to calling me with the familiar Aya-chan. I’ve seen what happens when people claim what isn’t theirs.
My life in Tokyo was an unbroken stretch of schoolwork once classes started. Though the school I went to was a SELHi and most of our classes were in English, I had to take pretty intensive lessons in Japanese with the other exchange students. Not that I minded—on the contrary, it was a nice way to keep my mind from wandering back into the past.
Sometimes, they took us on field trips to learn more about the local culture. The first place they took us to was this temple in Asakusa with a huge red lantern suspended in its gateway. But what I remembered most from the visit wasn’t the lantern but a bronze figure frozen in meditation in the courtyard, a lotus-shaped halo emanating from its head. I was so entranced by its serene expression that I didn’t notice one of the teachers come up behind me and was startled when she spoke.
“Kannon is the bodhisattva of mercy and compassion,” she said. She pointed to something bulb-shaped in its hand. “She’s holding the wish-fulfilling jewel.” I nodded politely, then squinted into my guidebook until she left to snap a photo for another student. Then I brushed my hand against the jewel and whispered a wish for my brother.
We couldn’t have been more different, my brother and me—I mean Rigel, my real blood brother back home in the Philippines. I could play nursery rhymes on the piano by the time I was three, when my mother bore him. I remember Mom sitting beside me on the piano bench, her round belly squashed against the keyboard, as I played “Mary Had a Little Lamb” or “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” for my yet unborn sibling. By the time I was twelve, I could play the piano plus the violin well enough for a local newspaper to feature me in its pages, calling me a prodigy.
But even as my “gift” flourished—that was how my parents and teachers called it—Rigel seemed to be caught in some sort of developmental time warp. He’d been slow to start walking and speaking as a kid, but my parents dismissed his condition as a natural outcome of being born and growing up in the shadow of a hyper-talented sibling. We became known in the school we both attended as Little-Miss-Mozart-and-her-moron-kid-brother. Poor boy, people would say, he got the short end of the stick—his big sister must have used up his share of IQ.
He was eight when my parents finally decided to take him to a specialist and he was diagnosed as intellectually disabled. I was in the waiting room with him when the psychologist spoke to our parents, and I overheard him ask them why they hadn’t had him checked sooner. I remember Mom bursting into tears as he continued. “I don’t mean to suggest that you’ve been anything but good parents, but perhaps your daughter’s gift, shall we say, drew away some of the attention that your son badly needed.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. I didn’t know why I was being blamed for my brother’s condition, when I adored him and never ever dreamed of hurting him. But though I could ignore the neighbors’ dumb talk about us being “the Lone Ranger and Tonto,” playing on the Spanish word for stupid, it was harder to dismiss the doctor’s words. I resented what they seemed to hint at—that I had robbed my brother of my parents’ affection.
From then on, I kept my distance from Rigel. I used to play the piano and violin for him, even trying to teach him how it was done, guiding his hands, his fingers, though he seemed to like it best just listening to me play. The music did something for him. He’d sit there on my bed or beside me on the piano bench and watch my hands, open-mouthed, and as I finished each piece, he would look up at me, blinking, then slowly break into a smile, as though he’d returned from some wonderful secret place. But I stopped doing that after he was diagnosed. Those first few weeks, he would sidle up to me as I practiced, waiting for me to play for him. But I steeled myself. Deep inside, I felt like the victim. This is what I get for being a good sister to you, I thought. After a while, he would leave, his eyes round and glistening.
Hiro came back at the end of June to spend his summer break in Tokyo. When our school was let out in mid-July, he decided to act as my tour guide for the month and a half still left before he had to go back to the States. He took me everywhere: To grab a bowl of ramen or a plate of curry rice at his favorite shops. To Harajuku, where he pointed out some of the most outlandishly dressed specimens, joking that I could get some fashion tips from them. Once, he even took me hiking to Mt. Takao on the outskirts of Tokyo, to get away from the muggy city.
Sometimes as we roamed about, just the two of us, I felt a vague warmth stir inside me—when he held my hand to show me how to use the chopsticks properly, or when we huddled beneath a single umbrella after being caught in an unexpected shower. The feeling never stayed long, though, always chased away by the thought of my brother. What was he doing back home, I’d wonder. Sometimes, I would resolve to make an excuse to stop going on those outings with Hiro, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. What’s the danger, I asked myself—he would be leaving by summer’s end anyway.
As the date for Hiro’s departure drew nearer, I racked my brain about h
ow to return his kindness. I didn’t have enough money to buy him a meal at a family restaurant or even Mos Burger. So one afternoon, I bought some onigiri and his favorite Mt. Rainier cold coffee from Family Mart and put them all in lovely ceramic dishes and cups on a lacquer tray, every one of them borrowed from his mother’s kitchen. We ate on the tatami floor of his room, which had been given over to me when I arrived in April. He said it was nicer than eating out.
He scanned his room, as if trying to reacquaint himself with it, and his eyes fell on my hegalong propped up against the wall at the foot of the bed. I had bought the native two-string lyre from a T’boli craftsman on the banks of Lake Sebu when I’d visited with my family back in happier days. It was my sole link to a past self I could barely remember, and wasn’t really sure I wanted to.
“What in the world is that?” Hiro asked, spotting the instrument leaning on the wall at the foot of the bed. He looked as perplexed as his parents had been when they saw the thing slung over my shoulder the day they met me at the airport.
I reached for the hegalong and handed it to him. “Go ahead, try it.”
He took it, cradled it on his lap like a guitar, then shook his head. “How do you play this thing anyway? It’s got only two strings?”
I gently relieved him of it, adjusted the strings, and started plucking a melody.
I stopped halfway through the song, suddenly remembering the promise I’d made myself before leaving Manila. How could I have forgotten?
He was staring at me, mouth half open, when I opened my eyes. He, too, seemed to have snapped back from a distant place only he knew about.
“Sugoi, Aya-chan! That was brilliant.”
His words made me flinch.
“What else can you play?”
“I used to play the piano and violin,” I said, biting my lip. Hoping to change the topic, I added, “Now the only keyboard I play is the computer’s.”
Thankfully, he didn’t probe. In fact, he seemed just as relieved as I was to change the topic. We’d moved on to talking about his life at UCLA when his cell phone rang. It was a friend of his—they were throwing an impromptu send-off dinner for him somewhere in Shinjuku.
“Ja, mata ne,”—see you later—he said, after thanking me for tea. He slipped out the door with the tray of used crockery, ignoring me when I said that I was the host so I should clear them. On the top step of the stairs, he paused and turned back to me. “Hey, why don’t you come along?”
I looked at his expectant face. I was about to say yes when the memory of my brother’s face floated up in my mind. What was I thinking? I hadn’t come here looking for fun or affection, but to suffer like an exile for what I’d done to him. “I have an essay to hand in on Monday,” I said, gently closing the door and leaning my head against it. For a moment, there was only silence, then the sound of footsteps, fading back to silence.
The following afternoon, he came knocking on my door. When I opened it, he strutted in, took the hegalong and slung it over his shoulder.
I watched him openmouthed, and he returned my gaze, brows raised. “What? We’re going for a ride.” He refused to say where, so I hopped on my bicycle and rode after him, my curiosity getting the better of me. We chained our bicycles at the edge of a park near Kichijoji Station. “Inokashira Koen,” a sign read. I followed Hiro as he trudged down the grassy path shaded by trees, my hegalong thumping behind him next to his backpack. I caught my breath when we emerged into a clearing, a beautiful lake teeming with boats in its midst.
My amazement grew as I looked around. Around the lake, young people in dreadlocks and Afros and all sorts of hats and hairdos had laid tie-dyed sarongs and woven blankets on the bare ground to display their artworks: postcard-size photographs and sketches, painted matchboxes, twisted-wire ornaments, beaded jewelry, dream catchers, and whatnot. Those who had nothing to peddle showed off their talents. There was someone juggling empty wine bottles, another blowing on a didgeridoo, someone else thumping a tabla, and another doing pantomime. I felt my heart seize up, looking at them.
Hiro seemed to read my mind. “They’re only here from late spring until early autumn, then they hibernate. When I heard you play your . . . that two-stringed thing, I told myself I should take you here. But first we must pay our respects to the guardian of this place.”
He took my hand and led me to the other side of the lake, where a temple, much smaller than the one in Asakusa, stood nestled among the trees. We stood in front of the one-floor wood building, painted a bright red. Hiro rang the bell that hung from its eaves and pressed his hands together, bowing low. I did the same, saying as I straightened up, “Kannon.”
“Close enough.” Hiro nodded. “It’s Benzaiten, the goddess of music, learning, and love.”
I peered through the doorway of the temple, and sure enough, the deity inside, whom I could barely make out in the shadows, held what looked like a lute instead of the bulb-shaped jewel.
“Come, we have her blessing now. I’ve picked the perfect spot for you.” He took my hand and, half running, pulled me toward a spot by the lake where the traffic of pedestrians seemed thickest. Beneath a gnarled old tree, in a gap between two rugs covered by trinkets for sale, was a cardboard sign with the word “Reserved” scrawled on it. Hiro took it, folded it in half, and crammed it into his backpack.
“Go on, sit down,” he said, waving me toward the railing that bordered the lake, which the other performers used as a perch. He eased the hegalong from his shoulder and held it out to me like a bouquet. “It’s time the world gets to know your music.”
I stood stock-still beside him, the blood draining from my face. “No, wait, Hiro. I can’t do it, I’m sorry.” I looked around me, casting about for an excuse. “The lake looks so pretty—why don’t we go for a boat ride?” I turned on my heels and headed for the pier. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw him standing on the spot he’d saved for me, frowning. I waved at him and made a rowing gesture, but he merely shook his head and backed away until he was leaning against the railing. I suddenly felt angry. How dare he put me on the spot? I never asked him to bring me to this place. But I felt sad, too, knowing that something in our friendship had splintered that afternoon. I tried to catch his eye one more time, but he was gazing down at his hands. I veered away from the lake toward the spot where we had left our bicycles and pedaled away as my tears began falling.
I didn’t hear him come back that night. When I came down in my school uniform the next morning, he was waiting on the landing, holding the hegalong. “Sorry about yesterday. It was stupid of me to take you there and expect you to play just like that.” He was gone before I could muster an answer, leaving the instrument leaning against the banister. All day at school I worried over what to say to him when I saw him that evening. But he wasn’t there when I got home. He had gone with his mother to say good-bye to his grandmother in Chiba. I stayed up for as long as possible, but I must have fallen asleep, because when I woke up, the sun was up and I knew from the silence that he was gone. I ran downstairs and sure enough Mrs. Nojima was alone in the kitchen. “Ah, ohayo gozaimasu,” she said. “Hiro left for the airport with his dad. He didn’t want to wake you up to say good-bye.”
For the first time since I arrived, I lied to Mrs. Nojima and told her that I wasn’t feeling well. My swollen red eyes convinced her. It was true though—I felt terrible. That was the end of it, I thought. But weeks later, he sent me a rambling e-mail. I didn’t mean to be rude that afternoon at the lake, it started. It has a story, that lake. They say Benzaiten placed a curse on it so that happy couples who go boating on it would end up parting. He confided then that his ex-girlfriend used to play the shamisen in that park every Sunday. He would always go with her, swelling with pride as people gathered around and applauded her, some of them even asking if she was a celebrity. Once, when she finished playing, she told him she wanted to go for a ride on the lake. It was there, on a swan-shaped boat that she broke up with him. When I first heard you play, I felt as
if she’d returned. That afternoon at the park, I wanted you to be her.
I sat in front of the computer, reading his words over and over. I felt a pang, wondering if he’d been so nice to me only because I reminded him of his ex. But hadn’t he gone out of his way to spend time with me even before he heard me play? I didn’t know what to say in reply to his e-mail. I knew only that the least I could do in return for his trusting me enough to tell me what he had told me, was to explain why I had refused to play that day, even though it was possible that he would end up hating me after he heard what I had to say. I wrote him a long e-mail, telling him everything about my brother and what I had done to him. There was no answer from him for some time, and I thought that my worst fear—that he wouldn’t want anything more to do with me after hearing my confession—had been confirmed. But just when I was ready to give up waiting for his e-mail, his reply came: It’s not only the lake that’s cursed. You and I, we too, are under curses—the kind that are hardest to break, because we placed them on ourselves. Perhaps, life threw us together to help each other break them.
A curse. I had never thought of it as such, but I suppose he’s right that I had let that episode of my past take hold of me like a curse.
When it happened I was a freshman in the arts high school I went to on the slopes of Mt. Makiling. Every year, we were supposed to put up a concert for the school’s patrons and our parents. Determined to make an impression, I decided to play Paganini’s “Caprice No. 24” on the violin, a difficult piece. I had overheard from my teachers that the heads of the two conservatories of music in the country would be in the audience and that the media would be covering the event.
A week before the concert, Mom came up to my room and sat on the edge of my bed as I polished my violin. “Listen, Rain. You know your dad and I both want to be there next Sunday, but since you don’t want your brother to come along—”
I didn’t even let her finish. “How often does this happen, Mom, once a year? I don’t even get to see you and Dad anymore except on weekends. And you know what it’s like when people see Rigel—they say hurtful things and it would just spoil the whole evening for us all.”
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