“No. Not yet.”
The sun had sunk well past their horizon of sight before Junko and her father turned around to head home. It had been a disappointing day—many of the paths were impossible to cross because of the rains the night before, and they hadn’t pushed very far into the forest. Her father’s feet fell heavily on the path behind her. Yet despite the mud caked on her jeans and sneakers, Junko was in a surprisingly good mood. Even though her dad often annoyed her, and was always telling corny jokes around her friends, he had chosen her over her elder brothers to carry on their family’s tradition of making drums. When Junko was still in preschool her brothers had moved away to find jobs and start families in the city. Junko felt she hardly knew them anymore. They rarely visited. Her father said it was just as well. They didn’t have any interest in old traditions and had often complained of feeling trapped by the mountains around the house. Junko knew better. It helped that she had inherited her grandfather’s sensitive ear and had a knack for craftsmanship. They were pretty isolated, yes, but the mountains hugged them from all sides, filled with life and creative possibility.
She took the lead, humming the tanuki song under her breath as she picked her way back down the mountain. “Poko pon-pon-pon . . .” It was hopelessly stuck in her head.
“Dad, what’s that?” Junko stopped where she stood, and in a few steps her father caught up with her from behind. Off the side of the path stretched a deep, jagged chasm. The freshly upturned earth glistened with the disappearing tails of earthworms as Junko stepped off of the path and onto the firmest edge her feet could find.
Her father stooped forward and pointed down.
“Wow . . .”
At the foot of the chasm, its body sunk more than a few feet into the earth and still tipping forward, was a keyaki tree of such great proportions that Junko almost lost her footing. Its thick, tangled roots hung suspended from the base of its trunk, dirt clods still clinging to the tips. Her father slid down alongside the fallen tree, a hand on its weathered trunk.
“How did this happen?” She called down to him, and reached out to one of the roots. It was oddly warm to the touch.
“Too top-heavy, I guess. This tree is old.” He patted the closest bough.
Lush lichen and tree moss grew along its upper branches, many of which had the girth of a respectably large drum on their own. Her father stretched his arms around the base of the trunk in an attempt to gauge its diameter. Even sunk into the mud, the tree dwarfed him. Junko’s laughter rang through the surrounding trees.
“Interesting isn’t it?” She slid down to where he stood and leaned on his shoulder.
“What’s that?”
“Just when you were getting frustrated . . .”
He smiled.
In the days that followed, the town was abuzz with talk of the monster keyaki up in the hills behind Junko’s house. It was no easy feat releasing the tree from its muddy bed, and her father had to call in several favors from the men in town. They carted it down in pieces, first the upper branches and roots (which the men accepted as informal compensation for their help, since keyaki was so beautiful and rare) and finally the trunk. Night had fallen on the third day by the time Junko and her father at last sat down at the table, muddy and a bit bruised. Her father pulled out two small cups and poured them to the brim with clear sweet-potato liquor. As if on cue, her mother swept past and plucked up the cup closest to Junko, who opened her mouth to complain.
“I haven’t made a drum this big since . . . well, before you were born.” Her father raised his little cup. “To your first odaiko.”
Shaping the trunk of a solid, aged tree was, traditionally, young men’s work. Though her father had begun to teach her the craft of carving and planing, she fell back to watch as he wrestled to keep his tools steady. The outermost edge of the tree dropped easily from the blade as he circled the trunk. As his hands followed the curve of the tree’s age lines—she tried to count them from the center, but her eyes blurred after two hundred—slivers of wood fell to the floor in thin curls. Every few minutes the plane would catch at a quick change in the direction of the grain. Beneath each layered cut lay a more exquisitely grained surface than the one above, down and down until his forearms bulged with the effort of guiding the plane and his forehead beaded with perspiration and dust. Only when the drum curved in near-perfect alignment, both sides sloping uniformly away from him, did her father stop to wipe his face.
“Kirei ja nai ka . . .”—isn’t it beautiful? He sighed, and slouched back to join her.
They stood for a moment in silence, eyeing what had once been a living relic of bygone days up in the misty mountains. Now it sagged gently on its supports, rough-hewn and raw. The emptiness that filled her ears pressed in excitedly, mingled with her heartbeat, and though neither of them spoke she could almost hear a faint hum. Then, loudly, “Can you hear that, Dad?”
But he had already turned away and was carefully replacing his tools in their cloth cases.
The next morning they pulled the lock off of the workshop door to find the drum squarely in the center of the room, as they had left it the night before. Yet its body, those streams and whorls of grain that had seemed so stark under artificial light, gleamed in the light of day. Had her father smoothed down the rough spots, rubbed it over with fine-grain sandpaper after she had left the shop? It was strange.
Her father didn’t see, or perhaps just didn’t acknowledge her puzzled eyes as they glanced back and forth from him to the drum shell. She wondered if he, too, didn’t look a little sprightlier than he had just hours before. He handed her a small brush and a recycled candy tin filled with varnish, and they began to paint the shell in quick, broad strokes. As they worked, the varnish bloomed off of their brushes to fill in the seams of naked wood. Soon the entire body was covered, and after only one coat it shone with the same deep brilliance as the smaller, finished drums that lined the workshop. She peeked up from the bottom edge that she had been worrying with her brush and looked at the shell in astonishment. Her father chuckled and clapped her on the back.
“You see how it takes to the varnish? Incredible.”
On they worked, late into that night and early again the next morning. The drum almost seemed to build itself; the moment they finished one step, the next step was under way. Her mother phoned the head priest at the shrine to say that, in all likelihood, the drum would be finished at least a week ahead of schedule.
Junko’s father sat back in the workshop, checking the hundreds of tacks that would be needed to nail the drumhead to the body. Since an entire cowhide was needed to accommodate the wide mouth of the drum, they chose a hide that needed only a little trimming at its edges. At this stage, Junko’s father left it to her; she had finished practically all of the other drums in the workshop. These days it was on account of her keen ear that their drums were still sought after.
Being careful not to scratch the delicate surface, Junko tapped her fingers along the perimeter of the damp rawhide—pon, pon, pon—and bent low, listening for any shifts of tone or resonance. As she pulled away, she saw—or was it a trick of the light?—something whipping away suddenly in the shining varnish. Among the whorls of wood grain, she thought she could just make out the tip of a thick, bushy tail, before it vanished. She glanced over at her father, bent over the pail of domed tacks. A glittering smile tugged gently at the corners of his tired eyes.
That night as she lay in bed, below the lilting pon-poko-pon and creaking ten ten tekke tekke that swirled through the gusty air in the mountains beyond their house, Junko could distinguish the unmistakably deep, resounding don of a centuries-old drum.
Paper Lanterns
by Jennifer Fumiko Cahill
Michelle had been dead for three months and six days, and she still wouldn’t shut up. Right when I woke up, there was always a moment before I remembered it had happened, like the weightless half-second on a swing just before gravity reaches up and yanks you backward and down in a tu
nnel of rushing air. Right then, just as I started to feel that pull, remembering she was gone, Michelle would start.
—Seriously, is Japan always like this in the summer? Because this is like the jungle. I think I’m flashing back to Nam. I think I was in a tiger cage.
—What, in a past life? You’d break in like a minute. You’d sell out your country for air conditioning.
—Shut up. You’d break for spring rolls. Or pad thai.
—Pad thai isn’t Vietnamese.
—Are you sure?
—It has the word “thai” in it.
I puffed out a laugh into the tatami mat. Michelle’s laugh was a light snort when nobody else was around, like a baby pig’s. I inched my face off the futon to touch my cheek to the cool weave. The suitcases were pushed into the corner of the room, and Mom’s futon was already put away. I could hear her downstairs, trying to light the gas stove and cursing in a rough whisper.
—Mina, how can your mom want fire when it’s this hot?
—She’s a tea junkie. It’s a disease.
From the hot square of sun on the mat, I guessed it was maybe ten o’clock. Mom would have normally gotten me up hours ago to tough out the jet lag, but a week into our annual trip to my grandparents’ house she was still letting me sleep in. It took a minute, but I remembered it was Friday here, and we were driving out to clean the family graves before the Obon festival in town.
Mom slid the door open. She had on a T-shirt and her hair was knotted up high, the ends shooting out like sparks. At home she always had her face done, her hair all smoothed down like a black curtain for work. Coming to her parents’ house was the only time she looked like this, like the girl she was in Obaasan’s cellophane-covered albums.
“Ohayo, honey. How you doing? You want breakfast?”
“Okay. And yes.” I smiled and tried not to look at her as she kneeled down and touched my hair. Her worry face made my chest shrink.
“It’s good to be here, right?” she asked. “I just thought it would be good to get away. And we were planning it already, so . . .”
“Yeah, of course.” It was, actually. There was no weird curiosity here. When people in this town stared, it was because my light hair and my halting Japanese gave me away as haafu, mixed, and a foreigner, not because my best friend crashed her car and died in a stupid high school cliché. Nobody here was telling me how “things happen for a reason.” And I knew my classmates back home were relieved not to have me drifting through their backyard parties and trips to the movies all quiet, like I had a stone in my mouth, ruining the summer you’re supposed to have when you’re sixteen. The truth was, they were handling it. Now that she was gone, everybody was always telling stories about Shell, something funny she said, or some shared moment, to keep her alive, like our school counselor Mr. Rhodes had suggested. And it was working in a way, building a group memory bank, their separate versions of her growing and evolving. I was the one who became a ghost, fixed and silent, trapped on this side.
After breakfast, Mom sent me out to the garden with cold tea and a colander for edamame. Ojiisan and Obaasan were working in separate plant beds, stooping and plucking almost in sync. Behind the stepped beds, the woods were like a mirage of shade. The trees were a heavy apple-green, and beneath them it was as dark as early evening. As still as the forest looked, it rang with thousands of unseen cicadas. In English class we read a haiku about them, and the writer said their sound was “drilling into the rock.” I felt like he nailed that one, but nobody in class was that impressed. You had to hear that sound to believe it. Sometimes it was so loud it felt like it was coming from inside your head. Shell would have said it was insane. She would have pointed at her ears and mouthed, I can’t hear a word you’re saying.
“Do-o-mo!” Obaasan took a big gulp with her eyes squeezed shut. Then she dumped an apron-ful of fuzzy soybeans into the colander and patted my arm. Her face was browned like the top of a pound cake, and she had rivers of creases around her eyes, despite her giant visor. Still, she didn’t look old to me, just sunned. She was a photo negative of my freakishly pale mom, and Obaasan’s wrinkles were probably the reason Mom slathered herself in sunscreen even on rainy days. She used the zinc-y stuff from Japan that made her look even whiter, and I sometimes called her “the Phantom.”
“Atsui!” Obaasan gasped, and she took another drink.
Hot. I knew that one. Sometimes we could have little conversations without Mom as a translator, as long as we kept to weather and food. Even in Japanese, though, Ojiisan said little, and mostly he just smiled at me and gestured. Everyone said I spoke when I was little, that I babbled away in Japanese, and it was strange to imagine that tiny version of me chatting with my grandparents, pointing at insects and fruit, naming them as I went. Every year I’d wished I hadn’t lost it, but this time it was kind of a relief.
In the kitchen, the fan was on and the lights were off. Mom took the colander from me gently and ran water over the edamame in the sink. She did everything carefully now, and always with the worry face. At the funeral, I just concentrated on her brooch, a little art deco arrow on her lapel. Watching Michelle’s mother, Mrs. Frye, was easier. She seemed not to notice me at all. She was still and far away, like someone at the bottom of a frozen pond. Mr. Frye hugged me hard and cried when he smelled my hair, the same shampoo Shell used. I felt stupid for washing it at all, for doing something so vain on a day like that.
—Don’t worry about it. Can’t come to my funeral with skanky hair.
—Why, you think I might meet somebody?
—Not with a snotty nose.
I stifled a giggle with a crumpled tissue and caught a look from the woman in the pew in front of me.
—Um, can you please keep it down, this is a funeral, loser.
—Yeah, I know, I’m trying to mourn, thanks.
—Shut up and mourn then, snot girl.
—You shut up, dead girl.
Her snort made me shake in silent laughter, like it had in the same church months before for her cousin’s ridiculous wedding with the rhyming vows. That day at the funeral was the first time we talked like that.
Mom shook the beans in the colander and dumped them into the pot of boiling water on the stove. Last time she scolded Obaasan for using aluminum pots because they gave you dementia, but now she didn’t seem to care. Behind her, the table was already filling up with food for the trip to the cemetery. There was a pile of fried chicken laid out on paper towels, potato salad, and tightly packed rice balls. I could tell from the perfect rounded triangles that Obaasan must have made them. We used to marvel at how she could toss the steaming rice between her palms—it was like watching someone walk over hot coals.
“Do you want to talk, honey? To me? Or to somebody, you know, maybe somebody else?”
“I’m okay.” One bean was clinging to the colander, and I picked it up. The fuzz was so fine, but sharp. It reminded me of a Venus flytrap we had at school in third grade. I’d fed it a little hamburger and its mouth had closed up, brushing my fingers. “Maybe I’ll want to talk. Later.”
“You can call Amy. I don’t mind paying the long distance.” Mom’s worry face was back. “You girls used to talk, oh my God, for hours every day, about what I have no idea. I mean you just came from school all day together and you’re still talking, but . . .” She waved her tiny hand.
“That was with Michelle, Mom.”
“I know. It’s just not, you know . . .” She smiled hard. “Maybe you should call Amy.”
I dropped the bean into the water. “Maybe I will.” I knew I wouldn’t. The last time we spoke on the phone, I just lay on the couch mystified as she told me about her crush on her cousin’s friend and her plans to go see colleges upstate. All I could think about was how every single thing that happened from now on was something Shell was going to miss. But I couldn’t say that to Amy, not when she sounded so happy talking about dorms and sororities that no way would she ever pledge. I could have told Shell. There was n
othing I couldn’t tell her. I tried to fill the pauses in the conversation, to swoon with her at the possibilities, but it was hopeless. It was as hard as talking to my grandparents, with the vocabulary I needed beyond my reach, forgotten.
“So we’re going to the cemetery around lunchtime, okay?”
“Okay. I’m gonna bike to the store. Do you need anything?”
Mom shook her head. “Be careful.” Now it was her not looking at me.
“Yeah, I know.”
It was about a mile of pitted dirt road to the little general store, but mostly under the shade in a tunnel of tall trees. If I pedaled hard and let the air blow through my arms, it would have felt like flying. But my legs were heavy and weak. I hadn’t gotten any exercise in months. There were no more walks to Michelle’s house, and even in the last few weeks of gym class, I just sat on the bleachers or at the edge of the field while everybody else did their drills and counted off into teams. I didn’t have a note or anything, but Coach Volkman cut us both a break and didn’t say anything. I was officially flabby, and still a little chubby, which seemed unfair to me, since depressed girls in movies always seemed to get thinner, and sort of chic in a sad-French-girl way, with dark eyeliner and thin gray sweaters falling from their pointy little shoulders.
—Maybe you should talk to somebody. Because this is a little crazy.
—I am talking to somebody. I’m talking to you. Just not out loud.
—Okay. So much crazier. Like, bag-lady-putting-on-imaginary-makeup-at-the-bus-stop crazy.
—It’s not. Because I know.
That was true. I never asked her about death, and I still didn’t totally buy the afterlife. I never turned to see her, even the first time. It was like talking on the phone, or during a movie when you’re both watching the screen and passing popcorn back and forth without looking. Only her voice was inside, like headphones turned way down, smaller but clearer than the outside world.
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