Tosa-Shimizu

The sky above Tosa-Shimizu had been rinsed almost weightless.

It was the blue of old denim after too many washings, when every darker trace has bled away into the water and what remains seems less like a color than light itself. Old instant photographs sometimes tried to imitate it. They never quite could. Photographs aged. Dust settled. Sunlight ate slowly into their colors.

That sky did not.

This is where I was born, before Tokyo.

My parents’ restaurant still faces the sea. By now, the salt wind and years of uninterrupted sunlight have peeled most of the old sign from above the entrance. The gaps around the door are stuffed with an insulating foam that must have been fashionable sometime in the last century. Each time the door opens, another invisible piece crumbles away. Rust has spread orange and ochre between the metal frame and the glass, while sand, vapor, and smoke have spent decades composing stains no amount of scrubbing can remove.

Cracks run through the awning.

If I stand beneath it and look through the places where the light gets in, I can still see the same coast I remember.

I have asked my parents more than once to leave it behind.

My husband and I spent years saving for our house in Kasukabe, outside Tokyo. There are trains everywhere there. A new Shinkansen station was built only a few kilometers away. The shopping streets are crowded with stores, and on the way home you can buy dinner beneath the overlapping calls of shopkeepers while the evening sun devours every color except orange and red.

My parents could stay with us whenever they liked.

They could put down the knives and dishcloths for a few days, sit on the tatami, and eat the food from home that I can never seem to find anywhere in the city.

They always refuse.

The explanation changes slightly each time. The answer does not.

So every visit home becomes another kind of working day.

That evening, the list on my phone had already spilled onto a second screen. I sat in what used to be my childhood bedroom, now called the guest room, and pressed the final key on an old laptop whose paint had worn away to metallic gray.

When I closed it, I looked left without thinking.

Beyond the polished window was a world fifteen years old.

Moonlight lay broken across the black surface of the sea. The trees, the bamboo grove, and the rocks along the shore had surrendered their separate outlines and joined into a single uneven curtain of darkness.

And yet I knew where everything was.

Memory supplied the missing colors.

The lamp beside me cast its electrical yellow across the room. For an instant it overlapped perfectly with another light, preserved somewhere on the film inside my head.

I was seventeen again.

Somewhere in the distance, the curfew bell began to ring.

I closed my eyes.

2006

At Cape Ashizuri, stone cliffs and coarse sand guarded the only place where an unfamiliar boat might come ashore.

Most people who lived there belonged either to fishing families that had depended upon the water for generations, or to families who had come precisely because there was nowhere farther to go. They buried their roots deep in the coast and, when the time came, placed the shovel into the damp hands of their children.

Turn your back to the noon sun on the beach and you would find the bamboo grove.

Its leaves overlapped so densely that daylight seemed an intrusion they had collectively agreed to reject. Yet through irregular openings between the stalks, pieces of the cliff and shore remained perfectly visible.

At the far end of that grove stood the Isumi house.

For years, my clearest memory of Mr. Isumi was not his face.

It was his shoes.

Whenever I missed school to visit the clinic, he was the thin man in the immaculate white coat who measured me. The corners of his wooden desk shone from repeated waxing, though no amount of polish could disguise the shallow depression worn into its surface.

Below it were those shoes.

Black. Carefully polished. Deeply creased.

Drops of shoe polish sometimes remained where the leather met the sole. A loose thread hung near one ankle beside the frayed edge of his sock. The nameplate pinned to his chest had been clouded by years of dust carried inland from the sea. Only when the light struck it directly could I make out the characters of his name.

Isumi.

That man, together with the tall figure in a black school uniform I saw every day, was almost everything I knew about the family.

At dinner, my mother recited the day’s encounter with Mrs. Isumi as faithfully as though it were part of the evening news.

“Mrs. Isumi came by at two-twenty today. She’d just bought mackerel from one of the fishermen and asked me to take care of the bones. I told her she really didn’t have to bring us a whole fish every time. And look at this, she left another tip…”

She continued talking while rapidly pushing rice into her mouth.

Only then did I realize I had been holding my breath.

I finished what remained of my miso soup, braced one hand against the tatami, and stood.

“I’m finished.”

I stretched the final syllable until I reached my room. As the door closed behind me, my mother’s voice stopped neatly on the other side.

When I was younger, I had once asked her what Mrs. Isumi looked like.

“Rich,” she had answered through a mouthful of food.

My father had made a small sound into his drink.

I heard that too.

The Isumi name fared no better at school.

Whenever Mr. Kimura called

Susuki Isumi’s name during attendance, someone inevitably followed it with the same old title.

The fallen aristocrat.

Every naked gaze in the classroom would turn toward the boy whose face seemed to have been granted better light than everyone else’s. Whatever reaction people hoped for disappeared beneath the hair falling across his forehead.

By evening, when the shoe lockers stood in shadow, Susuki would open his and take out another envelope.

Then another.

Behind him came laughter, teasing, the excited noise of other people’s adolescent secrets.

I usually stood somewhere behind the crowd, leaning near the rooftop door.

The sea air would reach me first.

Salt entered my nose, my eyes watered, and through the fractured image left by tears I watched one confession after another meet its end.

Once a month, our classroom changed seats.

Those mornings stored more whispered prayers and private disappointments than any shrine in town.

I picked up my already-zipped schoolbag and searched the seating chart trembling against the blackboard. I had been muttering for a place near the left corner.

Instead, when I sat down, I found myself facing the last window in the room, the one that was almost always locked.

Sunlight touched my body and whatever strength remained in it surrendered. I lowered my head into the crook of my arm.

The lesson continued above me without pause.

It was not until I heard Mr. Kimura say, “Miss Minaguchi,” that I forced my eyes open and stood.

That was when I noticed Susuki beside me.

There was a thin sheen of moisture over his eyes.

I had seen the same fragile transparency in my parents’ reddened eyes before tears formed. In them, however, it always gathered beneath the lashes, escaped at the corners, and fell hot against skin browned by years of sun.

Susuki’s did not.

I looked longer than I should have.

Fine hairs caught the light along his nose. His brow cast his eyes deeper into shadow. The hollow beneath his cheekbone ran toward the bridge of his nose and disappeared beside a faint dimple.

His lips were the only real color on him.

Then my gaze fell to the breast pocket of his uniform.

Someone had repaired it with black thread, but not quite the right black. The stitching was meant to hide the pale lining beneath the fabric. In the sunlight, it did exactly the opposite.

His shoes had been polished too.

At the seam between leather and sole, only the faintest dark stain remained.

Just like his father’s.

I finally looked away.

Summer evenings were selfish things. They kept the daylight for as long as possible, then seemed to take everyone’s sight at once.

At the shoe lockers, I picked up my indoor shoes and opened the wooden compartment engraved with my name.

Behind me, an envelope fell.

A soft sound against wood.

Susuki again.

I stepped down onto the concrete outside, expecting the last warmth of the sun to reach me through the window beside the entrance.

Instead there was shadow.

I turned.

For a moment, the image of Susuki from that afternoon arrived before the person himself did. Then I blinked and saw only his back growing smaller in the distance.

He crossed the beach toward the bamboo grove.

The narrow spaces between the leaves swallowed him easily.

I stood there until the sea breeze lifted the hair at my temples. Then I turned toward the only restaurant in our part of town.

The wind reached the bell before I did.

When I slid open the wooden door, my mother’s footsteps came through the steam rising above the dining tables.

“What are you standing there for? Dinner’s ready.”

I left my bag beside the bed and returned to kneel at the table.

Mother handed bowls of rice to my father and me, and with them began the story of her day.

But this time Mrs. Isumi’s name did not appear where I expected it.

Instead, Mother looked at me.

“You’re getting a new classmate.”

I forgot to swallow.

A grain of rice caught somewhere between my throat and nose, forcing the reaction my body had neglected.

“Why are you so excited?”

She had already turned toward my father.

“Mrs. Isumi heard it from Mr. Fujiwara, the fish seller. Apparently that passenger boat nobody recognized came in this afternoon. A middle-aged man got off wearing sunglasses, and there was a girl behind him, seventeen or eighteen maybe. She was wearing the same sailor uniform as Sachiko’s school. They said she sounded like she was from Kanto. And Yamada from the property office is delighted. Someone finally rented that two-bedroom place right on the water. Six months! Imagine choosing that house. It doesn’t even have a proper wall around it…”

I put down my empty bowl and disappeared into the shadow of my bedroom doorway, leaving the rest of her story behind me.

At my desk, I opened my mathematics book.

My pen stopped at the first problem.

Outside the window, at the far edge of the beach, a yellow light had appeared inside the dark shape of a house.

Beyond it, moonlight gathered on the water until the two lights seemed to belong to the same place.

For the first time, I could see where the sea ended inside the frame of my window.

I turned away.

Before the curfew bell finished ringing, I closed my eyes.