The forgotten Hana

There is a part of Tokyo that the travel books do not mention.

Not the Tokyo of lanterns and cherry blossoms, not the Tokyo of towers made of light, not the Tokyo where the trains arrive at the exact second they are promised and the streets are swept clean before the city opens its eyes each morning. That Tokyo exists. It is real and it is bright and it belongs to people who have somewhere to be.

But there is another Tokyo.

It lives in the spaces between — between the wide avenues and the narrow alleys, between the department stores and the vending machines that glow their tired fluorescent glow at three in the morning as if they too have forgotten how to sleep. It lives in the buildings that were built quickly and cheaply in an era when quickly and cheaply was enough, buildings that have since grown grey and water-stained, their walls developing the particular texture of things that have been rained on too many times to remember what dry felt like.

This Tokyo does not ask to be noticed. It has long since stopped expecting to be.

It is here, in the Adachi ward, in a neighborhood of narrow streets barely wide enough for a single car to pass without holding its breath, that our story begins.

The streets here have a smell — rain and rust and the faint ghost of something frying in oil somewhere above, always somewhere above, the smells drifting down from half-open windows the way secrets drift, slowly and without permission. Laundry lines stretch between windows even now, in the grey weeks of the rainy season, the clothes hanging damp and patient, waiting for a sun that keeps forgetting to come. The vending machines on the corners sell hot coffee and cold tea and neither has ever been asked its opinion on the matter. The trains pass in the distance — their sound arriving a few seconds after the vibration, like thunder following lightning — and they do not stop here. They never stop here. They are going somewhere else, and they are in a hurry, and the neighborhood watches them go with the expression of someone who has been not-invited to the same party enough times to have stopped dressing up.

It is the fourteenth day of the rainy season.

Or perhaps the fifteenth. The rain has stopped counting, and so have the people who live beneath it.

In a building on a street with no remarkable name, on the fourth floor where the elevator has not worked since a winter three years ago that nobody remembers fondly, there is an apartment. It is the kind of apartment that real estate listings would describe as compact and conveniently located and other such phrases that are technically true in the way that calling a wound interesting is technically true. Two rooms, if you are generous with the word. Walls that have heard everything and kept it all, the way walls do — silently, and without mercy. A window in the main room that faces another building's wall, close enough that on clear days, on the rare clear days, you can see the water stains on that wall's surface like a map of somewhere no one wants to go.

The tatami in the smaller room is old. It has developed, over the years, a softness in one corner that is not the good kind of softness.

The kitchen is a counter and a two-burner stove and a refrigerator that hums a single low note through the night like a monk who has forgotten what he was praying for.

This is the apartment.

Now let us meet the people inside it.

---

Her name is Aoki Haruka, and she is thirty-one years old, and she is tired in a way that sleep has long since stopped being able to touch.

She was not always from this city. She came from a town further north — a town so small it existed mostly as a name on a map that no one unfolded anymore, a town of rice fields and grey skies and the particular silence of places that have been slowly emptying of young people for thirty years. She came to Tokyo at seventeen with a single bag and the cultivated blankness of a girl who had learned early that wanting things too visibly was an invitation for them to be taken away.

She had been nine years old when she understood that the world was not arranged for her comfort.

Her father — she does not think of him often, which is itself a kind of thinking of him — had stood on a chair in the kitchen of that small northern house on a Tuesday in October, when the rice fields were golden and the sky was the particular blue that only exists in autumn, as if the world had decided to be beautiful on the worst possible day. He had made a decision that he did not consult anyone else about. Her mother had found him. Haruka had been told to wait outside. She had waited outside and looked at the golden fields and listened to the sound her mother made, and she had filed it away into the part of herself she was already, at nine years old, learning to lock.

Her mother after that had worked. The kind of work that is done at night and not spoken about in daylight. Haruka had taken over the household — the washing and the cooking and the sweeping, nine years old and already running a home because someone had to, because life does not pause for grief, because the rice still needed to be rinsed regardless of what has happened to the man of the house.

She does not blame her mother. She has decided not to. She keeps this decision renewed each year the way you renew a lease on an apartment you are not sure you want but cannot afford to leave.

Now she works at a small beauty salon twenty minutes away by bicycle, doing hair and makeup for women who sit in her chair and look at themselves in the mirror and sometimes sigh and sometimes smile and never once think about who is holding the brush. She is good at her work. Her hands are steady. Her face, when she is working, is the careful neutral of a professional — pleasant, present, and utterly elsewhere. She is good at heart, but she have a very bad temper.

She comes home smelling of hair products and the secondhand cigarette smoke of clients and something chemical and sweet that clings to her uniform no matter how many times it is washed. She comes home and the apartment is what it is, and Kenji is what he is, and she cooks if there is something to cook and does not if there isn't, and she sleeps and wakes and bicycles back to the salon and does it all again.

She does not think about whether this is a life. Thinking about it would not change it.

---

His name is Aoki Kenji, and he is forty-three years old, and he was going to be something.

This is important to understand about him — not as an excuse, because there are no excuses, but as context, the way you note the weather on the day of an accident not because the weather is to blame but because it is part of the picture. He was going to be something. His family had money, the quiet old kind of money that does not need to announce itself, and they had expectations, and they had pressed both the money and the expectations onto Kenji from the time he was old enough to sit at a dinner table without making a scene.

What they had not given him was the ability to bear the weight of either.

He had been a pretty child, then a handsome young man, then someone who was still coasting on the memory of being a handsome young man long after the coasting should have stopped. He had drunk his first beer at fourteen because it was there and because nobody said it shouldn't be. He had drunk his second and third and fourth because they were also there, and because the feeling they produced was the first feeling he'd ever had that belonged entirely to him and not to his family's blueprint.

By twenty he was a problem his family was managing. By thirty he was a problem that had exhausted their ability to manage. By thirty-five the money was gone — not dramatically, not in one catastrophic moment, but in the way water disappears from a cracked cup, slowly and then all at once — and Kenji was left with his posture and his pride and very little else.

He had met Haruka in a bar. He had been drunk. She had been at the end of a long shift, drinking alone in the particular way of people who are not there to be found. He had sat beside her. She had not moved away. In the morning they had looked at each other with the careful assessment of two people taking inventory of a difficult situation, and something in the accounting had come out, if not positive, then at least even.

That was seven years ago.

Now he drinks cheap canned beer mostly, sometimes something stronger when the pachinko has been good, sometimes something stronger when it has been bad. He does not work consistently. He fills the apartment with smoke and the sound of the television and the specific heaviness of a man who has given up in a way he would never describe as giving up.

He and Haruka do not love each other. They may have, once, in some provisional and exhausted way. Now they occupy the same space the way two weather systems occupy the same sky — not by choice, and with occasional violence.

---

And then there is Aoki Miko.

She is six years old.

She has her mother's dark eyes and her father's stubbornness and hair that has grown too long because no one has thought to cut it, falling past her shoulders in a way that would be charming if anyone was looking. She is small for her age — smaller than her classmates, smaller than the desks at school seem designed for, small in the particular way of children who have been, without anyone deciding this, quietly rationed. Not enough sleep. Not always enough food. Enough, just barely enough, to keep going.

She does not know she is small. She has no reliable reference point for what she should be.

What she knows is this: the gap between the wardrobe and the wall in the smaller room is exactly wide enough for her, and she fits there perfectly, and nothing can come at her from behind when she is in it. She knows that the rain on the metal balcony railing makes a sound like someone tapping impatiently, and if she listens to it long enough it becomes almost like music. She knows that if she is very quiet, very still, she sometimes becomes invisible — and invisible is safe, and safe is the thing she is always, quietly, working toward.

She knows one other thing, and she keeps it in the very center of herself, pressed there like a flower between the pages of a book.

Somewhere in this city, in a hospital she has visited twice and could not find again on her own, her grandmother is sick. Her grandmother, whose name is Hana —flower — who smells of clean soap and something warm that Miko has no word for. Who used to braid Miko's hair and call her my little moon.

Who took care of her for the first years of her life while her parents were whatever her parents were being. Who two and a half years ago became too sick to keep her, who had to send her back, who wept at the bus stop in a way that Miko had never seen a grown person weep and has not forgotten.

She is sick. But she is going to get better.

Miko is certain of this. She is six years old and she is certain with the whole unguarded weight of her, the way only children can be certain — with no room left inside the certainty for doubt, because doubt has nowhere to stand when hope has taken up all the space.

Grandmother Hana is going to get better. She is going to come back. And when she does, everything will be different.

Miko holds this and keeps it warm, the way you cup your hands around a small flame in the wind.

Outside, the rain falls on the fourth-floor window. It falls on the laundry lines and the vending machines and the streets too narrow for comfort. It falls on a red telephone booth three blocks away, on a corner where a convenience store's light makes a soft yellow square on the wet pavement.

It falls, and falls, and falls.

The rainy season has only just begun.

And in the gap between the wardrobe and the wall, a small girl pulls her yellow blanket tighter and listens to the rain and does not know yet what is coming.

None of us ever had.