Chapter 1
The Kanto Festival arrived on the first Wednesday of August. It had been happening for three hundred years with no intention of stopping.
I’d watched it my first August, standing in the crowd with jet lag and bewilderment, unable to process what I was seeing. Men balancing bamboo poles thirty feet tall from their foreheads, their chins, their shoulders, their hips, each pole hung with paper lanterns that caught the August air and moved in ways that seemed to defy the physics of the situation. The poles swayed and the crowd collectively stopped breathing, and then the poles were caught and balanced again and the crowd exhaled, and I stood there in my first week in Japan thinking: what is this country?
Now, in my third August, I knew what it was. I knew the poles were called kanto, that the lanterns stood for ears of rice, that the festival was a prayer for a good harvest that had become more than a prayer. It had become a thing a city did because a city needed things to do together, needed shared breath and collective relief and the joy of watching a human being do something that looked impossible and land it anyway.
I’d come from the beach with Becca and Tom and Jennifer and Nao, the usual configuration, plus two of the newer JETs who’d arrived in July and were still in the wide-eyed phase I remembered from my own first weeks. They wore it on their faces the same combination I must have worn on my own, overwhelmed and trying not to show it.
I knew what that looked like from the outside now.
Nao had secured our spot on the barrier by arriving two hours early with a camping stool and the calm of long meditation. The best spots went to whoever wanted them most, and Nao always wanted them most. I’d stopped questioning Nao’s methods in my second year. The spots were always good.
I hadn’t bothered to shower or change after the beach. The festival would be wall-to-wall people in August heat, and the white sundress over my swimsuit was fine. It was all fine. I had been in Japan long enough to know that fine was enough.
“Maya,” Becca said, with a warning tone, “your tan against the white dress is bringing out the green in your eyes more than usual. Which means—”
“I have my genetics speech ready. English and Japanese.” I held up two fingers. “Bilingual.”
“Which means, Maya, that many of the Japanese tourists here have never seen a foreigner before, and most have not seen one with green eyes except in the movies, so what are you not going to do?”
I put my hand over my heart. “I’m not going to be mean or attempt any Krav Maga moves.”
“Good girl.”
“I know the speech, Becca. I am the speech.”
“You literally threatened a man with a hip throw last Golden Week.”
“He grabbed my arm.”
“He was trying to get your attention.”
“Then he should have used his words.”
Nao, who had very few strong opinions about anything, looked up from his beer. “Can we talk about the hair?”
Wide eyed, Becca and I both looked at him.
“I’m just saying.” He gestured vaguely at my head. “There’s a bun situation happening up there that I think has stopped being a choice.”
“It’s beach hair.”
“It’s beach evidence.” He took a sip. “Like, forensically, someone could reconstruct your entire afternoon from what’s happening on your head right now.”
“Women pay good money to look like this.”
“At a salon. With product. Not by just,” he waved his hand,“living in the ocean and then showing up.”
“I showered,” Nao looked at Becca.
Becca looked at Nao. “I rinsed.”
“There’s sand,” Nao said, not ready to admit defeat, “on your neck.”
The street was wall to wall, the heat of the August evening compounded by ten thousand bodies and the lanterns beginning to glow as the sun went down. I was watching the first pole go up, that collective intake of breath as the balancing began, when a voice arrived from somewhere to my left, already laughing at something.
“Right,” it said, in an accent I placed after a second — not British, something else, flatter vowels, a warmth to it I didn’t have a name for yet, like picking a single instrument out of an orchestra by ear. “So I’ve been standing here ten minutes trying to work out what’s happening, and I’ve landed on this: either it’s the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen or I’ve had more of that sake than I thought. Honestly it could go either way.”
I turned, not entirely sure I wanted to engage.
He was tall enough to be visible above the crowd. A blonde hair, blue eyed giant, his face arranged into delighted bewilderment as he watched the kanto pole sway overhead.
“It’s the most extraordinary thing you’ve ever seen,” I said. “And also possibly the sake.”
He looked at me, surprised, recalibrating, and his face opened into a joyful grin.
“American?” he said.
“Is it that obvious?”
“Little bit. No offense. Probably the not showering.” He meant none of it. “Finn. Kiwi–New Zealand. Three weeks with the Bullets, lost four times, accidentally ordered something I still can’t identify, and somehow ended up on the wrong side of a conversation with a monk who I think was either very wise or having me on. Genuinely couldn’t tell which.” He stopped. “Were you at the beach today?”
“So you heard the conversation?”
“Some of it.” The grin again. “The forensic reconstruction bit was hard to miss.”
Something about the delivery — how he listed his failures in the same tone he might list achievements, the complete absence of pretense in it — made me smile.
“Maya. I teach at the junior high. Three years in August.”
He stared at me. “Three years.”
“Three years.”
“And you can,” he gestured at the crowd, the festival, the general incomprehensibility of Akita in August, “navigate all of this?”
“I can even navigate it while unshowered.”
“Could you explain what’s happening with the pole? Because I’ve been constructing theories and none of them are holding up.”
So I explained the kanto, and he listened with interest, asking questions that were pointed and occasionally very funny, and the pole did its thing, and the crowd did its thing, and I found myself talking to a stranger at a festival in a way that felt easy in a manner I hadn’t expected and hadn’t been looking for.
“I’m enormous,” he said at one point, when someone tried to pass in front of him and had to go around instead, apologizing profusely. He stepped back to make room, managed to step on someone else’s foot, apologized again, creating a small apologetic ripple in the crowd around him. “This is the thing. I take up the same amount of space here as I do at home, which is already too much, but here it’s, I mean, I’m sorry to everyone in a ten-foot radius, sincerely. I didn’t ask to be six foot four, it was imposed on me.”
I laughed, short and surprised. “Do the Japanese comment on your size the way they do about my eyes? I get that they aren’t used to lighter eyes, especially green, but I don’t want to talk about it all the time.” I heard how jaded I sounded. I didn’t mean it to come out that way.
“Oh yeah, all the time. And, to defend the Japanese, I’m not sure many people have seen eyes the color of yours. I imagine a lot of people do comment.” He chuckled. “To be clear, this was not me commenting.”
I ignored it. “So what are you doing in Japan?”
“Rugby,” he said, by way of explanation. “I’m from Christchurch originally, which is not a place that prepares you for being six foot four in Japan.
“I’ve heard it is beautiful there.”
“It is. Proper mountains. The Southern Alps, right there, like the city forgot to mention them.” He found this completely ordinary and loved it for that, the affection all over how he said it. “We have few eccentrics as well. I spent twenty-two years assuming every city had a wizard arguing with a woman with a Bible in the main square, and now I’m in Japan and I miss the argument, which I did not anticipate.”
I was smiling properly now, not by decision.
“Come watch with us,” I said. “We have a spot on the barrier.”
“I don’t want to impose.”
“You’re not imposing. My friend Nao got here two hours ago. He has a camping stool and strong opinions about festival positioning. This is what expats in Akita do.”
Finn’s face shifted. “Nao,” he said.
“You know him?”
“I don’t know him. I met someone with that name while I was with the team three weeks ago. Robes. Canada Goose jacket. Told me fourteen things about the temple his family owns and then said something I’ve been thinking about ever since, and I still don’t know if it was profound or completely made up.” He stopped. “Medium height. Very bright eyes.”
“That’s Nao.”
“That’s Nao,” he repeated, and something in his face settled, his world suddenly a little smaller and easier to read. “Everyone keeps mentioning Nao. The lads at the Bullets house mentioned Nao. Someone at the club admin office mentioned Nao. I’ve been here three weeks and Nao has already preceded himself in every conversation I’ve had.”
“That’s accurate,” I said. “That’s how Nao works.”
“What did he say to you? The first time you met him?”
“Well, you just heard what he said to me about my hair, so that should give you some insight into our friendship.”
I thought about the first time I met Nao. About the Hub, the first Thursday, Nao arrived like a weather event in a Nirvana t-shirt and immediately told Daniel he looked terrible.
“He told my friend he looked terrible and needed to sleep,” I said. “Then he told me someone talked about me constantly, which was embarrassing for that someone.”
“See, that’s,” Finn shook his head. “That’s the thing about it. He says the true thing. No preamble. No social lubrication. Just the true thing, delivered like it’s completely unremarkable.”
“Yes,” I said.
“It’s unnerving.”
“You get used to it.”
“Do you?”
“No,” I said honestly. “But you stop trying to.”
He laughed, fully, no part of him standing back to watch how it landed.
“Lead the way,” he said. “To Nao.”
We found Nao exactly where he always was, precisely where he intended to be, the camping stool set where the sightlines were best, because he thought about sightlines. He looked up when we approached, took in Finn with a single sweep of those bright eyes, and said: “You’re the one from the team. You stopped outside the temple on your run two weeks ago and I made you tea.”
Finn stared at him. “That was you.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t tell me your name.”
“You didn’t ask,” extending his hand. “Nao. My family owns the temple. I’m training to be a monk. I went to boarding school in Connecticut in the States.” He shook Finn’s hand. “You’re the rugby player. Playing for the Bullets. Also chasing an Olympic sevens spot, back home.”
“How do you know that?”
“The team newsletter mentioned you.” He nodded at Finn with the matter-of-fact interest of someone cataloging a natural phenomenon. “And you’re very large. We get a lot of rugby people.”
Finn looked at me.
“You said you got used to it,” he said.
“I said you stop trying to,” I said.
Becca appeared from the crowd behind us, took in Finn’s height and general situation, and said to me, the verdict evidently already in: “Oh, interesting.” It was the most restrained thing Becca had said about a man since I’d known her; therefore, it was the loudest possible statement she could have made.
“This is Becca,” I said. “She’s Australian. She invented a round system. Becca, don’t—”
“I didn’t say anything,” Becca said, feigning innocence.
“You said oh interesting.”
“That’s a thing I say.”
“It’s really not,” said Tom, appearing beside her.
Tom explained the kanto to Finn in detail, the history and the rice harvest and the three-hundred-year continuity of it, with two years’ worth of pent-up enthusiasm for a fresh audience. Jennifer gave Finn a list of restaurants written on a napkin, organized by category and distance from the school. Becca had, despite my warning, introduced him to her drinks philosophy, which he engaged with seriously and with what looked like real intellectual interest. This was the worst possible response to Becca because it encouraged her.
Nao said three things to him over the course of the evening that were either profound or completely made up and Finn received each one and turned inward, taking notes he meant to review later. That, I had come to understand, was the correct response to Nao.
