A Place to Belong

by Cynthia Kadohata

  By the time the history session was complete, Hanako was exhausted from trying to quickly translate in her head. Reading came next. The teacher called on her, and the other kids seemed delighted when she couldn’t read many words. One boy shouted out “America-gaeri!” Sensei seemed to take pity on her and called on someone else.

  Since it was only mid-January, Hanako knew she probably had to suffer through at least two more months of school—her mother had said the school year ended in March, and then the new school year started in April . . . or something. Maybe. She was starting to realize that “maybe” and “or something” were going to be part of her life here in Japan.

  During recess, she stood alone. She had expected everyone to be curious about her, but instead everybody seemed to have forgotten her completely. She took a piece of lint out of her coat pocket and pretended to be studying it. She actually got kind of involved with it, because it was red, and she didn’t know where it had come from. So that entertained her for a few minutes. Every time someone sort of looked her way, she eagerly tried to catch their eye by holding her hand up in a small wave. Maybe she should target someone and try to be their friend. So she tentatively approached a group of girls. They gazed at her blankly as she hovered just outside their circle.

  Some wore plain boku zukin; others’ were quite colorful. There was a tall girl wearing a bright blue one with many white and yellow flowers.

  “Your boku zukin is pretty,” Hanako ventured in Japanese. “Did your mother make it?”

  The girl studied her, ignored the question, then asked, “Why did you come back to Japan?”

  “I didn’t really come back. I was born in America.” Everybody seemed to be waiting for more, so she added, “My parents came to Japan because . . . they wanted to open a restaurant here like they had in America.”

  The girls mumbled to one another, and then the tall one said, “Thank you” in English. The girls moved off, as if to get away from Hanako.

  The bell rang, and they all went in to write haiku—special poetry—and Hanako decided to write about eyes, because that just seemed like a good idea. It seemed original—everybody else was probably writing about nature, like most kids had done when they wrote haiku in the camp school. She wrote about eyes looking left and right. She had to read her poem out loud, and everybody laughed, which really pleased her, as that’s what she’d hoped for.

  For lunch she had brought rice and cabbage with a touch of bacon grease on the rice. The teacher announced that a couple of mothers would be cooking misoshiru soup for them in the school kitchen. She seemed to be explaining this just for Hanako. When the miso was ready—complete with grasshopper bits in the broth—the sensei led the children in a song.

  Yoku kande itadakimasu

  Kobosanu yoni itadakimasu

  Sensei arigatō

  Otōsan Okaasan arigatō

  Minasan arigatō

  Itadakimasu

  I will chew well and eat

  I will eat without spilling

  Thank you, Teacher

  Thank you, Dad and Mom

  Thank you, everyone

  I will eat now

  After lunch came more singing. Hanako didn’t know any of the words, but she got quite involved swaying back and forth just like everybody else. It was funny how, when you were doing the same thing as other people at the same time, you felt different somehow—like part of the group instead of just yourself. Next they read out loud again, which was painful, and afterward they studied science, which was fun as far as she could understand it. After studies, Hanako was surprised when the teacher told them to clean the wooden floors of the school building, both in the classroom and out. Hanako was assigned to a team with five others. The five all watched her curiously as she carefully cleaned a corner, blew on it to help it dry, folded up her coat, and set it there. Then she joined them. Cleaning pads—part cloth and part rough plant husks—were handed out along with buckets of soapy water. The six of them got on their hands and knees at the end of the long hallway, and they pushed their cleaning pads into the wood. Afterward they oiled the floor. Hanako had cleaned many floors in her life, so this, at least, was nothing new. Except she’d never cleaned a floor in school before.

  Then finally they were finished! The students put on their shoes and lined up. When the bell rang, some of the boys shouted and ran out even as the teacher scolded them, but the rest of the kids walked outside in an orderly fashion.

  Baachan was waiting as Hanako exited the door. “I couldn’t understand the reading and the math, but everybody laughed at my poem,” she said first thing. “And I’m supposed to practice with the soroban tonight. The sensei gave me one.”

  Hanako’s sensei had also given her a list of math problems that she was supposed to use the abacus to figure out. Why couldn’t she just write out the problem and solve it that way? That would take her two seconds.

  “Homework good,” Baachan said. “You work twice as harder as other student, then you catch up soon. Maybe three time harder. Even if four time harder, you must do.”

  They walked quietly for a few minutes before Hanako asked, “What did you do all day?”

  “I pull weed. But today I happy working, because I get to quit early to come get you.” She looked immediately worried. “But after while you need come by yourself. I cannot be away from the field too much—it would be tragedy.”

  “I understand.”

  “Did I use right word?”

  “A tragedy is something really horribly awful.”

  Baachan nodded. “Yes, that exactly what I mean. If weed and insect win, would be tragedy. We would starve, so would others. So I must not take break. So deshō.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Every day after school, Hanako sat in the cold living room practicing her soroban and kanji. They had decided to use the kotatsu only for dinner, as they were running low on coal. Akira got slowly better, but he was never himself again. Truly never. He had become very subdued and fussy about how hungry he always was. He missed pork. He missed meat. He missed peanut butter. Apples. Bread. He would soon turn six and would not start school until April. So Mama took him for walks and made up stories and sang to him. She became like a regular performer. Papa managed to find a couple of children’s books, including one of haiku by a famous Japanese poet from a long time ago. Akira liked this one best:

  Cool melons—

  turn to frogs!

  If people should come near.

  That poem made Akira SO HAPPY. He would just sit by himself and say he was imagining melons turning into frogs. If anyone bothered him while he was imagining this, he would get annoyed. Sometimes he would just sit off in a corner with a half smile on his face, imagining. Hanako did not know if he imagined the same thing over and over, or if maybe he sometimes saw green melons and sometimes orange ones, all different colors. Big frogs or little frogs? She didn’t know, just saw that he was happy all by himself in his little melon-and-froggy world.

  But he was losing weight. He said he wanted “real food.” Papa bought another fish, but this one was even older than the last, and even Baachan couldn’t make it taste good. So far they had spent parts of their sixty dollars on a few things: train fare to Hiroshima, train fare to Kobe, fake mochigashi, two old fish, and various items that Mama had purchased in the village to replace those in the missing duffel bags. Maybe other things—Hanako couldn’t quite remember. Everybody gave Akira their carrots, but it wasn’t enough. As he sat in the corner, Mama wouldn’t sit so close that it bothered him, but she would sit about ten feet away, with her knees folded under herself, waiting in case he needed her.

  When Hanako had nothing to do, she started a new game. To herself, she called it “the day game” if it was light out and “the night game” if it was dark out. Every day she would take more steps, by herself, away from the front porch. Fifty steps more each day and three steps more each night. During the day, toward the village. During the night, towar
d where Papa came from after work.

  One night when she reached twenty-seven steps from the house, a middle-aged man with a lantern startled her. She had heard a noise behind her and turned swiftly around. “Oh!” was all she could think to say, her heart pounding.

  He bowed quickly and apologized for scaring her. “You are the granddaughter?” the man asked in Japanese.

  “Hai!” She bowed. “Watashi wa Hanako desu.” (“I am Hanako.”)

  He stepped closer, bowing slightly. Then he said furtively, “Our son came back tonight. I was coming to tell your grandparents. Will you tell them? It is secret to all but them. Please tell them thank you!”

  “Hai.” They both bowed at each other, and the man walked toward the farmhouse next door.

  Hanako hurried back home, burst into the living room, and exclaimed, “Their son came home tonight! A man—I think he lives next door—said their son is back, and it’s a secret!” She felt like a spy!

  Everybody was in what had become their usual place around the kotatsu. They all stared at her for a moment.

  Akira said, “If something is a secret, why are you telling us?”

  “Ah, our neighbor,” Jiichan commented. “We have hidden his son one night.”

  “I have told her!” Baachan scolded. “You must not bother her with tell again.”

  “I tell my way!” Jiichan said with passion. He turned to Hanako. “I think he is safe. The war has ended, and country is starting over. I think he is safe, yet we will not tell.”

  Oh, it was the man . . . or boy . . . who had run into her grandparents’ house in the middle of the night! Hanako started to speak, but Mama lifted a finger to her lips to shush her. “We won’t talk of it, even if he’s safe now,” she said.

  “But the country is starting over, Mama!”

  “We cannot know yet which direction our country will take,” Jiichan said. “We hope for good, but we cannot know yet.”

  So Hanako sat down to concentrate on her soroban. Her abacus had twelve columns. Papa had taught her a little about it the night she brought it home, right before he went to bed, which he often did directly after dinner. The bottom beads, called the “earthly beads,” were worth one, and the top beads, called the “heavenly beads,” were worth five. The beam dividing them was called a “reckoning bar,” and the only beads you counted were the beads touching the bar. You used your thumb to move beads up, and you used your pointer finger to move beads down.

  Next on the soroban, she’d learned about the complementary numbers up to five: (3, 2) and (4, 1). She’d gotten pretty fast at addition problems using the complementary numbers, but her fingers still didn’t fly like the fingers of the other kids. She was determined that someday they would—she decided she was going to fit in so completely that nobody would even know she was American. She was sure this was the secret to making her first friend. But then she thought of her purple coat and her plaid skirt that she wore almost every day. And her warm leather shoes, while everybody else wore handmade straw slippers, or even nothing covering their feet at all. And there was also her braid—the other girls all wore bowl cuts.

  Baachan had moved everybody into the kitchen. She always insisted that Hanako have the kotatsu while she studied. If the others wanted to be warm, they had to be quiet. If someone wanted to talk, they had to leave the room so that Hanako could concentrate. Baachan wanted Hanako to return to America one day far in the future and become a businesswoman, and she would need to know math to add up all her money.

  That night Hanako felt a little evil because she was thinking about how different she was instead of thinking about her schoolwork. But she had to admit, she also enjoyed sitting here relaxing, her feet and legs toasty, the whole household doing whatever she wanted! If she was thirsty, she knew they would fall over themselves to help if she called out for water. But she never called out; she just liked knowing that it was true.

  Papa came home and kissed the top of her head. “Good! Hard at work!”

  “Hi, Papa!” She got up to hug him. “Papa! When you were a child in Japan, did you fit in?”

  “No, not for a long time. And then I did. And then I left.”

  Baachan was suddenly in the room saying, “Tadashi, she try to study. You must eat in kitchen!”

  He shrugged jokingly at Hanako and said, “I’m being kicked out.”

  “But I’m finished studying!” Hanako said. “Please, Baachan?” Baachan crossed her arms in front of her chest, but Hanako could see she was melting. “Please?”

  “All right, it good for Akira to be in warm room. Your father can eat at warm table. This is good too.”

  Hanako placed the abacus on a shelf that had been cleared off just for her. Akira had his own shelf too, filled with “Japanese” rocks and “special” dirt and “nice” grass that he collected during the day. Hanako and Akira sat on either side of Papa as he ate. They didn’t get to see much of him.

  “Papa?” Akira said. “Tell me the truth. Do you think I’m smarter or dumber than Hanako?”

  “Hmmm, what an interesting question. Let me think . . .” Papa slurped his soup in an exaggerated fashion. “I believe you’re both exactly as smart as each other!”

  Akira jumped to his feet excitedly. “That’s what I think too!”

  “That settles it, then,” Papa replied. “If we both think it, it must be true.”

  Akira leaned over and held on to Papa’s right arm so that he had to use his left to finish his soup.

  “I told you so, Hana,” Akira said.

  “You never told me that!”

  “Yes, I did!”

  “Uh-uh!”

  Baachan pushed herself up with a groan and a grunt. “Must not fight! I do not like!”

  “I’m sorry, Baachan. I’m sorry, Hanako. I’m sorry, Jiichan. Mama, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, Papa.” Akira paused. “Sometimes I like to fight with Hanako. But not with anybody else.”

  Mama looked with embarrassment at Baachan. “When I’m tired, I do let them fight.”

  Jiichan said, “Not to matter! Let the children to fight!”

  “No, I do not like!” Baachan exclaimed.

  Jiichan and Baachan scowled at each other, but then Jiichan said, “Ah, well. She is in charge of house. I always say I do not argue with my wife over house matters. So there will be no fighting, then.”

  But he stood up and winked at Hanako and Akira, then announced, “I will take my bath now!”

  Hanako could hear him chuckling all the way to the door.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  These days Hanako was walking to and from school by herself. It was funny. She had never realized before that growing up would mean being by herself more. She liked this, because it was the first time in her life that she looked around herself and saw . . . everything. It was just her and whatever was around her. Walking to school by herself was kind of breathtaking and kind of scary, kind of lonely and kind of fun. Some of the trees were enormous, and she liked to pause to imagine how long they had been growing—probably hundreds of years, for some of them. There was one tree that seemed to be twenty times taller than she was. No doubt it started growing long before the camps, long before the Second World War and the First World War, probably before the Civil War, and maybe even before the United States was a country. Maybe. Japan would have been a country, though—it was more than a thousand years old, at least.

  Sometimes she paused on the empty path in the middle of all those tall trees and felt a bit scared, but in a good way. She knew she was safe because pine trees were scattered here and there, and they warded off negative energy. Back in California, Papa had asked their landlord if he could plant a pine in the backyard. The landlord had said yes, so Papa planted one. For a long time he’d never told Hanako that Shintoists believed pine trees were full of spirits and that that was why he’d planted it. He hadn’t wanted her to know, because believing in spirits in the pines wasn’t American. Not at all. So she had thought it was
a bit of a joke when he told her about it. Now, however, she felt certain it was true. She could feel it every day on her way to and from school.

  Then one day, after meandering home from school, the house was completely empty—Mama and Akira weren’t there like they usually were. After trying to study for a few minutes, Hanako decided to walk to the fields to see if Mama and Akira were there. She sliced two carrots for a snack and wrapped them up in a cloth.

  She shivered in the cool air as she walked past a couple of old farmhouses—and there, sitting on the steps of a two-story house, were the pink-faced boy and the little one. Hanako hesitated, then moved toward them. She stopped a few feet away.

  “Good afternoon! I thought you didn’t have a home?” Hanako asked in Japanese.

  “We’re just resting. We’ve been walking all day and haven’t gotten any food.”

  Hanako took two steps closer. “What’s your name?”

  “Kiyoshi.”

  Hanako thought that meant “saintly,” but that couldn’t be right. Or maybe he had been saintly before and the war had made him something else. “I’m Hanako.”

  Kiyoshi nodded without a lot of interest.

  “What’s your sister’s name?”

  Now Kiyoshi perked up. “This is Michi-chan. I call her Mimi.”

  That meant her name was probably Michiko, since girls’ names usually ended with ko, which meant “child.”

  Mimi was staring glassily into space, as she had been the last time Hanako had seen her. “Is she well?”