“You’re right,” I heard him say.
Yūsuke turned around then, his eyes scanning the room. For me.
“Hey Kazu. Kazuhiro. I found the street where your family lives,” he said.
He pointed to the map like the kid before him had done.
“Hmm, really?”
I stayed in my chair and nodded instead of standing. I wasn’t exactly fascinated by my family’s street being on the map. Unlike Yūsuke’s family, we’re not generations-long shop owners. We’re a bunch of regular worker types.
“It says your street is called Kimyō Temple Alley!” Yūsuke added.
“What?!”
Two or three people reacted at the same time. As if that were a signal, they all laughed.
I thought I had misheard. Kimyō Temple Alley? I had never heard of Kimyō Temple.
Some of the students in the group turned to look at me. I finally stood up.
“What’d you say it’s called?”
“Kimyō Temple Alley.”
Yūsuke beckoned me with one hand.
As I approached the map, the other students parted like the Red Sea for Moses. And I saw those red baubles again.
The area Yūsuke showed me was labeled Kimyōji Yokochō, or Kimyō Temple Alley. It was written in formal ideographs with tiny phonetic marks to help people read it.
“Is it really the same place?” I said, scanning the map.
I found the area labeled Ōmi, which seemed to be the former name for Minami Ōdori. At its center was the store called Takamatsuya, Yūsuke’s store. The place really had been around for generations—it was on an antique map! Ten stores east of it was a street—my street—connecting Minami Ōdori to the Daiku area, which runs parallel. Same as today. The street is about a hundred yards long with four or five houses on each side. And its name? Kimyō Temple Alley. At least on the old map.
“Kimyō Temple? I don’t know about any temple,” I said with a scowl.
“Does the map show one?” A sixth-grade leader took a look. There were no temples even close to my street.
“The temple district is way over there.”
“The map is from 1913, right? Maybe there was a temple before the map was made.”
“Maybe there was a graveyard too! Scary!”
“Live there, and you could get hexed!”
“I saw that happen on a TV show!”
“I saw that too!”
The conversation turned from Kimyō Temple to the TV specials the night before.
Fine for you guys, I thought. No hexes at your house. What about me? I live in the back alley of a haunted temple. I scowled some more.
“Let’s finish up, people,” a leader directed.
The students sat down and opened their notebooks.
I opened mine, too, for what it was worth. No way was my house on top of a graveyard. Or was it? Maybe that was why I’d seen the ghost.
Then I saw the red baubles across from me and off to one side. The head beneath them looked just like the one I had seen before dawn. There was no mistaking that outdated hairstyle. The girl with the baubles faced our leader, who had begun to speak.
She’s the one. The one I saw. The ghost who left my house before dawn!
“Ah—!”
Before I knew it, sounds were escaping my mouth as I stood up, knocking over my chair.
“Kazu, what’s up with you?” Yūsuke said, staring at me.
“That person, she’s a ghost. A ghost!” I sputtered, eyeing the girl as she looked up at me, wondering what was happening. Everyone else did the same. They had no clue who I was talking about.
“Why? Why is she here?” I murmured.
Yūsuke tugged at my pants. “Sit down, Kazu. Sit down.”
When I finally heard him, he pointed across the room with his jaw. Vice Principal Broad Bean was glaring at me.
I sat.
That girl is the ghost I saw at my house. What’s she doing here?
I stared at the red-baubled head. The girl wrote briskly in her notebook as though nothing had happened.
“Kazu, what’s the matter with you?” Yūsuke spoke in a low voice so as not to be heard by Broad Bean.
“Why is that person here?” I asked him.
“Who do you mean?”
“The girl between that second grader, Tomohisa, and Yamada’s little sister.”
“Akari Shinobu?” Yūsuke asked like it was no big deal.
I was shocked. “You know her?”
Yūsuke frowned and poked me. He thought I was playing.
“It’s Akari, dude. Akari,” he repeated.
“That’s her name?”
“Kazu, what’s wrong with you? Akari’s in your class!”
“She is?” For a second I was speechless. No way could she be in my class. I would know her if she were. “She can’t be.”
“Come on, Kazu, Grade 5, Section 1. Are you OK? Quit joking.”
Yūsuke made his scariest face, as if to say my joke was not funny. Tell me about it. Nothing funny at all.
“Did you hit your head? You’ve been out of it since this morning.”
Now Yūsuke peered at me closely, looking worried. I couldn’t say anything else.
“Her name’s Akari,” he continued. “You’ve known her since kindergarten—no, before kindergarten.”
He waved a hand in front of my eyes. I wanted to say that he was the crazy one, but I stopped myself.
The girl that Yūsuke had called Akari was writing something in the second grader Tomohisa’s notes, helping him out. Tomohisa nodded politely. Tomohisa is the kind of kid who gets nervous around strangers. He would never talk to someone he had just met, much less let that person to touch his notes. When he came here as a first grader last year, we all had a hard time getting him to hold hands for games, even with classmates, let alone the older students. It took six months to get him to do that, and even longer to get him to say hello and smile.
So Tomohisa was like Yūsuke. He also knew Akari Shinobu.
Did that mean Yūsuke was correct, and I was nuts?
But I knew. She was definitely the ghost who had left my house that morning. It was her face I saw. Her eyes I nearly met. Akari seemed to sense that I was watching her and glanced up. When she met my gaze, her expression changed as if to say, What? Quickly, I looked away.
“Does she live in my neighborhood?” I asked Yūsuke. I was supposed to have known her since before kindergarten, after all.
“Do you seriously not know? Is this a game?” Yūsuke thought I had made up some bizarre rules and begun to play a game all by myself. I do this sometimes, so I couldn’t blame him for asking. “She lives closer to you than me,” Yūsuke said. “Right there in Kimyō Temple Alley.”
He used the name we had just learned.
I felt totally lost. I still had no memory of Akari.
When multigrade activity time ended, I returned to my classroom. So did Akari.
I’m in small group four in our class section, and Akari is in group one. Her group’s five desks were pushed together to make a kind of table for lunchtime. Last I knew, that group had only four desks that formed a square at lunch.
We ate our meal of fried sweet buns, cucumber salad, white fish, and frozen pineapple.
“How many kids are in our class?” I asked Ami Yamagata, who was eating her fried sweet bun next to me.
“Thirty-three,” she answered.
The number had gone up by one! I thought we only had thirty-two.
“Our teacher is Jirō Harukawa, nickname: Country Music. The hamsters we’re raising are Boneless and Moochie. Our class leaders are Yōichi Sakura and Mizuki Yamabe. Is that right?” I asked.
Ami chewed her food, looking exactly like Moochie the hamster. She nodded yes.
Akari was the single detail I could not remember. I knew everything else.
Ami stared at me like Yūsuke had a moment before, then added, “And you are Kazuhiro Sada. An Aries. Blood type O. Grade 5, Section 1
pet coordinator. Nickname: Third.”
Yes, that’s me. In the youth sports program I was part of until recently, I covered third base in baseball. When my teacher Country Music heard that, he said, “Kazu, you seem to be third in a lot of things, don’t you?” Everyone agreed: in terms of smarts, sports, and even with girls, I always come in third.
“It’s because you don’t let other people see the real you,” my sister told me. “You’re not straight with them. That’s what keeps you from rising to the top.”
What’s so bad about being third? I want to know. I like not sticking out. I enjoy doing my own thing, my own way, in someone else’s shadow. I still got chocolates from two girls on Valentine’s Day this year. That may have been only a fifth of Yūsuke’s take, or less—he’s heir to a kimono dynasty, after all—but getting chocolate from two girls is no joke. One of the girls was Ami, but anyway.
“Kazu-kun, are you OK?” Ami asked. “You sound like my grandma.”
“Your grandma?”
“She asks really basic questions sometimes. They’re worried it’s dementia.”
Dementia. She might as well have punched me in the head. I started to panic. I wondered if you could get dementia at my age.
“Sorry to hear that. Never mind what I said.”
I wished I could swallow my panic with my lunch, but that was impossible.
Akari’s red baubles bobbed down the road ahead of us as Yūsuke and I walked home.
The rain had stopped after lunch, but the temperature outside had skyrocketed. I could see steam rising from the wet surfaces.
“I have to go to cram school now,” Yūsuke complained. “Tomorrow too.”
Tomorrow was the last day of school before summer. Our closing assembly would finish in the morning, but Yūsuke still had to study afterward because of his cram school teacher’s schedule.
“See you tomorrow then,” I said, parting ways with Yūsuke in front of his house.
Tomorrow night was also the start of the summer festival at the local temple dedicated to the goddess Kannon. We go there every July the evening after school ends. It’s a big deal for Yūsuke and me—and every grade schooler in Minami Ōdori—because for us, the festival means summer vacation. It’s ingrained in our brains.
After I said goodbye to Yūsuke, Akari’s red baubles began to take over my mind. I watched as she turned onto my street. Kimyō Temple Alley.
“Yūsuke was right.” I couldn’t believe it. She really lived right by me.
Our neighbor, Mrs. Uesugi, came walking from the other direction. Akari, who wore a pink vinyl backpack, said hello to her.
“Akari-chan! How have you been? Almost summer vacation, isn’t it?” Mrs. Uesugi replied.
So she knew Akari as well. I really was the only one who didn’t know her. In shock, I stopped walking.
“Kazu-kun, you’re back!” I heard Mrs. Uesugi call to me and quickly nodded.
Akari turned into the side road between Mrs. Uesugi’s house and an apartment building called Miyoshi Cottage. As if on a leash, I followed her.
Akari walked up to a house directly behind Mrs. Uesugi’s. A shrub with orange blossoms grew next to the small front gate. The nameplate on the gate read SHINOBU.
She lived so close to my house—practically on top of it. Had her house been there all along? If not, what had? I felt like the house should be there, and then again maybe not. I couldn’t remember for sure. The house was common enough, cream-colored, two stories, with a gray roof. The cherry tomato plant in the yard had fruit hanging from its branches.
“I’m home,” Akari called from the front door.
I watched from the front gate with my eyes wide open.
The door swung out.
“You’re home! You must be hot,” a woman’s voice answered.
The door opened to make room for Akari, but no one was standing there. Really! I didn’t see anyone who could have spoken.
Whoever had opened the door was invisible.
First a ghost. Now an invisible person. What next?!
I felt helpless, like something huge had happened or would soon, and I had no idea what. All I could do was stand there with my eyes glued to Akari’s house.
CHAPTER TWO
Am I the Only Clueless One?
Akari walked into the house. The front door closed.
My feet took me around the side of the house.
I saw a small porch with a roof and a long horizontal pole for hanging laundry. The door to the porch opened.
“Even if I hang it out this late, it’ll dry in a snap in this hot weather!”
A laundry hanger appeared—one of those pink plastic umbrella skeletons with clips for underwear and socks.
The hanger moved, but no one was holding it. The umbrella skeleton just floated back and forth with the dangling laundry.
I couldn’t believe it. Akari’s invisible mom was hanging the pink hanger from the horizontal pole on the porch. That had to be what was happening. That’s how it looked.
“Say, Akari, the summer festival starts tomorrow night, doesn’t it?” Invisible Mama said, directing her voice toward the house.
A gust of wind blew some white lace curtains away from the porch window. Now I could see inside.
The house was bare.
It looked as if it had just been built, or the family had just moved in—but there were no boxes like you’d see after a move. There was nothing. No table, chairs, or TV. Not even a calendar on the wall.
I could also see Akari sitting on the floor in front of the kitchen counter, hugging her knees. “Yes, the festival starts tomorrow,” she said. “Um, Mom?”
She looked up.
Her voice sounded happy, but she wasn’t smiling. She looked anxious.
“Worried about your yukata?” Invisible Mama asked as she hung a towel over the laundry pole. “I’ve got it all ready.”
The wind blew the curtains open again as if to tell me, look closely!
“Thanks, Mom! I’m so excited!” Akari said. But she still looked anxious, like she wondered if she’d said the right thing. What was the matter with her?
Just then I heard the voice of the caretaker at Miyoshi Cottage apartments, which are next door to Mrs. Uesugi’s. The caretaker has short white hair and walked along with a towel draped around his neck, using it to mop sweat from his face.
“Today’s a scorcher, isn’t it?”
I thought he was talking to me, since Akari was crouching inside.
But then Invisible Mama answered.
“Sure is. I thought the rain might cool things off, but it just keeps getting hotter and hotter.” She sighed, and then added, “Are you off to prepare for the festival?”
“Yes, Ma’am. We do a little every day to get ready in time. We’ll set the tents up today.”
The caretaker raised his hand in farewell.
“That’s a big job. Take care!” Invisible Mama answered.
The caretaker looked back as she called to him. He spotted me.
“Kazu-kun, hello there! Did you come to see Akari?”
The caretaker had seen Akari’s mother perfectly well. I felt like someone had knocked the wind out of me.
“Who, me? No,” I mumbled, and then fled.
Nothing made any sense. I was different from everybody: the only one out of the loop. The only one who didn’t know Akari. The only one who couldn’t see her mother. How had this happened, and why? I had no idea.
I practically dove back into my own house.
“At least say ‘I’m home,’ would you!”
My mom came out of the kitchen looking cross.
I’d planned on asking for help: Mom, I’m the only one who doesn’t remember Akari. The only one who can’t see her mother. What do I do?
“Mom,” I began.
She took a tray with some tea and manjū and sat down by the TV. The rebroadcast of her favorite suspense drama was starting.
“Mom,” I said again.
“O
h, Kazu, there’s ice cream in the freezer. Or do you want one of these?”
She held out a manjū. She was still watching the screen.
I was beginning to lose confidence that I could explain my predicament. How could I get her to see that there was something wrong with me—and only me? Telling her might just make her worry.
I got some ice cream and sat down beside her.
“Have you seen that house over behind Mrs. Uesugi’s, the one with the orange flowers blooming? It—”
“Akari-chan’s place?” Mom answered before I could say another word.
Even my mom said Akari’s name with a straight face.
I wanted to vanish with my ice cream. How could something this weird happen? Was my brain just messed up?
“Why are you talking like you’ve never seen her house before?” my mom asked. “You used to go there and play all the time when you were younger. Maybe you’re seeing Akari with new eyes.
“By the way, that flowering plant is called Chinese trumpet vine. Pretty, isn’t it? I wanted to plant one in our yard, too, but your grandma wouldn’t allow it. Said that those are flowers you only see at temples.”
Mom grumbled while still watching TV.
I remembered the other thing on my mind.
“Did you know our street used to be called Kimyō Temple Alley?” I asked.
Mom shook her head. “It’s been Minami Ōdori Lane 3 since I married your father.”
“Was there ever a temple here?”
Maybe the house was built on a graveyard and I was going crazy because of some vengeful spirit.
“No, I don’t think there was a temple. Kimyō Temple, that’s an odd name, isn’t it?”
“You write ‘come back’ and then ‘life,’” I said, explaining the characters.
“‘Come back to life,’ really? Sounds like zombies!”
Mom giggled, even though the thought was creepy.
Sitting opposite her, I felt my skin crawl.
Suddenly I knew. When Akari stepped out of our house, she’d worn a white kimono. She had come back from the dead. She had to be the ghost of someone who had passed away. I had witnessed her return. I didn’t know why everyone else seemed to know her already, or what was happening with Invisible Mama. But Akari was a spirit who had found her way back to the world of the living through my house. She had returned to life. The fact that I alone didn’t know her had to be linked to Kimyō Temple. It had to. There was just one problem: My house is no temple. My dad and his dad had regular office jobs; they weren’t priests.
Temple Alley Summer Page 2
