by Sarah Kuhn
“What do you think happened yesterday—nervous breakdown?” the Auntie on my other side says, talking over me like I’m not even there. “Mmm, I thought only white actresses had those.”
“Who knows, but what happened was very disruptive,” the first Auntie says.
And then both Aunties give me major side-eye. Like it’s all my fault that the parade was disrupted.
In a way, I guess it was my fault. But they don’t know the whole story. Still, I find myself shrinking into my seat, trying to disappear.
“Some people are like that, always disrupting things,” the second Auntie says, her side-eye intensifying. I shrink even more. “Are they gonna appoint someone else? We can’t have no grand marshal! It’s Nikkei Week!”
“No one’s asked me what I think,” the first Auntie sniffs. “But they should replace her. How will it look if we have no grand marshal at the gala?”
Nikkei Week always ends with a big gala at the Japanese American National Museum, and the grand marshal is expected to give a speech and take photos with everyone. But now that the grand marshal’s MIA . . .
“This year’s Nikkei Week is cursed,” a loud, braying voice at the end of the row says.
I swivel to look—and inwardly let out a huge groan. Somehow, Craig Shimizu must have sensed my presence and the fact that I was trying to get away from him and has moved so he’s sitting closer to me.
“Didn’t everyone read that letter Uncle Taki wrote to the paper?” Craig continues, naming one of the cranky old men who seems to have lived in Little Tokyo forever—no one knows where he came from or who he’s related to, but everyone knows him all the same. “He said only pure Japanese girls should be Nikkei Week Princesses. Because Nikkei Week is a festival that’s supposed to celebrate everything Japanese.”
“Japanese and Japanese American,” I blurt out without thinking, my temper flaring. So much for shrinking. Now the Aunties are side-eyeing me again. “And Japanese American can mean a lot of things. Anyway, what does that have to do with anything? Belle is one hundred percent Japanese.”
“She’s related to you,” Craig counters, his sneer deepening. “And you’re only half. Therefore, she’s tainted by association.”
“Uncle Taki writes that same letter every year,” I snap. “My Auntie Och says he does it because it’s something to do—otherwise he’s got nothing to do except boil so much fish that his white neighbors complain about the smell.”
“My dad says your Aunties or moms or whatever are living in several kinds of sin,” Craig says, latching on to something else he can needle me about. “So—”
“So shut up!” I explode, leaping to my feet. My hands curl into fists, my face flushes bright red, my kaiju-temper roars—
Craig regards me smugly, a sly grin spreading over his face. Because he’s gotten to me, really gotten to me, and that’s all he wanted. He leans back in his seat, his grin getting wider by the second. “Machigai,” he murmurs—the Japanese word for “mistake.” “Your whole family.” He jerks his chin toward Belle. “Maybe you all should be banned from Nikkei Week.”
“Do not talk about my family,” I snarl, my fists curling so tight, I can feel my fingernails scratching tiny crevices into my palms. “You listen to me, Craig Shimizu, if you ruin this for Belle and Rory, I will end you—”
“Ahem. Rika Rakuyama. Please stop whatever you are doing.” Uncle Hikaru clears his throat and glares at me.
The Aunties are also glaring at me.
Even Belle is glaring at me from her perch up front.
Stop, she mouths at me.
I breathe deeply, forcing my temper to quiet. When it just explodes like that, it feels like it’s consuming my entire body, burning me up from the inside. I lose all awareness of my surroundings, which means I didn’t notice how loud my voice was getting or how the room has gone totally quiet and everyone is staring at me.
That’s exactly what it was like when I bit Craig all those years ago. I could only feel rage, and before I knew it, my teeth were sinking into his forearm.
The second Auntie’s words echo in my head: Some people are like that, always disrupting things.
Face still flaming, I sit down in my seat again, trying to make myself small. I picture myself as the nure-onna, strategically stowing her anger away so she can strike when it makes sense.
Everyone goes back to whatever they were doing—Uncle Hikaru yelling orders at the princesses, the Aunties casting judgmental looks his way, the princesses valiantly attempting perfect mochi. But I already know this incident will spread through the gossip grapevine of Little Tokyo, yet another unruly blowup from Rika the Biter.
I only hope Belle won’t be too mad at me for ruining one of her queenly moments.
My gaze wanders to the garden connected to the room. I’ve loved this garden since I was a kid, its bristly shrubs and stout rock formations offering so many of those magical shadows for me to sink into. I try to mentally sink into them now, to breathe deeply and calm myself.
One time when I was twelve, I snuck in while the garden was technically closed, nestled myself under the twisting limbs of the biggest tree—I’m not sure what kind it is, but it’s always looked to me like it came from another world, its long flowering branches flowing to the ground and forming an enchanted canopy to hide beneath. I sat there and read about onryo well into the night—until Auntie Och hunted me down and yelled at me for disappearing without telling anyone and nearly giving Auntie Suzy a heart attack.
I’d been swept up in my stories—I was fascinated by the fact that so many onryo were women, so many of them were truly wronged in life, and so many ended the story by getting the vengeance they sought. Their long, tangled waves of hair reminded me of the branches of the big canopy tree, flowing and curving in all different directions, wild and unrestrained. From then on, I referred to that tree as “the onryo tree.”
And it’s still one of my favorite hiding spots, honestly. It absorbs my temper like nothing else.
I’m so caught up in thinking about the tree and onryo and how Grace is her own kind of onryo that I don’t even notice when freaking Henry Chen sneaks up behind me and whisper-yells, “Hey!” in my ear.
“Blagh!” I yelp, nearly jumping out of my seat.
Uncle Hikaru shoots me another admonishing look. Belle murmurs something soothing to Nak, while Rory rolls a ball of anko and mochi between her palms, her brow furrowed in intense concentration.
I whip around and glare at Henry Chen.
He’s sitting in the seat directly behind me, wearing a baseball cap pulled so low, it nearly conceals his eyes. Guess he’s doing the incognito-celebrity thing again. And it seems to be working, since the Aunties around us are paying him barely any attention. (Now they’ve forgotten about Grace and how disruptive I am and are mostly waiting for an opportunity to speak up about the clearly subpar mochi-making going on at the front of the room.)
“What are you doing here?” I hiss at him.
“Come outside with me,” he says, giving me one of his smug-ass grins.
“What?!”
“Rika, look!” Rory calls from the front of the room. “I got it to be perfectly round!”
I turn back around to see Rory proudly brandishing her mochi ball. I give her a thumbs-up.
“It’s still too big,” Uncle Hikaru sniffs, scrutinizing her work.
“Perhaps if you could get the mochi to be the proper texture, Hikaru,” one of the Aunties heckles from the audience. “Then she would not have to roll so much together to get it to stick.”
“Or if your anko was real anko and not premade paste from the market,” another Auntie chimes in. “You should always make it from scratch.”
“I did make it from scratch,” Uncle Hikaru growls.
“Well, I thought this one was pretty good,” Rory mutters, looking down at her apparently ve
ry controversial mochi ball.
“No.” The first Auntie shakes her head. “Too big and lumpy. You might as well start over.”
“I think it looks perfect!” I cry—attracting a death-glare from nearly everyone in the audience.
Okay, I really need to stop with the disruptions. But god, I hate it when stompy little Rory looks even a tiny bit discouraged. I want to turn myself into an onryo, float up onstage, and wreak vengeance on everyone making her feel bad. (And maybe there will be a little vengeance left for Craig Shimizu, if the onryo has time.)
“Come outside with me.” Henry Chen is now leaning forward so he can whisper directly at my head, his breath tickling my ear. I picture his annoying, constantly amused grin, and my cheeks warm. “I got something. From Grace.”
My stomach drops, and all thoughts of mochi balls and busybody Aunties evaporate.
“Okay,” I mutter back. “But we have to be stealth about it, or all everyone will be talking about for the next week is how I was involved in multiple disruptions of the mochi demonstration, just like I was involved in the total disruption of the parade—”
“No worries,” Henry says, his voice easy. “I got it.”
I hear rustling behind me as he leans back in his seat and mutters to one of the Aunties sitting next to him: “Is that dog eating the mochi?!”
My eyes go to Belle. Who is just straight-up feeding Nak mochi now. He looks like he’s in heaven.
“Hikaru!” the Auntie behind me bellows. “Are you letting dogs participate in our sacred tradition?!”
“What?” Uncle Hikaru whirls around to look at Belle. “Belle Rakuyama, I told you . . .” He shakes his head and turns back to the audience. “You all heard me tell her—”
But it’s too late. The Aunties explode with disapproving activity, some of them rising and bustling up to the table.
“Really, Hikaru, if you cannot keep control of this demonstration—”
“You’ve become so permissive over the years, the shame of it all—”
“I still think you bought that anko from the market—”
I hear Belle exclaiming, “Nak is part of the court!” over the din.
“Come on,” Henry says, jiggling my shoulder.
As the chaos rises, he grabs my hand and pulls me out of my seat, dragging me toward one of the exits.
“Wait!” I bark. “You don’t know where you’re going!” We switch course, me pulling him, so we can escape out the other exit, into the garden. I pull him behind the onryo tree so we’ll still be hidden from view when the chaos dies down.
“That wasn’t stealth at all,” I say, shaking my head at him, the flush rising in my cheeks. My kaiju-temper flares—it does not seem able to keep itself under control when confronted with Henry Chen. “The demonstration was still totally disrupted.”
He shrugs. “But it wasn’t disrupted because of us leaving and it wasn’t disrupted because of you, which seemed to be your primary concern. So basically a win?”
“Your definition of ‘win’ differs from that of every Asian elder out there,” I say. “And it was already disrupted because of me, so I was trying to avoid—ugh, you know what, never mind. Tell me what you got from Grace.”
He raises an eyebrow and gets that annoying amused look.
“You seem mad,” he says.
“I always seem that way,” I retort.
“I’m just wondering why you’re mad . . . at me?”
“I . . .” I draw in a deep breath, some of my aggravation dissipating. I’m not mad at him, I guess, I’m mad at . . . everything else? When my anger overtakes me that way, all the things I’m mad about get piled together in one big lumpy mess and there’s nowhere to put it. It just sits in my chest, eager to lash out at the first thing that comes its way. “Um, no. I’m not mad at you. I just . . .” I pause, trying to clear my brain. “Some stuff happened before you got here, and I . . . I’m sorry. I appreciate you helping me.”
He looks like maybe he wants to say something else, but doesn’t. Instead he just nods, pulls his phone from his pocket, taps the screen, and hands it to me.
Displayed is a single photo that looks like a very pretty pattern. The close-up of some kind of mosaic, perhaps? Bright splashes of green and yellow and blue that appear to be etched onto tiles. Is it a floor? Or . . . something else with tiles?
“What is it?” I murmur, almost to myself, turning the phone around—as if the image will make more sense upside down.
“I asked around last night, but no one in the Asian Hollywood group text seemed to have any idea where Grace is,” Henry says. “So I decided to go straight to the source. I was thinking about what you were saying about making sure she wasn’t kidnapped or something. How I should be a good friend. Grace has been helping me with something—”
“What something?” I say, my “this person is using vague language to hide their nefarious intentions” antennae going up.
“Just something,” he says, a resistant and obstinate thread creeping into his easygoing voice. “Anyway, I sent her a message directly, outside of the group text. Asked her to send me proof of life—please. She sent back that photo.”
“Did she say anything else?” I scroll down on the text thread, but it’s just Henry gently asking Grace a few more questions regarding her whereabouts. She never responded.
“I’m trying not to scare her off,” he says, gesturing to the screen. “But maybe I can keep getting her to send me those photos? Use my natural charm.” He grins at me.
I scrutinize the photo harder, bringing the phone closer to my face.
I don’t know what it is about Henry Chen that makes me want to immediately dispute what he just told me: that Grace sent him this photo after going off the grid so fully that the general public still has no idea where she is. Maybe it’s that thoroughly irritating smugness he has going on. Or maybe it’s the fact that this whole situation is just so bizarre, so unbelievable, that every step feels like it’s infused with a strange sort of magic. Everything I learn, everything that leads me closer to my long-lost mother, feels so momentous.
And this photo is so ordinary. So mundane.
It feels like something I was looking at the other day wandering through LA, like something I can remember glancing up and seeing—
Then it hits me.
That’s exactly what it is.
I search back through my memory. And I realize this image probably feels so mundane because I’ve seen it before.
“This is an extreme close-up of one of the tile art pieces at the LA Central Library,” I say, tapping the screen, a spark of excitement igniting in my chest. “Have you been there? It’s one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen—”
“Probably because you’ve never been to New York,” he says, his amused grin turning teasing.
Maybe that’s supposed to make me laugh, but I find myself glaring at him anew. “Oh god. Are you one of those ‘New York is the best city ever, and glitzy, fake-ass LA cannot ever hope to compare’ snobs?”
He gives a loose shrug that tells me everything I need to know. “Is the Citizens Patrol of Little Tokyo about to tell me I’m wrong?”
“The Citizens Patrol was about to feed you local tacos as absolutely irrefutable proof that LA is superior,” I say. “But with that attitude, you don’t deserve tacos, so let’s keep to the task at hand. If this is Grace’s proof-of-life photo, that means she was at the library—when did you get this?”
“This morning,” he says. “I sped over here to show you.”
“When you could have just texted me and not interrupted the mochi demonstration,” I say. “Yes, that makes sense.”
“If I’d texted you, we wouldn’t have been able to immediately go to our next obvious investigative step,” Henry says. “Which is—”
“Go to the library,” I say, com
pleting his thought. “Maybe she’s still there. Or will be there again. Or maybe somebody saw her and will be able to tell us something. Or . . . or . . .”
I can’t even vocalize my next thought. Which is that maybe standing in the same place Grace was standing, picking up on whatever spirit or energy she left in the air, will help me figure out where she’s going next. My gaze wanders up the twisting branches of the tree, and I imagine them morphing into the twisting hair of an onryo.
“So?” Henry says. He gestures to the garden’s exit. “I’m parked in the Aiso Street garage. We could take my car?”
“It’s not that far—we can walk. Or are you one of those New Yorkers who thinks LA people don’t walk anywhere?” I give him a scathing look.
He grins. “You said it.”
“But you thought it.”
He just laughs. “Berate me if you must, Citizens Patrol—last I heard, you can’t arrest me just for thinking something.”
EIGHT
I’m pretty sure I know the exact tile art in Grace’s photo. If you zoomed out, you would see a marvel of blues and greens forming the image of a wildly growing plant. There’s a striking blue vase at the plant’s base, but it can’t contain all the curving leaves, or the bright yellow flowers sprouting at the vine-y tips.
It’s a vivid portrait of life contained in a small space, in this series of tiles.
Every inch of the Los Angeles Central Library is crammed with these beautiful details—it is absolutely packed to the brim with hidden and not-so-hidden art. And I know all the corners of the place, each of its nooks and crannies, thanks to my addiction to gigantic Japanese folklore tomes. I still check them out by the stack.
I’m on a mission to get to the tile art from the photo, striding into the building with purpose. But before I can complete my mission, Henry grabs my arm.
“Hey, uh . . .” He gestures to the library gift shop. “You want to get a baseball cap or something?”
