by Amanda Sun
I realized I was holding my breath and I let it out in a gasp.
“Close one, yes?” said Jun, bending forward and pressing his hands against his knees. “Are you okay?”
I didn’t know what to say.
He looked at me, smiling kindly.
“Jun, what the hell was that?”
“Ah,” he said. “I don’t like gangsters. And he threatened you.”
“Yeah, but—”
“You have to mean business with them,” he said, “or they won’t leave you alone.” His piercing eyes stared back as he smoothed a blond highlight behind his ear. “I’m sorry if I scared you,” he said. “You can’t take them lightly, Katie.
Those guys are dangerous.”
“If you hadn’t been here—”
“Don’t worry,” Jun said. “You’re Yuu’s friend, right? And Ishikawa and Yuu are friends. So he wouldn’t hurt you. And now that I’ve shown him his goons don’t listen, hopefully he’ll distance himself from them.”
“Maybe.”
“I didn’t mean to frighten you. Listen, could I give you my keitai number?” I opened my mouth, but he held up a hand. “I know. I’m not going to ask you for coffee again.”
He smiled. “But I’d just feel a lot better if I knew you could get ahold of me.”
He was himself again, gentle and calm and gorgeous. I wished he hadn’t let Sugi get to him with the whole bumping-into-his-shoulder thing. But it did feel nice that he’d defended me and that I could count on him.
“Okay,” I said, pulling out my keitai. He smiled, pushing a button on his phone to send through his number. My keitai beeped with his info.
And suddenly his warm fingers wrapped around my hand, which sent a shock through me.
“I think you have someone you like,” he said. “But if things change, would you consider me? I’d really like to get to know you better.”
My heart felt like it stopped.
Then he scratched the back of his head, laughing. “I’m sorry. Hazui, I’m so awkward sometimes. Forget I said it. I go this way now, so…”
“Oh. Oh, okay. Thanks.”
“Bai bai,” he said, the same as the English goodbye, and he actually winked, shaking a thumbs-up at me. Yes, really. He turned and I watched his tall frame walk around the outskirts of Sunpu Park. He walked gracefully, not the swagger Ishikawa and Tomohiro sometimes tried when others were watching, and he swung his book bag back and forth alongside him. I watched him for another minute, then raced through Sunpu Park to class.
My mind fell apart as I listened to the gravel crunch beneath my feet. I just wanted a day where no one pulled a knife or released an ancient dragon into the sky. Too much to ask, apparently.
Ishikawa had seen the dragon after all. It was harder to deny than I’d thought. I was a bad actor. Good thing school was ending for summer break soon. I wouldn’t be able to make it much longer.
Ishikawa was waiting in the courtyard after school, but it wasn’t for me. I saw him standing among the clutter of bikes, his arms folded across his chest and the sun shining off his shock of white hair. He leaned against the metal bar, eyes narrowed, watching the door of the genkan as students filed past him.
I backed up to the cubby where I’d placed my slippers and waited. I had to get to cram school, but there was no way I could go out there now.
The door to the school hallway slid open and the scraping noise made me jump. I looked over my shoulder and saw Tomohiro there. He gave me a small nod, eyes scanning over the students in the genkan. When he saw Ishikawa outside, he grimaced. He shook the slippers off his feet and shoved them into his cubby on the other side of the room. Then, without looking back, he left the school. Deny everything.
Ishikawa spotted him and walked halfway over. I watched, holding my breath. Tomohiro was acting casual, slouching over and running his hand through his hair. Ishikawa looked a little calmer than the morning, too, but he wasn’t smiling.
“Hey!” Someone clapped me on the back and I jumped a mile. Tanaka stood there grinning at me.
“Don’t do that,” I hissed.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. I’m just… Never mind.”
“Hey, should we go for ramen together?”
“I have cram school.”
“So skip,” he said. “It’s almost summer break. Let’s go for ice cream at least, okay? Make memories to carry us through the lonely summer, stuff like that.”
“What?”
“Come on, come on,” Tanaka said, pushing me out the door. “Yuki’s waiting outside.” The wave of afternoon humidity pressed against my face, like walking into an oven.
Tomohiro would definitely be sweltering in his blazer, just to cover up his wrist. Ishikawa looked over as I stepped out, his face pale. He put his hand on Tomohiro’s arm, pushing him away gently as he approached me.
“Greene,” he said, and I didn’t want to stop walking, but Tanaka had no idea and stopped, looking around the courtyard for Yuki. He saw her by the tennis court with her friends and waved her over. Ishikawa was in front of me now, Tomohiro a step or two behind.
“Leave me alone,” I said quietly, but Ishikawa’s head bobbed down in front of me. A half bow, an apology.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry about what happened. I didn’t mean for it to happen, I swear.”
“What happened?” Tomohiro said, walking over.
“Nothing,” I said. “Ishikawa’s mobsters just decided they’d have a go at me.”
Tomohiro looked at Ishikawa, his face darkening.
“You pulled that shit in front of Katie?” he said.
I watched the plan disintegrating in front of my face.
“Katie-chan!” Yuki cried as she joined our group. She saw Tanaka’s confused face and added, “What’s wrong?”
“I didn’t know your friend would be provoked by that,”
Ishikawa said. “Sugi shouldn’t have done it, but your friend could’ve turned away.”
“What friend?” Tomohiro said.
“Takahashi,” Ishikawa said, and Tomohiro looked at me funny.
“I ran into him on the way to school,” I said. The sun felt too warm, and I wanted to leave.
“He said you’re friends,” Ishikawa said.
Crap. I couldn’t deny it or Ishikawa would know I’d been lying, and that would put me in more trouble. I looked at Tomo hiro and bit my lip. But so what if I had other guy friends? He wouldn’t take it that way, would he?
“Yeah,” I said quietly, “we’re friends.”
“Katie, everything okay?” said Tanaka.
“Everything’s fine,” I said. “Let’s go.” Tanaka nodded, and we started to leave.
That wasn’t so awful, I thought. It could’ve been worse.
“I hope you took care of Katie last night, Yuu-san,” Yuki blurted out with a wicked smile, and my heart stopped.
Tomo hiro opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. His face started to pale.
“So you were together last night?” said Ishikawa.
“Yuki!” I hissed.
“We weren’t,” Tomohiro said.
Yuki looked confused. “But…”
“We weren’t,” I echoed. “I was helping my aunt with papers all night. Really boring. Listen, I’m going to be late for cram school. I’m—I’m sorry.”
I did the only thing I could do in that situation. I ran. Yuki and Tanaka followed as I tried to lose myself in Sunpu Park, but I couldn’t. I knew the park too well now. The bells by the central fountain chimed beside me as I slowed to catch my breath.
“Katie, wait up!” Yuki called. She and Tanaka were at my side a minute later.
“What happened to not telling anyone?” I said.
“I’m so sorry! I thought you just didn’t want your aunt to know!”
“Wait, why is this a secret?” said Tanaka.
“It isn’t,” I said, running my fingers through the tangles in my hair. “It’s just…
” How much did I want to involve them?
The less they knew, the better. “I just don’t want Ishikawa to know anything about us. He’s creepy.”
“I’m sorry,” Yuki said again. “I’ll buy the ice cream. My treat.”
What could I do? It was done.
Tanaka chatted about cakes and drinks as we walked, and I forced myself to look down, to not look back. I squeezed my hands into fists as we walked. I tried to focus on the beauty of Sunpu Park, but the greenery had faded to the brown of a too-hot summer. I hoped Tomohiro was a smooth liar. I guess he’d had a lot of practice.
We bought extravagant ice creams from the stall at Shizuoka Station, warm waffle cones dripping with green-tea ice cream and sweet-bean topping, vanilla-and-strawberry swirl with melon and mango sauce drizzled on top. I tried to forget everything at that moment, to just enjoy the normalcy of it.
How much had changed that eating sweet beans in a waffle cone at a bullet-train station had become normal?
At the last kendo practice, Ishikawa tried again. I was drinking from my water bottle, and when I tilted my head down and pulled the bottle from my lips, he was there, standing too close. I almost spat the water out into his face.
“Greene,” he said quietly. “Yuuto is my friend. I don’t understand why he’s keeping this from me.”
“What do you mean?” I said as casually as I could. Ishikawa stared at me. I hadn’t noticed before how deep his eyes were, how they drew you in like prey.
“Listen,” he said, wrapping his wrist around my arm gently.
“Has Yuuto told you about the Kami?”
“You mean Shinto gods?” I said. Ishikawa swore under his breath. Behind us, the clack of shinai hitting against each other and the kiai shouts of opponents filled the gym.
“Look, pretend all you want. The Kami were scattered at the end of the war. But they’re uniting now, in secrecy.
They have been for the last ten, twenty years. And not all the Kami are gentle or good-hearted, or naïve, like Yuuto.”
He leaned in closer, his voice a hot whisper crawling on my skin. “Yakuza aren’t the most dangerous people in Japan. Do you have any idea what these Kami will do to claim Yuuto as their own?”
I was silent. Was he making it all up? Tomohiro hadn’t mentioned some secret society of others like him. It’s not like I saw strange creatures made of ink floating through the sky every day. People would pick up on that sort of thing.
I’d hesitated, and Ishikawa’s eyes gleamed. A smile hovered on his lips, like he’d convinced me to admit the truth. I didn’t know if he was lying about the other Kami, but I knew I had to protect Tomohiro. “Ishikawa, I have no clue what you’re talking about. Maybe it’s my poor Japanese.”
The light blinked out of his eyes and he screamed right in my face, shaking his head from side to side. “Don’t talk shit!”
“Hey, hey!” called out Watanabe-sensei. “Ishikawa, Greene, back to your kiri-kaeshi now!” Ishikawa sighed, his shoulders hunching as he tried to calm down. His grip tightened around my wrist.
“Do you think I’m the only one who saw the dragon?”
he whispered roughly. “You’re sorely mistaken. Yuuto won’t admit it, but you can save him, Greene. Let me help him.
Let us protect him from them. ” He let go of my wrist then, slamming his men over his head, and fell back into line before I could respond.
My whole body shook and I felt like I was going to throw up. I pushed in the door of the girls’ change room and shrank to the floor, tears trailing down my cheeks. What was the truth? What was going on? It was probably all lies, spun by Ishikawa to get me to spill what had happened. I rocked on my heels, crying and crying, and then slipped out of the gym before the girls came in from Kendo Club, before Ishikawa could confront me again. I hurried along the edge of the gym, and I could feel Tomohiro’s eyes on me as I slipped out of sight.
Chapter 13
Yuki’s mother picked me up at seven the next morning and drove us to Shizuoka Station. Diane was busy packing for a teacher’s conference in Osaka, so it was a quick hug and goodbyes, and off we went. The Shinkansen train sped across Honshu, the mainland of Japan. I stared out the window at rice fields and hundreds of low buildings, built with earth-quakes in mind. Yuki chattered excitedly about how we were going almost two hundred miles per hour, but it just made my ears pop and ache the whole way.
Yuki and I got off the bullet train in Hiroshima and switched to the local trains for the big red-and-white ferry to Miyajima. We saw the giant o-Torii gate in the distance, an archway of bright orange reflected in the deep blue water.
Itsukushima Shrine splayed out on its stilt legs above the tide, which swelled around the barnacle-encrusted base of the snaking orange hallways. Against the blue of the sky and the dark green forested mountains, the sight took my breath away.
Yuki squeezed my arm. “It’s beautiful, right? It’s the one thing I like about visiting my brother.”
I grinned. “Is he that awful?”
“Worse,” she said, and we laughed. I breathed in the smell of the sea, the motor of the ferry whirring in my ears. And in the back of my mind, I felt the happy thrill of a summer vacation with friends.
But whenever I closed my eyes, the imprint of the ink dragon leaped at me, Ishikawa’s words filling me with doubt and dread. What sort of world was Tomohiro walking into at his kendo training retreat? Could he hold out against Ishikawa?
And if there really was a secret society of Kami—a dangerous one at that—why the hell didn’t he tell me? Did he really not know? So how come Ishikawa did? As if the Yakuza were really the good guys, and I was supposed to fall for that.
But no matter how I played the scene out in my head, I was never fully convinced that I’d figured it out. It didn’t add up.
The ferry docked and Yuki’s brother was there, waving wildly at us.
“Niichan!” Yuki shouted.
“Yuki!” he shouted back.
Niichan was short and slender, and looked an awful lot like Yuki. They had the same round, warm face, and the same willowy fingers.
“So good to see you,” he said, when we’d finally docked at the Miyajima Terminal. “And this is your friend Katie?”
“Nice to meet you,” I said, and we bowed to each other.
“I’m Watabe Sousuke,” Niichan said. “But you can call me Niichan, too, if you like.”
“Thanks.” I smiled. I’d never had any siblings, and it was nice to have a brother, even if he was a surrogate.
He took our suitcases, one in each hand, and loaded them into his white three-wheeled truck. We puttered up a few side streets and then scaled the side of the mountain.
He pulled into a narrow driveway and there it was, a little two-room house halfway up the mountainside and out of the way of the tourists. The view was amazing, the ocean stretching out to tiny islands that rose from its depths. From the inside of the house, the roar of the waves was a gentle lapping, a pleasant sound that filled the house.
Niichan put our suitcases in the corner of the main room and then walked over to the little stove to boil some water.
He made us each a cup of tea, and we sat down together on the tatami floor.
“Yuki’s glad you could come this year,” he said, passing a plate of cookies. I sat up straight on my knees, ready to put into practice what I’d learned at Tea Ceremony Club. But Yuki sat with her legs sprawled to the side, so I collapsed, too, relieved but a little deflated. So much for tea-ceremony stud-ies. “She always complains about how bored she is.”
“How could you be bored here? It’s beautiful!”
Yuki groaned. “It’s beautiful,” she said, “and tiny. Once you’ve been here every summer for the last four years, it starts to wear on you.”
“Well, at least you can show Katie around this time, ne? ”
Niichan said, and I blushed at the familiarity of hearing my first name from a stranger. I guess I’d been in Japan long enough for it to
affect me like that. “Listen, Katie, if you’re interested, I can show you around Itsukushima Shrine.”
“Isn’t that the one we saw from the ferry?”
Yuki nodded. “Niichan works there.”
My eyes almost popped out of my head. “You’re a monk?”
He laughed. “No, no,” he said. “Just a caretaker. I main-tain the website for the priests, clean the grounds, lead tours, that sort of thing.”
“Oh.” But my heart was still pounding. If he worked at a Shinto shrine, wouldn’t he know a lot about Kami?
After the tea, we took a walk along the shoreline of Miyajima, the giant orange arch of Itsukushima in the distance. We had dinner at a café, and on the way home, Niichan bought us each a maple leaf–shaped custard cake, the pastry warm in our hands. He laid out futons for us in the living room, which was also the kitchen, and was now a bedroom. He slept in the other room, which was his bedroom and had a Western-style bed in it. Diane’s mansion had Western beds, too, and I wasn’t used to the tatami pressing against my spine through the thin futon as I tried to sleep. Yuki and I whispered for a while, but when she fell asleep I stared into the darkness, listening to the lapping of the ocean outside the window.
Suntaba School and my life there felt so far away, the happiness and the danger Tomohiro brought into my world. I wasn’t sure how I’d managed to get mixed in with gangsters and secret societies. I wished I’d fallen for Tanaka, that I’d called Tomohiro on the jerk he was and just stayed away from him. But I’d seen the real him, that he was deeper and different and changed. Now I couldn’t imagine a world without him in it. My heart was glass—easy to see through, simple to break.
I wondered if this was how Mom had felt after Dad. It was enough to make me swear off boys forever.
The ocean breeze blew in through the window, the rich, salty smell of the sea pressing against my face. I thought of riding the horse through Toro Iseki, galloping freely through the clearing and laughing until tears swelled at the corners of our eyes and our stomachs ached.
A buzzing noise sounded in my purse. My keitai. I pulled back the futon duvet and crawled over the scratchy tatami, fumbling around in the bag until my fingers touched the cool metal. The darkness flooded with rainbow colors as I flipped open the top.
