We exited the train at Yawata, but standing in the slightly run-down station, it seemed as though we’d hit our final dead end.
“Now what?” “260 up” and a drawing of a key wasn’t a lot to go on. “Maybe we’re supposed to keep working from 260 up. Like, 260 steps north from the platform?” I turned north—the way the train had left the station—and saw we wouldn’t get very far unless we could walk through walls. “Or not. Let’s try starting from the front of the station.”
Genki made a face.
“Unless you have a better idea?”
He mimed going to sleep.
“You want to take a nap? A break?”
Genki nodded and walked over to a nearby vending machine before I could argue that it was getting late. I couldn’t stay out all night chasing Purikura Man.
Genki and I bought cans of Fanta—melon for him, orange for me—and stood against a nearby wall.
Genki pulled his phone out and it wasn’t long before I had a new text. Your parents aren’t going to be angry if you’re late?
My dad will. I can deal with him, though. You?
My parents are too busy to notice if I’m around. He must have caught the sympathy in my eyes, because he added, It comes in handy when I’m following clues all over Kansai with a strange girl.
You think I’m the strange one? I raised an eyebrow at him and he mirrored my expression in return.
I drained the rest of my soda and walked back to the vending machine to throw my can away, Genki following with his own empty can. That’s when I noticed a red soda can with a golden key painted on it in the vending machine I’d barely glanced at before. It was exactly the kind of strange and mysterious sign we were looking for.
My phone chirped. Buy it.
“You buy it.”
I bought the train tickets.
Reluctantly, I counted out 150 yen and fed it into the machine. I pressed the button for the soda, but nothing happened. I tried again and still nothing.
“Hey!”
Genki gave the machine one desperate kick, but it was stubborn. No golden key soda for us. Somebody was already here and got it before us! He kicked the machine again and I put a hand on his arm.
“Genki? You’re kind of freaking me out.”
Sorry.
“Maybe it’s the key, not the soda,” I ventured.
What’s the key mean? We need a lock?
My eyes fell on the Fushimi Inari Shrine tourism poster on the wall. The poster showed one of the stone foxes at the main gate in Kyoto, a large key in its mouth. “What we need is another train ticket.”
I’d been joking before about Purikura Man being a yakuza, but now that the sun was setting, it seemed like a real possibility. As we sped closer to Fushimi Inari, I became more and more restless.
Teach me something, I texted.
What? Like chess?
JSL. So we can stop talking to each other like this.
Genki smiled his first genuinely warm smile. Before he’d always smirked or grinned, but this smile was almost shy. He taught me my name first, then his.
And the most important sign of all.
Genki cupped his left hand and made a circular movement with his two first fingers.
I copied him. The movements reminded me of scooping rice out of a bowl with chopsticks. “Eating?”
He grinned and patted his stomach in affirmation. Whether we get the prize or not, I’m taking us out for udon.
I barely had time to register that Genki wanted to keep hanging out with me, let alone gotten a chance to ask him what he meant by prize, when our train ground to a halt.
It was a five-minute walk to the shrine from the station, and the surrounding gift shops were closing for the day. Fushimi Inari rose up in front of us, and soon we were at the bottom of a long line of deep-orange torii gates leading up the mountain. In the day, walking through the gates was like walking to another world.
Lanterns had been lit now, but it only made the torii turn creepy and threatening. Genki didn’t hesitate to start walking through the gates, but I turned around to take one last look at the more brightly lit main grounds we’d just left.
Marching uphill toward us was Purikura Man. He was watching his feet and hadn’t seen us yet. I ran into the orange torii tunnel and pulled Genki aside to make him face me. He needed to read my lips perfectly. “He’s right behind us!”
He cocked his head and curled his first finger and made an arc with it over his head. Finger question marks.
“Purikura Man. We have to call the police before he spots us.”
Genki looked at me like I’d suggested we catch a train to Nara and find some deer to ride. He gestured at the rest of the waiting path through the torii. He wanted us to keep going.
While we argued, Purikura Man had caught up to us, and when he looked up from his shoes, he broke into a run up the path with Genki close behind. I was left standing there, not sure what to do.
My phone beeped and I dropped it in my rush to flip it open. It was a text from my father. He was angry I hadn’t come home yet and demanded to know what I was doing.
What was I doing?
I sprinted up the path, orange torii flashing past. My thighs, calves, and chest screamed for me to stop, but I couldn’t. Not when Genki might be in trouble. I kept waiting to turn a corner and see Purikura Man and Genki, but the only thing in front of me was more empty path and endless torii.
There was a break up ahead where the torii stopped, but the path only split into two tunnels. Purikura Man and Genki were wrestling, and Purikura Man was trying to pull something out of his pocket.
“No!”
I leapt onto the both of them, trying to pull what looked like it could be a knife out of his hand, but he held on tight.
“Get off me or I’m calling the police!” Purikura Man said, his voice strained as he fought off Genki and me.
His grip loosened and I saw he was only holding a cell phone.
There were footsteps and somebody emerged from the left path.
“Sango?”
I’d never seen her smile so widely. Me with a salariman and a strange boy didn’t faze her.
“You’re all too late,” she announced. “I already won.”
“What are you talking about?”
She wiggled a pair of tickets in the air.
Purikura Man shoved Genki and me off him. “It’s for M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie about a possessed boxing glove,” he said. “We all won the first clue in an Internet raffle and had to figure the rest out from there. The clues lead to tickets to the Hollywood premiere.”
“I’ve been running around all day for movie tickets?”
“What did you think?” Sango asked.
I gestured at Purikura Man. “That he was involved in something illegal,” I mumbled.
He laughed. “Just an office drone who loves movies. I had to work today, so I got here later than I meant to, otherwise I would have had it.” To Sango, he bowed and said, “Congratulations.” He headed back down the way he’d come. I was feeling increasingly silly.
“And that’s why you wanted to do purikura?” I asked Sango. “You thought there’d be a clue?”
“I’d been there earlier and I thought maybe the clue was weight sensitive, so I asked you and Yumi to come. I’m sorry I lied, but I would have been disqualified from the contest if I told anyone. I figured out to unplug it yesterday morning, but I got stuck with the ‘260 up’ stuff.” She flashed the tickets. “Until today.”
Genki had kept a blank face this whole time because it had gotten too dim for him to read everyone’s lips. He was trying to look like he knew what was being said and just didn’t care. Reading him was getting easier.
We’ve been on a movie ticket scavenger hunt and didn’t even win, I texted.
He looked disappointed, but nodded, as though he’d seen this coming.
I texted, You didn’t know, did you?
He shrugged.
“You
knew?!”
Sango looked back and forth between Genki and me, lost. I ignored her for the moment, waiting for Genki to text me an explanation.
It was the longest text I’d gotten from him all day. My sister hadn’t gotten the Internet invitation, and when I saw the salariman poking around the purikura booth, I had a feeling I knew what he was looking for. I just needed to figure out the clue he had been after, then follow the trail on my own to the tickets.
“And you didn’t think to tell me all that earlier?”
He mimed texting. I sighed and repeated myself in text, but with added angry-faced emoticons.
I thought you were after the tickets too, he answered. That’s why I didn’t want your help finding them at first. What did you think all those clues were for?
He had me there.
We said good-bye to Sango at the train station. “See you at school, Kana?” She discreetly waggled her eyebrows at me.
Once we were seated on the train home, Genki held his hand out to me and I knew this time he wasn’t asking for my cell phone.
I ignored the offer and texted: I’ve never felt so stupid in my life. This whole day, I thought we were doing something important.
That’s too bad, because I’m feeling pretty good right now, even without the tickets. I gave him a look, and he continued, I got to chase hidden signs and golden keys with a very weird and very smart girl.
Is that supposed to make me feel better? Calling me weird?
Genki shrugged. I like weird.
He still held his hand open for me to take.
Finally, I did.
Wings on the Wind
by Yuichi Kimura
translated by Alexander O. Smith
It happened at dusk.
The fox struck swiftly.
The cranes panicked—
One of their flock was gone.
A fledgling had lost his life.
In the twisting winds on the Mongolian plain,
the wounded flock spent the night in silence.
The hearts of the cranes wrenched tight with regret:
If only we’d taken flight sooner.
If only we’d seen the fox right away.
Their longing for the life lost
rushed round and round inside them and frustration welled
with no outlet for their grief.
“Just before the fox came I heard someone flap,” said one crane.
“When Kururu was feeding Karara?”
Kururu sometimes shared his catch with weak Karara,
who couldn’t hunt on her own.
The rest of the birds began to speak, hurling harsh words.
At last their anger had a target.
“That’s how the fox found us!”
“That was no time to feed!”
“You know, that always bothered me about you, Kururu. Always!”
I wasn’t the only one who flapped, Kururu wanted to say.
The fox had his eye on us for a long time before he struck.
How could feeding Karara have made any difference at all?
But he knew it was no use.
He could tell which way the wind was blowing.
From then on, it was as if Kururu himself had killed the fledgling.
No one took his side. Even Karara stood with the others in silence.
Everything he had taken for granted—the flock, his friends—
had changed.
All turned their backs to him, and spoke not a word.
No one even tried to understand how he felt.
He couldn’t trust his friends. He couldn’t trust his flock.
All poor Kururu could be was alone.
He blamed himself.
Even the sound of his own wings on the wind
was ugly to his ears.
Why didn’t I say something when I had the chance?
Why can’t I get along with the others?
I hate myself.
I hate my beak, my legs, my wings. I hate it all.
It became hard for Kururu just to fly with the flock.
One morning, Kururu found he couldn’t fly at all.
He flapped as usual, but remained earthbound.
All he could do was cower in a corner of the plain.
Winter was drawing near.
Winter on the Mongolian plains brought cold—
freezing, fifty-below-zero cold.
Before then, the cranes would cross over the Himalayas to the south,
leaving for the warmth of India.
A crane who could not fly when winter came was a dead crane.
But Kururu didn’t care.
It seemed to him that sitting still and refusing to feed
Was the only way he could hold on to the last shred
of his bedraggled pride.
In time he saw one flock flying southward.
A second, then a third followed.
White flakes had begun to flutter around Kururu
when he spotted a single crane approaching from the southern sky.
It was Karara.
Karara settled down next to Kururu without a word.
If she had said, “Fly with me,”
or even if she had just flown away,
Kururu would have shaken his head and said,
“I know you don’t need me.”
But Karara said nothing.
She simply sat by his side
watching as the flocks fled southward.
Day by day the air grew colder.
But Kururu’s heart had begun to melt.
She’s ready to die here.
If I don’t fly . . .
Just then, a fox appeared from the brush.
Fangs gleaming, he leapt at Karara.
“Look out!”
Kururu flapped his wings, pushing Karara aside.
She took off.
With a start, Kururu realized he too was rising into the sky.
Below them the fox remained, glaring longingly upward.
“I’m flying!” Kururu shouted.
He beat his wings with all his might, and felt himself soar higher.
The sound of his wings on the wind sent a pleasing rhythm
echoing through his entire body.
“I can make it! I can fly beyond those towering mountains.”
Karara looked back and asked:
“You’ll fly with me?”
“Of course,” Kururu said
with a shy smile.
The two cranes headed southward, chasing the last of the flocks.
With powerful strokes, they beat their wings, flying on and on. . . .
Families and Connections
The Law of Gravity
by Yuko Katakawa
translated by Deborah Iwabuchi
“Don’t cry. I’ll cry for you so you can stop.”
Five years ago these words changed my life.
Just so you know, my little sister Maika was the one who said them, but she didn’t say them to me. She was talking to an elephant in the zoo.
It was right after I’d started junior high. I had fallen down some stairs and broken my right arm. My mother decided to take me to the zoo to take my mind off the pain. She said it would just be the two of us, but I did everything I could to avoid that. Mom always favored me—pushing me to do better and make something of myself. She made sure I had the best of everything—probably to make it easier for me to stay on the path she had chosen. But I hated my life. I didn’t have a say in anything. Even worse, she didn’t seem to think Maika would ever amount to anything, and it hadn’t even occurred to her that her ten-year-old daughter might enjoy the zoo more than I would. But I refused to go without Maika, so Mom finally gave in and brought her along.
The idea of going out alone with my mom still sends shivers down my spine. I don’t remember much from those days, and there aren’t many good memories. I just recall wondering how I ought to end my life. At thirteen, I had made it through a long “
entrance exam war,” and been accepted to my first-choice junior high, but I no longer had the energy to go on living. It had all felt like so much work, and I was tired of it.
I had done what I had to do to get into the right school, studying late into the night. Dinner was always fast food or convenience store fare—whatever Mom picked up for me when she met me at the station to take my school satchel and pass me what I needed for evening cram school classes. The cram school teachers drilled it into our young heads to think of all the other test takers as enemies. Victory over our enemies would get us into the school that would guarantee our future. That was easy enough to understand, but things turned out to be more complicated. My new school was full of my former “enemies,” and now, of course, we were expected to become friends for life.
Nothing made any sense.
By the time I fell and broke my arm, I had figured it out—life would go on in the same way. I would continue to act the way my parents wanted me to, get into the schools they picked, and pretend to be the perfect son they had always wanted.
But a perfect son would never get a chance to rebel or even have an opinion of his own. The more I thought about it, the more suffocating it seemed, until I couldn’t come up with a reason to endure decades more of a life like that. If it was just going to be more of the same, putting a quick end to it all seemed the better option.
So that’s what was going on in my head, but I was basically just a helpless teenager who couldn’t think of any better way to change my life.
Then one day, someone pushed me from behind on a staircase landing at school, and I fell down the stairs.
As I fell, I turned around to see who had done it, so I could get back at him later. I should have just let go, because in that instant, what might have been a minor bruise ended up a broken arm—a worst-case scenario. What good was a student, a perfect son, without a right arm?
And all because of that hopeless idiot. The culprit was the guy who had been stuck in the number-two position below me back in cram school. We had both passed the entrance exam for the same junior high, and we had just finished our first midterms there, but he still couldn’t pull ahead. Obviously frustrated to find himself still trailing behind, he had taken the simplest and stupidest route available to get rid of me. Even as I fell, I was disappointed that his motive was so obvious.
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