by Asha Lemmie
Grudgingly, Nori made her way back up to her attic. She picked at her lunch, pushing away the milk Akiko offered her. She knew she was being difficult but no longer cared.
“I want something sweet. Have the cook make me a cake.”
Akiko raised an eyebrow. “What kind of cake?”
“I want lemon cake. And I want whipped cream.”
Akiko bowed and went out, leaving Nori to stew in silence. She paced around the attic in a huff before finally deciding to read a book. She plucked a book of poetry from her bookshelf and hunkered down to read by the window. She had been slacking on her reading lately.
The history book that Sensei had given her sat on the top of her bookshelf, collecting dust. When her lessons resumed in a few weeks, she would likely be in for a tongue-lashing. Saotome-sensei always went away all summer, but he expected her to keep up with her studies.
She sat there reading for several hours, and when her cake came, she picked at it for a moment before having it sent away.
She played with Agnes for a little while before growing bored with that also. She declined dinner and ignored Akiko’s protest.
She fussed under her breath when Akiko told her to go to bed in that voice that meant Don’t argue or I’ll tell your grandmother. She had just pulled her nightgown over her head when she felt a presence behind her.
“Nori.”
The way her brother said her name let her know that he was displeased with her. She turned to face him.
“Oniichan,” she started, filling up with excitement the way she always did when he said her name. But the look he cut her told her that this was not a smiling occasion.
“I’ve heard that you’re being a brat.”
She didn’t tell him that he’d heard this because it was entirely true. “I wasn’t acting like a brat.”
It was such a lie that she had a hard time keeping her face straight. But this was her pride at stake here. That damned Kamiza pride. Even a bastard could have some.
Akira rolled his gray eyes at her, glancing impatiently at his watch as if she were cutting into his meticulously planned schedule.
“Save it. Nori, I can’t spend every waking moment with you. And even if I could, I wouldn’t want to. What are you going to do when school starts?”
She felt her mouth go completely dry. “Gakuen? School?”
Akira rolled his eyes at her again, and Nori thought, somewhat bitterly, that it would serve him right if they got stuck in the back of his head. The dimly lit room accentuated his pale complexion all the more, and he glowed like Jesus before the sinners. His very presence shone a fluorescent light on all that she was not.
“Yes, school. I start in a few weeks. I’ve been putting it off as it is; my father’s death has made a worthy excuse. I’m not exactly thrilled about the place the old woman picked out. But they have a world-class music teacher there. It was the deal for getting me to go. Anyway . . . I’m going to be gone all day. And you can’t starve yourself when I’m gone.”
“I want to go with you.” Nori tried her best to sound like she was doing anything but pleading. Sadly, it wasn’t very convincing. “Please? I’m good at my lessons. Really, I am. I could go with you. I wouldn’t embarrass you, I promise.”
His face darkened. “Nori, I’m in a different year than you. Besides, my school doesn’t take people your age.”
And the unspoken: I wouldn’t want you there anyway.
“So? They have schools for girls my age. I know they do. Sensei used to teach at one. I can go to one of those.”
Akira gave her a long, solemn look. “You know that’s impossible.”
Translation: If you don’t know that’s impossible, you’re a complete idiot.
She dug her nails into her palms. “The school wouldn’t care. They wouldn’t and you know it. There are plenty of Americans—”
Akira raised an eyebrow. “Not in Kyoto, there aren’t. And how did you find out about that?”
Nori looked at her feet. She was an idiot, there was little doubt about that, but even she could manage to find the simplest conclusion. Everyone hated the Americans. And everyone hated her. It made sense.
“I’ve been reading the newspaper. Akiko-san gives it to me sometimes even though she isn’t supposed to. And I listen to the servants’ gossip. I know that the Americans are here. They won the war, didn’t they? That’s why they’re here. That’s why . . .” She let her voice trail off into nothing.
She still didn’t fully comprehend the war, but she knew enough to understand that her people felt threatened by these Americans. She had a secret fear that she had pushed away for years: she suspected that her father was an American. Where else had her skin come from? This skin that Akiko had called “colored” when Nori asked why she had to take the baths?
There were no colored people here. But in America, she’d read, there was every kind of person you could imagine. Every kind of skin, every race of people under the sun.
She had a deeper fear too, the very worst: that her father was a soldier for the other side. One of the men who had come into her family’s homeland and attempted to destroy its people, its tradition, and its legacy for no reason at all; one of the people who took away the power of the monarchy, one of the people who unleashed fire that fell from the sky. It all made sense. The timing of it, the reason for all the shame: her existence was an embodiment of betrayal.
Akira closed the space between them and placed a firm hand on the top of her head. She looked up at him, quite determined not to cry. He had read her mind, as clearly as if her thoughts were letters sprawled across her forehead.
“You are not an American, Noriko,” he whispered, slowly and clearly. “You are one of us.”
Now it was Akira’s turn to lie. She looked up at him, her bold gaze daring him to speak the truth. “My father wasn’t one of us. He was an American, wasn’t he? He was one of the people who hurt everyone?”
For the first time since Nori had known him, Akira looked truly unsure of himself. This conversation had gotten away from him, his control was gone, and it was obvious that he did not like it.
“Your father . . . didn’t hurt anyone. From what I understand he was just a cook. He came before things . . . before.”
“Before the war?”
“Nori, maybe this isn’t—”
She balled her hands into fists and spoke the words she’d always been too afraid to say.
“Just tell me.”
And there it was. The unleashing of the elephant in the room, the one that they had both been avoiding since the day Akira arrived on the Kamiza doorstep. Because the thing about the elephant was that it only existed if one acknowledged it did. In order to make it tangible, to give it power, one had to willingly step into the trap. Nori had been avoiding it. She’d been so overjoyed to have her Oniichan that she’d pushed all the rest aside. Because somehow she knew that once they had this conversation, things would never be the same.
But she could no longer cloak herself in ignorance and use it as her protection; whatever frail delusions she clung to were about to be freed from the shadows and cast into the unforgiving light, where they had no hope of surviving.
Akira looked immensely uncomfortable. He fidgeted with the sleeves of his burgundy button-down shirt. “This isn’t my place to be telling you these things. Someone else should.”
“And who is going to do that, Oniichan?” she demanded, seizing the hand he had on her shoulder and pressing her fingers into his palm. “Nobody. Nobody has ever told me anything. And part of me was grateful for that. But I’m not anymore. I want to know the truth. Tell me who I am.”
Akira closed his eyes for a brief moment. When he opened them, he almost looked sad.
“Sit down, Nori.”
* * *
The silence that followed filled the room like a noxious gas. Nori’s mouth
hung slack and gaping, her eyes rolled around like frantic marbles without a place to land. She was pulling at her hair so hard that it threatened to rip from her scalp.
Akira sat across the table from her, hands folded neatly in front of him. He looked at her with obvious concern. “Noriko . . . you must have known.”
“I didn’t,” she whispered, not bothering to look at him. She didn’t want to see the pity in his eyes. “I didn’t know that my birth destroyed your family.”
“Our mother and my father were never happy, Nori. They didn’t hate each other, but happy? No. Mother didn’t want to marry him. She didn’t want to marry anyone, but she didn’t have a choice.”
“She broke her wedding vows,” Nori whimpered, in a piteous little voice that she had thought was lost to her. “She betrayed your father. She betrayed God. She committed adultery. With an American.”
Akira shrugged a shoulder. It was clear that if this had ever bothered him, he was over it now.
“She left when I was four. I don’t really remember much about it, and she never told us where she was going. That’s, I’m assuming, when she realized she was pregnant with you. Even before she left, she was never around. She hung around with strange people and stayed out all hours. I highly doubt your father was the first strange man she took to bed with her. Though, as far as I know, nobody ever saw her with anyone colored. That must have been a new curiosity.”
If that was meant to make her feel better, it had a decidedly opposite effect. Her gut churned, and this time, it was more than just a feeling. She leaned over and retched, the acrid taste of bile causing her eyes to water.
Nori dragged her eyes from the floor and fixed them on her hands. They were shaking so badly that she couldn’t stop them. Akira rose from his seat and moved around to where she was, tactfully avoiding the vomit. He offered her a glass of water, but she shook her head.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, fat tears sliding down her cheeks. “Akira-san, I’m so sorry for what I am.”
It seemed unlikely, as tasteless as her mother was, that she had ever bothered to apologize to Akira for abandoning him and bringing shame onto their entire family. So it fell on her to do it.
Once again, her brother shrugged at her. “Seiko made her own decisions. That’s life. My father was a good man. He raised me well. In truth I was probably better off without her.”
“But I—”
“It isn’t your fault. So hush.”
She wiped her eyes. “Where is she?”
It seemed strange that a question that had weighed on her for so long, that had consumed her and dictated in some strange way every single footstep she placed on the ground, could be so simply put: three little words. That was it.
Akira shrugged. “I don’t know and I don’t care. Nobody has seen or heard from her since the day she dropped you on this doorstep.”
Nori could not bring herself to ask if he thought that their mother was dead. Instead, a very different question fell from her lips. “Do you hate her?”
Akira shut his eyes, and for a moment, he looked far older than his years.
“No,” he said, running a hand through his messy hair. “I don’t hate her. Do you?”
Nori’s hand inadvertently found the forest green ribbon tied around her neck in a bow. She remembered the day she had gotten this, just as she remembered the day she had gotten the rest of them.
“No,” she whispered, tears welling behind her eyes. But she stopped them there. They would not fall.
Not another tear would slide down her cheeks for the sake of Seiko Kamiza.
Akira’s strangely warm hands lifted her from her seat. She went limp, and he cradled her in his arms like a fledgling baby bird incapable of moving on its own. They stood like that for a long moment. He had never held her close before.
Nori shut her eyes and listened to the sound of Akira’s heart beating. Even his heartbeat was musical. His breathing was slow and steady, and it offered the cool reassurance that life would go on. When the moment had passed, Akira put her down.
“Go to sleep,” he said. “And don’t be late for lessons tomorrow. We’re doing Schubert.”
He left her standing there, and she watched him go, seeing the ghost of his outline in the darkness long after he had gone.
She did not sleep that night. She lay in bed, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling, suppressing tears with every inch of willpower she possessed. It proved to be quite a formidable amount. That invisible wall that separated her memories of the time before from the rest of her being was shattering piece by piece.
But she still couldn’t see her mother’s face: just a set of floating eyes.
And she realized now, finally, what that wall had been there for. It wasn’t there to torment her, to keep her from remembering glorious days of bliss with a mother who loved her. It was there to protect her from a mother who didn’t.
Smoke. Lots of smoke. The apartment always smelled like smoke and lye and vinegar.
Her mother cleaned, often, to cover the smell from the cigarettes. She would bring people back to the apartment some nights, on the days she wasn’t gone all day. She’d put on her rouge and her red lipstick, and sometimes she’d let Nori help her. She’d spray herself with some peppermint perfume. A vase of tall purple flowers was never absent from her mother’s vanity. Nori remembered this, especially.
After the primping was done, there would be a knock on the door. Nori was told to stay in her room, and her mother would turn the key in the lock from the outside.
Her mother never struck her. Never struck her, never screamed at her, but she also never kissed her, never held her, never spoke tenderly. The woman was a paragon of neutrality. No hatred, no love.
Nori’s body racked with silent sobs. She could stifle the tears and she could stifle the sound, but her chest heaved up and down with the force of a small hurricane, in total disregard to her will.
Her mother hadn’t given her up so that Nori could improve herself. Leaving her wasn’t designed to teach her a lesson or to make her “good.”
It wasn’t about Nori being perfect. It was about her being gone.
Without Nori, her mother could be free. She could be beautiful and free. No more shame, no more struggle. It was simple. Painfully, painfully simple.
All this time, she’d asked God for a gift. She hadn’t realized that she’d been living in one all along. A sweet little bubble, filled with a combination of dreams, hope, and blatant stupidity. It wasn’t a cage, as she had thought it was. It was a shield.
Her mother wasn’t coming back for her. She was never, ever coming back.
And it was this realization that finally made the tears come.
CHAPTER SIX
AME (RAIN)
Kyoto, Japan
Summer 1951
Akira woke her at dawn the next morning and, without saying a word, dragged her down the stairs and then told her to wait in the living room. Nori watched in stunned silence as her brother disappeared into the study to “have a word with our dear grandmother.”
Akiko was gaping at her, clearly unsure of whether she should even ask. She wiped her hands on her apron and frowned.
“Little madam . . .” she began.
“I don’t know,” Nori whispered, tugging on one of her curls. Unbrushed and unbound, it caught her finger in its tangles and refused to let go. She was still in her nightgown and shivered as a gust of air washed over her. “Go see what’s happening.”
Akiko nodded and started out of the room, but hesitated before turning the corner. She was supposed to be watching her charge. If anything should chance to be broken, they would both pay. Nori offered up a wry smile.
“Don’t worry, Akiko-san. I won’t go anywhere. Promise.”
That was all the reassurance the maid needed, and she rounded the corner, leaving Nori alone
. Nobody, not even her grandmother, seriously doubted her obedience. It was her one true skill.
The rugs beneath her bare feet were wonderfully plush and soft. They were probably obscenely expensive, and she carefully maneuvered herself off of them. Regardless of what Akira said, Nori knew that she was not impervious to beatings. Her grandmother was not a woman who could be told what to do, and she didn’t intend to push her newfound luck.
She stood there, pressed against the wall, desperately trying not to touch anything. She still felt uncomfortable in the main house. Even when she had her clothes on, she felt naked.
Twenty minutes turned into an hour. With every passing moment, her anxiety mounted.
Nori had not the slightest clue what they were talking about now. But usually Akira’s requests were greeted with a sigh, a flutter of the fan, and a calm “As you like, dear,” or “If you must.”
For the conversation to drag on for so long . . . what had her brother chosen to ask for this time? The prophet’s head on a silver platter?
Finally, after what seemed like a thousand years, Akira reentered the room. The expression on his face told her that whatever he had wanted, he had won. He was looking at her with a twinkle in his eye that she had not seen before.
“Nori,” he whispered, his voice queerly high-pitched. “Come with me.”
She could ask why. She could ask where they were going. But she did none of those things.
Wordlessly, she held out her hand. Akira took it, and she realized that his palms were sweating. He guided her down the hallway and around the twists and turns of this seemingly endless house.
She’d only ever seen it from her window: the gardens. Now that she was standing behind a thin, sliding screen door, it struck her that she’d never seen it at eye level. She knew at once that the door before her led outside. Her mouth opened involuntarily. She could smell the air. It brushed across her skin like a gentle caress, so tender it nearly made her weep.
“I can’t,” she whispered. “This . . . this is the most important rule. I’m not allowed to leave. Someone will see me.”
