CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

手毬

Temari

Packing up to go home became more labour-intensive with every passing year, supporting my theory that getting older makes everything worse. It would not do to simply collect the small signs of living in our rooms and stow them away in our suitcases. We had to fish out stockings wedged between the bed-post and the wall, pick out hairpins stuck in the floorboard gaps, sweep the dust settled on the sills. We returned books and magazines to their rightful owners and settled our debts. Our meant mostly Yaya, who owed me fifty sen.

We scoured the hallways with hot lye, disinfected the taps, scrubbed the grout, stripped the beds, washed the sheets. Then we loaded our suitcases and boxes and baskets into the carts to drive down to the train station, where girls left in shifts beginning at six in the morning. Always, we were interrupted by someone's mother or a maid trying to beat the crowds into Tokyo. A driver came for Yamamoto in an already-burdened automobile. She took one final look at the hallway, staring at the whitewash with pitiless eyes.

Yaya's father came next, tapping his heel and checking his watch. When Yaya threw her arms around him, he smiled distractedly.

"Let's get going, Yaya-chan," he said, grabbing her suitcase. "The train leaves in half an hour."

"Papa, can I have fifty sen?"

"I'll deduct it from your dowry," he joked, ruffling her hair and pulling out his pocketbook. "Do I look like I'm made of money?"

Yaya stuffed the banknote into my hand and made me swear on my grave to write her when she was in Taihoku. I pointed out that this wasn't for another six months, and anyway, we would see her at school. What was she so worried about?

She left in the shelter of her father's overcoat. I watched them go, shivering alone in the school gardens.

Four hours of floor-scrubbing later, Nagihiko unearthed a slip from my suitcase. He shook it out, silk floating in the cold updraft.

"No," I said. "You may not."

"It's mine."

"You are a thief as well as a liar."

Nagihiko held it up to his chest, pointedly. To my horror, it hung off his narrow shoulders and body just so. I scratched the back of my neck furiously.

"It's mine," he repeated. "We have the same slip size."

"No."

We did. I tore a second slip from my suitcase. We came together to compare them. I mirrored my hands to his. They fell the same. The same width, the same length. Nadeshiko and I.

Nagihiko's chest rose and fall softly against mine, lashes pointed downwards, breath audible. He was closer than my shadow. My skin itched and crawled. I was on fire.

"No," I said again.

"Very well." Nagihiko turned away. I ached to touch him, but we were oceans apart.


"Is it just us left?" Amu appeared in our doorway in a travelling suit that made her look five years older than she was.

I looked up from my comic strip book. The sun was going down. Nadeshiko sat at her writing desk.

"It is," I said. "Are we going?"

"I think so…" Amu glanced sideways at Nadeshiko, lip wobbling. "When are you leaving?"

"The overnight train." Nadeshiko stood up, taking Amu's elbows in her hands. "Sometime tonight."

"What will I do without you?" Amu whispered.

"Have heart, Amu-chan," Nadeshiko said bracingly. "Go home to your mother and father. Think about what's important to you."

I turned my back, gathering my things sourly.

"I will," Amu said miserably. "Have a Happy New Year."

"Best wishes to you as well," Nadeshiko relinquished her.

I got to my feet. Amu stood between Nadeshiko and I, smiling. Waiting expectantly.

"Hold this," I gave Amu my hat-box. "This is for you."

"The hat-box is for me?" Amu misunderstood, for in that moment, I thrust a fist-sized silk parcel at Nadeshiko. I stared at my own slippers. I settled my debts.

"Happy New Year," I said, wishing she'd just take it. I didn't want to dance with her in front of Amu. "It's not much."

This was standard self-effacing speech. Oh, it's just a bauble. It's boring, but … it's a dull little thing, but…

"Rima-chan, I couldn't dream of accepting anything from you," said Nadeshiko. She looked whiter than usual.

"It's nothing," I lied.

White teeth biting red lip. "It's too much for the likes of me."

"Take it before I throttle you," I said, veering off-script. "I have a train to catch."

Her hands took it. Her eyes did not.

"Well," I said. "Good-bye."

I marched out as fast as my little legs would carry me.

Amu stared at me all the way down Seiyo Hill. I avoided her eyes, cold and empty. It's done, I told myself. For three months, you poured your feelings into it. You returned it to its source. Now you can forget about them.

Vainly, I tried to replace Nagihiko with another man in my vicinity. Every businessman in Kamikawa was disembarking around us, returning home for the holidays. Amu and I took seats in the middle second-class car, as though it mattered. The train was nigh-empty, having deposited its previous loads.

"If I could trouble the little misses for your tickets?"

The ticket-taker appeared over Amu's shoulder. He punched and returned them.

"Next station is Osaka," he informed us. "Then Kyoto, Nagoya, Shizuoka, Ofuna, Yokohama, terminus station Tokyo Central."

"Thank you," Amu said distantly.

The stationmaster's whistle pierced the air, and the train rolled forward with a hiss and lurch. A businessman across the car shook a newspaper open. Amu and I watched pensively as Seiyo Hill slipped behind the windows and we rolled into twilight moorland.

"It's…" Amu finally spoke, breaking the soft lull of the rolling train tracks. She exhaled softly, turning her gaze back to the pitch-black window. "It's been an eventful year, hasn't it?"

I nodded.

"I miss Utau," Amu mumbled. "I don't know why, but I miss him."

I reflected on the year's events. A room with a snake. A nuptial threat. A ball. A longing I could not consummate. A near-brush with death. Mind, body, spirit, heart. A quadripartite assault.

Amu hugged her knees and looked downcast with reddish eyes.

My wooden limb patted Amu's knee. I felt stupider than when I was dancing.

"Put it behind you," I urged. It felt hypocritical, even to myself. Amu was torn between two men, and I, torn between two faces, was doling advice. "There are millions of men on earth."

Amu looked up at me, eyes golden in the light of the electric lamps. Her shoulders rattled, but from the movement of the train car or emotion, I could not tell.

"But only two to me," she said softly. "Hotori is gentle and reliable. I feel reassured when I'm with him. But when I'm around Tsukiyomi-san, I'm helpless. I would let him do everything to me, a thousand times over."

My friend could not read the horror in my expression and assumed a lack of sympathy.

"Of course, it wouldn't be like that, for you," Amu added. "You've always been sure of what you want."

If I was like Utau, I would have laughed right in her face. What a joke! I wanted out. I focused so firmly on what I did not want that desire had always eluded me. All but once.

"What I want?" I said wryly. "To have a Year of the Tiger that is utterly dull. I should like to die of boredom next year."

Amu laughed weakly. I smiled and returned to my diversions, trying and failing to shake off the sense that I had uttered a curse.

Travelling was, and still is, for me a liminal space where time suspends. When you are sitting in a train, an automobile, or a shaky Empire-class aeroplane a million feet in the air, your obligations vanish. You are in a waiting room sitting sedentary until your destination. Nothing begins and nothing ends.

The lights flickered. I jolted awake from my stupor. In those days, electricity outages were common. Commotion from the front of the train was not.

The roof crackled, as though being pummelled by a million pieces of rubble. Before I could ask Amu what was going on, my body hurled forward. I grabbed the seat for purchase. A dull roar. A newspaper skidding across the train car's floor. Amu yelping in my ear. Something huge was surging below us, breaking the earth, and soon it would reach the train, the train—

"Get down," a voice from outside myself said, and my hand shot out for my friend's elbow.

"Where?" Amu cried, forgetting how to behave in an earthquake. "Where?!"

We crawled below the train seats, hands locked on each other's forearms. The car rocked side-to-side. The head train car screeched against the iron rails as it last-minute braked. The lights swung. The hammering on the roof petered off like the tail-end of a storm. Glass shards were rolling down the car to join the newspaper lying in a heap in front of us.

My shoulder bones ached from the uncomfortable position and my body screamed out in protest, but I remained frozen to the spot. Amu's eyes shone with terror in the dark.

It was just our luck to run into a quake. I thought of all the other trains across Japan trying to shepherd thousands of people home for the New Year and almost laughed aloud from the absurdity of delays. But as it turns out, I was wrong. It wasn't an earthquake. Not precisely.

The ticket-taker returned to our car apologetically: everyone must evacuate the train. We crawled out from underneath the seats, wobbly but intact. Throngs of displaced passengers congregated by the side of the tracks. It was Kobe farmland as far as the eye could see. We hadn't even left the prefecture. I felt the stirrings of complaint.

I could not see, for I was too short. But Amu could. She gasped, pointing ahead.

"Look!"

"I am," I said, frowning. "What?"

"Th-the face of Mount Rokko, ahead of us…"

Amu's word had got the attention of the man in our car. He pointed over everyone's heads.

"Landslide!" he cried in a gravelly voice. "The rain must have loosened the soil, and so when the earthquake hit…"

Momentarily, the throng cleared ahead of me. The rock face had crumbled and spilled across the tracks in the form of boulders, pebbles, and mud. The train was stopped dead a mere two, three yards short. I now understood the scream of the brakes.

Like the sea after a storm, my brain had slowed to the unnatural silence of post-crisis calm.

"We are not going home tonight," I said, frank.

"But Mama's expecting me!" Amu cried.

"Your family has a wireless," I pointed out. "They will hear of the earthquake and expect delays."

I wondered if Yaya and the others got through. Then realised it didn't matter. The earlier train would have made it through the pass before the earthquake rolled across the prefecture.

"Where could we possibly stay? We have to turn back," Amu murmured, as though it was dawning on her.

I imagined the Dragon's face when we turned back up at her school doorstep to procrastinate her vacation, little grubby-faced burdens that we were, and paled.

"We could get overnight lodging," I suggested.

"Oh… do you have money, then?"

I paused.

"I have fifty sen."

The deed was done.

We waited what felt like hours in the hot, sticky dusk for the blockaded train to re-shift itself onto the opposite tracks. I grudgingly stood by while Amu took our return vouchers back to our prison. I sulked the whole train ride back, feeling the looming curse of the coming Year of the Tiger over my head. My responses to Amu were curt, short.

I would have been happy to delay my arrival by any other excuse but this. I feared hearing what marriage partners my mother had procured, but I feared the Fujisaki family and their enemies more. I had enough of that family, enough of the school, enough of it all. The monotony of my china-cabinet house with its dying solarium and Emi's tippity-tappity footsteps would have been bliss.

We were spared the agony of appearing on Fujisaki-sensei's stoop to beg her charity. As our train came to an uneasy halt under the black sky, a single lantern bobbed on the opposite platform. As we came closer it illuminated Shion's face, taking hasty notes. Closer still, and a soft voice dictated what sounded like the last of the typhoid decontamination notes.

"… Only one shaku to a whole tub of water will suffice, for cooking and drinking only. For bathing, pay no mind. The well inspector will be by tomorrow, and then you…"

Even dressed modestly to travel in a lush dark green kimono and otter stole around her shoulders, Fujisaki-sensei was the picture of glamourous self-assurance. Her face barely moved at the sight of us. I realized why upon closer approach.

"Mount Rokko," she said, inclining her head. Up close, it was easier to see the lines under and around her eyes. "We received the landslide warning shortly after you left. How long are the train delays?"

Amu bowed so low that her nose nearly touched her kneecaps. I swore she pulled a muscle doing so, because she tried to subtly rub her hip. I stared at the ground, in fear of looking around hopefully for Nagihiko.

"Forgive the imposition," Amu muttered. I couldn't see her face in the dark, but I was certain she was bright red from the impertinence of it all. I was unfazed, having long grown used to having to depend on others for my survival.

"The station said a day, sensei, before the track could be re-routed and the rubble cleared."

"A poor omen before the year is over," Fujisaki-sensei murmured to her sleeve. I found this rude.

Shion's mouth opened as though to say something. I wondered if she was going to offer to let us stay with her. She was silenced by a single look.

Fujisaki's eyes were shaped different than Nagihiko's. They were rounder and softer by the barrages of age, brown and not glittering black. But so are the eyes of a viper.

"Miss Shion," Fujisaki-sensei lilted, loosening a single glove and taking out a slim book. "Make it so."

I wondered what was being made so. When Shion returned, two tickets passed from her paw into the conductor's. With a sinking in the pit of my stomach, I watched Fujisaki's obi swivel around to face us. The red knot's pattern in the gas light looked like a demon's face, ascending the steps to the passenger section.

"Come," the obi said, softly. "Until it is safe to travel, it would be our pleasure to host you in Hiroshima."