The Street of a Thousand Blossoms (38 page)

“There’s something I want to tell you.” He smiled, seeking the vibrant thirteen-year-old girl he’d come to love. Instead, he saw traces of the woman she would become in the curve of her eyebrows, the thin, tragic lips.

Kiyo leaned in and then pulled away from him, her eyes brimming with tears. “It’s my fault,” she whispered.

She smelled of outside, of earth and trees and the cold. Akira lifted his bandaged arm from under the blanket and felt a sharp stab of pain. “This?”

She nodded.

“I didn’t know you could cause an avalanche,” he teased.

A small smile. “You know what I mean, Akira-san, if I hadn’t brought you up there, then …”

“Kiyo-chan, I wouldn’t have gone if I didn’t want to. It was an accident. Avalanches can happen any time, at any moment. How could you or I have known?”

Kiyo lowered her gaze and hiccupped. She shrugged.

He touched her cheek with his right hand. “So, it was an accident. There’s no blame. Do you understand?”

Another hiccup.
“Hai,”
she answered.

“There’s only one thing I need to know. Then I hope we won’t speak of this ever again.”

“What is it?” she asked, wiping her nose with the sleeve of her kimono.

“What did you hide for me between the rocks?”

Kiyo looked at him, still teary. “It was
mochi
that I made myself. They were wrapped in a
furoshiki.”

Akira remembered touching the cloth that contained the
mochi
, a sticky rice delicacy pounded soft by Kiyo, until it was as smooth as
flesh, then shaped like small eggs and filled with red bean paste. When he was a boy, it was one of his favorite treats, and he tasted again the sweetness on his tongue.

“Last one,” Kiyo said, leaning over and placing the log squarely on the block.

Akira nodded. Concentrating all his strength in his right arm, he raised the axe and, with a calculated swing, hit the block of wood, splitting it in half. He stepped back, dropped the axe, and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand.

“Pretty good,” Kiyo said, collecting the wood to carry back to the house.

“Next time,
you’re
chopping,” he teased. He squatted next to her and stacked the wood against his left forearm, surprised as always that his hand was missing. At least the rest of his arm was still good for something.

“Then what will
you
do?” Kiyo asked.

“I’ll supervise.”

She laughed, and turned when Emiko called from the house. “I have to go. I have to study for a test tomorrow.” Kiyo made a face.

He smiled. Since school had resumed in the village again after winter break, he saw less of her during the day. “Go then, I’ll bring the rest up.”

She bowed and hurried up the path toward the house.

At the door Emiko lifted some of the wood from his arms and invited him in. Akira bowed and entered. Despite the months he had convalesced in her house, he once again acted with the formality of a guest. Those days when Emiko had bathed his face with cool water and sat with him until his fever broke now seemed far away. Her touch had been that of a mother with her child, a nurse, someone who healed. One night, he’d awakened to see her sleeping by the fire,
her lips parted as if she had stopped talking in midsentence, and something close to love moved through him. Was it love? Or had he confused it with the comfort they found in each other’s company? He closed his eyes and fell into a deep sleep.

Akira stacked more wood by the hearth and placed another log on the fire. His cot in the corner of the room had been put away, every trace of his three-months’ stay gone.

“Kiyo-chan seems to be enjoying school,” he said. In the flickering light of the fire, Emiko’s face looked young again, still filled with hope.

“Hai, as much as she fights it, I believe she’s also enjoying it.” Emiko smiled.

“She’s so bright,” he said.

They heard Kiyo’s footsteps and fell silent. A vegetable stew bubbled and sputtered in an iron pot above the fire, but Emiko poured his tea without asking if he would stay to eat with them. He had turned her down too many times, preferring to return to Nazo and the barn, fearful of Emiko becoming too attached, himself, too. Akira drank down the rest of his tea and stood.

He bowed.
“Domo arigato
. I must get back to the barn.”

Emiko smiled politely.
“Hai.”
She bowed back, without rising.

Walking down the path to the barn, Akira paused to watch the sunset. He’d been in Aio for almost five years. Another man might have already married Emiko, cared for her and Kiyo as a husband and father would, but he wasn’t like other men. As the sun dropped below the mountains, the light fell to gray shadows. He walked quickly to the barn and swung the door open to a drafty darkness, the sharp smell of mold and decay. “Nazo,” he whispered, and then waited in the dark. He had stayed in Aio because Emiko and Kiyo were the closest he’d ever come to a family.

Haru sat in the quiet library and flipped through the book of plants until she found what she was looking for. She laughed out loud when she spotted the drawing and realized it was little more than a weed,
Pteridium aquilinum
, a bracken fern. Haru glanced up to catch a warning frown from Miyayama-san, the school librarian. She bowed her head in quick apology then returned her gaze to the drawings in the book. With its triangular-patterned bright green leaves, the fern would always be the most beautiful plant in the world to her. After all, it was the first sign of life she saw pushing its way out of the ashes after the firestorm.

Haru excelled in her studies. Unlike Aki, she was curious about everything, other countries, politics, how books were written, what made plants grow through ashes. While most of her sixteen-year-old classmates focused on boys, Haru sat in the library during part of her lunch and read. Usually, she had the cool, dark room all to herself, along with Miyayama-san, who never seemed to leave. Haru looked up when she heard the whine of the door opening. One of her schoolmates, Setsuko-san, hurried in and took the seat across from her at the long wooden table.

“I have a report to finish,” she whispered to Haru.

Haru nodded.

Setsuko laid her books out one by one for show, then leaned forward and asked, “I’ve always wanted to ask you, what’s it like to have so many young
rikishi
right next door at the stable? They seem so … so
strong.”
She smiled, looking down at the books in front of her.

The question surprised Haru. She rarely thought about them in that way. For as long as she could remember, the
sumotori
her father trained were as much a part of her everyday life as her father and Aki were. Of course, she saw the
rikishi
more often than she admitted to Setsuko, mostly at a distance, coming and going, wearing
yukata
kimonos or, sometimes, just their
mawashi
belts. When she met a
rikishi
in the courtyard, or at the stable, she bowed quickly and was on her way. They were always her father’s students. When her school resumed and she stopped cooking for the wrestlers, she saw less of
them, especially Fukuda, who had since left, the only sumo she thought of as a friend.

She smiled at Setsuko-san and said, “We don’t see them that often. Our lives are pretty separate from theirs.”

“Are they as big as they look in magazines?”

“Some of them,” Haru answered. “Some aren’t that big, just strong.”

“I don’t know what I’d do if I ever met one,” Setsuko whispered. Haru shrugged.

“Do you think I could come over and meet a
rikishi
sometime?”

“I’m afraid there’s very little chance. They keep to a rigid schedule of practice,” she said, annoyed at Setsuko’s persistence. She wanted to return to her reading.

“Girls, please be quiet!” Miyayama-san scolded.

For once, Haru was grateful for the scolding. She watched the light in Setsuko’s eyes dim before she looked down at her books.

The masks returned to Kenji at night. In his dream there was a bare stage, the wooden bridge to be crossed, and the pine tree painted on the backdrop. Then slowly, the beating of the drums, the high-pitched lament of the flute, the murmuring chorus, as one by one costumed Noh actors came forward until Kenji could reach out and almost touch their masks. Every time he tried, he awoke.

In his last year of college, Kenji was working part-time in an architect’s office as an errand boy. Twice a month, he was sent out to pick up balsa wood for models at a lumber company not far from the university. Every firm was vying to rebuild Tokyo, which at last had regained her footing. Kenji scarcely noticed the American soldiers now, their presence blending into the new landscape of building and growth. Since the war in Korea began last month, in June, steel
production had increased in the Japanese factories, and for the first time since Kenji was young, Japan was thriving.

While he waited at the counter of the dusty office for his order of balsa wood, he picked up a block of Japanese cypress the color of pale, dry grass. It was nearly five years since he’d held such beautiful wood, the kind Yoshiwara-sensei used for making masks. He ran his hands over its smooth planes, breathed in the subtle, sweet scent, and imagined the face trapped within. His life was so different now, studying architecture, which Kenji found abstract and distant. Lines measured and drawn on paper led to scale models constructed by others; he admired the finished structures, but had little part in building them.