The Street of a Thousand Blossoms (65 page)

Here she was, home again.

The train arrived late, and the usually bustling station felt too quiet in the dark of night. It held a hollow feeling that made her shiver now as an adult, and part of her longed for the warmth of her early childhood, of Aki’s sticky hand clinging to hers.

Haru wasn’t expected back until tomorrow morning, but at the last minute she decided to take the night train instead, with no time to let her father know. After teaching the semester in Nara, she had traveled to Kyoto for a few days’ research before returning to Tokyo for the New Year’s holidays. She had secured a position as a full-time lecturer in the botany department at the university. For the first time in her life, Haru looked down at the palms of her hands and felt free and happy. If she looked long and hard enough, she could almost see the faint lifelines emerging through her thickened skin.

Haru looked up when she heard the hurried footsteps of someone behind her. The click-clack, click-clack came closer and echoed off the high ceiling of the station, something she’d never noticed before, because it was always muffled by the daytime noise and crowds. For a moment, she wished for the crowds and chaos that daylight brought, not the few passengers who scattered like ants into the darkness. It was something she’d never felt in calm, quiet Nara. The footsteps grew closer then passed her by. She smiled at her own silliness. Haru drew a breath and walked out of the station. Having finally arrived in Tokyo, she discovered her tiredness was overtaken by the excitement of seeing her family, especially little Takara. She hailed a cab and gave directions to the Katsuyama-beya.

Each time Haru returned home, the stable appeared smaller than she remembered. The courtyard was lit with lanterns that gave off a hazy glow. Though winter, it was still crowded with a shadowy plant life, an array of shrubbery, the bamboo and pines, the branches of the
sakura
tree that reached out and now blocked the view of the house as she entered the front gate. She remembered the courtyard barren after the firestorm, burned hot white by the heat and wiped clean. She had waited day after day for any signs of life to reappear, and when they did, she had felt a sudden flush of happiness move through her.

“Haru-chan! Is that you?” Her father’s voice floated out into the night.

“Hai,”
she answered.

He stepped down from the
genkan
to greet her, dressed in a dark cotton
yukata
robe. “Why didn’t you tell me that you were coming earlier?”

Even in the muted light, she saw the joy on his face, a face that had aged since she’d last seen him, the welcoming shine of the light off his pale, shaven head. “I only decided at the last minute.” She smiled.

He took Haru’s suitcase and led her back into the house. It, too, felt smaller when he slid the door closed behind them. Once inside, the floating presence of her mother surrounded her for a moment. And then she was gone.

“You might have telephoned from the station,” her father added.

“It’s late,” Haru said. “I thought you might be asleep already.”

“I don’t need much sleep these days,” he said.

“Perhaps you were just waiting up for me, after all.”

Her father laughed. “I believe so.”

They stood a moment in silence, which was broken when Haru took off her coat and turned toward the kitchen. “I’m going to make some tea for us.” Her father picked up her suitcase and headed down the hall toward her old room.

“Haru-chan, I’m glad you’re home,” he called out.

“So am I,” she answered.

In the kitchen, Haru felt at home again. It was the one room she felt comfortable in after her mother died in the firestorm. Unlike his office, in the house her father was a meticulous man and everything was as neat as when she’d returned to Nara, so many months ago. He looked tired. Even far away in Nara, she’d heard his concern for Aki between the lines in the letters he wrote to her, always careful to keep from suggesting she return to Tokyo again. In turn, she wrote to Aki religiously every week, though this time, her sister rarely wrote back. Haru let herself believe that Aki was busy with Takara, that she’d gotten over this bout of depression and all had fallen into place. Was she so wrong to want a life of her own? The blood rushed quickly to her head. She took a deep breath and reassured herself that she’d see Aki tomorrow and there would be time enough to speak in the days to come.

Haru sprinkled tea leaves into a pot when the hot water boiled and let it steep. Her father shuffled back down the hall and stood in the doorway just as he had done when they were little girls doing their schoolwork in the kitchen, while her mother prepared dinner. “My three stars,” he used to call them. She remembered peering up at the night sky and wondering which star he thought she was. Now, her father standing in the doorway and the long-ago memory it conjured up comforted her.

The next morning Haru had just finished her breakfast when she heard voices in the courtyard. She hurried into the
genkan
and slipped into her sandals to see that it was Aki and her wet nurse carrying a bundled-up Takara. Her sister’s appearance frightened her. Aki was so thin. In the nine months since the birth of Takara, her sister looked like a different person, hollow-eyed and skeletal. The kimono she wore had been hastily put on and without much thought, the brown obi mismatched against the blue and green flower patterns. Her hair wasn’t properly combed. Not until Aki bowed and impulsively threw her arms around her did she feel any resemblance of this person to her sister.

“I look a mess,” Aki whispered into Haru’s ear. Her breath was sour, her voice high and tight, as if it might shatter like glass.

Haru held her tight then gently pulled away, happy her sister was
at least out and communicating. “You just need to put on some weight, that’s all.”

Aki forced a laugh. “I wish that were all I needed,” she said.

“Well, now that I’m back for the holidays, we’ll work on fattening you up.”

Aki brightened. “I’ve been waiting for you to come home.”

She sounded like a young Aki again. “You’ll be fine, you’ll see,” Haru said, smiling. Her words rose into the air and seemed to vanish like smoke.

Haru turned to the nurse and her little niece. Takara was a beautiful child, with large, inquisitive eyes and fair skin like her mother. She saw traces of Hiroshi in her eyebrows and around her mouth. “And look at you,” she said. Haru took the squirming child in her arms and hugged her tightly. Another little star. Takara looked at her and calmed in her arms. A few moments later, she laid her head on Haru’s shoulder as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Kenji walked quickly down the alleyway to meet Hiroshi. It was a warm fall day and the passageways in mid-afternoon were still manageable. It was before the teeming crowds could make the walk to the old bar near his
obaachan’s
house a stop-and-go process that he found increasingly unbearable.

Ever since Takashi’s death, Kenji had tried to meet Hiroshi at least once a month. More often than not, one of them had to cancel. This time, Hiroshi asked that they meet at the old bar his
ojiichan
used to frequent, a place Kenji took for granted no longer existed. He assumed it had closed down during the war. He hadn’t thought to ask his eighty-year-old grandmother what had happened to it. After his
ojiichan
died, the bar had in many ways died along with him. But there it was, a piece of the past right in front of him; small and run-down as he always remembered it, the faded wood and stained shoji windows unchanged. Anywhere else but in Yanaka the smallest ember during the firestorm would have set it ablaze. He stepped through the door and the familiar dim, damp, bitter smell confronted him. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust, to see that Hiroshi was already waiting for him.

“Hiroshi-san, I had no idea the bar was still here,” he said, walking toward his brother.

Hiroshi smiled. “I passed it for the first time in years last month. It reminded me of
ojiichan.”

Kenji looked around the empty room, at the sticky table near the
bar where his grandfather and his friends had sat for so many years, and to the corner bar stool where he perched, watching them. He heard again their low, gruff voices and their laughter as they teased and argued. They had been a comfort in his loneliness back then. “Is there anyone here?”

“She’s in the back. She should be out any minute.”

Kenji sat in the chair across from his brother. “How’s Aki-san?”

Hiroshi shrugged. He looked older, even in the dim light, the pale scar on his forehead strangely noticeable. He was dressed in a dark silk kimono, still every bit the famous sumo, strong and impressive. How could he not have aged, with Aki unwell and Takara to care for? He heard her sister, Haru, had returned in June and once again proved indispensable.

“Takara?”

“Growing.” He smiled.

Kenji felt a stab of jealousy. She was a beautiful little girl. A woman emerged from the back room, middle-aged and tired-looking in a soiled cotton kimono. On a tray she carried two beers and a plate of edamame. It was far from the elegant geisha houses his brother usually frequented.

“I ordered for us,” Hiroshi said. And then, “Aki seems to be getting worse. She hardly says a word.”

Kenji drank from his beer. “She’ll get better again,” he said, though he wasn’t sure he believed it.

“It seems a long time ago, the life we had here.” Hiroshi looked around. “Simpler.”

Kenji glanced at the lone bar stool in the corner, heard again the low drone of voices that had blanketed his loneliness. His brother had no idea how many hours he’d spent in the old bar. “It wasn’t really,” he said. “Everything seems simpler from a distance.”

Hiroshi shrugged and unconsciously fingered the slight rise of his scar.

He looked tired—no, sad, Kenji thought. The moment of jealousy had disappeared and in its place was the love and admiration Kenji had always felt for his brother. He wasn’t in any hurry; he could stay and talk to Hiroshi for as long as he needed to.

Aki dreaded the shadows that hovered over her, leaving everything in darkness. As the fall days shortened, the nights lengthened and she knew when the shadows were waiting by the stillness in the air and the breath they stole away from her, a squeezing, suffocating hand around her neck. She had long ago quit fighting them outwardly, and tried to remain as quiet and still as she could. That way the shadows might miss her; leave her alone when they saw she had very little life left to take. Aki sat now in the quiet semidarkness of her room, and felt the air begin to stir again.

Outside, in the garden below, she heard Haru asking, “Takara-chan, what kind of tree is this?”

Aki leaned toward the window, the warmth of the sun grazing her cheek, and saw her eighteen-month-old daughter, arms held out at each side for balance, as she walked toward her aunt: dark-eyed, full-lipped, round-faced, shiny black hair that gleamed with youth as she tumbled toward Haru.

“Kae-de,”
Takara said. Maple. Her voice sounded like a bell.