It is the longest goodbye she has ever known. Stepping away from her mother at the airport, Yuki feels the significance of her own two feet for the very first time. Cries, childish and panicked, shudder out of her, the reality of what she is doing growing hideous the further she walks away. It takes all of her strength to keep from turning around, from running back into the soft arms that have always held her in place. Yuki fingers the outline of her notebook in her inside jacket pocket over and over again. The pages containing instructions of what to do once at Heathrow, her London address, the emergency numbers, the school contact details. Everything she needs in order to exist, pressed up against her raging heart. The violin case on her back nudging her forwards with each step.
In the days leading up to Yuki’s departure, her body, only eighteen years old and a stranger to foreign skies, had felt weightless. Like a snow drift passing through air, only to melt before it touched the ground; as if the girl who’d decided to leave home was not Yuki at all, but a braver version, one who would set out on this adventure unflinchingly.
Now, as Yuki edges through the line in security, fear soaking her bra and T-shirt, she wonders if the men in uniforms will save her from herself. Send her back home, to its predictable gloom. The vast, open fields. Her father’s silences. Passing under the metal detector, Yuki longs for a nod, a stained-tooth smile from the security man—anything to tell her she is on the right path. He waves her through, barely looking her way, and Yuki wonders if she will die on the plane. A punishment for wanting too much.
Through the maze of wheels and machines and boxed whisky bottles, Yuki senses a sharpening. Herself coming into focus as she realises what lies before her is completely her own. As if—having escaped her old self, the remnants of which lay back home, littering the long country roads, the dusty corners of her family home—Yuki is now frighteningly real, entirely of her own making. She imagines her mother arriving back home in a few hours, walking to the kitchen and washing her hands, sighing with fatigue. She’ll gut a fish, or clean the vegetables, or boil the water for a kombu broth. Occasionally looking up, out the window, towards the darkening treeline, searching for the lone figure of her husband, who’ll eventually appear, looking older and thinner than any man she ever imagined marrying. A variation on a night that will repeat for the rest of her life. All minor.
When Yuki came across people, animals, trees, sometimes even inanimate objects, she often liked to categorise them into majors and minors. Her old PE teacher, Hayashi-san, sunny and simple, was a major. The neighbour’s old dog, a Great Pyrenees, was a major too. The plum tree in her garden in spring was also a major, though hints of minor could be heard come winter. Yuki’s mother, on the other hand, belonged to the minor key, always. As did Yuki. It was the key reserved for the more interesting people in her life. As well as the depressives, like her father, zoo animals and silver birches. The minor key was the key she most liked to perform and hear. When Yuki listens to Mozart’s Requiem or Mimì’s last duet before she dies of consumption, Yuki can feel the multitude of minor notes shivering beneath something, weighed down by a delicious burden the major keys simply didn’t have. The notes full of life, spilling with longing, yet forlorn. Like her mother.
Stepping onto a moving escalator, Yuki catches her reflection in a sealed mirror that hangs above the walkway: her dark eyes wild with newness, her shoulders curving inwards with fear. And yet,
(There I am) she thinks (whole and moving)
Yuki watches her chest, her chin, her cheekbones bloom with future, before disappearing with the dip of the ceiling.
She throws up on the plane. It is the smell of the food. It claws at her as if it were a solid thing. A thickness that churns her insides. She has to lock herself in the toilets to escape the smell, angering the full-bladdered passengers. She flits between her economy seat and the cubicles, afraid that someone might steal her violin—the only bridge between her and them. A shared language understood by all. The air hostesses take pity on the Sweet-Faced Girl with the Upset Tummy. They bring Yuki Coca-Cola to settle her stomach, fashion magazines to keep her distracted.
At every heave, Yuki imagines she is throwing up her Japanese self into the grey of the toilet bowl. Readying her body to become a fresh vessel for music lessons taught in a foreign tongue, red skin and English food—something her father had recently taken to warning her against. While on a business trip to Derbyshire his cousin had famously cut into a cod loin to find a fat white worm lying between the muscle. Even more unforgivably, the fish, he discovered, had been cooked from frozen. From there stemmed a general fear of any country that could not impart a decent meal. And, as with most things that came to define her father, Yuki was determined that this fear would not become her own.
Yuki’s father had always been a distant man, semi-detached in the way he moved through the world. Yuki would sometimes sit and watch him through a fog—something clouding his edges, a murk that was almost perceptible. He orbited Yuki’s life, never daring to come too close to her wants and needs. The older she grew, the less he would touch her, so that by the time Yuki was sixteen, she could not remember a time when he had. He cared for her and her mother by working hard. He was faithful. He could be as funny as he was infuriating. He liked to drink Tenjaku whisky and smoke Seven Stars cigarettes. He liked routine. He liked the quiet and to be left alone. He did not involve himself in Yuki’s life. That was the job of the mother. If Yuki had a dream, he would encourage it by saying nothing and paying where he could.
At first Yuki was afraid to go to him with her desire to study music overseas. She was certain he would deny her, brush it off as an unnecessary indulgence. When she finally found the courage to ask, she was surprised he said he’d consider it. Her father always had a way of surprising her just when she thought she’d reached the bottom of her understanding of him.
When Yuki and her mother had left that morning, he had tears in his eyes as he walked them to the train station. Yuki was shocked, then terrified by this quiet show of affection. But she went anyway. With an envelope of money he’d given her, taken out of his savings account. She left holding onto the memory of his embrace, the smell of his cigarettes. The first hug he had given her in years.
Yuki sits cramped in the aircraft, full of snack eaters and sleepers with the overhead light on, breathing shallowly into a scarf that smells nothing like home anymore. She turns a page of a magazine and looks down at the faces of the Western models. Dead-eyed pale waifs that resemble the pickled fish at Sado island aquarium stare back. They look disjointed. Comical. From head to swollen toes, Yuki feels a spreading. A golden, indisputable knowing that she is so very beautiful. Down to the marrow. Her long black hair, her freckles, her lips, her back, her eyes. Her eyes. Her eyes. Yuki’s beauty had always comforted her when she felt most alone.
She doesn’t sleep the whole flight. Stomach empty, hunger tears at her belly. Her mother had woken early that morning and prepared her a bento box of onigiri and tamago-yaki that sits untouched in her rucksack. Yuki can’t bring herself to unwrap and eat the rice parcels of plum and salted cod roe. She cannot eat her home. If she does, all that will be left will be within, slowly turning to shit. All that will be left will be herself, her old self now mingling with the excrement of strangers. She feels an ache rise up through her throat, pain readying to overflow.
Touch down. The plane shudders onto the tarmac and Yuki is met with greyness. A dry-eyed greyness. And relief. That she hasn’t died, plummeted or thrown up her organs. She is alive. She is terrified. She is ready to grow up.
*
The night before Yuki’s first day of summer school she doesn’t sleep. Jet lag and adrenaline keep her restless, her heart rattling her awake every time her mind falls away, skirting dreamland. The sun rises, the unfamiliar sounds begin: the creaking of the boiler pipes, the radiators clanging to life. Back home in Japan there were no radiators, no central heating, only electric heaters and palmed hoka-hoka hand warmers. The first time Yuki is alone in her new room, she reaches out and holds her fingertips to the hot metal, the pain strangely validating.
She cycles to the music school because it is the cheapest thing to do and she is good at it. She rides a heavy second-hand bike her landlady lets her borrow. It is a sunflower yellow with a basket at the front and it makes Yuki feel very European. She practises the cycle several times so that the journey on her first day is perfect. There is no way she is ever going to be late. Everything will be right; nothing will deter her from her British education. Her parents will be proud. She will be on time. She will make first violin. She will practise her R ’s. She will learn to like the slop of baked beans.