Haruka

They sit down side by side on the soft grassy bank. The sun shines down, warming their faces, and Haruka has the feeling of being lit up. There is a breeze on the open field and she smells something sweet, lingering with the grass and the heat. Something she doesn’t recognise. Not white peaches, but something close to a fruit. Something you eat. Something you taste.

(Elderflower. Meiko smells like an elderflower. And underneath that, sweat.)

I’m sorry , Meiko says picking at a blade of grass.

No. Haruka shakes her head. No sorry.

They look at each other and smile in a way that for the first time connects, feels easy and real.

There is still the uncertainty, but it has settled a little. The imprint of the other’s hand lingering as they sit next to each other, hearts beating with the same blood.

Sorry, Haruka says.

What, why? No, you don’t need to be sorry.

You. Uhh. You. Didn’t know. Sisters. I . . . Haruka motions between herself and Meiko, pointing at the imaginary cord between the two of them.

The scrambling in her chest returns like an animal caught within a cage, as she tries to explain that she is sorry for ruining Meiko’s blissful ignorance with a late-night email. That she is so very sorry for bringing her pain when all she wanted was an older sister. Someone to stand by when everyone else was dead in the ground.

Haruka wishes she could untwist her words, push them back, rearrange the deformities that have tumbled out of her mouth.

Sorry. My English. Not good.

No, it is! It’s really good. My Japanese . . . Is bad! Meiko says.

Her sister says something else but Haruka can’t make sense of it.

A ladybird crawls over Haruka’s hand and she lifts it up to distract Meiko from her mediocrity.

Ah. Kawaii , Meiko says.

Mmm. Kawaii. Haruka laughs.

Haruka is glad for the simplicity of such a word. One that used to follow her wherever she went until she hit puberty and something special about her slipped away. The moment others decided her face had taken on a different meaning, her body riddled with judgements. A word that defined the entirety of Haruka until it did not.

You grew up here? Meiko says.

Eh?

You live. Here?

Ah. No. I . . . Live Tokyo.

Oh, nice. What do you do there? What’s your job?

I. In a. Bar. Club. I work—

So cool!

Mmm. Haruka shakes her head no, shrugging off the approval.

She imagines telling her sister how she sleeps with men for money. She imagines the panic breaking across her sister’s face. First there would be shock, then faux acceptance, then concern, until finally her face would settle into a look of pity, brows furrowed, eyes small and tight. Haruka would try and explain how she wasn’t sad, or a victim, or being taken advantage of, but enjoyed her work, as much as anyone does. She would lighten the mood by saying she was good with her hands, then go on to talk about how much money she was making, and then finally mention how she saw her work as a kind of care. How she felt empowered by it.

And, even then, Haruka would hear herself straining to justify herself, and though it was always for the benefit of the other person, it would inevitably be read as Haruka being defensive, and inevitably she would again be seen as a victim. Only this time a deluded one. Haruka knew conversations like that were pointless. They never ended the way she wanted them to; people would always leave with their opinions unchanged, looking at her like she was subhuman.

Anata wa? Job wa?

Um. I’m a singer. Uh, music. Ongaku?

Meiko holds up an invisible microphone.

Eh! Yabai! You have to sing!

Oh no, no! I . . . No! Definitely not.

Yes! Please!

No!

Haruka and Mei laugh. Giddy at the conversation.

Uhh. What about your dad? Your . . . Otosan. Where is he? Meiko asks.

Ah. Nai. I don’t have father.

Oh. I’m sorry.

No, not dead, Haruka says.

No. Right. But still, I’m sorry.

It’s okay. I don’t need.

Ha. No.

And. Your father? It’s . . . Not good now?

Haruka watches her sister. Meiko looks up and for a moment she has the eyes of a baby, pained and honest. Looking without opinions, like she shouldn’t really be there. Haruka thinks Meiko looks like the kind of girl that has never had a dirty thought. The kind of face you would never find between a man’s legs. She looks clean.

No. No it’s not.

Meiko opens her mouth and breathes in like she wants to say more, but she doesn’t.

There is the sound of hundreds of male cicadas all around them, ribs buckling, looking for a mate. A sound that, even in parts of Tokyo, Haruka could not escape. A sound that on summer nights, alone in her apartment, comforted her and reminded her of home.

Haruka’s eyes rove over her sister’s hair, the colour of the rice when it is ready to harvest. Long swathes of sunlight-soaked gold. She reaches out and touches it. Haruka surprises herself with the forwardness of her gesture, how familiar and right it feels to reach out when words are near impossible.

Meiko’s hair feels coarse between her fingers, not as soft as Haruka had imagined. The ends are dry and some of them are split. Human after all. Haruka holds up the split ends and wags her finger in vague disapproval, as if to say no or bad or wear a hair mask, woman! She doesn’t know what she’s trying to say, all she knows is that she wants to make her sister smile.

Meiko laughs and the sound is like a pebble skimming across water.

Rice? Meiko says, pointing at the shoots, elbows dug into the earth.

Mm, so desu. Yes.

. . . I remember.

Meiko says something in English that Haruka doesn’t understand, and they fall quiet again. She focuses on a scabious flower shifting in the wind, the animal in her chest quieter now.

She thinks of the film The Little Mermaid , where Ariel loses her voice so she can live with the prince. How Ariel had to communicate with body language alone. So much is said in a look, that much Haruka had learnt over the years in the clubs and bars, a knowledge that had been dripping in ever since she was a child. But Haruka’s looks, fluttering and nubile, or wry and knowing, were curated to rouse a certain kind of response where words were rendered useless.

Sitting next to her sister, Haruka craves words in a way she never has before. Words to unravel this living, breathing make-believe of a person. She needs to ask her big sister what, if anything, she remembers of Mama. She needs to ask the things that will link them with similarities, separate them with differences: what Meiko’s favourite colour is, if she has a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend. Or a car. Or a best friend. If she likes Japan. What perfume she is wearing. If she also hates the taste of orange sweet potatoes, but likes the purple ones. What countries she’s been to. A favourite song.

The kinds of things you ask your big sister and then copy.

She watches as Meiko moves off her elbows and lies flat onto the ground. Face to the sky. Eyes closed. Meiko’s chest rises up with breath, reminding Haruka also to breathe.

Meiko opens her eyes and looks up at her,

(Mama’s eyes, bringers of love and daisy chains and strawberry milk)

Lighter and younger but there. Meiko pats the ground and Haruka lowers herself down next to her sister. For a moment they lie side by side in the quiet.

. . .What was she like? Mama? Meiko says.

Haruka turns to face her sister, but Meiko doesn’t look back, her gaze fixed on the blue above.

What was she . . . Was she a good mum, mother? To you?

Haruka can hear the strain in her sister’s voice, the question pushing against something buried. A bitterness Haruka had also felt.

Lying there next to Meiko, Haruka sees her sister for the first time, not as an abstraction, or an ideal, but as the daughter who had less time.

She watches as a tear slides down the side of Meiko’s face, disappearing into her hairline.

Hai. Yes. She was good mother.

Haruka wants to tell Meiko how sometimes it felt like Mama was entirely made up of longing for her lost daughter. How Mama never stopped loving her.

Good. I’m glad.

Meiko holds her hands up to the sky, reaching for the blue, and Haruka copies. Comparing knuckles and fingernails.

Two mermaids, voiceless and falling in love.

*

For dinner they eat strips of tender beef in umami sauce with grated radish, steaming white rice, fried lotus root with gingko nuts, seared whole mackerels, fire-roasted aubergine with ginger and garlic, pickles and fresh salad, hand-picked from the garden. Haruka’s heart balloons as she watches her sister eat all of her favourite foods. She had felt anxious as they sat down at the rarely used dining table, worried that Meiko would be overwhelmed by all the dishes and flavours, the indistinguishable bowls of grated vegetable root. But her sister pulls out the soft spine of the fish with ease. She likes the bitter taste of the yellow gingko nuts. The crunch of the lotus root. The sweetness of the pickled burdock. She likes it all.

Again, the conversation is broken, with Haruka and Meiko feeling themselves through the verbal debris, latching onto the words they understand in each other’s language. She is relieved that Meiko laughs off the messiness of their conversation, that she doesn’t seem like the kind of girl who is easily knocked off her centre. Haruka liked that quality in other people. Those that were capable of gluing a room together. That was one of the reasons she liked working at the clubs, watching the women around her hold up entire ecosystems. A colony of sorts. When Haruka was younger, Jiji had taught her about the female worker ants. How they worked tirelessly to feed the queen, while the male ants were needed only for mating. Once used, they would explode and die, the queen living for decades after, storing reserves of the dead male’s sperm so she could continue reproducing. Haruka had often thought how similar she and the other women were to these worker ants, milking the weak and resilient until there was nothing left to give.

Watching Meiko, her light hair falling past her shoulders, her mouth closing around the lacquer of the chopsticks, she imagines her sister also in the clubs, wrapped in a tight dress with open-toe heels clacking up and down the row of booths, the heads of men rotating at the sight of that face, that body, their groins kicking awake. She wonders how much money Meiko would make in a night, if she had the stamina to keep screwing the men with fifty-thousand-yen bottles of Riesling. As Haruka sizes up her sister, her grandparents ask Meiko about her life, her work, her hunger levels. Now and then turning to Haruka to translate.

When Jiji asks about Meiko’s father in a tone too sharp, there is a heavy silence that follows in which Meiko looks up from her rice, blushes, then continues to eat, pretending to be unaware of the shift in temperature. For the first time, Haruka is grateful for the language barrier. Grateful that she can protect her sister from their grandfather’s tactless questioning.

Across the table, Haruka watches Jiji pour another drink—the blood in her heart slopping down into her stomach, as she realises he is about to disappoint her again. He had been drinking consistently throughout the meal and now he was getting careless, his face growing red and formless.

Haruka had gotten ahead of herself, imagined a perfect, tempered night in which they would all go out into the garden after dinner and light the omocha-hanabi—the little hand-held fireworks that Jiji had bought in celebration of Meiko’s return. Fireworks they used to light every summer when Haruka was a child. It had been her and Jiji’s tradition: he would buy the supermarket hanabi and bring them back to the house. They would stand, just the two of them, long after the others had gone inside, watching the reds and golds of the sparks, unfazed by the mosquitos feeding on their legs. Then, the year her mother died, the tradition of lighting the fireworks had died a death too.

It had hurt to see her grandfather return from the supermarket a few days ago holding the colourful wrappings of the sparklers. She’d envied her sister in that moment. For inspiring a kind of hope in him.

After dinner, Jiji grows quiet. She watches his spirit receding, past the corners of himself and into the shadows. When he stands to leave, he winces at Meiko, his attempt at a parting smile. He doesn’t even look at Haruka. Baba stands and helps him out of the room. As he sways on his feet, Haruka imagines him dead. Cold hands resting on a still and unbreathing chest. Lifeless and waxy. Lying on a made-up futon upstairs, the cold afternoon light filtering through the glass doors.

Her grandparents leave through the shoji and it is just the two of them again. Haruka can feel her sister’s eyes on her, but she doesn’t look up. She doesn’t want to be pitied. She doesn’t want Meiko to know that a man can hurt her.

Haruka stands and starts stacking the plates. The leftover soy sauce and broth slopping across the surface. Meiko stands too, collecting the chopsticks, following her to the sink.

Haruka hadn’t told Meiko what their grandfather’s illness was—she had simply described him as sick in the emails that she had sent. She could have told Meiko in that moment, but she didn’t feel like talking about something she could barely articulate in her own language. She didn’t know the English word for cancer.

Haruka pulls the lever of the tap. The water pours out foamed and silky. She holds her hands beneath it, the sound quieting her thoughts.

Meiko begins to unstack the ceramic plates drying on the rack, the blue-and-white ones bought at Odakyu that Baba always carefully packed away in boxes, wrapped with tissue paper. Haruka feels frustration boil up, as she watches her sister walk over to the glass cabinet, unsure of where to put them.

Ah . . . It’s okay, she says.

Oh. I’m sorry. Do they go in here?

It’s okay. You don’t have to. You are guest.

Are you sure?

Yes. You can have bath.

Oh . . . Okay.

I show you.

Haruka leads Meiko out of the kitchen, and into the bathroom. Past the fireworks that lie untouched, leaning against the doorframe.