The day they say their goodbyes the sky is the colour of forget-me-nots. They walk, slowly, the golden fields of rice flung out before them, reaching for the horizon. The pine trees and the forest edge still and watchful.
Outside the station, Haruka clings to her big sister, as her sister clings back. The sharp ache in her chest threatening to spill onto her sister’s bare arms.
Meiko hands her a package wrapped in brown paper that smells sweet like demerara sugar.
Mata ne , she says, softly.
Mata ne , she replies.
Meiko pulls away, and Haruka feels her own skin lifting off muscle, stretching tighter the further her sister walks away, until the membrane snaps, open and raw.
She watches Meiko wave goodbye at the mouth of the station. Then disappear.
Haruka turns and the air around her shifts, the warm breeze changing direction,
(Mama)
She walks on.
The first night without her sister, alone in her room, Haruka opens the package Meiko had handed her at the station. A little red box of sweets rattles to the floor as she tears at the paper—sweets Mama used to always have loose in her bag when Haruka was a child. She places a milky sweet in her mouth and is moved to a nondescript, snowy morning, walking to school with Mama. That was all, that was the extent of the memory, but it was a gift close to magic.
Inside the sheets of brown paper, Haruka uncovers a book. She opens the first page and on the inside reads the words,
大好きな娘雪, ママ
To my beloved daughter Yuki, from Mama
Followed by,
大好きな娘 明子, ママ
To my beloved daughter Meiko, from Mama
And finally in fresh ink beneath the two previous owners,
Haruka, these are the stories from my childhood. Maybe one day you can tell me what they mean! Love, Mei
Ever since Meiko had left, Haruka had spent every evening poring over the pages of the fairy-tale book. They were strange stories, not quite right for a child, not quite right for an adult, but they were a comfort to her. A link to her sister, to Mama, and she consoled herself with the promise that one day she would read these stories to Meiko. She would read them to her, as Mama had intended, in their mother tongue.
*
The days after Meiko’s departure are filled with activity, which is something Haruka is grateful for. She spends most of her time helping Baba with the housework, cooking and cleaning where she can, checking on the fields while Jiji lies inert, gagging like a goldfish from the nausea. The intravenous drip stuck in his arm, depositing chemicals. The chemotherapy had started so swiftly, and the speed at which the doctors moved frightened her. She needed to watch over her grandfather, even if there was little she could do to relieve the sickening waves that kept him in bed with a bucket by his side.
Haruka was used to being left. By her father, then her mother, then Kai. By the time she was sixteen, she had learnt how to orchestrate her endings so that she was always the one leaving first. Always the one finishing whatever minor relationship she had with another. Even the little partings that happened after coffee with friends always ended with a discharge of panic as she said her goodbyes.
Haruka knew, in a distant, self-diagnosing kind of way, that this response came from her father’s abandonment. From those nights where she would stand crying, watching her mother leave through the door. Looking back through the years, Haruka could trick herself into believing those small departures were insignificant. She could see the reasons behind her mother’s leaving, and she could accept them. But as a child they had felt brutal. They had the effect of a blade to the belly. A feeling of rejection she had mostly protected herself from in adult life, but one that she could not protect herself from as she watched her sister leave. As Meiko walked away from her, Haruka had felt a familiar pain. It made her want to return to Tokyo, back to the clubs where she could forget, occupy herself with the company of strangers. Something she almost certainly would have done if it weren’t for Jiji’s sickness.
As the days passed, Haruka had expected the darkness to sink down into a place that was terrifying to her. For her wounds to fester with gangrene, cynical and alone. Instead, what happened surprised her. It was something closer to a shedding of skin, not entirely painless, but necessary all the same. Over the unfolding days, Haruka felt a slow spread of new skin healing over her sinkholes. She would be washing up, or stepping outside in the morning, breathing in the fresh, scented air, and she would feel a hand, a lightness, warm her, where moments ago there was darkness. The new growth wasn’t hardy and armoured as it had always been after pain like that. It was fresh. Like a baby’s. A new skin, one that she knew would be subject to all kinds of brutality, but one that would also hold her in place, softly.
Now, when Haruka thinks of her big sister, the curve of her spine unfurls up to the sky, just a little. She thinks about her body differently, no longer a wasteland where men have come to rid themselves of their muck, but a mountain range of similarities and blessings. Haruka now shares her skin, her textures, with others.
With Mama. The one who moves with the changing winds. And another, far away and so very close.
*
Out in the fields, Haruka stands next to her grandfather. His first day outdoors in a week. He leans on a cane, breathing hard after the walk up the sloping forest to the top of the paddies. The dusk is quieter than usual, as if the birds and insects recognise that this moment calls for a kind of stillness. A preservation of energy.
Jiji rests his hand on Haruka’s shoulder and points to the golden grain rippling in the open field, between the mountains and the city. His sato-yama.
Is the rice ready to harvest, Haru-chan?
Haruka turns to her first great love. A man of seeds and mud and solitude. A teacher of many things, a failure of many more. But a great love all the same. Unending and endlessly forgiving. All the father she will ever need.
Almost, Haruka says. But not quite yet.