Tadaima Is Not Hello

There were cherry petals stuck to the train window, and for two stations I tried to pick one off before I understood that they were on the outside.

My suitcase stood between my knees. On my lap the green textbook lay open at Lesson 12: Visiting a Japanese Home, which I had read so often on the plane that the man beside me could probably have visited one himself. The 17:40 from Kamakura, two green-and-cream carriages, swayed like a donkey cart.

My grandfather's watch said 13:52. It was on Tashkent time, and it was going to stay there.

Last night, at the door of our flat in Chilonzor, Buvi had held out a round non, still warm from the tandir.

"Bite," she said.

I bit. She put the rest on the kitchen shelf, where it would wait until I came home to finish it. A journey is one bite out of a loaf, and the loaf waits for you.

"Mehmon otangdan ulug'," she said. A guest is greater than your father. She poked me in the chest with one floury finger. "So be a good one."

The train came round a hill, and the sea appeared on the left, all at once, as if someone had opened a door in the side of the world.

I had never lived by a sea; Tashkent is more than a thousand kilometres from any. The biggest water I knew was the Charvak reservoir, which has a far shore and men selling ice cream. This had no far shore. It went on until it turned into sky.

The guidebook had promised me Mount Fuji across the bay. There was haze the colour of weak tea and, in the haze, nothing. I decided Fuji was shy. I could wait. I had a year.

At 18:12 the train stopped at the end of the line: one platform, a wooden roof, a vending machine, a bench facing the sea, and three people.

A round woman with glasses on a beaded chain was waving a sign, WELCOME SARUDORU-KUN, in bubble letters. (Her daughter's spelling. On purpose.) Beside her stood a thin, stooped man in a navy work apron, holding an old black bicycle with a cargo rack, and a girl in a hoodie with a fish-shaped clip in her hair, filming me.

I knew them from three emails and one photograph, in which the girl was pulling a face. She was pulling the same face now. It seemed to be her face.

I bowed a little deeper than the textbook showed, to be safe.

"Excuse me. I am Sardor Aliev. Please take care of me."

"Sar-chan! You're here!" The woman seized both my hands. "Did you eat? You didn't eat!"

The man looked at me for a long moment. "Mm. Welcome." He strapped my suitcase onto his cargo rack with two rubber cords, as if he did this with exchange students every day.

"Thank you, Moriyama-san," I said to him. "Thank you very much, Moriyama-san," I said to her. They both answered, both times. It was going to be a confusing year.

The girl said to her mother, not quietly, "He's taller than the photo." A pause. "And sadder."

I looked at myself in the glass of the vending machine. She was right. It was the face of someone who had bitten a loaf at a door.

We walked down the Shiokaze Ginza, the bicycle ticking between us, past a butcher's, a tofu shop, a bakery turning its sign to CLOSED. Everything smelled of the sea: not of fish, but of salt and wet stone and something very large, breathing just out of sight.

Moriyama Cycle was three minutes from the station, a narrow shop with bicycles hanging from the ceiling like sleeping bats. When my host father, Tetsuo, pushed the door, it struck a bicycle bell screwed to the frame. Ching.

I stepped in, bowed, and said, "Konnichiwa."

The girl kicked off her shoes and turned round on the step. "Wrong. You live here now. You say tadaima."

Tadaima means "I'm home". Lesson 12 had not said who was allowed to use it. I opened my mouth, and what came out was: "Tadaima-konnichiwa."

My host mother, Yukari, laughed so hard she had to hold the doorframe. Tetsuo said, "Mm." The girl, whose name was Mio and who was twelve, filmed it.

Dinner was hand-rolled sushi, with orange roe that burst on my tongue like small apologies. Then the gifts, because Lesson 12 was very firm about gifts. For Tetsuo, a doppi, the skullcap my grandfather wore to weddings; he put it on, said "Mm," and did not take it off. For Yukari, a suzani cushion, red and gold.

"Ninety-five points!" said Yukari, hugging it.

For Mio, a bag of qurt: hard little balls of dried cheese, salty and sour, the taste of every bus journey of my childhood. She put one in her mouth. Her face collapsed like a tent in the wind.

"Thank you for eating it, Mio-san."

She swallowed with great effort. "Mio. '-san' makes me sound like the dentist."

At 9:02 Tetsuo fell asleep in front of the television, sitting up, still in the doppi. Nobody woke him. Nobody, I learned, ever did.

My room was six tatami mats at the end of the upstairs corridor, with a tower of boxes in one corner labelled MIO — MANGA — DO NOT TOUCH. Through the window, between two roofs, there was a slice of sea.

I lay on the futon and read the exchange booklet again, the way you check a ticket you have already checked. Rule 7: Students should avoid serious romantic relationships during the exchange year.

That one, at least, would be easy.

On Tuesday the eighth of April, at 8:10, at the shoe lockers, I discovered that the school store's indoor shoes stopped at size 28. I am a 29.5.

"The very biggest," said the lady from the store, holding up a pair of green-toed slippers like a prize fish.

My heels hung over the backs. I had to walk on the front half of my feet, knees out, flap, flap, like a duck.

After the opening ceremony, in which I understood the word "spring" eleven times and nothing else, Class 2-B climbed to the third floor, where the windows at the west end were full of sea.

"Sardor-kun!" said our homeroom teacher, Kurata-sensei, in English. She had flashcards sticking out of both pockets. "Welcome to Japan! How are you?"

I had not flown six thousand kilometres to speak English. "I am very well, thank you," I said, in my most careful Japanese. "I am Sardor Aliev, from Uzbekistan. Please take care of me." And I bowed, deeply, sincerely, and hit my forehead on the teacher's desk.

The desk made a sound like a drum. Thirty-one people went silent. Then a boy with a buzz cut in the middle row jumped up and shouted "WELCOME!!" as if I had scored a goal, and everyone laughed, and it was all right.

My seat was in the back row, by the window, beside a girl who had not looked up once. She was small, with a heavy fringe she seemed to live behind, and a pencil turning slowly in her fingers. The seating chart gave her name in kanji, 白瀬, with the reading above it in kana so small that my eyes, busy being nervous, turned one letter into another.

I turned to her and said, warmly and loudly, the way you greet a new neighbour in Chilonzor: "Nice to meet you, Shirasu-san."

The class exploded.

I didn't know why. The girl disappeared behind her fringe, and the tips of her ears went red, then redder, as if someone were slowly turning up a stove.

I checked my Japanese. It had been perfectly polite.

Kurata-sensei handed out the school-life handbooks and said something that ended in a page number. I caught "page". I did not catch the number.

"Excuse me," I whispered to my neighbour. "Which page?"

She said nothing. She peeled a note off a pad of pale-blue sticky notes, wrote on it with a pencil, a 2B, always a 2B, and pressed it onto the corner of my desk the way you press a stamp.

Page forty-seven—

cherry petals on the sill

keep the place for you

I read it three times before I understood that it was a poem. Then I looked down. My handbook, which I had left closed, was open, and in the fold of page forty-seven lay a cherry petal from the sill beside her. She had kept the place for me.

I didn't read page forty-seven. I counted, under the desk, on my fingers. Five, seven, five.

My little brother Jasur reads light novels under his blanket, in which, whenever something important happens to the hero, a window opens in the air with his numbers in it. I had always thought this was stupid.

At 9:14 on my first morning at a Japanese school, one opened in my head.

[Name: Sardor Aliev]

[Level: 16]

[Japanese: N4 (textbook)]

[Reading the air: FAILED]

[Seatmate affinity: ???]

My guidebook had a chapter called "Reading the Air". I had read it twice and understood it zero times. The window, apparently, knew. Beside me the pencil went on turning, and the red went slowly out of her ears.

That night, twenty minutes before my curfew, I went to the konbini across the station square. The only sticky notes left were neon orange. I bought them and wrote until two in the morning, counting on my fingers.

Tomorrow I would answer her. In seventeen syllables.

How hard could it be?