Please Join the Literature Club

The third-years' corridor is on the second floor of the North Building, and at 15:40 on a Friday it belongs entirely to them.

Blue-toed indoor shoes everywhere. Cram-school bags as big as suitcases. Somebody's vocabulary cards spilled across the floor, somebody else eating a rice ball while reading a practice exam. Outside 3-A stood Minase's fan club, four second-year girls in a loose half-circle, pretending to talk to each other and watching the door.

I stopped at the far end, by the stairs, where a second-year in green-toed shoes was allowed to exist.

Kotone walked straight down the middle of the corridor.

People noticed her the way you notice a small boat going the wrong way up a river. Third-years stepped aside without knowing why. The fan club stopped pretending. She walked through the half-circle of girls, who parted for her, and stopped in front of Kaito Minase, who had just come out of 3-A with his bag on his shoulder.

She was a head and a half shorter than him. She looked up.

I could see her hands. They were shaking. I could see her breathe in once, the way she does before she writes, and I could see thirty people watching her do it.

"Minase-senpai," she said, aloud, clearly, to the whole corridor. "Please join the Literature Club."

Silence. Real silence, the kind the fireworks leave. Someone's vocabulary card slid off a windowsill and landed with a tick.

Minase smiled. Not the smile from the posters, not the one he gives the fan club or the teachers or the council. A different one, smaller and a bit crooked, which I had never seen before.

"I'd be honoured," he said.

The fan club gasped as one person.

At the end of the corridor I held my breath and said nothing. Every word I knew in two and a half languages was in my mouth, and I kept them there. It was the hardest nothing I have ever said.

She bowed to him and came back along the corridor, and thirty people watched her come. When she reached the stairs she stopped beside me without looking at me. Her whole body was trembling, like a string after the arrow has gone.

"I answered," she said, very quietly, only to me.

Then she went down the stairs, and I followed her at a distance of exactly one step.

On Monday Minase's form lay on the low table in Room 3, stamped by Hanzawa-sensei ("Hohoho. Minase-kun. A retired bow."). In the box marked Motivation, in brush-trained handwriting that made my katakana look like something a chicken had walked through:

Autumn, retired bow—

the string still hums in the dark,

wanting one more shot

I understood it perfectly. I read it three times anyway, looking for something to dislike, and couldn't find it.

Afterwards I took the kettle down to the Old Building's water tap, and Minase came down behind me to wash his cup. The tap is outside, under the pines, and the water comes out cold and tasting of iron.

"Aliev-kun." He turned the cup under the water slowly. "I'm not doing this to win her. I'm doing it because the club should live." He shook the drops off. "And because I'm curious whether you'll grow up before the festival."

He went back up the stairs without a sound. I stood with the kettle overflowing onto my shoes. Grow up. I was sixteen and a half and a hundred and eighty-six centimetres tall. I had assumed I was finished.

Registered members: four. Counted members: three. Kotone, Fumika, Minase. The quest was technically complete, and for an hour nobody in Room 3 felt like celebrating. Then Fumika opened a box, because of course she had brought one, and Hanzawa-sensei woke up for it, because of course he did. The cake had a chocolate 3 on it. Beside the 3, smaller, in white icing: +1.

I looked at it for a long time. Then I ate the +1, which seemed only fair.

Tuesday was the equinox holiday. On Wednesday Fumika took the whiteboard.

She wiped everything except one corner, where FIND THE RIGHT RICE had survived since May with and a third member underneath in pencil. Kotone reached over with the eraser and rubbed out the pencil line. Then Fumika wrote, in capitals:

HAIKU & PLOV CAFÉ

Plov at four hundred yen a plate. Every customer draws a season word from a box, and gets a haiku written for them on the spot. The money prints Shiosai vol. 64. When Fumika wrote Kotone beside the word HAIKU, Kotone looked at it for a long time, and then nodded. Writing, she could do. Then came the bureaucracy, which Fumika delivered like a weather forecast. The health centre: cooked on site, served hot, a hand-washing station, no more than a hundred and fifty plates a day. Fire safety: an extinguisher and an adult supervisor for the burner.

"Mm," said Tetsuo, when I asked him that evening. "I'll stand there."

The council's food-stall lottery was on Thursday: eight slots, twenty applicants. Minase recused himself, since he was now in a club that wanted one. Fumika refused to draw on the grounds that luck is not a regulation. Kotone refused on the grounds of being Kotone. I was not allowed, because I don't count. So Daichi, who is not even a member, drew for us under "Article 19, clause 4: proxies", which I am still not sure exists, with the hand that had caught the last out at Hiratsuka. He rolled up his sleeve, shut his eyes, prayed to something, and put his hand into the box like a bear reaching into a river.

Slot eight. The last one.

"That's a walk-off," said Daichi.

On Friday came the stage lottery. We drew Sunday, 13:40 to 14:00, in the gym, right before the dance club.

"Four hundred people who came for the dancers," Fumika said, with deep satisfaction. "A captive audience."

The kukai would be on that stage. Haiku read aloud, the audience voting. I looked at Kotone. She had gone pale, the white kind, the kind from the notice board.

On Saturday I cooked a test batch in the back yard of the shop, in a borrowed pot, with Japanese rice. Everyone came: Kotone, Fumika, Minase, Daichi, the Moriyamas.

The cumin smell rolled down the Shiokaze Ginza the way it had in May, and Nakagawa-san came out of the butcher's with his hands in his apron to ask whose wedding it was.

The lid came off. Risotto again. Sticky, glossy, delicious, and wrong.

Everyone said it was delicious. Minase said it was delicious in a way that sounded like a letter of recommendation. Daichi had three plates.

"It's porridge," said Mio, holding out her plate for more. "Good porridge. Again."

"It isn't right," I said. "At the festival it has to be right."

"Mm," said Tetsuo. "Right is next time."

On Monday Yukari's bento was a rice-ball Mount Fuji with a cloud of nori across its face. "Because it's always hiding," said the note. Half the class photographed that one, too.

On Tuesday the thirtieth Minase turned eighteen. Fumika knew from the council files, and said that remembering something is not a violation of anything. We didn't have a present, so we gave him a single qurt on a saucer. He ate it with great dignity, in total silence, and his eyes watered, and he said, "Thank you. That was… educational," and drank two cups of tea very fast.

On Wednesday the first of October the whole school changed into winter uniform overnight, like trees deciding together. Black gakuran again, the sailor collars dark. The wind through the pines was cool for the first time since June.

On Friday Buvi called at 15:50, which is 11:50 in Tashkent. I took it in the corridor, because Buvi on speaker in a room full of Japanese people is an international incident.

"Sardorjon! The rice!" she said, without hello. "In Tokyo, my friend Zulfiya's daughter's husband's cousin has a shop. Oydin. Uzbek rice, yellow carrots, everything." She held a piece of paper up to the camera, covered in her big handwriting. "Write it down! And do the Japanese have enough bread?"

"Yes, Buvi."

"Hm."

I wrote it down. I came back into Room 3 holding my phone like a trophy.

"There's an Uzbek shop in Tokyo," I told the club. "Shin-Okubo. My grandmother's friend's daughter's husband's cousin." They looked at me. "Everyone in Uzbekistan is three people away from everyone else in Uzbekistan."

I was still looking at the address, working out trains in my head, when I felt someone behind me reading it over my shoulder.

Kotone took the whiteboard marker. Under FIND THE RIGHT RICE, in small, neat letters, she wrote:

Sunday the 12th. I'm coming. (Rice is heavy.)