Meigetsu-in Blue

At 8:30 on Saturday it was already raining, the fine grey rain of June that doesn't so much fall as hang about, and Kotone was standing under the wooden roof of Shirahama Station in jeans and a yellow raincoat.

I had never seen her out of uniform. She looked smaller, and more like herself, as if the uniform had been a kind of sticky note too. She was holding a notebook in a clear plastic bag. Beside her, Hanzawa-sensei leaned on a long black umbrella like a cane, with his eyes closed. I was wearing, as instructed, the shoes I loved least.

"Good morning!" I said. "Excuse me. Is it going to rain all day?"

Kotone looked at the sky, and then at me, and nodded.

On the Shiokaze Line to Kamakura I asked about everything outside the window, because everything outside the window was new. A heron, standing in a ditch like a folded umbrella: she nodded. A shrine gate between two houses: she nodded. Then a field of water, flat and silver, with rows of tiny green shoots standing in it, reflecting the sky.

"Excuse me. Is that rice? Real rice?"

She took out her pad and wrote a note. Not a haiku; apparently rice was not worth seventeen syllables.

Rice. Yes, real rice. No, not your kind.

At Kamakura we changed to the JR line, one stop, to Kita-Kamakura. Somewhere across the bay, according to the guidebook, Mount Fuji was visible from here on clear days. It was not a clear day. Fuji had been cancelled.

At ten o'clock, Meigetsu-in.

The lane up to the temple was narrow, and every person in it was holding an umbrella, so that from the gate it looked like a slow river of black and navy and transparent plastic flowing uphill. On both sides, all the way up, were hydrangeas. Almost every one of them was the same colour, a blue so clear and deep that it didn't look like a colour a plant could decide on.

"Meigetsu-in blue," said Hanzawa-sensei, opening his eyes for it.

At the top there was a queue to look through a famous round window in the main hall, at the garden behind. Everyone in the queue was holding up a phone to photograph it.

"A haiku is a window," said Hanzawa-sensei to nobody in particular, "not a painting." Then he sat down on a bench beside the queue "for one minute" and was asleep in two, upright, both hands on the handle of his umbrella.

So I wrote. I stood in the rain with my orange pad against the saijiki, counting on my fingers, and for the first time I had a real season word, a word from the book, a word the whole temple agreed with.

Blue ajisai—

the whole temple is one blue.

Also, many feet.

I showed it to her and pointed at ajisai, very proud, the way Jasur points at a goal he has scored.

Kotone read it. Then she took her pencil and underlined ajisai twice, and gave it back. I believe this is the highest mark I have ever received in any subject.

It happened on the way down.

The path was narrow stone, slippery with rain, and a tour group was coming up it just as we were going down, and the river of umbrellas stopped being a river and became a crowd. Someone's umbrella caught mine. A man with a camera stepped between us. For a moment I saw her yellow hood between two black umbrellas, being carried sideways, and then I didn't.

I found her ten minutes later, behind the garden, where a path went up into the bamboo.

It was quieter there. The bamboo was tall and green and very straight, and the rain came down through it in threads. She was crouched at the side of the path with her arms round her knees and her hood down, rain in her fringe. She was breathing too fast, the way you breathe after running, except that she had not been running.

I didn't ask anything. I didn't know what had happened, and I had the feeling, for once, that the question was not the important thing.

I opened my umbrella over her and stood there.

The rain drummed on it. I counted the seconds, because I count. At a hundred and forty I lost count and started again, and at ninety I lost it again, because I was watching her shoulders, and they were slowly coming down. The bamboo creaked. Somewhere far off a bell rang. The rain ran down the back of my neck. It was, I think, the longest I have ever been quiet in my life.

Then, because I am me, I said the stupid thing.

"In Tashkent it rains about forty days a year," I said to the top of her head. "I think Kamakura used all forty today."

And she laughed.

It was the first sound I had ever heard her make. It was small and clear and surprised, like a teaspoon against a glass, and it was over almost before it began. She put her hand over her mouth, as if she had dropped something. Then she stood up, wiped her eyes with her sleeve, looked at my collar, and nodded once, the nod of someone who has decided to go on.

We walked back down under one umbrella. I am one metre eighty-six and she is one metre fifty-two, which is a difficult geometry for one umbrella, so I tilted it towards her. By the time we reached the gate my left shoulder was soaked through to the skin. I didn't notice until much later. I was listening to the rain, in case the other sound came back.

For lunch Hanzawa-sensei led us, awake and hungry, to a small shop in a side street near Kamakura Station, with six stools and a steamed-up window, and ordered for all three of us without asking.

The bowls came: rice, and on top of it a soft white heap of tiny fish, hundreds of them, each with two black dots for eyes, and a little ginger, and a raw egg yolk shining in the middle.

"Shirasu-don," said Hanzawa-sensei.

I looked at the bowl. Hundreds of eyes looked back. "Shirasu," I said slowly. "Like your…"

Kotone went red from the ears inwards. Then she wrote a note, not a haiku, and pushed it across the counter.

My family's. Half the whitebait in Kamakura is ours.

I read it twice. Her family were whitebait people. I had called her Whitebait-san in front of the whole class, and I had been, by accident, almost correct. I didn't know whether to apologise again or to laugh, so I ate. It was sweet and salty and tasted of the sea, and I ate two bowls, and Kotone watched me eat the second one with an expression I had not seen on her before and could not read.

Hanzawa-sensei ate three, and paid for everything, and when I tried to pay for mine he waved his chopsticks at me. "Hohoho. Teachers pay, Aliev-kun. It is our only power."

At four o'clock we took the train home. Rain ran sideways across the windows. Hanzawa-sensei lay across two seats with his umbrella on his stomach, asleep, like a knight on a tomb. Kotone sat opposite me and wrote in her notebook, and every time I looked up she was not looking at me, very carefully.

I tried to count the laugh. I had heard it once, for perhaps a second, and I kept playing it back in my head the way you rewind a goal. Two syllables, maybe three, and no season word at all. I couldn't make a haiku out of it, however I counted, and I found that I was glad.

At the Shirahama ticket gate she stopped, took something out of her raincoat pocket, pressed it into my hand, and ran. Out of the station, across the square, down the road towards the harbour, the yellow raincoat getting smaller, before I had even opened my fingers.

It was a blue note, a little damp.

Early summer rain—

under one umbrella, his

shoulder is soaking

I touched my shoulder. It was still wet.

The Blue Book was in my desk at school, where it lived now, so I put the note inside my textbook instead, at Lesson 12, and it stayed there. I never moved it. I told myself that was because I was busy.

It was the best Saturday of my life so far. It lasted until Wednesday.