Shaved Ice and the Fireworks Problem

Yukari's shaved-ice machine was shaped like a penguin, and she worked its handle like a woman drawing water from a well.

"Strawberry!" she announced, and set a paper cup in front of each of us: a small red mountain, already weeping in the heat.

It was Marine Day, the first Monday of the summer holidays, and the Literature Club had moved into the back room of Moriyama Cycle. The Old Building has no air-conditioning; in July, Room 3 becomes a steamed bun with a bookcase in it. The back room had a fan that turned its head slowly from side to side, like someone refusing an offer, a television switched off out of respect for literature, and on the wall the faded map of Central Asia with its pencil line running west. Kotone sat under it with the saijiki open on her knees, as if she had always sat there.

Mio leaned in the doorway with her own cup and her phone. When Kotone looked up, Mio stuck out her tongue, which was bright red with syrup, and held it there for a full three seconds.

Kotone considered her. Then she peeled off a blue note, wrote without hurrying, and held it up.

Shaved ice, strawberry—

a red tongue sticks out at me

from the sister's face

Mio read it upside down from the doorway. "…Gross," she said. She photographed it, went away, and was quietly pleased for the rest of the afternoon.

At three the bicycle bell on the shop door rang and Daichi came in sideways, carrying a watermelon the size of a small child. Round two had been the Wednesday before: lost 0–10, called after five innings, which Daichi described as "a mercy, man, an actual mercy".

"My summer's over!" he told us, with enormous joy. "My knees are free!"

Tetsuo looked through the curtain at the watermelon, said, "Mm," and went to find a knife.

In Tashkent a watermelon is not a fruit but a unit of summer. In August the melon men build mountains of them on the pavement, and you knock on each one like a door. I knocked on Daichi's.

"What are you doing?"

"Asking if it's ready."

"It's from the konbini, man. It's ready."

On Tuesday it was only the two of us. Yukari was at the clinic, Mio was at the pool, and on the other side of the curtain Tetsuo was truing a wheel, the only sound a soft tick as it spun.

Kotone slid a note across the low table. Not a haiku.

Minase-senpai asked me. What should I do?

I read it twice. In June she had written to me, in plain words, that I didn't have to answer for her, and I had kept that note. So I didn't answer for her. I tried to be fair instead, which is a different mistake. Minase-senpai was a third-year with a future in this country. I was a boy with a return ticket the Foundation hadn't even printed yet. It seemed only fair to step out of the way.

"You should go with the person you want to go with," I said, and I meant it with my whole heart.

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she peeled off a blue note, wrote nothing on it, and laid it on the table between us. She packed her pencil case. The bell on the shop door rang once, and she was gone, forty minutes early.

I looked at the blank note. Since June I have known that there are two kinds of blank: the thinking kind and the other kind. This was the other kind. What I didn't know was what I had done.

"You're an idiot."

Mio was sitting on the stairs in the dark, eating an ice lolly, as if she had been waiting for me, which she had.

"She asked YOU what to do," she said, "because she wants YOU to ask her."

"Then why didn't she say so?"

"Because she's not an exchange student." She stepped over my feet and went up to bed.

At ten my father called. In Tashkent it was six in the evening; he was still in his work shirt from the Metro, eating grapes at the kitchen table. Behind him, in the frame, was Buvi's shelf, and on it the round loaf with my bite still missing from its edge.

"How are the studies?"

"Good, Dada. I'm writing haiku. There's a club."

Jasur's face appeared under his arm, shouted, "Have you seen a ninja?" and vanished. My father nodded the way he nods at a drawing Jasur brings him. "Study. Engineering. This poetry is fine for one year."

"Ask him if they have enough bread!" Buvi called from somewhere near the stove.

After he hung up, I counted on my fingers under the table, the way I count syllables. One year had eight months left in it.

At four o'clock on Thursday morning the harbour was the only lit thing in Shirahama. The first boats had come in low in the water, and Kotone's mother had phoned Yukari the day before: the biggest catch of the summer, and could the Uzbek boy lift things? The Hikari Foundation's Rule 4 forbids paid work. Kotone's mother solved this by not paying me and feeding me instead, which the booklet does not mention.

Mio came too, in a hoodie, with a thermos of barley tea. "To supervise," she said.

The roof of Shirase Suisan was a field of bamboo drying racks under work lights, and the air was steam and salt. The whitebait came up from the vats in baskets, boiled, glistening, thousands of fish no longer than a fingernail, each with two black dots for eyes. Kotone, in rubber boots and a towel tied over her hair, showed me how to spread them: thin and even, one layer, no heaps. She didn't say a word. She showed me with her hands, the way she writes, not a movement wasted. There was a thin white scar on her left thumb; when she saw me looking, she tapped the wire edge of the rack and made a face. Old enemy.

Her father came up once with a basket on his shoulder, looked at my rack for a long time, said nothing, and nodded once. I have lived with Tetsuo since April. I know a speech when I see one.

Then the sky over the Miura hills went grey, and pink, and gold, and the sun came up behind the town, and for a minute every fish on every rack shone like a grain of salt. My hands smelt of the sea. My heart was going like the drummer's at Hiratsuka.

I had written it the night before, after the stairs, eleven times, until the counting was right. I took the orange note out of my pocket and gave it to her.

Sea Festival night—

if nobody else asked first,

will you watch with me?

She read it. She read it again. Her ears went red under the towel. Then she looked up, not at my collar but somewhere near it, and said, aloud, in front of Mio:

"…Un."

Yes.

Mio screamed into the thermos.

At half past six Grandma Tae sat the three of us on upturned crates by the counter and fed us bowls of rice heaped with warm boiled whitebait, soy sauce and a snow of ginger. She looked at Kotone. She looked at me. She looked at Mio, who was still red.

"Eat!" she shouted. "Growing! All of you!"

On Wednesday Fumika came into the shop with the culture-festival application forms in a plastic sleeve, as unofficial advice, and a piece of news she delivered to the tyre rack.

"For your information, Aliev-kun. On Monday the President received Shirase-san's answer about the fireworks. She declined." She pushed her fringe straight. "In haiku. I'm not allowed to say which."

"He told you?"

"He told the council he had been refused 'more beautifully than he deserved'." Something narrative flickered behind her eyes, and she put it away for later.

By that evening our fireworks had acquired, in this order: Fumika ("for research"), Daichi ("because the Iinchō is going, man, obviously"), and Mio with two friends, who were not coming with us, she explained, only going to the same place at the same time.

At dinner Yukari clapped her hands. "A yukata! Sar-chan, you need a yukata for the fireworks!"

Tetsuo went upstairs and came back with his own old one, navy with a grey stripe, smelling of camphor. I put it on over my Pakhtakor shirt. It ended twenty centimetres above my ankles.

"You look like you're wading," said Mio.

"Mm," said Tetsuo. "It was long on me."

Yukari was already on her knees with pins in her mouth, running a tape measure round my shin like a tailor measuring a tree.

"Leave it to me," she said, through the pins. "Three days. It will be ninety-five points."