Whitebait-san and the Neon-Orange Reply

At 8:20 on Wednesday I stuck an orange note on the corner of her desk, exactly where she had stuck hers on mine, and sat down, and looked at the sea very hard.

It had taken fourteen drafts. Thirteen of them lay on the floor of my room in a small orange snowdrift. The fourteenth said:

I am Sardor. Hi.

I come from Uzbekistan.

Thank you for the page.

I had counted it eleven times. It was perfect.

From the corner of my eye I watched her find it. She read it once, and again. The tips of her ears went red, which I was beginning to understand happened to her the way weather happens to a mountain. Then the pencil came out, and a blue note crossed the gap between our desks.

No season word, but

the whole of Uzbekistan

fit on one small note

I had been graded. Nobody had graded me since Tashkent, and I had missed it more than I knew.

"Season word" was not in my textbook. My electronic dictionary had it under kigo: a word that tells the reader which season the poem lives in. Cherry petals: spring. There were lists. There were whole books of lists. Haiku, it turned out, had rules, the way plov has rules, and I had served her rice with no meat in it.

But she had written back. And the whole of Uzbekistan had fitted on one small note. I read that line many more times than was necessary.

At break I stuck both her notes into the notebook with the blue cover that I had brought for vocabulary: hers on the left-hand page, a copy of mine on the right, so that I could study where I had gone wrong. By Friday I was calling it the Blue Book.

At 12:40 I opened my first Japanese bento, and a panda looked up at me.

Yukari had made it out of rice, with nori ears and nori eyes and a small nori smile, lying on lettuce like a panda on holiday. I closed the lid. I opened it again. It was still a panda.

"Is that a PANDA?"

The boy with the buzz cut was leaning over my shoulder with a lunchbox the size of a toolbox. His name was Daichi Hoshino, he was the catcher of the baseball club, and he was the loudest person I had ever met, louder than Chorsu Bazaar on a Saturday.

"Sar… Sardo…" He frowned at my name as if it were a fast ball. "Sado!"

"Sardor," I said.

"Sado!" He looked delighted, as though he had caught something. I have been Sado ever since.

He took me to the school store to see what he called the war. The yakisoba-pan, fried noodles in a soft bun, cost 150 yen and sold out in ninety seconds, and fifty students fought for thirty buns with their elbows. Daichi went in like a man walking into the sea and came out with nothing.

"Thirty-eight per cent," he said, with dignity. "My win rate."

I wanted to eat on the roof. In anime, everyone eats lunch on the roof, with the wind in their hair. Here the roof door had three padlocks and a sign that said NO. So we ate on the stairs below it, and I explained about anime, and Daichi explained about fire regulations, and neither of us listened.

"Yesterday, man," he said, with his mouth full. "'Shirasu-san'! That was a home run!"

"Excuse me, Hoshino-kun. Why was it a home run?"

He opened his mouth, looked at me, and closed it again. Something happened to his face that I would later learn was Daichi being tactful. "You really don't know? Nah. Forget it. You gotta read the air."

"Read the air."

"Kūki wo yomu." He waved a chopstick at the stairwell. "When the air is heavy, you don't talk."

I looked at the air. "Air is not heavy. Air is air."

He chewed for a long time, staring at me. "…You're going to have a hard year, man."

At 15:20 a chime rang, and the whole school picked up rags. In Tashkent our school has a caretaker; here the caretakers were us. My cleaning group had the corridor outside 2-B: me, Daichi, the girl by the window, two boys from the football club, and the class representative, Fumika Tachibana, whose ponytail was so straight it looked ruled, and whom everyone called Iinchō.

"This," said Daichi, folding a wet rag flat on the floor, "is the zōkin run."

You put both hands on the rag, lift your bottom into the air and sprint the length of the corridor on all fours, pushing the rag in front of you. It is cleaning, technically. It is also, obviously, a race.

We raced. I have long legs. By the end of the corridor they were longer than the corridor, and Daichi and I arrived together, at speed, in Fumika's bucket.

Grey water went across the floor like the tide coming in. Fumika looked down at it, and then at us.

"Aliev-kun. Hoshino-kun." Every word had been ironed. "Cleaning is not a sport."

Daichi apologised to her four times, very red. I thought he was sunburnt.

By the window, with her back to us, the girl was wringing out her rag, and her shoulders were shaking. No sound came out of her. It was not quite a laugh. But I noticed, and I noticed that I had noticed, and I mopped my half of the tide very slowly so that I could go on noticing.

After school Fumika stopped me at the shoe lockers and held out a folder.

"For you, Aliev-kun."

It was thirty-two pages, laminated, with coloured tabs: SHIRAHAMA HIGH LIFE GUIDE FOR EXCHANGE STUDENTS. Tab 1, shoes. Tab 3, lunch, with a map of the school store and the words Do not attempt the yakisoba-pan in your first month. Tab 6, clubs: All students are strongly encouraged to join. She had made it herself.

In Tashkent, when someone makes a thing for you with their own hands, you owe them until one of you dies. I looked at the tabs, and my eyes did something inconvenient.

Fumika pushed her fringe exactly straight. "It's inefficient for you to ask everyone everything."

There was a small ink stain on the middle finger of her right hand, the kind that never quite washes off. I noticed it the way you notice weather. I thought nothing of it.

At dinner Yukari wanted to know everything, so I told her everything: the panda (she gave herself ninety points), the war, the bucket, and my seatmate, Shirasu-san, who answered questions in poems.

Mio choked on her miso soup. "You called her WHITEBAIT?"

Tetsuo got up without a word, went to the fridge and came back with a small plastic tub. Inside were hundreds of tiny, soft, white fish, each with two black dots for eyes. Hundreds of eyes looked at me.

"Shirasu," said Yukari kindly. "Baby sardines. Very good on rice."

I opened Fumika's guide at tab 2, the class list. Shirase Kotone. Kotone Shirase. I had called her, in front of thirty-one people, warmly and loudly, Whitebait-san.

"Moriyama-san," I said to Tetsuo, "please excuse me," and "Moriyama-san," I said to Yukari, "please excuse me," and they both answered, twice, and Yukari put down her chopsticks.

"Tetsuo-san and Yukari-san!" she said. "Two Moriyama-sans at one table is one too many!"

So they became Tetsuo-san and Yukari-san, and I wrote my apology at the table, between the rice and the pickles, counting on the fingers of my left hand while my right hand held the pencil.

Shirase, not fish.

I am sorry, very much.

Please do not be fish.

Mio read it over my shoulder. "Gross. Love letters in 5-7-5."

On Thursday morning it went onto the corner of Kotone's desk. She read it. Her ears did the weather. The pencil turned twice, stopped, and wrote.

Spring whitebait, so small

a thousand fit in one hand—

I am used to it

I read it under the desk, and then on the stairs, and then in bed. I decided that it was forgiveness. I was right.

That made five notes, three blue and two orange, and on Friday I counted them again in the Blue Book, in case they had multiplied. She had still not said a word to me. I had seen her almost laugh once. It was, I thought, a very good start.

After cleaning on Friday I took a wrong turn looking for the library and ended up in the Old Building, among the pines at the west edge of the grounds: a wooden corridor that creaked under my slippers like a ship. Posters for the brass band covered the walls, glossy and loud. Half hidden under one of them was a small poster drawn by hand.

LITERATURE CLUB — ROOM 3 — WE ARE QUIET.

At the bottom, in small pencil: Members: 1.

Recruitment week started on Monday.