Lanterns, Wrists, and the N3

On the thirteenth of August we went up the hill behind the station to visit Tetsuo's father.

Genzō Moriyama lived among the other grey stones on the slope, with a view of the sea, under cicadas so loud they sounded like frying. Tetsuo scrubbed the granite with a brush, slowly, the way you would wash a friend's back. Yukari pulled weeds. Mio ladled water over the stone from a wooden bucket, and the water ran down the carved name and steamed in the sun. They lit incense, set out flowers, a rice cracker and a can of beer. "He liked beer," Yukari said, as if he might be listening. Then they put their palms together.

I held the bucket. In Tashkent we visit my grandfather Anvar's grave on his day; my father sweeps the path, and says a prayer with his palms open, and then passes his hands down over his face as if washing it in the words. I put my palms together like the Moriyamas and thought of Bobo in Uzbek, which seemed fair to everyone.

Tetsuo said something to the stone, too quietly to hear. On the way down, Mio fell into step beside me.

"He was introducing you," she said. "He told Grandpa you're tall and you cook." She kicked a pebble. "That's all. That's a lot, for Dad."

That evening Tetsuo burned a little bundle of hemp stalks in a clay dish at the shop door, so the dead could find the way home. For three days, Yukari said, Genzō-san would be back.

"He'll want his chair," said Mio, and moved her school bag off it.

"In Tashkent," I said, "Bobo would find the flat by the smell of Buvi's plov."

Nobody at the table mentioned the fireworks. Nobody had for two weeks. Kotone's notes had come every day of the summer sessions in the back room, about cicadas and heat and season words, and she had not written a word about the finale, and neither had I. It sat between us like a bruise: you don't talk about it; you just don't lean on that side.

On Saturday, at dusk, the harbour was crowded and quiet. People knelt at the water's edge with paper lanterns on little wooden boats, each with a name written on it, and set them on the sea to carry the dead back where they came from. This is tōrō nagashi. Yukari put a lantern in my hands and a marker in my other hand.

"Sar-chan. Write your grandfather."

I wrote Anvar Aliev in Latin letters, and underneath, carefully, in katakana, in case the Japanese sea needed help reading. Then I knelt and let him go.

The tide took them out in a long line, hundreds of small lights, slowly, past the end of the breakwater and the red lighthouse. On the far side of the harbour I saw the Shirases at the water's edge, Grandma Tae bent over a lantern, Kotone beside her. She looked across the water and raised her hand. I raised mine.

Lanterns on the sea—

my grandmother's grandmother

would not know this shore

That night the farewell fire burned down in its clay dish by the shop door, and Tetsuo sat on the bench outside with a bicycle wheel across his knees and a spoke key, tightening, testing, tightening. I sat beside him with barley tea. The Shiokaze Ginza was dark and smelt of smoke and the sea.

"My grandfather used to take me to the Navoi Theatre," I said. "There is a plaque on the wall. After the war, Japanese prisoners helped to build it, and in 1966, when the earthquake knocked down half of Tashkent, it didn't fall." I turned the glass in my hands. "Bobo said, 'People far from home built something that didn't fall.' That's partly why I chose Japan."

Tetsuo tightened a spoke. Then, because it was night and his hands were busy, he talked.

"In 1987 I was in the Literature Club. Second year. I wrote about that bike before I had it. The next summer I built it, in the loft, from parts, one at a time. The plan was: finish school, work for a year, fly to Tashkent, ride to Samarkand. Three hundred kilometres. The pencil line on the map in the back room is mine." He spun the wheel, watched it, stopped it with one finger. "In '89 my father got sick. Somebody had to open the shop in the morning. I was nineteen. The bike went up the ladder."

The fire in the dish ticked and settled.

"I asked the Foundation for a student from Uzbekistan because Samarkand is a nice word," he said. "And because I wanted to know what a person from there eats for breakfast."

"Non and tea," I said.

"Mm." He fitted the wheel back into the frame beside him. "Good."

I thought of the bike in the loft under its sheet, its front wheel pointing west for thirty-seven years, like a dog that waits at a door after everyone has told it nobody is coming.

"Do you still want to go?" I asked.

Tetsuo looked at the fire until it was only ash. "Mm," he said, which in Tetsuo can mean yes, no, or both, and went in to bed.

On Wednesday, at ten at night, which is six in the evening in Tashkent, my mother called. She said "Sardorjon" in the voice she uses before bad news, and my stomach fell down the stairs.

Buvi had slipped at Chorsu Bazaar, on the wet floor under the green dome, by the pickle sellers. Her wrist was broken. She was fine. She had a cast. She was furious.

"Give me that," said a voice, and the phone swung round and there was Buvi, her white headscarf crooked, her right arm in plaster from knuckles to elbow, held up like a flag. "Voy, stop making that face! I can stir plov with the other hand!" She peered into the screen. "You're thin. Are you eating? Do the Japanese have enough bread?"

Behind her, on the shelf, the bitten loaf sat exactly where it always sat.

After the call I sat on my bed and was angry at six thousand kilometres. I should have been there to carry her bags. For a whole day I thought about going home. I looked up the price of a ticket to Tashkent, which was the price of eleven bicycles, and then I read the page of the Foundation's booklet that says the return date is fixed by the Foundation, and then I lay on the floor of my six-mat room and looked at the ceiling, which had nothing to say either.

At breakfast Yukari put a fried egg in front of me and her hand on my head. "She said she's fine. Believe grandmothers."

That evening there was a knock on my door. Mio stood there holding her last box of Pocky, not looking at me.

"What do Uzbeks call brothers and sisters?"

"An older brother is aka," I said. "A little sister is singil."

She considered this. "Gross," she said, and pushed the Pocky into my hands, and took the words away with her.

On Monday the twenty-fifth, at twelve o'clock, the JLPT results went online, and the Moriyama kitchen became a stadium. Yukari had the laptop. Tetsuo came through from the shop in his apron. Mio pretended to be there for the rice crackers. Buvi was on my phone, propped against the soy sauce, where it was eight in the morning.

I typed my number wrong twice. Then the page loaded.

N3: Passed.

[Japanese: N4 → N3]

[Reading the air: 3% → 11%]

[Kotone affinity: ??? (warmer)]

[New skill: Silence (Lv. 1)]

I read it twice, the way I read the real screen. Eleven per cent. It seemed generous. I did not know what the skill was for yet.

"A hundred points!" shouted Yukari.

"Mm," said Tetsuo, and put his hand on my shoulder for exactly one second.

"Congratulations, Exchange Student," said Mio, into a rice cracker.

"Rahmat, singil."

"…Gross."

On the phone, in Tashkent, Buvi raised her cast over her head like a trophy and shouted something that made the soy sauce fall over.

In the evening, when the shop was shut and the town chime had long since played, my phone buzzed. A LINE message from Kotone. The longest she had ever sent.

Library. Wednesday. 2 p.m. I need to show you something embarrassing. 🟦

I read it nine times. Something embarrassing. A haiku with no season word? A photo of me asleep with my mouth open in the back room? Her school report? I spent two days imagining what it could be, and every guess was wrong.