The Right Rice

At nine o'clock on Sunday morning Kotone was waiting on the bench at Shirahama Station that faces the sea, in a grey cardigan, with an empty canvas tote bag folded on her knees.

I looked at the bag. She held it up so I could read the note pinned to it: For rice.

"It's ten kilos," I said. "It won't fit."

She pointed at me. Then at the bag. Then at me again. I understood: the rice would go on me, and the bag was for everything else. It was a very good plan, and it had been made without consulting the person it was going on.

Tomorrow was Sports Day, a holiday, so the Moriyamas had given their permission with the energy of people granting a national holiday of their own. "A day trip to Tokyo! Ninety points!" Yukari said. Mio, from the sofa: "Rice quest. Gross." Tetsuo gave me a thousand yen "for the train" and a second thousand "for the other train".

The Shiokaze Line to Kamakura, the sea filling the left-hand windows and then falling away behind the hills. Then the JR train north to Shinjuku, an hour of towns that ran into each other without stopping to breathe. I asked Kotone about everything outside the window, the way I had in June, and she answered with nods, and once with a note: No. That's a golf course. The net is for the balls, not the birds.

Shinjuku station is not a station. It is a country with trains in it. People came at us from every direction, fast, quiet and certain, like water finding its level. On the platform for the Yamanote Line the crowd closed round us, and I felt a small tug at my back.

Kotone was holding the strap of my backpack. Not my hand. The strap. She held it all the way onto the train and for the one stop to Shin-Okubo, and let go the moment the doors opened, and looked at the ceiling as if the strap had been someone else's idea.

Shin-Okubo smelt of fried chicken, cosmetics and a hundred kinds of cooking at once. At 11:30, down a narrow alley and a flight of stairs underneath a shop selling Korean face masks, we found a door with a green sign: OYDIN HALAL MARKET.

I opened it and walked into Chorsu Bazaar.

Sacks of rice standing open, with scoops. Strings of dried peppers. Chickpeas, mung beans, raisins, black and gold. Jars of cumin. A glass case of non, stamped in the middle, the same round loaves as the one on Buvi's shelf. The smell hit me in the chest, and for a moment I couldn't see properly, and I told myself it was the chilli.

Behind the counter a woman in a flowered headscarf looked up. Fifty-something, round-cheeked, and when she smiled her gold teeth flashed exactly like Buvi's.

"Assalomu alaykum," I said.

That was all it took. Oydin-opa came round the counter at speed and seized my face in both hands and began to talk. She was from Fergana. She had been in Tokyo twenty years. Zulfiya had called her. Zulfiya's daughter's husband was her cousin, which I knew. Was I eating? I was thin. Were the Japanese feeding me? Was it true I had cooked plov with Japanese rice? Voy, poor boy. All in Uzbek, at machine-gun speed, without taking a breath.

Then she saw Kotone behind me, small and polite, with her tote bag, and her whole face lit up.

"Voy, kelin olib kelibsan-ku!"

Oh, you've brought a bride!

My ears went hot. My neck went hot. A blue note appeared at my elbow.

What did she say?

"She said…" I looked at the rice. I looked at the peppers. "'Guest'."

Kotone looked at me for a moment longer than was comfortable, then bowed to Oydin-opa, who beamed.

While I was being interrogated about my diet, Kotone wandered along the shelves. She stopped at a jar of small grey-white balls and turned to me with her eyes shining, and held it up with both hands like a trophy. Qurt. A whole jar of it.

"Voy!" Oydin clapped her hands. "A Japanese girl who eats qurt! Where did you find her?"

Kotone paid for the jar with her own money, and put it in the tote bag, which was clearly what the tote bag had been for all along.

We bought ten kilos of devzira, the Fergana rice, heavy pinkish grains with a rust-red line down each one, as if every grain had been signed. A bag of yellow carrots, sariq sabzi, that Oydin grows in her own garden in Saitama. A bag of cumin. Dried barberries for the top of the plov. At the door she pressed a paper bag of dried apricots into Kotone's hands.

"For the kelin," she said.

"For the guest," I translated, firmly.

She would not let us leave without lunch. In the back room, among the sacks, she had an oven, and out of it came samsa, hot, the pastry shattering, the lamb and onion inside running with juice. Kotone ate one, carefully, blowing on it. Then she ate a second one, less carefully.

Oydin watched her with great satisfaction. Then she leaned towards me and said, in Uzbek, not quietly:

"She doesn't talk?"

"She talks," I said. "Just not to everyone."

Oydin nodded slowly, as if I had told her the price of something precious. "The good ones don't," she said.

On the platform at Shin-Okubo afterwards, with ten kilos of rice on my shoulder like a sleeping child and Kotone beside me holding the carrots, I balanced an orange note on my knee and wrote:

Devzira rice, found—

each grain on its own, and none

of them is alone

At four o'clock we were on the Yokosuka Line going south, the sun low and orange across the carriage, the rice on the floor between my feet.

Somewhere after Yokohama, Kotone's head came down on my shoulder.

I didn't move. I didn't breathe very much. She smelt of samsa and pencil shavings. I counted the stations instead of breathing: one, two, three. At the third, the train jolted, and she woke, and sat up so fast she hit the window, and went red from her collar to her hair.

"It's all right," I said. "The rice didn't see anything."

She looked at the window for a long time. The towns went past in it, and behind them, faintly, our two reflections. Then, quietly, aloud, looking at the glass and not at me, she started to talk.

"When I was thirteen," she said, "I read my haiku. At the junior-high culture festival. On the stage."

I waited.

"On the first line, my voice cracked. It went up. Like a squeak." She touched her throat. "Everyone laughed. One boy did it back at me. For a year. Every time I passed. Pii." She said it flatly, the way you say the name of an illness. "They called me Pii. I was in the town children's choir. I stopped going. I stopped answering in class."

The train went into a tunnel, and the window turned into a black mirror, and in it her face was very still.

"Since then," she said, "when people look at me, my voice goes back into my chest."

There were a lot of things I wanted to say. That the boy was an idiot. That it was nothing. That she should, that she could, that one day. I had a whole sack of sentences, and every one of them started with me.

"Thank you for telling me," I said.

In June, in a bamboo grove in Kamakura, I had learned that sometimes the most useful thing you can do for someone is hold an umbrella and keep your mouth shut. So I held the umbrella.

She nodded at the window. Then she sat back, not quite touching my shoulder, and stayed like that until Kamakura, one centimetre away.

On Saturday the eighteenth the four of us were in Room 3 at the low table, which was covered in Fumika's festival forms. The ten kilos of devzira were at home in the Moriyama kitchen, where Yukari had given them a place of honour next to the rice cooker, like a visiting dignitary.

Kotone had been quiet all afternoon, even for Kotone. She had written three notes and crossed out all three. Then she wrote a fourth, very slowly, and did not cross it out, and put it in the middle of the table where everyone could see it.

At the festival

I will read my own haiku.

Don't look at me. Please.

Minase and Fumika looked at each other across the table. Nobody said anything.

She was looking at me.

"I won't look," I said.

Fumika wrote it into the activity log, with the date, as if it were a regulation. Minase looked out of the window at the pines and said nothing at all, which from him is a gift.

It would be, I realised later, the hardest promise I ever kept.