Eho-maki Silence

"Oni wa soto!"

Tetsuo-san came out of the back room at half past six in a red cardboard demon mask, and the shop floor exploded with beans.

The mask had come free with the supermarket soybeans. Mio had improved it with a marker: eyebrows like two angry caterpillars, extra fangs, a scar. "The oni needs to be scary," she had told the whole club, and the whole club had come to make sure. By then the shop was half empty. The closing sale had not started, but Tetsuo-san had been selling stock quietly since New Year, and a third of the hooks in the ceiling hung bare, like question marks.

The rule of Setsubun is simple. You throw roasted soybeans at the demon and shout Oni wa soto!, demons out, and then you throw them into the house and shout Fuku wa uchi!, luck in. Daichi threw like a catcher, sidearm and far too hard. Fumika threw in neat, regulated handfuls. Kotone, it turned out, had a fisherman's daughter's arm; her first bean hit the demon exactly between the caterpillars, and Tetsuo-san retreated behind the counter going "Mm! Mm!"

I had a problem. I was raised by Buvi, and in Buvi's kitchen you do not throw food, you do not drop food, and if bread touches the floor you pick it up and kiss it and put it somewhere high. My hand would not let go of the first bean. It took Mio to solve this. Mio threw every one of hers at me. And she shouted the second half, Fuku wa uchi!, which means luck in, which, when you are throwing beans at a person, is confusing. I decided to take it as a compliment.

Afterwards you eat beans, one for each year of your age and one more for the year to come. I counted mine onto the counter: eighteen. Hanzawa-sensei, who had come "for the beans", counted out sixty-five, ate forty, and gave up.

"Hohoho," he said. "The rest I will eat next year."

Later I picked every bean up off the shop floor, on my knees, with a dustpan. I did not kiss them. There were about four hundred. But I thought about it.

Then Yukari-san brought out the eho-maki.

They were fat sushi rolls, uncut, as long as my hand, with seven fillings for the seven gods of luck. The rule, Fumika explained with her phone out, was strict: you must eat the whole roll without stopping, in complete silence, facing this year's lucky direction, while you make a wish. If you speak, the luck falls out.

"South-south-east," she announced, turning slowly with her compass app, and stopped. The lucky direction was the shop window.

So we stood in a row in front of the dark glass, rolls in both hands, like a choir about to sing into a sandwich. Minase-senpai was at cram school. He had sent a message: Wish for me too. Something unreasonable.

Yukari-san said, "Go!"

Silence.

Daichi lasted nine seconds. Mio, beside him, did not make a face; she simply looked at him while chewing, and he snorted rice. Fumika lasted forty, and then her discipline broke in the one direction it always breaks: "Hoshino-kun, your shoulders are—" and she clapped her hand over her mouth. Yukari-san was eating and shaking with silent laughter at the same time, which may also be against the rules.

I lasted. Everyone was surprised, including me. For ten months I had been the boy who could not keep a sentence in his mouth. Now I stood with a roll of rice and a wish, and I did not need to say anything at all.

The window was black; the shutter was still up, and outside it was night. In the glass the shop floor was reflected, bright and yellow, with all of us in a row. My face. And beside it, a head lower, Kotone's.

Our eyes met in the glass.

You're still going, she said, without saying it.

So are you.

Your roll is falling apart.

Yukari-san rolled it. It was always going to fall apart.

What are you wishing for?

I'm not allowed to say.

Neither am I.

The corners of her eyes creased. Mine did too. Neither of us laughed, and neither of us looked away, and we finished at the same moment, and it was the longest conversation I had had in Japan without one word in it.

For ten months everyone had told me to read the air, as if it were a notice on a wall. It is not. It is this: the space between two people where the words would be, if anyone needed them.

That night I wrote it down anyway. Some things you have to write down even after you have understood them without words.

The bean-throwing night—

we chew in silence, and still

your eyes talk to me

On Saturday afternoon the club room was warm under the kotatsu and cold everywhere else. Fumika was at the library. Minase-senpai was at an exam. Hanzawa-sensei was asleep in the corner, upright, with a mandarin in his hand. The window was full of flat grey sea.

Kotone had been turning her pencil for ten minutes without writing anything. Then she put it down.

"What happens in April?" she said. "For you."

I thought about giving a speech. I thought about saying something light. Then I told her the truth, plainly, the way I say everything.

"In the summer there are entrance exams for a technical university in Tashkent. Engineering. It's what my father wants. He builds metro stations; he thinks I should build something that doesn't fall down." I looked at the kotatsu quilt. "Maybe Japanese as a second subject, if they let me. And I don't know."

There was a second answer under the first one, the way there is always a second meaning under hers. I could hear Minase-senpai capping his red pen. I did not say it.

She nodded.

She did not pick up the pencil. She did not write anything. She only looked out at the grey sea for a long time, and I looked at it with her, and Hanzawa-sensei's mandarin rolled slowly out of his hand and across the tatami, and nobody picked it up.

From Kotone's notebook — Wednesday, 11 February

National Foundation Day. The nation is being founded. I am melting chocolate.

Grandma is supervising from a chair by the stove. Her instructions so far, in full:

1. "Stir, don't stab."

2. "Not so hot. You'll burn it and then you'll cry."

3. "Who's it for?" (Not answered.)

4. "IT'S FOR THE UZBEK BOY." (Not answered, louder.)

A small pan inside a big pan, steam coming up round the edges. The whole kitchen smells like a café that sells only one thing. I am using the bitter dark chocolate, because anyone who eats qurt for fun cannot trust anything that is only sweet.

Double boiler steam—

my hands shake more than the spoon.

Valentine's, Friday.

(That one stays in here. It's not a gift. It's a weather report.)

The plan: four small squares, like tiny sticky notes, with one letter each, piped in white. Latin letters, because his language is written in them, and because hiragana would be too loud. I am not writing the word here. Grandma reads upside down.

I will say it with chocolate, since my mouth is a coward.

(My mouth has done brave things this year. It read to four hundred people. It shouted GET WELL in front of the tofu shop. But this is one word, to one person, and he might bow and say "Thank you very much" in his textbook voice, and then I would have to become a whitebait and live in the bay forever.)

Valentine's is on Saturday. So we do it on Friday. Friday the thirteenth. Of course it is.

On the fridge, under the fish magnet: a postcard from Mizuki-senpai. Kyoto, a temple in the snow. Two words: Say it. She didn't say what. She didn't have to. (How does she know? I have told her nothing. Fumika-chan denies everything, which is how I know.)

At Setsubun we talked in the shop window for a whole eho-maki, and I think he heard all of it. On Saturday I asked him about April, and he said, "And I don't know." Everyone else says "It'll be fine." He said "I don't know." It is the most honest sentence I have heard all year, including mine.

Forty-two days. (In October I said I wouldn't count. I have counted every one. I am a liar with very good arithmetic.)

The letters are piped. I put them in the right order. Then I mix them up. Then I put them back. Then I mix them up again, and close the fridge, fast.

Friday. After cleaning. The club room. If I die, Fumika-chan gets my notebooks. Burn the pink one.