Terrible. Welcome.

On Monday I was so excited that I forgot to count.

The orange note I stuck on the corner of her desk at 8:20 was not a haiku. It was not five, seven or five of anything. It said, in my best handwriting: I will join the Literature Club.

She read it. She turned the pencil once, twice. Then a blue note came back across the gap, and there was nothing on it at all.

A blank note. I turned it over. The back was blank too.

I conducted a poll.

"It means no," said Daichi at lunch, through a mouthful of rice. "A blank sign from the catcher? That's a shake-off, man. That's a no."

"It means she's thinking," said Fumika at cleaning time, without looking up from her rag. "A no would have been written down. Shirase-san writes everything down."

"Sarudoru," said Mio at dinner, without looking up from her phone. "It means you're annoying."

Two votes to one for "no".

That night I studied the blank note under the desk lamp. A blank note is the hardest kind of poem: there are no syllables to count. It could mean no, or not yet, or go away, or nothing at all. I held it up to the bulb in case she had written in lemon juice, like a spy. She had not.

I stuck it into the Blue Book on a page of its own and decided to join regardless. I have never been good at voting.

The entry form needed the club advisor's seal, so on Tuesday after lunch I took it to the staff room, where Kurata-sensei intercepted me between the photocopier and the tea urn.

"Sardor-kun!" she said, in English, reading the form upside down. "Not the English club? International exchange!"

"Thank you very much, Kurata-sensei," I said, in Japanese. "I want a club with Japanese words in it."

She sighed the sigh of a woman who has lost a battle but not the war, and pointed me to the last desk by the window.

Hanzawa-sensei, who taught classical Japanese and had advised the Literature Club since 1995, was asleep. He was tall and bald, in a brown cardigan, with reading glasses on a cord, and he was sleeping perfectly upright, both hands around a cup of tea, as if he had been carved like that. The tea was still steaming.

"Excuse me," I said. "Excuse me. Hanzawa-sensei. Excuse me."

On the third excuse, one eye opened. It looked at the form, and then, slowly, at me. "Aliev-kun," he said, as if I were a word he was remembering from a very old book. "The Literature Club. Hm." He put down the tea. "A haiku. With a season word."

"Now?"

"Now."

I took an orange note from my pocket and counted on my fingers, fast, sweating slightly, while he watched me with his one open eye. I had a season word. I had read about them all week. I used the biggest one I knew.

Spring. My indoor shoes

are too small for my big feet.

I walk like a duck.

He read it for a long time. Then his shoulders began to shake, and a sound came out of him like a kettle deciding whether to boil.

"Hohoho. Terrible." He took his seal out of a drawer, breathed on it, and pressed it onto the form. "Welcome."

They were the two best words anyone had said to me in Japan.

He rummaged in the same drawer and held out a small, fat, battered book with a cracked red cover: a pocket saijiki, 1978, its pages soft as cloth. "Season words. Your textbook doesn't have seasons." Then, as I bowed over it, he added, in the same drowsy voice, "A club must want to live, Aliev-kun. I don't save clubs. I stamp forms."

By the time I straightened up, he was asleep again.

On Wednesday I carried the stamped form to Room 3 as if it were a certificate from the President.

Kotone was standing at the window with her back to me, looking at the pines. She didn't turn round. I put the form on the low table, where she could see it without having to see me, and said what I had prepared on the stairs.

"My grandmother has a saying. Til — dil kaliti. Language is the key to the heart." I cleared my throat. "My textbook is the key to the station. And to the post office, and to asking where the toilet is. I want the other key."

Her shoulders didn't move. The sea behind the pines was very bright.

"Also," I said, "I measured the room." I had, with my feet, on Thursday, while she was looking at the sea. "Six tatami. In Tashkent, we fit twelve people into a room this size for plov. So." I didn't know how to finish the sentence. "So it is not only big enough for one quiet person."

For a long time nothing happened. Then she turned round, took out the pencil, wrote on a blue note, and put it on top of my form. She didn't look at me. She looked at my collar, and then at the tatami.

Six tatami mats—

this morning I counted them

as a room for two

I read it and took it as yes. I was right, but I would have taken it as yes anyway.

She took the activity log from the windowsill. Inside its cover, in a column, were the names of every member since 1962, sixty-three years of names in fading ink and pencil. On this year's page, under her own name, she wrote: Members: 2.

Then she held out the pencil.

I signed in katakana, the way the form wanted. In katakana my name comes out as Sa-ru-do-ru, which is how Mio says it, on purpose, all the time. My sa looked like a chair someone had kicked over. Kotone looked at it for a while, and the corner of her mouth did something small, and she closed the book before I could see whether it was a smile.

In my head, from that afternoon, it was not Room 3. It was our room.

On Thursday evening Tetsuo came in through the shop at seven with a cardboard box under his arm and put it on the table beside my rice bowl.

Inside were indoor shoes. Green toes, for a second-year. Size 29.5. On the box, a sticker from a shop in Yokohama: SPECIAL ORDER.

"Mm," he said. "For the duck."

Mio had read the haiku in my notebook on Tuesday night and told him. Mio reads everything.

After dinner a first-year from my school knocked on the shutter just before closing, pushing a bicycle whose chain had come off on Tsubaki-zaka. Tetsuo switched on the work lamp over the bench and handed it to me without a word, and I held it while his hands went into the black of the chain. The shop smelled of oil and rubber. His fingers knew where everything was before he looked. It took four minutes. The boy held out a five-hundred-yen coin; Tetsuo shook his head and pointed at the door.

"Mm. Ride carefully."

When I went to put the lamp away in the back room, I noticed the map for the first time. It hung beside the calendar from the fishermen's co-op: a faded map of Central Asia, so old that my country was still coloured pink and belonged to something else. Someone had drawn a line on it in pencil, starting from the right-hand edge, where Japan would have been, and running west, across deserts whose names had changed.

"Excuse me," I said. "What is the line?"

Tetsuo was wiping his hands on a rag. "Old map," he said.

That was the end of the subject. I could tell, because he switched off the light.

On Friday, at dinner, I was drunk on belonging, which is the only thing I have ever been drunk on.

"In Golden Week," I announced, "I will cook plov. Real Uzbek plov. For everyone."

Yukari clapped her hands. "A real Uzbek dinner! I'll invite the neighbours!"

"How many?"

"Only twenty!"

Twenty. In Tashkent, plov for twenty is a small Thursday. I nodded like a man who does this every week. Mio had already raised her phone.

"He's going to cry," she told it.

Yukari was on the telephone before I could explain that I was not going to cry. "Nakagawa-san? It's Yukari! Saturday the third, at ours! Sar-chan is cooking Uzbek food! Bring your wife! Bring your mother!" She hung up and dialled again. The date, I realised, had just been decided by the telephone. At nine Tetsuo fell asleep in front of the news with his chopsticks still in his hand, and the telephone went on deciding things until ten.

In bed, I made two lists. On the left: what plov needs. On the right: what the Shiokaze Ginza has. By midnight, the right-hand page was very short. I had no qozon. I had no lamb. I had no yellow carrots. And, as far as I could tell, there was one tiny jar of cumin in the entire town.