Quest Accepted: Two Members and a Snail

By the middle of May we had a system. I asked out loud. She answered on paper.

In one week alone she answered eleven of my questions in five-seven-five: one about why the Old Building creaks (it is thinking), one about the kettle (it does not exist, and it is switched on), and one about why she writes in pencil and not in pen, which I did not fully understand but kept anyway.

"Excuse me. What is a cut?"

On Monday the twelfth, at a quarter to four, Kotone stood at the club whiteboard and answered with her 2B pencil, which I had not known would write on a whiteboard. It did, faintly, in a silver line, like the trail of a snail. A season word, she wrote, tells you when. A cut splits the poem into two pictures, so that the reader has to jump the gap; in English, usually a dash. She drew two small islands with a dash between them and a stick figure jumping.

"And the reader is the one who jumps?"

She nodded, and underlined the stick figure twice.

Then she wrote a haiku in Japanese, and under it, in letters for me, katatsumuri / soro-soro nobore / Fuji no yama, and under that her own English, and signed it, in small letters, Issa.

Little snail, climb up—

slowly, slowly, all the way

to Mount Fuji's peak

"Slowly, slowly," I said, trying it. Soro-soro. It felt like something you could walk to school on. "I have not even seen Fuji. It is hiding."

She wrote nothing, but the corner of her mouth moved.

"My grandmother would like this snail," I said. "She says, Sabr tagi — sariq oltin. At the bottom of patience lies yellow gold."

"Hohoho."

Hanzawa-sensei was standing in the doorway with his teacup, awake, which I had not known was possible either. He looked at the snail, and then at me.

"An Uzbek Issa," he said, and drifted away down the creaking corridor, still chuckling, and did not spill a drop.

From that afternoon, slowly, slowly was my motto. I wrote it inside the cover of the Blue Book, in three languages.

Before she put the pencil down, Kotone wrote one more thing on the whiteboard, lower down, smaller, the way you write a thing you don't want to look at:

Members: 2 / needed: 3 / months: 5

The window opened before I could stop it.

[Quest accepted: Save the Literature Club]

[Members: 2/3]

[Time limit: until the culture festival]

[Reward: ???]

Five months. I counted, because I count: from that Monday to the Monday after the festival was a hundred and sixty-eight days. In Jasur's novels the reward for a quest is usually a sword. Mine was a question mark.

For the first time since Tashkent I felt like the main character of something. It is a dangerous feeling. I picked up the marker and wrote a programme under her numbers: Mondays: season words. Wednesdays: tea (the kettle does not exist). Fridays: reading aloud.

Kotone looked at reading aloud for a long time, turning the pencil. She didn't write anything. I took that as approval.

The hunt began on Tuesday.

Daichi was first. He came back from the baseball club's room with his cap in his hands. "Coach says no." He did Coach Kuroda's voice, which was his own voice made square. "'A catcher who writes poems? Your mind will go soft.'"

"Is that true?"

"Man, my mind is already soft. That's why they made me catcher."

Mio was second. I asked her at dinner, because she was twelve and liked arguing and would be very good at kireji.

"I'm in junior high, genius." She didn't look up from her phone. "I'll join in three years." A pause, a swipe. "When you're gone."

I laughed. It was a joke. But it was a true joke, and true jokes are the kind that stay: I carried that one around for the rest of the week like a stone in a shoe.

Kurata-sensei, in the staff room, in English, had a bright idea. "A ghost member! Someone who just writes their name!"

"Article 12, clause 3." Fumika was in the doorway, as if summoned. I have never found out how. "Ghost members do not count."

On Tuesday a first-year boy with a brand-new gakuran and a kind, worried face joined us, in the sense that he sat on our tatami for an hour and took an entry form home to be stamped. On Thursday he came back, saw Fridays: reading aloud on the whiteboard, and went the colour of the whiteboard.

"Reading… aloud?" His voice went up at the end and cracked, like a question that had lost its way. "I'm sorry. In front of people, I can't. I really can't."

He returned the form, blank, with a bow so deep it was almost mine, and fled.

I took the eraser and rubbed out reading aloud. Behind me, Kotone watched me do it. She didn't write anything. She didn't need to; I could feel her watching, the way you can feel the sun on the back of your neck. I didn't know what it meant. I only knew that the room felt lighter without the words, and I couldn't have said why.

Midterms began on Monday the nineteenth and ended on Thursday the twenty-second, and classical Japanese destroyed me.

It is Japanese, but a thousand years old, and its verbs change their endings according to rules that seemed to have been invented by someone who hated foreigners in advance. On Monday night I sat at my desk with the textbook and a cup of cold tea, and at one in the morning I wrote:

Old Japanese verbs—

they conjugate in ways that

even Buvi can't

On Tuesday Yukari gave me a bento shaped like a sumo wrestler, rice with a nori belt and a topknot of seaweed, "for strength". Half the class photographed it. The sumo wrestler looked more confident than I did.

On Wednesday, the morning of the exam, a blue note appeared on the corner of my desk that was not a haiku. It was not five-seven-five at all. At the top, in capitals, it said EMERGENCY, and under that, in very small writing, the rule: zo, namu, ya, ka: the verb at the end changes its shape. koso: it changes even more. At the bottom she had drawn a snail.

I got 41. The pass mark was 40.

Hanzawa-sensei handed the papers back the following week, awake. When he reached my desk he looked at the red number for a long moment, then put the paper into my hands as if it were a certificate.

"Forty-one, Aliev-kun." His eyes were almost closed. "Hohoho. The snail arrives."

I did not frame the paper, because Yukari would have hung it in the shop. I framed it in my head, where it hangs to this day, beside the snail.

On Friday the thirtieth Kotone went to the staff room to see Hanzawa-sensei about the budget, and I was alone in Room 3 with sixty-three years of Shiosai.

I had been reading the old volumes on Fridays, slowly, slowly, one at a time. I chose them the way Buvi chooses melons, by weight and by knocking. That day my hand stopped at volume 26, 1987, a thin stapled book with a blue-grey cover gone soft at the corners. I sat by the window and turned its pages. The print was fading. The haiku were by students who were now, I supposed, somebody's parents: about exams, about the sea, about a girl in the next class.

Halfway through, one of them stopped my hand.

Summer grass—my bike

pointing west to Samarkand,

the sea in the way

Samarkand. In a Japanese schoolbook from 1987, in a club room in a town I had never heard of until this year, the name of a city three hundred kilometres from my home.

Under it, in the Japanese order, family name first, the printed credit: Moriyama Tetsuo, Class 2-A.

I thought of the map in the back room of the shop: the pencil line starting at the edge where Japan would be and running west, across the deserts, into the pink. Old map, he had said, and switched off the light.

I read it again. I counted it on my fingers, though I knew it would be right. Five, seven, five.

I took out my phone and photographed the page, and my hands were shaking so much that the first two pictures came out blurred. My host father, who said "Mm" instead of sentences and fell asleep at nine, had once written seventeen syllables about riding a bicycle to my country.