The Waking

2

M onju-no-Chie School managed to be both traditional and progressive at the same time. Though tourists were not uncommon in the Miyazu City area, according to Kara’s father, the school had only ever had a handful of gaijin students. Most westerners who attended school in Japan went to one of the international private schools that hosted students from all over the world, or immersed themselves in public schools in large cities.

The school still insisted on fuku sailor uniforms for girls and gakuran uniforms, a military-influenced style, for boys. Perhaps the nearness to the ports of Miyazu City helped explain the embrace of the naval dress. Not that Kara minded. The fuku might be itchy, but she thought the uniforms were really cute.

More than half of the students came from the Miyazu Bay area, and rode bicycles or took the train and then walked from the station. But Monju-no-Chie School had earned an excellent reputation, and privileged families from all over Kyoto Prefecture sent their children to live there. Boarding students resided in a second building located across a grassy sports field behind the main school.

Her father had given her the choice as to whether she would live with him in the small house the school had provided or in the dormitory with the boarding students. Maybe next year, if this grand experiment of theirs worked, she’d live in the dorm. But for now, she wanted to begin and end each day with her dad. Besides, she’d have a lot more in common with the students who came by train and bicycle than with the privileged kids who lived at the dorm.

Who are you kidding? You don’t have anything in common with any of them.

Kara hurried up the front steps, merging with the flow of students. Sakura had already vanished inside the school, and though many of the boys and girls snuck glances at her, none of them seemed ready for conversation. Once again, she was on her own.

Just inside the door, a group of girls clustered around, sneaking shy smiles behind upraised hands, whispering to one another. Kara would have thought their gossip was about her, were it not for the immediate reaction they had to her passing. Most of the Japanese students were far too respectful to outright stare at her, but not these girls. They appraised her frankly, and the tallest girl-her shoulder-length hair veiling one side of her face-cast a dubious glance at her. She turned to her fawning friends and rattled off a snide comment.

“Look at the bonsai,” the girl said. “Cut away and moved far from home. No roots at all. How long before she withers?”

The girls began to laugh, and Kara overheard the tall one’s name-Ume.

She tried to breathe evenly, told herself to keep walking. How many times had her father reminded her how important this first day would be? She had studied local customs, understood that propriety ruled here. But this Ume girl had insulted her, and letting it pass would only make things worse in the future.

Kara turned on her heel and strode directly up to the girl, who must have been a senpai -a senior. Ume had either assumed Kara couldn’t speak the language very well or didn’t care that she’d been overheard. She looked down quizzically.

“Though she is cut away from where she grew, this bonsai is healthy and strong. She will survive, as long as she can keep her roots from being choked by weeds.”

As soon as she had begun speaking, the girls had fallen silent and looked at her in surprise. Kara’s Japanese was not flawless, but her father had been teaching her the language almost since she began to speak.

“ Oo jyozudesune,” Ume replied.

Skillful, a comment on her command of the language. She’d heard it a lot and understood that, though it might be a compliment, an element of condescension went along with it.

Kara bowed her head slightly. At home she’d have called the girl a bitch. But this wasn’t home.

“Grow tall, bonsai,” Ume said.

Despite her earlier rudeness, she had abruptly become the most respectful, pleasant, and welcoming face that Kara had yet encountered.

“Have you chosen a school club yet?”

“Not yet,” Kara said.

“If you like soccer, you would be welcome in our club.”

The other girls looked surprised, even irked. As the other students continued to stream in through the main doors and gather in the corridor, Kara smiled thinly.

“I don’t have the talent for the game. But I will cheer when you play.”

Kara took a deep breath, reminding herself that not everyone would be like Ume. Japanese, her father had taught her, often consisted of saying things that were the precise opposite of what you actually meant.

She followed the flow of students into the genkan -a large, square, functional room lined with lockers. With so many voices speaking Japanese at one time, she found it impossible to interpret what anyone said. But that was all right. Since none of them were talking to her, she’d only have been eavesdropping.

All of the students were taking off their street shoes and stashing them in the lockers. From their backpacks, they all retrieved uwabaki -which meant “inside shoes,” though they were really more like slippers.

A smile touched Kara’s lips. Ever since her father had first told her about this custom, she’d thought it so strange, but sort of fun, too. The idea of all of the students wearing slippers made her think cozy thoughts of home-though there was nothing cozy about the genkan. The boys wore blue slippers and the girls pink. If there’d been even a single other American at the school, she could’ve made a joke about wearing pajamas to school, or carrying the dusty old teddy bear that sat in a box somewhere in storage back home. But she couldn’t be sure the kids at Monju-no-Chie School would get the joke, or would think it was funny even if they did get it.

Still, it amused her enough. She had a smile on her face when she looked up and caught two boys watching her intently. Kara gave them a nod of recognition, and they grinned, one of them waving at her.

She let out a breath. All right, so not every kid here is going to be nasty or bizarre.

Bizarre meant Sakura.

Kara felt badly that she’d let herself start thinking negatively of the girl. She glanced around but saw no sign of her. With her hairstyle and attitude, the cigarettes and the patches and pins, Sakura was working hard to give off a rebel vibe. She might as well have tattooed Tough Chick on her forehead. But she’d been cool and accepting to Kara without putting up the walls that everyone else seemed to have built around themselves. So what if she seemed like trouble? Sakura’s sister had been murdered. Grief could cause a person to do all kinds of things they’d never have done before.

Stashing her shoes in an empty locker, Kara leaned against it to put on her slippers. Now that the initial surprise of her arrival had rippled through the room and everyone had gotten a good look at the gaijin girl, they seemed to have gone back to their preparations for the start of the school year. She felt herself begin to exhale.

As strange as it all felt-Kara couldn’t imagine any of her friends from home making it through an hour at this school without totally freaking out-an odd happiness began to spread through her. She and her father had talked about this adventure for years. It had taken her mother’s death to make it more than a dream, and so the feeling was bittersweet. But Kara had vowed to herself that she would make her father proud, and be the girl her mother had always told her she could be.

I can do this.

Live and learn.

Someone bumped shoulders with her. She opened her eyes in time to catch the pained, embarrassed expression on the face of a tall, stocky boy with unruly hair.

“Excuse me,” he said with a quick bow. “I’m very clumsy.”

“We have that in common.”

She’d said it only to make him feel better. The typical boy at Monju-no-Chie School was slender, even petite, compared to the guys Kara had gone to school with back home. To his schoolmates, the one who’d bumped her would seem like some kind of giant. She liked his face, and there was a sweetness in his eyes, but when he smiled, she felt a little tremor in her chest.

“My name is Hachiro,” he said.

She smiled in return. “I’m Kara.”

Hachiro nodded. “Yes,” he said, in English. “It’s nice to meet you.”

Kara smiled. Most of the students here could speak English to some degree. When Sakura had done so, it had been because she’d assumed Kara’s Japanese wouldn’t be very good. Hachiro did it as a kindness.

“And you,” she said in Japanese.

They walked together along the corridor, near the back of the herd of shuffling students. Kara had been concerned about finding her way to the morning assembly, but even without Hachiro, she could have simply followed the parade.

“I’m looking forward to having your father as a teacher,” Hachiro said. “Last year we had several American scholars as guest speakers, but this will be the first American teacher we have for a full term.”

“He’s an excellent teacher,” Kara said. “He always makes me want to learn more.”

They entered the gymnasium, where lines were forming as the homeroom teachers gathered their students. Hachiro spotted his teacher and headed toward her line.

“I’ll talk to you later, Kara.”

“Bye,” she said. She was sorry to part company with him. He really did have a great smile.

After a few seconds standing around feeling foolish, she figured out which of the teachers was her sensei, Mr. Matsui. With his white hair and square face, he would have seemed grim if not for his oversize glasses and the kind eyes behind them. Mr. Matsui took her in with a glance, gave an almost imperceptible nod, and then proceeded to treat her with the same dour disapproval he showed her classmates. Mr. Matsui turned his back on them and faced one end of the gymnasium, and all of the students followed suit.

The principal, Mr. Yamato, and several members of the school’s board of directors addressed the students from the front of the room. The sheer ordinariness of the remarks surprised Kara. So much of the culture in Japan felt entirely new to her, but it turned out that boring speeches were pretty much the same around the world.

Numb after only a few minutes of this, she stopped mentally translating and let her thoughts and her eyes wander. Two rows over, she caught sight of Sakura and stared at her until the girl felt the attention and turned. Kara gave her a tiny wave. Sakura smirked in a way that could have meant Yeah, isn’t this boring, or Oh, great, weird gaijin girl thinks she’s my puppy now.

Suddenly self-conscious, Kara turned her eyes front to find Mr. Matsui watching her with his eyebrows knitted together. His only comment was a stern throat-clearing; he couldn’t quite manage a glower.

The voices of authority finished their declaration of the school’s glory and the ominous drone about their expectations of their students, and then the assembly mercifully ended and the teachers led their charges to their homerooms.

Mr. Matsui’s classroom-2-C-was on the second floor. Kara counted twenty-seven students in 2-C, herself included. Once again she found herself thrown off by the familiarity of the first-day rituals. Seats were assigned-her desk was third row, right in the middle-and then Mr. Matsui explained that each morning began with announcements and attendance. The class would rotate those responsibilities according to a schedule called toban.

When her teacher-her sensei-looked at her, she thought he might give her the toban duties for the first day, but instead he chose a girl from the front row named Miho. Though Miho’s glasses were much smaller than Mr. Matsui’s, Kara wondered if they were what made him choose the girl. Her long, black hair was pulled up on one side with a clip, and she sat stiffly, like she was in church. Kara listened to the names as Miho took attendance from a list the sensei had given her, but she knew she would forget most of them. One boy had dyed his perfectly combed hair a bronze color, and when Miho called his name-Ren-she blushed.

At last, the school day began.

At first, Kara liked the different structure of the school day. The students remained in their homeroom while, between classes, the teachers traveled. Mr. Matsui left them and a moment later the math teacher arrived. After math came Japanese-which, at this grade level, was mostly Japanese literature-and then science. There were no lab science classes on the first day and no gym until the second week, but those were the only classes that would require them to leave their homeroom.

Their books were kept inside the desks, and at the back of the classroom were lockers where they were expected to stash their lunches, jackets, and-on days when they had PE- gym uniforms. Between classes there were ten-minute breaks, during which the room became noisy with chatter and slamming lockers, but the minute the sensei arrived for the next class, all talking ended.

By lunchtime, Kara’s back and butt were killing her. Sitting in one position for so long with just short breaks had become torture, and she understood that other than bowing and politeness, the first thing she needed to learn to get by in a Japanese school was patience. Once, at the age of ten, she had gotten food poisoning and her parents had brought her to a hospital, where a doctor had given her an intravenous drug to make her stop vomiting and fluids to rehydrate her. Lying there on the gurney in the emergency room for three hours had been the same kind of torment.

Fortunately, they had the whole lunch period to talk and move around.

The girl who sat in front of her seemed very nice, and the supercute guy to her right had beautiful eyes, but they were both named Sora, and Kara couldn’t decide if that would be helpful or really confusing. Everyone moved their desks into circles so they could face one another and chat, and for a moment Kara thought she would be left an island unto herself, but both Soras gestured for her to join them. Nobody talked to her much, but to her relief she didn’t mind.

Everyone seemed to have rice and umeboshi, which were pickled red plums, plus an assortment of other things. Kara could have asked her father to pack more familiar foods in her bento box, but it was important to her to live like other students, and so she had fish, rice, eggs, vegetables, and pickles. No umeboshi for her, but she could only go so far. For a girl who’d eaten peanut butter and jelly for lunch every day until the sixth grade, it would take some getting used to.

When lunch finished and bento boxes had been put away, it was time for English class. Kara’s father- Harper-sensei, the students called him-did really well. They had discussed in advance how important it would be for him to treat her just as he did the other students, so their only communication consisted of a shared smile and a couple of questions that she answered after raising her hand. He seemed extremely happy, and Kara felt very proud of him. Yet once or twice, when he looked at her, she caught a glimpse of the wistful sadness that never left him for very long.

In his eyes she saw how much he wished her mother could have shared this with them. They both wished it. But there were some things that could never be, no matter how powerful the wish. Kara had learned that in the worst way-kneeling on the prayer rail beside the closed coffin at her mother’s wake.

A shudder went through her. Death was a lesson she had never wanted to learn.

The thought reminded her of Sakura again. Could her sister really have been murdered here, on the grounds of the school? It seemed impossible that Kara’s dad wouldn’t have heard about it, until she gave it a little thought. They were in Japan. If a girl had died here, and if it was possible students were responsible, of course no one would want to discuss it because of the shame it would bring them. Besides, why would Sakura lie?

It’s like Death’s following me, she thought. She told herself how crazy that sounded, that no connection existed between her mother’s death and the blood shed on the grounds of her new school. The car accident happened almost two years ago and halfway around the world. It couldn’t have anything to do with the murder of a teenage girl in Japan.

But now that the thought had lodged in her brain, Kara couldn’t shake the feeling that the shadow of her mother’s death-the shadow that she and her father had moved from Boston to Kyoto Prefecture to escape-had reached out to touch her again. And if she let herself believe that, it was all too easy to believe that it would always follow her and touch her anytime it wanted, anytime she felt like maybe she could be happy again.

God, she thought as she tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear, morbid much?

The last class of the day-in her case, art-was followed by the part of the Japanese education system that amazed Kara the most. Every day, when classes ended, all of the students took part in o-soji. The direct translation escaped her, but it meant the clean-up. The janitors at Japanese schools were maintenance staff only, fixing broken toilets and moving desks and that sort of thing. The students were the ones who picked up and collected trash, swept, cleaned the restrooms, and erased all of the chalkboards to prepare for the next day. She’d half-expected this to be done in a sullen silence, but everyone seemed to get into it, happy to be finished with the day’s classes and more than willing to do their part with the clean-up. But o-soji was part of the layered hierarchy that defined Japanese culture. Junior students were basically the servants of the seniors, but the older students were responsible for mentoring the younger.

From everything she’d read, it seemed like corporate Japan-and every other sort of business-functioned on the same basic principle. Many occupations had a particular uniform, and they existed on a sort of ladder of respect. In a school setting, or even in business, she understood how everyone might benefit from the system. But already, in Miyazu City, she’d seen the way that some people further up in the hierarchy, like merchants, treated those whom culture dictated were beneath them-street sweepers and laborers, for instance-and it made her sad. That system was what made school so vital for Japanese students. Success or failure now could lock them onto a rung of the ladder they weren’t ever likely to rise above.

Kara gathered up a trash bag and pulled it out of the can. Her art teacher, Miss Aritomo, stopped to compliment her on her Japanese.

Kara bowed. “I enjoyed art class today.”

Miss Aritomo smiled. “Your father told me that you are a photographer. I would like to see some of your work.”

“I’ll bring some pictures in tomorrow,” Kara said.

As Miss Arimoto walked away, Kara tied the top of the trash bag and carried it to the central staircase, where a bunch of students were sweeping up. In a classroom off to the left she spotted Sakura wiping down a blackboard. With a quick glance around to make sure no teachers were paying attention, she stepped into the room. In the central aisle, a girl pushed a broom like it was serious business.

“Hello,” Kara said.

Sakura turned from the board and arched an eyebrow, looking at the garbage bag. “You could have found a better souvenir from your first day.”

She kept up the tough-girl attitude-sharp edges and pitying looks-for several seconds longer, and then rolled her eyes.

“I’m teasing you, Kara. School might be more disciplined here than you’re used to, but that doesn’t mean nobody knows how to make a joke.”

Kara laughed softly. “That’s a relief.”

“Things aren’t nearly so serious in school clubs,” said the other girl in the room, who’d stopped sweeping.

Now that Kara saw her face, her narrow features and round glasses, she recognized Miho, the girl who’d taken attendance in her homeroom that morning.

“This is my roommate, Miho,” Sakura said.

Kara smiled at the thought of shy Miho and bold Sakura sharing a room together.

“I didn’t realize you were boarding students.”

Sakura ran an eraser over the chalkboard one last time. “Yeah. The forgotten ones.”

“Forgotten?”

“By our parents,” Sakura said, and though she smiled, her bitterness seemed genuine. “If they’d had a child murdered, most parents would probably have brought the other one home. Mine are trying to pretend it never happened.”

A trickle of ice went down Kara’s back. She knew she ought to say something but couldn’t find the words.

“My parents haven’t forgotten me,” Miho said. She shrugged. “They just don’t like me.”

Sakura rolled her eyes again, grinning. “They love you, Miho. They just want to keep you away from gaijin boys.”

Miho flushed and started sweeping again.

Confused, Kara looked at Sakura.

“She’s obsessed with American boys. There were several she made friends with online. That would have been bad enough,” Sakura explained, “but then she started to spend time with one she met in Kyoto. Miho’s parents are very traditional. They want her to marry a Japanese man, to stay in Japan forever. If you’d been a boy instead of a girl, Kara, they’d probably have taken her out of here.”

Kara didn’t want to upset Miho, but she couldn’t help herself. She turned to stare at the girl. “Really?”

She needn’t have worried. As shy as Miho seemed, she gave a sort of helpless smile and shrugged again.

“Probably.”

“That’s extreme.”

Miho nodded. “That’s my parents.”

“Go on, Miho, ask her,” Sakura said.

Kara glanced from one girl to the other. “Ask me what?”

“Ever since she found out you were coming here, she’s been hoping to talk to you,” Sakura explained.

“About what?”

Miho glanced at the ground again. “American boys. If you have a boyfriend at home, or just boys you like.”

Sakura and Miho looked at her expectantly.

“No boyfriend,” Kara said. “But plenty of stories to tell.”

Miho smiled like she’d just remembered it was her birthday.