All the Ways Home Read online

  I nod, not really sure at all.

  8

  After we exchange my Canadian dollars for yen at a kiosk and pick up a SIM card for my cell so I can stay online, we leave the airport for Shoma’s place. Shinjuku is one of Tokyo’s most crowded areas, and it’s a couple of trains and transfers away.

  Our car on the first train is pretty full, standing-room only. We hold on to hand straps suspended from the ceiling. The ground rumbles beneath my feet, kilometers of steel track being fed into shiny wheels. Commercials and train announcements play on the video screen above the doors—for upcoming stops, the arrival of a new summer tea, the takeout bento lunches always conveniently available from any local 7-Eleven.

  Along the way, Shoma points out stuff through the windows. Sites that are in guidebooks, places that are in famous anime or manga or movies, touristy stuff I might want to check out before I have to leave. There are buildings both tall and short, their roofs sharp and modern and scraping at the sky, or dipping low and tiled a shiny blue, brown, gray. Their sides are concrete and wrapped with billboards and digital screens; they are brick and wood and covered with lines of laundry hung to dry. Balconies are stuffed with bikes and AC units and container plants. There are parks and shopping arcades and roads full of cars and buses and people. There are other trains careening down other tracks, going in all directions. Nothing is motionless, and everything is fast, fast, fast. It all feels not quite real.

  Shoma keeps his voice low, but it’s still the loudest thing around aside from the announcements playing on the screens. No one else in our car—or in any of the cars, I’d peered down the snaking line of them to check—talks; everyone’s looking at their phone or reading or sleeping. Except Shoma doesn’t seem to care. Or maybe he does, but he’s decided silence between us is even more awkward than playing tourist guide.

  But I’m only half listening, also busy watching dozing passengers somehow wake instantly at their stop. Maybe living here you slowly grow a sixth sense for time, for how much space you can take up in a super-crowded country and still be polite, for the best and most natural order of things to keep everything running smoothly.

  If my mom had never left Japan, she wouldn’t have been driving on that Canadian road at that moment, coming home to surprise me with doughnuts for breakfast.

  If Mr. Ames had some of that sixth sense, he wouldn’t have taken his eyes off the road to look at his cell phone. He would have seen the light change in time, seen my mom’s car.

  If my dad hadn’t chosen work over us, then maybe none of this would be happening.

  Enough ifs to fill a whole new box, and maybe it’d be about the same size as the one I’ve already got that’s filled with hard questions.

  I peer out the train window, where the world’s turned into a strange, unidentifiable blur. Parts of me feel the same way, cut loose to drift around and wander, maybe forever. Vancouver was home because it was where my mom was, just as much as Tokyo never was because that was where Dad and Shoma were.

  The trip to Shinjuku takes us nearly an hour, the way the trains and transfers spread out into a bunch of different lines. Vancouver has the SkyTrain, but it would be a tiny corner of just one of the dozen or so transit maps that exist here. Shoma must be able to read my confusion because he says I’ll get used to it soon enough. That once I figure it out, I can get practically anywhere in Tokyo without having to drive.

  Shoma asks me stuff. Stuff he seems to know is safe.

  Is the sushi in Vancouver as he good as he hears it is?

  Is the rain as bad?

  Have I seen much of the rest of Canada?

  He doesn’t ask me about Mom (other than to say he’s sorry), or Jory, or Mr. Ames, or even how things are going at school. Like he’s being as careful about my sorest spots as I am.

  I ask him what he does for a job before he decides to stop being so careful.

  “I’m a writer,” he says. “Freelancer mostly. I write articles and do interviews for music magazines.”

  Music. I think of Mom and her constant radio before I make myself stop, not ready to share that. “Like, album reviews and interviews with bands?”

  Shoma nods. “I do write-ups about lives, too. So if I’m covering a tour for a special feature, it means getting paid to travel across the country.”

  I frown, confused. Lives, rhyming with hives. “What are ‘lives’?”

  “Oh, sorry. Concerts. That’s what they’re called here. Lives.”

  “Your job sounds pretty cool.” I remember now, Mom telling me Shoma liked to write. When she used to talk about him sometimes, a long time ago, his name just popping up out of the blue like she couldn’t help the memories from surfacing. Your brother wanted a dog. Shoma used to write for his school paper. He would have liked this Chinese restaurant, this color of sweater. But she eventually learned to stop, just like she stopped talking about Dad.

  “It is cool, getting to write about music and being paid for it,” Shoma agrees, smiling.

  I can’t miss his happiness with his work. Writing’s stuck with him, then. The same way photography stuck for our dad, which he started when Shoma was just a little kid.

  I wonder how much Dad stuck with my brother. What had he been like as a dad before I came along? Did his distance come from somewhere inside himself, something no kid could keep away? Or was it something else entirely, something a kid still wouldn’t have a chance at beating? Was it anything a kid could even see coming?

  Those tough questions in that small box—I hadn’t known any of them could be for Shoma.

  “Your Japanese is really good,” my brother says as we get out at Shinagawa Station to transfer to the Yamanote Line. “I guess your mom spoke it with you at home?”

  “Yeah, she was always worried I’d begin to forget it once I started going to school.” It’s odd talking about my mom to Shoma, even though for three years, she’d been his mom, too, the stepmom in his life from when he was twelve until he was nearly sixteen. Before the divorce happened, and he disappeared with our dad and she disappeared with me, his half brother.

  “I wish my English was as good, at least good enough so we could speak to each other in it. But I only know a few words, and most of them are swear words.” Shoma laughs. “Likely not the kind of conversation your mom would have wanted us to have.” He scans his Suica fare card over the scanner at the gate, and the turnstile ushers him through.

  My new Suica is shiny and slippery in my hand as I fumble it over the scanner. I nearly drop it. People are starting to pile up behind me, wanting to go through, too.

  Shoma’s put ten thousand yen on it, about a hundred Canadian dollars. His treat, he said—so his little brother could hang out and explore the city and still have enough to always get back.

  A part of my brain had squeaked like a door hinge gone crooked when I saw Shoma punch in the amount at the fare machine. I thought of that money and how it would help pay for a plane ticket to Sapporo. About how maybe it made more sense to use it to go find my dad on my own (I’m twelve, allowed to fly alone here) instead of just waiting around for him to show. Shoma wouldn’t know as much about our family tree, anyway, and I doubted he’d cheered when he’d been told about having to babysit. Then I watched Shoma feed bills into the machine and felt too guilty to think about it anymore.

  “Kaede? You okay with the Suica?” Shoma’s waiting for me on the other side of the gate. His blue hair stands out rebelliously, as loud as fresh paint, but his face says he’s worried for me, looking a bit like a parent’s. “Try it again.”

  I hold the card more carefully over the scanner and this time the turnstile moves. I walk through and follow Shoma down a flight of stairs and along the platform.

  “How’s your grandpa?” he asks as we stand in line and wait for the train. “You like living with him all right?”

  I picture breakfast the morning I left—my bowl of Apple Cinnamon Cheerios and glass of orange juice, his black coffee and dry toast. The drone of the m
orning news coming from Mom’s radio on the counter was the only real noise in the kitchen. (Grandpa never listens to anything else, not even sports radio. I haven’t heard any of Mom’s songs since she died, like they no longer exist just as she doesn’t.) I don’t really like cinnamon anything, but Grandpa can’t seem to remember that, so he keeps buying it. I waited until he left the room before pouring the cereal still left in my bowl down the sink, before changing the radio station from news to music. The song wasn’t one of Mom’s favorites, but it was still one that I recognized. So I’d stood there, shoving my dishes into the dishwasher, eyes blurred because things nearly felt close to before.

  “It’s okay, I guess,” I say to Shoma now. “It’s still kind of weird, someone other than Mom living in the house. But I think it’s getting better.”

  “Yeah?” My brother looks more closely at me. For a second it’s like he wants to hear something else, maybe something closer to the truth. For a second, I wish I could spill and tell him everything.

  Which doesn’t really make sense because why would any of it matter to him? Our dad’s coming back to Tokyo to pick me up, and then Shoma won’t have to babysit me anymore and soon he’ll forget I was even here. And then I’ll be on a plane flying back over the ocean, to a house that now feels unfamiliar. Back to Jory and Mr. Ames and school.

  My stomach tightens up into a knot, its ends thin and frayed. I just nod. “Yeah.”

  Then the train arrives, and we both push our way on. We pull away from the platform and the station, and I try to forget that second of nearly slipping. When, for that single second, it was almost like not being alone anymore.

  9

  Wiki tells me Shinjuku Station is the busiest in the world.

  I want to tell Wiki that the word busiest kind of feels like an understatement.

  We had a beehive at the house once, hanging from the banister of our back steps. At first it was just a tiny gray thing, about the size of my hand. Then seemingly overnight it blew up to the size of a basketball. The thing vibrated and thrummed, a motor encased in soft gray silk. Inside I knew there would be a map of a self-contained world, full of roads and paths and connected tunnels. It was neat to watch that world hum, the sound of it a low buzz in the air, even though it was also kind of scary. How did the bees keep from getting lost? How did they always know which way to go? What if instinct failed them and they just got stuck forever? Mom eventually called in pest control, and the guy smoked it all into silence. We were safe from stings then.

  Afterward me and Jory and Gemma had poked it halfway open with a stick before we decided to stop. It’d felt wrong, somehow. Like we were dissecting something still living, a body that still clung to a soul. Those bees were gone, but still they’d left signs behind that they’d been real. That they’d existed, had found places of their own somewhere in all those tunnels.

  Shinjuku Station makes me think of that nest now, with its tangle of gates and hallways, its fast-walking passengers who all have somewhere to go. It makes me think of a human heart, too. How it’s full of veins and arteries just pumping life along all its paths. So when a train arrives and pours out even more people, that’s the rush of your pulse in your ears, the steady whoosh of it telling you you’re alive.

  Navigating our way through the station, I decide three things about Shoma that are as indisputable as fact.

  One. My brother is cool, really cool. Not just because he’s got blue hair and writes about rock concerts and hasn’t said anything that comes close to being weird or creepy, but because he doesn’t even care that he is. (Cool, that is, not creepy.)

  Two. My brother has to be just like my dad, his tag-team partner—Shoma hadn’t been any better at being around, either. And he’s only babysitting me because he couldn’t get out of it. So if I’m even close to being smart, I should do my best to not like him.

  Three. Number one is going to make sticking to number two pretty hard.

  We step outside, and Tokyo’s boiling.

  I stop dead in my tracks as a wall of heat smacks me right in the face. The air is almost wet, like rain caught halfway.

  “Why is it so hard to breathe?” I manage. “Is this normal?”

  Shoma laughs and slips on sunglasses he pulls out from his pocket. “Yeah, August in Tokyo can be pretty deadly. You’ll get used to it.”

  I wonder how long it’ll be before that happens. Before Japan gets into my blood and changes me from the inside out. In three weeks, will I be more like Shoma, confident behind his glasses and easy with who he is? Or more like Kaede than ever, heading back still complete with questions?

  “You hungry?” Shoma asks.

  “Kind of? I’m too hot to tell.”

  “There’s a great noodle place a few blocks over that serves them cold. And it’s on the way to my place. Let’s go.”

  My eyes are everywhere as we walk. It’s impossible to take it all in, but I try anyway, dodging incoming waves of people along the sidewalk. Shinjuku is noise and color, and it’s like trying to slow down a firecracker to keep it from going off in your hand.

  Shoma points out the direction of Koreatown, a ten-minute walk away toward Okubo, the next station over; the skyscraper district in the west, its buildings all huge, silver teeth; Kabukicho, an area too seedy for me to explore on my own. Especially at night, Kaede.

  Different scents roll out from the restaurants we pass: fishy, all salt and brine and smelling of the sea; smoky, mysterious tea; red bean paste for dessert, turned stiff with sugar. There’s an arcade with taiko drums and photo booths. A café sells French-style crepes with whole wedges of cake rolled up inside. An old lady sits behind the window of a kiosk, smoking and reading and selling cigarettes and magazines. A store with racks of T-shirts and pullovers on the sidewalk, all with English sayings printed on the front. California Dreaming. Elvis Loves Peanut Butter. Washington University.

  Shoma stops in front of a dark-walled shop. There’s a food ticket machine just outside the main door, its menu rows of lit-up buttons. Shoma pays for us both—“Food’s on me while you’re in town, just don’t expect fancy ten-course kaiseki meals, okay?”—and shoves in a bill and a bunch of coins. The machine spits out tickets, and we go inside the restaurant.

  The air-conditioning is on, but it’s still only just a bit cooler than out on the street. The whole place smells of soft flour and fresh noodles and cooking broth, of things made to fill up emptiness.

  I guess, maybe, that I’m hungry after all.

  10

  The food comes quick, served to us at the counter where we’re sitting. I do my best to slurp my noodles, the way you’re supposed to eat them here, but it’s hard to instantly unlearn nine years of not doing that.

  “So what’s on your list of tourist things to see and do?” Shoma slides negi into his dipping broth. The slices of green onion float for a second before he stirs them down with a dab of wasabi. Once, as really little kids, I’d convinced Jory the green stuff was pistachio ice cream. He’d eaten a whole spoonful in one go. He wheezed so hard and went so red that I got scared and started crying. And then he started crying seeing me because he thought it meant he was really going to die. Mom grounded me for two weeks, and after I was allowed to go out again, she made me treat Jory to ice cream for real. “I have some lives I have to cover, but otherwise I’m game for whatever you feel like.”

  “I can read enough Japanese that I can get around on my own.” It’ll be simpler this way, I tell myself, doing stuff alone. I need to climb on that boat with that box of tough questions and just sail through until I can get to Dad. No distractions, no detours. No brothers too easy to like.

  “Your mom would kill me if I let you do that.” Shoma refills our glasses with cold tea from the pitcher on the counter. “Don’t make me stalk you around Tokyo, dude.” He says this easily, casually. But his voice has gone quiet at the mention of Mom. Thin and uneven, too, the way a sprained ankle might sound if it could talk.

  “You can’t know how
Mom would feel about me doing that,” I say, confused. How much can Shoma remember about my mom? Sure, he’d already been fifteen when we moved away, but it was still more than nine years ago. “You barely knew her.”

  “Sure I knew her. She was my mom, too, for three years. And she’d definitely want me watching out for you while you’re here. If you need ideas for places, just ask. Ideas can’t hurt, right?”

  His voice is still kind of odd sounding, and I remind myself that my mom had once loved him, had loved him as much as me. And for the first time it sinks in that he’s lost not just one mom, but two, and it’s weird to suddenly feel sorry for my super-cool older brother.

  Maybe … maybe it’s okay to want Shoma to stop being so much of a question, too.

  Through a mouth of half-chewed noodles I slowly tell him about my Summer Celebration Project. “If I do a really good job, I can start Grade 8 next year with my friends instead of staying back.” The idea of failing Grade 7 is bigger than just being left behind. Failing means being known the whole year as the kid with the dead mom, who set a guy’s house on fire, who sent his best friend to the hospital. Who belongs nowhere.

  “So that might be fun, right?” Shoma asks. “Like some kind of travel diary, except with a theme.”

  I nod. “My theme’s home.”

  “They couldn’t give you a break about your grades, considering your mom?”

  “I got into some fights, too. Pulled some dumb jokes on the teachers.”

  Shoma laughs. “You don’t look like the delinquent type, Kaede. What were you thinking?”

  “I guess I wasn’t.”

  “And that’s on top of what happened to your friend, him getting hurt at hockey camp.” Shoma doesn’t look at me as he talks, like he somehow knows not to. He doesn’t point out how I’m what happened to Jory, and why he’s still hurt.