Fifty Words for Rain(27)

“So? They have schools for girls my age. I know they do. Sensei used to teach at one. I can go to one of those.”

Akira gave her a long, solemn look. “You know that’s impossible.”

Translation: If you don’t know that’s impossible, you’re a complete idiot.

She dug her nails into her palms. “The school wouldn’t care. They wouldn’t and you know it. There are plenty of Americans—”

Akira raised an eyebrow. “Not in Kyoto, there aren’t. And how did you find out about that?”

Nori looked at her feet. She was an idiot, there was little doubt about that, but even she could manage to find the simplest conclusion. Everyone hated the Americans. And everyone hated her. It made sense.

“I’ve been reading the newspaper. Akiko-san gives it to me sometimes even though she isn’t supposed to. And I listen to the servants’ gossip. I know that the Americans are here. They won the war, didn’t they? That’s why they’re here. That’s why . . .” She let her voice trail off into nothing.

She still didn’t fully comprehend the war, but she knew enough to understand that her people felt threatened by these Americans. She had a secret fear that she had pushed away for years: she suspected that her father was an American. Where else had her skin come from? This skin that Akiko had called “colored” when Nori asked why she had to take the baths?

There were no colored people here. But in America, she’d read, there was every kind of person you could imagine. Every kind of skin, every race of people under the sun.

She had a deeper fear too, the very worst: that her father was a soldier for the other side. One of the men who had come into her family’s homeland and attempted to destroy its people, its tradition, and its legacy for no reason at all; one of the people who took away the power of the monarchy, one of the people who unleashed fire that fell from the sky. It all made sense. The timing of it, the reason for all the shame: her existence was an embodiment of betrayal.

Akira closed the space between them and placed a firm hand on the top of her head. She looked up at him, quite determined not to cry. He had read her mind, as clearly as if her thoughts were letters sprawled across her forehead.

“You are not an American, Noriko,” he whispered, slowly and clearly. “You are one of us.”

Now it was Akira’s turn to lie. She looked up at him, her bold gaze daring him to speak the truth. “My father wasn’t one of us. He was an American, wasn’t he? He was one of the people who hurt everyone?”

For the first time since Nori had known him, Akira looked truly unsure of himself. This conversation had gotten away from him, his control was gone, and it was obvious that he did not like it.

“Your father . . . didn’t hurt anyone. From what I understand he was just a cook. He came before things . . . before.”

“Before the war?”

“Nori, maybe this isn’t—”

She balled her hands into fists and spoke the words she’d always been too afraid to say.

“Just tell me.”

And there it was. The unleashing of the elephant in the room, the one that they had both been avoiding since the day Akira arrived on the Kamiza doorstep. Because the thing about the elephant was that it only existed if one acknowledged it did. In order to make it tangible, to give it power, one had to willingly step into the trap. Nori had been avoiding it. She’d been so overjoyed to have her Oniichan that she’d pushed all the rest aside. Because somehow she knew that once they had this conversation, things would never be the same.

But she could no longer cloak herself in ignorance and use it as her protection; whatever frail delusions she clung to were about to be freed from the shadows and cast into the unforgiving light, where they had no hope of surviving.

Akira looked immensely uncomfortable. He fidgeted with the sleeves of his burgundy button-down shirt. “This isn’t my place to be telling you these things. Someone else should.”

“And who is going to do that, Oniichan?” she demanded, seizing the hand he had on her shoulder and pressing her fingers into his palm. “Nobody. Nobody has ever told me anything. And part of me was grateful for that. But I’m not anymore. I want to know the truth. Tell me who I am.”

Akira closed his eyes for a brief moment. When he opened them, he almost looked sad.

“Sit down, Nori.”



* * *





The silence that followed filled the room like a noxious gas. Nori’s mouth hung slack and gaping, her eyes rolled around like frantic marbles without a place to land. She was pulling at her hair so hard that it threatened to rip from her scalp.

Akira sat across the table from her, hands folded neatly in front of him. He looked at her with obvious concern. “Noriko . . . you must have known.”

“I didn’t,” she whispered, not bothering to look at him. She didn’t want to see the pity in his eyes. “I didn’t know that my birth destroyed your family.”

“Our mother and my father were never happy, Nori. They didn’t hate each other, but happy? No. Mother didn’t want to marry him. She didn’t want to marry anyone, but she didn’t have a choice.”

“She broke her wedding vows,” Nori whimpered, in a piteous little voice that she had thought was lost to her. “She betrayed your father. She betrayed God. She committed adultery. With an American.”