Women On the Other Shore (4 page)

In grade school the problem was simply that no one would be her friend, but once she started junior high it escalated to outright bullying. Her books disappeared, her indoor sneakers acquired legs, and her gym clothes were stolen. The entire class openly shunned her, and soon she began finding her desk and chair moved out into the hallway each morning. No matter how many times she returned them to their place, they'd be right back out in the hallway when she arrived at school the next day.

By the end of eighth grade, she was refusing to go to school most of the time. But she never felt any ill will or bitterness toward the ringleaders because she always assumed it was her own fault. What other explanation could there be? She must rub people the wrong way somehow. She must deserve to be blackballed.

When the school warned her in ninth grade that she might not graduate, she started attending a little more often even in the face of the bullying. But she spent the entire day staring at the floor. She soon knew the patterns on the linoleum better than the faces of her teachers or classmates.

Aoi's parents worried about her missing so much school, but for the most part they seemed to be telling themselves that the problem would go away when she got through junior high. Things would be different in high school—especially if the school was far enough away that none of the students knew her from before. At least that was what they decided to place their hopes on.

It was in fact exactly for this reason that Aoi had first told her parents she wanted to move. As long as she lived here, she could never stop being the same old Aoi. She would always be bugging people and provoking their hostility; she would forever be branded 30

a loser a n d a p a r i a h . Even after she finished high school and went on to college or joined t h e working world, she still wouldn't be able to leave t h a t p e r s o n b e h i n d . She needed to move away now, to a place where no o n e k n e w h e r faults, or she would never be able to change h e r destiny.

W h e n Aoi first expressed these thoughts to her parents, they tried to persuade h e r she was wrong, but disturbing stories in the news soon m a d e t h e m c h a n g e their minds. Three junior high girls leaped to their deaths, a n d a junior high boy was charged with the murder of a homeless m a n . B o t h incidents took place right nearby, in Yokohama.

Aoi's m o t h e r h a d grown up in G u n m a Prefecture and her grandmother still lived t h e r e , so her parents decided that was the place to go. Plans for t h e move took shape with dizzying swiftness, and the next t h i n g Aoi k n e w she was being sent to stay with her grandmother so she could take t h e entrance exams to several girls' schools in the area. W h e n she m a d e t h e cut at an institution of marginal academic standing, t h e y completed their move in a whirlwind rush.

Aoi's m o t h e r sorely missed t h e comforts of her life in Yokohama.

There weren't a n y d e c e n t supermarkets or department stores, having to be neighborly with t h e neighbors was tiresome, good jobs were nonexistent no m a t t e r how hard she looked, and the people who lived h e r e were all such boorish busybodies. These were exactly t h e reasons she'd left G u n m a in the first place, back when she was young. S h e s e e m e d to be trying not to air her complaints about their n e w environs in front of Aoi, but she did this with a certain obviousness t h a t Aoi b e c a m e convinced was deliberate. She couldn't help t h i n k i n g it was her mother's underhanded way of getting back at h e r for forcing t h e m to move.

T h e auditorium was a solid sea of girls, girls, and more girls.

Which was no surprise, of course, since it was an all-girls' school,
but
this was the first time Aoi had seen so many teenagers exclusively
of
her own gender gathered in one place. On the platform, sporting

» light green suit, the headmistress was addressing the assembly at great length, stressing the importance the school placed on English education, japan was entering an age when a genuine command of the English language would be increasingly vital for every individual, she declared, punctuating her words with repeated emphasis.

Aoi looked across the rows of heads seated in front of her. It surprised her how few were bleached or permed or buzzed short up the side. She'd expected a school of underachievers to be crawling with disaffected misfits, but maybe the students here were more straitlaced than she'd imagined. She hadn't seen anybody else with a short hem on her way to school either. It'd probably be a good idea to lower hers again the first thing she had a chance, she decided as she returned her gaze to the sixtyish woman still holding forth at the podium. She'd hiked it up because she didn't want people to think she was a dweeb, but if nobody else was modifying her uniform, she might only be singling herself out for unwanted attention.

"Psst. Did you have that done somewhere?"

Hearing a sharp whisper nearby, Aoi put these thoughts on hold and glanced around her. The girl two seats over on her right was leaning forward and looking straight her way. Her hair was cut short like a boy's, and she had a boyish face as well. Like a boy of maybe five or six.

"Hunh?" Aoi didn't immediately understand what the person was asking about.

"Your skirt. It's short," the boyish girl hissed impatiently. "Where'd you have it done? I know Seiyodo won't do it."

"I just rolled my waistband, that's all," Aoi breathed. She had no idea what Seiyodo was.

"Really? And it won't come undone?"

"Probably not."

The girl sitting between them cast annoyed glances at them as they talked across her. She straightened up and leaned back in her chair to stay out of t h e way of the conversation.

"Show me later, okay? You just roll the band?"

"Uh-huh."

"Cool. When I went to Seiyodo—"

"Quiet there!" a teacher standing nearby hissed in their direction, cutting the girl off. Aoi turned her attention back to the front of the hall.

"Take the English word
the
, for example. T-H-E," the headmistress was saying. "Because we don't have the corresponding sound in Japanese, all t h e other schools teach you to pronounce it
za.
But here we teach you to say
the"
she enunciated in what was presumably the correct pronunciation.
"Za
is made-in-Japan English. I call it Japanglish, and if you go to an English-speaking country and say
za,
no one will know what you're talking about."

Listening to the headmistress's interminable discourse on English, Aoi thought she must have come to a really dumb school. But at this particular moment, she couldn't have cared less if the school was dumb, or all t h e students were below average, or they taught her to say
the
instead of
za.
All that mattered to her right now was that the girl who'd asked about her skirt didn't seem the least bit put off by her.

As everybody started from the auditorium toward their classrooms, the girl from two seats over jostled up to Aoi. "What's your name?"

"Aoi Narahashi.
Aoi
like the flower, then
nara
as in the trees and
hashi
as in bridge."

"I didn't know the trees in Nara were anything special."

She'd mistaken
nara
for the place name instead of a kind of tree, but Aoi didn't want to rub her the wrong way by correcting her so she just smiled.

"You?"

"Nanako Noguchi. Nanako is 'fish child/ and Noguchi is like Goro Noguchi the singer."

"Fish child?"

"Uh-huh. You write 'fish' plus 'child' and together they're read

'Nanako.' Because my family's always been from around here."

How did that explain anything, Aoi wondered. This was an inland prefecture, no water on any side. At a loss, she simply said, "And your family name's Noguchi?"

"Never mind that, Aokins," the girl said playfully. "Just call me Nanako." With a hard slap on Aoi's shoulder, she went skipping off toward the front of the procession. Watching her go, Aoi felt a sudden twinge of doubt. Maybe she was some kind of weirdo. "Fish child,"

she whispered quietly to herself, barely moving her lips. Was it only a matter of time before this girl stopped talking to her, too? Would she point at her and jeer the first time Aoi made a mistake? Would she tip her lunch box over and hold her nose? Would she throw Aoi's gym clothes on the floor and stomp on them with her shoes?

By the time Aoi looked up again, Nanako Noguchi had disappeared into the crowd.

The classroom windows looked out on a wide expanse of low-slung roofs with a fringe of mountains rising beyond. Aoi gazed out at the blue-gray silhouette of the distant range, barely listening to the fluid cadences of the teacher reading from their English language textbook.

Over the weekend she'd gone to Hayakawa Farm with her mother.

Her father had dropped them there in his off-duty cab. The previous weekend they'd explored the Snake Center, and during the break before school started they'd all visited Mount Haruna together. Aoi had little interest in any of these places, and she could tell her mom and dad weren't especially excited about them either. None of them particularly enjoyed sightseeing. But her parents put on a show of having a great time, bubbling constantly with suggestions to go here 34

or go there, a n d Aoi understood that they intended it entirely for her benefit, so she did her best to pretend she was as enthusiastic as they were.
I wanna try the place that serves pork cutlets with the special sauce,
she suggested, or,
How about we check out Yabuzuka Hot
Springs next weekend?

With two full weeks gone by since school began, the girls in Aoi's class had divided themselves up more or less into distinct groups.

There were t h e jocks w h o all seemed to have more energy than they knew what to do with; there were the bookish girls whose banter seemed a bit too earnest; and there was the faster crowd that raced straight for t h e nearest b a t h r o o m to slather on makeup as soon as they were dismissed at t h e end of the day. Aoi herself had gravitated toward a b u n c h of perfectly ordinary girls—a nondescript group brought together not by c o m m o n interests or personalities but by the proximity of their assigned seats. In spite of this relatively weak group identity, everyone seemed to live in mortal fear of becoming separated and left out in t h e cold, so they bonded during class breaks with exaggerated chatter and squeals of laughter.

Nanako N o g u c h i r e m a i n e d unaffiliated. She flitted back and forth among t h e various tribes during lunch or when moving through the halls to classes held outside their homeroom—spending the noon hour, for example, learning how to polish her nails with the girls in the fast crowd, b u t t h e n whooping it up with the athletes as they all headed off for gym class. T h e great mystery to Aoi was how Nanako managed to do this without being snubbed by anyone.

So
far, so good
, Aoi breathed in relief as school let out each afternoon. She'd m a d e it through yet another day without drawing scowls for something she'd said, blending smoothly into the conversations that sprang up around her. T h e lunch her mother packed for her had had sufficient color to spare her any embarrassment, and she'd avoided any spills that left ugly brown stains on her texts or notebooks. She'd laughed in the same places as everybody else, and she'd jumped right in when the others badmouthed their teacher As he headed down the hill toward the bus stop reflecting on her day, she felt a light tap on her shoulder. Turning to see who it could he, she found Nanako smiling back at her with a large, non regulation yellow bag slung across her chest. They hadn't spoken again since opening assembly.

"I've been wanting to ask. Why'd you put your skirt back down?"

she said as she fell in beside Aoi. The diminutive Nanako
barely
came up to Aoi's shoulder.

"Hunh?"

Nanako doubled over with laughter. "You do that every time I ask you something," she said between guffaws. "Go bug-eyed and say Several of their classmates came up behind them and hurried on by. A few paces ahead, they turned to wave. "Bye! See you tomorrow!" they called, then raced on down the hill with their pleated skirts flouncing and their black hair flickering in the sunlight. Aoi followed their progress through narrowed eyes, as if gazing at something wonderful.

"You told me the other day you just rolled your waistband, so I tried it," Nanako said as she lifted her jacket and began turning the narrow strip with both hands. "But it gets all puckered up. See?

Looks weird, right?" flicking her jacket back under her elbows, she showed Aoi the unsatisfactory results. Aoi laughed. Nanako's entire manner reminded her of a toddler who has yet to learn the concept of doing things neatly.

"Seriously. It's weird, right?" Nanako frowned.

Aoi reached around Nanako to undo the crudely rolled waistband and start over, this time carefully smoothing out the puckers as she went. The smell of Nanako's perspiration held a faint scent of citrus.

A large truck roared by in the roadway next to the sidewalk, kicking up dust in its wake.

"There, how's t h a t ? " said Aoi. "It helps if you make sure to fold it evenly and s m o o t h t h e wrinkles out as you go."

Nanako looked at h e r reflection in t h e window of a small grocery they were passing a n d t u r n e d a pirouette. "You're right," she said, amazed at t h e difference.

Aoi gazed at Nanako's legs extending straight as pencils beneath her raised h e m . On t h e first day of school, as soon as she realized she was t h e only o n e wearing h e r skirt short, Aoi had hurried to the bathroom and r e t u r n e d it to normal so as not to attract attention.

The midcalf length prescribed by t h e school was so yesterday, plus she was convinced it m a d e her legs look fat, but better that than being different a n d calling unnecessary attention to herself.

"How'd you do on t h e m a t h quiz we got back today? I got a t w o -