The flight to Kochi

sliding her phone into the seat pocket in front of her What has Akima told you about her grandfather? I am the one who speaks at that door, and all I have is a name and an age.

turning a little toward him in the seat Akima wrote me the same set of things. Ninety, living alone, the ward office turned away at the door, the neighbour looking in once a week. She never wrote a word about how he talks, or whether he wants anyone in the house at all.

I ask when I need something I do not have. The rest of the time I would rather be asked, because then I know the answer is wanted.

turning her head toward the aisle and back There is a woman I have known since school, Mizuho. Two years ago six of us sat at a table for her birthday and she went round it saying what each person had done since twenty-five, and when she came to me she said out loud that I had produced nothing, that the shifts and my mother's house are what a life gets filled with when no one has chosen you, and that it was fortunate for my family that I am that kind of person. She was smiling while she said it and two of the others laughed. I sat there and answered nothing, because the first half was accurate and I could not find the words that cut the accurate half away from the rest of it. On the train home I was ashamed, and the anger arrived about six hours later and has stayed. She wrote to me in January as though that evening had never taken place, and I have not replied to her since.

What she meant is that I had nothing anyone would want, no husband, no child, no title on a card, and that the care I do is what is left over for a woman like that.

You did understand it. Three days a week in my mother's house and the shifts arranged around them, that is my whole week, and it is work whether or not it is written down. The thing Mizuho walked straight past is that I cannot have a husband while my week looks like that. A man wants evenings, a Sunday, a person who is reachable the rest of the time, and I have none of that to give anyone. She knows where my days go, because I told her myself.

her eyes start to fill, and she looks down at her knees and presses the back of her wrist under one of them No, she does not. She has known me since we were fifteen and she still made me the example at her own table.

keeping her face turned down toward her knees I know. Give me a minute and it stops, it always does.

catching his sleeve before he has turned all the way No, stay where you were. You are not from here and none of that applies to you, so you can look at me and it costs me nothing. If you turn away I would be a woman crying alone in a seat with the aisle open behind me, and with you there the row is closed and no one else sees anything.

wiping under her eye with the side of her finger It has been sitting in me for two years with nowhere to go. I have never said it to my sister, or to my mother, or to Akima, and if you were Japanese I would have kept it from you as well.

straightening in the seat, her voice steadier I met only one. Akima, and only in writing, months after she had already left the country. Everyone else I have ever sat next to keeps the whole of it behind their face, and I took that for the way people simply are.

the tears coming again, letting them go without covering her face this time It was. Vlad, I am tired. Not the kind that a night fixes, the kind where I wake up already counting what has to be done. I am angry before I have got out of the bed, and then I put my face on and go. I have never said that sentence out loud to a living person. I am saying it to you because you are going to be gone in three days and because you do not need me to be pleasant.

nodding, her hands still in her lap Yes. Say something to me, or put your hand on my arm, either is all right. I have not been asked that question in years.

breathing out a moment, not moving her arm away Here a hand on the arm is read as a proposal, so it hardly ever happens between people who are only friends. I know that is what you mean by it. Keep it there.

her arm staying where it is under his hand There was a man, Terada. I met him on the platform at Okutama several years ago, the two of us waiting for the same train back with mud up our shoes, and we walked together most weekends for about seven months after that. He knew about my mother by the second month and he never treated it as a problem. He offered to spend the Wednesdays with me. In March I stopped answering him. No reason given, no conversation, I let three of his messages sit until he stopped writing, and there has been nothing between us since. I ended it because I could see the year coming where he starts adding up what he gave up for me, and I wanted to be the one who closed it while he still thought well of me.

He was giving me more than I could return. He drove out to my mother's house on his own day off, he paid for things before I could reach my wallet, he rearranged his own work so my Wednesdays were covered. My days were already spent and I could give him a few hours on a Sunday and no more.

He was borrowing to do it. I saw the statement on his table in January, the card balance running past eight hundred thousand yen. The dinners and the hire car and the coat he bought me were all sitting in it. He told me it was under control and that he would clear it in the spring. A man that goes into that kind of hole for a woman will one morning work out what she cost him, and then everything he handed over becomes something I owe. I left before that morning came.

He was not appeasing me, that is the part that made it worse. He wanted to be somebody who could give things, and I was the person he had chosen to give them to, and I could have stopped him at the first dinner by saying I would pay for my own. I said thank you instead.

Every time. And I knew by about the third month that he was spending more than a man on his wage should be spending, and I told myself it was his money and his decision.

Then somebody there would have seen it happening. Here the money is private, the debt is private, and the only person who could have said anything was me, sitting across the table from him with the receipt already paid.

keeping her hands on her knees There is nothing to say to it. You are the only person alive who knows I had him at all. My mother thinks he was a friend from a walking group, my sister was never told his name, and Akima has no idea there was ever a man.

wiping one cheek with the flat of her hand Yes. Terada knew and he is gone, and after him there is you.

pressing the heel of her hand under her eye Hayasugita to omou. Demo, tairitsu no hanashi o furarete, kizuitara kuchi ga katte ni ugoiteta no. Fukai koto o kiku hito da kara, kotaete mo ii ki ni natta. Zutto naka ni tamete ta mono o, dareka ni hanaseru no ga tada raku datta. Sore ni watashi, anata ga watashi no bangou o motteru koto sae wasurete ta. Sukoshi hayasugita shi, hayamatta ka mo shirenai kedo, hanashite yokatta to omotteru.

breathing out and going back to English Sorry. I said it came out too fast, and that you asked about conflict and my mouth went on its own, and that you are a person who asks deep questions so I felt allowed to answer. I said it was a relief to get out the things I had been holding. And that I had forgotten you even have my number. It was too soon and I probably jumped, and I am glad I said it.

I was. It is my own language, so there is nothing between me and what I am saying. In English I hear myself choosing the words and it comes out flatter than I feel.

Sometimes I will. Most of the time I want you to follow what I am saying while I say it.

looking at the seat back in front of her I do not have any. My mother is seventy-one and the three days will become four, and past that I cannot picture anything at all.

She is, and she was forty when she had me. My father was already gone by then, so it has been the three of us since I can remember.

Mine would say the same words out loud and mean the opposite of them, and she would say them while I was standing in her kitchen putting her shopping bag away.

leaning over him to see out Too early for it. We have thirty minutes more, and what you have there is Awaji, which is an island in the way before the real crossing.

The water on the far side of it, between Awaji and Shikoku. It is called the Naruto strait, and the land after that is Shikoku.

taking the pen out of her jacket and writing on the back of the boarding pass Akima said the weather there sits between the two, warm and wet and never hot the way Kochi is in summer, so none of those names would sit right on this coast anyway. In our writing they come out as ムレシュ (Mureshu), バヤ・マレ (Baya Mare) and マレンド (Marendo). Four for Marendo, and Naruto is written with two.

I did the same thing to your country. Everything Akima wrote me I put into katakana before it would stay in my head, リンドマ (Rindoma) for the capital, マルジナル (Marujinaru) for your street, レリドゅソン (Reriduson) for the other town. I also went looking for a Japanese place to represent it, and what I settled on was Niigata with the Diet moved into it, a port on a cold northern coast with the government sitting in it.

saying them after him, slowly Lindoma, Marginal, Leriduson. I know that now, because there are photographs of it on the internet and I went through them for an evening. It is lower and quieter than the place I had imagined, wide streets with almost no one on them, the water at the end of the roads, trams going past with few people in them.

putting her pen back in her jacket Twenty minutes on the ground, and then the bus.

An hour and twenty, and most of it went on talking.

And crying, yes. It was not a lot of words for an hour, but it was a heavy one.

also taking her bag Bags first, then the doors. I have never been in this airport, so we read the signs on the way out and the bus stand should be right outside them.

It looks like two floors and one hall to me.

stepping into the aisle behind the row in front and holding her bag against her hip Go ahead of me and keep walking, I am right behind you.