Naoki wakes to scratchy cotton against his skin and the smell of antiseptic. His mind makes the connection and supplies hospital.
Voices reach him but they sound fuzzy and far-away. One he recognises as his sister’s, tinged with worry, growing increasingly upset with each second. Phrases drift by and some of them he manages to catch, things like ‘he is your son’ and ‘all you and Dad care about is saving face’ and ‘I’m taking Nao with me’.
Naoki can feel his brain slipping backwards into sleep. His breathing is loud in his own ears but not as loud as his sister’s, who is now making sniffling noises beside the bed. His eyes open when her palm slips into his own, smooth like the coloured papers she used to fold origami cranes with.
‘When it’s safe to move you, let’s get you out of Kyoto, OK?’ Rika whispers and squeezes his hand. ‘Let’s live together from now on. OK, Nao?’
*
The doctor tells him that his voice may never come back, and the nurses wrap a strip of white gauze around his throat, so as to not frighten the other patients. The grown-ups speak to him in their sanitised sing-song voices while exchanging weighted looks over his head, as if he cannot see.
On the ledge outside his window sits a bird with glossy black feathers and glassy golden eyes. It watches him all day long. The cast on his arm stops him from turning away from it. At night, it pecks the glass and keeps him awake.
Yōkai, he thinks angrily. Demon.
The bird-demon cocks its head, as if in mockery. Am I? it seems to be saying, or perhaps, Try again.
*
Three weeks and two days later, Rika buckles him securely into the passenger seat of her second-hand Honda (which is actually not as rickety as it looks) and takes him to her home in Hikone. He presses his forehead against the car window and tries not to wonder why their parents did not come to say goodbye.
The rain falling outside makes strange wobbly tracks in his vision, blurring the ugly neon of Kyoto city lights. The radio croons sorrowfully in a foreign language, something with a piano and a saxophone and a vocalist who sounds like she’s spent a good part of her life sucking compulsively on cigarettes, but Naoki is just grateful for anything that isn’t J-Pop.
‘You turned fifteen two days ago. Is there anything you want, Nao?’ Rika chirps. ‘You don’t need to tell me now. Write it down when we get home. OK, Nao?’
The car stops at a red light. Two boys in their yellow kindergarten raincoats catch Naoki’s eye. They are jumping on the waterlogged asphalt, laughing at the splashes they make. One of them leans in and kisses his friend’s giggling mouth and his flower-pink cheeks in soft little pecks, and their parents don’t break them apart because they are just children, and children are supposed to love each other before they grow up and forget how to.
Naoki thinks of the Danish boy from the hospital rooftop two days ago, the one who laughed and talked incessantly, happy about everything. When they get home, he will tell Rika that he wants to learn a new language. She will like to hear that.
Boo Sujiwaro was born in Bangkok, Thailand, where she grew up ghosthunting and learning the English alphabet. She studied Fashion Design at the Accademia Italiana before going on to read English with Creative Writing at Keele University. She has recently received the UEA’s PG Scholarship Award to study MA Creative Writing – Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia. Find Boo at @pacemori and helloboo.com.
