But Luna, at six, never remembered. This was their third consecutive summer in Japan, but it might as well have been her first, except that she was familiar with her grandparents’ house, where they’d stayed their first two visits. She liked it there, despite her grandfather’s room, always closed, the white door emanating an incubated silence, like an eye turned inward. On his good days, her ojīsan used to slip out of his room to tend to his shapely plants in the foyer, and Luna remembered how, the first time she and Katy happened upon him, he’d surprised them by inquiring in gentlemanly English whether they were enjoying their day. Later, her father explained that both her ojīsan and obāsan knew some English from the American Occupation days, but unlike Ojīsan, Obāsan never gave herself away, prattling on in Japanese, content to transmit only her feelings: an open warmth, like the house itself.
Now Ojīsan was confined to a room at the hospital, but Luna never forgot how, on that first foyer encounter, he’d pressed a finger to his lips and, eyes glinting, shuffled into his sandals to show them the white peaks of Mount Fuji protruding like a giant tooth above the telephone wires.
Fujisan. It was the first word he’d taught them, telling them about their ancestors who congregated on the mountain to watch over the house. By the end of that first visit, even Luna, still three then, could follow his ritual, clapping her hands three times and pressing her palms together, eyes closed, a prayer for Fuji-san, his mountain god. Keeper of health.
Ojīsan recovered that time, but her parents had already decided to spend a few weeks every summer in Japan. This summer, their third, they were staying two months in a rented apartment midway between the hospital and her grandparents’ house.
* * *
—
MODEST ON the map, Shōnan-kaigan was a surfer’s hub teeming with colors: blue tubes, green boogie boards, towels like puddles of paint, the occasional rainbow parasol adrift in smoke billowing from the beachside cuttlefish stands.
All summer they’d gone to beaches along this coast, but none had been like this, with pink-lipped women, hair the color of hay, their men equally bleached and beaked with visors. At first their mother sat in the car, observing, and Luna worried that another afternoon might be ruined. But then her mother opened the door, plunging her hand into her bag—Luna knew exactly what she was looking for, what she was always looking for in Japan: sunglasses. Her father, who had also been watching, placed his hand on her head and said, Go help your sister.
Up ahead, Katy was inflating a beach ball. She’d already inflated their tubes, which were looped around her shoulders. The ball was enormous, and as Katy tried to inflate it further it kicked off her face. Luna laughed, but when she turned to see if her father had witnessed it too, she heard her mother say, I’m sick of being stared at. I feel so goddamn white.
But nobody noticed her mother here, and soon everybody nestled into their patches of sand as the sun drifted and the clouds flickered, brightening, then graying, stirring up a breeze that roughened the waves and lifted the tide, reminding the sisters of their afternoon’s last task: to choose their seashells, pearly pink ones today, pierced like earlobes. Luna wanted the whole pile to add to her collection. Katy planned to string hers together, like the necklaces she’d seen at a shop near the giant statue of the goddess their father had called the Kannon. Behind them, their mother was powering through her paperback, her brown sunglasses occasionally rising like a camel’s back to check on them. Down by the shoreline, their father was combing through bands of seaweed for the larger shells that washed up there.
“Hey,” Katy said, nudging her sister.
Ankle-deep in seaweed, their father was holding up a palm-sized shell. They raced to inspect it: a peach-colored dome shaped like a snail. No holes in this one, and too big for a necklace: Katy discarded it into Luna’s hand.
The shell was light, warm like an egg. When she turned it over, it looked like an ear. Her father said if she listened, she could hear the entire ocean inside.
Luna matched the shell to her ear. She heard the roar of the surf, the trill of the wind, and then: absence; the deafening slap. Her father spun around. Say, he said. Her mother, horrified, retracted her hand. Masa. She pointed at the gray spider retreating across the sand. It could’ve bit her.
* * *
—
“LUNA?” HER mother was staring at her. “Aren’t you going to eat?”
Luna blinked at the egg-sausage-milk combo. The eggs looked spongy. She rolled the sausages from side to side. “I’m not hungry.”
Katy, quicker than a cat, speared the sausages.
“Katy.” Her father lowered the newspaper. “Let Luna decide if she’s finished.”
“She said she doesn’t want them.”
Everyone looked at Luna, who covered her ear. “I’m not hungry.”
Her father gently pried her hand. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m not hungry,” she repeated.
Her mother folded her napkin. “She’s fine. She can eat later.”
Her father’s mouth tightened, but he closed his paper and scraped back his chair. “All right, I’m off. I’ll make sure I’m back around lunch,” he said. These days, he’d taken to visiting the hospital alone, his promise to return in thirty stretching into four, five hours. “I’ll give your bracelet to your ojīsan. He’ll love it,” he told the girls, who’d used their shells to make him a charm. “Don’t forget dinner’s at six,” he told their mother. “Let’s hope they’ll let my father out for a few hours.”
“But I thought we were having lunch at your parents’,” her mother said.
“My mother wants us all to have a nice dinner.”
“Masa, didn’t we agree—”
Her father scooped up the keys. “It could be his last time—can’t you see that?”
Her mother stared at him, face set.
Luna peeked at her sister, who was fighting to chew the egg and sausage she’d sulkily crammed into her mouth. Every summer, on their last day, Obāsan made osekihan and yakitori for Luna and Katy. Luna loved her grandmother’s osekihan, sticky rice plumped with red beans, a pinch of salt and black sesame sprinkled on top. She’d been anticipating it all week. She pushed her plate away. Her mother’s gaze fell on her.
“At least finish your milk.”
The milk was sweaty and as white as Elmer’s. When Luna brought it to her face, a sweet gamy smell wafted up her nose. She glanced at her mother, but she was looking out the window, watching her father traverse the little parking lot to their rented car. Luna shut her eyes and, in one queasy chug, drank the entire glass and carried it, sick and wobbly, to the kitchen.