1001 Cranes Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  MICHI’S 1001-CRANES FOLDING TIP NO. 1:…

  1 Monku with a Side of Smog

  2 Sick Sadako

  3 Closed-mouth Kokeshi

  4 Bedtime for An-jay

  5 Poisoned Phone

  MICHI’S 1001-CRANES FOLDING TIP NO. 2:…

  6 Three Kinds of Kami

  7 Eggs, Ketchup, and Shoyu

  8 Mixed-up Mon

  9 Tofu, Miso, and Nori

  MICHI’S 1001-CRANES FOLDING TIP NO. 3:…

  10 The Great Gambaru

  11 Dreaming Dad

  12 No More Spam

  13 Dueling Daughters-in-law

  14 Crazy Kawaguchi

  15 Wet Carnations

  16 Tony

  MICHI’S 1001-CRANES FOLDING TIP NO. 4:…

  17 Broken Butsudan

  18 Ding-dong

  19 Well Woman

  20 Loopy Loop

  21 Dear Diary

  MICHI’S 1001-CRANES FOLDING TIP NO. 5:…

  22 Sorry Dojo

  23 First Fight

  24 Kawaisoo Cranes

  25 Runaway Randori

  26 Astronauts and Alstroemeria

  MICHI’S 1001-CRANES FOLDING TIP NO. 6:…

  27 Grounded

  28 Small Talk

  29 Pessimist Club

  MICHI’S 1001-CRANES FOLDING TIP NO. 7:…

  30 A Change in Plans

  31 Big Haji

  32 Urusai Mama

  33 Cinnamon Yellow

  34 Turkeys

  MICHI’S 1001-CRANES FOLDING TIP NO. 8:…

  35 Obon Dance

  36 Hot Tears

  37 Flat Soda

  38 Dental Floss, Anyone?

  39 Silent Roosters

  40 One City

  41 The Last Crane

  How to Fold a Paper Crane

  About the Author

  Also by Naomi Hirahara

  Copyright

  To Martie, Sindy, and Coleen

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to Sonia Pabley, Claudia Gabel, Random House and Delacorte Press, Bill and JoAnne Saito, Seinan Judo Dojo, Robert Kawahara, Lewis Kawahara and Akiko Takeshita, and Wes and Iesu, always Wes and Iesu.

  MICHI’S 1001-CRANES FOLDING TIP NO. 1: Before you start, make sure your hands are clean.

  Monku with a Side of Smog

  No monku, my dad tells me before my mother and I leave, but I think that it’s easy for him to say. He’s not the one going away.

  “Monku,” which means “complaining” or “complain,” is about the only Japanese word I know. And it may be the only Japanese word my parents know. But they make up for not knowing much Japanese by using “monku” all the time. Like when they told me that I couldn’t go to a midnight concert with my friends: no monku. And when they told me that I couldn’t quit piano lessons: no monku. And now about my going away for the summer: no monku, again.

  My dad claims that we Katos don’t monku. The rule doesn’t apply to my mom. She’s kept her maiden name; she’ll forever be an Inui.

  My first name is Angela, and I know that’s no big deal, but if you consider who I’m named after, it might be. I got my name from an Angela who was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list back in the seventies. She’s black and wore her Afro combed out like cotton candy. I know this only because I searched online for her one day. She’s a radical, like my parents are, or maybe used to be. Now, don’t get me wrong—my parents aren’t hippies. They are too young to be real hippies; I guess they were involved in a second wave of hippiedom but aren’t part of that world anymore. My dad, for example, is extra-neat, and my mom’s always buying the latest deodorant to make sure her pits don’t smell. They are both super-strict and limit the number of hours I can watch TV or surf the Internet. I don’t even have a cell phone, even though my friends got theirs four years ago, when we were eight years old.

  But in other ways, my parents are number-one rule breakers.

  They met, in fact, at some kind of sit-in at Stanford, which pretty much means that they sat on the floor of the dean’s office until they got their way, or at least thought they’d gotten their way. I think my dad was even arrested, though he won’t admit it no matter how many times I ask. So it makes sense that Angela Davis was my parents’ role model. Well, at least enough of one that they’d name their only kid after her.

  My middle name is Michiko, after my maternal grandmother. My mother doesn’t get along with her. My dad says it’s because they’re too much alike. I haven’t made up my mind about Grandma Michi yet, because when I’m around her, she’s always busy doing something else.

  I’ve been to Grandma Michi and Gramps’s house twelve times. I know this exact number because we go to Los Angeles once a year, during New Year’s, which is important for Japanese people. My grandparents take us to the Buddhist temple near their house and we watch men use mallets to pound hot rice into this sticky goop they call mochi. Then the women, some of them wearing nets and caps over their hair, take the hot goop into the kitchen and spread it out on a floured wooden board. This next part is my favorite: we then tear the mochi with our fingers and make balls the size of eggs. The elderly ladies, including Grandma Michi, sit at a special table where they spoon red beans (actually, they are more brown) into the middle of the mochi and form the rice goop around them so the beans are a surprise in the middle. The red beans are called an, which sounds like when you open your mouth wide for the doctor. I think they taste better than chocolate. That’s why Gramps calls me An-jay instead of Angie. I could eat an all day.

  In five hours, we’ll be seeing Gramps and Grandma Michi and it’s not even close to New Year’s. It’s late June, summertime, when I’m supposed to be hanging out with my friends at home. Mill Valley, where we live, is just north of San Francisco, beyond the Golden Gate Bridge. Our house reminds me of a tree house, because it is surrounded by cedars, pines, and redwoods. My father teaches me the names of plants. He pulls the leaves off low branches and makes me smell and touch them. He says that even city girls need to know about green living things.

  Now I close my eyes tight and picture the trees. When I open my eyes, I’m still in the backseat of our car; my mother is driving. It’s just the two of us. My mother is pretty, I have to admit. A lot prettier than me. She doesn’t quite look like those hula girls on the commercials for Hawaii vacations, but she comes close. Her nose goes up like an elf’s, but her skin is smooth, without wrinkles and spots like other mothers have. While my hair is frizzy, like my dad’s, her long hair falls straight, like a waterfall.

  She doesn’t care that she’s up front by herself, because she gets to choose what CDs to play. She likes Sly and the Family Stone and all the Motown hits from the sixties and the seventies. “Real music,” according to her. “Mom’s Funk Junk Stuff,” Dad used to call it. FJS, FJS. I can’t remember the last time Dad teased Mom. I miss it.

  “What do you think Daddy’s doing now?” I ask Mom. It’s Friday, and he usually doesn’t work on Fridays.

  Mom pushes out her lower jaw. “He’s probably watching some replay of a game on TV.”

  I want to ask if he’s at our house or his new apartment, but Mom may not even know about the apartment. I figured it out because the apartment manager called a couple of days ago and I answered the phone. Even though I told the woman I’d give the message to my father, I didn’t.

  I first tried to write a note, but my fingers began to shake and I couldn’t even hold on to a pen. Later the words got caught in my throat and never came out.

  I don’t know what this new apartment means. Dad has moved out before, but he’s come back. For good, I thought until recently. I don�
��t want to tell my mom about the phone call, because it might make everything worse. Maybe my dad’s just thinking about it. I don’t know.

  I said nothing to my friends about my dad’s possibly moving out again. Or about my parents’ being in counseling together until my mother started going by herself. You see, there’s another rule in our house: don’t talk about bad things, especially in public. It’s not a rule my parents have said out loud. But I know it in my heart.

  I am so used to being quiet in groups that sometimes I forget how to talk in front of people I don’t know well. This past school year, kids wrote things like “stay nice this summer” and “you’re so nice” in my yearbook. Those words make me feel kind of strange, because I know I’m not that nice at all. It’s just that they don’t hear all the bad thoughts in my head.

  I lean against my duffel bag, a giant formless stuffed animal, and stare out the window. There’s nothing along the highway. Stretches of brown grass and dirt, like the underside of an old carpet that has been stripped from the floor. I can see rows of electrical transmission towers. Some look like metal outlines of cats on stilts or centipedes on their hind legs.

  My mother drives slowly, so dusty cars pass us by, one by one. Some have only one person—the driver—but others are filled with families, bare feet, and mussed-up hair. Sleeping bags and bicycles are tied to the tops or the sides of vans. I wonder what it would be like in a car full of human noise. To feel the hot and stinky breath of the person next to you, to feel bare knees knocking against yours, elbows poking into your side, stickiness from either sweat or spilled soft drinks on the backs of your thighs. I doze off to Sly Stone’s screaming, and then wake up to the worst smell filling my nostrils. We speed by a sign: KETTLEMAN CITY.

  The windows of the car are all dusty and smeared with the brown and green guts of flying insects. But I can still make out the acres of white-and-black-splattered cows tightly crowded in mud.

  Fumes of crap begin to rise in the Toyota.

  “Mom, the vent, the vent.”

  My mother lowers the stereo volume and flips the vents closed. “Poor cows,” she mutters.

  I pinch my nose and take short breaths through my mouth.

  “These animals are tough, Angela,” my mother says, turning a knob to squirt soapy water onto the dirty windshield. “They can stand in their own crap.”

  All I can think is that at least they aren’t alone.

  Sick Sadako

  You know that Los Angeles is within striking distance when you reach the Grapevine. I have no idea why they call it the Grapevine. There are no vines of grapes, just boulders and hills and a special turnoff for trucks that can’t handle the steep slopes. But my mother and I are going down the Grapevine, not up, which means the car isn’t going to shudder or tremble as it often does on extreme inclines. We don’t have to worry about overheating; we just have to make sure that we stay clear of any jackknifing trucks in the neighboring lane.

  We clear a hill and then I see a few skyscrapers poking their heads out of some brown soup. Not quite the Emerald City. More like the rust city.

  “We’re going in there….”

  “It’s not that bad. There’s smog in northern Cal, too. Haven’t you noticed it around San Jose?” my mother says.

  It’s going to take more than that for me to be sold on smog.

  “Listen, I lived in smog for eighteen years. It didn’t hurt me.” She goes on to talk about the regular smog alerts they had in Gardena. The school alarm would go off and no one was allowed to go outside for recess. Instead of dodgeball, they played seven up, in which they put their heads down and stuck up their thumbs. Each of seven secret chosen ones would touch the thumb of someone whose head was down, and the thumbs would then disappear into fists. Then they all lifted their heads, and those with thumbs down guessed who had touched them.

  She is talking again about the seventies, when all the Japanese girls used tape to create double eyelids, and feathered back their hair to look like Farrah Fawcett of Charlie’s Angels. I have a feeling that this Scotch tape eyelid technique worked on my mother but not on my aunt Janet.

  “Dad says smog smells bad.” I remember exactly how he described it: tinny, like car exhaust mixed with nail polish. “He says that it also feels heavy. Like a rock on top of your chest.”

  “Dad doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s not from L.A.” My mother’s voice sounds hollow, like a thick ceramic plate spinning on a linoleum floor. You’re afraid the fallen plate is going to break, but it stays whole and empty at the same time.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to be away all summer,” I tell Mom. I’m worried about what will happen while I’m gone.

  “What are you talking about? Grandma and Gramps are expecting you. Janet and Grandma need your help. And you said you would go.”

  But that was before Mom started going to the counseling sessions alone, before Dad rented some apartment. My leaving was supposed to get them back together.

  “So what’s the big deal about this one-thousand-and-one-cranes stuff, anyway?” I ask.

  “You saw the displays last New Year’s, didn’t you?”

  All I can remember are the fancy black frames. I didn’t spend too much time looking inside them. I was too busy stuffing my face with an, I guess.

  “Well, they’ve since turned that back storage room they have into a one-thousand-and-one-cranes workroom.”

  “That many people want those things? What are they for, anyway? Good luck or something?”

  “You know that book we used to read together—Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes?”

  “Yeah, what about it?” I remember the story of Sadako, a young girl who suffered from radiation sickness caused by the atomic bomb. She started folding cranes and pretty soon everyone was making cranes so that she’d get better. As these things go, she just got worse and eventually died.

  “Well, the Japanese fold a thousand cranes for people to get better from sickness. I guess here in the States, the extra one is for good luck for weddings and anniversaries.”

  “You mean they don’t even do this stuff in Japan?”

  Mom shakes her head. “Not for weddings. I think it actually started in Hawaii.”

  “You and Dad didn’t have a display, did you?” I try to remember the old photographs of their hippie wedding.

  Mom takes a deep breath and I see her narrow shoulders tighten. “You know we’re not into all that kind of stuff.”

  I sink back into my duffel bag. So Mom and Dad don’t even believe in the displays. But they are going to force me to make them to earn my keep this summer. As we wind down the Grapevine, I picture myself hunched over a table, my fingers bleeding from 1001 paper cuts.

  Closed-mouth Kokeshi

  Even though I’ve been to visit Gramps and Grandma twelve times, I never really paid attention to the house they lived in. Before, our visits would last, at the longest, a weekend. But I’m going to be there the whole summer. By myself.

  So as my mother turns onto their street and parks the car in front of the house, I take a long, deep look. The paint is faded yellow, like sunshine that has just about quit. The house has a square cement porch with stairs and a peeling white wooden lattice on one side. The lawn is not the kind that tickles and soothes bare feet. Instead, it reminds me of the plastic grass at the miniature golf course near my other grandparents’ house. The long driveway is cracked, with bits of stray gravel here and there.

  I can’t believe that my mother lived in such an ugly place.

  “Angela, c’mon. Bring your stuff in.” Mom holds open the back door, and I get out, dragging the duffel bag with me. The air is surprisingly cool and I even smell a tinge of salt.

  Mom leaps over the two front stairs and raps on the screen door. No one answers, and I feel my head start to ache. I don’t want to be here. I want to be with my dad, sitting on our deck, the sun shining through the trees onto our backs.

  “Hmmm, I told them w
e’d be here around three o’clock.” Mom tries to look through the windows, but heavy ivory drapes hide all evidence of what is inside. Finally, we hear the lock unlatch, and the door opens. Aunt Janet. “Oh, hello.” Janet is rounder than I remembered, and through her white T-shirt and peasant skirt I can see that her belly is squishy and soft.

  “Where is everybody?” Mom never bothers to say “hi” or “goodbye” to Aunt Janet, I’ve noticed.

  “At the shop. We have a wedding tonight. I just dropped off the crane display.”

  My mother glances down at her watch. “I’ve got to go to the bank before it closes. Angela, you stay with Aunt Janet.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “No, you stay. It’ll be better. You must be tired, anyway.”

  “I’m not that tired,” I lie.

  “No, Angela, you’re staying here.”

  From the tone of her voice, I know that my mother is going to do something she doesn’t want me to see. Something I’m sure involves my dad.

  “Maybe I’ll go skateboarding.” I know that idea isn’t going to fly with Mom.

  “You will not. You will stay inside the house with Aunt Janet.” Mom presses her fingers into the flesh of my upper arm and it hurts. I drop my duffel bag. She then pushes me through the front door. I bump into Aunt Janet, who almost falls backward, causing her gold-rimmed granny glasses to lie lopsided on her face. “Janet will show you where you’re staying, so you can settle in.”

  I feel the whole top half of my face grow hot. My nose becomes runny, as if I have just swallowed a big dollop of wasabi.

  Mom goes back to the porch to retrieve my duffel bag and drops it just inside the door. “I’ll be back,” she says. “It’ll only take an hour or so.” She then looks at me as if to say “sorry,” but I keep my head down.

  I rub the spot where she grabbed me, my arm outstretched as if I’ve just given blood. I stay in that awkward position for a few minutes, until I hear the door of the car open and shut and the engine turn on. Meanwhile, Janet fixes her glasses so that they lie exactly perpendicular to her knot of a nose. She closes the door, bends down to pick up the duffel bag, and places the bag by the sofa.