asked now, to find out if he’d had the same feeling I’d had at the temples. I was too scared to ask about living with him, in case he said no. I would impress and distract him with grand curiosity unlikely to come from a young girl.
“Yes, but not in the ordinary sense,” he said. “I believe there’s something. Some presence. Consciousness. It’s like a wheel.” He moved to stand, and I got off his lap. He crouched on the ground and drew a circle on the tatami with his finger, and then a smaller wheel within that. I crouched down too, my heart beating fast. This was closeness! I wanted more of this! For him to talk to me as if he was interested, to say what he thought, knowing I could understand because I was his daughter. “The wheel has nodes at different points, something greater on the outside, the outside and the inside connected.” He drew two spokes between the smaller circle and the larger one. “I don’t know if that makes any sense.”
It seemed he had also become confused. “Anyway, it’s simple,” he said.
That night, I wrote in my journal: “When I tell him events, they come alive. When I don’t tell him, they don’t exist.
“My insides are jumping,” I wrote.
Later he rode along with a group of us on bikes into the sleepy town, the houses and shops made out of dark wood, rice paddies all around, the hills carved into shelves. We went to a soba shop and sat at a booth. I ordered kitsune udon, broth with a few globules of fat floating on the surface beside a strip of fried tofu, thick noodles almost visible beneath, like white stones at the bottom of a murky pond. He ordered cold soba with dipping sauce.
“Can I borrow some yen, Lis?” he asked. He’d brought only dollars.
“Okay,” I said. I gave him some of mine from the amount my mother had given me, the amount our parents were instructed to give, calculated by the teachers to cover the days we were free to buy our own lunches and snacks, temple wishes, and transportation.
“I’ll pay you back before I go,” he said.
After lunch we went to a bank; from here, he would catch a train back to Tokyo. Japanese rooms were small but smelled of open spaces, food glistened in separate lacquered compartments, pachinko parlors clinked, the doors open to the street—all of it different, strikingly foreign. But this bank looked like any big bank in California, with carpeted floors, red-rope divisions in scalloped shapes with brass attachments, a line of people waiting for a teller. “Here,” he said, after he talked with someone behind glass who counted out a stack of bills. He handed over a bill of a denomination I’d never seen before—10,000 yen—an amount almost half as much as I’d brought for the whole trip. Other bills were rumpled; his were crisp. “I don’t have a smaller bill, kid. Sorry.”
“Wow. Thanks.” We said goodbye, the bill in my pocket making the day spark.
With the new cash, I bought gifts for my father and Laurene, including four porcelain bowls of different pastel colors, thin-lipped and small, fitted in a wooden box with four compartments. Incense in an oblong paper box that smelled of the forest and resin. “Cedar,” the woman at the counter said. She took the bills I had left over, bowed, returned many fewer bills. For my mother I bought a cotton yukata, size small, in indigo blue with a pattern of opening white fans and a cloth belt of the same fabric. The robe came in a plastic cellophane envelope and cost less than the gifts I’d found for my father and Laurene.
“Did you get them better gifts than you got for me?” my mother asked. We were in her bedroom. I’d brought her gift out of my luggage, still in its plastic sheath.
“No, I got you different gifts—nothing better or worse.”
“But you spent more on them,” she said. How did she know? I should have bought her the best gifts because she had less money and couldn’t buy them for herself.
“I like the yukata. It looks good on you,” I said. She’d put it on over her clothes in the bedroom while I sat on her bed and watched.
“I don’t like things that tie like this,” she said. “It’s too big. Anyway, I’m your mother and you should be more honoring toward me.”
“It’s a size small,” I said. “And I