Chapter Ten Tails and Tea Boxes
Chapter Ten
Tails and Tea Boxes
On their own, one man’s eyes were not more memorable than another’s. It was how they looked at you that made you remember them. Hana understood, in the moment that Minatozaki Keishin had told her about his lie, that his were going to be impossible to forget. No person’s eyes had ever invited her in. Her father’s had always been guarded, their clients’ more so. But Keishin’s eyes were an open door that drew her inside, offering her a seat and hot green tea.
“I’m sorry for misleading you. I really just wanted to help,” Keishin said. “As you now know, I am a doctor, just not the kind that’s qualified to stitch up wounds.”
“I see,” Hana said.
“And you were absolutely right when you said that I shouldn’t be here. Not if I followed logic. Tossing a coin isn’t any way to make a decision. I suppose that doesn’t speak well of me as a scientist, but, as I told you earlier, I chose heads, and here I am. I could have opened another door and could be eating a bowl of steaming ramen right now, but I didn’t. Instead I opened your door and found you, your bleeding foot, and a pawnshop that’s been turned upside down.”
“The door is not locked. You can turn around and leave anytime you want.”
“I could, but my father taught me better than to abandon someone simply because it’s easier to walk away.”
“You don’t even know me.”
“We could change that. You could start by telling me your name.”
“I—” Hana’s eyes fell to his lips. Her name in his mouth was a dangerous thing. She imagined how his lips might shape its syllables and how his voice might turn them into a stream of honey wine. Sweet drinks were the worst traitors. You drowned in them with a smile. “I can’t.”
“I’ll make you a deal. Since you already know my name, I’ll throw in a little secret about myself in good faith. It might make you believe that I’m even stranger than you think I am now, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take. Does that sound fair? Your name in exchange for something no one else in the entire world knows?”
“I grew up working in this pawnshop,” Hana said. “You may want to reconsider trying to win any negotiation with me.”
“I don’t care about winning. I want to help. That’s all.”
“And just like that, you have lost,” Hana said. “You’ve shown me your hand.”
“You might have the advantage in negotiation skills, but all the years I’ve spent in a lab may have taught me a thing or two about observation.”
Hana narrowed her eyes at him. “And what have you observed about me?”
“That you haven’t decided what to do with me yet. If you really wanted to get rid of me, you would have pushed me out the door by now. Instead, I’m standing here while you try to figure out whether or not my secret is worth it.”
“You should not be so carefree with your secrets.”
“You’re right,” Keishin said. “But I trust you.”
Hana looked away. Had Keishin been a client, she would have been elated. Instead, the Shiikuin’s shrieks tore through her mind. She had allowed Keishin to step into a world whose dangers he could not even begin to comprehend. To give him her name was to let him take another step closer to her. And all the secrets her door hid. “Perhaps you shouldn’t.”
Keishin shrugged. “It’s only my credibility and my entire reputation as a scientist at stake. No big deal.”
“You are making a mis—”
“Whenever I’m stuck on a problem, I conjure up my mentor, Ramesh, to help me work it out at an imaginary Indonesian restaurant that serves the best nasi goreng and pecel lele. Sometimes we have beer. And dessert. They have the most amazing—”
“Hana.” She sighed and closed her eyes. “My name is Hana.”
“Hana…‘flower,’?” he said, translating her name into a language Hana did not understand. “I hope that I pronounced it correctly. My Japanese is a bit rusty. I’m sorry.”
Hana nodded. She had never heard her name spoken with greater care.
“So will you let me help you, Hana?”
Hana pulled her shoulders back and lifted her chin. “Heads.”
“Sorry?”
“I choose heads.”
“Heads?”
“I can tell that you are a stubborn person because I am one too,” Hana said. “You will keep on insisting on helping me, and I will keep on refusing you. This is like the debate you had with yourself on that rooftop before coming here. As you said, you cannot win an argument with yourself. You have less chance of winning one with me. So let a coin be our judge. You trusted a coin to take you across the world. Why not trust it to decide whether you should stay or go? Heads, you leave right now.”
“Tails, you tell me what happened here.”
Hana nodded. “Agreed.”
Keishin fished a coin from his pocket. He flicked it with his thumb and sent it into the air.
Hana watched it fall. She did not understand Keishin’s world of subatomic particles and underground neutrino detectors, but she understood fate. Her father had made sure of it. Death or fate. The only choice anyone in their world could ever make. She caught the coin midair. She flipped the coin over the back of her other hand and lifted her palm, revealing the coin’s decision.
Keishin looked up from the coin. “Tails.”
Hana drew a heavy breath.
“I win,” Keishin said.
“My father is missing,” Hana said, allowing the words to slip from her tongue before she could change her mind.
“What?”
“I thought that he might have heard the intruder and chased him outside. But now…” She squeezed the coin. “I think that I was mistaken.”
“Mistaken? How?”
Hana fixed her eyes on the gold-rimmed glasses and the hand-painted playing card on the table. “I suspect that my father set all of this up to look like a theft.”
“You think that your father did this on purpose?” Keishin’s eyes flew around the room. “Why?”
“Because of these.” Hana picked up her mother’s glasses and Toshio’s playing card. “And a childhood spent searching for tea boxes.”
—
Eleven years ago, when Hana turned ten, the tea boxes her father hid became harder to find. She had spent the morning searching for one but had nothing to show for it except the sweat dripping down her neck. Toshio’s clues had sent her up and down the stairs, in and out of her bedroom, and through the kitchen thrice. The latest led her to their dining table. She scanned the deck of playing cards laid on it.
Her father’s Hanafuda deck was a set of forty-eight hand-painted cards that were divided into the twelve months of the year. Each month was a four-card suit that featured a unique flower in its design. When arranged in a row and in the right order, the four cards formed a panoramic scene. Her father seldom played with the cards, using them instead to teach Hana sleight of hand. He made cards disappear from his hand and reappear behind Hana’s ear or in her pockets. The tricks, he said, honed two of the most important skills of a pawnbroker: misdirection and manipulation.
Hana carefully looked through each row of cards. January was a crane among pines, February a nightingale in the midst of plum trees. March. April. May. June. July. August. September. October. November. December. Every month appeared as it was supposed to be. She looked through the cards again and stopped at August. Hana closed her eyes, trying to recall what the scene was supposed to look like. Susuki ni tsuki—kari. Moon over Pampas Grass—Wild Geese. Hana stared at the cards and caught the mistake. The geese card that was meant to come after the moon now appeared before it. Hana smirked, creasing a dimple on her left cheek. This was her father’s favorite type of clue, subtle and small. If only she knew what it meant. She picked up the two cards and held them in front of her.
Hana studied the cards, making two lists in her mind: what she knew and what she didn’t. August, she thought, was the month of falling leaves and changing seasons. In the traditional calendar, it was also the month for Tsukimi, the festival for viewing the autumn moon. Hana ran her thumb over the full moon on the first card and checked the time. It was only a few hours until sunset, and she doubted her father would let the treasure hunt run for so long. Dinner to him was as sacred as the sake he drank before bed. But she also knew that the cards’ misplacement in the row was not an accident. Toshio had wanted her to notice the moon for a reason, and Hana could think of only one place he intended the clue to direct her to. With a well-rehearsed flick of her wrist and a grin, she made the cards vanish up her sleeve.
At this time of day, the pond in the middle of their courtyard garden reflected the blue sky. On cloudless nights, it revealed its true purpose. Hana made her way to the pond, thinking about how generations of her family had followed the same pebbled path. She stood at the edge of the pond and watched the sun sparkle inside it. Though pretty, it was not half as beautiful as the visitor who swam in its water at night. The pond existed to catch the moon, and when the moon was full it filled the pond to its brim.
Hana pulled out the moon and geese cards from her sleeve, wondering what she was supposed to do next. On the table, the geese had been on the left side of the moon, but now Hana held them in their proper place on the right. She walked over to the right of the pond and knelt on the grass. The corner of a wooden box stuck out from behind a bush. Hana grabbed it, grinning wide. She pulled off the box’s lid and looked inside. It was empty. Her father usually packed the box with different kinds of sweets, and this was the first time he had not put anything inside it. She wondered if he had simply forgotten to fill it or if it was another clue.
Toshio walked up from behind her. “Have you found it?”
“Yes, Otou-san. But it is…”
“Empty? You found the wrong box.” Toshio strode to the left of the pond and retrieved a box from behind a rock. He opened it, revealing little wrapped bars of yōkan, sweet red bean–flavored jellies Hana loved having with her tea. “This is the correct one.”
“But the geese card is supposed to be on the right side of the moon.”
“Not in this pond.” He took the cards from Hana and held them over the pond.
Hana looked at the reflection and saw where she had gone wrong. In the water, right was left, and left was right. She sighed, dropping her shoulders.
Toshio held out the box of sweets to her. “Here.”
“But I failed. I did not find it.”
Toshio smiled and unwrapped a sweet for Hana. “This time, it found you.”
“Thank you, Otou-san.” Hana took the sweet and popped it into her mouth. A fat raindrop splattered on her forehead.
Toshio looked up at the darkening sky. A flash of lightning broke through a gray cloud. Toshio’s smile slipped from his face. “Hurry inside, Hana. It is about to rain.”