Shadow

Chapter Nine

Katie

“Katie!” Diane shrieked, waving wildly at me. She was easy to spot on the other side of the crowds. It’s not that she was really overweight or anything, but she had, as Mom put it, a “healthy appetite.” With her build, height and pale skin among the bustling Japanese crowd, she was like a sad version of Where’s Waldo?

But once we’d hugged and I trailed her to the lower level of Narita airport, everything changed. She wasn’t awkward. She wasn’t the piece that didn’t fit, the difference that needed circling. She spoke fluently to everyone, placing a ticket in my hand for the Narita Express train—the NEX—and standing with the crowd, watching the kanji fly by on the digital board to tell us which platform and which car to line up for.

 I was the one who didn’t fit, not her. I stared at her, awed.

She smiled. “You’ll pick it up quickly, too,” she said as we took our seats on the train.

 I tilted my head back against the fuzzy headrest.

 “Are you kidding?” I said. “I studied for four months and I could barely nod my way through customs.”

“Just give it four or five months here, and you’ll speak like a pro,” Diane said. “It’s completely different when you’re immersed in the language.”

“Okay,” I said, halfway between not believing and not caring. I was too exhausted from the jet lag to worry about it much. The train tunneled out of the darkness and to the outside, the February trees bare and the grass brown as mud.

“Just forget English,” Diane said, folding her hands in front of her. “Don’t even think of it as an option. Don’t translate things in your head—just go with what sounds right. If you translate, you’re not really thinking in Japanese, right?”

 “I guess.”

 Diane smiled. “Never mind. Rest a bit. We still have to take the bullet train after this.”

I peered out the window at the tracks, nestled between two steep hillsides so that I could see nothing of Japan but the slopes of winter forest. The train swayed from side to side gently, and a stream of steady Japanese echoed in the train car, announcements telling us something or other about the train and the destinations. The tracks clacked underneath us in a steady rhythm—click-clack, click-clack. Then another tunnel and out again, and the hills pulled away briefly.

I stared at the low buildings. They looked strange, somehow, deep reds and browns, with black-tiled roofs and gray brick walls.

“This isn’t exactly how I pictured Tokyo,” I said.

“Oh? What did you expect?” Diane peered out the window to look with me.

The hills blotted out the buildings again.

“I guess—skyscrapers? Pagodas? Millions of people?” But the glimpses of road that sped past were empty.

“Well, we’re not really in Tokyo for one thing. It’ll be an hour before we get there.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling ridiculous. Wasn’t Narita Airport in Tokyo? Just how big was a sprawling city of 13 million people? I couldn’t picture it.

I closed my eyes, the jet lag hitting me as the train rocked me from side to side. When I opened them again, Diane was gently prodding my arm as she grabbed the handle of my suitcase.

“We need to transfer to the Shinkansen,” she said. “We’re in Tokyo Station now.”

 “Wow,” I said. “I slept that long?”