Suicide Buddies

Honey Hazes : A Castella Recipe

(hello, tysm for reading :D this chapter is a little different and shorter??? lemme know how it feels. i might do another one or two like this towards the end of the book. SORRY FOR ALL THE ANGSTY PLOTTINESS. we'll get through it in the next chapter)
(i'm very much not fluent or accustomed to the Japanese language, so if there are mistakes, u have all liberty and invitation to correct me pls)

There are three Japanese alphabets: Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana.

My mother told me Katakana is for what you learn and don't remember, Hiragana is for what you understand and care about, and Kanji is for what you wanted to say.

I didn't understand that. But she never gave me a language to use for something I didn't understand, so when she asked, "Wakatta?" I had to nod. I didn't understand then, but maybe I would later, and it wouldn't be a lie.

We were still in Yoshino at the time, in a tiny town that had a tiny name and had so many pink blossom trees in the spring, you'd think we lived in cotton candy. I loved Yoshino, because I understood Yoshino. Small and quiet and predictable and high up, Yoshino was native and learning and childish and real.

So when my mother whisked us away to California in the early beginnings of summer, into a neighborhood with no other Japanese families, into a blue house with dark wood and white walls, I was upset for understandable reasons.

"Don't cry," she had snapped to me when we first arrived, little boxes and suitcases open in our respected rooms; all our rooms were separate now with four solid walls and a solid wooden door separating each of us. "This is a new home."

"I don't want to be here," I had sobbed. 

When she asked why, I just shook my head. I didn't have a language for what I hated, so I could only cry and be quiet. Because maybe later, I would have one, and I could tell her the truth.

"This is America, Yuki," my sister had told me, grasping my shoulders to stop them from shaking. "You have a lot of good chance of success here."

Success. It was always about what you could gain when it came to my family. Always about what to win, what to take, what to have. Always a means to an end.

"I miss home," I whispered.

"Home changes sometimes. Home can be here."

"I want to go back. What about Jiji?"

"Ojiisan will be fine. He's happy we're here."

Some part of me knew that was a lie, but I never asked. It was rude to question.

I sat on my empty bed for some time that summer, stubbornly refusing to eat or speak and relegating my family to either force feed me or lecture me till my ears bled. Both worked most of the time, as I was seven and was still below average size even then so I was easy to toss around. My father once came in to see why I still didn't want to come down for dinner, even though my mother had gone all the way to the new supermarkets to make us butajiru.

"I don't like it here," I said.

My father was a condensed, tilted, shadow of a man, who loomed over people in the same way ancient oaks did in a dark forest; cold-blooded by reflex and selfish in nature, he embodied everything I never wanted to be.