Chapter 1
Curtain, Texas
March 1, 1999
Paper hates water. It hates wind. And fire. Paper falls apart. There is no home safe enough for paper, did you know this?
Sometimes my grandmother speaks like an oracle. I mess with the tape recorder settings, make sure the microphone will pick up what she says next, feeling that she is about to tell me something I will need to know, sometime, somewhere.
“And that’s why you’d rather me record you instead of writing everything down?”
“Yes, I like my voice. It’s a good voice, even after all these cigarettes. The doctors say, don’t smoke, Mrs. Minnie-ko Cope, and I say, I do what I want, you old man. Minnie-ko? A man who goes to so much school and who can’t pronounce an easy Japanese name? Sheesh. Mean-echo. Not hard.”
“You can’t expect everyone to know how to pro—”
“You know why I smoke? I like smoking. Cigarettes, very small pleasure. Very small. Home is a place for small pleasures.”
But this house we’re now sitting in isn’t my grandmother’s home. Hers is a half-soggy heap of blackened plaster and ash. She burned it down last month. Accidentally, of course. So she’s living with my parents. So am I. If I’m being honest, I burned down my architecture career. But, I didn’t have a choice. We are both squatters on my parents’ land; eaters of cereal and consumers of ham sandwiches, drifting along out of place. There are nearly fifty years between us: I’m twenty-five, my grandmother is now seventy-three. Today is her birthday. And now we share a bedroom, a tub, a toilet. We tell each other it’s temporary.
My grandmother cracks my bedroom window and sparks a Salem Light, but the smoke comes back at us in a confused rush from a tricky breeze. In response, she hands me her cigarette, opens the window all the way, pops the screen like a cat burglar, and without any hesitation climbs onto the roof. She has already been scolded about this a few times, but scolding doesn’t work on my grandmother.
After the fire, my dad and my aunt fear for her to be alone again, and don’t know where she should live. They chat on the phone late at night. Find an apartment? We’ll just end up moving her again in a few years when she needs more care. Let her live with one of them? She’ll drive us to drink. Move her into a senior living community where they take Saturday trips to casinos up in Oklahoma? She’d hate the people but love the casino. Aunt Mae gently brought up the subject again tonight at Grandminnie’s birthday dinner, and my grandmother shut it down, refusing to discuss any of these options.
“The roof is the most important part of the house, Lia, you know this?”
She is getting situated, carefully settling her rear on the rough shingles, her voice loud on our quiet road. It’s been a rainy spring, and we can hear baby frogs chirping from the water-filled ditches that line Cope Street.
Curtain is small in population and spreads through Dennis County, uneven in shape. It has a downtown, which is just the main drag, the farm-to-market road that runs along the railroad tracks. That one, accurately called Main, has a few perpendicular streets jutting off it. On one side of the tracks, the names are pretty standard, and that’s where the businesses and the churches are—Oak, Pecan, First, Second, and Church. Where they cross the railroad tracks the names change to the names of the people who started the town. Thomas, Whitebrew, Whitehall (don’t dare get them confused, they hate each other), Morris, and Cope. We live off of Cope Street on land that has been in our family for generations. My parents’ house is our “town place”—the “country place” is where Grandminnie lived and where my dad was raised. It was a working ranch until my grandfather died years before I was born.
“Nope. It’s the foundation. That’s the most important part of a house.”
“Yah, little Miss Architect, that’s important, too. But the roof—so much happens under a roof. These shingles are better to sit on than my roof in Japan. Tiles hurt my bottom.”
I contemplate taking a puff off the cigarette before handing it back but don’t, because I suppose I’ve become a woman who just thinks of things and then doesn’t do them. I’m like a squirrel in the middle of a road, doing that back-and-forth thing, holding an acorn. I don’t know what to do next in my life. It’s complicated and shameful. A BA in architecture—the five-year program—from the University of Texas and a career-making job with Burkit, Taylor & Battelle on the team, the one reimagining the skylines of Texas cities. A few months until I had enough hours accumulated to take my Architect Registration Exam ahead of schedule. The apartment overlooking the Colorado River, right at the mouth of Lady Bird Lake, a kayak still hanging in the “ship shack” on the grassy bank just a few steps from my balcony.
Basically, I left my dream. I left live music and tacos and my sweet, goofy roommate, Stephie, who quotes teen movies like they’re Shakespeare. I think of the Colorado, rolling slow and wide and green, my Day-Glo life vest strapped around me as I paddle out. Sometimes, I’d cut through water-skimming fog in my kayak, all those minuscule droplets of cloud against my face. I thought I had everything figured out.
The drag off the Salem burns like a snake of fire down my throat. I have asthma and really shouldn’t be smoking.
I cough from the cigarette and my scalp hurts, which is funny, because no one ever complains of scalp pain, do they? At dinner, my mom ran her hand over my head and picked out a piece of flaky skin, the size and shape of a sequin.
“I’ll buy you some Selsun Blue, baby girl.”
But my grandmother, back in our room, had yanked my head toward her stomach pooch as I sat on the bed in front of her and, her hand on my jaw, her other hand parting my hair in sections, just whistled low and said, quietly, I know this thing you do.
Grandminnie is retired from the Dennis State Home for Mental Impairment. She was a nursing assistant for thirty years and retired last spring. Her words comforted the dizzying bat-like anxieties swooping and swirling in my brain. Anxieties that make me pick my head until it bleeds.
I remember the way the bats used to fly out from beneath the Congress Avenue Bridge, a black cloud that separated into vibrating clumps like television static. Today, I got a cheery greeting card from Stephie asking me if I’d be coming back or if I wanted her to find a replacement on the lease.
“You are missing Mars! Stop being scarediddy-cat slowpoke-girl!” Grandminnie calls to me through the window. “Hand me my cigarette.”
I thrust her cigarette out the open window toward her. My grandmother is talking to herself about how much has changed on Cope Street in the last forty years.
My window is nestled over the gently angled hip roof that covers the porch, but no fall from it would be gentle. My grandmother does not let this faze her. Her legs are clad in dark gray polyester slacks, and she’s wearing her upstairs house shoes (she has a different pair for downstairs). She is still muscular, stocky. My aunt Mae, my dad’s only sibling and Curtain’s lone pharmacist, in charge of everyone’s blood pressure and rosacea flare-ups, thinks Grandminnie is growing forgetful and going through a regression of sorts. My dad says it’s like a midlife crisis, to which my mom will quietly mutter, Well, hell’s bells.
I carefully perch beside her. The shingles are still warm from the sun, but the air is growing chilly. The pecan tree is budding with dangling yellow-green worms of pollen. It has grown crooked and is so close to the house, I can nearly reach out and touch it. I don’t know many details about my grandfather, not much is said, favorable at least, about the man. But he was fond of his pecans and babied the trees planted by his own grandfather at the ranch. This one is a relative of those ancient trees, stuck in the ground the same year I was born.
“Your daddy needs to look at this roof. Some bad places here. That hailstorm last year! Needs to be replaced, maybe. Also, that tree, it needs to be trimmed. He’s so busy with work, too busy!”
My grandmother isn’t being rude. This is who she is. When I look sloppy, she tells me. If the food’s too salty, she says something. Everything is noted. I used to take offense, but after living with her for twenty-eight days, reaching for the same coffee mug each morning, even sharing some of my clothes, I see now, perhaps for the first time, that she filters life this way. It’s like I’ve slipped into Grandminnie’s skin. This is how she loves, by taking note. Why, I don’t know. My mother says it’s cultural, and my father just usually leaves for work—he’s always working—when Grandminnie gets this way. I think there’s more to it.
I have the Sony microcassette recorder in my lap. I feel the tape turning through my sweatpants.
“Okay, back to what we were talking about. You never chose to write down your history before because you don’t trust paper and you don’t want me to do the same.”
“And I don’t write English. Only Japanese. And you don’t read Japanese. So that’s why I never write this down.”
“You never taught me.”
“I was busy. To learn Japanese, to really learn it, you have to be born there.”
“Then I suppose colleges need to stop teaching it.”
Her brown hand, all chiseled bones and sinew with perfectly shined nails, reaches out and slaps me on the leg. It smarts because my grandmother does not know softness.
“To learn Japanese the way you need to to understand my story, you need to be born there.”
I suggest that I could watch some of her favorite shows, maybe that would help me pick up Japanese faster. She thinks about this. Grandminnie’s shows, soap operas set in bygone eras sent on VHS from a friend in Tokyo, are what she misses most about her old house. In fact, my parents think—Grandminnie will not confirm their suspicions—the soap operas were the reason for the fire in the first place. She had just received the final season of her favorite the night of the fire, and so she stayed up all night watching it. Sometime in the early morning, they presume she fell asleep while smoking. Her hand dropped the cigarette on the floor, lighting the old shag carpet before spreading to the walls of the hundred-year-old wood-frame house. Up climbed the fire, gorging itself on the old place.
All that was saved is what she carried with her and what my dad raked through to find. Now, her stuff is packed in a few boxes in the garage, surrounded by Odor Eaters because a house doesn’t burn clean like a campfire.
My grandmother stumbled out of the fire with her cat under her arm and a bowling ball bag clutched in her hand. Then the fire trucks raced down her long caliche drive. How she didn’t even suffer a bit of smoke inhalation is a mystery to all. My mother says it’s because her lungs are so used to carcinogens, they thought the smoke-filled room was just a normal Friday night.
My grandmother takes a long drag off her cigarette and points to the full moon.
“Mangetsu.”
“Oh, now you plan to teach me some Japanese!”
“Fine. I will teach a few words. And I will tell you some stories since you’re being so bossy. But you might not understand. Things are different now.”
“Like what?”
“See, you won’t understand.”
She’s shaking her head, and I’m worried she’ll change her mind again.
Try me. I want to know. I’m bored at my job at Bags-N-Bows, an awful strip-mall store that sells, well, gift wrap bags and bows, along with greeting cards and those faceless angelic figurines that you buy for people whom you don’t really know that well. My other job, the one I loved, perhaps my entire career as an architect even, now feels lost, and I can’t help but think it’s because of him, Darren. When his name drifts into my head, I feel my insides twist. I can’t say I’m lost because that sounds so pathetic. Because I trusted him, because I am who I am, because I was in the right place at the wrong time, because, because, because . . . I’m stuck in a losing situation. I make a weird grunting sigh, just thinking about this, and Grandminnie raises her eyebrows, flips the lighter closed, and carefully stuffs it into the pocket of her slacks. Through the square of light from my bedroom window, I see her lipstick has bloodied the end of the cigarette. She blows out a thin cloud of smoke and closes her eyes.
For a moment I see her young, younger than me.
“I need to tell you about the beginning, way back. Back when I was a little girl. But you have to do something for me.”
My grandmother is both a dealmaker and a dealbreaker. I know this because I’ve grown close to her now, as an adult, not as a kid. When I was younger, she was busy, she says. My mother complained to her friends on the phone that she wasn’t interested in her granddaughter, in me. Daddy would say, “Just stop, Tam, you don’t get it.” But then he wouldn’t explain either, because I don’t think he knew.
Grandminnie’s thinking. I watch her chewing on her words, her jaw grinding, her skin still taut over that jaw. What could she want me to do? Or help her do? I’m willing. I have nothing else going on. And I have this need. I can’t even name it. I wonder if this is part of growing older, having needs without names.
And just before I can ask her again she says, “I want to go home.”
2
Kadoma, Osaka Prefecture
July 1936
The child was dressed in trousers with an ill-fitting sailor fuku on top, half tucked in. She had a red scarf tied on her head, was holding a slingshot, and was sneaking behind an azalea bush that had lost its blooms for the year, leaving crispy yellowed tufts nestled into the dark green leaves.
“Sagi-shi!” the child yelled, hands on hips. “You can’t hide outside the garden! It’s not fair!”
“I’m not!” came another little voice, this one softer and more gentle. And from beneath the bush a tiny girl crawled out. “I’m tired of being the good admiral. I want to be the pirate for a while, please, Mineko-chan?”
“You don’t have it in you, Fumiko! Pirates need to be fearless, and you are like a little chicken, chittering all the time.”
“And you’re a loud monkey!”
Mineko dropped her slingshot and, placing her hands on the ground, her backside in the air, scampered and screamed like a monkey.
“Stop it! People will see you! Your mother—”
But it was too late, and Mineko’s mother, Hana, was now outside, her hair still down but gleaming, her morning robe wrapped tightly around her thin frame. She had lost another child, another little brother, only a few months before and still looked washed-out and ghostly. She carried the fire poker and pointed it at Mineko, then at Fumiko, then at Mineko again.
“You’re not mine, Fumiko, but I’ll beat you like you are! Stop encouraging her!”
Hana paused by the open-wide morning glories, hanging heavy on the trellis that hid the outhouse from view, and even with her face crinkled in disgust, even though she appeared hollow-eyed, she was one of the most beautiful women in all of Kadoma.
“Rowdy girls! Into the shed with you! Stay there while Hisako has her dancing lesson! You’ll mess her up with all your squawking.” Hana hit the ground with the iron poker for emphasis, which spit up a little loose dirt, then pointed to the koyo. “Now!”
“It was me, Kaasan! Don’t punish Fumiko!”
Hana swatted at Mineko’s legs, and through the pants Mineko could tell that it had been a while since the fire had been stoked, thankfully, and the iron was only warm. The girls held hands and opened the door to the koyo and shut it firmly behind them.
“Ugly girl,” Hana said, loud enough for both to hear.
“You’re not,” Fumiko said.
“I am,” Mineko said.
Fumiko kneeled on the mossy earth that lined the floor of the shed. Mineko sat cross-legged.
“You’re smart, though.”
“She doesn’t care. I look like a stump. It’s okay. I’m used to it.”
“But—”
“No, call me stump face. Really! Call me that!”
Mineko squeezed Fumiko’s hand. They had been best friends for over a year, when Mineko’s father had finally received a promotion to assistant stationmaster and help was hired for the house. Along with a housekeeper came the housekeeper’s daughter. When Mineko was not in school and Fumiko was not helping her mother, the two spent time in the lush backyard of the Kamemoto home, playing until the sun set, leaving Kadoma in long gray shadows.
Fumiko whispered it. Stump face.
“Louder! Don’t be scared!”
“Stump face!” Fumiko said with a giggle.
Mineko pulled her hair back from her forehead and made the most ghoulish face she could conjure. Her hair needed to be cut, and because she hated being still—her mother’s hands on her shoulders, the glint of scissors and their icy touch across her forehead—she managed to escape this torture until before festival days. The bridge of her nose was low, her face wide, her skin the color of a walnut from being outdoors without a hat or parasol. She was thick and muscular. And to make things worse, she was, indeed, smart. The kind of cleverness lauded in firstborn sons, but Mineko was the firstborn daughter and thus this brain, her mother Hana often wailed, was wasted on her. What a firstborn daughter should have is a pretty face and a calm demeanor. Our daughter, Hana complained to her husband, Hiroshi, is the exact opposite of what I wanted. Her mother felt betrayed by the gods. And while her father rather enjoyed his daughter’s pluck and precociousness, he kept this, like his other feelings, hidden.
Hana had four more babies after Mineko—two sickly boys who lasted only a week after birth—and, finally, a baby girl who resembled Hana in every way she had ever wished. Then the most recent loss. While Hana used to be occasionally tender—Mineko remembered holding her mother’s legs and Hana’s hand heavy on her head—the last death seemed to Mineko to push her mother further and further from her. Once, her father broke rank and told Mineko that her mother had never suffered before motherhood and that, sometimes, a beautiful bird used to perfect weather could be downed in its first storm.
But a bird was gentle. A bird didn’t hit or curse. A bird didn’t squeeze until a blue bruise bloomed. Her mother was no bird, and Mineko was tired of being caught too close to her.
Mineko pulled her knees toward her chest and buried her nose between the knobs.
“Kaachan wants a nanny for me. Someone to tame me, she said, so she can focus on little sister. But my father said that he doesn’t make that kind of money and that she’ll just have to wait for the next promotion, and my mother said that if the gods weren’t watching, she’d run his boss off the cliff into the river just so Papa could get a promotion to stationmaster and so she wouldn’t have to deal with me.”
Fumiko breathed a long, surprised ohhhhh.
“‘Oh, bah! She’ll never be matched!’” Mineko said, in imitation of her mother’s worrying, pinching the bridge of her nose, as Hana did to dull the headache that Mineko always brought about.
Fumiko tucked her hands into her sleeves, and Mineko knew it was because she feared the spiders in the koyo. Fumiko was half the size of Mineko, small from early-in-life malnourishment, and even though her mother’s finances had improved since moving into the village, her arms and legs were iris-stalk thin. Fumiko had helped at many homes with her mother and had a mouthful of gossip, which Mineko delighted in. Fumiko scooted an inch closer to Mineko.
“You can live with me and my husband.”
“Your marriage! That’s a hundred years from now. I need a place to go now. Someplace I can be as wild as I’d like,” Mineko said, staring up at the straw ceiling of the koyo. Hana had yelled at Mineko yesterday for tracking mud into the genkan, and the day before that for talking too loudly and interrupting young Hisako’s afternoon nap.
“Mistress Kamemoto scares me.”
Mineko nodded. She had been born during her mother’s yakudoshi—her year of misfortune—and while her father had told her that any bad luck regarding her birth had long since blown away, Hana mentioned it often, and Mineko was split between believing her kind father or her difficult mother. More recently, she had decided that while she was pretty certain she was bad luck, she perhaps did not care.
Fumiko looked at her friend, who sat in thoughtful silence.
“Maybe you stay out of her way. Go find a good place to play during the day, then come back for dinner. An old auntie told me there’s an abandoned house not far from here, but you’ll have to look very hard to find it. It’s haunted though.”
“I’m not afraid of ghosts. Besides, I bet it’s easier to talk a ghost into being kind than my mother.”
The house, Fumiko had heard, was off the road toward the mountains. Instead of continuing left, as everyone usually did to get to the next village, one went right at the fork and found a bamboo stand, young, fresh, and thick. There, on the other side, was the path to the kominka of a wealthy banking family that had been built long ago. Back when the big banks in Osaka went through hatan, this family lost everything, including their beloved country house. They had moved out in the middle of a feast weekend in shame, selling most of their belongings and taking only what could fit in a couple of carts.
“Well, I’ll go see if this place even exists.”
“Are you doubting me?” her friend asked.
Mineko twirled a chunk of her hair tight around her finger, then let it unwind like a dervish. Fumiko was naive and could be easily led astray. But she could be right this time. Even if there was no abandoned house, she would at least have a good adventure to talk about later.
“No, I believe you, Fumi-chan. I’ll always believe you.”
The morning was pleasant, with a breeze picking its way between the houses along Mineko’s street. Mineko walked casually at first, pretending she was on the way to the market or to her father’s train station. But when she was a good enough distance away, her legs picked up speed. The sun was attempting to gather its first strength, warming the tanada on either side of the path. Finally, Mineko ran, a full satchel beating against her hip, her straw hat in her hand. As the elevation increased slightly, Mineko began to feel winded; she stopped only to walk for a moment, then skip, then run some more. She passed by the bamboo cover the first time, then had to double back to find it. After pushing aside a few stalks she squeezed through. She counted her steps and at step forty-four, the eerie green light from the bamboo was replaced with blue sky. There she found a weedy stone path that led far into the distance and, to her right, an overgrown cart-rut road.
The uneven path led to two monchu at the entrance, as large as those at a provincial palace and covered in ivy. The granite plinths stood at least five feet taller than Mineko. The wooden arch that connected them was also laced with shoots. Mineko wiggled and kicked open the gate and followed what had been a trail but now was even taller weeds. The house stood two stories with a deep hip-and-gable roof. Granite stairs rose to the engawa and the proud, tall front doors. Mineko felt a big rock under her shoe and picked it up, to see what it looked like. It wasn’t rock, but a chunk of ceramic roof tile, mineral gray and heavy, broken into a sharp-edged square. Mineko nestled it in the pocket of her dress.
And to think, for all of her life, this had just been down the road from her!
The path wound around to the left of the grand house, through another gate, and down a slight hill. There, the weeds began to give way to tall, soft grass. The flowering bushes that had been trimmed into lovely shapes many years ago were now hulking versions of their previous form. The blooms were copious, and there was a buzz in the air from the bees.
Mineko didn’t know if she should attempt to explore the house or the grounds first, but decided to get the most haunted part over. She took out an ofuda from the shrine that her parents kept in the genkan to protect their home, which Mineko had expertly pilfered that morning. Waving it in front of her, she approached the house, singing a little song to make herself brave.
At the granite steps, she looked up and saw a beautiful kawara staring back at her, a minogame turtle with its bushy seaweed tail sculpted behind it, as if floating through the water. It was a moody gray with glints of silica that had been baked into the ceramic. Unlike some she had seen before with menacing mouths, this one had a slight feminine smile, more mischievous than evil. Mineko felt her insides soften. Nothing to fear when such an auspicious creature was watching over her. The word turtle was in her surname, after all. This was destined.
“Hello, sister turtle,” Mineko said in greeting.
She entered into a rather spacious genkan with dirty shelves for shoes and hooks where only cobwebs hung. Moving cautiously, barely breathing, Mineko circled around the house through the engawa, the interior walls on one side, the storm shutters on the other. The air was cold and stale, made worse by Mineko’s silence.
Back at the entrance, Mineko slipped off her shoes and slid open the door that led into the front yoritsuki.
The ceiling reached to the top of the second story, creating a cavernous expanse. Dust motes drifted down and, with one wave of the ofuda, were propelled up again. An old-fashioned square irori was centered in the middle of the main room. A chain dangled from the ceiling with a beautifully wrought hook where a boiling pot had once hung over a fire. The beams were dark with years of smoke. She had never seen a place so magical.
“This is an old house,” she breathed. She gently touched the fusuma. The painted scene was of cranes and turtles, a willow and a brook. More turtles, she said quietly. Mineko loved how they moved slowly but could swim and carried their home on their backs. This place wasn’t haunted, surely, and even if it was, she felt the turtles’ protection. Why, this might be the luckiest kominka in the entire empire. And it was all hers.
The tatami was still in good condition, despite years of small creatures finding their way into the house. A few mousetraps lined the room, along with the skeletal remains of their catches. She climbed the stairs and slowly opened doors to find smaller bedrooms. Very little furniture was left, save for a couple of framed drawings and other odds and ends.
She picked out a room that she would like to have if her family lived in this house, but then thought about this—she would allow her grandparents and her father, but her sister and her mother, they could stay in town. She’d allow Fumiko—she’d get her very own room! And Fumiko’s mother, of course. Mineko slid open the door to the room’s balcony and there, below her, was a green pond, fed by a stream, dammed at the far side. An azumaya was perched at the very edge of the water, its wood gray with age.
Mineko raced down the stairs, grabbed her satchel, and burst outside, forgetting her shoes as she made her way to the water’s edge. ...
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
