“Is there a problem?” It was Kaitlin.
“Oh. No, certainly not. I was just thinking.”
“Ah.”
She was conservatively dressed, he was relieved to see, and holding a large, oblong box in her hands. “Did you call home?” she asked.
He nodded. “A car will be here in…” He glanced at his wrist-top. “…about a half an hour. Perhaps we can find a place nearby to sit down and have a drink.”
“I need to get this wrapped first,” she said, gesturing with the box. “The clerk here said there was a gift shop around the corner. All of those shops at the airport seemed geared for tourists, and I want to make sure this is wrapped properly.”
Her thoughtfulness stung. Both the giving and the wrapping of gifts in Japan were high arts and were as cloaked in ritual as the tea ceremony. Kaitlin had a Western face, but her heart was Nihonjin.
Now if only his father were able to see her in the same light…
0850 HOURS GMT
Ishiwara household
Outskirts of Kyoto 1750 hours Tokyo time
The limousine pulled up to the gate in front of Yukio’s house, where a uniformed guard looked inside the car, then opened the gate, waving them through. Kaitlin glanced back to see him pick up a phone in the guard shack, presumably to announce them. The security measures—necessary, Kaitlin supposed, for the household of the minister of International Trade and Industry—were so impressive, she was surprised to find that the actual house was not large and appeared quite traditional. Yukio had told her that his father was conservative in matters of custom, although he was something of a freethinker in the field of politics.
As they walked up to the front door, Kaitlin thought about the upcoming meeting. Back in Pittsburgh the idea of meeting Yukio’s parents and younger brother had excited her. When her father had been stationed in Osaka in the early twenties, she’d come to love this country and its people. As soon as they’d arrived in Japan, her mother, a natural linguist and determined not to be perceived as a typical American, had arranged for language and culture lessons. Kaitlin herself picked up the language, not through formal study but from playing with the children of her mother’s teacher.
Then her mother died, shortly after the end of her father’s stint in Japan. For Kaitlin, studying Japanese became a way of remembering and honoring her mother.
And now she was being invited into a Japanese home for the first time in almost fifteen years…and she felt totally unprepared. Speaking the language wasn’t enough—even knowing the customs wasn’t enough. She was different, and she would always be different. Yukio’s behavior proved that. At first she’d been hurt, watching him seal himself behind a wall of formality, but then she realized that it was simply that he was now home and acting accordingly. The misgivings she’d felt earlier reared up again. Was it possible for love to create a bridge between two cultures as different as theirs?
And if it was possible, was her love for Yukio strong enough?
Yukio slid the door open, and the two of them walked through into the genkan, the vestibule. “Toshi-chan!” a voice boomed down from the main level of the house. Three people were standing there, a young boy wearing a jean-suit and a T-shirt and an older couple in traditional garb.
“O-to-chan!” Yukio replied joyfully, confirming that the middle-aged man wearing Yukio’s face was the senior Ishiwara. The suffix chan was used only among close family members; o-to-san was the more formal way to address one’s father.
Yukio bowed to his father and slipped off his shoes, stepping easily onto the main level of the house and into the slippers that were waiting for him. Kaitlin followed suit, glad she’d remembered to change into slip-ons at the youth hostel. It was bad form to sit down to take off your shoes.
“Father, I have the honor to introduce Ms. Kaitlin Garroway.”
Kaitlin bowed low. “Konbanwa, Daijin-sama,” she said, using the title for a government minister. “I am honored by your invitation.”
Ishiwara returned the bow. “O-kyaku-sama, you are welcome to our house.”
Honored guest.
“Mother, Ms. Kaitlin Garroway.”
Bows and greetings were exchanged again, and the process was repeated with Yukio’s brother, Shigeru. Mrs. Ishiwara complimented Kaitlin’s command of Nihongo, and Kaitlin politely disagreed. She knew her Japanese was flawless, but it would be rude to acknowledge such praise directly.
Kaitlin then bowed again to Yukio’s parents and held out the package she had brought, resulting in still more bows and polite words. They would not open it in her presence, of course, so she would not be able to see their response, but with the Japanese simply the fact of a beautifully wrapped gift was more important than the gift itself. She wondered nervously whether she should have stayed with the gift she had originally bought for the Ishiwaras. Two weeks before, she had purchased a framed vidclip of a view of Pittsburgh from Mount Washington. During the course of the ten-second loop, the fountain at the Point sprayed into the air, birds flew past, and a tourist boat emerged from under the Fort Pitt Bridge. She and Yukio had taken a trip once on just such a boat. She knew that a gift from a foreigner that was representative of the foreigner’s hometown was usually acceptable, and this had the added benefit of depicting the city where their son had been living for the past ten months.
But as she was walking through the Kansai Terminal, she’d noticed a shop selling models, beautifully detailed miniatures of various ships, aircraft, and spaceships. While Yukio was getting their bags, she slipped back, under the pretext of visiting the O’tearai, the honorable hand-washing place, to take a closer look. As she’d hoped, the shop sold completed models as well as model kits, and one of the models on display was a beautifully painted Inaduma fighter, complete with booster—the very spacecraft that Yukio flew in. She’d bought it on the spot, and that was the gift she’d had specially wrapped that afternoon, while the framed vidclip languished in her room at the youth hostel.
What was causing her misgivings now was the fact that the twelve-inch model was very expensive.
It wasn’t that she couldn’t afford it. For all she’d teased Yukio about his being a rich kid, she was not poor herself, and she had enough money in her savings to handle a few special purchases. No, the difficulty was that giving an expensive gift created an obligation to reciprocate equally. She felt that the gift was well matched by the honor of being invited to the Ishiwara home. The question was, would the Ishiwaras feel that way? She might never know.
The four of them walked down the hall to a room with a tatami-covered floor, so everyone removed their slippers before stepping onto the reed mats. Three times she was offered the seat of honor near the beauty alcove, the toko-no-ma, and three times she declined. The fourth time she knelt on the tatami. After a similar process of offers, polite refusals, and renewed offers, she shifted to a floor cushion, a za-buton.
As they’d walked down the hall, Kaitlin had noticed a room with a carpet and Western-style furniture, indicating that the Ishiwaras were used to entertaining foreign visitors. The fact that they were treating her as a Japanese guest instead—taking her to the Japanese living room rather than the Western-style one, continuing to speak Nihongo rather than switching to English—was an honor…and a test. So far she’d been doing all right. The evening was young, though. She rarely got examination jitters, but she’d never had an exam on which so much depended.
Glancing at Yukio, she wondered what he thought of her performance. He had certainly come to life since arriving at his home. He was smiling, laughing, teasing Shigeru. This, she realized,