Furoshiki

When she thinks of travel, she doesn’t think plane. Or place. But apples. Oranges. Gifts from the downstairs neighbor. The woman at the dry cleaner’s next to the river in Matsumoto. Cakes from Ito-sensei.

And this: a salesman from the electric company knocking on her door, offering tea towels.

“Am I to buy them?” she asked.

“No,” the salesman said, bowing deeply. A gift. From the Japanese electricity company to you.

Once, she met with a Japanese English teacher from Shinmei School. The two drank café au lait and ate chocolate cake and talked about their upcoming trips—to hike the Himalayas for one, to lounge on the beaches of Thailand for the other. Then the young Japanese English teacher took the hand of her American friend.

“Ureshii!” she said.

The American smiled broadly. She was happy, too!

She remembers the young Japanese teacher. Her neat handwriting. The taste of warm milk at school lunch all summer. Tomatoes eaten whole. Taxi drivers with immaculate white gloves. Steam rising from streets near the onsen.

She remembers a song, a chant. A man’s voice. A three-note refrain. Every Saturday, she heard it and wondered what it meant. Later she learned he sold takoyaki: octopus, fried.

She remembers riding a bicycle home from school, her bag full of students’ papers, comparisons using adjectives.

I’m as small as a mouse.

I’m as interesting as a monkey.

I’m as slow as a turtle.

She loved the small tidy handwriting of her Japanese students, the accidental metaphors, the mix of purple and orange pens. She loved how they spoke in the singular and plural. She loved all their pages, full of perfect mistakes.

She’d been told travel would make her broad-minded. But travel, she learned, teaches you you are full of mistakes.

After karate class, she once asked a black belt if he was going to see the fireworks festival. He looked confused. Her Japanese was terrible! She was embarrassed to say a word. But she tried again, making hand motions to indicate the noise of fireworks—kaboom!

“Ah,” he said.

She had confused hanami for hanabi, “flower viewing” for “fireworks.”

This is what she remembers now. All those mistakes. All her tries. Flowers exploding—a stunning sight!

At school once, a seventh grader ran up to her after lunch.

“Purezento,” he said, tucking something into the palm of her hand.

Students in Japan often gave teachers small origami gifts: animals—paper swans, kangaroos—or tiny boxes.

“Arigatō,” she said, earnest and grateful in a way in her own country she was not.

He laughed, floating away in his paper-bag pants.

Then she looked at what he handed her: condiments left over from that day’s school lunch. A gift fit for fish sticks, two tiny packets of mayonnaise.

On graduation day, the eighth graders gathered outside the school, standing on grass, under the sun, after the ceremony was through. A girl she’d never seen rushed up and handed over her name pin.

“Tradition,” she said. “Best friends do this.”

She was young when she lived in Japan. This was a long time ago. She remembers it all, writing notes at the bottom of her Japanese students’ pages.

“Nice handwriting, Mayumi!”

She wonders: Shouldn’t everyone have a season when she uses exclamation points?

She affixed a sticker as a reward for good work.

A balloon. A flower. A star.

Simplicity soothed her.

She wrote down in her own notebook some of the students’ vocabulary words and wondered how her old language looked new. Her mind took to these words a needle and thread.

Hour. Slowly. Inside. Red.

“How did you meet him?” she asked her friend, Shirahata-sensei, one afternoon.

“Omiai,” Shirahata-sensei said. But hers became a love match quickly after that.

“What was it like, meeting your husband like that?”

They met at a restaurant, she said. “I told him he would know me right away. I would be holding a bag. That the bag would be red.”

A story. A color. A memory. Why a woman travels—for the...