You don't question why you're running through a forest of bamboo. You don't ask how you went through being in the centre of the city to an unending course of green. You don't give yourself time to think. You run. You curse your friend for convincing you to wear a stiff yukata. You rip at the flowing cotton sleeves as they snag on passing branches. You scream. You cry. You run, and run, and run.
And you hope the man chasing you with a bow and arrow doesn't kill you.
***
Tanabata was the festival of the stars. It was celebrated in Japan in a manner similar to Christmas. Decorations were hung on streets. Bamboo trees instead of pines were covered in paper ornaments. Families would come together and remember their ancestors. It was celebrated in July, except for in the north-eastern city of Sendai, where it was observed during the sweltering humidity August.
Every year for three days in August the arcade, a long shopping street covered in a glass-domed ceiling, was covered in three-metre long paper streamers called fukinagashi. They were cylindrical, topped with a large ball made of crushed paper. They looked like paper comets. They hung in colourful rows, and were so long and so close together that often you couldn't see the other side. You would have to part them like a curtain, only to be greeted by another wall of fukinagashi, and another and another. Each one was unique, a real artistic creation, and were hung for the entire three-day celebration.
The arcade was crowded that morning, mostly by visiting foreigners and people from different parts of Japan who had travelled to Sendai for the famous event. They were taking pictures and fanning themselves in a vain attempt to cool off in the exhausting heat. Many young girls wore flowery cotton yukatas, the traditional Japanese summer wear. It was an excuse to get dolled up, and while they were mostly just worn by women, every so often a young couple would walk by with a sheepish looking man wearing the darker and looser fitting male version.
Leda's Japanese friends had convinced her to wear one the week before.
One of the first things she'd noticed after moving to Japan from Canada was how much Japanese women loved dressing up foreigners in yukatas. She attended a bilingual university in Sendai, Miyagi, teaching English part-time to subsidize the scholarship she was living off of. She met most of her friends from her tutoring gig, so they were always eager to hang out and practice English for free.
In the weeks leading up to tanabata she had received more than one invitation from her friends to go shopping for yukatas. When she had relented and gone with them to try one on they had fawned over her with compliments and even – much to her embarrassed horror – applauded and told her how beautiful she looked. She felt like a doll at the mercy of overly imaginative girls.
She didn't think she looked particularly nice in one. Yukatas were not designed with her body-type in mind. Leda was all curves. The stiff obi that tied around her waist bunched the fabric around her bust, and her hips were too wide, so the yukata was more prone to opening when she walked, making her feel like she'd suddenly gained fifty pounds.
The first time her friends had taken her to look at yukatas she had managed to avoid buying one, but the week before tanabata she had finally broken. Part of it was her friends talking about how excited they were to wear their own yukatas, and another part was that after looking through half a dozen stores they had finally found a yukata she liked. She had tried it on, looked in the mirror and finally didn't see a frumpy gaijin trying to squeeze into a yukata.
It was red, with a pattern of large dark pink chrysanthemum flowers. The obi was gold with suns stitched on it, the other side dark blue dotted with stars and the moon. Instead of pushing all her bits out awkwardly, the obi gave her that cylindrical shape yukatas were supposed to have, with just a hint of her curves underneath. They braided her long sandy hair into a bun and pinned it together with a red flower ornament with dangling bells. The bells rang softly every time she moved her head, and she finally gave in.
She bought geta as well, raised wooden sandals with soft red thongs to slip her foot through. To complete the look her friends insisted she buy a bamboo bag to carry her wallet and other things in. It looked like a basket, with a cloth inset that had a flower pattern on it. None of these things were cheap, and she wasn't used to spending so much money on clothing, but she felt like she could afford to own one nice thing, and she knew she could wear to it to all the festivals she would go to in the future.
Tanabata began on the seventh, and her friends had come over early that morning to help her put it on. While not as difficult to put on as a kimono, yukatas were still notoriously hard to put on by yourself if you had no idea what you were doing. They went out into the heat together, giggling and taking selfies every few steps.
The obi was tight and she had to take small steps to keep the yukata from opening in the front and exposing her legs. She felt incredibly self-conscious. She could feel the stares towards her like angry accusations that she was doing it wrong. The tanabata decorations should have been enough to take anyone's mind off of something so trivial, but she couldn’t help but concentrate on the sweat running down her back.
Along the walls of the arcade were all kinds of booths selling souvenirs, like paper fans and mini tanabata decorations. There were also kiddie pools filled with toys for children to fish out. Leda's favourite proved to be the kaki-gouri, crushed ice. They had ‘sno-cones’ back in Canada with two or three different flavours, but here there were so many at each booth that she had a hard time deciding which one to pick (she finally settled on matcha with milk). At the end of the arcade the decorations branched north and south. They headed north. Now out on the open, the paper streamers blew in the wind as though they were dancing.
Leda had been living there since March. She had decided to go to Japan the year before. She hadn't known any Japanese cities other than Tokyo and Kyoto though. She didn’t like big cities, so she started to google other options. Maybe because she had been searching during the tanabata festival, but most of the sites she had found recommended Sendai. And now, almost exactly one year later, she finally got to see tanabata with her own eyes, and not for the first time she felt relieved she had come to Japan.
She wasn't exactly sure when she knew she would have to leave Canada. She had always been desperate to leave home. She had run away a few times when she had been really young, but the fall-out from those excursions were enough for her to realize she would need to bide her time. One thing she had probably always known was that if she ever wanted to truly escape him she couldn't just leave the city, or the province, she would have to get as far away as possible – and the other side of the planet was the farthest place she could think of.
She used to be convinced that her father wasn't an evil man. Maybe he was troubled, or maybe she deserved the things he said and did to her. Evil? Fathers couldn't be evil. But sometimes his outbursts would come out of nowhere. Sometimes she would be watching TV and he'd come in screaming at her about the noise she was making. Or she'd be playing with her toys and he would grab her tiny shoulders and shake her, screaming in her face to clean her room.
The closet became her safe place. Any closet would do. As a child she was small and thin enough to fold herself behind a box or pile or clothes, listening to her father's heavy footsteps as he went through the house, screaming her name. "Somerled!!!" She didn't like it when people called her that now, it brought her back to the darkness of the closet, hearing his footsteps. Thump, thump, thump… And anyway, Leda was nicer to the ears.
Spending most of your childhood in a closet left you with little to do. She had to keep quiet, or else he'd find her, so she would start bringing a book and a small flashlight with her. She read everything. Fantasy, romance, horror. Kids books, adult books. New novels, classic literature. Anything she could get her hands on was good. Manga was something she discovered in junior high, but it was something that had stayed with her, something that had planted the seed. Japan.
When she was sixteen she finally left that house. She would bounce around from friends' couches to shelters, struggling to finish high school, all the while her father kept looking for her. Her closets had grown bigger, but she could still hear him screaming her name, still hear the heavy footfalls. Thump… thump… thump.
As long as she stayed in Canada she knew she would never stop fearing he'd show up at her door one day and drag her back home like when she had run away as a child. So one day she simply started looking for universities abroad. She looked through most countries, but always kept coming back to Japan.
In wasn't just the manga that drew her to Japan. She loved history. It became her major now that she was in university. Canada's history had always been… somewhat lacking in her mind. The country was barely 150 years old, and its written history only went back around 500 years, but that was nothing compared to the rest of the world. The other thing she had always missed was having any kind of cultural identity.
Her father came from a Scottish background, and her mother was French Canadian, but she had never identified with either of those, especially since they seemed to move every two or three years. The only thing she took from her parents was her name from her father, and the French language from her mother.
Japan on the other hand had all the things she had always craved. Their history spanned over three-thousand years. Their culture was full of epic stories, beautiful and romanced artwork, heartbreak, and an undeniable pride. She loved it, she wanted it, and once her mind was made up there was no looking back. She studied Japanese for the six months leading up to her departure, all the while working as hard as she could at her part time job, saving money and getting her paperwork processed. When she said goodbye to her friends at the airport she feigned sadness, telling them she would be back soon, but it was the happiest day of her life.
She cried as the plane took off, but only because she couldn't believe she had finally made it. She had escaped.
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