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.