for release. Did traces of the night before show in the way she walked? Remembering the child, she averted her gaze and shifted the groceries from one arm to the other.
She didn’t want to be late for her lunch date with Louise, but she stopped anyway when the door to the confectionary swung open, beckoning her inside with its string of bells. What better place than Fugetsu-do to get out of one’s head? How could anyone resist those old wood-and-glass display cases lined with colorful, handcrafted omanju? Setting her bags down, she could already see Hiroshi rubbing his hands together in anticipation of the taste he knew from growing up. Her husband loved the dark adzuki bean fillings and, like her mother, looked down on her for her preference of plain mochi. Her stomach barely tolerated the starchiness of the thickened rice, forget the bean paste loaded with sugar, but she was pleased to see Hiroshi’s favorites. Yomogi, habutai, dorayaki—they were all there. The store clerk yanked paper off the fat roll with one hand and used the other to snip from the mechanical spindle a length of red string, which he wrapped expertly once, twice around the white confection box as Daidai looked on, intoxicated by the sweet, thickened air. She’d asked for one piece of chofu to go, and she ate it as she walked, believing that perhaps the problem with the day might merely have been hunger. The fertility specialist had found no abnormalities, so nothing was wrong. But how then to account for Hiroshi’s going on and on? He’d always required a certain amount of roughness before he’d yield to her, but lately it had become increasingly difficult to bring him to climax, because before she could mount him he needed to bear down on her, and her assurances that she could take any amount that he had to give had grown thin. He loved her. She knew it. But she knew he felt humiliated all the same.
“Let me help you.” The voice came from behind her.
“Excuse me?” Daidai turned against the bustling foot traffic in time to see a small man stutter-stepping backward. Her hand shot out reflexively to steady him, and feeling the strained sinews of his forearm beneath her fingertips, she began immediately with apologies. His slight stature only made matters worse. She was a tree waving its useless branches in the wind as he struggled to regain his balance, the skittering sound of rice hitting the pavement sounding like rain.
The stranger removed the rice sack from her shoulder with exaggerated care and turned it upside down on the sidewalk. Was he Japanese? His stoop-shouldered, scrawny frame bore no connection to his face, which was lit with bizarre self-satisfaction.
Amid the stink that felt so distinctively downtown—brine from the sea contaminated by all the filth hosed from the sidewalk into the gutter—passersby began kicking at the spilled rice. Soon, some thin-boned, elderly person would probably slip and fall and she’d have a lawsuit to add to her burdens. But as if to respond to her concern, the peculiar little man pulled from his back pocket a neatly folded advertisement printed all in Japanese and began sweeping rice grains over the curb. Daidai watched with fascination. “Carry this way,” he said, returning to her side and lifting the heavy sack to his chest.
Daidai held out her arms, but the bag was not proffered back in her direction. Instead, the man turned away with her rice, signaling for her to follow, which she might have done had a familiar figure not appeared just then. Gizo, Louise’s little brother, held an arm out to slow the vehicles on both sides of the busy street so that he could jaywalk, the capped sleeve of his shirt stretched across the taut muscles of his biceps.
“Hey-hey!”
Clearing the curb with his self-assured, athletic stride, Gizo pulled her in for a side hug, his thick hair draping moisture across her cheek. Turning to face him, she noted the line of perspiration streaking his forehead and the cool dampness of his skin. He had the post-workout look of someone freshly showered, but beneath the clean scent of his shampoo, she recognized a familiar musty odor, a fishy tang she associated fondly with the inside of the Hashimotos’ house that caused her to lean in before pulling away. Behind him, the sack of rice, its trademark red peony blossoming wrong side up from the ground, offered no explanation for what had just happened.
“I haven’t seen you all summer. You gonna at least say hi?”
“Hi, Gizo.” She smiled, her cheeks going hot.
“That’s better.”
Gizo threaded the grocery bags through one arm and with the other lifted the rice sack, managing not to let even one grain escape through the rip while she stood by admiring. Reminded of her mother’s claim that rice left behind in your bowl signaled bad luck, she took Gizo’s showing up as a good sign and let him lead her the long way back across the street. The detour meant she’d definitely be late for lunch, but she felt buoyed. The heat of the day and weight of the bags had worn her down, and the approving nods of shop owners as they passed set things right again.
Inside Akai Electric, an attractive teenaged salesgirl smiled at Gizo from behind the counter, the position usually occupied by Louise and Gizo’s father, Danji. Gizo saluted her as he strode down the housewares aisle with Daidai in tow, her eye catching on an assortment of steamers, strainers, teakettles, and, in particular, an industrial-sized rice cooker that she supposed might come in handy given all the rice she’d just bought.
At the rear of the shop, Gizo held the service door open for her to pass through. It took a minute for her eyes to adjust to the dim lighting. She’d been in the back only once before, brought in by Louise, who’d nudged the heavy bag with her shoulder as she passed and let Daidai try punching the speed bags, purchased by their father to teach Gizo to fight.
After disappearing into a storage closet, Gizo reappeared with tape and scissors, flicked a light switch, and gestured Daidai to his side.
“Didn’t that used to be out in front?” Seeing the old, hand-painted AKAI ELECTRIC sign above the door that led to the alley, Daidai was stirred by a memory of tracing a finger over the Japanese lettering.
“City ordinance made us take it down a long time ago.” Gizo smiled, pointing out the two thin chains from which the sign had once swayed above the sidewalk.
Across the wall separating the shop from the warehouse, rows of wooden shelves held stock that seemed less random than the contents of the store they would replenish. The worktable where Gizo had placed the sack of rice also held a MacBook and a bank of small black two-way radios. A row of lockers leaned, though without risk of falling, slightly away from the far wall and toward two black couches, and the irregular-shaped glass coffee table top carefully balanced on two old wooden crates somehow explicated the intentional decor of the room.
“You like it?” Gizo asked.
Daidai turned, made self-conscious by the realization that Gizo had been watching her. “It’s kind of great.”
“Pretty professional, huh?”
“What’s it for?”
“I have a little side business—keeps Dad’s store afloat so he has a place. I do security for some tourists, mostly Japanese businessmen, when they come to L.A. You know, executive parties, drivers, that sort of thing.
“You need to be careful,” he added, looking up. Having set the rice sack down on the makeshift worktable, he began cutting strips of athletic tape.
“What are you talking about?” Her gaze shifted from Gizo’s smooth, sun-darkened skin to the perfect razor slice in the rice sack, the image juxtaposed in her thoughts with the side part in the stranger’s slick black hair.
“I don’t want to see you get hurt,” Gizo said, casting suspicion on the intentions of the stranger who’d commanded her attention on the street. Having pulled out
