“Are you lost?”
The voice, boyish and barely inflected, came from beneath a braided sun hat, a kasa, standing four feet below her in the neighboring rice field. And it was in English– regular, gentle English, with a trace of an Australian accent. Jane jumped back.
The stranger was holding rice plants in each fist. He tilted his head back, and she could see the glimmer of a smile beneath the shadow cast by the kasa. Her eyes wandered further south and took in the loose-fitting cotton shirt and baggy pants, rolled up almost to his knees and yet still floating on the surface of the water that surrounded the evenly spaced spikes of green. “Are you lost?” he repeated. “Eigo o hanashimasu ka?“
“H…hanasu kedo,” she stuttered. Strange how it was easier to find her tongue in a foreign language than in her own. “I’m, I’m looking for the high school,” she said. “Kurimoto Kohkoh.“
He waded through the water and laid the plants down on the edge of the irrigation gutter. Then, bracing strong arms on the concrete blocks, launched himself over the small stream and onto the highway’s shoulder to stand face-to-face with her.
Jane’s knees went a little weak. It was such a natural gesture, so fluid and relaxed, all a single motion. Yet to summon the strength to make such a leap he must be built like a tiger. She let her gaze flicker to his hands, huge and callused, and the tanned skin of his arms, just as tight and muscled as she’d expected. And then he reached up, again in a gesture both larger than life and utterly effortless, and pulled off his kasa, revealing a tuft of wild, wheat-colored hair.
Squinty eyes blinked blue at her. He was young, and his pale face was out of place above the sun-tanned arms, as though it had been dropped atop the wrong body. He stretched out a hand. “You see the gas station on that corner?” he said, and Jane nodded, although she couldn’t turn her head to actually look. He was too interesting to turn away from. “Take a right there and keep walking. You’ll pass a bus stop on the corner, Kurimoto kohkoh-mae. Go up that side street to the top of the hill, and on the other side you’ll see the high school.”
“Oh my God, sounds like a trek,” Jane sighed, ruffling through her short-cropped hair with the fingers of one lean hand.
“In this weather, yeah,” the man agreed. “You picked a weird time of year to show up.”
“I guess,” she said. “I didn’t really think about when I was getting here, I just–”
“Got here, right?” He grinned as though he’d gone through the same thought process himself. Jane wondered if he had. Was he as enamored of the country as she had been? But his Japanese was so distressingly pedestrian– he spoke like he’d memorized it all from a phrasebook. She sort of wanted to beat him about the head for making foreigners look bad.
Then God got her for being self-righteous. An elderly farmer wearing an identical outfit was wading through the rows of rice and waving a hand. The farmer shouted something that Jane, to her great chagrin, couldn’t
for the life of her decipher. Served her right, she supposed. What had he said? He was going to put on the tea? Cha hairu zo, with a weird regional dialect, maybe?
The man in front of her waved back, and then turned toward Jane and wrinkled his brow at the sight of her quizzical expression. “It’s my name,” he said. “Child.”
“Oh.” Chairudo. That’s what she’d thought he’d said. Utterly pleased with herself, Jane forgot to ask why the heck a grown man would be going by the name Child.
“Well. I need to get back to work,” he said. “See you around. Welcome to Kurimoto.” And in one more stunningly easy gesture, he reached his arm up in a great sweep and plopped his kasa onto her head. Then he was jumping down into the field again and within a few blinks was deep in conversation with his farmer friend.
Jane stared after him a moment. “T- thank you,” she called out halfheartedly, but there was no sign that he’d heard her. Puzzled and feeling slightly lightheaded, she adjusted the kasa and trudged her weary way toward the gas station.
