Now, Jane used to call herself Joan, for no other reason than she thought Jane was far too token a name. She didn’t want to share a name with Mary Janes, or plain Janes, or Jane Doe. And it was funny, because Jane was as plain as you could get. She had the brown hair for which the word mousy was coined, and she wore it close to her skull and manageable. She’d never met a blowdryer she spent more than five seconds with. Showers were a waste of time, when there was so much else in the world she’d rather be doing.
Mostly, Jane would rather be teaching. From girlhood, when she sat on the steps of the living room teaching her younger sister Lauren to read at age 2, she’d found her niche, her sense of importance, from being the one who knew things. It made her an expert and a role model, and it made prettier eyes than her own shine at her, despite the dullness of her complexion. Maybe she didn’t look like much, but Jane was worth something when she could teach.
The other thing she enjoyed was puzzling. She was off of regular crosswords and onto cryptics by the time she was 15; by the time sudoku started being popular in the United States, she was bored by most of the regular ones and sought out new varieties. It was sudoku, in fact, that cemented her love for Japan, despite the fact that in the country itself, it was never called sudoku; that wouldn’t be nearly exotic enough for the foreign-stuff-loving Japanese. No, they had to name it in English: Number Place, or nanpure for short. But that was too boring for American publishers, who had to invent a Japanese name for the puzzle. Who knew. Maybe by now Japanese people had picked up the American name for it. It certainly must sound at least as exotic as the English equivalent.
But it wasn’t sudoku that was the origin of Jane’s Japanophilia. No, that honor belonged to a photograph she’d seen when she was twelve. It looked like an outdoor tunnel, leafy green background suffused with sunlight and through the middle of it all, an endless set of orange gates like train tracks. They looked like pi symbols, or top-heavy letters H, and there was just one after another after another for what must have been miles. Jane was sure that if she ever found that place in the real world, it would transport her into another dimension entirely. And she wasn’t the type who thought much about other dimensions. She’d just never seen anything quite so otherworldly in her life.
The photo, she learned later, was of Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto, and the gates were called torii. Literally, “the place where the birds alight.” Jane started flapping her wings that very day, confident that if she just tried hard enough and flew far enough, she, too, would be able to alight atop the gate to a Shinto shrine and find her opening to another dimension.
