A Novel by Holly Thompson
This is the first section of Ash. It is a prologue section whose action takes place when Caitlin is a young girl living in Kyoto, fifteen years before the main events of the novel.
You can read the rest of Ash when it is published in October 2001.
Visit "The World of Ash" website to find out more about Ash, background locations in Kagoshima and Kyoto, plus cultural details.
July 14, 1970
Yellow. They're both wearing yellow. Caitlin a gingham smock with rickrack along the hem, and Mie a citrine party dress with a bow on each puffed sleeve.
Caitlin likes when they wear the same colors, and she wishes her hair were crow black to match Mie's. At least their last names are close-Oide and Ober. Someday they will marry brothers, they've told their parents. Someday they will live in the same house. On the way to school in the mornings, they pretend they're twins with their red leather rucksacks-strutting along, copying one another with hands on hips, mimicking each other's accents. And when their mothers take them to department stores downtown, they like to gaze on themselves, side by side, in long mirrors. Once Mie told the greengrocer they were sisters, and when the woman, hefting a crate of daikon, asked, mocking, how it was that Mie spoke Japanese and Caitlin English, Mie turned to Caitlin and said matter-of-factly, "She doesn't speak English, do you?" and they hooked arms and left the store chattering noisily in Kyoto dialect.
Today they're holding hands along the Uji riverbank. Plastic insect cages hang from long ribbons around their necks and thump against their stomachs as they walk. The ribbons are yellow too. They can't get enough yellow. Caitlin grows dizzy with yellow. She doesn't see how she could have ever liked blue.
Ahead their fathers talk, stopping now and then to look back at them. They enjoy being out with just their fathers-no younger sisters to slow them down, no mothers to tell them how to stand or sit or speak. And Mie's mother is so pregnant now, that Caitlin can't look at her without grimacing. She's too big, and Caitlin wants her to be small again and is glad her mother isn't huge and waddling. Sometimes Caitlin and Mie wave to their fathers, and every so often they race up the bank toward them. But mostly they ignore the two men to swing their nets at dragonflies, to test a rock shaped like a seat, or to watch a fat stick twirl crazily through the foaming white water.
In the cages, jostled about, cling the hoppers and cicadas they found at the temple. The priest's wife helped them hunt while their fathers sat on the veranda talking with the priest. They're disappointed not to have found any beetles, but the priest's wife has promised she'll save in a terrarium whatever unusual insects she finds in the garden for them to claim the next time Caitlin's father comes to visit her husband.
As they walk along the riverbank, they scan the grasses and rocks and agree that if they catch something neither of them already has in her collection at home, they'll share it. Caitlin can keep it at her house for a night, then Mie at hers. They often take turns this way with their finds-piggyback hoppers, gold bugs, coins from the gutter, pottery shards, a spark plug. Once they even traded their pillows, and Caitlin liked falling asleep on cotton full of the scent of Mie.
But there are hardly any insects to be found in Uji's heavy mid-July heat, so they stop eyeing the short grasses beside the path, and instead swing their arms back and forth as they walk. They know they'll at least see cicadas in the cherry trees up along the road that follows the river. So they sing: songs they've learned at school, Four Leaves hits, and songs of their own to which they've coordinated hand motions. Mie bats at dragonflies that zoom near, then as a joke puts her insect net over her head. Caitlin does the same, and they walk upriver examining the bank, the bridge to the island, and the backs of their fathers through the tiny diamond holes in the mesh.
But when they spot the flicker of blue tail at the tip of Mie's shoe, they yank the nets off. Caitlin isn't sure what they've seen-she can't imagine an insect so long and blue and shiny-only dragonflies, but they don't slither. Mie cries, "Tokage!" and Caitlin furrows her brow. Lizard? She's never seen one blue.
They scramble and stalk over the damp and mossy rocks, nets poised, swatting at grasses and lifting concealing stones to follow the lizard's wriggling path, until suddenly the water is there, taunting with spray, too loud, too close, too white. The lizard darts beneath a rock, Caitlin points, then straightens, and a hand brushes the length of her calf like a feather.