Read a Review

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.

Excerpted from ASH © Copyright 2001 by Holly Thompson.
Reprinted with permission by Stone Bridge Press. All rights
reserved.