Chapter Text
“Ah," said the fox, "I shall cry."
“It is your own fault," said the little prince. "I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you…"
“Yes, that is so," said the fox.
“But now you are going to cry!" said the little prince.
“Yes, that is so," said the fox.
“Then it has done you no good at all!"
“It has done me good," said the fox, "because of the color of the wheat fields.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Today is Kojiro’s third day of kindergarten, and it’s raining. Water is falling in big, heavy splatters off the overhead awning as he stands in the mouth of the apartment stairwell. He shuffles his feet against the damp concrete. The rain doesn’t stop.
He’s supposed to walk to school by himself today. Mama and Papa had taken him on the first day so he could learn, and Grandpa had taken him yesterday so he could practice. Today, he gets to show off how mature he can be and make the five-minute walk alone. Like a big boy.
But now it’s raining.
There are already puddles on the sidewalk he knows he needs to take. His shoes will get all squishy even if he doesn’t jump in them on purpose. And he has an umbrella, but what if he forgets to hold it up again? It’s hard to remember to hold it above his head when he has to also remember how to get to school and watch out for cars and people AND maybe he’ll see something cool or shiny or exciting, like a bomb or a polar bear or a spy or a spy riding an exploding polar bear.
There are lots of reasons he can’t go to school today; the rain is just easiest to explain.
But he doesn’t like school as much as he thought he would. He’s still a nenshou, but he’s easily the oldest amongst the first-year students. And he started late too, joining the class in August rather than the spring because of moving from Nago to Naha for Papa’s job. All the other kids have had ages to become friends, and none of them seem particularly interested in making another one.
When he tried to tell his Mama that, she told him it would just take time. But it’s been days! He misses the park in Nago with the big swing set. He misses the trees that shaded their old house, where his Grandma told him stories about yokai and heroes and kami and tricky, scheming foxes. Where the sun would shine through his bedroom window in a dazzling display of pinks every year when the cherry blossoms bloomed. Where the other kids would grin as they shared their bentos and toys and the adults all called him silly nicknames.
He misses Nago, and he misses seeing his Grandma smile with her whole face rather than the stoic memorial photo sitting in their family shrine.
Frustrated, stubborn tears well up in Kojiro’s eyes, and he tries to scrub them away with his hands so they don’t spill onto his blue apron. He’s not a baby anymore, but he’s crying like one. It’s terrible. He lets out a single, hiccoughing sob, as loud as he can.
His Mama doesn’t magically appear.
Nor do Papa or Grandpa.
The rain keeps right on falling.
Well, he is forced to conclude he’s on his own for this one. When he sticks out a hand to test the rain, the water is warm. That’s not so bad. And if he holds his umbrella really close to his head, he looks like one of the amefurikozō of Grandma’s stories, the little boys who call down rain with umbrella hats and magic lanterns. It makes running through the puddles more fun to imagine that he made them, stomping up a little storm as he takes the road to his school.
“Grah!” Kojiro offers up to the sky. He shakes his imaginary lantern, and it’s like the sky gets darker. “Kojiro says it must rain more! A fox is getting married!” He remembers that too from Grandma’s stories, a polite amefurikozō creating a sunshower over the fox’s wedding.
The clouds humor him, whipping up a wind that tears the hat from his head. He nearly loses the umbrella too, clinging to it with both hands.
“Wait!” he shouts as the little yellow bucket hat flies down the street. “I need that!” It’s part of his uniform, proudly plopped on his head just this morning by his Papa. He can’t lose it!
His legs are shorter than the wind is swift, and it’s hard to keep the umbrella up when he’s running, but Kojiro’s a big boy now and that means getting his own hat. The whirling gust carries the hat over a puddle and across the road. Kojiro has to stop and check for traffic first, but there’s no one out in this dismal weather. Except for the rain and his rapidly fleeing hat, the whole world feels eerily frozen and empty.
Kojiro doesn’t notice; there’s a street to cross. By the time he’s hopping across another puddle to the sidewalk, the hat is dancing on air currents near the abandoned lot down the road. Tall, dense bushes spill over the chain-link fence. But the hat finds a way through and disappears into the overgrown grass on the other side.
The urge to cry is setting back in. What if there are no more hats for him? What if they don’t let him into class without his hat? His uniform is important, Papa had said, so losing a part of it might mean that he’s not grown enough to go to school.
There’s a gap in the leaf-covered fence, shadowed by thick foliage and trembling in the wind. The torn, curling edges of the fence jut out of the bushes like gnarled teeth. Kojiro can’t see his hat, and he doesn’t want to get the rest of his uniform dirty by crawling into the scary passageway.
He should get an adult, like his Mama told him to do when he needed help.
And maybe he would have, if not for the odd, pitiable whistle-whine that trickled out from the yard. It’s an eerie sound itself; goosebumps shiver down his neck. But he knows this sound! It’s like when his neighbor’s dog in Nago had puppies, the meek little squeaks and whines they made to let the mother dog know they were hungry or cold or scared or needed a hug.
If he’s hearing it now, there must be a puppy in the yard that needs help, Kojiro concludes. Hat forgotten, the mouth to the yard doesn’t seem so bad. He can brave the monster’s maw when there’s a puppy to rescue!
He hunkers low under his umbrella, crouching awkwardly through the opening in the fence. The loose edges of chain-link scrape at his umbrella and catch for a moment, but then he slips past. His shoes are squishy from his puddle jumping, and the bottom of his smock is muddy, but he’s standing triumphantly in the waist-high grass of the lot. He roars at the sky in success.
The puppy whines again.
It’s hard to pinpoint the noise over the rain pattering on his umbrella and the wind shaking the leaves and the distant sounds of the city filtering through. But it seems like it’s coming from a tumbling, half-rotted shed in the corner of the property, so that’s where Kojiro aims. He has to slog through the muddy yard, kicking at the tall grass when it threatens to cling and trip him, but he makes it to the shed.
“Hello?” he tries. The puppy hasn’t made another noise, and the shed door is closed with a heavy lock and chain. Hopefully, the dog that needs his help isn’t trapped inside. “Where are you, puppy?”
The puppy yips this time, breathy and weak. The noise comes from the far side of the shed. Planks of thin wood have peeled and fallen away from the roof to create a tiny little tent, like when Kojiro builds pillow forts against the side of the couch. The opening is too small for him to fit in all the way, but he can peek his head inside. So he does.
It isn’t a puppy he finds in the tangle of plywood and smushed grass. Instead, a fox stares warily up at him, head pillowed on Kojiro’s yellow hat and half-soaked from the trickle of water through its haphazard shelter. Its tail is wedged between some of the heavier pieces of wood, ones so big Kojiro’s not sure he can move them without help.
Kojiro bows his head low to be even with the fox’s round, gold eyes. He whispers in his softest, gentlest voice – the one his Mama uses when he crawls into her arms after a nightmare in the dark – and says, “Hello, fox. My name is Kojiro.”
The poor little fox whines. It gives a half-hearted shake, trying to fling away the water in its fur, but it doesn’t amount to much.
“I think you’re stuck,” Kojiro observes. That seems to be the biggest problem, the one keeping the fox from moving out of the rain to somewhere warm. The logs trapping it are thick and heavy, bigger than anything he’s ever tried to move before. But no one came to help when he cried, and now the fox needs him. “Hold on. I’ll fix it.”
He’s going to try. He scoots backwards out of the plywood tent and toddles behind it, where a stack of logs has clearly spilled. He can see the very tip of the fox’s tail peaking out. The log next to it is slimy from rain and moss, and a fat bug skitters across his hand when he grabs it.
He tries to pull it away from the fox’s tail, but it slips out of his hands. The rain is drenching his hair without a hat or umbrella; his curly bangs slap wetly over his eyes. The rough bark leaves angry pink scrapes on his palms.
He tries to move the log again, wrapping both arms all the way around it and pulling. It doesn’t want to move, but Kojiro pulls. And pulls. And yells. And pulls.
Finally – finally – he stumbles to the ground, feet and hands flailing wildly as he lands on his butt. The log tumbles over too, and the fox yips again, unseen. Its tail, now freed, moves cautiously, then disappears in a flash into the plywood tent.
Kojiro tries to scrape the mud from his uniform, but it’s a lost cause. Well, the best he can do at this point is to retrieve his umbrella and hat before heading off to school. But he saved a fox! He’s a hero, now, so he doesn’t have to worry about uniforms or getting in trouble. Heroes don’t get in trouble!
Except, when Kojiro pokes his head back into the plywood tent, the fox is still there, neatly curled up on his hat. Its eyes are closed like it’s sleeping.
“Ah,” Kojiro whispers. “Excuse me, fox.”
The fox blinks one eye open to stare at him.
“That’s my hat.”
The fox doesn’t move.
“I need it for school, please,” he tries politely.
The fox closes its eyes, turning its head away.
Kojiro could go to school without his hat. He’s a hero, so he can’t get in trouble either way. But it feels wrong to do so. And he can’t just take it; Mama told him to never touch wild animals because it could make him and them sick.
But the foxes in Grandma’s stories like food, he recalls, and sometimes people can trade with them for gifts.
“If I give you some food, can I have my hat back?” Kojiro asks. Golden eyes snap open to watch him as Kojiro wrestles the bag off his back and pulls out his bento. Foxes are supposed to like azukimeshi and tofu, but Papa packed his lunch today, which means the box is full of his Italian cooking. Kojiro lays the box out before the fox and explains the different dishes to it. “I have insalata di riso and prosciutto and melon and peaches. I even have bruschetta and some crunchy bread to eat it on!”
The fox doesn’t move from its nest on his hat, but it stretches its nose towards the bento. Its face scrunches as it sniffs the rich scents of tomatoes, olive oil, and tuna. But it doesn’t take any.
Kojiro frowns. “Just try some,” he encourages the fox. “How will you know you don’t like it if you don’t even try.” He carefully reaches out, slowly so the fox doesn’t flinch, and uses his hands to scoop some bruschetta onto a piece of toasted bread. Some of it spills over his chilled, chubby fingers. But he manages to spread it the way Papa does, and he smiles when he sets it in front of the fox.
“This is my favorite, so you’ll like it too.” It’s exciting to watch the fox reach out and tentatively nibble at the smear of tomato. It stares at him, pausing, before quickly scarfing the whole thing down. “See!” he cries, “My Papa makes really good food!”
The fox doesn’t wait anymore. It leaps up in a blur of orange, and when Kojiro blinks, the fox has already buried its head into the bento. The bruschetta vanishes into its tiny, snapping jaws. Kojiro just watches, laughing quietly.
“Can I have my hat back now?” he asks when the fox finally slows down. A thin pink tongue darts around the inside of the bento, chasing down any remaining trace of tomato and garlic. Kojiro takes the lack of response as agreement and carefully reaches around the fox for his hat, discarded and covered in tiny muddy footprints.
The fox’s jaw snaps quick as a snake.
Kojiro freezes as the movement, startled at the pinprick of teeth over his wrist. The fox’s mouth holds him in place, but it isn’t biting hard enough to break the skin. Just enough to stop him.
He doesn’t move. Neither does the fox.
Quietly and carefully – as careful as he can – Kojiro bows his head in apology. “Sorry,” he offers the fox. “I shouldn’t have just grabbed it.”
The fox releases him.
This is a very clever fox, Kojiro is starting to realize. It may have been too small to free itself, but it is just as smart as Grandma’s magical kitsune. So, he needs to be careful, or he might end up cursed.
The fox’s golden eyes are trained on him as it circles back around his hat, sitting daintily on the other side. Kojiro holds very still. The fox tilts its head, then grins. Its laugh is full of squeaks and chirps as its tail waves from side to side and its ears press back into its fur.
Kojiro can’t help but laugh too, a trickle that grows like ocean waves until his cheeks bunch around the force of his grin. They’re laughing together! He hasn’t laughed this hard since they moved, since Grandma stopped being able to weave stories for him while they listen to rain rattle down the kusari-doi. They’re laughing and sharing food and playing games, like friends do. Kojiro’s first friend in Naha.
A friend who just happens to be a fox.
The fox settles itself first, at least enough to pick up Kojiro’s yellow hat in its mouth. It drapes the floppy plastic across his bento before hopping back on lively feet with a satisfied squeak.
Kojiro smiles and bows his head again. “Thank you for my hat!”
He grabs it before the fox can change its mind, pulling it tightly over his wet hair before it can escape again. He expects it to smell like dirt or rain or wet fur, but instead the familiar scent of fresh flowers and clean grass settle around him like a heavy blanket. Like when the cherry blossoms would fall around his old house, he concludes with a smile, fumbling to repack his bento.
It’s a nice smell. Kojiro feels warmer despite his rain-soaked closes and muddy knees. “We should be friends,” he tells the fox. The bento gets placed carefully back in his backpack, and his backpack slipped onto his shoulders again. “Then I can bring you food every day.”
The fox blinks at him, watching.
“If we’re friends, I need a name to call you.” Kojiro doesn’t even need to think, the perfect name comes to him, carried by the heady, sweet smell of nature around him. “How about Cherry?”
The fox blinks again. Then nods.
Kojiro bows low one last time, to be polite, and says, “Hello, Cherry. Thank you for being my friend.”
The fox stretches, chin resting on the ground as its front legs extend long in front of it. Almost like it’s bowing as well.
And then it’s gone, darting under the plywood around them and out of sight.
“I’ll be back later!” Kojiro calls in its wake. He misses his fox friend – Cherry – already, but school is waiting, and the magic warmth gifted by his returned hat is starting to leech away. He grabs his umbrella and heads back out of the yard.
He only pauses to make one last promise. “With food!”
Today is Kojiro’s 6th month of trying to open a restaurant, and his apartment is a disaster. He’d moved into the apartment space above his soon-to-be restaurant nearly 3 months ago, but he’s still living out of boxes. He has furniture at least. But the couch is buried under unpacked books and the collected debris of adult life. The drawers of his wardrobe are empty; the closets are stacked full of things teenage Kojiro had left stored at his parents’ house when he left for culinary school and the Mediterranean Sea.
The contractors working to prepare the restaurant space have been polite enough to ignore how he’s been cycling through the same five shirts and two pairs of shorts.
Kojiro frowns as he stares across the wasteland of cardboard boxes and empty walls that is his living room, then retreats to the safety of the kitchen. It’s the only place in his apartment that’s been unpacked and organized. By virtue of the fact that he needed to use it for recipe testing and menu building while the restaurant’s kitchen was still being refitted. But it’s clean, the countertops decluttered, and it eases the itch that the messy apartment awakens in his brain.
There’s no getting around it, Kojiro knows. His apartment needs to be livable at some point, and this is likely the last good time to do it for several months. But after breakfast. And some caffeine courtesy of the well-loved moka he had brought back from Italy. Sitting at his little table with his back to the waiting clutter, he can even enjoy the easy morning as the world wakes up around him.
The restaurant – his restaurant, Sia la Luce – is quiet now that the renovations are finished, and furniture delivered. His new staff will arrive in the evening to continue training and preparing for a soft opening. Cars putter by on the street outside, and the excited chatter of school kids bubble up through his open windows in the muggy August heat.
A good reminder that he needs to install the window air conditioning unit as well.
He delays the inevitable by handwashing his coffee cup and aligning it perfectly in its cupboard. “You got this,” Kojiro mutters into the air. “Just pick a box and do it. One box at a time.”
He turns around.
The boxes on his couch taunt him.
“Let’s start in the bedroom,” he asserts to no one.
The bedroom – with its four walls and limited number of moving boxes – feels much more manageable. His bed lies against the far wall, facing the wardrobe and illuminated by a wide window that catches the morning sunrise over the hills of Naha. The ensuite and closet are off to the side, and the space between them contains only a small pile of clutter.
Moving is tedious and boring, a chore he’s mostly been able to avoid by going to school in Florence. He had only brought a suitcase and a backpack when he arrived. And coming back to Okinawa months ago, he had only added one more suitcase to the mix. Between returning to the island and moving into this newly renovated apartment, he had lived with his parents, so he hadn’t bothered unpacking.
The first box he grabs from the bedroom pile is bedding. Kojiro picks through them mournfully, the single set of red sheets on his bed mocking him. He’s been washing and reusing them constantly because it had seemed like more trouble to go looking for the spares. He growls as he haphazardly shoves the fabric onto the top shelf of the closet. “Should’ve done this ages ago.”
He should have, but this whole restaurant thing has been a whirlwind – sometimes bordering on a nightmare.
He couldn’t have expected to come out of 4 years of culinary school and an 18-month apprenticeship with the opportunity to start his own business in his home town. With no practical experience in starting and running a successful restaurant, no one would ever risk offering him a significant investment. And he didn’t have that kind of money just lying around. So, when his mom sent him the application for Naha’s small business development grant program, he didn’t give it much thought.
She wanted him to come home. Kojiro could understand that. Italy was beautiful, and his dad’s extended family were welcoming and delightful. But Okinawa was his home. He wanted to come back.
Completing the application was just a way to appease his mother and soothe his own homesickness. He filled it with the fanciful daydreams of a romantic, intimate Italian setting overlooking Naha’s scenic ocean views – warm lighting and soft woody tones, a cozy bar and nook-like seating. And a window between the kitchen and front to bring the whole space together. It was by no means a comprehensive or impressive business plan.
Then the acceptance came through as he bounced between gigs up and down the Amalfi Coast.
The next box Kojiro opens on his bedroom floor is a weird collection of anime figurines and graphic tees from middle school. Holding one shirt up, he’s not sure it could fit over his arm now. One of the boxes his mom packed for him. He laughs as a little plastic vulpix tumbles out of another t-shirt. Most of it can be donated, and the corner looks like a good place for that pile.
There’s more boxes of clothes that don’t fit and things he hasn’t thought about since he was 15. Photo albums and manga and school books and old recipe notebooks. He sorts them and shoves things into drawers. It feels productive, especially as he turns music on and sings quietly in Italian. He’s three boxes down before he finally finds clothes that he can actually wear.
Coming back to Japan has been a miracle teetering on the knife-edge of disaster, he thinks as he hangs interview outfits around the stacks of nostalgia in the closet. First, he was flying back at the last minute for an in-person interview with the city business counsel, which he can’t even remember through the fog of jet lag. He wrote a proper business plan on the plane, notes covered in frantic, shaky scribbles and coffee stains. Then it was back to Italy to pack and wait and fret as he waffled between panic and hope and complete assurance that the interview was just to humor him.
But he got the grant and offers of investment from some of the council members. Even a suggestion for a potential restaurant space. And it all came together in the face of Kojiro’s disbelief; the work to update the building started before he was even back, based solely on staticky phone calls and half-baked sketches.
There were months and months of leaving Italy and crashing at his parents’ house in a fever dream as he built a brand and restaurant from the ground up. It felt at times like the council members were practically dragging him toward success. He just stumbled through meetings and problems and decision making until the building was functional, the staff hired, and an opening date set.
Sia is beautiful now, recessed lighting and soft lanterns soften the space. The wooden interior conjurs images of family dinners and intimate, personal dates over small tables and candles. The kitchen is brand new and gleaming, spacious and open, and when he stands at the service counter, he can see the whole front of house.
The apartment above the restaurant is also his, with its own upgrades and renovations now that the construction is finished. The paint is fresh; the floors glow and squeak.
It’s just empty. Except for the moving mess.
That’s been there for months.
But he’s working on it now! The wardrobe is finally stuffed, the boxes from the bedroom floor are sorted. He has a better sense of where things will go, what to hang on the walls and what furniture he still needs to buy. The buzz of anxiety in his head – about his apartment, about next week’s opening night, about management plans and finances and investor expectations – is quieter.
Kojiro cuts open the last box, buried in the depths of his closet, and it feels like a victory. If he finishes one room a day, he’ll still have a few days to do last-minute shopping and organize before the restaurant consumes him. Maybe he’ll ask his parents along; his mom almost certainly has ideas about what he needs.
The last box is full of skateboarding gear. Kojiro grins, worries about Sia and business ownership evaporating as his fingers scrape over the grip tape. His old board looks the same as when he packed it away at the end of the high school – dark blue with bursts of pink and green like fireworks. It was his companion for so much troublemaking before Italy called. Holding it now leaves Kojiro’s heart racing with memories of illicit races down city streets and tricks in the halls of abandoned buildings.
The box has his toolkit and spare parts as well, nostalgia soaked into every item he pulls out. A busted-up piece of metal from the pipe he splintered during a nosegrind, the wavy wheels he had wanted to try but never got the chance, the scuffed and torn-up sneakers he only ever wore when sneaking out late for a meet-up or beef. God, if he didn’t have adult responsibilities bearing down on him, he would start skating again in a heartbeat.
Maybe if the restaurant business is kind to him, he will. The skateboard equipment is reverently tucked into the genkan, just in case.
There’s one last thing at the bottom of the box, a small velvet pouch that scratches at the door of Kojiro’s memories. It’s only once he tips a necklace from the bag that he recalls it, at least in part. The double-looped leather cord and blue triangular charm that always seems to catch the light. He used to wear it everywhere, under school uniforms and t-shirts and even the occasional kimono for festivals. He must have packed it away for safe-keeping when he left.
The necklace is almost warm in Kojiro’s hand. His smile is soft, puzzled, as the actual significance of his former favorite necklace remains elusive. It was a gift, he thinks. From a friend. But he doesn’t remember a name.
Just warm yellow eyes – the color of wheat fields, he remembers thinking once – and long petal-pink hair, a mischievous grin and slim, nimble fingers. The ghostly sensation of cool, tiny hands pressing the necklace into his own stocky grip under the shape of a promise.
But not a name or a face or even a voice.
It was an important gift then, offered in exchange for an equally important vow. I promised to open a restaurant, he thinks, I invited him to come see it, eat there, when I became a famous chef. It still feels that way, dangling in a tangled knot from his fingers. Sunlight finds its gleaming center, like the charm is welcoming him back with a sunny grin.
He picks out the knots, straightens the chord. It settles around his neck in a familiar weight that soothes the rattling bits of his soul, breathes new life into his lungs. In the mirror, he looks complete with the charm resting over his breast.
The earthy scent of cherry blossoms swirls faintly around him.