My grandfather was baptized last month, the Japanese one. I got the message from my sister in Tokyo. "It was beautiful," she wrote. "ojiichan in robes, he bows and water sprinkle. all the days writes the verse on very long scroll, two hours. obaachan happy time smile. love ame :)" Ojiichan is my grandfather, Obaachan my grandmother. I studied this email at a desk that was not mine, behind the closed door of an office that was not mine. I was supposed to be fixing a Windows problem; that is my job. But actually I am never at my desk; I have no desk of my own, strictly speaking. I’m a roving tech person, a problem-solver.

I read the thing again. In fact Ame knows English well, but she pretends not to sometimes, she hates it so much. I replied: "ame: send pictures. love ken." I stared until the screensaver came up, startling me, the company logo, hurtling through space.

*

We are all named Ken. What I mean is, there are many half-Japanese males with my name. It’s popular because it’s common in both Japanese and English. Your typical half-Japanese family has two children, a boy and a girl: the boy is named Ken and the girl, Emi. Emi is not quite Amy, but it is close enough for most Americans. My sister is named Ame, pronounced AH-may. It means rain. I’ve never heard of anyone else with that name, though now that she is famous, perhaps there will be more. I don’t know why my mother decided to be different, naming her Ame. Ame is half of America, maybe that’s why.

*

My mother used to pray for Ojiichan at meals. I used to pray for Ojiichan at my bed, when I remembered. "Father," I would whisper, "open Ojiichan’s eyes to Truth," but it would be tucked in among all the other things. At ten, I prayed harder than at any time in my life. At ten years old I prayed for a Commodore 64 every single day, and Ojiichan about every third day; it was backwards I knew, and yet I had not been to Japan since I was five and I could barely remember what he looked like. When I did remember, I prayed with a guilty fervency that I hoped would make up for forgetfulness; my fingers, folded together, squeezed so tightly that when I was finished they would be blanched and sweating.

We did have Atari. Ame was a year younger but she was better at it than I, at Missile Command and Space Invaders—she would be the one, when the game ended and the screen went to pink and blue or green and purple, she would be the one slamming her joystick down, or else stretching her fingers slowly, working the knots out. I was usually dead long before, and waiting for her to finish; I would stop reading computer ads or comic books and look at the screen, at the end of the world and its candy colors.

*

I rent an apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey; not one of those high-rises above the Palisades, but a smaller one, along the waterfront. It’s slightly expensive but it’s nice enough and I like being on the water. I can look across and see Harlem. The two-family where Ame and I once lived with my mother is close by, a few towns over.

In the kitchen next to my refrigerator—towering over it, actually—is my PDP-11/45. Some people restore old cars; I have my PDP-11. It’s got a reel-to-reel tape drive and expansion trays that slide out and black cabinet doors that open upon rows of circuit boards that can be configured in almost any way, and a front panel that’s simple and clean with two knobs and one row of twenty-seven red rocker switches. Its programs are punched as holes on ticker-tape five centimeters wide. There are people that can actually read and interpret it; they are the theologians of this world. In one of the trays, I’ve installed a two-hundred-and-twenty-four megabyte Intergraph hard drive modification with a metal disk, hard like steel and with a diameter twice that of a vinyl record. In 1972 this thing did calculations faster than God.

I admit, though, that most people just don’t see the point of it. There are few people I know well enough to have over, but every once in a while I get a chance to show someone the PDP. Nobody’s really that impressed. Ame, especially, dislikes it—she visited once a couple of years ago and kicked it every time she went to the refrigerator. It’s old, and I guess most everyone these days wants the fastest, the slickest, the loudest.

*

My father left us soon after I was born. I don’t know what the circumstances were; he just disappeared. My mother died when I was eleven, of cancer. She had given me my first computer that Christmas—the Christmas before—an IBM PC, Jr. I was disappointed, I wanted a Commodore, but I tried not to show it; Mom was dying and it would have hurt her.

She never really talked about what would happen after she was gone. The closest she came to saying anything concrete—to me at least—was near the end, when she called me to her bed. She lay under the covers and I knew how swollen her ankles were under them, filled with a mysterious fluid that I uncomfortably thought of as death. I imagined it thick and purple, dissolving tissue and bone, and turning blood to oil.

She clutched my arm and pulled me closer. "You look American," she said, running her fingers through my hair. "You’ll be okay. Different, but okay." I didn’t know what she was talking about, and I asked her, but she didn’t seem to hear; she said, "At least you know some Japanese," and then closed her eyes and settled into a thick snore.

Ame walked in. I looked at her then. Her hair was so black it was almost silver. It was almost blue. Her face was round. She looked like a doll. She walked into the room and when she saw me there she screwed up her face and walked out.

We stayed with the church pastor for a week after my mother died. "Wish we could keep you with us," said his wife, sweetly. I don’t know if they tried to reach my father—or if anybody knew where he was. But my mother had made different plans for us. A week after the funeral, the pastor and his wife drove us to the airport, and we boarded a plane for Tokyo.

*

About a week after Ame’s email I got two more, right together. I read them at home on the PDP, which I have rigged for the internet. The first had no message—just an attachment. When I clicked it open it tumbled out of my browser and into another window, a video of the baptism.

There is my grandfather, bowing. He stands straight and stiff. He still has the same bristled army haircut he had fifty years ago, only it is white now. The sounds are all wrong—I can hear people coughing, I can hear the squeak of chairs, but I can’t hear the Japanese pastor and I can’t hear Ojiichan’s response. The water falls silently on his head, like raindrops. He turns to bow to the congregation and then the clapping starts, and it is as sharp as thunder, before the camcorder mic recoils, and smothers it. I can’t see where my grandmother is but I know she is weeping. She has been waiting a long time.

The second email, directly after the first, was worded almost as an afterthought: "Job job job?" it started. "come to tokyo, i can get you best computer job, drink pepsi and do web site. ken work with ame, call your sister for big yens." She’d hinted before at things she had up her sleeve, cash in her pocket and amazing, can’t-miss opportunities. She had made a name for herself finally, and I couldn’t help but read in this message a bit of gloating, a note of pity.

*

"Do you remember them?" I had asked my sister on that flight to Tokyo, years ago. From the window seat I saw us poised over a glaciered Yukon.

She shrugged.

"Well, do you?" I asked. I waited. "Do you think we’ll understand them?" I was not sure—my Japanese was not good, and they did not know English. "Do you? Well?"

"Don’t bother me," she said.

She was like that sometimes, so I chose to ignore her. I went back to what I was doing, looking at the map in the magazine, trying to figure out where we were, exactly.

A missionary-friend of my grandparents met us at the airport, and led us on the train to Karuizawa. Ojiichan and Obaachan greeted us at the train station. Obaachan took my hand and shook it continuously and profusely; all of the feeble strength in her body went towards my hand. She shook it and it seemed she could not speak but only laugh, with tears that she wiped away with a handkerchief. I was embarrassed. Then she took my sister’s hand, but Ame dropped it and hugged her; my grandmother uttered a short cry, of surprise and delight. Ojiichan, behind her, stepped forward, and immediately picked up a suitcase—though he, too, smiled and laughed, and remarked on how we had grown. I think he did not wish to submit to an American hug.

I noticed that Obaachan’s breasts hung to her belly and I was suddenly mortified.

Their house was small and tightly fitted, with thin walls and square rooms. Ame and I were to share a four-mat room. In the closets were futons that we were to pull out each night, and fold away in the mornings.

"I thought that we should go for a walk," Ojiichan said, a phrase he would use often, I thought that we would, or Now we shall do such-and-such. But I was relieved that I understood these simple words. Later, he confessed that he, too, was relieved on that first day, that we had understood them: "We were both so nervous!" he exclaimed. "Obaachan couldn’t sleep for a whole week, before you came."

That first walk was short; I guess my grandparents were tired from the anticipation. I remember being the first one outside, waiting for the others. It was early summer and there was an echo of tennis balls in the air. There was a tennis court in front of the house and another could be seen further down the hill, between the short fields of cabbage. Out the door in front of the house I stood clutching the tennis-court fence, the chain links digging into my knuckles and crisscrossing against my face; and through it I saw the broad slopes of the volcano rising towards a gentle hump, and above that the wisps of smoke that trailed off, and after that the small, unmoored puffs, dissolving quietly into the blue sky.

"I can still picture it," said my grandfather from behind my head, speaking slowly and clearly, "the last time it erupted. The stones dropped through the roofs of some houses like bombs. At night it was a pillar of fire." I turned around and he was staring intently at the mountain. He stood so still, a way I had never seen anyone stand, straight and with his hands clasped behind him. Then he said, "Okay," and we walked. We walked slowly and in silence, and I kicked the stones at my feet ahead of us, kicking them again and again as we went. Ame meandered along the road’s edge. We stopped at the train tracks and rested on a log; my grandmother had brought plastic bags and we placed them on the log so as not to get dirty.

"Exercise is good for you," my grandfather said, looking at me. "We walk every day." He watched me and I nodded.

He asked Obaachan how she felt, and if she was ready, and then we walked back. This time Ame and I lagged behind a bit. As we walked I could feel her get closer and then her breath in my ear, and she whispered, "I remember," and then ran forward and before long she and my grandmother were laughing, Ojiichan chuckling alongside them.

*

It was apparent that my grandfather liked to talk. First he would say, "We will drink otcha now." Obaachan would pour the tea. Then he would talk. We had tea three, four, sometimes five times a day. Ojiichan was more interesting than any old man I had known, and I loved and trusted him immediately for that fact alone.

On the second night, after dinner, he explained things. In the summers, we would stay with them; for the rest of the year, we would go to a Christian boarding school in America, that they would choose for us. The American missionaries at their church were helping them with information and applications. In telling us this, he seemed so serious—and Obaachan so anxious—that from the first I understood that, in the matter of our schooling, he was bound to Obaachan’s wishes.

"Next," he said, peremptorily, as if he was working from a checklist, which in fact he was, a short square of hand-ruled paper, dense with kanji. Mornings, Obaachan was to teach us Japanese; three afternoons a week Ojiichan would drive us to the missionaries’ house for English and Math lessons. We were to watch television at least three nights a week, to help us with our Japanese.

"But Ame," he said mischievously as he was finishing. "But Ken. Want to see yourselves, as babies?" My sister and I looked at each other, and shrugged. He pulled out albums, reams of them, and showed us baby pictures and pictures from our last visit, and black-and-white pictures of my mother at our age, Ame’s age, looking just like her in fact. They had wedding pictures, in color, and he berated my father’s photo as if it was my father himself. But he was joking; his arms waved through the air, You stole our child away to America, he scolded the blue-eyed groom, and Ame laughed and aped him though I wasn’t sure why.

At the back of one album I found pictures of war, of horses and cannons and guns, and of Ojiichan in uniform, young and decorated.

"Tell me what it was like," I said.

He would not. "War is terrible," he said. "War is terrible and cruel." Obaachan shook her head. He did tell us what it was like after the war. After the war they had nothing. After the war my grandmother took his uniform apart and sewed clothing for my infant mother with it. My grandfather tried to plant cabbage in his father’s field, but the crop failed. He was no farmer, he said. He was a soldier. They ended up at the community center by the park where the town had pooled its rice supply.

From the first day, we ate many new Japanese dishes. My mother’s dinners had been simple: soba, udon, okonomiyaki. Obaachan cooked full meals every day, dishes that were new for us, and what Obaachan called simple country foods were to us exotic delicacies. But she always seemed embarrassed about it, like she was clumsy, a simpleton. I did not understand that then, why she felt that way.

*

My sister has sent me emails over the past two weeks, about visiting, and jobs. "ame misses ken, please call soon, write soon, visit soon. web jobs is waiting, you want?" Or, "ojiichan-obaachan ask, how is ken, when will we see ken? so old now, ojiichan 86, so old! visit japan, see them, see me, maybe see job?" She’s forwarded me one job listing, and then another. She wants to twist my arm with question marks, to pull me along by the arm like I’m still eleven. "But no PDP in Japan," she says, "No place for big calculator box."

*

Before every meal, Obaachan would pray. Inori. She would bow her neck into her chest and her prayer would move quickly and quietly over the syllables that I could not pick up, that even Ame couldn’t understand, running the prayer through sentences without stuttering and hardly pausing for breath, until she ended with a longer pause and a deep breath and the one word of English, Amen, that was almost not spoken but sung, and broken into two head-nodding syllables. A-men. Many times I kept my eyelids parted slightly, so that I could look across and watch Ojiichan sitting quietly and staring up at the ceiling. I would lower my head then and pinch my eyelids shut, to pray for him. Only once did our eyes meet, and it was a terrible moment, like I was sneaking a shameful glimpse of his sex.

*

Three times a week, we visited the Edgars for our English and Math lessons, and each time Obaachan prepared a present wrapped in a furoshiki for us to take to them, some bean cakes or English-style tea. She told us to behave. "Mr. Edgar is a very good man," she said before our first day. "He led me to God." Mr. Edgar was tall and old and had gotten used to stooping so much that he walked with one hand set in the small of his back. I do not know how tall he actually was but in a Japanese house he seemed a giant, ducking his head under doorways. He was always cheerful and he always had presents in return, which he did not offer to us, but to Ojiichan. There were books, many times, and tapes; sometimes a Pirates hat or a sweater. It made Ojiichan blush, always, and he politely refused them; but if the missionary urged strongly enough, he accepted.

I do not remember what Mrs. Edgar looked like, though it was she who taught us the lessons. I studied hard for her, my face close to the books and papers. I remember her thin, trembling voice. It was a lame voice, a pathetic voice, but I liked listening to it; I liked listening to any English at all.

"Your grandmother showed me the tea ceremony," she said once. "It was so beautiful, so complicated. She explained all the parts to me, like turning the cups. I love it when there are hidden meanings to things, little secrets."

Ame did not do so well. She made faces at Mrs. Edgar behind her back and smirked in her face and stared out the window. She chewed her pencils and pinched me under the table. She flummoxed Mrs. Edgar, who finally found a way to pacify her, through candies. Ame sucked on them noisily, still bratty but under control.

As he drove us to and from lessons, Ojiichan would point out places in town linked to his life, repeating the same things almost every day. "This is the best golf course." "That used to be my father’s farm. Negi and daikon." "After the war, all of Karuizawa got their food here." "I used to ride my father’s horse down this street."

The first time she heard about the horse, Ame, in the back seat, perked up. "A horse," she said. "That must have been fun. More fun than cars, anyway."

He smacked the steering wheel with a flat palm. "Your ass hurts!" he said. "When it rains you get wet. Nobody rode horses who could afford cars—and only Tokyo people had those, the princes and rich men. Look," he said, pointing. "That’s where your mother used to go to school."

I turned and watched it go by and after it had passed Ame asked me, softly and with a funny face, "Can you picture her in school?" I shook my head, because I couldn’t—I couldn’t imagine her there, or anywhere in Japan. I couldn’t really see her face anymore, though I remembered other things, the lilt in her voice, her fingers in my hair.

*

My grandmother never mentioned God in front of Ojiichan except to pray before meals. But privately, she told me she prayed for him every day. "You, too, please, pray," she said to me after a Japanese lesson, grasping my hand and shaking it. "We are old," she said. "We will die soon." I said yes but then I said no I did not mean they were old—yes I would pray. Through the window we could see Ojiichan hoeing, bent over, the blade dropping and pulling the soil back. In truth, I hardly prayed anymore; and, standing there with her holding my hand, I was stricken with guilt. My grandmother bowed over her open Bible for an hour and a half, daily. Her faith was hidden and quiet and her strength was one of longing.

That night, lying in the darkness under the covers of the futon, I said my prayers. But Ame interrupted me. "What are you doing?" she said loudly. I must have been whispering. "Are you jerking off?"

"I’m praying," I answered, quickly.

"Oh," she said. "Right."

I’m not sure where she learned about that. It startled me—though I had never heard that phrase before, and though I had not yet felt a need to masturbate. But I knew immediately what she meant somehow; the week before, Ame had been in my first wet dream, and since then I had been suffering an immense and lonely guilt. I renewed my efforts, fervently turning the Lord’s Prayer over in my thoughts. And yet I doubted my sincerity.

Ojiichan had told us the first week that it was good for us to pray to God and go to church. "For me," he said, "it’s just too late. I’ve committed many sins and I’m too old. I’ve already lived my life and it would not be fair." But every week he went to church with us, and I wondered what he thought of it all—or Ame, if she ever listened. The only one of us I was certain of was my grandmother, assured of her eternal rest.

*

"Come on," Ame said to me so often, "I know you know this." My grandmother’s Japanese lessons were difficult for me; my throat would tighten from fear and ignorance. Ame, on the other hand, loved Japanese. She was better at it than I, and when my grandmother held up the flashcards of kanji it was always she who responded first. If she answered too many in a row, Obaachan would direct some questions towards me.

For instance, there is Ame, and she is knocking them down, one by one, while I sit dumbly: "Autumn," she says, "east," "temple," "God," "phone." My grandmother stops. She says my name. She holds the card out with her arthritic fingers.

Slowly—excruciatingly slowly—I struggle through the strokes in my head, while Obaachan leans forward with hope. I think of all the words that I can think of, and she mouths the beginning. I say the beginning, and then she mouths almost the whole word, the card shaking in her grasp, its meaning just beyond my tongue.

Perhaps I get it. Or perhaps Ame helps me along, giving me hints.

Often my sister is exasperated.

"God damn," she says, "You don’t know this yet?" Her cursing shocks me, but my oblivious grandmother smiles. "God damn, it’s car, it’s car: car car car. You’re a boy, you should know that one at least."

"Caaa," says Obaachan, opening her mouth too wide, too long.

We studied Japanese two hours in the mornings, with a half-hour break in-between for otcha and sweets. Ojiichan came in from his garden then, and told us his stories. Obaachan sat silently, pouring us the otcha. She sat on the chair like she sat on the floor; it was a Western table with Western chairs but still she sat on the seat of her chair as if she was on the floor, perfectly, knees together, her ankles crossed under thin buttocks. I soon found that Ojiichan’s stories repeated themselves frequently, but with slight variations, of golf or the occasional eruptions of Mt. Asama nearby, and of high school baseball and the life of the surrounding farmers who went to Hawaii every winter. I couldn’t always understand him, though, since when he was excited he would speak faster; sometimes he gestured wildly, and often Ame would be laughing and I would find myself smiling anxiously, wishing she would explain.

The ones I liked most were of war. He said he could not talk about it—and I never asked him—but then he did anyway, by degrees. Reluctantly, at first, and then with without seeming to know we were there. One of his eyes leaked a fluid sometimes at a corner and he wiped it away with a handkerchief. He told us he had been in the cavalry and was trained in kendo. He was shot twice. He had trained on Mount Fuji.

Ame craved tales of love. Obaachan grew up Japanese in Korea, in a wealthy family where she had learned to play the koto and perform the tea ceremony. During the war Japanese women were mailed slips of paper with names typed on them, names of soldiers whom they were instructed to write letters of encouragement to, about the war and the honor of war, of service worthy of the emperor. She got a poor farmer’s son. He was in China and she was in Korea and they wrote back and forth like that, exchanging pictures. In the middle of war, and never having met, they decided to marry.

Ojiichan was telling that story. "Are you listening?" he asked Ame. But she was looking at Obaachan. My grandmother sat on her chair, silently, blushing, picking at cookie crumbs on the table with her napkin. "Oh," she said, almost whispering, "listen to your grandfather, Ame." Ame reached over and took her hand then. Ojiichan leaned over the table, eyeing me mischievously: "Women," he said, and I rolled my eyes as best I could. But then he and I sat awkwardly, with nothing to look at but each other, while my sister and grandmother embraced.

*

One night, Ojiichan rushed us through dinner. It was a Tuesday; Obaachan’s samurai drama was on NHK.

"You were out too late," Ojiichan scolded us, as we ate. "It’s not good for you to eat this fast." He looked at Ame: it was her fault, she had kept us late, and he knew.

Ame beamed. She was radiant. She cocked her head and grinned. "Ken and I can clean up," she said to my grandmother. "You watch the show."

"No, no," replied Obaachan, hastily, as if Ame had suggested something shameful. My grandmother was rarely adamant about anything, but she never let us help in the kitchen.

"Please," said Ame, and then: "Okay." Though it made no sense, Ojiichan put us in front of the television, and my grandparents shuffled around from sink to cupboard to refrigerator until they were done.

The samurai dramas were the hardest for me to understand because the men often lapsed into long, guttural monologues, but I liked seeing the strange haircuts and the doomed samurais riding their horses through the villages, and I could understand vaguely the honor and pride and sacrifice that were underneath it all. Ame also liked them, I could tell, though she called it stupid.

"Isn’t this boring to you?" my grandfather asked me, after they had finished the dishes and joined us.

"No," I said. "I like the sword fights." The fighting scenes were few, but I watched for them.

He laughed. "Oh," he said. "You would."

"I held a sword once," I said. "A guy in our church had one; he was from the Marines. He showed it to me once. It was heavy."

"Was it sharp?"

"No," I said. "It was just for show. They don’t use them." I had not found that odd before. "Did you ever use your sword?" I asked him. "Or was it just for show?"

"No," he said. "Not for show."

On the screen a woman and her lover were discovered, mid-embrace, by the woman’s brother. The lover and the brother were both samurais, from opposing clans. The brother uttered his challenge. A duel, he said. The woman clutched at them both, pleading with them, but they pushed her aside.

*

Karuizawa lies cool in summer at the base of a smoking volcano. It lies hidden under forests of birch and hemlock and spruce. In the open spaces are meadows of sharp grass and butterflies, and the squat, irregular portions of vegetable farms. In the forests are houses tucked into a hill or along a gravel path, with thick velvet moss-yards surrounded by short walls of volcanic stone. Ferns grow bright and the monkeys steal their way under them, or perch high on a branch, picking themselves clean.

On afternoons when we didn’t go to the Edgars, my grandparents napped, affording us time to explore the countryside, riding cranky old bicycles with bells and baskets and streamers at the ends of the handlebars. We scrambled up the steep hills, stuck up like earthen thumbs, or we rode around them, into town. We took our time or we raced the day, and afterwards Ojiichan would pull out the map and we would show him where we went.

Ame liked the park best of all, though I found it boring. It was gray and dusty and when we went I would not even bother with slides or swings, preferring instead to wander inside the community center where there were various board games, or to hunt for horned beetles along the rock walls—if you trapped two of them together they would fight to the death. Ame talked to kids hanging upside down from monkey bars and spinning on merry-go-rounds.

These were the times I felt most the divide between us, when she had more fun than I did. For one thing, I was less confident, because of my hair color; though adults found me adorable, children thought me strange. Some pointed me out to their mothers: gaijin, they said slowly and without guile, and their mothers would scold them with a quick smack that left them stunned. Once, dragging a line with my foot at the perimeter of the playground, I was pelted by small stones thrown by three boys hiding behind trees. I fled and they chased me until Ame ran them off, screaming Japanese. "Buta buta buta buta buta!" Pig pig pig pig pig. "You’re running from a girl you stupid pig boys, you stupid rock throwers!"

Indeed, Ame rarely went off without me, but grudgingly carried me along, and on such occasions when she was making friends I was a dead weight that she dragged behind her like a schoolchild’s knapsack; those times, she didn’t bother to speak to me much, and though I could hardly blame her, I resented it anyway.

But one day she brought me to a friend’s house. It was a house like all others in that part of town, three square rooms and sliding paper doors. They had something I had never seen before, in the way of video games. Nintendo, it was called. We spent hours navigating a squat moustached Italian through worlds of mushrooms and pelicans; afterwards, I nagged at her to take us back.

*

A week later, when we returned from riding around on bikes, it was sitting there, in the box, on the floor in front of the television. Ojiichan was puzzling over the directions. "Help me with this," he said.

It was a Nintendo set. "This is what kids like these days," he said proudly, as if he were helping us be children. He sat back and watched with interest while I hooked it up. He handed me the directions but I didn’t need them; it was simple, a few wires and plugs.

We showed him the game with the Italian. He seemed curious at first, asking hopelessly misdirected questions, and frowning through my explanations. I wanted to thank him but I didn’t know how. "Look," I kept saying, "Look at this part."

He chuckled that first day as we hopped across the cartoon world, but after that, he only grunted or snorted, and was constantly turning down the volume. I was aware of his annoyance, but mesmerized as I was by the video world, I was reluctant to leave it.

Ame tired of it easily, dropping it after a few times and leaving me there alone. I played in the afternoons while she went out and my grandparents napped.

"Get out there," Ojiichan said to me once, when Ame was about to go. "Go now. Leave. There’s so much to see."

I answered slowly, blinking. "Not today," I said. "I think I’ll stay here."

He narrowed his eyes, shook his head, and walked into his room for his nap, muttering.

He got me a new bicycle, another gift to get me going. It didn’t work: Ame ended up with it, a boy’s bike. She came back from her rides with loud stories, smug with adventure, smirking at me sideways. I consoled myself with the secret suspicion that she elaborated wildly, and probably made whole things up, just to spite me. But Ame and Ojiichan would pore over maps in the evenings, while I rubbed away a dull headache. "When I was a boy," Ojiichan said, loudly and without looking at me, "I went all over Karuizawa. The world is so big, when you’re young."

*

Yesterday, Ame sent me an email. "I call you," she wrote. "i call you tomorrow :)"

*

In the first week of August, they told us they were sending us to a Baptist boarding school in Pennsylvania. They would send money, and we could come back for breaks if we wanted. I suppose it was a difficult thing for them to decide, not knowing anything about America; I’m sure that it was more the Edgars’ decision, than theirs. But I wasn’t thinking of those things at the time; I only remember my grandfather’s voice, sober and punctuated by the slightest of head-nods—and the emptiness afterwards.

That night I woke to Ame’s weeping. I didn’t say anything for awhile. I just lay in bed and stared through the darkness, listening to her.

Finally I said: "Are you okay?"

"Yes." I could hear her wiping the sobs away. Everything stilled. "I’m scared."

"It will be okay." I wanted to reach out to her, in the dark.

"I don’t want to talk about it," she said. I wanted to reach out to her, but I couldn’t. I wanted to forgive her then for all the things I held against her—her Japanese looks, her smirk, her mischief and swank. I wanted to touch her, but I couldn’t, lying there, staring into darkness.

*

My grandmother cooked a dinner for me on my birthday, August fourth, two weeks before we were to fly to Pennsylvania. We skipped the morning Japanese lessons and she spent half a day preparing, grating dashi and cutting cabbage and sending Ojiichan to the grocery. She worked slowly with her arthritic hands, slicing the shaking vegetables. Ame tried to help but Obaachan would not let her.

Her meal was a feast. She broiled shark. She fried tofu dipped in eggs and shoyu and flour. She stuffed the small pouches of inari-zushi. There was a dish with salmon eggs and one with ika and another with ebi. There were trays and plates all over the table.

She apologized. "The food is not good," she said. "I never learned to cook properly." But on the table it was overwhelming and all I thought was that I could never eat it all. Obaachan prayed and I lifted the chopsticks off the hashioke and filled my plate full of food.

Throughout the meal Ojiichan’s sake cup stayed full. He offered me some, and I took it, and he offered Ame some, and she took it. It was warm and sweet and I didn’t like it so much. But it made us giddy, Ame and I.

What I remember is that at some point I was picking through the spinach. I was spreading out the leaves with my hashi, separating a wet leaf out from the pile.

The bug was small and kind of mushed up, like a gnat.

"A bug," I said, and I made a face. I pointed at it with the hashi. Ame giggled. I didn’t do anything with it, I didn’t know what to do with it, I didn’t want to touch it with my hashi. I just looked at it there on the plate in the spinach.

Ame giggled again. Her mouth was closed with one hand cupped over it and she giggled through her nose.

Ojiichan slammed his hand down on the table, rattling the plates. I looked at him and there was fluid leaking from one eye and I thought that was funny, suddenly. Everything seemed funny. I joined Ame then, laughing.

"You apologize," he said. "Right now. Apologize to your grandmother."

"I didn’t mean anything by it," I said. "I was only pointing it out."

"You apologize," he said.

"Doesn’t Ame have to?"

"You do it."

"But she laughed." He said nothing but his eyes bored through me.

"The food is good. I didn’t mean anything by it," I said. His fist on the table stayed clenched. I looked down at the bug that was soaked like the wet plant, that was balled up like a wet dead spinach leaf, rolled up and puny. I took my napkin from my lap and picked up the bug, squeezing it between the folds of the napkin like I was killing it.

I sighed. "I’m sorry," I said, into the table.

"What you say you say to her."

I turned to my grandmother. To my surprise she was weeping silently. She said nothing, she just sat there and her tiny body shook and her hands at her face shook doubly, shaking with arthritis and shaking with sorrow. I had not thought it meant anything at all and now I saw it there in those shaking hands, that it had meant everything, the whole world in fact. I could not say anything, my throat was so dry. I opened my mouth and there was only a kind of hoarse gasp.

He slammed the table again. "You apologize!"

"Sorry," I said, and this time it was audible.

My grandmother raised her doleful eyes. "Don’t," she said. "They didn’t mean anything by it."

"No," he said. "There is no excuse. Your grandmother cooked all day for you. She is old and she is humble and shy about her cooking. She deserves respect."

"They don’t know," said my grandmother quietly. "They’re not Japanese."

He slammed the table. "It does not matter! It does not matter whether you are in Japan or America or China. Such disrespect for family." Under the table Ame grasped my hand. Our fingers locked together. It was the last time I remember her doing that but right then it seemed our hands would be joined forever. My grandfather’s eyes darted across the room, across the cupboards and doors and chairs, across the table and away from me and away from my grandmother and off to the side of everything. He said: "Where I went to school you could not so much as step on the shadow of the teacher or you would be smacked. Where I was raised grandparents were treated as sacred. I do not understand the young people now. I do not understand what they wear and what they listen to and the games that they play but most of all I do not understand their disrespect. I do not understand how a daughter could dishonor her parents like your mother did. Obaachan was never raised to cook but when we married she learned. She is more refined than you two will ever be."

There was a silence then where the food turned cold and no one dared to touch it.

"Now you eat that spinach," he said. "All of it."

I did not argue. I picked up the cold salted spinach, leaf by leaf, and thought of the bug in the napkin and the leaves in my mouth tasted like spinach, only worse.

Ojiichan rose then and cleared the dishes and he would not let my grandmother get up from where she was sitting. Ame helped him as I picked through the spinach. My grandmother looked at me with sympathy. "It’s all right," she said. When the table had been cleared and I was finished the sweets came out with the otcha and it was like it never happened—except the rest of the time until we left, it was always there, behind what was spoken, though no one ever brought it up again.

*

I was late in losing my faith. I held onto it for the duration of boarding school, and then college, though at times it seemed so thin and useless as to be dangling from a thread. Ame lost hers early, or she never had it at all, I don’t know which. She played along with it but she never really cared one way or the other.

She hated the Pennsylvania boarding school; she only lasted a year. My grandparents brought her back then, and sent her to a school in Tokyo. She has lived in Japan ever since. We visit each other occasionally, every couple of years.

They call her Video Ame. She is famous now, in Tokyo. In all of Japan, actually, for what she created, though I imagine my grandparents have no idea. She tells them that she works with computers, and that is true, mostly.

In Netscape I have it bookmarked, but sometimes I type it in just to type it—just like I dial her number manually sometimes instead of using speed dial: 011-81-3-3456-7976 instead of *1. There is something comforting about that, about remembering the actual number. So I turn on the PDP-11, and my fingers tap out this line: http: //www.videoame.co.jp. I’ve visited the site many times, though in the past year I really haven’t bothered to call much, maybe two or three times. We’re both so busy, I guess. Anyway that’s what we tell each other—and there is always email.

Video Ame is a new Japanese pop star. She has a popular album, with videos for two of the songs. She is featured on an advertisement for Pepsi: as part of a promotional campaign, a drawing will be held in 2001. Video Ame will draw a slip of paper with a name on it and the winner will ride in the American space shuttle. Video Ame fans, mostly young teenage girls, write in with letters of enthrallment. They say: I want to be like Ame. I want to sing like Ame, and live her life. I want to climb Mt. Everest, like she did. I want to fly into space with her.

In reality, I guess Ame is quite busy; busier than I am at least. When I go to the web site, it surprises me, without fail, how much Video Ame looks like my sister. The cheekbones are a little higher and the eyes are much bigger and wetter. She has my sister’s thin lips, the small, angular chin.

But Video Ame is not my sister. Video Ame is a virtual creation, without a physical analogue. The image I bring up on the screen has long legs, stretched out legs. The breasts are small, the neck white and smooth, and the face has been given a sprinkle of freckles. This does not describe my sister. The voice, too, is not hers. What is hers is the face, the imagination and strength, her fuck-all smile.

"Your sister is so hot," gushes a friend of mine. "Got her number?" I don’t have a good comeback for these kinds of comments, though I get them a lot. "You can email her," I say wryly. "Just click on the mailbox."

There is even a manga of her at another site in which she is practically naked. I called her when I saw that. "Don’t you have any self-respect?" I was angry, I wanted to chastise. But she just laughed. "That’s not me," she said patiently. "Think about it: it’s a cartoon of a virtual girl that only has my face."

How could I argue with that? It only makes me think, my grandparents, what would they think if they saw this? But at least, to her credit, she visits them often; whereas, for me, twelve thousand miles away, it’s been—how long? Three years, almost four.

*

So Ame calls me today, as soon as I get home from work. "What is your problem?" she yells immediately, in English. "You’re supposed to call me. Aren’t you interested in the job?"

Just like her to jump right into it, like that.

"I don’t know," I say. "I don’t think so."

"I mean, what is it you do now?" she says. "Tell me. I forget, exactly."

"I’ve told you before, many times."

"Oh," she wails. "But Ame forgets. Ame doesn’t get it. You just sit around playing with that time machine, that stupid PDP-thing." She stops, exasperated. I say nothing.

"Web design," she says, speaking quickly now. "Not the sexiest thing but you’d be doing good stuff, working with good people. And there’s so many Americans in Tokyo now. Lots."

Still, I am silent. I think: I hate it, the way she can make me unhappy with my life, so easily. I have no willpower with her, after all these years, and so far away.

"What’s the big deal?" she says. "Ojiichan-Obaachan ask about you all the time and I’m sick of it. I just say things. I tell them whatever. ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘Ken visits soon,’ or ‘Oh, Ken writes soon.’ Just come, what’s the problem?" She pauses.

"Ken," she says, quietly. "They are so old now. They just want to see you. And Ame just wants you to be happy."

The silence hangs there, padded by static. I am tired, just tired. "Okay," I say, defeated. "Tell me more about it."

Afterwards, I go to the PDP-11. When you power it up it kicks and hums like a car. It is like a car, big and sexy, with quirks and switches that constantly need fixing.

And as I click through the web—checking the prices on airline tickets, checking dates, checking my bank account—I realize that I don’t know why I am doing this, who or what I am going for—Ame, my grandparents, a job. All three, I suppose, to some extent. I take a deep breath, and click on.

*

It is still a bit of a mystery to me, why my grandfather finally decided to convert. The only clue I have is a message Ame sent me after he first converted. "Ojiichan likes the new pastor," she wrote. "He is young and Japanese and he is committed." Apparently, and though he had never said as much, he did not like the old one—Mr. Edgar, in fact, who had died of a heart attack. Each day, she wrote, Ojiichan spends two to three hours copying verses out of his Bible.

I can picture him now, sitting at that kitchen table with the scroll smoothed out across its length, each rolled end anchored by a paperweight. He is wearing glasses and he is perfectly groomed, as always. His Japanese Bible lies open off on one side, to Isaiah or Matthew or Psalms. He pours a bit of water into the dish, picks up the ink tablet, and scrapes it against the bottom of the dish, back and forth. He does this until it reaches the proper consistency and then he sets aside the tablet and mixes the ink with a toothpick. He dips his brush into the dish, and smears a line across some newspaper. When he is satisfied with the consistency of the line and of the ink, he stops. He leans his head over to the side where his Bible lies open and reads the first line of the verse. He dips the brush into the ink dish.

For an instant the brush is poised over the paper. The paper is flat and white and pure and the brush above it is at an exact perpendicular. His hand is positioned upright as if he bears the offering of a single flower. Obaachan sits across from him with her own Bible open, reading silently, moving one shaking finger across the lines.