“That this was your choice.”
Chapter Thirteen
Whispers and Wax
Tokyo had been a stopover on his way to his new job at the Super-Kamiokande detector in Gifu. His new home was a two-hour shinkansen ride away from Tokyo and then another thirty-minute ride on a local train. Keishin wasn’t expected at the research facility until Monday, and he had pictured spending the weekend rediscovering his old city.
He was eight when he and his father packed up their lives and moved across the Pacific. Keishin had not returned since. There had been no reason to. He no longer had any family in Japan, and all his childhood friends had long faded away. Still, Keishin held the hope that somewhere along the city’s streets, he would stumble upon a lost memory to welcome him home. There was one other thing that he hoped to find, but that was something he was never going to say out loud.
Keishin knew that his chances of finding fragments of his past were less than slim, but they were enough to draw him from under the covers of his hotel room’s warm bed to brave the early hours of an autumn morning. The sooner he got his nostalgia out of the way, the sooner the questions buzzing between his ears were going to quiet down and move on to more important things. Miyazaki Hayao’s Studio Ghibli was at the top of his to-do list, as it was unthinkable to leave Tokyo without making a pilgrimage to the home of one of his favoriteanimes,My Neighbor Totoro.The film’s Catbus character, a grinning, hollow, twelve-legged cat with windows and fluffy, furry seats, had made every car, bus, train, and plane ride Keishin had taken since watching the movie painfully mundane. But the pond in the pawnshop’s backyard put Catbus to shame. Traveling by pond trumped any mode of transportation, including ones covered in fur.
Finding words to describe how he had fallen through water and emerged completely dry on the other end was not a problem that had ever crossed Keishin’s mind. Today, it became one of two challenges that were going to haunt him for the rest of his life. The second was explaining how, when only moments before he had been standing over a pond in Tokyo, he had come to find himself in the middle of a seemingly endless sea of pampas grass. He turned to Hana, not realizing that he was still clutching her hand.
“You can let go now,” Hana said.
“Oh…uh…sorry.” Keishin dropped her hand, heat rising beneath his collar despite the chill in the air. “Where are we? How did we get here?”
“We jumped into a pond, remember?”
“Yes, but…” Keishin closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead, unable to decide whether his experiment had succeeded or failed. To accept that a mossy pond had somehow teleported them was to call into question more scientific laws than he cared to enumerate. “That’s not possible.”
“And yet here we are.”
Keishin shook his head. “Ponds can’t—” He snapped his mouth shut, his eyes growing large. “Unless…”
“Unless?”
“It wasn’t a pond.”
Hana lifted a brow. “I was not aware that there was another name for the pool of water one watches the moon swim in.”
“There isn’t,” Keishin said. “But thereisa word for things that connect two different points in space-time. An Einstein-Rosen Bridge. A wormhole. A wormhole, Hana! In your backyard! Do you have any idea what this means? My god. This could change everything.”
“It changes nothing.”
“Of course it does.” Keishin paced over the grass. “This is the discovery of the century! The applications are—”
“My father is still missing.”
Keishin stopped mid-step, sending a jumble of plans and possibilities crashing into the front of his skull. He winced. “Hana…I…I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“I understand,” Hana said, her voice flat. She turned away from him and pointed at an empty field. “That is the Whispering Temple.”
Keishin scanned the swaths of grass swaying in the breeze. “There’s nothing there.”
“Things are not always as plain to see in my world as they are in yours.”
“Your world?What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The place where I am from and you are not. Does your science have a name for it too? I shall call it whatever you prefer, even though I still do not understand why you would rather call a pond a hole for worms.”
“I…” Keishin searched for a neat little label printed in bold, fifteen-point black font that he could stamp over the ground he stood on. Debating the existence of a multiverse was something he indulged Ramesh in, but only on Fridays after a few rounds of twelve-year-old Scotch.
Though Keishin was more than well-versed in every hypothesis and counterargument about parallel dimensions, he failed to find anything that could adequately describe the rustle of the grass around him, the sunlight warming his cheeks, and the patient gaze of the woman waiting for his answer. How her eyes were both impenetrable and inviting was a greater mystery than the impossible world a pond had whisked him to. “No, it doesn’t.”
“We do not have a name for it either. There has never been a need for one. We only have one world, and this is it,” Hana said. “But if you feel that you must call it something, then you may call it Isekai.”
Other world.Keishin translated the word in his head, convinced that his Japanese was rustier than he thought. “This is a dream,” he said, more to himself than to Hana. “It has to be.”
