My Sister and The Kite

A short story by Yuri Kageyama

I have not spoken to my sister for years.

She is the only sister I have.

I’m not sure that makes our growing apart an extraordinary loss in a human connection, or just the loss of one person in an array of such connections.

I usually don’t worry about it.

Her existence had become irrelevant to my every day, as forgotten as the bell-bottoms you wore as a teen-ager. Or what you watched on TV last week, if gazing at a machine that happens to be turned on can be called “watching.”

It was more than a decade ago she went and married a Japanese “salaryman.” He had attended a reputable Japanese college, or Keio University, and gotten a job at a reputable company, or listed on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

This was her ticket to propriety, a dream since childhood for those of us branded outsiders.

I never said all this to her face.

But our disinterest in each other, although it was never mutual disrespect or outright disgust for the other, kept growing.

It had started long before her marriage. She was, in short, different from me.

My theory is that Japanese American-ness is so obliquely defined in the American psyche that most of us get stuck with either identifying with white or Black.

Maybe the identify is not even really there.

It’s about taking sides in the big game called Life. And there are only two teams you can cheer for.

White or Black.

You might think I am obsessed with race or in the place race occupies in society or Life.

Maybe so, but I can’t help it.

My sister came up with an even better option: Becoming a proper Japanese.

She could even teach English at home, a proper housewife with lucrative yet unthreatening talent, doing this as she also kept house, pristine clean and decorated with her housewife friends’ oil paintings. and perpetually filled with the smells of miso soup, teriyaki chicken and hot white rice.

Her pragmatic solution to what I thought was a deep problem seemed a cop-out.

This was her routine modus operandi.

When our father would get violent, slapping me or punching me for being outspoken or impudent, my sister would cower, bow deeply, looking down and blurt out: I am sorry. I am sorry.

I was the one to get beaten, never her.So we went our separate ways.

I got an occasional Christmas card from her. I sent them to her, too.

Then one day, she sent me a message.

“I have breast cancer,” it said.

“It was found in a routine physical, and I have already had the cancer removed. A mastectomy was not needed. I will be going through both chemotherapy and medication treatments.”

I held my breath.

As odd as this might sound, the first thing I thought of was how she would lose her hair, and how that would be devastating for her. She loved her hair. She always kept it long, taking care to comb it thoroughly, all the time, so that every shiny curl fell in its rightful place. It was as though her hair was more important than anything else about her appearance.

I wanted to weep.

And then she wrote this: “I just wanted to say how I am sorry for some of the exchanges we’ve had in the past.”

I quickly wrote back assuring her there was nothing between us. She is my sister, whom I always have loved, nothing else, love now, and will forever.

Of course.

I made a point to order a cute beanie hat online for her as she said she would need lots of hats for the inevitable hair loss her doctors had warned her was coming.

We would not have to meet physically.

The coronavirus pandemic and everything else that’s happening means this relaying of information about a life-threatening disease would be a few lines exchanged on social media. And an online order of a beanie hat.

She will likely send me a nice thank you note, an assurance of our relationship, at least in the face of cancer, will remain civil and cordial.

But a scene plays out in the back of my mind, as I hold my breath, a movie, clear and in color, MX4D.

Our father had had his peaceful moments.

I had not thought about him for years. My sister and I are still children. We live in the same house, with the same parents. Being sisters then is the most ordinary thing in the world, never questioned as coincidence or destiny.

A NASA engineer, our father knew a thing or two about aerodynamics. And so his handmade kites, even when they twirled lopsided, the wrong way, he could tweak the frame, a tiny bit, then and there in the park, and get just right, so it would start zooming, straight, level, brave and upright, upward.

I was impressed with this skill, but not as much as was my sister.

I found out years later she had written an essay about these memories, for which she won a local contest award.

Made of humble wrapping paper, chiseled bamboo sticks, thin and bendable but strong, a big spool of thread, our father’s kite was the centerpiece of our family adventure.

Always a funny color, lime green or fluorescent yellow, or simply white, it stood out in the sky.

He would tug at the string, sometimes quickly but usually lazily, so that the wings of the kite caught the wind, or rather, a gust of wind touched that little square of paper, bamboo and thread, like God’s hand cusping an airborne flower.

The kite would spring to life, as though it were a little bird with a heart and lungs within it, and wings attached on the outside that fluttered. It transported itself, weightless and free of spirit, up and up and up.

He would unwind the spool, often in haste but controlled, to keep up with the thread pulling, and pulled by the kite, muscular in flight, despite its paper and bamboo identity, and eager to reach outer space.

“My father’s kite flew better than anyone else’s,” my sister wrote. “It was the best in the world.”

The kite flew higher until it was a dot, barely visible, in a stretch of blue.

And then it was gone.

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BIO

Yuri Kageyama is a poet, filmmaker, fiction writer, essayist and journalist. Her latest book is THE NEW AND SELECTED YURI (Ishmael Reed Publishing 2011). She has two films, NEWS FROM FUKUSHIMA: MEDIATION ON AN UNDER-REPORTED CATASTROPHE BY A POET, which documents a 2017 performance of her poetry with dance and music in San Francisco, and a 2019 animation short that is a collaboration with Japanese stop motion artist Hayatto, THE VERY SPECIAL DAY. She lives in Tokyo

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