When You Were Here

early dinners, from anywhere. It is five thirty in the evening on a Thursday night in June, and the station is bustling. I read somewhere that more than two million passengers travel through this station each day.
    I push through the final turnstile at the Hachikexit.I’m at one of the busiest, craziest intersections in the world, because Shibuya Station sits at the convergence of six streets that all seem to collide at once, to my American eyes. But somehow the Japanese car drivers and bus drivers and cab drivers all know when to stop, when to merge, and when to let the other lanes go. I walk over to something that has become a favorite thing of mine from all my past trips here. Carved into the street-side wall of the subway station is a bright, chunky mosaic of stars, rainbows, and a white husky dog with a perfectly coiled tail. There’s a statue of the dog here too, but I like the mosaic best. Everyone in Tokyo knows the story of the dog named Hachik. He followed his owner, a university professor, to work every morning and waited for his return in the evenings. One day in 1925, his master failed to show. He had died while teaching. But Hachikwas loyal to the end. The dog walked to the subway stop every day, waiting for the same train for the next several years until his own death. A statue was erected, a ceremony is held every year in April, and the dog’s taxidermied body resides in Tokyo’s National Museum of Nature and Science.
    I tap the dog’s head once, for good luck.
    I head for the intersection and join the sea of people fanning out in all directions. I don’t know any of them, I don’t understand any words they say, but there’s this flicker, a flash of something familiar inside me, the feeling that I’m no longer so alone.

Chapter Ten
    I open the familiar glass-paneled door to the lobby of our apartment building. I expect to see Kana, since she had told me she’d meet me here at 6:00 pm to let me in and give me my keys. Instead Mai greets me with a small bow, and I bow slightly in return.
    “Hello, Mrs. Miyoshi.”
    “Hello, Daniel. Please call me Mai.” She extends her hand, and I shake. She is much younger than I thought she would be. Maybe in her mid-thirties. Her long black hair is fastened in a braid. She wears jeans and a short-sleeve blouse. “How was flight?”
    “Good. Easy.”
    “That is good.”
    “Yes.”
    “We are glad. Let me show you.” She presses the elevator button, and we shoot up six floors. The last time I was here, my mom was feeling good. She wore an electric-blue wig because her hair hadn’t all grown back yet. We went to the fish market every morning for breakfast. “We are so Japanese, aren’t we?” she said to me, as we sat at the counter of the food stall we both loved, eating raw fish in bowls.
    “Totally, Mom,” I said, and then gobbled up more of what had become my favorite breakfast food ever.
    The elevator door opens, and Mai gestures for me to exit first. But I sweep out a hand for her. My father would roll over in his grave if I went in anywhere—store, building, car—before a lady. He held doors open for everyone all the time.
    Mai walks down the hall, turns the key in the door of our— my , I need to get used to saying my , especially since I’m the one who has to decide what to do with it—apartment. I follow her in and inhale. My lungs feel like they’re filling with the equivalent of water from a fresh mountain stream. This place is small; it is Tokyo real estate after all, but it feels big compared to my house in Los Angeles somehow. I drop my backpack by the door and turn into the kitchen, running my hand across the outside of the fridge, over the bright white sliver of a countertop, then along the panes of the window that look out over the street below. There are potted plants along the window, some with flowers blooming. They are my mother’s plants, the gardens she made here in Tokyo so she’d have her flowers here too. I touch thesoil in a pot with blue irises. The soil is damp. Mai and Kana must water the plants. I like knowing that they take care of my mom’s plants. I lean in to smell the flowers, something my mom did every day. They smell like flowers, like they should, but they also smell like her, if that makes sense.
    I return to the living room, breathing in the familiar surroundings—the blond hardwood floors, the bookshelves wedged in that hold framed photos of Laini, Sandy Koufax, my dad from years ago, my mom