It turned out that at a yakiniku restaurant, you grilled your own food on a small burner in the middle of your table. It was a concept that would never fly in litigious America, due to the likelihood of someone getting burned. You ordered a selection of various raw meats and vegetables, which came cut up into pieces of a convenient size and thickness, grilled them to suit your taste, and then ate them with any one of a number of sauces or plain, as you chose.
"This is fun," Rose said, wrapping a strip of beef around a piece of green onion before putting it on the grill. "Like camping out, only without mosquitoes or rain. Oh, please tell me they do s'mores for dessert! "
"S'mores?" Yukie asked.
"You've never had them? You toast marshmallows—actually, they taste best if they're burnt just a little—then you sandwich them between pieces of graham cracker with a square of chocolate. They're called s'mores because after you try one, you want some more," his daughter explained, turning over her piece of food to grill evenly.
Yukie laughed. "I don't know if the concept has reached Japan yet, but you can ask our waitress when she comes by again."
"Yukie? Nee-chan, is that really you?" A woman had appeared at their tableside.
She was forty-something, short and a little plump, with a round, pleasant face. Matronly. Some women were clearly more attractive in middle age than they had been twenty years before, like Adeline, and then there were some who you looked at and thought: I bet she was something, back in the day. This woman was in the second category.
"Haruko?" Yukie replied, weakly. "Y-yes, it's me."
"I can't believe it! After so many years—. Look at you, you're so elegant and poised now! When I saw you from across the room, for a moment I thought I was looking at Grandmother's ghost. "
"Haruko, what are you doing bothering these people?" A little old man came bustling up behind the woman.
"You shut up!" the woman snapped back at him. "It's because of you that I haven't seen my only sister in so many years."
"Your—Yukie? B-but still so young?" he stammered. Then his eyes bugged out at Slade. "Whoa, who's the huge foreigner and what happened to his eye?" He said it in Japanese, of course thinking neither Slade nor Rose would understand him.
"The huge foreigner's name is Wilson Slade and his ex-wife shot him," Slade remarked in the same language. "And you are?"
"Ah," The man's face grew red, and he bowed. "I am terribly sorry. I am Yamato Isamu, and this is my wife Haruko. Ah—your Japanese is really very good."
"Thank you. So is yours," Slade returned smoothly.
"My sister and my brother-in-law," Yukie confirmed for Rose's benefit, her voice very even and colorless. "Haru-chan, my friend Wilson Slade and his daughter Rose."
"I am very pleased to meet you," Rose chimed in. "Please forgive any social errors I might make, for I am young and this is my first visit to your country."
"What a lovely young girl," Haruko exclaimed, clearly charmed. "Are you enjoying yourself so far?"
"Yes, I am, very much." Rose replied demurely.
"Wonderful. Are the three of you here together on a trip?" Yukie's sister looked from one of them to another.
"Yes. I wanted to see the old country again, and they were kind enough to come along with me," Yukie's smile at her sister was genuine but a little strained.
"Haruko, come away now!" her husband ordered, grabbing at her elbow. "They don't want to be bothered, can't you see?"
"I see you running away from someone you'd rather not face again," Haruko retorted, throwing him a glare that should have reduced him to ashes on the spot.
By this time, Slade was quite amused by the situation. Yamato's general shamed-dog expression clearly wasn't new, and all in all, the man looked the very definition of whipped. "Won't you join us?" he invited.
"Oh, no", Haruko waved off the suggestion. "We couldn't impose—."
"Please," Yukie offered, though whether she was saying 'Please do join us' or 'Please go away' was open to question.
"If you truly want us to—," Haruko wasn't about to refuse twice. "Oh, Nee-chan, it's been so long .and I've missed you so much!"
"I missed you too," Yukie said, with a little catch in her voice.
"This makes me so happy." Haruko slipped into a chair. "I want to hear about everything. Go get the waitress to bring our food over here," she ordered Yamato.
Yukie looked half ready to bolt, and he reached out to place his hand over hers. "Chin up," he told her. "We'll just have to trust he doesn't throw food on the floor and shout in public."
"He hasn't done that since the first week we were married," Haruko grinned triumphantly. "I let it lay where he threw it and walked out of the house while he was still shouting at me. He had to clean it up. It was drawing bugs and mice by then. Where you went wrong, Yukie-chan, was that you cared. I never did. What could he do? Divorce me? Not without paying back seventy million yen. After all, our parents didn't have any more daughters for him to marry."
Rose's eyes popped a little at that, and she looked back and forth between the sisters, but she didn't say anything. Good girl; she was learning when to be quiet and just listen.
Yamato returned, trailed by the waitress, and he folded himself into his chair with a sigh. Clearly all the spine had gone out of him years ago.
So he divorced the gentle one and married the shrew. There may be some justice in the world after all.
"So, tell me, where have you been and what have you been doing all this time?" Haruko asked, spearing a slice of meat and laying it on the grill. "Nobody had any idea whether you were alive or dead until Great-uncle came back from America saying he had seen you at an illegal Jian Wu match, about to duel this one-eyed—. Oh! Was that—that must have been you!" she turned to Slade.
He reached over to squeeze Yukie's hand again. "That was how we met," he informed her.
"Amazing!" Haruko wondered, and then asked, "But surely duelling is not all you do?"
"No, for the last twelve years I have worked in the cryonics field, while Slade is a security consultant-." Rose had shared what she told the girls at the shrine, and it was as good a cover story as any.
For a while the conversation revolved around banalities. Yamato found a position with an importer of Italian food and wine after he lost the brewery, while Haruko was a free-lance feature writer who supplied articles to several magazines under pseudonyms. She produced her phone, and Yukie dutifully admired photos of her nieces and nephew. All the conversation was provided by Yukie's sister, whose spouse was silent except for the occasional grunt of agreement accompanied by a nod. The only person he actually spoke to was the waitress.
Slade studied him. The man did not look to be in the best of health; a fine webbing of broken capillaries around cheekbones and nose spoke of alcoholism, and under that ruddiness, his skin had a tinge of grey. He also looked to be over sixty, but ill health might make him look older than he actually was. Hitting him was out of the question. No matter how Slade pulled his punch, he might kill the man without meaning to.
In the meantime, Yukie had lost the hunted-doe look, relaxed and warmed to the conversation. "How are Mother and Father?" she asked.
"Very well, thank you. No. No, I'm not going to keep up appearances, not with you. Something is wrong. It's not their health and it's not money. I have no idea what it is, but they are both...nervous. Worse than nervous," Haruko explained. "They are frightened. Very frightened. Yet they deny everything when I try to find out why." She suddenly smiled. "Mother will never believe it when I tell her who we had dinner with tonight!" Picking up her phone, she snapped a picture of her sister. The smile vanished. "Unless you don't want me to tell them."
"It's all right," Yukie assured her. "You can tell them. Do not look for any big family reunion, though. This one is big enough for me."
"But I so much want the children to meet you! They think I must have made up having a sister, since no one else ever talks about you," Haruko wailed.
Her husband murmured something, got up, and shambled off in the direction of the men's room.
"He'll be gone for twenty minutes," his wife grimaced. "His prostate is the size of an orange these days." Her gaze swept over Slade. "Now this is a man who takes care of himself!"
"I have to, to keep up with Yukie," he quipped.
"Yes, I remember," Haruko said, and when she smiled as she did then, there was a clear resemblance to Yukie in her face. "It's so good to see you looking happy and free, as you did when we were girls. That was what broke my heart when you married Isamu. It was like you were crammed in a box, and you cut off all the parts of you that didn't fit. Your spirit, your wit, all the fun just got chopped off… But Yukie-chan, I understand why you wanted nothing to do with the rest of the family, but why didn't you at least write to me now and then? I thought you hated me for stealing your place, when they forced it on me."
"I never hated you," Yukie answered. "I hated myself. I was too much of a coward to stay and watch what happened to you after you married him."
"So that was it," Haruko's brow furrowed.
"Also, it seemed to me that I had failed at everything everyone asked of me-as a daughter, as a wife,-and as a sister as well." Yukie confessed.
"You never failed me. Yukie, our parents-." She broke off, glancing at Slade and Rose. "It never mattered how hard Nee-chan tried, or what she achieved. She was no better than a dog to them. In middle school, when she tied for second best student in the whole school, not just her grade, Father said, 'Never humiliate us like that again.' because she wasn't first. Then the next year when she was the best, neither of them came to the end of year ceremony. You wouldn't act like that if Rose-chan got a prize, would you?" Haruko appealed to Slade.
"I would be very proud if she were among the top ten scholars in her entire school," he assured the woman. "Provided she was the best martial artist in her school as well." Rose made a face at him for that.
"Well, you and Grandmother were there," Yukie said, "and you were the ones who truly mattered. That was all I cared about."
Her sister went on, "Meanwhile, whatever Ichiro did, he was always their little emperor, from the moment they saw he had a dangle between his legs instead of a dimple. He's our little brother. They'd complain to the principle that the teachers were neglecting him if he didn't get good grades. I remember the way they crowed with delight over the first diaper he soiled. But it's been downhill from there." Haruko drank a large swallow from her wine glass, and continued.
"He went to college-not Tokyo University, a third-rate one out in the sticks-and in his first year there, he knocked up his girlfriend. That was the last time they were pleased with him, because it was a boy. But they wouldn't let him marry the girl, though he wanted to. I told him, 'Man up and marry her if you love her. They won't disinherit their only son!' He didn't have the balls to stand up to them...She's still getting child support. Our parents pay it, of course. He never has any money. Ichiro's been married three times since then. They get younger and sourer every time. No more kids, though. Not with any of his wives. As for me..." Haruko paused.
"I was invisible to them, except when I misbehaved, so you can be sure I misbehaved a lot! Oh, I was very bad!"
"You were never bad. You were just high-spirited, and you wanted attention," Yukie refuted.
"That's my Nee-chan. You always believed I was wonderful; how could I show you any other face?" Haruko's expression softened, and she looked at Slade. "I never would have become a writer if not for her, you know. All the hours she spent reading with me when we were children, but now look at us. Nobody would ever think she was four years older than I am!" She chuckled heartily.
Rose made a little, stifled sound. Slade smiled. He had seen Yukie's true birth date on her passport, and knew she was forty-four. If she was fifteen years older than he was, he wouldn't have cared. She was herself, that was all that was important.
"Did your grandmother look younger than her age, too?" he probed.
"Oh, yes, up until the last couple of years of her life. Then she was suddenly a little old lady, bent back and all." Haruko told him. "Then she was gone… It was only after that our family came up with the idea of swapping me for Yukie in Isamu's house. They knew she wouldn't stand for it."
"That still puzzles me," Slade sat up. "I understand there was money involved, but Isamu doesn't strike me as such a prize that they'd want to keep him in the family at such a price."
"They really wanted to see me married and settled down," Haruko shrugged. "Like I said, I was very bad, and since he'd done such a good job of cowing Yukie-chan, I guess they thought he'd do the same to me. Hah! His mother and sister pleaded with him not to divorce Yukie for me, but he didn't listen. Any more than he listened when Yukie told him not to degrade the quality of his product, and you can see how well both worked out for him! As for why I've stayed with him—I've got him broken to harness now, and it suits me to be the stronger one and the smarter one in the relationship. Speaking of Isamu—he really has been gone too long. I don't suppose—?" She looked appealingly at Slade.
"That I'd check on him? My pleasure." It fit right in with his plans. He moved his napkin from his lap to the table, stood up, and made for the men's room.
TBC…
'Nee-chan' means 'elder sister'. Happy Holidays, everyone!