One Bird by Kyoko Mori

Author:Kyoko Mori
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466876736
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)

Chapter 7

EASTER SUNRISE

Halfway up the hill to Dr. Mizutani’s, I stop and turn around to look at the sea. The water foams dark blue, the color of the indigo vats at the dye shops in Grandfather Kurihara’s village. Only in the far east, on the edge of my vision, the small waves glitter under the sun. I wonder if Kiyoshi got up to watch the sunrise alone. Pastor Kato decided not to hold the Easter sunrise service this year because so few of us had attended last year. “I’m going to get up early, watch the sun, and pray,” Kiyoshi told me last week. He didn’t ask me to come along.

It’s a few minutes before ten. At church, Mrs. Kubota must be playing a prelude on the organ, a series of Easter hymns with hallelujahs climbing the scale. People are sitting with their eyes closed, heads bowed, reviewing the past week and talking to God in silence about the things that worry them, the things they regret. I can almost see the three or four rows of thin hands clasped tight in prayer. In the front row, Kiyoshi is wondering where I am, but he won’t turn his head to check the door even if he hears footsteps. He is too serious and grown-up to fidget in church. Maybe this once, he and Mrs. Kato will assume that I had overslept or been ill. But before the week is out, I will have to tell them so they won’t keep looking for me. I have to write to Mother and ask her not to send her letters to their house. That means telling her that I stopped going to church, that I don’t believe in God. The thought makes me queasy. The white buildings along the coast remind me of teeth. The blue sea looks cold and rough. I picture my mother sitting up in bed, her back stooped, her hands clasped so tight in prayer that the veins stand out. She will ask God to forgive me for my faithlessness and protect me all the same; she will panic, thinking that I am completely alone now without the Katos, without God.

Last year on Easter, the sun came up while Pastor Kato was reading the passage in the Bible about the two disciples meeting Jesus on the way to Emmaus. Though the disciples walked with him, they had no idea who he was, till a few hours later when Jesus blessed the bread before dinner. Seeing him in this familiar gesture, the disciples suddenly recognized the way he held the bread, the tone of his voice, the expression on his face. At that moment, Jesus vanished; overcome with joy, the disciples rushed back to Jerusalem to tell the others. Standing between my mother and Mrs. Kato in the early morning light, all of us hearing the familiar story one more time, I wanted to believe again. Jesus seemed like an old friend, someone whose gestures and words I, too, would recognize.

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