Brother

When I was three years old, in an act of defiance against the looming end of my spoiled life as an only-child, I took the arrowheads my grandfather gave to me and flung them into the cold north sea. I marked them as they fell (one, two, three, just like me!), whooping at the way they threw back the sun’s light on their dizzy descent. A baby boy was coming, they said to me earlier in the day; a gift from the kamuy to carry the dreams of my grandfather, of my grandfather’s grandfather, indeed, the dreams of our whole history, proudly into the future. At three years old, I stuck my thumb into my mouth and blew a trumpet sound to express my disgust. At three years old, I ran, laughing, from my mother’s scolding hand. At three years old, I snuck away with my grandfather’s arrows, wondering what was so different between me and some baby boy that meant I couldn’t be a dream child, too.

Fierce snows whipped at the roof of our home that night, and my brother was born with a twisted heel. I loved him the moment I saw him, a screeching, plump, wrinkled little creature whose stubby fingers grasped my hand like it would save his life. I cried over his funny little foot, covering it in tears and kisses as if with an outpouring of love I could wash away the wrong. Mother sat me in her lap and let me hold him, and for the first time I was given a nickname in the familiar words I didn’t understand. In her parents’ language, she called me Sapo; older sister. The moment that name fell upon me, it didn’t matter anymore that my brother was special, and that I was not. It didn’t matter that under their breaths, my mother’s family called me shamo, while my brother, whose father I didn’t share, was welcomed into the fold of the community like he was everyone’s son. They called him Henke in affectionate acknowledgement of his ruined foot. My little brother, Henke: “the Old Man.” I wanted to protect him.

I thought it was my fault his foot was bad--the kamuy’s punishment, I believed, for throwing away my grandfather’s precious arrowheads. It was five years later that my grandmother explained to me how the kamuy are drawn to the souls of great people like the mighty bear is drawn to the salmon’s stream, and that sometimes, this hurts the people who are the most beloved. My brother, she said, was to be very great, and the kamuy wanted him back. That was why, chasing dace fish in the river with our cousins at the age of five, he drowned in a flash flood. They never had the chance to name him properly, but in the depth of his grief my grandfather confessed to me that they were hoping to call him Pakkaytoy: “One Who Carries the Land on His Back.” This secret name, unbestowed, I cradled to my heart.

The last prayer I ever said over a hearth fire was to ask that the name be carried to my brother in the place where the kamuy made their home. I hoped that wherever he was stolen away to, lost among the kamuy whom grandmother told me loved him, he would at least know what to call himself. I hoped that with his name, he would take some comfort in knowing who he was supposed to be. My grandfather caught me at my prayer. With tears in his eyes, he gently informed me that naming was something I did not have the authority to do.

From that day on, I hated the kamuy with all I had.

I was eight when I left my mother’s family and moved to Sapporo with my father. It was my first time ever in an airport. Up until then, I had never even left my hometown. I would not have left for many years yet if my mother had not been worried about the way I spoke to Pakkaytoy’s ghost in the shadows on the walls. For the first time since she left him, my mother reached out to my father and told him of my existence, hoping against hope that he might want to meet me. He did.

“I don’t care that you’re Ainu.”

Those were the first words my father ever spoke to me as I stared up at him, clutching my small suitcase in front of me like a shield.

“Even though you’re Ainu,” he went on, “you’re still my daughter. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” I said.

I really didn’t.

“Some people might ask you about it, but you don’t have to answer them. You just go ahead and say you’re Japanese, like your dad. Okay?”

“Okay.”

What was okay? Who was going to ask me? I wondered about these things as I followed him to his car, my head bowed, my small knees knocking. I was still wondering about them on the drive to his house, a trip we took in almost complete silence. He only spoke to me a couple of times on the way to tell me that his wife and son were eager to meet me, and that his son was only a year younger than myself. I was too overwhelmed to give this information much thought.

What did he mean he didn’t care that I was Ainu? What did he mean, go ahead and say I’m Japanese? The way he said it seemed like he was asking me to lie. Did that mean I wasn’t Japanese, after all? To eight-year-old me, that didn’t make any sense. My mother’s family called me shamo, not Ainu. Other than a handful of scattered words and phrases, I did not speak the language they spoke amongst themselves. My mother only spoke to me in Japanese; in school, they only taught in Japanese; Japanese was the only language I knew. What was I, then, if not Ainu, and not Japanese?

My father probably meant well. It was his first time meeting me too, and he couldn’t have known the way my mother raised me.

I thought of Pakkaytoy. He spoke Japanese so well, even with his baby lisp. Unlike me, however, our mother very carefully taught him Ainu words, too. After my brother was born, our mother began reciting yukar and upashkuma before bedtime. By the time he was three, Pakkaytoy knew five different tales nearly by heart. Every night, he would follow along with his favorite parts, bouncing excitedly on mother’s knee as he half-laughed, half sang his way through yukar and acted out upashkuma until he fell over exhausted. Afterwards, since the extra effort he had to expend moving around on a twisted heel all day made him too achy and tired to settle down on his own, I massaged his sore little foot until he fell asleep. Those were some of my favorite memories with him. Pakkatoy was, without a doubt, Ainu. Had he lived to be the great man he was meant to be, he would never have had to question who he was. As I pondered over this in my father’s car, I closed my eyes and wrapped my arms tightly around my suitcase, pretending it was my little brother curled up in my lap. I wanted to be just like him: certain, hopeful, a dream child.

My father’s son, though a full year younger than me, was taller than me by a head. No surprise, my step-mother said, since my father was tall for a Japanese man. I took her word for it. As a child, all adults seemed tall to me. That my father was particularly imposing seemed simply a consequence of the expectation that there should be some kind of close relationship between us when, in fact, I felt nothing particularly familial towards him. I was drawn much more towards my step-mother, whose sweet smile and welcoming embrace helped smooth away the panic of an unfamiliar situation.

Their son, Jun, was introduced to me as my younger brother, and I to him as his older sister. We both recoiled at that. He screamed that he would never share any of his precious things with a weird, gross girl. I wailed that I already had a brother, and that I would leap into fire before I ever replaced him. Neither my father nor my step-mother were prepared for this. It was a wretched first meeting, and the one thing Jun and I agreed on was that we were mutually disgusted by each other.

Since I arrived in Sapporo with very little, I had to borrow some of Jun’s clothing at first. He hated that I touched his belongings, and I hated to have his belongings touching me. Yet wearing Jun’s clothes, I realized that if I pulled back my hair to make it look short, I could see traces of Pakkaytoy in the plump curve of my cheeks and in the hard line of my brow. These were traits that we shared with our mother and, because of it, we resembled each other. When my step-mother finally took me shopping for my own clothes, I showed a preference for the boyish outfits that helped me see Pakkaytoy whenever I looke d into a mirror.

“Are you sure, Aiko?” my step-mother asked me, plucking worriedly at the sleeve of my button-down shirt.

I cringed at the use of Aiko. Although it was technically my name, I was not used to hearing it anymore. I had gotten so used to Sapo that anything else sounded wrong in my ears.

“There are so many cute clothes here,” my step-mother said. “You can pick anything you like. Are you sure this is what you want?”

I met my own gaze in the dressing room mirror and saw Pakkaytoy there, smiling back at me. I nodded.

“I’m sure.”

Despite what my mother hoped for when she sent me away, I did not stop speaking to Pakkaytoy’s ghost. I chased him across the shadows of my new school’s playground and recited yukar to the nighttime shadows on my bedroom wall. In the early mornings before anyone else was awake, I would speak to him in the bathroom mirror. I’d sit on the countertop and curl my foot underneath me, crushing it against the cold tile until the pain brought tears to my eyes. It wasn’t long before he started visiting me in my dreams, and we would run together through forests older than memory, singing songs and teasing the kamuy as we passed them by. In my dreams, his beautiful little foot was no longer twisted, but perfect and strong. In my dreams we raced over mountains, and he outran me every time.

It was Jun who told everyone at our school that I was Ainu.

He heard me one night as I was speaking to my brother where he hid curled up in the shadows under my bed. I made the mistake of calling out for Pakkaytoy when I momentarily lost sight of him, and Jun burst into my room to tease me for talking to imaginary friends. I chased him around the house as he whooped and hollered, boasting that he couldn’t wait to tell everyone how crazy I was.

“You dress like a boy and you talk to yourself,” he teased. “You’re so creepy! Creepy Aiko!”

When I finally caught him, I punched him square in his smug face. He grabbed at my ponytail as he fell and dragged me down with him. Summoned by our screaming, my father found us brawling on the floor like a pair of stray cats. I was too angry to speak, and could only cry fat, ugly tears, when I was told to apologize for throwing the first punch. After Jun was sent to his own room, I was sure my father was going to tell me he was sending me back to my mother. I steeled myself for it, not even sure if I wanted to stay in Sapporo or to return home. But instead of telling me to pack my things, my father sat with me for hours, stroking my hair while I cried myself to sleep on his lap.

“What kind of name is Pakkaytoy?” Jun asked later, scrunching up his nose when he spoke my brother’s name. It sounded horribly garbled coming from him. “It’s not Japanese, is it?”

I glared at him from across the dinner table.

“No,” said my father, “it’s an Ainu name.”

“Inu? Dog?”

“No, Jun,” my step-mother chimed in. “Ainu. There’s an A in front.”

“What’s an Ainu?”

That question was the beginning of the end of whatever small chance there was that I would ever consider Jun to be my brother.

Jun probably did not mean to be malicious. Even so, I decided I hated him. I hated the way he talked openly to his friends about his “strange Ainu sister,” introducing me like I was some kind of exotic pet. I hated how he seemed so proud to have something foreign and exciting to show off to anyone who would listen. I hated that he acted like that made him special and superior. I hated that he acted superior to me. Thanks to him, everyone in our school pointed and whispered whenever they saw me. That dreaded word I’d only heard so rarely before leaving my hometown flew back and forth around me every day.

Ainu. Ainu. Ainu.

I came to hate the sound of it almost as much as I hated seeing, hearing, or even smelling Jun. It crept under my skin like a fever and made me sick to my stomach. I could only do as my father told me that first day we’d met. Whenever confronted, I stared at my feet, bewildered, muttering over and over, “I’m Japanese, like my dad. I’m Japanese. I’m Japanese. I’m Japanese.”

The school teachers could only do so much to reign in the teasing, but even they, I noticed, began treating me differently. They spoke to me slowly, asking me after every conversation, “Do you understand, Aiko? Do you understand?”

To this, too, I would simply reply, “I’m Japanese.”

I repeated it so often, the phrase became meaningless. I was not Japanese. That was made perfectly clear to me by the blank stares and endless questions of the other children, by the dismissive attitudes from the teachers, by my own father’s words echoing in my head: “I don’t care that you’re Ainu.”

But I was not Ainu, either. I was in between and nowhere all at once, and I had no idea what I was supposed to be. Eventually, I hated both distinctions.

The only name with meaning was Pakkaytoy. I clung to that name as hard as I did on the day I sent it away on a prayer. I clung to it until I couldn’t tell the difference between my little brother’s story and my own.

I was twelve years old when Jun, walking home with me from school, decided to step in front of me and block my path.

“Hey, Creepy Aiko.”

I stepped around him without answering. He moved in front of me again and put his hands on my shoulders, holding me in place. He was taller than me, heavier than me, but I was confident I was stronger. I brought up my hands to shove him away.

“Pakkaytoy.”

That name directed at me fell on my ears like a favorite song. Jun still couldn’t say it right, moved his tongue too sharply around the consonants and made the whole thing sound stiff and dead, but it seemed like he had been practicing holding the shape of it in his mouth. My heart hammered in my chest, and I stared up at him in shock.

“You’re always telling stories to yourself, right? Are they Ainu stories?”

I nodded dumbly, the sound of “Pakkaytoy” still knocking around in my skull.

He considered for a moment before asking, “Will you tell me some? I hear you sometimes. You always sound like you’re having fun..”

“Okay,” I choked out, barely hearing my own voice.

Jun, apparently satisfied, nodded once and continued walking ahead. I trailed a ways behind him, fixated on my own shadow stretching out in front of me like spilled ink. It shifted and fluttered with every step I took, appearing as though it limped along on a twisted heel.