March 3rd was Hinamatsuri , Japan’s day of celebration for girls where everyone puts out beautiful little dolls and eat sugar candies colored white, pink, and pale green. “If you don’t put out the dolls,” C-san started gravely, “your daughter may not get married until she is very old.” She said this as she steeped instant coffee in dainty, precious tea cups, and I vaguely wondered if maybe I would never get married. After all, my mother had not even known to put out hina ningyo dolls. C-san had put her ornate set out in the beginning of February, and she didn’t even have a daughter.

I had first visited C-san’s house in February. I had met O-san, a nice, awkward, and kind of weird older gentleman a couple months earlier, and B and I occasionally dragged ourselves to lunch with him, where it would take O-san 15 minutes to say something we could say in 5. And we were speaking Japanese. But he liked the company of us foreigners, so I figured we would humor him once in a while. One day he invited me and B to dinner at his house. “My wife, her name is C. She’s going to make a nice, normal meal, because you know, I figured. You guys get to experience all the special stuff in Japan, all the big events, but you don’t get to see what normal people do, on normal days.” He certainly is right - foreigners in Japan are always the guests and never the family.

I said yes the first time to be polite and expected an awkward, panda-on-display type night but was pleasantly surprised to see that C-san was much more of a …normal person. She teased and tsked at O-san whenever he said anything weird, and he would smile at me with a twinkle in his eye. We sat at their dinner table for a few hours talking about many things, in a house only 10 minutes walk from the office, a house that O-san, an architect, had designed. He may have designed it but it definitely had C-san’s touch about it - from the flower-patterned curtains to the cat knicknacks on the counters to the frilly chair leg covers that prevented the soft brown wood from being scuffed. I felt very comfortable, and after C-san’s dinner, very satisfied. It wasn’t so bad, I decided, to humor an older couple once in a while.

Moreover, I just really liked C-san. I’ve only met a few Japanese wives but the few that I have met have been shy and distant, choosing to stay in the kitchen and prepare food than bother the guests. C-san and I chatted for hours and immediately had a connection, if a 20-something American girl and a 50-something Japanese woman can have a connection. It’s so rare for me to immediately hit it off with people here - I can entertain at parties and first meetings, but getting someone to follow up on that connection has proved to be harder than I expected. But C-san made me feel welcome, and even though I have no illusions that some of the reason may be that she enjoys having a foreigner in her house, the fact that we talk about things that have nothing to do with foreignness or english or america really makes me feel like she thinks of me as a person, as someone she wants to be friends with. A lot of Japanese people are polite and friendly, but it’s hard to grasp whether they really think we can be friends. Even though I never imagined that I’d become friends with someone so much older and wiser than me, somehow, a connection was made. Life keeps surprising me, in so many different ways.

“Amanda,” O-san beckoned to me from the entrance of my office on Wednesday (he doesn’t like actually entering the room; says it’s hairizurai “hard to enter” because everyone always stares at him when he opens the door - I wonder why!). He paused and stared at me a few seconds too long, which is what he always does when he starts a conversation. “Are you busy tonight?”

“Uh, no, I don’t think so. What’s up.”

“Today is Hinamatsuri, but I’m going on a business trip to Ofunato. I won’t be home til late…”

“…So you want me to hang out with C-san?”

“Waow,” he laughed, mimicking the way I say “wow” in English still, whenever I’m surprised. He ends up saying it at weird, inappropriate moments, with his whole mouth struggling to capture the depth of that English dipthong. I love it. “Yes. You can surprise her. You can buy a hinamatsuri cake too, bring it over, have a girls chat.”

“Yeah, okay. Sounds like fun,” I agreed. What a sweet thing, for him to think about his wife sitting at home alone on Hinamatsuri. I wouldn’t have to spend it alone either.

“Waow,” he said again. “Sapuraizu. Waow.”

After work (and a particularly grueling interpretation session in which I was suddenly christened Main Interpreter about a topic I knew zippo about), I headed over to the bakery O-san had pointed out so that I could buy some hinamatsuri cakes, or something. The only problem was, the bakery did not seem to have any cakes, whatsoever. They didn’t even seem like they sold cakes at any point. So I shrugged and bought some sweet maple bread and gave C-san a call.

“Hi, it’s Amanda. Uh…What are you doing right now?”

“Hmm? Nothing really, making dinner I guess.”

“So O-san asked me to come hang out with you today because it’s Hinamatsuri and he’s not gonna be home til late. So, is it okay??”

“Huh??? Well, I’m not really making anything special for dinner but if that’s alright, of course you can come over.”

 I meandered through the streets, a girl in a suit with multi-colored sneakers. To get to O-san’s house you had to walk past a couple temples and Buddhist statues, on a street that was sometimes called “Little Kyoto.” A lot of towns have a “Little Kyoto,” it’s true, but it still makes me happy that Morioka, so many miles and miles and thousands of yen away from I-house, has a Little Kyoto of its own. Even though nowadays, I’m pretty sure I’ve fallen far more in love with Morioka than I ever could with big, touristy Kyoto. Well, the Kyoto I loved was all narrow pathways and rusted rails, a rickety school building and a well-worn bench. It wasn’t stuff you could put in a guidebook, just like Morioka could never truly be a tourist destination, even if they rebuilt the old castle, even if that’s what they wanted. And I can never go back to Kyoto, and I’m so alright with that.

It’s been a long time, but I’ve accepted it. Kyoto could never be what it was during that magical year, and I can never be who I was again. I wouldn’t want to go back to that. Maybe I was a tiny bit “happier” then but it’s only because I was lot more full of myself and horrible then. Sometimes I feel like I grew too fast in Kyoto, and didn’t have the time to reflect on anything that happened, leading me to make stupid, selfish decisions because I felt entitled to them. I’m a lot more grounded in Morioka, and a lot less “free,” but I’m a tiny bit more mature and lot more sure of what I’m doing, instead of just putting on the bravado that I know what I’m doing. I’ve gone through some tough things here, but they’ve really made me realize what I want, what I’m capable of, and who I am, on the inside. Morioka, in the beginning, disappointed me for not being as non-stop fun as Kyoto was, but I realize now that Kyoto was like a movie - you go to it, you’re entertained, you say it really moved you, you go home and nothing changes. Everything is out of your hands, and you’re just along for the ride.

Morioka is quiet and cold, but I can turn the heater on myself. I bought that heater myself. I can warm everything up, all by myself. I just had to realize that I controlled the switch. And that quietness and that coldness is part of life too, and they can be beautiful in their own little ways. Morioka, slowly but surely, is teaching me that.

C-san made me some hot coffee and put out some sweets while I admired her hina doll display. I forgot to ask for some cream and sugar, but C-san smiled at me with a twinkle in her eye saying, “I like it black too, without any sweetness.” I didn’t have the heart to disappoint her by asking for sugar, so I popped some sweets in my mouth to dull the bitterness as we watched tv. A politician was mad that another politician was late to a meeting. People in Ofunato were picking up after the wreckage of the “tsunami” we survived on Sunday. A fourteen-year-old girl jumped to her death because she was bullied. “Our youngest son was bullied when he was in fifth grade,” C-san sighed. “But that kind of thing, if you survive it, makes you so much better of a person. You really think about other people you hurt them.” I agreed with her, but once more didn’t have the heart to tell her that while in high school I was no prom queen (so far from it it’s not funny), I did a fair share of bullying myself, even if at the time I wouldn’t have called it bullying.

O-san came home around 6 pm. “Amanda!” he said, calmly shocked. “What are you doing here? Supuraizu. Waow.”

“What the heck. I already know you asked her, anta,” C-san waved him off from the kitchen.

“O-san,” I said grimly. “They had no cake at all at that bakery you told me about.”

“You went to Brugge?”

“Yeah.”

“They had no cake?”

“Yeah, it was just bread. I bought some maple thing-”

“There was no cake?”

“(sigh) No, no cake.”

“There’s two Brugge stores. Did you go into the bakery? There’s one right next door that just sells cake.”

“What?? Really?”

Me and O-san ended up going back to Brugge and walking into the store next door, which was also Brugge, and also sold the cakes. O-san thought it was the funniest thing in the world that I missed it, even though I whined that I had been tired and that there was a huge truck in the way when I went earlier. It was a story for us to laugh about over chicken, mushrooms, daikon, and rice balls. We sat and talked for far longer than I expected - about my dream for my future career, about how O-san and C-san met, about the boy who I can only admire from afar, and about the boy I try not to think about even though he was a part of my life for so long.

“You know,” C-san smiled, her hands clasped together, “We’ve had foreigners over before - we’ve had students homestay here. But I think you’re the first one I’ve ever really connected with. I really do think we clicked.” I smiled, touched, because I felt the same way. How odd to feel so warm and at home with someone who had lived more than 50 years in a land that was not my own! You would think we had completely different thoughts and experiences, but at the end of the day, we were more similar that you would think. It was so incredibly kind of C-san and O-san to take me under their wing like this. It felt like they were really looking out for me, and I geniunely enjoyed spending time with them, even though I had never guessed I would. I hit it off with this older japanese couple, and I really feel like they treat me like a real person. I have no pretenses that the reason they wanted to know me in the first place is because I am foreign, but she said to me that out of all the foreigners she’s known, I’m the one she feels closest with, and this is only after three meetings. That’s not a lie. That’s not “tatemae.” She’s not just saying it, I really feel like she means it. And that’s the best thing anyone’s ever said to me.

She smiled again, “You don’t have an 裏 to you.” An ura. A dark side. A hidden side.

But that’s the thing: Everyone has a dark side, has a hidden side to them. And that’s okay. If everyone has it, then you can’t be surprised when someone does something bad, because all people do bad things, think bad thoughts, are generally rotten at a certain point in their life. Or maybe, I just want to think that because it’s something that let’s me forgive myself for being such a horrible human being during that muggy Kyoto summer.

Kyoto was something I did when I was a stupid girl, when I believed in all this stuff we celebrate on Hinamatsuri - that girls are special, that every one is supposed to be a beautiful princess. You know, it’s okay to be a normal guy. An average guy. There’s nothing wrong with that. But calling a girl average is an insult. Nobody wants to be with average girls. I don’t want to be an average girl. But somewhere along the way, I confused being special with being pretty and desirable. I felt like my worth was based on whether I could get a guy, not how good I was at japanese or how I treated other people. I still feel that way sometimes. and it’s a horrible, ugly way to feel. I’m not here to compete with other girls. I’m not here to prove how hot I am. I’m not special, and I am special, the same way everyone is special or not special depending how you see them. Somewhere I got it into my head that the boy who thought I was special wasn’t enough. Somewhere along the way, the only person I thought was special was myself.

So I have a dark side, a hidden part of me that I don’t want others to see. But I also realize that that part of me is what makes me human. It’s what makes us all human. And while we all battle that part of ourselves our entire lives, if we didn’t have it then life wouldn’t be what it is. Maybe what C-san meant when she said I don’t have an ura is I know it’s there, and I just try to be honest about it. If you want me to admit that I cheated on my boyfriend when I was in Kyoto, I’ll admit it. I’ve never been good with secrets, after all. It’s something that I’ll always be sorry about, even though what I feel is not worth very much. Just because humans do bad things sometimes doesn’t mean it was ever okay for me to do a bad thing. But I’m sure that I’ll be hurt, and that I’ll hurt again, because everyone has a dark side, and just knowing it is there somehow helps. We can never really understand why other people do things, because I don’t think we ever fully understand why we ourselves do things. But I feel like I have to at least try. And being with the O-sans makes me want to try, because they believe in me without knowing everything about me, because they probably would still believe in me even if they knew it all.

It was 10:30 by the time I got home; C-san playfully reminded me as I exited their car that I should keep in mind our “plan” to invite my crush to Hirosaki with them to go see the sakura blossom. I grinned, waving goodbye as they drove off, a bag full of Hinamatsuri candy and rice balls in my hand. I pushed the rusty key in the lock, set my coat down, and checked my phone to see that my friend had finally had her baby on the day of Hinamatsuri, and it was a boy.