Content Warnings:
Chapter 1 - Nattō
Kai
Kai picked at the nattō with his chopsticks, sticky strings forming between each soybean, stretching out like the delicate silk of a spider’s web. He did not pull hard enough for the strings to snap, but lowered his hand, setting the glistening beans back onto their bed of steamed rice. Perhaps the miso would be easier. But one look at the cloudy, dark broth only chased his appetite further away.
His mother had woken early to prepare this breakfast, one that had been so common before, but now was a luxury. These foods were non-existent in the local supermarket. Finding nattō had involved a trek into the dingiest street of the next village, and scouring through a run-down East Asian shop that seemed to keep everything in precariously stacked cardboard boxes. He should be grateful. This meal, for all of its painstaking effort to prepare, should be comforting. It should remind him of home.
Except, it wasn’t home anymore, was it? Home now was a small village tucked away in some hilly area of cloud-cast England. There seemed to be more sheep than people. And the only local school was...
His stomach rolled again.
“Kai, you haven’t touched your food. Aren’t you hungry?” said his father, observing him from his cross-legged position opposite the low dining-table.
No, not really. The words were ready at the tip of his tongue, but his throat constricted and he hesitated, a second too long. “Iie, sou demo nai,” he said, instead, falling back into familiar territory.
His father sighed. He’d been making a point to speak only in English, presumably to encourage Kai to do the same. But the words were faraway in his brain and it was as though he had to wade through river-water to find them. The sounds felt clunky in his mouth. Whilst fully-strung sentences flowed with native ease out of his father’s mouth, for Kai, it was like forcing a broken record into a record player. No matter how hard he tried to mimic his father’s speech, no matter how perfectly he could recite an English phrase in his head, whenever he spoke aloud he always ended up sounding off. Like a five-year-old stuck in a fifteen-year-old’s body.
And the people here thought the same didn’t they? That foreignness correlated to stupidity. His thoughts suddenly took a turn, and Kai stabbed his chopsticks into his rice, frustrated. He willed, willed the memory to go away, but humiliation was an anchor, forcing him to relive it yet again.
***
His mother, forever protective, hadn’t wanted him to go alone.
“Look at him, he’s not ready,” she’d said, to which his father had argued, “It’s just grocery shopping! He’s done it plenty of times before,” to which his mother had replied, “But not here. He doesn’t even know his way around yet.”
Their arguments were always bilingual, neither parent wanting to concede by speaking in the other’s native tongue.
In the end, with an unexpected surge of self-confidence, Kai had sided with his father. He wanted to prove that he could be independent. That he could go outside and run normal errands like a normal teenager without anxiety plaguing his every move.
So he had taken the bus to the next village, located that dingy street with the run-down East Asian shop, even asked the shop owner, in English, where the nattō was (after he had spent about half an hour searching for it himself). When he boarded the bus home with a cornucopia of food, he was feeling accomplished. He’d found all the items on his mother’s shopping list and his favourite flavour of Pocky (matcha green tea—the best flavour—no one could convince him otherwise), without triggering any disasters.
At least, that was until his luck was ruined by a pothole. Kai, who had been standing, cradling the shopping bag against his chest, jolted forwards as the floor shuddered beneath him. The pack of nattō flew out of his bag and in the path of a hunched man who was shuffling to get off the bus. The man tripped right into Kai and steadied himself with the metal pole. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Kai rambled, but received only a contemptuous glare in response.
The man turned away as the bus came to a halt, but not before Kai heard him mutter, “Bloody immigrants.”
Kai didn’t need to understand the words to feel the discriminatory venom in the man’s voice. He crouched to the floor to retrieve his nattō, all sense of achievement eradicated. Sniggers erupted from a nearby group of teenagers. “I’m sorry, I’m solly,” they said amongst themselves, mocking his accent. He kept his head bowed, refusing to meet their eyes.
The bus reached his stop not a moment too soon. But, before Kai could leave, one of the teenagers was pushed into his way by the others, who were watching in gleeful anticipation. The teenager clasped his hands together and took a deep, derisive bow. “Ni hao ma,” he drawled, the tones clearly wrong, even to a non-Mandarin speaker.
Kai scowled. “I’m Japanese,” he said, with as much conviction as he could muster. It only made them laugh more. In his periphery, Kai caught a glimpse of a couple of the cronies pulling the corners of their eyes back into slits, and averted his gaze, sickened.
Face burning, he tried to slip away, but the boy who couldn’t speak Mandarin stuck an arm out to grip the metal bar, blocking his exit. “Con-nee-chee-wah,” he jeered instead, provoking another outburst of sniggers.
Kai’s fingernails dug deep into his palms. It was a skin-crawling mockery of the language. His language.
There was only so much of this he could stand. “Excuse me,” he said, using the phrase that he was most familiar with. But it just made him sound weak. He’d need to memorise a more confrontational one when he got home.
If he got home.
“You gonna ninja your way out, Jackie Chan?”
“Stop messin’ about or you lot can all get off the bus,” the bus driver yelled, noticing the confrontation in her rear-view mirror.
At last, the boy dropped his barring arm and Kai stormed through. The sound of their sardonic laughter trailed him as he walked off the bus. It rang deafeningly in his head as he hurried down the street to his house, depositing the grocery bag on the kitchen table, and even as he doubled over at the edge of his mattress with his eyes screwed shut and his hands over his ears.
***
“You will try to speak, today?” His father said, jolting Kai back to reality. Though it did not sound like a question, more of an admission of defeat. Let the teachers do what I can’t. “I don’t know why you’re so embarrassed, Kai.”
Kai sulked at his father. It’s different for you, he didn’t say. You don’t look like me and Okāsan.
“Let him be, it’s only his first day,” said his mother. “Eat your food, Kaitō-chan, before it gets cold,” she added, waving her chopsticks at him. The familiar tones of Japanese felt like a warm hug.
At least his mother wasn’t trying to make him change. To squeeze him into the foreign mould that would allow him to survive in a place that couldn’t seem to feel like home. The box of Frosties in the kitchen cupboard remained unopened, only because of her determination not to succumb such conveniences. You need a proper meal in the morning, she’d claim. Not any of that rubbish. He imagined the taste of the soggy cornflakes, swimming in saccharine milk, and looked down at the selection of savoury, aromatic dishes in front of him. Definitely better, he decided. And, despite his first-day-of-school butterflies, he tucked into his nattō and tried to enjoy it.
***
The first thing Kai noticed about Mordley High was that it was loud. He could understand his father’s English just fine, but it was different standing outside a classroom with fifteen obstreperous voices all clamouring over each other. Not wanting to be involved in the ruckus, he hovered near the door, feeling more awkward with every passing second.
A clack clack clack echoed from behind. Approaching him was a tall woman, with blonde hair pinned back in a French twist and black stilettos that looked like they could pierce through the floor itself.
“Are you Kaitō?” the woman asked.
Kai nodded, and gulped. Yes—why couldn’t you just say yes?
She opened the classroom door and ushered him inside. “I’m Miss Pruce, your form tutor.”
Even when the teacher walked into the room, the shouting did not cease. Kai was taken aback; didn’t the students know any discipline? At his old junior high school, anyone behaving like that would be disgraced. But Miss Pruce did not seem to think anything of it, and simply sat at her desk, sorting through paperwork. She handed him a few sheets of paper—his brain reeled at the thought of deciphering his way through all of those words—and explained to him his timetable. With the speed at which she was talking, and an unfamiliar accent (Welsh? Irish?), a chunk of the explanation was lost to him as meaningless noise. But the gist was clear. For the most part, he would be thrown in the deep end with the same lessons as everyone else. His heart sank, and his despair must have shown on his face, because Miss Pruce gave him a sympathetic look.
“I’ll find someone to show you around,” she said. “In the meantime, your seat is over there.” She pointed to the middle of the classroom, before leaving again and murmuring something about coffee.
It was only when Kai sat down that he noticed the other students’ eyes on him, muttering in hushed voices.
“Why’s there a new kid?”
“Didn’t you hear? Harry left. Family moved to Australia. The outbacks.”
“Why there?”
“God knows.”
“Do you think he’ll get attacked by wallabies?”
“Oy, new kid. You got a name?”
Kai’s head snapped up when he realised that the question was directed at him. He’d practised how to answer this. My name is—
But the only sound that came out of his mouth was, “Um...”
The owner of the voice raised an unimpressed eyebrow. He was slouching so far back in his seat, his bum was barely in contact with it. “Speak up, mate.”
Another snorted. “He deaf or something?” He bum-shuffled over a desk, knocking a pencil case to the carpet, and peered in so closely that Kai could see his singular eyebrow piercing, shaving scar and blond nose hairs. Nasty. “What—is—your—name?” He half shouted, tone thick with condescension.
“Lay off him, Fintan.” A brown-skinned girl with a long ponytail glared at him, eyes shooting daggers through thick, purple-framed glasses.
“Or else, what, Princess?”
“Or else I’ll roundhouse kick your numbskull brain so hard you won’t even remember your mum’s name.” She cracked her knuckles, and despite having the build of a string bean, Kai could almost believe that she was serious.
“Kid still hasn’t told us his name, though. I think he’s mute.”
“He’s not mute,” said the girl with the purple glasses. “Spruce told me he’s Japanese. He probably just doesn’t under—”
“Kai,” he interrupted. Just to clarify that he was neither deaf nor mute nor totally ignorant. He could understand more English than he could speak, courtesy of his father speaking the language at him as a child, and his own refusal to reply in anything but Japanese. The students all looked at him nonplussed.
“There,” the girl said. “He told you his name. Happy, now?”
The boy, Fintan, looked like he wasn’t finished with his questioning, or rather, taunting, but one icy glare from the girl had him raising his hands in submission. “Alright, Sunshine. Jesus. I’m leaving. Go hang out with your new boyfriend.”
The girl gave him a look of pure disgust, and plonked herself down on Kai’s desk, using the back of a nearby chair as a footrest. Unlike most of the girls, she wore grey trousers with her uniform. Possibly because the forest-green tartan kilt didn’t look fetching or comfortable. Although Kai couldn’t help but wonder whether it was to help her follow through with her roundhouse kicking threats.
“Ignore Fintan. He’s a twat,” she muttered. Then she turned to Kai, pushing up her glasses, and any threatening expression had vanished from her face, replaced by an eager smile. The switch was jarring; if Kai didn’t know better, he would say that she looked positively harmless. “Spruce—I mean, Miss Pruce—told me to be your study buddy. So I’ll just be showing you around and stuff. My name’s Prati.”
~Notes~
Disclaimer: I'm not Japanese. My research was done off Google, so if you notice any mistakes, please let me know and I'll change them 
I know there have been some racially-charged debates on the forum, recently. It's not my intention to cause any drama or controversy. I wrote this chapter months ago, but could only post it after I'd finished posting all of HGBF, so I'm sorry if it's ill-timed 
. Race will not be the main focus of this story. I only included it here for CharacterisationTM. I didn't want to write a protagonist of colour and not acknowledge the struggles they would face because of their race. If you want to talk about anything race-related in this chapter, you're more than welcome to PM me
Edited by midget7, 24 March 2021 - 01:05 AM.
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