Nagoro

I went to Nagoro to look for you, son.

Your silence and thousand-yard stare spooked me. So did the doctor’s pronouncement of catatonia. So I went to Nagoro to look for you, to try to bring you back.

I found you at the tearoom, your ceramic cup overturned on the wooden table where you were propped in your seat. Green tea stained the seams of your hands. Other tourists wandered through the village and down by the river, remarking on this doll or that. I wondered why they couldn’t tell the living from the doll.

In this faded place there was one person-sized doll for every villager who no longer remained. The silent school yard and empty driveways were populated with stuffed likenesses. One doll for each resident who’d slunk away to the cities for a better life, or exhaled their final rice-soured breath, waiting hours, sometimes days, for an ambulance from Miyoshi to climb the winding mountain roads into this secluded one-road valley to carry their body away. How did no one notice when people like you slipped in among them, with your expressionless faces, your harms barely sewn closed by ragged stitches under bandaged wrists. I could see the appeal, but should it be so easy to quietly insert yourself into this land of scarecrows?

I speak to you, try to call you back to me. When you refuse to answer, I grow despairing and leave the tearoom to wander the village in a daze. Along the desolate and cracked road, I pass the lopsided wooden shelter where a group of dolls, some in fishing boots, some in head wraps, waits patiently for a bus that never arrives. I come upon a doll kneeling in her garden, floppy hat shading her button eyes and moss growing on her samue-clad knees. I want to touch her shoulder, to ask if she is happy here, if she raised happy children here, but the mildew growing into the fabric of her face scares me and I turn back to the road. Ignoring the tourists who come to gawk, I stand in front of a grandfather doll seated on a front porch, his cane next to him and his grandson doll standing between his legs. I wonder if the thing they were waiting for ever happened. I wonder if it will for me and my boy.

When I return to the tearoom, you have not moved from the spot I first found you. I am filled with fear you will never move from it again, but I sit at the table with you, will keep sitting with you until you don’t need me anymore. I reach out and take your limp hand in mine as we gaze out of the dirty, glazed window at the tourists taking pictures.