The air hit him like a wet cloth.
Kai stepped through the sliding doors of Miyazaki Airport and the humidity closed around his chest, his neck, the backs of his hands. Twenty degrees and it clung. Regensburg had been grey and four degrees when they left. Three airports, seventeen hours, and the atmosphere had changed species.
Palm trees lined the pickup lane. Their fronds ticked in a wind that carried salt and exhaust and something floral he couldn't place. The sky was too blue, too bright, the light sharper than any March afternoon in Bavaria. His shirt stuck to his spine before he reached the curb. Beside him, Daiki adjusted his bag strap and scanned the pickup lane.
A horn. Short, impatient. A white van pulled up with the window already down and Haruka Nishimura was out of the driver's seat before either of them could move.
She went to Daiki first. Grabbed his face with both hands, pulled him down, kissed his forehead. Three months since she'd seen her son. She held him at arm's length, inspected him, said something fast in Japanese that made Daiki's ears go red. Then she let him go and turned to Kai.
Her head tilted back. And back.
"Du bist noch GRÖSSER geworden!" She planted herself on the curb and looked up at him. Way up. She came to his chest. Five months ago, in Regensburg, she'd come to his shoulders. "Fünfzehn Zentimeter. In five months. What are they feeding you in Bavaria?"
"Bread," Kai said.
She laughed and grabbed his bag. He held it above her reach and she swatted his arm and took it anyway, swinging it into the back of the van.
"Get in, get in. Both of you. It's an hour to Minamisaki."
The van was not built for someone his size. Daiki climbed into the back without being asked. Kai took the passenger seat and pushed it as far back as the rails allowed. His knees still rose above the dashboard. His head grazed the ceiling unless he slouched, so he slouched. In the rearview mirror, Daiki's mouth didn't move but his eyes carried the full commentary.
Haruka drove and talked. Japanese to Daiki about enrollment papers, switching to German for Kai about the house, back to Japanese for something fast that he didn't catch, then German again: "The ocean is ten minutes from the house. You still swim?"
"Yeah."
"Good. The beach is beautiful. Your room is small, but I put in fresh sheets. The futon is new." She passed a truck on a curve that would have earned a citation in Bavaria. "The food here is different from Germany. You'll eat everything I make."
It wasn't a question.
The road followed the coast south. Between headlands, the Pacific appeared in flashes: a stripe of dark blue between green slopes, then gone behind a hillside, then back, wider each time. Low mountains to the west, forested, clouds sitting on them. Paddies beside the road, brown water, no green yet. Greenhouses between them. Palms he didn't recognize. The sky was too bright. He closed his eyes against the window.
Small towns slid past the window. Clay tile roofs, narrow roads, convenience stores with bright signs. A petrol station. A shuttered pachinko parlor. A temple gate down a side street. His head rested sideways against the warm glass. Each town looked the same and looked nothing like anywhere he'd been.
Minamisaki appeared around a headland. Small. Compact. Houses stacked on a slope above a curved bay. A school sat partway up the hill, clay-colored buildings behind a chain-link fence. Behind it, visible through a break in the trees, a baseball diamond. Brown dirt infield, thin grass outfield, a backstop and metal bleachers that might hold two hundred.
Smaller than Regensburg's.
The house was narrow and warm and smelled like sesame oil and something frying.
Kai ducked through the genkan. His forehead cleared the doorframe by a finger's width. Inside, the ceilings dropped lower and stayed.
"Shoes off," Haruka called, already two rooms ahead. "Slippers by the step. They won't fit. Just socks."
Dim hallway. Family photos on the wall, shoes lined up on the step in descending size: Coach Nishimura's, Haruka's, Yuki's. A space cleared for two more pairs.
His room was at the end. Tatami floor, a futon rolled against the wall, a small desk under a window facing the neighbor's garden. The futon, unrolled, covered most of the floor. His suitcase took the rest. He stood in the doorway because there was nowhere else to stand.
Dinner was at a low table in the kitchen. Kai's legs didn't fit under it. He sat cross-legged and his knees rose above the surface anyway. Rice, miso soup, grilled fish with a ginger glaze and crispy skin, pickled vegetables in small dishes he had no names for. Haruka set everything down without explanation. Chopsticks. A glass of barley tea, cold and faintly grainy.
He ate. The fish was good. The miso was hot and tasted like the ocean had smelled from the car. One of the pickles was sharp, almost vinegar, and he reached for a second helping before the first was finished.
"See?" Haruka said, in German, to nobody in particular. "He eats."
A door slid open at the far end of the kitchen. Yuki came in barefoot, hair still damp, wearing a tracksuit that hung loose in the shoulders.
"You're even taller," she said to Kai. In German. Flat and direct, the same register she'd used on him since they were children.
"Or Japan is shorter."
Her mouth moved, barely. She sat across from him and reached for the rice. One year younger than Daiki, three months of Japan ahead of them. She'd come with her parents in December, enrolled at Minamisaki alone, rebuilt from zero while Daiki and Kai finished the school year in Regensburg. She didn't mention any of it. Her Japanese came out faster than Daiki's, her hand found the soy sauce without looking, and she sat at the table like it had always been hers.
"How was the flight?" In German, like the rest.
"Long."
"How's the room?"
"Small."
"How's the fish?"
He paused. Looked at the plate. "Good."
"She tried three glazes before she picked that one." Yuki glanced at Haruka, who was wiping the counter with pointed efficiency. "She's been cooking since yesterday."
"It's fish," Haruka said, not turning around. "Not a performance."
Yuki asked about Regensburg, about the winter, about whether his parents had ever fixed the upstairs bathroom.
"They called a plumber in January," Kai said. "Froze again in February. My father bought a space heater and put it in the hallway. My mother says it's an aesthetic crime."
Yuki didn't remark on it. She asked the next question, and the one after that, and Kai kept answering because the German made it easy and Yuki made it easier.
The kitchen filled with sounds: pots in the sink, rice cooker clicking, and from outside the open window, a pulsing chorus that rose and fell in waves. Frogs, insects, he couldn't tell. Nothing in Regensburg sounded like that.
After the dishes were done, Daiki appeared at the hallway entrance.
"Come on. I'll show you around."
The coastal road was dark. Air warm and damp, salt-heavy even two streets back from the water. Streetlights spaced far apart. Between them, nothing but their footsteps on asphalt and that pulsing chorus from the hillsides.
Daiki pointed at shapes in the dark. "School's up there. The field's behind it. You saw it from the car." A beat. "Convenience store on the corner. We'll be there a lot."
They passed a shuttered ramen shop and a vending machine glowing blue-white, the only bright thing on the block. The road curved and the houses thinned and then there was a seawall. Concrete, hip-height, rusted railing. Beyond it, the Pacific.
No water visible. Only the sound of it: a low, constant wash against rocks below, steady as breathing. Salt and kelp and a coolness that cut through the humidity. The coastline disappeared into blackness. A scatter of lights from somewhere down the shore. The running lights of a boat far out where the sea met nothing.
Stars were thicker here than in Regensburg. No city glow to wash them out.
Daiki leaned on the railing. "The air's different," he said. In German, quiet.
Kai leaned beside him. The metal held the day's warmth. Rough under his forearms.
"Yeah."
They stood there. Two people at the edge of a town neither of them knew yet, listening to an ocean they couldn't see. Daiki's family had been here since December, but Daiki had stayed in Regensburg with Kai to finish the school term. Minamisaki was new to both of them.
"You good?" Daiki asked. Not: are you ready for the team. Not: are you excited. The question underneath those questions.
Kai looked at the dark where the ocean was. "Yeah."
His futon was shorter than him by ten centimeters. His bare heels rested on tatami. The walls were thin enough that the house breathed around him: water running, a cabinet closing, footsteps on creaking floorboards.
Through the wall, Coach Nishimura's voice carried from the living room. On the phone.
German first. Stilted, careful, the grammar of a man who'd lived in Bavaria for five years but never quite made the language his own. Kai's parents' names surfaced in the current of words. The cadence of a status report: Angekommen. Alles gut. Die Schule ist geregelt. Arrived. Everything's fine. The school is sorted. A man who'd filed enrollment forms, arranged health insurance, handled a sixteen-year-old's residency paperwork across an ocean. It registered the way the frogs did outside: present, part of the landscape, carrying a weight Kai didn't measure.
Then a second call. Japanese, faster. Sentences he couldn't parse, words running together, rising and falling in a rhythm that would surround him for the next two years whether he was ready for it or not.
One word landed clean. Yakyū.
Baseball.
The frogs pulsed outside his window. Somewhere in the house, a floorboard settled. Kai stared at the ceiling and listened to the machinery turning.