The shop was the size of a parking space. Four counter seats, a kitchen behind a half-wall, and a ticket machine bolted to the wall by the entrance. Steam hung in the air, thick with pork fat and soy and something sweet Kai couldn't place. The broth smell had been leaking through the door for weeks. Every time he walked past on the way home from practice, it caught him in the back of the throat and pulled.
Today he stopped.
Daiki almost walked past him. Then he turned, saw Kai standing at the entrance, and came back.
"Here?"
Kai pointed at the door.
Inside, the ticket machine waited. Rows of laminated buttons with kanji and prices. Steam had warped some of the labels. Kai stared at the characters. He recognized maybe four of them.
Daiki squinted at the machine from the same angle. He could read it fine. He just hadn't done this since he was eleven.
"You buy a ticket," Daiki said. "Then you... sit?"
He looked at Kai for confirmation, which was useless because Kai had never been in a ramen shop in his life. They stood there, two tall teenagers blocking the entrance, staring at the machine. A man came in behind them, walked to the machine without looking, pressed a button, handed his ticket to the shop owner, and sat down. The whole thing took four seconds.
Kai and Daiki watched this happen in silence.
Daiki pointed at a button. "That one looks like noodles."
He pressed it. A ticket printed. He handed it to the owner, who nodded once, and sat on the nearest stool. Kai followed the same process, pressing the same button because it had worked for Daiki and there was no reason to gamble.
Low stools. Kai's knees hit the underside of the counter. He turned sideways and his kneecap cleared it. Daiki had the same problem, less severe.
The ramen came fast. Two bowls, set down with a solid clack. Broth the color of milky coffee, sliced pork, green onions, a soft-boiled egg split in half. The heat rose off the surface in waves.
The shop owner and the regular were eating. The sound was loud, cheerful, unselfconscious. Slurping. In Germany, you didn't slurp. Kai looked at Daiki. Daiki looked at the other customers, then at his bowl, and slurped. His shoulders climbed toward his ears. He slurped again, and the shoulders came back down.
Kai slurped. Heat crept up his neck. The noodles were good. The broth was hot, salty, and made more sense than anything else that had happened in Japan.
The owner said something in Japanese. Friendly, fast, gesturing at them. Kai caught fragments. Foreign? Students? The owner's Miyazaki accent blurred the rest. Daiki answered for both of them. He'd come back from Germany, his friend had come along. The owner asked something else and Daiki laughed and said something Kai mostly followed — about the food, or the town, or both. The owner grinned and went back to his kitchen.
They finished at almost the same time. Kai drank the last of the broth from the bowl. Daiki did the same. They stacked their bowls, nodded to the owner, and walked out into the warm evening air.
"Good," Kai said.
"Yeah," Daiki said.
Toru fell in step beside him on the walk from school. Not arranged. Just two people heading the same direction.
Toru was talking. Kai's Japanese was still bad enough that Toru's conversational speed left gaps, but Toru filled them with his hands, pointing at things, miming when a word didn't land. He was going to the convenience store. Did Kai want to come along?
Kai shrugged. They walked.
With Toru, there was no fallback. When Kai's Japanese failed, Toru just talked slower and used his hands. No Daiki to translate. No German. Just Japanese at whatever speed Kai could manage, and Toru filling the gaps with gestures.
At the convenience store, Toru flipped through a music magazine while Kai bought a bottle of water. Toru pointed at something in the magazine, said a band name Kai didn't recognize, and made a face that meant either "great" or "terrible." Kai nodded. They left and kept walking.
A block later, Toru brought something up. Flat, the way he said everything, no investment in the outcome.
"People are talking about the swimming thing."
Kai looked at him.
"At school," Toru said. "The baseball team's pitcher, swim club." He shrugged. "People talk."
Kai didn't understand the problem. In Germany, you played football on Saturday, swam on Tuesday, ran track on Thursday. Nobody cared. You joined what your schedule allowed.
"So?" Kai said.
Toru shrugged again. They walked on. He pointed at a vending machine, said something about a drink he liked, and the conversation moved.
At the next corner, Toru waved and took a different turn. Kai waved back. The whole thing had taken ten minutes.
Yuki was already at the table when Kai sat down with his homework.
Her textbooks were open, a red pen between her fingers. She didn't offer to help. She was doing her own work. After a while, she glanced at his paper.
"That says 'dog.' You wanted 'big.'"
She corrected it without being asked. The pen moved across his paper, red ink over pencil, and she was back to her own work before he'd processed what happened.
May exams were coming. Kai wasn't stressed about the exams. He was stressed about the kanji. The history textbook required essay answers in Japanese. He'd never written an essay in Japanese. The characters swam on the page, and he recognized maybe a third of them.
Yuki covered the furigana on his study sheet and pointed at a kanji compound. "Read."
He guessed. Wrong.
She uncovered the reading. Pointed at the next. He guessed. Wrong again.
She marked the ones he missed, handed the paper back. "Again."
Her system was flashcard-style drilling, the compounds grouped by radical. She was efficient, slightly impatient, and treated his mistakes as engineering problems rather than things to be gentle about.
"School kanji is different," she said, still in German. "What my mom taught us and what they expect here." She shrugged. "You catch up."
She'd done it. The same move, the same confusion. She didn't say it like a confession. She said it like a weather report.
A kanji went wrong under his pen. He didn't see the problem. Yuki's head tilted, and then she laughed. A real laugh, short and bright.
"You wrote 'big shellfish.'"
He had no idea what it was supposed to say. But her laugh pulled one out of him too. She caught it, said nothing, and pointed at the next compound.
When he got one right, she nodded once. The pen tapped the table. "Next."
Haruka came through. Two cups of barley tea appeared on the table. She said something in German about the neighbors' air conditioning breaking again, and how the repairman had told them it would be fixed by Golden Week and here it was mid-May. She wasn't talking to him, exactly. She was talking, and he happened to be there, and that was enough.
Down the hall, Daiki's voice. On the phone or watching video. Fragments of baseball terminology drifted through the walls. Batter counts, pitcher names, something about a slider's break. Daiki's baseball brain never switched off. At the dinner table, on the walk home, in his room at night. The sound of it was ambient now. Background.
Daiki appeared in the doorway. He paused, looked at Kai, and switched to German. Quiet.
"Takeda's been talking."
Kai looked up from the study sheet.
"The captain," Daiki said. "He hasn't said anything to you yet. But he's mentioned it to me. The swim club."
"I made the promise," Kai said.
"I know."
"Baseball comes first when it matters. I said yes."
Daiki held the look for a moment. His jaw tightened, then released.
"Just so you know," he said, and went back to his room.
Kai looked at the kanji sheet. Yuki's red marks covered it like a rash. Down the hall, Daiki's door closed.
The ceiling was still too close. It would always be too close. But for the first time, that fact didn't register as a problem. It was just the room. His room, with its low ceiling and thin walls and the window Haruka had left cracked.
The ocean. Not the Danube, which had been grey and wide and ran through the middle of a city that made sense. The Pacific, which was warm and dark and crashed against a coast he'd known for two months.
The sound was the same. Water on rock, over and over. The same rhythm in a different ocean.
He fell asleep listening to it.