“There’s a rabbit, too!” another cop hollers from the balcony. Dressed in jeans and a blue windbreaker, he seems to be enjoying the raid far too much.

“Is it yours?” he asks coming back into the room.

“The rabbit? Actually, he belonged to my next-door neighbor, but I, um, ‘adopted’ him when they moved away.”

“What’s the rabbit’s name?”

“Pyon-kichi,” I answer.

Everyone laughs.

The black rabbit hops into the room and, pausing at my feet, glances up at me with his dark eyes as if to say, “Dude, what’s with all the pigs?” Then, dropping a few balls of poop, hops off towards the dining room where another old cop is rummaging through my cupboards.

Atta boy, Pyon! Sic ‘em!

“Pyon-kichi? Who gave him a name like that?” the cop in the windbreaker asks.

“My wife did,” I say, reaching down to pick up Pyon’s droppings with a tissue.

“Well, that makes sense,” he says with a chuckle. “Pyon-kichi isn’t the kind of name I imagine a gaijin would give a rabbit. What about the bamboo in the other room?”

In the main room of my apartment, a large open space comprising the living and dining rooms which I sometimes use for the English lessons I have at home, is a bamboo branch about two and a half yards long that arches out from one corner of the room. A few days ago, my girlfriend Azami and I spent the evening decorating it with colorful origami for the Tanabata Star Festival that falls on the seventh of July. [1]

As she often does, my girlfriend impressed me with not only her retention of, but also her ability to still apply all the creative and artsy-craftsy skills she picked up ages ago in elementary school. Where the typical Japanese might be able to fold a square piece of paper into an origami crane, Azami can take the same piece of paper and make four connected cranes out of it as if it was the easiest thing in the world to do. Most of my students were thrilled when they saw the bamboo, and, filled with nostalgia, gladly wrote down their Tanabata wishes on paper, which they then attached to the bamboo branch.

“My students and I made it,” I tell the cops. “There may be some extra tanzaku paper left. Feel free to write your wishes down, too.”

None of them take me up on the offer.

[1] Tanabata (七夕, literally, “evening of the seventh”) is a Japanese star festival, celebrating the rendezvous of the deities Orihime and Hikoboshi (represented by the stars Vega and Altair), who are separated by the Amanogawa (Milky Way). The lovers are allowed to meet once a year on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, according to the old lunisolar calendar.

The first posting/chapter in this series can be found here.

Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.