Chương 195: Kira's Choice

With Ethan gone to build his imperfect business, Chris's life went quiet again. He spent hours walking New York, from the Brooklyn Bridge to the paths in Central Park, an ordinary tourist observing the city and observing himself. He tried to reach Kira several times. Nothing came back. Her phone was off and her accounts had stopped updating. The girl who had been a silent blade on a competition floor had chosen the most complete kind of silence afterward. It wasn't that he didn't worry.

He preferred to believe this was Kira's own choice. Then, a few days later, Sarah called.

"Chris, have you managed to reach Kira?" She sounded resigned.

"No. She's vanished off the planet. Why?"

"Ah." Sarah sighed.

"Do you know how many people have been through my office door looking for her this week? The largest knife maker in Japan wants her as a global ambassador — an eight-figure fee. A Scandinavian design house saw the plate she used in the final and wants a Kira Watanabe line of tableware. And that's before the investors who want to open her a top-flight kaiseki restaurant in New York, London and Tokyo." None of it surprised Chris. Kira's gift and her singular style had enormous commercial value built into them.

"She turned all of it down?"

"Turned down doesn't cover it." There was something between laughing and crying in Sarah's voice.

"She wouldn't meet anyone. She had me send every single one of them the same sentence. Thank you, but I don't need it. And then she left."

"Left? Where? Back to her restaurant?" Something moved in Chris's chest.

"No. That's why I'm calling." Sarah said.

"She bought a ticket to Shizuoka. Not Tokyo, not Kyoto — somewhere small in Shizuoka. She said she's going to spend three months on a tea farm."

"A tea farm?" That stopped Chris completely. It surprised him more than every commercial offer put together. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"A working farm. They grow tea and they pick it." Sarah didn't understand it either.

"She said she used too many other people's stories during the competition, and now she wants to go and listen to what the tea has to say. And she said — she owes the ingredients some quiet time." She owes the ingredients some quiet time. Chris repeated it to himself, and understood all of it at once. On that finals floor Kira had completed the most important change of her career. She'd gone from a solitary artist who only spoke with ingredients to somebody who could hear, understand and retell human feeling.

That apple pie was the tenderness she'd offered Madame Dubois, and it was also the first answer she'd handed to a loud world. For Kira, it had probably also cost an enormous amount. She'd emptied herself out to carry memories that were heavy and complicated. Now the competition was over and the celebration had ended, and she needed to go back somewhere she felt safe and quiet and draw strength again. That place wasn't under a spotlight and it wasn't in a starred restaurant.

It was a tea field in Shizuoka, in the veins of a leaf, in one bead of morning dew. It wasn't running away. It was going back. Having found a way of connecting to the world, Kira had chosen to return to her own interior and hold a deeper conversation there.

"Did she leave a message?" Chris asked quietly.

"She did. She said there was something I had to get to you." Sarah paused.

"Can you take a delivery? Or I could bring it over."

"Post it." Two days later a package arrived. Under several layers of bubble wrap was a plain wooden box. There was nothing in the box but one sheet of unusual paper, folded very precisely. Chris opened the washi carefully. Kira's handwriting was on it, elegant and firm, exactly as he remembered. Two lines. The first was a haiku in Japanese. Chris couldn't read it, but even in the shape of the characters he could feel a rhythm. The second was in English. I owe the ingredients some quiet time.

See you in a kitchen next time, whenever, wherever. And her signature under it. Chris stood by the window holding it for a long time. He looked up the haiku on his phone later. It came out as: on a single tea leaf, the silence and fragrance of an entire universe. He smiled. That was very Kira. He didn't try to reach her again, and he didn't feel abandoned by her leaving without saying goodbye. Kira hadn't gone anywhere. She had simply changed methods and was continuing her practice in another corner of the world.

And see you in a kitchen next time, whenever, wherever was a firmer appointment than any promise. Because they were cooks. A kitchen is the best language they have for meeting again. Chris put Kira's note and Vincent's letter together into the felt bag that held the brass tasting spoon. There was one more precious thing in his luggage now, and it was about the future.