Shoji Part 3

Summers were cowboys and samuris, as the only child of two very old fashion parents, she needed something off kither to fork up her road. Her parents were born and raised in a small town called Dothan, Alabama and didn’t really seem to want anything extra out of life. This being the reason Kariya was an only child, no extras needed. She was all her parents wanted along with a house and a job with the school board as a janitor and cook. This was the ol’ American dream, right?

Fortunately for Kariya, her father’s parents moved to San Francisco seeking the American dream of real estate and government employment. Without this smudge in her family dream book, her life would have been eating TV dinners on a foldable tray and buying a vowel with her high school sweetheart. This blip made Kariya’s dreams silky with a swagger and she couldn’t get enough of it.

The end of every school year, was like an adventure starting for Kariya. Her mother packing her sundresses, sandals and underwear in a small plaid suitcase as her father made peanut butter and jelly cracker sandwiches for the trip. The bus trip was always fun as her father invented games for them to play to pass the time until they arrived to the bus depot in the Land of Rice o’ Roni. Her nana would greet them with crushing hugs and then hurry them into the car explaining she was missing her stories.

Entering the house was enough stimulation to manage an army of pre-schoolers. In her right ear, with her pop sitting in a worn brown leather recliner, was the gunshots, horses galloping and John Wayne. She played saloon waitress and made sure his mug was always filled with frothy beer or a whisky. Her pop would talk to her about the presentation of “real men”. In her left ear, with her nana sitting in on a plastic covered loveseat, was swords crashing into each other, wooden shoes trampling on cobble stone and another language. She was the translator holding a billigual dictonary of Japanese - English. Her nana would hear a word on her “stories” and would ask Kariya what they were talking about.

By the time she was in middle school, she was fluent in Japanese and John Wayne-isms. As Kariya sat in the hard steel chair awaiting her name to be called for her interview at Fuji TV, she smiled at how influence sneaks up on destiny’s radar. If they didn’t know yet they would soon see that Kariya Herald was a huge force to be reckoned with.