The following piece is published as part of our TLM Young Writers series, a dedicated section of The London Magazine‘s website which showcases the work of exceptional young talent aged between 13-21, from the UK and beyond.

Tia Pratt

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A Girl in Japan
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Winter burns in Japan. It’s not just because of the cold – a cold that bites and burns and numbs, that’s clean and feels minty against your cheeks. It’s because there’s no rain, because there’s nothing to extinguish the red in the trees or to wash the autumn down deep beneath the spotless streets. Tokyo in December is rich, vivid, alive; and it’s where I found my sister at her happiest.

I arrived about a week before Christmas, when the sky should have been ashy and I shouldn’t have been able to see clouds in the rivers and ponds. My sister met me at the bus stop – excited, glowing – in a coat I’d never seen before. I wondered what I must have looked like to her after nearly twenty hours of travel; a little grey, a little slow, eyes wide and glazed as I took in the size of Shin-Yurigaoka station. As soon as I stepped off the coach, she pulled me into a hug and I realised that it didn’t matter how tired I might have looked or felt. That maybe, to her, I was just as radiant as she was.

‘You look exhausted,’ she said.

A rising sun shone through golden leaves and onto ground the colour of rust. It looked as if someone had poured whiskey along the road, behind the glass of the station’s windows, and Teri’s brown hair turned warmer, almost auburn, in the low light.

‘I am exhausted,’ I replied as I hoisted my suitcase up the curb.  ‘But at least now I’m exhausted in Japan.’

‘How does that make it any better?’

‘It doesn’t,’ I said. ‘But it does make it prettier.’

It wasn’t just the new clothes or the shifting tone of her hair that made her seem different to me. There was something unrecognisable about the way she stood – maybe a bit taller, maybe a bit straighter – and there was a lightness in her voice, like steam, that the breeze carried above us when she spoke.

It took a while for me to see it, the garden that Japan had planted deep within her. At first, I wasn’t sure what it was. I could smell the dew on the leafy grounds of the Imperial Palace. I could smell the earth, loose and soft by the lake, that dipped and crested against the pavilions in Shinjuku Gyoen, yet I thought they were just the scents of our planet, of the city. A reminder that Tokyo was awake and growing.

When we went to Disneyland on Christmas Eve, hiding from the chill beneath four layers of clothes, I began to see it in her – a fine, pale hair, a thing like a single dandelion seed, that fluttered weakly against her neck. The perfume of the ruby wreaths, subtle and light, unwrapped itself from around the stained yellow glass of the street lamps and trailed behind us as Teri searched for something to eat.

‘I should have packed some onigiri,’ she groaned. ‘Or a coffee. God, I would kill someone for a coffee.’

‘There was a cafe just outside the station,’ I said. She began jogging on the spot and I brought my hands to my lips, unwilling to say more in case the words stole the warmth from under my tongue.

‘Yeah, but I don’t want to risk leaving the park,’ she replied. ‘They might not let us back in.’

She dragged me from restaurant to restaurant, studying the menus and then leading me to the next. There was too much choice, too little to choose from, and I could feel something hard and tight swelling in my abdomen.

‘I need to eat soon or I’m gonna pass out.’

‘I know,’ Teri said, ‘but everything has meat in it. I don’t understand why every single salad has to have bacon.’

I crouched down and pushed my hands into my stomach. I was running on green tea, an electrolyte drink, and the childish delight of seeing a story, a collection of fairy tales, breathe and shiver beneath Christmas lights.

‘Don’t worry. We’ll find something,’ she said.

And we did.

They came in small plastic bags covered in Pokemon. She danced when she saw that her pineapple was dotted with the little faces of Pikachu, and grinned when she saw that I had chosen the mango-juggling Charmanders. We sat eating dried fruit on a bench decorated with holly, fingers numb and sticky, not saying a word to each other. I looked at her smiling beneath the orange glow of the shop. It was then that I first heard the crack of the splitting seed in her stomach, and I truly believed that she would grow, like the little fire Pokemon on my packet of sweetened fruit, into a mango tree. I thought then that if we came here again, I could sit beneath her canopy and pick a fresh mango for us to share. At all of our Christmases since, I have been able to smell it. Faintly, like a candle in the next room – that creamy, tropical perfume.

The next time I saw it was in Odaiba, a district uniquely beautiful and otherworldly, like a sky stained violet by lightning. Buildings rose so close to the moon that they were tinged silver, dipped in blue, and if I pressed a palm against them, I could feel them vibrate, electrified. It felt like I had been sucked into a Ray Bradbury novel, unaware. I thought about my suitcase back at the house, my beaten copy of The Illustrated Man stuffed somewhere beneath thermals and a half-open make-up bag, and tried to convince myself that I wasn’t dreaming.

It was in the Mori Art Museum where Teri bloomed. This time, it wasn’t just the whistle of the wind behind swaying branches or the smell of fresh grass that kept catching my upper lip. It was explosive and colourful when the garden took over her body, and I watched as the falling petals played with the light on her face.

There had been a warning earlier that day. On the Ferris wheel – a massive, metal flower that unfurled in the sunlight – I saw a pink rose slowly flourish beneath her skin. She cried like she was trying to water it, like there wasn’t enough moisture in the air to keep it alive during winter, and when she opened her mouth to laugh, I thought she would spit out its thorns. As our pod climbed higher, her cheeks turned redder, as though it was trying to squeeze out of her pores. For a moment, I worried that I had pushed her too far. Maybe there was something I didn’t know about Japanese roses. Maybe they could only survive closer to the ground where there were people to see them and people for them to see. Perhaps heaven was too far for their roots to stretch, and they needed to stay near the pavements and roads to access the sun. When the ride had finished, her skin looked like wine, and it rippled when she turned to smile at me.

‘Next time, don’t stand up,’ she said, slightly breathless. ‘You made it worse.’

I held her bag while she tied her shoe and laughed at the water still clinging to her eyelashes. ‘It wasn’t that bad.’

‘Yes, it was. Did you not feel it rocking? I thought it was going to collapse.’

‘I can’t control the wind, Ter. We’ll go on a smaller one next time.’

‘You can, I’m not,’ she said. ‘But it was fun. Kinda.’

By the time we had reached the digital art museum, the rose had receded, although I could still see it in the way she unfurled her fingers from her fists, in the spiral of the hair framing her face. When we stepped in and the light changed, it turned invisible in the dark. But I could sense it in her, a garden too impatient for the spring.

The displays were breathtaking. Each room had a different theme, a different colour scheme, projecting onto the walls and the floors and the people around us. Before arriving, I thought that my favourite would be the lantern room; a space where fire lit the sky and our skin and we could walk on them, gently, as they burned through the mirrors in the ground. They faded from orange and red to blue, and it was like I was at a festival, an aquarium, floating in a bloom of jellyfish. I fell in love with it – with its calmness, with the smallness of myself – but then we went into the room with the waterfall. And that is where Teri finally flowered.

There was a large stone on the ground, close to the rushing blue lights. The waterfall fell from the ceiling onto the rock, and I stood there on the flattest part of it, trying not to slip. Flowers followed the cascade down, down past the edge of the wall, down beneath our feet, and the room flooded with all the colours of a sunset. Teri stood facing me, the art projected across her figure, and that was when it fully clicked. Since coming to Tokyo, she had grown. Her confidence, her resolve, her ambition – there was a gathered joy around her like a halo, like the yellow halo of a buttercup held underneath a chin. She had finally found herself, here in Japan, and I could finally see her for who she was. Eve, rejoicing in the bounty of Eden.

I looked down at myself, at black trousers, a black coat, and a tan scarf. I was still carrying the greyness of England in my skin, the dampness of winter by the sea in my water line. Home still clung to me and I could smell the salt of it when I turned my head. But then Teri pointed at me, her finger swallowed by lavender, and said, ‘You’ve got a petal on your cheek’. I brought a hand up to my face and there, on my open palm, I saw something small and white and soft. Like a lily.

Maybe our four months apart were enough to make me forget that I was a reflection of her – one that was three minutes younger, two inches shorter – and although she was the one who could grow trees and wild grass and blackberries in her limbs, she would always give me enough to make my own bouquets. Or maybe Japan had planted something in me, too; something smaller, something that could germinate in less time – a seed that would develop into something beautiful and living and new. As we left the museum to go down to the river, I decided that it was both. My sister’s radiant happiness, the spirit and personality of a winter in Tokyo – maybe both would encourage me to sprout.

As the night opened up, and the rainbow bridge sparked, the temperature dropped. It was the last Saturday of December, and as we shuffled through the crowds with our arms linked tight, I could feel Teri shivering. The air above us turned white when we spoke and without my glasses, it looked like a cluster of hydrangeas. The cold bit and burned but I knew that it would make the memory of the day much sweeter. Even now, nearly five years later, we still laugh at it – the winter when our feet were so numb, it felt like walking on a sponge, like our soles had turned to mushrooms.

 I nearly tripped as we followed the crowd up a flight of stairs and into the shopping centre. I spotted a Family Mart and dragged Teri over to get some red bean ice lollies. She spotted an ice cream shop and dragged me over to get a sandwich, her shoulders dancing as she licked the strawberry gelato from between the sweet buns. As we left the building to find the best vantage spot, she grabbed my arm.

‘Wait, we still need one more thing. Maybe two.’

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Well, first, I need you to go back in and get me another gelato thing. Pistachio this time.’

‘Why can’t you do it?’

She wiped her fingers off in a napkin then handed me her purse. ‘Because I just bought one and they’ll recognise me.’

I stared at her, waiting for the realisation to hit. When it didn’t, I sighed and said, ‘You know that we’re twins, right?’

‘No, I completely forgot.’ She rolled her eyes and pushed me lightly towards the shop. ‘You were standing behind me. They saw that there were two of us.’

‘If my ice lollies melt, you’re replacing them,’ I mumbled.

‘They’ll probably be more frozen by the time we sit down,’ she said.

When I returned, she took the ice cream from me and turned around. ‘And now we go to Daiso.’

I ended up buying a neck warmer that I stuffed beneath my scarf. Teri came out with a dog blanket, barely big enough to fit across both our laps, and we laughed as we made our way down to the river. She wrapped it around our shoulders. I sat chewing on chunks of adzuki and felt the tickle of grass through my jeans. The rose was back in her cheeks, dyeing her nose bright pink, and we shivered together as we waited. I looked at her as the light from the bridge adorned her face and saw how she reflected it, like a crystal splitting sunlight, out onto the still water. I wondered what plants might grow in her now that the moon was up and the winter was stronger.

I heard someone whistle across the river, and when I looked up, there was a smiley face burned into the sky. We watched as it changed into a heart, a windmill, an orange star. With each bang, the ground beneath me vibrated lightly against my legs. The fireworks started to shoot up faster, louder, brighter, until it was two at a time, three, until the whole sky was overtaken by flaming flowers. Teri smiled and I smiled with her and we looked, together, up at a garden made of light.

I don’t think she knows that she had the same thing in her, growing just beneath the surface, closer to her heart. I felt it in me, too, deep in my stomach – that small, budding garden of Japan.
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Tia Pratt is a student at the University of Portsmouth, currently completing her Master’s degree in Creative Writing. When not writing, she is practising taekwondo, teaching herself Korean, or painting very poorly. Find her on X at @TiaPrattx.