‘It’s my daughter,’ Hiromi said. ‘To be honest, Kana’s always been different, ever since she was an infant. Always walking around on tiptoes.’

Kana watched her lap as the psychiatrist listened to Hiromi, averting her eyes from the certificates that covered his walls. From time to time, she ran a hand under the lip of the imposing desk.

‘I started noticing it more when she started elementary school. The scenes at the school gate when I dropped her there for class. The slightest touch from the teacher was like an electric shock.’

The memory came hurtling back to Kana; she heard her six-year-old voice repeating ‘no’, yelling at the top of her lungs, felt herself writhing in the grasp of the woman who was not her mother.

‘Then there was the moment every afternoon when she came home from school. “How was your day?” I’d ask, and she’d give a minute-by-minute report of each of her lessons. No detail was too small. And, another thing, she referred to everyone in the class as her “friend” as if she didn’t entirely understand what a “friend” is. If a teacher happened to call her Kana-chan, the teacher became her “friend” as well. It took a long time to get her to say simply “classmate”. Truth is, it’s never been easy for her to make friends.’

Hiromi broke off and glanced at her daughter to see if she was blushing too.

It was true, everything that her mother was saying. But that did not mean she had always felt alone. Sometimes, it had been enough to aim her thoughts elsewhere, on the pleasing shape of a stone or a phonetic symbol, and that had protected her. She’d give no thought then to the siblings other single kids often longed to play with, nor imagine, later on, taking up the life of a doting wife, a young mother, as did many teenage girls.

‘Please continue,’ the pot-bellied man said in a tired voice.

‘If I think about it, it’s not just the word “friend”. Sometimes she won’t say watashi, “I” or “me”. We’ll be out for a walk together in the evening and I’ll say something like, “Let’s start back for the apartment, I’m feeling chilly,” and she’ll say, “Kana, too” instead of “me, too”.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said the man.

‘It’s like she speaks her own Japanese. Like she doesn’t always understand other people’s.’ And Hiromi told him about the time she and a teenage Kana had been in town and she’d needed to dash off on an errand. ‘Wait for me outside this store, and don’t wander off,’ she remembered saying to Kana. ‘Here,’ she pointed. ‘I’ll meet you right here in half an hour.’

‘Well, then, not ten minutes after I leave, what do you know, the heavens open. And what does Kana do? She just stands there on the pavement, waiting for me outside in the pouring rain. Twenty minutes out in the pouring rain. “Why didn’t you go inside the store and wait for me there?” I said to her when I got back. You should have seen her. Drenched through and through.’

‘You said, wait for me outside the store,’ Hiromi remembered Kana replying.

The young woman sat motionless, her head down. She kept her gaze on her lap to camouflage the frustration that was building inside her. Nothing would come of all this talk, she realised, not with this man. They should not have come here.

There was nothing wrong with her daughter’s brains, Hiromi added. ‘But since she began at Tsuda she’s been texting all these messages home saying how unhappy she is. And when I come here, I discover she’s lost 10 kilos. Too sad and stressed to eat, she says. I haven’t the faintest idea what to do.’

When Hiromi finished speaking, the psychiatrist cleared his throat and projected an annoyingly know-all expression.

‘I’ve seen cases similar to your daughter’s,’ he announced. ‘A form of depression that we find in young, intense, educated women who push themselves too hard. These women tend to suffer from an anxiety disorder whose precise origins and nature are unclear.’

Finally, Kana looked up at the man sitting in front of his certificates. As he spoke it seemed that he was making less a confession of helplessness than asserting a status quo of medical incuriosity, which was self-explanatory and absolute.

‘We can reduce your daughter’s symptoms with medication. Antidepressants. I’ll write a prescription now.’

The psychiatrist didn’t ask Kana how she saw her future. He would not have known what to tell her, to comfort or to reassure her. She would have talked around his question. You don’t see or hear, you don’t understand, Kana imagined herself retorting. The words depression and disorder do no justice to the person in front of you.

‘Here you are,’ he said, handing the prescription to Hiromi. As he led the women to the door, Kana thought she heard him give an impatient sigh: Those silly, female, anxiety-prone nerves.

A waste of time and money, it seemed to Kana. As if she needed another person to misunderstand her. What her future wellness depended on could not be found in any pill. But at least her mother had been reassured enough to take her train home the following week.

And, not long after this disappointment, Kana began gradually to recover herself. All the time spent with her mother in Tokyo, and the regular sessions with Ms Oka, were having their effect. She felt sure that she had seen the last of doctors like the pot-bellied man. (Janine, the perceptive psychologist she’d see in Boston, would be the one finally to put autism’s name to her difference.) She was coming to a momentous decision, inspired by an incipient self-confidence she owed for now to Ms Oka.

‘Oka-sensei, can I ask, how did you become a clinical counsellor?’

She almost wanted to say, ‘How did you become you?’

‘I studied in America.’

This was what Kana heard. Her counsellor said much more, by way of detail and explanation, but it was this word, America, that grasped her imagination and would not let go.

America! And so before long it was decided, and Kana went about switching course and country.

✲

When Kana got back from walking the puppy she went to her computer and set to her research. This time next week, she told herself again, without finishing the thought. For a time she was able to work with total concentration, her fingers typing and her feet tapping to the ballet music that filled the room. And then she found herself remembering something the British author had said to her.

Her life was a story. The writer, Danieru – Daniel – had told her this in his emails. If she wished (and how much she did wish) for it to be told, he would find the words. The story would be Kana Grace’s; he would be her pen. And she thought now about her dream of the night before, and breakfast with her mom, and each of her daily routines, as if she were already telling him all about them.

✲

Kana was nearly finished packing. The feel of gauze, cotton and soft leather alternated on her fingers. One of the boxes held nothing but her leotards, tights, costumes and pointe shoes – many long unwearable. But there was never any question of her letting go of them; from the tiniest up, each item was a witness to her younger selves and to her progression as a dancer.

During Kana’s terrible bout of loneliness in Tokyo, what had helped to keep her sane – besides the foreign language classes and Ms Oka’s counselling – was ballet. By chance, a new studio had opened its doors just across the road from her lodgings. It was minuscule. Below street level. She loved it. Several times a week after class she donned tights and soft shoes and limbered up at the horizontal bar. The first time that the instructor asked her to dance she worried she might trip over herself from being rusty, but as soon as the emphatic music began her honed legs and arms remembered every gesture, and provided each with a fluid grace, effortlessly bending and swaying.

She had attended ballet lessons since she was a small girl, to the accompaniment of a thunderous piano, in the after-school clubs that were numerous in her home town. Week after week, she worked on her insteps, learned to have a good turnout, pirouetted and practised her entrechat. Accepting several roles in school productions, she had been a soldier in The Nutcracker; another year, a snowflake.

Alongside balance and coordination, ballet helped Kana acquire the concept of personal space. The tutu was a tangible illustration, a colourful decoration, of the boundary that surrounded every dancer.

And ballet accompanied her overseas, so that wherever she would go to study, and later to perform her research, she also danced. The Boston Ballet School. The Place in London.

All through the pandemic, in her room, she had carried on her practice. And watched videos of the Royal Ballet’s past productions of The Nutcracker, her mind spinning and leaping as she watched those graceful young women together on stage – three, six, nine … eighteen dancers. So nimble their every movement, so confident their identical steps, no brush of a leg or jolt of an arm outstretched, no collision. Eighteen personal spaces dancing in parallel, in harmony, separately and yet as one.

✲

Her travels had broadened Kana’s mind immeasurably. And from the time she had returned to the mainland, Kana knew that she would once more leave. And take her mom and dog with her. The inhabitants of mainland Japan were among the loneliest on earth. You had only to follow the media in recent years to think so. Hardly a week or month passed now without Kana and Hiromi reading or watching or hearing some report about the hikikomori, the adult recluses holed up in a bedroom of their ageing parents’ home; or about a forgotten elderly neighbour who had been left to wizen into a mummy; or about the men and women who drop everything to run off and go missing, joining the tens of thousands each year who become jouhatsu, ‘evaporated people’.

Not once did Kana consider these reports to be mere sensationalism or purely anecdotal. She knew families in which a grandfather or some other relative had ‘evaporated’ long ago just like the reporters said. She could not help but wonder if loneliness ran in many Japanese families.

But with Hiromi, to whom she had always been so close, and could speak her mind, never having to stand on ceremony, Kana found it nearly impossible to discuss kodoku, loneliness. Her mom, she knew, had to feel lonely sometimes. When does that happen? She would have liked to ask her mom, but never dared. How long does the feeling last? What makes it better or worse? These were questions she was always asking in her research. Another was, what words would you use to describe your loneliness?

Mother and daughter were sharing one of their last suppers in Utsunomiya when Kana asked this question under cover of a word game. She was thinking of a certain category of words in Japanese, onomatopoeic, that evoke sensations and states of mind. Kura kura, for example, a sound associated with giddiness; zuki zuki, with painful throbbing.

Kana put down her chopsticks and said, ‘When I think of feeling lonely, I think of the word buru buru. It sounds just like the feeling, don’t you think?’

‘Buru buru?’ Hiromi had finished her gyoza dumpling. ‘Yes, I suppose. Yes, I can see that.’

The sound usually described someone trembling – trembling from the cold or fright.

‘Like not having the warmth of someone close to you,’ Hiromi pursued. ‘Or feeling afraid on account of being on your own.’

‘Yes, exactly.’ And seeing her chance, Kana went on, ‘And with what sound do you associate feeling lonely?’

Hiromi’s face turned thoughtful.

‘Chiku chiku,’ she said at last.