The Thursday Drum

Fryer Side

The refrigerator in the hospital pharmacy held its temperature between two and eight degrees, and Mariana Takeda Souza checked it the way other people checked the sky. At the start of the night shift she read the display, wrote the figure on the paper log taped to the door, and initialed it in the small square provided. Four point one. At midnight she would write it again. The digital record kept itself, but the paper log was hers, and in nineteen years nobody had asked her to stop.

She was forty-one and had worked in this building since her residency, first in the satellite pharmacy on the oncology floor and now as the senior pharmacist on nights. Her work was a matter of tenths. Tenths of a milligram, tenths of a milliliter, a vial turned under the light to find the hairline crack that would ruin a dose. She liked the hum of the laminar flow hood and the smell of alcohol swabs drying on her gloves. She liked that a label meant what it said.

At six on Saturday morning she handed the keys to Rogério, who arrived with wet hair and a paper cup of coffee from the bakery on the corner, and she took the elevator down past the floors that were waking up. On Avenida Paulista the buses were already full. She slept until two in the afternoon in her apartment in Paraíso with the curtains pinned shut by a clothespin, and on Sunday she rose at five to help her parents at the feira, because that was what Sunday had always been.

The street market set up two blocks from her building, on a sloping street lined with jacaranda trees that dropped purple trumpets onto the canvas roofs every October. In June the trees were bare and the light came down gray and thin. By six the iron frames of the stalls had gone up with a clatter that sounded like a dropped drawer of cutlery multiplied a hundred times. Someone's radio played a sertanejo song about a truck, and someone else's radio played the morning news over it, and the two did not fight so much as ignore each other.

Her parents' stand sat at the bottom of the slope, where the street flattened. A blue tarp, a long steel counter, two deep fryers fed by a gas cylinder painted orange, and a hand-lettered board that read PASTEL in tall red letters. Under it, in smaller print: CARNE, QUEIJO, PALMITO, PIZZA, FRANGO COM CATUPIRY, BAURU.

Her mother, Celina, was already rolling dough. She was sixty-eight and wore a quilted vest over a cotton apron, her hair under a net, and she handled the long sheet of pastry as if it were a bolt of silk. She cut it into rectangles with a wheel, spooned ground beef seasoned with onion and green olive onto one half, folded the other half over, and pressed the edges closed with the tines of a fork. The rhythm never changed. Fill, fold, press, turn. Her father, Edson, stood at the fryers in a white cap. When a pastel went into the oil it hissed and swelled, the dough blistering into pale bubbles that browned at the edges, and he turned it once with long tongs and lifted it out to drain on a rack lined with brown paper.

"You look tired," her mother said, without lifting her eyes.

"I always look tired on Sunday."

"Then you always look tired." Celina pushed a stack of folded paper napkins toward her. "Counter."

Mariana took the counter. She made change, called out orders, and slid the pastéis into paper sleeves so customers would not burn their fingers. Across the aisle, the caldo de cana man fed lengths of peeled sugarcane between the steel rollers of his press, and the green juice ran down a trough into a pitcher with a chunk of lime and a scoop of ice. The press groaned with each stalk. The smell of cut cane, grassy and sweet, drifted over to mix with the smell of hot oil.

The second fryer stood empty. It had been empty for fifteen months.

For thirteen years after he came back from Japan, her uncle Osvaldo had worked the second fryer. He was her mother's younger brother, a narrow man with a long jaw and reading glasses he wore pushed up into his gray hair, and he had been the most exact person Mariana ever knew. He folded the drying towels in thirds and then in half again, stacking them at the corner of the counter with their edges aligned. He wiped the steel down every half hour whether it needed it or not. He timed the oil by the sound it made, not the color of the dough, and when a pastel came out of his fryer it came out the same shade every time, a gold with no brown spots. The customers called him Japonês, the way São Paulo did with anyone who looked like him, though he had been born in a farmhouse outside Bastos and spoke Portuguese with the soft interior r of the coffee towns. He had answered to it without complaint. He answered to most things without complaint.

He had died in March of the previous year, at sixty, of a heart that had given no warning. Her father found him on a Tuesday morning in the small room he rented on Rua dos Estudantes, sitting at the table with his shoes on, as if he had been about to leave for the feira and decided to rest for a minute first.

Nobody had replaced him at the second fryer. Her father said it was because the business did not need two fryers anymore, which was not true.

At eleven the crowd thinned and Celina wiped her hands on a towel and reached under the counter for her handbag. She took out an envelope and set it on the steel between them.

"This came on Friday," she said. "To the apartment. For Vado."

The envelope was pale blue, the airmail kind with red and blue chevrons along the border. It was addressed in two scripts. On top, in careful Roman letters, someone had written TAKEDA OSVALDO and her parents' address in Liberdade, the apartment above the stationery shop where the family had lived since 1979. Below that, a line of Japanese. The postmark said HAMAMATSU.

"I didn't open it," her mother said. "I thought you should."

Her father turned off the burner under the first fryer and came to stand beside them. He was seventy and broad, with forearms freckled from fifty years of feira sun, and his grandparents had come from a village in the Minho with nothing but a set of copper pans and a stubbornness he claimed to have inherited intact. He looked at the envelope the way he looked at a gas cylinder that might be leaking.

Mariana slit it open with the edge of a pastry wheel.

Inside were two sheets of paper and two photographs. The first sheet was written in Japanese, in small neat characters that marched down the page in columns. The second sheet was in English, typed.

Dear Mr. Takeda Osvaldo, or dear family of Mr. Takeda,

My name is Kuwabara Shuhei. I am a retired police officer of Shizuoka Prefecture. At present I am assisting as a temporary staff to arrange the old storage of Hamamatsu Central area police station before the building is closed. In this storage I have found one large drum, of the type used in summer festival for dancing. It has been kept since October 2011, first as evidence of a theft and later, because of a mistake in our register, as a thing that nobody remembered. Please excuse that this long time has passed. I am very sorry for this.

On the drum there is a shipping label with your name as sender. Under this label there is a second label, partly damaged, with an address in Brazil. I write to this address with hope.

The drum is in good condition except one head is split. I would like to return it to the correct owner. If you are not Mr. Takeda, I ask you to tell me who is the correct person. My electronic mail address is below. I can read English slowly and write it with dictionary. Please forgive mistakes.

With respect,
Kuwabara Shuhei

The first photograph showed a drum on a gray metal shelf. It was a barrel drum, as tall as a child of eight, its body made of wood staves gone dark with age, banded around the middle by a rope. Both heads were stretched cowhide held down with rows of round-headed tacks. One head had a crack running across it like a river on a map. A paper tag hung from one of the iron rings on the side, with a number written in marker. And around the belly of the drum, painted by hand in a band no wider than two fingers, was a stripe of green and a stripe of yellow, and between them a single word in white capitals.

BASTOS.

"That's his," her mother said. Her voice did something small and strange. "That's his paint. He painted the farm gate in those colors when I was fourteen. Our father made him do it over because he went outside the lines."

The second photograph was a close view of the shipping label. It was a courier's slip, printed in Japanese, filled in by hand in blue ink. The sender's box held Osvaldo's name in katakana and an address in Hamamatsu that meant nothing to Mariana. The recipient's box held a different name, written in kanji, and a different address.

Celina took the photograph and held it at arm's length, then pulled her reading glasses down from her hair. She had gone to Japanese school on Saturday mornings until she was twelve, in a wooden schoolhouse at the edge of the colony, and she could still read the simple characters and pick out a few harder ones if she went slowly.

"Mizu," she said, touching the first character. "Water. No. Mizu-no. Mizuno. And this one I think is Kayo." She lowered the photo. "Mizuno Kayo."

"Who is Mizuno Kayo?" Edson asked.

"I don't know."

"A friend?"

"I don't know, Edson."

"He never said anything about a drum," Celina said. "Twenty years he was in Japan. Twenty years and he came home with one suitcase and a box of tools, and he never said anything about a drum."

"Maybe it was for the colony," Edson offered. "For the festival in Bastos."

"Then why send it to a woman in Japan?"

Nobody had an answer to that.

Mariana walked home at two, when the street smelled of wet canvas and bruised fruit, put the envelope on her kitchen table, and stood looking at it with her keys still in her hand.

Then she opened her laptop and wrote to Kuwabara Shuhei.

She wrote in English, because she had read pharmacology journals in English for twenty years and could manage it, and she kept her sentences short and plain so that a dictionary could follow them. She told him that Takeda Osvaldo was her uncle, that he had died in March of the previous year, that the family had not known about the drum, and that she would be grateful for anything he could tell her. She asked whether he knew who Mizuno Kayo was. She thanked him three times and then deleted one of the thanks so as not to seem frantic.

When the message was gone she sat back and listened to the building. A neighbor was frying garlic.

Later that evening she opened the family space her cousin Everton had started two years ago, the private one where relatives were added one branch at a time and nobody outside could see in. Everton lived in Hamamatsu himself, had lived there since he was nineteen, and he had begun it when his daughter started asking about the faces in the old photographs, because he wanted the children to know who belonged to them on the other side of the world. The tree spread across three countries now. On the Japanese side were the names of the village in Kumamoto that Mariana's great-grandparents had left. On the Brazilian side were Bastos and São Paulo and a scatter of interior towns. On her father's side, a short branch reached back across the Atlantic to the Minho, three names and a parish with no dates.

She found Osvaldo's square. TAKEDA, OSVALDO. Born Bastos, 1965. Died São Paulo, 2025. Lived Hamamatsu, 1991 to 2011. There was a photo someone had added, Osvaldo at the fryer with his glasses pushed up, squinting at the camera as though it had asked him a difficult question. There was no spouse. There were no children. There was no Mizuno, anywhere on any branch, in any country.

She sat with the screen glowing in the dark kitchen until the neighbor stopped frying garlic and the building went quiet, and then she closed the lid and went to bed, and did not sleep for a long time.

Careful English

His answer came at four in the morning São Paulo time, which was four in the afternoon in Hamamatsu, and she read it at the pharmacy counter during a quiet half hour between the antibiotics for the surgical floor and the first chemotherapy orders of the day.

Dear Ms. Takeda Souza Mariana,

Thank you for your reply. I am sorry to learn of the death of your uncle. Please accept my condolence. It is regrettable that the drum did not reach him while he was living.

I will explain what I know. I ask your patience because my English is from a book.

In October 2011 there was a break-in at a small delivery depot of a courier company in the east part of Hamamatsu. One delivery truck was taken during night with the parcels inside. Next morning the truck was found at the bank of the Tenryu River, near the bridge. Some parcels were opened and some were taken. Many were left. All the left parcels were brought to our station and registered as evidence, because the case was under investigation.

I was at that time a sergeant in this station. I carried the drum myself from the truck. It was heavy and I remember the smell of it, like a barn. This is why I recognize it now. Fifteen years is a long time for remembering a smell, but I think a policeman remembers what he carries.

Most of the parcels were returned to the courier company after a few months, and the company delivered them. The drum could not be delivered. The address of Mizuno Kayo was a building that had been closed in the same autumn, and there was no forwarding. The apartment of the sender was empty. The courier company said they would wait for instruction. The instruction did not come. Then the investigation officer was transferred, and the file was placed in a cabinet. In our system there are many cabinets. When the time limit for the case ended, the drum should have been announced as unclaimed property and then returned or disposed of. But in the register it was written under the wrong section, so no notice was made, and nobody asked for it. This was an error of our station, not of your uncle.

I am now sixty-eight years old. When I retired, the station asked some retired officers to help to empty the old storage before demolition. I said yes because I like order. I did not expect to find the drum.

You ask who is Mizuno Kayo. I do not know yet. I have the address on the label. It is now a parking area for a large home goods store. I will try to learn what building was there before. Please give me some days.

May I ask one question. Do you know when your uncle left Japan, and if he left quickly or slowly? Excuse me if this question is too personal.

With respect,
Kuwabara Shuhei

She read it twice and printed it, which she never did with emails, and folded the paper into the pocket of her white coat. At seven, when she handed over to the day shift, she found that she had touched the pocket several times during the night without noticing, the way you touch a key to make sure it is still there.

That afternoon she called her mother.

"When did Tio Vado come back?" she asked. "Exactly."

"Exactly." Celina made the small breath that meant she was thinking. "It was November. November 2011. Your father picked him up at Guarulhos. The flight was late and they didn't get home until one in the morning, and he had a cold."

"Did he leave Japan quickly?"

"How would I know how he left?" Her mother was quiet for a moment. "He lost the factory job in 2009, when everybody lost the factory job. The Japanese government paid for tickets home if you promised not to come back for a while. Half of Hamamatsu went. Everton's friends went. Vado didn't take the ticket. He stayed two more years doing whatever he could find. Cleaning. Moving furniture. I don't know. Then one day he called and said he was coming, and two weeks later he was here."

"Two weeks."

"He said there was nothing to stay for. Those were his words. Nothing to stay for."

Mariana wrote it down on the back of a prescription pad. NOV 2011. TWO WEEKS. NOTHING TO STAY FOR.

She remembered him leaving. She had been six, and what she remembered was mostly the airport. It was 1991, and the international terminal at Guarulhos had a departures board made of black panels with white letters that flipped over when the flights changed, every panel rattling at once with a sound like a flock of birds taking off from a tin roof. Osvaldo had lifted her onto his shoulders so she could watch it. He had shown her his flight, a line that read TOKYO via LOS ANGELES, and told her the letters knew where everyone was going before the people did. When the panels flipped she had grabbed his hair in fright and he had laughed.

He was twenty-six then. The whole family had come to the airport, her grandparents from Bastos in their good clothes, her grandmother Sumie in a brown wool coat she had bought for the occasion and never wore again because São Paulo was never cold enough. Mariana remembered the coat because it smelled of mothballs and camphor and she had stood beside it for an hour. She did not remember anyone crying. She remembered a cousin eating a coxinha so fast that he got the hot chicken filling on his chin.

The family had told that departure many times since, so many that she could no longer separate her memory from the story. In 1990 Japan had changed its law to let the children and grandchildren of Japanese emigrants come and work. Brazil in those years was a country where prices changed twice a week and a month's salary could disappear in the time it took to cash it, and an agency in Liberdade advertised jobs in auto-parts plants that paid in yen. Osvaldo had a degree in accounting that nobody would hire him for. He spoke the Japanese of a farmhouse kitchen, kitchen Japanese, the Japanese of his grandmother telling him to wash his feet. He signed with the agency in October and flew in December.

They had called people like him dekasegi, a word that meant someone who leaves home to earn money and come back. He came back. It took him twenty years.

That evening she wrote to Kuwabara.

She told him that her uncle had returned to Brazil in November 2011, two weeks after deciding to, and that he had said there was nothing to stay for. She told him that her uncle had worked in a factory that made parts for cars, but she did not know which one. She asked whether the date of the break-in was close to the date of his departure.

She hesitated over the next paragraph, then wrote it anyway.

You may wonder why my family does not know about the drum. My uncle was a quiet man. He was precise about everything that could be measured and silent about everything that could not. When he came home he worked with my parents at their pastel stand in the street market, and he lived alone, and he never talked about Japan except to say the trains were on time. We thought there was not much to tell. I am beginning to think we were wrong.

Kuwabara wrote back the next day.

Dear Ms. Mariana (may I call you so? In my English book it says this is friendly),

The break-in was on the night of 21 October 2011. Your uncle's label has a date of sending of 19 October. So the drum was sent two days before. If your uncle left Japan in early November, he left about two weeks after sending.

I think he sent the drum and then went away. I think he did not know that it did not arrive.

I have also some news. I visited the city office to ask what building was at the address before. It was a school. A small school for children who cannot hear. In 2011 this school was joined to a larger school in another district and the old building was closed. The closing was at the end of September. So the drum was sent to a building that was already empty for three weeks.

Mizuno Kayo was perhaps a teacher there. I will try to learn more. A city office is like our cabinets. It has many drawers, and the drawers do not know about each other.

With respect,
Kuwabara Shuhei

P.S. I have looked at the drum again with permission. Inside the body, through the crack in the head, I can see some papers fixed to the wood with tape. I cannot take them out without opening the head, and I cannot open the head without permission of the owner. You are now the owner, I think. But I think you should come and see.

A school for children who cannot hear.

Mariana read the line several times. She sat at her kitchen table with the window open to the noise of the street below, a motorbike courier revving at the light, a man selling corn from a cart calling out pamonha, pamonha in a recorded voice that looped from a speaker on the roof. She tried to fit the sentence onto the uncle she had known. Osvaldo with his towels folded into perfect rectangles. Osvaldo listening to the oil to know when to turn a pastel. He had been a man who lived by sound, by the hiss and the change of pitch, by the tick of a fryer timer he did not need and set anyway. Why would a man like that send a drum to children who could not hear it?

She opened the family map, the one Everton's wife Priscila had begun the previous Christmas, where anyone in the family could put a pin in a place that mattered and attach a note or a photograph. There was already a pin on the farm outside Bastos, with an old picture of the chicken sheds and the long dirt road lined with eucalyptus. There was a pin on the corner where her parents' feira set up on Sundays, and another on the Tuesday feira in Vila Mariana, and one on the stationery shop in Liberdade with the apartment above it. In Japan there were pins for Everton's building in Hamamatsu, for the elementary school where his children went, for the plant where he inspected brake calipers.

There was nothing for Osvaldo in Japan. Twenty years, and not a single pin.

She typed the address from the shipping label into the search box. The map turned and zoomed across the ocean and settled on a rectangle of gray beside a large building with an orange roof. She dropped a pin on the rectangle. In the note field she wrote: School for deaf children (closed Sept 2011). Mizuno Kayo? Drum sent here 19 Oct 2011. She left the photo field empty.

Then, because she could not sleep anyway, she did something she had never done in nineteen years. She opened the hospital's leave calendar and looked at the last week of July and the first week of August.

At the feira on Sunday she told her parents she was going to Hamamatsu.

Her father stopped the tongs above the oil. Her mother went on filling dough, fold and press and turn, but more slowly.

"Everton has a room," Celina said at last. "The children sleep together in the summer. He told me last year."

"I'll ask him."

"You'll stay with him. Not in a hotel. He'll be insulted."

"Mãe, I'm forty-one."

"And he is your cousin, and he will be insulted." Her mother pressed the fork along the edge of a pastel so hard that the tines cut through. She looked down at it, then set it aside on the tray where the broken ones went, the ones they ate themselves at the end of the day. "Take him the guava paste. The good one, from the Japanese shop on Galvão Bueno. He says the one in Japan tastes like plastic."

Across the aisle the sugarcane press groaned. Her father lowered the tongs and turned the pastel, which had gone a shade darker than he liked.

"Bring back the drum," he said.

"I don't know if it's ours to bring."

"It says Bastos on it," said Edson Souza, whose grandparents had come from the Minho, and who had never been to Bastos more than a dozen times in his life. "That's ours."

Red Earth

The overnight bus to the far west of São Paulo state left the Barra Funda terminal at eleven and arrived in Bastos at seven, and in between it crossed a country Mariana had stopped noticing as a child. She took a window seat and did not sleep. The city fell away in a smear of sodium light and then there was the long dark of the highway, sugarcane fields on both sides like a black sea, and every so often a truck stop lit up in white and red where men stood eating grilled cheese sandwiches under a television. Somewhere after Marília the sky started to gray. By six she could see the soil.

People from the interior said the earth there was purple, terra roxa, though it was really the color of brick dust, of paprika, of rust left out in the rain. It stained the tires of every car and the hems of every pair of trousers. It got into the grain of the wooden tables. When she was small and her grandparents were still alive she had come every July, and her mother had to scrub her socks with a brush when they got home, and they never came completely clean.

Her aunt Neusa was waiting at the bus station in a white pickup with an egg company's name painted on the door. She was seventy-two, the eldest of the three Takeda children, short and square in a fleece jacket and rubber boots, and she held Mariana at arm's length to look at her before she hugged her.

"Thin," she said. "Hospital food."

"I eat at the feira."

"Pastel is not food. Pastel is an accident." Neusa took her bag and threw it into the truck bed. "Get in. Tomio is waiting to eat and if he waits too long he gets philosophical."

Bastos was a town of a little over twenty thousand people and some millions of chickens. On the drive out they passed the association hall with its tiled roof, the gateball court where four old men in visors were already bent over their mallets, the water tower, the cemetery, a pharmacy, a bakery with a Japanese name and a sign advertising pão de queijo. Then the town ended and the road became dirt, and the dirt was red, and the eucalyptus trees along the edge stood in straight rows with their bark peeling in long strips like old wallpaper.

The farm had been in the family since 1934. It was smaller than it had been and larger than it looked, a cluster of white buildings around a yard swept bare, with the long low laying sheds stretching away behind them in parallel lines. The air smelled of feed and ammonia and, faintly, of the jasmine her grandmother had planted along the kitchen wall. A dog came out to look at the truck and went back under the porch.

Tomio Matsuda was at the kitchen table with a newspaper. He was Neusa's husband, seventy-five, retired from managing the egg cooperative, and he rose to greet Mariana with a formality that he reserved, as far as she could tell, for nieces from the city and the governor.

They had lunch at ten-thirty because farm people ate when they had finished the first half of the day. Neusa made yakisoba the way the colony made it, which was not the way anyone in Japan made it, with thick wheat noodles stir-fried in a wide pan with cabbage, carrot, broccoli, strips of chicken and beef and a sauce that was dark and sweet and salty at once, thickened with cornstarch until it shone. She served it in deep bowls. Mariana ate two. Tomio ate three and said nothing philosophical at all.

Afterward Neusa poured coffee from a thermos and they sat on the back porch looking at the sheds.

"So," Neusa said. "The drum."

Mariana showed her the photographs on her phone. Neusa took the phone in both hands and held it close to her face and enlarged the picture with two fingers, then made it smaller again.

"That's the colony drum," she said.

"It can't be. It's in Japan."

"I know where it is. I'm telling you what it is." Neusa handed the phone to Tomio, who put on a second pair of glasses over his first. "Look at the shape. Look how long the body is, how it swells in the middle. The ones in Japan are fatter, rounder. This one is long, like the one in the schoolyard. Old Hayashi made that one in 1951 from a peroba tree that came down in a storm. Every summer they put it up on the platform in the schoolyard and the men took turns playing it while we danced around in a circle. Vado was always trying to get a turn. He was six, seven years old. They never let him."

"Peroba wood?"

"No, no. This one isn't peroba. Peroba is red. This is darker, see." She took the phone back. "He copied it. He made one like it." She looked up at the sheds, at the long straight lines of tin roof shining in the sun. "He wrote to me about it once. Ninety-six, ninety-seven. A letter, a real one, three pages. He wanted the measurements of the old drum. How tall, how wide at the middle, how wide at the ends, how many tacks around each head. He wanted to know where Hayashi bought the hide."

"Did you send them?"

"Tomio went to the school with a tape measure on a Saturday." Neusa smiled for the first time. "He measured everything three times. Then old Hayashi's son drew a picture with all the numbers, and I mailed it."

"In tenths of a centimeter," Tomio said.

"In tenths of a centimeter. Vado wrote back and said thank you, and that was all. I thought he was homesick. I thought he wanted to hang a picture of it on his wall."

"Do you still have his letter?"

"No." Neusa did not apologize. "I don't keep letters. I keep eggs."

They walked through the sheds in the afternoon because Neusa did not know how to talk to anyone without also working. Inside, the light was dim and gold and the sound was enormous, ten thousand hens speaking all at once in the low wooden voice of hens, a sound like a river going over stones. The eggs rolled down from the cages onto a slow belt and traveled in single file toward the grading room at the end, where they were weighed one by one and sorted into trays by size: small, medium, large, extra, jumbo. Mariana watched the eggs drop into their slots with tiny clicks. Each tray held thirty. Each egg sat in its cup with its narrow end down.

"Your uncle loved this room," Neusa said. "When he was a boy he'd sit here for hours. He said he liked that every egg knew where it belonged."

"Did he say that?"

"Something like that. Maybe I'm making it nicer." Neusa picked up an egg that had come down cracked and set it aside in a bucket. "He was strange, Vado. Good strange. When he was five he took apart our father's radio to see where the voices lived, and when he put it back together it worked better than before. Papai didn't know whether to hit him or give him a prize."

In the evening, while Neusa fried eggs in lard and Tomio watched the news, Mariana sat at the dining table with the laptop and opened the family photo archive. Neusa's daughter-in-law had spent the pandemic winters scanning the farm albums, hundreds of pictures from the forties onward, and uploading them into the shared space where everyone could see them, with dates and names typed underneath where anyone remembered.

Mariana had looked at them before, in a distracted way, the way you look at the family albums at somebody else's house. Now she went through them slowly.

There were the oldest ones first, a handful of photographs that had survived from before the war. A man and a woman standing stiffly in front of a wooden house with a tin roof, the woman in a dark kimono and the man in a white shirt buttoned to the throat. Takeda Kanji and Takeda Masu, Fazenda Santa Rita, 1921, someone had typed. Her great-grandparents. They had come from a village in Kumamoto on one of the early emigrant ships to Santos, before the First World War, and had been sent inland by train to a coffee plantation in the hills, where they lived in a row of colono houses with other families from Japan and Italy and the northeast of Brazil. Mariana knew the story only in its broad lines, the way most of the family knew it. The contract had promised wages that did not arrive the way the agents described. The work was harvesting coffee by hand, stripping the red cherries from the branches onto cloths spread on the ground, then raking them in the sun on the drying terraces. The rains came at the wrong time. Children were born. After many years, and after saving coin by coin, they had moved west when the new Japanese settlement opened at Bastos and bought a plot of forest that had to be cleared before anything could be planted. They grew cotton first. Then silkworms, in sheds where the mulberry leaves rustled all night like rain on a roof. Then, when silk collapsed, chickens.

Next came pictures of her grandfather Jorge Tokuo as a boy on a horse. Her grandmother Sumie at a wedding with her hair set in waves. A Sports Day at the colony school, girls in white blouses running in sacks. The summer festival in the schoolyard, 1958, the long drum up on its wooden platform hung with paper lanterns, a man in a cotton jacket with the sticks raised over his head, and around the platform a ring of women and children caught mid-step, all with their right hands lifted.

Then the color pictures, faded toward orange. Neusa's wedding. Celina's wedding, with Edson in a wide-lapelled suit grinning like a man who had won a prize. A baby that was Mariana herself, fat and furious in a lace party dress.

And then, in a folder labeled Japão, a dozen pictures that Osvaldo had sent over the years.

Most of them were what she expected. Osvaldo in a gray work uniform in front of a factory gate. Osvaldo standing beside a white car in a parking lot. Osvaldo on a train platform under a sign she could not read. A snowy mountain seen from a train window, the kind of picture people take because they think they ought to.

The ninth photograph was different. It had been scanned from a print that had a white border, and someone had typed underneath it: Vado com os meninos de Everton? 1999? But Everton had been eleven years old in 1999 and still in Bastos.

The picture showed a gray asphalt yard behind a low concrete building, late afternoon, the shadows long. In the center stood a drum on a wooden stand, the drum from the evidence room, its wood paler and its heads new. Osvaldo stood beside it with the sticks hanging from one hand. He was younger, his hair still black, and he was smiling in a way Mariana had never seen him smile in São Paulo, a wide open smile that showed the gap beside his eyetooth.

Around the drum stood eight children. None of them were looking at the camera. Every one of them had a hand pressed flat against the drum, on its body or its rim or one of its heads, and every one of them had their eyes closed.

Mariana enlarged the picture until the pixels went soft. The children were nine or ten years old. One was a girl with a short bob and a yellow cardigan. One was a small boy with dark curls and a Brazilian soccer shirt that came almost to his knees. And behind the ear of a third child, a thin boy at the edge of the group, was the curved shape of a hearing aid.

"Tia," she called. "Come look at this."

Neusa came in with the spatula still in her hand. She bent over the screen for a long time.

"Those aren't Everton's friends," she said finally.

"No."

"Who are they?"

Mariana did not answer. Outside the window, the laying sheds were dark except for a single bulb over the grading room door. She could hear the hens settling, the river sound dropping lower and lower. She typed a note under the photograph, for whoever in the family looked at it next: Not Everton's friends. School in Hamamatsu? Children who cannot hear. They are feeling the drum.

Then she sat back and looked at her uncle's young smile, and at the eight small hands on the wood, and she understood that the man who had come home in 2011 with one suitcase and a box of tools had left something behind that was bigger than both.

Timetable

The departures board at Shinagawa did not flip. It glowed, a long rectangle of amber and green characters that changed without a sound, and the times on it were written to the minute. 13:07. 13:10. 13:13. 13:16. Mariana stood under it with her suitcase and a backpack full of guava paste and tried to understand a country where a train left every three minutes and everyone believed it.

She had been traveling for thirty-one hours. São Paulo to Doha, a terminal of polished stone and one enormous yellow teddy bear sitting under a lamp, where she drank a coffee that cost as much as a week of pastéis. Doha to Tokyo, eleven hours over deserts and mountains she never saw because the window shades were down. At Haneda the immigration hall had two sets of lines, one for Japanese passports and one for everyone else, and she had stood in the one for everyone else with her Brazilian passport and her great-grandmother's face, and when she reached the booth the officer had looked from the photograph to her and back again and then said something kind and rapid in Japanese. She had answered in English. He had switched to English too, a little startled, as though she had played a card he had not known was in the deck. It was nothing. It took four seconds. She thought about it for the whole monorail ride.

The Shinkansen came in at 13:31 exactly, and it came in with a hush like a sheet being drawn across a bed, a long white nose sliding along the platform and stopping so that its doors lined up with the painted marks on the concrete where the passengers stood waiting in two neat queues. Before it arrived, a woman in a pink uniform had bowed to the empty track. Mariana did not know whether she was bowing to the train or to the idea of the train. When the doors opened, a cleaning crew in the same pink went through the cars in what could not have been more than seven minutes, turning every seat to face the direction of travel with a single motion of the foot, and when they came out they lined up on the platform and bowed again.

She found her seat. The seats had covers of crisp white cloth over the headrests. The floor had no crumbs on it. A cart came by selling coffee and ice cream that was so hard it had to sit for ten minutes before a spoon would go in. Outside the window the city went on and on and then gave way to rice fields so green they hurt, and then to factories, and then to the sea, flat and silver under a hazy sky. Mount Fuji was supposed to be visible somewhere on the right. It was hiding.

The train reached Hamamatsu at 14:59. She checked her watch as it stopped. 14:59.

Her cousin Everton was waiting at the ticket gate with a sign that said MARIANA in Portuguese and the same name written below it in katakana, and under that, smaller, in what she would later learn was his daughter's handwriting, a drawing of a pastel with steam coming out of it. He was thirty-eight and tall for a Takeda, with his father's square shoulders and his mother's wide face, and he wore a short-sleeved shirt with the name of the brake company stitched over the pocket. He hugged her hard enough to knock the backpack sideways.

"Thirty-one hours," he said. "You smell like an airplane."

"Thank you."

"I mean it with love. Come, the car is in the lot, and you have to see the children before they fall asleep. Kauã has been waiting by the door since lunch. He thinks you're bringing a pastel."

"I brought guava paste."

"Then he will be disappointed and then he will forgive you."

Outside the station the heat came at her like a wet towel. It was July and the air was thick and gray and filled with the shrill sawing of cicadas, a sound that started in one tree and was picked up by the next until the whole city seemed to be humming one high furious note. Everton's car was a little white box on wheels, almost square, and she folded herself into the passenger seat with her knees nearly at her chin.

They drove east and south through a city that seemed to have been arranged by someone with a ruler. The streets were narrow and clean. The houses were close together, each with a small car parked tight in front and a set of potted plants by the door. On every corner, it seemed, stood a vending box glowing white and red and blue in the bright afternoon, offering cold tea and cold coffee and hot coffee and orange soda and something called sports water, each can lit from behind like a jewel in a shop window.

"There's one every hundred meters," she said.

"Less. Lívia counted once. On the way to school there are fourteen." Everton turned onto a wider road. "You stop seeing them after a while. Then one day you're back in São Paulo and you're thirsty and there's nothing on the corner but a man selling chewing gum, and you think, how do people live like this?"

Then she saw the first sign in Portuguese.

It hung above a low building with a sloped roof and a parking lot full of bicycles. MERCADO, it said, in letters painted green and yellow, and under it, PRODUTOS BRASILEIROS, CARNES, PÃO DE QUEIJO, ENVIAMOS DINHEIRO. Two doors down was a hair salon with a picture of a woman with a blowout and the words SALÃO DA KELLY. Across the road a small storefront with its windows covered in paper advertised, in both languages, help with visa paperwork and tax returns and translations.

"Welcome to Brazil," Everton said, and laughed at her face.

He lived on the fourth floor of a public housing complex at the edge of the city, eleven concrete buildings set in parallel rows like the laying sheds in Bastos, each one painted the same pale gray-green, each one with numbered stairwells and balconies hung with laundry and futons airing over the railings. Behind the complex rose a line of low wooded hills. In front, beyond a road and a canal, stretched the long flat roofs of factories.

At the foot of the stairwell stood a bulletin board under a little roof. On it was a chart of colored squares, a calendar for the month showing which day each kind of garbage could be put out: burnable, nonburnable, plastics, bottles, cans, paper bundled with string, oversize items by appointment. Every instruction was printed twice, in Japanese and in Portuguese. Under the chart, someone had taped a laminated notice with a cartoon of a sad garbage bag: POR FAVOR, SEPARE CORRETAMENTE. NÃO DEIXE O LIXO NO DIA ERRADO. Please separate correctly. Do not leave the garbage on the wrong day.

"They take it very seriously," Everton said, catching her looking. "When I first came I put the cans out on a Tuesday and the next morning they were back in front of my door with a note. A very polite note. I felt like I'd been arrested."

The apartment was small and very full. A narrow entry where shoes had to come off, lined with a cabinet of children's sneakers in diminishing sizes. A kitchen with a two-burner stove. A main room with a low table and a large television and a Brazilian flag pinned flat to the wall like a tapestry, the stars faded. Two smaller rooms behind sliding paper doors. On the balcony, a folding grill, a plastic tub of basil, and an inflatable swimming pool, deflated and drying.

Priscila came out of the kitchen with her hands wet. She was from Londrina, in Paraná, and she was not Nikkei; she had come to Japan at twenty-two to marry Everton, whom she had met at a wedding in Bastos, and she said she had been learning Japanese for sixteen years and was now almost as good as a four-year-old. She kissed Mariana on both cheeks and took the guava paste and held it up to the light like a sommelier.

"Real goiabada," she said. "Your mother is a treasure."

The children appeared behind her. Lívia was ten, thin and serious, with her hair in a braid so tight it pulled at her temples. Kauã was six, round and wild, and he looked at Mariana's empty hands with bitter disappointment.

"Where's the pastel?"

"It wouldn't survive the airplane," Mariana said.

"Why not?"

"It's very long. It would get cold."

Kauã considered this. Then he turned to his sister and said something in Japanese, fast and fluent, and Lívia answered him in Japanese, and the two of them laughed at a joke Mariana could not follow. Everton winced.

"They do that," he said. "Portuguese with us. Japanese with each other. When they fight, it's Japanese. When they want something from me, Portuguese."

"Which language does he dream in?"

"Ask him."

She asked. Kauã looked at her as though the question were very stupid.

"In dreams there isn't any talking," he said in Portuguese. "You just know."

Dinner was rice and beans and frango à passarinho, chicken cut into small pieces and fried with garlic until it crackled. Priscila had found black beans at the Brazilian market and cooked them the night before with bacon and bay leaf, and the smell of them, so ordinary in São Paulo, was so extraordinary here that Mariana found she had to look out the window for a moment. Below, the canal ran straight between concrete banks, and on the far side the factory roofs caught the last of the light. A siren sounded somewhere. A shift was changing.

After the children went to bed, Lívia came back out in her pajamas with a tablet and sat beside Mariana on the floor.

"I put you in," she said shyly. "In our family place. I made your picture." She turned the screen. In the family tree that Everton had started, under Celina and Edson, Mariana's square had a new photo, one she recognized from a cousin's wedding five years ago, and a new line under her name that Lívia had typed: Prima da mamãe e do papai. Farmacêutica. Veio ao Japão para achar o tambor do Tio Vado.

Came to Japan to find Tio Vado's drum.

"Is that right?" Lívia asked.

"That's right," said Mariana.

She slept on a futon on the floor of the main room, under a fan that turned its head back and forth all night like someone looking for something. At two in the morning she woke and could not get back to sleep, and she went down the four flights of stairs in her flip-flops and walked to the corner, where a convenience store stood lit up in the dark like an aquarium.

Inside it was cold and bright and very quiet. A young man at the counter said something in a sing-song voice as she came in. The shelves were arranged with a precision that she, a pharmacist, could only admire: drinks in a wall of glass doors, each bottle turned to face front; sandwiches cut into perfect triangles and sealed in plastic, egg salad and ham and something with fried pork; bento boxes of rice and fish and pickles; tiny cups of pudding. Beside the counter, in a steel tray, cubes of daikon and boiled eggs and fish cakes floated in a broth that smelled of the sea.

She chose a rice ball wrapped in seaweed. The wrapper had numbered tabs, one, two, three, with arrows showing which way to pull, so that the dry seaweed stayed separated from the moist rice until the last instant. She paid and went outside and stood under the store's bright awning and pulled the tabs in order, one, two, three, and the seaweed came out whole and crisp around the rice, exactly as the arrows had promised.

Inside was salted salmon. It was very good. She ate it standing beside a vending box that hummed and glowed, and thought that in Brazil someone would have put catupiry in it, and that her uncle had stood in places like this for twenty years, eating things that came out exactly as promised, and had gone home with nothing to stay for.

Item 1147

Kuwabara Shuhei was waiting for her outside the old station at nine o'clock, standing so precisely in the center of the sidewalk that people walking past had to choose a side. He was a thin man of medium height with white hair cut short enough to show the shape of his skull, and he wore a pale blue polo shirt tucked into gray trousers, and a cloth bag over his shoulder with a folder inside it. When he saw her he bowed, and she bowed back too deeply, and he bowed again to cover her mistake, and they both stood up laughing a little.

"Ms. Mariana," he said. His English was slow and every consonant was given its full weight, as if he were setting each word down on a table. "Thank you for coming such a long distance."

"Thank you for writing to us."

"It is my duty." He considered this, then corrected himself. "No. It is not my duty. My duty finished eight years ago. It is my wish."

The station was a five-story building of brown tile from the 1970s, its windows streaked, its front steps worn into shallow dips where fifty years of shoes had landed. A new station had been built two kilometers away with glass walls and solar panels, and this one would be pulled down in September. Most of the windows were already empty. A young officer at the front desk recognized Kuwabara and stood and said something respectful, and Kuwabara answered him with a few short words, and the young officer bowed and went back to his paperwork.

"He was in kindergarten when I came to this building," Kuwabara said as they went down a stairwell that smelled of floor wax. "Now he is my boss for this project. This is how time works."

The storage room was in the basement. It was long and low with a concrete floor painted green, and rows of gray steel shelves ran its length under fluorescent tubes, some of which flickered. Most of the shelves were empty now. On the ones still loaded sat cardboard boxes with paper tags tied to them, bicycles with numbered labels wired to their handlebars, a stack of car tires, a child's red tricycle with one wheel missing. The air smelled of dust and cold metal and paper.

And faintly, under all of it, of a barn.

"There," Kuwabara said.

The drum sat on the bottom shelf at the far end, alone, as though the other objects had given it room. It was larger than Mariana had expected from the photograph. Lying on its side it came up to her hip. Its wooden staves had darkened to the brown of strong coffee, and the hoops that held them were iron gone black. The two heads were cowhide, cream at the center where they had been struck and darker toward the edges where the tacks went in, the tacks themselves round and brass and set so evenly around each rim that she could have used them to measure a circle. Across the upper head ran the split, a crooked line from rim to rim.

The green and yellow stripe went all the way around the body. BASTOS, in white, on one side. On the other side, which she had not seen in the photograph, there was another word in the same paint, in smaller letters. She bent down to read it. QUINTA.

"Quinta," she said aloud.

"What does it mean?"

"Thursday." She frowned. "Or the fifth. Or a farm, in Portugal. But in Brazil, mostly Thursday."

Kuwabara wrote this down in a small notebook with a pencil that he sharpened, she noticed, with a pocket knife.

He had laid the paperwork out on a folding table beside the shelf. The evidence tag, its corners soft. The original inventory sheet from October 2011, typed, with item 1147 on the third page: drum, wooden, large, one; condition, good; contents, unknown. The courier's slip, which she had seen in the photograph, attached to the drum by clear tape gone yellow and brittle. And below it, half peeled away, the second label in her uncle's hand, block capitals in black ink: IF NOT DELIVERED, RETURN TO, and the Liberdade address.

"I am sorry to say," Kuwabara said, "the release requires approval of the station chief. You have brought the documents?"

She had brought them in a plastic sleeve: her uncle's death certificate, her mother's birth certificate and her uncle's, both showing the same parents, and a letter from her mother authorizing her to act for the family, each one translated into Japanese by a sworn translator in São Paulo who had charged by the line.

He went through them one by one with his reading glasses on. He compared the dates. He compared the names of the parents. He compared the stamps. He took more time over this than anyone had ever taken over any document of hers, and she found, to her surprise, that she was not impatient. She was watching a man do his work properly, and she knew what that looked like from the inside.

"Very good," he said at last. "I will give these to the chief today. He will say yes, I think. But he will say it slowly. Perhaps one week."

"I'm here until the ninth of August."

"Then there is time." He took off his reading glasses and folded them. "Meanwhile, you are the owner, or almost. I wrote to you that there are papers inside. If you agree, we can look. We cannot open the head. But we can look through the crack."

She knelt on the green floor. Kuwabara brought her a flashlight from his bag and a pair of white cotton gloves, which she put on. She shone the light through the split in the hide.

The inside of the drum was dark and smelled stronger, of old leather and wood and something else, a ghost of oil, maybe, the kind that coats a bearing. She stopped herself. Not oil. Wax. The inside of the staves had been waxed. In the beam of the flashlight she could see the curve of the wood and, taped to it a hand's length below the split, three pieces of paper held flat under wide strips of clear tape.

"I can't reach them with my fingers," she said.

"I have chopsticks," Kuwabara offered.

She unzipped the small travel case she carried everywhere, the one with her contact lens solution and a nail file and a few medical things she could not bring herself to travel without, and took out a pair of curved forceps, the kind she used at work to lift a cracked ampoule out of a tray without touching it.

"Ah," said Kuwabara.

It took her twenty minutes. She worked the tip of the forceps under the edge of the first strip of tape and lifted it a millimeter at a time, so as not to tear the paper. The tape had gone hard. In places it came away clean and in places it stuck and she had to wait, breathe, work the corner again. Kuwabara held the flashlight steady without being asked and did not say a word.

The first paper came out folded in half. She laid it on the folding table and opened it.

It was a receipt from a shop, handwritten on a printed form with a carbon copy behind it. The heading said CASA ARAKAKI and below that, in Portuguese and in Japanese, couros, artigos para churrasco, produtos do Brasil. Leather, barbecue supplies, products of Brazil. The date was June 1998. The items: two cowhides, whole, untreated, and something she could not read, and a total in yen. At the bottom, in a round feminine hand, someone had written in Portuguese: Boa sorte com o tambor, Vado! Good luck with the drum.

The second paper came out more easily. It was a small card, laminated, the size of a business card. On it, in Japanese, were a few characters and a number. Kuwabara leaned in.

"Thursday," he read. "Fifteen thirty. And this word means club. Club activity. It is what children do after school."

The third paper was a sheet of graph paper folded in quarters, the squares faint blue. Someone had drawn a grid on it in black pen, sixteen columns across, eight rows down. In some squares there were heavy dots, filled in solid. In some there were open circles. Many were empty. Down the left side, each row was labeled in Portuguese in her uncle's capitals: CORAÇÃO. TREM. CHUVA. CAVALO. DANÇA DE RODA. SAMBA. And two more, in katakana that Kuwabara read slowly for her: the name of a festival song, and a word he said meant fireworks.

Heart. Train. Rain. Horse. Circle dance. Samba.

Along the top of the grid, in the margin, he had written in tiny letters: CHEIO = FORTE, ABERTO = FRACO. Solid means strong, open means soft.

"It is a score," Kuwabara said. "A rhythm. But not music notes."

"It's for people who can't read music notes," Mariana said slowly. "Or can't hear them." She touched the edge of the paper with the gloved tip of her finger. "He made it like a production chart. Like the charts on the wall in a factory. Each row is a pattern. You read it left to right, and each square is a beat, and you hit hard or soft." She looked up. "Heart. Train. Rain. He gave them things they could feel."

Kuwabara looked at the grid for a long time.

"Thursday, fifteen thirty," he said finally. "Club activity. A school for children who cannot hear. Quinta." He tapped the word on the drum. "He went every Thursday."

They photographed everything. Kuwabara wrote a new entry on a fresh form, in pencil, describing each item removed and the time of removal, and asked her to sign it, and signed it himself, and put it in the folder. Then they put the papers into a clear sleeve and the sleeve into the folder, and the folder into his bag.

"I will make copies," he said. "The originals will stay with the drum until the release. This is correct procedure."

While he filled in the form, she sent her own photographs into the family space, into a folder she made for the purpose and set so that only her parents, Neusa and Everton could open it. Her father had been given a viewing-only place there the year before, after he deleted a whole wedding album by touching the wrong corner of the screen, and she pictured him at the kitchen table in Liberdade in the middle of the night, enlarging the grid with two thick fingers, unable to change a thing.

At noon he took her to lunch at a narrow restaurant two streets from the station where the specialty of the city was served. The dumplings came in a skillet arranged in a perfect circle, twenty of them pinched shut along their crescent edges and fried until their bottoms were brown and glassy, and in the hole at the center of the circle sat a heap of boiled bean sprouts, pale and steaming. He ate the dumplings in order, clockwise, starting at twelve o'clock.

"You knew Brazilians," she said. "When you were a young officer."

He set his chopsticks down across the edge of his plate.

"When they came, in the beginning of the nineties, many people here did not know what to think," he said. "They had Japanese faces and Japanese names, and they did not speak Japanese, or spoke it like grandmothers in the countryside. They had parties. They had music outside. They put the garbage out on the wrong days." He paused. "The police stopped them often. On bicycles, mostly. To check the registration of the bicycle. It was a way to look at them."

"Did you?"

"Yes." He did not look away. "Many times. It was the instruction. I did not think about it. Later, my son made friends with a Brazilian boy in middle school, and the boy came to our house for dinner and ate everything my wife made and asked for more of the pickles, which nobody ever does. And I thought, this boy's father I have stopped perhaps five times on his bicycle." He picked the chopsticks back up. "I am not telling you to be forgiven. I am telling you because you asked."

She did not know what to say to that, so she said thank you, and he nodded as if thank you were the right answer.

At the end of the meal he took out the copy of the Arakaki receipt and turned it toward her.

"This shop," he said. "Casa Arakaki. It closed some years ago. But I asked a colleague. The woman who wrote good luck, perhaps it is Arakaki Ivone. She is still in Hamamatsu. She has a supermarket now. Brazilian supermarket." He smiled faintly. "Before, she had also an office for workers. An agency. She sent many Brazilians to many factories. If anybody kept records of your uncle, it is Arakaki Ivone. My colleague says she keeps everything."

"Like you."

"No," said Kuwabara Shuhei. "I keep things in order. That is different. I think she keeps them because she cannot throw them away."

Shift Cards

The supermarket stood on a corner across from a pachinko parlor, and the two buildings faced each other like relatives who did not speak. The pachinko parlor was all mirrored glass and flashing lights and a roar of steel balls that leaked out every time the automatic doors opened. The supermarket was a low cream-colored box with a hand-painted sign: MERCADO BEM-TE-VI. On the sign, a yellow-breasted bird with a black-and-white mask sat on a branch and looked down at the parking lot with an expression of permanent surprise.

Inside, Mariana stopped in the doorway.

It was Brazil. Not the Brazil of São Paulo exactly, not any one place, but a kind of distilled Brazil, the Brazil that people far from home carried in their heads and arranged on shelves. A wall of green guaraná cans. Sacks of manioc flour, coarse and fine, toasted and raw. Bags of feijão in three colors. Tins of condensed milk stacked into a pyramid. Bottles of hot sauce with labels showing chilies on fire. Frozen açaí in plastic packets. Coconut candy. Paçoca, the peanut squares that crumbled if you looked at them. Packets of seasoning with the faces of smiling grandmothers. Soap, the brand her mother used. Hair conditioner, the brand Priscila swore by. A rack of Brazilian magazines a month old. At the back, a meat counter where a man in a white apron was cutting picanha the Brazilian way, with the fat cap left on, under a sign that explained the cuts in Portuguese and Japanese with a diagram of a cow divided like a map of states.

Near the register, a warming case glowed. In it, in neat rows, sat coxinhas, each one shaped like a teardrop or a fat fig, golden brown, their crumb crust glistening. A sign said FRESQUINHAS. Beside it a television high in the corner played a Brazilian soap opera with the sound low, a woman in a red dress slapping a man in a white suit, and three customers at the counter watched it with the absorbed expressions of people watching a penalty kick.

Behind the register sat a woman of about sixty-five with silver hair cut in a sharp bob and glasses on a beaded chain around her neck. She wore a sleeveless blouse with a print of parrots, and her arms were tanned and strong. She looked at Mariana once, and then again.

"You're a Takeda," she said in Portuguese.

"How did you know?"

"The jaw. All the Takedas from Bastos have that jaw. Like they're about to argue with you." The woman stood and came around the counter. "Ivone Arakaki. You're the niece. Shuhei-san called me. The policeman. He calls me every few years when he needs a Brazilian to explain something to him." She held out her hand. Her grip was hard. "I'm sorry about Vado."

"Thank you."

"Come to the back. Bring a coxinha. You look like you need a coxinha."

The coxinha was still hot. Mariana bit through the crust into a filling of shredded chicken bound with creamy cheese, the dough around it soft and dense, and she had to stand still for a moment to keep from closing her eyes. In São Paulo there were bakeries on every corner selling coxinhas, and none of them had ever tasted like this one, here, across from the pachinko parlor, in the middle of July.

The back office was a room the size of a large closet, with one window looking onto the parking lot and four tall filing cabinets of beige steel lined up along the wall. A desk covered with invoices. A calendar from a Brazilian money-transfer company. An electric fan. On top of one of the cabinets, a small potted cactus and a framed photograph of a man with a mustache, standing in front of a shop with the sign CASA ARAKAKI.

"My husband, Seiji," Ivone said, following her eyes. "Leather and barbecue supplies. Skewers, grills, coarse salt. He sold Brazilians the things they couldn't find here, and he sold Japanese the things they didn't know they wanted. He died in 2016. I closed the shop and opened this." She waved at the store beyond the door. "Same idea, more beans."

"You wrote good luck on a receipt for my uncle. In 1998."

"Did I?" Ivone thought. "Yes. Two hides. He wanted them whole, not tanned. Seiji had to order them from a supplier in Gunma, and it took a month, and Vado came in every week to ask if they'd arrived. Every week, the same day. I remember thinking, this man needs a girlfriend." She laughed. "He said they were for a drum. I thought he meant a samba drum, for the escola. They make those with plastic now. He said no, a big one. A festival one. Like in the colony."

"Did you ever see it?"

"Never." Ivone pulled open the top drawer of the second filing cabinet. "But I have something else."

She explained while she searched. From 1990 to 2012 she had run an employment agency, an empreiteira, one of the dozens in Hamamatsu that recruited Brazilians, arranged their visas, found them apartments, placed them in factories and paid their wages. The factories paid the agency; the agency paid the workers, after deductions for rent and transport and insurance and the agency's own share. It had not always been a fair system and she did not pretend it had been, she said, not looking at Mariana. Some agencies had been very bad. Hers had been, she believed, less bad than most.

"And I kept the cards," she said. "Every worker. Every week. When I closed the agency, everyone said throw them away. I said no. Twenty years from now, somebody will need to prove how long they worked, for a pension, for a visa, for something. And who else has it? The factories don't keep records of agency workers. The agencies close and disappear. So I kept them. Four cabinets." She found a folder and pulled it out. "But I'll tell you my rule, so you don't think I'm a gossip. I show a worker's file to the worker. Or the family, when the worker is gone. Nobody else. Not the police, not the city, not a curious neighbor. Shuhei-san asked me for this one and I told him no. Bring me the niece, I said."

The folder had his name on the tab: TAKEDA OSVALDO, 1991. It was thick.

Inside were his contracts, his visa copies, his apartment leases, a photocopy of his passport photograph at twenty-six looking startled and very young. And the time cards. Hundreds of them, held together in bundles with rubber bands that had gone sticky with age. Each card was a narrow rectangle of stiff paper printed with the days of one week, and in each box was the time he had punched in and the time he had punched out, stamped in faded purple ink by a time clock at the factory gate. At the top of each card was the name of the plant. Hamana Precision. It made, Ivone said, small parts for fuel systems. Tolerances of a few microns. The Japanese foremen there were famous for sending back parts that would have passed anywhere else in the world.

"Your uncle was good at it," Ivone said. "The foremen asked for him by name. That almost never happened with Brazilians."

Mariana untied the first bundle. 1991. 1992. The times marched down the boxes in their purple rows. 06:28 in, 15:17 out. 06:29 in, 15:16 out. 06:28, 15:18. Week after week, the same two or three minutes of variation. In the nineties the plant had run two shifts, a day shift from six-thirty to three-fifteen and a night shift from six in the evening to almost three in the morning, and the agency workers rotated between them every two weeks. Osvaldo's cards showed the rotation perfectly. Two weeks of days. Two weeks of nights. Two weeks of days.

Until June 1998.

From June 1998, something changed. The rotation continued for every day of the week except one. On Thursdays, no matter which rotation he was on, Osvaldo worked the night shift. Every Thursday, 17:58 in, 02:51 out. Every Thursday for the rest of that year. And the next. And the one after that.

She went through the bundles faster now. 2001. 2003. 2005. Every Thursday, the night shift.

"How could he do that?" she asked. "Choose his shift for one day?"

"He swapped." Ivone tapped a box on one of the cards where a different stamp, a small rectangular one, had been added. "This means a swap was approved. He switched with another worker. Someone on the opposite rotation took his Thursday day shift and gave Vado their Thursday night. It needed the foreman's approval every time. Most foremen hated swaps. Too much paperwork."

"Who did he swap with?"

Ivone was already pulling open a lower drawer. She went through it with her lips pressed together, fingertips walking along the tabs, and pulled out a second folder. ARRUDA WANDERLEY, 1994.

She opened it to the 1998 bundle and laid the two sets of cards side by side on the desk.

Every Thursday that Osvaldo worked the night, Wanderley Arruda worked the day. Every swap stamp on Osvaldo's card had its twin on Wanderley's. For eleven years, until the plant let them both go.

"Wanderley," Ivone said. "From Goiânia. Big man. Loud. Laughed like a donkey. He and Vado were nothing alike. I never saw them together outside the factory. Never at a churrasco. Never at the escola." She frowned at the cards. "And they did this every week."

"Is he still in Hamamatsu?"

"No. He went back in 2009. Took the government ticket, him and his wife both. Most of my workers did. For the boy he paid the fare himself, so the boy would be free to come back." Ivone sat down in her desk chair, which creaked. "But the son came back. The son lives here."

"The son?"

"Caio. He was a little boy when they came, four years old." Ivone took off her glasses and let them fall on their beaded chain. "He couldn't hear. He was born that way, in Goiânia, but it was here they learned how to raise him. He went to a school for deaf children, here in the city, a small one, and then the big school for the older grades. When the family went back to Goiânia he was nineteen, and it was hard for him in Brazil. He knew Japanese Sign Language, not Libras, the Brazilian one. They are different languages, not dialects of one. He knew how to take a bus in Hamamatsu, not in Goiânia. He was a foreigner in his own country." She shrugged. "At twenty-two he came back here on his own. He works at a bicycle repair shop near the station. And he plays surdo for Toninho."

"Surdo," said Mariana. The big bass drum of the samba bateria, the one that held the beat for everyone else. The word in Portuguese also meant deaf.

Ivone smiled at her expression. "Everybody makes that joke once. Caio makes it more than anybody."

"Where does Toninho's escola practice?"

"Saturday nights. In the parking lot of the old textile mill on the Route 152 side. Tomorrow." Ivone put the cards back in their bundles and snapped the rubber bands around them. Then, after a moment, she took Osvaldo's folder and held it out across the desk.

"Take it," she said.

"I can't."

"You're family. It's his. That's my rule." She pushed it into Mariana's hands. "I kept it for him. Now I keep it for you. It's the same thing."

On the way out, Ivone wrapped two more coxinhas in paper and put them in a plastic bag with a can of guaraná, and would not take any money for any of it, and stood in the doorway under the masked bird with her arms crossed as Mariana walked to the bus stop. The pachinko parlor across the street opened its doors and let out its roar and swallowed two men in work uniforms and shut again.

On the bus Mariana opened the folder on her lap and looked at the Thursday cards. 17:58. 17:59. 17:58. A man who could have been on time to the second every day of his life, who chose instead, one day a week, to leave his afternoons free. She thought of the laminated card from inside the drum. Thursday, fifteen thirty, club activity. She thought of the photograph of the children with their eyes closed and their hands on the wood. A small boy in a Brazilian soccer shirt that came to his knees.

She took out her phone and opened the family map and put a pin on the old textile mill on the Route 152 side, and another on the corner where the Bem-te-vi bird watched the parking lot. Under the second one she typed: Ivone Arakaki. Kept every card. Gives them only to family.

Microns

Sugiura Masato had agreed to meet them at a coffee shop near the old plant at eight on Saturday morning, and he was there before them, seated in a booth by the window with a newspaper folded into a long strip so that he could read one column at a time. He was seventy-one, bald, with heavy black eyebrows that had not gone gray with the rest of him and a habit of pressing his lips together before he spoke, as if checking each sentence for defects before letting it out. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt and a wristwatch with a steel band, and he stood when they came in and bowed to Everton and then, more briefly, to Mariana.

Everton had found him through a chain of three people. A coworker at the brake plant had a brother-in-law who had worked at Hamana Precision in the nineties, and the brother-in-law still went fishing on the Tenryū with his old foreman, and the old foreman, when asked, had said he remembered Takeda Osvaldo very well and would be honored to meet his niece.

"Honored," Everton repeated in the car, shaking his head. "He said honored. Those guys never said honored to us. They said hurry up."

The coffee shop had brown vinyl booths and a counter where an elderly man in a vest made each cup by hand, pouring water from a gooseneck kettle in a slow spiral over a paper cone. It smelled of dark roast and toast. Because it was before eleven, every coffee came with the morning set: a thick slice of white bread toasted and buttered, cut into two exact rectangles, a hard-boiled egg in a small ceramic cup, and a little salad of shredded cabbage with a single slice of tomato on top. Mariana watched the old man at the counter cut the toast. He used a long knife and a single downward stroke, and every slice in the shop, on every plate, was the same.

Sugiura spoke in Japanese. Everton translated, pausing sometimes to find a word, sometimes asking Sugiura to repeat something. Mariana had imagined her cousin's Japanese as the factory kind, practical and rough. It was better than that. It was careful and polite, full of soft endings, and she watched Sugiura's face relax a little as they went on.

"He says he was the line leader for inspection," Everton said. "Final inspection. For fuel injection parts. Small parts. Valves, nozzles, he says. The tolerance was two microns." Everton held his thumb and finger almost together. "That's two thousandths of a millimeter. A hair is like fifty, sixty microns. So, one thirtieth of a hair."

"He says your uncle could find a defect by feel. Before the gauge. He would pick up a part with gloves and turn it and put it aside, and when they measured it, it was always out. Always. He says, at first, the Japanese inspectors did not believe it. They thought he was guessing. So they tested him. They gave him a tray of fifty with five bad ones mixed in. He found all five. They gave him another tray. He found all five again."

Sugiura said something more, and smiled slightly, the first time.

"He says, after that, they called him the Brazilian's fingers. Not by his name. The fingers."

Mariana thought of the pastel stand. Osvaldo touching a sheet of dough and saying it was too wet before anyone else could see it. Osvaldo running his thumb along the edge of the steel counter and finding a burr nobody had felt.

"Ask him about Thursdays," she said.

Everton asked. Sugiura set down his cup.

He was quiet for some time. Then he spoke slowly, and Everton translated slowly, as if the words had to be carried across a narrow bridge one at a time.

"He says he approved every swap. Eleven years. Every week he signed the form. The plant manager did not like it. The manager said, why do you let this Brazilian choose his days? Other workers will want the same. Sugiura-san said, this Brazilian finds every bad part. Let him have his Thursday." Everton listened again. "He says, one time, early, he asked your uncle why. Your uncle said, for the children."

"For the children," Mariana repeated.

Sugiura said something else and looked down at his toast.

"He says he did not ask again. He says he understood." Everton hesitated. Then he translated the rest carefully. "He thought your uncle had a child here. With a Japanese woman, maybe. That they were not married, or separated, and he could see the child once a week. He says this happened sometimes, with Brazilian men. He says he did not want to make it worse for him by asking. So he signed the forms and said nothing to anyone."

Mariana felt the floor of the coffee shop tilt a few degrees.

A child. It fit. It fit too well, the way a wrong part can fit the tray. Thursday afternoons, every week, for thirteen years. A man who went home in 2011 saying there was nothing to stay for. A drum sent to a woman named Mizuno Kayo two weeks before he left. A boy in a soccer shirt that came to his knees.

She made herself think it through the way she would a medication error. What did she actually know? A label with a name. A school address. A laminated card that said club activity. A grid that said heart and train and rain. A photograph of eight children, not one. And Caio Arruda was not Osvaldo's son, he was Wanderley's.

"Ask him if he ever saw my uncle with a child," she said. "Any child."

Everton asked. Sugiura shook his head. He said something short.

"Never. Only at the plant."

"Ask him if my uncle ever talked about a woman."

Sugiura shook his head again, more slowly, and said more.

"He says your uncle never talked about anything. He says he was the quietest worker he ever had, Japanese or Brazilian. He says that in the canteen, at lunch, the Brazilians sat at two tables by the window, and the Japanese workers sat at the other tables, and nobody made a rule about it, it just was. And your uncle sat at the end of a Japanese table, by himself, every day. He was not Brazilian enough for the window tables and not Japanese enough for the others. So he sat at the end."

Mariana looked out the window. Across the road, the plant itself was visible behind a chain-link fence, a long white building with a blue roof and a row of small windows high up under the eaves. The parking lot in front was nearly empty this Saturday morning. A single flag hung limp on a pole by the gate.

"Ask him," she said, "what it was like. For Brazilians. In the plant."

Sugiura listened to the question and pressed his lips together for a long time.

"He says it was not easy for them. He says the Japanese workers did not understand why people with Japanese names did not behave like Japanese. They talked loudly. They laughed on the line. They did not bow correctly. Some of the older workers called them gaijin, foreigners, even though their grandfathers came from the same villages. He says he called them that too, at first. He says that he is not proud of it." Everton paused while Sugiura added something. "He says, your uncle bowed correctly. He says your uncle bowed better than most of the young Japanese. And they still called him gaijin. So after some years, Sugiura-san understood it was not about bowing."

The old man at the counter poured water in a slow spiral. The coffee dripped through the cone into the glass server with a sound like a clock that had lost its hands.

Sugiura took something from his shirt pocket and laid it on the table. It was a small steel tool, a gauge of some kind, with a knurled thimble and a fine scale engraved along the barrel.

"He says this was your uncle's," Everton said. "A micrometer. When your uncle left the plant in 2009, he cleaned out his locker and he gave this to Sugiura-san and bowed and said thank you for the Thursdays. Sugiura-san has kept it since then. He says he wants you to have it."

Mariana picked it up. It was heavier than it looked, cool from the pocket, and when she turned the thimble it moved with a silky, exact resistance, like a jar lid that has been perfectly threaded.

"He says your uncle's locker was the cleanest in the plant. The towels folded in thirds. He says he still folds his towels that way, because of your uncle."

She thanked him in Japanese, a phrase she had practiced on the train, and he bowed to her across the table more deeply than he had when they arrived.

In the car afterward, Everton drummed his fingers on the wheel.

"It could be true," he said. "The child thing. When I came in 2007 everybody said Tio Vado had a Japanese girlfriend once, in the nineties. Nobody knew who. It was just one of those things people said at churrascos. And he always left early on Thursdays from wherever he was. I thought it was a bar. I used to joke about it." He winced. "To his face. He never laughed."

"There were eight children in the photograph," Mariana said. "Not one."

"Maybe one of them was his."

"Maybe." She held the micrometer in her lap and turned the thimble back and forth. "He wrote down club activity. He made a chart for a group. He swapped with Wanderley, whose son was at that school. If he had a secret child, why would he make a chart for eight?"

"Because he's Tio Vado," Everton said. "He'd make a chart for a goldfish."

Back at the apartment, Lívia was at the low table doing her summer homework, a workbook of kanji practice with each character written in a grid of squares, and beside each square, smaller, the order of the strokes: one, two, three, four, numbered like the tabs on the rice ball wrapper. She wrote each one ten times in pencil. When one came out wrong, she erased it so thoroughly that the paper went thin.

"Tio Vado would have liked you," Mariana told her.

"Why?"

"You erase properly."

Lívia looked pleased and suspicious at the same time.

That afternoon, while the children were at the pool with Priscila and Everton was asleep on the floor in front of a baseball game, Mariana opened the family tree on her laptop. She found Osvaldo's square. She clicked on it, and the small menu came up that let you add a relative. Spouse. Parent. Sibling. Child.

The cursor sat over the word child for a long moment.

She thought of Sugiura, signing the swap form every week for eleven years, keeping silent out of kindness about a thing he had invented to explain what he could not see. She thought of how easy it was to make a story fit. How easy it was to put the wrong part in the right tray.

She closed the menu without clicking anything. On the balcony, the deflated pool lifted one corner in a breath of wind and settled again. At six, Everton woke up, stretched, and said it was time to go, the bateria started at seven, and if they wanted to hear Toninho tune the drums they had better be early, because the tuning was the best part, and nobody believed him until they heard it.

Tuning

The textile mill had closed in the eighties and been turned into a self-storage warehouse, and its parking lot was a wide rectangle of cracked asphalt bordered on three sides by a chain-link fence overgrown with kudzu. On the fourth side rose the mill itself, a sawtooth roof of old gray glass, half the panes painted over. Four tall lamps stood at the corners of the lot. When Everton and Mariana arrived at half past six, the lamps had just come on, and they hummed and flickered from violet to orange as they warmed, and the first moths of the evening were already circling them in loose spirals.

In the middle of the lot, thirty or forty drums sat on the asphalt in rough rows, like a herd resting.

Mariana had grown up in São Paulo and had watched the carnival parades on television every February of her life and had twice, in her twenties, gone to watch a samba school rehearse in a hall in Bela Vista where the sound was so enormous she felt it in her teeth for two days. She had never seen the drums like this, silent, waiting. The big bass drums, the surdos, stood upright on their rims, aluminum shells painted red and white, as wide across as a car tire. Beside them, the snare drums, the caixas, shallow and bright. The repiniques, tall and narrow. Tamborins, small as dinner plates, stacked in a cardboard box. A heap of chocalhos, the metal frames strung with jingles, glinting. Two cuícas lying on their sides with their bamboo sticks poking out of their heads like the antennae of insects.

A man was crouched over one of the surdos with a tuning key.

He was in his fifties, thick through the shoulders, with a gray ponytail and a T-shirt from a samba school in Rio that had been washed so many times the logo was a ghost. He tightened one lug a quarter turn, then struck the head once with the flat of his palm and leaned his ear down close to it. He moved to the lug opposite and tightened that one. Struck again. Listened. Moved around the drum in a star pattern, never two adjacent lugs in a row, the same way, Mariana realized, that a mechanic tightens the nuts on a car wheel so it sits true.

"Toninho," Everton said. "Antônio Yoshida. Mestre of the bateria. Born in Santo André. Came in 1992. Works at the motorcycle plant on the other side of the river. Don't talk to him while he's tuning."

They did not talk to him. They stood at the edge of the drums and watched.

He tuned every surdo that way. There were three kinds, he explained later. The first surdo, the deepest, which marked the second beat of the bar. The second surdo, a little higher, which answered on the first. And the third, the cutting surdo, which played the syncopations in between and gave the whole thing its swing. They had to be tuned to one another, not to any note, but to a relationship. The first deep enough that you felt it in your stomach. The second higher by just the right amount that the two sounded like a question and an answer. If they were too close, the question and the answer blurred together. If they were too far apart, they stopped speaking.

"Like a married couple," Toninho said. "Too close, nobody can tell them apart. Too far, divorce."

It took him forty minutes. By the time he was done, the players had begun to arrive, by bicycle and by car and on foot, carrying water bottles and towels and plastic bags of snacks. Most of them were Brazilian, Nikkei and not, men and women from their teens to their sixties, the women in shorts and tank tops, the men in soccer shirts and flip-flops, several with towels around their necks already. But there were Japanese players too. A man in his forties with the tidy haircut of an office worker, who took a tamborim from the box and began to warm up with a fast, flicking stroke. Two college girls who strapped on caixas and giggled. An older woman, sixty at least, who picked up a chocalho and shook it once and nodded as if it had passed inspection.

A notice was taped to the fence near the entrance, in Japanese and Portuguese. Everton translated the Japanese side for her, though the Portuguese said the same thing. Practice permitted on Saturdays from 19:00 to 21:00. Sound must stop at 21:00 exactly. Please respect our neighbors.

"Exactly," Everton said. "Toninho stops the bateria at nine o'clock in the middle of a bar. Mid-note. Some of the Brazilians complain that it's cruel. He says rules are rules, the Japanese gave us this parking lot and we're not going to lose it over thirty seconds of surdo."

At seven o'clock Toninho blew a whistle.

The sound that came out of the parking lot was not like anything Mariana had heard on television. It was bigger and closer and rougher and it came from below, through the soles of her sandals and the bones of her shins. The first surdos began alone, the deep beat, the answer, the deep beat, the answer, and then the third surdo came in skipping between them, and the caixas started their dry rattling roll like dried beans poured into a steel pan, and the tamborins came in high and sharp, and the chocalhos shimmered over everything, and the cuícas began to make their strange sound, a squeaking moaning laughter like a monkey teasing a dog. Toninho stood in front of them facing the players with his whistle in his teeth, and with his hands he gave signals. Two fingers up, a fist, a flat palm pushing down, a circle drawn in the air. Each signal meant something. The bateria changed at each one, stopping, starting, dropping out section by section, coming back in all at once with a roar that made the moths scatter.

Mariana found that she was crying, and did not know why, and wiped her face with the back of her wrist, and Everton pretended not to see.

Then she noticed the man in the front row.

He was playing the first surdo, the deepest one, at the center of the line. He was in his mid-thirties, broad-shouldered, with dark curly hair cropped short and a thin beard, and he wore a sleeveless shirt in the yellow of the Brazilian team. The strap of the surdo crossed his chest. He played with a mallet in his right hand and his left palm flat on the drumhead, muting it between strokes the way the surdo players did, but there was something else about the way he stood. He was barefoot. His sandals sat beside him on the asphalt. And he did not watch the other players at all. He watched only Toninho's hands. When Toninho gave a signal, the man in the yellow shirt was the first to change, a fraction of a second before anyone else, so that it seemed the whole bateria was following him.

"Caio," Everton said in her ear. "That's him. He hears through his feet. That's what everybody says."

The practice went on for two hours. Toninho stopped them many times, to correct a section, to drill a transition, to yell in Portuguese at the caixas, who were rushing. At eight a woman arrived with a cooler and sold cans of cold beer and guaraná and skewers of grilled chicken heart, and during the ten-minute break the players crowded around her and the parking lot filled with Portuguese, loud and cheerful and profane, and two of the Japanese players stood with them eating chicken hearts and laughing at jokes they understood perhaps half of.

At 20:59 Toninho raised his whistle.

At 21:00 he blew it. The bateria stopped. Not at the end of a phrase. In the middle. A caixa player hit one extra stroke and winced, and somebody laughed, and the silence that fell over the parking lot was so complete that Mariana could hear the lamps humming again, and the moths, and very far away, a dog.

Caio was wiping down his surdo with a towel.

She walked over to him across the asphalt. Her legs felt strange, as if she had been on a boat. When she was a few steps away he looked up. His eyes went to her face and stayed there, reading it, and she saw that he was taking in the jaw, the same way Ivone had. The Takeda jaw.

She did not know any sign language. She did not know how to begin. She held up her phone, where she had written a message in Portuguese in the car, and turned the screen toward him.

My name is Mariana Takeda Souza. I am the niece of Osvaldo Takeda. Tio Vado. I think you knew him.

He read it. His face did not move for a long moment. Then he took the phone out of her hand, gently, and his thumbs moved over the screen, and he gave it back.

Ele está aqui? Ele voltou?

Is he here? Did he come back?

She had not prepared for that. She had been so busy with the question of who Caio was that she had forgotten Caio would have his own question. She looked at the screen and felt something close in her throat. She took the phone back and typed slowly, deleting, retyping.

I am very sorry. He died in March of last year. In São Paulo. His heart. It was very quick.

Caio read it.

He set the phone down on the head of the surdo very carefully, as though it might break, and he stood looking at it. Then he put both hands flat on the drumhead beside the phone and closed his eyes.

Around them the players were packing up. Toninho was walking toward them, and he stopped a few paces away and looked from Caio to Mariana and back, and did not come closer.

When Caio opened his eyes he picked up the phone again and typed for a long time. He gave it to her.

I did not know. Nobody told me. I am sorry for your family. I am sorry. He was my teacher. He was all of our teacher. You came about the drum? I did not know it still existed.

She typed: Yes. The drum is at the police station. It was sent to Mizuno Kayo in 2011 but it never arrived. Do you know who she is?

He read it and then he laughed, a short surprised breath of a laugh, and covered his mouth with his hand.

Of course, he typed. She is Mizuno-sensei. She was our teacher at the small school. The drum never came? She thought he took it home. She thought he forgot us.

Then he typed again, before Mariana could answer.

I want to tell you everything. But not here. Not like this. Mizuno-sensei should tell you first. It was her club. It is her story more than mine. If I tell you before she tells you, it is not correct.

Mariana almost laughed herself. Correct. A deaf Brazilian bass drummer in a Japanese parking lot, and he too had to do things in the right order.

Where can I find her? she typed.

Caio took the phone and wrote an address. Then, under it: She is seventy-four. She lives with her sister. She does not like surprises. Let me write to her first. Tomorrow I will tell you when.

He handed back the phone. Then he did something she did not expect. He took her right hand, turned it palm down, and laid it flat on the head of the surdo. He picked up his mallet and struck the drum once, hard, beside her hand.

The sound went into her palm and up her arm and into her chest like a second heartbeat. The drumhead trembled under her fingers for a long time, the vibration thinning and thinning, until it was gone.

Caio watched her face. He nodded, as if she had answered a question correctly. Then he pointed at her, and at the drum, and made a small motion with his hand, a gesture she did not understand and would later learn meant again, or next time.

Toninho came over then, finally. He put his hands in his pockets.

"You're the Japanese pastel man's niece," he said. "I knew him. Not well. Nobody knew him well. He came to watch us sometimes, in the old days, when we practiced behind the furniture warehouse. He'd stand by the fence and never say anything. One time I asked him to play a tamborim and he said no thank you, he only played one drum." Toninho looked at Caio, who had gone back to wiping down his surdo, slowly, the towel moving in long careful strokes. "I always wondered what drum."

On the way home Mariana filmed the dark lot through the car window, the lamps going off one by one, and sent the short clip to her parents in the family space with no message. Before they reached the apartment her mother's answer came back, from the middle of a Saturday morning in São Paulo. A photograph of the second fryer, its oil fresh and clear, the burner off, and two words.

Para ele.

For him.

Sensei

The building association permitted charcoal grilling on balconies on Sundays between eleven and three, provided that the grill was no wider than sixty centimeters, that a bucket of water stood beside it, and that the neighbors on either side had been informed in writing the day before. Everton had a laminated copy of the permission form, stamped with the association's red seal, and he zip-tied it to the balcony railing before he lit the coals, as if it were a talisman against complaint.

The grill was a small steel box on legs, and the coals were Japanese charcoal, dense and gray and ringing faintly when they knocked together. Everton had salted the picanha that morning with coarse rock salt from the Bem-te-vi and left it on the counter under a dish towel. Now he cut it into thick half-moons, each with its cap of fat, and threaded them onto long flat skewers, curved so the fat faced outward. Beside them went linguiça, the pork sausages pricked with a fork. Chicken hearts on thin skewers.

The smoke rose up the face of the building and drifted off over the canal. On balconies up and down the block, other people were airing futons and hanging laundry and pretending not to notice it.

Priscila made the vinaigrette, tomato and onion and green pepper diced so small they looked like confetti, dressed with vinegar and oil and salt. She toasted manioc flour in butter with bacon and egg until it turned the color of sand and smelled of popcorn. The children set the low table in the main room. Kauã put out the forks with great ceremony, each exactly perpendicular to the edge of the table, and then went back and moved them all one centimeter to the left.

Ivone came at noon in a straw hat with a box of pão de queijo still warm from her ovens. Kuwabara came at twelve-fifteen, precisely the time Everton had suggested, in a collared shirt and pressed trousers, carrying a wooden box tied with a ribbon. Inside, on a bed of tissue paper, lay a single muskmelon, perfectly round, its skin netted with fine raised lines like a map of rivers, a short T of stem still attached at the top.

"In Japan this is a gift," he explained, a little embarrassed, when Kauã asked why anyone would give somebody one melon. "It is a very good melon. It is the shape that is important. Perfectly round. The farmer gives each plant only one fruit, and removes all the others. So that one can be perfect."

"That's sad for the other melons," Kauã said in Portuguese.

Once it was translated, Kuwabara considered it seriously for some time.

"Yes," he said at last. "It is sad for the other melons. I had not thought of this."

They ate on the floor around the low table and on the balcony and standing in the narrow kitchen. Everton carved the picanha straight from the skewer onto a wooden board, the outside crusted with salt and the inside pink, the fat crisp and running. Kuwabara watched the first slice fall and then accepted it on his plate and ate it with chopsticks, which made Ivone laugh so hard she had to put her plate down. He ate the farofa, sprinkled over his rice with great care, and when Priscila offered him more vinaigrette he said that in his house they would call this a salad and he would like to have the recipe for his wife, who grew tomatoes. Lívia wrote it down for him, in Japanese, on a sheet torn from her kanji workbook.

Halfway through the meal, Mariana's phone lit up on the table. A message from a number she did not know, written in Portuguese with careful accents.

Caio here. Mizuno-sensei says yes. Tuesday, ten o'clock. She says please bring the policeman. She wants to thank him.

Mariana passed the phone to Kuwabara. He read it and set down his chopsticks.

"She wants to thank me," he said. "I have done nothing."

"You carried the drum," Ivone said.

The house was in an old part of the city north of the station, on a lane too narrow for cars, where wooden houses with tile roofs stood behind low walls and every gate had a small brass nameplate. Mizuno lived in one of these with her older sister. The gate had a nameplate with their family name and two smaller plates beneath it with their given names, Kayo and Teruko, side by side. Morning glories had been trained up strings along the front of the house, and at ten in the morning they were open, blue and violet and deep magenta, each flower as wide as a teacup. By noon they would close.

A small woman opened the sliding door before they could ring. She was seventy-four, very straight-backed, with her gray hair pinned up and reading glasses on a cord, and she wore a cotton blouse and loose trousers and white socks. She looked at Mariana for a long moment without speaking. Then she put her hand flat on her own chest and bowed.

"Takeda-san no," she said, and then something else Mariana did not catch, and Kuwabara answered her softly.

"She says, you have his face," he translated. "She says, please come in."

They took off their shoes in the entry. The main room was floored with tatami and smelled of straw and of the green tea Teruko was pouring in the next room. A low table stood in the center with cushions around it. A glass wind chime hung in the open window to the garden, its paper tail turning in the breeze, and every few seconds it rang, a single clear note.

Mizuno spoke Japanese. Kuwabara translated, slowly, into his careful English. And once, when he hesitated over a word, Mizuno spelled it for him in the air with her fingers, the Japanese finger alphabet she had used in her classroom for thirty-one years, and he nodded and found the word and went on.

"She says, she taught at the small school for thirty-one years," Kuwabara said. "From the smallest children up to twelve years old. In the spring of 1998 a Brazilian boy moved up into her class. His name was Caio. His father came to a meeting with teachers, and the father could not speak Japanese well, so he brought a friend to translate. The friend was your uncle."

"She says, at this meeting, she told the father about the summer evening at the school. Every summer, in July, the school had an evening for families in the yard. There was a dance in a circle, the kind every neighborhood does in summer, with a big drum on a stage. The school borrowed the drum from the neighborhood association. But the drum came for one evening and went home the same night, so the children never had time to learn its patterns, and they stood at the side and watched their parents dance. She said this to Caio's father so he would not be disappointed when his son did not dance."

Mizuno spoke again. Her hands moved as she talked, not signing, just moving, shaping something in the air.

"She says, your uncle translated this to the father. Then he turned to her and said in Japanese, very politely, with country words like an old grandfather, Sensei, excuse me, but you do not need to hear a drum. You can feel it. She says, she was a little offended. She had been teaching deaf children for eighteen years and she did not need a factory worker to tell her this. She said, yes, of course they feel it. But one evening is not enough to learn a rhythm, and the drum goes home with the association." Kuwabara paused. "Your uncle said, then they need a drum that stays, and a way to write the rhythm down that they can read. Could I come on Thursday afternoons?"

"She says, he came the next Thursday at three-thirty. And the Thursday after. The neighborhood association would not lend the drum to a foreigner for practice. So he built his own. It took him all summer. He built it from the wood of old barrels he got from a sake brewery, and he made it long and narrow, like the drum in his village in Brazil, and when he brought it to the school in September it was so heavy that four teachers had to help him carry it from his car."

Mizuno smiled for the first time.

"She says, he painted the name of his village on it. And Thursday. Because, he said, a drum should know where it comes from and when it works."

The wind chime rang. Teruko came in with a tray of tea and small sweets made of bean paste shaped like morning glories and set them down and went out again without a word.

"She says, he came every Thursday for thirteen years. Never missed. Not for a cold, not for a typhoon. He made the charts. He put the children's hands on the drum, on the body, on the rim, on the head, and showed them how each part felt different. He played them heartbeats. He played them the train that went past the school. He played them rain on the roof. Then the circle dance. Then samba, because Caio wanted samba. And at the summer evening the next year, the children played the drum themselves, and their parents danced around them." Kuwabara stopped. Mizuno had stopped too. When she went on her voice was lower.

"She says, the first year the parents cried. After that they only danced, and complained when it ended."

Mariana took out her phone and opened the family's photo archive to the picture from the Japão folder, the gray yard and the eight children with their eyes shut, and turned it toward the teacher. Mizuno held the phone in both hands. She touched each small face with the tip of one finger, and with each touch she said a name, and Kuwabara wrote the names in his notebook in pencil. Caio, in the shirt that came to his knees. Nanami, in the yellow cardigan. A thin boy called Haruto with the hearing aid. Five more. When she reached the end she went back to the beginning and said them all again, in the same order, as if checking a roll.

"What happened in 2011?" Mariana asked.

Kuwabara asked. Mizuno's face changed.

"She says, the small school was joined to the big school in another district. The big school was very correct. They had rules for volunteers from outside. A volunteer needed a document of employment and a guarantor and a certificate. Your uncle did not have a job then. He had lost it in 2009. He worked by the day, cleaning, moving furniture. He could not get the document. She asked the principal to make an exception. The principal said the rules were the same for everyone."

Mizuno took off her glasses and folded them in her lap.

"She says, on the last Thursday at the small school, in September, your uncle told her he would send the drum to her, so the children could keep it at the new school, even if he could not come. He said he did not want to bring it himself, because if he brought it himself it would be a goodbye, and he did not like goodbyes. She said thank you. She told him the address of the new school, but he had already written the address of the small school in his notebook, and he said, it's all right, I know this address, I'll send it here, they will forward it. And she thought, yes, they will forward it." Kuwabara's voice slowed even further. "She says, she waited. October. November. The drum did not come. She wrote to his apartment and the letter came back. She asked at the old school, but the old school was empty. She thought, he changed his mind. He took it home to Brazil. It was from his village, after all. It was his. She thought, he did not want to say this to me, so he said nothing. She was hurt. But she understood."

Mariana could not speak for a moment. When she could, she asked Kuwabara to tell Mizuno something, and to tell it exactly.

"Please tell her that my uncle came home in November 2011 and told my mother there was nothing to stay for. Please tell her I think he sent the drum, and waited for her to write and say it had arrived. And no letter came. And he thought that meant you did not want it. Or did not want him."

Kuwabara translated it. He took a long time doing it, and he did not hurry any of the words.

Mizuno Kayo sat very still. Outside in the garden, a crow called from the top of a utility pole. The wind chime turned in the breeze and rang its single note.

Then the old teacher put her face in her hands, and her sister came in from the next room and knelt beside her, and Kuwabara looked away at the morning glories in the window, which were already beginning, very slowly, to close.

Open Circles

Priscila made the rice balls at six in the morning, standing at the kitchen counter with a bowl of water and a dish of salt, and Mariana watched her wet her palms, salt them, scoop a fist of warm rice, press a hollow into the center with her thumb, spoon in the filling, close the rice over it and shape the whole thing into a triangle with three quick turns of her cupped hands. Each one came out the same size. Each one she wrapped in a strip of seaweed and then in plastic film and set in a row on a tray.

The fillings were not Japanese.

"Carne seca with catupiry," Priscila said, pointing with her chin as her hands kept working. "Chicken with requeijão. Linguiça with a little farofa, that one's for Everton. Tuna with corn and mayonnaise, because the children won't eat anything else. And these," she said, setting down the last four, "are Romeu e Julieta."

"Guava and cheese? In rice?"

"Your mother's goiabada and a slice of Minas cheese. Don't make that face. In Japan they put sweet beans in everything. Why not guava?" Priscila pressed the rice closed. "The Japanese mothers at the school think I'm crazy. Then they ask for the recipe."

They drove to the dunes in the late afternoon, when the heat had broken a little. Caio had chosen the place. The sand dunes at Nakatajima stretched for kilometers along the shore south of the city, wide pale hills of sand where the Tenryū River had been carrying grit down from the mountains for longer than anyone had been counting, and the Pacific broke against them in long gray lines. A wind came in off the water steadily, and the people flying kites on the crests did not have to run. Their kites simply rose.

Caio was waiting at the foot of the wooden boardwalk with his bicycle and a woman Mariana recognized at once, though the yellow cardigan had become a white linen shirt and the bob had grown long and been tied back.

Ogura Nanami was thirty-six. She was small and quick and had a dental technician's hands, short nails, a faint callus on the side of her right index finger where a carving tool rested eight hours a day. She shaped crowns and bridges, Caio had told Mariana in a message, porcelain teeth fitted to tens of microns, so that when a patient bit down nothing would catch. She bowed to Mariana, and then, after a moment, she stepped forward and hugged her, briefly and hard, the way people hug at airports.

They climbed the first dune together. Everton carried the cooler. Lívia and Kauã ran ahead, sinking to their shins, and slid down the far side on their backs, shrieking. At the top the wind took Mariana's hair and wrapped it over her face, and when she pulled it away she could see the whole curve of the coast to the east, a pale crescent, and to the west the long low line of the lake and the bridges, and behind them, hazy, the city, its factory stacks and its apartment towers and its rows of tiled roofs, all shrunk to the size of a model.

They spread a blue tarp in the hollow behind a crest, where the wind passed over their heads, and sat on it. Priscila unpacked the rice balls. Caio took one of carne seca and bit into it and closed his eyes, and opened them and looked at Priscila and patted his cheek twice with his flat palm. Priscila laughed.

"That means delicious," Everton explained. "Even I know that one."

They talked the only way they could, which was in every way at once. Nanami signed in Japanese Sign Language, quick and fluid, her face doing half the work, eyebrows and mouth and tilt of the head. Caio watched her and typed it into his phone in Portuguese and turned the screen for Mariana. Sometimes, when he was too slow, Nanami took the phone from him and typed in Japanese, and Everton read it aloud in Portuguese. Sometimes Caio skipped the phone and spoke a few words aloud in Portuguese, in a voice that was flat and soft and slightly hard to follow, the voice of someone who had learned to speak by watching mouths and feeling his own throat. Sometimes they all gave up and drew in the sand with a finger.

It was slow. It was not as slow as Mariana had feared. After a while she stopped noticing how slow it was.

Everton says you hear through your feet, Mariana typed, and wished at once that she had not.

Caio grinned at the screen and typed back. "Brazilians love that story. I don't hear the drum. I feel it, in my feet and my chest and my hands, and I watch Toninho. It is not hearing. It is not less than hearing either. It is mine."

"Tio Vado never learned to sign properly," Caio typed. "He learned maybe one hundred signs in thirteen years. Mizuno-sensei was very angry with him. She said, you come every week for ten years and you still sign like a baby. He said, I'm a factory man, I learn with my hands slowly. So he invented his own signs."

Nanami laughed, and made a gesture: two fingers walking along the back of her other hand, then the hand lifting and the fingers taking a small leap.

"That was train," Caio typed. "His sign for train. It's not the real sign. Ours is different. But he made the train go over the gap in the rails. Because that was the beat. The gap in the rails."

She made another. Fingers drumming on her own collarbone, light and fast and then slower.

"Rain," Caio typed. "Starting and stopping."

Another. A fist on her chest, double, double.

"Heart."

Mariana typed into her own phone and passed it over. Did he ever talk to you? With his voice?

Nanami read it and thought for a moment. Then she signed something to Caio and he translated, slowly.

"She says, he talked all the time, with his mouth. Always in Japanese, old country Japanese, like her grandmother's. We could read some on his lips. Not all. He knew we couldn't understand everything. He talked anyway. She says, she thinks he talked to us because we could not hear him. He could say anything. Nobody was listening, so he could talk."

"What did he say?"

Nanami shook her head and smiled. She signed something short.

"She says, we don't know. That was the point."

The wind changed and a shower of fine sand came over the crest and pattered on the tarp. Kauã came running back with sand in his hair and took two rice balls without asking and ran away again. Far out, a container ship sat on the horizon like a gray brick that someone had set down and forgotten.

Caio typed for a long time and then handed the phone to Mariana without looking at her.

When I first went to school I was four. My parents did not know Japanese. I did not know any language, no Portuguese, no sign, nothing. I knew my mother's face and my father's face and that was all. The school taught us to read lips and use our voices. Sign was not for the classroom then. The older children gave it to me, in the yard and on the stairs, and Mizuno-sensei used it with us when the door was closed. That was my first language. Japanese Sign Language. So when I was a little boy I could talk to the other children and the teachers, but not to my parents, because they did not know sign, and not to the Japanese world, because I could not hear. And not to Brazil. I was Brazilian, but in what language? Later, at nineteen in Goiânia, I started again from zero with Libras, like a tourist. The two sign languages are as different as Japanese and Portuguese. Even the hand alphabets are different.

Then Tio Vado came. He was Brazilian like my father but his face was Japanese. He talked to me with his mouth in Japanese, and with his hands in his terrible baby signs, and with the drum in samba. Samba was the first Brazilian thing I ever understood. Before samba, Brazil was just the word my parents used for the place they were sad about. After samba, I knew what it felt like.

Mariana read it twice. She gave the phone back. She did not trust herself to type.

Nanami was watching her, and leaned over and drew something in the sand at the edge of the tarp with her finger. A grid. Four columns, two rows. In some squares she pressed her fingertip in hard, making a deep dimple. In others she drew a small open circle, lightly.

She pointed at the dimples. Then she made a fist and struck it gently against her palm. Strong. She pointed at the circles. She opened her hand and let it fall, softly, onto her knee. Soft.

Then she signed something to Caio, and Caio laughed aloud, a big surprised laugh, and typed it out.

"She says, you should know the secret. Tio Vado was a terrible samba drummer. Terrible. He played like a factory. Every beat the same. Exactly the same. Perfect. And samba is not perfect. Samba swings. It is a little late here and a little early there. The open circles are where the swing lives." Caio pointed at the soft circles in the sand. "We taught him that. The children. He made the chart, and he played it perfect, and we said, no, Sensei, it is too correct. It sounds like the train. And he did not understand. So we put his hand on the drum while I played, and he felt the difference."

"He played perfect," Mariana said aloud. "And you taught him to play wrong."

Caio watched her lips. He nodded hard. He typed: Not wrong. Loose. He was so happy when he got it. He danced. Tio Vado danced. You never saw that, I think.

"No," Mariana said, and found that her face was wet again, and that the wind was drying it almost as fast. "I never saw that."

At dusk the kite flyers began to come down. The sea went from gray to violet, and the line of the shore turned black, and out on the water the lights of fishing boats came on one at a time. Priscila handed around the Romeu e Julieta rice balls. Nanami took one, bit into it, and her eyes went wide, and then she laughed with her mouth full and signed the delicious sign twice.

On the walk back to the cars, Nanami asked for Mariana's phone and opened the family map, which Mariana had left on the screen. She looked at it for a long time. She moved it with her fingers, zooming out until both Japan and Brazil were on the screen at once, Bastos and Liberdade and the feira on one side of the curve of the world and the cluster of pins in Hamamatsu on the other. Then she zoomed back into the gray rectangle beside the home goods store, where the small school had once stood.

She tapped on the pin Mariana had made and, below the note that said School for deaf children (closed Sept 2011), she typed a second line in Japanese. Then she handed the phone back.

Mariana asked Everton to read it.

"Thursday, fifteen thirty," he read. "We were here."

Behind them, the last kite came down out of the dark.

Caio walked his bicycle alongside Mariana to the parking lot. At the car he stopped and typed one more message.

Shuhei-san called the bicycle shop. The drum is released Friday. Toninho says we can fix the head at the parking lot on Saturday, before practice. Mizuno-sensei is asking the big school if the children can come to the festival. The Brazilian association festival, the eighth of August, in the parking lot. Do you stay until the eighth?

She checked the date on her phone, though she did not need to. Her flight home was on the ninth.

Yes, she typed.

Then, he wrote, we play it again.

Thirty-Two Tacks

The release took eleven minutes and four signatures.

The station chief was a man of about fifty with a crew cut and a gray suit, and he received Mariana in an office on the third floor that had already been mostly emptied, so that his desk sat alone in the middle of a square of carpet less faded than the rest. He read the forms that Kuwabara had prepared. He compared them with her documents. He stamped the release with his personal seal, pressing it into the red ink pad and then onto the paper with a slight rocking motion, and lifted it, and checked that the impression was clean. Then he stood and bowed to her and said something in Japanese that Kuwabara translated as: the police apologize for the delay of fifteen years.

"Please tell him it's all right," Mariana said.

"I will tell him thank you," said Kuwabara. "All right is too much. It will make him uncomfortable."

In the basement the drum waited on its shelf with the tag still tied to its ring. Kuwabara cut the string with a pair of scissors from his bag. He held the tag in his palm for a moment, item 1147, the marker faded almost to gray, and then he put it in an envelope, wrote the date on the envelope, and handed it to her.

"For your family archive," he said. "It is part of the history now."

Toninho had brought his van, a white box with the logo of an air-conditioning repair company half scraped off the side. He and Everton and Caio and Kuwabara carried the drum up the basement stairs between them, one at each corner, sideways and then tipped and then sideways again, while Mariana walked ahead opening doors. On the landing they had to stop and set it down and rest. Caio put his palm flat on the drum's body, feeling the wood, and Kuwabara watched him do it, and then after a moment did the same.

The young officer at the front desk stood up as they went past and watched them all the way out to the street.

The split head could not be repaired, only replaced, and nobody in the Brazilian community knew how to replace a festival drumhead. The samba drums had plastic heads now, screwed down with lugs, and could be changed in ten minutes in a parking lot. A cowhide head nailed down with tacks was another thing entirely. You had to soak the raw hide until it went soft. You had to stretch it over the drum with ropes and a jack, pulling it tighter than seemed possible, tighter than seemed safe. You had to let it dry under tension. You had to set the tacks, every one the same distance from the next, all the way around, so that the pull on the hide was even, or the drum would sound like a cough.

It was Kuwabara, in the end, who found the man.

Ōta Hisashi was eighty years old and had been, for fifty years, the drum keeper of the neighborhood festival preservation society in the old castle district, the same kind of neighborhood association that had refused to lend its drum to a factory worker from Brazil in 1998. Not the same association, Kuwabara was careful to say. A different one. But the same kind. Ōta had a workshop behind his house, a shed with a dirt floor and a corrugated roof, where he repaired the drums of a dozen neighborhoods every spring before festival season, and Kuwabara had once, as a young officer, returned a stolen festival drum to him and been given a bottle of rice wine he had not been permitted to accept.

Ōta came to the mill parking lot on Saturday morning in a pickup truck with a hide rolled up in the back. He was tiny and brown and bowlegged, in a sleeveless undershirt and baggy work trousers tied at the ankle, and he walked around the drum three times without saying anything. Then he crouched and ran his thumb around the rim of the good head, counting the tacks under his breath.

He said something to Kuwabara.

"He asks who made this drum," Kuwabara said.

"My uncle," said Mariana.

"He says your uncle was not a drum maker."

"No. He made car parts."

Kuwabara translated. Ōta grunted. He said something longer.

"He says, it is not made the correct way. The staves are cut by a man who does not know drums. But the spacing of the tacks is the most even he has seen in fifty years. He asks how your uncle did this."

Mariana thought of the letter Neusa had described, and of Tomio going to the colony schoolyard on a Saturday with a tape measure. That morning, before dawn, she had written to Neusa and asked. And Neusa had answered within the hour, because it was late afternoon in Bastos and she was awake anyway, with a photograph posted into the family space. A page from a small notebook with a green cover, lined, written in her uncle Tomio's square, careful print. DRUM, SCHOOL, MEASURED 1997. Height of body. Diameter at the ends. Diameter at the middle. Number of tacks per head: 32. Distance between tacks, measured at five points around the rim and averaged. And under all of it, in Neusa's hand, added later: Tomio keeps everything I don't.

She showed the photograph to Ōta on her phone. He held it close to his eyes. He read the numbers. He looked at the drum. He looked at the numbers again.

Then he laughed, a dry cackle like a magpie, and said something that made Kuwabara smile.

"He says, a farmer in Brazil measured a drum in tenths of a centimeter, and a car-parts man in Japan copied it in tenths of a centimeter, and now an old drum man is going to nail it back in tenths of a centimeter. He says, this drum has been measured more than any drum in history. He says, he is honored."

The work took all day.

Ōta had soaked the new hide overnight in his own shed, and now he laid it in a plastic tub of water in the shade of the mill wall to finish softening, turning it now and then, until it went limp and gray and smelled powerfully of barn. In spring, he told Kuwabara, he would leave a new head under tension for three days. In August heat, on asphalt that burned through his sandals, one long day would hold it, so long as the family did not mind that it would go on tightening for a week and he came back to look at it before the festival. While it soaked, he pulled the tacks from the split head with a curved claw, one at a time, and dropped each one into a coffee can, and Mariana counted them as they fell. Thirty-two. The old head came away in a single piece, brittle and pale on the inside. Ōta handed it to her and she held it up to the light, and through the split she could see the sky.

Then the stretching. Ōta laid the wet hide over the open end of the drum and lashed it down with ropes, threading them through holes he punched around the edge and down to a steel ring under the drum. He set a car jack under the ring. Then he began to crank, a few turns at a time, and the ropes groaned and the hide drew tight across the opening, tighter, until the surface went smooth and drumlike and the edges began to stand out in ridges. Every few minutes he stopped cranking, and climbed up onto the drum, and stood on the wet hide in his bare feet. He stamped once with his heel. He listened. He climbed down and cranked again.

"He is listening to the hide," Kuwabara said. "With his feet."

Caio, who had come at noon and had been standing at the edge of the shade with his arms crossed, watched this happen three times. The fourth time, when Ōta climbed onto the drum, Caio took off his own sandals and walked over and stood beside it, and when Ōta stamped, Caio laid his palm flat against the drum's body.

Ōta looked down at him. Caio looked up. Neither of them said anything, because there was nothing that either of them could have said that the other would understand. Then Ōta stamped again, and Caio held up a hand with the fingers spread and tilted it, a little, side to side. Not yet. Ōta considered this. He climbed down and cranked twice more. He climbed up and stamped. Caio waited, palm on the wood. Then he nodded and made a fist. Now.

Ōta laughed his magpie laugh again and thumped Caio on the arm and said something Kuwabara did not translate, because, he told Mariana afterward, it was rude and very complimentary.

They let the hide dry under tension through the hot middle of the afternoon. Priscila came with sandwiches and a thermos of iced coffee sweetened with condensed milk. Ivone came with coxinhas. Toninho arrived at four with the first of the bateria and stood looking at the drum and the jack and the ropes and the old man asleep in a folding chair in the shade with a towel over his face, and said that it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in a parking lot, and he had seen a lot of things in parking lots.

At five Ōta woke and tested the hide with his knuckle and judged it ready. Then the tacks.

He marked the positions first with a pencil, measuring with a cloth tape and then with a folding ruler, and then, when Mariana hesitantly held out her uncle's micrometer, with that. He turned it over in his fingers. He tried the thimble. His eyebrows went up. He used it for the next thirty-one marks, and after each one he handed it back to her, and she handed it back to him for the next, so that they passed it between them all around the drum, like two people taking turns with a single pair of reading glasses.

Then he set the tacks. He held each one in place between his thumb and finger and drove it in with three strikes of a small hammer, never four, never two. Thirty-two times. Mariana stood beside him and counted them aloud in Portuguese, under her breath, without meaning to, and when she reached thirty-two Ōta looked at her and said the number back to her in Japanese, and she realized she had been counting in the wrong language and he had understood her anyway.

He cut away the extra hide with a curved knife. He took off the ropes. He took away the jack. The new head sat on the drum pale and tight and new, ringed with brass, beside the old wood and the green and yellow paint and the word QUINTA.

Ōta took a pair of thick wooden sticks from his truck, the drumsticks the Japanese called bachi, and held them out. Not to Mariana. To Caio.

Caio took them. He looked at them in his hands. He looked at the drum. Then he did something none of them expected: he turned and gave one of the sticks to Mariana, and kept one himself, and stood beside her at the new head.

The bateria had gathered around them now, thirty Brazilians and a handful of Japanese, in their soccer shirts and their flip-flops, holding their own drums and not playing them. Everton was there with Kauã on his shoulders. Lívia was holding Priscila's hand. Kuwabara stood a little apart, as he always did, with his cloth bag over his shoulder. Ōta sat back down in his folding chair.

Caio raised his stick and looked at her. She raised hers.

They struck the drum at the same moment.

The sound came up out of it like something that had been waiting at the bottom of a well. It was lower than the surdos and rounder, with a long tail that hung in the air and shivered the kudzu leaves on the fence and rolled away across the asphalt and came back off the wall of the old mill. Mariana felt it in her stick and her wrist and her teeth. Beside her, Caio had his free hand flat on the drum's body and his eyes closed.

When the sound had faded completely he opened his eyes. He was smiling the kind of wide open smile she had seen only once before, in a photograph from 1999, on her uncle's face.

Toninho blew his whistle once, softly, the way you would whistle to a dog you loved. Then, with no signal at all, the whole bateria began to play.

The Circle

She called her parents on Tuesday night, which was Tuesday morning in São Paulo, and caught them at the Tuesday feira in Vila Mariana in the slow hour after the breakfast crowd. She could hear the stand behind them. The oil, the radio, a man shouting that his avocados were bigger than heads. Her mother put her on speaker and set the phone on the steel counter so that Edson could hear too, and so Mariana's voice came out among the pastéis.

She told them everything. Mizuno and the Thursday club and the grid with its open circles. Caio, who felt the surdo through his bare feet and read the bateria from Toninho's hands. Nanami and her porcelain teeth. Ōta and the thirty-two tacks. She told them about the big school, and the principal, a brisk woman in her fifties who had met with Mizuno and Caio on Monday and listened to the whole story without interrupting, and at the end had said that the school's rule for outside volunteers was still the rule: a document of employment, a guarantor, a residence card. Caio had all three. He had brought them in a plastic sleeve.

"So they'll keep it," Mariana said. "At the school. Caio will go on Thursdays."

There was a silence on the line, filled with frying.

"Pai," she said. "You told me to bring it back."

She heard him take a breath.

"It says Bastos on it," Edson Souza said finally. "Doesn't matter where it sits. That's ours there."

Her mother said nothing at all for some time. Then she said, in Japanese, a phrase that Mariana had not heard her use since her grandmother's kitchen, something the old people in the colony said at the end of a long day of work, and Mariana did not know how to translate it and did not need to.

The Brazilian association's summer festival had been held in the mill parking lot every August since 2004, and by noon on the eighth the lot had been transformed. The drums of the bateria were gone, stored in the warehouse, and in their place a ring of white canvas tents had gone up around the edges, each with a hand-lettered sign. PASTEL. YAKISOBA. ESPETINHO. CALDO DE FEIJÃO. A Japanese family from the next street had set up a tent selling shaved ice, the ice spun into tall cones and drenched in strawberry and melon syrup, and the Brazilian stall beside them was selling the same shaved ice drenched in condensed milk, and both had lines.

In the center of the lot stood the yagura, the festival platform. It was built of steel scaffolding pipe, two meters high, with a plywood deck and a short ladder, and from its corners ran four lines of paper lanterns out to the lamp posts, the lanterns alternating green and yellow and red and white. On the deck, alone, sat the drum on its wooden stand. Its new head was pale, and Ōta had come on Thursday to tap it with a knuckle and call it settled. Its old head had been oiled by Ōta until the dark hide gleamed. The stripe around its belly caught the afternoon sun.

Mariana spent the afternoon at the pastel tent.

It had not been her plan. She had come early to help Lívia tape Osvaldo's grid, which Lívia had redrawn in marker on four sheets of poster board, to the front of the platform where the drummers could see it. On the way back across the lot she passed the pastel tent, run by a couple from Maringá in their sixties, and saw that the wife was frying alone while the husband argued with a gas cylinder, and that the line was twenty people long. And without deciding to, she had gone around the back of the tent and washed her hands in the plastic basin and taken the second pair of tongs.

The oil was too cool. She could hear it. She turned the flame up a quarter turn and waited until the sound changed, the low lazy bubbling sharpening to a quick fine hiss, and then she lowered the first pastel in, and it swelled, and blistered, and went gold.

"Where did you learn that?" the wife asked.

"From my uncle," Mariana said, and turned the pastel once, and lifted it out.

By five o'clock the lot was full. Brazilian families in soccer shirts, grandmothers in folding chairs fanning themselves. Japanese neighbors who came every year, and some who had never come before and stood at the edges looking politely startled. Children in cotton summer robes printed with goldfish and fireworks, and children in shorts and Brazilian jerseys, and some in both, a robe tied over a jersey. Teenagers on their phones. A man walking around with a parrot on his shoulder, which Kauã followed for half an hour. Music from a sound system on a folding table, Brazilian pop and then Japanese pop and then forró, and a few couples already dancing, pressed close, their feet sliding in the quick small steps of the northeast.

Kuwabara came at five-thirty in a cotton summer jacket with his wife, a tall woman with short gray hair who shook Mariana's hand firmly and said in English, "Thank you for the tomatoes salad." Ivone came in a dress printed with hibiscus. Sugiura came, which surprised everyone, alone, in his white short-sleeved shirt, and stood near the shaved ice tent with his hands behind his back until Ivone saw him and took him by the elbow and fed him a coxinha.

Mizuno Kayo came at six, with her sister on one side and the principal of the big school on the other. Behind them came four children and their parents. The children were eight, nine, ten, eleven. One of them, a girl with two cochlear implants and a robe printed with morning glories, was holding Mizuno's hand so tightly that her knuckles had gone white. Two of them were Japanese. One was a Peruvian boy whose mother had been in the lot since noon selling empanadas. One was Brazilian.

Caio met them at the foot of the ladder. He was barefoot again. Nanami was with him, and a thin man in glasses whom Mariana had not met, who bowed to her and signed something, and Caio typed it: This is Haruto. He came from Osaka this morning. He was the one with the hearing aid.

At seven, the lanterns came on.

Caio climbed up onto the platform first. Then Nanami and Haruto. Then, one by one, helped up the ladder by their parents and down by Caio, the four children. They stood around the drum. Caio knelt and spoke to them with his hands, and they watched his hands, and nodded, and one of them laughed. He showed them where to put their own hands: on the body, on the rim, on the oiled head. Nanami pointed at the poster board taped below them. HEART, it said, in Lívia's careful letters, in Portuguese and Japanese, with the row of solid and open circles beneath it.

Caio raised one stick. Nanami raised the other.

They played the heart.

It was slow and simple, double, rest, double, rest. Strong and soft. The sound rolled out across the lot and the conversation at the edges dropped, not all at once but in widening rings, the way water goes still. The children on the platform had their palms flat on the drum and their eyes on Caio's face. On the third bar, the girl with the cochlear implants began, very slightly, to nod.

Then the train. Then the rain, starting and stopping. Then the horse, which Mariana had not understood on paper, and which turned out to be a gallop, three quick and one long, so obviously a horse that the crowd laughed out loud. Then Caio stopped and looked down from the platform, searching, and found Mizuno at the front of the crowd, and made a sign to her that Mariana now knew. The circle dance.

Mizuno stepped forward. She raised her right hand.

And the dance began.

It was the old dance of every summer in every neighborhood in Japan and in every colony schoolyard in the interior of São Paulo, the dance Neusa had danced as a girl, a slow ring moving counterclockwise around the platform, everyone doing the same few steps, a clap, a turn of the hands, a step forward, a step back. Mizuno led it. Her sister followed. The parents of the four children followed. Then Ivone, pulling Sugiura, who protested and then, astonishingly, knew all the steps. Then the Japanese family from the shaved ice tent. Then the Brazilian grandmothers out of their folding chairs. Then Everton and Priscila, with Kauã trying to do it backward, and Lívia between them holding the family tablet over her head to film the platform for her grandparents in Bastos and her great-aunt and great-uncle in Liberdade, who would wake to it in the morning. The ring grew and grew until it filled the lot, two hundred people moving around the drum in a slow wheel, Brazilians and Japanese and Peruvians, half of them doing it wrong.

On the platform, Caio and Nanami and Haruto took turns at the drum, and the children kept their hands on it, and the drumbeat went out over the circle steady as a clock.

Kuwabara stood beside Mariana at the edge, not dancing.

"In my neighborhood," he said, "the Brazilians did not dance this. They watched."

"And now?"

He looked at the ring going past. Ivone came by and grabbed his wrist. He resisted for exactly one step, and then he was in the circle, raising his hand, clapping on the beat, his wife laughing behind him.

At eight Toninho's bateria came out of the warehouse.

They came in a column, thirty players in green and yellow shirts, the surdos leading, and they did not play until they had surrounded the platform on all four sides. Then Toninho put his whistle in his teeth and looked up at Caio. Caio looked down at him. Caio raised his stick and struck the festival drum once, hard, and Toninho blew the whistle, and the bateria came in underneath the big drum all at once, and the circle dance broke apart into samba.

Mariana did not remember climbing the ladder. She remembered being on the platform, and Caio putting a stick into her hand, and the girl with the cochlear implants moving over to make room for her. She remembered the grid on the poster board below her, SAMBA, with its solid circles and its open ones. She remembered that she played the solid circles first, perfectly, on the beat, exactly, the way she counted milligrams and initialed refrigerator logs, and that Caio watched her and shook his head and laughed and put his hand over hers on the stick.

Then he played with her, his hand on her hand, and she felt it. The open circles. The little lateness. The place where the swing lived. It was like a train going over the gap in the rails. It was like a heart that does not keep perfect time and keeps going anyway.

Below them the lot was a single moving body. Lanterns swung. Somewhere in the crowd her cousin's son was shrieking with joy on someone's shoulders. The smell of oil and grilled meat and burned sugar and cut grass from the kudzu along the fence came up in the heat, and the moths spun around the lanterns, and a train went past on the elevated line without making any sound at all that anyone could hear.

At 20:59 Toninho raised his whistle.

At 21:00 he blew it, and the bateria stopped, and Caio and Mariana stopped with it, in the middle of a bar. The silence came down over the parking lot all at once, like a lid set on a pot. Two hundred people stood still, breathing. Somewhere out on the road, a bicycle bell.

On the platform, the girl with the cochlear implants had not taken her hand off the drum. She stood with her palm flat on the new head and her eyes closed, feeling the last of it going out of the hide, thinner and thinner. When it was gone she opened her eyes and looked up at Caio, and he nodded at her, and she grinned. Then she took her hand away and wiped it on her robe, very carefully, as if there were still something on it she did not want to lose.

Second Fryer

The jacaranda trees on the sloping street were still bare at the end of August, but the light had changed while she was gone. It came down warmer now and yellower, slanting in under the canvas roofs at six in the morning and lying across the steel counters in long bright bars, and the fruit men had set out the last ponkan tangerines of the winter beside the papayas, loose-skinned and bright, their zest sharp in the air whenever a peel split.

Mariana arrived at five-thirty and found the second fryer already lit.

Her father was standing beside it with the long tongs in his hand. He did not say anything about it. He held the tongs out to her, handles first, the way you hand someone a pair of scissors, and she took them and went around behind the counter and washed her hands in the basin and stood at the second fryer, where her uncle had stood for thirteen years.

The oil was cool. She waited for the sound.

All through the morning the feira did what it always did. The fishmonger broke his ice with the heel of a hammer. The radios fought and did not fight. Two old women argued over the price of okra with the solemnity of diplomats. A man came through selling ironing-board covers from a cart, calling out in a voice like a foghorn. The caldo de cana man fed his stalks between the rollers, and the press groaned, and the green juice ran down into the pitcher with its lime and its ice, and the smell of cut cane drifted over the stand and mixed with the hot oil and the onions and the ground beef and the dough, and Mariana breathed it in and thought that there was no smell like it anywhere on the other side of the world, and that she had stood on the other side of the world and missed it, and that her uncle must have missed it for twenty years.

Her mother filled and folded and pressed and turned. Mariana fried. Edson worked the counter and made change and told every regular customer that his daughter had been to Japan, until Celina told him to stop, and then he told them anyway, more quietly.

At ten the caldo de cana man came across the aisle with two plastic cups of juice, which he had never done in Mariana's memory, and set them on the counter.

"For the Japonês's niece," he said. "Welcome back."

She drank it. It was cold and green and very sweet, with the bite of lime underneath, and it tasted, impossibly, of the inside of a plant.

She had brought home less than she had expected and more than she could explain.

In her suitcase, wrapped in a hospital towel, was her uncle's micrometer. In a plastic sleeve, the envelope that held the evidence tag, item 1147, with Kuwabara's date on the front in pencil. In another sleeve, a copy of the grid on graph paper, the original having been hung by the principal herself, in a frame, to the wall of the music room at the big school, beside the drum. And in her handbag, a page Kuwabara had torn from his notebook for her: the eight names Mizuno had read from the photograph, in pencil, in the order she had said them twice.

The drum was not in her suitcase. The drum was in Hamamatsu, in the music room of a school for deaf children, where on Thursday afternoons at three-thirty a Brazilian bicycle mechanic would take off his sandals and put four children's hands on its body and teach them the heart, the train, the rain, the horse. Caio had sent her a photograph from the first Thursday. The girl with the cochlear implants was in it, in a school uniform now instead of a robe printed with morning glories, and she was not looking at the camera. Her eyes were closed. Her palm was flat on the wood.

The night after she came home, Mariana had opened the family space and made a page for her uncle.

It was the kind of page the family made for birthdays and for remembrances, where anyone with access could leave a few words or a photograph. She had made one for her grandmother Sumie years ago and one for a cousin's wedding. She gave her uncle's page the photograph from the tree, the one at the fryer with his glasses up in his hair. Under it she wrote only his name and his dates and the places he had lived. And then, because it was the private family space and outsiders could not see in, she did something she had never done before: she sent an invitation to see this one page, and only this page, to eight people who were not family.

They had all written.

Mizuno Kayo wrote in Japanese, and Kuwabara had translated it underneath in English, and Lívia had translated the English into Portuguese below that, so that the message stood in three languages one above the other, like a short stack of plates. It said: Thank you for thirteen years of Thursdays. I am sorry I thought you had forgotten us. We did not forget you. The children who are now adults remember everything you said, though most of them could not hear a word of it.

Caio wrote in Portuguese, misspelled and certain: Tio, I play your drum every Thursday now. The new kids are terrible. Just like you were. I am teaching them the open circles.

Nanami posted only a photograph of her hands, palm down on a white tabletop, beside a tiny porcelain tooth no bigger than a grain of rice.

Haruto wrote that he had become a sound engineer in Osaka, a man who measured vibration for a living, and that he had never told anyone why.

Ivone wrote: I kept your cards. I gave them to your family. That was my rule. Boa viagem, Vado.

Sugiura Masato, who had never used such a page in his life and had needed Everton's help, posted a photograph of a locker shelf with towels folded in thirds.

Toninho wrote: So that was the one drum.

And Kuwabara Shuhei wrote, in English, in a message that Mariana read so many times on the airplane home that she could recite it:

Dear Mr. Takeda Osvaldo,

I am the policeman who carried your drum from the truck in 2011. I am sorry it did not arrive. I am sorry that for fifteen years it waited in the dark, in a room that I was responsible for, while the children were waiting in another room. I think that you also waited. I think that everybody was waiting for a letter from everybody else, and because everybody was polite, nobody wrote.

I am now learning the finger alphabet from Ms. Ogura. I am very slow. She says I am like you. I take this as a compliment.

With respect,
Kuwabara Shuhei

At noon the crowd thinned. Mariana turned the flame down under the second fryer and wiped the steel counter, and then, without thinking, she wiped it again, and stopped, and looked at her hand.

Her mother was folding the drying towels. She had a stack of them on the counter, the thin striped cotton ones that went over the trays of finished pastéis to keep the flies off, and she was folding them the way she had always folded them, in half and in half again, quickly, without looking. Then she stopped. She unfolded the last towel and laid it flat. She folded it in thirds, carefully, the left side in and the right side over, and then in half, and set it at the corner of the counter and aligned its edge with the edge of the steel.

She looked at it for a while.

"He did it like that," Celina said. "Thirteen years. I used to think it was because he was fussy."

"He was fussy."

"Yes." Her mother picked up another towel. "And he was something else." She folded it in thirds. "I never asked him what. I thought, if he wants to tell me, he'll tell me. And he thought, if she wants to know, she'll ask." She set the second towel on top of the first and squared the edges. "So nobody asked and nobody told. That's what we do in this family. We're very polite."

"Kuwabara said the same thing."

"Then he's smart, your policeman." Celina reached for the next towel. "Next time he comes, I'll make him a pastel of hearts of palm."

"He's not coming to Brazil, Mãe."

"Everybody says that," her mother said. "Then they come."

That afternoon, after the iron frames had been folded and stacked on the trucks and the city's water truck had hosed the slope clean, Mariana walked home under the bare jacarandas and sat at her kitchen table and opened Osvaldo's square in the family tree and, under Lived Hamamatsu, 1991 to 2011, she added one line. She thought about it for several minutes before she typed it, and then typed it without changing a word.

Taught on Thursdays.

On Monday, at the hospital, she went to the staffing office on the second floor and asked to change her schedule.

The coordinator, a tired woman named Dulce who had been processing schedule requests for twenty years, looked at the form and then at Mariana.

"You've never asked for anything," Dulce said. "Nineteen years."

"I know."

"Thursday afternoons off." Dulce read the reason Mariana had written in the box provided. "A course in Libras. At the federal institute." She looked up. "Sign language?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

Mariana thought about how to answer. She thought about the grid with its open circles. She thought about a factory man who signed like a baby for thirteen years and was so happy when he learned to play badly that he danced. She thought about a girl with her palm on a drumhead and her eyes closed, holding on to the last of a sound with her ears and her hand at once.

"My uncle didn't learn it properly," she said. "I'd like to try."

Dulce stamped the form, and rocked the stamp slightly, and lifted it, and checked that the impression was clean.

The class began the following Thursday at half past three, in a room on the ground floor of an old building near the Luz train station, with windows that did not quite close and a ceiling fan that ticked on every rotation. There were eleven students. The teacher was a deaf woman of about fifty with short white hair and silver rings on every finger, and she did not speak a word aloud for the whole two hours, and by the end of it nobody in the room wanted her to. On the first afternoon they learned the alphabet and their own names and the signs for family, for mother, for father, for uncle. Mariana got most of them wrong. She practiced on the bus home, her fingers moving in her lap, a little late here and a little early there, and the woman in the seat beside her watched for a while and then, without a word, reached over and corrected the shape of Mariana's hand for uncle, bending one finger into place, before she got off at her stop.