The Smudged Kanji
Muromachi Street is no longer the same. On the days we hung out, Issei and I would leave our houses along that stretch—his with a Porsche and Mercedes out front, and mine the cheapest apartment near campus—and walk toward each other until he appeared, waving in his black Moncler puffer. That was the ritual.
Now, sneezing through cedar pollen, I pass his house, the grade school with the empty pool, turn the corner, and keep going alone.
He has moved to Tokyo to train as an airline pilot. I remain here for my thesis.
Above my apartment door hangs a breaker panel, and from one switch dangles a blue strip of paper—Issei’s Tanabata wish. A duplicate of the one he tied to bamboo that humid July at Kitano Tenman-gū. The sentence begins with “Friendship” while its predicate is hiragana, except for one smudged kanji I couldn’t read. At the bottom: L & I.
I could have asked him about the kanji during our weekly calls, but I did not. Perhaps I did not want him to know that I sometimes still needed validation that we were best friends. (I seek validation for everything.) So it took a stranger, a woman at a downtown bookstore, to decipher the kanji after I showed her the photo on my phone.
“Tsuzukimasu,” she said.
To continue.
Muromachi Street is no longer the same. But I still see us crying that night along a construction site over a job one of us did not get. I still see him start his Tesla for our mission to find my new bookshelf. I still see us eating yakiniku with his family on their rooftop, watching the mountains burn with giant kanji, sending ancestral spirits back home.
The blue slip hangs above the door.
Linus Van Plata is a Filipino writer who teaches English in Osaka and walks runway shows in Tokyo and Kyoto. Afflicted with tsundoku, he lives in a small Kyoto apartment among growing piles of books he fully intends to read eventually.
“The Smudged Kanji” won the Local Prize in WiK’s Tenth Kyoto Writing Competition, 2026.
This prize is awarded to a writer living in Kyoto. The winner receives a selected ceramic piece from the Robert Yellin Yakimono Gallery.
See the full list of this year’s competition winners.
See this year’s competition notice with prize details.