The following piece is published as part of our TLM Young Writers series, a dedicated section of The London Magazine‘s website which showcases the work of exceptional young talent aged between 13-21, from the UK and beyond. Winter burns in Japan. It’s not just because of the cold – a cold that bites and burns and numbs, that’s clean and feels minty against your cheeks.
It’s because there’s no rain, because there’s nothing to extinguish the red in the trees or to wash the autumn down deep beneath the spotless streets. Tokyo in December is rich, vivid, alive; and it’s where I found my sister at her happiest. I arrived about a week before Christmas, when the sky should have been ashy and I shouldn’t have been able to see clouds in the rivers and ponds.
My sister met me at the bus stop – excited, glowing – in a coat I’d never seen before. I wondered what I must have looked like to her after nearly twenty hours of travel; a little grey, a little slow, eyes wide and glazed as I took in the size of Shin-Yurigaoka station. As soon as I stepped off the coach, she pulled me into a hug and I realised that it didn’t matter how tired I might have looked or felt.
That maybe, to her, I was just as radiant as she was. ‘You look exhausted,’ she said. A rising sun shone through golden leaves and onto ground the colour of rust.
It looked as if someone had poured whiskey along the road, behind the glass of the station’s windows, and Teri’s brown hair turned warm.
