Oniisan… Ohitori Desu Ka? May 2026

“Me too,” she said. Then, after a pause: “Can I sit?”

“Will you come back?” she asked.

“Every day,” she said. “Except when it rains. Then I sit under the shrine’s eaves. The old lady lets me.” oniisan… ohitori desu ka?

She held up her other hand. A small plastic bag, crumpled at the edges. She offered me a piece. Rice cracker, slightly stale. I took it.

“Oniisan… ohitori desu ka?”

I was twenty-two then, or maybe twenty-three. The kind of age where “alone” still sounded like a choice you made, not one that was made for you. I’d come up the mountain to escape a thesis I wasn’t writing, a city that buzzed like a trapped wasp in my chest, and a voicemail from my mother that I’d listened to four times and still not answered.

She tested it, lips shaping the syllables. “Kaito-oniisan.” “Me too,” she said

“Do you come here often?” I asked, stupidly. The kind of question adults ask children when they don’t know what else to say.