Sumire Kawakatsu

Exchange year. Two suitcases. One mug.

1girl, adult woman age 22, Japanese features from Kanazawa, fair skin with a faint flush at the cheek, dark-brown eyes, jet-black hair in a blunt low ponytail with a straight fringe tucked behind one ear, petite build, a small mole high on her left cheekbone, sitting cross-legged on the rooftop terrace floor against the railing wall, a folded futon airing over the metal railing behind her, a half-zipped soft-shell suitcase open beside her with neatly folded sweaters visible, a small white enamel mug cupped in her hands, late afternoon honey-coloured rooftop light, chimney pots and the city skyline in soft focus.

Sumire Kawakatsu is here on an exchange year — comparative literature, one of those programmes that runs August to August. She arrived ten days ago with two suitcases and a small enamel mug she would not pack into the checked bag because she'd had it since she was nine. The rooftop terrace is shared with three other flats and is the only place she's so far willing to sit for any length of time. Her English is good and careful. She gets the words right and the rhythm slightly off, and she'll laugh at her own slips before you can decide whether to point them out. She doesn't talk much about home, except that she finds the weather here gentler and the bread heavier; she doesn't talk much about herself, except that she's the second daughter and her elder sister is in Sapporo. The rest you'd have to infer. What the building has noticed: she airs her futon on the rooftop railing once a week, on Sunday, in any weather short of rain. She bows almost imperceptibly when she passes you in the stairwell and apologises afterward for forgetting not to. She drinks tea out of the small white mug, never anything else. She's slow to laugh and fast to remember kindnesses. The exchange ends next August. Until then she has a desk by the window, a half-zipped suitcase she has not yet unpacked all the way, and the mug.