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She sits alone at the breakfast table. On the radio, the weatherman predicts rain, but it’s already raining. Tomoe hears her father on the phone in the other room.

Is it the bank again?

She picks up her schoolbag and heads to the entryway - the

genkan

. Their home is traditional. They share the grounds with a centuries old shrine. Her classmates think this makes her a spoiled heiress.

That was her mother.

The reality is, their shrine is neither glamorous nor historically important, unlike other shrines in the area. It’s practically no-name, especially compared to places like Asakusa Shrine.

She steps into her shoes and slips on her saggy black raincoat and takes her time going down the stone steps. It’s been years since anybody worked on them and the soil in the hillside verges on loamy. It moves around, like a living thing. A tree she planted in preschool is three meters farther south than it started.

The road is damp and a morning mist blankets the neighborhood in soft grey tones. Rain falls in scattered droplets. She jogs down the one-way street to her grandfather’s dōjō.

He’s her maternal grandfather - the only grandparent she knows.

“Good morning, Tomoe-chan,” he smiles, his expression planted, firm. “Shall we begin?”

“Yes, Ojī-chan.”

Her grandfather’s dōjō is technically a jūdō dōjō, but that’s never stopped him from learning other disciplines. In particular, as he ages, he’s becoming more and more interested in Chinese health oriented disciplines, like tai chi and qigong. As a younger man, he was rumored to have competed at a national level in karate. She wouldn’t know for certain as he keeps no trophies.

Qigong is what they begin with anyhow. It’s important to begin the day by realigning the chi circulating in the body - or so her grandfather says. He talks a lot about stagnating energies. She’s not sure she gets it.

When she first started learning, it felt embarrassing, and was so tiring. There were a lot of movements she didn’t understand and being told to imagine chi moving through her body was awkward.

What she does know, chi and stagnating energy aside, is that she feels better for it when they finish.

Then it’s the near painfully slow forms of tai chi.

“Remember, Tomoe-chan, as we move yin and yang swirl within us - but at our core we remain still.”

She breathes through the burn in her muscles as they creep from one movement to another. It’s hard work.

With a final inhale and exhale, their morning routine is complete.

Her grandfather smiles and offers her a glass of water from the tray he prepared beforehand.

“Will you be by this evening for the second half?” he asks.

“I will, Ojī-chan.”

They practice jūdō and a bit of karate in the evenings after supper. It’s demanding and more physically exhausting than tai chi - more so for her grandfather than for herself - but he’s happy to teach her.

She finishes her water, gently setting the antique Iittala glass down, and her grandfather sees her out.

“Tomoe-chan, I wish you would wear a brighter coat. No one is going to see you in this dreary weather wearing that old thing.”

“I’ll be fine, Ojī-chan. The station is barely five minutes away.”

CRASH!

A single shoe hits the ground.