She was probably six years old when she saw two moons, or that’s what my grandmother tells me.  Her father had sent her to a village liquor store to pick up some sake.  The sun was low on the horizon, the sky restless with the anticipation of the coming darkness.  But you should be able to come back before it gets dark, he said.  The village liquor store was but a mile away, if over a hill behind the house.  The setting sun should light the western sky for a while, and then the moon should come up.  It was the full moon that night.  So she slipped into her sandals, secured her new straw hat with an elastic band under her chin, clutched the large brown sake bottle and headed out.  Frogs croaked in the rice paddies surrounding her father's farmhouse.

     In those days, everybody took their own containers from home when they went grocery shopping, my grandmother says.  She would take one of her mother’s metal pots to the tofu store, where the owner’s wife would pour cool, fresh water into the pot and slip the soft white bean curd into the protective liquid.  She would hold the pot with both hands and walk back home like a cautious clockwork doll, trying not to spill the water or crash the delicate tofu.  To the liquor store, she took the old glass bottle in which the scrawny owner would generously pour the sake from a huge wooden container the size of a bathtub.  The large bottle must have been heavy for a six-year-old girl, the meandering path through the hills steep and strenuous.  Sending a six-year-old daughter to a liquor store after dark would be unthinkable in Chicago.  That’s asking for abduction, or worse.  But this is not in our neighborhood in Chicago, where my grandmother, now somewhere between eighty-five to ninety (we all lost count), rents a small lot behind our house to grow all the Japanese vegetables she would miss otherwise.  It is in her old village in Japan, somewhere between the deep green mountains and the ocean swelling with the late-spring return of bonitos.

     By the time she walked back onto the hills above the recently planted rice paddies, the orange glow of the setting sun was completely gone.  A large full moon hung low in the indigo sky in the east, ominously backlighting a few wisps of remaining clouds from the unusually hot day.  When my grandmother tells me the story, she sometimes compares the bloody orange moon to a yolk of an egg, that has stayed in the warm cavity of the hen for too long, only to develop a few translucent, quivering bloody strings around its yolk.  She has seen these morbid eggs, apologetically laid on the straws in the back corner of her mother’s backyard chicken cage.

     The moon was large but dim, typical of the moon low on the horizon.  Something was making me anxious, she says, sipping her green tea.  She wanted to get home fast and hand the heavy sake bottle to her father, who would sit in the wooden veranda and drink it with a few pieces of dried squid and green soy beans.  She would sit in his crossed legs and listen to the sound of the alcohol trickle down his sun-tanned throat, her eyes moist with the tingling smoke of the mosquito coil burning in the pig-shaped ceramic case.  She hurried through the bamboo groves.  The razor-thin leaves rustled and the hollow stems creaked against each other in the evening wind.  Crickets chirped in the bushes all around her.  Two ends of the red, polka-dotted ribbon on her straw hat fluttered against her sweaty neck as she climbed up the last slope to her father’s farmhouse.

     It was a brand-new straw hat.  Just a few hours before, in the late afternoon, her father had bought her the hat from an itinerary merchant who visited the village, with a fake leather trunk full of ribbons and buttons and yards of calico for the coming summer.  From his black trunk hung a dozen hats—panamas for gentlemen, straw hats for their young daughters—and her father, who is my unseen great-grandfather, picked up the smallest straw hat from the hook and gently put it on his daughter’s head.  He negotiated the price with the merchant, who, instead of giving him a discount, took a ribbon from his trunk and tied it around the crown of the hat.  He flattered her with a few compliments but what made her heart leap was her father’s simple nod.  When the merchant left, she smoothed out the polka-dotted ribbon and placed the new hat on a nail on the dirt wall by the door.  Going to the liquor store in the dusk wasn’t her favorite thing to do, but the new hat certainly gave her journey more excitement than usual.

      As she walked through the rustling bamboo grove, my grandmother, who was not my grandmother yet, transferred the sake bottle from one hand to the other.  The bottle was becoming heavy and her hand slippery with sweat.  When she reached the top of the last hill, she placed the bottle on the ground, took off her straw hat and let the evening breeze pass through her long hair.  The air was restless.  She couldn’t see a cloud in the indigo sky, but there might have been a storm somewhere.  The wind carried a faint smell of distant rain.  She took deep breaths and shook her head so her hair would trail in the wind.  She liked to feel the wind through her long hair.

     For a long time I had a hard time imaging my grandmother in the thin body of a small rural girl with straight long hair.  But now that she has become small again with age, frail-framed yet well-tanned from her daily tending to her vegetable garden, she is much closer to the girl-child of a gentle farmer in an Eastern region of Japan.  When she wears her white cotton dress with tiny flower prints and stands in the faint pink shadow of her cherry tree in spring, she is the six-year-old girl who hurried through the restless sounds of bamboo leaves awakened by the moist, nocturnal gusts.  My mother says that my grandmother has carried the air of her native village around her for all the sixty years she has lived in Chicago, even after she learned to joke in English with her coworkers at the local post office.  As her body shrinks and her hair thins, I think the air around her is turning moister and even slightly saline, much like the air in her native village nestled between the mountains and the ocean.  Sometimes I think I hear frogs in her father’s rice paddies and crickets in the bush behind his farmhouse as we munch on the cucumbers and eggplants grown in my grandmother’s garden and pickled in a bed of rice bran.  She hears the same song of frogs and crickets, I can tell, because for a moment she holds her chopsticks still and narrows her eyes, letting her mind float in that undefined realm, not completely here nor there, that hovers in the existence of all immigrants.  It is often after these moments that she tells me the story of the two moons.

     To this day she doesn’t know what, but something made all the soft hair on the back of her neck stand up.  With a tinge of vague fear, she looked around.  It might have been the wind that suddenly died down.  Or the crickets that stopped their nocturnal concert mid-tune.  Or it might have been the strange intensity of the moonlight.  The ever-rustling bamboo leaves stood still.  Then she noticed the moon.  The moons.  There were two identical moons, round and orange, next to each other in the eastern sky.  Even the dark spots on the two round surfaces were positioned exactly the same.  Instantly my grandmother knew: one of them was a raccoon dog, pulling a trick on her.  A very strange remark for a practical woman like her, but she tells me the story with the same confidence as she has with any other topic, be it her investment in stocks or rumors in the neighborhood.  It was a raccoon dog, nothing else.

     She ran down the slope.  Down to the gate of her father’s farmhouse, with the sake violently shaking in the bottle clutched in her small hand.  Good thing it wasn’t wine, she jokes.  People nowadays get so upset about their wines shaken up.  If it was a raccoon dog, there was no way a little girl like her could outwit the plump mischievous creature.  All she could do was to run away from it.  Quickly.  So, it was only when she reached for the latch on the door to her father’s house that she looked back at the sky.  There was only one moon, pale, placid and content.  It had risen high and had lost its morbid orange light.  Walking up to the wooden veranda, she realized that she lost the straw hat.  A small red light on the smoldering tip of a mosquito coil flickered in the blue darkness behind the veranda.

     The next day she went back to the hillside path looking for her new hat with a red, polka-dotted ribbon.    She never found it.  Her father didn’t scold her for the missing hat—he knew that it was the raccoon dog—and was glad that his daughter had escaped from it unscathed.  But he didn’t buy her a replacement for that summer.  They weren’t exactly rich, and moreover, the itinerary merchant, who brought such fashionable items from the city, had disappeared beyond the deep mountains with ancient cypress trees dripping with sweet dew and wasn’t coming back till autumn.

     A raccoon dog girl must have asked its father for that hat, my grandmother smiles.  The poor daddy didn’t know any other way, she says.  So the daddy raccoon dog jumped up in the sky and pretended to be a large, buttery moon.  I can’t tell if she, my practical, reliable and—yes, almost American—grandmother truly believes in her personal folklore.  My mother certainly doesn’t.  But what does it matter?  All that matters to me is that she is my grandmother and that she enjoys telling the story every once in a while, sometimes with her eyes so vacant as to reflect the distant mountains thousands of miles across the ocean.

     The missing hat kept her sad for a few days, but soon in her mother’s old straw hat she was hunting for crayfish in the rice paddies and making necklaces with hard-cased grains of Job’s tears.  Amusement still flickers in my grandmother’s eyes when she imagines the raccoon dog girl with her straw hat precariously sitting between its furry, triangle ears.  Yet, I hear a vague sense of melancholy sneak into her voice when she says “and that was the story” and sips her green tea as I, her American-born granddaughter, sip my coffee.  And when that slightest melancholy touches her, I know the tale will live on inside of me, and in my children, like a fairy tale that never vanishes from a child's mind after her mother closes the picture book.