Back to the Source

The train stopped with a metallic screech, and Esperanza Takashi, her face pressed against the dusty window, felt her stomach tighten. The Yamanashi landscape unfolded before her like a faded watercolor. Seven years had passed since she had left for Tokyo, four of them spent studying veterinary medicine under the protective anonymity of the capital. Now, at twenty-two, she was coming back to the place of her childhood, carrying the unsettling feeling that she had somehow become a stranger to herself.

The village hadn’t changed. The same wooden houses with their gray-tiled roofs, the same narrow lanes bordered with bamboo, the same mixed scent of damp earth and late-blooming cherry blossoms. Yet something felt wrong in this idyllic picture. Esperanza frowned, trying to name what escaped her, but nothing came.

Her thesis advisor, Dr. Yamamoto, had practically forced her to take these summer holidays.
"You seem… elsewhere lately, Takashi-san. Those long hours in the autopsy room after class, that morbid fascination… it’s not healthy. Go home, get some rest."
She had wanted to argue, but he had been right. Over the past months, she had felt increasingly disconnected from reality, and her falling grades spoke for themselves.

“¡Esperanza! ¡M’hija!”
Her mother’s voice pulled her out of her thoughts. Maria stood on the small station platform, her black hair now streaked with white, her smile slightly forced. A little behind, her father, Hiroshi, raised a hand in greeting, oddly stiff and formal.

“Luz couldn’t come,” Maria explained, her tone too cheerful to sound true. “She’s preparing her class for tomorrow. She’s eager to see you.”

Esperanza nodded, a strange emptiness stirring at the mention of her twin sister. Luz had become a teacher in the village, something Esperanza found hard to imagine. In her fragmented memories, Luz had been… different. More fragile, perhaps. But those memories were hazy, like dreams you only half recall at dawn, leaving just a vague impression.

“How are your studies ?” her father asked while carrying her suitcase to the car.

“Good,” she lied. “My advisor thinks I’m on the right track for my final exam.”

Her parents exchanged a furtive look — a silent, meaningful glance that children learn early to understand. Esperanza noticed but chose to ignore it.

The ride home was quiet, broken by superficial conversation. Esperanza noticed her parents carefully avoiding certain topics: why she had left so young to live with her aunt in Tokyo, why she had never come back for holidays, and above all, why this tension now hung in the air like an unspoken storm.

The family house at the end of a path lined with blue hydrangeas hadn’t changed. Traditional tatami mats, sliding doors, that particular scent of old wood and incense that memory instantly recognized. A little further away, beyond the trees, the white building of her parents’ veterinary clinic rose like a silent lighthouse in the mist, calling to her for no reason she could name. Yet everything seemed oddly different, as though she were seeing her childhood scenery through a warped lens.

That evening, Luz arrived for dinner. She came into the room with a discreet, almost forced smile, pausing for a moment before stepping closer. Esperanza stood, uncertain. They kissed each other’s cheeks quickly, like acquaintances reunited after too long apart. Something unreadable lingered in Luz’s eyes — not joy, not hostility, but a shadow slipping at their corner. Esperanza wondered if her sister had always looked like that, or if it was just her imagination.

“You look well,” Luz said in a measured tone. “City life suits you.”

“You too, you seem… fine.”

The lie floated between them. Luz looked healthy, but something in her posture, in the way she avoided Esperanza’s gaze, suggested constant caution, as if she were always on guard.

During dinner, Esperanza felt every one of her gestures observed, weighed. The quiet scrutiny began to irritate her.

“Is there something wrong with me ? I feel like the strangest exhibit in a sideshow,” she said finally, masking her irritation with a light laugh.

The silence that followed was deafening. Her parents exchanged a look, and Luz lowered her eyes to her bowl of rice.

“It’s just… it’s been so long,” Maria murmured. “We were wondering if…”

“If what ?”

“If you remember your childhood here,” Hiroshi finished.

Esperanza frowned. Her childhood memories were indeed patchy. She recalled the broad strokes — the house, school, a few games with Luz — but the details dissolved like ink in water. She had always thought that was normal. Who truly remembers everything from their childhood ?

“Not really, but that’s just growing up,” she said with a shrug.

Another exchanged glance, and the meal ended in a silence heavy as a cathedral.

Esperanza climbed the creaking stairs to her room, her feet instinctively finding the steps that didn’t protest under her weight. The familiarity of that movement startled her.

That night, lying in her childhood bedroom, she struggled to sleep. The oppressive atmosphere of the day pressed down on her chest like a heavy blanket. On a shelf, she noticed a book of Mexican legends, a gift from her grandmother Rosa before they had moved to Japan. She opened it at random and found an illustration of a creature crouching near a dead goat, eyes glowing red. The Chupacabra. Her grandmother’s stories came rushing back — the monster that attacked livestock, draining every drop of blood. Abuela Rosa had told these tales with a mix of fear and fascination that had marked Esperanza’s early years.

Closing the book, she felt warmth trickle from her nose. Blood. She rushed to the bathroom and saw a thin red line staining her upper lip. Stress, surely.

She wiped it with a tissue, but the metallic scent tugged at something deep, something almost forgotten. Without thinking, she brought the tissue to her lips and tasted it.

The flavor burst on her tongue — salty, iron-like, disturbingly familiar. For a fraction of a second, she felt ten years old again, hidden in some dark, secret place, savoring something forbidden.

Then reality crashed back. She threw the tissue away, rinsed her mouth over and over, but the taste lingered. More troubling still, a part of her had found it… pleasant.

That night she slept only lightly, haunted by fragmented dreams where a creature with glowing red eyes watched her from the shadows of the veterinary clinic. At dawn, she woke to find fresh earth under her fingernails, a discovery that unsettled her far more than she wanted to admit.