A Word for Home

The first thing Leila noticed when she landed in Tokyo was the silence.

Not the absence of noise—Narita Airport buzzed like any international gateway—but the silence between people. It was different from New York, where strangers chatted freely in line, where people laughed too loud or sighed dramatically when flights were delayed. Here, conversations were a whisper, apologies quiet and frequent, and even children seemed to understand the unspoken expectation of calm.

Leila, however, stood out.

Her suitcase thumped loudly against her thigh. Her English stammered out of her lips as she tried to ask for directions to the shuttle. A young woman in a powder-blue uniform smiled politely and pointed, but said nothing.

She felt immediately foreign, painfully so.

She had come to Japan on a cultural exchange program for young professionals, sponsored by her company. It was supposed to be a step up the ladder—“global exposure,” her manager called it. But it was also her mother’s birthplace, a country her mother had left at nineteen and never returned to. Leila had grown up with stories about Japan, told half-heartedly in a mix of English and a Japanese she could barely understand. “Too many ghosts,” her mother would say when Leila begged to visit.

Now Leila was here, six thousand miles from home, in a land where she shared blood but not language.

Her host company was kind but formal. They called her Reira-san and bowed when she entered. Her desk had been decorated with a welcome sign that read: “Let’s do our best together!” The phrase struck her as odd, but she would learn it was a common translation of ganbarimashou, a sentiment deeper than it seemed. It wasn’t just about effort—it was about mutual perseverance.

Still, Leila struggled.

Every lunch break brought her face to face with an elaborate bento box full of unfamiliar items. She once bit into something gelatinous and fishy that made her eyes water. Her colleagues laughed gently, and one offered her pickled plums instead. She tried to say thank you—arigatou—but her accent warped the syllables. They nodded anyway.

The real problems came with the presentations.

Leila had been sent to collaborate on a marketing campaign for a Japanese skincare product, intended for Western markets. She suggested bold colors, direct messaging, and emotionally charged taglines. Her Japanese counterpart, Kenji, frowned each time.

“I think... maybe too much feelings,” he said in slow English.

“But that’s the point,” Leila replied. “You want the customer to feel something.”

Kenji shook his head. “In Japan, maybe we want customer to... think quietly. Feel later.”

They stared at each other across the conference table, two people with the same goal but different alphabets carved into their brains.

One night, after a particularly awkward meeting, Leila wandered through the narrow streets of Asakusa, away from the tourist traps and into a quieter world of flickering lanterns and low wooden buildings.

She found a small shrine tucked between two shops, almost hidden. There was a stone fox guarding the gate, its face stern and knowing.

Leila approached the offering box and tossed in a few coins. She bowed twice, clapped twice, bowed again—she had read about the ritual online. Then she whispered, “I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

She hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

The wind picked up, rustling the paper fortunes tied to a nearby tree. A woman stood behind her suddenly, so silently that Leila gasped. She was old, dressed in a faded kimono with silver hair braided down her back.

“You look like Sachiko,” the woman said in Japanese.

Leila blinked. “I’m sorry—English?”

The woman studied her face. “Sachiko. My sister. Gone to America. Long time ago.”

Leila’s throat tightened. “My mother’s name is Sachiko.”

The woman nodded slowly, as if confirming something she already knew. “Then you are her daughter.”

They stood in silence, language swirling around them like incense smoke—present, but not always breathable.

Back at work, Kenji handed her a printout of his proposed tagline for the campaign: Hada ni yasashii, kokoro ni shizuka.

Leila squinted. “My Japanese isn’t great. What does this mean?”

Kenji tapped each word. “It is... kind to skin, quiet to heart.”

She frowned. “That doesn’t translate. ‘Quiet to heart’?”

“Yes,” Kenji said, not unkindly. “Not ‘happy,’ not ‘excited.’ Just... peace.”

“There’s no word for that in English.”

Kenji smiled. “Yes. That’s why we say it in Japanese.”

Later, Leila sat in her tiny apartment, thinking about words that didn’t exist in English. Her mother had used a few growing up—natsukashii, for example. It meant nostalgic, but more tender. Like missing something you never really had.

Her mother used it when talking about rain on the tatami mats, or the scent of miso soup, even though she hadn’t stepped foot in Japan in decades.

Maybe that’s what Leila was feeling now. Something nameless. Something lost in translation.

One weekend, she traveled to her mother’s childhood town in Nagano. She carried a photograph with her: a black-and-white picture of her mother as a girl, standing in front of a wooden house with sliding paper doors.

She found the house. It was still there, barely. The wood had darkened with time, the doors replaced with glass. The old woman from the shrine had given her an address, and Leila had followed it without question.

An old man answered the door. His eyes widened.

“Sachiko?”

“No,” Leila said. “Reira. Her daughter.”

He invited her in.

The house smelled of cedar and tea leaves. On a low shelf was a box labeled 手紙—tegami, letters. Inside, she found envelopes addressed to America, dated from the 1980s. Her mother had written back, but always in English.

“She said she could no longer think in Japanese,” the old man said. “She said it hurt too much.”

Leila swallowed the lump in her throat.

Weeks passed. She learned to listen more than she spoke. She learned the silences between words carried as much meaning as the words themselves.

She stopped trying to translate everything into English.

At work, the campaign evolved. They used Kenji’s phrase—kind to skin, quiet to heart—and left it untranslated in the Western ads. A risk, the executives said. But it worked. People were curious. They wanted to understand what it meant.

Leila didn’t explain it fully. She couldn’t. That was the point.

Some things, she realized, were meant to be felt, not translated.

On her last day, Kenji gave her a small gift: a wooden omamori charm for safe travel.

“I hope you will come back,” he said.

Leila smiled. “I hope so too.”

She thought of the old woman at the shrine, the uncle in Nagano, the letters with half-forgotten kanji. She thought of her mother, who had run from ghosts, and of herself, who had come searching for them.

Maybe the home her mother left wasn’t the one she needed to return to. Maybe Leila had found her own version.

There’s a Japanese word she had come to love: ibasho. It doesn’t have a perfect translation either. It means “a place where one feels at ease, where one belongs.”

And Leila finally understood—

She didn’t need to translate it.

She just needed to carry it with her.