He had hired Asha Reynolds four years ago, when she was twenty-two, after she walked into the restaurant on a Tuesday afternoon with no appointment, no restaurant experience, and a single sheet of paper listing two certifications she had earned by studying from library books. He had poured her six wines, blind, at the bar. She had named the grape on all six and the region on five. Then he had asked her where she had learned to taste like that, and she had told him, and he had looked at her for a long time over his wire glasses and then said something to her in Japanese.
And she had answered him in Japanese.
He had hired her that afternoon.
Asha had lived in Japan for twelve years. She had arrived at four and left at sixteen. Her father, Darnell Reynolds, had been a chief petty officer in the United States Navy, an aviation machinist's mate, stationed at Naval Air Facility Atsugi, outside Tokyo, and then at Yokosuka, on the coast of Kanagawa. Her mother had died of an aneurysm when Asha was three. Her father had been offered a chance to come home to Ohio and raise his daughter near family. He had chosen instead to take her with him to Japan, because, he said, he wanted her to see the world before the world decided what to see in her.
They had lived off base, in a small apartment in a working-class neighborhood of Yokosuka, above a family-run tofu shop. Her father had insisted on it. He wanted his daughter to grow up among people, not behind a fence. He had enrolled her in the local Japanese public elementary school, where she was the only Black child, the only foreign child, the only child who arrived on the first day unable to say anything but konnichiwa and arigatō. She had cried every morning for three weeks. Then, the way small children do, she had stopped crying and started talking, and by the end of her first year she spoke Japanese like a native of Kanagawa, with the local accent and the local slang and the particular sing-song lilt that the old women at the tofu shop downstairs used when they gossiped.
The old women at the tofu shop had raised her, really. While her father worked twelve-hour shifts on the flight line, Asha had spent her afternoons and evenings in the back of the shop with Mrs. Shimizu and Mrs. Hayashi and old Mr. Shimizu, who had been making tofu by hand in the same building since 1961. They had fed her and scolded her and taught her to fold laundry and to write kanji and to bow correctly, and how to speak to an elder, and how to speak to a stranger, and how to speak to someone of very high rank, which was an entirely different kind of Japanese, formal and careful and full of humility, called keigo. Mrs. Shimizu had been particularly strict about that. "A girl who can speak properly to the emperor," she used to say, rapping Asha's knuckles lightly with a wooden spoon, "can speak to anyone."
And it was Mr. Shimizu who had first taught her to taste. Not wine. Sake. He had kept a small collection of bottles from breweries all over Japan on a high shelf in the back of the shop, and on Sunday evenings, after the shop closed, he would pour a few drops into a tiny white porcelain cup and let her smell it, and ask her what she noticed. She had been eight years old the first time. She had said it smelled like pears and steamed rice and a little bit like the rain. Mr. Shimizu had looked at her for a long time and then laughed and slapped his knee and called his wife in from the front of the shop to tell her that the American girl had a nose.
She had a nose. She had spent the next eight years learning what to do with it.
At sixteen, her father was transferred back to the United States, to the naval air station in Jacksonville, and then, two years later, he retired and they moved home to Cincinnati, to the West End, where he had grown up. Asha finished high school there. She had wanted to go to college. She had been accepted to Sophia University in Tokyo, with a partial scholarship. But in the spring of her senior year, her father had been diagnosed with a degenerative condition in his spine, the long-term result of twenty-two years of crouching under the bellies of jet fighters, and he could no longer work, and someone had to.
So she had worked. Waiting tables. Bartending. And then, at twenty-two, walking into a hole in the ground on Moore Street with two certificates and a nose.
That had been four years ago. Now she was the assistant wine director of Vault 1887, the second-ranked sommelier in a two-star restaurant, responsible for a cellar of eleven thousand bottles. She had passed the Advanced Sommelier exam on her first attempt, which almost nobody did. She was also certified as an international sake sommelier, the only one in the state of Ohio. Mr. Okada introduced her to guests as "my successor." She was embarrassed every time he did it. She was also, secretly, prouder of it than anything in her life.
She never told guests that she spoke Japanese.