Flower was actually a rebel who insisted on being called “Flower. Yes, that's the English word, “Flower,” which when rendered into Japanese sounds more like “furawaa.”
Her actual name was Hanako, which does mean “Flower Child” in Japanese. It's a rather dated name, popular many decades earlier. Hanako is a name that used to be common in Japanese textbooks the way that “Jane” is used as a generic girl's name in English textbooks, but nowadays it's actually a little too dated even for textbooks.
Flower disliked the boring, Showa-era sound of the name, and wished that her parents had give her a progressive, hip name. In addition, there's a little story behind the name “Hanako” as a ghost in the elementary school bathroom. But alas, her parents were not at all hip or progressive. Her father was a taxi driver, her mother a cafeteria lady. They worked hard, laughed hard, and enjoyed life. They never took days off from work, never traveled, and rarely ate out at any restaurant fancier than a diner.
The local Buddhist temple cemetery was filled with their relatives—in fact, it sometimes seemed to Flower that she was related to half the people in town. This was hugely annoying to her, as it seemed there were eyes on her at every moment of every day. Not only were there cousins and second cousins floating around at school, but even the lunchroom ladies were somehow connected to her mom, and the old guy who owned the magazine shop around the corner from school knew her dad well, and always called out to her as she walked by on her way to and from school.
What would it take, she thought, for her to be anonymous, just for a single day, a single hour?
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