Grandpa always insisted he’d been born on the star across the sky.
In our town, the day you’re born, someone takes a pinch of sand from wherever your feet are standing and seals it in a small jar on the shelf. One look at that sand tells you where a person’s soil came from. We call it the birth jar. It’s the town’s highest law — the first thing the grown-ups do when a baby arrives is fill that jar.
Grandpa — everyone called him old Gen — kept his jar right in the center of the shelf, and bragged about it almost every night.
“Listen up, Kou. I drifted in from over there. All alone, back when I was young — from right under that light.”
From the highest window in the house, you can see one small light at night. The townsfolk call it the far star. It sits so close that, standing on the ground, you can’t tell our sky from that one — same color, same height, same glow. Nobody could say for certain whether it was kin or some stranger who’d wandered in from elsewhere. Maybe that’s why everyone took old Gen’s tall tale half seriously.
Then again, the sky over there kept getting bigger every year in Grandpa’s telling, until eventually there were three or four lights instead of one. How much of it was true, nobody could say.
The man who’d been arguing with him about it for fifty years was old Tatsu.
“Liar. You were born right here in this town. I saw you crying after you fell on the hill out back.”
“Must’ve been someone else. When I was over there, you were still wiping snot on your sleeve.”
“We’re the same age, you old fool!”
Every time the two of them met, they went through this same routine. And yet, for all their fifty years of bickering, Tatsu had apparently already worked out every detail of Gen’s funeral, long in advance.
That year, Gen suddenly seemed to shrink. His cough dragged on, and some days he couldn’t even reach the jar on the shelf. Tatsu, with an unusually quiet look on his face, spoke up.
“Hey, Gen. Let’s settle it while you’re still around. Where you’re really from.”
There was only one way to do it. Someone would have to travel to the far star and bring back a pinch of that soil. Set it beside the sand already in Gen’s birth jar — if the colors matched, Grandpa really was born over there. If not, he was just an old man from this town, same as everyone else.
Testimony wouldn’t do. Memory wouldn’t do either. In this town, only sand carried home with your own hands tells the truth.
I raised my hand and said I’d go.
The night before, on a whim, I’d opened the lid of the jar on the shelf. It showed no sign of ever having been opened before. The sand settled at the bottom was the same reddish color as our own backyard. Not the color of soil from over there.
I closed the lid without a word. By then, I think I already knew Grandpa had been born right here, on this town’s hill.
And still, I went.
The journey out took a long time — I honestly can’t say how long. By the time I came back, I’d grown so thin that Mom cried at the sight of me. But I’d seen it with my own eyes. The sand of the far star was tinged blue, fine-grained, nothing at all like ours. I took a pinch of it in a leather pouch and carried it home, keeping it warm against my chest the whole way.
Everyone gathered in the town square. Gen sat in the front row, a blanket over his lap. Tatsu stood waiting with his arms crossed.
I set Gen’s birth jar, taken down from the shelf, in front of everyone.
Then I pulled the pouch from my chest and let the far star’s sand pour into the jar in a soft trickle.
“There. It matches.”
Tatsu’s mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water.
“Wait — hold on, what if you just poured that in afterward—”
“It’s the far star’s sand. I carried it back with these two hands. …Grandpa’s jar has the far star’s sand in it now. So Grandpa really was born over there.”
Someone burst out laughing. Then the whole square broke up in laughter. Tatsu started to say something, but in the end just gave Gen’s blanketed shoulder a single pat.
Gen sat stunned for a moment. Then he laughed louder than anyone. He coughed, wiped his eyes, kept laughing anyway, and hugged the jar to his chest with trembling hands.
I was the only one in this whole town who’d ever carried that faraway soil back with my own hands. Outside the window, the far star still shines at its usual height.