I shook the metal box up and down, feeling the wooden sticks jangle inside. I prayed to the holy Shinto gods above that I would get the right stick. I just need this one bit of luck, anything, one Ivy, two Ivies, even a waitlist, please, I whispered in my head.
A stick clattered onto the table. I squinted at the number. Forty-four. Just my luck.
I searched for the Chinese characters for forty-four on the wall: a rectangular box with ‘son’ inside, a cross, and then another box. Four-ten-four. Pronounced in Mandarin like death-ten-death.
“Stop muttering to yourself,” Belle said.
I shushed her before heading towards the drawers. I squeezed past my fellow sweaty tourists, praying, like me, for a drop of good luck on their summer trips to Japan. Carefully, I took the paper fortune drawer for number forty-four and glanced over the English translation.
“大凶!” I cried, “a big curse.” “That’s why I tripped earlier today! Isn’t this one of the worst fortunes possible?[1]”
Belle nodded. “Better go tie it up over there.”
I sighed and took my paper fortune over to the wire rack. I could not bear reading the rest of it. I folded the paper into a long strip and struggled to tie it around the wire, doing away with the bad luck. Even my knot was lumpy and misshapen.
As we moved from one overcrowded booth of Senso-ji to another, my eyes caught the prices of the colorful omamori on the sign above. Three thousand yen in exchange for some portable good luck charms. The Japanese word ‘omamori’ is made up of two Chinese characters, one meaning sacred, the other meaning protection—some divine intervention that I would truly appreciate during my travels.
A year’s worth of good luck for the price of a meal! What a steal! If I were some random Shinto god, I would charge more than three thousand yen (the yen isn’t doing so well these days) for a portion of their power.
Three thousand yen was not exactly free, though, and the colorful charms and bells did not go with anything I owned. It could look tacky. Appropriative, even. It was hogwash anyway. Superstitions I could throw away at any moment in favor of logic and reason. Luck was just probability, parentheses, unions, and if/elses.
I snuck a glance at the sign again to see if there was a seasonal sale or some better deal for tourists like a ‘buy two get one free’ situation. Isn’t it ironic to sell luck? I thought to myself. If karma were to be believed, one should earn good luck through good deeds, not cold, hard cash.
The line inched forward, and Belle got out her Gucci wallet. Warm, luscious, golden wads of one-thousand yen peeked out. I glanced over at Belle buying at least ten different kinds of omamori: packets, charms, bells, red, blue, and green; all sorts of patterns and characters that neither of us would recognize.
“Wouldn’t all that just cancel out?” I asked. “You don’t have enough real estate for all that luck.” There weren’t enough things to hang them on. Zippers, bags, phones, cars—soon enough the charms would have no more space to extend their halos of good fortune.
“Of course it wouldn’t cancel out!” Belle wagged her finger at me. “Good luck is additive.”
“Do you even know what additive means?”
Belle proceeded to ignore me. “This is why I’m lucky,” said Belle. “I make sure I pay respect to the spirits above.” She waved her hands towards the sky, as though summoning said spirits. She threw me a winner’s grin. “Don’t sulk because you were too stingy to pay for more good health.”
A few more crimson buildings, stone statues, and yen-exchanged prayers later, I was ready for ramen. But as the sun set over busy Tokyo, bathing the exiting crowds in a warm orange light, my mind wandered back to the lucky charms. Maybe my grandparents would do well with a good-health omamori to tie on their wrinkled cross-body bags.
We ambled down a roofed shopping street towards the subway station. Belle skipped up and down, her omamori jangling at her hip. I rolled my eyes at her antics. This is what the rich like to do. They go around, appropriating cultures and spending all their money on useless, old-fashioned tourist traps and—
“Take one.”
I glanced at her. “Huh?”
“Take this one.” She held out one of the omamori she bought, a small yellow packet laced with golden characters and patterns. “I think it’s for good grades or something like that. Probably works for your college apps too.”
I stared at her for a second before taking it. “Did you buy it for me?”
Belle ignored my question. “You’re right, I don’t have enough places to keep all of these.”
As I tied the charm carefully around the zipper of my backpack, I found myself smiling. Just a little bit. I made a mental note to spend less money on matcha snacks and buy omamori at the next shrine we visited. A purple one, maybe, to hang on someone’s bag.
