by India Millar
“Akira-san is the leader of the Ishikawa-ikka yakuza.” I bit my lip. Even in the Hidden House, we knew about the yakuza gangs. Criminals who wielded immense power and were feared throughout Edo. This particular gang was said to be the most terrible of them all. And I, a mere girl, had defied its leader, caused him to lose face in public. Just as well I was unlikely to see him again.
I took the tea cup from her and sipped the contents. I decided that I didn’t care. In the space of a few hours, I had tasted glamor and love. Had hovered between life and death itself. In fact, I had taken part in my very own kabuki performance.
How could some low-life gangster compete with that?
Chapter Nine
When the snow leaves the
Ground, does the
Earth remember its kiss?
I had a visit from Bigger very early the next morning. I was barely awake when he barged in, prowling around my room and tickling Nekko with his toe. The kitten spat and tried to bite his foot. I lowered my gaze and tried not to look happy. After all, no one was entitled to more than one day of immortality, and back in the real world of the Hidden House, I had no desire to annoy Bigger.
I had dreamed, but I could barely remember what of. Danjuro’s face mingled with the samurai who had stopped me in the street. Then the rough man’s features appeared suddenly, coated with the white makeup of the kabuki. Only his grey eyes blazed at me. Was he laughing or lusting? I had no idea. At one point, I seemed to be on stage in the theater, acting out the part of a young man. Strangely, that was the one bit of my dream that I could remember clearly. If only! Even though Danjuro had made it brutally clear that I could never be a kabuki actor, it was the one thing above all that I wanted. Even above Danjuro himself? At that moment, I just didn’t know. Later in the day, when my brain had woken up a little, I would have poured scorn on the idea. Me? A woman? On stage at the kabuki? What nonsense! What a crazy thing to even dream about! Of course it was Danjuro, my talented, wonderful Danjuro, that I wanted.
Bigger mooching about my room put all my skittering thoughts in order. I took a deep breath and ordered myself to concentrate.
“Well? How was it?” Bigger demanded. I bit back a suicidal desire to blurt “wonderful!” and lowered my eyes to the floor modestly.
“I think Danjuro was happy with me,” I said.
“Did he mention Big?”
I didn’t even need to think about it. The answer was no, and I said so firmly.
“You’re sure?” Big used his foot to poke me.
I nodded. “Quite sure. I watched him perform in the kabuki, and afterward he took me. All he wanted to talk about was the play and his part in it.”
Bigger grunted. I kept my eyes down, willing him to go. Eventually, I thought he was going to leave, but instead he squatted down in front of me, his eyes level with mine.
“Did he say he wanted to see you again?”
“No…no. But I’m sure he will. He called me Midori No Me-chan!” I said desperately.
Bigger stared at me, hard, as if his gaze could penetrate my mind. I looked back at him unflinchingly. I was not going to lie. If I did, I felt certain that Bigger would see through the lie and punish me for it.
“We’ll see. I’ll find out soon enough from Auntie if he wants you again. If he does – when he does – remember, I want to hear about it. Immediately.”
Before I could even say yes, Bigger stood up and left. It seemed to me that the very screen walls breathed a sigh of relief as he went out. I wanted to summon Suzume and ask her how she knew so much about the Floating World. About the kabuki. It was a mystery to me how the shy, biddable little maid that existed in the Hidden House could be transformed into such a confident, talkative creature as soon as she was free of this place. It was as if my Suzume’s body had been taken over by somebody else entirely, one of the mischievous spirits from a fairy tale perhaps. And how did she come to know so much about the kabuki? It suddenly occurred to me that when she had left me at the entrance, she had darted off to find our guide without a second thought, as if she knew exactly where she was going. And then, when we were back in our own courtyard, the new Suzume was gone in a flash, and the quiet, timid little maid was back in her place. Before I could shout for Suzume, there was a soft rap on the door frame, which startled me to no end. Who in the Hidden House ever bothered to knock on a door before they entered? Particularly my door? I called out “come in” in some confusion, and all of the girls piled through. Kiku first, her spaniel at her heels, with Carpi behind her. Tiny Masaki sandwiched between Carpi and Naruko.
I stared at them in surprise, which deepened into something very like horror as I glanced at Carpi. I had been so wrapped up in the surprising turn of events that were taking place in my own life that I had not really looked at Carpi for many weeks. I was vaguely aware that she had lost weight recently. In fact, I had meant to talk to her about it, but it seemed that Carpi was keeping to herself much more these days, and I had never dared to intrude into her room without being invited. Now, I saw that she had not just lost weight; rather, it appeared that she was fading away to nothing. Never fat at the best of times, now she was as thin as a reed, and just like a reed it seemed to me that the slightest puff of breeze would bend her in two. She seemed to move without any of her old, vigorous grace, almost as if she was a tired old woman rather than a young and vigorous one.
But Kiku was talking to me, so I tore my gaze away from Carpi.
“Go on, then. Tell us. What happened? What was it like? Did you really go to the kabuki? What was Danjuro like? What play was it?”
In spite of my worries over Carpi, I was forced to laugh. All of the girls were talking at once, echoing Kiku’s questions.
“Curiosity killed the cat,” I said smugly.
“That’s not at all it will kill if you don’t tell!” Kiku tried to snap, but her face was alight with genuine interest. “Shut up, all of you. Let Midori No Me tell it in her own fashion.”
I stared at the ring of avid faces surrounding me and blinked. Where did they want me to start?
“At the beginning, of course. As soon as you stepped out of the door.”
That was Carpi, back to her old, acerbic self. Thank the gods.
So I started at the beginning, and told them everything. Or at least, almost everything. For some reason, I omitted the rough, villainous man who had accosted me on the way home. He didn’t matter, anyway. Perhaps that was why I left him out.
The girls were an excellent audience. They oohed and aahed when I told them about the samurai and were greedy for details of the performance. What was the theater like? I had had a private box, all to myself. Near the stage? No! I only had to mention Danjuro’s name, and food and drink appeared. Anything I wanted? I hardly liked to disillusion them by adding that I was too nervous to eat anything except a bowl of noodles. And – with many a sly glance between them – how had Danjuro’s performance been? Afterward, as well as in the kabuki!
I talked myself hoarse. Finally, the girls were satisfied and sat back, looking at me as if I was an exotic creature who had wandered into their midst unnoticed. I decided to take my chance and ask the question that had been bothering me from the moment I had stepped outside the Hidden House and taken my first steps into the Floating World.
“Kiku, there’s something I don’t understand.”
Kiku sipped at the green tea Suzume had bought unbidden and waved her hand in a grand gesture. “Ask,” she said benignly.
“I don’t understand why everything was all right. I don’t mean with Danjuro. I mean outside the Hidden House.”
The girls exchanged glances and then looked at me, obviously puzzled. Kiku raised her eyebrows and shrugged.
“Why shouldn’t it be alright? You walked modestly, didn’t you? Kept your head down? Made sure Suzume was behind you?”
“Yes, of course I did. But Auntie always told me I was so deformed that if I went outside, the people would spit on me to avoid bad luck. Tha
t I would probably have things thrown at me. At the very least, they would all jeer and laugh at me. But they didn’t. The honorable samurai was even interested in me. And I know I was in a box at the kabuki, but nobody paid any attention to me there. Auntie has always said that the Hidden House was the only place where I would be safe. That not even the Floating World would ever be safe for me. For any of us.”
I looked hopefully from face to face. At first, their faces were expressionless, then a strange uneasiness began to appear on all of them. More and more puzzled, I stared fiercely at Kiku.
“Kiku, why wasn’t it like Auntie said it would be?”
Kiku licked her lips and looked around at the other girls. Obviously having elected her spokeswoman, they all nodded encouragement, but remained silent.
“You were born here, weren’t you?” I nodded, perplexed. What did that have to do with it? “The rest of us started life out there, Midori. We’ve got a bit of an advantage over you. Auntie tells us all the same thing. That we are safe here. That the Floating World is no place for us. That the people out there would treat us as freaks. But the difference is, we know Auntie isn’t exactly telling the whole truth.”
She paused and the girls nodded. I shook my head, even more bewildered now than I was before she had spoken. Kiku rolled her eyes in desperation and Carpi took over.
“Auntie needs to keep us here,” she said bluntly. “She says these things to make us frightened. To make us depend on her. She can’t see that we want to be here. That life inside the Hidden House is far easier, much more pleasant than it ever was for us outside. So she tells us all fairy tales about how bad it is out there. The only problem is, she doesn’t realize that we know. We just let her tell her horror stories to humor her.”
I was shocked. Auntie, the one stable person in my entire life, the only mother I had ever really known, had told me lies? I shook my head.
“Carpi, that can’t be right. You told me yourself how you were locked up in a cage and exhibited for small change. Wouldn’t the same thing happen to you if you went out now?”
Carpi bit her lip and waggled her hands. The forlorn little gesture broke the tension and we all laughed, more from relief than humor.
“I don’t think it would. It’s difficult to explain, but you have to remember I was put on show in tiny, out of the way villages. Half of them thought the burakumin were devils anyway, so I was just a little extra tidbit. Let’s face it, if you put a monkey in a cage, people stop and stare just because it’s behind bars. You saw how the men clustered around the whores behind the bars, didn’t you? Saw how they stared at them?”
“Well, yes. But that’s not the same thing, is it?”
The ring of faces around me nodded. Naruko leaned forward and spoke hesitatingly, her odd Japanese strangely charming.
“Midori-chan. Where I was born in China, a strange woman lived in one of the local villages. She had two heads. She did!” Naruko insisted, even though nobody was disagreeing with her. “She was born like that. Two heads, two bodies, four legs, but they both sort of joined together from her breasts to her hips. She had four arms as well, but two of them were always kept behind her back. She always said that she wasn’t one person, she was two. She said the other one was her sister. But the other one never spoke. It was all most odd. But anyway, this woman actually married. Two brothers in the village married her, or them, however you want to think about it. And she, they, had babies. They both did, a couple of weeks apart. The babies were perfectly normal babies. Big strong boy children they were.” Naruko nodded vigorously. “But the thing is, nobody thought twice about her – about them – after a while. Strangers marveled at her, but nobody in the village cared. I think that’s the same with us. We might not be quite like everybody else, but in the Floating World, I don’t think anybody would greatly care.”
“They care enough to part with good money for us,” Carpi said bluntly. “And that’s the only thing that matters. Look, Midori. If I were you, I wouldn’t believe everything Auntie tells you. We’re all safe here, we’re well looked after. That’s the main thing. If your Danjuro wants to take you out of this place, then all well and good. If he doesn’t, eventually somebody else will.”
Her voice was oddly bitter, at odds with what she was saying. But all the other girls were nodding and smiling, so I decided it was me who was just imagining the bitterness. I was still deeply shocked to think that Auntie had lied to me all these years.
It was Kiku, as usual, who had the common sense to finish the discussion.
“Auntie’s probably trying to protect you from the same fate as your mother,” she said quietly. “After all, none of us have heard a word about her since she left the Floating World. I don’t want to upset you, Midori, but if you think the Floating World is bad, what must it be like outside? Outside Edo itself? In another country, even?”
We all fell silent, considering her words, and I shuddered. She was right, of course. Japan had been sealed away from the outside world for many hundreds of years. We knew little about the foreign Barbarians, and what we did know was brutal. They were not like us. They were not just foreign, but strange in ways we could not begin to comprehend. Everything about them was strange; their languages were barbaric, their morals even worse. Not for the first time, I wondered what could have convinced my beautiful, talented mother to run away with one of those monsters. I would never know, I supposed. Only Auntie and the Boys had been here when I was born, and they never spoke about my mother’s flight from the Green Tea House. Not even Big, who would torment me in any way he possibly could, ever referred to my mother.
Suddenly, I felt very glad for the girls who were ringed around me. They – and Auntie, despite her well-meaning fibs – were my family. I felt a rush of gratitude for them all and smiled my thanks.
Obviously relieved to be at the end of the serious discussion, the girls stretched and yawned and got to their feet. Carpi stood up with her usual athletic grace and Kiku was pulled up by Naruko in front and a push from the back by tiny Masaki. They filed out, grumbling good-naturedly that nothing of any interest ever happened to them. Some people, Masaki said, were unduly favored by the gods.
In the doorway, Kiku paused for a final word. She spoke very quietly, for my ears alone.
“It’s not so bad here, Midori. Not so bad at all. We have Auntie and the Boys to protect us. We are well fed and warm. All of the geisha and courtesans in the whole of the Floating World are no better off than we are, remember that. We are all slaves. But at least our cage is made of silk.”
She smiled, clicked her fingers at her spaniel, and glided away silently with her usual grace.
I waited until the girls’ voices died away before I clapped my hands for Suzume. If today was the time for curiosity to be satisfied, then let Suzume explain to me what had happened to her the moment she had stepped outside the Hidden House.
She came at her usual trot, a tray with a charcoal burner, teapot, and a cup in her hands. She placed it in front of me and kneeled, her head bowed. Once again, I was baffled by the change in her. Was this really the girl who had led me through the maze of the Floating World so deftly? So very confidently?
“Suzume, stop it.”
She kept her head bowed, but wound her hands around each other in a humble gesture. I was having none of it. I wanted to know which Suzume – if either of them – was the real one.
“Suzume, you were not at all meek yesterday when we were outside. Tell me about yourself. How you came to be here.” I saw she was peeking at me from beneath her eyelashes and I realized that she was actually a very pretty girl. It was not that I had simply not noticed, rather she was normally so self-effacing that she simply escaped attention. Was she trying not to laugh? I rather thought she was.
“I’m sorry, Midori No Me-san. Did I do wrong yesterday?”
“You know you didn’t. I wouldn’t even have found my way to the kabuki theater without you.” I saw her eyes light up at mention of the kabuk
i and seized my chance. “You’ve been to the kabuki before, haven’t you?”
“I worked there, when I was a child,” she said simply. I stared at her in surprise and, yes, jealousy. Suzume had actually worked in the wonderful kabuki? It was as if mere thought of the theater had unlocked a hidden place deep within her and she began to speak without further prompting.
I poured myself a cup of green tea. Suzume should have done it for me, but I was reluctant to interrupt her flow of words. The more she spoke, the more fascinated I became. Truly, I thought, Kiku had been right when she had said that there were worse places than the Hidden House.
“I was born in the Floating World.” Suzume sat back on her haunches and spoke to the corner of the room, somewhere behind my left shoulder. “My father was a calligrapher, one of the best in the whole of Edo. His handwriting was very beautiful, and he always had more work than he could manage. People paid him very well to write letters for them, to compose scrolls. Even the nobles came to him, he was so well known.
“I was the third daughter born to him and my mother. He had no sons, which of course was a great sorrow to both of them. Father would have been within his rights to put mother away for her inability to bear him sons, but he would never consider it. He said he had known Mother was the only one for him the moment he had seen her, and if it was her karma not to have sons, then it was his as well.”
I must have gasped in surprise at that because Suzume nodded her head vigorously.
“He was a good man when I was very small. He did not even take a mistress. Mother told him that he should, of course, and then if his mistress had a son by him, the boy could be adopted into the family. But he would not hear of it. As I grew, my father’s hands began to bend. He started to get much pain in his fingers, and eventually his hands became so clawed that his handwriting began to suffer. He visited the doctor, of course, and he prescribed bitter herbs and barks for Father, both to rub into his hands and to drink. But it did no good. Day by day, his hands became more and more useless. His clients began to look elsewhere and our income diminished. We were not poor exactly, because Mother had always been very careful, so we had some savings put aside.