by Yukimi Ogawa
“Tell them you punished her because she had stolen the gold and silver threads.” Silver’s calm voice. “If she dies, it’s an accident.”
Hase would have preferred drowning in the dye pot, especially now with the new indigo being brewed, the bubbles from fermentation slowly blooming like a nebula over the dark liquid. But that would spoil the new dye. Through the pain she imagined the dye’s warmth, the smell, explosion of stars as the liquid rushed into her head. Hase shivered.
Behind her, the younger of the wives burst out laughing, her voice full of gold dust. “Then let me do it! I want to choke her with my own hands!”
Silver glowered at Gold. “Are you stupid? We cannot do it ourselves. We are going to say that the servant did it to impress us, of their own will. Be careful not to get your robe wet or touch anything that could prove we were here.”
At that, the servant boy’s hands loosened a little from Hase’s shoulders. Hase whimpered, as she heard Gold make a frustrated noise.
“Anyway.” Silver came around to where Hase could see her, and crouched down to flash the two spindles of thread. “These are confiscated. You don’t need them, anyway, do you? Because the patterns are all in your head, like you said.”
“No! Please, I need them! They are my inspiration!”
Silver smiled her cold, cold smile. Hase tried to reach out for the spindles, but the servant boy pulled her back. She heard Gold laughing again, saw Silver tuck the spindles into her sleeve.
Hase could feel her aunts’ frustration. She wasn’t making enough progress. Seeing the color of indigo change in impossible gradation, learning simple knots that revealed unexpected patterns weren’t enough yet for her to create new, satisfying designs. She needed inspiration, and it seemed as though the people here were determined to snatch away that inspiration just when she thought she had found it.
Until one night, at the far end of the house, where she found the three young nobles.
She watched as they tangled and disentangled, making new patterns for her every second. The thin curtain of organdy, which they must have chosen so that they would be seen, provided her with even more inspiration, as it swayed and added a sheen to their passion. Patterns, patterns, patterns.
“What is it that we don’t have and the pot girl does?” Silver’s cool voice carried through the night as she gracefully moved to ride atop the man.
“The pot hides her face and let me see my own lovely self on it,” Sai said breezily. Gold sighed with pleasure behind them.
“And also,” he said, pushing up a little to grab at Silver’s buttocks, “she is from an Island full of treasures. Why not make her a slave of mine, let her serve as a liaison between us and the Island?”
“Did you say ‘us’?” Gold crawled up from behind Sai and kissed him upside down.
“Besides.” Sai lay fully down again and reached out to touch Gold now. “She looks ordinary, I mean, apart from that pot, but who knows what her children will look like? I know her aunts have the colors, because she told me, because she trusts me, so why not her children?”
“So then you can sell them?”
“Or we could give them to the high generals or perhaps even the Emperor!”
The three all laughed. Then Silver said, while Gold’s laughing voice was still trilling in the air: “How did you make her trust you? She doesn’t have a face, it’s hard to tell what she thinks. Even if you’re good at putting up with your own face staring back at you.”
“Oh, that was easy. Just being kind to her is more than enough. Treat her as a woman, as no one else does around here. And she’s yours.”
Gold laughed. Sai chuckled. Silver grinned and licked her lips as she cast her glance upward. “Really? If that’s true, you must be a very, very undemanding person, aren’t you, Pot Head?”
Sai followed Silver’s eyes. Hase, previously hidden in the dimness of the corridor behind the sheer curtain, stepped into the light and moaned softly, her sigh swaying the cotton organdy in front of her. Sai bolted upright, pushing Silver off him. “Hase!”
Silver let out a laugh, a trilling of cold, cruel bells. “Oh, Sai, didn’t you know she uses this path to get to that stupid cot of hers in the storehouse? You should have paid more attention! If you intended to fool her long enough so that she would take you to that stupid Island, that is!”
Sai looked embarrassed, seemed to be searching for the right words. But soon he gave up, knowing there were no right words to save face with Hase. He looked at her mouth, her smooth, potted head and spoke. “Yes, I was using you, but you had to know this. Why else would I, a man with a rank, place special favor upon an odd girl like you if it weren’t to use you?”
None of the three could read Hase’s face, of course, with that mirrored helmet of hers. But they could see her trembling. Silver and Gold looked pleased. Sai still looked a little embarrassed, a little uncertain, despite his declaration.
“So why don’t we make a child here?” Gold said.
Taking that as invitation, Hase stepped over the threshold, pushing the organdy fabric out of the way. “But why? Why are you so interested in me?” she asked.
Sai frowned. “No, I told you, I’m more interested in your…”
But Hase wasn’t listening to him. She crouched down, not to face him, but to face Silver beside him. “You are like a cold fire that seeks to burn me out.”
Silver’s grin became wider. “Of course, I hate you, your pot, your behavior, your strangeness—”
“Am I? Am I strange enough? Everybody says I’m plain, with my ordinary hair, my ordinary skin, my plain colors. Everybody’s disappointed!”
She turned to Sai. “And to you, yes, I don’t mind having your genes. We always need more variations.”
Hase moved on her hands and knees, scampering towards Gold. “Oh, I love the way you laugh. Like gold dust exploding and filling the space. Laugh! Laugh, laugh, laugh at me!”
By then, even Gold was frowning with discomfort, and the silence drew out between the four.
“You are disgusting,” Silver spat, breaking the quiet.
“Yes!” Hase turned around to her. “Yes, I’m disgusting! I love being bullied! I love being punished! Bully me! Punish me! You like it too, don’t you!”
The three nobles slowly backed away from Hase. She swiveled her heavy smooth head back and forth between Silver and Gold—Sai was no use now for her, not paying enough attention to her and therefore, misunderstanding her. Of course, in retrospect, all the questions he had asked her were about the Island, not Hase herself. Gold was nicely cruel, but she was more like a small child, always looking for a new toy. She’d probably tire of Hase sooner or later. So she looked at Silver, whose hateful stare almost choked Hase, like a flood of warm indigo dye.
Trills of silver, quiver of gold.
“Aunts,” Hase whispered, grinning impossibly wide, resembling a huge-headed, one-eye monster. “I finally found what I needed. My offering to our goddess!”
Silver scrambled back further on her hands and buttocks, eyes shining with fear. Her terror made a sharp pang run through Hase, a shiver that wove new patterns, a shiver that pierced colorful stitches over her bright darkness, her white-out canvas.
Silver winced at her reflection on the mirror of Hase’s helmet as the strange servant girl drew closer. What Silver didn’t, couldn’t know was that it was a mirror both outside and inside alike. The inner mirror was always connected to the server, where her aunts received and observed every pattern Hase formed. The outer mirror projected and transferred information from the outside world to Hase’s brain, in the place of her long-crumbled eyes. Pains and hurts, both physical and psychological, inspired Hase more than anything; they had known that much through years of observation. That was why her aunts had sent her to this strangely feudal place—as much for the pain as for the rare colors and dyes that weren’t allowed to be exported.
“I’m the head designer of the clan,
you see,” Hase said, smiling her eyeless, reflective smile. “We need more patterns, colors, shapes to satisfy our goddess. Favor of our goddess means wealth, and wealth means we will be able to afford a more expensive, lighter-smaller-better helmet for me. But if you prefer me in this heavy old thing, if you’d bully me more in this thing, I want to keep wearing it forever!”
Hase’s breath came in quick pants of arousal and excitement, while Silver’s breathing turned ragged with terror. Hase could hear Gold making strange noises, like choking, like gagging, like she was about to vomit. No noise, no move could be heard from Sai. Has he fainted? Hase queried halfheartedly. Useless youngest boy.
“What do you want?” Silver choked out.
Hase shifted into a seiza position. “I want you inside my helmet.” She thought for a split second, and then, waved her hands in excited denial. “Not you, but the copy of your mental map, so that you’d keep on inspiring me.” She stopped her hands and placed them on her chest, and crooned, “Yes, those eyes. I want your eyes, spiteful, hateful, always on me. Don’t worry, it won’t hurt you!”
“I don’t understand.” Silver backed away further, frantically looking for an exit. “If I let you do that, you will leave us alone?”
Hase’s cheeks and lips were enough to tell Silver that the pot headed girl was disappointed. “I thought you wanted to keep me around, to hate me, to laugh at me. But yes, if you let me have your copy, I’d simply go home with it. And I’ll send you treasures with the patterns you inspired, if you’d like that.”
Quietly, slowly, as to not startle Hase into excitement again, Silver shifted to sit cross-legged. “Do send them, then. You are going to be rich, right? Why not us, too?” Silver’s eyes turned calculating, momentarily forgetting her fear.
Hase grinned wide again. Behind them Gold started to sob. “Sister, no! What if she’s lying about not hurting you?”
“I am not!” Hase whipped her large head back, wobbling slightly, making Gold jump. “It’s just like…drawing a picture of her! Surely you’ve been drawn a portrait before? A beautiful person like you? Did it hurt you, ever?”
“N-no, but…”
“I’m all right,” Silver said. “She looks much more interested in being hurt, rather than hurting people, anyway.”
Hase nodded eagerly.
Silver said, “All the beautiful things sent from her are mine, then.”
Hase slowly lifted the helmet, the mirror in front of her eyes.
Gold couldn’t see what her sister-in-law saw, but she saw Silver’s incomprehension as she took in whatever lay beyond the girl’s helmet, and began to scream. Silver screamed on, and on, until she lost all her breath, until her throat started to bleed.
Until her sanity was lost.
Apathy seized Sai after Pot Head disappeared, people concluded. As for the two young wives, no one could determine what caused their sad turn of situation. The older one kept her eyes open unseeing, her lips slightly parted but always unspeaking—and when she saw something beautiful, anything remotely beautiful, she’d start to scream anew. The family decided to keep her in a white-walled room with plain white doors, where she was always dressed in coarse linen robes without design, color or pattern. The younger wife fared a little better than her sister-in-law, but not by much. She wouldn’t leave Silver’s side, sometimes crying loudly like a small girl, sometimes giggling hysterically, especially when anyone ever tried to detach her from her sister. But she took care of Silver and of herself without problem, so people decided to keep her in the white room, too.
People laughed at Sai and despised him for his laziness. They treated the women as if they didn’t exist, and the first and the second brothers of the house remarried. The white room became a small fish bone stuck in the household’s throat; it hurts and you want to get rid of it, but it might hurt even worse if you try to force it out.
There are things people don’t forget. Things like the way the people of the house mistreated the strange woman from the Island with her heavy, potted head. Things like how, eventually, the hired woman disappeared, and all those close her were driven to madness. No one wanted to go near the family after that.
Slowly, the once prosperous house decayed.
It happened on a crisp autumn day, the clouds high, the air thin, the cold enfolding the quiet, decaying house. It arrived, alone, bearing nothing. It walked through the people who gazed, who gaped. Without searching or asking or even hesitating, it walked into the house, towards the white room. And it opened the white doors.
It was a child.
Its hair was indigo, its eyes the color of young leaves. Its face—every surface of its skin—bore intricate patterns, woven with silver, gold, and every shade of indigo. It was a thing of beauty framed in the whiteness of the room.
No one had to ask; the two women recognized it as soon as they saw it. It was Hase’s creation.
“I have come, to be yours,” the child said.
The women started to scream.
Inspirations & Influences
The tale of “Hachikaduki”, the pot-wearing princess, had always struck me as a very absurd story. When the goddess of mercy told her to hide Hase’s face in a pot, why didn’t Hase’s mother protest or question the deity? Why didn’t anyone—including Hase’s own father—explain to the second wife or others the reason why Hase bore that pot on her head? Why did no one at the noble house ever think there must have been a reason she wore that pot? After rereading an older version of “Hachikaduki” (slightly different from the version Kudo-san translated, here) for the first time in over a decade, my immediate thought was “Oh, so this is a story of a pitiful wife and her enemy-husband.”
The “enemy-husband” is a notion that has popped up in certain corners of Japanese Internet-verse over the past few years. The term refers to a husband who acts, voluntarily or not, as an enemy to his wife. This typically applies to a situation in which the relationship between the husband’s original family (his mother/father/siblings) and his new family (his wife and children) is not going well—in many cases, the husband’s mother is being hostile to his wife. The husband usually attempts to get away with the uncomfortable situation by trying to please his mother, while asking his wife to endure her mother-in-law’s bullying.
In the version of “Hachikaduki” that I recently reread, the young noble man keeps saying to his wife, “Let’s leave this house so they can no longer bully you,” but always changes his mind at the last minute. In the end, the princess’s pot cracks open and she herself saves the couple by showing her skills in poetry and music, proving herself worthwhile to her in-laws as their son’s wife. Throughout the tale the noble man stays quite useless.
I don’t know why it took so long for her pot to crack open and help Hase in the original tale. Perhaps to make sure the noble son truly loved her? Or did the goddess of mercy finally deem the husband useless, granting Hase the chance to escape the situation by herself?
If I were the goddess, I wouldn’t have let Hase marry that man.
If times were different, perhaps Hase would have choosen independence—to leave her noble husband behind and use her impressive skills for more worthy purposes. I wanted my Hase to choose her own perfect moment to crack open the pot on her head, to reveal her true nature and her true purpose. After all, I love a good story about a woman who realizes, at her own perfect moment, that she alone is the key to triumphing over her enemies.
Hachikaduki: A Girl with a Bowl on Her Head
The original Japanese fable that inspired In Her Head, In Her Eyes
Part I—Misfortune
Long, long ago there lived a rich and sophisticated couple with a little daughter in a town. They loved poetry, music, books and so on.
When their beloved daughter was thirteen years old, her mother suddenly got seriously sick. The mother said to her daughter at her bed, “It’s a great pity to say that I have to go to the next world soon, leaving you and my husband
behind in this world.” She was a most devout woman. She added, “Kannon, the Buddhist deity of mercy, said in my dream, ‘You should fill a small box with something important for your daughter in the future. Put the box on your daughter’s head, and then cover them with a big wooden bowl. As you ask me, I’ll protect her after your death.’”
Saying so, the mother put a small box on her daughter’s head. Moreover, she put a huge wooden bowl upside down on the box.
Leaving her little daughter behind, she passed away soon.
After the woman’s funeral, her husband tried to remove the bowl from his daughter’s head with all his strength. But it was attached on her head so tightly he couldn’t remove it.
“It’s a pity that I lost my wife, and what’s worse, I can never remove the bowl from my daughter’s head. She was the most beautiful girl in the town, but look, how ugly she is now! People will treat her like the handicapped.” He mourned deeply.
Some time later, he got remarried to a young lady with his relatives’ insistence. The stepmother didn’t love the handicapped girl. Especially after she had her own baby, she hated the daughter-in-law all the more, who was tormented by her mother-in-law everyday. She told her husband the false report about the girl, “Your daughter is cursing not only my little daughter and me but also you in front of your former wife’s grave.” At last her father thought about the false report as a true story, and ordered her, “What a horrible child you are to curse us! I can’t stay with you here at the same house, such a handicapped and undutiful daughter like you. Leave here immediately and go away anywhere you like.”