Book Girl and the Undine Who Bore a Moonflower

by Mizuki Nomura

  Maki remained silent, her eyes still frigid.

  Tohko went on, unconcerned.

  “From time to time, an oracle would be born in the Himekura family. The oracle was always accompanied by a ghoul, and a legend was passed down saying that they brought the family prosperity. But at this point I start to imagine something.

  “Why did the oracles and the ghouls only ever appear at the same time?

  “What were the ghouls really?

  “In the mid-1800s when the borders opened and foreigners began to come and go freely in Japan, they were feared as ogres or long-nosed goblins because their hair color, eye color, and body types were different. People speculate that the goblins that appear in old fairy tales might have been people from other countries.”

  Tohko broke off for a moment. Her intelligent black eyes were looking straight at Maki.

  “Perhaps the Himekura oracles were people born with white hair due to some mutation. Since they worked in imports, the Himekuras had many opportunities to come into contact with foreigners, and it’s entirely plausible that the blood of other countries could have gotten mixed in. The first oracle with the blood of dragons might have been a foreigner herself. And then through the generations, people with appearances different from Japanese people began to be born in the Himekura family. But that appearance would be seen by others as demonic, and that’s probably why they created the story of the oracle who seals in the ghoul.

  “And Yuri Himekura, a ‘lily’ child as her name suggests, was born with hair as shining white as that same flower.

  “That was why she was said to be a product of her mother’s infidelity. I imagine her father feared a scandal and made her live in this villa where there was no one to see her.”

  Tohko said that perhaps Yuri dyed her hair black or wore a black wig most of the time.

  She wrote in her diary that the pond was pretty during the day, but it was scary at night because there was a goblin in it. Perhaps, Tohko said, she feared seeing her black hair reflected in the lake, looking silvery in the moonlight.

  “Yuri was forbidden from leaving the house. From her earliest memories, she had been inculcated by her father to live in hiding without letting people’s eyes fall on her. He would tell her, ‘You are the Himekura oracle so you must continue to keep the ghoul contained.’ That was their promise.”

  Yuri prayed to go home.

  She longed for her family living in Tokyo.

  But because she believed her father’s words—because it was her promise to her beloved father—she persevered despite her loneliness. Tohko told us this with a sad look, her eyes filled with tears.

  The books her father sent her.

  The words To my daughter written inside their covers.

  Yuri had known that she was rumored to be the product of her mother’s infidelity.

  She always worried that she didn’t resemble anyone else in her family.

  Perhaps I am the child of sin like everyone says.

  Perhaps my late mother did couple with a monster to have me.

  Perhaps the Shirayuki inside me is the real me.

  “Certainly every time Yuri felt unhappy about or irritated at or loathing for her restricted position, she felt as if there were an evil ghoul within her and she got terribly frightened. And so she wrote about Shirayuki in her diary as if it was a different person.

  “The Yuri who strove to keep her promise and the Shirayuki who screamed for it to be broken—they were both how Yuri truly felt.

  “Yuri thought the very act of being dissatisfied and having doubts was forbidden. And so she tried desperately to cling to the affection that her father showed her.”

  I am not a ghoul. I am my father’s daughter. He calls me, “My daughter.”

  A young girl who told herself that again and again as she read his books and drove back her loneliness and tried to keep her promise.

  Like the dragon god of Demon Pond, who asked that the temple bell be rung three times a day to remind him of his promise, her father’s words written in the books were, for Yuri, the proof of his love and of their promise to each other.

  “A volume arrived from father in Tokyo. Upon turning back the cover, I discovered a message from my father. Father’s hand is dignified and beautiful, and it possesses a gentlemanly power. I gazed at it, and my breast swelled with happiness and remembrances of home.”

  “…I could never break my promise.”

  “I’m the oracle who prays for the prosperity of the Himekuras, and I’m my father’s daughter.”

  Like a fragile moon floating on the water at night, sadness wavered in Tohko’s eyes.

  “But Yuri’s father only sent books to the villa and never once went there. To him, Yuri wasn’t his daughter; she was a ghoul, an illegitimate child, and a troublesome secret for the family to keep.

  “So he employed people and kept a dog and made them keep watch so that Yuri would never surface. The servants at the villa were prison guards watching Yuri.”

  A criminal with the title of oracle.

  Yuri was a prisoner of the Himekuras.

  “And when Akira came to stay at the house and fell in love with Yuri, they continued watching.

  “Akira tried to leave the estate in order to study abroad in Germany. At the time, Yuri feared that Akira was going to abandon her.

  “Since Yuri had made a promise, she couldn’t go with him.

  “Plus, she was probably afraid of going outside.

  “She had seen Shirayuki one night when she went to the pond with Akira, and it had almost made her heart stop, so despite her happiness she was frightened and she held Chiro and wept. From diary entries like that, we can picture Yuri’s complex emotions.

  “If she was at the house, as the young lady of the Himekuras, Yuri was a holy oracle and could remain the girl who was ‘my daughter’ to her illustrious father. But outside the estate, she suspected she would only receive cold looks for being a ‘ghoul’ and be ostracized. If Akira were to cast her off out there, she would lose the people who protected her and the things she could rely on.”

  My heart squeezed tight.

  Her promise had locked Yuri up in a cage and bound her, but at the same time it had protected her from the outside world.

  Was Maki, too, imagining the fear she’d felt toward losing that protection?

  Though she hated the Himekuras, would she be able to live without their power? Applying that thought to her own situation—

  Maki pressed her lips together, her face hard.

  Tohko’s face fell, too, and she looked troubled.

  “Around the same time, Yuri learned the sad truth. She stole a peek at a book that had just arrived from her father and saw that there was nothing written inside the cover.”

  “A volume came from Father. I have nothing but that to cling to now. I thought if I could see Father’s message, it might soothe me, so I went to the butler’s room and tore the wrapping off the freshly arrived package and opened the book.”

  “But when I opened the cover, I knew that this was not a book like the others I’d received from my father up until now.”

  Citing Yuri’s diary, Tohko told us that the book that was different from the previous ones had probably been completely blank, without her father’s writing in it.

  “My father’s books will no longer offer me comfort. The words To my daughter will never again echo through my heart. There is only despair like falling into a pit of darkness.”

  “Even so—the books that were brought to Yuri’s room after that had her father’s message, ‘To my daughter,’ written in them in her father’s hand, just like always. Yuri confesses that ‘the butler brought the book from my father. It’s sitting on my desk. I turned back the cover and stared at my father’s message. Tears filled my eyes and refused to stop.’”

  A book with the message that shouldn’t have been there. What’s more, written in the same hand as always.

  What did that mean?

&nb
sp; Tohko’s face fell further.

  “It hadn’t been her father writing the message; it was the butler, perhaps at her father’s command. He received the books and passed them on to Yuri—”

  “So it was true when everyone said that I was not my father’s child, but a child of sin, born as the result of my late mother’s infidelity.

  “There is no happiness left to me. If I was to meet Shirayuki now, I would surrender to her temptations.”

  Her lover had decided to study abroad and was trying to leave.

  Her family’s love was a fabrication.

  Yuri had nothing left from which her spirit could find support.

  When Tohko had read the diary before, I’d felt only quiet sorrow.

  But once I learned the meaning of the words To my daughter written in the books and thought about Yuri’s feelings, deep black pain and despair closed in on my heart and threatened to crush it.

  After that, Shirayuki appears frequently in the diary and Yuri’s mind breaks down bit by bit.

  “Please, Shirayuki, don’t come here. No, you’re wrong. I’m still keeping my promise.”

  “Shirayuki beckons to me from the window. I won’t go to the pond.”

  “I think I’ll put up some red flowers. White flowers are so ugly—I hate them. I think I’ll tear apart every one of the white flowers, every one of them, and throw them away. I can’t go to the pond at night. After all, the moonlight is white; I mean, it’s white after all, white; I mean, it’s white, it’s white.”

  “My promise. Our promise.”

  “But you know—”

  An even deeper sadness tinged Tohko’s eyes, her voice. As though just looking at her made it harder to breathe, as though just hearing her made my chest tighten. That kind of unsullied sadness.

  “At the very end of the diary, Yuri writes that something joyous happened. That she’d made an important promise with Akira. I feel sure that it had to be a promise that Akira would be with her in the future.

  “That Akira had been trying to take Yuri with him.

  “That Yuri had nodded and told him yes, glowing with happiness.”

  Uotani choked out her voice, shouting with a look that showed she was desperately trying to stop herself from crying, “M-Mr. Akira—he told her…he wanted her to come with him…!

  “The two of them promised to marry!”

  So Akira hadn’t cast Yuri off…

  Their hearts had remained linked, just as they had been when they met.

  I didn’t know whether that meant salvation or despair. It simply hurt as if my heart were being pierced.

  Maki glowered stubbornly at a point in space.

  Rather than showing sympathy or compassion for Yuri’s sorrow or Uotani’s grief, Maki looked as if she felt more irritation and loathing.

  Or perhaps it could have been rage for the Himekuras who’d torn the affectionate lovers apart and irritation at the fact that she shared their blood.

  Tohko was looking at Maki, her gaze morose.

  “When Yuri discovered that Akira had been killed and thrown into the pond, she rushed to the pond shouting Akira’s name. To the villagers she passed, she must have looked like she was going to throw herself into the water and commit suicide.

  “The pond was deep and Akira was tangled up in underwater weeds, so Yuri was unable to pull him up by herself. It took all the strength she had to cut off his arms. The blood that flowed from Akira’s body dyed the pond red.

  “When she left the pond, Yuri’s hair had changed from black to white. Either her wig fell off or the dye came out. The villagers thought a ghoul had appeared and they fled. And thus the legend of Shirayuki was born.”

  When Yuri got back to the house, she and Hiroko took their revenge and killed the servants.

  Yuri was no longer her old self.

  Her promise with her father no longer held any power over her. On the contrary, her father had had Akira killed for the sake of the family’s honor.

  When she crawled up from the pond, Yuri had accepted the presence of Shirayuki within herself and transformed into a merciless ghoul.

  Like Undine appearing from the depths, wearing a white veil on her wedding night—her white hair hanging in wet clumps, bringing a cold death to her betrayers.

  The blood-soaked revenge tale of a woman who seized the one she loved and fell into damnation.

  But hadn’t the book girl told me that was only how the story appeared on the surface?

  That Undine was the story of the sweet, nostalgic, tender, pure love of a water spirit bound by laws—

  “Magical women like Shirayuki repeatedly feature in Kyōka’s stories.

  “The beautiful woman who transforms people into animals that the priest meets in ‘The Holy Man of Mount Koya,’ Tomihime from ‘The Goblin’s Tale’ who rejoices in receiving severed heads as souvenirs, and Ayame from The Grass Labyrinth who lives in a strange other world—they’re all coldly cruel and terrifying to the point that the reader’s spine tingles.

  “But on the other hand, they all enfold the protagonists, alone of all men, in deep affection like warm water.

  “Kyōka lost his mother early in life, and they say that he continually pursued her image and brought her back to life in his works through his ideal women. And the fact that many of his stories take place near water could be an allusion to the amniotic fluid of a mother’s womb.

  “Dozing in the water, protected by his gentle mother before he was born—he constantly wrote stories reminiscent of that kind of eerily beautiful dream.

  “Kyōka was obsessed with cleanliness and he was afraid of a lot of things. He hated dogs because he was afraid of getting rabies, he was afraid of flies and bacteria, and he would never put something uncooked in his mouth. He would only drink alcohol that had been boiled to scalding, he would recook the food he ate at his hotel in his room, and any food that he ate by hand, he would leave uneaten the part he’d held it by. The word curdle unsettled him, so he refused to refer to tofu as ‘bean curds.’

  “Kyōka sought something unquestionable that would protect him from such a terror-filled world—he sought a mother. So Kyōka’s heroines love the protagonists instantaneously, like mothers who embrace their newly born children with joy and dedicate their very souls to trying to shelter and heal them.

  “The face of the cruel waterside goblin and the face of the deeply compassionate holy mother. Just as water can be both blessing and disaster to people, Kyōka’s heroines always combine that sort of precarious duality.

  “And maybe Yuri was like that, too.

  “She may have been a terrifying water spirit, but at the same time she was a woman who lived for a single-minded love.”

  With a look as clear as water, Tohko gazed at Maki.

  “No matter her reasons, the fact that Yuri killed the servants is not something we should condone. Yuri and Akira’s story is cursed and drenched in blood without question. It’s a somber, ghastly, cruel story that no one can redeem.

  “But it’s just like the way Kyōka’s stories with all their focus on the grotesque, subtle, and profound can actually be beautiful love stories between men and women. I expect there existed another story behind the story of Yuri and Akira, one filled with affection and happiness and kindness.

  “Kyōka’s stories are a lot like dreams, but they aren’t all scary; they’re also beautiful and kind. The story of Yuri and Akira must have been the same.

  “And perhaps because it was such a beautiful story, Sayo’s grandmother continued to guard it for nearly eighty years. And so did Sayo.”

  Tohko turned a warm gaze on Uotani.

  Tohko had gently picked up in her white hands the story that Maki had dismissed as laughable and retold it as a fleetingly beautiful story.

  As if to say, “The story you and your grandmother protected is not in any way laughable or absurd.”

  It was a gentle, tender story—like a dream.

  Glittering water collected in Uotani’s
eyes.

  Maki yelled, obviously aggravated, “But Akira was killed and the story had an unhappy ending. No matter how many pretty images you pick out, that’s the truth! Yuri was defeated by the Himekuras, just like my father.”

  Tohko didn’t back down.

  She looked back at Maki calmly, her eyes touched with melancholy, and whispered, “You’re right. In the real world, Yuri and Akira couldn’t marry.

  “A lot of Kyōka’s love stories don’t see fruition in reality, either.

  “They become goblins, or they’re joined in the next world…or they promise to be together in the afterlife. After watching the countess die, Takamine from ‘The Surgery Room’ takes his own life.

  “Like the phrase about a flower glimpsed in the mirror that gave rise to his pen name—all love was like that reflected flower, like the moon floating in the water; beautiful but unobtainable, ephemeral as a dream.

  “Yuri and Akira’s story was also like a dream.”

  A love that prayed to be always together with the flower, with the moon.

  But you can’t touch the flower reflected in a mirror, and if you try to scoop up the moon floating in the water, it vanishes.

  “We all awaken from dreams. Kyōka has Akira’s friend in Demon Pond say that there are dreams you wish you didn’t have to wake from, but no matter how hard you wish for it, you will wake up. There’s no dream that won’t end in waking. But you know…”

  Tohko’s voice held warmth, like a mother encouraging her children.

  “After you wake up from a beautiful dream, the story remains in your heart.