by Asha Lemmie
Nori inclined her head but said nothing.
Kiyomi searched her face, her dark eyes trying desperately to seek out the truth, but she had done her job too well. Nori’s face was a cool mask. There was nothing to be found.
“You haven’t even asked me his name.”
She did not even dignify that with a response. There were only two names that mattered here: master and slave. Kiyomi knew this. But she was clearly desperate to find something to say, anything, that would change what could not be undone.
Finally, Nori spoke. She could not explain it, but she felt an absurd kind of pity for the woman before her. Even though she had power and Nori had none, even though she would go on living in wealth and comfort while Nori would soon be cold in the ground . . . she found that she would not trade places.
“It is a long road to Tokyo. You should try to rest.”
Then she turned her face back to the window, closed her eyes, and waited.
Her courage sat curled in her lap like a sleeping cat, waiting with her.
Soon.
* * *
The road was not so long after all. Perhaps they had not been on the edge of the earth, as she had thought. Perhaps their little world had existed right alongside this one.
Nori had never seen Tokyo before. She had heard stories, of course, stories of bright lights and busy people in modern clothes: not kimonos, but suits and dresses with short skirts. She had been told of women who wore gel in their hair and painted their nails, of men who wore smart hats and walked around holding women’s hands in public, in broad daylight with no shame. This was a city full of neon signs, of scholars, of music and life. And somewhere, there was a toy store that had once sold their last silk stuffed rabbit to a beautiful boy who never combed his hair.
She did not allow herself to think his name. Even now, to think that name was to lose all of her strength and crumble into nothing.
She pressed her palm to the window and spread her fingers apart so that she could look out. Then she saw it, looming in the distance. The walled city in a city: Edo Castle, surrounded by moats on one side and a massive gate on the other. All designed to keep the rest of the world out.
“The palace,” she whispered.
“Yes,” Kiyomi said teasingly, pleased that she had finally gotten Nori to speak. “You must view it as your ancestral home.”
She turned away from the window and looked straight ahead. “No. I do not.”
“Well, that’s not where we are going. Which you would know if you had asked me.”
“I don’t care.”
“They are your cousins, you know.”
“I am a bastard,” she said stiffly. She folded her hands in her lap. “I have no family.”
“You came from somewhere,” Kiyomi pressed. “You did not spring up from clay.”
Nori drew in a deep breath. “Why are you doing this?”
“I don’t know—”
“Why are you doing this now?” Nori hissed. She could feel her pulse quickening.
Kiyomi folded her lips over her teeth and did not answer right away. She glanced ahead. The driver had not spoken a single word, nor given any indication that he was listening.
Quickly, as if trying to do it before she changed her mind, Kiyomi pushed a button that brought up a black screen between the back seat and the front.
This was as alone as they were going to get.
“I was wrong,” she whispered. She seized Nori’s hands in her own and spun her around so that they were facing each other. “And now you must listen to me.”
“Stop it.”
“Noriko!”
“It’s not your concern anymore. I don’t belong to you now. Why do you care?”
“Death isn’t what I wanted for you. None of this is what I wanted for you.”
“What we want doesn’t matter. You have taught me this.”
Kiyomi’s expression was pained. There were tears behind her eyes. “My God, Nori. You have to live. You have to survive. You . . . you just have to survive. I cannot save you from this. I cannot give you hope, for it would be a lie. But you must live.”
“This isn’t your concern,” Nori repeated through cold lips. Her calm was slipping away from her, as it always seemed to. “It’s not as if you’ll have to give a refund.”
“But think!” Kiyomi burst out, and finally, the tears fell. They fell down her rouged cheeks and pooled at her collarbone. “Think what kind of woman you could be.”
Nori had never, for one solitary second, thought of what kind of woman she could be.
“You . . . you told me to resign myself.”
“And now I am telling you to fight.”
Nori shook her head. “I can’t fight anymore.”
Kiyomi started to say something but broke off. Nori felt it too.
The car was slowing down. They kept their eyes locked on each other, breathless, saying so much with no words.
Nori squeezed Kiyomi’s hand. The sound of the engine winked out.
“I’m sorry,” Kiyomi whispered. “For all of it. I am sorry.”
Nori hesitated. She could hear that the driver had gotten out and was coming around to open her door. She had only seconds. She could not think what to say to this woman. Here they were, madam and whore, raised pauper and fallen princess, master and servant. But in this moment, they felt like none of those things. They were simply two women with their heads bowed against the wind. Nori decided that if it did not make them friends, it made them something.
“I’ll miss you, Kiyomi-san.”
It was absurd. But it was also true.
Her door opened. Without being asked, Nori got out of the car and blinked into the autumn sunlight. She knew where they were. Every child in Japan knew about this place.
Chiyoda-ku was the royal ward of Tokyo. All the government buildings, embassies, and monuments were here. And so were the richest, most powerful people in the country.
The house before her was not a palace, but it was close.
Nori found herself standing in an enclosed estate, with high walls of whitewashed stone. The house before her was old and grand, low and sprawling, with a tiled roof the color of red clay. There was a family crest she did not recognize emblazoned onto the gate behind her.
It looked old, but cared for. The only things neglected were the plants. There were some sad-looking plum trees, with leaves the same color as the roof, that had clearly seen better days.
Kiyomi came up to stand behind her. Nori knew she had to walk forward, into a house that did not welcome her, with people who would not love her.
She had been here before. She knew what to do.
And so she walked. The hem of her best kimono dragged behind her, stirring up the fallen leaves. Her hair was parted in the middle and allowed to fall free to signify her virgin state. Her skin was flushed and her heart was beating fast as a sparrow’s, but she was not afraid.
She walked up the wooden steps and through the sliding door to the antechamber, which a maid on the other side opened without a word.
She stopped to remove her shoes and then continued on, until a woman appeared before her, dressed in a kimono of sky blue silk.
“Douzo agatte kudasai,” she said. “Welcome.”
Nori bowed.
The woman did not even look at her. “Thank you for the prompt delivery. You may leave her things outside, someone will come and get them.”
Kiyomi hesitated. She could not speak freely now. She had a part to play, the same one she had played dozens of times before.
Nori turned to face her. Just for a moment, with her face hidden from the stranger with the veil of her hair, she allowed herself to smile.
“Arigatou. For all you have taught me.”
Kiyomi bowed low. “Goodbye, little princess.”
The words bubbled up in her throat.
Don’t go.
Don’t leave me.
Don’t leave me, again.
Not again.
Please.
But she could not speak. Her lips closed on the words and she turned away. In a moment, Kiyomi had gone.
And, as she had been at the beginning, Nori was alone.
* * *
She was led to a large room with tatami floors. All other furniture had been removed, save for a lone silk pillow in the center.
“Wait here,” the woman said shortly.
Nori lowered herself onto the pillow with her knees folded underneath her. She knew how she was supposed to sit. Her mother had taught her when she was three. It was one of the few things Seiko had bothered with.
She waited until she heard the fusama-style doors slide shut.
Nori did not know how much time she had left. A few minutes, maybe. She imagined that her new owner was sitting behind a desk somewhere. Maybe he would have a drink or two before coming down to see her.
If she did not gather up her courage now, she never would.
So she had a few minutes. Six.
Five.
She didn’t know exactly—but she knew that it was not enough. She pressed her hands against her face. For the first time, she let herself feel the full injustice of everything that had brought her to this.
She wasn’t even fourteen years old and she had never had a day to herself, not one day that had not been dictated to her by someone else. She had never seen the summer festival, or made snow angels with other children in the winter. She had never been kissed, or acknowledged, or loved as in her storybooks.
Well . . .
Maybe, in a way, she had been loved. She held tight to that, clinging to that warm little feeling. She wrapped herself in every happy memory she could find.
This was her armor.
The smell of her mother’s peppermint perfume. The sound of Akiko’s laugh, with the snort at the end. Kiyomi’s wry smile. The feel of Miyuki’s clammy fingers intertwined with hers.
The rain on her face. The first time she’d heard the violin.
And Oniichan.
Akira.
Nori did it in one deft motion. The pain was sharp and deep along her thigh. Even though she should have expected it, it knocked the wind out of her. The knife fell from her hand, and instinctively she placed her palm on the cut. It wasn’t going to be deep enough. She knew, somehow, that she’d missed the artery her books had told her about.
She couldn’t even die right.
She fell backwards, hitting the floor hard but without feeling it. With her hair spread out and her arms opened wide, she could almost pretend that she was back in the garden in Kyoto.
Gomen, Oniichan.
I wanted . . . to see you . . .
Her head began to feel very heavy. The pain in her leg was almost gone. She thought she could hear the crack of a door. Someone screamed, but it felt very far away.
It did not touch her. She knew there was nothing they could do to stop it now. Was that . . . footsteps? Two sets, one behind the other.
And then someone was leaning over her, touching her, cradling her in strong arms.
Someone was shouting.
“Nori!”
She smelled lemons and wasabi.
“Nori! Wake up. Wake up! I found you. I finally found you, so you don’t get to die. Do you hear me? You can’t die. Please, no, no, no, no, no.”
She squinted. She could barely see anymore, but she thought she felt something on her face. Something wet.
You smell like Akira, she thought. I missed . . . that . . .
The roaring in her ears was deafening now.
Okaasan.
I’m sorry.
There was a bright white light and then there was nothing.
CHAPTER TEN
SONATA
Tokyo, Japan
October 1953
For a single day she lay floating. This was the in-between.
It was different from a dream. She could see nothing, but it felt different from being blind. There was no hunger or pain, no fear or sadness, no angels or demons here to greet her.
There was only the white.
And then, bit by bit, there was the sound.
At first it was distant, like someone shouting across an immense void. She latched on to that sound. She wrapped herself around it and let it pull her up from underneath the white. It grew louder and louder until she could hear it as surely as if someone had their lips pressed against her ear.
And then she could see the tiniest flicker of color.
She felt herself floating upwards, from the very depths of nothing to just beneath the waves.
And when she finally reached for one gasping breath, she was able to catch it.
And when she opened her eyes, there, right there, was the sun.
He was kneeling beside her pallet, with his dark head bowed and his hands laid over her heart.
“Oniichan.”
His head jerked up. His gray eyes widened as he met her gaze. She noticed the dark circles under his eyes, the greasy film on his skin, and she wondered how long he had been there.
“Noriko,” he said, and his voice cracked. “My God. My God, finally.”
She pushed herself up onto her elbows, ignoring the way it made her head spin. “Is it really you?”
Akira leaned forward and kissed her on the side of her face, right onto one of the deep dimples in her cheeks. The gesture was foreign, like so many of his mannerisms picked up from his time in Europe as a child. But to Nori it felt foreign for another reason.
He had never been so affectionate with her before.
“You have been in and out all day,” he whispered. “Your leg . . . we managed to stop the bleeding, but then you spiked a terrible fever. I thought . . . for a moment, I thought . . .”
The leg. She had completely forgotten about the leg. She slipped her hand beneath the blanket, and sure enough, her left leg was wrapped in heavy bandages.
“We had to suture it shut,” Akira told her. He looked queasy, though it was hard to tell in the darkened room. “You may have a limp. We can’t be sure. But there will be a scar.”
She just looked at him. She hardly cared about the leg, a limp, or a scar; she just wanted to look at him.
Akira smirked as if he knew this already.
“I found you,” he said, with a quiet but deep sense of satisfaction. “It took me two years, but I found you and I made a plan to get you back.”
She nodded. It seemed impossible to her that she was alive. She could not process that she was here, well, and reunited with the brother she had tried so hard to force herself to forget.
She did not want to feel anything, in case this was all just the devil’s last joke before he threw her into hell.
Akira went on. “Once I realized you were . . . you were in one of those places, I had one of my father’s old servants pose as a buyer to find you out.”
Nori’s heart began to beat faster. It hurt, almost as if it was out of practice.
“I had him arrange for you to be delivered here. This was my uncle’s house, but now that he is dead, it’s part of my inheritance. I knew I could get you here. Grandmother will realize what’s happened soon, but I will protect you. I swear it.”
Nori forced herself to sit up. She pitched forward so that she was in his arms, with her head nestled in the crook of his neck.
“I’m so sorry,” she moaned. The tears began to fall heavy and free. Her whole body ached, but she was not crying for the pain. Like two ships passing in
the night, they had almost missed each other. She had almost let him go. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
Akira patted the top of her head. “Hush. It’s my fault. They sent you to that horrible place because of me. I couldn’t stop it. I tried . . . I tried everything, but they threatened to hurt you if I didn’t . . . if I didn’t stop meddling and do my duty to the family.”
His voice was filled with a poisonous spite. “They told me you were somewhere safe but that I could never see you again. They told me to forget you. To go on with my schooling and my music like nothing had happened. Grandmother said she would buy me whatever I liked, Grandfather told me that he would get me a princess to marry.”
Nori lifted her face up and pulled back so she could look him in the eyes. He had grown. His face had lost what little baby fat he’d had, and his cheekbones were sharply defined. Even with him kneeling, she could tell that he was taller. And there was something else too. The shine had been taken off him. He was a lucky boy no longer.
From birth, Akira had been divinely favored. That’s what her grandmother had always told her and Nori had come to believe it herself. He had floated through life effortlessly, assured of a warm welcome everywhere he went. He had rarely known disappointment, scarcely known pain, never known what it was to be overlooked. And so he had the confidence, or, in truth, the arrogance, of someone who knew that nothing could ever go wrong for him.
But now that confidence had been badly shaken. His certainty was gone, and whatever had been left of his innocence was gone with it.
When she realized this, she had to ball up her fist and bite down on it to hold back a scream.
“You should have forgotten me like they told you,” she whispered brokenly. “I have ruined you.”
Akira tugged sharply on one of her curls. “Hush.”
“But—”
“I said shut up.”
She bowed her head against his will. Akira shifted his weight and glanced over his shoulder.
“I should fetch the doctor. It’s the middle of the night, but I’ve had him staying in one of the guest rooms.”
She did not want him to leave. She seized hold of his sleeves.