My body convulsed. Delirium. The stench of burning cunt and lilies filled the room. I saw the crime I had committed. Blood, ribbons of blood, streamed across the walls and ceiling. I danced among the streamers of bright blood. My father cried out to me from the empty chalice.
Then the moment exploded, and memory became a mist.
Minutes passed, or hours. I sat up, shaking, and pushed my hair out of my eyes. The strands were heavy with clots of dried blood. I looked around at the dusty crepuscule of my father’s study, at the stains that darkened the floor, and remembered nothing.
I was alone.
You were captured that night and thrown back in prison. I send you letters, but the censors cross out all the parts about blood and memory and desire. I don’t know if you read what I’ve written. You never answer. Sometimes I think I’m writing to myself.
I make sure that you’re never left unguarded. I make sure that you’re kept in the smallest possible cell, with no sexy clothes to remind you of who you were when you were free. You are not allowed to have lovers in prison, or to touch yourself, or to fantasize about being touched. Prison life will leave you hollow. You will grow smaller and smaller, until you disappear.
My father and I will be safe here, in the house that murder built. Our devotion to each other will prove that you are a liar, that those three words you spoke to me were a delusion of your fractured mind.
I am you, you whispered into my ear.
No. You are the enemy.
Sakura by Diane Kepler
ICHI
It is that magical week when the cherry blossoms are just past the height of their fullness and their petals begin to flutter down in a fragrant, pink rain. The streets and avenues are quieter somehow, and more comfortable, as if wrapped in a rosy quilt.
The pastel-patterned sidewalk occupies Hiroe as she makes her way home from school. Her gait is dreamlike. At times she slows, lingering under the perfumed boughs, lifting up her face to feel the petals alight. They dot her cheeks and the fragile domes of her closed eyes. Each contact is like a kiss. She smiles to herself, imagining the real kisses that are soon to follow.
He waits for her at the temple. Not grand Kinkakuji or ancient Daitokoji, where the other foreigners swarm like so many pale moths, but the humble sanctuary that marks the spot where her lane joins the main thoroughfare. He is burning incense when she arrives. As always, she is reminded of the first time she saw him there, kneeling composedly, and, as far as she knew from her casual acquaintance with Jodo Buddhism, doing everything exactly right.
NI
She waited, on that first day, until he’d finished his devotions. Waited and then hurried forward as he was stepping into his shoes back on the wide, wooden verandah of the shrine.
“Ex-cu-suh me, pu-ree-suh,” she managed after a great deal of shifting from foot to foot. For the first time, Hiroe had cause to regret all those notes she kept passing during English class. But he was so beautiful. She had to say something.
When he turned she saw how wide his eyes were and, when he answered in polite, idiomatic Japanese, how elegant his smile.
“I’m sorry, Miss, could you repeat that? I didn’t understand.”
“A Kyoto accent,” she’d whispered to Rei and Asuka at school the next day. “It’s as if he’d lived here all his life.”
“Is he handsome?” Asuka urged.
Hiroe lifted her chin. “Remember Yuji from the Weiss-Kreuz anime?”
Rei gaped at her. “You mean the tall blond?”
“Exactly. And not only that, he’s smart! He’s studying history at Kyodai – politics and culture of the Muromachi era. Aunt Setsuko said he knows as many kanji as she does. He’s practically a poet.”
“How does your aunt know him?”
“That’s the very best part,” Hiroe sighed. “He’s staying at her guesthouse!”
“Right down the street from you,” breathed Rei.
“Fifty-four steps,” confirmed Hiroe with a nod of her head. “I counted.”
Rei and Asuka drew their friend into an exuberant, three-way hug. “Iyaaa!” they shrieked in unison. “You’re so lucky!”
“So, does he like you?” Rei prompted, which forced an awkward pause. Hiroe dropped her eyes, scuffing one shoe along the paving stones of the schoolyard. “I don’t know. At first I thought no, but then… How can I tell?”
“That’s easy,” said Asuka. “He buys you things.”
SAN
“Happy birthday,” John murmured as the subway gathered speed. It was a Thursday afternoon, an occasion that had shot up Hiroe’s “Favourite Times of the Week” chart ever since she’d met him by chance on his way home from classes and found that their schedules coincided. She’d lain in wait for him ever since.
From his knapsack he conjured a small, flat package, elegantly wrapped in the old style in a square of plum-coloured silk. It was a favourite trick of Aunt Setsuko’s, and Hiroe couldn’t help wondering if her aunt had taught him or if he’d figured it out himself.
She gave a small cry of happiness and then worked at the knot, concealing neither her eagerness nor her disenchantment when her long-awaited present turned out to be just a book of classical poems, and a used one at that.
How… boring, she thought. And how cheap! This was nothing like the extravagant presents from the salarymen who wooed some of her classmates.
John watched her closely and then gave a little grin. “I know, it’s not what you expected. But I’m hoping you’ll appreciate it some day.”
“No I won’t,” Hiroe pouted, squinting at the elegant type. “Who cares about standing under a straw roof in the rain?” Yet despite her moue of displeasure, she was more happy than not. Finally, after months of waiting, summer slipping into autumn, he had given her a gift. And now, a lucky break. A rude little dumpling of a boy who seemed destined for the sumo ring had wedged himself in on her other side, giving Hiroe the excuse to press up against John, hip to hip and thigh to thigh, so that, whenever the subway slowed, she could lean in to him, pretending it was her own inertia that took her.
The doors closed, the train gathered speed. Hiroe dared a glance at the object of her affection.
“Now a book of love poems,” she murmured, with her toes touching prettily and her eyes as round as she could make them, “that would be an ideal gift for a girl like me. Why don’t you give me a book of love poems, John?”
He scratched his head, pretending to think. “Uh, because we’re not lovers?”
“Yes, we are. I love you, and you’re just crazy about me!”
That brought an honest laugh out of him. “Ah, Hiroe, Hiroe,” he murmured, shaking his head.
She thrilled at the way he said her name: gently, with each of the three syllables glowing as if lit up from the inside.
“We should take a honeymoon,” she declared. It was half a joke, but as always, it was also half serious.
John raised an eyebrow at her. “You’re getting ambitious. First you suggested a tryst in the park, then a love hotel, and now an honest-to-goodness trip somewhere? Hm…” he pretended to consider, “I hear Singapore’s popular. My savings could probably get us to Osaka.”
“I have money. I can pay.”
He pursed his lips and then twisted them in an expression she couldn’t understand. “You probably could at that. Tell you what. Give me a while to pick out a destination.”
“How long?”
His sweeping glance was appraising but not unkind. “How about a few years?”
Hiroe went red and looked down at her lap. The book of poems was still there, also red against the blue pleated skirt of her school uniform.