CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE HOUSE OF SISTERS, MOUNT SHIRANUI SHRINE

Sunrise on the twenty-third morning of the tenth month

THE THREE BRONZE BOOMS OF THE BELL OF THE FIRST CAUSE REVERBERATE over roofs, dislodge pigeons, chase echoes around the cloisters, sluice under the door of the newest sister’s cell, and find Orito, who keeps her eyes shut and begs, Let me imagine I am elsewhere for a moment longer. But the smells of sour tatami, greasy candles, and stale smoke deny her any illusion of release. She hears the tap, tap, tap of the women’s tobacco pipes.

During the night, fleas or lice feasted on her neck, breast, and midriff.

In Nagasaki, she thinks, just two days away, the maples will still be red …

The manju flowers pink and white, the sanma saury fat and in season.

A two-day journey, she thinks, which may as well be twenty years …

Sister Kagerô walks past the cell. Her voice stabs, “Cold! Cold! Cold!”

Orito opens her eyes and surveys the ceiling of her five-mat room.

She wonders which rafter the last newest sister used to hang herself.

The fire is dead. The twice-filtered light has a bluish whiteness.

First snow, Orito thinks. The gorge down to Kurozane may be impassable.

With her thumbnail, Orito makes a nick in the wood skirting the wall.

The house may own me, she thinks, but it shan’t own time.

She counts the notches: one day, two days, three days …

… FORTY-SEVEN DAYS, forty-eight days, forty-nine days …

This morning, she calculates, is the fiftieth since her abduction.

You’ll still be here, Fat Rat mocks, after ten thousand notches.

Its eyes are black pearls and it vanishes in a furry blur.

If there was a rat, Orito tells herself, it didn’t speak, because rats don’t. She hears her mother humming in the passageway, as on most mornings. She smells her servant Ayame’s toasted onigiri rice balls rolled in sesame.

“Ayame isn’t here, either,” Orito says. “Stepmother dismissed her.”

These “slippages” of time and senses, she is sure, are caused by the medicine Master Suzaku concocts for each sister before supper. Hers the master calls “solace.” She knows the pleasure it brings is harmful and addictive, but unless she drinks it she shan’t be fed, and what hope has a starving woman of escaping from a mountain shrine in the middle of winter? Better to eat.

Harder to tolerate are thoughts of her stepmother and stepbrother waking up in the Aibagawa residence in Nagasaki. Orito wonders what of her and her father’s belongings remains and what has been sold off: the telescopes, their apparatus, books, and medicines; Mother’s kimonos and jewelry … It is all her stepmother’s property now, to sell to the highest bidder.

Just like she sold me, thinks Orito, feeling anger in her stomach …

… until she hears Yayoi, next door: vomiting; groaning; and vomiting again.

Orito struggles out of bed and puts on her padded over-kimono.

She ties her headscarf over her burn and hurries into the passageway.

I am no longer a daughter, she thinks, but I am still a midwife …

… WHERE WAS I GOING? Orito stands in the musty corridor partitioned from the cloisters by the rows of sliding wooden screens. Daylight enters through a lattice carved along the top. She shivers and she sees her breath, knowing she was going somewhere, but where? Forgetfulness is another trick of Suzaku’s solace. She looks around for clues. The night lamp at the corner by the privy is extinguished. Orito places her palm on the wooden screen, stained dark by countless winters. She pushes, and the screen yields a stubborn inch. Through the gap she sees icicles hanging from the cloisters’ eaves.

An old pine’s branches sag under snow; snow encrusts the seated stones.

A film of ice covers Square Pond. Bare Peak is streaked by veins of snow.

Sister Kiritsubo emerges from behind the pine’s trunk, walking along the cloisters opposite, trailing her withered arm’s fused fingers along the wooden screen. She circumnavigates the courtyard one hundred and eight times daily. Upon reaching the gap, she says, “Sister is up early this morning.”

Orito has nothing to say to Sister Kiritsubo.

Third Sister Umegae approaches up the inner corridor. “This is just the beginning of the Kyôga winter, Newest Sister.” In the snow light, Umegae’s dappled stains are berry purple. “A gift in your womb is like a warm stone in your pocket.”

Orito knows Umegae says this to frighten her. It works.

The stolen midwife hears the noise of vomiting and remembers, Yayoi …

THE SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD woman bends over a wooden bucket. Gastric fluid dangles from her lips, and a slop of fresh vomit is pumped out. Orito breaks the ice on the water bowl with a ladle and carries it to her. Yayoi, glassy-eyed, nods at her visitor to say, The worst is over. Orito wipes Yayoi’s mouth with a square of paper and gives her a cup of the numbingly cold water. “Most of it,” Yayoi says, hiding her fox’s ears with her headband, “went into the bucket this morning, at least.”

“Practice”—Orito wipes the splashes of vomit—“does make perfect, then.”

Yayoi dabs her eyes with her sleeve. “Why am I still sick so often, Sister?”

“The vomiting can sometimes continue right up to the birth.”

“Last time, I yearned for dango candy; this time, even the thought of it …”

“Each pregnancy is different. Now lie down for a little while.”

Yayoi lies back, puts her hands on her bulge, and withdraws into concern.

Orito reads her thoughts. “You still feel your baby kicking, yes?”

“Yes. My gift”—she pats her belly—“is happy when he hears you … but … but last year Sister Hotaru was vomiting late into her fifth month and then miscarried. The gift had died several weeks before. I was there and the stench was …”

“Sister Hotaru had not, then, felt the child kick for several weeks?”

Yayoi is both reluctant and eager to agree. “I … suppose not.”

“Yet yours is kicking, so what conclusions can you draw?”

Yayoi frowns, allows Orito’s logic to pacify her, and cheers up. “I bless the Goddess for bringing you here.”

Enomoto bought me, Orito thinks, biting her tongue, my stepmother sold me …

She begins rubbing goat fat into Yayoi’s distended belly.

… I curse them both and shall tell them so at the next opportunity.

Here is a kick, below Yayoi’s inverted navel; below the lowest rib, a thump …

… adjacent to the sternum, a kick; over to the left, another stirring.

“There is a chance,” Orito decides to tell Yayoi, “you are carrying twins.”

Yayoi is worldly enough to know the dangers. “How sure are you?”

“Reasonably sure, and it would explain the prolonged vomiting.”

“Sister Hatsune had twins at her second gifting. She climbed two ranks with one labor. If the Goddess blessed me with twins—”

“What can that lump of wood,” Orito snaps, “know about human pain?”

“Please, Sister!” Yayoi begs, afraid. “It’s like insulting your own mother!”

Here come fresh cramps in Orito’s intestines; here is the breathlessness.

“You see, Sister? She can hear. Say you’re sorry, Sister, and she’ll stop it.”

The more solace my body absorbs, Orito knows, the more it needs.

SHE TAKES YAYOI’S foul-smelling pail around the cloisters to the slop barrow.

Crows perch along the ridge of the steep roof, eyeing the prisoner.

Of all the women you could acquire, she would ask Enomoto, why rob me of my life?

But in fifty days, the Abbot of Shiranui has not once visited his shrine.

“In time,” Abbess Izu answers all her questions and entreaties, “in time.”

In the kitchen, Sister Asagao is stirring soup over a huffing fire. Asagao’s disfigurement is one of the more arresting in the house: her lips are fused into a circle that also deforms her speech. Her friend Sadaie was born with a misshapen skull, giving her head a feline shape that makes her eyes appear unnaturally large. When she sees Orito, she stops speaking in mid-sentence.

Why do those two watch me, Orito wonders, like squirrels watch a hungry cat?

Their faces inform her that she is uttering her thoughts aloud again.

This is another mortifying trick of solace and the house.

“Sister Yayoi is sick,” says Orito. “I wish to take her a bowl of tea. Please.”

Sadaie indicates the kettle with her eyes: one is brown, one is gray.

Beneath her gown, Sadaie’s own pregnancy is becoming visible.

It’s a girl, thinks the doctor’s daughter, pouring the bitter brew.

WHEN ACOLYTE ZANÔ’S stuffed-nose shout rings out, “Gates opening, Sisters!” Orito hurries to a point in the inner corridor midway between Abbess Izu’s and Housekeeper Satsuki’s rooms and slides open the wooden screen. From this position, just once, in her first week here, she saw through both sets of gates into the precincts and glimpsed steps, a cluster of maples, a blue-cloaked master, and an acolyte in undyed hemp …

… but this morning, as usual, the acolyte on sentry duty is more careful. Orito sees nothing but the closed outer gates, and a pair of acolytes bring in the day’s provisions by handcart.

Sister Sawarabi swoops from the stateroom. “Acolyte Chûai! Acolyte Maboroshi! This snow hasn’t frozen your bones, I hope? Master Genmu’s a heartless one, starving his young mustangs into skeletons.”

“We find ways,” Maboroshi flirts back, “to keep warm, Sister.”

“Oh, but how can I forget?” Sawarabi brushes her middle breast with her fingertips. “Isn’t Jiritsu provisioning us this week, that shameless slugabed?”

Maboroshi’s levity vanishes. “The acolyte has fallen into sickness.”

“My, my. Sickness, you say. Not just … early-winter sneezes?”

“His condition”—Maboroshi and Chûai begin carrying supplies into the kitchen—“is grave, it seems.”

“We hope,” cleft-lipped Sister Hotaru adds, appearing from the stateroom, “that poor Acolyte Jiritsu is not in danger of death?”

“His condition is grave.” Maboroshi is terse. “We must prepare for the worst.”

“Well, the newest sister was a famous doctor’s daughter, in her previous life, so Master Suzaku could do worse than ask for her. She’d come, and gladly, because”—Sawarabi cups her mouth to her hand and calls across the courtyard to Orito’s hiding place—“she’d die to see the precincts, so as to plan her escape, wouldn’t you, Sister Orito?”

Blushing, the exposed observer beats a tearful retreat to her cell.

ALL THE SISTERS except Yayoi, along with Abbess Izu and Housekeeper Satsuki, kneel at the low table in the long room. The doors to the prayer room, where the gold-leafed statue of the pregnant Goddess is housed, are open. The Goddess watches the sisters over the head of Abbess Izu, who strikes her tubular gong. The Sutra of Gratitude begins.

“To Abbot Enomoto-no-kami,” the women chorus, “our spiritual guide …”

Orito pictures herself spitting on the illustrious colleague of her late father.

“… whose sagacity guides the shrine of Mount Shiranui …”

Abbess Izu and Housekeeper Satsuki notice Orito’s motionless lips.

“… we, the Daughters of Izanazô, render the gratitude of the nurtured child.”

It is a passive protest, but Orito lacks the means of more active dissent.

“To Abbot Genmu-no-kami, whose wisdom protects the House of Sisters …”

Orito glares at Housekeeper Satsuki, who looks away, embarrassed.

“… we, the Daughters of Izanazô, render the gratitude of the justly governed.”

Orito glares at Abbess Izu, who absorbs her defiance kindly.

“To the Goddess of Shiranui, Fountainhead of Life and Mother of Gifts …”

Orito looks above the sisters opposite at the hanging scrolls.

“… we, the Sisters of Shiranui, render the fruits of our wombs …”

The scrolls display seasonal paintings and lines from Shintô texts.

“… so that fertility cascades over Kyôga, so famine and drought are banished …”

The center scroll shows the sisters’ precedence, ranked by numbers of births.

Exactly like, Orito thinks with disgust, a stable of sumo wrestlers.

“… so that the wheel of life shall turn through eternity …”

The wooden tablet inscribed ORITO is on the far right position.

“… until the last star burns out and the wheel of time is broken.”

Abbess Izu strikes her gong once to indicate the sutra’s conclusion. Housekeeper Satsuki closes the doors to the prayer room, while Asagao and Sadaie bring rice and miso soup from the adjacent kitchen.

When Abbess Izu strikes the gong again, the sisters begin breakfast.

Speech and eye contact are forbidden, but friends pour one another’s water.

Fourteen mouths—Yayoi is excused—chew, slurp, and swallow.

What fine foods is Stepmother eating? Hatred churns Orito’s insides.

Every sister leaves a few grains of rice to feed the spirits of their ancestors.

Orito does the same, reasoning that in this place, any and all allies are needed.

Abbess Izu strikes the tubular gong to indicate the end of the meal. As Sadaie and Asagao clear the dishes, pink-eyed Hashihime asks Abbess Izu about the sick acolyte, Jiritsu.

“He is being nursed in his cell,” replies the abbess. “He has a trembling fever.”

Several of the sisters cover their mouths and murmur in alarm.

Why such pity, Orito burns to ask, for one of your captors?

“A porter in Kurozane died from the disease: poor Jiritsu may have breathed in the same vapors. Master Suzaku asked us to pray for the acolyte’s recovery.”

Most of the sisters nod earnestly and promise to do so.

Abbess Izu then assigns the day’s housekeeping. “Sisters Hatsune and Hashihime, continue yesterday’s weaving. Sister Kiritsubo is to sweep the cloisters; and Sister Umegae, twist the flax in the storeroom into twine, with Sisters Minori and Yûgiri. At the Hour of the Horse, go to the great shrine to polish the floor. Sister Yûgiri may be excused this, if she wishes, on account of her gift.”

What ugly, twisted words, thinks Orito, for malformed thoughts.

Every head in the room looks at Orito. She spoke aloud again.

“Sisters Hotaru and Sawarabi,” continues the abbess, “dust the prayer room, then attend to the latrines. Sisters Asagao and Sadaie are on kitchen duty, of course, so Sister Kagerô and our newest sister”—the crueler eyes turn to Orito, saying, See the fine lady, working like one of her old servants—“are to work in the laundry. If Sister Yayoi is feeling better, she may join them.”

THE LAUNDRY, a long annex to the kitchen, has two hearths to heat water, a pair of large tubs for washing linen, and a rack of bamboo poles where laundry is hung. Orito and Kagerô carry buckets of water from the pool in the courtyard. To fill each tub costs forty or fifty trips, and the two do not talk. At first the samurai’s daughter was exhausted by the work, but now her legs and arms are tougher, and the blisters on her palms are covered with calloused skin. Yayoi tends the fires to heat the water.

Soon, Fat Rat taunts, balancing on the slop barrow, your belly shall look like hers.

“I shan’t let the dogs touch me,” mutters Orito. “I shan’t be here.”

Your body isn’t yours anymore. Fat Rat smirks. It’s the Goddess’s.

Orito loses her footing on the kitchen step and spills her bucket.

“I don’t know how,” says Kagerô coolly, “we coped without you.”

“The floor needed a good wash, anyway.” Yayoi helps Orito mop the spillage.

When the water is warm enough, Yayoi stirs in the blankets and nightshirts. With wooden tongs, Orito transfers them, dripping and heavy, onto the laundry vise, a slanted table with a hinged door that Kagerô closes to squeeze out the water from the linen. Kagerô then hangs the damp laundry on the bamboo poles. Through the kitchen door, Sadaie is telling Yayoi about last night’s dream. “There was a knocking at the gate. I left my room—it was summer—but it didn’t feel like summer, or night, or day …. The house was deserted. Still, the knocking went on, so I asked, ‘Who is it?’ And a man’s voice replied, ‘It’s me, it’s Iwai.’”

“Sister Sadaie was delivered of her first gift,” Yayoi tells Orito, “last year.”

“Born on the fifth day of the fifth month,” says Sadaie, “the Day of Boys.”

The women think of carp streamers and festive innocence.

“So Abbot Genmu,” Sadaie continues, “named him Iwai, as in ‘celebration.’”

“A brewer’s family in Takamatsu,” Yayoi says, “called Takaishi adopted him.”

Orito is hidden by a cloud of steam. “So I understand.”

Asagao says, “Phut you uur spheaking a’out your drean, Sister …”

“Well,” Sadaie says, scrubbing at a crust of burned-on rice, “I was surprised that Iwai had grown up so quickly and worried that he’d be in trouble for breaking the rule that bans gifts from Mount Shiranui. But”—she looks in the direction of the prayer room and lowers her voice—“I had to unbolt the inner gate.”

“The ’olt,” Asagao asks, “’as on the inside oph the inner gate, you say.”

“Yes, it was. It didn’t occur to me at the time. So the gate opened—”

Yayoi provides a cry of impatience. “What did you see, Sister?”

“Dry leaves. No gift, no Iwai, just dry leaves. The wind carried them away.”

“That,” Kagerô leans hard on the vise’s handle, “is an ill omen.”

Sadaie is unnerved by Kagerô’s certainty. “Do you really think so, Sister?”

“How could your gift turning into dead leaves be a good omen?”

Yayoi stirs the cauldron. “Sister Kagerô, you’ll upset Sadaie.”

“Just speaking the truth,” Kagerô replies, squeezing out the water, “as I see it.”

“Could you tell,” Asagao asks Sadaie, “I’ai’s phather phon his phoice?”

“That’s it,” says Yayoi. “Your dream was a clue about Iwai’s father.”

Even Kagerô shows interest in the theory: “Which monks were your engifters?”

Housekeeper Satsuki enters, carrying a new box of soap nuts.

THE RAREFIED SUNSET turns the snow-veined Bare Peak a bloodied fish pink, and the evening star is as sharp as a needle. Smoke and smells of cooking leak from the kitchen. With the exception of the week’s two cooks, the women’s time is their own until Master Suzaku’s arrival prior to supper. Orito embarks on her anticlockwise walk around the cloisters to distract her body from its clamorous longing for her solace. Several sisters are gathered in the long room, whitening one another’s faces or blackening their teeth. Yayoi is resting in her cell. Blind Sister Minori is teaching a koto arrangement of “Eight Miles Through a Mountain Pass” to Sadaie. Umegae, Hashihime, and Kagerô are also taking exercise, clockwise, around the cloisters. Orito is obliged to stand aside as they pass. For the thousandth time since her kidnapping, Orito wishes she had the means to write. Unauthorized letters to the outside world, she knows, are forbidden, and she would burn anything she wrote for fear of her thoughts being exposed. But an ink brush, she thinks, is a skeleton key for a prisoner’s mind. Abbess Izu has promised to present her with a writing set after her first gifting is confirmed.

How could I endure that act, Orito shudders, and live afterward?

When she turns the next corner, Bare Peak is no longer pink but gray.

She considers the twelve women in the house who do endure it.

She thinks about the last newest sister, who hanged herself.

“Venus,” Orito’s father once told her, “follows a clockwise orbit. All her sister and brother planets circle the sun in an anticlockwise manner …”

… but the memory of her father is chased away by jeering ifs.

Umegae, Hashihime, and Kagerô form a shuffling wall of padded kimonos.

If Enomoto had never seen me or chosen to add me to his collection …

Orito hears the chop chop chop of knives in the kitchen.

If Stepmother was as compassionate a woman as she once pretended …

Orito must press herself against the wooden screen to let them pass.

If Enomoto hadn’t guaranteed Father’s loans with the moneylenders …

“Some of us are so well bred,” Kagerô remarks, “they think rice grows on trees.”

If Jacob de Zoet had seen me at Dejima land gate, on my last day …

The three women drift by, hems traipsing along the wooden planks.

A Dutch alphabet V of geese crosses the sky; a forest monkey shrieks.

Better a Dejima wife, Orito thinks, protected by a foreigner’s money …

A mountain bird on the old pine sings in intricate stitches.

… than what happens to me in the engifting week, if I don’t escape.

The walled stream enters and leaves the courtyard under the raised cloister floor, feeding the pool. Orito presses herself against the wooden screen.

“She supposes,” says Hashihime, “a magic cloud shall whisk her away.”

Stars pollinate the banks of Heaven’s River, germinate and sprout.

Europeans, Orito remembers, call it the Milky Way. Her soft-spoken father is back. “Here is Umihebi, the sea snake; there Tokei, the clock; over here, Ite, the archer”—she can smell his warm smell—“and above, Ranshinban, the compass …”

The bolt of the inner gate screeches open: “Opening!”

Every sister hears. Every sister thinks, Master Suzaku.

THE SISTERS GATHER in the long room, wearing their finest clothes, save for Sadaie and Asagao, who are still preparing supper, and Orito, who owns only the work-kimono in which she was abducted, a warm quilted hakata jacket, and a couple of headscarves. Even lower-ranked sisters like Yayoi already have a choice of two or three kimonos of fair quality—one for every child born—with simple necklaces and bamboo hair combs. Senior sisters, like Hatsune and Hashihime, have acquired, over the years, as rich a wardrobe as that of a high-ranking merchant wife.

Her hunger for solace is now an incessant pounding, but Orito also has the longest wait: one by one, in order of the list of precedence, the sisters are summoned to the square room, where Suzaku holds his consultations and administers his potions. Suzaku spends two or three minutes with each patient; for some sisters, the minutiae of their ailments and the master’s thoughts on the same are a fascination second only to the New Year letters. First Sister Hatsune returns from her consultation with the news that Acolyte Jiritsu’s fever is worsening, and Master Suzaku doubts he shall survive the night.

Most of the sisters express shock and dismay.

“Our masters and acolytes,” swears Hatsune, “are so very rarely ill …”

Orito catches herself wondering what febrifuges have been administered, before thinking, He is no concern of mine.

The women swap memories of Jiritsu, using the past tense.

Sooner than expected, Yayoi is touching her shoulder. “Your turn.”

“HOW DO WE FIND the newest sister this evening?” Master Suzaku gives the impression of a man perpetually on the brink of laughter that never comes. The effect is sinister. Abbess Izu occupies one corner and an acolyte another.

Orito answers her usual answer: “Alive, as you see.”

“Do we know”—Suzaku indicates the young man—“Acolyte Chûai?”

Kagerô and the meaner sisters nickname Chûai “the Swollen Toad.”

“Certainly not.” Orito does not look at the acolyte.

Suzaku clicks his tongue. “The first snow is not sapping our constitution?”

Don’t plead for solace. She says, “No.” He loves you to plead.

“We have no symptoms to report, then? No aches or bleedings?”

The world, she guesses, is his own vast private joke. “Nothing.”

“Or constipation? Diarrhea? Hemorrhoids? Thrush? Migraines?”

“What I am suffering from,” Orito is goaded into saying, “is incarceration.”

Suzaku smiles at Acolyte Chûai and the abbess. “Our ties to the world below cut us, like wire. Sever them, and be as happy as your dear sisters.”

“My ‘dear sisters’ were rescued from brothels and freak shows, and perhaps, for them, life here is better. I lost more, and Enomoto”—Abbess Izu and Acolyte Chûai flinch to hear the abbot named with such contempt—“hasn’t even faced me since he bought me; and don’t dare”—Orito stops herself pointing at Suzaku like an angry Dutchman—“spout your platitudes about destiny and divine balance. Just give me my solace. Please. The women want their supper.”

“It scarcely behooves you,” begins the abbess, “to address—”

Suzaku interrupts her with a respectful hand. “Let us show her a little indulgence, Abbess, even if undeserved. Contrariness often is best tamed by kindness.” The monk decants a muddy liquid into a thimble-sized stone cup.

See how painstakingly he moves, she thinks, to sharpen your hunger …

Orito stops her hand from snatching the cup from the proffered tray.

She turns away to conceal with her sleeve the vulgar act of drinking.

“Once you are engifted,” promises Suzaku, “your sense of belonging shall grow, too.”

Never, Orito thinks, never. Her tongue absorbs the oily fluid …

… and her blood pumps louder, her arteries widen, and well-being soothes her joints.

“The Goddess didn’t choose you,” says Abbess Izu. “You chose the Goddess.”

Warm snowflakes settle over Orito’s skin, whispering as they melt.

Every evening, the doctor’s daughter wants to ask Suzaku about the ingredients of solace. Every evening, she stops herself. The question, she knows, would initiate a conversation, and conversation is a step toward acceptance.

“What’s good for the body,” Suzaku tells Orito’s mouth, “is good for the soul.”

DINNER IS A FESTIVE occasion compared to breakfast. After a brief blessing, Housekeeper Satsuki and the sisters eat tofu in tempura batter, fried with garlic and rolled in sesame; pickled eggplant; pilchards and white rice. Even the haughtiest sisters remember their commoners’ origins, when such a fine daily diet could only be dreamed of, and they relish each morsel. The abbess has gone with Master Suzaku to dine with Master Genmu, so the mood in the long room is leisurely. When the table is cleared and the dishes and chopsticks washed, the sisters smoke pipes around the table, swap stories, play mah-jongg, reread—or have reread—their New Year letters, and listen to Hatsune play her koto. The effects of solace wear out a little earlier every night, Orito notices. She leaves, as usual, without saying good night. Wait till she’s been engifted, she feels the women think. Wait till her belly is as big as a boulder, and she needs us to help her scrub, fetch, and carry.

Back in her cell, Orito finds that someone has lit her fire. Yayoi.

Umegae’s spite or Kagerô’s hostility encourages her to reject the house.

But Yayoi’s kindness, she fears, makes life here more tolerable …

… and ushers closer the day when Mount Shiranui becomes her home.

Who knows, she wonders, if Yayoi is not acting under Genmu’s orders?

Orito, troubled and shivering in the icy air, wipes herself with a cloth.

Under her blankets, she lies on her side, gazing into the fire’s garden.

THE PERSIMMON’S branches sag with ripe fruit. They glow in the dusk.

An eyelash in the sky grows into a heron; the gawky bird descends …

Its eyes are green and its hair is red; Orito is afraid of his clumsy beak.

The heron says, in Dutch, of course, You are beautiful.

Orito wishes neither to encourage him nor wound his feelings.

She is in the courtyard of the House of Sisters: she hears Yayoi groan.

Dead leaves fly like bats; bats fly like dead leaves.

How can I escape? Orito asks nobody. The gate is locked.

Since when, mocks the moon-gray cat, do cats need keys?

There is no time—she is knotted by exasperation—to speak in riddles.

First, persuade them, says the cat, that you are happy here.

Why, she asks, should I ever give them that false satisfaction?

Because only then, answers the cat, shall they stop watching you.