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She receives a white, blonde doll made of vinyl. Its hard, chubby cheeks and stiff coifs are so unlike anything she had hoped for that in furtive privacy she considers popping its limbs from its sockets so that it can instead be an alien grub emerging from a red and white cocoon. But it is endearing in its oddness, and she likes it better than Junko's delicate ichimatsu doll, which is too pretty to play with. So she decides to keep it, making it her first girl-friend.
She also receives new socks, a ribbon, and a nagajuban made from cheap surplus sufu. The exterior is plain and white; the interior has a faded display of wartime vehicles: fleets of boats, planes, and cars, modern and so unlike the farm-carts in town that she wishes that she could wear it inside out, knowing that the illustrations would impress her friends, especially Shu, but her parents do not let her. Her father scolds her for the idea far more than she would expect.
A fist falls down, and the table jostles. A letter to Santa is strewn to the side. He thinks of his time spent on the sea. "—don't need a weapon in the house."
"A toy, dear?"
"It's improper. What would cause her to think of such a thing? Why can't she just—"
It is difficult to persuade the other children into participating in hide-and-seek without her partner around. The girls typically complain about her muddied knees, and the boys ask: why are you bringing a doll? Still, she's good at the game and she wants to play. She can run fast, and she can find far-out spaces to tuck herself into; she kneels in the grassy lip of a culvert and feels how the dew chills her shins. Her friend is at her side, hiding too. The yellow hair is dirtied with mud. Hinako takes some and stripes it upon her arms: tactical camouflage.
She waits, hiding, and the sky loses its luster; evening shadows creep down the slope; her stomach growls. She crawls up, and she looks around. She squints against the sunset's sear because there's a figure at the foothills, a young boy— she thinks: Shu?— but the body only observes her from that immobile distance, dark and anonymous before the falling sun. The silhouette is too stiff to be a listless farmer's boy; the posture is more like a statue than a scarecrow. Abruptly, she wants to meet him, if only to ask: Who are you? and then: Were you the only one looking for me?
A maze of deep ditches separates them. Gooseflesh prickles over her neck and arms, and she clutches the doll as she walks out and is intercepted by the man that does own the field. He is big, familiar, and scary only because of his upset; children can drown, he says, and: didn't your parents ever teach you any better? Didn't you listen? Why would you shame them by acting as though you didn't know anything at all?
"Business is steady, but steady is stagnant; a town like this needs only one doctor, one baker, one priest. I make as much money as I will ever make, but I have little worry of a competing apothecary opening in Ebisugauka. I don't blame you for moving elsewhere, my brother. When I can work no more, the boy can take my place. I know he'll have the aptitude for it. But I thank you for inviting us out to visit. He loved seeing the boats in the bay. For how long do you intend to remain a bachelor? You should have your own little boy, and give us an excuse to leave the shadow of our valley..."
Hinako comes home with a bounty of sweets, and she shares it with her sister as Junko is cleaning. "Where did you get all of this?" Junko asks. "Mother won't be happy if you spent—"
"It was a gift from Rinko!" Hinako says, happily. "She brought us all candy. Try this one, it's good!"
"She gave everyone this much to take home?"
There is a sour, soap-water taste. "No," Hinako says. "She said she wanted to give me extra."
"Why?"
"We almost never have candy at the house."
"And you told her that?"
"No," Hinako says. "No, she just knew."
"Knew what?"
Hinako sucks on her candy. The botan tastes like plastic and citral. "She said we should have it because we're poor," she says, with hurt honesty.
Junko pauses. She looks at Hinako, searching for a canniness that is not there yet. She herself has already been tempered to shrewdness, to a perfect ceramic hardness, cool, smooth, and pleasantly removed. Because of this, her honesty, when it must be released, feels like a broken edge.
"That girl is making fun of you," she says, and she continues washing the dishes.
One makes one's bed to sleep in it again. One eats one's meal to wash the dishes again. One wears pretty clothes to wash and wring and dry and fold and fix again. "A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg." A mother and father aim to produce another mother and father. Her own family is functional, but in proceeding, she intends to be more successful than her forebears. Debts accrue. Another bottle breaks. She sweeps up the shards. Junko will allow an arrangement, but she refuses to marry a foolish man.
Junko watches Kimie's hand as it holds a needle, trembling through anxiety, arthritis, and cancer. It still makes its mark. She stitches together a suitor. Junko meets the man after school. He is tall, skinny, and somewhat avian in his cleverness, blinking behind thick-lensed glasses, speaking only after a gap of sharp consideration. He does not seem skittish around her, nor does he seem unduly charmed. For a rich family, the dynasty is the organism, and each heir is a cell. There are rituals and roles; the mechanism must continue smoothly; to do otherwise is to invite ruin. When they look at one another, Junko knows that they are both at once thinking: this will do.
"A girl almost drowned in an irrigation ditch two towns over," Sakuko says.
Rinko adds: "But a boy jumped in and saved her."
"The boy drowned, and the girl survived," Sakuko says, and she leans her head against her crossed arms. "Isn't that dreamy?"
"Dreamy?" Hinako echoes.
"Morbid," Rinko says with a shiver, just as Sakuko says: "Chivalrous..."
Hinako sits in class and wonders: What would it be like to drown? It would probably involve a heavy sensation in the lungs and a collection of failing muscular impulses. She has tried to keep her head submerged in the bathtub, and she has always come up gasping. It would take a leap from a bridge, or a coastal riptide, or the enclosure of a sinking car, some externality that would incapacitate her animal urge towards life.
"If I fell in a ditch," Sakuko asks, "would either of you save me?"
"I'd let you fertilize the fields," Rinko mutters, and Sakuko gasps.
"Hinako would save me," Sakuko insists. "You'd jump in and rescue me, wouldn't you? Hinako?"
Everyone in town has problems, really. Rinko acts like she has to buy all her friends, and Sakuko's mother berates her. If no-one has noticed her own despondency, then it isn't really there. It is easy to forget herself at school, to suffocate her thoughts beneath all these silly social games, but as she walks back up the mountain at the end of the day, it feels like floating back up to the reflective meniscus, like meeting the eyes of her true self. And her true self is something her mother appraises, like she might be able to trade it away at the market for something better. And her true self is a thing her father can hardly bear to have in the house. She gave Junko a charm before she left. She should have asked for another memento in return. She was the only one that ever seemed happy to see her at home.
She wonders again: what would it be like to drown? If she killed herself and became someone else, would anyone notice? Shu might point and say: Alien imposter. The perfumed letters she keeps hidden within her desk might say: You are no longer the girl that I loved.
Or, he might say: You've bloomed.
"Hinako-o-o." Sakuko clutches at her sleeves and whines. "Wouldn't you ride in on a white horse and save me?"
Hinako lifts her head, feeling sluggish and belatedly startled. She looks at her friend's face and feels a foreign ache. "But I'm not a boy," she says.
Hinako trips and falls on the track, unable to beat her best time or keep up with the boys, and as Rinko clucks maternally over the scrapes on her knees and Sakuko plays with her hair, she thinks: why do you both look so happy? How big will your smiles be when I am dead and gone?
Junko is in the hospital. Junko is pregnant. Junko might die. Junko observes her own struggling, straining body, and she suffers, and she watches her sister take a handful of pills before ducking out of the room, overwhelmed.
Her husband doesn't visit much, but he would if she called; it is only that they typically leave one another to their own supposed expertise. She tells her mother about him: He is shrewd. He has good business sense. He is well-traveled. He has gifted her a matryoshka doll. It is a doll consisting of a woman that can produce another woman that can produce another woman.
Kimie sits at Junko's side and speaks blithely about how they'll stitch her back up when she's done. "They did it badly with me, the last time. I took time to heal. That's why— only two. Hinako has been difficult," she says, "from the very start." The complaint is made with bitter fondness.
Hinako eats. The food tastes rotten. There's a little box in her pocket; if she takes one more, perhaps the food will merely taste like fog, like ash. Junko's boring husband talks in his boring voice about his Issei and Nisei relatives, about a younger brother that had moved to California for business and had ended up in Topaz, but after the war had ended he had remained in Salt Lake, founding a cannery and joining the JACL. This brother had requested assistance in running his burgeoning business, and Junko's husband had been tempted to take the offer; he and Junko and the baby would move to Utah, to the dry-sea land of fossil shells and dust. Hinako imagines the black sky and the exposed rock and the inhospitable silver lake of the city. She imagines her sister as far away as the moon.
Kanta drinks. Kimie blinks with tentative bemusement. "And your brother's children are..."
"Mormon," Junko enunciates, and she smiles with her pretty, white teeth.
Kimie touches her husband's shoulder. "There's an old story, dear. Isn't there? About a morumon-dansei that brought a flower..."
Kanta's brows furrow. The recollection sparkles distantly. "The old priest at the shrine would tell it."
"It was such a strange story—"
"I don't think he was Mormon—"
"Are you going away?" Hinako asks, and then her narrow gaze aims towards the man. "Are you taking her away?"
Kimie folds her hands in her lap, and Kanta lids a simmering apoplexy. Junko's husband looks more surprised than offended; he has not tired of Hinako's pique, yet. It remains a novelty. Such a spirited sister. Would she be warm where Junko is cold?
Junko sets her hand upon her belly, and she looks at him.
"Unfortunately, we cannot go," he answers, "as— and this was the true reason as to why I extended this invitation— my wife is of delicate health, and we are again expecting—"
He's a smart man, a shrewd man, and he is also spoiled, selfish, and blind to anything but his own passing desires; he is a boy. Why has he not grown up when she has? Junko offers herself and he takes her, as expected. He is used to pleasure coming easily. If she was born rich, she might behave the same. They lay in bed after, and she feels wet warmth cooling down the inside of her thigh.
"I believe he will fail without me," he says. "I should—"
"Harden your heart," Junko says. "There is no life for us there, and you know it."
"There is opportunity—"
"Not half as much as what you have found here. I did not marry a fool."
"He is my family—"
"Grow up," she says, and he falls silent. She keeps the charm in a box in her wardrobe. She will not look at it for several years. What will Hinako do without her? What will she do without Hinako?
Hinako succumbs to a nightmare so violent that she vomits in her own bed. In it, she sees: A lipoma on the neck of a man in town. The pills her mother takes at breakfast. Her father's thirst. Bile, urine, feces, placenta, body-products, Junko-products, all of which she produced voluminously on a gurney for a pittance of yen. Her mother bought a washing machine with it. She uses it to wash her husband's soiled sheets. She doesn't have the energy to do it herself anymore, because the body is a thing always ready to betray you, and a child is a profitable tumor. It grows and grows and falls out and has about a half-chance of inheriting your fate. What kind of a mother sells her daughter for a washing machine? A mother who was also born.
After she wakes up, she gathers up the mess, and she washes her sheets in the new machine.
Later, her mother, also pale, smiles at her, blearily, as she folds another load; food poisoning, perhaps, she says, or confesses.
When Kotoyuki courts her, she wants to die. When the latest perfumed letter is an invitation, she wants to die. When he tells her the rule of his Bluebeard's castle, she wants to die.
One must die to enter Heaven; it is not a place for the living.
The staff are all courteous and welcoming. Fair maidens take her bags, her shoes; Kotoyuki then takes her by the arm, and he shows her a thousand wonders. His estate is grand. There are doors upon doors upon doors. When she tires of her amazement, she rests, and she is told ask the staff for anything she would like, as they will give it to her. There is only one thing that is forbidden.
With uncharacteristic trepidation, the boy takes hold of her fingertips. I love you, he says, and I respect you and your needs.
Come close.
But remember, my father has passed, and all that remains...
Women must submit to men.
He is an old man, his mind half-gone.
Kotoyuki is still but a fledgling.
No matter your curiosity—
Come, and we shall treat you as we see fit.
Don't go near him.
Look. Look into my eyes.
Pay the patriarch no mind.
Shu never saw her as a woman and Junko's husband saw her as an amusing, mewling malfunction and she can't yet tell if Kotoyuki sees her as a bride or as herself but she knows, immediately, that the old man is sober, sane, and acutely aware that she is a human being. He can see the shape of her mind, of her soul; he knows that like any other life on Earth, she endeavors to exert her will. When one utilizes a hammer, one does not gloat over the defeat of it; when one drives cattle, one does not conquer the members of the herd. He knows that a woman is not a washing machine. He knows that a woman is not a cow. He knows that he hardens when he takes hold of her arms because his thumbs transgress against the soft shape of her breasts, because he can see her disgust, and because this room and all beyond it are a part of the same mechanism, his greater reputation, his family name.
There is no more thrilling hunt than to humiliate her and lay claim to her will. The castle, as convoluted as an intestine, constricts. Pistons pump in the walls. This family will consume her; her body will be scoured hollow and made redolent. This is how the organism survives. A cancer continues for no reason other than it can reproduce itself. A cure would be calamity.
"Such a beautiful woman," the old man says, and his fingers stroke up and down the inner edges of her arms. "Kotoyuki's a lucky boy."
In her most recent dream, there was a lake of amnion. The surface was solid, like ice, like a shell. There was no way of seeing her own reflection. She has not taken any kakura-makakura in a long time.
"I want to save myself from drowning," she tells him. It would be frightfully easy for him to take to anger; an heir denied, a suitor spurned. Hinako can see the tightening in his jaw. She pauses, waiting, and then she brushes the rare gem of a teardrop from his cheek. "You're drowning, too."
I've never actually played hide and seek, he confesses in an unscented letter. Do you promise to come and find me?
Alone, Hinako holds per pen and considers her answer.
On sufu cloth in WWII, some notes on Utah, chicken and egg quote, obligatory Utena reference re: Sakuko's story about the boy who drowned. A spiritual citation to The Bloody Chamber. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed!