Fudoki (24 page)

“Bigger, you mean?” I asked. We were sitting on the veranda, eating pickled eggs and watching one of the household’s cats prowling at the edge of a clump of reeds under a bright moon.

“They have gold eyes,” D
mei said. “Flat and fierce. Think of a dog that could kill you, that would not even care whether it did so: that’s a wolf.”

Mutsu province, where there are wolves, and gold-eyed men like D
mei. I shall never see it now.

Strange.
All these pages, all these brush strokes, and I have said little about my half-brother, the emperor everyone now calls Shirakawa. This is perhaps intentional: thinking of him is like scratching at a scab to see if the cut beneath is still fresh. What will I accomplish by doing this? I already know that it has not healed, and I am not brave enough to face the fresh pain.

It is not many months since the forty-ninth night rituals after his death. Some nights, when I feel the thing inside my chest pressing against my lungs, I talk to him. Some nights, I think he answers me.

He was not so many years older than me, and, when he was young, very handsome (as everyone told me, again and again—even my nurse sometimes looked at me and sighed, “Why could you not have a bit of your brother’s elegance?”). For a time, when his father was still emperor, he lived with my foster father. The house was full of flurry and attendants because of him, but my women kept us far apart (“Trust me, your highness, he has no interest in having his thoughts disturbed by a flyaway girl with dirty hands and no manners”).

Then my foster father said that I could no longer keep mice. Worse, he forced my nurse to take away the mice I did have. There were two or perhaps three: tiny buckwheat-colored creatures with glittering black eyes bright as prayer beads. She would not tell me what she did with them. My tears devolved into an enormous tantrum, for which she locked me into a little raised-floor storehouse, avowedly until I learned to control myself.

I did not learn control there, but I did learn that there were two planks in the floor that had not been properly secured, so that a resourceful girl could lift them and let herself down into the crawl space. I crept through the dust and emerged cautiously, on the far side from the house, then ran for the copse of white pine and
sawara
cypress at the garden’s opposite end, as far from the main buildings as I could get without crossing the residence walls.

We called him Sadahito then, for he was not yet emperor. He must have been sixteen; certainly, he was much taller than I. He spent much of his time with his father, so I did not expect to find him in the grove—and certainly not alone; an heir is
never
alone, any more than a princess. I do not know what he was doing there—did not think to ask, caught up as I was in my own miseries.

I knew bursting in on him was a terrible solecism, but I couldn’t think of what to do next: Apologize? Back away as if I hadn’t seen him? Throw myself on the ground? Faint? Grace in awkward situations does not come at the age of ten, so I stood rooted to the ground, as if a tree myself. He did not seem offended; said only: “You’ve been crying,” and pulled a soft paper from his sleeve. “Here, use this.”

I took it from his hand and scrubbed at my cheeks, but I could not stop staring at him. Unless I did something stupid (now, for instance), I would probably serve Sadahito at court someday; he (and my foster father) would select the man I would marry. He controlled my destiny—he and the other gods.

“You’re my half-sister,” he said. We had met before, but always through curtains, as befit a princess and the heir. “I forget: what do they call you?”

“Harueme. What should I do with this?” I held up the now-grimy wad of sleeve-paper.

“Give it to me and I’ll get rid of it for you,” he said. “You don’t want them to guess you got out, do you?”

“No,” I said, amazed at his insight. He knew I’d been crying, and he knew I’d escaped. No wonder he got to be emperor. “Why are you here?”

He made a gesture, implying everything and nothing. “I am tired of studying, and I cannot visit Kenshi right now—she is in her courses.” I knew who Kenshi was: she was his consort, and said to be very beautiful, though I did not meet her and learn the truth of this for several more years. He sighed heavily, though he smiled at himself as he did so. “So, little sister, why have
you
been crying?”

He had distracted me for a time; now his question brought it all back, and I started crying again. Between sobs, I sniffled out the story of my mice. He put his arm around me (though I was covered with dirt and snot and tears) and told me that they would be fine in the garden, if that’s where they had been abandoned. “There’s a lot for a mouse to eat out here.”

“But the cats—foxes—” I said, crying in earnest now.

“If they die, they will just come back as something better. Maybe cats themselves, hmm? And who can say? Even mice may eventually attain enlightenment.”

I was comforted by this, not because I believed the mice were safe (or that their enlightenment was possible; already I’d had enough mice to suspect otherwise), but because he had tried to comfort me at all. By the time he helped me sneak back to the storehouse undetected, I loved him with all my heart.

Later that night, after I had been freed from my storehouse, bathed and given a good supper, my brother’s chief man came to my rooms, and left a pierced silver box, a treasure from beyond even India. Inside was a single gray-furred mouse, young enough that its eyes were still too large for its face. I named it Little Sister, and pretended that I was my brother, and the mouse me. No one could take the mouse from me—it was a gift from the heir, after all—and so I carried it inside my sleeve and fed it rice from my bowl. I wept for a half a month when it died, because he had given it to me.

Several years later (I was fifteen) I came to court to attend my half-brother. Everything happened very quickly—my father the emperor Go-Sanj
died, and Sadahito gave up his name and became emperor that very day. He asked for my company, and my foster father sent me there.

I had visited the palace before, when my father the emperor Go-Sanj
requested it, and even once when he was gone to stay with a consort’s father, and I was allowed to explore a little. Still, the notion of living there made everything different. The painted floor the color of turquoises, the crimson pillars, the painted screens—these were all mine now, in some small way. Every day I would wear robes prettier than my finest as a child. I would be surrounded by witty, beautiful, cultured people, and I would (I fantasized) become immensely popular, famed for my wit and scholarship, and as elegant as Sei Sh
nagon had been, eighty years before. All my lovers would be handsome as Genji; all my attendants would be famous for beauty and charm, their glory reflecting on me.

And my half-brother and I—we would spend all our time together, reading and writing, perhaps even traveling, to Ise or even the Shirakawa Barrier or beyond! I would show him my moths’ wings, and my notebooks of observations; he would show me whatever it was he cared for most in the world. He would call me Little Sister; I would call him Brother.

It was not like that; I have to laugh at my naïveté at thinking such a thing was possible. His responsibilities were great; he was always with his regent or the other high nobles, discussing this or that. When his duties did not occupy him, he spent time with the other high-ranked young men at court; or his consort, Kenshi; or others of his women. He even had other sisters and half-sisters, at court or nearby shrines. A thousand thousand people wanted his time or attention. I was just one of the horde, if higher-ranked than most.

And I was no Sei Sh
nagon. Granted, I was the daughter of an emperor and (I am told) exceptionally beautiful; but the people at court were all more interested in music and poetry than in water-clocks and philosophy. No one but I cared how learned I was. And the public halls and emperor’s chambers were lovely, but the private rooms, even the rooms of a princess, were worn-looking, sometimes dilapidated, and always flea-haunted.

A month after I came to court, I asked the emperor if he would let me leave, to return to my uncle’s residence, or enter a nunnery. He denied the request. “I need you,” was all he said. It was not for many years that I understood what he meant by this, until the day we sat together and tasted the rain on our lips. In the meantime, I learned to accept my life here.

Shirakawa and Kenshi. I was jealous of her, of course. She was only a little older than I but she was beautiful and graceful, and more important, charming. In my heart I claimed to despise these things (it would never do for me to announce such a sentiment), but now I can admit that I despised them because I felt I could never attain them. I was beautiful (I say with all candor), but that meant nothing. A round face and white skin are an accident of birth; being well dressed and groomed was a reflection on Shigeko and my other women.

As a child I judged myself by the adults that surrounded me—my mother and her women; my foster father and my uncle—and they all seemed infinitely elegant, masters of mysteries I could barely perceive. I was the daughter of an emperor; if I could not be as elegant as they, well then, I would be clever.

Becoming beautiful was a process that surprised me as much as it did my uncle. He had despaired that I would ever be valued for anything besides my birth, but my woman Shigeko came to attend me (just before my half-brother became emperor, this was), and I was suddenly clean, and my robes matched, and any dead animals I might be examining were discreetly hidden away. I think my half-brother Shirakawa would have summoned me to court in any case; but it was a comfort, my uncle said, to know I was not going to disgrace everyone associated with me when I got there.

Shigeko made me polite as well as elegant. It was she who insisted I write to my half-brother’s favored consort, Fujiwara sammi no Kenshi, who lived elsewhere at court. I did so, growling all the way through the required poem, something about the reeds of the east wing greeting the grasses of the north—I’m sure it’s here somewhere; I’ll ask Shigeko when she returns from overseeing a gift to one of the temples south of town. I still recall Kenshi’s response: “The clouds visit both east and north. Grass-blades blown between us show only fragments of the wind.”

And so we wrote letters, and visited one another when we could. We were never friends, both being too highly ranked to be close to anyone not assigned to us; but I found her pleasant and quietly witty. It was easy to see why Shirakawa loved her.