Vampires in the Lemon Grove (4 page)

“Where are you from?” they ask me.

“The castle in Gifu, perhaps you know it from the famous woodblocks? My great-grandfather was a warrior.”

“Oh! But Kitsune, we thought you said your father was the one who printed the woodblocks? The famous
ukiyo-e
artist, Utagawa Kuniyoshi …”

“Yes. He was, yesterday.”

I’ll put it bluntly: we are all becoming reelers. Some kind of hybrid creature, part
kaiko
, silkworm caterpillar, and part human female. Some of the older workers’ faces are already quite covered with a coarse white fur, but my face and thighs stayed smooth for twenty days. In fact I’ve only just begun to grow the white hair on my belly. During my first nights and days in the silk-reeling factory I was always shaking. I have never been a hysterical person, and so at first I misread these tremors as mere mood; I was in the clutches of a giddy sort of terror, I thought. Then the roiling feeling became solid. It was the thread: a color purling invisibly in my belly. Silk. Yards and yards of thin color would soon be extracted from me by the Machine.

Today, the Agent drops off two new recruits, sisters from the Yamagata Prefecture, a blue village called Sakegawa, which none of us have visited. They are the daughters of a salmon fisherman and their names are Tooka and Etsuyo. They are twelve and nineteen. Tooka has a waist-length braid and baby fat; Etsuyo looks like a forest doe, with her long neck and watchful brown eyes. We step into the light and Etsuyo swallows her scream. Tooka starts wailing—“Who are you? What’s happened to you? What is this place?”

Dai crosses the room to them, and despite their terror the Sakegawa sisters are too sleepy and too shocked to recoil from her embrace. They appear to have drunk the tea very recently, because they’re quaking on their feet. Etsuyo’s eyes cross as if she is about to faint. Dai unrolls two tatami mats in a dark corner, helps them to stretch out. “Sleep a little,” she whispers. “Dream.”

“Is this the silk-reeling factory?” slurs Tooka, half-conscious on her bedroll.

“Oh, yes,” Dai says. Her furry face hovers like a moon above them.

Tooka nods, satisfied, as if willing to dismiss all of her terror to continue believing in the Agent’s promises, and shuts her eyes.

Sometimes when the new recruits confide the hopes that brought them to our factory, I have to suppress a bitter laugh. Long before the
kaiko
change turned us into mirror images of one another, we were sisters already, spinning identical dreams in beds thousands of miles apart, fantasizing about gold silks and an “imperial vocation.” We envisioned our future dowries, our families’ miraculous freedom from debt. We thrilled to the same tales of women working in the grand textile mills, where steel machines from Europe gleamed in the light of the Meiji sunrise. Our world had changed so rapidly in the wake of the Black Ships that the poets could barely keep pace with the scenes outside their own windows. Industry, trade, unstoppable growth: years before the Agent came to find us, our dreams anticipated his promises.

Since my arrival here, my own fantasies have grown as dark as the room. In them I snip a new girl’s thread midair, or yank all the silk out of her at once, so that she falls lifelessly forward like a
Bunraku
puppet. I haven’t been able to cry since my first night here—but often I feel a water pushing at my skull. “Can the thread migrate to your brain?” I’ve asked Dai nervously. Silk starts as a liquid. Right now I can feel it traveling below my navel, my thread. Foaming icily along the lining of my stomach. Under
the blankets I watch it rise in a hard lump. There are twenty workers sleeping on twelve tatami, two rows of us, our heads ten centimeters apart, our earlobes curled like snails on adjacent leaves, and though we are always hungry, every one of us has a round belly. Most nights I can barely sleep, moaning for dawn and the Machine.

Every aspect of our new lives, from working to sleeping, eating and shitting, bathing when we can get wastewater from the Machine, is conducted in one brick room. The far wall has a single oval window, set high in its center. Too high for us to see much besides scraps of cloud and a woodpecker that is like a celebrity to us, provoking gasps and applause every time he appears.
Kaiko-joko
, we call ourselves. Silkworm-workers. Unlike regular
joko
, we have no foreman or men. We are all alone in the box of this room. Dai says that she’s the dormitory supervisor, but that’s Dai’s game.

We were all brought here by the same man, the factory Recruitment Agent. A representative, endorsed by Emperor Meiji himself, from the new Ministry for the Promotion of Industry.

We were all told slightly different versions of the same story.

Our fathers or guardians signed contracts that varied only slightly in their terms, most promising a five-yen advance for one year of our lives.

The Recruitment Agent travels the countryside to recruit female workers willing to travel far from their home prefectures to a new European-style silk-reeling mill. Presumably, he is out recruiting now. He makes his pitch not to the woman herself but to her father or guardian, or in some few cases, where single women cannot be procured, her husband. I am here on behalf of
the nation, he begins. In the spirit of
Shokusan-Kōgyō. Increase production, encourage industry
. We are recruiting only the most skillful and loyal mill workers, he continues. Not just peasant girls—like your offspring, he might say with his silver tongue to men in the Gifu and Mie prefectures—but the well-bred daughters of noblemen. Samurai and aristocrats. City-born governors have begged me to train their daughters on the Western technologies. Last week, the Medical General of the Imperial Army sent his nineteen-year-old twins, by train! Sometimes there is resistance from the father or guardian, especially among the hicks, those stony-faced men from distant centuries who still make bean paste, wade into rice paddies, brew sake using thousand-year-old methods; but the Agent waves all qualms away—Ah, you’ve heard about x-Mill or y-Factory? No, the French
yatoi
engineers don’t drink girls’ blood, haha, that is what they call
red wine
. Yes, there
was
a fire at Aichi Factory, a little trouble with tuberculosis in Suwa. But our factory is quite different—it is a national secret. Yes, a place that makes even the French filature in the backwoods of Gunma, with its brick walls and steam engines, look antiquated! This phantom factory he presents to her father or guardian with great cheerfulness and urgency, for he says we have awoken to dawn, the Enlightened Era of the Meiji, and we must all play our role now. Japan’s silk is her world export. The Blight in Europe, the pébrine virus, has killed every silkworm, forever halted the Westerners’ cocoon production. The demand is as vast as the ocean. This is the moment to seize. Silk-reeling is a sacred vocation—she will be reeling for the empire.

The fathers and guardians nearly always sign the contract. Publicly, the
joko
’s family will share a cup of hot tea with the Agent. They celebrate her new career and the five-yen advance against her legally mortgaged future. Privately, an hour or so later, the Agent will share a special toast with the girl herself.
The Agent improvises his tearooms: an attic in a forest inn or a locked changing room in a bathhouse or, in the case of Iku, an abandoned cowshed.

After sunset, the old blind woman arrives. “The zookeeper,” we call her. She hauls our food to the grated door, unbars the lower panel. We pass her that day’s skeins of reeled silk, and she pushes two sacks of mulberry leaves through the panel with a long stick. The woman never speaks to us, no matter what questions we shout at her. She simply waits, patiently, for our skeins, and so long as they are acceptable in quality and weight, she slides in our leaves. Tonight she has also slid in a tray of steaming human food for the new recruits. Tooka and Etsuyo get cups of rice and miso soup with floating carrots. Hunks of real ginger are unraveling in the broth, like hair. We all sit on the opposite side of the room and watch them chew with a dewy nostalgia that disgusts me even as I find myself ogling their long white fingers on their chopsticks, the balls of rice. The salt and fat smells of their food make my eyes ache. When we eat the mulberry leaves, we lower our new faces to the floor.

They drink down the soup in silence. “Are we dreaming?” I hear one whisper.

“The tea drugged us!” the younger sister, Tooka, cries at last. Her gaze darts here and there, as if she’s hoping to be contradicted. They traveled nine days by riverboat and oxcart, Etsuyo tells us, wearing blindfolds the entire time. So we could be that far north of Yamagata, or west. Or east, the younger sister says. We collect facts from every new
kaiko-joko
and use them to draw thread maps of Japan on the factory floor. But not even Tsuki the Apt can guess our whereabouts.

Nowhere Mill, we call this place.

Dai crosses the room and speaks soothingly to the sisters; then she leads them right to me. Oh, happy day. I glare at her through an unchewed mouthful of leaves.

“Kitsune is quite a veteran now,” says smiling Dai, leading the fishy sisters to me, “she will show you around—”

I hate this part. But you have to tell the new ones what’s in store for them. Minds have been spoiled by the surprise.

“Will the manager of this factory be coming soon?” Etsuyo asks, in a grave voice. “I think there has been a mistake.”

“We don’t belong here!” Tooka breathes.

There’s nowhere else for you now, I say, staring at the floor. That tea he poured into you back in Sakegawa? The Agent’s drink is remaking your insides. Your intestines, your secret organs. Soon your stomachs will bloat. You will manufacture silk in your gut with the same helpless skill that you digest food, exhale. The
kaiko
-change, he calls it. A revolutionary process. Not even Chiyo, who knows sericulture, has ever heard of a tea that turns girls into silkworms. We think the tea may have been created abroad, by French chemists or British engineers.
Yatoi
-tea. Unless it’s the Agent’s own technology.

I try to smile at them now.

In the cup it was so lovely to look at, wasn’t it? An orange hue, like something out of the princess’s floating world woodblocks.

Etsuyo is shaking. “But we can’t undo it? Surely there’s a cure. A way to reverse it, before it’s … too late.”

Before we look like you
, she means.

“The only cure is a temporary one, and it comes from the Machine. When your thread begins, you’ll understand …”

It takes thirteen to fourteen hours for the Machine to empty a
kaiko-joko
of her thread. The relief of being rid of it is indescribable.

These seashore girls know next to nothing about silkworm cultivation. In the mountains of Chichibu, Chiyo tells them, everyone in her village was involved. Seventy families worked
together in a web: planting and watering the mulberry trees, raising the
kaiko
eggs to pupa, feeding the silkworm caterpillars. The art of silk production was very, very inefficient, I tell the sisters. Slow and costly. Until us.