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Legends speak of the language of the bones—how mysteries of life and death and love, which cannot be understood by mortal minds, are solved in the skeleton.
The strangeness of my life combines into a puzzle of impossible reckoning, but my bones know it, and if you hearken to me, your own frame will hear and answer the song of my story.
* * *
Stone lanterns cast long shadows over the combed gravel walks of Madame Ozawa's winter garden. A hired poet stood under the eaves, singing the stanzas of a tale about star-crossed lovers, slow and mournful.
Most of Madame’s dinner guests had departed for the evening, all but a stubborn few lingered beneath the naked branches of the plum tree.
Cook yawned, exposing a set of unsightly crooked teeth.
"You finish cleaning up, Furi. I'm tired."
The crockery crashed in the basin as I shifted a fragile tower of porcelain bowls, pots, and fragments of food among the scattered abalone shells. Leftovers from Madame's feast. There was still so much work, and my shoulders collapsed at the sight of it.
"Crush the shells out in the compost heap tomorrow morning, but you had better take them out to the garden right away or they'll draw flies." Cook yawned again. "I'm going to bed."
She left me, peering at an empty abalone shell and its watery iridescence under the low lamplight. Pretty, even in the clutter.
At once, an idea unfolded in my mind's eye. A shot of adrenaline spiked my blood, and the workday's fatigue disappeared.
With new-found energy, I piled shell after shell into my cotton apron and heaved them down the garden steps and along the gravel path back to the garden spring. Kneeling beside the pool's edge of bare earth, I dug my fingers deep into the moist black clay. Yes! It would do nicely.
I found a mochi mallet from within the garden shed and brought it down with a mean crack! on the shells, and then raced to the kitchen for another load. When I had finished breaking the shells up into fragments, I separated them by light and dark, stared at them, and sorted them again by color and intensity, leaving myself five piles of mother-of-pearl tiles organized by light and color. While I worked, a vision emerged in my mind's eye, sufficient in clarity to propel my fingers to expert speed and precision.
Within the hour, I had begun working out a seascape mosaic along the pool's border of earth. By moonlight, the iridescent tiles gleamed white against black earth, wreathing the pool in soft light. I worked deep into the night, and smiled at the glowing design with the lunar reflection's ethereal effect. I shivered, not with cold, but with the thrill of a vision born inside my head. It tickled me with its foolishness, if not outright madness. But I couldn't silence the whispering of a warm southern gale, seeming to repeat the words:
The gods will descend from their heavens to bathe in your garden pool!
* * *
Madame’s daughter Satomi clucked her tongue as she stood over me where I crouched in the kitchen, drying the last of the porcelain from the prior night’s dinner.
“Furi. Go to mother in her parlor.” She paused, the smug pleasure in her voice evident. “I think you know the reason.”
Madame’s summons came without surprise. I knew she would notice the mosaic. Madame didn’t need much provocation to punish me. My posture, the length of my neck, even the straightness of my gait irritated her. Any sign of dignity was an insult to her conviction of my inferiority, and she hated the sight of me.
“I’ve been waiting.” Madame’s warm breath blew a frosty cloud into the morning air as she knelt beside the table.
I knelt and bowed my forehead to the floor. “I am sorry, Madame. It was rude of me to be so slow.”
She let me bend for a long moment with my head upon the tatami floor before she finally spoke. “What have you done?”
I knew, or at least guessed, but it was never a good strategy to appear savvy. “I have so many faults. I haven’t guessed for which you have called me this morning.”
I kept my forehead planted steadfastly upon the floor, but I could feel her cold eyes twitch in irritation.
“It was your disaster I saw at the garden pond.”
The mosaic, of course. “Yes, Madame.”
“You stole the shells. You will pay the price. And you will clean them all up before guests arrive this afternoon. Now stand…and disrobe.”
I stood, untied my robe, and let it drop, leaving me naked but for a thin cotton undergarment. As my clothing pillowed lightly around my ankles, my skin prickled against the assault of the winter air, but this was not a novel sensation. Madame’s lashings were routine enough—at least, they had been common enough this winter, and I stoically bared the fresh scars from my last instance of disobedience.
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Madame’s lip curled in disgust at my injured skin. “You are such a disgrace,” she muttered as she raised the switch.
* * *
It was unusual for a merchant woman to possess grounds on the scale of Madame’s garden, but the Ozawa mill was many generations old, and more prosperous than most, though the garden’s glory had faded in my time.
The mill’s walls stretched many jou around the house and mill. The rich black earth nourished up aged and stately plum, persimmon, and maple trees. Fine conifers grew about the spring, though they had long outgrown the sculpting of a master. And most of the further growth crowded in a tangle of unruly wood and branch to the edge of the property. Still, I thought the grounds ample to the inspiration of a poet.
Madame’s gardener died some few years after my arrival. She declined to replace him. I didn’t mind it, but this really meant the trees’ maintenance fell mostly to me. And if I deviated in the slightest from the traditional garden of combed gravel walks and classically sculpted junipers and cypress trees, Madame found reason to punish me.
Punishment notwithstanding, I wouldn't lift a finger to destroy the mosaic around the mineral pool. Beatings were inevitable. I was born to create. It was the only pleasure I knew, and it was enough. I was willing to suffer for it. And although the price I paid was dear, I thought it my burden alone. It wasn't.
I had been the lowest ranking in Madame Ozawa's servants, but there came one who might have been lower...and oddly, more threatening to Madame Ozawa. He came and went like the moon, exerting tremendous pull upon me, leading me far from my intended course.
* * *
A stranger awaited admittance on the southern veranda in full view of the household servants through the south-facing doors, and set the house buzzing. None of us had ever seen anyone like him. Bronze as typical of a peasant laborer, he stood a full head taller, and much broader than a peasant diet could reasonably support. The only thing to explain it was a secret source of nourishment. So we set him down as a thief as well.
Worse still, he couldn’t have been of pure Otoppon ethnicity. His eyes were set wider on his face and curved, almost like a foreigner’s, and their frank stare at me would have affronted any person of respectable rank. But while his gaze angered me, I could not exactly justify my own indignation. I was little better than dust within Madame’s house.
I averted my eyes and ducked past him, withdrawing to an inner corner to take up some unfinished embroidery work. The servants and weavers whispered about him as they worked, calling him the bastard child of an Otopponese whore and a Vineland trading merchant. They weighed him, measured him, and declared him ugly, examining him by the rule of cohesion. I thought him a very worthy subject to copy, examining him by the rule of symmetry.
Madame’s was a sturdy house, with a clay-tiled roof, a broad surrounding veranda overhung by deep, heavy beamed cedar eaves, but few secrets could be kept between its retracting shoji walls. Some of this stranger’s secrets were soon disclosed by Madame’s grainy voice, elevated with contempt. “You cannot satisfy Yamada’s debt to me. Go back and tell him no. I have only a small farm for personal use. I’ve no need for someone of your sort.”
There was a pause, as she read the letter over and re-emphasized, with slightly more patience, her reasons for not needing him.
“I do not need much,” he said, almost in a whisper.
“I cannot board you under a proper roof.”
“I would be satisfied in the gardener’s shed.”
“The roof leaks irreparably.”
“It will be fine, and you will find your increased yield far outweighs the balance of my daily bowl of porridge.”
I was sure Madame wouldn’t take in such an irregular person, and probable thief, but how wrong I was. I didn’t know how exactly he managed to persuade her, but I suspected it was similar to my own case. Madame always had a sharp eye for a fine beast of burden.
His name was Ansei—only Ansei, without family name. And beautiful or no, I hated him.
The garden had been my sanctuary. My weaving, I worked by moonlight, because I required little sleep. Madame was strict about creative liberties and punished me whenever I followed designs of my own imagining.
With Ansei in the garden, I would be confined to the mill by day, working tedious patterns under Madame’s constant observation and vulnerable to Satomi’s unchecked fits of temper.
As the lowest of Madame’s small number of servants, I was often shamed and victimized, but Madame was fond of reminding me that I had not suffered every humiliation common to female servitude in her house.
I was lucky, for she had only elderly Tatsuo and no living male family members. And while I was routinely beaten, I was never violated. I had this single thread of dignity. A younger, and less than scrupulous servant as Ansei appeared to be might change this status, and the thought of him filled me with a complicated mixture of curiosity and foreboding.
* * *
Cook and Madame’s maid Kame gossiped about Ansei for days. They bent their heads close and whispered. The words curse and bad luck reached my hearing repeatedly
“You should tell Madame,” Kame said, dragging her thin futon from the closet.
“Madame does not consult me about these things. She does not care for traditions. Think of it, she doesn’t even keep her father’s shrine,” Cook said, reaching into the tansu chest to tuck safely away the small Buddhist charm she wore daily. Then she screamed. “Ah! Get out! You nasty spider! Quick! Give me something to smash it with!”
“Don’t kill it,” I said. “Spiders are good for the garden.” I scooped up a splendid specimen of an orb spider in a small square of fabric and released it gently outside on the veranda.
“Then he should stay in the garden, and out of my chest,” Cook muttered.
I knelt down low on the veranda to observe the creature. “You’re a beautiful fellow, aren’t you?” I whispered, watching him creep across the path.
“Only you would touch such a frightful little beast as that,” Kame said on my return.
“We would all be dead by pestilence, but for the assistance of frightful little beasts like him,” I whispered, unfolding my futon and small blanket.
Cook muttered and turned on her futon to the wall. “They’re hideous creatures who eat their own young. I shouldn’t be shocked at your preference for them.”
“They don’t eat their young.” I said in a low voice, and mostly to myself.
“But they eat their mates,” Cook said. “You will make me believe you a jorogumo.”
“Eating their mates is necessary to regulate the population—the females die after laying their eggs. If she didn’t check the males, there would be no male and female balance. It is the way spiders survive,” I said, then added as an afterthought, “And if I were a jorogumo, I would have to be the most passive spider demon there ever was. You have lived with me unmolested seven years.”
Neither Cook nor Kame had more to say to me. We were, after all, on only slightly more cordial terms than Madame and myself. We had shared close quarters most of seven years, and we might have shared as much sympathy in our mutual humility, but Cook preferred to cling to her tiny step of superiority, and lorded over me and Kame both. But Kame flattered Cook for better treatment, and while they liked each other very little, they hated me, and often aligned against me.
Was it any wonder I protected my fellow weavers of fibers? I could admire them for their industry and the beauty of their webs. I felt an odd companionability with them. Humans seemed to hate me, too, and I would take care of and shelter my creeping friends.