Fifty Words for Rain(44)

I go into Nori’s room a little past midnight when I can muster up the gall. I find her sitting on the floor, her basket of yarn beside her. She is knitting something, her fingers moving with practiced ease. I see that she is making a scarf for the coming winter months. She doesn’t look up as I enter, but she doesn’t seem surprised when I speak.

“I’ve come to check on you,” I say.

She nods. “I figured as much. Will you sit?”

I shouldn’t, but I do, pulling out the stool in front of her vanity and lowering myself into it. I feel weary. I was never meant to live this long.

“Don’t you have enough scarves?” I ask.

She smiles a tiny smile. “It’s not for me. It’s for my brother.”

I look at her as if she’s gone mad. She knows better than this. In all her time here, I have never heard her mention him. I thought she had given him up. “Why on earth would you do a thing like that?”

“Because I’ll be dead before very long,” she says quietly. Her hands do not stop moving. “And I wanted to leave him something. This is all I could think of.”

I go cold. “You’re not going to die. Why would you die?”

For the first time, she looks at me. She looks eerily calm. “I won’t be a slave, Kiyomi.”

I hadn’t known she would go this far. I never realized she had this kind of resolve. “Don’t be ridiculous. Life is always better than death.”

She laughs, but it is humorless. “You don’t believe that.”

I am grasping for words. “You don’t know that he’ll be a monster. He could be kind. He could even be handsome.”

Nori stops her knitting. “Kiyomi,” she says, very quietly, “there’s no need to lie.”

I just stare at her. I recognize the dead look in her eyes.

Bile rises in my throat.

She bends her head so that her eyes are shadowed by the veil of her hair. “I was hoping you could get the scarf to him. After I’m gone from here.”

I look at her blankly. “You know that I cannot.”

She nods. She expected this. “I’ll leave it here, then. If you ever change your mind.”

“I won’t be changing it.”

She pushes her hair back. A tear slides down her cheek, the first tear I have seen from her in two years. Something inside me rips in two.

“Yes. I know.”



* * *



—

I wait outside the room where Tanaki is selling Noriko, commanding an auction for her virtue, tantalizing men old enough to be her father with the prospect of keeping such a prize at their side for as long as they desire. And when they don’t desire her anymore? This is not spoken of. We aren’t concerned with this part.

I can’t watch. For the first time in a lifetime, I can’t bring myself to watch. But I can hear. He is hardly quiet.

“This rare young blossom . . . just thirteen, so young, so fresh! She is untouched . . . of a fine form, gentlemen, a fine form . . . Who will be the first . . . Ah, thank you, Tono-sama, a very generous offer . . . Do we have another? Mutai-sama, not your type? That’s all right, that’s all right, we have other girls arriving within the month . . . Perhaps they’ll be more to your taste. But back to the matter at hand . . . Don’t be shy, gentlemen, don’t be shy.”

I know a few of the men inside the room. Some are worse than others. There’s one, a young doctor with a terrible stutter and a clubfoot, who is not so awful. He always calls me Kiyomi-san, and he says “please” whenever he asks for anything. He would be kind to her. I don’t even think he would bed her—he never touches any of the other girls. All he ever wants is company. He would be content to listen to her read poetry in her calming voice. I hope that for her. I hope so hard that I dig my nails into my palms until they are bright red.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Miyuki trying and failing to be discreet. I gesture for her to come forward. She does so, and I can see that she is white as a sheet.

“It’s happening now, isn’t it?” she whispers. Her voice is hoarse. She has been crying.

I nod.

She wrings her hands together. “When will they take her?”

“Within the week. As soon as the payment is complete.”

She draws in a breath. “Let me go with her.”

I shut my eyes. I am far too tired to deal with this. “No.”

“I’d go for free. I don’t care.”

“What about your sister?”

She deflates. Her big eyes well up with tears. “Please let her stay here. Please, Kiyomi-san.”

I shake my head. “She is too valuable. I thought . . . I thought we’d have her for some years yet, but . . . it seems not.”

Miyuki falls to her knees in front of me. She lays the side of her face against my feet. I look down at her, horrified.

“What the hell are you doing?”

She weeps into my socks. “You can’t sell her.”

“I have no choice.”

“No!” she cries.

I try to wriggle free, but she is holding me like a desperate animal. I grab hold of her shoulders and push, but she is heavy as a slab of marble.

“What are you doing? What’s come over you? Miyuki, stop it!”