Fifty Words for Rain(63)

This Seiko was a stranger.

Yet just five years from this diary entry, she would be a wife and mother. Eight years after this, she would be a fugitive with a bastard girl in her belly.

Nori wondered where she herself would be in ten years, when Akira had a wife and child. Perhaps back in the attic. Perhaps nowhere at all.

He will be home in two weeks. She wrapped herself up in the thought of it.

That was enough of the diary for today. She would try again tomorrow.



* * *





It was three more days before Nori found herself perched high on a tree branch with the diary spread open in her lap.


September 15th, 1930

I’ve received a letter from home today. Mama asks after my health and my virtue. Unfortunately, both are still intact. If I die here, I will die romantically. I could contract the artist’s disease and perish at the peak of my beauty. Maybe they’d write poems about me.

And I’d never have to go back to Japan.

I have met a gentleman, but he speaks of marriage so I will have to keep looking.

I will never marry. I would rather have a noose around my neck, it is over more quickly.

Maestro Ravel played for me today, I could die. He is such a brilliant man. I would love him if he were not so very old.

He says that I am a rare talent. He is composing again, and the whole city is holding its breath waiting to hear. Or at least I am.

I cannot think what else to say, in spite of how much has happened this week alone. I’ve been having pains in my hands. One of the other students says it is nothing but a woman’s weakness. He says I strain myself studying with great masters and should attend to less difficult things.

A woman’s weakness. He is no different from the men back home. I pay even less attention to him than I do to them.

I’m sure he would like it if I quit. He doesn’t want the competition.



* * *





September 30th, 1930

I have found him at last. He is tall, very tall, with eyes as blue as sapphires. He has hair like spun gold. I think he is the handsomest man I have ever seen. Just like a prince from a story.

He plays the violin, which I have never given much thought to.

He is rich, from an old French family. He had three brothers, but two died in the Great War so now he is left with only one. He favors strawberries, as I do, and he doesn’t like tea.

We have spent three whole nights together but have not passed beyond kissing.

No words of love yet. How long is it meant to take?

I thought I was in love once before. But it was nothing but a pale shadow of the true thing. And anyway, he was only a servant and he is gone now. Sent back to his family.

At least, that’s what Mama told me as she was beating me into convulsions.

Mama always says I will ruin myself and our name. But I don’t live for her, or her name.

I will have what I desire. I will always find a way.



* * *





October 12th, 1930

I love him.

I truly do love him. And he has promised that he loves me back. It is true this time, I know it.

I really can’t bear to go back to Japan now. Kyoto even less, with Mama standing firmly rooted in the last century. She lives in perpetual atonement and would have me do the same. She would have me married and locked safely away from the world like a princess in a tower.

Mama was married at seventeen. She had given birth to three dead sons at my age. She thinks there is a curse on us, I know she does. Her brothers all died too. That is why when Papa married her, it was he who took her name.

There is only Mama and I left now. And Mama is nearing the end of her fertile years. My family looks at me like starving wolves desperate for a piece of flesh.

They care nothing for love, or for my happiness. They want to breed me like a horse.

Mama says that I must do my duty regardless of what is in my heart.

But I think I would die before I live as she has done.



* * *





October 31st, 1930

Today I am a woman.

This truly is the city of love. I am a creature of love.

I will stay here and be happy.

“Ojosama!”

Nori looked up. She was seated on the snowy ground with the diary held up to her face.

As much as she was trying not to, she quite liked the image of her mother that was emerging before her. She was enjoying her time spent lost in a past that she had been forbidden to know of.

This Seiko was passionate and defiant, silly but clever. This was a woman with a desperate need to walk her own path.

This was the bundle of beautiful contradictions that Akira sometimes hinted at that inspired devotion in everyone who met her, from Akiko to Ayame.

But Nori still did not understand how her heart could have grown so cold that she left both of her children behind.

And today, clearly, was not the day that would be figured out.

Ayame’s face was bright. It could mean only one thing.

“Akira-sama’s home,” Nori gasped. He was a day early. She scrambled to her feet and thrust the diary into Ayame’s open arms. “Put this back in its place. I’ll come back for it later.”

“Yes, little madam. But—”

Nori gathered up her skirt around her knees and bolted inside the house. She had felt Akira’s absence like a physical pain, a dull thud that never waned.