There was only ever me.
Only I existed.
Until there was you.
There lay a barren monster in me from the beginning. At first, it hatched from my anger, harboured between the lines of my hate and happiness; a trivial and useless thing like control, and honour. There was a promise whispered in my ear, a reason to love, a meaning to loathe, and the existence it lead thereafter was shallow. But still, the chains around its ankles rattled, and the rope about its wrists left lacerations, cold on my heart, and bitter to my tongue. There was a time when those promises were whole, and a day breaking on the bleeding horizon didn't mean a day alone.
This is not a love story. When I was found, it was in a house in the back streets of Edo, 1633. Edo was forgotten beside the Geisha city of Miyako, divided by the war of the Tokugawa shogunate. The beauty of the city was buried under the dust and mud of war, the only people left made their living providing a time of leisure to the samurai. I was a child of twelve years old, an only child forgotten to my mother and father who made their living ducking between shadows under the cover of night. The only thing they taught me was how to barter with what I had to offer to survive. Unsure of what it meant to survive, I knew only living at that time, and living was simply an occurrence. It occurred, whether I was actively in it or not, and I was content. I didn't know what it meant to care or be cared for, I didn't know what it meant to be unclean in any sense. I didn't know what Edo really looked like or what the people living there did day to day that differed from me.
The samurai, like a whirlwind, came calling anyway, without consideration for my indifference. Four suits of armour driven by what I assumed to be men, but the glimpse of them was through my fingers as I peered. Covered in a blanket, clutching as tightly to the rough wood and dirt of the floor as I could, I wished to be invisible.
"This girl's family has left." Girl. I had been found in my mother's old yukata, my hair long and uncared for in my twelve years. Dirt on my knees and hands, my feet bare and nearly blackened.
Beauty.
"Imprisoned for stealing." Imprisoned because it was the last resource. My mother and father needed the excuse to be rid of me, but leaving me was the easier way. The way out of that life was through consequence. The way to the next event in that life was through consequence as well.
Obsession.
"She can belong to you, for free."
Choice.
The Okiya was in the centre of Edo, the place on the border of the lands surrounding that which were segregated by the battles. On one side of the border, pleasure. On the other, pain. The Okiya, a house that had a dripping aura of female presence, was certainly the gateway to a side of Edo that I had never experienced. I crossed over to the pleasure side of the city so effortlessly, on the back of a horse in the grip of some strange and savage man. It would become a foreshadow to the rest of my existence, but as I was dragged away from pain, away from what was familiar and safe, I felt exhilaration through the fear of what fate awaited me. As the front steps of the Okiya came into view, I recognized it was a place where a different kind of strength was taught. I could feel the energy of endurance, of beauty, and I understood that this house of Geisha would somehow become my salvation and downfall.
The samurai holding me tightly threw me to the ground. My face was in the dirt long before the rest of my limbs caught up, and the momentum of my fall sent dust and dry mud into airborne clouds. Through the debris, I opened my eyes to the black lacquer of a geta sandal, and the smooth woven silk of a tabi sock. As I raised my gaze, I took in the sight of dark green silk, vibrant red of a pattern that swept across the hem of the kimono this elegant being was wearing. I dared not lift my eyes to meet hers. Though this new world laid out before me was incomprehensible to me, I felt in my soul that this woman before me deserved the respect of my averted gaze.
"If she is free." She said, addressing the samurai. I lay in between them on the ground, too paralyzed with fear to even crawl into a low bow. There was a hint of amusement in her voice as it floated down to rest around me on the ground.
"Bathe her. She might be pretty through the filth."
Meaningless.
"Mother?!"
Tune.
"His hair should have been cut at this age!"
Mistake.
"Don't. He'll be punished for this charade." As if I was not a victim to my life. As if I could have changed my world should I have wanted to.
Drown.
"We'll make you proud."
Desperate.
"A dishonor to his family's name."
Five years of my life unrelenting, uninterrupted passion of a thousand failed before me. And at the beginning of it all, I as a twelve year old child caught in the blinding rage bestowed upon me and my past. I lived it until I was sixteen, and I let my freedom perish and burn at the hands of the stage, the lights, the calls of my name. And it all meant nothing, as beatless wings against my back. I did not have the pride to say I was sold. I did not have a smile on my face when Mother told me the truth of how I came to belong to her Okiya. I was given away, and taken with pity. I was trained to be a geisha because I was being punished for being left alone, punished for being found and rescued, and my twisted sense of what it meant to be cherished was defined for me.
Edo, like me, was divided. During the nights I could see into the distance where the black of the sky was ripped open by the fireworks of the shrines on the mountains burning to the riots of the last remaining Christians in Japan. The Tokugawa Shogunate and their rein of power was threatened by the invasion of the West. They were righteous, and they told us the purity of Japan was at stake if the people were given options. Japan was an island, self sustaining, and the people were islands themselves. They were strong because they were the same, they could bond together with no conflict. It was called Sakoku, and it was a policy of isolation. I understood isolation. Japan was separated from the rest of the world. No other type of person was permitted to enter the country, and the Christians were the target to be destroyed. Still, they wore their crosses with pride, flaunting as if to dare every swordsman to gather enough courage to strike them down. It was a civil war, and there was no escape. The samurai were on one side, defending their land, and everyone else was on the other side, praying that it would all be over.
All around me, there was blasphemy, until I was given to the Okiya. When I was a child, I was caged, and my world was a small space that shrank with every breath I took. I was locked away from the outside, I didn't know what existed anywhere past the threshold of the door. Sheltered, covered, to protect my childish innocence from the wars and manipulation of the Tokugawa Shogunate in power. The war had begun when I was twelve, in 1633, the same year that I was abandoned and then again taken in by the mother of the Okiya. But life did not change for me. My family had been at war with Edo long before, and from birth, I had always been taught to hide. That was one side of life, divided, like Edo.
On the other side, there was a beauty that I could never have fathomed into existence before I was a witness to it. The curtain of poverty and misfortune was lifted, and behind it was a world of light and colour. The women were enigmas that walked the streets showered with praise, kicking up the fallen flower petals from the trees with the hems of their kimonos. I had never seen a woman in such power, such grace and beauty, and I was taken. Taken not by lust, but by a jealous nature. I wanted that lush beauty for myself. Had it not been for the Okiya mother that took me in, I would have let the chance slip by me while I reached for it with lazy hands. But maybe I was blessed, after all.
The Sumida River ran constant through Edo, a force with the strength of my heart and power of my life. Once seeds of jealousy had been planted within me, there was nothing in nature strong enough to cure me. The river was the nature from which I came, from where my name, Spirit, called me back. I was connected to it, as I had learned that I was connected to everything else that breathed to live, and how I lured my audience to me with my simple dance was with that connection where I held their heart strings. It was called Shinto, and I was made a child of it when I entered the Okiya. I lived knowing that everything had a spirit, had energy, and the flow of that energy could be molded and shaped into whatever I desired. I lived under my own power, because I was God of my world. I lived in my fantasy because I was trained, dressed in kimono, given fans to dance with, given every tool to make men weep at my feet. I knew all the secrets the women didn't understand. What did I see when I dressed in front of the mirror? Hips too slender, a chest too flat, a jaw line too angular, and hair too coarse. All my limitations as a man in a woman's profession. Everything masculine about me was hidden under makeup, silk, and still it all shone through the expression on my face, that I was a chameleon in this world. I was something so different from every other creature, but somehow I still belonged with them.
When those Shinto shrines burned at the hands of the rebelling Christians, Japanese and Portugese alike, we outside of the war brewing retreated back into our makeshift world, with our makeshift shrines, and all the hope we could gather. There were still times when I thought hope was worth something, when I thought that my performances in the bars and teahouses were enough to make the warriors happy, to inspire them. But I didn't hang on to that childish part of my world for long.
"You're lonely."
"Sumimasen yo?" I was sitting on the floor in a pile of silk cushions, brushing my hair. The early morning sun was beginning to paint the sky deep red through the lingering black of the fading night. We had returned from a party that lasted until 1:00, and my face was damp, there were streaks beginning to show in my white face paint. She was flush in the cheeks with the lingering intoxication of sake.
My adopted sister smiled in that weary way she had, that I had watched shine as we aged, that I knew I would one day fall victim to as the rest of the world crumbled around us. We had both been chosen for this makeshift family, and there was no relation between us past the knowledge of our similar profession. Still, we were the same. We laughed at the same hope, and we cried at the same pain. "There are some things you can hide, Seishin, like your body. And some you can't because you're too weak to lie about them. Your loneliness is one of those things that makes you weak."
The way she lingered in the doorway, leaning slightly over it as if to entice me with some manner of her existence she didn't yet know how to tame. I ignored those things about her she so desperately wanted me to see. I ignored her beauty because mine was stronger. I ignored her movement because mine were more fluid. I ignored the way she would gaze into my soul, try to read me, because my eyes pierced deeper.
There are things about you that make you sinister.
"My dear sister, my welfare became a useless concern to you when your mother gave me my own room in this Okiya." I peered through my hair, watching her in the mirror of the vanity, where her intentions were lost, and the world was inverted. Black became white, dark became light, and even through the thickest hours of the night where whispers were swallowed before they were heard, this world of mine through the mirror was pure.
I had been given my own room in the Okiya on my sixteenth birthday, 1637, after four years trailing on the skirts of the women in the school where music and dance were sewn into the mesh of my existence and the man in me was ironed out smooth, thinly. I had been working as a Maiko for one year. There were no curves in my body to throw, there was no rhythm in my soul to sway to. All of those things I had learned, all of those things that were already bred into the women who became my sisters, I had to learn. I had to teach my body how to move in unnatural ways, invite the devil to possess me so that I could find the measure I needed. I had to die and remake myself.
My sister, the same age, was more awkwardly coming to understand the body she was growing into. She took for granted the things about her that made her a woman, and pronounced her right to curves, grace, and desire without ever introducing herself to them. Instead these traits about her trailed behind her, almost catching up, and she charged on ahead of them without looking back. I looked at us side by side when I could see her in the reflection of my mirror. My black hair like a cascade across my back that came to rest at my hip bones, just as her's was. My eyes round and slightly upturned in the corners, just as her's was. My lips full and broad, just like her. I had grown into something else, in addition, that she did not.
There are things about me that look good on you.
"I'm not lonely, though. You're desperate." You want me to be lonely so you can save me. But I don't have anything I need to be saved from.
There was a lapse of silence between us as she gathered her remaining wit. It ran thinly, and her words held no strength behind the tone of her voice. "You're a sorry excuse for a man, Seishin. And a sorry excuse for a woman."
It wasn't enough just to love you.
I smirked at her as she left my sight, and I turned back to face the mirror. Our world was small, and we were all so close together. Over the few short years we had together, many encounters between us we called practice were really nothing more than a chance to to dance for her, or for her to show me how gentle she could be with a makeup brush. One night when we were thirteen, as we returned home from a performance at an Izakaya, she followed behind me to my room. Our performance had been perfect from start to finish, no flaw could be found, and with her playing shamisen for me to dance to, we earned more together than any other Izakaya that night. I let my body fall heavily to the floor in front of my vanity, turning my head to the makeup smudged mirror to asses how much my eyeliner had run. I barely remembered she was there after I caught sight of myself.
"Let me help you, Seishin." She so enjoyed the sound of my name on her tongue. She sat gently next to me, not making a sound, smoothing her palm over her knees to tuck her kimono under her just like when she sat next to a client she wanted to impress with her beauty and grace.
I sat with no grace or poise in that moment, removing my obi so just a thin inner belt remained holding my kimono closed. I took a deep breath from the moment the obi was released, and blew it out through a purse in my lips while she reached for one of my ankles. She placed my heel gently on her knee, and with skilled fingers, unbuttoned the side of my tabi and with drew it from my foot. She placed it neatly on the floor next to her, and waved her hand to invite my other heel onto her knee. I obliged without much thought, paying more attention to the fog of exhaustion behind my eyes. As she removed my other tabi, I let my head fall back, hooking my hands together under my thighs, staring hard at the slats of wood in the ceiling.
Without any other words, she moved around me, facilitating the cleanliness of my surroundings. She took a scrap of lipstick stained linen from my vanity and situated herself between me and the mirror. Raising her hand to my face, she began to smear the black charcoal from my eyebrow. Her fingers traced the side of my face, down my neck, across my collarbone, and I snatched it from my body before it went any further. I tossed her hand aside, my eyes sharply meeting hers, carefully and calculatingly devoid of any expression. She had been testing my limitations, and I finally decided she had reached them.
"I didn't meant to…" There was fear in her eyes, and as much as the touch of me excited her, the fear in her excited me.
"Yes you did." I cut her off with abruptness, exposing the intention in her words. "My dear sister, how many times have I rejected your intrusiveness?" I laughed through the words, mostly drunk and exhausted, her actions only amused me. She became silent and still, and I stared her down into the deepest part of her soul. "How many times?" I asked again. "And only when I've had too much sake at the Izakaya with our clients. How many times have I told you 'no'?"
I could see in her face as her expression twisted that she didn't know if I wanted her answer me to to simply be submissive. I could see she wanted to plead her case to me, justify herself, but her heart was in a place too close to mine. At that time, I didn't feel the need to be intimidating, that time in my life would come much later. I felt that putting fear in her would do nothing for either of us. We lived together, worked together, danced together, and I felt no need to poison her feelings toward me, only harden them. Create a boundary.
"Aishiteru, Seishin." She used a word that was reserved for expression of love between two people to secretly and desperately I believed no one could ever find love worthy of the expression. Her voice was small, nearly lost in the piercing sound of the silence. My ears were still ringing from the sound of the music, and laughter at the bar.
"Don't you dare use my name." We did not use each other's names, instead calling each other 'sister' and 'brother'. Though we were not related by blood in any form, a child living in an Okiya is simply a sister to every other child. Though we had grown up together, I found myself insulted, but whether it was by the combination of words or truly by the use of my name so informally I couldn't be sure. "And don't you dare say that word to me."
There was no use for anything further. She simply left my room. I would not know the strength of what I had done to her in those moments for some time later.
My family was taken from me. I was not sent away from them, I was left alone. My family had been poor but strong enough that theft didn't need to become an option. Instead, it was an excuse. Prison provided them with a better home, and the guarantees that a life of their own couldn't give them. They didn't care about me. They weren't strong enough to chase the evil out of me. As a child, experiencing the tragedy of losing my family was an ocean of feeling, memories, and everything else I couldn't imagine needing to burry. As time passed, I didn't care. My family became the mistress of the Okiya as my mother, and the other child that belonged to her as my sister. Still, the evil grew inside of me, and I could feel it pacing like a tiger in its cage. My family fed the evil, encouraged me to let it take me over, because it made me desirable, and desire made me rich.
Behind my eyes through my sleep, I felt a shiver through every pore of my skin, every follicle of hair. When I opened them to darkness, the call of pain, hunger, anguish rose from where it was foreign to me. Not my voice, not my rush of panic, but the tender things in my dreams washed away as the last note sounded and another began. I crawled across the floor to my sister's room, keeping low, keeping under the sound that woke me, should it ring through the Okiya again.
She had the devil in her, my sister. As I had in me, and there was nothing that ran through either veins or likeness that made us repent. We were children of a different God, held under a different light, and to our ends it was a poison that tasted sweet. Evil drew us together, and through the screams of our Okiya mother that night, I saw, evil broke us apart.
Hitori kiri. All alone.
Her body was frail, with the weakness of a woman that I despised, even when her spirit held it above me, and I was proven the sacrifice. She was now, simple as her beauty, a blue cast of dampening cold on her skin as she was bare. I could see that she shivered moments ago. The only thought that came to me was her beauty, in the nakedness she shone almost translucent, and had I known what an angel there was to become of her when night was her only cover, I would have thrown myself to the feet of that angel and begged her to love me. But I was blind to it, to all the passion and hope. Her fingers were swelled with the blood that stopped, her eyes clenched shut through bloodshot tears, and the rope burned a pattern of blisters around her neck.
Anata wa boku no desu. You're mine.
I was only lovely. I was only a shadow in the radiance of her life, casting a darkness upon her feet that lead her to destruction. My words couldn't reach her, but I loved her just the same, for what she had given me and what never would be uttered over her grave stone. She had sinned. She was lost to any God who had watched over her life. And so her body remained, hanging from her refuge, while the room in which she died was locked away forever and blessed in the hopes of some angel to have mercy on her wandering soul. I prayed she wouldn't leave. I prayed for her to stay by my side, every night past the prying eyes of the world, at the shrine I built for her on the floor just outside the locked door. The draft from under the screen would always stifle the incense, and I would rebuild it against the angry ghosts still prowling there, every night, to honour her, to help carry her to Heaven. The stench of death was sickening after days I couldn't bare to count. But the shine in my eyes had faded with her, and still I wondered over every corner of my mind, why it was now that her life had been wasted, and I had been given the name of a spirit.
"If you keep setting up that shrine, the devil will never find her."
I looked up over my shoulder, keeping the rag in place over my nose to cover the smell of the rot inside the room, and she was stoic. My mother was as uneventful as my sister's death, when the screams of terror were devoured by the dawn and the colour flushed her cheeks, she was the same as she had ever been, and unaffected by the reality only hours before. Now days had gone by, and she hadn't wept, she hadn't mourned. "Why are you keeping her in there? Why don't you burn her and set her free?"
I had lit sandalwood incense every day since her death, in that altar I made outside her door where she would rest eternally. The stench of death took over the hallway, and I covered the bamboo vents in my room, and prayed that no visitors would come. I prayed that no one would know she perished here, that no one would miss her, or cry for her. But it was selfish. I needed to be cleansed, and I needed to know that I was cleansed of her, because I felt her death so heavily upon me it was as if her spirit was left sitting atop my shoulders. Every day that I waved that incense to drive the evil away, I felt lighter. The flowers I had taken from the garden had died, choked in the soiled air of the house, begged for an escape like I did. More death, more destruction to be rid of. I breathed it all in. I let it soak me, take me over, because I thought that breathing in this evil would rid me of the evil already within me from my birth. If it did, then I was saved. If I was wrong, it made no difference. I didn't want to go to Heaven anyway, because I didn't think that far into my future.
There was the smell of rust and steel, as if it churned on the inside of me instead of blood, when Mother struck me and sent the protective rag flying out of my unsuspecting hand. I groped the floor for the rag to smother the stench of death in the air, where my cheek was suddenly against the wood there, the pattern of the gaps between the boards leaving parallel marks. And on the other, a growing red pattern of shame in the shape of a hand print. "If I set her free, you'll be damned, Seishin."
Her spirit would chase me, because the meaning of my name called to her, and her love made her die in hate. She would avenge herself because there would be no one else to, and she would come after me, because she had loved me. She wouldn't rest until my body joined hers hanging from the ceiling, because it was her desperation for me that killed her, just as if it was done by my own hands.
I sat upright again, throwing the hair over my shoulder. I didn't have to hide from Mother, where the tender parts of my mind were hers, and my innocence could be lost at the raise of her brow. I looked back to her, empty, as if all the good in the world had been wasted where I placed my hand on my cheek to dampen the sting. And I thought I had been shown kindness. I thought that was the way of the world past the circle of salt surrounding my bedroom. Pain, despair, those things were golden to me. I didn't feel them, I didn't know what sorrow was, because I had never felt anything opposite of it.
Moments passed where there was nothing between us, I so delicately perched upon the floor, tucking my legs beneath me again as if I had never had reason to move. Mother stared down on me, and as I watched, her eyes filled with a shine that I recognized as despair, from so many times watching in the mirror of the vanity as my own did the same.
"It's your fault there is now ungodliness in this house."
She turned to leave, and I had one hand still upon the warmed flesh of my cheek, the other reaching for her. Silently begging for her not to leave me, not to show me this hatred, to place another bruise upon me, to ravage all the spirits I still believed in if it would make her happy, if it would make her love me. I couldn't explain that need I felt, I couldn't understand why it took such a hold on me that I wanted more pain instead of solitude.
"She loved you, and you ignored her. She could have been immortally beautiful."
She loved you.
I bit my lip, clenching my eyes shut to block out the lies, but the truths were everywhere around me. My fingers closed around her ankle within reach, a desperate sorrow, a hungry longing. Her hand connected again with the same spot on my cheek stained already, and my voice came as a moan of pleasure.
Upon my thigh where the yukata fell apart, the stench of burning flesh and flash of pain that came in bursts like a nightmare I was slowly waking from. Again and again, and when I looked, the stick of incense from the altar made tiny pools of blood there, like tears cried with force from Heaven.
"It's your fault she's dead."
I was still delicate in the places she knew, still different from her, and she drove a bare foot in flashed where the light swung in the hallway, until it was between my legs, and I was gasping for air on my side, burning within where I was constricted.
"A man as good as dead."
As I lay unmoving, now I prayed she would have mercy, and spare me the rest of my decency while I was hindered. I wouldn't try to get up, I wouldn't try to call to her, I would only lay still until the pain in me subsided, and the strength to my legs returned. My breath was hot over the skin of my arm already printed with the tainting hands of reason. She didn't feel for me, she didn't know how this body acted, and I shouldn't have. She couldn't let go. That was why she didn't take my sister from that room. She didn't want to let go of her, and she wanted a reason to keep hating me.
"Dance now, Seishin."