When the snow fell, those samurai and their daimyo sought me out again to warm their bodies. The warmth I provided was cheaper than firewood, a warmth to fall asleep to with no remorse for, no obligation to. There was not a heart that entered the ochaya where I performed that I didn't capture. One by one, they traded the secrets of their fights, their methods; a dance to them the way it was to me.
I traded a secret dance of my own. The war had separated Edo, and guilt was a word foreign to the lips of anyone, where the atmosphere was luxurious and thick and creatures existed only for use in the night. I lived it. I was one of those creatures that became an enigma, and I was craved for the way I held myself, the way I was wrapped in a kimono, the way I danced. But Edo was a lonely place, obstructed by civil war brought by the Christians, and so I was craved because there was another dance only I was willing to perform. And by the time the sakura blossomed, the sun lingered in the sky a little longer, I earned my sword and way to avenge those crimes against me. The samurai paid my service equally, blurring the lines of their code of conduct to teach me their way of the sword. My sin for their lies, and that was how it always worked. Edo blossomed at night, like a flower nourished by the moon and stars, and the darkness as a mask for the beauty that was so intoxicating. It was a different breed of people that were set loose there, all waiting with outstretched arms because they were a breed lonely enough that secrets, decency, didn't matter.
I learned forgiveness early in my chosen profession, denying how much of it was chosen to begin with and how much of it I was forced to discover. Forgiveness meant to me that every cause I sold myself for was worth its end in the weight of the gold thrown at my back melted into the weight of my sword.
"Whoever told you that you wouldn't make a name for yourself was a fool, you know that?"
"I know that." I let my eyes fall to her, sweep over the tiny woman at my feet, as the porous way she ran the blade over my leg calmed me in some discomfort. Swipe of blade, pour of water, lather of soap; a pattern at least that I could follow. I clutched the yukata tighter in a clenched fist at my waist, weary of the way it draped over my relaxed thigh. I wasn't shy, I didn't have decency, but I took pity on her conscious. This young girl, set to the task of shaving the legs of a whore; I felt she was the richest woman in the world; rich with the kinds of things I would never understand. She didn't know how grateful I was for her. She didn't know that I prayed for her future to be kind. She was a maiko, training beside her sisters as I had trained beside mine. When she was fifteen next year, she would be a geisha, and I was to become her mentor, because she trusted me and I had some kind of love for her.
"You're better than the geisha!"
"They don't take men back to their rooms at the end of the night." I reminded her. "That's why I am the one they ask for."
She looked up at me through the curtain of hair cascading from my back to cover my face as it often did, shifting on her knees to settle her weight to one side. She draped the wet cloth over the side of the water bucket gently, showing as much care to it as she did my abused flesh. "I hope I can be as good an entertainer as you are one day, Seishin-sama."
"For the sake of your innocence, I hope that never comes true."
She was hopeless, like I was. She was lost, like I was. She couldn't remember what misfortune had lead her to the okiya, or considered that her entire life would be spent in a circle of doubt, and harsh beauty. We were a perfect match. The night of our Sansun-kudo ceremony, we covered ourselves in the dark blanket of the sky, and I was invited into her room in the okiya that made me.
"I'm glad you came back here." She said to me, lighting a stick of incense. The tendrils of sandalwood scent danced in the breezes we created as we settled upon the tatami. "I hope you're not jealous of my room."
There was a practiced gaze that I had for moments to save my embarrassment, and it flickered through my eyes without my control while my slight laugh escaped. "Why would I be jealous?" I held the match to my lips, and extinguished the flame with one puff of air. "I've got my own home."
"I know a lot about you, Seishin-sama, but why did Okasan make you leave?" She tucked her knees to her chest, grasping with her arms as she cocked her head to listen to my story.
But I didn't deliver. "I was complicated."
"Where did your name come from?" I could see a sparkle appear in her eyes even through the dim light of the room. "What part of your name will I have?"
The feeling swept through me like I was made part of her fantasy. She wanted this life, that was the difference between us. I loved that life, but my choice to live it was gone, replaced by my will power to simply survive. I thrived because I had to. She thrived because she had respect for me, and lived perfectly by my charade.
I took the stick of incense and waved my wrist delicately through the air, spelling out the characters of my name. I watched it wistfully as the smoke strings lingered in the air before dispersing. "My name means Spirit. I don't remember what name I had before I came to the okiya." I began to explain. "I know what they'll name you. Seimei. Life. Because this is where you thrive." I waved the incense with a flick of my wrist again, writing the characters for her name in the air. The first character was the same as mine. "I'm the spirit of this place. You're the path the existence within it takes."
She was mesmerized, her eyes glazing over in a display of her silent emotion, her hidden longing. Starstruck with the ebb and flow of Edo, her existence in it a complete fantasy that she had written in her mind, and watched it come true before her eyes. I was perfect to teach her the way of life in Edo. The way of real life in Edo. I had been so full of dreams and hopes for my future the way she had been, and I had been so crushed under the weight of them.
We were a pair tradition had never bonded, and so we walked together into the shrine hand in hand. Something swelled in me that day, as we sat before the priest while his voice echoed through the hall deep and rhythmical, like the music I danced to. A smile came to my lips, tugging at the corners shyly, as if love had settled on my shoulders in an array of glittering light. I glowed. The atmosphere swallowed me, caressed me like gentle fingers.
We turned to face each other as we were presented with a cup of sake. Three sips from me, three sips from her. Repeated two more times. When we bowed to the floor to each other, I threw a smirk in her direction, and she smiled back at me proudly. We were beyond this ceremony. We didn't need sake or a priest to tell us how we were bonded, we had razor blades and incense, fans and dances, stages and respect. I touched my forehead to the floor, and rose again. When I looked at her across from me, we were different. Even though the time we had been together had dictated who we had become to each other, what we trusted in each other, the ceremony had suddenly given us a connection that was founded somewhere far away from us and rained upon us from Heaven. That same Heaven that neither of us would ever see.
We left the temple linked hand in hand, under the blanket of the sky that had turned dark with night to be our cover. Maybe I was made for her, to show her that she didn't have to walk alone in this life of shame and decadence. Maybe she was made for me, to soak up my sin, because it was overbearing and I could only dance for so long before I would fall hard to stage, be too heavy to rise again.
Swipe of white powder, smudge with calloused fingertips. Calloused, from so many nights clinging helplessly, pushed and pulled against a hard wood floor. Splinters from abuse, blisters from love, scars that didn't cast a shadow for now; hidden under a mask so no one could see how much it hurt. Marks of a whore, strength of a samurai, stains where someone else had been and another would discover; and I wondered why I would die before I put away every brightly coloured kimono, every flawlessly lacquered hair comb, every night forgetting the hours before, and learn to live again.
Line of red over the supple curve of a lip, hill then valley, compromising the lacking of a slightly different curve where I was shallow on my body. Smooth with the pads of fingers, porous skin soaking up the colour where it bled into tiny lines. No one would notice them; on the stage, they were miniscule, and closely after the show, they were smudged by fervor before the imperfection was frowned upon.
A body barely shy of childhood, hardly shining in maturity, sold for what I needed just to be beautiful to someone else. Bristles of a brush through course hair, ends falling to proudly protruding hipbones. White flakes of wax dried and tarnished fell to rest on my bare knees, the silk of the kimono breathlessly floating over the skin. White on white, suddenly thrown into such a contrast, I saw it as that beauty I longed for. Brushing a few strands of black hair free of marring the perfect white of my forehead, leaning gracefully slowly closer to the mirror, a sweep of black over the lid of one eye, then the other. I tilted my head up, keeping my gaze locked on myself, battling in the candlelight to test the even colour.
The shine to my hair had faded, the thickness strong for a man, and unforgiving of all the qualities of a woman. What was I, in the end? I pressed my knees closer together, my gaze drawn to the door of the dressing room, the general direction of my audience, and wondered why they didn't care. Did they even know? Did they deny it? I wondered why I was the one they preferred to go home with. Was I a little more wild? A little more dangerous? A little more submissive? Sometimes I forgot to remind myself I was doing it to avenge for myself with that blood on the blade of my sword. Sometimes, just sometimes, I forgot to remind myself not to enjoy it.
I watched from behind the curtain as the last geisha preformed; she was graceless in a way, but she had a way with beauty that only so many did. She threw it from the pores of her skin so effortlessly. I thought myself her only competition in a world of such undying colour and splendor. I thought myself the only competition for anyone. For that, I was considered all the vanity in the world, and for that, another name would never surpass mine.
The sounds of her men calling her name when she left the stage excited me, imagining they were mine. I peered through the tiny part in the silk curtain backdrop to catch the way her kimono swung away from her, and in my mind those chants her name became my own as the voices wafted from the audience. I had seen that tiny frame bare the weight of a burden much stronger than a kimono while she danced, but still I saw force in her movement where her spirit lacked a great deal of her heart. Her heart I knew was lingering sheltered from the audience with me. But she too had paid her debt to me, and I didn't ask for anything more. My heart beat with drum I danced to, and would never belong to another aside from that innocent one locked away in my room.
The lights dimmed as I stepped up to the part in the curtains, zori inches too high placed lightly in front of the other. Clean shaven legs of a whore I despised in a rapture of love too heated to keep to myself. Adoration on the left foot, Hate on the right, and the left always placed in front as in every Shinto practice. First the left side, then the right, then the left again to signify renewal, and once those three steps were taken, the dance would begin.
Swiftly, the curtain was behind me, clasped in my sweating palms behind my back, hip jutting painfully accenting. The air was thick with a lingering fervor, a sedated cold shiver that teased the skin of my leg until the hem of the kimono touched and warmed it. It dispersed in the air, mixing with the dead buzz of sake in the lazy eyes dimmed in the blue light. It burned through me, my muscles ached before I took the first step, and the motion coursed through my veins until the end.
The azure melted into the atmosphere, shining on me, one side in shadow and one side brilliant by that light. They didn't understand, but like that, divided by the cast of hue and shadow, it was a symbol to show that two of me would dance; the innocent and the filthy. Like the performance of a different kind under a harsher colour of blue, two of myself I could see like I imagined during the night. Crawling, lips parting in a silent whimper, I moved to the beat of the drum toward that innocent me stranded on the edge of the stage. "I'll save you." I said to him in my mind. The black of my eyelids felt heavy, pace quickening in seduction as the blood began to boil within me. My passion lit ablaze with the falling candle flames. When I stood at the edge of the catwalk, reaching to the ceiling, reaching to the Heaven that cast me out, I felt the weight of my hair as it cascaded down my back, and I could imagine that the innocent one was laying there reaching for me as well. He was holding me back, because if I went to Heaven, there would be no one to be soiled in his place. But it was a dance, that battle, that love.
Shivers touched my skin as my fingers raking through my hair, my head lolling back with a bout of love my audience couldn't see. It was me and myself, us together, and one alone in a dance of confusion. My pain, my pleasure, we moved in opposite unison, apart and the same entity until that beauty of myself materialized before me.
That beauty I wanted, the fluid motions of my body, craving an end to satisfy me; all when I would watch myself in the mirror, the outlines of highlight, and I tipped my head back with the weight of my hair and sighed to the beat of the drum. Sighs turned to pants, for myself, and the other me waiting for my attention, our delicate sweeps of hands and careful placement of feet. Swing of parasol before my face to conceal a stolen kiss, whisper of a desire to an emptiness beside me.
And when it was over, I cowered behind a curtain of hair until the blue light of my soul burnt out, I melted into one, and bid that other side of compassion farewell until the later night. We would meet again, and this time I would be taken restlessly until my voice caught in my throat with a height that overflowed.
I lingered in the space between the curtain and the room backstage, tilting my head to the sound that slithered up from the audience. They called my name. A woman walked past me, the next performer, and when her form was revealed melting through the split in the curtain, the throes of my name became an anti-fanfare. I lowered my eyes, sweeping the air with my lashes, and smirked as I turned to walk away.
When I met Sugai, it was a darker magic than I conjured when I danced. In the mirror of the vanity, I could see him enter the room as a shadow, and yet he brought with him an energy that engulfed me in solace. My room had never held such an atmosphere, and it was suddenly filled like the smoke from a fire. I hoped it would stain the curtains, the wood floor, the tatami, and leave a stain there forever.
"How did you get here?" My voice like a shy whisper, I didn't turn around, I hardly moved so that should he have wanted to, he could invade me.
A chuckle through the darkness. "Did you see me in your audience?"
"I couldn't take my eyes from you." It was a lie, but it was what he wanted to hear. It was what I told every man who entered my room. "Who let you in? My younger sister meets my admirers to escort them to my room. No one is allowed in here."
The white of his kimono glowed in the darkness, picking up the faintest light thrown around the room from the candles. My eyes swept down the length of his hakama pants, then back up to his face. I was so drawn to the shape of him even now as it had become so familiar, I could picture myself there against him, tangling my fingers the black mess of his hair, trailing my tongue against the smooth white of his cheek. As ethereal as his presence in my room to begin with, so too was my sudden attraction, devotion, to him. It was reasonless as far as I could tell through all the nights I spent beside him, like he had cast a spell on me to lure me. I couldn't distinguish anything in particular about the line of his eyes, or the shape of his body that set him apart from any other man who desired me, and so I couldn't find a motive for my heart's ache for him. But oh, it ached.
"The point is that I am here. That's an answer enough to fate, don't question how I got here." My knees trembled slightly at his words, an outreach to me, when every event past, I was the one outreaching.
Heaven wept for us when we danced, because it was beautiful. I wanted to give him everything about me, I wanted him to reach inside me and take my soul if he could use it. There was never space between us when we danced, we danced for no one but ourselves, and I thought that even though that innocent part of me I danced with before was shameful when compared to Sugai. There was something between our eyes like an invisible link where he could read my mind, and I could tell him stories like how I believed in love, without ever saying a word.
But our worlds collided harshly. So forceful was our passion, intense and real, that I felt it wave after wave like pain. When I touched his skin I could feel a pull so strongly that I expected to be fused to him, never to be free. He was binding, I felt I couldn't live without him, because when he was gone in the daylight, the loss of his energy made me weak. But I wasn't strong enough for his love.