Work Text:
For a story to live, it has to be told. Which is also to say: that silence is a slow burial. That one commits a lover’s suicide with each tale one takes to the grave.
There are many things you intend to take with you.
The most obvious of your plans, the one that even a writer on the fringes of the rakugo world could discern, began the moment you turned away the first would-be disciple. Or perhaps earlier yet, taking root on the remains of a withered promise. If you can no longer keep something alive, better to kill it with your own hands. Some might call it spite; you prefer to think of it as mercy. The point of a lover’s suicide, after all -- however distorted, however selfish -- is the love.
Consider the story about lovers and a river. Romantic until rephrased: lovers falling into a river. Variations on variations on an old story, one of the oldest, one that you tell and tell without ever coming to believe: “There is no man who does not delight in the company of women.” A man, a woman, and the listeners already think they know how things will go. Perhaps you did too, once, before you learnt otherwise.
The scent of powder and pomade carries with it a worn nostalgia, familiar yet forgotten enough for the distance to ache. He closes his eyes, leans against the wall. Turns and buries his face in the soft curve of Miyokichi’s neck.
“Tired?”
Her voice is a soothing murmur, her hand a reassuring weight on his knee. Until it edges higher, the gesture sliding from comfort to something less benign, and Kiku tenses, wavers between resistance and resignation.
“I don’t--” he manages at last, but Miyokichi is already pulling away.
“I know,” she says. “Of course I know. I’ve just been trying hard not to.”
He doesn’t apologise. It isn’t something one can apologise for. He thinks of a girl, years ago, who never quite mastered the shamisen; who tilted her head like a sparrow and held his hand in the shadows of alleyways and cried on his shoulder and asked him not to forget her. Of a woman in the quiet-skied countryside who saw him off at the train platform with a rueful smile. And here, with her deft fingers and defter words, with those wide, bright eyes that he still hasn’t learnt how to meet -- Miyokichi. Who listens to his half-formed fears and lets him rests his head in her lap like a child. Who holds out an umbrella in the rain. Who has given him so much, asked and unasked for.
Wanted and unwanted.
“Miyokichi-san.” She’s turned away; is she crying? Not that he’d know what to do, even if she was. “I...”
“Kiku-san,” she replies, the flatness of her tone smothering whatever he might have said. “Am I that impossible to love?”
“That’s not it. It’s not… I mean, I-- I do,” he says, in sudden realisation, the ease of the confession proving its own point. “Just not--”
“Not enough.”
“No,” he replies. It might even be true. “Just not how you wish I would.”
Neither of them moves. Somewhere outside, a group of young men pass beneath the window, voices raised in drunk anticipation of the debauchery ahead, and for one long moment Kiku imagines a world in which he could be one of them.
And then Miyokichi sinks against the wall, barely brushing his shoulder, still not looking at him.
“I’m tired. I’ve been so tired, Kiku-san.”
It is the first time she has allowed him to see her thus. Something spreads through his chest, softer than sympathy, warmer than pity. Slowly, he edges closer, until her cheek presses cold and damp against his sleeve.
“You must think me such a fool,” she says at last.
“No.” He doesn’t apologise, because what he needs to find isn’t an apology; it’s something that can serve as a better answer. “Thank you, Miyokichi-san.”
Consider the story about a man who snuffs his own life out by wanting too much. The one about a man who fishes for love and sinks the hook into himself.
There are stories you learned by heart and stories you never had to memorise. In the oldest of the latter, someone leaves. In the second-oldest, someone is always one step ahead. It’s the second story that you tell to yourself over and over, reimagining the protagonist through the years: hero, villain, victim. It begins with dust and cicadas and the blazing, obnoxious sun, with a crossed threshold and an outstretched hand; picks up the textures of tatami and warplanes, women’s laughter and audience’s applause. It hasn’t ended. It didn’t end even when one of your stories did. In that, as everything, he went first: a crossed threshold. An open hand.
You reimagine the protagonist. You try, over and over, to reimagine his story.
The countryside’s night -- deeper, heavier than the city’s -- has started to grow familiar. Kiku stares up at nothing. Somewhere above are the rafters that they dusted clean of cobwebs; outside is the yard they tended. Earlier this afternoon, Konatsu was admiring her freshly-cut hair in a bucket of water. Kiku knows this house is nothing more than a necessary detour, a stopover before the eventual return to Tokyo. And yet.
He doesn’t want to complete that thought. Soon he can’t, anyway, because there’s a rustle beside him, a draught of cold air, and someone shifting clumsily under his quilt to sling an arm around his waist.
Unsurprising. This used to be Miyokichi’s futon, after all.
“Sukeroku,” he says, in warning. Not that warnings have ever worked on that man. Kiku feels himself being pulled closer, Sukeroku’s body warm against the line of his hip, one leg shamelessly trying to intertwine with his.
“Shin-san,” Kiku hisses, because surely that name if nothing else should make him realise the mistake -- “I’m not--”
“Shut up,” Sukeroku grumbles. “You think I’d mistake your scrawny body for hers? You think I don’t know what a woman feels like?”
As Kiku freezes, uncomprehending, Sukeroku leans in, fingers rough against the curve of Kiku’s jaw.
“She was right,” Sukeroku says when he pulls away.
“What?” Kiku asks, dazed.
“Like kissing a woman.”
Bitterness curdles in his throat. He tries to pry Sukeroku’s greedy hand from his waist. “Find yourself one, then. Don’t make me some… some easy substitute.”
“Bon,” Sukeroku says, his voice unbearably tender. “You think that little of me?”
I’ve never let myself think anything about you. Not in this way. I’ve never dared.
It’s only when Sukeroku’s fingers brush the corner of his eye, gentler than they have any right to be, that he realises he’s crying.
To take a name is to inherit its duties. To become Yuurakutei Yakumo is to belong no longer just to yourself; to let all manner of things stake a claim upon you, from seven past generations’ worth of reputation to the petty politics of association meetings. Once you would have wearied of it. Yet it’s easy, once you have nothing else, to grow into the role, fill out its fetters. You give yourself up to those changes, age into the skin of the grinning shinigami you portray, accept that to be a storyteller is to be a vessel for tradition. What is preserved does not change, except to age.
And rakugo, in turn, is not unkind. In Shinagawa Shinjuu, the woman walks away from the edge. The man comes back alive.
“There,” Miyokichi says, setting the comb down. “Don’t mess your hair up too much, Konatsu-chan.”
Konatsu leaps up, pulls a face, jumps down into the yard and runs off without a backward glance. Sukeroku laughs and shuffles over to lay his head in her lap instead.
“Say ‘thank you’,” Kiku calls out. He glances back at Miyokichi, who meets his gaze with a wry smile.
“She didn’t escape halfway through, this time. I’ll take that as a good sign.” She shoves Sukeroku away unceremoniously, gets to her feet. “I’m going to prepare lunch.”
“But Matsuda-san…”
“Deserves a break sometimes. Besides, if I’m going to make this new job work, I have to improve my skills in the kitchen.”
“You’re the true hero of this household,” Sukeroku says from where he’s sprawled on the veranda, one hand reaching out for Miyokichi’s ankle.
Miyokichi huffs in mock-scorn, avoids it neatly. “That’s something to say when Kiku-san’s the one keeping us fed.”
“Just because he didn’t have debts to pay off,” Sukeroku grumbles. “I’m still the popular one, you know! Didn’t you see how the theatre overflowed for my glorious return performance? Queues for miles, they said. They could barely keep the audience from breaking down the doors to get in--”
“Yes, yes.” She steps inside. “Just make sure you show up there on time this evening. I don’t think you’ve grovelled quite enough to the association for letting you return.”
“He could grovel for a lifetime and it wouldn’t be enough,” Kiku says. Miyokichi laughs as she leaves.
Kiku still hasn’t decided what he’ll perform this evening, despite sifting through the seasonal list of stories in his mind. How strange, he thinks, for it to be spring once again. For a whole year to have passed since then. Beside him, Sukeroku swings one leg in a lazy half-kick. He’s still wearing the disheveled yukata he woke up in, collar gaping open to the waist, and Kiku’s gaze follows the folds down: the just-visible planes of muscle underneath. The grin of a scar.
He’s reaching out before he realises it, fingers tracing that jagged line. Out of the bright afternoon, a chill sparks down his spine and the jaws of the past yawn open, sharp with what-ifs -- everything that could have been, that might not have been, that might have been lost.
Until a hand takes his wrist and drags him back into the sunlight.
Sukeroku quirks an eyebrow. “In front of Konatsu-chan?”
“Pervert.” Kiku should be old enough not to be embarrassed. He really should. “It’s nothing.” He draws his hand back, belatedly; turns to look at the garden instead. The cherry tree sapling they planted last autumn has managed to offer a few tentative blossoms, and Konatsu’s stretching up on her toes to squint at the nearest branches.
Sukeroku takes his hand. Places it back against the scar.
“Would’ve taken more than that to get through all this muscle,” he says lightly. He flexes, and it’s almost enough to startle a laugh out of Kiku, despite the reminder, despite how time hasn’t yet scrubbed the freshness from that scar. Under his palm, the ripple of muscle -- warm, firm, real.
“You think too much,” Sukeroku says. “I’m still here, right? We all are.”
Then he laughs and sits up and heads over to join Konatsu in the garden.
Kiku leans back on his palms. Remembers a performance of Shibahama in a hot springs inn in Shikoku. If this is a dream, he thinks, watching Sukeroku pick a petal out of Konatsu’s hair, hearing Miyokichi humming to herself as the warm scent of rice drifts out from the kitchen -- then he never wants to wake up.
To call something a story is to draw a line between it and the truth. Better: to insist on the latter's irrelevance. No one asks if there truly was a philanderer who terrorised the pleasure district with his freeloading, or if incense can reel in a ghost, or if weathered bones ever rattled back to life and wrapped themselves around the living. All the audience needs is the punchline, the ochi -- the fall. As in the raku of rakugo itself: descent.
You are still waiting for your punchline.
Sometimes you wonder if it already happened from that balcony, the point after which there should have been nothing left to say. Yet time rolled on and took you with it. So now you wait for it to come at the hands of Konatsu, for her to complete what her mother could not. (To complete what Konatsu herself began, in the one story that you tell to no one, not even yourself.) If only it were as easy, you think, as a candle flame and a breeze.
Then the punchline shows up one crisp spring day in a flashy suit and begs you to take him in.
Then you feel an atmosphere in the theatre you have not felt for a very long time.
Then the years.
In the original version of one story, a child drowns; someone must have decided, at some point, that it was allowed for endings to be changed. In another story, a man escapes his debts. In another story, a man makes good on his promise to change. In another story, a woman fumbles and a knife is the only thing that cleaves the river’s surface. In another story, a child is stopped before she can do what she will not remember. In this story you look at your fool of a disciple and a woman who is no longer a child and think: At least one Sukeroku should be allowed his happy ending.
Somewhere there’s a river and two familiar figures waiting. You think you might, at last, be ready for the ending of that story.