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~
The year before succumbing to her illness—as the story goes—Shinobu’s eighty-ninth best friend met with the secretary of the Poetry Office to deliver a copy of her latest one hundred poems. The reddening and furiously detailed plum blossoms at the Oi mansion where she lived in seclusion must have been profuse that spring, filigreeing the paths where she walked alone accompanied only by memories equally crowded and proliferatingly unstoppable. She looked at them, and in front of the secretary delivered an impromptu poem, so forcefully he recorded the incident later: plum near the eaves, do not forget me!
This was not, of course, the poem that went into the Hyakunin Isshu, that lives, now, stacked in its torifuda deck in the sticker-covered lacquer case on Shinobu’s dressing table. In Shinobu’s yomifuda illustration of poem eighty-nine, she is closer to the teenager she must have been when she abdicated her priestess’ whites at the Kamo Shrine, leveling a direct, flaying gaze at Shinobu over her fan.
It’s an extraordinary gaze. Only a slip of a girl alone in her grand, empty house, but another girl alone in another grand, empty house would notice how she’d been drawn looking into your eyes with such faith.
Shinobu isn’t a historian. She likes this story for its defiance, the adroit elegance of the outburst it eulogizes, but sees no need to let Shokushi know she knows it, because card eighty-nine is so temperamental there’s simply no telling what kind of intrigue would ensue. Shinobu tells her things friends tell each other, such as that she doesn’t care if Shokushi is one of six other ta-cards and not useful to her defensive formation, and also that she doesn’t look sallow in her new silk jacket and that it’s safe to eat another bowl of anmitsu. Someone with such a refined aesthetic sense surely appreciates the finer things in life, such as purple no. 27 food coloring and Snowmaru’s immaculate proportions, but requires delicate handling in turn.
The princess meanders on her card, kicking up her feet tempestuously. You won’t forget me, she demands of Shinobu. No, Shinobu says, no, I could never. I’ll come for you. Tell me your poem again, and Shokushi beams the way no one ever drew her smiling, and says Nothing could be worse than living a moment longer—words that draw Shinobu’s finger to her again, every time, herself in the prime of her youth and strength, never, for a minute, forgotten.
~
Shinobu had fallen asleep on a beautiful coat. She saw the cashmere pilling at the shoulders out of extensive, too-enthusiastic overwear and needed to feel it on her cheeks so dramatically she had no choice but to list backwards, sliding down on the tin bench full of jackets and shawls, until she could lean on the coat’s shoulder while making it look like an accident if needed.
When she opened her eyes Chihaya was standing in the stripe of sunlight from the doorway, shading her eyes at her and beaming.
“Shinobu-chan! You haven’t left either?”
Considering what she’s doing she thinks she’s justified in ignoring the question. “I’m not awake. I am in fact asleep, actually. I’m still quite exhausted from yesterday, it may be, I think, the malaise of age or something of that nature.”
“Shinobu-chan is really deep as always! And sitting here in the coatroom in the dark, it’s—“ she ruminates over it, “…totally unheard of! As expected of the queen! Did you—” she gasps, hand to her cheek, whispering, “did you stay out all night. Having a—having a torrid affair! It’s the passionate spirit of the Hyakunin Isshu! As I told Kana, Shinobu-chan is so worldly, so…”
“Of course I’m not having a torrid affair, do you think I would have a torrid affair in a shawl-collar cardigan, how—that is to say—it’s loud there, I want to rest. The day after the matches is always my portrait day, you know, for my new years' nengajo.”
“Uwaa, so exciting! No wonder you look so tired…I was going to get my coat, because it’s so cold while waiting, but you can still sleep on it, umm…” She drops onto the bench, tugs on the coat, and turns her back diffidently to Shinobu until Shinobu cautiously leans back and lays her head between her shoulderblades. Now she can’t close her eyes. “When is your train?”
“Six. And…Mizusawa’s?”
“Oh, they left. I’m here? I just wanted to talk to some people, to, um, Sakurazawa-san, and others. I was thinking about some things, a lot of—things. I’ll go at seven-thirty.” She rolls her shoulders. “I’m glad you liked this coat. It’s my sister’s, you know. Isn’t that interesting?”
It isn’t interesting but only the sort of thing people pretend to find interesting when they have nothing better to talk about and are avoiding something else. Through the harsh sunlight from the door Shinobu can see people in the station waiting room, its granite floor darkened with eddies of icewater as others come in from outside, shaking the snow from their boots. The alchemical process by which a random gathering of people became something like a party had already taken place sometime during the last hour, the point at which she’d gone into the coatroom. Someone had brought their karuta club’s leftover spirits from the new year and she can smell it permeating the old concrete.
The pipes, old oxidized copper, have rusted over and carry too much sound. From across the platforms, they can hear the scratch and scrape as tables are dragged aside to clear the floor, people searching for cards, email addresses, memorabilia of another year.
Chihaya’s coat is green, with a bluish plaid dappling down it, and cut on the horizontal with pink laddering all the way up to two swipes of the same color on Chihaya’s cheekbones when she turns her head. Shinobu hasn’t ever seen anything like it in Kyoto and says so.
“Well, it’s,” says Chihaya, and tenses her shoulders in the coat as though she’s never seen it before, “well, it’s. I guess it’s off-the-runway, from Ginza! It fit me better than her, though neither of us could fill it out really, she’s about this size. Shinobu-chan would like her, she’s a model!”
“You think I like models? I’ve never even met one. I’m so terribly sheltered that I’ve never even met a—”
“Ohh really sheltered! But—don’t feel bad, maybe lots of people haven’t met models, for example, Taichi, if he hadn’t met my sister, he wouldn’t have met a model, I don’t think. He’s actually sheltered, you know, his eyelashes, they’re like those plants that grow in the dark in the Amazon I think, while Shinobu-chan, Shinobu-chan’s hairstyles and everything, you’re so…worldly. But I wasn’t saying I think you’d like her because she’s a model,” sometime during the litany Chihaya has turned towards Shinobu but is still holding her hands studiously away from her, careful, as the words aren’t careful, not to jostle her leaning head, “I think you’d like her because she’s my sister. And she’s a model. Everyone is, is something. Wouldn’t you say?”
She supposes, intellectually, that if Chihaya looped her arm under hers, they could sit more comfortably. She wonders what Chihaya is thinking about, if not her sister. If that’s what they’re talking about.
“Did you tell her about me?”
What is there to tell? Still, Chihaya stops, starts, and says, “That you—won again? Of course! It was only yesterday. She knows you’re still queen.”
“I could have been a model. You could see, in my…portrait. I have—quite well-formed nail beds. Quite…utterly…voluptuous nail beds. If they’re intended to be voluptuous, of course, and if not, then—they’re not."
Chihaya’s hands uncoil, recoil, and then settle on her knees. “You know,” she sucks on her chapped bottom lip, snatching the only bit of relevance from the sentence, “Shinobu-chan could still be.”
She’s a liar, Shinobu can see, and also not; she wouldn’t fill out the green coat. She’d fit it rather than it fitting her, lamplight expanding into the warm hollow of a room.
“Have you eaten?” she asks.
In the wet, icy street outside Omijingumae Station their footsteps are noiseless in the drifts of snow. The cold is so complete it pulls them into themselves, focusing their attention inwards and not on one another; the effect of an odd claustrophobia endures as though they’re still in the coatroom.
When she looks down they’re both dressed in thick-soled boots, dangling scarves, mummified within their own preoccupations but the same in the cold. The visible Omi Jingu, that Shinobu knows in all her moods like a sister, like Chihaya knows her sister-who-is-a-model, is bitter and reticent, veiled in a complex purpling fog. Nothing yet of the sun, glancing through the inkstroke trees, only a few needles of light, flashing and receding over the second torii gate.
~
The great tragedy of the Wakamiya family, as explained by the dual authoritative sources of the Kyoto Shimbun municipal election special and Shinobu’s father on three glasses of happoshu, is that they don’t live in a venerable old shinden-zukuri style estate but one of the nameless, refurbished cherry-and-ash condominiums stacked one on top of the other over Teramachi Street.
Naturally, there are only so many old houses in one city, and occupying or being born into them, whichever comes first, becomes a game of musical chairs writ public. Kyoto already has her political daughters taking up first-class seats and Shinobu’s grandmother is not one by inheritance; the mansion is nouveau riche and nouveau, more generally, of uncertain reputation, the family in it the same and the same. To combat the impression, December 14th sees a flotilla of Wakamiya family nengajo written in her grandmother’s studiously upmarket diction travel radially into the upper echelons, new years’ postcards held as always by the postal service and opened on the first of January within the kinds of houses they will never see the inside of in this lifetime.
(She thinks she’s the only one who had to earn her time and place, and that! explains her father, waving, perhaps, the fourth glass of happoshu, is why the old bag—and here may follow a litany of anything, a marital disagreement, a slight at a family dinner, all of them ushering along a foregone conclusion. After I determined to end my love, begins poem sixty-three, and so, evidently, this is an old, old story, and not of uncertain reputation, at all!)
These nengajo. Shinobu was allowed to keep eight cards each year if she helped with the addressing and it was always modern art, a few amorphous or laser-guided lines. The portrait—the first one—had been broached when she was twelve.
(That winter she’d also picked up a new hobby, which was lining up the packets of Calbee rice snacks from her and her mother’s side of the pantry to memorize the ingredients. Many different kinds of sugar, some syrup, artificial colors. Artificial colors! They knew, surely, that what was there wasn’t enough. She’d done it all through the start of the new year holiday. And on the fourth day—why, on the fourth day her grandmother came to show her the portrait.)
The photo selected was a ceremonial Omi Jingu portrait, had been run through a violet filter and made her hands glow. The wax in her hair shone almost blue.
“I look extremely distinguished,” said Shinobu. This was what her father had said about her new practice tatami room, sardonically, when he’d once come to pick her up for a weekend visit, and Shinobu thought they were delightful words, frothy and insubstantial. Absolutely full of artificial colors! Extremely distinguished.
“You do,” said Shinobu’s grandmother, and tilted the card to show Shinobu the embossed zodiac sign for the year of the rooster. She had a lot of taste, Shinobu’s grandmother. In a political family, when you had a lot of something you liked things to reflect that you had a lot of it. Shinobu liked this. This was why if you had ten glittering hairclips you should wear all ten of them, no restraint. As much sugar, as much color, as you could. As much! “A veritable goddess of prosperity.”
“Veritable.” She crunched the word under her teeth, like a Calbee rice snack. Rolled it around and said, “But this is last year’s portrait.”
“It would be difficult,” said her grandmother, “to procure the portrait of your next queen title match, in—“ she checked her watch. “Two weeks. For next year’s, however, you’re welcome to choose the portrait yourself.”
“The placement of the new year,” said Shinobu, “is quite inconvenient,” and her grandmother smiled then, not mirthfully.
“Better for it to be now, when you have all the time you need,” smiled and left her alone to study herself, the silent audacious proclamation that had gone out, that she’d inaugurated the last year with a triumph and wouldn’t fail to do so again this year.
Two weeks later she won and had her next year’s portrait taken. She chose her prettiest cards, Princess Shokushi and her name-card’s own Taira no Kanemori, to accompany her, peeking over the tops of her fingers. She imagined the princess and the writer jostling for space next to her, a two-time queen. Queen Shinobu, you look ex-treme-ly dis-tin-guished, cooed Taira, but he was a notorious flatterer and Shinobu could tell him so, if she wanted. But that day, that day. She’d allow her first fan the praises.
The red lacquer of the shrine enveloped the railings in a liquid shellacking, like candy apples. If she put her tongue to her palm after touching it, she imagined it would come away sweet.
That was January, the day after the championship matches. Shokushi and Taira jostled for her on cards eighty-nine and forty; jostling, too, reporters in a steely quieted snowfall; her grandmother’s pulsing presence on the steps of the Diet, wishing her granddaughter congratulations from miles away; yes, she’d known, yes, it was Shinobu on the new years’ nengajo, last year’s win, she’d wanted her to remember that her family anticipated, before anyone else, how far she’d be able to go. The winter morning glinted; the snow fell sparse for the photo ops. Her grandmother in Italian leather. Her hands aglow. The wax in her hair shining almost blue.
~
She’d made the invitation in part because Chihaya had already made her overture, was delighted by Shinobu’s victory and that delight had made her tactless, releasing her confettied congratulations into the corridor while Inokuma ducked past her with her palm over her eyes. Shinobu was wrongfooted by the candor and doubly so by her own consternation at it, and the soft newness of uncertainty made it easy to dip into it and enfold the invitation there for safekeeping, to be extracted at a moment’s notice, even as she was conscious of Sakurazawa Midori saying Ayase! in her filleting teachers’ voice. The note of warning there that Chihaya, it occurs to her only now, might be hoping to avoid.
They, as a general concept, are disorienting without any mention of cards. Chihaya a piece from her mother’s long-ago attempt to interest her in piano, the music understood in the sight-reading but something entirely different—unfolded and unmanageable—once her fingers hit the keys.
There is a curt, electric wind on the snow-lined streets, ice-laced as water and with all of its fluidity. A powdery shiver she feels herself wearing like makeup above her scarf, and through the way it replicates the feel of chilled silk on her skin she can tell herself it’s identical to every year.
There’s a boxed snacks stand on the side of the road near the restaurant still doing business in the little new years’ dishes called osechi-ryori, though the new year is long over, and they stop to buy two rolls each of rolled datemaki omelettes with fish paste. Chihaya buys an aloe drink though it’s too cold for it, flinches and opens up her jacket to set the drink under her sweater. Her breath warming and dewing the bottle before she zips it close to her. Shinobu averts her eyes.
They walk along the shopping street off Omijingumae Station as they eat, the shops closed now around them with their new years’ banners still displayed in the windows. The kanji heralding fortune and favor, just as her portraits promise, and now she has ensured them for another year.
Chihaya’s quiet seeps out black and glossless as the windowpanes. She is tense herself now, withholding where the tasuki she’d made, still tied loosely under Shinobu’s cardigan, were given so freely. It hadn’t occurred to her that Chihaya could be so ill at ease.
She stops in front of the station waiting room window. Hanging there, an enormous pop art rendition of the cover of the otsu-e postcard book she’d bought and showed Shinobu in the waiting room before queen matches resumed (“I wanted some Otsu specialty, something like that, something that will make Kana-chan say, wow, Chihaya! You’re so knowledgeable!”) She breathes on the glass, obscuring the houses as big as their heads. The psychedelic people going about their lives.
The wind picks up, invisible sun in the smeared-glass sky. Chihaya writing her name tentatively, then a little curve, two eyes and a nose, then she stops.
“Shinobu-chan, you come here all the time, don’t you?” It’s clear the moment she asks that it wasn’t what she’d wanted to say.
“Four times since I was twelve.”
“You’ve never bought something like this to—to remember it?”
The sense of herself is dense and close under the shawl, the way the alleyway feels, the way Chihaya’s presence feels. She would never buy something in a place like the station shop. Not something that treats the shrine as something already a memory. She’d read sometime that the shrine was built in 1940, itself a memorial to the Emperor Tenji, but this is not her Omi Jingu, candy-apple red lacquered only on the outside, smoke and frost under her tall sandals across the middle of the path reserved for gods. Still savage and glitteringly alive.
The railings of the Kamo Shrine where Shokushi served, too, are candy-apple red. It had remembered her, surely. Or she’d thought it would, the way she had beseeched those plum trees at her mansion to remember her too, when she’d known she was running out of time to be outdoors.
“I’ve got plenty of opportunities.”
“Then I won’t buy one for myself either!” says Chihaya, too brightly, and Shinobu’s hand slips on her omelette, still, against all logic, too hot to eat. Chihaya winces, looks down.
They are more awkward like this than they ever were, facing one another on the mat. The vicious sudden intimacy that had overwhelmed her in the dimly lit waiting room is nowhere, feels like nothing.
In the flecked cement-framed windows they look like any two friends they are not making their way out during a winter afternoon, and it makes her head hurt.
She slips a warmed hand under her jacket and pulls on the tasuki until it comes loose. She unfolds it, the Daddy Bear pen drawing opening up on the fragment of handkerchief.
“You can’t even do this from memory. I didn’t expect that from you.”
“Shinobu-chan—” Chihaya works a hand into her hair, her hat slipping off. “Did you keep my tasuki for—for your portrait?”
“The nose is—it’s the only part you got right. As they say, it’d be best to remain with your day job.”
Too close. She has no choice but to skitter back again. Accept the reprieve, she thinks. Make up the difference.
Chihaya does. Her wide, wondering eyes. She leans over to look and her hair brushes Shinobu’s wrist. She finishes her drawing, the lopsided bear—extremely poor proportions, but recognizable—poised cluelessly as if entering one of the drawn buildings. Shinobu draws a tatami mat for him. She changes her mind midway and makes it a table with a cake the size of a boat. Chihaya lets out a horrid, screeching bark of laughter and there!—there it is again, the feeling in the waiting room, flaring, that turned-over ember in Shinobu’s chest: a sense of herself as someone who could put someone else at ease. They don’t have time here, but for a moment it doesn’t seem important. Right now she only wants a quiet moment.
“He’ll faint by the time he’s done with it! Shinobu-chan, draw something else. Bears eat healthy food, you know, they also eat berries and nuts. It’s good because their tongue is sort of like a suction tube? I read that in my zoology notes but I can’t picture it at all.”
“Wow, Chihaya! You’re so knowledgeable,” says Shinobu, before she’s thought about it.
A misstep, probably, but then Chihaya does something recognizable, swoops in underneath her sentiment and laughs again. There is such quizzical gratitude in her face. Any two friends they are not, but under her arm, given reassurance perhaps, Chihaya’s hand snakes up again, compensating for the absent tasuki, the grip through her jacket now surer with a genuine warmth. She is getting faster—she is getting ever faster—at making up the difference.
~
Something else she doesn’t tell her princess, who is delicate: not long after her death the old emperor and secretary Minamoto came to visit her mansion for a game of kickball and found it overrun with too much greenery for that time of year, yellow roses, wisteria and the particular thick and artificial-looking ferns also known as shinobu. Minamoto reports that he was stunned by the aura, as if the house had been vacant for decades though people still inhabited it, the rites of prayer still took place there, but the paths and pavilions themselves had been reclaimed by the wilderness. It suited her, he wrote, the withholding nature of her lifestyle near the end. The fecundity of her feelings, so powerful that even in their absence they overwhelmed what she could no longer have.
~
Yesterday Suou had the self-control to let her get all the way down the steps and halfway into her car before lassoing dementedly around the other side and launching himself into the seat beside her. She’d eyeballed his supine form, thought about asking her driver to run over his motorcycle, and contemplated the loss of the precious sidecar as collateral damage before gesturing for him to pull away from the curb.
They circumnavigated the block in silence. Suou slid his shoe out of his slipper and put one bare foot up on the window, leaving a clammy half-moon. Shinobu thought about strawberry melon pocket cake and bloodshed.
"Shinobu-chan's admirers must do this all the time," he mumbled eventually, "that's why, such composure--"
"Admirers, why, I thought you mistook Tetsuma and me for a taxi service," she said, "I do avoid flashiness in my travel arrangements, unlike some."
"Well, I just took the train, like any old university student--"
"That is blatantly a lie. I saw your motorcycle tethered at the bicycle rack."
He bolted straight up. "I LIED!" he shouted so loudly Tetsuma hit the horn by accident, and then he collapsed back into the seat, shoulders slouching up to swallow the newly-shaven jawline again, "that's a lie, that's definitely a lie. Shinobu-chan, please wear a seatbelt. My heart, my chocolate medallion heart, is too weak to bear news of your tragic death. Maybe it's too weak. Before your death, my death, I mean my heart, was like a--"
"Give me something to eat," she said, putting on her seatbelt. “If you bring cakes for class A players, shouldn't you have something for defending queens? Give it now."
"I don't have anything for defending queens."
“That is just like a man, and especially an ugly man with a beard. I don’t care if you don’t have it right now, you’ll always be an ugly man with a beard for me. I am a very nostalgic person, which is something you may not know about me.” She snapped her seatbelt savagely against her collarbone. “I suppose you brought something for defending meijins, then.”
“No.”
“Because you didn’t think you would lose.” It wasn’t supposed to be serious. “You didn’t think you would lose and now you almost had to give someone something you didn’t even bring. What a disgrace. What an egregious disgrace. How can I trust anything you say?”
“Shinobu-chan.” She was lying, too; he didn’t look like an ugly man with a beard. What he looked was terribly sad, and sorry. “You’ll send a nengajo with this year’s portrait to me, won’t you? No matter what happens next year.“
“Be quiet!”
“Shinobu-chan.” He was looking at his hands, still deferring. “You should be careful of Ayase. She isn’t as innocent as you think she is. It’s a good thing. Be careful.”
“I know that.”
“Do you know why they call us the masters with no teachers?” He was closing his eyes and opening them, tilting his head from side to side. “It’s because they know. A meijin—a queen should be someone who can still learn to do things differently.”
“I know that. I know that. I’m the queen now, don’t you think I know?”
It was like something unknotting inside her: she did know. She was never the fastest player on the circuit, not the most knowledgeable or with the best hearing; all she had was her love, her promise to the Princess Shokushi and the others that had now been proven one of many, opening up a silver space of doubt—and into that doubt Chihaya would rush, now, surely, water into the cracking hull of a vessel. She was losing already. The knowledge was pinprick cold as snow, she was losing everything. Inokuma and Chihaya’s eyes. Their wide, wondering eyes, direct as Princess Shokushi’s on her card and that must have been the way they felt, when she fixed them with that direct gaze, placing her trust in them. How could she trust anything Shinobu said?
If there had been only one—but there were two, there could be more. The problem was never that there were others who could win, it was that there could be others who deserved to, who could meet that direct gaze. There could be hundreds. There had always been hundreds. For the first time she understood, all in a rush like the outside’s antiseptic January cold, the root of her grandmother’s fear and love, how they were one and the same, now become hers.
She pulled her feet up to her chin and turned away from Suo, pressing her temple against the glass of the car. A few snowflakes disengaged from the lowering bulk of the sky. Only one or two, now, but soon there would be more. Soon no one in Shiga would be able to tell, anymore, which came first before it all went white.
~
“I don’t want to go back yet,” says Chihaya. “Shinobu-chan—is it all right if we don’t go back yet?”
They buy two mochi at another stand on the other side of the station. They break them in half and trade to sample the flavors but it’s so cold Shinobu can’t taste anything, her mouth still seared with the chili oil in the omelette rolls. They climb the stairs to a hillock where buses stop in the summertime, from where the shrine is still visible and curdles like a reflection in the fog, suspended in the chilly clouded lights of Otsu city that is nothing like Kyoto’s cacophonic urban constellations. In two hours, Shinobu thinks, an oddly calm certainty like the realization of hunger. Something the body already knew. In two hours, I won’t have the opportunity to take a portrait anymore. This was my last year.
Chihaya launches herself down the snowy obscured path without thinking and the bright beacon of her hair glints where she topples over and her hat falls off, her green coat flaking with snow. She is shouting something, half-laughing or crying; Shinobu gets closer. Oh, Shinobu-chan! Chihaya is crying, I would have landed if I hadn’t looked down!
~
Writing the new years’ nengajo had always been a pleasant obligation until the seal was broken on the newly delivered packets of cards, and then for a serrated moment she always saw her proudly posed self as an outsider must: the arrogance in it, the humiliation the portraits would have been if she hadn’t won. It was a paranoia that was always quick to pass. The portraits were timely because Shinobu was ahead of her time.
Princess Shokushi had only been the high priestess of the Kamo Shrine for a small slipknot of years. Her own white ritual clothes must have been burned with her but the shrine itself still stands, on the banks of Kyoto’s own Kamo River. Shinobu has passed it herself, hundreds of times, on Tsuzuku High School field trips or stopping to let her driver take a call. The shrine’s elusively melodic bells sounding keenly like a knife through butter in the resin-scented leather dark of her car.
If she is carrying her cards, she shields them with her cupped hands almost superstitiously. She doesn’t want her friend to see it, the evidence that what you thought you could not live without goes on without you, after all. Outside of a match, she doesn’t want to hear those words. Nothing could be worse than living a moment longer—
~
“Honeydew melon with—with pretzel flavor! Not pretzels, wait, something spicier—with wasabi rice pearl flavor. Uwaa! They’re green too, it’d be pretty to have them, you know, actually included—”
“Hm. That’s cheating, but I’ll accept it.” The waiting room of the station again, cold, bright, the warehouse style ceiling tall enough to make it seem empty but for the chiming of wheels on metallic, faceted frost and dirty glass. Near the railing for the first set of tracks a Japanese literature class all in purple and white uniform has accompanied the woman from Saitama called Yukino something-or-another, herself a challenger Shinobu recognizes, and are shouting the opening poem at the top of their lungs, THE FLOWER THAT BLOOMS IN THE PORT OF NANIWA— “Honeydew melon with wasabi rice pearl and—peppermint with ginger.”
“Peppermint with ginger! It’s so classy, Shinobu-chan! I’d never have thought of that.”
“Of course. I am by nature given to flights of extreme perspicacity. It’s your turn to add a flavor, don’t make it messy. It has to retain this air of delicacy, since it’s a flavor expressing Snowmaru’s winter melancholy. Don’t think that simply because he is a snowman, he isn’t prone to winter melancholy, that is a rookie mistake.”
Their voices echo and a woman in line for a ticket looks revolted but a few schoolgirls tip their heads together like dominoes and fall into giggling. They can’t be more than seven. Chihaya ignores them in favor of noting the flavor combination thus far on the margin of an Omi Jingu guidebook she has annotated with things Shinobu has never done, has stupidly never understood as part of the shrine but were before she was, will be after she is.
“We should ask someone to make it for us,” says Chihaya. “Shinobu-chan, do you know how to cook?”
“I don’t know how to cook. Do you?”
“No!” They stare at each other, stunned and happy at the mundane revelation. “Let’s play another game. I play this one with myself, but never, um, out loud, though. Name a food, and I have to guess what actually goes into it. Like—golden curry blocks. What do you think is in those?”
Artificial colors. “Caramel,” says Shinobu immediately.
“No way! Eek!”
“Why, how do you know? You don’t cook, you said so yourself.” Their wheeled suitcases in front of them propped together like a drawbridge. Coming in from the cold, ordinary. It’s nearly evening, Shinobu thinks. The last rite of the championship is almost over and I know you, I don’t know you. Is this how we are now?
“Can you believe,” cries Chihaya, her shyness now apparent only in how light she looks, having cast it off, “I was nervous—when I saw you? When I saw you sleeping? I didn’t realize, you know—that you couldn’t cook. Or anything.”
“I wasn’t born the queen!”
“Did you really think that, Shinobu-chan?” says Chihaya, as directly as she asked if she could cook, if she’s ever bought herself a souvenir, and so Shinobu can admit that no, she didn’t. She has stood at the apex for so long she doesn’t have a memory of the cold slopes struggling toward it and has never wanted one.
“You said I could still improve,” she says. “That is not quite true. I can’t stop being who I am. But I think, perhaps—from yesterday, I’d be a fool to think winning all my matches means I’m the best at what I do.”
Chihaya’s hands on her suitcase handle are alternatingly garrotting and steadying it, a strength exercise for the fingers of violinists or acupuncturists. Her eyes are fixed on her guidebook’s sepia image of the Omi Jingu clock museum, where an image of a water clock projects time spilling aimlessly into a clear dish. “Ah! I can’t agree with that,” she murmurs, as though she isn’t talking to Shinobu.
Now that she thinks of it, she had never asked Inokuma Haruka what she thought of this, or anything else, but perhaps that was the flaw in her own logic.
“You don’t think so?”
“For me karuta was always a chance I could take to be the best at something, I guess, but...I don’t know if I could have kept going, if I kept thinking just that. Shinobu-chan—“ she was wrong; Chihaya knows exactly who she is talking to— “just because a lot of people have a chance at it doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as the best, at all? That’s what I think.”
Chihaya’s eyes aren’t panicked at all but only looking at her evenly. Here it is, their quiet moment.
You will surpass me, Shinobu fills the stillness with, just to see what it feels like. The truth expanding not devastatingly but gentle, like the Shiga hillsides covered with that vast and blanketing stillness of snowfall. That is what I deserve. You will take all this away from me, but still I want this. I want to be with you now, like this. Is this how you felt, when you took my hand?
“Peppermint with ginger,” she says. “It’s your turn. I haven’t forgotten.”
~
Her grandmother had always loved to watch her practice. Expertise intoxicated her in any form whether she was familiar with it or not, and she asked such sure-handed questions. How did wooden cards compare, she’d seen a hand-painted set on auction at a Gutai exhibition and wanted to ask Shinobu before making a bid. Was there an advantage to listening to a reader on vinyl? How did Shinobu account for her short limbs when playing that gangling Wataya child?
She never gave advice except once, when a teacher had made a snide remark about the presumptuousness of Shinobu’s nengajo portrait to her, and she had brushed it off.
“People love women with dreams, they resent women with ambitions,” she’d said. “The latter implies you are capable of realizing those dreams. It confers power upon you and not the dream.” Her willowy and unforgiving smile, that was Shinobu’s smile. “You are a Wakamiya girl—shall I tell you, or do you know, already, what things are like for women with power?”
Shinobu is aware Chihaya isn’t oblivious where it matters. She knows her talents and her flaws, that her hearing is superlative enough to protect with the Daddy Bear noise-canceling headphones Shinobu saw her wear once going home on the metro, and that she is beautiful, so much so that she doesn’t notice priceless clothing because it adds nothing to what she is just slumped sideways on someone’s borrowed windbreaker trying to push a spherical truffle into her mouth without opening it. She knows her callousness hurts people she loves and she can, if she wishes, cut loose of it by dampening down her own ambitions and staying what she was before karuta, a nice girl, slightly dilettanteish, who could be vaguely interested in a niche sport. She knows she was about to do that exactly and then she met Shinobu, in the middle of the road to the shrine, and her ambitions split at the seams and soaked her to the bone again because Shinobu strode up the very center of her life, drawing it together at its seams, and showed her that it was possible to live that way.
She doesn’t know she did the same for Shinobu, that day at the championship matches, and that Shinobu longs to be with her for that reason, longs and pulls back, because even Princess Shokushi didn’t know if she wanted more time or if she only wanted that time on her own terms. Shinobu knows, where Chihaya does not, that she too could be stranded powerless on the outside of what is only a dream, now, not an ambition, beating her fists against the clouded glass walls of a heart she’d once seen herself inhabiting clearly and imploring, I cannot move past the me I was with you, please, please, please, don’t forget me.
~
A gust of wind on the metal station chairs have them springing up, shrieking, and then chasing their wheeled suitcases across the floor. As they wrestle them back to the bench she tells Chihaya a story about her cleverest card, Ono no Komachi on poem nine, who acts coy but can barely contain herself from leaping to Shinobu’s hand when her poem is read, in search of praise. Chihaya is laughing so hard she’s covered her face with the guidebook explaining everything about the clock museum, its inception, the famous water clock with its steady erosion of the time remaining to everything living and all these things Shinobu never knew about Omi Jingu, her Omi Jingu, and now knows. She closes her eyes.
One more year, she thinks of Suo saying to Arata, holding up one finger. I only need one more year. Don’t take it from me yet, my right to all of this, and in Chihaya’s familiar eyes it’s Inokuma’s determination that turns itself over like a flipped copper coin, weighting Shinobu’s even chances, her bruised, bruising voice, and my right, Shinobu-chan, the right of the women we’ve both defeated to come here—what of that?
The grey melancholy that has weighted her since the match threatens to overwhelm her again and then Chihaya’s arm is around her shoulders, her voice in her ear, “Shinobu-chan! Shinobu-chan, Yukino-sensei recognized you! Look, they want us—“ and so they have, the litter of delighted schoolchildren yelling the Naniwa Bay poem again, this time for Shinobu, challenging her to finish though their teacher tries vainly to quiet them down. “Karuta queen! Karuta queen! Can we take a picture? Are you the princess?” this last to Chihaya, who actually thinks about it seriously.
“There’s no princess,” says Shinobu, “just queens. You all should learn about this before you ask these embarrassing questions of royalty,” which causes a girl in a purple coat to scream so delightedly she capsizes herself.
The girl has reddish hair and a face like a stapler would have if it had a face. Shinobu wants to feed her twenty Snowmaru pastries. “Do you even know any poems besides that one?” she asks with consummate scorn.
“Of course not,” shrieks the apparition, “I don’t play karuta except on new year’s when I have to beat my stupid twin brother in front of my grandparents! But I didn’t know there were queens! Why doesn’t baseball have queens?!”
“Baseball does not have queens because it is barbaric,” Shinobu explains, and the child’s expression turns murderous before Chihaya manages to drag her away, giggling in her ear, posing her in front of the sign that says Omijingumae Station with the children and their teacher.
“Only one queen, right?” she is saying. Shinobu shrugs.
Chihaya is laughing; she might be laughing too. Meeting someone new, she thinks dimly, is the inverse, perhaps, of being remembered, and then the wind has kicked up so loudly in her ears she can’t say for certain if it’s wind or laughter or applause or the sound of hands slapping, skin on bamboo, the triumph of capture and its sudden, acidic adrenaline. Before she takes the picture Chihaya takes her coat off and drapes it loosely over Shinobu’s shoulders to compensate for the wind that is making her squint, and the children shiver and yell. The picture is taken like that, her face rising bewilderedly out of the green and pink coat and the purple uniforms of all the schoolchildren, the buildings of the shrine spreading out behind them, all the scattered insignia of her old and new loves. One more year, she thinks fiercely, and then doesn’t. If there weren’t another year—if there were only this, before she doesn’t have it anymore—she would be satisfied. It is the first time she’s told herself this and warmed to it. There are only queens. Chihaya could learn to stand there with her, as she has learned to reach out. Shinobu could learn how to set her at ease. They could both learn, perhaps, how to be exceptions to themselves.
The reality of the new year is so sudden it nearly brings her to her knees, there in the dark and exhilarating afternoon with its promise of a glittering winter night. The curdling clouds and their weight suddenly revealed as lightness. That vegetal tang of the chinook through the station smoke, a smell she knows carries the weight of hope. A sick, giddy feeling flutters underneath her sternum, the same as it had been watching Inokuma count her cards and knowing—knowing with all certainty—that she deserved it; the feeling could overturn her.
She clutches at the coat. Her heart is singing with love, with terror.
~
Inokuma Haruka spent the break after the first match with her son, Aki, who Shinobu had seen flitting around her since he was born and had only now learned his name, never having told him hers. You didn’t have to ask children to remember you and it was why the cards remembered Inokuma also, pliable under her passion as her son’s petally cheek was under her palm. She looked up at Shinobu watching them when she straightened. The bright ambition was smoldering in her face. Oh, there you are! she’d said, perhaps heady with her victory, and Shinobu had thought she was like Chihaya, wild-eyed and too forthcoming when her wishes were coming true, and then she felt it: that intoxicating admiration, that love for someone else’s expertise. A Wakamiya girl. She had always had it in her. I always think of you as a little girl, but just now you blended into all these women. You were so still I thought you were one of the pillars, part of Omi Jingu herself.
Is that how much I will have to support, Shinobu wanted to ask her. Is that how much weight I will have to bear, to stay a little longer?
~
As the children reminded her, for the two weeks of new years’ celebrations everyone in the country is a karuta player; the Hyakunin Isshu sets are given out as gifts and dug up in stylish stacked apartments where they’re kept out of sight the rest of the year, as they had been, once, in her grandmother’s house. There are grasping hands all over Shinobu’s regal Murasaki and Shonagon, the cards she prepares for as studiously as for visiting dignitaries, who pout, surely, at the neophytes who deign to set them next to each other in formation. On the far end of the station, where a few last clubs are still mingling, Shinobu and Chihaya find a rickety table of card sets departing clubs have laid out for sale, bought on discount from printmakers’ shops around the country with a coin box propped in front as donation for the Karuta Association.
Chihaya tucks a slice of hair behind her ear as she flips aimlessly through the sets to find her name-card. Now and then she glances back at Shinobu and waves a card, and Shinobu sees it isn’t her name-card at all but Shinobu’s, a little bit different, but known true as a fingerprint. She holds up a finger and heads out to the open-air train tracks to take a phone call and Shinobu looks back at the table.
The last person who used an incomplete, cheap set shedding glitter had set the cards back in a careless fashion, mixing in the yomifuda indiscriminately; she tips them out onto the table to put them in order. There are footsteps on the concrete behind her.
“Let me help you with that.” She looks up, and Sakurazawa Midori bows to her.
“After such a long weekend. Surely you have better things to do,” but she has succumbed already, to her irritation, to the surgical way the older woman pulls her gloves off finger by finger before holding a hand out for the cards. She halves the deck and passes it over.
“I’ve been meaning to replenish our stores. My students ruin so many and there’s certainly a variety available after the new year, isn’t there?” Shinobu tilts her shoulder and Sakurazawa plays a limpid gaze over her cards before beginning to cut them into collated stacks of three. “Wakamiya-san. Spending a nice day on your own after your annual portrait at the shrine?”
“You know about that?”
“You write Rion nengajo every year, if you don’t recall. Quite stunning. We all look forward to them at Fujisaki.”
“Very kind of you.” Here is poem eighty-nine, the sudden cold hollow of the poem all at odds with the glitter flaking off on Shinobu’s fingertips. Nothing could be worse than living a moment longer—She doesn’t want to see it like this, denuded. She wants her own known and perfectly illustrated set, Princess Shokushi as the young priestess at Kamo, dewy and sweet, not yet weakened by her illness. Not for many more years yet.
“Did you wear the lovely kimono you wore yesterday?”
“You—certainly do seem to be interested, you weren’t lying.”
Sakurazawa gestures with her chin at Shinobu’s modest suitcase. “It’s only that you’re not carrying a traditional garment case for it. I thought Shiho-san must have taken it with her.”
“It’s not—my portrait, or the lack thereof, is not your business, sensei.”
“The lack thereof?”
A jarring habit Sakurazawa has is the same one Inokuma does collecting the cards: smoothing a thumb over the women poets as though to affirm some tie between them, not a friendly motion but a caretaking one. As precise as Shinobu, no delay. She wonders who learned it from whom. She has never wondered such a thing before. She averts her eyes. It’s not something she should ever have seen.
“What about you, anyway? I could have sworn Fujisaki didn’t stay to see my ceremony—Yamashiro, at least, didn’t seem to be present in the audience.”
When she finishes with her deck Sakurazawa is looking at her passionlessly. “That must be the first time Wakamiya-san has taken notice of our humble school’s presence.”
That she should say this—that she should say something like this when Shinobu is still soaked with the chill through her clothes, as though she’s stayed out all night since her victory—the anger flares up easily as a memory. She snaps the tie around the cards and turns away, her thoughts in tumult.
She hasn’t stopped noticing, since the match. She doesn’t think she will ever stop noticing again. She cannot believe in her own victory anymore and it’s this woman’s fault, it is Inokuma’s fault, it is Chihaya’s fault that she has only now understood what poem eighty-nine was about, the sharp pain but also the inevitability, the horror that comes when you finally understand you will lose everything at the moment you know what it was you had, know to want them—your years of quiet moments.
“I don’t—“ she says,“it’s rather rude of you to—“
“Sakurazawa-sensei!”
Chihaya is pattering across the station all brightly composed in the cold, carrying two or three stacks of cards as though she doesn’t care at all what they’re like, only needs the extras for practice. Shinobu does not want to see her like this and turns away but it’s there, still, the subject they’ve been avoiding thrust into the open by Sakurazawa’s candor. It’s the fourth new year since Shinobu’s first victory and it is impossible to deny, now, that she has missed her last chance to take next year’s portrait. Of exposing herself in the fullness of her convictions, when she can’t summon them to her fingertips anymore.
“I wasn’t intending to disparage you at all,” says Sakurazawa. She spared Chihaya barely a glance, though she is her student. She is only looking at Shinobu. Under the force of her regard Shinobu is brittle with her rage. Someone could snap her, she thinks. Someone could fracture her so easily it’s a wonder it has never been done before.
“It is not important to me what your intentions are,” she says wildly, “you’re trying to unsettle me and I know why, it’s because you’ve never won against Inokuma-san and I beat her again yesterday—“
“Shinobu-chan! Don’t talk to Sakurazawa-sensei like that!”
“No, let her say it, Ayase. I provoked her.”
“She doesn’t even mean it!” cries Chihaya. She has dropped one of the sets she was holding on the ground, spangling the floor at Shinobu’s feet with her one hundred accusing, dismayed best friends. I am sorry, she thinks, I am so very, very sorry— “Sakurazawa-sensei, you don’t deserve that kind of—“
Shinobu rounds on her, incandescent. “Deserve?” she hisses, “why don’t you tell me who deserves it, I saw you watching Suo’s matches, I saw how angry you were when he won, why don’t you tell me who deserves that kind of—what, exactly? Chihaya, why don’t you tell me I don’t deserve it?”
“I’ve never thought you don’t deserve it! How could I? Shinobu-chan, if you only knew—if you only knew how much time I’ve spent trying to play like you, you’re the queen—“
She can’t stop watching herself detonate the day, as though she is outside her own body. She feels so lightheaded she must be floating outside it.
“I am the queen,” she says, “and I know what that means now and you, you still don’t. You don’t want anything more from me but to be static and unreachable to you, well—here I am, now. You’ve—reached me. The way I play isn’t unique, I know that now. You’ll surpass me within the year because you can improve. I’ve accepted that. I’ve realized that before you and now I’m just waiting, I—I—“
“You’re not waiting,” says Chihaya, stricken. She is angry now. Of course she is. “You don’t know how to sit still and wait, it’s just that no one’s ever realized it because you’re so—so precise—but I do! I always have! You haven’t accepted anything, you want me so you can think I’m just this—oblivious innocent, like everyone else, you wouldn’t have wanted to be near me at all if you’d known I don’t—I don’t think you’re unreachable anymore!”
Her face is red and bitter, the brittleness like frost there, too, in her horror; she ducks her head, defeated, her hair falling in front of her face.
“Why is it so hard for you to believe someone might have realized first,” she says, quiet, and then—it’s all blindingly clear. Her solicitousness through the afternoon, now revealed in its true form as only pity. How stupid Shinobu must have seemed, thinking they were changing together when it was only the moment of coming closer temporarily, the closeness of lowered heads to one another in the bow after defeat.
It’s too much. “That’s enough, Ayase,” says Sakurazawa sharply but Shinobu has heard enough and doesn’t want to listen anymore. The bell she heard at the Kamo Shrine is louder now, slicing through the devastating, fractured wind of the January day. All its impurities burned away leaving nothing but emptiness for the sound to reach them, and of course, then, it would come to Chihaya first. She drops to her feet and scoops up her name-card and Shokushi out of the commotion of cheap cards, quick as Chihaya would be able to, as Inokuma would, as Sakurazawa would, and then she hitches up her cards, nearly crushing them with her grip, and pushes past Chihaya, out into the darkening, terrible afternoon.
~
The year before succumbing to her illness—as the story goes—Shinobu’s eighty-ninth best friend met with the secretary of the Poetry Office to deliver a copy of her latest one hundred poems. The reddening and furiously detailed plum blossoms at the Oi mansion where she lived in seclusion must have been profuse that spring, filigreeing the paths where she walked alone accompanied only by memories equally crowded and proliferatingly unstoppable. She looked at them, and in front of the secretary delivered an impromptu poem, so forcefully he recorded the incident later: plum near the eaves, do not forget me!
This is as the story goes, anyway. It’s not the entire story, which is why Shinobu never wants to know any more about what happened to her friends before she came for them. When the plum came back the following year the princess saw it rilling the trees that had lain bare all winter, brushstrokes against the sky portending what she already knew, and finished her poem in a whisper: —if only for another year.
It had never been a story of defiance in the first place. Shinobu images she knew there was no hope. She imagines her entire being glimpsed in an instant what she would never see, and then it was upon her again, the regret and passion that had gripped her when she took her brush in hand and wrote her poem eighty-nine for her unrequited love, for Shinobu who would meet her only in centuries, but most of all for herself, for the best of herself she’d glimpsed only at the moment it came time to bid it goodbye. Nothing can be worse than living a moment longer, when I cannot bear growing any weaker than I already have.
~
Her mother’s face in her hands after the divorce, her hair falling over her face so often Shinobu thought someday she would forget what it looked like. I can’t face him, she cried, not knowing it’s all behind us. Outside her father waited with the summer sun kindling a heat in his eyes. Shinobu’s cheek pressed against her back. I memorized the ingredients of Calbee rice snacks, she wanted to say. Don’t cry, because there are four kinds of artificial pink. If you try hard, things you make up are almost as nice as the real thing.
~
Her heart stops racing when she is halfway across the bridge to the other side of the tracks, in the opposite direction as Kyoto, to Sakamoto. There are still people on the ground waiting through the glass. Here it’s colder, the metal closer without the warmth of other people and she can see the sky going violet in the distance, lowering itself into night where the red glint of telephone towers punctures it.
The train tracks bisect the snow ahead of her, as far as she can see. She has her favorite portrait cards out, one in each palm, hidden there. Shokushi and Taira. Extremely distinguished. She has never felt so aimless.
Sakurazawa Midori is walking near the entrance to the bridge. She says something to someone else, shields her eyes, and points up to where Shinobu is. Shinobu shrinks back against the sound of clattering on the stairs and then Inokuma is there, shaking her hair out of a loosely tied scarf.
“My god!” she shouts, and then sees Shinobu. “It’s freezing up here! It can’t be that far off the tracks, can it?”
“I’ve—heard altitude increases cold.”
“Oh please, that’s if you’re rappelling off Fuji-san, not on a station bridge waiting for your train delayed forever. Waka-chan, did you even bring gloves?”
“They’re down—“
“Take my scarf, then, here, come here.” She bundles Shinobu’s hands into the scarf. “Well, now I’m cold. Won’t you huddle up with me? Good thing you’ve got jeans on and not that incredible kimono. Though we’ll miss your portrait nengajo next year, you know.”
They hunker down against the glass wall of the bridge, the railing just clearing their heads. Below them and across the concrete expanse of the station Sakurazawa is striding decorously in her navy coat. A child’s face bobbing out from behind it now and again as he runs circles around her riding boots. “If Aki can get Midori to tank up and play tag, I’ll consider this delay more than worth it,” Inokuma mutters to herself, then removes a ziploc of Calbee chocolate curls from inside her jacket pocket. “Waka-chan, you look like you won’t judge me for whatever the hell goes into these things, grab a handful. Hey, hey, that’s not a handful, unless you’re Harada-san and have horrible gargantuan hands. Slow down!”
The glass against the back of Shinobu’s head is cool and liquid-feeling. She has the sense it’s not there at all.
“Sakurazawa-sensei told you I didn’t take the portrait.”
“She did. Said she didn’t expect you to be a bad sport, which shows how much she knows, anyway. You’re not mad you lost a few matches here and there.”
She was, once. Arata laughed at her for it; she knows why now.
“Not to you.”
Inokuma grins. “Just like a queen, you know? Not everyone can chose who they prefer to lose to.”
"I will need to apologize to Sakurazawa-sensei."
"Mm, you will."
She fits the vinyl of her jacket against Shinobu, insinuating her further into the private warm space they’ve created against the chilled glass. There’s snow coming down now, almost indistinguishable from the sky. Only a flake here or there. The poets in the cards had written such beautiful things about snow, such beautiful things in general about those times of the year where the world and the soul darkened, and now Shinobu can’t remember a single one though she’d made one hundred friends for only that reason. For a little beauty in the encroaching dark.
Inokuma peels open her fingers in the scarf. “What’s that you have?” She pries out the card the way she must pry secrets from the hands of her children, one of whom has now coerced Sakurazawa, out under the awning of the Sakamoto line track, to play a clapping game with one of her gloves off. “Eighty-nine? Sweetheart, this is a poem for an old, old woman.”
“She was a teenager.”
“Not when she was sick enough to write this one. You know, I’ve been telling Masaru our current queen’s a real prize, very mature, not much of a teenager at all, but here you are carrying around a poem about a girl with a fatal illness thinking it’s about your life, don’t you think that’s more than a little bit silly? See, this is what I tell Midori, you can’t just upend the Hyakunin Isshu on these kids without a little perspective. What do you know? What on earth do you know?”
“I don’t—“ She feeds a few chocolate curls into her mouth, stoppering it before she has the chance to say anything. “I don’t think it’s about my life. I’m not—I haven’t thought it was about dying, not really. She didn’t just want to live, she wanted—she wanted to live as strong as she was then.”
“Is that what you think?” Inokuma turned the card over and returned it to her. “God,” she said. “Everyone remembers the cards they want, don’t they? They start when they’re just playing and then when they’re dreaming, when they’re in love. That’s what makes it more than a game.”
Sakurazawa is playing so seriously now she’s dropped her glove on the ground, absolutely singleminded and it delights the child, who is laughing the way the children laughed, taking their picture with Shinobu. Inokuma’s hair flips up at the ends as her head bobs in a mirror of her son’s delight, watching. A peal sounds in the distance, the train oncoming, and somewhere in the station Chihaya must be listening for it too. Must have heard already, if Shinobu is hearing it now.
“I didn’t think,” says Shinobu, “that being queen. Meant anything. You showed me differently.”
“Are you sorry I did?”
It’s the easiest question anyone she could answer right now. “No,” she says, slowly. “It’s—the best thing I’ve ever felt, inside that shrine.”
“Ah, then. Vice-queen or whatever, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all, you know, to be that for someone. It took me a long time to realize that.”
She thinks of Chihaya, of women with ambitions. Her grandmother’s circuitous questions and then the cards themselves, accessory to victory but never in her wildest imaginings of them has she wondered what they thought of it themselves.
“You know you still have a lot to learn, if you know that,” Inokuma is saying. “Shouldn’t you have taken that portrait?”
“How could I have? I can’t even touch the cards without thinking of what you, or Chihaya, or anyone else I’ve met would make of them. I was strong when I was alone. Not because I overcame what was possible. Because I didn’t know what was. Now I do, and what am I—am I still a contender?” She looks at her hands. Her princess and her first fan. “And perhaps I’d be happy not to come back here, not to be a contender, but—but—“
She is whispering now, like the princess, the tears gathering at the corners of her eyes. The winter world blurring and the snowfall is faster now, the tiny pinpricks on her cheeks. “I want to reach up to all of you,” she says, undone. “I want to reach up to you now, as you did for me, and I can’t—I simply can’t see how I can do both. I don’t—want—to be alone.”
Inokuma’s gaze is bright, flipped-coin full of potential and wonder. This is what she looked, like, Shinobu thinks. This is what they saw, before she took them with love.
“You dear girl,” she says, with such gentleness, “do you think your friends will allow that to happen?” and then she turns and draws Shinobu and her two cards close, inside the circle of her arms as the world ripples white, the coming train shakes the tracks below them, and the queen, not yet eternal, begins to cry.
~
Chihaya is still sitting in the waiting room next to their two suitcases, pink and purple. She is kicking at the base of hers fretfully and when she sees Shinobu looks up, eyes wet and so utterly morose Shinobu only sits down next to her in silence.
In the time she’s been gone someone has lit a brazier for the few people still waiting, though the warmth is fitful, now spooling out, now withholding a ribbon of heat against Shinobu’s legs. It’s evening proper now. Almost five-thirty.
“I do believe I owe you an apology,” she says.
Chihaya looks stricken. “Oh, no, Shinobu-chan, no, it’s.” She lifts her hands, runs her fingers through her hair. The tips of her ears are very red. She is laughing a little, almost too low to hear under the hum of the brazier.
“Nothing is really turning out the way it should, is it?” she says helplessly. “I’m afraid I don’t…really know what to do. Sakurazawa-sensei, though, she told me—she said she wanted to apologize to you. Because—this was the first time she wanted to congratulate you on a win, too. She said because,” she swallows, “it was the first time she thought you’d want to congratulate yourself. Is that true, Shinobu-chan?”
“I’d say I told you today, in so many words.”
“Shinobu-chan…always so polite. But—you really ruined our day, you know. We were having a good one.”
“It isn’t done yet. Must you be so pessimistic? It’s one of the most unseemly things about you.”
Chihaya laughs. Their skin grows cold and warm, cold and warm.
“Shinobu-chan. I’m…I’m also sorry. I wasn’t listening to you. Isn’t that—isn’t that funny?”
They sit there, looking at one another, and they’re in that waiting room again, the surge of warmth she felt, drawing with Chihaya in front of the glass window, again inside the station, side by side. A year, or four years, only separated into a chain of quiet, infinite moments.
Nothing is forgotten, she thinks, the thought dropping into her as though into deep, still water. Nothing is forgotten, and that is what it means to improve.
“It’s because a lot of people have a chance at it that the best exists,” she says, slowly, then. “I wanted to tell you that. Before I left here.” Chihaya is staring at her; it’s not complete yet. She tries again. “It’s all right if you need me to be the queen for a while longer. I’ll wait for you.” Still not. “I’ve…” She straightens her shoulders, as if about to bow. “I’ve waited for you.”
Chihaya’s boot kicks the base of her suitcase once more and then stays still. She takes her glove off, finger by finger, as Sakurazawa did. She touches, centimeter by centimeter of soft skin, Shinobu’s chilled and restless hand.
She bends her head in the bow Shinobu wants to make, having chosen, like a queen, what she will lose to, and then Shinobu feels her lips on her knuckles, the kiss at the web of skin between her fingers.
“Close your eyes,” she tells Chihaya. “Don’t look.” Chihaya says, “I won’t,” so Shinobu closes hers then, raw to her bones. Ravaged with tenderness. Chihaya kisses her; she kisses her again. Their hands grow warm together, staying so.
In the cold evening the snow whirls upward into the dull orange sky. She imagines the lights of the city, faraway Tokyo and her own Kyoto and Omi Jingu here, miles upon miles of luminescence kindling the fields and hills of the nation under the winter night. Blood into the chambers of a newly beating heart.
~
She hefts her suitcase into the overhead rack of the train and puts her earmuffs on against the clanging bells. The snow is in that beatific state of fast flakes but total clarity in the air, its beauty held in a balance with its own motion when she runs back out to the open platform between trains, clapping her hands together under their gloves. Inokuma and her son must have gone inside. Chihaya is standing on the platform, Sakurazawa next to her and her tense eyes soften when Shinobu meets them, nods once to her to affirm the apology she made moments ago.
“Shinobu-chan!” cries Chihaya. “Shinobu-chan, remember, peppermint with ginger. We’re going to make it. Because—“ she has to shout now, the train has begun to move. “I’m going to see you again before next year!”
“I’ll be ready,” Shinobu shouts back.
Chihaya could run towards her now, but they talked about it; she is only standing still to wait. And Shinobu is ready, she is standing at the end of the train compartment, picking up speed, and ready. Her two cards in the pockets of her jeans as she leans against the railing. Not a bad thing, at all, to be that for someone. Chihaya holds up three fingers, counts down, and at the last one Shinobu raises her hand, waves in earnest farewell to Omi Jingu for that year only, not thinking of the next, that may or may not be her last at all, and the snow comes and claims her, everything going white as they pull out from under the awning and into the glittering aliveness of the night.
~
Inside the train, she goes back to her seat. The snowflakes on her cheeks. She shakes her boots off, combs a hand through her wet hair. She puts her cards on the tray table to dry.
Her phone pings. She opens the text from Chihaya, and looks at her portrait.
Shinobu-chan is so stylish, it says.
She closes the portrait and the phone case. Princess Shokushi’s card spins on the table, dislodged by the motion; she picks it up and meets the princess’ eyes, the directness that in its honesty is nearly a smile. She smooths over the wrinkled surface, so dearly loved. All the gratitude she has never felt so keenly.
“Well?” she says. “What are you looking at?”
the end