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One crisp Monday morning when the autumn harvest of the leaves hung ripe and red along the city streets, the noise of rushing water poured into Youko’s ears. They twitched first for a few moments, attempting to identify the sound—sudden, harsh, unnatural—and her bleary eyes peeked through a narrow oak door to where a man stood.
Her heart leapt: she did not immediately recognise him, did not remember sharing a space with him—then as her fingers, aching and empty, spread out across the flat white sheets of the bed, her swimming thoughts all coalesced. She recalled, if vaguely, stumbling half-drunk and curious enough to be foolish into a hotel room with a man who had simply been kind enough to offer her an umbrella and his sturdy arm. His broad, dark frame filled the tantalising gap in the door, and she watched, unblinking, as he drew the polished silver of a razor up the long curve of his throat.
She could hear a gently rippling breeze out the window, and along with it the languid drip of last night’s rain from the drooping leaves into placid puddles. The man let out a short, sharp hiss through his teeth and Youko stared as a single drop of red made its slow descent over his neck down to the collar of his white shirt like a mountaineer. She swallowed, her throat dry. Only then did she notice that she was hungry.
“Watanabe?” she asked tentatively, scrunching the sheets in her pale-fisted grip to draw them over her chest.
One of his large, brown eyes drifted over to her, his mouth covered briefly by a damp towel that he pressed over his lips and then his throat; that red line disappeared into the glistening sheen of water. The room smelled cold to her in a way that only this time of year did—cold with the fading embers of summer and the promise of winter. It was a time when a fox should be out hunting and securing a den, but Youko was parched and naked in a bed she would never see again.
“I left a glass of water on the nightstand,” he told her, words meant to placate her—what he meant was that he was busy, but still wished to offer her something.
“Could you get me some food?”
His silence she knew to be assent. It was something she had learned quickly about him, when they had still been sober and even more so afterward: he did not always inuit her desires as well as either of them may have wished, but if she made any request of him he seemed to hold it as sacred. When she saw the look that came into his eyes whenever she started a sentence with “could you…” something in her heart stirred in wonder if there could ever be a limit to her demands. What would he not do to please her?
He slipped around the door and out of the bathroom, already half-dressed in his officer’s attire as though his being here was its own kind of service. He was so unlike other soldiers she had encountered over the years in how he wore the uniform, rather than it wearing him. In another life, the thought suddenly came to her, Watanabe might have been a monk.
“I went downstairs and fetched something—though you were asleep and I did not want to wake you.” He squatted down by a drawstring bag, untied it, and produced a pale red, round fruit almost too big for his hand.
Youko had never seen its kind before, and she cocked her head; it was reminiscent to her of a large apple, but its flesh appeared stiff and hard like a shell.
Watanabe placed it like some imperial jewel on the towel, nestled softly on the nightstand—then he stepped into the bathroom, let the water run again, and emerged with his razor in one wet hand, flicking droplets of water from the other.
“This is a pomegranate,” he explained, seeing curiosity bloom in her eyes. “Originally these came from the mountainous regions of Persia, which may also be from where we get the name: zakuro we say in Japanese; the mountains there are Zagros. They have been cultivated in Japan for at least one thousand years, since Heian—”
“Let me eat it,” Youko grumbled, almost wanting to snatch the fruit and sink her teeth into it—but her wiser nature told her to let him handle this, as he seemed to want to.
He smiled at her impatience, glad that he had made her so interested in the exotic pomegranate, and glad at her expressiveness. He took the razor and sliced away the top of the fruit—the part that reminded Youko of a monk’s gourd bottle—then observed as though to learn as he made six shallow incisions in its side from top to bottom. Holding it swaddled in the towel, he let it fall open in his hand like the last flower of summer.
Youko paused in awe at the glittering, bloody hearts that studded the inside of the pomegranate, countless in number—and as Watanabe peeled back more of the fleshy white skin more and more of the scarlet seeds revealed themselves. The filtered rays of dawn, slipping in the window, gleamed through the translucent membrane of the fruit and made it look like a bouquet of rubies.
Watanabe picked out a few of the hearts and held them out to her, dripping red, in his palm. She pinched them lightly in her fingers, one at a time, testing them on her tongue, letting them roll past her teeth, feeling the grit of the seed as she chewed each slowly and thoughtfully.
He did not have to ask her, “do you like it?” He often found himself unable to interpret her sparse words, but her actions—brief, symbolic gestures here and there—said everything to him.
Youko did not waste her time with single bits of pomegranate: she was a fox at heart. She eyed the fruit briefly, and then sunk her teeth into one whole slice. The mass of seeds filled her and quenched her and she breathed in, satisfied, after she swallowed. A mess of red painted her mouth and lips, and when she found herself smiling at the sweet taste and the notion of, in an indirect way, eating out of Watanabe’s hand like some wild animal… she inadvertently let her fangs show in the morning light, dripping pomegranate blood over the edge of the bed onto the towel.
Watanabe’s breath caught in his throat but he did not say anything—instead letting himself live in this moment, not knowing nor caring if another like it would ever come again in his human life. It was not so often that a man made a kitsune smile, and something in Watanabe was aware that this made him a rare man indeed.
In his eyes was something akin to a look of awe as he watched her eat: the gore of the pomegranate across her cheeks gave them a lively flush. There was life in blood and there was death, and with her long span of life he wondered quietly how much death had been in it, too. The pomegranate connected both of these worlds, but when he looked at Youko his thoughts drifted most of all to how she enjoyed it, how her experience of living, so different from his own, was like a mirror of re-enchantment on the myriad experiences of the world. Even a simple pomegranate was born anew in her hands and teeth and tongue.
In the end he only ate a little of the fruit; Youko devoured her share and then some, but Watanabe did not mind. It was enough to see her satisfaction and to know that he had sated her hunger. She allowed him to dab at her face with the towel, wiping away thin streaks of red, staining the blue fabric like real blood; he pressed his lips to those stains, but found the flavour was mostly water. Youko eyed him suspiciously but said nothing in protest, knowing how he was. It was a small ritual but a special one and she did not mind.
“I was thinking—” he began, but paused, losing his words when he found her inquisitive eyes gazing at him. A part of him did not want her to grasp how much power she had over his heart—but, of course, she knew.
“Were you now?” she teased, after he had fallen silent. “Go on—keep thinking out loud. I’m not hungry anymore and I won’t interrupt you, I promise.”
Instead, her attention captured for however long, he told her another story of the pomegranate: it may instead have originated from the foothills of the Himalayas—the birthplace of Buddhism. The fruit followed the footsteps of the religion across China into Japan, its sweetness and symbolism created and recreated on each step of its long journey. He told her of the goddess Hariti, baptised in Japan as Kishimojin, and there was a steady light of curious recognition in her eyes as he spun a tale of the Buddha and the pomegranate, the transmutation of a demon into a deity from the tender seeds of one precious fruit.
When his words slowed and his story wound down, Youko looked up at him, reading his face with her penetrating gaze—how much of him did she understand without saying a word?
“Now, what were you actually thinking?”
Watanabe smiled and lowered his eyes, as though she had offered him her favour and he could not help but give his respect in turn. A small twinge of guilt that festered in his mind wondered if she regretted last night—but he let it wash away like so much cool rain on his face. He knew that all of this could be nothing beyond one night’s reverie and a morning pomegranate, someday half-forgotten under the accumulation of so much time. Or it could be more.
He wiped his hands on the towel and let out a breath. “I know you dislike the cold, and this happens to be the time of year when my work keeps me least busy—so, forgive my assumption, but I hoped you might be interested in going somewhere warm and spending the winter with me.”
His fingers balled into a fist by his side, and as the words passed his lips he imagined them as the last gasp of a dying man, unable to take them back and say something else. It was a leap of faith into the future from the present—but the unknown had a certain charm and allure to him now, with her, that it had never had before.
“Sure,” she said, her expression unchanging, as if he had asked to borrow a pair of sandals from her. It was certainly better than hibernation, and she immediately began to think, as he also did, of destinations and activities.
And then—with a shock that nearly stilled his vast heart—she kissed him. She kissed him like she had not eaten at all, like there might be still more pomegranate hearts hidden on his tongue. The nectar on her lips, full and red like a blooming rose, poured into him and he had never known or thought it could be so sweet as when he tasted it from her mouth.
As the sun slipped behind a patch of roving clouds and Youko drew her tongue across her gleaming teeth to clean the last sharp streaks of pomegranate juice, Watanabe realised that for the first time he was in love.