Incarnadine

Chapter 12

CHAPTER 12

The sun was glaring as hard as the villagers who wanted to kill me.

“Let’s reconsider this idea first,” Haruka-sama was telling them. “This is a modern age, and we are not at direct disadvantage when it comes to this young woman.”

“Spirits are immortal!” one of the elder ladies yelled. “We should kill her before she grows into her evil powers!”

It was Katashi’s aunt Midori, who lived just three houses away from my home. Katashi himself was Ren’s promised sweetheart. Ren had followed him when he went to the city to get a better life.

Ren had always been the more favored sister. After all, she did come from the Takahashi family, and I came from under a tree at Haruka-sama’s backyard crop. I was a nobody. I was related to no one by blood. I was disposable.

Especially now that they had a reason to dispose me.

“Now, that is just superstition,” Haruka-sama said. “We have no proof that she really is the spirit. And even if she is, remember that the spirits have been in our favor in the war.”

“And look where that got us!” another of them yelled. “Look at us—desperately waiting for the next harvest, fearing the war, fearing the next wave of tsunami, fearing a young woman who has the face of Moriko—we don’t need another Tamamo-no-Mae in our homeland! We should banish her before she did what Moriko did!”

Moriko. Moriko was a famous legend in our village, of a woman who had lived for generations and never aged. She was notorious for being the most beautiful lady of the village, one who stole the rich landlords from their wives’ arms. According to the stories about her, she was a witch with features of a fox. High cheekbones, fox eyes, vixen grin.

Legend said she was a kitsune, and no one dared to cross her. A witch. A cunning vixen. As the local Tamamo-no-Mae, she had hunters on her trail, and they usually fell dead not so later after they saw her fox form.

Of course that was just a superstition. The lady Moriko must have had the rumors running about her because she was caught hiding an American soldier in her chamber back in the war. And though Moriko could be called a Geisha of higher class, she never was one who served in brothels. A Japanese woman with respect shouldn’t, by the eyes of society, let an American take her to his bed without a fight. Should she be forced, she should kill herself and never endure being used by the American.

Katashi’s grandmother said that the local Japanese soldiers came for him and killed him on the spot, while Moriko ran into the woods in shame and never came back.

Moriko’s painting was still hung in some rich lords’ homes. The summer I turned fifteen, they had begun the rumors about my resemblance to her. I had just gotten taller that summer; my chest had just begun to finally fill out. But people began to talk about how I was too tall, how the shape of my eyes looked western, and how the men in the village had behaved around me. It had happened before, with Moriko.

They said I must be her daughter. The offspring of a witch with the enemy’s blood.

“She is not welcome here,” I had heard Noboru-sama tell Haruka-sama in one breezy afternoon. He was an old family friend. “For her own good, you should send her to the city or another village.”

“She shouldn’t have to leave,” Haruka-sama insisted, strong even in his sickly state. He was almost a real father to me, but his old age had withered him into a feebler projection of the man he once was. “She has the right to live here.”

But that was before the villagers began coming to our front yard.

At first it was just five of them, some elder ladies from our neighborhood. And then they grew, into some farmers and the younger people who believed that I would bring bad luck over them. Haruka-sama, the patient man he was, ignored them and told me to live my life the way I always did. His sickness had worsened, but he always tried to smile at me. But I knew what Noboru-sama had said was creeping into his mind. It was just a matter of time before I was truly cast out.