WARNING: Contains references to violence, rape and suicide

 

 

The seasons passed, yet to Sumire they felt as one long and bitter winter. Frozen over so many times, she believed her heart would never fully thaw again. Perhaps she had entered into a season of life from which there was no return from the cold darkness of encroaching death. Still she toiled on despite this, with a defiance that grimly bemused her. It was as if in the face of such bleak despair a cord of dormant strength within her yet steeled in stubborn opposition, keeping her standing straight beneath the crushing hand of fate.

Poor and friendless in this place so once hospitable, she and the Inoki clan looked upon each sunrise as a challenge to be met. It seemed there was never an end to the hard labor of simply staying alive. The bit of coin they managed to pool together would vanish in a flash as a family member fell ill or the roof fell in or the cart broke an axle or the ax split its haft. Every setback was a crisis. At every storm they shuddered, wondering if they could weather it. And after it had passed, dreading if they could weather the next. 

Though she had no time or energy to spare, Sumire yet found reserves of both for the traumatized women of the clan, whom the rest viewed as beyond helping. Perhaps because of her own frightful past she could not view them in this way. 

And so she spoke to them, softly and coaxingly as if speaking to a wild, wounded creature, paralyzed with hurt and fear. She dressed them and brushed their hair and set them to the simplest of tasks of sweeping or stirring kettles. Often, especially in the beginning, they would drift off, first in the eyes then in the body. But she would guide them gently back, again and again. Even Shurei shook her head at this, but Sumire persevered.

“So long as you live there is hope for the future,” she would whisper to them as she tucked them into bed. “Each new day is one step further from the past. It is dead and left behind, but you are alive and moving ahead. The past cannot rise at dawn, but you will. You will…”

Slowly, one by one, they began to return from that state of living death. But the breaking of their frigid numbness brought with it the white-hot agony of awareness. The night was rent with screams as they relived their horrors; the day with choking sobs as they recounted them to Sumire.

In their heinous tales she felt the monsters of her own past resurrected.

“I always told myself I would fight. Even while I lay there I told myself to fight but I couldn’t move a muscle…I couldn’t do anything but let it happen…My sister broke her neck fighting back. Maybe if I had fought like her, maybe if I had resisted even a little, maybe then I could forgive myself…”

“You’d think I’d know just how many it was.” A harsh, rasping laugh. “But I don’t know. They just kept coming, and I felt each one like a knife so how can I not know how many it was that were in me? I don’t know how I can’t know, and I can’t stop asking myself how I could lose track. What sort of woman could…”

But for some Sumire had no compass for the evil they had endured.

“They ripped him from my arms but he wouldn’t stop crying. He was so loud, so loud and they were so angry. I heard a crack but I didn’t think—I didn’t think what it was until one forced me over and I saw the blood on the wall and I realized he wasn’t crying anymore. My ears were ringing and all I could hear was that awful silence. I hear it still…”

Sumire began to doubt whether she had done these women any favors, bringing them back into this world of grief and pain. Shurei tried to reassure her. But then they cut down the first one who hung herself in the ramshackle shed. Another wandered off into the night, never to be seen again. Yet another Sumire found leaning over the side of the bridge, staring down at the white-edged current rushing by below. Perhaps simply staring, perhaps not.

Time wore on. In their pit of poverty it seemed the family slid back a step for each scrabble upward. Determined to dig his clan out for good, Kouta rallied what kinsmen of his were able to the task and hustled tirelessly for better and steadier work. At last, he secured a contract, dangerous and ill paid though it was.

When he said he intended to use the money to purchase a burial plot for his late father, for his mother who’d perished only a few short days after his return and for his other departed kin, Shurei quarreled with him fiercely.

“We have the living here to feed and shelter—surely the dead can wait!”

“It is all ashes in my mouth and curses that surround me,” Kouta said gravely, frowning away, “so long as their remains lie in disgrace.”

Shurei balled her fists, stamped her foot. Sumire knew her daughter spoke only reason, but there was no accounting for logic in matters of the heart. 

“Such senselessness, Kouta-kun! Selfishness, too. You would put the welfare of our children on hold—”

But a series of hacking coughs from him cut off her tirade. Between poor living conditions and endless stress, the cold he’d picked up on the journey west had festered. Blood was on his lips, on his hand as he drew it back shakily from his mouth. Sumire caught a dreadful glimpse of this before Shurei swooped in, pale and harried, fussing over him like his illness was a fire to be tamped out with a few blots of a handkerchief and a cup of weak herbal tea.

“How long has he been coughing blood?” Sumire asked her later, when they were alone.

Shurei swallowed, glanced aside. Muttering something about needing to check on the children, she hastened from the room, swiping her wrist across her eyes as she went.

The ashes of Kouta’s kin were re-interred with proper ceremony. Whether by some blessing of his ancestors or the grace of the gods, the next few contracts that came the clan’s way proved more lucrative and manageable. With each one, their reputation grew. Over the course of another year, Kouta was able to find both a lender and landlord in a shrewd, stringy man named Tanaka, and set up shop in the trade district of the city.

They moved the family into the rooms above the shop, which for all their drabness seemed a palace in comparison to the squalor they’d been living in before. At long last, it seemed the clan’s fortunes had begun to turn. 

Then one bitter winter day, while reviewing the accounts with his eldest son, Kouta collapsed on the shoproom floor. He waved it off as a spell of faintness brought on by the cold dry air. But the next morning he did not rise from bed. Nor the morning after.

Sumire sat by her daughter’s side, listening to his thin, rattling breaths as Shurei did her best to comfort and cheer him. But now his lids did not rise either.

At her urging, Sumire left them to see to the children and others. Lingering a moment outside the door, she heard above the howling night winds the sound of her daughter’s muffled, anguished cries. 

They laid Kouta’s ashes to rest alongside his father’s. For the burial and its proceedings, Shurei spared no expense.

The Inoki clan was shaken, bereft without their patriarch to guide them. With an urgency bordering on ruthlessness, Shurei stepped in to fill his shoes as best she could. She cut their mourning short and sent them back to work, throwing herself into the shop with a furor fueled by grief and desperation.

Her children were desolate, each grieving in their own way the untimely death of their father. Like his mother, Kouta’s eldest son preoccupied himself with the family business, feeling now as Kouta had the weight of his clan resting upon his teenaged shoulders, unfair though it was. Kouta’s daughter cried herself to sleep nightly, and clung close to either her mother or grandmother as if fearing that they too might vanish from her life.

And as for Kenichi…

Sumire saw him at mealtimes and otherwise at random. With sullen haste the young boy would complete his daily chores at the shop, then dash off into the streets like the devil was at his heels. He started getting into fights with the other local boys, and would often come home bloody and bruised and glaring like he dared the gods themselves to take a jab at him.

All Shurei and Sumire’s attempts to rein him in were spent in vain.

In every realm of life, Kouta’s yawning absence was felt. Once again for all their forward progress, it seemed the family stood upon the edge of slipping back into ruin. 

No one slept well, Shurei least of all. It wasn’t unusual for her to be up and about in the dead of night, agonizing over facts and figures. Why this time felt strange to Sumire only a mother’s intuition could explain.

Alone downstairs in the empty shop, she found her. Standing by the door, Shurei had been drawing her shawl about her shoulders, but at her mother’s approach, she paused.

“Where are you going?” Sumire asked.

Not quite looking at her, Shurei replied, “Tanaka-dono has raised the rent on us again. I thought I’d go and speak with him about it.”

“At this hour.” When she gave no reply to this, Sumire said sternly, “Shurei, look at me.”

Shurei turned. In the lantern light, her eyes were raw and red. Her mouth was tight. This rent hike so soon after Kouta’s funeral was no coincidence, and both of them knew it. Sumire had seen how Tanaka’s weasel eyes followed her daughter.

“Go back upstairs,” Sumire said. “You’re not thinking clearly. You need to rest.”

Shurei set her jaw. “If I don’t come to some arrangement with him, he’ll evict us. Our reputation will be ruined. We’ll lose our home, we’ll lose everything. Everything Kouta-kun sacrificed for,” she said, her voice cracking with pain. “All of it will be for nothing. It’s as good as spitting on his grave, to let his efforts go to waste.”

Sumire shook her head. “Your husband would never want this for you.”

“My husband is dead,” Shurei said wretchedly, “what does it matter what becomes of me now.”

With that she turned toward the door. She’d barely touched a hand to it when Sumire strode forward and wrenched her back around. Brisk as a whipcrack, she slapped her daughter full across the face. 

Eyes wide, Shurei stumbled back from her, clutching at her cheek. Not once had her mother raised a hand to her. Only a few times in her life had Sumire raised it to anyone, and never to another woman. Not even to the surliest of whores.

Trembling all over, she held her stinging palm aloft as she stared her daughter down. “Your husband may be dead, but I am still your mother, and you will heed what I say. There is no price for you.” As Sumire lowered her hand, her voice fell in turn. “Over my dead body will you become such a thing.”

With terrible sadness Shurei gazed upon her, not for the slap. Not for herself or even for her husband. The sorrow in her eyes was for her mother, whose words of vicious self-loathing still hung between them, heavy and foul in the gloom. 

Sumire looked away from her. “Go back upstairs,” she said again, and this time Shurei went.

With an oily twisting in her guts she hadn’t felt since she was twenty, Sumire made the short trip to the Tanaka estate. The night was still dark, but even if it wasn’t she wouldn’t have cared.

At twenty years old she’d been eight years a whore. Now some thirty years later, she realized she had always been, from the moment her parents had sold her to Madam Noh for a few bits of copper and a bag of weighted rice.

When she rapped at the door she presumed to be his, Tanaka answered. As she drew back her shawl and stepped past him into the warmth of the room, he trailed after her warily.

“Who are you? What do you want?”

“I understand you intend to raise rent on one of your tenants, Inoki Shurei.”

Shutting the door behind him, Tanaka crossed his arms. “And what business is that of yours?”

Sumire rested her gaze upon him as she let down her hair. “I am her mother Sumire. I’ve come here to tell you that if there is any question of additional payment in the future, you will bring it to me.”

His beady black eyes peered at her, taking in the silver threads in her hair, which did not match her vixen’s face. Not in this dim lighting, at least, where the fine lines about her mouth and eyes were hidden.

“How old are you?” he asked her narrowly.

Sumire smiled in answer. And when she pulled loose the sash about her waist and padded toward him with her robe sliding free from her naked shoulders, he asked her no more questions.

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

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