prologue.
The first time she dies, Sayuri is fifteen and staring up at a pair of snake eyes.
She's scared. Which she thinks is understandable, considering the fact that this man has done something to her- though, she's not sure what he has done. She merely cannot comprehend or fathom the importance of the symbols drawn out on her body or their glowing hands.
Sayuri is a simple girl. This is something she has accepted and understands all too well. (Especially in the midst of the snake man and boy. Their ridicule and scorn at her ignorance is nearly palpable.) Ninja and their world had been a foreign concept to her, something she heard in passing but had never experienced first hand. The ninja didn't often visit her small and isolated farming village, not unless they were experiencing a drought or were in desperate need. Otherwise, the village had little else to do with the outside world. Of course, she had heard of The World Wars in history class (before she left to help her father's farm, that is) had been raised to think that the ninja were there to protect her.
This, the ninja and their glowing hands and hidden agendas, are completely out of her realm of understanding. She doesn't think she could ever understand this in her lifetime.
But, while Sayuri has no chance in understanding the ninja or their ways- there is something that she is absolutely certain of. This man- the snake man- has done something terrible to her. The symbols itch at her skin, and there is a dark and foreboding feeling in her chest.
( Apparently this isn't the first time she has met the snake man, if the smiling snake boy with glowing hands can be trusted. She thinks yes, because his smile is kind and he has done nothing but take care of her. A part of her wants to trust him. The snake man's hideout has been nothing but pain, and the smiling boy has been the only glimpse of light and kindness in this place. But anyone affiliated with the snake man cannot be trusted. Sayuri may not be the smartest tool in the shed, but this she knows. )
She is dying. She knows that too, and doesn't need the snake man's thinly veiled annoyance and dismissive look to tell her so. Sayuri can feel her life slipping out of her grasp. Her only solstice is that at least she's not in pain anymore. She cannot remember how long she has been cooped up in this building, the days and nights and months slipping by without her awareness. The pain had made it more difficult to simply float through time, but she had learnt to separate from herself.
Sayuri is okay with dying now. She'll be away from the pain and the snake man.
"Failure." is the last thing she hears from the man with snake eyes, before the world around her fades away.
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The second time she dies, Sayuri is twelve and she's laying in a medical chair not unlike the one she last died in.
( Of course the moment she had woken up at 7 years old she had assumed the whole ordeal had been a dream. A terrible, terrible dream. Never mind the fact that most seven year olds wouldn't dream about kidnapping, death and complicated ninja things. Least of all Sayuri of all people. Never mind the fact that Sayuri began to predict events like the earthquake that caught the village by surprise, and the death of dear old nan. But it was just so easy to shrug it off when she was surrounded by her family and cozy little village.
It was also an experience that was quite hard to believe. She was Sato Sayuri, and things like that could never happen to someone like her. It was a miracle in itself that she even had the imagination to conjure up such a wild and extraordinary tale.
She stays in denial for her whole life, or at least until shes kidnapped by the snake man. Again. )
Sayuri isn't quite sure what she had said that offended the woman so much this time around. But apparently she wants Sayuri dead because of it. To this day she still cannot comprehend ninja.
In all honesty her death is quite anticlimactic compared to the pain and suffering of her last life, but a death is a death nonetheless. A quick slice across her throat, and the girl is gagging on her own blood. Once again Sayuri opens her arms to death's embrace, because although she hadn't spent as much time in the hideout with the snake man this time around, it was still quite a terrible experience.
As she starts to fade away she can hear the snake boy scolding the woman. He doesn't sound too upset about her death, though.
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It takes six deaths for Sayuri to come to terms with her... unique condition.
Every time she dies she winds up back at age seven, waking up to the birds chirping outside and the sun shining through the crack in her curtains. It's an oddly peaceful moment to wake up to, especially after a brutal death. It's always difficult for her to acknowledge that her future is only filled with suffering and experiments. Her home felt.. safe. It's easy to overlook the future, when the present was so nice and pleasant. Everything else felt so far away and surreal.
After six deaths she's still not sure why this has happened to her. Why he chose her.
But she has figured out that the snake man is the reason behind her "condition", with his symbols and glowing hands. She has found out that the reason why she reverts back to age seven is because that moment was right after she had first met the snake man. ( Though she doesn't remember such an occurrence happening, the snake boy assured her that this was the case. ) When she reverts back she adapts the mental age of her past life, however it is very easy to succumb to the seven year old mentality.
Her story goes like this:
Sayuri is seven years old when she wakes up one morning, completely unaware and oblivious to the modifications that have been made to her body. They are slight and subtle, so no one really notices too much. Not enough to make a fuss about it, at least. Aside from her mother's scolding and brother's teasing, the fact that she had disappeared for a few days is not made a big deal of. Sayuri smiles and pretends she's not confused because she is quite certain that she came home last night just like she was supposed to, but doesn't push the subject because breakfast is served.
Later, she will go to the tiny school situated in the tiny village to learn about things that she doesn't truly care about -that none of the villager children will truly care about. They all know that they will be pulled out of school eventually, and true to form at age ten Sayuri drops out of her classes so she can help her father on the farm. Her father and brother need all the help they can get, and Sayuri quickly adapts to the lifestyle. It doesn't take too long before her skin tans, muscles define, and fingers and palms become calloused. While her mother bemoans the loss of her delicacy, the girl quite likes the roughness.
Nobody mentions that Sayuri is, perhaps, a tad bit too strong for a girl her size and age. Or, at least, they don't mention it to the family. While the villagers are willing to turn a blind eye to the few eccentricities in the village, they do love to gossip. She is a distant relative to one of the ninja clans, they whisper, and like to ponder the possibilities. Most of the gossip is merely for amusement, and none of the villagers particularly care about it.
At age twelve she will be kidnapped (once again) by the snake man's ninja men. It is quiet and during the night she'll be extracted from her home without a sound.
What happens next differs from life to life. She is always taken to the horrible prison where she is strapped to a medical chair and forced to spend her days in a cell. She is always experimented on, though the severity differs depending on how obedient and submissive she is. In some lives she dies within a few months in this building, and in some she spends years.
Though it isn't until her seventh life that she survives past fifteen.
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The seventh time she dies, Sayuri is (merely) sixteen and she's bleeding out on her medical chair (once again.)
She made a mistake. She made a very, very grave mistake indeed. This was by far the worst life she had lived so far, all because she broke and succumbed to the pressure.
The world had never seemed so bleak to her. She knew that when she died she would return to seven years old and nothing enticed her less than that. Sayuri was tired. She was in pain and whatever the snake man was trying to do was failing quite fantastically. The thought of dying and reliving was heart dropping. She didn't want to go through this again, she didn't want to die only to be destined to suffer at the hands of the snake man and his ninja over and over again. She wondered what the gods wanted from her, why they were allowing such an atrocity to happen under their noses. Did they even care?
Sayuri is sick, tired, and half delirious when she confesses to the snake boy.
His smiles are sickly sweet, she knows, but she makes the mistake in trusting him while he's slicking back her hair after a particularly grueling session. She wants this to be over, she wants it all to end. So she confesses, tells him about how she dies and goes back to age seven. Once she starts, the words pour out of her mouth without stop and soon enough she is sobbing. She wants comfort and she wants salvation, so she hopes that the boy can aid her.
The snake boy merely smiles, pats her head (like a good dog) and leaves her alone. She finds peace in this action, and hopes that they will help her, that they will undo whatever they have done to her.
It's in her seventh life that Sayuri truly comes to terms with how naive she is.
The moment the snake man arrives with his gleaming little snake eyes, she realizes that she has made a very terrible mistake. His actions afterwards only further drive the point across, and she loses count how many times the snake man examines all of her files and the symbols that have long since been carved onto her body. Sayuri spends many, many hours on the medical table after that and spends most of her time in pain.
She learns from this experience. She learns that she cannot be so easy to trust people. She truly learns that she is just a naive and simple farm girl, something she thought she already knew but never actually believed until that moment. Six lives too late it dawns upon her, these men don't care for her. She knew that, of course she knew that. She knew full well of their ridicule and their scorn, the disgust in their eyes at her normalcy and ignorance in the world. But it finally sinks in that they only see her as cattle for their heinous experiments- an object, a possession. Six lives too late she realizes that they sicken her, that she is broken and beaten, that she is resentful to herself because she could have done something to avoid this. She had sat aside, knowing full well what would happen to her by playing the happy farm girl until she was twelve and kidnapped.
This man has no intention on helping her or fixing his atrocities, she acknowledges quickly enough.
It takes awhile, but the first opportunity she gets Sayuri slits her own throat without much internal conflict. She only wishes she could have done it sooner.
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After her seventh death, Sayuri makes a point to try things differently in every life.
In many lives she tries to run away. At age ten, at age seven, at age twelve. Constantly trying out new ways, attempting to figure out a safe path. Sometimes she goes further into the Land of Fire, sometimes she ventures into the Land of Rivers. One time she explores across the sea to the Land of Water, but she very quickly regrets this decision.
In nearly every life she finds herself back at the snake man's hideout. In that sense, Sayuri usually dies there. ( However, after life number seven she isn't hesitant to take her own life anymore. Going back to Point Zero is better than needlessly suffering at the hands of the snake man. )
She doesn't always die there, though. One time she dies of sickness in her home village, and in another life she dies in a fire while travelling. She dies while drowning, once, and after that she can't quite look at large bodies of water the same way.
Most of the time she dies in her early to mid teens, however she managed to survive until age twenty once. It had been her best life, though the world around her had succumb to a war that had quickly fizzled out. Sayuri listened about the events from a safe distance, and took every chance she got to speak with ninja passing through the town she worked at. Their arrogance made it easy to extract information, especially when alcohol was included. She was merely a civilian, and there were a handful of ninja that wanted to boast about their accomplishments. (There were more ninja that were tight lipped about it, however.) She was curious about the war, but mainly she wanted the information in case she died again.
( She did, but this time to bandits raiding the inn she worked at. )
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Sayuri realizes, throughout her many lives, that dying itself is rather easy.
Surviving, however, is much much harder.
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Sayuri has lost count how many times she has died when she finally gets fed up with running away and wallowing in her own weakness. If she were to make a guess, she'd say around twenty-five times.
Twenty-four lives too many, if you were to ask Sayuri's opinion.
It's when she's laying in a pool of her own blood on the floor of the inn where she finally decides that enough is enough. Sayuri is finished with being the simple-minded, naive farm girl. She played her part. Fantastically, in fact. She should get a goddamn award for it. For most of her lives she had been docile and harmless, just how the world expected her to. However, now she finds herself at wits end. There is only so much she can take before she feels as though she needs to take the bull by the horns and change her own goddamn life.
She has experienced things that she would bet even most ninja and samurai have not gone through. If sweet, innocent little Sayuri can persevere through the hardships of her past lives, then she sure as hell can take the meager amount of strength she has and form it into something she can actually fight with. She's beaten and battered, and she doubts that the traumas of her past lives will ever fade away. But if she doesn't do something then she can only assume that she will be stuck in the loop forever. If her past lives had taught her anything, it's this: if she continues to stand by idly and take the punches, she's not going to find the solution to her situation. She has to take the initiative, for once.
It is this thought that prompts her to slam her hands on the dinning room table when she is seven again and at Point Zero, blurting out "I want to be a ninja."
( Of course, her family chokes comically on their breakfast at her sudden declaration. )
you've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?