Lore of the Fan
By: Amber Michelle
Notes: poems by Izumi Shikibu.
...
In this world
…
Though Sai used his fan for effect, Hikaru left his own at the side of the go board, folded closed. Spreading it open would have been silly. There were pros that fiddled with fans during games - or other objects like sunglasses, pens, and one time a freak with a paintbrush still caked with red ink - and their mannerisms gave everything away. Anxiety, confidence, desperation.
Hikaru believed in a carefully schooled expression, a mask of flesh and blood and determination. Over the board Sai would watch him like a hawk, not to ferret out his intentions on the board, but to unnerve him, to read his thoughts in every flicker of eyelash. You did this, he said, when your opponent was a woman, and propriety required her to hide the lower half of her face at all times when in the presence of a man. The angle of her gaze, how fast it shifted back and forth, how dilated the pupils - it was all telling, like letters inked on creamy parchment.
"It is old-fashioned," he'd agreed when his younger half laughed at the custom. "It hasn't been done for centuries."
Hikaru slid the black pieces off of the board, into his wooden bowl. "In Shuusaku's time?"
"No." At this Sai tapped his fan to his lips, looking off to the side. "Not often. Noblewomen did sometimes. The younger ones were always hidden behind screens."
Life must have sucked for women, Hikaru had thought back then, trying to imagine Akari hiding behind fans and talking to him through shutters. He could almost see it, but then he thought of Kaneko, who would rip the shutter from its hinges and hit him with it.
"He tried to tempt me into looking once, as if I would ever compromise some poor girl's honor."
He dragged the white pieces off the board more slowly. "How long-- he was thirty-three when he died, right?" Sai nodded. Hikaru turned back to his task. They were together so long -- longer than he had been alive. "And he played Go all his life? That's all?"
Sai didn't answer. Hikaru rubbed a stone between his fingertips, watching the shine dull under his fingerprints. He was only fourteen, and didn't think much about his future unless it was in terms of go, or his mom asking quietly if he would stay a little longer before he moved out. That always made him squirm a little in his chair. He wasn't Waya, and she wasn't his laundry slave. There was no reason to ask.
Then, on the way to the arcade the week before, he and Waya caught a glimpse of Isumi through the window of a fancy restaurant. The logo on the awning was accented with a quick-stroke painting of the Eiffel Tower, and he couldn't have pronounced the name to save his life. There was a girl sitting across from him. The sidewalk had tilted under Hikaru's shoes.
Two cell phone pictures and a Street Fighter tournament later, they found out she was his cousin and the matter was dropped. Sai told him the body language said it all if he'd bothered to pay attention, but refused to elaborate when pressed for details.
Hikaru didn't care about girls or boys, but he couldn't stop wondering after that: what if he changed his mind?
"Torajiro did... other things." Sai's voice startled him, and he dropped the stone. "Sometimes."
"Like what?" Hikaru asked.
Sai spread the fan, the corner covering his mouth, and said nothing.
.
love has no color
…
Sai meditated to pass the nights. Hikaru knew this because he woke once from a dream of dark, cold water closing over his head, and knew by the crease between the ghost's eyebrows that it wasn't his own mind conjuring the image. Folded into the lotus position, Sai was the perfect imitation of a marble statue. His colors were washed out to begin with, and the darkness bled them away. He was white, and gray, and his hair blended with the shadows, tips snaking over the floor in inky streaks and curls Hikaru longed to touch.
In time it became routine to wake from that dream in the middle of the night, and after asking about it the first time, he decided to pretend it didn't pack his bones with ice. Usually he thought over games until he fell asleep again, but sometimes he turned onto his side and watched his friend, wondering what the flutter of his lashes would give away.
"You wrote poems," he said once in July, watching Sai over the edge of his comforter. The clock read 1:32 in neon green.
Sai's lashes lifted. "I preferred reading them." His heavy-lidded eyes gave his voice the impression of huskiness, as if he too had been sleeping until a little while ago. "I was no match for the great poets of the court."
Hikaru accepted that, even though Sai's existence, if you chose to look at it a certain way, was the kind of thing poets wrote about: wandering, karma, the cold unknown after death. "Tell me one of yours."
One of the ghost's eyebrows lifted. It looked like it had been drawn in charcoal with short, feathery strokes. "You hate poetry."
Hikaru squirmed under the blankets and thought about how hard it was to breathe underwater, even in a dream. "There's more to you than go," he said, not looking at his other half.
That's what it had become. Symbiosis, the term used when parasite and host share a beneficial relationship by some twist of nature. He took a chill when his science teacher steered to that topic, flipping the projector to a three-color diagram.
Would science explain this, or would poetry have the answer?
Sai opened his fan slowly, one fold at a time, in his lap. As if reading from the parchment, he said, "How I envy the Tanabata stars..."
.
yet how deeply
…
Touya was late for the first time since-- ever, as far as Hikaru could remember. He waited at their table in the back, taking the green tea Ichikawa offered and watching the leaves settle at the bottom.
In five days, I'll catch a train to Innoshima. The chair was uncomfortable, pressing into his shoulders at the corners. The cushion was worn from years of use, barely softer than the pressboard underneath. He considered replaying a game, but the go-ke were on the other side of the board, and Hikaru didn't feel like stretching to reach them.
In five days, it would be a year since the morning he woke up at the go board and felt the cut of emptiness for the first time.
He sipped his tea, and didn't comment when Touya came in, gave Ichikawa a breathless hello, and sat on the other side of the board with a heavy sigh. Thirty-two minutes late, almost on the dot -- and it looked like he'd run all the way from the station.
When he had his own cup of tea to nurse, Touya bowed his head slightly and said, "I'm sorry. The interview took longer than I thought. Shall we play?"
Hikaru took white, and their first moves were made in quick succession, almost like they were scripted. Sai used to favor opening with archaic forms, and today his student did the same. Touya paused, staring at the board while he thought, and Hikaru noticed for the first time that he was dressed formally - not his usual tasteless button-ups and sweaters, but kimono, hakama, and haori.
He looked better in it, Hikaru thought, his eyebrows drawing together. Touya looked better in the old-fashioned; his face looked familiar in it, like something Hikaru should recognize, but didn't.
"Why are you dressed that way?" he asked.
Touya made his move and looked up. "Profile article," he said, "and my four-dan certificate. We always dress formally for family events."
The collar was blue, and the haori black. Crisp. The shape rounded the other boy's shoulders and looked heavy, the sheen like silk. He knew the look of silk, even though he'd rarely had the opportunity to touch it the way he wanted to. The layers added bulk he knew Touya didn't have and made him look slightly larger than life. Would he go back to normal, look like himself again, if he peeled those layers off?
Hikaru looked back to the board, and had to replay the game again in his mind to see what the last move was.
"I've never seen you formal, even during holidays."
Hikaru slid his stone home to the point just right of tengen. "I don't feel right in it."
Touya's hand dipped into the go-ke. "Neither do I."
.
my body is stained by yours
…
Contrary to popular belief, Hikaru appreciated irony. He lost the last game of the month to his rival, and sat at the counter of a tiny ramen place in Shibuya waiting for his order - shoyu with pork and egg - with Touya beside him, waiting with his hands folded, for his gyoza.
"Well?" Touya said.
Hikaru ran his finger over the rounded end of the fan, twisting the tassel. "I don't open it because I'd look like an idiot waving a fan around."
The other boy's eyes narrowed and he laughed, a sound Hikaru had heard often from Sai. It was so familiar he turned quickly on the stool, and had to plaster a scowl on his face when Touya arched a brow. "I'm not buying your lunch for an answer like that."
Their orders arrived, and Hikaru attacked his noodles, picking the bits of pork apart with his chopsticks while he chewed. Touya ate more daintily - there was no other word for it - the napkin unfolded over his lap.
At a ramen place. Hikaru shook his head, shoved more noodles into his mouth, and stared at his reflection in the bowl as it stilled and clouded with spices. Sai sat seiza, and wore girly robes and makeup. Nobody could see him, of course, but that hadn't lessened the contrast in Hikaru's eyes, or cured the ever-present temptation to reach for his sleeves and feel the silk slide over his hand.
"They break if you open them too much," he finally said, absolutely not avoiding the other boy's gaze by stirring his ramen and trying to catch bits of cilantro. "It's just a fan, but I wouldn't want to buy another one."
He ordered more noodles, and someone came to pour more tea. They finished lunch in silence and walked three blocks down to the park, passing like ghosts through the thinning lunch crowd, finally pausing where the path intersected with another. Here they parted ways.
"Tradition," Touya said, turning his face up to look at a blooming cherry tree.
Something like that, Hikaru told him. They exchanged a long look, Touya's eyes searching his and no longer crinkled in laughter. He nodded slowly, looked as if he wanted to say something, and then confirmed their next meeting before turning to go. Hikaru watched his back until he disappeared.
When he got home, he sat in front of the go board and took the fan out of his pocket. He had replaced the tassel twice; this one was brand new, bright red. The handle was lacquered black and shiny, dull in places by his fingerprints. Hikaru opened it slowly, one fold at a time, until the fan was spread open on his lap.
Three days after losing at the Hokuto Cup, when Sai's memory choked him and startled him awake at night with visions of a lake and a silver moon, Hikaru had purchased a sumi-e brush and opened his fan to fill in the blank space with the last puzzle piece. Sai, in the dimness of midnight, reading and tracing the calligraphy on his own fan, eyelashes quivering.
.
In this world
love has no color--
yet how deeply
my body
is stained by yours.