It was red wine that looked like soya sauce. The bold madame Kochou, thirty-four years old, greying in minority places already, poured a cup of the dark liquid and upturned her palm, letting me know that this was the traditional hospitality for all that came into their estate.

"Coffee," the madame said. "To drink."

Proved now, it was neither red wine nor soya sauce. But terribly bitter, and I had to ignore my tongue to drink it.

"How old are you, Giyuu?" the madame asked.

"Twelve," I replied.

"Oh! One year less than Kanae. And where do you come from?"

"Here? Japan?"

"And what was your father's name?"

"…I don't know."

"Your mother's?"

"Don't know either."

"Well, how come?"

I answered in a small voice: "They're dead."

The madame apologised. "But then who do you stay with?"

"No-one. My sister."

"You live with no-one and your sister?"

"No, I meant…"

I didn't finish what I meant, and the madame learned moderation and stopped questioning. She turned around. The Kochou living–room, a mismatched and sedimentary place, had two brass–framed couches under the largest window, where Kanae sat with her laid sister in orange evening warmth, and beyond was the low tea table that had the scatter cushions and matchstick placemats, where I was. A gutted wall clock with an enlarged '12' flanked me, which had beside it the glass-front cabinet with the contrasting memorabilia; the limited–edition vodkas and the family photos. You had to slant your body to pass everything neatly, but otherwise, I envied the setup.

Shinobu lay immersed in a temperature. The madame wiped her face with a cloth and then declared that Kanae and I would have to play alone. She looked back, trying to understand how falling off the monkey bars could result in a fever.


We went and tried to be children. In their garden, Kanae balanced on the arcaded edge of a bridge built over a fake river and pointed around, telling me the name of each flower on the bank, dressing to me down their uses and disuses, the symbolism, and in childish fashion, asking which one I liked most. The white one, I said, but I felt water splatter me. I recoiled and saw Kanae with her hand in the stream.

"How come?" I asked.

Because I had picked chrysanthemum, and that meant, vaguely said, that I had terrible things on my mind. Terrible in what category, I didn't analyse. But I received the attack as an invitation for rebuttal and I tossed a jet at her too, because I was truly irritated, and this spiralled further and further into an exhaustive battle of water–throwing and chasing and branch–fencing, hide–and–seek and imaginary hopscotch, that I recognised at the end I found pleasant as well.

We sat under a chestnut tree. For a moment, it wasn't like winter: the dahlias blazed in the sun, and motes of water dropping from the corners of leaves brought small rainbows in their trail. Far away, the house remained frozen, and from any of the frosted windows we imagined the madame may have been watching us, but as long as we sat near the khaki trunk of the tree, we felt disguised from her eye. Kanae took off her coat, sweating.

"Do you know what they say?" she asked me. "You can't even tell if a woman is pregnant through all the winter padding."

A strange analogy.

"Point being," she topped off quickly, realising this, "the Kimono sucks, because it's too thick!"

We then spoke. After talking only for five minutes, I became inclined to her without knowing. She asked me if my name was really Giyuu Tomioka, and I said yes. She asked me if I had any siblings, and I said yes, and she asked who this sibling yes, and I refused to tell them. She asked about my long hair, and I said that I took inspiration from Samurai, but she replied that Samurai wore topknots. She asked me what my favourite fairy-tale was, and I said I only knew one hazily, that if you stuck a pair of feathers on your back and you slept you would be able to fly in the morning, and I couldn't remember who told me that. Then she asked me if I'd ever been down the Niyodo River, and I said only once, and not down it but by there, with my sister – and someone else? – and soon she knew the name Tsutako Tomioka, and had interrogated out of me her love for badminton, her equivalent distaste for tennis, her shepherd's habit of hiking between the hills, how I would never be able to follow her fully because she had inherited a fitness I did not, among the other details of an evaporated life. I could tell her no more than that. Then we went inside and turned to talking over sessions of Hanafuda, and sliced winter melon provided by the , when night came:

"Go bathe," the madame said to me. "And Kanae, go to sleep. Your father will be home late."

So I bathed, in their weird aquiline bathroom, and they gave me jinbei pyjamas to wear. Simultaneously, they had failed to coerce me to surrender the red kimono, and I wore that too.

It was natural that I was to sleep in a different room. A storeplace, musty and inorganically dark, was designated to me at the tip of the madame's rose–painted finger, and the futon followed. They left me alone and the estate at once became weighed by the layers of silence and the iridescent moon that shone above. I turned around and tried to sleep but I could not. Then, without warning or apparent cause, the door opened, and it was Kanae.

With Shinobu.

"What're you thinking about?" she asked.

"Nothing much," I said.

In fact I was beginning to think of my sister. In retrospect, their sudden appearance saved me from that.

They had defied their mother and brought futons, and they set up beside me on either edge to make three rows. Only Shinobu got in hers, and without saying anything, because she still felt sick. Kanae lay like a Greek on her side over the covers, concealed in herbal perfume, and her hair glossed too much to not be wet: I would later learn these were two maintained features from the same cause, for she always rubbed hibiscus oil in her scalp before she slept, ever since a shocking moment at eleven when she saw her first split end. Kanae pointed at me abruptly.

"I asked you before," she said, "but why's your hair so long?"

"What's the deal?" I said.

"In school, not my school, but others, the boys there all have to have short hair, like the army…" – she made finger–scissors across her fringe – "…but what about you? What's the… deal?"

"I'm not in school," I divulged.

Kanae wasn't shocked for a moment. "Oh. But then you can't read?"

"…Of course I can."

"Then who taught you?"

"My sister… I think."

"Ah, your sister. How old is she?"

I realised Tsutako Tomioka was the objective of the interrogation all along. Now Kanae lay on her belly with her chin in both hands. Shinobu had fallen asleep and was nondescript. I sat up with the kimono and answered.

"…Twenty–one," I said.

"Is that kimono hers?"

"Yeah."

"Her favourite colour was red?"

"…I don't know."

Kanae frowned. "You don't know your sister's favourite colour?"

That also brought it to my attention. I did know – I remembered that I knew – but it escaped me. To cover myself I blurted "blue", and Kanae went on.

"Have you thought about what you're gonna do when you're older?" she asked.

"…I'd buy a radio," I said. "Have an ivy garden… get a car?"

Kanae eyed me and didn't blink. That's a little boring. Then she pointed to Shinobu.

"But you know about her?" Kanae said.

"What do I know?"

"She wants to travel the world."

"Standard dream," I said.

"That's not standard. She's not standard," Kanae replied. "She can tell you where Lisbon is. Can say what kingdoms are in Germany. Can name three types of Christianity. I thought there was only one. And she knows all the capital cities. Did you know? New York's not the capital of America."

"I know," I said, and turned away. Despite myself, the thought of Tsutako had managed to swell, and it burned like a beehive now behind my eyes. I had to make a great effort to keep them open.

"Say," Kanae began. She compressed her voice with her palm on her throat. "You grieve well."

For a moment Kanae lapsed into her age, and it came to me that she knew Tsutako was dead. The only possibility I could muster was that she overheard my story.

"Grieve well?" I stalled.

"You're not crying," Kanae said.

"Boys don't cry."

"Who told you that?"

I opened my mouth and my tongue curled but nothing left my teeth. Kanae moved closer when she watched me stutter. I restarted the sentence, a 'he was called…', but no name after that. The words died on my lips.

"But it's a he," Kanae said, when I told her I couldn't remember. "An older man?"

That much I confirmed: twenties.

"Then, he was probably with your sister." Kanae leaned deeper in her hands. "Did she love anyone?"

"I think," I said.

"You think?"

"I don't know."

"Well, if she's your sibling, she must have someone looking out the window for her."

I did not realise the calibre of the comment, and paid no mind to it. Kanae closed her eyes, continued murmuring, but now in her sleep. A tumultuous wind began to blow. The spaces between the trees magnified the wailing and dispersed the fragrance of dank wood throughout. It didn't bother the sisters but I couldn't sleep. I was thinking about Tsutako. My restlessness amplified the effect of the wind and it became part of my insomnia.

Particularly, it was the recent string of amnesia regarding Tsutako that kept me. Kanae's questions had insurrected the notion and I attempted to recall my life with my sister.

It wasn't an excessively chromatic history. I was not one who could claim to remember things from the time of his own birth, or at the least, not those from my perspective, and when I first saw Tsutako in the amber haze of nostalgia I was already walking, somewhat speaking, and she was ten years old, with a silly gap in her teeth, and the red kimono around her that had endured since. Instead of one braid she had two and she still had her shepherd's gait. However, that was all.

The comprehension came so suddenly and in the veil of so many before I refused to accept it, and with reason. I turned over and sought the next moment in time. That would have been the trip we took to the Niyodo River, and I remembered the stream itself in the purest clarity: clear as glass and fragrant like unbaked green tea. The sun that beat down impartially on all and the world that was mine. But it was that the most esteemed part of that memoir, and the one before it, which eluded and alerted me so starkly: my sister was nowhere to be recalled. No image of enforced braids and red kimono, favourite colours and intimates. Not there and anywhere. In fact, besides her name, her face, and the moment we had met, Tsutako Tomioka had disappeared soundlessly and causelessly from my entire memory with no prior indication and without leaving behind anything.


Rain started. I could not perceive above the murmur of the drizzle on the roof the authority of death that entered the house to embroil its inhabitants in a destiny too contrary for heaven's making, yet it was. A dead octagonal bracket clock in the corner had its dial stuck on twelve adjoining, and the more sleeplessness threatened me, the more I reckoned to wait for the clarity of morning to observe my condition.

Despite the noise of the water, I heard the bump against the wall when it came. It had too much weight to be inorganic. My initial opinion was that it was the madame, or the father, but this was disproved when I looked through a slit into the hallway and saw the blond sentinel in the half–light of the moon. Though he had grown immeasurably tall and seemingly older, his identity was instantly apparent. It was the boy I had seen with Shinobu the morning of that day, who I would later be taught as Roman de Acosta.

I woke Kanae. Her suspicion of the appearance established an intrusion. She looked out the hole and came back declaring: "Roman!", which confirmed a thing more to her than to me, and I returned to scrutinising. Roman was making rounds through the hall, stopping at doors along the length and peering inside, and producing no effort to do it silently. He appeared someone not of this world, when he approached ours and didn't walk past. I watched through the peephole. There was an intermission, until he said in a pleasant, but terribly exhausted voice: "Ah, mother." I only saw he was looking at me through the crevice when the door had been torn down and there wasn't a crevice anymore.

His eyes were in some sort of transition colour, between blue and everything else, and he had muscles on him that appeared unnatural, like stolen armour. He was well around one–eighty centimetres and looked to weigh double of me, probably did, but there was nothing to designate the stereotype of the gentle giant, and furthermore, nothing to mask the brute authority of death I felt had just entered the room.

I wonder why I dodged. Many years later I would examine it as a reflex, but what to? In complete and omnipotent retrospect, he only lunged after I moved, and that saved my life.

It was sudden, but Roman attacked us. With inhuman velocity he zipped across the tatami mats and landed at the other side with no grace. Then he turned with so much torque that the floor ripped beneath his heel, but we had already gone.

With Shinobu, we descended the still darkened halls of the Kochou estate and dove into the first room we could, which was the kitchen. They ducked behind a counter and I attuned my ears to the current of the house: Roman was still here but not near, and I allowed myself a glance at the sisters. Not yet devastated, they were nevertheless rattled, and Shinobu more than Kanae. Her fever had spiked into a bonfire that imperiled to evaporate her like smoke, and it magnified the extent of her shock.

"Where's your mother?" I asked.

I was told we had passed her room, but the door was open and they saw she wasn't inside. And the father, presumably, still working.

"Whatever's happening," I said, "let's hide outdoors."

But Kanae refused, and with reason. Even if Shinobu had made the invincible sprint here, there was no reason to believe she could continue, as her dog's panting and shrivelled eyes refused to disguise. And Kanae felt obligated to stay with her sister anyway –– so with all urgency, I was commanded to rush for the town alone with the greatest momentum I could, and retrieve help there to ensure the totality of that night would remain a stain on the 25th of February, 1912, and spill no further beyond into the endless course of time.

It would spill, and it wouldn't ever wash. I saw Kanae and Shinobu in the iridescent moonlight and for a space in time, refused to pull my eyes off them. At that age and for the time I had known them, my gaze couldn't have had any connection with love, but it did gradually and tenuously spur within me a longing for a past much like my future, the nature of my calling, the distant countries I would see, those I would watch die.

The beastly sight confronted me on the way out, but I wasn't stopped. I emerged from the Kochou estate and crossed the quivering silver hills, and the maggot swamps after that, until coming to the escarpment in the landscape that shielded behind it Iyo town, though nothing. I ignored this and went on. The infant slopes grew, and eventually into an interminable snowed highland, but even then I was impossibly arrogant and thought help would be found here. I fell once and got up, but the second time took more effort. In the phosphorous air I detected something phony and it began to make my head spin: the first onset of hypoxia, which would numb me progressively throughout my fanatical race, yet fail to counteract the new spirit that the sight of a house in the distance endowed me. Eventually that was my doom. I didn't notice the ground at my feet fracture into cliffs, and hardly the gravity on me as I fell – I would only perceive lightly, like a dim lantern in the afterlife, the sensation of my back splitting when I landed, and the curtain of darkness that slipped over my eyes while reality gave way.