I'm sorry to be abrupt, but the previous letter was a load of lies. I was blushing when I wrote it, blushing when I reread it. That's why it ended so suddenly. Remember I wrote that I originally put in a lot of mawky guff? It turns out that without it, the next part makes no sense and is dishonest besides.

So as your candid friend, here is the sentimental bridge between letters. I'm not even going to pretend that there's a lesson here.

Reisen didn't follow her own advice, of course. In our lessons that week after the Rikkunshito episode, she kept circling and circling around the topic like a kite. She would talk vaguely about 'guests' and become distracted, stare at nothing in particular. I even caught her doodling crabs, once. Crabs. Still she would clam up during our tea room sessions, though she ate the snacks. It was maddening: there was this thick anticipation in the air, as if she were waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Eventually, eventually, I realized that because she was the one who asked that the topic not be brought up again, that it fell to me to breach the topic. This is the kind of messy Reisen-think that I would become familiar with, a cowardly hue of stubbornness wrapped up in manners.

I played her game, I did. I asked her if her guests had left, and why she worried about them so. And then, honest, Reisen gave me this lippy smile, like she had caught me doing something untoward.

"Lady Miyake, I'm sorry that the guests have distracted me, even here. They're my—were my—old teachers. I haven't seen them in a while. I wasn't expecting them. I'm not sure how much more I should tell." She had affected a hesitant half-whisper. Fakery through and through.

I told her that I couldn't teach her if she left her mind at home.

"Well, that's true. I guess I'll have to tell you, as I'm your student? I'm not used to talking so frequently to people, so please forgive me."

It was another one of her excuses, of course; it wasn't as if she blabbed about her guests with any discretion. From what I gathered, her guests were sisters, and they made for horrible teachers. One of them ("the sister with the ponytail") made Reisen run 10-ri marathons every morning and smacked her around with a sword. I was about to call her out on this, but she showed me her blazer, which did indeed have a long, terrifying cleft up its left sleeve. The other one ("the sister with the hat") only seemed to laze around, but Reisen went on about her slovenly habits and the amount of "special cooking" that she had to do for her.

As her story wore on, I recognized the tone that she was striving to take. She wanted to say: I don't loathe my abusers, they're my old, embarrassing friends who take things too far sometimes. It was in the way she mimed the ponytail-sister slashing at her ears, and the self-conscious little giggles she had made when she told me how her torturer fell into some kind of trap. In her stories, Reisen played the generous host, familiar with their odd expressions of love.

And yet, the edge wouldn't leave her voice. Her tone felt accusatory, somehow, as if I too was complicit.

Reisen had been telling me about how the hat-sister had wanted a last-minute meal when I stopped her. I asked her, very simply: "Aren't you exhausted?"

Reisen didn't even miss a moment. She gave me her first genuine smile of the afternoon, and said: "Yes, very much, Lady Miyake. Like you."

What followed was a peculiarly honest conversation. I'll print it in full because I doubt any paraphrase could do it justice.

"It's alright if you're not sure what to make of them, Reisen."

"Yes. Both of them are kind, very much, sometimes."

"Not all the time."

"Not all the time. Teachers are meant to be like that, yes? Even for humans."

"Even for us, right now."

"Is that why you have to pretend? I can see you. You're not good at pretending. I'm not sure how to react. Should I keep going with it, with you? I'm not a human student, though. Your wavelengths aren't as short as you make them out to be. They're really quite long."

I felt invited to explain myself. So I told her about my father, Akyuu. It began that evening, anyway. She had listened patiently until it was over, then told me a bit more about the sisters. When night fell we fed the stove together, and I put on some of my father's records, and both of us just listened to him for a while.

The afternoons after had Reisen talking kindly about death. We shared some of the jisei we had memorized. Reisen favored the melancholic: her absolute favorite had been Ariwara no Narihira's death poem. "He wrote about not expecting it, even as he's dying. He gave me a pretty good idea about death." She had talked about death as if she were describing some foreign landscape seen only dimly, but I didn't mind. What she said was true.

What would you have done in my place, Akyuu? I meant, the entirety of my place, Kampo practice and all. Would you also have pretended that you knew how to live on after death, knew how to teach?

Maybe all my previous letters were lies as well. I'm as roundabout as Reisen, aren't I? It wasn't pity I felt for her, and she had known all along; it was a sort of fellow-suffering. I hope you will not judge me too harshly for this. Please, do not judge me too harshly.

Your friend,
Chiyoko Miyake.

A/N: Glossary of terms

Ri: Japanese unit of length. 10 ri would be around 20-24 miles or around 32-40 km.

Jisei: Poems composed usually before a person's death, offering reflections on death.

Ariwara no Narihara's jisei

Though I heard

Everyone goes this road

Eventually

I didn't expect that

I'd be on it yesterday or today