The Winter of the Ubume
A/N: I'm spelling Viktor's name with a K, in the Russian way. – LLS
壱: 立冬
¥Yuuri
New Year's Day is a day for family. The kitchen of Yū-topia Akatsuki doesn't open on the first of January itself. However, during the second through fourth of January, it is absolutely forbidden for normal humans to enter the premises.
Since we're a family affiliated with the yōkai, every spirit this side of Hasetsu always visits for New Year's greetings. Like the legends of the Kyoto Hyakki Yagyō, any ordinary human that enters a yōkai gathering without protection is just asking to be eaten. So, the two worlds need to be separate for New Year's greetings – and for a taste of the Shūten Brewery's sake and human shōchū. Mum mixed them with the bottles of Makai-e no Sasoi.1 None of the humans in Hasetsu has realised how literal the label was meant.
The night of the second of January, the party booths on the first floor and along the corridors of the upper floors are packed with yōkai. Laughter and chatting voices rose from everywhere in the manner of loud partying and continuous orders for food. The dense collective of Hasetsu's yōkai generated enough demonic aura for even the least attuned human to be scared away.
"Gyahaha, Yuuri's gained weight!" The oldest yōkai friendly with us laughed when I appeared before his booth and put down his latest order of shiokara. "So, I heard that little Yuuri went to Russia?"
"He did!" Minako-sensei nodded as she chatted with Tsuchigumo-sama. Since she was human-size and Tsuchigumo-sama's head brushed the ceiling at two stories tall, it was a nerve-wracking sight how he had managed to come in at all. The splinters of wood showed how Tsuchigumo-sama had entered – through the walls. "I'm so jealous! I haven't been to Russia since performing in Moscow so long ago~!"
...I said that normal humans knew to stay away. However, Minako-sensei has been my mother's sempai in school, and she's a human born from the union of a human and an Amanojaku as well. The term 'hanyō' would describe Minako-sensei perfectly, except that human-yōkai marriages don't usually work like that.
"It's cold."
"Yuuri!" Tsuchigumo-sama boomed. "Just in time! I heard that Kyō Kaigara invited you you to perform with her kabuki-mono in Hyōgo."
"Eh? Kyō-sama did say that, but she's doing a New Year's dance at Mt Tâte now," I replied in confusion. "It was nice of her to give me a chance to go to one of the three holy mountains, but the inn's stretched for the New Year, and Mari-neechan can't go anyway."
Considering that Kyō-sama was probably in the yōkai Yakuza, I seriously wondered about Mari-neechan's choice of friends. But there was really no other option – yōkai aren't taken seriously and are kind of losers, so they might as well be Yakuza. The only way for order to exist amongst yōkai was through the logic of strength – bosses and the subordinates who pay protection and run errands. One of the family would have had to make friends with a yōkai boss sooner or later.
Instead of our local suiko boss, though, Mari-neechan had chosen to side with the yōkai from the Kai-no-Kuchi clan of Kanagawa and their oyabun, Kyō Kaigara-sama. Tsuchigumo-sama was another such boss, though his territory lay closer to Lake Biwa.
"Inheriting the inn won't be bad," Tsuchigumo-sama laughed, raising a stink of the extremely strong Yashiori daiginjō he was drinking. "We'll be able to drink here! The Mt Âso yamanba retired and her granddaughter closed shop. There's one less drinking hole with sake from the other world..."
"Tsuchigumo-sama, if you drink too much you won't be able to get yourself back home," Mari-neechan appeared, bearing a tray with glasses and more of the 'invitations to Hell'. "Maybe you'll go to Russia instead."
"Don't know that place. Trust me to fall asleep under Shōkoku-ji," Tsuchigumo-sama shook his craggy head. "Miss a lot of things. Humans!"
"By the way, old man, you've paid for that squashed couch, right?" Mari-neechan pointed at him. A human threatening a yōkai was pretty laughable, except that Mari-neechan had the Ôbō-Jikara like me, and was also one of Kyō-sama's kabuki-mono.
"Yes, Mari-chan," Tsuchigumo-sama nodded, giggling like it was a joke. Maybe it was. "Would you like to meet my grandson? You would make a fine granddaughter-in-law."
"You're good, Mari-chan!" Minako-sensei laughed as Mari-neechan walked away in secret embarrassment, though she was trying to keep her head high. "Ah, I'm so jealous. Why couldn't I get anything other than this face?"
It depends on luck when a yōkai is born from a human-yōkai marriage. The yōkai lineage manifests like atavistic characteristics. In just all stories of yōkai marrying humans and vice versa, the children of these pairings are always noted to be superior to normal human children – more intelligent, physically perfect, prodigies, magic abilities, etcetera. For example, Abe no Seimei was born from the byakko Kuzunoha mating with Abe no Yasuna, but he was definitely human.
Minako-sensei was another example, being definitely human though she looked really too young to be in her fifties, on a conservative estimate-
It's bad to talk about a woman's age.
...what about an athlete's age?
Figure skating is cruel to age. My muscles might be able to bench-press a car – and I've tried it in front of Phichit back in Detroit. But I was still human, and the Ôbō-Jikara could only stretch so far before I was competing not by my own strength, but the inheritance left by my grandfather.
I would never be able to live... as a normal human. To skate like Viktor.
"Happy New Year!" Tsuchigumo-sama clinked glasses with Minako-sensei, and the hall of yōkai roared with them. Nobody noticed when I didn't raise my glass.
Three months later, all of them would come back for a different reason. That reason... is Viktor.
Viktor
My name is Viktor Nikiforov, and I think I might have been rather hasty in coming to Hasetsu.
There is a statue of a squid eating a sea urchin outside of Hasetsu on the spring night that I had come. A chill nipped at my uncovered nose – it seems to be a common theme, that the cold would always bit at the extremities whether inside or outside of Russia. As far as I recalled, snow and ice and cold rains have followed me.
Makkachin yipped. In the desolation of the rickety train station, a peal of shutters rung out. The night hung down, perhaps alive by itself.
Japan is a magical place, isn't it.
Critiquez, s'il vous plaît !
1 Unbelievably, '魔界への誘い'is an actual shōchū brand in Japan under the Mitsutake Brewery.
