June 20th, 2023
Being given to a Catholic private school with all the expectations of a human sacrifice –never to return, never to be thought of again– had had some… effects, on Shion as she grew up.
Nothing too damaging, of course. Just…
Displacement.
That, she thought, was the right word for it, and oh, what a wretched and insidious thing it was, how clever Oni-Baba's plan to sever her from her legacy.
Shion was sent to a place where Western thought, Western ideas, Christian religion predominated. She was taught to kneel when approaching the holy part of a sanctuary, using the right knee to genuflect before the sacred image, rather than bow twice, clap twice, and then bow again. She was as adept with fork and knife as she was chopsticks, knew the proper way to wear skirts and knot a tie as well as how to fold a kimono and obi.
She knew of her own cultural rituals, of the proper way to approach a shrine in her family, but they were like leaves from a past autumn in her memory, faded and fragile.
These two worlds ran through her like the foundation lines of a loom, and Oni-Baba sending her to St. Lucia's year after year thickened one and thinned the other, patiently wearing away Shion's connection to her home. If Oni-Baba had her way, by the time Shion graduated she would be garishly Western in all her ways and thoughts, unable to take over the deep, subtle intricacies of the family tradition even if she tried. When she returned home, no one would know her ways, and she would not know theirs.
Shion is not particularly resentful of this –no more and no less than she resents nearly everything Oni-Baba has done to her out of that damn sense of familial duty– but she does resent, in some small way, the persistent subtle effort to rob her of her heritage. She is Japanese, born and bred, and yet Oni-Baba and St. Lucia's are trying to turn her into something she's not.
This place –this stuffy little miniature garden of a school– is trying to snip the line between Shion and her past, erode the differences between her and them. Those from elsewhere, the outsiders that even now Hinamizawa still hates: that is what they're trying to turn her into.
And it's working.
It's working, because Shion will be graciously allowed to return to Hinamizawa for school breaks or family holidays and she will briefly feel strange, alien inside her own home. For a scant few days or hours, until she slips back into her own skin, she will feel displaced, like these people with familiar faces are putting on some strange paper façade of customs and history that she does not quite understand anymore.
Did she ever truly know these ways, or has she merely forgotten them due to long years away?
Shion doesn't know, and that is almost worse than the confusion and displacement. Are these sights and actions familiar because she remembers a dim, dim ghost of them from her childhood, when she was still allowed to stay at Oni-Baba's side and guided gently through the steps, or are they merely familiar because she's seen them from a distance several times before?
She doesn't know.
She doesn't know, and she hates the not-knowing as a microcosm of all that this has done to her. Shion is not a member of Hinamizawa anymore, not fully, not truly, and yet where else is she supposed to belong? Not the school, where she is shunned by her peers and looked down upon by her teachers. Not outside Hinamizawa, because the place still calls to her all the same, as haunting and persistent as a siren's melody beneath the waves.
She is displaced, cast adrift, and there is no healing that severance inside her.
10.09 AM, USA Central Time
