February 1922

Just before Ubuyashiki died Giyuu Tomioka stood and waited for Shinobu over at the Confucian Garden; she had said, "I'll be with you latest by eight," and when nine struck he couldn't stay quiet any longer and went down to the unpaved road by the hospital. A lot of nurses in apostolic white blouses gossiped on the pavement: every patient inside was stable or he supposed the scent of detergent tired them. One Kakushi walked slowly by a noodle cart dim with the amber light of paraffin, and he could hear guitars playing from where the fishermen slept. There was no sign of Shinobu anywhere in the long street.

Of course, Giyuu said to himself, what he was going to tell her could have been dispatched by letter instead, and she wouldn't have minded – she still believed wisteria oil dropped onto the envelope conveyed immortality and that paper folded four times was misfortunate. He went into the hospital and had turned into her office when he noticed the girl sitting in the black carved chair. He couldn't see her face, only the long butterfly haori and the bamboo photo–frame between the unfilled fingers, but he knew her for all that. Above the light of a candle her silhouette glowed defiantly iridescent like so many he'd known to go before.

"Kochou," he said – which means butterfly, because nothing nowadays metamorphosises and nothing sheds its wings to decorate the hair of daughters. She looked up and he saw the clear purple eyes and the spider–coloured hair, the quiet dignity of the dynast who he had regarded as innocent for the past ten years – all until the week before – and her hands lacked strength when she grasped the sides of the chair to rise and meet Giyuu's glare. In that moment she answered the candlelight had cast into overlapping shadows of axes the two prongs of her butterfly hairpin.

"Let's go," she said. "As fast as we can. There's nothing for us here."

Giyuu had heard her say this so many times and in so many different tones that he still did not believe she meant it, even though she watched the grandfather clock for quarter–to, and the clusters of light were beginning to stir in the distant mansion of Ubuyashiki. In any case, he followed her outside, and when they reached the street all the nurses turned their heads, and as soon as they passed their voices rose and fell plaintively as though they were singing together.

"What are they doing?"

"They are mourning the death of an old soldier," Shinobu said. "That is what kept me so long."

They reached Giyuu's home. Inside the lounge a lamp put out before his departure still smouldered, and by the leg of the table with all the books was the record player that danced on the ceiling its corrugated black light. A flask of tea leaves had spilled into the ribs of the vinyl. He picked them out into an agate ashtray. "Do you still have cigarettes?" Shinobu asked.

"No. It's not like me anymore."

Giyuu took off his shoes and jacket and lay his neck on a porcelain pillow just there. He heard Shinobu strike a match, then the spark of gas: she re–lit the lamp. "You had something to tell me?"

"I did."

"But, I suppose – not immediately."

"No. Anything but that," Giyuu said. "Anything."

Shinobu tucked in her hair, and he remembered the time a female mentor criticised that boyish style which she thought becoming of someone in as utilitarian an occupation as hers. She went over to a cupboard against the wall of the room and pulled it open. "But look here," she said. She held out a lacquer opium set; the pipe rattled in its slot; she exclaimed over its patterns, some carved dragons. "I know how to do this. This is like cigarettes."

Giyuu closed his eyes and, moments later, when he opened them again, Shinobu had already unloaded the set. He kept no actual opium; she used moxa instead, cut into slivers and gnashed from a bundle of incense. She added oil and kneaded the mound against a bowl in her lap until it became pliable, and when she applied a clump to the needle and ignited it in the flame of the lamp the fragrance suddenly detonated. Giyuu wondered where she had learned the method: emperors never prepared their own opium, not even the nineteen–year olds, not even those reborn as commoners. Now she took the needle back and scraped off the moxa into a funnel on the pipe, laying it on a stand so the end would hover in the fire, holding it steady for Giyuu. The golden paste pooled and gurgled soundlessly while he inhaled.

Shinobu said, "I want at least a pointer. Is it bad news?"

"It is."

Up went the sleeves and she made another pipe. "But it's nothing to worry about," Giyuu said. The moxa, like a placebo, quickly saw to it that the hypocrisy of his statement was bearable. "Nothing at all. Why don't we have some music?" He turned the record–player on. A lovely tune vibrated the warm air inside the empty house: a woman in an orchestra longed for home – she sung of flowers, and rivers, and train stations.

Upon hearing the lyrics, Shinobu said abruptly, "Do you remember the day I first said I loved you?" With a cloth she wiped the beige stains off her hands, and he saw something bulged in her sleeve. "The world has never seemed since as excellent as was needed for that moment."

"Of course. How old were you?"

"Fourteen. And you, seventeen."

"Kanae was still alive."

"All sorts of people were still alive. Will you have another pipe?"

"Yes."

Giyuu felt himself languish further. The moment was coming. When Shinobu bent over the fire and her skin was tinted its colour he imagined her in other places and times; as a darker human being, a lighter, with smaller and wider eyes … a too–worldly nurse in the battlefields of Europe … a make–believe revolutionary standing blue in a canyon in America … indigenous when it suited her, cultivated when it didn't. Once, he thought she would stay eternally the same, standing four feet two in one of those zen gardens, in the old month of kisaragi. He had seen the butterfly in her hair beside a river in the south, she was as naïve as a nun, and he never wanted her to be better. Now she had attached herself to travel and adultness and despair and they were going to fail her more than youth and daydreams.

"Another pipe?" Shinobu asked again.

"No."

She looked flatly at Giyuu. A concentrated frown. The pipe was re–placed in its slot; the set went folded back into the cupboard; the grandfather clock in her office raced towards quarter–to and the soprano's song droned to a stop. Giyuu had no technique to tell her gently what he was going to tell: he was a Hashira, he thought in statistics, nothing rounded. He held her under the arm and touched her cheek. "Shinobu," he said. She placed her hand on top of his. "Shinobu, you are going to die." She asked him to repeat. "You are going to die. Moments from now. Your worst enemy will kill you. These ten years will have been for nothing."

She sat back on her heels and stared at Giyuu. The frown stayed, but there was no fuss, no scene, only thought – the long, discreet thought of someone who has to alter the whole course of a fifteen–minute life. "Earlier you called me Kochou. Now, it's Shinobu," she only said. He enjoyed her effortless answer.

"We had better go watch Ubuyashiki," Giyuu said, and got up.

The crackle of white and red came across the sky, then the grumble of an exhausted explosive, and when they reached the cliff it was already fixed like a battlefield panorama taken from one of those lithographs of the Great War. A team of Kakushi attempted to put out the fire, the hose winding like a snake at home in a ruin, and because they always pushed and retreated to the same place, it looked like they never moved. In the wood the tiny pale flames frothed, the white sands combusted and spat, and files of smoke reached solidly into the sky. The blast looked very inconsequential and tidy from that distance.

Three days earlier, on the numb of morphine suppositories, Ubuyashiki Kagaya had said to Giyuu, "In three days' time I shall die. But I shall bring Kaemon with me, the old and untrue Ubuyashiki…". He remembered the words but in a confused way. Perhaps he had never heard them and they were a creation of his imagination as he boiled in the broth of memory during those evenings.

Shinobu pointed. "There's Muzan," she said, and there he was, regenerating in the inferno through the gummy drizzled outlines of the smoky heat clouds. He was dark and his hair was rags and he looked panicked and dismembered, but he looked alive enough for the innocent to think that Ubuyashiki went elsewhere for nothing.

Shinobu's finger scared him more than Muzan did. She was still pointing. Manicured and painted a faint lilac, it could approximate the direction exactly, like a needle.

Giyuu said, "We'll have to head down soon."

"Why bother?"

Shinobu threw a stone. It sailed over the cliff, the blanched trees, the eagles, the calcium statues of the Confucian Garden, the laundry fields down south, the awakened fishermen on the banks, and the lake. It plopped and two rings expanded on the water: it might have been that act of malevolence towards nature which told Giyuu for the first time she was in turmoil. The lake lay between the estate and they, was ten incarnations deep and nine centuries wide, and shone every colour in the moonlight while chrysanthemum bunches on the shore tainted the air their white, equatorial scent. They had witnessed this scene before, their previous versions, nearly a millennia ago…

"For you," Giyuu heard Shinobu say, and when he turned around, she had produced from her sleeve an envelope, folded less or more than four times, and the wisteria oil smell was apparent even above the chrysanthemums. She unkinked it and held it out flattened and read the characters aloud, a poem where the address was meant to be:

The brilliance of the chrysanthemums
is the living reflection of his worldliness

Giyuu nearly asked what's this? but what remaining clairvoyance he had already told him. Shinobu nevertheless explained, and he heard her in shards and pieces. "It is a letter I've been working on … maybe I'll continue it in the future … it is not only my testament, but everyone's … written here are my most precious feelings and memories." When she looked up, she was shocked to see that Giyuu's eyes were filled with tears.

"That's no good," she said. "We mustn't act like this is news to anyone."

He managed to suck the tears back. "What a cruel thing to say."

Cruel to say even to oneself. She gave the envelope to him and watched it longingly in his hands. She wondered at what point her path of purity had become overgrown so. It was before she had learned to be cruel, certainly, and probably before she was arrogant enough to say the whole world was for her, like Mowgli, whose world was the jungle.

"You won't open it until I am dead," Shinobu said.

"You knew that you were going to…"

"No. It was just a slight premonition," Shinobu said, but she felt herself making less and less sense as the ravages of time came to swirl all at once within her head. She was overcome: "I've got to go now. I hope you won't grieve too much."

"How can you say that?" Giyuu answered.

"It's the correct thing to say, isn't it?"

"There isn't any use."

Shinobu asked, "There's no use what?"

"What you said. Telling me not to grieve."

"I can't think of anything else to tell you."

"Please, will you not talk in circles!"

They gazed at the fire in silence for a long time. Muzan still regenerated. Slowly Giyuu felt the hard line of his shoulders loosen and finally, he called out to Shinobu.

"I was too harsh. I'm sorry."

"You mustn't be."

"I suppose you do have to go."

"Yes," Shinobu said.

"And I cannot join you."

"It won't change anything."

Giyuu felt that loosening of the bowels that came with the realisation of a last experience – the last day in a beloved country, the last page of a novel, the last first love, the last goodbye. He could change nothing anymore. He had only one more thing to say.

"The afterlife won't be your ghost traveling the world." Giyuu pulled her closer. "I'm sorry, Shinobu."

She looked as if she halted a rebuttal. "Again, you mustn't be. The rest of us are coming. I have to go…"

"Yes, go quickly. Kiss me first." Her trembling mouth skated over his, and she made to leave.

While she walked away Giyuu witnessed her silhouette in the last flash of moonlight, and for a moment she appeared just as she had in the zen garden. But when the flash subsided he saw that she stared back at him. Two tears jangled beneath her eyes, and in that instant they had become the colour of rainbows.