#Aichi's famous places

[summary-trivia-jp]

日本のトリビアまとめ #0020

[trivia-jp]

名古屋城 愛知の名所

名古屋城は、愛知県名古屋市に位置する日本の城であり、重要文化財に指定されています。以下に名古屋城の特徴や魅力をいくつか挙げてみます。 1. 瑞龍の天守閣 名古屋城の天守閣は「瑞龍の天守閣（ずいりゅうのてんしゅかく）」として知られ、金色に輝く龍が特徴的な外観です。豊臣秀吉の命を受けて築かれた天守閣は、美しいデザインと装飾が施されています。 2. 城内の歴史と文化 城内には、歴史的な展示や城の建築技術、当時の生活様式を知ることができる施設があります。また、名古屋城の歴史や築城の経緯などについて学ぶことができます。 3. 周辺の庭園や景観 城内には美しい庭園や堀、歴史的な建造物があります。特に桜の季節��は、桜の花が咲き誇り、城とのコントラストが美しいです。 4. イベントや催し物 名古屋城周辺では、様々なイベントや文化行事が開催されます。季節ごとに、城内外での催し物やイベントが行われることもあります。 5. 周辺の観光地 名古屋城周辺には、栄や大須などの観光地があります。また、名古屋城からは近隣の観光名所にもアクセスしやすい場所に位置しています。

♪♫♬🎤🎹🎶♪♫♬🎤🎹🎶♪♫♬🎤🎹🎶♪♫♬🎤🎹🎶

Nagoya Castle Aichi's famous places

Nagoya Castle is a Japanese castle located in Nagoya City, Aichi Prefecture, and is designated as an important cultural property. Below are some of the features and charms of Nagoya Castle. 1. Zuiryu Castle Tower The castle tower of Nagoya Castle is known as the ``Zuiryu no Tenshukaku'' and has a distinctive exterior with a shining golden dragon. The castle tower was built on the orders of Toyotomi Hideyoshi and has beautiful designs and decorations. 2. History and culture within the castle Inside the castle, there are facilities where you can learn about historical exhibits, the castle's construction techniques, and the lifestyle of the time. You can also learn about the history of Nagoya Castle and how it was built. 3. Surrounding gardens and scenery The castle has beautiful gardens, moats, and historic buildings. Especially during the cherry blossom season, the cherry blossoms are in full bloom, creating a beautiful contrast with the castle. 4. Events and Entertainment Various events and cultural events are held around Nagoya Castle. Depending on the season, entertainment and events are held both inside and outside the castle. 5. Surrounding tourist attractions There are tourist spots such as Sakae and Osu around Nagoya Castle. In addition, Nagoya Castle is located in a location with easy access to nearby tourist attractions.

[ducktoonsfanart]

Donald Duck, Three Caballeros, Darkwing Duck, Ducktales and Duck family in Dragon Ball Universe - Duckverse and Dragon Ball - Crossover - Quack Pack Week - Tribute to Akira Toriyama and Dragon Ball - My version

I wanted to do this later, but since I found out last month about the bad news that Akira Toriyama died, I decided to do something special in his honor, but not to cry because I believe that he is safe in the other world and that which left behind a great achievement for all of us who love manga and anime, so I made a crossover of my favorite characters from Dragon Ball or Duckverse in Dragon Ball Universe.

Yes, and in honor of Akira Toriyama, in honor of one of my favorite manga and anime even though the action takes place in China and certainly dedicated to the 90th anniversary of the creation of the best Disney duck, Donald Duck. I drew three separate drawings of the crossover Duckverse and Dragon Ball characters and combined the various Duckverse and Dragon Ball variants into one. I wanted to add more, but not all characters would fit, so I'll post it separately another time. I mean especially the villains.

Akira Toriyama was born on the same day as me, April 5th, but in a different year, which is 1955 in Kiyosu, Aichi, Japan, and he started his career in 1978 working for a Japanese magazine and later published the manga Dr. Slump continues to write and draw the Dragon Boy manga after 1983, so that from November 1984 he writes, draws and publishes the famous Dragon Ball, which will later become very popular and even the most popular in the world. He was particularly inspired by Osamu Tezuka, who created Astro Boy and is the father of manga. In 1986, the Dragon Ball series began airing and it would become one of the best anime I could enjoy. Yes, it will come out through various series like Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball GT, Dragon Ball Z Kai, Dragon Ball Super, etc. Unfortunately, Akira Toriyama left us on March 1, 2024, and many were affected by this, including me that this happened. Thank you for everything, good man that you have done for all of us! Rest in peace, amen!

The first drawing I drew shows Donald Duck, Jose Carioca, Panchito Pistoles, Aracuan Bird and Drake Mallard as Saiyan warriors along with famous Dragon Ball heroes. Not to be outdone, I drew Duckverse characters that they could relate to and be similar to. So Donald Duck is like Goku (Kakarot), Drake Mallard is like Vegeta (who says OVER 9000!), Panchito Pistoles is like Yamcha, Jose Carioca (Ze Carioca) is Piccolo and Aracuan Bird is like Majin Buu (I don't have to say why ).

Another drawing I drew shows other male characters and boys with other Dragon Ball characters, like Ducktales and Dragon Ball. Scrooge McDuck is with Master Roshi (I don't have to say why), Fethry Duck is with Krillin, Dugan Duck (Fethry's nephew) is with Oolong Pig, Huey Duck is with Gohan (Goku's older son), Dewey Duck is with Trunks (Vegeta and Bulma's son) and Louie Duck is with Goten (Goku's younger son).

The third drawing I drew represents the female characters and girls of Duckverse and Dragon Ball. Daisy Duck is with Chi-Chi (Goku's girlfriend and wife), Morgana Macawber is with Bulma, Gosalyn Mallard is with Videl (Gohan's girlfriend), Lyla Lay (Paperinik New Adventures) and Kay K (Double Duck) are for Launch (in the works about one woman, but with a split personality and one of her natures is good, the other is very awkward).

Yes, I combined from the comics Donald Duck, Duck Avenger (PKNA), Double Duck, Darkwing Duck, Three Caballeros and Quack Pack into one along with various Dragon Ball variants in my own way and drew them to wear the same clothes as in Dragon Ball. I hope you like this idea and this crossover. Feel free to like and reblog this and if you support this idea feel free to say so, just don't use my same ideas without mentioning me. Thank you! Also, happy 90th birthday to Donald Duck as well as 40th birthday to Dragon Ball and Goku himself!

Also, dedicated to the topic Crossover for @quackpackweek . And finally this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK1ZrwR5NWQ

[a-forbidden-detective]

Karaoke love

This is written for @flashfictionfridayofficial with the prompt #FFF238 Take my hand and for @fluffbruary February 2 prompt : engagement | scent | jam

—

Beware of manga spoilers for the latest chapter. This is exactly 1000 words. I was totally into it at the end. I hope the ending makes sense. Heh!

Toto takes a shot from his whiskey glass, easing himself up. It’s his turn to sing. The screen monitor shows the song that he’s chosen awhile back. The truth is his singing is only confined to the four corners of the flat and his shower cabin in Asakusa.

Ron mentioned once that his love for singing in the shower is one of the rare times when Toto lets himself go apart from his innate resoluteness. But come to think of it, Ron didn’t say much about the quality of his singing voice, Toto has only been just self-conscious ever since that incident that he never sings anymore whenever he stays at Ron’s apartment.

Who suggested going to the karaoke bar anyway? Ah, it was Kawasemi-san. Today is the last day that he’s going to be in town and coincidentally his birthday that for all intents and purposes, Dr. Mofu asked him what else he wanted to do in Tokyo before going back to Aichi.

They rent a private room at the Karaoke Kan in Shibuya. The shop became famous when it was featured in a Western film in the early 2000s about two Americans, who found each other amidst the backdrop very alien to them: from food to cultural references. The premises have become a Mecca for tourists.

The whole gang is here. Amamiya, who tags along these days, and Dr. Mofu didn’t have the time when they went to Kamakura for sightseeing two days ago. So, they made sure that they were present this time around before sending Kawasemi-kun back to Nagoya. The only one who’s missing is Spitz, who cannot leave London at the moment and is disgruntled with a dash of envy in his body when he finds out their plans.

“Ack, Tototo! I am going to miss your performance. Ron-kun says that he has a rock ‘n’ roll singer living in his house.” Toto laughed when he heard this.

Should Toto stand up?

An arm gathers around him, as if grounding him. While the hand holds his shoulder, firm and yet tender. Toto turns to his left; Ron’s blue eyes confront him. Relax.

“Y-yeah…” Toto has calmed down a bit.

The first notes of a raunchy electric guitar surge, he poses to belt out the text that flashes on the screen.

“I'm an alligator/ I'm a mama-papa comin' for you / I'm the space invader / I'll be a rock 'n' rollin' bitch for you / Keep your mouth shut … Keep your 'lectric eye on me, babe … Press your space face close to mine, love / Freak out in a moonage daydream, oh yeah!”

His friends are fired up, hooting at the way Toto playfully sings a David Bowie song. Chikori-kun’s admiration skyrockets to 200 per cent. Her eyes scream of glowing stars. Kawasemi kun sings along. He knows it by heart and has been a Bowie fan. He’s so glad that Toto made a little research about him. Dr. Mofu’s face breaks into a giggle as she stops conversing with Amamiya, who cannot stop smiling. Toto, gyrating before her very eyes, has transformed into another person. And Ron? He’s looking at Toto with his hungry eyes, his hands won’t stop rubbing his thighs clothed in loose jeans. He then places his right hand into his pocket and reaches for a small box inside, feeling glad that he hasn’t lost the engagement ring.

You deserve all the good things in the world, Toto!

As the Tokyo police officer hits the end notes, Toto bows to the delight of his friends clapping and whistling on his way.

“Thank you so much!”

Ron hands him a glass of water and half-hugs him when he’s already seated.

“You did well, Toto!”

Toto mouths his thanks as he downs another glass when the next song starts to play. Chikori kun can’t stop herself from gushing when he notices that Ron stands up.

Oh, he’s next. Toto is darn curious now. He knows that Ron can sing really well as expected of him.

“Wise men say / Only fools rush in / But I can't help falling in love with you / Shall I stay? / Would it be a sin / If I can't help falling in love with you?”

All of a sudden, the whole room turns quiet. No one claps, nor whistles. As if a magician does his trick enchanting the audience. Everyone is glued watching Ron does his interpretation of a popular Elvis Presley song.

Toto is fastened on his seat, mouth agape. Ron is looking at him, his intentions are clear. His heart beats faster, aware of his surroundings and the four sets of eyes that are focused on them.

“Take my hand / Take my whole life, too / For I can't help falling in love with you…”

Ron sits next to Toto and seizes his hand. He begins to speak.

“I am glad that our friends are here to give me support and witness the promise I will say here today. Too bad that Spitz isn’t around but he already knows my plans.”

Toto’s face is red now not because of the alcohol but specifically because of Ron, who is in front of him, who is now removing an object from his pocket.

“Toto, I know that it is all so sudden. But, after all the things that happened between us, I believe that there is an understanding that we can’t live without each other and instead prepare to die together if we are faced with a choice, are you willing to be my partner for life? Will you marry me?”

Toto’s mouth quiver, why hasn’t he never thought that this day will come? Ah, that’s why he can never be as good as Ron when it comes to sleuthing.

He then grabs Ron’s face and in front of everyone kisses Ron, his fiancé. Without remorse nor embarrassment while their friends say their congratulations.

“Yes!”

~ fin ~

[lgcmanager]

LGC GIRLS JAPAN 004

SCHEDULE TYPE: TRIMESTER ( PART 1 OUT OF 1 ) SCHEDULE RESTRICTIONS: cannot be paired with another trimester schedule, unless stated otherwise. for reference as to whether your muse is eligible for this event, please click over HERE.

early morning on OCTOBER 16, KIM HYUNCHEOL is already waiting for the girls in the meeting room as they come in. a file folder is waiting for each girl in front of their seats. when everybody has found a place, hyuncheol finally speaks: "good morning. the family concert is now behind us, so we can finally share the details of LGC GIRLS JAPAN's SECOND SINGLE and FIRST LIVE TOUR."

SINGLE

"in front of you, you'll find a file with various lyrics sheets. the first one is the TITLE TRACK of your single, called "FIRE TRUCK". the concept is inspired by the famous SAILOR SQUAD, and each of you have been assigned a member. your hairstyles will be changed or refeshed to relect your assign member:

CHA SORI: SAILOR MERCURY (short black hair)

NOH AREUM: SAILOR JUPITER (long brown hair)

PARK JAEKYUNG: SAILOR VENUS (long blonde hair)

PARK TAEHA: SAILOR MOON (long blonde hair)

YANG AERA: SAILOR MARS (long black hair)

since the release of the single is planned for NOVEMBER 21, you'll have the week to learn and practice the song and will record it next MONDAY. the following days will be dedicated to learn the choreography and the music video will be filmed on OCTOBER 30. then from OCTOBER 31 to NOVEMBER 20 focus will be on practicing for the tour. on NOVEMBER 20, you'll be flying to JAPAN and spend the following 3 days promoting the single at various TOWER RECORDS locations."

LIVE TOUR & HANDSHAKE EVENTS

"the following pages in the file are all dedicated to the tour. added to the lgc girls japan songs you've already practiced and the new singles songs, are 3 of your suggestions and 2 additional songs picked by the staff, for a total of 10 songs."

1. BREAKTHROUGH (lgc girls japan) - All [ MC 1: Intro ] 2. TOKYO DRIFT FREESTYLE (cover) - All 3. BZZ BZZ (new single bside) - All 4. GIRLS GOTTA LIVE (lgc girls japan) - All [ MC 2 ] 5. LOOK AT ME NOW (lgc girls japan) - Aeri, Areum, Sori 6. JANKENPYON (cover) - Jaekyung & Taeha 7. HEAVY ROTATION (cover) - All 8. CLAP CLAP (cover) - All 9. Idol (cover) - All [ MC 3: Ending ] 10. FIRE TRUCK (new single title track)

all relevant details of the new single & upcoming tour are available HERE

"the tour will have a total of 14 shows. every show will be preceeded by a one hour GROUP HANDSHAKE EVENT with about 100 lucky fans. furthermore, during the period of the tour, you'll be flying to japan on THURSDAY EVENINGS and come back to seoul on MONDAY MORNINGS. since this schedule will be quite demanding, we only ask you an 8 hour of practice during your time in seoul. you may do anything during the rest of your free time. however, i strongly advise that you spend time working on your stamina if you want to get through the tour without any injury or getting sick. your health needs to be a priority."

NOVEMBER 25: Kanagawa (Harmony Hall Zama Dai Hall)

NOVEMBER 26: Tokyo (Line Cube Shibuya)

DECEMBER 2: Miyagi (Sendai Sunplaza Hall)

DECEMBER 3: Iwate (Oshu-shi Bunka Kaikan Z Hall Dai Hall)

DECEMBER 9: Osaka (NHK Osaka Hall)

DECEMBER 10: Osaka (NHK Osaka Hall)

DECEMBER 16: Ehime (Matsuyama-shi Sogo Community Center Camellia Hall)

DECEMBER 17: Aichi (Nippon Tokushutogyo Shimin Kaikan Forest Hall)

DECEMBER 23: Shimane (Shimane Kenmin Kaikan Dai Hall)

DECEMBER 24: Hiroshima (Ueno Gakuen Hall)

DECEMBER 30: Kagoshima (Houzan Hall)

DECEMBER 31: Fukuoka (Fukuoka Sunpalace Hotel & Hall)

JANUARY 6: Hokkaido (Sapporo Cultural Arts Theater Hitaru)

JANUARY 7: Kanagawa (Harmony Hall Zama Dai Hall)

rooming at the hotel during the tour:

ROOM A: PARK TAEHA, YANG AERA

ROOM B: CHA SORI, NOH AREUM

ROOM C: PARK JAEKYUNG, ACCOMPANYING STAFF (changes almost every week)

SUPER✰NOVA & LGC RETREAT

"finally, most of the debuted artists will that part in a RETREAT in december. unfortunately, due to their schedule, NOVA will be unable to attend. instead, their participation will be done through preparing a meal for the company's artists and staff members. considering the group only has 6 members, they are far from enough to be able to prepare LUNCH BOXES for everybody in a timely manner. so it's been decided that the five of you and some LGC SPRING BOYS members will be assisting the girls in their task, on DECEMBER 6." hyuncheol announces. "the activity will be used as content for NOVA's upcoming YOUTUBE SHOW. i expect all of you to be on your best behavior and do your best on this day."

as explained above, the girls will be assisting the NOVA members in making LUNCH BOXES for their seniors. do not worry, staff of the partnered cafe will also be present to supervise and assist the idols and trainees.

the participants will be divided in three teams, each in charge of different parts of the boxes:

SANDWICH & KIMBAP TEAM: seo minseo, yu milan, baek byeongkwan, kwon hyuntae, noh areum, yang aera

GRILLING TEAM: kim nayoung, watanabe miyu, kurosawa akio, xue yichen, park jaekyung, park taeha

SALAD & PLATING/PACKING TEAM: kwon sena, son nabi, han noeul, park seojin, cha sori

REQUIREMENTS

TOUR: write a 4 replies (minimum 8 lines) thread with another lgc girls japan member about anything that happened during the tour for +5 POINTS TO DISTRIBUTE ANYWHERE and +6 NOTORIETY !

DVD MENT: write a 300+ word solo of your muse being interviewed and asked about a memorable moment of the tour for +6 POINTS TO DISTRIBUTE ANYWHERE and +3 NOTORIETY ! these interviews will be included in the dvd release of the tour

FREESTYLE: write the 8 lines freestyle your muse performs during the tour (see the tour list for more details) for +6 LYRICS WRITING and +6 NOTORIETY !

OFF DAYS: write a 300+ word solo or a 4 replies (minimum 8 lines) thread with another lgc girls japan member about anything they've done during their off days +8 POINTS TO DISTRIBUTE ANYWHERE and +2 NOTORIETY !

LUNCH BOXES: write a 4 replies (minimum 8 lines) thread with another participant, ideally from your own team, about anything that could be caught by the camera for +6 POINTS TO DISTRIBUTE ANYWHERE and +3 NOTORIETY !

**concerning the lunch box threads: since there are a limited number of participants, please be mindful of the number of threads you take for this event, as you might block others from having partners if you take on more than one or two. also, the show is foused on the nova members, so threads between other participants might not make the final cut. finally, there's currently no air date for this or the lgc retreat, so do not mention any of it in your sns.**

make sure to use the hashtag lgc:lgcgirlsjapan for all of the tasks. you have until JANUARY 6, 2024 at 11:59PM EDT to complete the requirements and validate your points. please submit the following form ONCE on the points blog.

MUSE NAME ∙ LGC GIRLS JAPAN 004  - TOUR: +5 ( skill points distribution ), +6 notoriety  [ LINK ]  - DVD MENT: +6 ( skill points distribution ), +3 notoriety  [ LINK ]  - FREESTYLE: +6 lyrics writing, +6 notoriety  [ LINK ]  - OFF DAYS: +8 ( skill points distribution ), +2 notoriety  [ LINK ]  - LUNCH BOXES: +6 ( skill points distribution ), +3 notoriety  [ LINK ]

[designobjectory]

Setogura Museum. Seto Ware Large Ornamental Jar by Kawamoto Masukichi I, 1876

Seto-yaki (瀬戸焼) is produced around the cities of Seto and Owariasahi, in Aichi Prefecture. Seto is one of the Six Ancient Kilns of Japan, along with Bizen, Echizen, Shigaraki, Tamba and Tokoname. The origin of Seto ware goes back to the beginning of the 19th century. A potter from Seto brought the porcelain process from Kyushu back to his hometown. Local artisans then learned the Chinese-style art of painting and developed ceramic painting depicting Seto’s scenery and nature. By the end of the 19th century, Seto ware had become highly prized in the west and even influenced the Art Nouveau movement in Europe. During the Meiji Period (1868-1912), the production of this most valued of Japanese pottery prospered and comprised tableware, tables, lanterns, and flower vases.

The characteristics of Seto ware are its white unglazed pottery and its dyed and refined designs. Local raw materials are used: motoyamakibushi clay, motoyamagairo clay and sanage feldspar. The use of dyeing techniques for undercoating is a characteristic feature. Dye is applied directly on ceramics and painted designs are placed onto the unglazed pottery. The most famous dye is asbolite, an indigo blue paint.

[yuzu-all-the-way]

Nagoya news - 28.06

Transcript of translation below cut:

Q: What does Nagoya remind you of?

A: Chicken wings. I rather like chicken, so I'd like to have chicken wings, & miso-katsu (deep-fried breaded pork cutlet with miso sause). I like "katsu" (also means "to win") but I don't think I can eat that until the show's finished!

Q: There's another episode in Nagoya

A: There was a time I went into a good old-fashioned cafe in Nagoya & I was the only customer inside (lol). I remember clearly that I had "Kishimen" (flat udon noddles, like fettuccine). I think I was still a junior high school student then, when I wasn't as famous. So I simply went inside, ate it like nothing had happened & left.

MC: It would be a big deal now!

A: Hehehe!

Q: Your impression of Aichi?

A: It's like a training ground for Japanese figure skating. Midori Ito, Mao Asada, Shoma-kun & Kagiyama-kun are working hard. I myself have attended training camps at a rink in Chukyo University since I was a junior competitor. So I have an image (Aichi being) a place that's raising the standard of Japanese FS.

Q: So how do you feel about doing ice shows in Nagoya?

A: I'm nervous, extremely nervous. The audience in Nagoya are discerning - that's my impression. So I feel I have to perform well.

[megurodivision]

Yeong's Thoughts on Shizuoka Division

Hojo Kanon

"Woah... is it weird to say that this woman scares me, yet... also brings something out of me? She's insane, that's for sure. You have to wonder exactly what Chuohku does to these people once they're in their clutches. It makes me think about..." Yeong stops himself, and shakes his head, getting back on track.

"Anyway, this woman screams dangerous. If we're to face her and her team, we'd better be careful. She seems even more dangerous than the scary-spider woman from Shinagawa. And that's saying something!"

Aichi Reika

"Ah, the famous and rich widow, herself, Reika Aichi. I don't know why it took so long for people to realize that she was responsible for the murder of her husbands. I mean, her first husband should have been a major hint, especially since the guy was responsible for Reika's mom's death. Turnabout is fair play, as they say.

"But still though, what the hell was the deal with the rest of your spouses, lady? Were you that eager to get in their pockets? Or was the money just a bonus and you have a thing for killing men? If so, Chuohku might just be the place for you."

Kito Sakura

"Ah, Ms. Sakura. I didn't think I'd have to see that ugly mug of yours again... especially after I delivered a nice roundhouse kick to it. No wonder she hasn't been seen back here in Meguro!" Yeong laughs at this. "Sorry sweetheart, but you only had yourself to blame for that! Meguro is DSC's territory. My territory. And if you want to take it, you'll have to pay for it. And I'll tell you now, we aren't cheap." Yeong laughs again.

"Ahh, I kill myself..."

Silent Tragedy

"Silent Tragedy, huh? Not the most unique of names out there, but it kinda fits with these three, don't you think? Well, whatever. I'm not eager to face most teams, but these guys... yeah, I'm definitely looking forward to facing them, partially because I have a good feeling about the outcome."

"My superiors don't care much for this team... at least as far as Reika Aichi and Kito Sakura are concerned. ...However, they have asked me if I'll make contact with Hojo Kanon, for reasons unknown. Seesh, I have to wonder what those bald SOB's are thinking half the time..."

[lebomboniere06]

The September issue of 25ans magazine has a short article detailing Eiji, which was written by a screenwriter named Mihoko Yamada.

Beautiful People Collection The reason why that person in season is wonderful ikemen

Mihoko Yamada Essay This month's person Eiji Akaso When the intellectual "seasonal actor" who has a high elegance and affinity is on the cover, it moves That's right. "Said by a female editor of a weekly magazine. "Moving" means that the number of copies is sold out and the sales increase.

"He" is Eiji Akaso, the "seasonal actor" who won first place in the "20s actor soaring ranking" of the "Talent Power Ranking" in August and November 2021. he looks young because he has a baby face, but he is 28 years old.

His name spread to young people in the drama "Cheri Maho","It seems that you can become a witch if you are a virgin until the age of 30" (TV Tokyo series). In Wich starred for the first time alone ,It seems that it was "SUPER RICH (Fuji TV series)" were he played the role of Noriko Eguchi's husband that was "discovered" by the adult women in Japan. Eguchi who played the executive career woman was straight with clear eyes. Mr. Akaso, who is a super young husband who supports with such thoughts and played a business partner. I am not the only one who inflated my delusion how wonderful it would be if such a man supported me both publicly and privately.

In order to unravel the "beautiful person" with Elegance and affinity by 25ans magazine of this month I dig in

Mr. Akaso, the familiar "Elementary school town" in Nagoya" will be the most important. After all, Mr. Akaso was born in Osaka prefecture and is from Aichi prefecture. Because was a member of idol group of "IKEMEN ☆ NAGOYA". As a member of a local male idol group that will be renamed to "BOYS AND MEN" later, Eiji Akaso has appeared in stage performances and variety shows in the three Tokai prefectures since his teens. There is a "past" that was willing to respond to the "much swing" unique to local stations.

With such a flow, the roots are gradually known, but the most famous is that the father is a linguist (English studies), and now the president of Nagoya Gakuin University, it must be Mr. Haruyuki Akaso.

Akaso Eiji San says he has taken a lecture from his father because he is from the same university. "I spent my father's job in Wisconsin, USA until I was three years old." "When I was two or three years old, I was taken to an overseas academic conference," he said in an interview. That's why Twitter is flooded with English sentences and fans from overseas sometimes send comments in English. And my mother is a piano teacher. Akaso san, who learned the piano from the age of 3 to junior high school and was entrusted with the accompaniment in the chorus contest when he was in elementary school, is definitely a thoroughbred and can be said to be the most handsome guy who has a high affinity with the Elegance group of "25ans" readers. Probably.

After winning the Grand Prix at Samantha Thavasa's "Men's Model Audition" in 2013, he has belonged to the same office as Shun Oguri, Kei Tanaka, Shotaro Mamiya, Kentaro Sakaguchi, and younger people. It continues to the present as the first. I often hide my eyebrows with mashed hair, but the points are the thick and powerful "male eyebrows" and the eyes that tend to have brown/honey colored big eyes. The shape of the chin is also popular as "sexy". Eiji Akaso is appearing in July with Kasumi Arimura and Tomoya Nakamura in the role of a clumsy, serious and kind-hearted young man in "Ishiko and Haneo.

Let's enjoy the latest ikemen together!

PROFILE Yamada Mihoko Born in Setagaya-ku, Tokyo. While working on variety programs such as "Dancing! pacific saury Goten!" (NTV), "A Story I Don't Know About One Round" (NTV), "Dodesuka" "!" "Up!" Me-Tele) Also active as a commentator for "Sunday Japon" (TBS series).

[btzone]

Commonality of Buck-Tick member names

I was thinking that if you’re not Japanese, you might not know how common or rare the various Japanese names are. For Buck-Tick, the names of the band members are fairly common first names and surnames, not really anything unusual happening there. No native speaker should have trouble reading their names. However, the most interesting thing to note is that Hisashi’s kanji is not usually how one would think to read that name, which is how it ended up that on their very first release on an independent label, his name was typo-ed as Kotobuki instead of Hisashi. (To keep that kanji and reading, it is likely to add one more kanji to make Hisashi, much like how Atsushi’s name is 2 kanji.) Our Hisashi Imai is not the only one with that kanji and name reading, but it’s not the default way to read it. This is why when you fill out forms in Japan, you not only write your name’s kanji but you also write down how to read it because you never know what combos a parent came up with.

Some basic info about their surnames, such as how common it is and where in Japan is it most common. Excluding Hokkaido and Tokyo as the majority of people who live in those two places are “immigrants”, so to speak, and not native for several generations. (If you meet someone from those 2 places, ask them where their grandparents are from.) I need you to be able to track your family history in that general area for at least 150-200 years in Japan to call you a native of that region, sorry. (If you can’t claim that you’re the 19th generation descendant of so-and-so, what is your worth?) This sort of tracking is quite easy to do in Japan because we have family registry books that note the genealogy (patriarchal because who needs to remember the names of women) and also serves as a way of establishing citizenship. It’s also fairly common IMHO for the history of a surname to be like, well 1000 years ago this person did something good for the emperor/king so they were granted a gift and the gift was this name and some land. But, I digress. (Trust me, this whole paragraph is hilarious if you’re Japanese with a sense of humor because it’s true.)

Focusing on family names here. No info on their first names as I looked up what were the most common names given to boys in the years the members were born and though their names are common enough, only one of the members have a name in the top 10 most popular boys names for the year they were born. Takashi (same kanji as B-T member; real first name of Toll) was the 9th most common name given to a boy in 1962 (same year as Takashi the drummer). Yutaka gets an honorable mention. Yutaka (same kanji as B-T member) was the 3rd most common name given to a boy in 1962 and 1963; the 6th most common name given to a boy in 1964; the 7th most common name given to a boy in 1965 (Yutaka the bassist was born in 1967). Minor note: though the kanji is different, Atsushi was the 10th most common name given to a boy in 1968 (Atsushi the singer was born in 1966). To the rest of the band members, don’t feel so bad as my name isn’t in the top 10 either! And who can even read child names today. It’s crazy, right? (mic check, um, can I get a chuckle?)

What is not so commonly shared and do not expect to ever know this stuff is the family crest. The family crest is VERY specific to the son that you descended from. Japan be like, “We can’t have each of George Foreman’s kids named George AND have the same family crest!” This ain’t no google search thing. This ain’t no ask a librarian. This is in the family genealogical book and the only people who get to see that is family. Sure, there’s crests online. But don’t think that’s your crest or your favorite celebrity crest. That’s just some common crest that made it’s way to a scanner. Also, if you study a craft, it could be that craft is from a “school” that passes on a pseudonym once you’ve mastered the craft, complete with kanji and crest so unless you know the master’s birth name, you’re not even looking in the right direction. Example, one year someone with the same family name and kanji as mine got really famous in Japan and even made international headlines. Like, you’ve probably heard of this person famous. My mom was curious if we’re related (internet says there’s only 5400 of us so maybe) and while she was visiting relatives, happened to find out that we have different family crests, thus she gave up the search and declared we are not related. (She did not want to bother to go back 19 generations or so to the story of the king who passed out names.., see paragraph 2 above.)

On to the names! For reference, all Buck-Tick members are from Gunma prefecture. Japan has a population of 126,476,461 people. The most common surnames are Satō, Suzuki, Takahashi, Tanaka, Itō, Watanabe, Yamamoto, Nakamura, and Kobayashi. Each of those surnames have over 1,000,000 people with that name residing in Japan. What’s a rare surname? Something with either 1 or 4+ kanji. (Except Hayashi.) They exist but. Really rare surnames? Well, those would be the names the Japanese government declared cannot exist anymore so those names tend to exist only outside of Japan. (Happened to one part of my family so I know this shit exists. Only 460 left. How did they get away with it? And how can I get hanko with this?)

Name info source: https://myoji-yurai.net/

桜井 (sakurai) literal meaning: cherry blossom-well (like a water well) This kanji for Sakurai is ranked #106 for most common surnames in Japan. This is the most common kanji for Sakurai. It is commonly found in Kanagawa, Saitama, and Chiba prefectures. (Kanto region) For cities, Takasaki, Gunma and Uonuma, Niigata have the most people named Sakurai. Roughly 172,000 people in the entire nation are named 桜井. In Gunma, almost 5% of Kanna town has this surname. Other famous Sakurais? Argh, someone in The Alfee. Better than that, Ao from Cali≠Gari.

櫻井 (sakurai) Same name as above, just different cherry blossom kanji (older version). This kanji for Sakurai is ranked #813 for most common surnames in Japan. It is commonly found in Kanagawa, Aichi, and Chiba prefectures (Kanto and Chubu regions) For cities, Takasaki, Gunma and Akashi, Hyogo have the most people named Sakurai. Roughly 23,600 people in the entire nation are named 櫻井. (The people who couldn’t be sussed to simplify their kanji.) 

今井 (imai) literal meaning: now-well (like a water well) This kanji for Imai is ranked #75 for most common surname in Japan. This is the most common kanji for Imai. It is commonly found in Kanagawa, Saitama, and Aichi prefectures. (Kanto region) For cities, Gero, Gifu and Ichinomiya, Aichi have the most people named Imai. Roughly 212,000 people in the entire nation are named 今井. In Gunma, 20% of Ueno village has this surname. Other famous Imais? Miki Imai, singer, wife to Tomoyasu Hotei. 星野 (hoshino) literal meaning: star-field This kanji for Hoshino is ranked #147 for most common surnames in Japan. This is the most common kanji for Hoshino. It is commonly found in Gunma, Saitama, and Kanagawa prefectures (Kanto region). For cities, Kiryu, Gunma and Nagaoka, Niigata have the most people named Hoshino. Roughly 137,000 people in the entire nation are named 星野. In Gunma, almost 36% of Katashina village has this surname. Other famous Hoshinos? Gen Hoshino wrote a song during the pandemic that got very popular and even Hisashi Imai posted a video of him playing along to that song.

樋口 (higuchi) literal meaning: gutter-mouth This kanji for Higuchi is ranked #132 for most common surnames in Japan. This is the most common kanji for Higuchi. It is commonly found in Fukuoka, Osaka, Niigata, and Kanagawa prefectures (Kansai to Chubu regions) but it’s safe to say it is common throughout all of Japan except for Okinawa. Roughly 146,000 people in the entire nation are named 樋口. In Gunma, there’s roughly 1,000 people named Higuchi in Takasaki and guess where our bassist is from. Other famous Higuchis? How about Yutaka Higuchi the figure skater.

Yagami...the stage name of the drummer. He never writes this in kanji but I imagined that if he did, he would write it as 八神. Or did he write it like that once so that’s why I imagine it that way? Anyway, there’s many possible kanji variations and I was surprised that the most common way to write it is actually 谷上. (For me, I’m like is that Tanuye? Taniue? because I’m Okinawan and we have weird place names.)

[germanreich]

Guren guren guren

Title: In the Absence of the Demon

Disclaimer: This is a fan-made translation from Chinese translations! Please go easy and enlighten us on any mistakes or deviations from the original light novel. All credit goes to the original author and illustrators. - Hyaka and Kuro Shion

——————————————————————————————

‘This is Ichinose Guren-sama.’

This was heard in one of the classroom of First Shibuya High School.

Until recently, everyone here should have been an enemy.

What greeted them originally was only scolding, ignoring and a cola bottle thrown from goodness knows where –

Opening the classroom door, there were a few students whispering in the corridor.

‘I heard he was selected as Kureto-sama’s direct subordinate.’

‘They say he was hiding his real strength, but was found out by Kureto-sama.’

‘He’s on good terms with Shinya-sama too, and his strength has even been acknowledged by those two from the Mito family and Goshi family.’

‘So which idiot said he was a rat from a bad family?!’

‘You said it yourself.’

‘No way! Stop joking!’

Guren himself, however, was ignoring those upsetting conversations. He sat at his desk, supporting his face with his hand and daydreaming. Evidently, he was lacking in sleep.

Overnight, he had been in the backseat of a car on the Tomei Expressway, bound for Tokyo via Aichi at 150 km per hour. During that time, his mind was fixated on what might happen in the future, and so he was unable to have a good sleep.

‘……’

Guren squinted his eyes, half-asleep, and gazed out the window.

Although it could not be felt in this classroom with its excellent air-conditioning, outside it was so hot that the scenery seemed to be enveloped in a heat haze.

Today was the 20th of August.

For normal schools, it would be summer vacation, but in this school there were no such holidays.

According to the news, the temperature these few days had set a new high. Why was it so hot? If the heat persisted, it might lead to stored food going bad, but since the world was going to end this Christmas anyway, to worry about food going bad would be utterly meaningless.

‘…… Guren. Guren!’

Someone called his name.

But Guren did not notice and continued to look out the window.

The owner of the voice grew angry and forcefully rapped the table.

‘Hey, Ichinose Guren! Why are you ignoring my questions?’

Impatiently, Guren glanced towards the source of the noise. There stood a girl from his class.

Her most noticeable characteristics were her bright red hair, strong gaze and pale white skin.

This was the daughter of the prestigious Jujo family – Jujo Mito.

She continued to speak.

‘Every day, you don’t train and you always have this dazed, dumb attitude…… has the fame from being noticed by Kureto-sama made you so arrogant?’

‘…… Who’s arrogant?’

Guren countered, and Mito angrily replied.

‘I’m talking about you! Ichinose Guren. In class you act as there is no one around you, during physical education and spells class you don’t use your true strength. What on earth do you want!?’

Faced with these questions, Guren was troubled over how to answer. In the first place, the content covered in class here were already below his intellectual level. There was simply nothing worth learning.

However, everyone here was his enemy, so there was no need to let all his enemies see his true strength.

And so, every day, Guren acted lazy and pretended to be a half wit – but even if he explained all this she would definitely still not understand.

In the Hiiragi family, to have value or to be famous – in the eyes of the people here, this was something to be celebrated.

Hence, for Guren to become arrogant or proud was not surprising, for this was something that was worth feeling proud over.

So was it better to act out that happiness? However, be it his terrible attitude or hidden true strength, both had already been seen through by Kureto, so was it still necessary to hide everything to such a degree?

In the midst of pondering all these, unexpectedly –

‘……Uwah~’

A yawn leaked out of his mouth.

This angered Mito even more.

‘What kind of attitude is that?’

‘Your yelling is making my ears hurt.’

‘First of all, just now during physical training, I saw that you lost to a classmate in an instant…… How can this be? Your strength shouldn’t be so low!’

Guren shrugged.

‘No, I really do only have that much strength.’

She grew even more furious.

‘And that is exactly the kind of attitude that gives others a headache!’

‘Headache? Why? You have no reason to have a headache.’

Mito spoke intensely.

‘Of course I do! If you laze about, those from prestigious families who hang out with you will also be laughed at and shamed, haven’t you noticed?’

No wonder she was so angry.

In other words, being Kureto’s subordinate, Guren was now grouped with Jujo and Goshi, so if his bad attitude were to be seen, he would also drag down the reputations of the others.

Guren smiled and said.

‘Why do I have to be concerned about your reputation too?’

‘That is because…… We are all Kureto-sama’s subordinates, in future we will also be companions working together, so……’

However, Guren was no longer listening.

Companions.

They were companions?

Kureto-sama’s subordinates, companions?

This was certainly fortunate, to be personally chosen by Kureto-sama to be one of his underlings.

This thought surfaced in his mind.

‘…… Haha.’

Guren laughed in a self-depreciating way, before yawning and continuing to support his head with his hand.

‘Hey Guren!’

Mito called.

The male sitting nearby began to laugh.

Hiiragi Shinya.

‘Come on, Mito-chan, don’t bug him anymore. It’s not like his laziness and disappointing attitude is anything new.’

Mito showed a respectful face to those of the Hiiragi family.

‘Ah, Shinya-sama. However……’

‘Anyway, to someone of his caliber, the curriculum taught at this school must be pointless. Right? Guren? Don’t you agree?’

‘……’

When Guren ignored Shinya, Mito grew angry again.

‘Hey, you! How dare you ignore Shinya-sama’s words!’

Hearing this furious shout, the people outside started to whisper again.

‘Hey, looks like that rumor was true. He really is on good terms with Shinya-sama and that girl from the Jujo family.’

‘So, does that mean that rebellious Ichinose branch family has sworn allegiance to the Hiiragi family… to Kureto –sama?’

Hearing that voice,

‘……’

Guren once more stared out the window and gently bit his lip.

In the past, the Ichinose family had been the most loyal to the Hiiragi family, and among the branch families had been the most prestigious and powerful.

But 500 years ago – they split with the Hiiragi family, and set up the religious sect ‘Mikado no Tsuki’.

With regard to the situation then, there were no exact reports, but the reason for this was something everyone knew well.

The lone reason, was simple a love story.

A heart-rending love story.

There had once been a beautiful Ichinose girl, the Hiiragi’s eldest and second sons both vied for her favor.

After a series of complicated events, the girl’s affection was successfully gained by the second son.

According to legend, the eldest son was unable to accept this reality.

Thus one night, the eldest son raped the girl, impregnated her and had the second son castrated.

After that, the eldest son had his own son, the girl and the second son cast out of the family.

The exiled second sun, together with the Ichinose girl, then set up the new religious sect ‘Mikado no Tsuki’.

However, their defeat was still apparent.

After all, when all was said and done, the eldest son was still heir to the Hiiragi family.

The one leading ‘Mikado no Oni’, was the heir to the Hiiragi family.

However, the eldest son did not destroy the organization set up by the second son and the Ichinose girl.

The reason for this, was to humiliate them.

So that the Ichinose girl who had not chosen him, and the younger brother who had betrayed him, would be laughed at and scorned for eternity.

He allowed them to live to suffer humiliation.

To allow their descendants to always bear the scorn of others.

Of course, the castrated second sun could not produce children with the girl.

Hence, the child born of the rape by the eldest son – the Hiiragi boy became the adopted son and heir of ‘Mikado no Tsuki’.

The second son was always scorned.

The girl was always scorned.

The two of them continued to deeply love the other. Yet everything other than this was taken away.

Everyone in the families scorned them.

Humiliated them.

This was the price of betrayal.

The price of betraying the Hiiragi family.

And so, everyone in the families became used to scorning the Ichinose family.

That was why the Ichinose were always rats.

From the moment they were born, they were dirty, smelly rats.

Only, after a long time, all this simply became urban legend.

To the new generation’s Guren and those of the Hiiragi family, this was no longer a topic of importance.

That was why Kureto could calmly issue orders to Guren. The eldest son of the Hiiragi family, had forgiven the Ichinose family.

While this could be seen as violating tradition, it was still a reasonable thing to do. Anyway, things like the ancestors’ love stories, no one really cared about.

Being the loner among the ten families comprising the Ichinose, Nii, Sanguu, Shijin, Goshi, Rikudou, Shichikai, Hakke, Kuki and Jujo, the Ichinose should be the strongest.

If that family would follow Kureto-sama today – this was important enough to be a significant topic of discussion.

It could also be due to his controlling nature that Kureto-sama took Guren under his wing.

Recess was coming to an end, class would resume soon.

Hence, Mito huffily returned to her seat.

As she did so, she was also teased by Goshi.

‘You really don’t learn, huh. Why bother with Guren? Or do you like him……’

‘Shut up!’

Goshi had only said halfway before he was slapped.

Goshi laughed.

However, the rest of the class dared not to laugh. They were afraid of the revenge that came from laughing at a member of the elite families.

And so, everyone could only show kind, sincere smiles.

In the end, whether it was Jujo or Goshi, they were both venerated by the others.

The teacher was already standing on the teacher’s platform. The fourth period of the day began.

This class was on the ways to counter and deal with Western magic, a topic in which Guren had little interest.

Shinya, sitting next to him, lightly tapped his shoulder.

‘Hey Guren.’

‘……’

‘Hey.’

‘So noisy.’

‘Well, this is class. So try to speak softer, okay?’

‘That wasn’t what I meant.’

But Shinya pulled his chair closer, leaned on Guren and whispered in his ear.

‘…… If I’m speaking so softly, will I anger the teacher?’

Guren turned with a face full of irritation.

Shinya was still smiling widely. In this school, there were no teachers who dared show wrath towards those who bore the Hiiragi name, Shinya was only saying this for fun.

Guren did not say a word. Shinya annoying him was also perfectly normal, there was no need to respond.

Yet Shinya did not seem to care and continued to whisper in his ear.

‘Tonight, <Hyakuya Sect> will come. So where shall we meet up?’

In this instant, Guren could not help the widening of his eyes.

His gaze locked onto Shinya.

This was not something that should be said in a school run by ‘Mikado no Oni’.

If they were to be overheard, they would immediately be arrested and tortured.

However, Shinya was still wearing his usual smile. Evidently, before saying these words he had already made untold preparations.

If so,

‘……Don’t scare me like that.’ Said Guren. Shinya grinned again.

‘That’s because it’s not good for you to always ignore people and even make Mito-chan angry.’

‘Stop joking around. I’m not interested in playing around with you.’

Guren said, directing a stern gaze at Shinya.

‘I’m not joking. I’m also not interesting in silly games.’

Guren stared at Shinya.

Shinya merely smiled and let Guren stare.

Guren had no inclination to trust Shinya.

Shinya had given him the piece of the chimaera called <Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse> that Mahiru had left behind, so to some extent he could be trusted, but if he let down his guard, he might be taken advantage of.

Therefore, it was necessary to act cautiously.

‘……’

Guren did not reply.

Taking the initiative, Shinya placed a piece of paper on the table. On it was written the address for rendezvous that night.

Shinya had left his fingerprints on this paper. If Guren gave it to Kureto, the place where they were to meet the <Hyakuya Sect> would be ambushed by the Hiiragi family, and Shinya would also be killed that day.

In other words, Shinya had exposed his weakness to his opponent.

With a shocked expression, Guren asked.

‘…… Why do you trust me?’

Shinya smiled.

‘Why don’t you instead say that you’re amazed at my alertness.’

‘Because your face annoys me.’

‘Ahaha. Even though I look so friendly?’

‘Shut up.’

‘….. Anyway, you may know nothing about me, but I’ve always heard about you.’

‘……’

‘Ever since I was young. From the time I first met Mahiru… Because, she always talks about you.’

Shinya said thus.

Guren smiled coldly.

‘Then, did you go mad with jealously? You really like Mahiru, right?’

In response, Shinya smiled lightly.

‘To be accurate, I have good feelings towards Hiiragi, but I don’t like her to that extent.’

‘……Humph.’

‘But, I really am jealous of you.’

‘Huh? Why?’

‘I’ve always been imagining what you were like. I wondered about if you were to appear before me, which of us would be stronger, and what you looked like, etcetera.’

This made Guren remember.

When he first entered the school, Shinya launched a surprise attack on him.

Of course, even now he could not ascertain the truth of his words, but maybe to some extend he was trustworthy.

Even so.

Guren picked up the paper Shinya left on his table and slipped it into his pocket, taking care to preserve Shinya’s fingerprints on its surface.

This action that purposely preserved the fingerprints was noticed by Shinya, who smiled.

‘How prudent.’

‘To avoid the fate of the trash that is not street-smart and is disposed of.’

Hearing him say this, Shinya was a little upset, and said.

‘…… That self-pitying talk…… If it were Mahiru she would definitely put on an annoyed expression, why on earth does she like you?’

‘Maybe my face looks friendlier?’

When Guren said this, Shinya looked at him in apparent surprise.

‘…… Ha, hahaha.’

He laughed.

Guren cast his gaze outside the window.

The schoolyard, as expected, was filled with dry heat.

It was summer.

Summer.

If this world were to end on Christmas day, this would be the last summer ever.

———————————————————

After class and club activities were over, the phone rang.

The caller ID read <Hiragi Kureto>.

The main candidate to be the Hiiragi heir, the student council president that no one in school could disobey.

After pressing the ‘Answer’ button, he heard the other’s voice.

‘What?’

‘No. Is there anything you need of me, Kureto-sama – that is how you should say it.’

‘Do you like oppressing your subordinates that much?’

‘Nah, just joking.’

‘Your jokes aren’t funny at all. Have you been spoilt so much by the higher-ups that your brain has also spoilt? (TN: Hurhur, pun intended)

‘Hahaha, do you want to die?’

‘I dare you to try. Do you think it’s such an easy feat?’

‘……No. But, you know, I really like that attitude of yours.’

‘Sigh~ What attitude do you like?’

‘Although your way of speaking is very sharp, when you cannot win against me you clearly recognize your own status; this attitude.’

‘……’

Guren did not respond. Because this was a fact. Right now, he could not afford to be surrounded by enemies.

‘Mikado no Tsuki’ could not afford ‘Mikado no Oni’ as an enemy.

This was not a simple child’s fight. Even if he attained victory with his sword, it would be meaningless.

If the people he respected and treasured were labelled as criminals, even the pregnant would not be spared.

Just like 500 years ago.

The situation had not changed at all.

Mito and Goshi, who had finished packing and were ready to go home, walked over.

Goshi saw Guren and snickered.

‘Making a call right after school ends, could it be your girlfriend.’

Mito overheard this, and –

‘……What!?’

For some reason she stared at Guren.

Guren ignored her and continued to talk on his phone.

‘Anyway, what do you want?’

‘During lunch break tomorrow, come to the student council room.’

‘No.’

‘Haha, you don’t have the right to refuse. See you tomorrow.’

‘Bleh.’

Before hearing the sound of Guren sticking out his tongue, Kureto ended the call.

Shinya, who was sitting beside him, lifted his head to ask.

‘Kureto-nii?’

‘My girlfriend.’

Hearing this, Mito rushed over.

‘…… Wait, wait a minute! You’re still in training, how could you engage in such leisure activities as dating?’

What on earth was this girl saying.

Guren stared at her with an irritated expression, before sighing and ignoring her. Mito was immediately angered and glared at him forcefully. Seeing this, Goshi burst out laughing for some reason.

Guren did not take notice and instead scooped up his bag and left his seat.

Behind him, Mito muttered angrily.

‘Why is he rushing off just because a girl called him? What rubbish.’

Hiding a smile, Shinya told Mito.

‘That call just now was from Kureto-nii.’

‘Eh? What, really?’

Shinya had overheard.

‘Are you going to the student council room now?’

Guren shook his head.

‘No, tomorrow, during lunch break.’

But hearing him say this, Mito was even more unsettled.

‘Wait, wait, you really talked to Kureto-sama like that? That question just now……’

‘How annoying.’

‘What annoying! Wait……’

To the sounds of Mito raging, Guren left the classroom. It seemed that Mito was not yet done ranting, so Guren bluntly closed the door.

In the corridor, Sayuri and Shigure were already waiting for him. They were now in the class just next dor.

‘Ah, ah, Guren-sama. We have been waiting for you!’

Shigure then spoke coldly.

‘Did those disreputable people from the Hiiragi family do anything to you today?’

Behind him was Mito who was complaining ‘Those who are disrespectful to Kureto-sama will blah blah blah’, now, in front of him was his aide who was calling the Hiiragi family disreputable.

Half wanting to burst out laughing, Guren resisted and replied.

‘Nothing at all. Just as usual.’

Sayuri still showed a worried expression.

‘What do you mean, as usual? Did someone throw a cola bottle at you?’

Shigure’s face immediately went cold.

‘If so, we must kill everyone in the Hiiragi family.’

From her uniform skirt, she pulled out a knife. She was serious.

But Sayuri did not notice this and spoke cheerfully as usual.

‘Oh yeah, Guren-sama! What do you want to eat? Whatever Guren-sama wants to eat, I can make it……’

‘Curry.’

‘Eh, again~?’

At this moment, the classroom door opened. Mito walked out and noticed Shigure’s cold glare.

‘Ah, Yukimi-san…… Such a scary expression, has something happened?’

‘No, nothing at all.’

‘Even so, it is better to speak of happy things here. As such, there are some things Yukimi-san should also tell Guren. With the disrespectful manner in which he treats Kureto-sama, right now Guren’s position is not very good.’

However, Shigure directed her cold glare at Mito and answered.

‘Guren-sama did not do anything wrong.’

‘Being his aide you always cover up for him……’

‘Outsiders have no right to criticize the master of my house. Your voice is very piercing, can you keep it down a little?’

‘……Uh.’

And so Mito embarrassedly silenced herself, casting a silent plea for help towards Guren.

‘Why’re you looking at me?’

Guren said, which made her blush for no reason.

‘…… I, I only, I was only thinking for your sake……’

‘Don’t pry into others’ matters.’

Goshi walked out from behind Mito.

‘Alright, stop teasing Mito-chan. Today’s that day right? The day that everyone plays nice and goes to Guren’s house to play, right? So let’s all get along.’

But this was the first time Guren had heard of such a thing.

‘Huh? What’s up with that?’

Guren burst out. Grinning, Goshi explained.

‘Well~ you see, we’re all united as Kureto-sama’s subordinates, so sometimes we should get closer right?’

‘No, never heard of that.’

‘Yes. Okay. Since I have just come up with such a brilliant idea, let’s all go to Guren’s place.’

‘Stop kidding. That would obviously never happen.’

Unfortunately, yet another nuisance emerged from the classroom, this time it was Shinya who walked out.

‘What, what? Such an interesting idea. I also want to go~’

His expression filled with annoyance, Guren whipped around to leave.

‘What idiots. Let’s go.’

And so he left, which Shigure and Sayuri following.

However, Sayuri occasionally glanced back over her shoulder.

Hearing the sound of footsteps, Guren asked.

‘……Are those three following?’

‘Yes.’

‘…… Haa, those idiots really took it seriously.’

Shigure lifted her head to ask.

‘Should I destroy them?’

‘If you can even shake off Mito, that would be not bad already.’

‘…… That is true…… Uuu…… I am not strong enough, I am very sorry……’

‘No, forget it, I’m not angry or anything.’

Guren gently petted Shigure’s head, causing her to look at him in surprise. On her usually emotionless face, a dazed expression seemed to emerge.

Compared to this, the reaction from the side was much bigger. Sayuri’s face was filled with panic.

‘Ah! Ah! What was that just now! Shigure is so sneaky. Me too! I also want to be petted by Guren-sama!’

But Shigure grabbed and restrained Sayuri’s hand, saying.

‘…… No. Last time Sayuri confessed to Guren-sama and was petted, this time it’s my turn.’

‘Eh~ Yuki-chan is so sneaky. I also want to be petted.’

‘No.’

‘But, but.’

They argued so, but the two aides were already showing expressions of understanding.

When petting Shigure’s head earlier, Guren had slipped the paper Shinya had given him behind Shigure’s ear. On it was written the time and location of the meeting.

2am.

Hikarigaoka Park.

In front of the tennis practice courts.

This was the meeting with the <Hyakuya Sect>. Naturally, the name <Hyakuya Sect> was not written on this paper, but there would definitely be preparations to be made. Weapons had to be readied. Or perhaps they would have to move stealthily and not let anyone notice.

Shigure spoke.

‘Putting the jokes aside, today I need to take in the laundry, so I shall head back first. What about you, Sayuri?’

‘I need to go the supermarket. Today, everyone……’

She glanced back. Guren confirmed it.

‘Probably so. That bunch is very annoying, we can’t shake them off.’

‘I see. Then just to be on the safe side, I will prepare their shares too.’

As Sayuri said this, Goshi snuck over.

‘Ah, to be able to eat Sayuri-chan’s homemade cooking? I’m really looked forward to it.’

Sayuri answered his smile with a cold aura, before saying.

‘Then I shall prepare curry, Guren-sama.’

With this parting statement, she turned and quickly walked away with Shigure.

Seeing them leave, Goshi sped up to walk side by side with Guren.

‘…… Guren you really are sneaky~ to have two such cute girls serve as your aides.’

Shinya also walked side by side with Guren.

‘You could just ask your family for the same.’

‘Ah, Shinya-sama… Nah, I’m not as good as my younger brother. Actually, they don’t really think much of me……’

‘But now you are Kureto-nii’s subordinate.’

‘Oh yeah, that’s true. After that all my attendants’ attitudes towards me changed, but that immediate change is what’s repulsive…… It feels like my brother is also more nervous……’

The two people by Guren’s side chatted as they walked.

‘You’ve really made up your mind to come to my house?’

As Guren asked this, Goshi nodded.

‘Yeah. Can we?’

Shinya then smiled.

‘Ah, is it that? You’ve hidden many R-rated books in your house, so us visiting is a problem for you?

Actually, it was not because of hidden porn magazines that he felt trapped. Even if it were people from the Hiiragi family who came to check, they would still not find anything of significance.

Why did Goshi suddenly want to visit Guren’s home? Shinya had also taken notice of this issue.

No matter how you put it, today was the day that they might meet the <Hyakuya Sect>.

Was it possible that Kureto had found out about this –

That the meeting tomorrow afternoon in the student council room was just a cover, and that he actually knew that they were meeting the <Hyakuya Sect> today.

Guren directly interrogated Goshi.

‘…… Were you ordered by Kureto to keep surveillance on me?’

Shinya looked over at Guren and Goshi. Evidently, he had also been thinking about this.

Goshi shrugged.

‘Nope. I haven’t gotten any instructions from Kureto-sama.’

‘Then why do you suddenly want to come to my house?’

‘Because we are companions.’

‘Huh?’

‘We are also classmates, if this were a normal school, it would be the summer holidays now.’

‘So?’

‘It’s the time for everyone to play together. Right?’

However, Guren wore an expression of complete befuddlement and shook his head.

‘I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.’

Goshi laughed.

‘Really? Okay, the truth is that~ I got scolded by my parents yesterday.’

‘Parents? What did they say, that you have to gain as much of Kureto’s favor as the Ichinose?’

Goshi shook his head.

‘No, no, the opposite actually. They said that the Ichinose trash are still traitors and will soon be shunned again, so I should not associate with them so much.’

His parents certainly had foresight, thought Guren in his heart. However, it seemed that Goshi intended to ignore his parents’ criticism.

‘You should listen to your parents, or you’ll become bad.’

‘So what if I’m bad.’

‘You rebellious rascal.’

‘Haha, just like those who steal motorcycles for a joy ride? That also seems like a great activity for summer~’

‘Go die.’

‘Hahaha’

Goshi laughed.

From the side, Shinya asked.

‘Does Goshi have a motorcycle licence?’

‘Ah, no. What about Shinya-sama?’

‘Me neither. But I can ride one during training.’

‘Ah, me too~ but it’s more fun to take the public’s possessions? I also want to ride a motorcycle bike.

Even as they conversed, they continued to follow Guren. Obviously, they planned to follow him home.

In the middle of Shinya and Goshi’s discussion of motorcycles, Mito spoke.

‘…… Can I, um, ask you something?’

It seemed that she also intended to follow Guren home.

‘…… Um, just now, you petted Yukimi-san’s head.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Ah, that…… that……’

‘What about it?’

Mito was having trouble forcing the words out.

‘…… The two of you, uh, are going out?’

‘Ah?’

‘Uh, or is that even if you are not officially dating you would touch your subordinates so tenderly? Or unless, unless, even at night……’

‘What are you saying?’

‘To lay a hand on your subordinates who cannot disobey you, what kind of person are you……’

‘You’re really noisy.’

Guren let out a sigh and stopped listening.

This group of rascals, what were they up to since just now? Their inane chatter was just like that of normal school students. In the first place, to play with friends, this idea was something Guren could not understand. To gather at his house, what did they want?

Was it to play poker?

‘……Good grief.’

They walked out of school.

The weather was the usual oppressive heat.

There were still students training in school. This was the type of school it was. Even if the <Hyakuya Sect> attacked and decreased the school population, no one would stop to rest.

The order to lockdown all information had yet to be rescinded. Only the few in the higher ranks knew about their state of war with the <Hyakuya Sect>.

Even so, small conflicts were taking place unceasingly. Not just in Japan, but even in the branch organizations all over the world, fights were starting to take place.

Hence, to say that the headquarters of ‘Mikado no Oni’ in Shibuya was the most peaceful place left on earth might not be a lie.

Even the <Hyakuya Sect> could not easily lay siege to Shibuya.

However, this school with its concealed traitors was a different story.

As Guren looked around the school, he thought of all the things Mahiru had done.

About dyeing this school crimson with the blood of students, and the things he had done in his youth.

Mito noticed his distant gaze.

‘……Time passes really quickly, huh.’

Was Mito also comparing the schoolyard before her eyes to the scenes of that day?

The scenes of blood and corpses everywhere.

‘Yeah. That’s true.’

It seemed like he had made no progress forward at all, but time was already slipping away.

Mito spoke.

‘In this short time, I’ve already been saved by you twice.’

‘It was just luck.’

She laughed bitterly and lifted her head to gaze at Guren.

‘…… You said it was by luck, but wasn’t it because of it that you ended up grievously injured and comatose for a month?’

‘I was just careless. Furthermore, sleeping is my hobby.’

‘You’re always cracking jokes to change the subject…… But, Guren.’

Saying this, she gripped a small piece of the back of Guren’s shirt.

‘……I really want to show my gratefulness. So, I want to repay you.

‘Repayment, huh. Like how?’

‘…… Like, until the day Kureto-sama officially acknowledges you, and gives you the position of honor you deserve in ‘Mikado no Oni’, I will always support you.’

Nosing into affairs that were not hers – this is what Guren thought, but did not say aloud.

‘…… Furthermore, the current Guren, father would never accept……’

‘Huh?’

‘Nothing, just talking to myself.’

For some reason she stepped back shyly.

Guren really couldn’t understand her feelings.

He could not understand Goshi’s feelings either.

Why care about the Ichinose trash? Why support him? In Aiichi, the research on Kiju, that if discovered by the Hiiragi family would be severely punished, had already begun.

Yet this bunch of people trusted him so easily.

Companions? Friends? To gain position under Kureto? These kinds of words were too foolish.

It was just as Goshi’s parents had said, the traitorous Ichinose family that was rotten to the core, was too dangerous to get close to.

But even so they said they wanted to be friends. They said that they wanted to deepen their friendship as fellow subordinates of Kureto. It seemed that they did not suspect him as all, and were still innocent and happy in their roles as the young mistress and master that were coveted by their families.

‘……’

Could he kill these two with his own hands?

Guren mulled over this in his head.

Because they were enemies, enemies of the Ichinose family, there would come a day when it had to end. When that time came, could he do it with his own two hands?

In Ueno he had not killed them. That should have been the time to do it, yet he could not. Whether or not this was the right thing to do, he had no idea. It was not a matter of principle. The point was that he should have acted, but he could not.

– I couldn’t do it.

‘……’

This sentence reverberated in his head.

Once again he recalled Kureto’s words to him.

‘Although your way of speaking is very sharp, when you cannot win against me you clearly recognize your own position.’

Kureto had said this before.

But was it the truth?

His ambition was ultimately just empty talk, if Shigure and Sayuri were to be captured and held as hostages, would his ambition be so easy dispelled?

Or was it that he still held such an innocent way of thinking that he could not even kill Mito and Goshi?

If so, he should just discard his ambition. For he had already dragged in his comrades in the Ichinose.

The war had already begun.

It had already begun long ago.

Despite all this, Goshi exhibited no anxiety at all, and asked with a face filled with expectation.

‘Hey, is your place far away?’

‘If I say it’s far will you go home?’

‘No way.’

Guren sighed.

‘It’s not that far…….’ He replied tiredly.

Translator’s comments

Hyaka: The history of the Ichinose and Hiiragi is so dark. Guren can also be very dark. Also, why is Guren so popular? First Mahiru, then Shinya, then Mito, not to mention Yuu-kun, Shigure and Sayuri…

K. Shion: Cos he is Guren that’s why. .__.

[ducktoonsfanart]

Ducktales, Quack Pack and Dragon Ball - Scrooge, Fethry, Dugan, Huey, Dewey and Louie Duck with Master Roshi, Gohan, Goten, Trunks, Krillin and Oolong - Duckverse and Dragon Ball Crossover - Tribute to Akira Toriyama and Dragon Ball - My version

Even though I'm late, and to make it easier for you to refer to your crossover, I'll post one drawing each so you know what it's about.

Yes, and in honor of Akira Toriyama, in honor of one of my favorite manga and anime even though the action takes place in China and certainly dedicated to the 90th anniversary of the creation of the best Disney duck, Donald Duck. I drew three separate drawings of the crossover Duckverse and Dragon Ball characters and combined the various Duckverse and Dragon Ball variants into one. I wanted to add more, but not all characters would fit, so I’ll post it separately another time. I mean especially the villains.

Akira Toriyama was born on the same day as me, April 5th, but in a different year, which is 1955 in Kiyosu, Aichi, Japan, and he started his career in 1978 working for a Japanese magazine and later published the manga Dr. Slump continues to write and draw the Dragon Boy manga after 1983, so that from November 1984 he writes, draws and publishes the famous Dragon Ball, which will later become very popular and even the most popular in the world. He was particularly inspired by Osamu Tezuka, who created Astro Boy and is the father of manga. In 1986, the Dragon Ball series began airing and it would become one of the best anime I could enjoy. Yes, it will come out through various series like Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball GT, Dragon Ball Z Kai, Dragon Ball Super, etc. Unfortunately, Akira Toriyama left us on March 1, 2024, and many were affected by this, including me that this happened. Thank you for everything, good man that you have done for all of us! Rest in peace, amen!

This drawing I drew shows other male characters and boys with other Dragon Ball characters, like Ducktales and Dragon Ball. Scrooge McDuck is with Master Roshi (I don’t have to say why), Fethry Duck is with Krillin, Dugan Duck (Fethry’s nephew) is with Oolong Pig, Huey Duck is with Gohan (Goku’s older son), Dewey Duck is with Trunks (Vegeta and Bulma’s son) and Louie Duck is with Goten (Goku’s younger son). Scrooge McDuck is similar to Master Roshi because he is like an advisor, and who influenced Goku and Donald the most, and they are quite comical and love women, Huey is similar to Gohan because he is the oldest, and they are often both rebellious, Dewey is similar to Trunks because he tends to stand out and be alone, but also because of the similarity of his hairstyle, Louie is like Goten because he is the youngest, but prefers sports and they have a good heart, Fethry is like Krillin because they are clumsy and are often with Goku, that is, with Donald and Dugan is similar to Oolong because they are smaller in stature, although both have a strange energy. I definitely drew them wearing Dragon Ball clothes (as in the previous drawing) since they are in China practicing martial arts.

Yes, I combined from the comics Donald Duck, Duck Avenger (PKNA), Double Duck, Darkwing Duck, Three Caballeros and Quack Pack into one along with various Dragon Ball variants in my own way and drew them to wear the same clothes as in Dragon Ball. I hope you like this idea and this crossover. Feel free to like and reblog this and if you support this idea feel free to say so, just don’t use my same ideas without mentioning me. Thank you! Also, happy 90th birthday to Donald Duck as well as 40th birthday to Dragon Ball and Goku himself! I hope you like this drawing and this idea!

[hedgebelle]

Cultural References in “They Are Out There Saying”

It took me forever to compile it, but here it is! A brief explanation on all the references to Japanese culture I made in my JayDick Summer Exchange fic “They Are Out There Saying”.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/25707886/chapters/62420596

When I got the prompt from @paperempires​ calling for the Batman Ninja verse, I was like, you want 16th century Japan? I SHALL DELIVER.

Ok, so first, let’s talk about geography.

Right now, Japan is divided into prefectures, but in the past there were provinces. Check out the map below.

Green: Hida Province

Aka the province where this fanfic actually takes place. Nowadays the Hida-Takayama region in Gifu Prefecture.

Located there is the hidden village of the Bat Clan, the calligrapher's house, as well as real places briefly mentioned: Takayama city with its castle (ruins) and Tenshōji Temple (associated with True Pure Land school of Buddhism), and Shirakawa Village (diamond shape on the map).

Btw, Shirakawa Village is a UNESCO world heritage site and overall a lovely place. If you have a chance to visit it, please do. Here, check it out 😊.

Also, Hida is one of the two places in all of Japan where gneiss, a type of metamorphic rock, can be found. A piece of trivia I learned from my best friend (who might or might have not dared me to fit gneiss somewhere in the fanfic) 😉. The second place where gneiss can be found - again, true fact - are Oki Islands, the archipelago north of the Grand Izumo Shrine.

Dark red: Owari Province

Nowadays part of Aichi Prefecture.

According to the Batman Ninja (the version with Japanese voice over) Joker made himself a feudal lord of this province. Which is kinda interesting, seeing as Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582), one of the key players during the warring states period who started the unification of Japan, was a lord of that domain.

Located in Owari is also Alfred's teahouse 😊.

Yellow: Kai Province

Nowadays, it's Yamanashi Prefecture.

Penguin made himself a feudal lord of this domain. In Batman Ninja he really commanded penguins wearing samurai armour 😂.

Violet line: Tōkaidō Road

A tract that linked Kyoto, a seat of the emperor, and Edo (present day Tokyo), the seat of shogun.

So, traveling the Tōkaidō Road didn't become a thing until the 17th century ^^". But I figured, if castles can be weaponized in this verse, then I can send Jason down this road 😊.

On the side note, travelling the Tōkaidō Road became quite a subject in the culture of the Edo Period (1600-1868). For example, check out these famous ukiyo-e.

Star: the Grand Shrine of Izumo

Very much a real place. One of the three most important Shintō shrines in all of Japan. Worshipped there is Okuninushi no Okami, god of marriage. When praying in the Grand Shrine, a pilgrim is supposed to clap their hands four times, not just two like everywhere else. That's because in that Shrine one is not praying just for themselves, but for their destined partner too. 

The Grand Shrine is located in the Izumo Province - nowadays a part of Shimane Prefecture. 

*Even today Izumo is called a place where fates are being brought together 😉.

Circle: Mt Hiei

Again, a real place, located very close to Kyoto. The Enryakuji temple located on that mountain historically had big influence also due to the fact, it commanded its own army of warrior monks. Some further reading on them, if your interested, is here.

(Btw, the Enryakuji Temple is also a UNESCO world heritage site.)

It was emperor Shirakawa (1053-1129) who one said that the only things he does not have control over are the roll of dice, the waters in Kamo River and the warrior monks of the Enryakuji Temple.

*Kamo River flows through Kyoto.

Square: Inabayama Castle

Nowadays called Gifu Castle, located in Gifu City, Gifu Prefecture 😊. One of few castles built on top of a mountain.

Triangle: Mt Osore

A real place, considered one of the most sacred in all of Japan. A site of Bodaiji Temple. Due to the volcanic activity in the area, there's sulfur both in the air and in the lake right by the temple - hence its striking colour. Otherwise, the landscape is barren. 

It is said that Mt Osore matches the description of Buddhist hell, and holds the entrance to the afterlife. For some further, light reading check here.

If you think to yourself wooow that's a lot of references then fear not - there's more 😂.

Other references

Fuke Sect of Buddhism 

Monks of this sect, as a part of their practise, wore basket hats, played flute, and were on constant pilgrimage. 

Travel, however, used to be heavily restricted, so in exchange for a special travel permit, monks were asked to spy for the shogun. Also, ninja (and other people involved in espionage) were known to donn on the attire of a Fuke Sect monk. For that reason, monks were sometimes asked to play on their flutes to prove their identity.

In Batman Ninja Jason is operating undercover as one of those monks.

Check this, for some further reading.

Direction of the Demon’s Gate

It’s north-west. It was believed that demons and evil spirits enter through that direction, hence it was considered unlucky.

Rokuyō (lucky/unlucky days)

A circle of six days, three of which are thought to various degrees lucky, another three - to various degrees unlucky. The most unlucky one is called butsumetsu and apparently is meant to symbolise the day Budda died.

Ri

Old unit of measurement. 1 ri ≈ 3.9 km ≈ 2.4 mi

Sexagenary cycle

A cycle of 60 years. It was traditionally used in China for time reckoning, and was known in other South-East Asian countries too.

For some further reading click here.

Golden leaf

Kaga Province (north-east of Hida; now part of Ishikawa Prefecture) is known as the biggest producer of golden leaf in all of Japan.

Zen Circle

On the photo below:

It’s an important symbol in Zen Buddhism that stands for enlightenment, absolute, the void. In Japanese calligraphy and sumi-e (ink painting), drawing the circle is seen as an expression of absolute freedom of the mind that lets the body create. If it’s closed, it symbolises perfection. If not, it becomes an expression of wabi-sabi - a concept in Japanese aesthetics that translates to beauty of imperfection.

Kappa

One of the fantastic creatures that appears in many Japanese folktales. Kappa is a water demon that (unsurprisingly) dwells in lakes and rivers. It is rather mean and known to cause mischief, but surprisingly enough - very fond of cucumbers.

Ogre (oni)

One of the fantastic creatures featured in Japanese folklore. Usually portrayed with red skin, horns, and a tall, hulking figure; as a concept somewhat similar to demons or devils, as they represent everything evil and harmful (and also, oni reside in the eight great hells). It was believed a human wicked beyond any redemption might turn into an ogre.

Haikai-no renga

A genre of linked verse poetry. It is made of 18 or 36 verses that alternatively have 17 (5-7-5) or 14 (7-7) syllables. It is less formal than an earlier genre, renga, and as such is supposed to be lighter, witty, comical even. There aren't as many rules dictating which verse is supposed to have a direct allusion to which, how many times and in which verses certain motives (like flowers, moon, seasons) can be mentioned. 

Still, the first verse is supposed to contain kigo, so a word or phrase that indicates the season - in the fanfic it’s May (rice planting season) which is classified as early summer in the old lunar calendar - or in some other clever way gives an allusion to the environment the poetry meeting took place in. The first verse is also supposed to be written by the guest of honour which is why Jason was asked to compose it 😊. Important is also the third verse, as that’s where the theme of the whole haikai-no renga is officially established. 

From the first verse of haikai-no renga evolved possibly the most recognisable form of Japanese poetry - haiku.

Lovers’ suicide

A suicide committed together at the same time by the lovers whose shared affection defied the rules of society and/or obligations to their families. Before commiting the act, they would usually pray to be reborn together on the same lotus flower in the Pure Land. 

Lovers’ suicide is a theme featured in plays for pupper theater bunraku, most prominently The Love Suicides at Sonezaki written by Chikamatsu Monzaemon.

Pure Land

In a nutshell: According to some schools of Buddhism in Japan, Pure Land where people can be reborn and practice pure version of Buddhism, thus are able to finally gain enlightenment (which is impossible when alive, because the practice in the land of the living is warped, impure).

Please, take my way too short explanation with a grain of salt. It might not seem that way, but I’m not all that knowledgeable about Buddhism ^^”.

Nenbutsu prayer

Practised in True Pure Land Buddhism. It’s basically a recitation of a short phrase that translates to “I take refuge in Buddha Amida”.

Kannon

The bodhisattva associated with compassion.

Vengeful ghost

It was believed that a person who harboured a deep grudge or hatred in their last living moments towards those who had wronged them could become a vengeful spirit.

 *Hoichi the Earless - one of the traditional horror stories. In this story, vengeful ghosts (of the fallen Taira clan) want to take with them a blind monk because he beautifully plays on biwa (traditional instrument). Once his brethren realise the danger Hoichi is in, they paint his whole body in Buddhist sutra, safe for his ears. Because of that, when the ghosts appear again, Hoichi - safe for his ears - is invisible to them. Spoiler alert, the ghosts take Hoichi’s ears, thus the earless in the title. Check out here for some further reading.

Ten Virtues of Tea

Text attributed to a Buddhist monk Myōe (1173-1232. It lists all the properties of green tea beneficial to the human body and soul. 

Translation can be found here.

Portuguese firearms

Historically, the first Europeans Japanese people came in contact with were Potuguese traders. They introduced many European goods including firearms. 

On the unrelated note, the Potuguese in that time period were referred to as Nanbanjin (南蛮人) which translates to southern barbarians.

Eight great hells

...are the concept of hell in the traditional culture in a nutshell. The concept itself was heavily influenced by Buddhism. 

Further reading is available here.

Shinto wedding ceremony

While it incorporates many rites, the most core one (as far as I know) features the groom and the bride taking turns drinking sake (rice wine) from three cup, each slightly bigger than the other. When drinking, they are supposed to sip three times. 

In feudal times, wedding ceremonies started with an elaborate bridal procession to the groom’s house. There, the dowry would be presented, blessings would be given, and then the bride and groom would take turns drinking sake as described above. 

...Okay, I believe that’s it. Thank you for reading!

[burnedbyshoto]

Yes, sir - Background

so this is an informational post about my...multichapter fic! i’m starting this story in a few days and this is the background information about the story. it’s going to be a multichapter (im thinking 10 parts) of todoroki shouto x reader with a side of momojirou, because they’re gay, karen.

anywho, this is just what I need you guys to know about it before the story just as world building!!! let me know what you guys think in comments or in my inbox please :) i’m also tagging this as momojirou, but only this teaser because its not as focused in the storyline but just in case theres any momojirou fans who also love self insert todoroki fics.

Yes, sir maid!au an inside look of the most elite and powerful family of japan:

— you’re a struggling individual living paycheck to paycheck. you had wanted to do something with the arts, but realized that cleaning and organizing are things that make you happy so you drop out of college while nearly being done two years earlier than you should have been.

— the world is not a forgiving place to people who aren’t actively pursuing an actual white collar job, so your family shunned you. it’s okay because you lived with roommates anyways.

— you had tried the entire “maid cafe” in tokyo and absolutely hated it. it was humiliating and full of weird kinky and horny boys from japan and other foreign countries. they always waited until you were off your shift to approach you! it was your fault though. you had no idea what it was exactly, your dumb friend and roommate mina had convinced you that it was a cleaning company. you were dumb and believed her.

— so you had taken a grueling task of being a janitor for a local company. it still wasn’t exactly what you wanted. they had very specific things you were allowed to do, and it was only cleaning. no organizing. at this point you were ready to become a secretary. as a secretary you’d be able to clean up a bit and mostly organize.

— going back to the job center, you sit down with the man who had been helping you out with finding jobs, kirishima. he looks up anything suitable to your needs. (you’ve been here so many times he doesn’t even ask)

— it must be some miracle because there’s a maid request at some rich mansion over in the Aichi prefecture. meaning a 30 minute commute to work. the paycheck is HUGE and they’re desperate. it seems that no one lasts around for longer than three days.

— “do you want the job, y/l/n?”

— “IS THAT EVEN A QUESTION?! OH MY GOD YES, KIRISHIMA!”

— you send in your resume to this family, and within ten minutes of kirishima telling you how to follow up, you get an email. they’ve selected to hire you.

— “well good luck, it’s the todoroki family!” kirishima laughs as he reads the profile for the job selection and you feel yourself go breathless.

— the TODOROKI’s??? you feel your breathing increase as you stare at the grinning man in front of you 

– Todoroki Shouto and Yaoyorozu-Todoroki Momo were richer than rich. they were both from families of old wealth and new wealth. the nation cried and watched them get married three years ago when they turned 22.

— they are the royalty of japan aside from the royal family themselves. you were only 20 at the time of this event, but damn, even you had teared up slightly as the worlds hottest man married the tall gorgeous woman next to him.

— they’re heroes as well, well not literally.

— momo is a philanthropist, scientist, and the occasional model and designer. she’s a creator, an artist.

— shouto is the CEO of the Todoroki Company, a company that did literally everything. they’ve been in business since the beginning of time, and they have never had a single true competitor since the Yaoyorozu family! but it seems that the heirs of both companies fell in love, forming the ultimate company. but in terms of his heroic deeds he volunteers a lot at hospitals, a focus to burn and frostbite victims and pays off medical bills. a philanthropist. has modeled.

— you nearly collapse as you read through their profiles again as you head back home.

— mina greets you at the door, your three other roommates chilling in the living room.

— ashido mina is a chemist, but despite being financially secure now, loves to live with the everyone and won’t leave no matter how much she could leave your little 6 room, 2 bath apartment.

— uraraka ochako is a construction worker. she works for her family and she’s their mascot, so they’ve had a booming business! she’s independent from them, but definitely can’t afford her own place! when mina suggested they room together she said yes.

— hagakure toru is an instamodel. her income comes in from promotions. she has the weird genetic thing that makes her super super pale. she’s not albino, but she just as well might be. she’s super cute and always down to help people with their instas. she’s the reason why your guys feeds are cute.

— asumi tsuyu is a herpetologist with a focus on frogs. she’s super smart, the mom friend of the group. she was bullied when growing up so she loves this group of you girls, main reason why, like mina, she hasn’t moved out on her own.

— the five of you girls are basically sisters and they supported your decision to go and do this job. of course mina and toru were jealous it was for the todoroki’s but they were all there to help you get ready for the first day.

— makeup done, hair did, best work clothes on, you’re now own your way to work

— so there you stand in front of the mansion, your jaw dropped at the sheer size of it. your arm reaches out to press the doorbell/intercom?

— “Todoroki Residence, how may I help you?”

— “Hi, I’m Y/l/n Y/n! I was just hired for the maid position?” you squeak, suddenly feeling powerless at the thought of just what was really happening. there’s a long period of silence that further eats at your nerves.

— the gates open and you suddenly feel your heartbeat in your throat as you make the first few steps forward, unknowingly entering the chaotic and secretive livelihood of this famous and rich family.

[azflashjp]

【ゆるキャラ】いなりん（愛知県豊川市）

外国人の方が日本に旅行に来ると、京都の伏見稲荷を訪れることが多いのですが、愛知県豊川市の豊川稲荷も日本三大稲荷と言われるほどの有名な場所。 (When foreigners come to Japan to travel, they often visit Fushimi Inari in Kyoto, but Toyokawa Inari in Toyokawa City, Aichi Prefecture is also a famous place called Japan's three major inari.)

ゆえに、町のキャラが狐がモチーフでかついなり寿司のお米が詰まった「いなりん」になっています。

なお、豊川のいなり寿司はB-1グランプリにも出品するぐらいに、様々な工夫をお店で凝らしたものを提供。 大葉やワサビを入れたものが人気のようです。

“Inarin“ Toyokawa city in Aichi.

[unsettlingshortstories]

Reeling for the Empire

Karen Russell (2013)

    Several of us claim to have been the daughters of samurai, but of course there is no way for anyone to verify that now. It’s a relief, in its way, the new anonymity. We come here tall and thin, noblewomen from Yamaguchi, graceful as calligraphy; short and poor, Hida girls with bloody feet, crow-voiced and vulgar; entrusted to the Model Mill by our teary mothers; rented out by our destitute uncles — but within a day or two the drink the Recruitment Agent gave us begins to take effect. And the more our kaiko-bodies begin to resemble one another, the more frantically each factory girl works to reinvent her past. One of the consequences of our captivity here in Nowhere Mill, and of the darkness that pools on the factory floor, and of the polar fur that covers our faces, blanking us all into sisters, is that anybody can be anyone she likes in the past. Some of our lies are quite bold: Yuna says that her great-uncle has a scrap of sailcloth from the Black Ships. Dai claims that she knelt alongside her samurai father at the Battle of Shiroyama. Nishi fibs that she once stowed away in the imperial caboose from Shimbashi Station to Yokohama, and saw Emperor Meiji eating pink cake. Back in Gifu I had tangly hair like a donkey’s tail, a mouth like a small red bean, but I tell the others that I was very beautiful.

    “Where are you from?” they ask me.

    “The castle in Gifu, perhaps you know it from the famous woodblocks? My great-grandfather was a warrior.”

    “Oh! But Kitsune, we thought you said your father was the one who printed the woodblocks? The famous ukiyo-e artist, Utagawa Kuniyoshi …”

    “Yes. He was, yesterday.”

    I’ll put it bluntly: we are all becoming reelers. Some kind of hybrid creature, part kaiko, silkworm caterpillar, and part human female. Some of the older workers’ faces are already quite covered with a coarse white fur, but my face and thighs stayed smooth for twenty days. In fact I’ve only just begun to grow the white hair on my belly. During my first nights and days in the silk-reeling factory I was always shaking. I have never been a hysterical person, and so at first I misread these tremors as mere mood; I was in the clutches of a giddy sort of terror, I thought. Then the roiling feeling became solid. It was the thread: a color purling invisibly in my belly. Silk. Yards and yards of thin color would soon be extracted from me by the Machine.

--

    Today, the Agent drops off two new recruits, sisters from the Yamagata Prefecture, a blue village called Sakegawa, which none of us have visited. They are the daughters of a salmon fisherman and their names are Tooka and Etsuyo. They are twelve and nineteen. Tooka has a waist-length braid and baby fat; Etsuyo looks like a forest doe, with her long neck and watchful brown eyes. We step into the light and Etsuyo swallows her scream. Tooka starts wailing—“Who are you? What’s happened to you? What is this place?”

    Dai crosses the room to them, and despite their terror the Sakegawa sisters are too sleepy and too shocked to recoil from her embrace. They appear to have drunk the tea very recently, because they’re quaking on their feet. Etsuyo’s eyes cross as if she is about to faint. Dai unrolls two tatami mats in a dark corner, helps them to stretch out. “Sleep a little,” she whispers. “Dream.”

    “Is this the silk-reeling factory?” slurs Tooka, half-conscious on her bedroll.

    “Oh, yes,” Dai says. Her furry face hovers like a moon above them.

    Tooka nods, satisfied, as if willing to dismiss all of her terror to continue believing in the Agent’s promises, and shuts her eyes.

    Sometimes when the new recruits confide the hopes that brought them to our factory, I have to suppress a bitter laugh. Long before the kaiko change turned us into mirror images of one another, we were sisters already, spinning identical dreams in beds thousands of miles apart, fantasizing about gold silks and an “imperial vocation.” We envisioned our future dowries, our families’ miraculous freedom from debt. We thrilled to the same tales of women working in the grand textile mills, where steel machines from Europe gleamed in the light of the Meiji sunrise. Our world had changed so rapidly in the wake of the Black Ships that the poets could barely keep pace with the scenes outside their own windows. Industry, trade, unstoppable growth: years before the Agent came to find us, our dreams anticipated his promises.

    Since my arrival here, my own fantasies have grown as dark as the room. In them I snip a new girl’s thread midair, or yank all the silk out of her at once, so that she falls lifelessly forward like a Bunraku puppet. I haven’t been able to cry since my first night here — but often I feel a water pushing at my skull. “Can the thread migrate to your brain?” I’ve asked Dai nervously. Silk starts as a liquid. Right now I can feel it traveling below my navel, my thread. Foaming icily along the lining of my stomach. Under the blankets I watch it rise in a hard lump. There are twenty workers sleeping on twelve tatami, two rows of us, our heads ten centimeters apart, our earlobes curled like snails on adjacent leaves, and though we are always hungry, every one of us has a round belly. Most nights I can barely sleep, moaning for dawn and the Machine.

--

    Every aspect of our new lives, from working to sleeping, eating and shitting, bathing when we can get wastewater from the Machine, is conducted in one brick room. The far wall has a single oval window, set high in its center. Too high for us to see much besides scraps of cloud and a woodpecker that is like a celebrity to us, provoking gasps and applause every time he appears. Kaiko-joko, we call ourselves. Silkworm-workers. Unlike regular joko, we have no foreman or men. We are all alone in the box of this room. Dai says that she’s the dormitory supervisor, but that’s Dai’s game.

    We were all brought here by the same man, the factory Recruitment Agent. A representative, endorsed by Emperor Meiji himself, from the new Ministry for the Promotion of Industry.

    We were all told slightly different versions of the same story.

    Our fathers or guardians signed contracts that varied only slightly in their terms, most promising a five-yen advance for one year of our lives.

    The Recruitment Agent travels the countryside to recruit female workers willing to travel far from their home prefectures to a new European-style silk-reeling mill. Presumably, he is out recruiting now. He makes his pitch not to the woman herself but to her father or guardian, or in some few cases, where single women cannot be procured, her husband. I am here on behalf of the nation, he begins. In the spirit of Shokusan-Kōgyō. Increase production, encourage industry. We are recruiting only the most skillful and loyal mill workers, he continues. Not just peasant girls — like your offspring, he might say with his silver tongue to men in the Gifu and Mie prefectures — but the well-bred daughters of noblemen. Samurai and aristocrats. City-born governors have begged me to train their daughters on the Western technologies. Last week, the Medical General of the Imperial Army sent his nineteen-year-old twins, by train! Sometimes there is resistance from the father or guardian, especially among the hicks, those stony-faced men from distant centuries who still make bean paste, wade into rice paddies, brew sake using thousand-year-old methods; but the Agent waves all qualms away — Ah, you’ve heard about x-Mill or y-Factory? No, the French yatoi engineers don’t drink girls’ blood, haha, that is what they call red wine. Yes, there was a fire at Aichi Factory, a little trouble with tuberculosis in Suwa. But our factory is quite different — it is a national secret. Yes, a place that makes even the French filature in the backwoods of Gunma, with its brick walls and steam engines, look antiquated! This phantom factory he presents to her father or guardian with great cheerfulness and urgency, for he says we have awoken to dawn, the Enlightened Era of the Meiji, and we must all play our role now. Japan’s silk is her world export. The Blight in Europe, the pébrine virus, has killed every silkworm, forever halted the Westerners’ cocoon production. The demand is as vast as the ocean. This is the moment to seize. Silk-reeling is a sacred vocation — she will be reeling for the empire.

    The fathers and guardians nearly always sign the contract. Publicly, the joko’s family will share a cup of hot tea with the Agent. They celebrate her new career and the five-yen advance against her legally mortgaged future. Privately, an hour or so later, the Agent will share a special toast with the girl herself. The Agent improvises his tearooms: an attic in a forest inn or a locked changing room in a bathhouse or, in the case of Iku, an abandoned cowshed.

--

    After sunset, the old blind woman arrives. “The zookeeper,” we call her. She hauls our food to the grated door, unbars the lower panel. We pass her that day’s skeins of reeled silk, and she pushes two sacks of mulberry leaves through the panel with a long stick. The woman never speaks to us, no matter what questions we shout at her. She simply waits, patiently, for our skeins, and so long as they are acceptable in quality and weight, she slides in our leaves. Tonight she has also slid in a tray of steaming human food for the new recruits. Tooka and Etsuyo get cups of rice and miso soup with floating carrots. Hunks of real ginger are unraveling in the broth, like hair. We all sit on the opposite side of the room and watch them chew with a dewy nostalgia that disgusts me even as I find myself ogling their long white fingers on their chopsticks, the balls of rice. The salt and fat smells of their food make my eyes ache. When we eat the mulberry leaves, we lower our new faces to the floor.

    They drink down the soup in silence. “Are we dreaming?” I hear one whisper.

    “The tea drugged us!” the younger sister, Tooka, cries at last. Her gaze darts here and there, as if she’s hoping to be contradicted. They traveled nine days by riverboat and oxcart, Etsuyo tells us, wearing blindfolds the entire time. So we could be that far north of Yamagata, or west. Or east, the younger sister says. We collect facts from every new kaiko-joko and use them to draw thread maps of Japan on the factory floor. But not even Tsuki the Apt can guess our whereabouts.

    Nowhere Mill, we call this place.

    Dai crosses the room and speaks soothingly to the sisters; then she leads them right to me. Oh, happy day. I glare at her through an unchewed mouthful of leaves.

    “Kitsune is quite a veteran now,” says smiling Dai, leading the fishy sisters to me, “she will show you around—”

    I hate this part. But you have to tell the new ones what’s in store for them. Minds have been spoiled by the surprise.

    “Will the manager of this factory be coming soon?” Etsuyo asks, in a grave voice. “I think there has been a mistake.”

    “We don’t belong here!” Tooka breathes.

    There’s nowhere else for you now, I say, staring at the floor. That tea he poured into you back in Sakegawa? The Agent’s drink is remaking your insides. Your intestines, your secret organs. Soon your stomachs will bloat. You will manufacture silk in your gut with the same helpless skill that you digest food, exhale. The kaiko-change, he calls it. A revolutionary process. Not even Chiyo, who knows sericulture, has ever heard of a tea that turns girls into silkworms. We think the tea may have been created abroad, by French chemists or British engineers. Yatoi-tea. Unless it’s the Agent’s own technology.

    I try to smile at them now.

    In the cup it was so lovely to look at, wasn’t it? An orange hue, like something out of the princess’s floating world woodblocks.

    Etsuyo is shaking. “But we can’t undo it? Surely there’s a cure. A way to reverse it, before it’s … too late.”

    Before we look like you, she means.

    “The only cure is a temporary one, and it comes from the Machine. When your thread begins, you’ll understand …”

    It takes thirteen to fourteen hours for the Machine to empty a kaiko-joko of her thread. The relief of being rid of it is indescribable.

    These seashore girls know next to nothing about silkworm cultivation. In the mountains of Chichibu, Chiyo tells them, everyone in her village was involved. Seventy families worked together in a web: planting and watering the mulberry trees, raising the kaiko eggs to pupa, feeding the silkworm caterpillars. The art of silk production was very, very inefficient, I tell the sisters. Slow and costly. Until us.

    I try to weed the pride from my voice, but it’s difficult. In spite of everything, I can’t help but admire the quantity of silk that we kaiko-joko can produce in a single day. The Agent boasts that he has made us the most productive machines in the empire, surpassing even those steel zithers and cast-iron belchers at Tomioka Model Mill.

    Eliminated: mechanical famine. Supply problems caused by the cocoons’ tiny size and irregular quality.

    Eliminated: waste silk.

    Eliminated: the cultivation of the kaiko. The harvesting of their eggs. The laborious collection and separation of the silk cocoons. We silkworm-girls combine all these processes in the single factory of our bodies. Ceaselessly, even while we dream, we are generating thread. Every droplet of our energy, every moment of our time flows into the silk.

    I guide the sisters to the first of the three workbenches. “Here are the basins,” I say, “steam heated, quite modern, eh, where we boil the water.”

    I plunge my left hand under the boiling water for as long as I can bear it. Soon the skin of my fingertips softens and bursts, and fine waggling fibers rise from them. Green thread lifts right out of my veins. With my right hand I pluck up the thread from my left fingertips and wrist.

    “See? Easy.”

    A single strand is too fine to reel. So you have to draw several out, wind six or eight around your finger, rub them together, to get the right denier; when they are thick enough, you feed them to the Machine.

    Dai is drawing red thread onto her reeler, watching me approvingly.

    “Are we monsters now?” Tooka wants to know.

    I give Dai a helpless look; that’s a question I won’t answer.

    Dai considers.

    In the end she tells the new reelers about the juhyou, the “snow monsters,” snow-and-ice-covered trees in Zao Onsen, her home. “The snow monsters”—Dai smiles, brushing her white whiskers—“are very beautiful. Their disguises make them beautiful. But they are still trees, you see, under all that frost.”

--

    While the sisters drink in this news, I steer them to the Machine.

    The Machine looks like a great steel-and-wood beast with a dozen rotating eyes and steaming mouths — it’s twenty meters long and takes up nearly half the room. The central reeler is a huge and ever-spinning O, capped with rows of flashing metal teeth. Pulleys swing our damp thread left to right across it, refining it into finished silk. Tooka shivers and says it looks as if the Machine is smiling at us. Kaiko-joko sit at the workbenches that face the giant wheel, pulling glowing threads from their own fingers, stretching threads across their reeling frames like zither strings. A stinging music.

    No tebiki cranks to turn, I show them. Steam power has freed both our hands.

    “ ‘Freed,’ I suppose, isn’t quite the right word, is it?” says Iku drily. Lotus-colored thread is flooding out of her left palm and reeling around her dowel. With her right hand she adjusts the outflow.

    Here is the final miracle, I say: our silk comes out of us in colors. There is no longer any need to dye it. There is no other silk like it on the world market, boasts the Agent. If you look at it from the right angle, a pollen seems to rise up and swirl into your eyes. Words can’t exaggerate the joy of this effect.

    Nobody has ever guessed her own color correctly — Hoshi predicted hers would be peach and it was blue; Nishi thought pink, got hazel. I would have bet my entire five-yen advance that mine would be light gray, like my cat’s fur. But then I woke and pushed the swollen webbing of my thumb and a sprig of green came out. On my day zero, in the middle of my terror, I was surprised into a laugh: here was a translucent green I swore I’d never seen before anywhere in nature, and yet I knew it as my own on sight.

    “It’s as if the surface is charged with our aura,” says Hoshi, counting syllables on her knuckles for her next haiku.

    About this I don’t tease her. I’m no poet, but I’d swear to the silks’ strange glow. The sisters seem to agree with me; one looks like she’s about to faint.

    “Courage, sisters!” sings Hoshi. Hoshi is our haiku laureate. She came from a school for young noblewomen and pretends to have read every book in the world. We all agree that she is generally insufferable.

    “Our silks are sold in Paris and America — they are worn by Emperor Meiji himself. The Agent tells me we are the treasures of the realm.” Hoshi’s white whiskers extend nearly to her ears now. Hoshi’s optimism is indefatigable.

    “That girl was hairy when she got here,” I whisper to the sisters, “if you want to know the truth.”

--

    The old blind woman comes again, takes our silks, pushes the leaves in with a stick, and we fall upon them. If you think we kaiko-joko leave even one trampled stem behind, you underestimate the deep, death-thwarting taste of the mulberry. Vital green, as if sunlight is zipping up your spinal column.

    In other factories, we’ve heard, there are foremen and managers and whistles to announce and regulate the breaks. Here the clocks and whistles are in our bodies. The thread itself is our boss. There is a fifteen-minute period between the mulberry orgy—“call it the evening meal, please, don’t be disgusting,” Dai pleads, her saliva still gleaming on the floor — and the regeneration of the thread. During this period, we sit in a circle in the center of the room, an equal distance from our bedding and the Machine. Stubbornly we reel backward: Takayama town. Oyaka village. Toku. Kiyo. Nara. Fudai. Sho. Radishes and pickles. Laurel and camphor smells of Shikoku. Father. Mother. Mount Fuji. The Inland Sea.

--

    All Japan is undergoing a transformation — we kaiko-joko are not alone in that respect. I watched my grandfather become a sharecropper on his own property. A dependent. He was a young man when the Black Ships came to Edo. He grew foxtail millet and red buckwheat. Half his crop he paid in rent; then two-thirds; finally, after two bad harvests, he owed his entire yield. That year, our capital moved in a ceremonial, and real, procession from Kyoto to Edo, now Tokyo, the world shedding names under the carriage wheels, and the teenage emperor in his palanquin traveling over the mountains like an imperial worm.

    In the first decade of the Mejii government, my grandfather was forced into bankruptcy by the land tax. In 1873, he joined the farmer’s revolt in Chūbu. Along with hundreds of others of the newly bankrupted and dispossessed from Chūbu, Gifa, Aichi, he set fire to the creditor’s offices where his debts were recorded. After the rebellion failed, he hanged himself in our barn. The gesture was meaningless. The debt still existed, of course.

    My father inherited the debts of his father.

    There was no dowry for me.

    In my twenty-third year, my mother died, and my father turned white, lay flat. Death seeded in him and began to grow tall, like grain, and my brothers carried Father to the Inoba shrine for the mountain cure.

    It was at precisely this moment that the Recruitment Agent arrived at our door.

    The Agent visited after a thundershower. He had a parasol from London. I had never seen such a handsome person in my life, man or woman. He had blue eyelids, a birth defect, he said, but it had worked out to his extraordinary advantage. He let me sniff at his vial of French cologne. It was as if a rumor had materialized inside the dark interior of our farmhouse. He wore Western dress. He also had — and I found this incredibly appealing — mid-ear sideburns and a mustache.

    “My father is sick,” I told him. I was alone in the house. “He is in the other room, sleeping.”

    “Well, let’s not disturb him.” The Agent smiled and stood to go.

    “I can read,” I said. For years I’d worked as a servant in the summer retreat of a Kobe family. “I can write my name.”

    Show me the contract, I begged him.

    And he did. I couldn’t run away from the factory and I couldn’t die, either, explained the Recruitment Agent — and perhaps I looked at him a little dreamily, because I remember that he repeated this injunction in a hard voice, tightening up the grammar: “If you die, your father will pay.” He was peering deeply into my face; it was April, and I could see the rain in his mustache. I met his gaze and giggled, embarrassing myself.

    “Look at you, blinking like a firefly! Only it’s very serious—”

    He lunged forward and grabbed playfully at my waist, causing my entire face to darken in what I hoped was a womanly blush. The Agent, perhaps fearful that I was choking on a radish, thumped my back.

    “There, there, Kitsune! You will come with me to the model factory? You will reel for the realm, for your emperor? For me, too,” he added softly, with a smile.

    I nodded, very serious myself now. He let his fingers brush softly against my knuckles as he drew out the contract.

    “Let me bring it to Father,” I told the Agent. “Stand back. Stay here. His disease is contagious.”

    The Agent laughed. He said he wasn’t used to being bossed by a joko. But he waited. Who knows if he believed me?

    My father would never have signed the document. He would not have agreed to let me go. He blamed the new government for my grandfather’s death. He was suspicious of foreigners. He would have demanded to know, certainly, where the factory was located. But I could work whereas he could not. I saw my father coming home, cured, and finding the five-yen advance. I had never used an ink pen before. In my life as a daughter and a sister, I had never felt so powerful. No woman in Gifu had ever brokered such a deal on her own. KITSUNE TAJIMA, I wrote in the slot for the future worker’s name, my heart pounding in my ears. When I returned it, I apologized for my father’s unsteady hand.

    On our way to the kaiko-tea ceremony, I was so excited that I could barely make my questions about the factory intelligible. He took me to a summer guesthouse in the woods behind the Miya River, which he told me was owned by a Takayama merchant family and, at the moment, empty.

    Something is wrong, I knew then. This knowledge sounded with such clarity that it seemed almost independent of my body, like a bird calling once over the trees. But I proceeded, following the Agent toward a dim staircase. The first room I glimpsed was elegantly furnished, and I felt my spirits lift again, along with my caution. I counted fourteen steps to the first landing, where he opened the door onto a room that reflected none of the downstairs refinement. There was a table with two stools, a bed; otherwise the room was bare. I was surprised to see a large brown blot on the mattress. One porcelain teapot. One cup. The Agent lifted the tea with an unreadable expression, frowning into the pot; as he poured, I thought I heard a little splash; then he cursed, excused himself, said he needed a fresh ingredient. I heard him continuing up the staircase. I peered into the cup and saw that there was something alive inside it — writhing, dying — a fat white kaiko. I shuddered but I didn’t fish it out. What sort of tea ceremony was this? Maybe, I thought, the Agent is testing me, to see if I am squeamish, weak. Something bad was coming — the stench of a bad and thickening future was everywhere in that room. The bad thing was right under my nose, crinkling its little legs at me.

    I pinched my nostrils shut, just as if I were standing in the mud a heartbeat from jumping into the Miya River. Without so much as consulting the Agent, I squinched my eyes shut and gulped.

    The other workers cannot believe I did this willingly. Apparently, one sip of the kaiko-tea is so venomous that most bodies go into convulsions. Only through the Agent’s intervention were they able to get the tea down. It took his hands around their throats.

    I arranged my hands in my lap and sat on the cot. Already I was feeling a little dizzy. I remember smiling with a sweet vacancy at the door when he returned.

    “You — drank it.”

    I nodded proudly.

    Then I saw pure amazement pass over his face — I passed the test, I thought happily. Only it wasn’t that, quite. He began to laugh.

    “No joko,” he sputtered, “not one of you, ever—” He was rolling his eyes at the room’s corners, as if he regretted that the hilarity of this moment was wasted on me. “No girl has ever gulped a pot of it!”

    Already the narcolepsy was buzzing through me, like a hive of bees stinging me to sleep. I lay guiltily on the mat — why couldn’t I sit up? Now the Agent would think I was worthless for work. I opened my mouth to explain that I was feeling ill but only a smacking sound came out. I held my eyes open for as long as I could stand it.

    Even then, I was still dreaming of my prestigious new career as a factory reeler. Under the Meiji government, the hereditary classes had been abolished, and I even let myself imagine that the Agent might marry me, pay off my family’s debts. As I watched, the Agent’s genteel expression underwent a complete transformation; suddenly it was as blank as a stump. The last thing I saw, before shutting my eyes, was his face.

--

    I slept for two days and woke on a dirty tatami in this factory with Dai applauding me; the green thread had erupted through my palms in my sleep — the metamorphosis unusually accelerated. I was lucky, as Chiyo says. Unlike Tooka and Etsuyo and so many of the others I had no limbo period, no cramps from my guts unwinding, changing; no time at all to meditate on what I was becoming — a secret, a furred and fleshy silk factory.

    What would Chiyo think of me, if she knew how much I envy her initiation story? That what befell her — her struggle, her screams — I long for? That I would exchange my memory for Chiyo’s in a heartbeat? Surely this must be the final, inarguable proof that I am, indeed, a monster.

    Many workers here have a proof of their innocence, some physical trace, on the body: scar tissue, a brave spot. A sign of struggle that is ineradicable. Some girls will push their white fuzz aside to show you: Dai’s pocked hands, Mitsuki’s rope burns around her neck. Gin has wiggly lines around her mouth, like lightning, where she was scalded by the tea that she spat out.

    And me?

    There was a moment, at the bottom of the stairwell, and a door that I could easily have opened back into the woods of Gifu. I alone, it seems, out of twenty-two workers, signed my own contract.

    “Why did you drink it, Kitsune?”

    I shrug.

    “I was thirsty,” I say.

--

    Roosters begin to crow outside the walls of Nowhere Mill at five a.m. They make a sound like gargled light, very beautiful, which I picture as Dai’s red and Gin’s orange and Yoshi’s pink thread singing on the world’s largest reeler. Dawn. I’ve been lying awake in the dark for hours.

    “Kitsune, you never sleep. I hear the way you breathe,” Dai says.

    “I sleep a little.”

    “What stops you?” Dai rubs her belly sadly. “Too much thread?”

    “Up here.” I knock on my head. “I can’t stop reliving it: the Agent walking through our fields under his parasol, in the rain …”

    “You should sleep,” says Dai, peering into my eyeball. “Yellowish. You don’t look well.”

    Midmorning, there is a malfunction. Some hitch in the Machine causes my reeler to spin backward, pulling the thread from my fingers so quickly that I am jerked onto my knees; then I’m dragged along the floor toward the Machine’s central wheel like an enormous, flopping fish. The room fills with my howls. With surprising calm, I become aware that my right arm is on the point of being wrenched from its socket. I lift my chin and begin, with a naturalness that belongs entirely to my terror, to swivel my head around and bite blindly at the air; at last I snap the threads with my kaiko-jaws and fall sideways. Under my wrist, more thread kinks and scrags. There is a terrible stinging in my hands and my head. I let my eyes close: for some reason I see the space beneath my mother’s cedar chest, where the moonlight lay in green splashes on our floor. I used to hide there as a child and sleep so soundly that no one in our one-room house could ever find me. No such luck today: hands latch onto my shoulders. Voices are calling my name—“Kitsune! Are you awake? Are you okay?”

    “I’m just clumsy,” I laugh nervously. But then I look down at my hand. Short threads extrude from the bruised skin of my knuckles. They are the wrong color. Not my green. Ash.

    Suddenly I feel short of breath again.

    It gets worse when I look up. The silk that I reeled this morning is bright green. But the more recent thread drying on the bottom of my reeler is black. Black as the sea, as the forest at night, says Hoshi euphemistically. She is too courteous to make the more sinister comparisons.

    I swallow a cry. Am I sick? It occurs to me that five or six of these black threads dragged my entire weight. It had felt as though my bones would snap in two before my thread did.

    “Oh no!” gasp Tooka and Etsuyo. Not exactly sensitive, these sisters from Sakegawa. “Oh, poor Kitsune! Is that going to happen to us, too?”

    “Anything you want to tell us?” Dai prods. “About how you are feeling?”

    “I feel about as well as you all look today,” I growl.

    “I’m not worried,” says Dai in a too-friendly way, clapping my shoulder. “Kitsune just needs sleep.”

    But everybody is staring at the spot midway up the reel where the green silk shades into black.

--

    My next mornings are spent splashing through the hot water basin, looking for fresh fibers. I pull out yards of the greenish-black thread. Soiled silk. Hideous. Useless for kimonos. I sit and reel for my sixteen hours, until the Machine gets the last bit out of me with a shudder.

    My thread is green three days out of seven. After that, I’m lucky to get two green outflows in a row. This transformation happens to me alone. None of the other workers report a change in their colors. It must be my own illness then, not kaiko-evolution. If we had a foreman here, he would quarantine me. He might destroy me, the way silkworms infected with the blight are burned up in Katamura.

    And in Gifu? Perhaps my father has died at the base of Mount Inaba. Or has he made a full recovery, journeyed home with my brothers, and cried out with joyful astonishment to find my five-yen advance? Let it be that, I pray. My afterlife will be whatever he chooses to do with that money.

--

    Today marks the forty-second day since we last saw the Agent. In the past he has reliably surprised us with visits, once or twice per month. Factory inspections, he calls them, scribbling notes about the progress of our transformations, the changes in our weight and shape, the quality of our silk production. He’s never stayed away so long before. The thought of the Agent, either coming or not coming, makes me want to retch. Water sloshes in my head. I lie on the mat with my eyes shut tight and watch the orange tea splash into my cup …

    “I hear you in there, Kitsune. I know what you’re doing. You didn’t sleep.”

    Dai’s voice. I keep my eyes shut.

    “Kitsune, stop thinking about it. You are making yourself sick.”

    “Dai, I can’t.”

    Today my stomach is so full of thread that I’m not sure I’ll be able to stand. I’m afraid that it will all be black. Some of us are now forced to crawl on our hands and knees to the Machine, toppled by our ungainly bellies. I can smell the basins heating. A thick, greasy steam fills the room. I peek up at Dai’s face, then let my eyes flutter shut again.

    “Smell that?” I say, more nastily than I intend to. “In here we’re dead already. At least on the stairwell I can breathe forest air.”

    “Unwinding one cocoon for an eternity,” she snarls. “As if you had only a single memory. Reeling in the wrong direction.”

    Dai looks ready to slap me. She’s angrier than I’ve ever seen her. Dai is the Big Mother but she’s also a samurai’s daughter, and sometimes that combination gives rise to a ferocious kind of caring. She’s tender with the little ones, but if an older joko plummets into a mood or ill health, she’ll scream at us until our ears split. Furious, I suppose, at her inability to defend us from ourselves.

    “The others also suffered in their pasts,” she says. “But we sleep, we get up, we go to work, some crawl forward if there is no other way …”

    “I’m not like the others,” I insist, hating the baleful note in my voice but desperate to make Dai understand this. Is Dai blind to the contrast? Can she not see that the innocent recruits — the ones who were signed over to the Agent by their fathers and their brothers — produce pure colors, in radiant hues? Whereas my thread looks rotten, greeny-black.

    “Sleep can’t wipe me clean like them. I chose this fate. I can’t blame a greedy uncle, a gullible father. I drank the tea of my own free will.”

    “Your free will,” says Dai, so slowly that I’m sure she’s about to mock me; then her eyes widen with something like joy. “Ah! So: use that to stop drinking it at night, in your memory. Use your will to stop thinking about the Agent.”

    Dai is smiling down at me like she’s won the argument.

    “Oh, yes, very simple!” I laugh angrily. “I’ll just stop. Why didn’t I think of that? Say, here’s one for you, Dai,” I snap. “Stop reeling for the Agent at your workbench. Stop making the thread in your gut. Try that, I’m sure you’ll feel better.”

    Then we are shouting at each other, our first true fight; Dai doesn’t understand that this memory reassembles itself in me mechanically, just as the thread swells in our new bodies. It’s nothing I control. I see the Agent arrive; my hand trembling; the ink lacing my name across the contract. My regret: I know I’ll never get to the bottom of it. I’ll never escape either place, Nowhere Mill or Gifu. Every night, the cup refills in my mind.

    “Go reel for the empire, Dai. Make more silk for him to sell. Go throw the little girls another party! Make believe we’re not slaves here.”

    Dai storms off, and I feel a mean little pleasure.

    For two days we don’t speak, until I worry that we never will again. But on the second night, Dai finds me. She leans in and whispers that she has accepted my challenge. At first I am so happy to hear her voice that I only laugh, take her hand. “What challenge? What are you talking about?”

    “I thought about what you said,” she tells me. She talks about her samurai father’s last stand, the Satsuma Rebellion. In the countryside, she says, there are peasant armies who protest “the blood tax,” refuse to sow new crops. I nod with my eyes shut, watching my grandfather’s hat floating through our fields in Gifu.

    “And you’re right, Kitsune — we have to stop reeling. If we don’t, he’ll get every year of our futures. He’ll get our last breaths. The silk belongs to us, we make it. We can use that to bargain with the Agent.”

    The following morning, Dai announces that she won’t move from her mat.

    “I’m on strike,” she says. “No more reeling.”

    By the second day, her belly has grown so bloated with thread that we are begging her to work. The mulberry leaves arrive, and she refuses to eat them.

    “No more room for that.” She smiles.

    Dai’s face is so swollen that she can’t open one eye. She lies with her arms crossed over her chest, her belly heaving.

    By the fourth day, I can barely look at her.

    “You’ll die,” I whisper.

    She nods resolutely.

    “I’m escaping. He might still stop me. But I’ll do my best.”

    We send a note for the Agent with the blind woman. “Please tell him to come.”

    “Join me,” Dai begs us, and our eyes dull and lower, we sway. For five days, Dai doesn’t reel. She never eats. Some of us, I’m sure, don’t mind the extra fistful of leaves. (A tiny voice I can’t gag begins to babble in the background: If x-many others strike, Kitsune, there will be x-much more food for you …)

    Guiltily, I set her portion aside, pushing the leaves into a little triangle. There, I think. The flag of Dai’s resistance. Something flashes on one — a real silkworm. Inching along in its wet and stupid oblivion. My stomach flips to see all the little holes its hunger has punched into the green leaf.

    During our break, I bring Dai my blanket. I try to squeeze some of the water from the leaf-velvet onto her tongue, which she refuses. She doesn’t make a sound, but I hiss — her belly is grotesquely distended and stippled with lumps, like a sow’s pregnant with a litter of ten piglets. Her excess thread is packed in knots. Strangling Dai from within. Perhaps the Agent can call on a Western veterinarian, I find myself thinking. Whatever is happening to her seems beyond the ken of Emperor Meiji’s own doctors.

    “Start reeling again!” I gasp. “Dai, please.”

    “It looks worse than it is. It’s easy enough to stop. You’ll see for yourself, I hope.”

    Her skin has an unhealthy translucence. Her eyes are standing out in her shrunken face, as if every breath costs her. Soon I will be able to see the very thoughts in her skull, the way red thread fans into veiny view under her skin. Dai gives me her bravest smile. “Get some rest, Kitsune. Stop poisoning yourself on the stairwell of Gifu. If I can stop reeling, surely you can, too.”

--

    When she dies, all the silk is still stubbornly housed in her belly, “stolen from the factory,” as the Agent alleges. “This girl died a thief.”

    Three days after her death, he finally shows up. He strides over to Dai and touches her belly with a stick. When a few of us grab for his legs, he makes a face and kicks us off.

    “Perhaps we can still salvage some of it,” he grumbles, rolling her into his sack.

--

    A great sadness settles over our whole group and doesn’t lift. What the Agent carried off with Dai was everything we had left: Chiyo’s clouds and mountains, my farmhouse in Gifu, Etsuyo’s fiancé. It’s clear to us now that we can never leave this room — we can never be away from the Machine for more than five days. Unless we live here, where the Machine can extract the thread from our bodies at speeds no human hand could match, the silk will build and build and kill us in the end. Dai’s experiment has taught us that.

    You never hear a peep in here about the New Year anymore.

--

    I’m eating, I’m reeling, but I, too, appear to be dying. Thread almost totally black. The denier too uneven for any market. In my mind I talk to Dai about it, and she is very reassuring: “It’s going to be fine, Kitsune. Only, please, you have to stop—”

    Stop thinking about it. This was Dai’s final entreaty to me.

    I close my eyes. I watch my hand signing my father’s name again. I am at the bottom of a stairwell in Gifu. The first time I made this ascent I felt weightless, but now the wood groans under my feet. Just as a single cocoon contains a thousand yards of silk, I can unreel a thousand miles from my memory of this one misstep.

    Still, I’m not convinced that you were right, Dai — that it’s such a bad thing, a useless enterprise, to reel and reel out my memory at night. Some part of me, the human part of me, is kept alive by this, I think. Like water flushing a wound, to prevent it from closing. I am a lucky one, like Chiyo says. I made a terrible mistake. In Gifu, in my raggedy clothes, I had an unreckonable power. I didn’t know that at the time. But when I return to the stairwell now, I can feel them webbing around me: my choices, their infinite variety, spiraling out of my hands, my invisible thread. Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose. It’s become my sanctuary here in Nowhere Mill. A threshold where I still exist.

    One morning, two weeks after Dai’s strike, I start talking to Chiyo about her family’s cottage business in Chichibu. Chiyo complains about the smells in her dry attic, where they destroy the silkworm larvae in vinegary solutions. Why do they do that? I want to know. I’ve never heard this part before. Oh, to stop them from undergoing the transformation, Chiyo says. First, the silkworms stop eating. Then they spin their cocoons. Once inside, they molt several times. They grow wings and teeth. If the caterpillars are allowed to evolve, they change into moths. Then these moths bite through the silk and fly off, ruining it for the market.

    Teeth and wings, wings and teeth, I keep hearing all day under the whine of the cables.

    That night, I try an experiment. I let myself think the black thoughts all evening. Great wheels inside me turn backward at fantastic, groaning velocities. What I focus on is my shadow in the stairwell, falling slantwise behind me, like silk. I see the ink spilling onto the contract, my name bloating monstrously.

    And when dawn comes, and I slug my way over to the workbench and plunge my hands into the boiling vat, I see that the experiment was a success. My new threads are stronger and blacker than ever; silk of some nameless variety we have never belly-spun before. I crank them out of my wrist and onto the dowel. There’s not a fleck of green left, not a single frayed strand. “Moonless,” says Hoshi, shrinking from them. Opaque. Midnight at Nowhere Mill pales in comparison. Looking down into the basin, I feel a wild excitement. I made it that color. So I’m no mere carrier, no diseased kaiko—I can channel these dyes from my mind into the tough new fiber. I can change my thread’s denier, control its production. Seized by a second inspiration, I begin to unreel at speeds I would have just yesterday thought laughably impossible. Not even Yuna can produce as much thread in an hour. I ignore the whispers that pool around me on the workbench:

    “Kitsune’s fishing too deep — look at her finger slits!”

    “They look like gills.” Etsuyo shudders.

    “Someone should stop her. She’s fishing right down to the bone.”

    “What is she making?”

    “What are you making?”

    “What are you going to do with all that, Kitsune?” Tooka asks nervously.

    “Oh, who knows? I’ll just see what it comes to.”

    But I do know. Without my giving a thought to what step comes next, my hands begin to fly.

    The weaving comes so naturally to me that I am barely aware I am doing it, humming as if in a dream. But this weaving is instinctual. What takes effort, what requires a special kind of concentration, is generating the right density of the thread. To do so, I have to keep forging my father’s name in my mind, climbing those stairs, watching my mistake unfurl. I have to drink the toxic tea and feel it burn my throat, lie flat on the cot while my organs are remade by the Agent for the factory, thinking only, Yes, I chose this. When these memories send the fierce regret spiraling through me, I focus on my heartbeat, my throbbing palms. Fibers stiffen inside my fingers. Grow strong, I direct the thread. Go black. Lengthen. Stick. And then, when I return to the vats, what I’ve produced is exactly the necessary denier and darkness. I sit at the workbench, at my ordinary station. And I am so happy to discover that I can do all this myself: the silk-generation, the separation, the dyeing, the reeling. Out of the same intuition, I discover that I know how to alter the Machine. “Help me, Tsuki,” I say, because I want her to watch what I am doing. I begin to explain, but she is already disassembling my reeler. “I know, Kitsune,” she says, “I see what you have in mind.” Words seem to be unnecessary now between me and Tsuki — we beam thoughts soundlessly across the room. Perhaps speech will be the next superfluity in Nowhere Mill. Another step we kaiko-girls can skip.

    Together we adjust the feeder gears, so that the black thread travels in a loop; after getting wrung out and doubled on the Machine’s great wheel, it shuttles back to my hands. I add fresh fibers, drape the long skein over my knees. It is going to be as tall as a man, six feet at least.

    Many girls continue feeding the Machine as if nothing unusual is happening. Others, like Tsuki, are watching to see what my fingers are doing. For the past several months, every time I’ve reminisced about the Agent coming to Gifu, bile has risen in my throat. It seems to be composed of every bitterness: grief and rage, the acid regrets. But then, in the middle of my weaving, obeying a queer impulse, I spit some onto my hand. This bile glues my fingers to my fur. Another of nature’s wonders. So even the nausea of regret can be converted to use. I grin to Dai in my head. With this dill-colored glue, I am at last able to rub a sealant over my new thread and complete my work.

    It takes me ten hours to spin the black cocoon.

    The first girls who see it take one look and run back to the tatami.

    The second girls are cautiously admiring.

    Hoshi waddles over with her bellyful of blue silk and screams.

    I am halfway up the southern wall of Nowhere Mill before I realize what I am doing; then I’m parallel to the woodpecker’s window. The gluey thread collected on my palms sticks me to the glass. For the first time I can see outside: from this angle, nothing but clouds and sky, a blue eternity. We will have wings soon, I think, and ten feet below me I hear Tsuki laugh out loud. Using my thread and the homemade glue, I attach the cocoon to a wooden beam; soon, I am floating in circles over the Machine, suspended by my own line. “Come down!” Hoshi yells, but she’s the only one. I secure the cocoon and then I let myself fall, all my weight supported by one thread. Now the cocoon sways over the Machine, a furled black flag, creaking slightly. I think of my grandfather hanging by the thick rope from our barn door.

    More black thread spasms down my arms.

    “Kitsune, please. You’ll make the Agent angry! You shouldn’t waste your silk that way — pretty soon they’ll stop bringing you the leaves! Don’t forget the trade, it’s silk for leaves, Kitsune. What happens when he stops feeding us?”

    But in the end I convince all of the workers to join me. Instinct obviates the need for a lesson — swiftly the others discover that they, too, can change their thread from within, drawing strength from the colors and seasons of their memories. Before we can begin to weave our cocoons, however, we first agree to work night and day to reel the ordinary silk, doubling our production, stockpiling the surplus skeins. Then we seize control of the machinery of Nowhere Mill. We spend the next six days dismantling and reassembling the Machine, using its gears and reels to speed the production of our own shimmering cocoons. Each dusk, we continue to deliver the regular number of skeins to the zookeeper, to avoid arousing the Agent’s suspicions. When we are ready for the next stage of our revolution, only then will we invite him to tour our factory floor.

    Silkworm moths develop long ivory wings, says Chiyo, bronzed with ancient designs. Do they have antennae, mouths? I ask her. Can they see? Who knows what the world will look like to us if our strike succeeds? I believe we will emerge from it entirely new creatures. In truth there is no model for what will happen to us next. We’ll have to wait and learn what we’ve become when we get out.

--

    The old blind woman really is blind, we decide. She squints directly at the wrecked and rerouted Machine and waits with her arms extended for one of us to deposit the skeins. Instead, Hoshi pushes a letter through the grate.

    “We don’t have any silk today.”

    “Bring this to the Agent.”

    “Go. Tell. Him.”

    As usual, the old woman says nothing. The mulberry sacks sit on the wagon. After a moment she claps to show us that her hands are empty, kicks the wagon away. Signals: no silk, no food. Her face is slack. On our side of the grate, I hear girls smacking their jaws, swallowing saliva. Fresh forest smells rise off the sacks. But we won’t beg, will we? We won’t turn back. Dai lived without food for five days. Our faces press against the grate. Several of our longest whiskers tickle the zookeeper’s withered cheeks; at last, a dark cloud passes over her face. She barks with surprise, swats the air. Her wrinkles tighten into a grimace of fear. She backs away from our voices, her fist closed around our invitation to the Agent.

    “NO SILK,” repeats Tsaiko slowly.

--

    The Agent comes the very next night.

    “Hello?”

    He raps at our grated door with a stick, but he remains in the threshold. For a moment I am sure that he won’t come in.

    “They’re gone, they’re gone,” I wail, rocking.

    “What!”

    The grate slides open and he steps onto the factory floor, into our shadows.

    “Yes, they’ve all escaped, every one of them, all your kaiko-joko—”

    Now my sisters drop down on their threads. They fall from the ceiling on whistling lines of silk, swinging into the light, and I feel as though I am dreaming — it is a dreamlike repetition of our initiation, when the Agent dropped the infecting kaiko into the orange tea. Watching his eyes widen and his mouth stretch into a scream, I too am shocked. We have no mirrors here in Nowhere Mill, and I’ve spent the past few months convinced that we were still identifiable as girls, women — no beauty queens, certainly, shaggy and white and misshapen, but at least half human; it’s only now, watching the Agent’s reaction, that I realize what we’ve become in his absence. I see us as he must: white faces, with sunken noses that look partially erased. Eyes insect-huge. Spines and elbows incubating lace for wings. My muscles tense, and then I am airborne, launching myself onto the Agent’s back — for a second I get a thrilling sense of what true flight will feel like, once we complete our transformation. I alight on his shoulders and hook my legs around him. The Agent grunts beneath my weight, staggers forward.

    “These wings of ours are invisible to you,” I say directly into the Agent’s ear. I clasp my hands around his neck, lean into the whisper. “And in fact you will never see them, since they exist only in our future, where you are dead and we are living, flying.”

    I then turn the Agent’s head so that he can admire our silk. For the past week every worker has used the altered Machine to spin her own cocoon — they hang from the far wall, coral and emerald and blue, ordered by hue, like a rainbow. While the rest of Japan changes outside the walls of Nowhere Mill, we’ll hang side by side, hidden against the bricks. Paralyzed inside our silk, but spinning faster and faster. Passing into our next phase. Then, we’ll escape. (Inside his cocoon, the Agent will turn blue and suffocate.)

    “And look,” I say, counting down the wall: twenty-one workers, and twenty-two cocoons. When he sees the black sac, I feel his neck stiffen. “We have spun one for you.” I smile down at him. The Agent is stumbling around beneath me, babbling something that I admit I make no great effort to understand. The glue sticks my knees to his shoulders. Several of us busy ourselves with getting the gag in place, and this is accomplished before the Agent can scream once. Gin and Nishi bring down the cast-iron grate behind him.

    The slender Agent is heavier than he looks. It takes four of us to stuff him into the socklike cocoon. I smile at the Agent and instruct the others to leave his eyes for last, thinking that he will be very impressed to see our skill at reeling up close. Behind me, even as this attack is under way, the other kaiko-joko are climbing into their cocoons. Already there are girls half swallowed by them, winding silk threads over their knees, sealing the outermost layer with glue.

    Now our methods regress a bit, get a little old-fashioned. I reel the last of the black cocoon by hand. Several kaiko-joko have to hold the Agent steady so that I can orbit him with the thread. I spin around his chin and his cheekbones, his lips. To get over his mustache requires several revolutions. Bits of my white fur drift down and disappear into his nostrils. His eyes are huge and black and void of any recognition. I whisper my name to him, to see if I can jostle my old self loose from his memory: Kitsune Tajima, of Gifu Prefecture.

    Nothing.

    So then I continue reeling upward, naming the workers of Nowhere Mill all the while: “Nishi. Yoshi. Yuna. Uki. Etsuyo. Gin. Hoshi. Raku. Chiyoko. Mitsuko. Tsaiko. Tooka. Dai.

    “Kitsune,” I repeat, closing the circle. The last thing I see before shutting his eyes is the reflection of my shining new face.