Pathway to Japanese Literature

That parrot—whether she should deliver that white parrot from Baekje to Prince Ōama herself, or perhaps attach some accompanying letter and have a messenger take it... With such thoughts, Lady Kagami agonized through two days of mid-spring March whose daylight hours were already long enough, only to realize later that she had done unnecessary worrying.
She was a lady often teased by her younger sister Princess Nukata with remarks like, “Sister is cold—cold like true jade from Mizue.”
For all her sharp-witted perceptiveness that drew such teasing, Lady Kagami had failed to discern the true nature of the relationship between Ōama and her sister.
No—far from merely failing to notice.
First of all, she was a lady who could not even begin to imagine in her wildest dreams the nature of love between middle-aged men and women, nor the very state of such affection.
Kagami and Nukata were inhabitants of separate worlds to such an extent that one could hardly believe they were sisters sharing the same womb and lineage.
Years later, Lady Kagami would suddenly realize this misjudgment and find herself biting down on those beautiful lips.

However, by that time, the era had become vastly different from the present one, and Lady Kagami had been made to perceive the true nature of their love affair through the very state of the world itself—whether she wished to or not.
This was, so to speak, an indirect realization.
For Lady Kagami—who had dedicated the pure love of her maidenhood to Prince Naka no Ōe, then after becoming a mother lived as Kamatari's dutiful wife through days so self-contented that she never even entertained thoughts of satisfaction or dissatisfaction—this might not have been unreasonable after all, considering she had now spent nearly fifteen years maintaining such mornings and evenings.
But that is a story from much later.…

＊

The parrot was safely delivered to Ōama's hands.
Moreover, this had unfolded far more smoothly than anticipated.

After spending an entire day engaged in what might be called a psychological tug-of-war with the parrot—becoming utterly exhausted and consequently being tormented that very night by an ominous dream in which Prince Ōama appeared—Lady Kagami had the scarlet cage promptly removed from the sitting room the following day and hung beneath the eaves of the now-deserted guest hall that nobody used anymore. Yet this ultimately worked to the advantage of her seven-year-old younger daughter Princess Iori, who along with Wet Nurse Imatōji proceeded to make the parrot mimic one thing after another, laughing themselves breathless.
The parrot's shrill cries carried across the garden, at times swelling in volume until each piercing note reached the sitting room as if plucked from the air.
In the end, that day too—from morning until evening—Lady Kagami spent with her brows furrowed, trapped in a peculiar mood of restlessness that granted her no peace whether sitting or standing.

This is unbearable—thought Lady Kagami. After all, as someone who was supposed to be a lady of the Great Fujiwara clan, she could hardly resolve her muddled feelings by scolding her young daughter or venting her frustrations on the wet nurse. Moreover, Lady Kagami was well aware that this parrot was not a creature to be easily silenced by such measures. Then—should she have someone strangle it to death, or perhaps open the cage and release it into this bright, hazy spring sky?... Such whimsical notions would occasionally flicker through her mind, but of course they remained distant thoughts too contrived to elicit even a bitter smile—let alone a genuine one—as if contemplating someone else’s affairs. Even if she were to carry it out, that would ultimately be her younger sister Nukata’s role to fulfill—never her own. To begin with, they were nothing alike.

......
No sooner had those capricious thoughts faded like shadows than her younger sister's large eyes—expressive and ceaselessly darting—surfaced in their wake, persisting unvanquished for some time.
Those were indeed eyes that could calmly observe a parrot's death throes mid-strangulation—Lady Kagami nodded inwardly, feeling a fierce yet somehow detached, icy envy.
Then again there rose her sister's chin—slightly protruding with a delicate double indentation—imparting since childhood a taut definition to that overly animated round face; forming the foundation for expressions that could turn oddly precocious or mockingly dismissive while sometimes surrendering its seat entirely—wit yielding to intellect, mockery to silent scorn—momentarily transforming her sister's countenance into something strangely cold and meditative. This chin now materialized vividly before her, churning unbearable jealousy in Lady Kagami's breast before lingering suspended in transitional void.
Such envy and jealousy arrived with far more visceral immediacy than those senseless fantasies about disposing of the parrot.

Because of that mischievous chin, Princess Kagami was often made to feel vexed. Especially during their childhood, the majority of those sisterly quarrels without particular reason had their cause—or rather at least their remote cause—undoubtedly first formed in her younger sister's impishly precocious chin. Particularly since gaining awareness of such matters, that last-mentioned situation—when that chin’s mischief caused her sister’s face to suddenly pale and momentarily take on a sculptural shadow—had become most unbearable to endure. Therein Princess Kagami discovered a caricature of her own face—terribly exaggerated by some malice and inescapable. It was nearly what one might call a physiological revulsion. Even though she maintained composure enough for her younger sister to mock her as being “cold like true jade from Mizue,” this antipathy alone remained utterly beyond her control.

But Princess Nukata—now well past thirty-four, having in these past two years especially put on weight so noticeably that even she found it troubling—naturally saw a different quality emerge in the workings of that chin. It remained a chin that moved with subtle agility, yet one could not deny that an indescribably complex shadow had now accumulated there. Lady Kagami resided at Fujiwara no Kamatari’s residence and was not particularly sociable, while her younger sister had been granted a residence near Yatsuri no Sato—deep in the eastern mountains of Asuka—where she lived alone in a manner that appeared supremely carefree to outward eyes. Thus, while they could not be called estranged as of late, it was not uncommon for them to go about two months without meeting face-to-face. After such occasions, whenever Lady Kagami suddenly caught sight of her younger sister’s face at palace banquets and such, she would often feel a shock within her heart that made her nearly let out an involuntary gasp. If one were to speak of deepening shadows—they existed not only in her younger sister’s large eyes but equally in that expressive mouth of hers, so rich in movement and nuance. Being an elder sister of flesh and blood who could vividly recall—even if each stage were separated—the path from her younger sister’s childish face to her adolescent visage and onward to her current countenance, no artificial expression or exotic makeup technique could possibly obscure that sharp gaze. The increasingly intense application of rouge on her younger sister's cheeks, the skillful curves of eyebrow ink, the charming green floral designs pressed against her skin, even the beauty spots dotted at the corners of her mouth—none of these could ultimately fulfill their role as veils to conceal secrets from her elder sister's eyes.…

However, upon reflection, such changes—such deepening shadows—were undoubtedly things that Lady Kagami herself would have found in her own face, to a greater or lesser extent.
It was, so to speak, a claw mark inescapable yet not easily noticeable amidst time’s tremors.
It was that claw mark—the one that most voraciously preys upon a woman’s beauty, whether she be a mother or not.
Moreover, a woman’s face—when faced with those claws’ merciless attacks—resisted with astonishing flexibility and adaptability, at times tenacious enough to become defiant, employing every cunning stratagem in its arsenal.
At times it would even turn the opponent’s own weapons against them to armor itself in the process.
When it came to such secrets of middle-aged women—there had been no need to deliberately seek them out from her younger sister’s face—she had known them a hundred times over in her own morning and evening mirror.
The problem lay precisely with that chin.

Princess Nukata no Kimi’s chin—even at that age—remained briskly mobile, ever responsive.
To be sure, the transformation that had turned her younger sister’s plump, fair-complexioned round face into something richly voluptuous left its mark here too: the signature double indentation had acquired greater thickness and prominence, occasionally casting shadows that hinted at something weighty—almost burdensome. Yet through the eyes of her elder sister—who could no more erase from her retinas the memory of that childish countenance—it remained unchanged: that precociously sharp chin, still mischievously dismissive as ever.
Moreover, in its relationship to her sister’s current visage as a whole, there emerged a strangely discordant yet precisely fitting cohesion—an indescribable harmony within dissonance—that would occasionally draw a sorrowful smile from Lady Kagami.

Now, had matters remained at this stage, Lady Kagami might have occasionally found herself drawn into untimely sentimentality to this degree but would not have particularly troubled herself over it. The issue lay in how an entirely unexpected element—one she had never before witnessed, or at least never noticed—had now been added to the dizzying array of transformations produced by her younger sister's chin.
To liken it to moments at imperial banquets—when lips would touch a wine cup only to swiftly withdraw, or when lips moved to answer a neighboring gentleman’s remark before hesitating and closing again—it was but a faint impression that flickered and vanished in an instant. Yet Lady Kagami, with an elder sister’s sharp eye, swiftly captured this quivering nuance. Thereafter she never neglected to verify the accuracy of her observation at every opportunity, though in the end she found herself utterly perplexed as to how she might articulate it in words.

It was no longer anything resembling a sneer.
Nor was it even that unconscious or conscious coquetry which so often appears at a woman’s lips when she flatters others or even her own heart.
It was a sudden projection outward—of a mental movement turned far deeper inward, utterly without an object, terribly lonely—which in that sense might rather be called supremely simple or pure: a mere momentary glimmer resembling nothing so much as when the underside of a bamboo leaf abruptly flips over.
Yet this bore some resemblance to that meditative, strangely cold expression which had always induced in her elder sister Princess Kagami an almost physiological self-disgust—and yet was entirely different.
To put it briefly, it was a melancholy of profoundly deep shadows.…

With a cacophonous flapping of wings, the parrot took flight.
And in the next instant—the white shadow of the bird and the scarlet cage vanished as if erased—the younger sister’s chin lingered suspended in intermediate existence.
The indentation of that chin thrust out sharply as if chasing the bird’s path.
That indentation too, when she eventually noticed, was not that of her childish face but rather that which folded the shadowed melancholy of recent times.

"This is unbearable!" Lady Kagami muttered almost aloud.…

As evening fell on that day spent half-entangled in uncanny thoughts that were neither quite fantasy nor delusion—thoughts that defied categorization—Lady Kagami finally solidified a certain resolution.
That is—come the next morning, she would throw everything aside and promptly depart for the new capital at Ōtsu, taking Princess Iori with her—so she resolved.

As for the outrageous memento left behind by her younger sister—she could simply dispose of it according to the first thought that came to mind the very moment the horse’s nose turned north.
Until then, I shall think nothing more, consider nothing more.…

And through this resolution, at least Lady Kagami herself was splendidly saved from her immediate troubles.

*

It was often the case that those commonly deemed strong-willed—especially women—possessed unexpectedly narrow spheres of conscious perception. That said, regarding whether Princess Kagami truly qualified as what one might call a strong-willed woman—no definitive evaluation could necessarily be established, and from posterity’s perspective, particularly when viewing this elder sister alongside her younger sibling Princess Nukata, the possibility of an inverse assessment arising might in fact prove greater. For her younger sister was renowned as the Manyoshu’s preeminent poet of grand vision. However, it remained an undeniable fact that in contemporary eyes—those of the so-called Hakuhō period—Princess Kagami appeared as a rational “steady and reliable” figure. In contrast, Princess Nukata was somehow considered to possess diametrically opposed traits.

Be that as it may, Lady Kagami was sharp enough to perceive melancholy as a new element added to her younger sister’s expression; yet regarding the source of that melancholy, she had not been able to formulate any particularly precise analysis.
It was as if a kind of blind spot existed in Lady Kagami’s vision—one that rendered her unable to discern circumstances such as the following:

As I have touched upon briefly before, Lady Kagami had believed without doubt that her younger sister remained Prince Ōama’s lover until the very moment she laid eyes on that parrot.
To tell the truth, this belief of Lady Kagami’s was of a peculiar nature—half accurate and half mistaken—but setting that aside for now, it remained an irrefutable fact that Princess Nukata was no longer the woman she had been a decade prior, let alone the maiden of her youth.
She was now neither simply Prince Ōama’s lover nor, conversely, merely the favored consort of Prince Naka no Ōe—who might as well have already ascended the throne.
She was no longer a woman of such ambiguous status—at most, even within private estimations, she was already the mother of Princess Tōchi.
This was the one daughter she had borne to Ōama.

Moreover, that was not all.
She—whose womb had borne Princess Tōchi now received as none other than Prince Ōtomo’s consort, this young couple both twenty this year already having produced a seven-year-old Prince Kadono between them—now wore this implicit political background draped casually about her voluptuous middle-aged form, having become an unassailable presence.
She was indeed a princess-queen in the truest sense of the word.…

This Prince Ōtomo was born to Takeko—a court lady of Iga who ranked lowest among Prince Naka no Ōe’s numerous consorts and ladies-in-waiting—and owing to this connection had been called Prince of Iga in his childhood; yet among the sons of Prince Naka no Ōe, whose fortune in siring male heirs proved strangely tenuous, he was undoubtedly the sole prince who had actually reached adulthood.
The first prince, born to a daughter of Ochi from the Soga clan, had been mute and died young about nine years prior; as for Princes Shiga and Kawashima—putting aside that they too were born to mothers of lowly status—Prince Shiga was but fifteen years old and Prince Kawashima a mere eleven.
Not only that, but Ōtomo was a young man who resembled his father, Crown Prince Naka no Ōe, possessing both a keen intellect and brilliant wisdom.
In particular, regarding his mastery of Chinese studies—people had conceded there was none to rival him in court or beyond—and one too found oneself inclined to concede this assessment.
His eyes, too, resembled his father the Crown Prince in their clear coolness; yet his overall character and bearing bore no resemblance to his father’s whatsoever—unyieldingly large-framed and powerfully built, with a resolute spirit that matched well with an imposing presence.
In terms of such appearance and boldness of temperament, Ōtomo was even rumored to be the spitting image of his uncle, Prince Ōama.
In short, this young prince had much of the air of a demon child to his father the Crown Prince.
Given this, it would be natural to say that the prince had ultimately become an object of his father’s intense doting.

Reflecting on it, the Crown Prince Father’s regency was indeed long.
Beginning with the late years of his biological father Emperor Tamura, through the reign of his mother Empress Takara, then that of her younger brother—his uncle who through paternal lineage was also his cousin—Emperor Karu, and further through Empress Takara’s second reign, he had patiently served as regent under the unchanging title of Crown Prince Regent across these four successive courts.
Moreover, now that even his mannish mother-empress had finally died—leaving him with no one left to defer to, no one before whom to display Tang-style virtue of humility, or, interpreted more maliciously, no one in whose sleeve’s shadow he might conceal the responsibility for his countless governance failures—he still refused to shed his timeworn regent’s robes and persisted for nearly six years in this daring gambit of keeping the imperial throne nominally vacant.
And thus the Crown Prince reached his fifty-fourth spring.
There must be some extraordinary circumstances behind this—if it were a suspicion of that magnitude, then even a three-year-old child’s mind would have conceived it.

What, then, could indeed be the cause of that abnormal patience?
Once posed thus, the problem became no straightforward matter—transformed into something oddly muddled and nebulous.…

First of all, even speaking of a vacant throne in general terms, the period of over five years since Empress Takara's death was by no means one of actual vacancy in substance.
This was because Kisaki's Princess of Yamato, in her capacity as Nakatsu no Mikoto, had splendidly served as mediator between gods and men.
Particularly, the radiant wisdom and intelligence unique to the Soga lineage inherent in this princess proved perfectly suited to fulfilling that role of conveying divine will to the highest human ruler.
Moreover, the fact that this Princess had been born a woman who never experienced childbirth undeniably added an extra layer of sacredness to both her bearing and her words and deeds.
Given this, whether her husband Prince Naka no Ōe remained in his status as regent crown prince or had formally undergone imperial succession procedures to become emperor—such matters were irrelevant—the absolute authority of the imperial court should not have wavered in the slightest.
When it came to discerning the essential qualities of such a theocratic state and wielding maximal skill in exploiting them, Prince Naka no Ōe may well have far surpassed his younger brother Ōama.

No—pushing one step further in consideration—it may well be that this statesman harbored a sentiment along these lines: to seize upon the vibrant persistence of faith in the shamanic power dwelling within the virgin’s body, still preserved almost unchanged from ancient times, as an opportune pretext; to attempt, beneath that faith’s shadow, to obscure himself as thoroughly as possible.
In truth, Prince Naka no Ōe—from the intense experiences of his nearly thirty-year political career—must have keenly realized that reformist governance inevitably brings countless missteps; indeed, from his political rivals’ perspective, it could only appear as an unbroken succession of failures.
Moreover, given that these instances of misgovernment and failure had until now been shielded by his father, mother, or uncle, he could not possibly have failed to notice how the people’s discontent and censure had naturally coalesced into latent forces that instead pressed ever more heavily upon the Crown Prince’s own shoulders.…

Of course, that such an arrangement—where Kisaki currently served as Nakatsu no Mikoto while her husband wielded governance in his capacity as Crown Prince Regent—constituted an unprecedented anomaly in the land of Yamato, let alone how it contradicted the very principles of those Taika Reforms whose implementers had even bloodied their long spears, was something the astute Crown Prince understood thoroughly.
However, principles remained principles—they were not politics.
While he was so enamored with Tang culture that he was even nicknamed "the Tang person," Prince Naka no Ōe nevertheless possessed an innate and unyielding pragmatism as a statesman that was impossible to eradicate....

The era was slightly past the middle of the seventh century.

Speaking of the mid-seventh century, it was an era when the surging waves of Saracens rising in the Near East were incessantly washing against the shores of the Eastern Roman Empire.
Moreover, even for those very Saracens, they still had to wait nearly two centuries before ushering in their cultural golden age.
In the countries of Western Europe, darkness still hung thickly, and under the rampage of so-called barbarians, there continued only aimless stirrings.
If one were to speak of countries that could boast cultural traditions and their achievements to the world, in those days there was only the great Eastern power of Tang.
While geographical advantages certainly played a role, this was the Crown Prince who had been so utterly enamored with Tang’s institutional and cultural artifacts that he first conceived of transplanting its centralized system—the very same Prince Naka no Ōe who, as the era’s undoubted radical leader, had overcome mountains of adverse conditions to sacrifice clan-based politics on the altar of reform. Yet the fact that his fiery idealism was simultaneously backed by the pragmatic realism now observed—that he did not overlook the restorative or purifying elements inherently contained within what is called “reform”—may freely be criticized by posterity as cunning, impure, or even cowardly. Nevertheless, this duality undeniably constituted one of the rare strengths found in this Crown Prince’s governance, which otherwise tended to reveal its fragility.
And needless to say, the person who had never ceased paying close attention to his elder brother’s political methods and had even secretly drawn extraordinary lessons from them was none other than that Ōama.

Even to Prince Naka no Ōe, the signs of old age had finally come.
This Crown Prince Regent had continued to prove with his very being that the imperial throne was ultimately but an empty vessel; yet even that realism of his had finally ruptured—and of all possible forms, it had come in the shape of paternal love.
That was his blind doting on Prince Ōtomo.

For today's Crown Prince—who had tasted to the very depths both the allure and the transience of politics—whether he himself would ascend the imperial throne was of course no longer a question.
His younger brother Ōama was an utterly different sort from himself in temperament—an elusive oddity beyond comprehension—but if he desired that throne, he could gladly hand over this empty vessel with a label attached.
But in that case, what would become of that Ōtomo?
To put it simply, within this final phrase lay a question that the fifty-four-year-old Prince Naka no Ōe could not solve by any means.
It was no longer self-will nor attachment, much less affection—it had become something far simpler in nature: a state of mind akin to the instinct for species preservation.
To put it another way, it was a desire so ferocious as to resemble the impulse behind a deathbed testament—utterly meaningless and empty, yet more intense than anything in this world.……

*

It had been a dream.—

The moment he awoke with a start, Prince Ōama propped himself up on one elbow and sharply raised his upper body.
And with his hairy fist still pressed into the flesh of his cheek, he gazed as if in wonder at the white thing faintly floating before his eyes.

It was a face.
The more he looked, the more human—no, it was undeniably the face of a living woman.
She slept.
Her breathing softened like a child's.
Though not exactly swaying, the face seemed to float quietly—a phenomenon Ōama had found suspicious for some time.
When he stared intently, what drifted wasn't the face but rather his own body—a strange illusion taking hold.
To dispel this, Ōama tensed his shoulders and adjusted his propped cheek, testing his bodily stability through deliberate pressure shifts.
Even knowing himself anchored, the face persisted in floating.
Dizziness crept upon him until he wondered—could this be the dream continuing?...

The dream he had just now was an unbroken succession of faces—face after face. Amidst the vaguely interspersed familiar faces, occasionally mingled those that made him think, "Huh? What’s this one doing here now?"—all these faces formed an unbroken, precise continuity peculiar to that dream, rising and vanishing, appearing and sinking one after another. It had been a dream filled with such faces. Whether it was a continuation of that dream or not, the fact that this face now existed before his eyes was something Prince Ōama simply could not comprehend. It was not an unfamiliar face. Far from it—it was a face he knew all too well. Moreover, it was a face whose emergence could only be thought of as utterly unexpected. It was a face that made one question the reality of this very moment. Moreover, as he continued gazing intently at it in this manner, it was also a face that seemed likely to gradually soothe his own feelings—such a face it was.

Prince Ōama closed his eyes.
It was quiet.
Moreover, this silence—seeming still far from dawn—was a silence thick and heavy.
Within that silence, Ōama suddenly heard the sound of the wind.
A spring night wind roared ceaselessly, seemingly carrying rain.
It was likely a wind that had been blowing since earlier—no, rather, since two or even three hours prior—persistent in its course.
While listening intently to the long, sea-like roar of the wind, Prince Ōama finally began to grasp the secret of the face floating before his eyes.

A draft was causing the bedchamber’s hanging silk to sway.
No—rather, it was the tip of the candle flame beyond that hanging silk that was swaying.
The flickering firelight, filtered through thin hanging silk, fell diagonally from above over his own shoulder onto the woman’s face, casting flickering shadows that danced across her tranquil sleeping visage.
As this happened, the woman’s long eyelashes appeared to lengthen and shorten.
The shadows shading the short chin also shifted and tilted.
Even the hair spread loose upon the pillow appeared as though breathing.
Her lips were slightly parted, harboring a faint smile while their shadow continued to merge with and separate from the shallow dimple’s shadow.
Her fair-skinned, innocent round face appeared to float and drift because of this.
Not only that—even her innocent breathing now seemed to him to grow stronger and weaker moment by moment.…

Once he realized this, Prince Ōama—who until now had been wholly absorbed in the face’s wavering, drifting sensation—now found the mental space to focus his attention on the woman’s face itself.
In other words, within his imagination, the woman’s face had finally stilled.

"Oh, isn't this Ōtoyo?"
"...What's this woman doing here...?"

Prince Ōama gazed intently at the motionless white face while muttering inwardly.
This face had not appeared in the dream just now.
Therefore its emergence could also be perceived as something like a sharp-angled shift in the dream—so to speak.
The dream had been abruptly severed, and from there arose a kind of paralyzing sensation; before this had even faded, the next theme immediately surged forth—wavering unsteadily at first before being forcibly connected back to the previous dream.
There existed something forced and awkward—a sensation one might call discontinuous connection—that intensified the oppressive feeling; yet soon even this was overwhelmed by the powerful unfolding of the second theme beginning ere long, and the sleeping person submitted once more to the flawlessly ordered realm of dreams.
At that hairbreadth moment of transition, should some external influence—a faint unexpected sound perhaps, or a draft's rustle, or an irregularly intense palpitation—crack the forced connecting mechanism, one would come to experience a dreary midnight awakening... Prince Ōama now seemed to have undergone precisely this.
Dimly at first, then gradually sharpening into focus, this new woman's face that had emerged a foot before his eyes remained tolerable while still faintly wavering and drifting.
Because he had been able, however imperfectly, to entrust himself to the dream world.
However, the face had stilled.
It had become Lady Ōtoyo's face.
Moreover, though he had been staring intently at it since earlier, there was still no sign of movement.
There was no sign of it acting upon him or dragging him along.
Whether he willed it or not, Prince Ōama had no choice but to plummet back into the real world—like a plasterer who had missed his footing on a ladder.

The sense of balance crumbled away all at once with a rustling sound. Instinctively trying to regain his posture, Prince Ōama reached out his hand.
With his outstretched hand, he tried to grab onto something.
The outstretched hand was his free left hand—the one not propping his cheek—but the moment it was about to touch Lady Ōtoyo’s bare, plump shoulder, he abruptly checked himself.
He hurriedly pulled it back.
The woman was asleep.
Like a young child, she slept deeply without a care.
Like apricots, her small, plump lips remained half-open, faint breaths entering and exiting from them.
She was a woman with wide, star-like sparkling eyes, but now those eyes were concealed beneath thick eyelids.
As desire intensified and began nearing its peak, those were eyes whose star-like sparkle would start swirling golden.
To Prince Ōama, this was both rare and struck him as truly wondrous.
The memory of tonight vividly returned to Prince Ōama—how he had forced open those eyes that kept trying to close, how he had compelled them open again and again until even roars mingled with his actions, how he had indulged in that golden swirling to his heart's content.
It was a near-demented state that even he himself could have called monomaniacal.
Such an intense state had continued tonight for what was, by recent standards, an unusually long duration.
Prince Ōama was recollecting that and introspecting.
Yet at the bottom of that introspection lay a bitter sediment.

If I were to shake this soft, plump shoulder now, I would merely be adding new sediment to that bitter residue once again—that much he understood all too clearly.
"Tonight I've been acting rather abnormally... Even Ōtoyo seemed somewhat taken aback."
"Well then—let her sleep, let her sleep."
"She must be exhausted..." Pulling back his outstretched hand, Ōama narrowed his long-lidded eyes and muttered to himself.

However, the faint smile that had risen to his sunken cheeks was closer to one of cynical self-mockery than that of affection.
It did not fade for some time.
…

*

The dream was now almost completely gone.
Lady Ōtoyo’s sleeping face and the entirety of her recumbent form were inexorably forcing him back into reality.
As if foretelling the rainy season’s arrival, tonight’s sultry air pressed close—her white chest lay bared, a third of one plump breast peeking through.
The exposed flesh shone unnaturally pale, luridly vivid.
The bedding had been shoved down nearly to her navel, its crumpled folds now exaggeratedly framing the gentle swell of her abdomen—robust-looking yet strained as if ready to burst.
No matter how he scrutinized it anew, no matter how his gaze caressed that form, it remained undeniably Lady Ōtoyo’s sleeping figure.
Yet as her body grew ever more tangible before him, some corner of Prince Ōama’s mind felt an intensely phantasmal sensation—a near-delusional quality—only strengthening further until it became unbearable.

To put it simply, it was a loss of the sense of place.
"Strange... Where on earth am I?" Prince Ōama muttered almost aloud.

The woman lay peacefully in an unshakable world—no mere extension of dreams—indulging in a sleep more real than any nightmare yet formless in essence. Through the immediate presence of her form, he felt himself being inexorably guided—nay, lured—into the real world, yet paradoxically experienced the uncanny sensation of being cast instead into a void beyond reality. It seemed to resemble a state where memories severed by the dream were desperately striving to reconnect with their original threads, while on the other hand, the dream’s intense impressions persistently interfered. This struggle alone had already brought him to a rather troublesome pass, and now even the motionless sleeping figure of the woman before his eyes had become entangled with it, vigorously supporting the latter’s cause. As a result, matters had become even more tangled...

“Damn it all! Why on earth is this woman here?! No—fundamentally: Is the sleeping woman before me a dream, or is the awakened me the dream? If it’s a dream, vanish away at once! Whether this woman disappears or I disappear—I don’t give a damn either way! …But at least I am awake like this. My eyes are open, staring firmly ahead. It’s you who’s sleeping here without substance. Ōtoyo. Why can I see you? Are you truly Ōtoyo? Ah, Ōtoyo! Ōtoyo! Why are you sleeping here? No—why am I here? Answer me, Ōtoyo! Where on earth is this place?...”

Gradually growing frantic, Prince Ōama kept leaning his chest forward aggressively until he nearly loomed over the woman's childlike face, firing those questions one after another in rapid succession.
His tongue wouldn’t cooperate properly from speaking too fast, and that frustration gnawed at him.
It felt as though the very root of his tongue had gone slack, making it unbearably frustrating.
His mouth had already drawn so close above the woman’s nose—its bridge faintly glistening with oil—that the lotus-like sweet breath peculiar to her struck directly against his cheek, yet still she showed not the slightest reaction.
Frustratingly, my own voice firing rapid questions had unwittingly risen to a shrill pitch—that thunderous voice now reverberating painfully in my own eardrums, leaving even myself feeling wretched and mortified—yet the woman lay utterly limp like a corpse, not a single eyebrow twitching nor the slightest shift in posture, her maiden-like sweet breath continuing to flow in and out with the same tranquil rhythm.

“What on earth?!” Prince Ōama exclaimed.
He rolled his large eyes wildly.
“Ōtoyo—are you dead?
Are you truly so asleep?
Why do I still see you?”
“Wait—this... This light... It must be that light—” His thoughts spun violently then.

“Hmm... This makes no sense!
“Why’s that light still here...? I swore I blew it out...” Ōama jolted and whirled around.
In that instant—as though blindfolded—both light and woman’s face vanished simultaneously, plunging him back into bottomless dark...

*

Lady Ōtoyo was the second daughter of Soga no Akahito and was eighteen this year.

The eldest daughter was called Princess Hitachi; though born of the same womb as her younger sister, she differed completely from her in both physique and temperament—a slender, tall woman who could be described as cold and rational.
Whether that aspect suited his preferences or not, the elder sister had been taken as the consort of Crown Prince Nakano Ōe, the Regent, about four years prior.
While there had been no conscious intention to compete with her brother, the younger sister—who was born with corpulent flesh and thus named Ōtoyo—soon came to receive Prince Ōama’s favor.
The elder sister had given birth to Princess Yamabe, and the younger sister had borne Prince Hozumi, who were now five and three years old respectively.

In terms of their multitude of wives and concubines, these brother princes were equally matched; within their inner court—certainly not a harem in the traditional sense, but merely used metaphorically here—these two sisters stood at present as the youngest in years and thus should have been the most freshly beloved and intensely favored consorts.
Akahito had already crossed fifty.
Until reaching that age, he had sired no sons—whether fortune or misfortune.
A man of talent well-versed in worldly affairs and quite the schemer when his true nature was revealed, he lagged behind no courtier even in matters of taste; yet this alone had defied his efforts.
Akahito—this small man with a forehead gone smooth from baldness—had long nursed profound distress over this matter.

After Emishi and Iruka, father and son, were offered as sacrifices to the new government, only the branch of Emishi’s youngest brother Kuramaro remained to carry on the legitimate line of the Great Soga clan. However, after Ishikawamaro no Kurayamada—who had been both the pillar of that branch and a meritorious reformer of high repute—met an untimely death, even the fading glory of the setting sun seemed to have abandoned the name of Soga.
Ishikawamaro's immediate younger brother Hinata was expelled from the capital as retribution for entrapping his elder brother, while the next brother Hasuko—an utterly ordinary man valued solely for his mild temperament—served briefly as Minister under Kamatari and received the Great Purple Crown, but he too died suddenly about three years ago.
What remained was Akahito alone, both before and after; though after his brother’s death, the clan chieftain’s sword had come to him, his court rank remained merely Junior Purple.
It was only natural that he had grown markedly old and begun to fret incessantly about the future.
Precisely because he was a proper villain, he was acutely aware of his own powerlessness.

The sole comforts of his later years—though why he alone had become so convinced of this remained unclear—were that his eldest daughter had first been taken as a consort to the Crown Prince and then his second daughter wedded as a wife to Ōama. Admittedly regarding the latter [daughter], he made quite a troubled face and repeatedly tilted his head in consternation; but given that Lady Ōtoyo herself had long since vanished as if swept away by currents, this too may have ultimately been nothing more than a token gesture befitting such an old man. In Princess Hitachi’s case by contrast, he had ample time to gauge those around him through sidelong glances—though of course no amount of scrutiny could change anything; one might say this too was merely another gesture regardless—but at any rate rumors swirled persistently for a time about him being seen emerging furtively from Kamatari’s residence late at night while wiping his balding forehead over and over again—or perhaps not seen at all depending on who you asked—which only meant when reversed that Kamatari’s expressions proved so unreadable even for someone as shrewd as Akahito that he finally threw up his hands and resorted to direct confrontation—or rather perhaps it would be truer still simply saying Akahito’s interpretations themselves grew overheated.

“The Soga house is done for now!” roared Yasumaro—a young man acknowledged by all as the clan’s foremost troublemaker—who had been one of the primary spreaders of such rumors, laughing uproariously. “If only we’d never had Uncle Kuratayama from the start, things might’ve stayed tidy! What an utter disgrace!”

However, whether this remark had merely mocked Akahito’s senility or carried some other meaning remained unclear.
This vigorous young noble was one of the most fervent among the many hidden admirers that Prince Ōama himself had yet to notice.

Prince Ōama had Lady Ōtoyo residing in the village of Ishikawa, a place of unforgettable memories for the Soga clan.
While living quietly in the Kawahara Old Palace—which the Emperor Mother had temporarily used as an interim residence after the burning of Itabuki Palace—he would sneak away from Princess Uno’s notice to make these visits.
Princess Uno was the full younger sister of Princess Ōta, who had been Prince Ōama’s first consort, and after her elder sister’s death, she was made his principal wife.
Her mother was that Oto no Musume, daughter of Kurayamada no Ishikawamaro, and here too the Soga blood ran thick.
Though they shared the same father in Nakano Ōe and were born of the same womb of Lady Oto, between these sister princesses existed differences in temperament and appearance as stark as those between complete strangers.
This was likely a coincidental correspondence, but the nearly identical differences we had just observed in the case of Soga no Akahito’s two daughters—Princess Hitachi and Lady Ōtoyo—also divided these sisters.
All one needed was to reverse the sisters' positions.
On top of that, if necessary, one should have proceeded to discern the subtle yet crucial differences between Princess Ōta and Lady Ōtoyo one after another.
On the other hand, between Princess Uno and Princess Hitachi, there had not even been a need to follow this second procedure.
To such an extent were these two women of strikingly similar mold.
Undoubtedly, these two were Crown Prince Nakano Ōe’s preference—nay, even his very lineage—or so Prince Ōama had at least concluded.
In other words, they were precisely the type of talented, intelligent women he detested.
Moreover—and what made it even worse—Princess Uno never let her intellect show through in that ostentatiously feminine way that flits about the tip of one's nose; rather, she had wrapped it layer upon layer within the fragrant veil of her virtuous character.
Moreover, she was a tall, slender woman with an elegantly oval face and striking beauty.
...Prince Ōama’s figure—rebelling against each and every one of these traits, irritated all by himself—must have appeared to the eyes of a discerning woman like Princess Uno as something so utterly comical, so childishly absurd, that she could not help but be drawn into an involuntary smile.
In the end, Prince Ōama was merely projecting onto the blameless—nay, likely flawless—princess a fierce yet indeterminate, almost physiological repulsion he felt toward his brother, forcibly crystallizing this vague aversion into concrete form only to grow arbitrarily irritated by its manifestation.
As a princess, she likely possessed ample deductive ability for such matters; unbeknownst to her, this would occasionally emanate around her as a certain atmosphere—perhaps resulting in Ōama growing increasingly irritated.
Two years younger than her deceased sister, this consort—now twenty-three—had a prince called Kusakabe, who was six years old.

Now long since filled in and vanished without a trace, there had once been a rather large lotus pond called Kei Pond just beyond the southeastern edge of Ishikawa Village.
The lotuses—so ancient that by that time their origin era had vanished from human memory, having been introduced from overseas in some forgotten age—completely covered the pond's surface, manifesting each summer a world of five-colored flames suffused with a suffocatingly rich fragrance so lushly southern in character.
That Prince Ōama had gone to the trouble of building a residence for Lady Ōtoyo in Ishikawa village was not inconceivable to consider—not so much because it was the ancestral land of the Soga clan, but rather due to the presence of this lotus pond.
It was because those were precisely the kind of flowers that would appeal to Lady Ōtoyo.

It had been nearly four years since he first began visiting that house.
During the first two years or so—when Princess Ōta, that woman whose plump figure harbored a thread of loneliness within and whom he now recalled as resembling a white lotus—had still been alive as his principal wife despite her illness, things had been somewhat tolerable.
With this consort, he could remain at ease—believing she understood his solitude, not only overlooking his capricious visits to Ishikawa but even forgiving him in her heart.
Yet since this consort's passing and Princess Uno's ascension as principal wife, Prince Ōama had felt with growing anguish how this mental respite dwindled daily.
He who had serenely regarded his generous affection toward this fair-skinned, plump girl—two years younger than his firstborn princess by Princess Nukata—as something given freely without expectation of return, now began feeling an icy shock upon realizing he had started demanding something from her.

This thirst had of course remarkably transformed the nature of his love for Lady Ōtoyo over the past year or so.
What had until then been generous affection had suddenly changed into infatuation.
Eventually it transformed into a fierce passion bordering on sadism.
Lady Ōtoyo appeared to adapt with ease to the increasingly restless shifts in the man's affections through her naturally gentle disposition and more than ample physical stamina.
Yet her excessively obedient adaptability ceaselessly bred a thread of unease in the corner of Ōama's mind—while this anxiety fueled his flame to burn ever more intensely, conversely it whispered in his ear something akin to a faint sense of guilt: that what he sought from this woman, and what he had obtained in some twisted form, might not truly align with what he desired in his heart of hearts.

But ultimately, their love had only just begun.
As for Ōama himself, lending ear to such devilish whispers remained but an occasional occurrence; it could be said that day and night, nearly the whole of his heart was consumed by astonishment and admiration toward the fresh, unexpected discoveries he found in every corner of this young Soga daughter’s body and mind.

*

……The light went out.
The face vanished too.
And Ōama began to sink down through the darkness, as if being sucked in.

“Where am I going? Where?”
“……Where am I going? Where?” he kept asking into the void.
But that voice was instantly swept away by the intense wind grazing his ear.

“Ah, this is that pond…” Prince Ōama suddenly thought.
This thought never formed into words, but the intense sinking motion came to an abrupt halt there.
To tell the truth, the progression had stopped, and in its place, a development had begun.

A scene instantly unfolded before his eyes.
That was indeed the Kei Pond.
Yet whether Prince Ōama had descended into that pond or alighted upon its shore remained unclear.
It seemed to be both and yet neither.

“Just now I was a beggar with both eyes devoured.”
With bare long shins and using a long, twisted stick as a staff, after what must have been years of wandering through various provinces, I had finally arrived at the edge of this pond.
“……And then, what did I do?……”

He posed his question in reverse.
Then, something strange happened there.
In response to that question, his earlier experiences began reversing their course.
That became readily apparent from how every scene unfolding one after another—though he had completely forgotten them all—were things he nevertheless knew with perfect clarity.
And yet the fact that such truly fresh, truly novel impressions emerged each time was likely nothing more than the natural effect of this reverse rotation.

A large, indescribably voluptuous white lotus flower appeared, nearly filling the entire frame. The plump and beautiful flower gazed up unblinkingly in this direction while displaying an oddly complex sneer—accusatory, scornful, yet enduring pain with stillness. Abruptly those crimson lips moved. “No, I cannot say,” they declared coldly. As the expression froze once more, another voice now quivered grotesquely in supplication: “Who were you again? Ah, I’ve forgotten, forgotten! Come on, why don’t you just tell me?” “...Who were you again?” he repeated.

"That’s my voice," Prince Ōama thinks—"What’s more, I do know who that flower is…"

I know for certain yet cannot say it.
The frustration proves inexpressible.
Prince Ōama re-experiences anguish so intense it makes him writhe.
Still the name refuses to rise to his lips.
The flower too retreats into the background—crimson lips pursed in scorn—swaying gently as it withdraws.
Two or three blossoms emerge around it first, then five or six more.
All flowers sway together.
Quietly at first, then with mounting violence.…

"The reason those flowers are swaying so much is because I'm stirring the pond water with that staff tip," Prince Ōama's imagination raced ahead.
Sure enough, the staff's fierce movements began appearing visibly as spray started rising vigorously.
As this happened, the scene gradually receded until it became the full view of the pond.
The light bore an eerily pale, dull color—unthinkable for midsummer noon.
Amidst this, lotus flowers blanketed the pond—blue, white, yellow, red—each hue and contour rendered with such piercing clarity they seemed nearly translucent, sharply defined against the water's surface.
They were still.
There were flowers with bowed heads.
There were flowers gazing up this way.
There were withered flowers.
There were flowers smiling gracefully.
Ōama noticed each corresponded precisely to appearances and expressions of women he knew from various moments.
Moreover, he had absolute confidence that—save for one large white lotus—he could splendidly name every last one.
Behold—wasn't that blue lotus's form blooming tautly atop a towering stem precisely Lady Kachihime's visage? She who bore him two princes and princesses before dying after her fourth childbirth—that morning when her uncanny fever broke into icy coolness, she'd sharply looked up at his visiting face by her pillowside, lips slightly parted as if to speak?
And wasn't that luxuriant yellow lotus's triumphantly graceful smile exactly what graced Amako's daughter after she'd splendidly delivered Takechi—my first prince?
...As Ōama pointed at each with his staff tip—marveling himself at these vividly preserved memories—the flowers nodded in satisfaction, swaying so violently they nearly spilled over with coquettish poses.
Finally when Ōama called to the now-distant pond—mere speck in wilderness—"Oh who were you again?" it suddenly shrieked with shrill laughter.
That laughter carried madness-tinged sharpness so intense it seemed capable of gouging chests.
Once again Prince Ōama jolted awake.

The light had gone out at some point, and the surroundings were true darkness.

“Hmm, Lady Ōtoyo was lying here just moments ago…” Prince Ōama thought, propping his cheek again and raising his upper body as he pondered—

“Wait—now that I think of it, that laughter just now... I have a feeling it might have been her.”

Prince Ōama extended his left hand and groped through the darkness.
In the area he estimated, there was not only nothing for his hand to touch—there wasn’t even the faintest warmth of skin.
There was only space.
There was only the persistently cold space.

The instant he confirmed this, Prince Ōama involuntarily shuddered.
He sat up properly and straightened his posture.
There is something bizarre here—he intuited.
As though in direct response to that intuition, suddenly at that very moment, that shrill scream rang out again.
It faded away with a long, mocking tail—

“Ah, that parrot!” Prince Ōama leapt up and, with that cry, charged furiously toward the adjacent room.
With a thrust of his sturdy shoulder, the sliding door ripped open to both sides.
He stumbled five, six steps into the small room—the very one Princess Ōta had used as her parlor until just a year prior—and there stood frozen rigid on the spot, stunned by the uncanny accuracy of his own ominous premonition.…

There, just as expected, a lamp was lit dimly in peach-colored hues.
And indeed, it dimly illuminated the gruesome scene that had just unfolded moments before.
There, just as expected, was the vermilion-lacquered large birdcage—now empty—swaying slowly through the space.
Right below it, atop the blue dressing table once favored by the deceased consort, sure enough crouched the white parrot—fixing its vacant eyes upon him who had now arrived.
From its eyes all hostility had vanished; a dementia-like dull whiteness had spread like a membrane in their place.
At the base of the blue dressing table's slender legs lay Lady Ōtoyo collapsed face down, blue blood overflowing from one corner of her shoulder gradually staining the white sleeping robe as it flowed down her back in considerable quantity toward the voluptuous right hip.
A deep silence after everything had ended reigned over the small room.

After standing there for a considerable time, intently gazing at the scene, Prince Ōama eventually approached the parrot with quiet footsteps.
The parrot kept its eyes fixed on him as ever, not moving a muscle, with no change appearing in those vacant pupils.
Around its neck, Prince Ōama’s hands suddenly clamped down.
The parrot did not move.
Strength surged into both hands.
He tightened his grip.
Prince Ōama thought he was just one breath away.
However, the moment he thought this and inadvertently relaxed his resolve, the parrot—which had remained still until then—exploded into resistance as though a dam had burst. …What followed was nothing but a frenzied struggle.
The parrot exerted astonishing power.
Not only that—in inverse proportion to Ōama’s strength gradually waning, the bird’s power seemed to grow ever stronger.
In the end, even its body began to swell and expand until he thought it had grown nearly human-sized.
Prince Ōama was desperate.

……But in the end, everything had ended.
The room had returned to silence, and all that remained were the feathers torn from the parrot’s body during their fierce struggle—now filling nearly the entire space of the small chamber, drifting soundlessly upward and downward.……

At length, Prince Ōama began noticing the weight of what he held in both hands.
He looked down and saw the parrot's neck.
It should have been heavy.
The parrot's neck had undeniably grown to match a human head in size.
From between its beak, crimson blood drew a single sharp thread.
It traversed the bird's skin where feathers had mercilessly fallen away and dripped rhythmically onto the floor.

The moment he involuntarily averted his eyes and tried to release the parrot's corpse, Prince Ōama sensed the bird had grinned mockingly.
He turned his gaze back and stared intently.
What he clutched in both hands was unmistakably a human woman's head.
An elusive, enigmatic smile—still trailing that single thread of blood—appeared and vanished at her lips' edge when suddenly, in that very instant, the woman's face changed form.

“Ah—that’s it!” Prince Ōama had meant to shout, but it ended as nothing more than a “gyah!”—a choked scream.
He dropped the head.
At that moment, someone’s hands violently shook him awake.

Prince Ōama opened his eyelids.

Night had completely given way to dawn, and the world of dreams had departed. Up close, this time it was truly Lady Ōtoyo’s face—eyes rounded in apparent astonishment—peering down at him.

Morning light flickered on long eyelashes and played on the downy hair of a chin.

“What a loud voice you have there!” Lady Ōtoyo laughed.

“Well—I had a strange dream.
“A dream where I strangled that parrot....”

"My, what a peculiar dream."

"Hey—is there blood on my hands?"

"No! Not your hands!"
"The parrot—was that the one Lady Kagami herself brought yesterday just before her departure?"

"Yeah, that one."
"But when I looked after strangling it—"

Prince Ōama began to say before biting his lip hard.
Lady Ōtoyo smiled guilelessly,

“So…?”

“Well, you’d be surprised—it had turned into a crimson parrot.”

“My, what a strange story!”

“Well, Lady Kagami certainly left quite the troublesome memento behind.”
“Where’s that thing now?”

“It’s been awake since earlier and has been cheerfully muttering something to itself.”

“Today I think I’ll release that thing somewhere deep in Amakashi Hill…”

“Oh, if Your Highness is going to release it, then please give it to me.”
“After all, it seems to have already grown attached to me.”

“Hmm, that might be good too”—Prince Ōama responded as though it were nothing and stared intently into Lady Ōtoyo’s eyes.