Prologue
For all that Kaiou Michiru may have been her mother, Hotaru knew nothing of the woman.
She'd died of a car accident when she was three and all Hotaru remembered of her was faint wisps of bergamot in the air and flashes of bright, turquoise hair. But even then, she couldn't tell if those were real memories of her mother or something her mind had manufactured based on the articles she'd read and the pictures they'd contained.
How many times had she stared at herself in the mirror, searching for a sign of her mother in the angles of her face, only to turn away in frustration. There was nothing of the beautiful artist in Hotaru; she was entirely her father's daughter and in a strange twist, she looked more like her stepmother Keiko than she did her mother with her pin straight black hair and dark, shallow eyes (nothing like the dark, bottomless depths that taunted Hotaru in every photograph with the mysteries they held, her mother elusive even in death).
It was no use asking the adults in her life as well. Her grandfather and father adored her to no end but their grief seemed ever fresh whenever Hotaru brought up to the topic of her mother and eventually, the guilt at causing them such visible pain grew to stop her from asking even as her need to know more grew.
The biggest sources of information she had on her mother were old newspapers and her mother's art: her mother had been a celebrated artist before her death, the belle of the art world. Kaiou Michiru had been young, beautiful, charismatic, talented, and rich; a person would have been lucky to have any of these traits but her mother had somehow had them all and they had garnered her the same attention as would have been given to a celebrity.
Her mother's death at an early age had further cemented her place in the industry and now her artwork hung in museums around the country. But most famous of all was her mother's untitled collection of paintings, affectionately called "The Four Muses" by her fans.
If Vivaldi had his Four Seasons, Kaiou Michiru had her Four Muses: a series of paintings exploring the same four women in different perspectives, the culmination of her mastery over the medium.
The identities of the four women and their relationship to Hotaru's mother had been a long running mystery and a favoured topic of discussion amongst historians; the brush strokes were too sensuous not to be those of a lover, some argued. The paintings were almost uncomfortably intimate, going beyond the flesh on display and somehow capturing their subjects' souls so exactingly that Michiru must have known them deeply.
The first time Hotaru had come across these speculations in biographies, she had felt herself blush. It was unbelievably strange to read strangers trying to puzzle out her mother's sexual history in such formal and explicit detail but it had also been illuminating.
Because this suggested that there were four women out there who had known her mother well and if her family would not help her, Hotaru would do it herself. She would find the answers to the questions that had plagued her her entire life.
Hotaru scoured her mother's old possessions for hints of these women's identities. And while her mother had unfortunately never seen fit to keep a journal or anything so organised, she finally came across a mixture of scrawled initials and names.
It had taken a long time to call all the names listed in the phonebook that matched the scrawls and it had been unbearably uncomfortable to call so many strangers (Hello, did you know my mother?) but at long last, she had found the lost identities of the four muses.
And when Hotaru turned twenty and obtained her license, she set off on a journey to finally know her mother.