Silk
A strange land is hard to live in,
men say;
Come quickly home,
Before I die of love for you!
Ruri wonders at the nature of her ‘beautiful’ cage. For she sits dressed in layers upon layers of ‘beautiful’ brocade, so heavy that she could not run in them; perched a lovely floor cushion, in a room full of chintz, like vases and painted umbrellas and silver incense holders; surrounding her like the walls of a labyrinth are silk screens painted with oxen, elephants, roosters, flowering trees, fine paintings of provincial villages and scenes of noh plays— all sights that she had never seen, isn’t seeing, will never see. All of this inside a ‘beautiful’ red lacquer cage, in a ‘beautiful’ and grand building, similarly up to its ears in finery and glamor, in an entire neighborhood of ‘beautiful’ things, of ‘beautiful’ buildings and ‘beautiful’ cages filled with ‘beautiful’ women, on a ‘beautiful’ island in a ‘beautiful’ sea, and Ruri, too, is ‘beautiful’.
She is ‘beautiful’ with her long hair, and her twinkling eyes. She is ‘beautiful’ in the way she smiles, how her skin is fair and smooth like a cool jade. She is ‘beautiful’ in the fragility of her wrists, and the way her ears point at the ends. But most of all, Ruri is ‘beautiful’ because she cannot say ‘no’.
A story that’s told over and over, tiredly, anciently, universally, is this: there once was a girl born to poor parents, or married to a poor husband. Those parents or that husband took out many loans, and eventually the debts became expensive enough that they gave up all hope to pay them off through their own work. Then, thinking themselves very clever for thinking up such a solution, they sell their daughter or wife to a brothel, and make her work at the brothel to pay their debts for them before she inevitably dies, killed by a love-spurned samurai or by an STD, and the world is happier without her, for her heart had grown wicked over the years. Her family’s debt is forgiven.
Ruri was not named ‘Ruri’ when she was born. She was named something plain and simple. Her parents, a stone-mason father and a housewife mother, did not even know the kanji for what they named her. Marise? Marika? Something like that. Ruri can’t remember.
Ruri’s true prison is not the red-lacquer cage she sits in, but her familiarity with the inside of her cage. Her father sold her when she was seven and she hasn’t left the brothel since. When she was eight she learned to read. When she was thirteen her skill on the kouta got even a tayū’s attention. When she was fifteen she started taking clients and didn’t have time to think about escaping from this place. Now that she is seventeen she is one of the most popular yūjo, and with her face and wit, she could become a tayū if she dared to dream, and she has forgotten what the feeling of rain on her skin is like.
She is sure that if she checked the balance of her father’s debts, she would have broken even by now, if not long ago, but she did not check her balance. Ruri did not check her balance for the same reason she did not throw herself at her first marriage proposal extended to her by a blushing countryside samurai, the reason she did not go out unless on a necessary procession, the reason she ate the same breakfast every morning.
Her inability to leave is not that the fabric of her kimono is too heavy for her to run, that the bars of her cage are too thick for her to chip through, or that the guards of her brothel are too strong for her to escape from. The nature of Ruri’s prison is her mind. It is her familiarity and unwillingness to change. The fear of what will happen when she leaves, when she is free, what would she do next?
What would Ruri be without her ‘beauty’? Without her prestige? She fears, secretly, privately, with her whole heart, that if one were to strip her naked of her fine clothing and clean her face of her makeup and pull out each tortoise-shell comb from her hair, what would be revealed would be nothing.
So she stays in her heavy clothes and her heavy makeup, she stays suffocated by too-much incense and the adoration of men, whose faces she forgets once they leave. At the end of the day, when her sleep-clothes are plain and her hair is let down and her face is bare, she does not look at herself in the mirror, for fear of the girl who would gaze back at her.
Absent-mindedly, Ruri folds and unfolds her silk fan with one slim hand. Flick her wrist down, and there are morning glories saying hello. Tilt her hand back, and the flowers are cascading down, paper folding into itself making little ‘chk, chk, chk’ sounds when the bamboo slats click and slide by one another.
Passers-by stop to stare, at her, at her sisters, at the rare items that the brothel’s ‘mother’ decided should be shown today. A guard steps forward, foot making a small splash among the pattering of raindrops and chattering of people on the street, when an onlooker spends too long gazing between the bars of the cage.
“This is a brothel, not a street play.” The guard says mildly, softly, as though one of his hands did not rest lightly on the hilt of his katana. “If you have no ryo, I suggest you leave.”
The man turns around, but not before one last sullen glance at Ruri, who slowly flaps her fan like the wings of a butterfly, and he begins on his sodden march, off and away. Ruri flicks her wrist down, listens to her fan go ‘chk, chk, chk’ as it falls open, and raises it to cover her mouth coyly, to hide her lips curl into a sneer as her eyes follow the man who was, just a second ago, yearning for her outside of the bars.
“What a bum,” Ruri’s voice carries lowly to another prostitute lounging about.
The clean ‘thock, thock’ of the prostitute’s, Miyako’s, pipe hitting against the ashtray placed next to her is agreement enough, as her vermillion lips curl into a mean little smile.
Cutting through the fog and drizzle is the light of two warm yellow lanterns and a couple of red umbrellas held, by stern samurai, over their charge.
“Speaking of bums,” Miyako takes a long drag from her thin pipe, her black varnished teeth clinking on the silver mouthpiece as it slots into her lips. “Look what the cat dragged in!”
Ruri blushes under her white makeup, flapping her fan as if to ward away the heat rising in her face.
“Takahiro-san isn’t a bum!” Ruri protests, eyes darting between the man’s form and Miyako. “He’s been a good customer to me all these years. He said he’s gonna marry me one day.”
“So you’ve been holding out on all those other nice men’s proposals, even a wealthy shinobi that dropped by here, for your precious ‘T-T-Takahiro-san’?” a few ashes from Miyako’s pipe fall on the knot of her obi, which is gaudily large and tied up front so that she may lie on her back. “You’re already seventeen, if he was going to marry you, he’d have done it by now. Not just that but he’s a nobleman’s son! do you really think he’d marry a common whore like you?”
“He called me beautiful the first time we slept together.” Ruri says archly, ignoring Miyako’s words. She shifted in place a bit in her seiza, trying to force feeling back into her legs, to make blood flow once more. “He was a good first time. He’s a gentle lover, and has always been kind to me. Takahiro-san will marry me, like he always said.”
Miyako then maybe sighs tiredly, or maybe was just taking a gusty draw from her pipe. Her face remains in the same expression it always holds when she sits in the cage, trying to draw in customers, the corners of her lips curled just so and her eyes kept wider than perhaps would be comfortable normally, just to make them seem larger.
“Don’t sound so sure, Ruri-chan.” Miyako says softly, kindly. Ruri’s jaw stiffens at Miyako’s sisterly tone, like the woman thinks that she’s smarter than her.
But what Ruri fails to acknowledge is that Miyako is almost thirty. It’s a feat for a yūjo to reach that age. She had made her debut at eleven, was practically born in the brothel, besides, and had sharp eyes and sharp wit. If it weren’t for her too-small nose, too-close eyes, and too-big ears, Miyako would have become a tayū years and years ago.
Ruri’s nose twitches as the smell of tobacco and sandalwood incense mix in a way that they didn’t before. They were down to half a stick, and some poor girl, probably one who knows she’s ugly and won’t have any customers, will probably have to get up in about 20 minutes to light another one, but for now the air inside the cage is heavy and warm and mercifully dry compared to the cold rain outside.
“Then don’t compare me to you.” Ruri says, tone perfectly light, but her chest curls in satisfaction at the microexpression of hurt Miyako made in between drags. “Just because you’re jilted doesn’t mean I’ll turn out the same.”
Miyako’s pouted lips pursed.
“Ruri-chan, take it from me, one day you’ll find that, despite your eyes and hair, despite your pretty little face and bouncy little ass,” She begins mildly, but her voice curdles with each syllable becoming more and more bitter, and while her practiced face for display does not melt away, her elegant manner of speech does. “Despite it all, you’re not that special. A man is just a man, and a bum is just a bum. They’re one in the same; they’re all the same. Lord Hitotsuba’s son will never marry you, and I’m sorry that you’re too silly to see it.”
Ruri shifts uncomfortably, yet imperceptibly, at Miyako’s words. ‘You’re wrong.’ Ruri thinks, ignoring whatever petty doubt that rises to argue with her confidence. ‘I’m not special, you’re just ugly. That’s why you can’t accept that Takahiro-san will marry me.’
“You think I’m pretty?” Ruri says airly, instead of voicing her thoughts, fluttering her long lashes to the older woman like she is a customer.
“I do,” Takahiro san’s gilded voice interjects from the other side of the cage. Ruri does not know when he reached the brothel entrance, and her heart skipped a beat. She pushed away the inkling of dread that bloomed in her chest, as it did with greeting all customers, in favor of the puppy-like giddiness she always got with Takahiro.
“Takahiro-san, you flatter this humble courtesan with your kind words,” Ruri’s fan picks up its pace from it’s previous sedated tempo. “How may I serve you?”
Behind her, Miyako’s teeth click on her pipe, brows twisting ever so slightly before yanking themselves apart and buffing the skin out to smoothness.
As soon as Takahiro came, he leaves. ‘Hold me,’ Ruri often asked of him, her blood cooling down to a simmer. She felt more naked than usual, with Takahiro. Each time it was like a new layer of clothing had been discovered on her, then promptly stripped off. Like her skin was peeled back and pinned open. Each time, Takahiro would look at her guts, tamper with them, make a space for himself inside of her and force her to conform, then think the better of it. Pathetically, Ruri still loves him, hates him, needs him and his empty promises and his false care, because he makes her feel beautiful and clean. Like a girl.
Ruri is not truly beautiful. She is attractive, alluring, something to own and to covet, an object of jealousy and pining, but no, she is not beautiful. She is not beautiful like how girls are. Their skin is honeyed from helping their parents fish or farm or peddle. Their hair is flat brown and eyes black, and for their troubles and time outside, a dusting of freckles scatter their nose and cheeks. When they cry, which is every night, for being sold to a place as terrible as this, it is loud and pitiful. Their parents regret selling her, or are dead, or their mother died and their stepmother, feeling threatened by them, sold them to a brothel. They are not prostitutes, rather girls in whores’ clothing. They are forced to, in dire straits, sell their body. They pray to village gods, villages from which they were stolen away, for deliverance. They have great, generous hearts, big enough to hide their innocence from the wetly intruding pith of men. And yet, they love men, save the soured few. These girls remain to be ones worth marrying.
One such girl, Ruri recalls, used to sell little bamboo trinkets, carved by her father’s shaking hands. Crab traps, and minnowing baskets; a small hairpin that she snuck into place instead of the usual tortoise-shell pins, while the brothel’s mother had her back turned. That girl was beautiful.
Ruri is not beautiful like how she was beautiful. She does not regret or pity herself for becoming a whore. Her skin remains unblemished from ten years of life inside and her hands soft from only touching gentle flesh and silk and jewels. She doesn't pray to gods, doesn't remember or wish to survive her parent's craft, doesn't have a heart inside her ivory ribcage worth salvaging for the sake of a worthy lover. Ruri is unlike them for her unabashed hatred of men. She, and other whores, forsake men, who take on work-animal status. A mule whose job it is to empty out it's pockets, divulge itself of all it is worth, whose dick is caught in a vice. They are the vice; those whores who cease to be girls.
As they take customer after customer, insisting on pre-lubed up condoms to hide the lack of wetness between their thighs, they might look back onto girlhood with a cynical amusement. Prostitutes who regret ever being a girl, ever being innocent, for the waste of time it was. They flush in humiliation over ever imagining a marriage to a poor man, a man with an open face and earnest smiles. Their client mistakes it for orgasmic flush and moves inside of them more quickly. They clench their stomach to stop from laughing, for how laughable is an existence without the pursuit of comfort? Why would they ever want to learn to grip tools in their hands, would that not beget callouses? The client finds the tightness unbearable and moans into their neck. He slips out of them, and they relax in relief. Disgust meets them like an old skin as he softens against their thigh. The whore quickly extricates themself from the too-plush futon, having been paid in advance.
Takahiro is only an exception in that Ruri begs him to stay for a minute or two after the deed is done. For those precious seconds, as Takahiro pants wetly over her and grows flaccid inside of her, Ruri forgets her hate and becomes a girl. Takahiro had never been so handsome before, had he? He had the same wide eyes and thick brows, the same sloped and pointed nose, under which a pair of faintly smiling lips curled contentedly, but it was different somehow. In those moments, it was like Takahiro had a glow around him, like a godly master had given him a cloak of handsomeness to wear.
“Spread your beauty,” God said to him, and he did. Takahiro sees no reason to question his duty, to question whether he is truly beautiful or not, as nothing had ever been given to him to suggest elsewise. He is rich and blessed, catered to, loved and adored, a soon-to-be master of his own domain. Ruri sees many reasons to question whether he is truly beautiful or not. Whenever he leaves, before he swings by again as a dalliance and after he finds relief inside of her, Ruri’s skin is unpinned, her guts arranged to rights, and she finds herself breathing more easily. The painting of his likeness that Takahiro once gifted to her lays forgotten because of how revolting it seems to her. As it does to all whores, disgust comes easy.
“I love you.” He whispers, his chest wet with sweat and spit, and it sticks to her back. The sides of her arms are cold, and one of her cheeks is growing pink from chill, but where their bodies touch it’s like lava, burning hot. Just a minute before, Ruri had looked into Takahiro’s eyes, and told him to hold her.
The afterglow of sex wears off, and a servant girl comes scuttling into the room once Takahiro steps out. She re-pins Ruri’s hair, straightening out fly-aways and rebel locks, and re-ties Ruri’s obi, the obscenely large knot punching her in the gut when exhaustion weighs on her shoulders, so she straightens her back. The servant girl scurries away, and Ruri glides over to meet Takahiro, who has already taken out a pipe, despite smoking being unallowed in this area of the brothel.
“Was I good tonight, Takahiro-san?” Ruri teases him, making a childish gesture for him to hand her his pipe. He does, and she takes a small, novice drag, stifling the cough. “Perhaps a marriable performance?”
Takahiro smiles indulgently with closed lips, the space under his eyes seems tighter than normal, tighter than all the times before that they sang the same song and danced the same dance, and Ruri all of a sudden feels helpless. She nibbles at the inside of her lip, careful not to smudge her lipstick, and her eyes turn flinty. Why was he acting like this? She did everything right, he always hated when she acted as witty as she knew she could be– ‘I get enough of that at home,’ he would complain when she referenced classics, and so she stayed young for him. Her makeup was never matched to the hard planes of her raised cheekbones and full lips, forcing roundness through pink blush and consciously widened eyes. He was normally happier with this, so what was the change?
He takes a long drag of his pipe, tobacco smell lingering in the air and sure to cling to the brocade silks ruri was wearing, worth two of her, and seemed to relax a bit with that. “I have a wife.” He says casually, filling up the open air left wanting for what would have been his usual response– which would be laughter or babying her.
“Pardon?” Ruri is sure she heard wrong.
“I’m married.” he restates, as if commenting on the chill of the wind this season (Ruri wouldn’t know) or how the newest restaurant’s food was (Ruri wouldn’t know).
“What do you mean— married?”
“My wife doesn’t want me coming here anymore. She’s expecting, so it’s bad for her health and the baby to worry about me, y’know?” He coughs a little bit, too. Whatever he stuffed in his pipe was a new blend that didn’t go down as smoothly as it ought to. Underneath the tobacco, it smelled like orange peels and patchouli. Overly summer-ey for the dark, January season. “And after he’s born, it’s a son by the way, well… he can hardly grow up seeing me going to the whorehouse every month.”
Takahiro pauses a beat, then shrugs with one shoulder, raising both eyebrows with a jaunty tilt of his head. “Not until he’s older, at least. It wouldn’t do, to set a bad example.”
“I don’t understand.” Ruri’s voice is flat and she knows that if, at this moment, she were to be left alone, she would break out in loud, hiccupy sobs and embarrass herself to any eavesdroppers terribly. Because of that, she doesn’t want him to leave.
“Don’t make that face at me.” Takahiro says, softly, sweetly. “Please, Ruri. I love you, I really do.”
“Go away,” her voice grows thick and ugly with mucus.
“You don’t mean that. You love me too.”
“Leave me alone.”
“I can’t. Look at you, you’re crying.”
“I said go! Go back to your… your ugly fucking wife,” Ruri chokes out, and beats at his chest as Takahiro tries to embrace her. “You never should have lied to me— you lied! You said you would marry me and take me away, why would you lie?”
“It's not a lie, I love you.”
“I’ll call the guards, I swear I will—“
“As if.” Takahiro scoffs. “What would some whorehouse samurai be able to do to a lord’s son?”
“Just go, please.”
“No.”
“Please just go! Go away!” Ruri abandons propriety in favor of getting her point across with volume, still trying to push Takahiro away as his arms cage her in and his fingers lace behind her back. He's like a calm parent weathering the storm of a toddler.
“I’ll make you my concubine, I swear. She is my legal wife; she does not own my heart or my body. Any child from that woman will surely be as homely as her— I want you.”
“Please go—“
“Imagine a daughter who looks just like you, I’d dote on her terribly— I’d give you a new name, you’d both be mine. I could forget that wretch I’m married to, except for at banquets or for business, but think about it! I could have you.”
“Go!” Ruri cries and finally breaks his grip by dropping her weight, hitting the floor hard as she falls. She scrambles back into the room they were in just a minute ago, she claws at the floor like a wild thing in her escape and slams the sliding door shut behind her.
“Ruri—,"
“Go away!” She shrieks, and she is beyond the farce of caring about the millions of ears, loving the drama and living for it.
Ruri abruptly remembers the story told to her by a client from the Land of Wind. She was an older woman, a shinobi, who never confessed to her decaying family and tribunal of elders that she loved women with the heart of a man, of a lover. So instead she came to Ruri. She had shared with Ruri the tale of the “Evil Eye”, a supernatural curse brought on by envy of good fortune, or from the victim’s own jealousy and impure actions.
‘Yes,’ Ruri thinks as she hears the impatient tapping of Takahiro’s foot on the other side of the door. ‘This must be it.’
“Ruri!” He calls from the other side, his silhouette visible through the thin paper screens. “Stop being a child!”
"I never want to see you again."
"You're being hysterical." He sighs loud enough for her to hear it through the paper, the wood, the hushed din of eavesdroppers and onlookers. "I'll come back later, when you aren't being so emotional."
Ruri waits for the clip-clop of his sandals to recede before she makes downstairs. Of course, not before she fixes her makeup.
The ferry never really goes the whole way into the Land of Water. At a certain point of the archipelago, nearing the capital, islands break down into craggy rocks, studding the straits between the islands. Encroaching too close to the center spells certain doom for any large enough ship. It is at Tokuyama island that you would have to get off.
To get to the capital from there is easy for the well connected, several quick gondola rides cut down a week’s worth of travel into about half a day.
Unfortunately for Obito, he is not well connected.
Zetsu had put him out like a naughty cat, saying his restlessness was symptomatic of idleness, and distracting at that. So, in preparation for their plans in the Land of Water, Zetsu told him to investigate. What exactlyObito is to investigate was not specified, which makes him think this task is merely busywork, and that rankles.
Busywork is still work, however, and failure isn’t an option for him. From the ferry office, Obito sets out with hopes to complete his mission.