Work Text:
Rise like a raging mountain; all the dark colors veiling your stone skin and ragging breath. A phantom being, the shadow hiding in the sky’s plenitude. Yell. Be a volcano. An earthquake. Cry out your name – to the clouds and to the snow pilling on your breast, scream a forest’s worth of anger. Be indignant and alive like a mountain; breaths and laughter frightening the crows and cracking your own flesh. Rise and be full of wrath and pain.
Maybe, then, will they listen.
(You were born as a « she ». Never truly understood what it meant – a quality of manners, long eyelashes, the soft touch of pale hands – pain or softness, the big paradox, the big question, that makes everyone look oddly at you – and you, wondering, have you ever been a woman at all?)
Men in your clan have a duty: thus, you polished your body – it was meant to be a blade – it was meant to go to war – it was meant to be a man’s body – broad enough to carry the pride of a family.
You took great care in making it hard to the touch – stiff – unbreakable – a tree’s powerful trunk – mornings and evenings spent swinging a sword until the skin of your hands bled – until your flesh turned round and strong and solid – a man’s body – as it was meant to be.
(Maybe as a result of this harsh training, you grow up to be less influenced by the Moon’s cycles than other women are supposed to be. Sometimes not a month passes, but three – the period long enough for you to hope; hope your body has been unknowingly renewed.)
(You were born in spring; fertility might be your sign; prolificacy – an ambiguous being – the screaming newborn of Life, or the victim of a roundabout metamorphosis?)
You were, to your family, for your family, a “he”. This you know: strength, such an efficient aptitude, is the only required quality. For there must be nothing gentle in yourself, even in your womanhood – a stroke of pain each almost-month to remind you of your first failure.
For a long time, looking at her is the only way for you to feel One and Only.
Otae is a living creature, a “she” (a real she), a proof of an existing axis;
Otae is, really, truly, lovely.
One day, in winter, you suddenly realize how beautiful she is, and, looking at the soft curve of her breast under colourful fabric, at the arc of her neck up to the curve of her mouth, you think that Oh, oh, this must be how being a man feels like. Mist-broken vows cloudy-parched mind bright-hot-cheeked smile. You feel like a child, like a tornado, you feel tormented and blessed at the same breathy moment. – and Otae, she is so strong too – you remember her fighting – fighting for the sake of your past piteous self – a fist rightfully covered in crimson, fury in her eyes, fury in the set of her shoulders –
You wouldn’t mind accepting being a “he”, if it meant living forever with “her”.
For once, the reason is simple: on a winter day, you fell in love with her.
Feeling so furious against choices that were made so many years ago – decades now – centuries – millennials – is arduous; you prefer to hide into your own small shell of self-infuriation.
Why, though, should you foolishly punish your own body for what it is, now?
Perhaps because you do not quite know what it is yet – is it soft white mountains on your chest, is it thick hair growing up to your navel?
It couldn’t be both, so it couldn’t be neither.
Flow like a furious river; all the swift colors veiling your liquid skin and razzing breath. A cloudy phantom, the light hiding in the shadow of rocks. Bellow. Be an earthquake. Be a tempest. Cry out your name – to the clouds and to the snow pilling on your breast, scream a mountain’s worth of anger. Be pained and alive like a Goliath; gasps and mirth frightening the crows and breaching your own flesh. Rise and be full of rage and blissful awareness.
Surely, then, will they listen.
How rightly afraid you are of losing everything by simply becoming. A fearful destiny it is: becoming. Becoming by changing, for the sake of being happy. A mountain does not have to change; a valley does not have to become a river, a river does not have to become a flower. Kyuubei needs to change, Kyuubei needs to be folded into the perfect paper-crane, the perfect artefact for the family and the lover.
The body must change, the nature is wrong, the object must transform.
There is a box for Kyuubei’s body, there is another box for Kyuubei’s mind, there is a box for the whole of society.
There is a box, too, in Kyuubei’s heart, one Kyuubei doesn’t dare touch, for it is one Kyuubei cares for this much.
Under the cover of the night, when things are covered with this thick veil that frees in your bloodstreams every beating sensation, you stare at the pale shape of her, you look at the slow movement of her chest going up and down, down and up, you imagine the sound her heart must make, a melody, ba-dump, ba-dump, the creek of her muscles you would hear if your pressed up your left ear to her right palm, a melody, your melody, this dream, oh, and her skin becoming vapoury winds, wild sent of flowers, the ones imprinted on her kimonos, and the smell of winter, there, the taste of it lying right here on her lips – a melody, all of it, a dreamful tearful melody.
For the sake of the Moon,
You would become a mountain.
You would become a man. You would become a woman.
You would become her pet or her princess
(You would forget: the tears, the pain, the doubts, the anguish)
(You would weep for joy alone – you would disappear in the spiral of her smile)
Claw out the flesh that swells the dirty blood the unlucky DNA – the set of bad genes has to renew itself –
Oh, what you would do for her. What you would give if it were not for your own damn self.
The furious river, the winter, the mountains and their fire – all spent in verses, in tears, in agony. You have the resolve, you have the will and the hundred thousand arrows ready to pierce your skin. But an indecisive proposition is not an answer; for the nature has no substance, no reality here in the mere corporeal. The nature is a question: answered, unanswered? No one quite really knows –
Some argue they do indeed have their answer: they have proof, they say. They act and their actions speak for themselves.
Others – are indecisive – do not even know there is a question – they dance here in the dark – in the sweet blue-grey shadows – delusional maybe – perhaps – oh, no need for answers when there is no troublesome question – how glad these others are!
And there is you, Kyuubei; you were told the question on the very minute you were born – is it a boy? No, it is a girl. It shall be a boy. A circus, this birth! A joke! – a joke that has plagued you ever since – the question so close so constant it has become dear.
(A being that has to answer the question with no clue presented. Has it ever been seen?)
Oh, the irony! An existence, in two words, in a schism: boy, girl. Woman, man.
So, woman, or man? Man or woman? In all these years the question itself has become quite unclear.
The furious river flows. Its swift colors make your skin seem liquid, and the sight makes you gasp with terror. You suddenly imagine yourself, here, swimming in a river, drowned, a spirit haunting fishes and round rolling rocks. You imagine yourself, seeing everything, from the source of the earthquakes to the home where are born tempests. You imagine seeing your name written in clouds – you imagine yourself dying over and over again in winter, freezing in the snow, and becoming the stone of the mountain – you imagine yourself being the mountain – growing – growling to get the squawking crows out of your forests.
Nature does not come with words – it merely exists, here, transforms, there, grows and decays to restart again.
You imagine yourself, then, being, being simply Kyuubei.
Who is Kyuubei? You answer:
Kyuubei is not a man – Kyuubei was meant to be a blade
Kyuubei is not a woman – Kyuubei was never meant to be the Moon’s priestess
Kyuubei has grown to love Otae – Kyuubei has grown to understand they can only be Kyuubei.