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Yoru. The name given to her by her mother, a concession by her father— reparations, in his mind, for her suffering.
It means evening, night. A breath held by sky, swallowing up the sun, until it exhales, the next day rising like plumes of smoke from the straight-laced maw of the horizon. A day that is already finished, where time seems to spool in circles like the quietude of her mind in the darkness of the eve. The starless City night loved her in its endless vacuity, and she loved it in turn.
Shiomi, the manacle wrapped around the ankle of her mother, passed down to her as a name. All it means is that her family — her father’s side — made their trade in overseeing salt flats.
It has no other meaning. It exists to show ownership. That her mother is his wife. That she is his daughter.
Mother and daughter.
Daughter and mother.
Both owned by the same man.
Her mother, a proper and upright woman, kept Yoru’s hair cropped short, close to her head, for fear that her inky tresses would grow in as glossy and beautiful as her own, and that this would attract men to the house.
Not boys.
Men.
Yoru was six when she asked her mother why she couldn’t have long hair like her, and did not understand the answer when a man — her father — already resided in their home. She liked her mother’s hair, thinking of it like the night sky, and would sometimes crawl into the space between her mother’s back and her hair, thinking of it as a blank pane of nothingness hiding her away.
She was six and too big to hide fully.
And then, one day, her mother cast her out of the house.
Nothing happened.
She was playing outside, as she always did, and her father was watching her, a rare occurrence, and then the sun was setting and her father was no longer there and when she turned the handle of their door to go inside, she found it locked, her house hers no longer, and she could not fathom why.
She sat on the porch for a long, long time.
Until it felt like she belonged to the night and the night belonged to her.
She remembers her mother’s only piece of advice, her only explanation, said through the heavy wooden door — “Do not become like me.”
And then all was quiet.
Shiomi Yoru does not heed this advice.
She doesn’t know her hair has indigo highlights until it grows out, the same shade as the sky after the sun retreats below the skyline, the afterimage of its light still making the sky glow before night truly falls.
She doesn’t know anything about herself, not really.
Not until her master teaches her.
He plucks her from the porch that is not hers any longer and for the first time the night is illuminated by a single star.
He calls himself the Diwei Star and has a tiger mask in place of a face, and wears a montsuki ensemble, his haori himo an indigo that he will tell her reminds him of her hair when it begins to grow longer. Unbeknownst to her he will pluck a single one of these indigo hairs from her head as she watches the starless sky, and braid it into the rest of those silken cords.
When she asks him why he always dresses as a bridegroom, he laughs and says that because he was left at the altar in his youth, he is ever waiting for his bride. Says that he’s a tiger wearing the skin of a man, and once he’s had true love’s kiss, he’ll transform back and slink into the shadows where he belongs.
So don’t ever kiss me, he would often joke. For I quite like being a man.
This story never sat right with Yoru. In the fairytales she remembers, true love’s kiss was supposed to turn a transformed man back into a human, not the other way around. This story, in her eyes, was terribly unfair.
But life isn’t fair, he would say, laughing again, his yellow eyes curving into crescents through the mask as if this was not a sad thing to say.
He would tell her many a fantastic and nonsensical tale, his voice having the rasp of a man who smoked for a long time, but never once did he smoke in front of her.
He used to say that smoking is for adults, and that if she chooses to smoke when she’s all grown up, he’ll share her first cig with her.
That day never comes.
It never comes because, foolishly, on the eve of her eighteenth birthday, while he sleeps she raises his mask and presses a kiss to the lips she did not think existed until then, and she can taste the smoke, blue — indigo — in her mouth.
She sleeps against his chest as she always does, the rhythm of his breathing and steady beat of his heart belying nothing, but when she wakes she is masterless, alone, a single star shining by itself in the sky.
Shiomi Yoru curls against herself, clutching sword to breast, the only proof that her master once belonged to her.
In her dreams she hunts tigers, thinking that if she can just peel the striped hide back, she’ll find a man. But instead there is void, and her hands, her lips, fall through nothingness.
She styles herself as a bride. Body hidden beneath layers of kimono, heavy shiromuku cradling her body. She wears a veil to shield her face from all but her would-be husband, only her hair, dark as the night sky with bits of indigo peppered throughout, peeking from beneath as a small beacon, just in case a tiger comes looking for the evening sky.
Under the layers of silken fabric, she feels cocooned, a silkworm dreaming of being a moth.
The dreaming of the sky is enough.
Because if she doesn’t dream of the sky, she dreams of fingers trailing along her back, teaching her of time, how it is not a line, but a coil, a spiral, curling forever and ever, never reaching an end.
Pain, a voice rasps, low as a tiger’s growl, only lasts a moment. But time goes round and round, pressing on old wounds, making them ache.
Pleasure, too.
Feelings spiral together in the web time weaves until pleasure and pain are knotted together, and it feels like both will last a lifetime.
It’s unfair.
She tries every carton of smokes she sees, none of them tasting quite right, and settles on a brand with an indigo label.
By the time she settles on one, she’s tasted so many that smoke tastes like nothing to her now.
Maybe that’s why it happens.
She styles herself as a tiger’s bride, but she kills all the tigers she sees until no beast dares appear before her.
Until she is the bride of nothingness.
And then nothingness itself bares down on her with yellow eyes and a bridegroom’s suit, and this is not her husband, but it feels so good that perhaps she pretends it is.
Sometimes, she remembers.
Her father had yellow eyes, too.