She prayed to whatever god might be listening: Save my sister, please.
It was the month of hazuki. All of Tokyo was hot, muggy. Komako’s wrist and the shadow of her wrist lifted and hung in front of the lantern, twinned and strange there in the glow of the brazier and the darkness of the sickroom floor.
“Show me, Ko,” her little sister whispered, stirring, her eyes shining. “Show me again. Show me the girl in the dust.”
The oak rafters of the theater creaked around them. Through the shutters, rickshaws rattled past over the wooden streets of the old quarter.
Komako did not think there was time. The third act was already half over and if the stagehands caught them underfoot they would be scolded or beaten or worse. She knew the kabuki and the tempers of its players the way other girls knew calligraphy and etiquette. But she slid back the screen with a soft click and crept in her slippers down to the trapdoor behind the ropes and pulleys, her little sister rising thin as smoke from her tatami to follow.
No one saw them go. The dark below the stage was sweltering and still. She waited until her sister was at the bottom of the crawl space and then went back up and pulled the braided cord of the trapdoor to shut it. Down through the slats drifted the singing of the ghost, the stamp and drag and stamp of the kabuki. Orange light from the stage fell in stripes over her mittened hands and face.
She could hear the rustle of her sister’s obi dragging in the dust and she paused and turned. “Teshi,” she whispered. “Teshi, do you need to rest?”
But her sister, five years old, stubborn, only set her pale face and crawled on past.
They found the paper box among stacks of props and old masks far at the back. It was filled with a silky gray dust, collected carefully by Komako. She unwrapped her hands. The skin was chapped and red-looking.
There was an old mirror, which she uncovered and laid flat for the smooth surface of it, and then she kneeled and dumped out the dust in a slow smoking pile and closed her eyes, waiting for the stillness to come. She could feel the sweat trickle down her rib cage. The dust was cool to the touch and then it got colder. A chill radiated through the heels of her palms and she bit her lip at the quickness of it. Then it came over her. The ache crept into the bones of her wrists, her elbows. She turned her hands slowly, and slowly the dust turned too, rippled across the dark mirror, and her reflection and her sister’s reflection shuddered and dissolved in the swirling sand. Komako could not feel her arms. The cold was creeping into her chest. She opened her eyes and molded the air, gently, softly, and as she did so the dust came together into the shape of a little silhouette, doll-like, and it bowed its little head to Teshi, and she heard her sister laugh softly.
“Make her dance, Ko,” her sister breathed.
And Komako, working her fingers like a puppeteer, danced the little dust creature across the glass of the mirror, its hands pressed demurely together, its legs sawing and folding in a perfect imitation of a kabuki princess.
In the gloom she heard a change in her sister’s breathing and glanced across. Teshi’s eyes were dark and big. Her lips looked very red.
“Teshi?” Komako whispered in concern, her damp hair plastered to her temples. She let the dust swirl and fold itself back down into an inert soft pile. Her hands throbbed. “We should go back up, now. You need to rest.”
Her little sister was weaving, weakly, as if she might fall over.
“Oh, it’s cold, Ko,” she mumbled. Her white skin almost glowed in the darkness. “Why is it so cold?”
* * *
Gekijo mausu, the two sisters were called. Theater mice. The Ichimura-za had stood in the crowded Asakusa Saruwaka-cho district nearly twenty years, ablaze with fire lanterns, famous throughout Tokyo for its kabuki. The two girls lived there after hours and cared for the props and kept the doors locked and the braziers cold, the candles snuffed. The theater had burned to the ground in 1858 and the fear of fire was still real in a city of wood and paper. After the old master retired from the stage his son Kikunosuke kept the girls on. They went unpaid but ate what was left by the actors, balls of sweet rice, half bowls of broth, a fried dumpling on lucky nights. Winter mornings they would hunch over a charcoal brazier while curtains of rain swept the shop fronts outside, and the theater creaked emptily around them, and they’d imagine they were the only two in all the world. For their round eyes and pale skin set them apart. They were hafu and belonged nowhere and to no one. Many were the alleys they would not walk because of the urchins and rag boys who threw rocks and chased them. Yes, they knew what the world could be, its cruelty. Justice existed only on the stage. Their father had sailed off to his own country far in the west while Teshi was still in the womb and when work dried up their mother in despair had tied Teshi to her back and taken Komako by the hand and begged her way north to Tokyo. That was Komako’s earliest memory, walking through the big city gates in the rain.