Kotori Haruto never hated anything in her life, until smallpox took her parents and she moved to the other side of Edo. Then she hated how the air didn’t smell like the ocean or sound like the docks, hated the old fashioned wooden garage doors, hated missing every sunset because she was inside waiting tables. Uncle Ueda didn’t let her haggle with the rice merchants, like her father had, didn’t believe that she could save him ten percent. He wouldn’t let her talk to anyone, if anyone wanted to talk to her, which they didn’t, except to say, watch it, little girl. Show some respect. Stop chattering. Fix your kimono.
No one in Hachijojima took pilgrimages down the Tokkaido to Kyoto. She had been planning her trip since she was eleven, had plotted every shrine and mountain she wanted to write a haiku about. Aunt Ito wouldn’t hear of it– in Hachijojima, women never went anywhere.
That was the first time her heart was broken.
When a patron started coming to the restaurant just to see Kotori, Aunt Ito exulted. “Arai-san is a fine man, so tall! He owns a wholesale business, his wife died, I’m sure he’s looking for a new woman. We’re lucky you’re attractive.”
Kotori spat in his soba and served him with an insulting smile.
“Foolish girl!” Aunt Ito slapped her. “Don’t you understand? Making a household is the only way to make something for yourself.”
Kotori never wanted to work. She wanted to fight yakuza, wanted to sail to Osaka, wanted to meet the Shogun; she felt the world owed her adventure. What she got instead was pregnant, by foreigner who sailed back to Holland, leaving her with a cross-shaped necklace, a half-gaijin son and nowhere to go.
Her first day back at the docks, passing by the westernized metal surfaces of the shops' garage doors, Kotori put on a red obi and went into business.
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