I have loved precious few in my time on earth. I loved the little cat I found and brought home when I was five. I loved my dear friend Tsukiko who died when I was eleven. I loved Machi, the woman in Yokohama who liberated me. And I loved my older brother. And therein lies the root of my sins.

He wasn’t my real brother, mind you. My Mother was a widow and the man I called ‘Father’ a widower. They were wealthy, the both of them, and upper class. They married a year after my real father died. A year and a half after I was born. The man I called ‘brother’ was already of the age to remember those details and he told me some time later. But it was all the same in the eyes of our family.

1 Memoirs of a Broken Spirit

By Nami

It was a bright a sunny morning in the middle of January. I was standing in the street, watching the other children romp in the snow. I wished that she could join them. That I could put on my brother’s old work pants with my wool stockings and straw shoes and jump into the deepest snowdrift I could find, like I used to. But Mother said that was improper behaviour for a young lady. Ever since I had begun her monthly moon cycle, in fact, Mother strictly forbade my doing half the things I used to be able to do freely.

When my cycle came, I was forced to wear a piece of thick cloth tied between my legs until the bleeding stopped. And that meant that I couldn’t be as active as I was used to. So Mother kept me indoor at all times, teaching me embroidery and other woman craft that would, supposedly, be useful when Father found the perfect husband for me.

The only reason I was out today was because my brother, Kagetsuya, was taking me to the market. He was much more lenient than Mother’s servants and he never got angry when I stopped to watch the snow fall or the children in the snow.

I recognized some of my old playmates there, among the other children. They were mostly male and all at least a year or two beneath me. I was just out of my thirteenth year and already a woman at that age. It was unacceptable; Mother admonished me often; for me, the eldest daughter of a noble household and a woman now, to be frolicking with the servants’ sons. People would begin to talk and who knew what those dirty-minded little gutter dwellers thought about. She would tell me over and over again that if I ever became pregnant with a child beneath my status, she would disown me immediately.

So I didn’t play with my old friends anymore. I spent my free time walking with Kagetsuya or talking with my dead best friend’s little brother through the gate surrounding our garden. He would come to hear stories about his sister and I told them, glad to relive those happy days. I was forced to put the words of the stories to a poem or a song or to hold a scroll on my lap, as though I were practicing some lesson Mother had given me that morning.

But this story is not meant to be the retelling of my childhood. The purpose of this story is to tell how I arrived in such a dreadful place as this mountain convent surrounded only by the harsh nuns and their crass statements about my upbringing.

Kagetsuya had always been very protective of me. He used to call me hime-ko, “little princessâ€