Tokyo Japan
Juuban Prefecture
I was not exactly leading a charmed life. I am a college student by day, and by night… let's just say I am somewhat of a firewalker. I am the Sakura Maiden, the Nectar Laden Bloom. I can dance and make you melt like putty in my outstretched palm. To what do I owe this exciting and dangerous lifestyle? I’ll tell you, my accursed father.
Most nights, when not working, I would sit and imagine a dark mysterious lover visiting me in my room and making love to me. But Jadeite's youthful face became my waking fantasy. I imagined him cupping my substantial handfuls and kissing my neck, that boy, naked and beautiful. I pictured his long blonde hair flowing over his shoulders and muscular chest. I relived that encounter. Remembering how I clung to him. After we had finished having sex, we cried together in each other’s arms. We stayed like that for a time, just holding onto one another, the moonlight streaming over our naked bodies. An act forged by those with not our welfare in mind, but the money we could make, or the status attained, the gentle act became almost a parody of the image we must have presented I the afterglow of surprising tenderness.
Then that bitch, Nehelenia demanded we open the door. She inspected the bed, and examined both our genitals to ensure we had done the deed. Satisfied, she kissed us both and left.
I pushed back my long black hair off my shoulders and imagined the soft kisses of my fantasy man as he seduced me, as I unbuttoned my nightgown. I closed my eyes, and gave myself to my pleasure. I felt the rush of ecstasy subside as I sat in front of the mirror on the rug cross-legged, my reflection looking sad. I felt so guilty, but why, the ultimate irony as love and sex were confused given my torrid lifestyle. I suppose in some small way, I wished to make a connection with Jad, to hold a place in my heart and to love him and be a woman for him for the right reasons, not for the whims of an underworld mistress or anyone else for that matter. But for that moment, my fantasies, as warped in the minds of some as these might have been was a bridge to a dream, a slim hope that I would find my way out of my twilight mirror-like existence and find love and freedom.
---
I was glad I had not told mother of my ‘work’ at the club. Father had conveniently come up with the perfect alibi.
‘Cram school’
I smirked at the false report cards and other threads of this elaborate subterfuge. Father was devious I must say. I had opened up to mother on my sixteenth birthday, telling all. She wasn’t that surprised. Mother expected I would be dragged into the sordid world of the Shachihoko, eventually. She just went into denial, preferring to believe the myth that I was your average junior high school student without a care in the world. I couldn’t blame her.
She hadn’t judged me. In fact, we’d grown much closer after that. But my main reason for holding back, I didn’t need her to suffer any more than she had already. And besides, I was feeling like being a Marta.
Six months later, I was sitting on the end of my bed, still listening to my parents arguing, the sound of the wind outside the only respite. It was like a scene in a Shakespearean play, drama queen Ophelia and the king going head-to-head, toe-to-toe. The screaming, the crying and the excuses, and the taunts and the accusations of infidelity; I'd heard it all for years.
Long before father had become a hired killer, I loved and respected him. Once employed at the Tsibuko market as a seller of quality watches and jewelry, we were happy then. But all that had changed after the night he came home with a strange stone-faced man by the name of Rubeus. Apparently, he was offered a new job. Our home was now paid for. Not long after this, he bought a renovated Edo period homestead at Lake Biwa in Ômi province, not far from Kyoto. He was also granted, let's just say, other incentives, mostly of the female variety.
Oh, the fucking ironies of life; I had been so proud of my mother for leaving him. But this was short lived. One day I had come home from school -- in my other life -- to find that after years of working up the courage to leave him, mother had come back to him.
‘Whoopti-fucking-do!'
Why she would give him another chance escaped me. He beat her, screwed her and all-but had her dance for him. She was only different to her daughter by degrees, save the fact she wasn't a whore like me. But for all her pain and suffering, she may as well have been.
But I learned from her years later that if she hadn’t put on this gauche performance, he would have beaten her to a pulp, perhaps even killed her. I cringed at the thought.
I lamented so much during those days, and the pain of seeing her physically beaten or worse had me constantly on edge. I was determined to do something about this, but wasn’t sure how, but if the opportunity arose I would seize it with both hands.
