Nodoka!”
“Hai, Otousan?”
“I need to talk with you about your status here.”
Nodoka dropped to her knees, hands folded in her lap, eyes downcast. She had been expecting this. Ever since the doctor said her mother would not recover… and the funeral had been yesterday.
“You know, Nodoka, you aren’t really my child.”
“I know, Otousan.” Katamari had never let her mother forget, never let her forget that she was another man’s offspring.
“I never accepted legal responsibility for you, you know,” her stepfather went on. “I only supported you for your mother’s sake.”
“I understand.” She knew Katamari had never legally adopted her, never entered her on his family register, even though she was known by his name at school, even though she had to call him Otousan. He’s probably going to make me quit school.
“It’s not every man who would take in a woman with someone else’s child.” The familiar litany that she had listened to almost every day and night for ten years, nobody else would have you, you useless bitch…
“I know you cared for Okaasan very much.”
Katamari snorted. “A man’s got needs, and it’s a woman’s job to take care of those needs.”
“Okaasan took good care of you. I’ve tried hard to take her place, but I know I can never be what she was.” Almost since Nodoka could remember, her mother had tirelessly cooked, cleaned and mended for this man, had uncomplainingly endured his constant faultfinding and tried her best to meet his often contradictory demands.
“I know you want to finish high school, Nodoka.”
What was he getting at?
“We could both have what we want, if you really did take your mother’s place.”
“What do you mean, Otousan? I’m already doing all the housework.”
“You’ve grown into quite a pretty woman, Nodoka. Much prettier than your mother, and fresh. It’s been a long time since I’ve had anything but used goods. I want you to take care of all my needs, the way your mother did before she got sick. I’ll let you keep on living here, and you can keep going to school as long as you take good care of me.”
She recoiled, almost dizzy with horror. “You want me to…” This can’t be happening! He’s my father! But of course he wasn’t. Her real father had died when she was a little girl. She remembered him, a little. He had been the complete opposite of the hulking Katamari: a small, slender man, with the same auburn hair and sapphire eyes as Nodoka, and a soft, gentle voice. “Your hands are too small to grip it properly, No-chan. I’ll teach you the right way when you’re older.” His arms around her, his hands closing over hers on the katana’s smooth hilt…
“Do… do I have to decide right now?” She was almost too scared to talk. If he decided to claim his “rights” now there wouldn’t be anything she could do. Not that there was much she could do anyway… “I have to go to the market, and fix dinner, and do my homework…”
“Of course. Take your time, Nodoka. I won’t need your answer until later tonight.” Katamari smiled, the false smile he used to the customers in his magazine store. He knew that Nodoka only had one choice. She had no real friends, no skills to support herself. Of course she would come back.
Nodoka went first to the shrine. She rinsed her hands and her mouth, tossed a few yen into the offering box, and clapped her hands twice. Kamisama… Tou-chan… Okaasan… help me!
She didn’t feel any better. It was stupid to think the spirits could help her. There probably weren’t any spirits anyway. She was just as trapped as her mother had been.
“Sometimes it helps if you buy a fortune.”
Nodoka nearly jumped out of her skin. But it was only the priest. The old man’s eyes twinkled at her behind his glasses.
“That’s right,” he cackled. “Pretty girls with troubles should buy fortunes!”
Nodoka sweatdropped. Sometimes the priest sounded very wise… and sometimes he just sounded senile. Today he just sounded senile.
“You never know what the kami might tell you… only five yen!” His eyes didn’t look senile.
She put her coin into the slot and took the slip that indicated the right drawer to open. Her fingers shook a little as she tore open the envelope.
Help can be found near water.
That’s it? She had actually begun to believe… disappointment dropped into her heart like a lump of ice. Stupid, stupid, stupid! She squeezed her stinging eyes shut for a moment. Then she took a deep breath, shoved the paper into her purse, and turned back toward the shrine gate.
“You really ought to do what it says,” the priest told her. He didn’t seem senile at all now. He seemed mysterious and powerful. She felt like a bug on a pin, skewered by his gaze. “The kami know their business. Follow what they tell you, and you won’t regret it. Now go on, your chance won’t wait all day.”
Nodoka almost ran down the shrine steps.
It was peaceful next to the river. A crazy homeless woman used to have a shack under the bridge; she had drowned in a flood last fall but the local children were still in the habit of avoiding the place – they probably thought it was haunted. Maybe I’ll go crazy and build a shack here… The water sparkled in the afternoon sunlight. I wonder if that old woman suffered when she went into the river. Would it hurt… or would it just feel like letting go of everything?
It seems like all the help I’m going to get.
“Aww, don’t do that.”
Nodoka looked up, started by the male who had seemingly read her mind.
The young man took a step back, waving his hands in a placating gesture. “Don’t get mad, I just can’t stand seein’ girls cry.” He took another step back, missed his footing, and fell with a splash into the river.
Her hands flew to her mouth. “Oh! I’m so sorry!”
He raised his hand to the back of his head in embarrassment and began to laugh. He looked so ridiculous, with water streaming out of his sodden hat – and the bright-colored hat looked so strange with his Chinese shirt – that Nodoka started laughing too. But then she thought about what she had to go home to, that there would be no more bright innocent moments like this for her, and she started crying again. She dropped to her knees and buried her face in her hands, suddenly helpless under the crushing weight of misery.
“Oi, it ain’t that bad.” There was something wet and white being shoved into her face. She blinked at a large, sodden handkerchief. “It ain’t like you pushed me or nothin.”
Nodoka shook her head. “That’s not it. It’s not you at all.”
“If you got a problem…”
She looked up into the youth’s broad, homely face. “It’s nothing.”
“Hey, I’m s’posed to protect people. It’s a martial artist’s duty. So c’mon, tell me. Maybe I can help.”
Help can be found near water…
So she found herself telling him everything. About her mother’s death, and her stepfather’s ultimatum, and her terror of having nowhere to go except the streets, nothing to support herself with except her body.
“Couldn’t you run away?”
“What would I do? I don’t have enough money for a train ticket anywhere, he only gives me enough to do the shopping. I even have to save to have a few yen for an offering! And I don’t have any friends. He wouldn’t let me join any clubs in middle school, and then Okaasan got sick and I had to come straight home and do all her work.”
“Did your mom have any family? Or your real father?”
She shook her head. “Okaasan didn’t have anybody. Tou-chan had some relatives, we went to see them once when I was little. I don’t remember where they lived though, only that we rode on a train for a long time and then we had to go up about a million steps. I think maybe it was a shrine…” she sighed.
“You know, I’ve got a place you could stay. My mom’s house – it’s mine now she’s dead, but I’m always on the road trainin’ so it’s empty.”
She shook her head, stared at the ground. “No… I couldn’t… there’s no way I could repay you for such kindness…”
“No, really. It ain’t like I’m ever there anyway. And I ain’t gonna make ya do… do stuff. ’Less ya want to. I mean, I ain’t no weirdo, I like girls fine, I just…” He trailed off into stammering, his round face red as a sunset.
“I understand,” she smiled. “But I couldn’t. Thank you anyway, it’s really nice that you care.”
“At least lemme walk home with ya. Maybe I can beat some sense into that bastard or somethin’.”
She stopped outside the gate of a small house. “Thank you for cheering me up.”
“Want me to come in with ya?”
She shook her head. “No, it’s better if you don’t. There isn’t anything you can do now.”
He stayed on the sidewalk, watching her as she walked through the gate and disappeared into the house. How come I always get mixed up with weird girls, he wondered. He wanted to run away, but he couldn’t. It’s a martial artist’s duty to protect the weak. He clung to that, torn between his instinct to run and the memory of the girl’s tears. What kinda asshole would do that to a kid he’s raised, even if she ain’t his own blood?
“Tadaima,” Nodoka called. No one answered. She went into the kitchen, put the groceries away, and got out the rice cooker. Maybe I should have accepted that young man’s offer… but how could I burden a stranger with my problems? She began cutting up vegetables for dinner, feeling like she was preparing the feast for her own funeral.
Katamari had spent the time in his own room, “working.” He’d gotten in a shipment of magazines for his special customers, and of course he had to check them out – he couldn’t go palming off inferior merchandise now, could he? It was a prime shipment, page after glossy page of naked young girls, most of them weeping in terror and pain as their maiden bodies were torn open by their own fathers. And I’m finally going to get to do that! It wouldn’t be quite as exciting as doing it to his own blood, but that couldn’t be helped; the useless bimbo had never caught from him… but maybe Nodoka’ll give me a daughter, and I can…
It was getting time for the girl to be home. He wasn’t sure he wanted to wait for dinner; looking at the pictures had aroused him to the point where it was actually painful. So he decided not to wait for her to call him, but to go into the kitchen and surprise her.
A flash of color outside the front gate caught his eye. A man… or was he only a boy? It was hard to tell… He wondered if the guy were an undercover cop; he’d been hearing rumors about a crackdown on rorikon pornography, though he’d always figured his operation was too small to attract police attention. On second thought, the guy was probably too young and too weird looking. The white tunic looked like something out of a Hong Kong action movie, and the bright-colored hat was the sort that old men wore on the golf course to keep the sun off their bald heads. Definitely too conspicuous to be a cop… so what was he doing hanging around the house?
Nodoka…
There she was in the kitchen, cutting up vegetables and looking like Miss Domestic Purity.
Little whore, sneaking out to meet some no-good boy…
“So, Nodoka. Are you ready to keep your part of the bargain?”
She dropped her knife, backed away slowly. “O… Otousan…”
He savored the fear in her eyes. “Thought you’d run out on me, didn’t you, little tramp? I saw your boyfriend out there, waiting for you. What were you going to do, sneak out after I was asleep?”
She shook her head wildly. “I… I don’t have a boyfriend! There’s no one out there!”
“You don’t know a boy in a white tunic and a weird hat? Looks like some kind of loser?”
Masaka…
“You gave him what shoulda been mine, didn’t you, you little whore!”
Frantically she shook her head and put out her hands, but his blow knocked her across the kitchen. She felt him on top of her, tearing at her dress, his hot, sour breath on her neck…
Then nothing. Well, not nothing, but something like a fierce wind, and a sound like the mallet made when she pounded cutlets, and Katamari wasn’t on top of her any more, he was on the other side of the kitchen, all in a heap like a pile of discarded rags.
“You okay?”
It was the young man from the riverbank. Somehow she’d known it would be. He relaxed from his fighting stance when he saw that Katamari wasn’t getting up.
“I think so. “Thank you.”
“He didn’t…”
She shook her head. “No, he only tore my dress.”
He shuffled his feet, looked away. “Yeah, well… you better get your stuff together. We oughtta get outta here ’fore he wakes up.”
She stared at him in wide-eyed wonder, her hand to her mouth. “I can’t…”
“Well ya can’t stay here with him!” the youth exploded. “And if ya call the cops they might not believe ya. C’mon, don’t be a moron. Look, I prob’ly won’t even be home most of the time, it’ll be just like livin’ by yourself. Go get changed and get your stuff.”
Nodoka spread out a furoshiki on her bed and looked over her scant wardrobe. There wasn’t a lot she wanted to take. She wouldn’t be needing her school uniforms, only her underthings… her one other decent dress, getting a little tight now… comb and brush. She had no other keepsakes. No toys, no charms from past Tanabata festivals, no souvenirs from class trips. Only… she rummaged in the bottom drawer of her dresser and brought out a long, slender object wrapped in purple cloth. Only this. She ran her hands over the silk wrapping. All she had left of heritage, of pride, of honor. All she had left of her father.
She cradled her father’s sword in the crook of her arm, picked up her bundle, and went downstairs.
“That all ya got?” the young man asked, coming in from the direction of her father’s room.
She nodded.
“Well, let’s get goin’ then.”
She followed him out of the house, and never looked back.
“Ano… if I am going to stay in your home, I should at least know your name.”
He gave an embarrassed laugh and pushed at his hat so it fell from his head. Even though he didn’t seem to be too many years older than herself, his black hair surrounded a circular patch of bald scalp. “Didn’t I tell you? Sorry… it’s Genma Saotome. Age 20. But I don’t know yours either.”
“Nodoka Ka… no, that’s his name, he made me use it but my real name’s Nodoka Eitou, and I’m sixteen.”
NOTES, EXPLANATIONS ETC.
Whatever drove Nodoka to marry a lout like Genma? I’ve wondered about that for years. Some time back I invented a character without a story: Makoto Eitou – veteran, kendo-master, wanderer (and all I knew of Kenshin at the time was who’s-the-scarred-up-redhead?) who was supposed to be Nodoka’s father. Part of my assumption about him was that he had died when Nodoka was very young. Katamari turned out a lot sleazier than my original intent. I didn’t originally mean for her situation to be quite as desperate as it turned out; it just wrote that way. A lot of the rest of the plot seems to be from the horrible trashy romance novels my mother used to read when I was a kid; I tended to devour them whenever I was sick.
High school in Japan is not compulsory, but there are very few opportunities for someone without a diploma. According to a report that showed up on the FFML, many businesses even require a high school education for low-end “baito” part-time jobs. In fact, in the current depressed economy, college graduates are losing out on jobs to people with postgraduate degrees. Without it (or some equivalent like a traditional apprenticeship), aboutthe only things open are crime or, for a girl, prostitution.
Buying “fortunes” at a shrine is taken from an episode of Blue Seed. I have no idea where the priest came from, he doesn’t have a name or anything, he just wrote himself into the scene. He’s more or less based on Rei’s grandfather in Sailor Moon.
The name “Eitou” means “sharp sword.” A long time ago I read an interview with Rumiko Takahashi where she said that Ranma’s name came from the idiom “kaitou ranma,” written with the kanji for “sharp sword” and “anarchy,” which means to give a ready solution to a difficult problem. Unfortunately “kaitou” has a better-known soundalike meaning of “mysterious thief” which I didn’t want to use, so I looked up another synonym.
Rorikon, or lolicon, is short for “Lolita Complex” – which is about older men being sexually excited by barely- or not-yet-pubescent girls. It’s quite openly practiced in Japan, at least in its more harmless aspect, where young girls pose nude or partially clothed, professional photographers publish high-priced artbooks of these pictures, and popular models become international stars. However, it also has its darker side, and what Katamari is dealing in is the sleaziest kind of kiddie-porn. I wanted to give him no redeeming qualities whatever.