A Mother’s Love

The atmosphere, once light and buzzing, instantly became delicate, charged with an unspoken voltage.

Every woman at the table maintained a semblance of a smile, but the smiles were now masks, their eyes fixed on Haruka, trying to read something, anything, on his calm, beautiful face. The air grew thick, heavy with anticipation.

“Even though it’s raining, why is it still so hot and stuffy in here?” Izayoi complained, her voice a little too loud. She began fanning herself with a frantic, agitated rhythm. Under the table, hidden by the long tablecloth, her silk-slippered foot gently, insistently, pressed on Haruka’s—a silent, urgent warning not to speak.

He didn’t need her reminder. Haruka understood perfectly. The question wasn’t a question; it was a demand for a declaration of allegiance, a test of loyalty.

Kiyohime realized it too, and a cold knot of anxiety tightened in her stomach. Anyone else would just say they look like their father, mumble a few pleasantries, and it would be over, she thought, her mind racing. But he loves his mother so much. I only made a few harmless jokes about her before, and he already got so angry… He’ll never choose his father. This is going to be a disaster.

She was about to interrupt, to create a diversion, to say anything to shatter the suffocating tension, but he stopped her with a look. A single, steady glance that cut through her panic.

Haruka could have easily dodged the question, but he disliked running away. He knew that as long as he was in the Fujiwara house, he would have to face this question sooner or later. And besides… he saw this not as a trap, but as an opportunity. A chance to finally, definitively, secure his footing.

“You…” Kiyohime started to say, her voice trembling slightly despite her best efforts.

“Trust me,” Haruka whispered, his voice so low, so intimate, that only she could hear it.

Kiyohime’s frantic heart, hearing those two simple words, gradually calmed. The women surrounding them were all her elders, powerful figures even she didn’t dare to be too flippant with, yet Haruka’s face remained serene, a faint, unreadable smile still playing on his lips.

He held out his hand to her.

Kiyohime understood his meaning instantly and handed him the fan Izayoi had given her.

He turned and offered the fan back to its original owner. “Thank you for the loan of your fan,” he said graciously, his voice smooth.

Izayoi slowly, reluctantly, drew her foot back. “There’s no need to return it,” she said, her smile a little strained. “I have already given it to the Second Young Mistress.”

Haruka’s own smile widened. “Then could I perhaps have the one you are holding now?”

Izayoi couldn’t fathom where he got his courage, his audacity. She folded the fan she was holding—All Rivers Run into the Sea—and presented it to him with both hands, a gesture of formal offering. “Then it is yours, Young Master Haruka.”

“Did you write the characters on this yourself?” Haruka asked, accepting the fan. He couldn’t read the elegant, splashed-ink calligraphy, but he recognized the raw, untamed beauty of it.

“I did,” she admitted. “My handwriting is not very good.”

“It is a precious gift,” Haruka said, gently closing the fan with a soft snap. “Besides you, no woman has ever given me a gift.”

“You exaggerate, surely. Not even your mother?”

“She never gave me anything,” Haruka said, his voice even. “Not even for my birthday.”

“What a heartless woman,” Izayoi sighed, her tone laced with practiced pity. “To have received the Young Master’s ‘first time’… I am truly honored.”

No one paid any mind to her flirtatious remark. They were all focused on the word he had so deliberately, so carefully, dropped into the conversation: “mother.”

All eyes were on him, a hundred invisible hands hovering around him, ready to drag him back into the abyss at the slightest misstep.

Kiyohime felt a prickling on her scalp. To be stared at by so many of her elders with such intensity… she would have been a nervous wreck, stumbling over her words.

“You are right,” Haruka said, his voice calm and clear, though inside, his heart was beginning to pound against his ribs like a trapped bird. “My mother was indeed a heartless woman.” He met their gazes, one by one, his composure absolute, unshakable.

The boy, not yet thirteen, broke free of the invisible chains of their judgment. His voice grew stronger, ringing with a surprising power through the suddenly silent hall. “No matter how well I did, from the time I was small, she never praised me once, let alone gave me a gift.”

Everyone’s attention was on him now. The servants in the distance stopped moving, frozen in place. The record player seemed to fall silent, the melancholic melody swallowed by the thick silence. In the grand, silent pantomime of the hall, he was the only spot of color, the only source of sound.

Haruka’s heart was beating wildly, a frantic drum against the quiet. He tapped his thigh with the folded fan, setting a rhythm for his story. “I must have been only this big,” he began, “when I asked my mother, ‘Who is my father?’ She just answered coldly, ‘Your father is dead.'”

He didn’t turn his head, but he could see the reflection of the women’s shifting attitudes in Kiyohime’s wide, expressive eyes. She looked annoyed, which meant the guests were feeling disdain for his mother. But Kiyohime made no move to stop him, which meant they were truly, seriously, listening. That was all the encouragement he needed.

“I never saw my father, not once,” he said. “I don’t even know his name. My mother never gave me anything. But when I was seven years old, she fell ill. I tried to cook for her, to surprise her, but I was too small. The pot was too heavy. I stumbled, and hot oil was about to splash all over my face.”

His voice dropped, pulling them in. “My sick mother, who could barely stand, rushed over in that instant. She pushed me away, hard.”

Haruka remembered it with a perfect, painful clarity that had never faded. “She didn’t help me up. She slapped me, hard, across the face. Then, without another look, she went back to her room. I was so hurt, so full of self-pity, I started to cry. I ran to her bedroom door and sat there, wailing, feeling a sense of vengeful satisfaction with every sob.”

“I cried louder and louder, crying because she didn’t love me, crying because all the other children had parents who loved them and brought them home from school.”

“My mother didn’t say a single word,” he continued, his voice dropping to a near whisper. “I wanted to see the look on her heartless face. I pushed the door open… and I saw my mother collapsed on the floor beside her bed. The skin on half of her arm was burned away, red and raw.”

The faces of the women around the table were impassive masks, but deep in their eyes, something had shifted, a flicker of understanding. The image of Yukishiro Tomoe, a woman they had only known through rumor, began to form in their minds—the image of a proud, difficult, fiercely protective woman.

“To this day,” Haruka said, his voice now quiet, filled with a profound and genuine confusion, “I don’t know if my mother truly loved me or not. And now, someone asks me if I look more like my mother, or my father.”

He knew exactly what the question was hiding. He looked up, his gaze sweeping across the room, holding each of them captive. “I can say with certainty that I look like my mother,” he declared, his voice ringing with a conviction that left no room for doubt or argument. “Because from the moment I opened my eyes, I have never once seen my father.”

His story was finished. The hall was utterly, profoundly silent. No one knew what to say. They couldn’t imagine a child, not yet an adult, uneducated and alone, speaking with such devastating poise and power in front of them. To have raised such a child, they thought as one, that woman must have been truly remarkable.

His mother, Kiyohime thought with a sharp pang of something that felt dangerously like jealousy, was probably only a little less amazing than my own.

Izayoi, however, felt a sense of pessimistic dread wash over her. Her good mood had vanished completely. Because she saw that someone had arrived. She began to fan herself furiously again. Perhaps I shouldn’t have given him the fan, she thought, a cold knot forming in her stomach.

Clap. Clap. Clap.

The sound of slow, deliberate applause echoed through the silent hall, each clap like a stone dropping into a still pond.

Everyone turned, a beat too late, and immediately bowed their heads in deep, instinctual respect. “Lady Murasaki.”

“I can say with certainty that you look like your mother,” a voice said, a sound so beautiful it could melt snow, so rich it could break your heart.

Haruka looked over. The single spot of color in the silent play, the role of the protagonist, had just been stolen from him.

A woman in a long, flowing purple kimono was gliding toward them, her movements a study in languid, graceful elegance. She carried herself with a lazy, innate arrogance, as if no one else in the room was worthy of her notice. Her dark hair was piled high on her head, and her hands were adjusting a single, jeweled hairpin that glittered in the light.

Her face was, without a doubt, the most beautiful Haruka had ever seen in his life.

Even with his formidable self-control, he was stunned into silence for two or three long seconds, his mind completely, utterly captivated. She… she must be Lady Murasaki… the one who stole my father from my mother… How can she be so beautiful… more beautiful than my own mother… The thought shamed him, a betrayal he quickly, violently, pushed away.

Lady Murasaki was his mother’s rival, half an enemy. He shouldn’t feel hatred, perhaps, but he certainly shouldn’t feel this… this breathless admiration. But her beauty was so staggering, so absolute, that just looking at her, it was impossible to harbor any ill will. The feeling left him ashamed and disgusted with himself.

He didn’t know that Lady Murasaki, seeing him, was also experiencing a flicker of genuine surprise. If he weren’t still so young, so green, she thought, I would have summoned him to my side for a closer inspection. Even so, she couldn’t help but look at him for a few moments longer. So this is the boy. Momozawa Ai was right, he is more beautiful than the ‘Shining Prince’. But who does he resemble?

Images flashed through her mind. The boy looked like his father, but he also looked so much like his mother. It was impossible to say who he favored more. His parents had both been exceptionally, unfairly beautiful. He had not simply inherited the features of one or the other, but had taken the best of both, with none of their flaws. If his parents were alive, they would likely argue endlessly, possessively, over who he resembled more.

But hearing Haruka’s story, the image of Yukishiro Tomoe, which had been fading in her memory, became sharp and vivid once more. Her brow furrowed slightly. She could see the shadow of that annoying, stubborn, infuriating woman in this boy. She had hated Tomoe, had wanted to take everything from her. And now, even her most precious possession, her son, would be remade. He would become something of her own.

Lady Murasaki smiled, a slow, silken caress of a smile that wrapped around Haruka, pulling him in.

“Because you,” she finished his sentence for him, her voice a devastatingly soft declaration, “are my son.”