Chapter 4: Monster

Yukina’s memory of her mother was an indelible brand, a complex character etched into her bones as deeply and irrevocably as a baby’s first words.

Her mother possessed narrow, almond eyes. A single, cool glance was a physical force, enough to make Yukina’s heart feel as if it were being squeezed by an invisible hand. She was a woman of tyrannical beauty, her power absolute and unquestioned.

Yukina could still feel the humid air of that summer afternoon, the scent of rain on the tatami mats. Her mother had gathered the children, presenting a lacquered box of sweets. “I have a number of sweets in this box,” she had announced, her voice as smooth and cold as polished stone. “Whoever guesses correctly may come forward and take one.”

Before the words had fully settled in the quiet room, a young Yukina, standing closest, had eagerly piped up. “Eight! There are eight! And they’re daifuku!” She could see them perfectly, eight plump, pink mounds nestled in silk paper through the transparent lid.

Her mother didn’t even grace her with a glance. She lifted the lid. “There are seven daifuku here,” she said calmly, her voice unchanging. “Whoever answers correctly may come forward and take one.”

Yukina froze, the world tilting on its axis. The eight daifuku sat there, a clear, undeniable fact.

The first to react was Yukina’s only sister. Dressed in a violet kimono, she moved with the weightless, silent grace of a butterfly. She stepped forward, her small face a perfect mask of reverence. “There are seven daifuku.”

Her mother stared at her sister for a long, unnerving moment. If it had been Yukina under that intense, appraising gaze, she would have dissolved into trembling tears. But her sister simply stood with her head bowed, radiating nothing but placid respect. Her mother granted her a daifuku.

With the precedent set, the other children from the branch families all murmured “seven,” their voices a chorus of compliance, and one by one, received their reward.

Only Yukina remained silent, biting her lip so hard she tasted the metallic tang of blood.

Her mother’s gaze finally fell upon her. “How many daifuku are there?”

“Eight!” Yukina didn’t dare look at her mother’s face. She fixed her eyes on the box, on the single sweet that remained.

“Look at me.” The command was soft, but it held the unyielding force of a tidal wave.

Yukina forced her head up. Her mother glanced around the room, and Yukina’s eyes followed. All the other children stood like perfect statues, holding their sweets, not daring to move, not daring to even breathe too loudly.

Then, her mother picked up the last daifuku and, in a single, delicate bite, consumed it. “There were only seven,” she said, her eyes locking with Yukina’s.

Yukina would never forget that look. Whether it was contempt for her defiance or a chilling lesson in the nature of power, she could no longer say. She only knew that a profound, bone-deep chill had enveloped her, freezing her heart solid.

Even now, years later, walking under the warm sun, the memory still sent shivers of ice down her spine.

A maid led the way, and beside Yukina walked her cousin, two years her senior. After crossing the long, silent courtyard, the maid opened the bedroom door. The cloying, medicinal smell of incense and decay immediately assaulted her nostrils.

Yukina looked with a knot of complicated feelings at the figure on the bed. The woman lying there was a stranger, a withered ghost inhabiting the shell of the mother she remembered.

“It hurts, it hurts so much! I need to pee… someone help me!”

A thin silk screen, painted with faded cranes, separated Yukina from her mother. The shadow of a maid flickered behind it, holding a chamber pot.

“It hurts, God, it hurts, it’s coming, get ready…” The agonized wails were thin and reedy, a sound of pure animal suffering that filled Yukina’s ears.

“Young ladies, if you would please wait outside for a moment,” a maid requested, her voice strained, ushering Yukina and her cousin into an adjacent room.

Yukina stopped her. “How is she?”

“The mistress is… in good spirits, all things considered,” the maid replied, her face a carefully blank mask.

“What did the doctor say?”

The maid shook her head.

“The doctor can’t do anything?!”

The maid’s voice dropped to a whisper. “The mistress has not seen a doctor.”

“Why not!”

“She says she has a… strange illness. She feels constant, excruciating pain and the urge to relieve herself, but nothing ever comes out. And her appetite… she eats constantly, as if possessed by a bottomless hunger. And… she has not had a bowel movement in almost a month.”

“How can that be? Then why hasn’t anyone called a doctor!” Yukina felt a surge of helpless anger.

The maid lowered her voice even further. “The mistress has summoned a miko from the Ise Grand Shrine.”

“What?”

“She believes there is a yokai… a monster… in her belly. She has asked a shrine maiden to perform an exorcism.”

“That’s absurd!”

Yukina was furious, but also felt a profound, chilling sense of helplessness. In this entire, massive Fujiwara clan, was there not a single person who dared to reason with her mother? But then she remembered her mother’s tyrannical will, the cold lesson of the daifuku, and she fell silent.

“Hungry… I’m so hungry!” The cry pierced through the wall, thin and desperate. Yukina couldn’t stand it any longer. Ignoring the maid’s protests, she pushed back into her mother’s bedroom. She saw her mother snatching rice balls from a maid’s hand and stuffing them into her mouth, one after another, with a frantic, desperate energy. Each was the size of a grown man’s fist. She ate twelve without stopping.

Yukina was horrified. She rushed forward, but a maid held her back. “My lady, please… she has been like this for a month.”

Yukina was dumbfounded. Did her mother have a black hole in her stomach? She looked at her mother’s emaciated frame, like a dry twig that would snap at the slightest touch. The beautiful, formidable woman of her memory was gone, her face now the sallow, lifeless color of wet cement.

Not ten minutes later, she began to wail again. “So hungry, so hungry!” A maid, already prepared, brought over a large bowl of chazuke and began spooning it into her mother’s mouth like a factory conveyor belt.

Yukina felt numb. She, too, began to wonder if there truly was a monster in her mother’s stomach, a parasite stealing all her nourishment. How else could she possibly eat so much?

“The miko from the Ise Grand Shrine is here!” her cousin called out.

Escorted by two maids, a woman in the white and red robes of a shrine maiden entered the room. Yukina thought she looked less like a maiden and more like an ancient crone. She was an old woman, perhaps in her eighties, her face a mask of wrinkles like a dried-up riverbed.

A maid pulled back the silk screen. The miko stepped inside and began speaking to her mother in low, murmuring tones. Soon, she emerged, lit a stick of incense on a nearby cabinet, and ordered a maid to bring her a bowl of water.

Yukina stopped the maid and poured the water herself, placing it on the cabinet and standing aside. She watched the miko with the cynical eyes of a modern woman watching a charlatan, waiting to see what tricks she would perform.

The miko clasped her hands together and began to chant, her voice a low, guttural drone. Almost immediately, a scream came from behind the screen. The bowl of clear water began to slowly, impossibly, turn the color of blood.

Yukina stared, her breath caught in her throat. She had poured that water herself.

With every line the miko chanted, her mother let out another piercing scream. As the miko’s pitch rose, so did the agony in her mother’s cries. As the miko finished with a final, high-pitched wail, her mother suddenly fell silent.

The miko drew a short sword, the length of a baby’s arm, from her robes. “There is a monster in her belly!” she declared with grim certainty.

Yukina found it laughable. But her amusement vanished when she saw it—a flicker of a black shadow darting across the room, a distortion in the air. She blinked, and it was gone. Yet she knew, with a terrifying certainty, that she had seen it.

“Take this.” The miko gravely handed her the short sword. It was heavy, a crude, unsharpened piece of iron. “What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Dance.”

“Dance? How?”

The miko closed her eyes.

Yukina frowned, and then she saw it again. The black shadow flickered into existence by the far wall, silent and menacing. She gasped, and at the same moment, the miko’s chanting filled the air. To her horror, her own body began to move, to dance, her limbs controlled by an unseen force.

Her mother began to scream again, but this time, the thin, reedy cries of an infant were mixed with her own. A strange, cold wind whipped through the bedroom, making the silk screens billow and snap. The black shadow began to solidify, taking the form of a hunched, monkey-like creature with sharpened goat horns and cruel, glittering fangs.

Yukina screamed, a raw sound of pure terror, and the sword flew from her hand, embedding itself deep into the tatami floor. At the same instant, the miko cried out and collapsed, drenched in sweat.

Covered in a cold sweat herself, Yukina frantically looked around. The shadow was gone. She looked at the collapsed miko with a newfound awe. “The monster… is it gone?”

The miko shook her head, speaking with great difficulty. “It is too powerful. A male of the direct bloodline must wield the sword to drive it away.”

Everything that had just happened was so bizarre, so impossible, that Yukina had no choice but to believe. Hearing the requirement, she hesitated. “A male relative? Does it have to be?”

The miko nodded. Her cousin, understanding the grim implication, asked timidly, “My husband… or my brother, perhaps?”

The miko shook her head again. “It must be a direct blood relative.”

“And if there are no direct male relatives?”

The miko fell silent. Everyone in the room understood. If the old mistress died, the Fujiwara family would be thrown into chaos.

“We have to save her!” her cousin cried out.

Yukina’s mind raced. The direct line was all female. The men were all gone. Who could possibly drive out this monster?

Suddenly, an image of Yukishiro Haruka flashed in her mind—his quiet defiance, his unnerving calm.

“Could he…?”

It was a desperate, insane gamble. Yukina told them of Haruka’s existence.

The miko looked surprised, then fell silent for a moment before nodding slowly. “It could work. The title, the name… the bloodline is all that is needed. The monster is not human; it only fears the name.”

Before Yukina could process this, she heard her mother’s weak voice. “Hungry… so hungry…”

The maids snapped back to reality, but her mother waved them away. “Not you! Yukina? Yukina, are you there?”

“I’m here, Mother.”

“You… you bring it to me. Please.”

Yukina ignored the tray a maid offered her. Instead, she picked up a different plate, one holding a single, perfect daifuku, and slowly walked behind the screen.

“Yukina,” her mother whispered, her voice laced with a pleading quality that shattered something deep inside Yukina.

“It’s time for your sweet.”

Yukina, her face a blank mask, held the daifuku to her mother’s lips. Her mother looked at her, her eyes filled with a universe of regret and guilt. The unshakeable tyrant was gone.

Tears streamed down her mother’s face as she ate the daifuku from Yukina’s hand. Suddenly, her mother’s hand shot out and gripped Yukina’s wrist. Her grasp was weak, but Yukina remained still.

Her mother’s lips trembled. “Be careful… of your sister,” she whispered, her voice a bare thread of sound. “Lady Murasaki… she was the one who killed…”

Yukina’s eyes widened in disbelief. Lady Murasaki was her sister’s formal name. Her mother was saying that she… she had killed Haruka’s father. Her own husband.

“Ah, daifuku.”

The voice, cold and sweet as honey, came from right behind her. Yukina turned her head, her body stiff with a sudden, paralyzing dread.

Lady Murasaki stood there, smiling. She must have entered without a sound. Dressed in a violet kimono like a dark, beautiful butterfly, she glided forward, plucked an imaginary sweet from the empty plate, and popped it into her mouth. Staring at the plate, she smiled, her eyes glittering.

“There are only seven daifuku.”