Year of the Boar, Eleventh Month, Day 5.

 Atsuko insisted on throwing my screen doors open at some unholy hour this morning. She said it was about time the fresh air was actually allowed to come in. That is quite unfair; I have sat outside on my veranda many times of late with the doors open as she well knows but once she is taken with an idea she can as unmoving as Itsuki was… Itsuki… the mere mention of her name still chills my blood – as if she could crawl out from her grave whenever she pleased and seek to exact her revenge on me. Since I did not feel like going back to my offices or the banquet hall, I have taken refuge on my veranda despite Atsuko’s assertions that I have not been outside for months. I suppose it is not unpleasant to sit here in the coolness of the early morning and watch as the sun rises over my grounds.

Sunrise… a tiny crescent peeping up as if to test the day, casting its blistering rays across the horizon colouring it every shade of pink, red and orange and some in-between which I am sure I could not name if I could be bothered to try… the process seems interminable, as if the sun is too heavy to drag itself into the sky… then all of a sudden, as if by some sort of sorcery, an enormous ball, glowing red hot like the molten, pulsating liquid metal the smith uses, is there; the entire sky blazing with its heat and light; the mountains lit up and glowing, ethereal beneath its benevolence… shreds of cloud doing their best to maintain their sovereignty of the sky remain, failing miserably to best the sun, trailing, hazy, and transparent like cobwebs until they admit defeat and surrender to daylight as finally, the sun sheds the heaviness of dawn and the sky bursts into the clean, bright light of the day.

When I was little, I remember mother telling me that things always looked better in the light of day. She meant to reassure me about whatever trifle had upset me; trying to make me understand that everything seems different, less important, less troublesome after a good night’s sleep. 

I wonder if she ever looked at the gardens and thought about how different they seem under a clear, bright sky… about how the grass, studded with those small white flowers, seems inviting, begging to be danced upon; about how the pond, filled with the fat carp fighting each other for space between the deep pink of the water lilies, seems a harmless source of endless entertainment; about how the trees, creaking with old age, seem to stretch out their branches and encircle the gardens protectively… 

At night however, when I sit here, afraid of the horror sleep would bring did it not elude me, the gardens seem to be an entirely different place. Icy cold with the blackness of a barely lit night; the tired, yellow glow which flickers from night lanterns in need of fresh candles struggles to light even the edge of the lawn closest to my veranda. The grass seems forbidding, as if it would swallow me should I step onto it and the pond brings the same terror as sleep; the dark glass of its surface reflecting the night sky, now an infinite depth hiding an unknown evil which lurks waiting only for the merest hint of an opportunity to break through the glass and wreak havoc; the trees, protective in daylight, in the depths of night seem to harbour demons. 

I wonder if mother, too, saw the demons which haunt my nights and sought to warn me rather than reassure me… I wonder if, had she lived longer, she would have protected me from what has come to pass or whether she would have given me to him anyway as a way to save herself …