Beneath the Ink
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 3: Two Conversations
Akiko had not composed a poem since she was fourteen.
That one had been an assignment, set by her calligraphy teacher, a small precise woman who never praised anything but whose silences contained gradations of approval that her students learned to read like weather. The poem had been about autumn leaves. Akiko had written it in an afternoon, turned it in, received a silence that she had interpreted as middling, and largely set poetry aside in favor of the more practical skills that court life rewarded.
She sat now in the small hours with her writing box open and the lamp turned low and thought about what she was doing.
She was a lady-in-waiting to the Empress of Japan. She was thirty-one years old. She was proposing to conduct a secret correspondence, layered inside her mistress’s correspondence, with a person she had never seen, whose face she could not picture, whose name she did not know, whose sex she was not yet prepared to formally acknowledge to herself as uncertain.
She was doing this because of the way a brush moved.
She picked up her brush.
The first attempt she destroyed immediately, not because it was wrong but because it was too careful. It had the quality of a document rather than a voice. She ground more ink and sat with the brush raised and made herself stop thinking about craft and think instead about what she actually wanted to say.
What she wanted to say was: I know you addressed that poem to me. I know you noticed the fold of my hands. I know that you are sitting somewhere in that house watching your words travel outward into a world you cannot enter and waiting to see if anyone on the other end is actually listening.
I am listening.
She couldn’t write any of that. Not plainly. But Heian verse didn’t require plainness. It required the opposite.
She wrote about a bird that flies the same path twice and finds the branch changed. A small thing. Seven syllables, five, seven, five, seven. She read it back. It said, beneath its surface, that she had noticed she was being noticed, and that she did not find this unwelcome.
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