Chapter 4

Fuyuki told her about the dinner three days before it was to happen, over tea in the corridor overlooking the garden, in the same measured, unhurried way he told her most things.

“I am hosting several of my fellow hatamoto and their wives at the end of the week,” he said. “A small gathering, nothing elaborate. I wanted you to know in advance, rather than have you learn of it the morning it arrives.”

“Am I expected to attend?”

“You are welcome to attend. Nothing more is expected of you than your presence, if you wish to give it.” He said it simply, without the weight she had half braced herself for, and returned to his tea as though the matter were already settled and required no further defense from him.

She told herself, walking away from that conversation, that she believed him. She discovered, three days later, standing in front of her mirror while Hikari arranged her hair, that belief and readiness were not the same thing at all.

“I heard from the kitchen staff that the shamisen player has already arrived,” Hikari said, working a comb through a section of Meimi’s hair with practiced hands. “He’ll be set up in the receiving room before the first guests appear.”

“Why would a shamisen player be needed, if I am merely a guest at this dinner.”

Hikari’s hands did not still, not at first. “My brother thought you might like the option, should you wish to dance. No one has asked it of you.”

“No one needed to ask.” The words came out sharper than Meimi intended, sharper than she had spoken to Hikari in weeks, old fear rising in her chest so fast she barely recognized its arrival. “The music will simply be there, waiting, and every guest in that room will know exactly what it is waiting for. So this is where the trophy geisha is put on display for all to see master’s new possession.”

Hikari’s hands stilled on the comb she had been holding. For a moment she said nothing at all, and when she spoke, her voice had lost the patient warmth Meimi had grown used to over these last weeks.

“A trophy.” She set the comb down with deliberate care, as though setting down her temper alongside it. “Is that truly what you believe you saw, these past weeks? A man who has never once raised his voice to you, who bought you a comb you didn’t ask for and asked nothing in return, who told you outright he intends to introduce you tonight as the woman he hopes one day to call his wife — hopes, Meimi, not claims, not demands — and you call that a man displaying his possession?”

Meimi opened her mouth to answer and found nothing ready to say.

“You want to talk about what your mother did to you,” Hikari went on, quieter now, but no gentler. “Then let us talk about it plainly, since you seem determined to relive it tonight regardless of what’s actually in front of you. She could have kept you. Kept collecting from every sponsor who paid to sit near you, every man who paid more to be first, every year after that for as long as your looks held and your voice stayed sweet enough to sell. That is what most okiya-mamas do with a girl as gifted as you were. She would have owned you outright, in every way that mattered, dressed you up finely and sent you out to be used by whoever paid the price, and called it patronage, and taken her percentage of it for years without end.”