Chapter 9
Kaneko
She started with sitting.
Who in all the hells needs lessons in sitting?
I knew how to sit. I’d been doing it my entire life.
But apparently, I’d been doing it wrong.
“Your back,” Hana said. “Straight, Kaneko-san, as if a string pulls you up from the crown of your head.”
I sat the way I always had, the way I had sat on boats and docks my entire life.
“Kaneko-san. Please, your posture.”
I didn’t move. Some stubborn part of me—the part that was still a fisherman’s son, still a free man in my own mind, if not my body—refused to comply.
Why should I sit differently? What did it matter how my spine curved or where my shoulders rested?
I was not going to become what they wanted me to become.
I would not cooperate in my own transformation.
Hana waited. Patient and silent.
The silence stretched.
Finally, I shifted—not into proper posture, just enough to show I had heard her.
“Now your shoulders,” she said quietly. “Relaxed, but not slouched.”
I slouched more deliberately.
She sighed.
“Your hands. Rest them gently on your thighs.”
I pressed them flat against my legs, fingers splayed, a posture no refined person would ever use.
Hana circled to stand in front of me and then kneeled so we were at eye level. Her expression was not angry, not even disappointed. It was just . . . understanding.
“You resist,” she said.
“I am sitting.”
“You are sitting incorrectly on purpose.” She tilted her head slightly. “Because if you learn these things, if you do them well, it means accepting what you have become—what you now are.”
The words hit harder than I expected. My throat tightened.
“I can’t become this,” I said, my voice rough. “I’m not . . . I refuse to become some painted doll for—for you people to—”
“You people?” Something flashed in Hana’s eyes, and her serene mask cracked, revealing anger and something far deeper. “I did not take you captive, Kaneko-san, and I do not hold your leash, no more than I took myself to be a slave.”
The words were a slap, a harder crack across my face than anything I had felt from the bokken of Takeo or Yoshi.
I stared at her.
She stared back.
“We each must learn to accept our fate,” she continued, her voice tight. Her hands clenched in her lap—the first time I had seen her struggle with her composure. When her head dipped, and her gaze fell to her hands, my heart lurched.
“I certainly did,” she whispered.
For a moment, she seemed to shrink, to shrivel before my eyes. She looked so young, no longer my graceful teacher, but someone who had been broken and reshaped, just as they intended to do to me.
Fury drained out of me, replaced by something more intense, more intimate.
Shame, perhaps.
“Hana-san—” I said softly.
Her eyes snapped up at my first use of an honorific with her name.
“I did not mean—”
“I know what you meant.” She drew a long breath, smoothing her expression back into neutrality, but I could see the effort it took.
“You think I am one of them, that I chose this, that I enjoy training you to become what I am because I do not resist or shout or attempt to flee.” Her bright eyes met mine.
“I was nineteen when I was sold. My father . . .” She stopped, swallowed.
“It does not matter. What matters is that I am here. You are here. We both must survive, however we may.”
The silence between us was different now, heavy with shared pain.
“I’m so sorry, Hana-san,” I said.
And I meant it.
She nodded once, as though dismissing the conversation, then slowly her expression softened, not quite shifting back to the gentle patience from before, but into something more real, something more honest.
“You are angry,” she said, her voice still a whisper.
“I was angry, too, at first. I refused lessons. I slouched and stumbled and made myself as unappealing as possible, hoping no customer would want such an ungainly beast.” Her voice dropped even lower.
“Then the mistress told me I would be given to the guards for practice if I did not improve.”
I stared at her, at this woman who had seemed so serene, so perfectly at ease in this place, and tried to imagine her frightened and resistant and desperate.
“How long ago?” I asked, my voice barely audible over the breeze rattling the paper walls.
“Three years.” She looked back down at her hands—smooth, graceful hands that bore no trace of whatever life she had lived before.
“I stopped fighting, and I learned. And now . . .” She gestured around the room.
“Now I teach others. I have good food and safety. The mistress would brook none to raise a hand to me. She would sooner slice that hand away than let it fall to my face.”
Her gaze drifted past me, focused somewhere distant, perhaps the past.
“This is not freedom, but it is a life. It is survival. And survival, Kaneko-san, is something.”
“But you . . .” I struggled for words. “You seem almost content, as if you have accepted—”
“What choice do I have?” she snapped, though even the sharpness of her words held the gentleness of blossom’s kiss.
“I can rage against the bars of my cage, against what I cannot change. I can make every day a misery. Or I can find what happiness exists in this world and hold on to it.” She met my eyes.
“I choose to survive. If that makes me weak in your eyes, then so be it.”
“I could never think you weak,” I said quickly.
“Then do not think I am your enemy either.” She reached out and touched my hand. “I am trying to help you, not because the mistress orders it—though she does—but because I remember what it felt like to be where you are now. I would spare you the worst of what I endured, if I can.”
Her words settled over me like a heavy blanket, suffocating but also strangely comforting. Hana understood. She had been where I was. And she was offering me a lifeline, even if it meant cooperating with my own captivity.
“If I learn,” I said slowly, “I am still a slave.”
“Yes.”
“I am still owned.”
“Yes.”
“But I might . . . I might have some small measure of control over what happens to me?”
“Yes.” Hana’s expression softened further. “Not much, but some. In a place like this, Kaneko-san, ‘some’ is a treasure.”
I drew a deep breath, let it out slowly, then straightened my spine, pulling my shoulders back while placing my hands gently on my thighs. The position felt foreign. Wrong. Like wearing someone else’s skin.
But I held it.
“Better,” Hana said, and there was relief in her voice, as if my compliance mattered to her personally, as if she truly did want to help me, not just complete a task. “Much better.”
We continued the lesson. This time, when she corrected me, I tried to follow her instructions. There was no perfection in my movements, in the way I sat or stood or walked. My body still wanted to rebel, still wanted to return to familiar patterns.
But I tried.
And after a while, the trying became almost bearable.
“Do you have eyes in the back of your head?” I asked after the twentieth correction.
“No,” she said, warmth in her voice. “But I know every way a body tries to cheat proper posture.”
The admission hung in the air for a moment. I looked at her—really looked at her—at the perfect grace of her movements, the flawless way she carried herself.
“You?” I said softly. “You were . . . ?”
“I learned.” She said simply.
Her smile was different now, not just patient or amused, but something genuine, something offered freely. “And you will, too, Kaneko-san. I promise.”
In that moment, something shifted. I realized that her smiles—the small ones, the genuine ones—were for me, to help me. Beneath the training and correction and endless patience, she actually wanted to be not just my teacher, but my friend, perhaps.
Despite everything. Like I imagined a sister might be, if I had ever had a sister.
The thought of siblings made my chest ache, and my mind drifted.
To Yoshi.
Where was he? Was he safe? Was he learning things as strange and impossible as I was?
“Your shoulders tensed,” Hana said gently. “You are thinking of something painful.”
I forced myself to breathe. To relax.
“My . . . brother. I wonder if he is well.”
Hana nodded slowly. “Then we must make sure you become skilled enough to thrive here, so perhaps, one day, you might find a way to discover his fate.” She adjusted my shoulders with gentle hands. “But first, you must learn to sit without looking like a sack of rice.”
Despite everything, I laughed.