Chapter 14
Kazashita
Ilost count of the days somewhere around my third month on the mainland, when the last of my coin ran out and I had to choose between food and my cramped room at the Harbor’s Rest. I chose food and began sleeping in doorways, in alleys, anywhere the city guard would not immediately move me along.
Eventually, I found work at the docks loading cargo, hauling crates, and whatever backbreaking labor might earn a few mon. My hands, already callused, became raw and bled. My back developed a persistent ache as the rest of my body grew lean and hard in ways that spoke of hunger rather than health.
But the work gave me enough to eat. Enough to survive. And survival was all I could manage.
In what little free time I had—those brief hours between collapsing and waking before dawn to begin again—I searched.
I asked questions in taverns, spending precious coin on sake to loosen tongues.
I bribed petty officials who took my money and gave me nothing.
I visited the red district more times than I could count, watching women and men display themselves in windows, wondering if Kaneko might be among them.
He never was.
The city had swallowed him, erased him, as if he had never existed at all.
At night, when I finally found somewhere to lay my head, I dreamed of him.
It was always the same dream—Kaneko on the slave ship, chains on his wrists, looking at me with eyes that pleaded for rescue.
I reached for him, always reached for him, but the distance never closed.
He receded farther and farther until I woke with my hand outstretched toward the ceiling and my chest hollow.
I loved him. Desperately. Hopelessly. In a way that made no sense given how little we had spoken, how brief our connection had been, but Irie had been right when she’d said, “The heart does not answer to good sense. It simply feels.”
And mine felt like it was being carved out piece by piece.
Sometimes, in my lowest moments, I wondered if I had gone mad, if my search was the vain stupidity of a man with a boyish crush. I had abandoned everything: my position on Kichi’s ship, reliable pay, the life Irie and I had built on the wakō island, however modest.
I had thrown it all away to chase a boy I barely knew.
What am I doing? The question rose unbidden in the darkest hours.
Sometimes—and the shame of this burned—I felt a flicker of anger at him. I raged at Kaneko for being beautiful enough to be taken, for looking at me with those earnest eyes, for making me care so much that I destroyed myself trying to find him.
Then my heart would counter, He did nothing wrong. He is the victim. I am the fool.
And beneath the anger and doubt, a more terrifying question played like a distant drum: Did Kaneko even think of me, or had I become just another face in the nightmare of his captivity?
Would he even want to be found by me, a stranger who had participated in his enslavement and then done nothing, saved nothing, changed nothing when it mattered?
Was I searching for someone who did not care for me at all?
That thought made something crack inside my chest every time it surfaced.
But I couldn’t stop, even knowing I might be chasing a ghost, a fantasy I had built in my own mind, even knowing Kaneko might not want—or need—my rescue.
Because sometimes, when I closed my eyes, I could still see him clearly, not the dream version—that was already becoming hazy—but the real Kaneko, the one I had glimpsed in stolen moments.
I remembered his hands—callused from fishing, scarred across the knuckles.
I remembered the way he looked at the ocean one evening while I was coiling rope nearby, as though glimpsing a long-lost friend.
I remembered his voice, not what he said—those words had faded—but the quality of it, rough but not harsh, the accent of the northern isles rounding the edges of his consonants.
And I remembered—gods, I remembered—the moment I saw him smile that first time.
That was what I was chasing, the boy who could still smile despite everything, not the perfect, idealized Kaneko of my dreams. I sought the real one, flawed and frightened and human.
The sun was setting when I finally finished my shift at the docks. My shoulders burned, my hands were bleeding again, and I needed food and water, needed to find somewhere to sleep that would not leave me stiff and aching in the morning.
Instead, my feet carried me toward the slave market. I had been there dozens of times, perhaps hundreds. It had become almost a ritual—this painful pilgrimage to watch other people’s suffering, to scan each face for the one I sought.
Today would be no different, I told myself, another wasted hour, another disappointment, but I went anyway.
The auction was already underway when I arrived. A crowd had gathered around the platform—merchants, military men, a few nobles with servants. The auctioneer’s voice carried across the square, barking out bids with practiced enthusiasm.
A thin woman stood on the platform, perhaps thirty, her eyes hollow and resigned. The bidding was lackluster. No one wanted her. I knew what would happen next, had seen it happen too many times.
The auctioneer’s voice grew sharp. “No bids? Very well.”
The Samurai stepped forward and steel sang. I looked away because there was nothing I could do, nothing anyone would do. The crowd barely reacted. This was routine.
Servants cleaned the blood while the next slave was brought forward.
This one was different. He was young, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, and stunning—handsome in a way that made even my heart, which had room only for Kaneko, ache with a longing for beauty.
Delicate features. Smooth skin. Large eyes that held terror but also a kind of defiant pride that made him even more attractive.
The crowd stirred.
“Opening bid—ten ryō!” the auctioneer called.
Bidders erupted.
A merchant.
A military officer.
A man in noble’s robes.
The price climbed quickly—fifteen, eighteen, twenty.
I watched, hollow. This had happened to Kaneko, I was sure of it. This exact scene, played out while I was still traveling to Bara. Someone had stood here and bid on him. Someone had purchased him and taken him away.
The thought made my stomach churn.
Then she stepped forward, a woman unlike any I had seen at these auctions before.
She wore a kimono of deep crimson silk embroidered with silver cranes, her hair elaborately styled, her face painted with precision.
She carried herself with absolute confidence—not the confidence of wealth, but of power and the knowledge that she would not be outplayed, not here, not in any game.
She raised a fan decorated with cherry blossoms.
“Twenty-five ryō,” she said, her voice calm, almost casual, indifferent to the life-altering sum she’d just tossed across the plaza.
The crowd gasped.
People physically stepped back, creating space around her as if she were radiating heat.
The auctioneer stared for a moment, then found his voice. “Twenty-five ryō. Going once . . . twice . . .” The mallet came down. “Sold! To Yubi Momoko-sama.”
Murmurs rippled through the crowd. I caught fragments:
“—the mistress—”
“—House of Petals—”
“—must be something special if—”
Momoko. The House of Petals.
Something tickled at the back of my mind: a memory, faint and half forgotten—or a premonition. I couldn’t tell which. It felt so . . . familiar . . . so vibrant and real and . . . lived.
Had I heard her name spoken aboard Kichi’s ship?
Yes, that was it.
I had overheard sailors carousing as we docked on one of our many voyages to Bara. Despite Kichi’s iron fist, they were already drunk and boasting of their exploits with women who likely never existed.
But one of the men had been different, quieter, almost reverent.
He had spoken of a pleasure house in Bara, the House of Petals, he called it. He’d said it was unlike the brothels in the red district—refined, elegant, where only the finest courtesans worked.
“A piece of heaven itself,” he had said, his voice wistful. “If you have coin enough and status enough to enter, you’ll never forget it.”
The others had laughed and called him a romantic fool, but I remembered the look in his eyes. He remembered. He’d been telling the truth.
Momoko turned and walked away, her servants scrambling to follow. Her palanquin was being prepared. She stepped inside with practiced grace, and four bearers lifted it smoothly. The boy she had purchased was led down from the platform, looking dazed.
I had no time to make a decision. My body moved before my mind caught up. I flagged down a rickshaw driver hovering at the edge of the square.
“Follow that palanquin,” I said, pointing.
The driver—a thin man with tired eyes—looked at me skeptically. “That’ll cost you.”
“How much?”
“Three mon.”
Three mon? I had four to my name, the only coins I had earned that day. Without them, I wouldn’t eat tomorrow.
But if this led to Kaneko—
“Done,” I said, climbing into the rickshaw and handing the man the coins.
The driver grunted and lifted the handles. We lurched forward, threading through the crowd, following the crimson palanquin as it glided away from the market.
We moved through the merchant quarter, the buildings growing grander, better maintained, then into what looked like a wealthier district—tea houses with elaborate facades, establishments with guards at their doors.
The palanquin turned down a side street, and my driver followed at a discreet distance.
We crossed a boulevard. Then another.
Finally, Momoko’s palanquin turned toward what looked like a park—a sea of every color I could imagine. It was beautiful, almost obscenely so, given the squalor only a few streets away.
At the far end of the park stood a building three stories tall with walls of deep crimson and black roof tiles that gleamed in the fading light. Banners bearing a stylized flower emblem hung from the eaves.
It might’ve been the most beautiful building I had seen in Bara aside from the royal palace. Somehow, that made it even more sinister.
The palanquin stopped at the entrance, and Momoko emerged. Without so much as a glance back, she climbed the steps and entered massive wooden doors that opened before her foot struck the top stair.
My driver pulled to a stop at the edge of the park. “This is as far as I go,” he said. “That’s the House of Petals, not a place for the likes of you or me.”
“The House of Petals,” I repeated as I climbed out of the cart.
“Famous pleasure house, been here for decades. Only the rich get through those doors.” The driver looked at me with something like pity. “Whatever you’re planning, friend, forget it. That place is beyond you, beyond most people.”
He wheeled the rickshaw about and left, wheels crunching on the gravel path.
I stood there at the edge of the park, staring at the crimson building where beautiful slaves were trained to pleasure the wealthy. Where Momoko brought her purchases. Where Kaneko could be held captive.
Behind those walls, in some room I could not see, was he being forced to—?
I couldn’t focus on that. This could be nothing, another false hope to add to the pile. But it felt like something, like a thread, thin and fragile, but real.
I looked down at my hands, scarred and coated with dried blood from the day’s dock work; at my clothes, dirty and worn and smelling of sweat and fish; at my reflection in a nearby pond, gaunt, exhausted, barely recognizable as the man I had been six months ago.
The driver was right. I couldn’t simply walk through those doors. They would throw me out—or worse.
But I was here. I couldn’t give up now. I had to know, one way or the other.
Stepping back into the shadows at the edge of the park, I watched the building, studied it, memorized the doors, the windows, the way servants came and went through a side entrance. I might not be able to enter as a customer, but perhaps there were other ways inside.
The sun set. Lanterns lit inside the House made the windows glow like fluttering eyes.
Music drifted out—a shamisen being played with exquisite skill, beautiful and refined, a piece of heaven, just like that sailor had said.
Or a piece of hell, depending on whether you entered as a guest or a slave.
I kept to the shadows, watching and waiting, as the last light faded from the sky. Somewhere in that building was Kaneko. I didn’t know it, but I could feel it.
I would find a way to reach him.
Or die in the attempt.