KEIKO Nieshima waited at the harbor. She bit her nails, her brooding expression clashing with the cloudless blue sky. The boat bound for her family home would arrive before too long. She couldn’t bear the idea of returning to her homeland in such a pathetic state.
“Hello there, Nieshima,” said a girl’s elegant voice.
Turning around, Nieshima found a beautiful, black-haired girl in a dazzlingly white dress. The girl’s limbs were unnaturally pale beneath the summer sun, while her hair, swaying in the ocean breeze, was as dark as the night sky.
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Nieshima’s eyes widened, for she had just glimpsed something not meant to be seen. “You…” she mumbled.
“Thank you,” the girl replied. “Everything I’ve accomplished has been thanks to you.” Without a sound, she approached Nieshima and embraced the miko tightly in her bone-white arms.
Nieshima stared at the girl in stupefaction.
The girl, meanwhile, stood on her tiptoes, bringing her face close to Nieshima’s. Then she kissed Nieshima, who let out a silent scream.
A few moments later, the miko collapsed on top of the wharf.
“Disgusting,” the beautiful girl spat. “What’s with this unpleasant aftertaste in her spiritual energy? That’s what you get for half-assing your sadhana.”
The girl glanced down at Nieshima, grimacing and wiping her lips. The woman had already passed out.
“Well, whatever,” she sniffed. “Now she’ll return to the island without a fuss.”
The beautiful girl picked up her lace parasol, opened it, and twirled it playfully as she left the harbor. She rode a bus to the train station. From there, she made several transfers bound for Tenjin.
Despite her abnormal beauty, no passersby paid her any heed as she strode through the nighttime crowds of Tenjin. Eventually, she arrived in front of a house in a residential area of Higashi Ward. The two-story property, meticulously cared for, looked around fifteen years old.
As the beautiful girl lurked in the shadows, a woman in a job-hunting suit rounded the corner. The woman unlocked the front door with a practiced hand and disappeared inside. Her mother, a homemaker, must have been waiting for her, since warm light and the appetizing scent of dinner drifted from the windows. Overall, the home was the very portrait of happiness.
After watching the defenseless woman disappear behind the door, the beautiful girl cracked a smile. “Kaede,” she said aloud. “You look well. I’m so glad you’re getting along with Shino too.”
Her smartphone vibrated. Still smiling, she tapped the screen to answer.
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OVER four hundred years before, Shino, the shapeshifting fox of Chikushino, was dreaming. It was 1602, the seventh year of the Keichō era, and he dreamed that he was playing like a child in a castle at the foot of Mount Tachibana.
“Shino!” a young miko cried. “Look! I’ve grown a tail!” Sticking a blade of silver grass into the sash of her kimono, she shook her hips to mimic Shino’s wagging tails.
Shino rolled his eyes. “What in the world are you doing, Sakura?”
“Come, Sakura,” said Ginchiyo. “Tails alone do not make a fox. Allow me to place ears upon your head as well.”
“Wow, thank you so much!”
“There’s no need to humor her, my lady,” Shino said.
Ginchiyo laughed softly. “Why spoil an opportunity for fun? Oh, and Sakura, you need five tails to imitate Shino.”
“Yikes!” Sakura squealed. “That tickles!”
Still smiling, Ginchiyo added four more stalks of grass to Sakura’s sash, then tied beanbags to her hair for ears. Other handmaidens and female kitsune surrounded them, fondly watching the young girls play.
Sakura—the miko—was Shino’s master. Her name was Japanese for “cherry blossom,” and thus evoked a sense of the ephemeral. It suited her, for she’d grown into a cheerful, energetic girl who didn’t fret needlessly.
Similarly, the character gin in Ginchiyo meant “one who speaks respectfully,” and the lady had developed a strong concept of self just like her father.
“Still,” Shino said, “why are you imitating a fox in the first place?”
“Because I’m going to be your wife someday,” Sakura declared. “I have to start practicing now!”
“Practicing, eh…?”
Shino’s young master smiled innocently.
The castellan of Tachibanayama Castle, Dōsetsu Bekki, had encouraged Shino to form a contract with Sakura. As a six-hundred-year-old fox, Shino had initially regarded her as nothing more than an adorable, naïve child.
And yet—
The dreamscape shifted.
An adult Sakura smiled beneath the gentle sunlight, gazing down at Hakata from the castle.
“Shino,” she said. “Lady Ginchiyo’s wedding ceremony was beautiful, wasn’t it?”
“Indeed,” he replied.
“Her Ladyship is happy, and I have you. What more could I ask for?”
Although the miko could never have one of her own, she celebrated Ginchiyo’s marriage from the bottom of her heart.
In the end, we’re nothing more than a human and a shapeshifting fox.
Shino recalled Sakura’s innocent profession of love as a child. He’d expected her to someday mate with a human man and forget all about it. Yet even as an adult, Sakura hadn’t budged. She still insisted that she wanted to marry him.
“I love you, Shino.”
When she proclaimed her love for him again as a woman, Shino’s mind began to change. He longed to marry her as well, no different from a human man.
A union between human and kitsune was unheard of. Yet, by the time Sakura appeared the same age as Shino, the people of Tachibana no longer viewed them as the miko and her fox. Instead, they were celebrated as the perfect pair.
“What’s wrong with being in love?” Muneshige himself had asked. “My parents are the happiest couple I’ve ever known.”
Sakura blushed happily each time she received such well-wishes.
Shino didn’t mind the attention either.
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