I wept when I heard this fate. Disappointment sounded like the voice of a bitter old woman. I feared that a fox spirit or a jealous ghost had entered this body. I feared that the voice was, in truth, my own. I wept until I remembered that the voice belonged to foster Grandmother, who three years ago had departed this world. The ghost was not jealous but stubborn and blind. In life, foster Grandmother never acknowledged the demise of her class, that the men had been defeated, that the women were degraded, that the seat of power in Matsue was no longer in the fortified castle but in the modern bank. She had berated the house of Inagaki for allowing me to attend public school, bemoaning my lowered marriage prospects because I, a highborn girl, would be exposed to the eyes of commoners on the city streets, like a lowly maid. In death, foster Grandmother remained unwavering in her assessment. The future she saw for me was bleak with blood and cloth.

If I had continued my schooling and been among the first female graduates of the Normal School, I would have not met you, Yakumo. Or I would have but as a novice teacher at the Middle School or, perhaps, the governess to the daughter of the prefectural Governor, introducing my young charge to the fundamentals of the English language.

I had no foreknowledge of my life or the existence of yours, so I could not soothe Setsu at eleven. Even if I had known, she would have not believed me or she would have only wept more.

Setsu at twelve wiped away the tears. She was no longer a child. She was a wage earner in Father’s textile mill, a rare business started by a former samurai who had not failed. I can still see her seated at the handloom. There were rows of them, each with a highborn girl, pumping the pedals with her feet and legs, sending the flying shuttles back and forth with hands and arms that Mother soon would not recognize. The repetitive movements would make these limbs thick, branches that could hold the weight of a man, not sprigs bending to the weight of their few blossoms.

At eighteen, Setsu understood that it was not public school that had hindered the prospects of marriage. It was a body that resembled that of a young man’s, arms and legs muscled, shoulders strong and straight with not a hint of the elegant slope that had conveyed the leisure and languor of the women of her former class. Unlike Mother, she had not been betrothed at the age of twelve. She, instead, had been weaving a kimono’s worth of cloth per day.