Mother survived two husbands, I began.

On the cusp of thirteen, she was betrothed to the first son of a samurai house whose family name was no longer said aloud now. When her husband failed to appear in their sleeping chamber on their first night of matrimony, she fell asleep waiting for him. She awoke to the muffled sounds of her new husband and a young maid, who had only hours before swept clean the very courtyard where they now both lay, publicly declaring their love. The blood was fresh and bright red, pouring from her neck and his stomach. Shiomi Chie looked down at her husband’s face and then at the maid’s. So this is love, she thought. She then alerted the guards at the front gate that they had slept through a murder-suicide, and she returned to the sleeping chamber to await her widow’s fate.

Soon the samurai house was a river of tears, mostly shed by the maids who had long known of the love affair between the young Master and Yuki. Shiomi Chie shed no tears. She showed humility and deference toward her deceased husband’s family, careful never to utter his name or his deeds in the days to come. The maid’s own name was erased from the story even before her body grew cold. By morning, the news of the lovers’ deaths had swept through Matsue, and Shiomi Chie was being praised in the houses in the shadows of Matsue Castle as a female worthy of the Shiomi name. Among the maids in these same houses, Shiomi Chie became known as the “Ice Bride.” Among the maids in the house of her deceased husband, she was known as the “Blood Bride.”

You gasped when you heard these words, Yakumo.

You asked me to say them again. Then you asked if they were all true.

“No,” I admitted.

“Ah, even better!” you declared, slapping your knees.

The story of Hinoko had brought you to tears, Yakumo, but the story of Mother made your eye shine, brighter than the moon that night.

At the end of that June, an article appeared in the San’in Shimbun that detailed how the goodhearted and generous Lafcadio Hearn had rescued the birth mother of his rashamen from imminent eviction. The paper claimed that Mother received a monthly allowance from Herun-san when, in fact, it was more. It noted her hunger but not Third Brother’s and Youngest Brother’s, which also had to be fed. Ensconced with her sons in a newly rented house, modest but furnished once again with all the household items that Third Brother had sold off over the years, Mother refused my visits.

Upon seeing the house of Koizumi identified in the newspaper as the birth family of a rashamen, Setsu at twenty-three left her body in a long curl of smoke, pulled up and into the sky. The Setsu who remained was unrooted and thus light on her feet. She had the sudden urge to travel. Like many travelers before her, she had lost a home and was in search of another.