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Your name is Chiaki.
And that name rings out in the street, punctuated by a peal of laughter.
“Chiaki! Chiaki! Come and play!” they call, the three of them shouting at once, their voices mingling into a chorus. “Chiaki!” they shout, and when you peer out of your bedroom window (you push your toys out of the way, little plastic things from gachapon machines) you see them standing there in a line on the sidewalk, arranged from tallest to shortest, and it makes you laugh.
Kunishige and Togo and Soshiro.
They’re your best friends.
“Coming!” you shout back to them.
You were being lazy because it’s the weekend, so you’re still in your pyjamas, the old ones with the faded picture of a mech on the front. When you dress, you dress to play, in jeans and a t-shirt because it’s the summertime. You don’t tie your hair back because you got gum stuck in it last week and had to cut it short, but that’s fine because you don’t mind it short, especially in the summer when it’s warm. You say goodbye to your mom on the way out of the door but you don’t stop to let her respond, because she’ll just tell you not to get your clothes dirty and why do you have to play with those rough boys all the time and you don’t want to hear it.
“Chiaki!” your friends exclaim when they see you, wide smiles on their faces. Already they’re running off down the tree-lined street, not looking back to see if you’ll follow because they know that you will.
Your name is Chiaki, and this is when you get to be a little girl, and you don’t know yet that it won’t last forever.
Back at home, while you’re out playing, your mother sighs and rubs her temples. She goes to your room and hesitates when she sees your gachapon toys on the windowsill, wondering if she can throw them out without you getting upset. This time, she leaves them in place. It won’t be long until you’re old enough to start taking on some family duties, which is the polite way of saying you’ll be a servant. You are from a lesser branch of the clan, after all. Your mother’s fingers linger on one toy in particular, a plastic frog with wonky eyes. Those wonky eyes are why you like it, because you feel bad for it. It looks so silly. Your mother picks it up and she remembers when she was just a girl herself, playing with a boy whose name she’s long since forgotten. They were in the woods, and he put a frog down the back of her shirt, and she was so startled that she fell into the pond he’d scooped it from. The frog hopped away with an angry croak and with a kick she swiped the boy’s legs out from under him and he fell in the pond too. They were both covered in mud and laughing so hard that they cried.
Your mother puts the frog back down. It’s been a long time since she thought of that.
Then, she leaves your room. She is busy, after all; she has her duties.
Your name is Chiaki, but not just Chiaki.
You are Chiaki Soga.
This is a fact which means almost nothing to you now. You’re a kid, so what do you care about lineages and power? You know your own family name and you know your friends’, too. Kunishige Rokuhira and Togo Shiba and Soshiro Azami. Your mother calls them the neighbourhood boys, and she doesn’t say it in a very nice way.
When you hear people talking about the Soga Clan (that’s how they say it – the Soga Clan – with the emphasis just like that), it feels like they’re talking about something that you have nothing to do with. And you don’t, really. You know you’re from a lesser branch, though you’re not sure exactly what that means.
“It’s like my distant cousins,” Soshiro tells you when you’re musing about it. Your run down the sidewalk has slowed to a walk now, two-by-two, your little child-gang which runs this town. In your eyes, anyway. You’re on the way to the arcade, and all four of you have pockets jingling with change. “The live on the other side of the country, but they still have the name Azami,” continues Soshiro. “I don’t see them very often, so it’s kind of like we’re strangers, but we’re not. We’re family.”
You understand what he’s saying. The Soga Clan is a big family, but you don’t feel like you know any of them. Not like you know your friends. Sometimes, your mother lets you go to Kunishige’s house for dinner and you see the way his family is with each other, and you feel weird in your chest. It’s like it hurts, and it makes you sad, but you’re happy as well. They sit at one small table, crowding in together, and they all talk while they eat and snatch things from each other’s plates. Kunishige’s father always ruffles his hair and messes it up, and Kunishige doesn’t call him Father, he calls him Dad.
At the arcade, you forget all of this. The four of you part, each running for a different game, but you quickly find your way back to one other. You play shooting games with Togo – you win – and a racing game with Soshiro. You and Kunishige play a dancing game, but you’re both terrible at it so even though you win, it doesn’t really count as a win. You all laugh, though, and the fun’s more important than a high score. Still, when you do get a couple of high scores, you make sure to leave your name. Chiaki. Anyone else who plays today will see that you were here, and maybe they’ll even get mad because they can’t beat you, Chiaki who’s good at arcade games, even though you have to stick your tongue out to concentrate and Kunishige says it makes you look like a lizard. He only says it to distract you, and anyway he looks like a big teddy bear with his messy hair.
“Like you’ve been hibernating,” you tell him.
Kunishige tries to win you a teddy bear on the claw machine after that. He’s not very good. Togo’s really good, though, and he wins a cat for Soshiro, who acts like he doesn’t want it. He’s younger than you three, but he likes to act the same age. He asks you where your brother is, because if Akemura were here then he wouldn’t be the youngest, but you wrinkle your nose at him.
“Home,” you say, but he was already out when you got up. He likes to watch Hiroto Soga train. You don’t understand why, but you never question it because it’s not fun when your little brother tags along too often.
The topic of Akemura is quickly dismissed because you all still have money left. You squat by the gachapon machines and you win a toy rocket. Awesome! That gets the four of you talking about what it would be like to be an astronaut, to walk on the moon, and you don’t know the names of the men who did that but you do know that they were all men.
While you are at the arcade, on the moon, your mother is back at the Soga estate, walking across the yard to take a message to the main house (that’s where the real Soga Clan lives, not your lesser branch). She pauses because she sees Akemura. He’s still watching Hiroto train, standing on hip tiptoes, lips parted in awe. Your mother sighs because she knows he wants to be like him, the way all the little boys here want to be like him. One day there will be a sword in his hand that he will call an honour. There is nothing that she can do to change this; she walks on. Children are not just children here, she reminds herself. There is a reason she doesn’t remember the name of the boy with the frog.
The toy rocket sits comfortably in your pocket. It will go on your windowsill, along with all the others, a line of bright colours which is the first thing you see every morning when you open your eyes. You leave the arcade because you’re all getting hungry. Kunishige leads the way because he’s always the hungriest. You trot after him, then comes Togo, slower because he keeps turning around and walking backwards so that he can talk to Soshiro, who’s walking the slowest because he knows that Togo will turn around. At the closest convenience store, you buy lunch with the little bit of money you have left. You choose a chicken sandwich and some cheese-flavoured chips. It’s fried chicken, with ketchup and mayonnaise and a pickle that you don’t like but Kunishige does, so he’ll eat it. The food goes into a plastic bag, a picnic to take to the park. You eat sitting on the grass, not caring about getting stains on your jeans, and with one hand you hold your sandwich while with the other you bat at flies.
Your name is Chiaki. Chiaki Soga, really, but for now it’s just Chiaki, the name that your friends call you, and you’re a little girl who won’t get to stay that way.
Years later, you sleep in your bedroom, but it’s not your bedroom.
It’s a room in the main house. They call it yours. There’s a big bed and diaphanous curtains fluttering over the window. Your gachapon toys are in a landfill somewhere. If you’d known, you would have tried to hide one. Your gift of prophecy doesn’t extend to such small things.
This building is too far from the walls for you to hear children in the street, though your friends aren’t children anymore and don’t come calling. You’re not a child either, even though you are, just not in the eyes of anyone who matters enough that they could point it out and someone would listen.
Your name is not Chiaki.
Not anymore.
Your name is Princess Soga, an incarnation of the goddess Izanami. You foretell disasters with a gift passed down once in each generation. You are a symbol of the order in this world, and it is your duty to someday marry a man from a good lineage and dedicate your life to this country and to your family.
Nobody has ever asked you if you wanted this.
In the mornings, you’re awoken by a servant. She’s a girl a little older than you, and she’s your cousin. You think of Soshiro and that time he told you about his cousins, and you don’t know what to say to her. You think that she might hate you, because you were a servant too until one day you became a princess. You want to tell her that you know it isn’t fair, but you don’t. She would think you were being condescending, and she would go back to the others and talk about you in hushed whispers, and you would pretend not to hear as you walked past.
When she’s opened the curtains (your eyes still search each time for the missing gachapon toys), you get out of bed and she helps you dress and do your hair. You can do all of these things on your own. You want to wear jeans and a t-shirt, so you can run around in the sun. You want grass stains on your legs and ketchup on your sleeve. Your jeans were donated long ago, so maybe there is some other girl somewhere, a little girl with coins in her pocket, running around and laughing the way you used to. The thought is comforting, sort of.
The servant leaves you, and your mother will be here soon. In these vast halls you will hear her coming, the echo of her footsteps, and so because you have time and that warning this is a moment that belongs to you alone.
They check under your mattress, the servants, when they change your bedding. They pretend they don’t, but you know that they do, because that’s where they found the letters from Kunishige. You don’t hide things there anymore, and it’s only by pure luck that they didn’t get them all. While you watched the smoke swirling up from the chimney as the letters were burned, you thought of the one you’d saved, which is still hidden where you’d hid it then, beneath a loose floorboard under your dresser. You take out the letter and smooth it flat, and you don’t so much read it as you do stare at it, at the lines of Kunishige’s messy writing, at the creases where he’d folded it carefully to fit it into the envelope.
Chiaki, he calls you in the letter. You read your name and you hear it in his voice. Chiaki, not Princess Soga, not even Chiaki Soga but just Chiaki.
Togo (Shiba, you remind yourself, you call him Mr Shiba now) would take a letter to Kunishige if you asked, but you haven’t since you got caught, and you don’t think you ever will. He would get in trouble, even if he always insists that he wouldn’t.
The old you might have taken him up on the offer, though. The Chiaki who ran outside to play with her friends, not waiting for her mother to tell her not to. That Chiaki was the one who’d written the letters before, when it had seemed like you could still keep that piece of yourself, but you don’t think that you’re even her anymore.
Footsteps echo in the hall outside. You hide your letter and position yourself in front of your mirror, making sure your hair is neat. Your long hair, tied up and pinned back. You look like a princess, but you still don’t feel like one, and you definitely don’t feel like the incarnation of a goddess.
Your mother seems disappointed when you tell her that you had no prophetic dreams last night, and without thinking you clench your fists, your perfectly manicured fingernails digging into your palm. You want to shout at her, to tell her it’s a good thing that you had no dreams because then that means nothing bad is about to happen, and you want to scream at her because how dare she be disappointed in you at all now? She always says that she’s proud, but is she truly proud of you or is she just happy that she’s not part of a lesser branch anymore? She says she’s proud of you both, of her daughter and her son, but does she see Akemura sneaking out at night to get another few hours of practise in the training yard? Did she notice when he would have fresh bruises on his pale skin every single morning? Or does she just hear that he’s almost ready to be a part of the elite guard, and nothing else goes in?
You hear the way people talk about you both. They’re in awe of you. Princess and prodigy, they say. You’ve watched Akemura with his sword and you think he might even be better than Hiroto is, but you can’t tell him that because he’ll say what he’s said a thousand times already, that he’s doing it to protect you, and your heart will ache because you wish you were someone who didn’t need protecting in the first place.
The sudden anger in you fades, and you unclench your fists. You look up at your mother, tall and beautiful, just like you but older. There is a whole world inside her that you can’t see, because she was a little girl once the way that you were a little girl, and you wonder if she used to have friends that she played with until one day she wasn’t allowed. You wonder if she was scared the day she married your father, and you wonder if her own mother was kind to her.
You wish that you could ask her if she wanted you at all. If there was no such thing as the Soga Clan, if she had no family name, would there still be a Chiaki and an Akemura?
“Come along, Chiaki,” she says, her voice softening. She is a mother, after all, and she does love her daughter, and her son too, and maybe it’s easier to be proud of him than afraid for him. “We’ll go and tell them that you’ve had no visions.”
On the way, you spot Akemura. He’s training outside, so deep in concentration that he doesn’t notice you. You lean against the doorway and smile; he truly is gifted with that sword, you think. You watch as he spins like a dancer and brings his wooden training blade up to block a strike, and when he strikes back he hits so hard that you hear the wood crack. All of this, for you, and there’s a pang of guilt in your chest because you didn’t want him to tag along with you when you were kids. You try to give yourself some grace, because nobody would want their little brother hanging around with them, at least not all the time, but you can’t help it. The excuse was that he was younger and that somehow made him annoying, even though there’s only a few years between you two. Sometimes you think that his age was never the real reason, and it was just something that your child-brain made up to hide the truth. Maybe you didn’t want Akemura to tag along with you because you didn’t want someone with you who would remind you of what you were.
Soga.
If he wasn’t there then you could pretend that your family was like Kunishige’s family, that you could do what you wanted like Togo, that you had dreams of your own like Soshiro.
If Akemura wasn’t there then you could just be Chiaki.
Your mother clears her throat and you fall into step beside her.
The visit with the main branch of the family goes as well as it always goes. You tell them that you have had no new visions, and you see the tension leave their bodies. Your eyes go to each of them in turn, to these men who are related to you but who you hardly know at all. They dismiss you and your mother, their princess no longer of any use to them until she’s slept and woken once more. When you’ve left the room, your mother dismisses you too, but she tells you that you should rest.
You don’t do anything that even requires rest. Your muscles don’t ache from climbing trees and your knees aren’t skinned from playing tag. You have no bruises from falling off your bicycle – Look, Kunishige, no hands! – and whatever happened to that bicycle anyway? It had a bright green seat and tassels on the handlebars, and you covered it in stickers. Probably it went to the landfill with your gachapon toys and the rest.
Instead of going to your room, you decide to walk around the gardens. It’s a mistake, because you spot some of the servants hard at work, weeding and watering, and when they look at you it’s with the eyes of strangers. You were one of them, only a couple of years ago. You used to laugh together and tease each other and make jokes. You used to sit back on your heels and wipe the sweat from your forehead with the back of your hand and pass around snacks. You used to gossip and whisper about boys and brush off any questions about Kunishige and Togo and Soshiro. You used to read magazines together and jab your fingers at the pictures of celebrities, declaring I would never wear that in a million years, no way! It was fun and it was conspiratorial and you never asked for it to end, but they look at you like you did.
You turn and walk away, finding somewhere, anywhere to go where no one will see you. Where no one will look at you like that. You hurry along in your pretty clothes that you can’t run in and finally you sit down heavily on a carved stone bench near a flowerbed, the sun beating down on your head. You close your eyes and tilt your head up, wanting to feel the warmth on your face.
Flowers and the sun. It smells like the old days. You tell yourself that you’re in the park with your friends, that Togo’s brought a soccer ball and you’re going to kick it around. You tell yourself that you’re going to make daisy chains and put them in Kunishige’s hair, that he’ll let you, and he’ll pose so you pretend to take a photo of him with your hands as the camera. You wish that you had real photos, but you suspect they would have burned with the letters. If I have to be Princess Soga, you think, then why can’t I be Chiaki, too?
Your name is Chiaki, but it doesn’t feel like your name. It feels like some old, threadbare thing that you’re holding onto when you ought to throw it away but can’t bear to. Can’t you hang onto it for just a little longer?
“Chiaki.”
Your eyes snap open and you’re blinded by the sun, dazzling and white. You blink and your vision swims, and you see Togo standing there by the flowers, looking at you with a curious expression on his face.
“Mr Shiba,” you say politely, standing and smoothing down your clothes. “It’s nice to see you.”
“Chiaki,” Shiba says again, raising an eyebrow.
You grin at him. “Togo,” you say.
“That’s more like it.” Shiba laughs and reaches into his pocket. “I can’t stay long, and I can’t get caught talking to you or they’ll suspect I’m bringing letters again—”
“Are you?” you interrupt, your heart skipping a beat.
“Take it, quick.” Shiba shoves something towards you and you fumble for it. A letter and a small object wrapped in paper. You don’t have any pockets, but you hide it all in the folds of your voluminous sleeves. “I’ve gotta go. Good seeing you, Chiaki.”
“You too, Togo,” you say, wishing that he could stay longer but understanding that he can’t. “Say hello to everyone for me.”
He gives you one last grin – wide and mischievous, the exact way he grinned as a kid – and vanishes in the blink of an eye.
You hurry back to your room with your prize, and you lock yourself in your bathroom. Your mother thinks you’re resting, and you would hear her coming anyway, but even so, you don’t want to risk interruption. This is important; you can feel that, and not because of any gift of prophecy but because you know your friends the way any girl would know her friends.
First, you open the letter. It’s smaller than the others were, not a true letter in an envelope but just a folded piece of paper. Not even a piece of paper for actually writing on; it’s blue ballpoint pen on the back of a convenience store receipt, but for some reason that touches you even more than if it had been a real letter. You look at what’s on the receipt, just for fun, and it makes you smile. Instant ramen, some soda, and a chocolate bar. Processed food, unhealthy, a world away from the nutritious traditional meals you eat every day.
Then, you read the letter, and your smile widens; Miss ya, Chiaki! Saw this and thought of you. Don’t forget me, okay? Kunishige.
You trace his name with the tip of a finger. It’s smudged, like he wrote it in a hurry. I miss you too, you think. How silly of him, to worry that you would forget him, when the memories of your old happiness orbit him like a star within you. You will keep this note hidden, away from the other letter, in case you lose than one too.
Though they keep trying, they can never take him away completely.
Bolstered by this little rebellion, you unfurl the paper from the object that Togo handed over. Your heart is racing, because Kunishige has never managed to send you a gift before and whatever it is, you’re going to treasure it.
It sits in your hand like the most precious thing in the world. You think you might cry.
Kunishige has given you a gachapon toy. It’s a little plastic rocket ship.