By Any Other Name

Since she was a small child, Kirimi had a certain predilection for games.

One of her favorite games, a secret game she played in her head to keep herself from falling asleep in class, was a name game. She had a special name, Kirimi, a versatile name. That was what she decided. It worked on many levels.

On one, it was a pun on another word for sashimi, a filleted raw fish, a dish she enjoyed immensely. It was something of a joke, because cats liked it as well, and she could not decide if it had been fortunate or unlucky she was born with a feline surname on top of that.

But dissect it even further and one literally had "cut body".

Kirimi was not prone to violence, let alone against herself, and the mere sight of real blood frightened her on a level not so much visceral as it was . . . a sense of staring her own mortality in the face. She hated that. She hated any reminder that she might grow old and die eventually. However, at the same time, even though she avoided places that were physically dark and had ever since she was a small girl, Kirimi could not deny that there was a kind of darkness within herself.

There was a secret place where she could go in her head, the place made by damsels in distress and the princes who rescued them, where bad things happened that weren't always made all right by the last page. Where monsters were slain, and sometimes heroes as well—or sometimes, even worse, where heroes were dead to begin with, or rather, undead. Where there was something powerfully gripping about the struggle of flesh, whether it be a battle between a knight and a fearsome dragon, or the sensual surrender of a vampire's bite.

The stories of the deepest love and the greatest honor were often bloody. They just had to be. That was their nature. What would Romeo and Juliet be if their love wasn't tragic? Nobody wanted to see them grow up into a bitter old married couple, no sir. Of course, maybe it was knowing these things were not real, or happened so long ago, to someone else, that made them seem so beautiful, but that was fine with Kirimi. Love suicides weren't her scene, but that didn't mean a little part of her couldn't empathize, just a little bit.

Because if she switched the syllables, and stood on her head, she could make herself into Mikiri—"abandonment".

This one was a little too close to home for her comfort, however. She knew that feeling all too well, sitting in her lonely room with only a worn and saggy cat doll for company, while stories of young love and romantic adventure surrounded her floor to ceiling, like the walls of a fortress keeping her in. Sometimes she felt just a little too much like Rapunzel in her tower, when her parents were out and the creek of her footsteps on the far right corner of the third stair from the top down was the only sound to keep her company in the cavernous house. She was too old for a nurse, she was told, now that she was in junior high, but how many times had she cried herself to sleep when Kuretake went on vacation?

Of course, in world where a person's worth was counted by their lavishing of others, Kirimi had plenty of friends. She was a typical social teenage girl with the usual concerns. She was the one all the others looked up to. The one all the others wanted to be. But, perhaps because she ran at the front of the pack, there was something missing still—something lacking when she needed a helping hand from up ahead or a sounding board to fall back on.

Something missing when White Day came and all her friends got their Valentine's Day chocolates returned, while all the boys who had flirted with her just yesterday suddenly became nervous about her shady family name, and that brother of hers. . . . Wasn't he the one who founded that club when he was in high school here? The one with the voodoo and conspiracies? You never know, he might curse you if you try anything.

She felt sometimes like that hermitess in the poem by Princess Shikishi they read in Classical Grammar: The paulownia leaves/ are hard to make a way through/ so thick they have fallen/ Although it is not as if/ I'm expecting anyone.

It would not have been inappropriate to write the "kiri" in her name with the character for the paulownia tree. The empress tree. For this meager descendant of czarinas. Her girlfriends were always lauding her shiny, flaxen hair and soft skin, rubbing her wrists admiringly like one might caress the tree's wide, velvety summer leaves. Her admirers were always complimenting her eyes that were like Czech glass, or leaning in over their desks hoping to catch the scent of her when her gaze was turned to the front of the classroom—like one might look forward to those purple spires of fragrant flowers in spring. And then there was Kuretake, more a mother to her than the woman who gave birth to her, always lamenting how she had grown up as fast as a weed.

Yet when the longer nights of autumn came, it was like there were giant leaves lying thick across her pathway, and she could only quell that same old feeling of abandonment by telling herself, Well, it's not as though I was really expecting anyone. Right?

Yet, when Kirimi was ready to come clean and be honest with herself, she would find there was one person she wanted to see more than any other.

And she would admit her true name wasn't so bad at all. In fact, she loved it most of all, not because it was hers, but because it was the name he knew her by. Her older brother. Her prince. Umehito.

So he had a black Rolls Royce instead of a white horse. So he spent most of his time in a dark office rather than one of those Gothic castles from her childhood fairy tales, and wore a pressed black suit instead of shining armor, and dyed his fair hair raven black. So everyone said he was a little eccentric. He was her Prince Charming nonetheless, and she loved him more dearly than anything else in the world.

They were separated by more than a decade: when he left high school she was just entering the first grade. And when they were both living at home, their respective fears mostly kept them apart, hers of the dark and his of the light. But since he wouldn't grow out of his, she grew out of hers, out of necessity if nothing else.

It wasn't as hard as she had feared. After all, he was her sun; and she could tell, when she dropped by his work to visit him after school—even in the dark room with the lights turned down and just a hint of daylight coming through the blinds—when she wrapped her arms around him from behind and felt him melt like winter snow making way for the first plum blossoms she so looked forward to every February, she could tell she was his, too.

When he called her name, when he murmured it next to her ear, it was her true name that came through in the gentle inflection in his voice. With gratitude and relief. Like he had glimpsed some elusive, beautiful thing somewhere in the mist and couldn't believe he actually had it there in his arms, it went to her soul.

And she could tell he meant it—that when he looked up in the middle of a busy day, a busy week, and saw the smile she had brought just for him, it was like a searchlight guiding his way through the haze of it all. She could see it in those eyes she still dreamed about when she gazed up at that portrait of him that hung above the stairs back home, still after all these years, painted when he was the same age she was now. Those eyes that looked so jaded and weary to the rest of the world—she knew how quickly they could light up from within just like they did all those years ago.

That was why, when she signed her name, she always wrote out the syllables now—Ki-ri-mi—and let others guess which Chinese characters had originally gone with them. Even if they guessed the right ones, she knew her secret was still safe, because only someone who understood magic would understand the power a person's true name can wield.

A/n: Credit goes to Steven D. Carter for the translation of Princess Shikishi's poem. It can be found in Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology, copyright 1991 Stanford University Press.