(The Doctor)
Sugiyama Usagi
The doctor arrived, clad in a Western-style long coat and hat. I bowed in welcome. I am still the onsen’s landlady. “I’ll take you back to see Madame, Doctor – ?”
He makes a coughing noise, his head down, face covered by the hat. “My name is nothing you need to know, woman,” he gets out in-between coughs.
I miss the normal world. The world where people had names and I ran a normal onsen in a normal resort town. Where I had a fiancée, out at sea, coming back to me. He is a doctor too… I wonder how the girl he marries handles him being gone.
Gone, gone, he’s gone from Ito too. As are our doctor. The rest of us suffer through illnesses but Mama-sama? She gets to call in this strange one from Osaka. I had to bind up and try to fix my own ankle after she –
“Woman, I told you to lead me back to Madame!” Was I ignoring him? I mutely nod, and indicate that he should follow me from the main building to the cottage that Mama-sama took for herself.
It was mine. It had my things, and my mother’s, in it. She had it all taken away. Selling what she could, she told me. My father’s debt was that enormous.
He gambled on cards, on dice. He gambled on this place, on Ito. Expanding. Ito will never be Atami, but we -were- a nice option to the bustle and wildness of that place. Were. But the new rooms never brought in the money, to cover the loans for their construction, the loans for his gambling debts.
I knock twice, listening for her word to enter, and then slide open the door, allowing this doctor to enter.
I start to slide away but her voice comes. She’s been demanding lately. “Usagiko! You remain.” I enter her room, where she’s still laying on the futon.
Ah. Yagi-san’s man did want me to know what I can. There’s not much to tell about this doctor so far.
So I sit where she likes me to, wincing as I sit seiza. This is part of it, after all.
(OOC – will continue)
“You need not hide it from me doctor. I know I’m worse,” she says. I keep my eyes down, my face expressionless.
The doctor makes a sound, and says something to her in what I know to be a heavy Osaka dialect that I can’t entirely understand. Her heart, I think. I can tell that, she’s sometimes blue around the lips, I’ve seen that before.
She responds back, her tone dismissive. Then she laughs. “Ha! Usagiko here wishes for my death every day. I’m surprised she’s not smothered me yet, when I’m like this.” More laughing, and I don’t look. At her smirk, at how weak I am. She knows I won’t make a move.
Oh, but not like -that-. I wonder where that man is. Where he’s waiting. How much longer… how much longer will this night be? Will the beaten-down people of this town finally rise up? Or are we just lost?
Then she asks the doctor how long, but he’s evasive. If I spoke, I’d tell him that the evil oni that I imagined as a child never died. They popped back up at every blow, sometimes retreating to the shadows, but always watching. Always waiting.
Then she mentions a name, speaking to the doctor. MIyagawa. He’s missing? She seems annoyed by that. I know that name. It’s on the letters that come to her, sometimes the telegram.
He offers her something, medicine maybe? But she says no. I know the old witch. She wants to stay sharp, even if she’s in pain. She told me once, she worked her entire life on this. On her son, his empire. That he was a fool was regrettable, but that she was -far- from done.
That she would have Yagi-san, the whore who brought down her precious son.
Then she starts coughing, a horrid sound. “Doctor stay close,” she says as she catches he breath. “Usagiko prepare him a room in the next cottage over.” Finally dismissed, I bow and silently leave the room. I’ll prepare it myself, I just need to breathe… I always seem to be holding my breath around her, that’s what she does to me.
Sugiyama Usagi
This night is endless and yet she still lives? Whatever the doctor gave her… she slept some but now she’s awake, having bidden me to her attendance so that the doctor could sleep.
I shouldn’t be here. What if Yagi-san’s lover returns? He said…
HA. Men are unreliable. Making promises to your face, forgetting you the moment they turn around. Just like my fiancé. Just like the rest of this town.
So now I sit here wondering why time won’t move, or how it feels endless. But perhaps it’s my -task-, to listen to an evil old lady breathe… I wonder what I could use, in the night, to stop that sound.
I won’t do it tonight, just as I’ve never poisoned her tea or any of the other chances I have. I’m a coward and she knows it.
So I watch her, and ruminate in the uselessness forced upon me by fickle men, and the uselessness I embrace because somewhere in my mind, I’m still the perfect onsen landlady, despite all of -this-.
Then I hear a crash, and shouting. Is it – no, no. From the shouts, its a gambling session gone bad, with accusations of cheating filling the night air. I close my eyes. Her thugs will take care of it. If they weren’t the cause of it to begin with… how sordid it all is.