Post by HARUKO SUGIHARA on Jun 4, 2013 22:48:21 GMT -6
HARUKO SUGIHARA
19 ♦ FEMALE ♦ STRAIGHT ♦ TIGER ♦ PRINCESS ♦ ZEL
HISTORIA
Once upon a time in the red, and gold, and green land of Shambala, there lived a lord, a strong, old man named Sugihara, with two children, an obsidian-haired son and a copper-haired daughter. Though he was a lord of illustrious heritage, his forefathers lived and died in the name of the Emperor, he had nothing to offer his children but their once and always glorious bloodline. But in times of peace and plenty, their military family wilted, and the heart of his eldest child, his son, grew bitter.
“What is glory when the roof above my aging parents leaks?” his son asked. “What is honor when my infant sister grows thin?” And as if to punctuate the words of his son, thunder rumbled in the white sky above their ailing garden, the trees there bare and the pools brown.
“Minoru—”
“I am going, Father,” his son said. “I won’t be stopped—I—I will come back when I’ve restored us.” He paused, as lightning cracked the horizon in half, and a buzzing, electric silence fell again. The Lord’s wife’s hands shook as she watched this, their family gathered around the last hearth burning in the great, cold house, and her son smiled at her. “I am grown—anyhow, Mother.”
“Minoru!” she crooned anyway, grabbing her son’s sleeves. “Oh, Minoru—”
“Don’t cry. Feed Haruko,” he said, still smiling. “I will be safe. I love you all. Good bye.”
--
Eight years passed after that night and that storm, and a messenger, not Minoru, came to the old house. They had been restored, and Haruko watched her mother crumple on the cracked floor of her great floor, shaking and biting her silk sleeve as she wept with joy, joy at pearls, velvets, jade bracelets, earrings hooked with gold, the rich joys to come. “He—he—how—”
“Lady, no questions,” the messenger said. “In seven days, my master’s men will come—to take his family into the Forbidden City.”
“The—city?—oh, oh, husband, the city—”
Old Lord Sugihara helped his wife to stand.
“But lord and lady,” the messenger said, “I bring terms.”
Their household afforded one maid, a nurse, old, fat, and squawking, and this nurse tugged young Haruko away to the garden as the messenger lowered his voice.
“Lady Haruko, don’t listen,” she ordered, and Haruko looked away from her parents and the messenger from the Emperor’s city.
“Lady Haruko, don’t run!” the nurse squawked out in the garden, and Haruko stopped running. “Lady Haruko, don’t fidget!” And Haruko stopped fidgeting. “Lady Haruko, don’t leave the garden!” And Haruko came back, and sat with her nurse as the old woman embroidered in the warm sunlight, detailing blue irises until she nodded off at her stitching.
And then, Haruko left the garden. The walls of the estate were crumbling anyhow; the city might as well have been as hers as the trees in the orchard, as the stream halving the gardens widened and met one of the rivers splitting the imperial kingdom. And like always, under the trees shadowing the river bank, she met up with her oldest friend, the son of the one of the common families living along the Song river.
But the morning had barely waned into afternoon when the nurse found them, her skirts streaked with reeds and river-water. “Lady Haruko!” she snapped from further down the bank, “And you,” she said to the boy in a voice for vermin. She chased the boy off, and dragged the girl home to her mother, sitting in her parlor by an antique cabinet, its doors flung open and a spill of blue silk spilling from a neglected drawer. Her mother’s hands shook lightly.
“Haruko,” Lady Sugihara said; she stood up. “How many times have I—and how—how could you do this now—” She grasped her daughter’s wrist. “Your brother will be duke! And you will be a princess! Don’t you understand anything? How could you embarrass him like this? Associating with lowborn riffraff—” Her mother’s grip began to burn, leaving marks in Haruko’s skin, and against her will, the girl made a small sound, and Lady Sugihara’s eyes trembled. She let go, smoothed her kimono, and stood up tall.
“I will not suffer this,” she told her eight-year-old daughter. “Again. Ever.”
--
As was family custom on topics that displeased Lady Sugihara greatly, she and her daughter did not speak of the boy from the river again, and the Sugihara family left their ancestral mansion for apartments in the Emperor’s fortress city. Their eldest son married the only daughter of the Shionoya Clan’s chief, absorbing the Sugihara family into the Shionoya clan, and when the old prince passed, Minoru became Clan Prince in his stead.
Haruko grew, as all girls do with time, and when she and her mother spoke of the boy from the river again, she sat in her study with a length of canvased screen stretched out along the room. She painted a garden from memory, piecing out the trees as she remembered them, the pools as they cooled in her memory, and the gaps in the garden walls—
“Why are you wearing that?” her mother interrupted, and Haruko put her brushes aside as her mother touched the deep indigo sleeves of her kosode. “This color—so dark—doesn’t suit you at all. It makes you look—too red.” It did; it accented the redness of Haruko’s hair and the brown color of her eyes badly, every red hue in her skin stuck out.
“I know,” Haruko said. “I just paint in it, so I don’t ruin my others—”
“We would buy a new kosode if you spotted it,” her mother said, and Haruko paused: this was not what she said last time.
“I know, but I like this one,” Haruko said, as her mother knell beside her on the mat before the painting screen.
“Oh, I know this place, this is—” she stopped, and curled her hand over her heart. “This is our old house.”
“Do you like it?”
“I hope whoever you marry likes you to paint,” Lady Sugihara said. “I remember these trees.” Her voice shuttered. “That house is gone now, and—” Her mother trembled, her tears fattening.
“Mother—”
Lady Sugihara burst into tears. “Oh, Haruko, Haruko, that house is gone.” Haruko didn’t say anything at first; her mother cried a lot—over everything. When they moved into the Shionoya mansion, she cried over the silk futon covers and the golden lamps, and now, her mother warbled and sobbed openly, her tears streaming through her hands.
“Why are you crying?”
“Your father’s house is gone—and your father’s name is gone, Haruko. When Minoru married, ‘Sugihara’ died—and it is all my fault; your father,” she paused to hiccup and sob. “Your father asked nothing of me, nothing of me but to bear his heirs, to carry his name, and I could not do it—I—I am a terrible wife—”
“Oh Mommy,” Haruko said, wrapping her arm around her mother. Minoru married the daughter of one of the most powerful families in the imperial kingdom, and ruled that clan, but he discarded his name, Sugihara, to honor the Shionoya legacy--as was custom. ‘You’re never happy,’ Haruko thought with a sigh as she rocked her mother. “Don’t cry. Father loves you, and Father is so proud of Minoru—” Her mother sniffled and looked up at the painting.
“There is a child in your garden,” her mother said.
“Yes,” Haruko said, following the sudden subject change. “He’s not finished, I don’t know if I like how he’s turning out—”
“It is that boy.”
Haruko froze. “What?”
“That boy, the one you always played with.” Lady Sugihara folded her hands in her lap. “That boy. I was so cruel to that boy.”
“What do you mean—”
“I drove him away, and, and you never saw him again. I didn’t want to embarrass Minoru—” Her tears rushed new and she covered her mouth. “Do you—do you think he will ever forgive me?”
Haruko gaped and glanced at the small figure in the painting, the unfinished shadow standing in one of the gaps in the red walls.
“That was, that was so long ago,” Haruko said, looking away from the painting. “He was so young, he probably doesn’t even remember me, or any of it, anymore.” Her mother sobbed again and leaned against her daughter.
“I am a terrible woman. Do—do you forgive me, Haruko?”
“Of course I forgive you,” Haruko said, stroking her mother’s back. “What could you have done that you feel so guilty—”
Her mother broke the embrace suddenly and dabbed at her eyes. She sat awhile, her breath hitching as she composed herself. She took her daughter’s hands then, streaked with paint.
“I hope your husband will like you to paint,” she said, turning her daughter’s hands over. “My precious girl. I know you will marry well. My daughter—she has such pretty skin!” She picked at the blue kosode. “She just must not wear blue, no. I will leave you alone now; go to sleep soon, or you will get bags under your eyes.”
“I will. Good night, mother.”
OTHER
- POSITIVE TRAITS. Optimistic. Artistic, but not gifted. A hobbyist painter—for the pleasure of replicating nature. Of her own mind. Outdoorsy. Active. Honest. Terrible at keeping secrets.
- NEGATIVE TRAITS. Disobedient. Of her own mind. Her heart is not in a lady's duties. Unrealistic about the depth of her circumstances. Poor judge of danger.
PLAYER BACKGROUND. I mod here.
PLAY BY. SOUND! EUPHONIUM – KIMIKO OUMAE - HARUKO
PLAY BY. SOUND! EUPHONIUM – KIMIKO OUMAE - HARUKO
