“But where did all the time go?” Sen had said.
“Into the fisherman,” her mother said, and that was supposed to be enough of an answer.
Sen wanted to shake her head, but she was too comfortable with her cheek pressed against her mother’s soft skin.That’s not how time works, she’d wanted to say.The fisherman lived another life with time borrowed from a goddess. Where did the time go after he could no longer use it?
The turtles were now golden shadows dancing across the walls, swimming across the paper doors. Sen felt like Urashima Taro, her life washing over her like the cool pull of the tide, dragging her toward an ending.
The man beside her coughed, and Sen used the last of her strength to set her cold hand in his. His skin warmed at her touch, the edges of her vision fading to darkness.All of us are alone, she thought.
“I remember you,” the man said. Then he closed his eyes and his chest went still.
Sen didn’t remember the man, but she remembered the feeling of her hand in someone else’s. She remembered white sky and dreams, cold rivers and quiet words, a world made of sunbeams and kind shadows on paper doors. Maybe somewhere, somehow, she had opened a different door and lived a life better than this one.
She closed her eyes, and the last thing she felt before the world turned to ashes was the warmth of the man’s hand in hers, a feeling that lingered on her skin even after he was gone.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Otohime
In the palace beneath the sea, there was a princess, and a window, and a dream.
For years after Urashima Taro left her, the princess Otohime sat in her palace alone, watching the seasons change beyond her four windows. What more could she have given the human to make him stay? The man she had cared for was nothing but ashes. Now, her endless life grew pale, for eternity held no value in the lightless depths of the ocean, where even the fish could not survive.
Otohime watched the days pass on earth, counted them in autumn leaves cascading to the ground, in bones that returned to the soil, in drops of rain that fed the sea.
Until one day, a woman gave her an offering.
On the shores of Satsuma, a mother placed her daughter in the sea and prayed for the life of her son. Otohime swam up to meet the mother, accepting the girl as the waves breathed her in. She cradled the child in her arms and tasted her loneliness, felt it like the peal of a bell in her soul. Though this was only a human girl, she shared Otohime’s gray heart.
Otohime knew such thoughts were dangerous. The last timeshe had been so enchanted by a human’s heart, she was left alone. So this time, she promised to watch over the human from afar, to protect her from her place in the sea. Humans were delicate birds that longed for the sky, and she wished not to trap one again, or to make them yearn for home. She breathed life into the child’s cold body and returned her to her bed, then watched from a distance.
She watched the girl grow tall and fierce and beautiful, but also lonely. When Otohime could bear it no longer, she came to the girl’s family as a servant and loved her quietly in small, stolen moments.
But even in her human form, Otohime could see all the threads of time. That was how she saw the child’s life on earth swiftly coming to an end. When her father went off to battle, the girl would chase after him, and he would slay her where she stood in the road.
So Otohime broke the promise she had made to herself on the day Urashima Taro turned to dust.
She built a new palace, somewhere between the earth and sea. She hid the home beneath the sword ferns and ginger, wrapped it with flowers of all seasons, just like her home beneath the ocean. She told the girl’s mother of this safe place, and when the girl’s end drew near, Otohime picked her up from the road and brought her close to home, where her brother found her.
The family moved to the palace of Otohime’s creation, and for a time, the girl had everything she had wished for: a father who loved only her, a dream that had not yet been extinguished, a purpose ignited within her. Otohime folded up the walls of time like a box around the house, and she locked the child inside. Unlike Urashima Taro, the girl would not yearn for home, for she would think she was already there.
Time went on. Days did not pass in a straight line for Otohime but rather as a map of stars, everything spread out all at once, forever and never again at the same time.
Somewhere among the scattered sparks of the timeline, she met the boy.
Otohime had been lost at sea. She was choking on a length of rope and had washed ashore somewhere far away, a distant land, a distant time. A woman brought her home, pulled the rope from her, and cared for her. The woman’s son stood behind her, his dark eyes full of tempests, the same as the girl’s. Otohime swore that, to thank his mother, she would protect the boy.
But death came quickly for him as well.
On a day like any other, the boy would take one too many pills and fall down a stairwell and shatter. Precipitated by nothing but the constant gray haze of his life, meaning nothing, changing nothing.
So, for a second time, Otohime broke her promise.
Before that day could come to pass, she went to the boy’s father, for his mother was long gone, and whispered in his ear as he slept.Go to the house behind the sword ferns, she said.
She led the boy to the same house in a different time and gave him the things his heart had been afraid to ask for: a devoted father who had loved his wife until the very end, a safe place to weather the tempests of the rest of the world, a family that was whole and kind and safe. She came to him with another face, cooked for him, told him ghost stories, brought him sparkling sea glass and sharp shells. She trapped the boy inside her palace by the sea, away from his own ending, the truth that he could not bear.
She did not realize, at first, how unstable her palace was, how precariously it balanced between the earth and the sea.
