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[17 Jan 2014|11:56pm] |
Outside Kawazu in an area politely removed from the comings and goings of the tourists who filled the town to bursting each year during sakura season stood a little, traditional house itself half-hidden among the sakura. Even the proper residents of Kawazu often paid no notice to the house as it seemed to disappear when the sakura were in full bloom, though everyone had something they could contribute about the woman who lived there--she was quiet, she was reclusive, she was kind to children who stumbled onto her property, that she was an old woman with a girl's face.
The house had been Kikuya's one secret, a treasure she had tucked away from the government and even from her friends during her service to Japan. It was the house she had been born in, owned by her grandfather and carefully, privately shuffled along until a time when Kikuya herself had taken ownership of it and in her hands it remained less of a home and more of a token connecting her to the life that slipped away when the government had turned her into what she was.
Now it was all she had, a private place where no one bothered her and no one knew that the private woman at the end of the lane in the house was once a national hero. No one knew that she had once been Super Geisha. No one knew that she had been taken away from the only thing that mattered to her. They just knew that every year, just before Tanabata, she came into town to mail a package to a man in the city, the package absent of a return address, but wrapped in the colorful wish papers of the holiday.
And every year, on Tanabata, Hajime receives a package wrapped in the colorful papers of wishes, the postal service acting as a flock of magpies creating a bridge, though outside Kawazu, Kikuya isn't sure he even knows that his mysterious admirer send him books not from the heart of a smitten fan, but instead from a familiar, long-thought-lost heart.
Two days after Tanabata, Kikuya rises as she always does at dawn and goes outside to watch the sun rise.
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