Free Fudoki by Kij Johnson

get it for you?” She stood and crossed to the sliding door, and gathered up something that had been there. It was a footed wicker box with straps so that one could carry it over the shoulder, like the packs the monks carry.
    The tortoiseshell woman frowned. “This is not mine.”
    “Of course it is,” the wife said. “We saw you bring it here. You put it right there when you came in, along with your cloak and other things.”
    The tortoiseshell woman opened the basket. Inside were bundles of various sizes. She unwrapped the first: a handful of needles pinned to a scrap of the indigo cloth that peasants use for everything, rolled tight to protect them. She handed this to the wife, who ooh ed over their sharpness, the lack of rust. There was a larger lumpy bundle of oiled cotton, as well. She unrolled it on the floor, and found wrapped in rabbit-patterned silk nineteen knives.
    “Those are nice,” the farmer said. “What do you want for them?”
    The knives were each precisely as long as her palm, each identical to the one in her belt. “I—cannot trade these,” she said, looking at them.
    The farmer shrugged. “Someone else wants them, eh? It’s a pity, they look good and sharp.” But despite the fact that she had nothing to give him, he gave her a cloth filled with goose meat and rice balls.
    They slept soon after that, and she was nearly asleep when she heard the farmer’s wife whisper: “My lady? Men, they see little, but you are more than a seller of needles, or even a flighty girl running away from home. Who and what are you?”
    “I don’t know,” she answered, honestly but warily, remembering the last time she’d answered this question, for the black cat who had attacked her. “No one.”
    “No one is no one,” the farmer’s wife said. But nothing else happened, and when she went her way at dawn the next morning, the farmer’s wife said nothing of this.
    I try to write of the common people, but, really, what do I know? I have never met any. I have never slept in their homes, eaten their food. Even my servants are of good family, elegant and civilized women all. I imagine what their lives must be like, yet my imaginings are necessarily naïve. But what else do I have? Is it better to write and think only of what I have myself experienced? Most monogatari tales are about what their authors already know: life as a court noblewoman, the mannered round of exchanged poems and misunderstood intentions. I am intimately familiar with this world: I was born for it, and have lived at court for fifty years. And here, where I tell the tale of the cat who became a woman, I confess frankly that much of my life bored me senseless.
    I have watched the full moon many times, crossing the same arch of sky between the same mountains to east and west, lighting gardens that were nearly interchangeable: here the three lakes, there the stand of reeds and iris, the pagoda from China, the perfect little bridge. Yes, it is always beautiful, each month’s moon unique. But all my life I longed to see a place where the eye was drawn, not by delicate nuances in oh, so familiar sights but by utter newness, by a blow to the mind. Perhaps this is why I write a tale now, something so foreign to my experience—because in doing so I am for a minute or a month freed from my life.
    I have traveled as much as was allowed. I have gone as far north as Funaoka hill, and been on pilgrimage as far away as Ise, Hase, Yoshino mountain, two days’ travel and more from the capital. I even saw the moon rise over the ocean once. But every night the tortoiseshell woman sleeps under a new sky and a new moon. She has lost everything, and still I envy her from the bottom of my heart.

4. The Butterfly-Printed Notebook
     
    In the morning it was raining. The wicker pack was still there, and so she shrugged into its straps. There was also a basket-hat, deep enough to conceal her face, with a trailing veil of ivory gauze. She had not had this the day