Himitsu (Book One of the Kakureta Hana series)

I: Ichi

My father rued the day I was born. My mother said the moment I came into this world, he walked out to the veranda and screamed to the heavens for the mere reason that I was a girl.

A girl, one who would have to be married off and supplied with finery until the day she left her father's house. Not the boy they had tried twenty years for, the one who would inherit my father's lordship and become the most renowned samurai in the realm.

When he came back, he took me in his arms, looked straight into my innocent eyes, and told me, "Hush now, child. For this day, you shall be my son, and no son of mine will bawl like a girl."

Mother and Nurse said his words stunned me so much that I stopped mid-cry and stared at him. He named me Amachi Junichi, despite my mother's protests, and insisted it would remind me of my duty.

My duty to my family and the people I would one day rule over even though I was a woman and no man. Every moment I lived was another one I was lying.

For the moment I was introduced to those beneath my father, I was his son, not his daughter. I was forced to give up everything a girl could have expected before I knew it was mine to take.

Those who attended my mother on the birthing bed were executed except for two: my father's most trusted samurai and the woman who would become my nurse. The four of them swore a vow of silence that day: my mother weeping tears upon my head, my father grim and determined, the other two stone-faced as they entered the tangled web that would become my life.

I hadn't understood why my father insisted I was male when I was younger. My mother and Nurse christened me with a female name and secretly dressed me as the girl I was in lovely printed kimonos and obis. My hair was allowed to grow slightly longer than my childhood mates for the two women to adorn with bows and flowers in secret moments.

The older I got, the more I realized why my father had made the decision he had that day. With both of my parents aging and no sign of another child, I was their only living heir. To keep our line alive, something had to be sacrificed, and that sacrifice had been my feminine identity.

In my seventh year, my mother passed on from this life. Distraught, my father threw himself into the brewing war, leading his men into battle after battle. That was the first time I really understood that my parents had loved each other in their own way.

The only time he took notice of me through his grief-stricken haze was when I started to show womanly curves. Infuriated, even though it was nature and not me who threatened to reveal his lies, he starved me in an effort to prevent my breasts from growing. The moment he returned to the battlefield, my nurse taught me how to bind and hide that which could give me away.

My fifteenth year, a horrible bloody war was being fought in true force. My father, still grieving for his wife, rode off into battle with his most experienced samurai, nearly 2,500 men.

When the carnage finally ceased, my father and his general were not among those few who returned to us. Instead, all his surviving men brought back was his sword and declared that I was to lead them, never mind the fact that I was young and still on the scrawny side.

I chose Igarashi Ryuu as my new general, someone who was only three years my senior but had already proven himself in battle.

He had been one of the few to return and the youngest. Those he had trained with, our new blood, were dead, bodies never to rise again.

Thus, I took up the burdens that my father had pressed upon me, ever reminded of my duty by my name Junichi. I believe that I wept harder for Nurse's passing than for my own father. By sixteen, I was the only one who knew what I truly was. The kimonos my dear mother, and later Nurse, had given me were stowed deep in my closet, only seen by me in the dark of the night.