Hirogato pulled the double doors closed gently and turned towards the waiting group. All men, all in suits, they stood stiffly and formally around the quietly decorated anteroom. None of them had ever really known her. None understood her the way that he had. One â€" one had been the cause of her demise and the others where simply puppets: mute witnesses to a dance of succession.
Bowing low and solemnly, Hirogato addressed himself to tup and to one tall thin man in particular. “My mistress is dead,†he intoned, a hint of accusation in his voice.
There were no signs of grief. Her death had been hoped for but unexpected. Only the low murmurs of men who now found themselves at a loose end until the new head of the Zaibatsu was chosen. This was a task that could not wait; the massive Japanese conglomerate depended on strict authoritarian rule from the top. The body must not be allowed to remain headless.
They filed out, straightening their ties and tugging on their cuffs, ill at ease to remain in the room where word of their young leader’s death had impolitely stained the walls. Hirogato, who had been treasured by her for his dark sense of humour and his passion for European history, waited until the room had emptied. Then he announced to the hollow chamber in perfectly intoned English, “The Queen is dead. Long live the King.â€
She would have really enjoyed that.
****
Mitsue Yatsuda had been many things. No one knew her origins but old Zenjiro Yatsuda had adopted her at the age of sixteen. People had whispered that the old man had had an appetite for young girls and that she was not so much his daughter as his plaything. He kept her shut away in his summer house outside Kobe.
It wasn’t until Zenjiro’s fifty fifth birthday celebration that the rest of the Yatsuda family laid eyes upon the girl. Zenjiro, it was said, seemed wizened and shrunken â€" far older than his years. But the girl Mitsue sat quietly and attentively at his side, dressed demurely in the furisode kimono of an innocent. The gold silk patterned with chrysanthemums and peonies set off her milk white skin and the back of her kimono drooped gracefully, revealing the two dark, sinuous hairlines that follow the neck’s tendons down and evoke the lips of a woman’s vulva. Zenjiro sat with his gnarled hand casually tucked between the folds of her robe as she served him. And from time to time his hand, nestled between the silk layers, would become agitated and his eyes would glaze over. But the girl maintained perfect composure as if nothing were amiss. People said it was obscene. She was just eighteen.
The following year, in the autumn, Zenjiro Yatsuda died and left his entire fortune and the leadership of the Yatsuda Zaibatsu to his two sons, Akira and Toshiro. This was entirely expected. One provision of his will, however, was exceptionally odd. In order to inherit, Akira was obligated to marry Mitsue. And, odder still, should tragedy befall Akira, Toshiro would not only take over his brother’s place as leader but also take his wife. Finally, and strangest by far, was the condition that Mitsue would take a seat on the board of management of the Zaibatsu.
This was virtually unheard of. Women simply did not sit on the board. It was inappropriate and destabilizing for a woman to wield the power that the vote afforded her. Both Akira and Toshiro protested bitterly to their father’s attorneys, but it seemed the will was clear and incontrovertible on this point.
Akira was vociferously resentful of the conditions of his inheritance and, insulting the memory of his dead father, turned up late for the wedding and sat opposite Mitsue, glowering at her as the matrimonial sake cups were brought in. Some of the invited guests commented privately that this was no marriage blessed by heaven.
