Rain hisses like swinging snakes and gutters gurgle. Orito watches a vein pulsating in Yayoi’s throat. The belly craves food, she thinks, the tongue craves water, the heart craves love and the mind craves stories. It is stories, she believes, that make life in the House of Sisters tolerable, stories in all their forms: the Gifts’ letters, tittle-tattle, recollections and tall tales like Hatsune’s singing skull. She thinks of myths of gods, of Izanami and Izanagi, of Buddha and Jesus; and perhaps the Goddess of Mount Shiranui, and wonders whether the same principle is not at work. Orito pictures the human mind as a loom that weaves disparate threads of belief, memory and narrative into an entity whose common name is Self, and which sometimes calls itself Perception.

‘I can’t stop thinking,’ Yayoi murmurs, ‘of the girl.’

‘Which girl,’ Orito wraps Yayoi’s hair around her thumb, ‘Sleepyhead?’

‘The ribbon-seller’s sweetheart. The one he planned to marry.’

You must leave the House and leave Yayoi, Orito reminds herself, soon.

‘So sad.’ Yayoi yawns. ‘She’d grow old and die, never knowing the truth.’

The fire glows bright and dim as the draught blows strong and weak.

There is a leak over the iron brazier: drips hiss and crackle.

The wind rattles the Cloisters’ wooden screens like a deranged prisoner.

Yayoi’s question comes from nowhere. ‘Were you touched by a man, Sister?’

Orito is used to her friend’s directness, but not on this subject. ‘No.’

That ‘No’ is my stepbrother’s victory, she thinks. ‘My stepmother in Nagasaki has a son. I’d rather not name him. During Father’s marriage negotiations, it was settled that he’d train to be a doctor and a scholar. It didn’t take long, however, for his lack of aptitude to betray itself. He hated books, loathed Dutch, was disgusted by blood, and was despatched to an uncle in Saga, but he returned to Nagasaki for Father’s funeral. The tongue-tied boy was now a seventeen-year-old man of the world. It was “Oy, bath!”; it was “Hey, tea!” He watched me, as men do, with no encouragement. None.’

Orito pauses as footsteps in the passageway come and go.

‘My stepmother noticed her son’s new attitude but said nothing, not yet. Until Father died, she passed as a dutiful doctor’s wife, but after the funeral she changed… or changed back. She forbade me to leave our residence without her permission, permission that she rarely gave. She told me, “Your days of playing at scholars are over.” Father’s old friends were turned away until they no longer called. She dismissed Ayame, our last servant from Mother’s time. I had to take over her duties. One day my rice was white: from the next, it was brown. What a pampered creature that must make me sound.’

Yayoi gasps slightly at a kick in her uterus. ‘They’re listening, and none of us thinks you were a pampered creature.’

‘Well, then my stepbrother taught me that my troubles had not yet begun. I slept in Ayame’s old room – two mats, so it was more of a cupboard – and one night, a few days after Father’s funeral, when the whole house was asleep, my stepbrother appeared. I asked him what he wanted. He told me that I knew. I told him to get out. He said, “The rules have changed, dear stepsister.” He said that as head of the Aibagawas of Nagasaki’ – Orito tastes metal – ‘the household’s assets were his. “This one, too,” he said, and that was when he touched me.’

Yayoi grimaces. ‘It was wrong of me to ask. You don’t have to tell me.’

It was his crime, Orito thinks, not mine. ‘I tried to… but he hit me as I’d never been hit before. He clamped his hand over my mouth, and told me…’ to imagine, she remembers, he was Ogawa. ‘He swore that if I resisted, he would hold the right side of my face over the fire until it matched the left side, and do what he wanted to do to me anyway.’ Orito stops to steady her voice. ‘Acting frightened was easy. Acting submissive was harder. So I said, “Yes.” He licked my face like a dog and unfastened himself and… then I sank my fingers deep between his legs and squeezed what I found there, like a lemon, with all my strength.’

Yayoi looks at her friend in a wholly new way.

‘His scream woke the house up. His mother came running and ordered the servants away. I told her what her stepson had tried to do. He told her I had begged him to my bed. She slapped the head of the Aibagawas of Nagasaki once for being a liar, twice for being stupid, and ten times for almost wasting the family’s most saleable property. “Abbot Enomoto,” she told him, “will want your stepsister intact when she arrives at his Nunnery of Freaks.” That was how I learnt why Enomoto’s bailiff had been visiting. Four days later I found myself here.’

The storm pelts the roofs and the fire growls.

Orito remembers how all her fathers’ friends refused to shelter her on the night she ran away from her own house.

She remembers hiding all night in the House of Wistaria, listening.

She remembers her painful decision to accept de Zoet’s proposal.

She remembers her final shaming and capture at Dejima’s Land-Gate.

‘The monks aren’t like your stepbrother,’ Yayoi is saying. ‘They’re gentle.’

‘So gentle that when I say, “No,” they stop, and leave my room?’

‘The Goddess chooses the Engifters, just as she chooses us Sisters.’

To implant belief, Orito thinks, is to dominate the believers.

‘At my first Engiftment,’ Yayoi confesses, ‘I imagined a boy I once loved.’

So the hoods, Orito realises, are to hide the men’s faces, not ours.

‘Might you have known a man,’ Yayoi hesitates, ‘who you could…?’

Ogawa Uzaemon, the midwife thinks, is no longer my concern.

Orito banishes all thought of Jacob de Zoet, and recalls Jacob de Zoet.

‘Oh,’ says Yayoi, ‘I’m as nosy as Hashihime tonight. Pay me no mind.’

But the Newest Sister slips from the warmth of their blankets, goes to the chest given her by the Abbess and takes out a bamboo-and-paper fan. Yayoi sits up, curious. Orito lights a candle and opens the fan.

Yayoi peers at the details. ‘He was an artist? Or a scholar?’

‘He read books, but he was just a clerk in an ordinary warehouse.’

‘He loved you.’ Yayoi touches the ribs of the fan. ‘He loved you.’

‘He was a stranger from another… domain. He scarcely knew me.’

Yayoi looks at Orito pityingly, and sighs. ‘So?’

The sleeper knows she is dreaming because the moon-grey cat pronounces, ‘Someone carried this fish all the way up this mountain.’ The cat takes the pilchard, jumps to the ground and vanishes beneath the walkway. The dreamer lowers herself on to the Courtyard, but the cat has gone. She sees a narrow rectangular hole in the foundations of the House…

… Its breath is warm. She hears children and summer’s insects.

A voice up on the walkway asks, ‘Has the Newest Sister lost anything?’

The moon-grey cat licks its paws and speaks in her father’s voice.

‘I know you’re a messenger,’ says the dreamer, ‘but what is your message?’

The cat looks at her pityingly, and sighs. ‘I left through this hole, beneath us…’

The dark universe is packed into one small box that slowly opens.

‘… and reappeared at the House gate a minute later. What does that mean?’

The sleeper wakes up in frosted darkness. Yayoi is here, fast asleep.

Orito gropes, grapples, fumbles and understands. A conduit… or a tunnel.