Read Vampires in the Lemon Grove for Free Online Page A

because I remember that he repeated this injunction in a hard voice, tightening up the grammar: “If you die, your father will pay.” He was peering deeply into my face; it was April, and I could see the rain in his mustache. I met his gaze and giggled, embarrassing myself.
    “Look at you, blinking like a firefly! Only it’s very serious—”
    He lunged forward and grabbed playfully at my waist, causing my entire face to darken in what I hoped was a womanly blush. The Agent, perhaps fearful that I was choking on a radish, thumped my back.
    “There, there, Kitsune! You will come with me to the model factory? You will reel for the realm, for your emperor? For me, too,” he added softly, with a smile.
    I nodded, very serious myself now. He let his fingers brush softly against my knuckles as he drew out the contract.
    “Let me bring it to Father,” I told the Agent. “Stand back. Stay here. His disease is contagious.”
    The Agent laughed. He said he wasn’t used to being bossed by a
joko
. But he waited. Who knows if he believed me?
    My father would never have signed the document. He would not have agreed to let me go. He blamed the new government for my grandfather’s death. He was suspicious of foreigners. He would have demanded to know, certainly, where the factory was located. But I could work whereas he could not. I saw my father coming home, cured, and finding the five-yen advance. I had never used an ink pen before. In my life as a daughter and a sister, I had never felt so powerful. No woman in Gifu had ever brokered such a deal on her own. KITSUNE TAJIMA , I wrote in the slot for the future worker’s name, my heart pounding in my ears. When I returned it, I apologized for my father’s unsteady hand.
    On our way to the
kaiko
-tea ceremony, I was so excited that I could barely make my questions about the factory intelligible. He took me to a summer guesthouse in the woods behind the Miya River, which he told me was owned by a Takayama merchant family and, at the moment, empty.
    Something is wrong
, I knew then. This knowledge sounded with such clarity that it seemed almost independent of my body, like a bird calling once over the trees. But I proceeded, followingthe Agent toward a dim staircase. The first room I glimpsed was elegantly furnished, and I felt my spirits lift again, along with my caution. I counted fourteen steps to the first landing, where he opened the door onto a room that reflected none of the downstairs refinement. There was a table with two stools, a bed; otherwise the room was bare. I was surprised to see a large brown blot on the mattress. One porcelain teapot. One cup. The Agent lifted the tea with an unreadable expression, frowning into the pot; as he poured, I thought I heard a little splash; then he cursed, excused himself, said he needed a fresh ingredient. I heard him continuing up the staircase. I peered into the cup and saw that there was something alive inside it—writhing, dying—a fat white
kaiko
. I shuddered but I didn’t fish it out. What sort of tea ceremony was this? Maybe, I thought, the Agent is testing me, to see if I am squeamish, weak. Something bad was coming—the stench of a bad and thickening future was everywhere in that room. The bad thing was right under my nose, crinkling its little legs at me.
    I pinched my nostrils shut, just as if I were standing in the mud a heartbeat from jumping into the Miya River. Without so much as consulting the Agent, I squinched my eyes shut and gulped.
    The other workers cannot believe I did this willingly. Apparently, one sip of the
kaiko
-tea is so venomous that most bodies go into convulsions. Only through the Agent’s intervention were they able to get the tea down. It took his hands around their throats.
    I arranged my hands in my lap and sat on the cot. Already I was feeling a little dizzy. I remember smiling with a sweet vacancy at the door when he returned.
    “You—drank it.”
    I nodded proudly.
    Then I saw pure