Asato
Purple eyes.
The thin wail of a child sang with the wind, the sound torn to shreds as the storm raged outside. It had been a week; he had never stopped crying. The villagers gathered to discuss this, huddled in their wooden houses. Though the modern world had come to Japan, it had not been an even distribution – there were still many places such as this, villages hidden deep in the mountains that had missed the new laws and the new ways.
She was only fourteen and unmarried when it happened. She went by herself to gather mushrooms out in the deep mountain forest. When they found her, it seemed as though a wild beast had ravaged her. She said she didn’t remember it; half the family had believed her, the other half wanted her thrown out for fear of bringing a strange spiritual pollution to their people. It was settled that the child’s birth would solve the mystery.
And then, it was a son. And it had purple eyes.
She died giving birth. It was too strong for her, the midwife had said. Too bad.
They left him out in the snow on the mountain for a week in a sturdy basket with no blankets for warmth, but he lived, tears frozen to his cheeks, his body numb and blue. The men who found him dug him out of three feet of snow, finding the woven coffin of rush, and his purple eyes turned up to the light as if in gratitude. They wanted to bury him again after the ground had thawed, hoping that he would die for certain in the dark earth, but were stopped by one of the village elders.
Eventually, they gave him away, praying that they had not offended one of the old gods of the land that roamed the hidden places.
And so, to the nearest market town they took him, the boy sucking on his thumb, his violet eyes staring wide, coal black hair long to his shoulders, a beautiful child by any perspective. He was growing fast; by the thaw he could walk by himself. They kept him out in a storage shed where his strange eyes couldn’t curse anyone.
Halfway to the market town they stopped for the night in another little village, one that had sprung forth as a resting point a day’s walk before the market town.
They tied him firmly to a tree to keep him from wandering away. The posts were for valuable farm animals, not for one such as him. He sat quietly, because he was afraid of being beaten.
Ruka was fifteen at the time. She had been widowed before she was even married. Three times over her promised husbands had died in accidents or from illness. It was bad luck. No one wanted her anymore, because they were afraid that she was cursed. A girl who couldn’t be married was useless; she knew this much.
But when she saw the little boy she knew that they had something in common. She had heard them talk about his unnaturalness, the fact that he was cursed. That the crop had failed the year he was born; that there had been signs from heaven that expressed displeasure. The freeze had been especially hard that year.
He was the child of the reed basket that had lived. That’s what they called him, Asato, like the early grave they had made for him, the one that he escaped.
It was a good enough sign for her.
So quietly, after the men had gone to bed, she untied the sleeping boy, picked him up, and walked away.
She never looked back.
Note: The kanji for Asato means a flax or hemp container.