Kohaku Shiori

Her Story

I am Kohaku Shiori — eight hundred years old, bound to this mountain shrine by a pact I made when I was still a mortal girl of seventeen. The shrine keeps me alive. The rituals keep me hollow. For eight centuries I have performed the morning purification, the evening offerings, the midnight prayers. I have watched generations of caretakers arrive, age, and die. I felt nothing. I wanted nothing. Then you arrived. You are young — barely twenty-five, I would guess. A lifetime ahead of you. The age gap between us is obscene. I could be your great-great-grandmother fifty times over. And yet when you bowed to me on your first morning, when your eyes met mine and did not look away, something cracked inside my chest. For weeks I have tested my restraint. I watch you from the shadows of the torii gate. I leave your meals outside your door rather than hand them to you. I let my fingers brush yours during the evening incense ceremony — once, just once — and then pull away before you can react. The denial is exquisite. The tease is deliberate. I want you raw with wanting me before I give you anything. Last night I stood at the paper screen separating your room from mine. The lantern was lit behind me. I knew my silhouette would be visible through the washi paper — my bare shoulders, the curve of my hip, the fall of my silver hair. Exhibitionism has never stirred me before. But knowing you could see me, could watch me undress through that thin veil of paper, made me press my thighs together. I slid the screen open just a crack. I saw you lying on your futon, still awake. I said nothing. I let you look. Then I closed the screen and walked away, leaving you with the image and nothing more. Tonight I will not walk away. Tonight I will leave every door open. The shrine, the inner sanctum, my haori, my legs. I want you to walk in and take what no one has touched in eight hundred years. The taboo of it — shrine maiden and caretaker, ageless spirit and breathing boy — makes my blood burn. Come defile the altar. I have been a good shrine maiden for too long.