Girl Rides the Wind by Jacques Antoine

Shogunate, and now the castle was little more than a reminder of that loss.
    A childhood memory came to her – climbing the steeply sloping stone walls of the ruined keep with her brother and her cousins. Done in the ancient nozurazumi -style, with gaps between the boulders, there were lots of hand-holds, and they’d come home scuffed and scraped, shrieking flush-faced for joy. When the Prefectural government restored the castle a few years later, they insisted on redoing the walls in uchikomihagi -style, with cut stones fitted together to make a smooth surface, ostensibly on the grounds that this was how it would have been done under the Tokugawas, if they’d ever gotten around to a renovation, though everyone knew it was really because this was the style tourists expected to see, even if it isn’t historically accurate.
    Cousin Takako, who used to scamper up and down those old walls like a mountain goat, faster and braver than all the boys they knew, danced before Gyoshin’s mind as the plane banked for the final approach to Yonago Airport. Her best friend and confidante, over the years the two girls had hatched various rebellious plans for escaping the tyranny of the old man – Ojii-san they called him, as if he were just some stranger and not their grandfather, and patriarch of the clan, Heiji Nobutada . She remembered one summer in particular, just before she was to return to the university.
    “No, Taka-chan,” she cried out that day. “You can’t.”
    “I can and I will,” Taka had replied, in a voice as full of steely resolve as her grandfather’s ever was. “Don’t let Ojii-san intimidate you.”
    “But he’ll disown you… cast you out of the family. What will you do for money?”
    A year older than Gyoshin, she’d gone to university a year early and graduated even earlier. How she longed for Takako-san now, for her courage and her daring. Did grandfather realize the magnitude of the loss she represented to the family… and to himself? What she wouldn’t give to be able to confide in her cousin just one more time.
    “He wouldn’t dare, not if you do it, too. Don’t you remember our pact?”
    “We were just kids then. Things are different now.”
    “Are you saying you don’t love Hiroki-san anymore?”
    Just thinking about the lie she uttered next made her gag, and the taste of her own stomach acids at the back of her mouth promised to stick with her for the rest of the day. The plane banked right for its final approach and she clutched at the armrest. Takako died less than a year later, complications of the birth of her daughter – Gyoshin’s niece, or cousin, more accurately, though she didn’t care for such fine distinctions – and Ojii-san disowned the baby just as he had her mother.
    Worse than disowning the granddaughter, Heiji Nobutada exerted his influence to ruin Takako’s husband’s family as well. The Okamotos’ ramen restaurant went under when the bank suddenly called in a loan, and a few months later their son, Yasahiro, lost his position in the prefectural government and could find no other work. Their finances began to seem desperate, and his death in a car accident a year later completed their plunge into real poverty.
    Their daughter, Haru, went to live with her father’s parents, a shining bit of joy amid their otherwise dismal fortunes. Just before she was born, Takako teased Gyoshin with the idea of giving her one of those preposterous names favored by peasants, like Haruhime. “She’ll be our ‘sunlight princess’, and usher in sunnier times.” Gyoshin did what she could for them under the circumstances.
    “Why do you even care?” her brother had asked after the accident. “She brought it on herself. Grandfather warned her what would happen.”
    “And her daughter? She’s our blood, too.”
    “She’s an Okamoto, and besides, you’ll never change his mind about them… or her.”
    “Hasn’t he done enough to them?”
    Gyoshin scowled at the memory of