Vampires in the Lemon Grove Read Online Free PDF

bathhouse or, in the case of Iku, an abandoned cowshed.

    After sunset, the old blind woman arrives. “The zookeeper,” we call her. She hauls our food to the grated door, unbars the lower panel. We pass her that day’s skeins of reeled silk, and she pushes two sacks of mulberry leaves through the panel with a long stick. The woman never speaks to us, no matter what questions we shout at her. She simply waits, patiently, for our skeins, and so long as they are acceptable in quality and weight, she slides in our leaves. Tonight she has also slid in a tray of steaming human food for the new recruits. Tooka and Etsuyo get cups of rice and miso soup with floating carrots. Hunks of real ginger are unraveling in the broth, like hair. We all sit on the opposite side of the room and watch them chew with a dewy nostalgia that disgusts me even as I find myself ogling their long white fingers on their chopsticks, the balls of rice. The salt and fat smells of their food make my eyes ache. When we eat the mulberry leaves, we lower our new faces to the floor.
    They drink down the soup in silence. “Are we dreaming?” I hear one whisper.
    “The tea drugged us!” the younger sister, Tooka, cries at last. Her gaze darts here and there, as if she’s hoping to be contradicted. They traveled nine days by riverboat and oxcart, Etsuyo tells us, wearing blindfolds the entire time. So we could be that far north of Yamagata, or west. Or east, the younger sister says. We collect facts from every new
kaiko-joko
and use them to draw thread maps of Japan on the factory floor. But not even Tsuki the Apt can guess our whereabouts.
    Nowhere Mill, we call this place.
    Dai crosses the room and speaks soothingly to the sisters; then she leads them right to me. Oh, happy day. I glare at her through an unchewed mouthful of leaves.
    “Kitsune is quite a veteran now,” says smiling Dai, leading the fishy sisters to me, “she will show you around—”
    I hate this part. But you have to tell the new ones what’s in store for them. Minds have been spoiled by the surprise.
    “Will the manager of this factory be coming soon?” Etsuyo asks, in a grave voice. “I think there has been a mistake.”
    “We don’t belong here!” Tooka breathes.
    There’s nowhere else for you now, I say, staring at the floor. That tea he poured into you back in Sakegawa? The Agent’s drink is remaking your insides. Your intestines, your secret organs. Soon your stomachs will bloat. You will manufacture silk in your gut with the same helpless skill that you digest food, exhale. The
kaiko
-change, he calls it. A revolutionary process. Not even Chiyo, who knows sericulture, has ever heard of a tea that turns girls into silkworms. We think the tea may have been created abroad, by French chemists or British engineers.
Yatoi
-tea. Unless it’s the Agent’s own technology.
    I try to smile at them now.
    In the cup it was so lovely to look at, wasn’t it? An orange hue, like something out of the princess’s floating world woodblocks.
    Etsuyo is shaking. “But we can’t undo it? Surely there’s a cure. A way to reverse it, before it’s … too late.”
    Before we look like you
, she means.
    “The only cure is a temporary one, and it comes from the Machine. When your thread begins, you’ll understand …”
    It takes thirteen to fourteen hours for the Machine to empty a
kaiko-joko
of her thread. The relief of being rid of it is indescribable.
    These seashore girls know next to nothing about silkworm cultivation. In the mountains of Chichibu, Chiyo tells them, everyone in her village was involved. Seventy families workedtogether in a web: planting and watering the mulberry trees, raising the
kaiko
eggs to pupa, feeding the silkworm caterpillars. The art of silk production was very, very inefficient, I tell the sisters. Slow and costly. Until us.
    I try to weed the pride from my voice, but it’s difficult. In spite of everything, I can’t help but admire the quantity of