Oriental Rugs in Japan

 
Haruto Kotori gave birth on a syrupy night during her sixteenth summer, tsked over by the brothel owner and an old crone from down the street, sweating on a bed of old Oriental rugs. She named her son Sorame, because every single idiot who saw her baby was going to call him that, anyway. “Sky-eyes” at least had some poetry in it. The other girls at the Akabeko tutted that it sounded like a girl’s name, but agreed to watch him.
Kotori couldn’t bear to be out of work, and went back too soon, half-useless and thick-waisted. Nobody called her little girl anymore. Every night she went to the docks and swilled saltwater, and every morning she came home and cried it back out. Sorame cried with her, out-cried her. Sometimes she buried her face in her antique rug, sometimes she wanted to bury him. By the time the sakura were blooming again, Kotori was dried out.
By his fourth Tanabata festival, Sorame had a mop of lightish hair and his last willing babysitter was the boy-whore Aijirou. Kotori saw them, at sunset as she left, folding a few bits of paper for lanterns and playing with whichever bugs Sorame had found that day. In afternoons she tried to teach him his kanji and hiragana, but her own lessons were hazy.  
“So what’s this one, Sorame?” She kneeled in her worn house-robe on the worn tatami in their room in the Akabeko, chewing on an old fishbone like the sailors did.
“Come on. What is it, it’s not that hard.”  The word was ‘sword’.
“Outside, Mama? Outside?”
All he ever wanted to do was dash along the harbor, or tumble through the woods by the graveyard, whacking at things with a bamboo stick. Well, she didn’t want to work either.
“Fine. Wait for Mama to get her kimono-” He tore off to the garden. She let him, and sank down to take a nap. She never seemed to be awake, anymore.
She dreamt of sails and flags with crosses on them.