The Ruined Flower

The violent north wind had been raging for two months when a cold day dawned. On the 20th day of the 2nd month of Meiji 5, (20 February 1872) a large crowd gathered at the gates of Kodenma cho’s prison, waited with steaming breath for its dark gates to open, heedless of the biting storm.

A peculiar sight emerged; a woman barely 27, a renowned former geisha appeared and was led out with sword carrying officials of the Imperial Government. The din of confusion rung, and amidst the crowd’s echoes, the woman surrenders herself to the officers. Her hands were tied together with straw rope and she was squeezed, prone, into a waiting cage that reeked of piss from condemned ages past.

A bank of charnel mud awaited her in the fetid gloom. Her own beheading was to take place within these precincts. 

Her name was Yoarashi Okinu, 夜嵐おきぬ “Night Storm,” for she was an orgasmic screamer. A much sought-after geisha in Edo that captivated Japan in the latter 19th century after killing her pimp and trying run away with a kabuki actor.

Hordes of savage women screamed, culling down upon Yoarashi’s beautiful head one anathema after another. While Fathers described her filthy exploits with racy theatrics to their befuddled sons. Young knaves regale each other with nights spent with this “Ruined Flower”, comparing notes. Many brought their friends, as if to prove that they have got their money’s worth in monstrous debauchery.

Their vile thoughts buzzed in the air and stung her to the core. The men who had frequently sampled Yoarashi's “talents” were the first to call for her fall.

Along the road pitched the decapitated heads of other women, thrusted upon pikes like a row of tattered flags. Wind plucked at their strands of hair, beetles fed undisturbed their gore streaked face. Crickets flares up from within their dead mouth. Their dead, violet eyes stared at Yoarashi from the gloom, and under their gaze she thought they changed, turned greyer, darker, into an expression of mocking, and sneers of fiendish malignity. 

Soon, her rotting head would adorned these streets as a warning to women in every corner of Japan while the cruel sun bleach it with a rapist’s intensity and her body cast away like offal, a decaying heap beside men’s feet

She imagined the executioner preparing to behead her and was surprised to find a boy half her age: the 19 year old Yamada Asaueimon VIII (probably about his ninth month working at Kozukappara execution grounds with condemned criminals). 

Upon seeing her he popped with sweat, then cast away his eyes from the lovely sinner. She contemplated the sword about to behead her; A sharp and graceful thing, with a sensual form embellished with a life time of care: A fitting weapon.

At length he met her gaze, with air confused. 

Of those around; she gave no reply, 

She wielded her gyrating kimono and hypnotic hips in taunting movements till she marked the spot of infamy. 

She stood alone in the sodden field, her dark gold sandals planted in the mud churned up by the cavalry who drilled there. 

Like an artist of a sublime craft she squeezed and tore off her sandals, then knelt before her killer with a gentle ease that had always been admired in her. 

She eyed the grim brooding masses that ringed her, the disapproving wives and the many boys and girls they brought, for it is encouraged to speak to “the children,” to warn them against turning into a bad person like her. 

“Yoarashi Okinu hana no ada-yume” She spoke in a soft, measured tone, “in my flowery dreams of revenge,” her voice was ethereal and had a sensual ring, her eyes were half closed as if lost in a nightmare that was her life. Lewd images of all the cigar pipes put out on her skin, the bitter semen from devilish suitors staining her insides, their piss splashing on her face, endless, hopeless rapes till she’s half dead…all the endless daily defiling no one will know save for the guilty. Her long fingers sampled the rich embroidery on her sleeves for the last time, “I awoke again to arrange flowers.” Also translates to “Remember me Arashi (her lover’s name)” and felt her pink womanhood leaking at the very thought. 

When she finished she gazed before her with a lost smile.

And in a world which made her hard, she washed away sorrow with one lone tear.

The sight almost deprived Asaueimon of reason and He grew drunk with death.

Because of the exceedingly difficult crime she had caused he must perform the last sad office of impaling her decapitated head, expose to public scorn to show that her evil had come to an end. Leaving her superb lips and cheeks striped away by eager beaks till not a strip of flesh remain.

Distant thunder rolled and rumbled beyond the fields. Great drops of rain fell upon the officers' hats. The wet wind whipped about as if warring with itself. 

Yoarashi’s pale white skin trembled as tiny motes of snow drifted down, dancing along her pulse for a moment before melting in her body’s heat.

The gloom gathered again upon Asauemon's features, his
blade curved slightly back, like a glittering claw.

As the blade rose up behind the geisha's neck. The beautiful woman adjusted her head under the blade and points her head toward hell.

The lightning arced across the clearing, and as the storm raced across Edo, the woman that had scandalized and seduced Japan was no more.

~

For more:

http://diversejapan.com/2012/07/09/a-true-life-kabuki-crime-story-an-actor-and-his-geisha-mistress-murder-her-patron/