The Tenth Month

About

In the tenth month of 1004, the month the gods leave the capital, Lady Suo writes love letters for a prince who cannot write. Two years of paper — the right season-word, the ink thinned to the exact weight of longing, one blot placed like a caught breath — have won him Lady Kaneko of the Left Gate. Kaneko arrives at the household in the ninth month. By the tenth she has met the man behind the screen and understood that she fell in love with a hand, not a mouth. Three people now share one secret and none of them wants the same thing from it. Suo wants to be read once under her own name, whatever it costs a woman with no rank and no protector. Kaneko wants to know which of them she loved, because her daughter's marriage depends on the answer staying quiet. Ono no Yasuhira, the night guard who taught himself letters from discarded drafts, carries every message in the house and has begun to choose which ones arrive. A courtly love story with the manners on and the knives under them: incense, wet ink, a poetry contest with a career at stake, an abortive elopement in the rain at Awataguchi, and a final letter that only one hand can write. Desire runs frank and unhurried; nothing here resolves without someone losing a name, a household, or a life. Five endings, and the kindest of them still costs a woman her handwriting.

Cast

• Lady Suo protagonist; the Prince's unnamed ghostwriter
• Lady Kaneko of the Left Gate the woman the letters won; a widow with a daughter to place
• Ono no Yasuhira night guard, message-carrier, literate against his station
• The Third Prince, Sadanori the man with the mouth and the rank
• L Lady Ōmi, chief of the women's quarters keeper of the household's secrets and its ledgers no portrait yet