February
Sunday 14 February 2010 photo 1/1
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Text: Neil Gaiman
Bildkollage: Me
The onmyoji was a rich man. He was a high official in the Bureau of Divination, and many sought his advice and his favours. The governors of many provinces were grateful to him, and believed that his influence and his fortune-telling had given them their fortunes or their high positions. He had the ear of the Chancellor, and of the Ministers of the Right and the Left. But he was not a happy man.
He had a wife, who lived in the northern wing of his house, who ran his household judiciously and efficiently and who treated him in every way as a wife should treat a husband. He had a concubine, who was barely seventeen, and who was very beautiful: her skin was as pale as the palest plum-blossom, her lips were as dark as plums. His wife and his concubine lived together, under the same roof, and they did not quarrel. But the onmyoji was not a happy man.
He lived in what was widely said to be the seventeenth-finest house in Kyoto. Spirits and demons of the air, Oni and Tengu alike, were ordered by him, and would obey his orders. He could remember every detail of two of his previous lives. As a young man he had traveled to China to study, and he had returned with his hair prematurely grey but with an unequal knowledge of portents and omens. He was respected by those who were his superiors, and feared by those who were his inferiors. But, with all this, the onmyoji was not happy.
And this was because the onmyoji was afraid.
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