aithne | Miwa explains herself

The second book in the Nine Secrets series focuses on gravity. The setting in 1500's Japan, the sport is sumo, and the protagonist is Isenoumi Miwa, only daughter of the man who owns the Isenoumi sumo stable.

Hit the cut to meet the fiercely ambitious Miwa, and learn about the secrets she keeps...

(Wow, there is a lot of cultural stuff to absorb around sumo. My information-gathering runs are filled with detours into Shinto tradition and Japanese cultural and military history.)

My name is Miwa, and I was born right here, in the Isenoumi sumo stable.

Well, not right here. But my father owns this stable, and I have been here ever since I was born. I learned to walk on polished wood floors, learned to speak by listening to the wrestlers talk, learned my numbers by calculating the stable rankings.

Sumo is in my blood; my father was a wrestler who injured his back early in his career and then turned what few winnings he had and a gift for talking money out of people into a new sumo stable. My mother was an avid follower of the sport as well, at least she was before she died about five years ago. We have a house near the stables, but neither my father nor I are there much. There is too much to do.

I do whatever needs doing, an extra pair of hands to help dress hair, clean, make sure that the supplies for bouts are stocked, and calculate rankings. My father, for all of his charm, has no head for business; I keep the books and copy and recopy the rankings, just like my mother did.

I keep my hair cut short and I wear men's clothes, and everyone overlooks the fact that the stables are men's territory, and women aren't really supposed to venture inside. I am too useful to let inconvenient ritual rules get in the way of me doing my work, and outside the stables I am known as Wen, and most people think I'm a boy.

I don't keep many secrets, but the one I keep is a big one. After my mother died, my grandfather called me to him. "You're only a girl," he said, surveying me, "but I think my chance of having a grandson died with your mother. And you've got a lot better head on your shoulders than that son of mine. So this is yours." He handed me a strange thing, a collection of paper and thin metal sheets pressed between heavy leather, wrapped with braided silk cord.

"What is it?" I asked after I took it from him.

"A book," he said, as if it were too obvious to explain. "Off you go, and don't let your father lay eyes on it. He'd never understand it, and he talks to much when he's drunk sake. Smartest thing that boy ever did was marry your mother."

He never spoke any more about it, and he died half a year later, before I had done more than puzzle out that the book was about something called gravity, and how to manipulate it.

I know more, now. I haunt the halls of the scholars and listen, I find those few who know the scripts of far-off lands and ask them what this character or that sigil means. I piece together my knowledge, and what the book is telling me--

Oh, what the book is telling me!

For gravity is the pull of one body on another, and if you can control it, you can control so much else. You can change the path of an arrow in flight. You can leap so far that you think you're flying.

You can make the feet of even a rikishi so heavy that nothing can move him.

You can win bouts, even those bouts you think are lost before the first clash, those bouts that are won or lost in the ritual...

You can build the greatest stable in Edo.

I keep the book very safe, and I wait and watch for the wrestler who will be my instrument, who will, with my help, carry us into the top rankings.

And I read my book, and practice.