A teacher I once had warned the class never to ask a question you don’t want to hear the answer to – even if you think you do. Firefly Wedding is filled with those questions: what is Shinpei’s true history? Why doesn’t Asagiri want to be bought out? Who sent Satoko to the island? While we don’t get all of the answers across these three volumes, the ones we do get are enough to make you question whether ignorance was perhaps more comfortable.
You’ll notice that I don’t say “better.” At least two of the answers feel as if they inform the third, or rather, as if they ought to inform it. The most searing is the truth about Asagiri. Once the top courtesan on the island, she now no longer takes customers, instead lolling around her room refusing all offers to buy her out – and to tell anyone, even the man she was once in love with, Mitsueda, her reasons. This has pushed Mitsueda to the point where he will do anything to force her hand, and so he enlists Satoko’s help: if she can get Asagiri to agree, he’ll give her the document that proves that her stepmother sold her into sexual slavery. Possession of this paper will allow her and Kotaro to leave – and Shinpei too, as far as he’s concerned. (Kotaro’s the only one not keen on this, honestly.)
But Asagiri is more willing to play with Satoko’s desire like a particularly sadistic cat with a mouse, or at least, that’s how it looks to Shinpei and Kotaro. In Asagiri’s mind, her room in the brothel is the only safe place left for her. She’s gained enough power and fame to set her own terms, and that gives her an autonomy she’s unlikely to find elsewhere. And that’s something she badly needs to protect herself.
As a character, Asagiri is representative of everything that can go wrong for a woman indentured (or sold in outright slavery) to a brothel. As a younger sex worker, she was one of the most beautiful women, and thus in high demand – but it wasn’t necessarily her choice who she served. One of her “top” customers was a powerful politician, and, as we learn in these volumes, he had very particular tastes… tastes that resulted in permanent physical issues for Asagiri and, presumably, other women. After suffering at his hands, she’s unwilling to put herself in a position where she can be used and abused by other men, all of whom, no matter their social standing, are above her in the hierarchy of the Meiji era. In her room in the brothel, she’s in charge of herself. Being bought out offers no such guarantees.
It’s also why she’s at least partially invested in Satoko. Asagiri’s life has been filled with sex but devoid of romance, and she sees Satoko and Shinpei as having the romance she was denied. In Asagiri’s mind, Satoko and Shinpei staying on the island may be the safest thing for them: Shinpei has some power there, and Satoko’s skeletal figure isn’t likely to put her in the way of selling sex. Besides that, someone in Satoko’s family sold her into sex work, which implies that even if she returns, she’s unlikely to be safe in the family home. And since nobles are also unlikely to welcome Shinpei, the island may, in fact, be the safest place for her, health issues notwithstanding.
There’s something to this line of thought. Kotaro may eventually come around to Satoko’s relationship with Shinpei, something solidified in these volumes, and take steps to ensure that her family doesn’t despise him on sight, but things are unlikely to be much easier for them off-island. This is driven home in the final page of volume seven, which reveals the culprit of her kidnapping in what is a strikingly horrible scene. Although Firefly Wedding isn’t billed as a series about the dangers of being a woman in the past, it’s impossible to read it, especially these three volumes, without thinking about what it’s revealing. The only reason Satoko is at all safe is that she’s under Shinpei’s protection…and as we’ve seen before, “protection” can turn into something else with the flick of a knife.
Tachibana’s artwork is at its best in these books. The reveal of how dangerously thin Satoko has become is enough to make you gasp aloud, and what happened to Asagiri is equally ghastly. Fight scenes are dynamic, and Shinpei’s brief foray into cross-dressing is very well done. Firefly Wedding still isn’t a series I’d recommend to just anyone, because it is a lot, but the more of it I read, the more imperative it becomes that I finish it out.
