With her typical perspicacity, Mio saw in Sato someone perfectly suited to her needs. She approached him with an offer to spend his retirement in California, as the caretaker of her house in Sacramento. He accepted the offer with obvious gratitude, and has lived here ever since.
Mio had lived in the house for a couple of years before deciding that Sacramento was not to her liking. When she had first bought the house, she brought a crew of craftsmen from Japan to make modifications to the interior. There were, in fact, five upstairs rooms. The fifth room was a narrow area between the bedroom and study, about six feet wide, running the full length of the two adjoining rooms. This hidden space was where I routinely spent my daylight hours. If you didn’t know it existed, you would never suspect that the study and bedroom were separated by more than an intervening wall. Access was via a fiendishly clever hidden door in the study.
Mio referred to it as the shoebox, and for lack of a better name, so did I. It was furnished with a narrow but quite comfortable bed, a small freezer in which I kept an emergency supply of blood, a comfortable lounge chair, a bookcase with a few dozen of my favorite books, and a desk with a computer. There was another computer in the study, equipped with a broadband Internet connection. The two computers were connected via a router, and there was a surveillance camera that allowed me to view the study from inside the shoebox.
In addition to the hidden entrance, an emergency exit was concealed beneath a throw rug. Lifting the hatch gave access to a ladder leading down a narrow shaft that descended, hidden on the ground floor behind cabinets, to a tunnel under the house. The tunnel led underground about fifty yards to another concealed hatch in the floor of a shed in the back yard.
When Mio first showed me the house, she explained that the emergency exit had been built mainly in case of fire. I learned later that fire was a particularly sensitive issue for her. Mio was born in 1765, in Edo, now Tokyo, the daughter of a minor government official who had distinguished himself by drinking and gambling away the family’s modest fortune and, along with it, their respectability. When she was fifteen, her father, in financial distress, indentured her to a successful Edo doll merchant. As it turned out, the merchant himself had no personal interest in Mio. He had been acting as a proxy for someone else. That someone else was a rich and eccentric doll maker named Midori.
Hinamatsuri, the doll festival, dates back to Japan’s Heian period, sometime before the twelfth century. Dolls created by the more celebrated craftsmen were, and still are, prized as works of art and often fetched large sums from collectors. Midori’s dolls were generally regarded as among the very finest. In addition to being a respected artist, she also happened to be a vampire; a lonely vampire in search of someone to relieve her solitude. Mio proved to be the perfect companion. Once turned, Mio understood immediately that Midori had rescued her from the humiliation and drudgery that awaited her as the daughter of a disgraced petty bureaucrat, and she was deeply grateful.
The psychological life of vampires can be complicated. On the one hand, they are separated from humans by inescapable disparities. Most of what distinguishes a vampire from a human being makes an equitable relationship close to impossible. A vampire has to conceal too much, and the need for secrecy makes the relationship one-sided, emotionally constrained, and unsatisfying. On the other hand, although it is possible for two vampires to form deep and enduring bonds, it rarely happens. We always seem to be too volatile to mix. But there are exceptions. Mio and Midori lived together for seventy years and, to hear Mio tell it, they were absolutely dedicated to one another. When their time together ended, it was not the result of incompatibility.
In the early 1850s, they were living in a country house on the island of Kyushu. More than anything else, Midori’s untimely end was due to her own carelessness in arousing the superstitious fears of the peasants living in the surrounding villages. For reasons Mio was never clear about, rumors began to circulate through the villages that Midori was some kind of demon, responsible for a variety of local misfortunes. As happens with rumors, they were progressively magnified in the retelling, eventually becoming so outlandish that they either had to be dismissed outright, or taken as true. Dismissal was by far the less interesting option, so it wasn’t long before community consensus took its natural course in the form of a mob.
Luckily for Mio, the prevailing opinion was that she was an innocent victim ensnared in Midori’s evil web. The village where they lived was about a half day’s journey from the city of Fukuoka. Mio and/or Midori made periodic trips to the city to deliver dolls to the merchant who handled their sales. The trip, of necessity taken at
