The Despicable Asama

[Outside the Northwest Gate, the Nakayama Road]

While Rāja was laying out the Nakayama road, a large tanuki in women's clothing arrived, mounted on a white-headbanded horse-beastfolk. This had to be the envoy of the Land of Ke.

"Welcome to the Library-City Dungeon. My name is Rāja. I look forward to our acquaintance. Marie, ah, the aide-de-camp scribe-dono, is waiting, so I'll show you the way."

"Yes. I am Takahashi Tsushima-no-kami, District Governor of Gunma. I'll be in your care."

They say a tanuki turns into a human, but whether in fact it doesn't transform, or whether there's some condition for transforming, or whether it simply figures there's no need to bother, she stayed a tanuki.

Rāja mounted Haruna and returned to the dungeon together with the tanuki. Mint's duplicates would pull back after the cleanup was done.

"Why, if it isn't Haruna."

The horse-beastfolk called out to her.

"Asama, you despicable, gluttonous horse!"

"You're the last one I want to hear that from. I'll wager you've gotten yourself barred from every shop here too, 'going all-out' the way you do."

Since there are no all-you-can-eat places, and so long as she doesn't get drunk and rampage, she wouldn't be barred at all.

"A stipend of a hundred hyō and five rations' keep, so I won't go wanting for food, she says."

"That stipend's meant to cover hiring a spear-bearer, a footman, and a maidservant, isn't it? You're allowed to eat the whole of it yourself?"

"I'm reckoned the equal of a mounted samurai of two hundred koku or more serving single-handed, so my military service is no concern, she says. Besides, Asama, aren't you one of the Four Heavenly Kings of big-eater horses yourself?"

"I am no such thing. It's not the Four Heavenly Kings; it's the three of them, Haruna and Akagi and Myōgi. Ask anyone in the Land of Ke and they'll all answer the same. Myōgi being a colt, well, that's all right, but a girl who eats too much is disliked."

Akagi is a colt's name too, but this Akagi is a filly.

"Listen to you. You out-eat Shirane and Mikabo and the rest of them by a mile, Asama. And anyway, I run fast, so I just eat that much more to match. And I'm younger than old Auntie Akagi, so even if we eat the same amount, I'm not the glutton."

"I'll grant you Haruna's fleet of foot. But isn't this horse's fuel economy simply dreadful? Why, her very father was the greatest glutton in all the Land of Ke, ate about as much as an animal horse, and at the end of it was granted leave to style himself Kōzuke-no-suke by the lord of the realm, Kōzuke-no-suke-sama himself: Oguri Kōzuke-no-suke. No wonder she eats."

So said Asama, calling out to Rāja as well. In the Land of Ke, a rare talent excelling in some single art is permitted to style himself Kōzuke-no-suke. The etiquette instructor set upon by AKO47 was a Kōzuke-no-suke as well, but that is a different world.

"Oguri, then. Haruna, is your father the gray monster the Master spoke of, Oguri Tadamasa?"

"No. I can't reveal my father's taboo name, but it is not Tadamasa."

Oguri Tadamasa, written in katakana, is not a horse-beastfolk but a racehorse. Oguri Tadamasa, the Bakumatsu-era figure written in kanji, was a human. Both belong to the otherworld.

"If you've a surname, perhaps I'd best call you Lady Oguri from now on."

"Just Haruna is fine, really."

Of the horse-beastfolk Oguri Kōzuke-no-suke, many legends are told: that he out-ate a sumo wrestler of twice his body weight, and the like. The present generation has several rival gluttons, the Four Heavenly Kings, or the Three Mountains of Jōmō, but in the previous generation the field was his alone.

"Hoho, the daughter of Oguri Kōzuke-no-suke. I've had a long acquaintance with that one. If there's a child of Ke here, this'll go quickly. Won't you tell me all sorts of things along the way?"

A tanuki geezer carrying out espionage as naturally as breathing… or in this case, a tanuki auntie. A tanuki lives ten years and a horse thirty, but beastfolk are not, after all, quite so short-lived.