Excellent piece. I've always loved that particular brand of yuri stories that's sad and sweet and smoky, swilling maudlin memories in rueful grins and sleepy sighs, watering tears down with time to sprinkle the begonias with. Here too, there's parts of people curling suspended, captured in apprehensions poetic and orgasmic, the mists of memory and the fog of darkened rooms parted by runnels of light to illuminate the curve of a breath, the flicker of a hand, the chill of a tress, the shiver of an eye, parts hinting at wholes, shadows at bodies we'll never fully see and yearn all the more to know and be.
The workers in the story occupy a liminal role, shoring up, per Saki's ideal, a client's self, melting into them to make them more solid, crystallizing pleasure in movements and moments, that they may forget themselves in love, become complete in the arms of another, and bear with them a sliver to light the hollowness, led back some nights to secret hearths. It's a spiritual take on the trade quite common in this subgenre, and illuminative of a telling irony in which holy matrimony's mechanical and illicit pleasures sublime, where fairytales flower in dingy motels and paramours spring priceless from coin, telling of a legitimacy in illegitimacy, a comfort in exchange and trade for queer lovers whose affections don't figure in the daylight economy of relationships, and in becoming more economic still by night, create as by water-forged wine a value more fulsome for the secrecy, more precious in deprivation. In such an upside-down world, a shadow's as substantial as a person, a session more pleasurable than lifetimes, and so Miya can only taste life by descending into the underworld, where the ghost of her love for Izumi sure enough becomes flesh, the shadow vanishing in the absence of light, leaving only a body, a pleasure, and a farewell.
This circular dance of yearning strangers would be admirable enough by itself, painting in Miya and Izumi's relationship the ultimate irony as the yearning bridesmaid becomes the pleasure pursued, the happy bride a moonlit seeker, but it is Saki who elevates this tale to brilliance, breaker of cycles, beacon from purgatory. She puts up the star that guides Miya in choppy waters, letting her circumnavigate the oceans of her heart and find at the end of it all a place she can call home, even as she continues to rove a concrete sea. Saki teaches Miya of the pleasure that lives in a soul, the light that sparks itself and thus finally ends the search for suns, the hunt for shadows. She teaches her of the infinitude of the present, the eternity of nights, and the ability to make every union as sweet as first love, and so escape the shadow of an origin, the myth of the one that got away. It is Saki, being of both worlds and a world unto herself, who ushers Miya into the night where she can find parts of herself too faint to spot in daylight, and Saki who accompanies her back into the day once she's come to know herself in shadows. And perhaps just as Miya immersed herself in the night long enough to move the clock again and begin a new day, so too might Izumi, having bid her first love goodbye, decide someday to leave the shadows of brides and sirens to their dances and seek a solid form again. A crosser from one world to another, a dweller of both, and a drifter in neither- it's in a masterful interplay of these three characters that this story manages to puff binaries and archetypes to smoke and create a glittering taste of the delicious complexity of life in all its glorious feeling. Definitely a fave.
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