Vampires in the Lemon Grove

The story is told from the perspective of Kitsune, a young Japanese woman who, along with twenty other Japanese women, is becoming a reeler:

[s]ome kind of hybrid creature, part kaiko, silkworm caterpillar, and part human female. Some of the older worker’s faces are already quite covered with a coarse white fur, but my face and thighs stayed smooth for twenty days. In fact I’ve only just now begun to grow the white hair on my belly(24).

The women live in a place they’ve named “Nowhere Mill,” a single room with one window that’s too high for anyone to look out of. On one side of the room are the dirty mats the girls sleep on and in the middle of the room is “the Machine,” a device that quickly pulls the silk from each girl. Many of the girls were brought here against their will, their lives signed over to the Recruitment Agent in exchange for five yen. The Recruitment Agent says that the girls will be reeling silk for the empire, but he never says the truth about what ultimately happens to the girls. Once the girls are alone with the Recruitment Agent, he forces them to drink an orange tea that makes them pass out and ultimately transforms them into silkworm creatures that produce large quantities of silk—Japan’s main trading commodity. Since the silkworm has supposedly gone extinct, silk is a highly-desired and expensive good, but nobody in Japan knows about the girls because they are hidden away at an undisclosed location and aren’t allowed to leave.

Two new girls, Tooka and Etsuyo, are brought to Nowhere Mill, and Kitsune shows them around. The new girls are terrified when they see the hybrid creatures, but the tea makes them sleep. Kitsune reflects on how each of the girls had similar dreams before coming to the factory: “We envisioned our future dowries, our families’ miraculous freedom from debt. We thrilled to the same tales of women working in the grand textile mills, where steel machines from Europe gleamed in the light of the Meiji sunrise” (25). Before coming to the factory, Kitsune’s country was in the wake of rapid industrial development, and she and the other girls saw working at the silk mill as a way to freedom from the financial oppression that their families had faced for years. Kitsune has trouble sleeping most nights because she can’t let go of the past that brought her to this point.

Kitsune and the other girls each produce thread that is uniquely colored. On most nights, Kitsune can:

feel it traveling below [her] navel […] Foaming icily along the lining of [her] stomach. Under the blankets I watch it rise in a hard lump. There are twenty workers sleeping on twelve tatami, two rows of us, our heads ten centimeters apart, our earlobes curled like snails on adjacent leaves, and though we are always hungry, every one of us has a round belly. Most nights I can barely sleep, moaning for dawn and the Machine (26).

Before arriving at the factory, each girl looked different but had the same dreams. However, now that they are all turning into silkworm hybrids, they are all beginning to look alike. In an attempt to cling to their humanity, they tell stories of their past. A consequence of their new identities is “that anybody can be anyone she likes in the past. Some of our lies are quite bold” (24). The girls make up stories about who they once were. Kitsune’s own past is laced with regret.

The “zookeeper,” an old blind woman, brings bags of mulberry leaves each day to feed the girls. She passes the bag through a hole in the door in exchange for their silk. On this night, she also brings human food for the two new girls. The older girls watch with jealousy. Every time a new girl comes the older girls try to gather information about how they got there, but no one can seem to find out where the factory is located, and no girl knows how the Agent’s tea has transformed them into silkworm creatures.

The Machine takes “thirteen to fourteen hours […] to empty a kaiko-joko of her thread: The relief it brings is indescribable” (29). Although Kitsune resents what’s happened to her, she is proud of the silk that she and the other girls can produce. The Agent, who regularly visits the girls, “boasts that he has made us the most productive machines in the empire, surpassing even those steel zithers and cast-iron belchers at Tomioka Model Mill” (30).

Kitsune shows the girls how their thread will be reeled. She dips her hand into a basin of boiling water, and “the skin of [her] fingertips softens and bursts, and fine waggling fibers rise from them. Green thread lifts right out of [her] veins” (31). She then feeds the threads to the Machine, which looks like “a great steel-and-wood beast with a dozen rotating eyes and steaming mouths—it’s twenty meters long and takes up nearly half the room” (31). For each girl to be emptied of her silk takes nearly fifteen hours.

Kitsune thinks about how “[a]ll Japan is undergoing a transformation—we kaiko-joko are not alone in that respect. I watched my grandfather become a share-cropper on his own property. A dependent” (33). Due to the influence of the new Meiji government, the ensuing land tax forced many people, including Kitsune’s grandfather, into bankruptcy. The farmers attempted a revolt, but it failed. Kitsune’s grandfather “hanged himself in our barn. The gesture was meaningless” because he still owed his debt, and it passed onto Kitsune’s father when he died (34). As a result, Kitsune didn’t have a dowry.

Kitsune thinks about when the Recruitment Agent came to her house. Her father was sick and had gone away with her brothers for treatment, and she was home alone. The Agent was handsome and charismatic, and promised her father five yen if she would “reel for the realm, for your emperor? For me, too” (35). She went into the other room, pretending her father was in there, and signed the contract herself. Her father never would have let her go with the Agent because he “blamed the new government for [Kitsune’s] grandfather’s death. He was suspicious of foreigners. He would have demanded to know, certainly, where the factory was located” (35). She ultimately agreed to go with the Agent because she wanted her sick father to have money and be debt-free.

After signing the contract, the Agent takes Kitsune into an abandoned house in the woods. “Something is wrong,” she thinks, but she goes into the house anyways (35). He takes her upstairs, to a dimly-lit room. A teapot sits on a table, and there is a stained mattress in the corner. The Agent starts to pour the tea, but rushes out of the room to get something. Kitsune looks into the pot to see a silkworm. In an attempt to show how brave she is, she drinks the tea and the worm in one gulp. When the Agent comes back in the room he is shocked and says that no girl has ever drank the tea like that. Normally—as Kitsune later finds out from the other girls—the tea is so poisonous that he has to force it down their throats. She feels dizzy and the last things she sees before passing out is the Agent’s face in front of hers.

Because Kitsune drank the entire pot of tea, her transformation happened rapidly. She slept for two days and woke up different: “Unlike Tooka and Etsuya and so many of the others I had no limbo period, no cramps from my guts unwinding, changing; no time at all to meditate on what I was becoming—a secret, a furred and fleshy silk factory” (37). Kitsune envies this, along with the fact that all the other girls were forced into this position by poor family members, whereas Kitsune signed herself over to this miserable state. She can’t let go of this regret.

Dai, Kitsune’s closest friend in the factory, notices that Kitsune isn’t sleeping, and she says it’s because “[she] can’t stop reliving it: the Agent walking through our fields under his parasol, in the rain…” (38). Dai tells her that she should find a way to sleep because she doesn’t look well. Later that day, the Machine glitches and spins Kitsune’s thread out too fast. By instinct, Kitsune bites the thread to break the connection to the Machine. She thinks she’s fine, but when she inspects her thread she notices it has changed from her normal green to black: “Black as the sea, as the forest at night, says Hoshi euphemistically” (39). Everyone is worried because no one’s thread has ever changed color.

The next day, Kitsune’s thread goes back and forth between green and black. She thinks about her father and wonders if he’s still alive. She notes that the Agent hasn’t been by to visit the factory in a while: “The thought of the Agent, either coming or not coming, makes me want to retch. Water sloshes in my head. I lie on the mat with my eyes shut tight and watch the orange tea splash into my cup…” (41). The girls’ bellies are growing larger than normal with silk, and Kitsune is growing more tormented by her past. Dai tries to tell her to stop thinking about it.

Dai’s father was a samurai, and as a result she has always considered herself the warrior among the girls: the strong one and the leader. She tells Kitsune that she’s right: “we have to stop reeling. If we don’t, he’ll get every year of our futures. He’ll get our last breaths. The silk belongs to us, we make it. We can use it to bargain with the Agent” (43). Dai quits eating the mulberry leaves and stops emptying her silk. Kitsune tries to stop her, knowing Dai will die. Eventually, Dai’s skin:

has an unhealthy translucence. Her eyes are standing out in her shrunken face, as if every breath costs her. Soon I will be able to see the very thoughts in her skull, the way red thread fans into veiny view under her skin(44).

Dai dies, and the Agent comes and says that she stole silk from the factory. The girls are filled with incredible grief:

What the Agent carried off with Dai was everything we had left: Chiyo’s clouds and mountains, my farmhouse in Gifu, Etsuyo’s fiancé. It’s clear to us now that we can never leave this room—we can never be away from the Machine for more than five days. Unless we live here, where the Machine can extract the thread from our bodies at speeds no human hand could match, the silk will build and kill us in the end (45).

Kitsune thinks she’s dying, too; her silk is completely black and “[t]he denier too uneven for any market” (45). She can’t stop thinking about how she willingly signed herself over to this fate, but she finds comfort in her repetitive thoughts: “Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose. It’s become my sanctuary here in Nowhere Mill. A threshold where I still exist” (45). The more she thinks about her past, the angrier she becomes. She channels that anger into an ability to control her black silk and instinctually begins crafting a cocoon: “The weaving comes so naturally to me that I am barely aware I am doing it, humming as if in a dream […] It takes me ten hours to spin the black cocoon” (47). She talks the other girls into doing the same. They reel enough silk to appease the Agent and keep him ignorant, and then spend the rest of the day building their cocoons. Chiyo, who knows a lot about silkworms, says that silkworm, if left alone, become moths that “develop long ivory wings […] bronzed with ancient designs” (49). Kitsune and the girls are about to go into cocoons, but they “have to wait and learn what [they’ve] become when [they] get out” (49).

With their cocoons ready, they stop giving silk to the Agent. He comes immediately to the factory. He steps into the dark room and the girls drop from the ceiling on silk lines. He appears terrified, and Kitsune realizes “what we’ve become in his absence. I see us as he must: white faces, with sunken noses that look partially erased. Eyes insect-huge. Spines and elbows incubating lace for wings” (51). Kitsune jumps onto the Agent and spins her silk around him, covering him in his own cocoon. He will suffocate and die in his, but the girls will eventually emerge as something new.