Each time Mitsumushi's sleeves brush against Hiromasa, he wonders how much it actually means. She's a sweet butterfly, a pretty butterfly, a charming butterfly, and a very faithful butterfly, but at heart and at root she's nothing but a butterfly. Those lovely sleeves and those painted robes seem to cover white flesh, but the whole thing is a mask; underneath them, her spirit is all shifting air and dust.
When he offered her a poem, she giggled and hid her mouth behind her sleeves.
When he offered her a flowering branch, she danced around on little feet and smiled at him.
"She's very obliging," Seimei had once said, with that sideways flirt of his eyes that could mean anything at all. "She's very loyal. If you ever want . . ." And he'd trailed off, leaving the rest of the sentence undefined, with that smirking amusement still behind his eyes.
Hiromasa has always admired beauty. He wouldn't deny that Mitsumushi is a beautiful thing. Her movements deserve poetry: her grace deserves music. That time before, he had grieved to think that she was dead. And so he courts her, he praises her, he makes all the right approaches, and yet she gives him no more answer than those butterfly-light sleeves and those raised hands that hide her face. She drifts towards him as he plays the flute, and hovers on the edge of the garden, but then floats away again once he has finished, or positions herself near Seimei to parrot his opinions.
Once he framed a verse for her. It began:
your dancing sleeves drift like the iris petals bluer than the sky --
But she only giggled over it, and didn't reply with a proper stanza of acceptance or refusal.
The flowers that she lands on have more substance than she does.
It does mean something to him that she seems to like him: he values that, and he values her, and he values her loyalty: but she's nothing more than a butterfly, and her kisses are only butterfly kisses, and she is as transient as the blowing dust of summer.
butterfly passion is like syrup on snow -- sweetness in summer
When Seimei finds that among Hiromasa's papers, he attaches it to a withered ragweed plant in the garden, and Mitsumushi flitters around it, laughing charmingly.
No matter: at least she is always ready to listen to his flute-playing, and Seimei himself is something quite different in any case.
But sometimes, just sometimes, he wishes that the brushes from the fluttering sleeves meant a little more.
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