Chapter 584: Clothing
Satsuki followed the proprietress with faint unease. The lighting back here was considerably dimmer than the main shop floor, but this wasn't their destination. The proprietress kept walking without pausing, moving to the far end of the corridor, where she stopped in front of an unremarkable door -- the same color as the surrounding wall, easy to miss entirely.
She produced a small key from her pocket, inserted it, and the door opened. Beyond it was darkness. The proprietress went through first, then pressed something against the wall.
The lights came on.
Not ordinary lights. Not the bright, even, white-spectrum lights that illuminated everything without mystery. These were softer -- dimmer -- carrying a faint warm tone. Orange-amber. Hazy at the edges, drawing the outlines of the space without making anything entirely clear. The proprietress had chosen this lighting deliberately. Under this kind of light, nothing was too stark. Nothing was too blunt.
In that moment, Satsuki understood what the proprietress intended to sell her.
Not kimono. Not dresses. Not everyday wear. Not a qipao.
What she was looking at was something she had never seen in any shop window, never encountered in any catalogue, had never imagined anyone would specially design, specially manufacture, and hang on a rack waiting for customers to purchase.
She was seeing it for the first time. In her world, in the ordinary fabric of daily life, she had never encountered anything like this.
Her breathing quickened. Her chest rose and fell with obvious effort. Her eyes moved in rapid, uncertain sweeps -- not knowing where to look, not knowing where to let her gaze land. But she did not look away.
She looked. She looked at those garments -- the ones she had never seen, the ones designed with a boldness that pushed against every limit of what she had considered a garment to be, every detail a challenge to what she had thought possible.
"This -- what is this?!"
She hadn't expected this. She hadn't imagined that something like this was sold commercially. That someone had designed specific clothing for -- for this purpose. The impact on Satsuki's entire framework of understanding was considerable.
The color of her face had moved across a visible range from the moment she entered the shop: faintly pink when she first walked in, deep red when the proprietress whispered in her ear, and now -- in the instant she saw these garments, in this amber-lit room -- it reached a place beyond that.
Faint steam had begun rising from the top of her head.
She had worn fake cat ears once, to delight Naruto. But those were shinobi disguise accessories, originally used for infiltration while impersonating ninja cats -- when she wore them, her thought had simply been "would this be fun?"
Wedding dresses were formal ceremony wear. The maid outfit was a uniform worn by household staff in wealthy homes. The shiromuku she had worn at her own wedding was traditional, solemn, carrying the weight of sacred ceremony.
Those garments had acquired certain connotations through the small intentions of the people who wore them or designed them for specific moments.
That was why it had never occurred to Satsuki that the world also contained garments designed from the beginning -- in the concept, in the cut, in the choice of fabric, in every considered detail -- specifically to make hearts race, to bring color to faces, so that the person who saw them for the first time immediately understood without being told: this garment was made to be worn in front of a particular person, at a particular kind of moment.
The difference from "ordinary clothes worn in an extraordinary way" was not the same level at all.
The full reality of what she was looking at spread out before her in the amber light.
Row after row of garment racks. Every item something she had never seen. Every item that, if she looked at it for one more second, she felt she might actually combust -- but she could not make herself look away.
The first thing that caught her attention was a full-body garment made entirely of mesh.
Her first thought was: is this a stocking? No -- it couldn't be -- stockings were for legs. But why was it full length? And why was the weave this large? The grid pattern was enormous -- large enough to see clearly through each individual opening, large enough to understand exactly what it would look like with someone inside it, skin visible through every gap.
This wasn't a stocking. Stockings had fine, dense weave. This garment had openings large enough to suggest fishing net.
Satsuki forced her eyes away from the mesh garment and let them land on the next rack. She thought she might need to sit down, if her legs would cooperate with her on that.
On the next rack was a black undergarment. No -- undergarment wasn't the right word. Undergarments were worn underneath other clothes. This piece -- if you wore something over it, the outer layer was entirely beside the point.
Because this garment, on its own, was the whole thing. Its reason for existing was to be seen, not to be concealed.
The extent of the design: the fabric across the chest was thin, barely-there, translucent. The waist was completely open -- only a few narrow bands bridging the top and bottom sections. The back was one large unbroken absence of fabric.
But -- strangely -- it didn't look unfinished. It looked complete. Every opening was precisely placed. Every band was exactly the right width and length. This wasn't something left half-made. This was exactly what it was meant to be.
Her eyes continued moving along the racks. With each inch they traveled, her temperature rose another degree.
There was a white, soft, fluffy garment with rabbit ears.
The upper portion was fitted. At the chest, a large heart-shaped opening had been cut. At the collar, a red ribbon was tied in a bow, and from the center of the bow hung a small bell. Satsuki could easily imagine that when someone wore this garment and moved, the bell would ring with a clear, delicate sound.
She kept looking. At the garments. At the cutouts. At fabrics sheer enough to see through. At hemlines that had no more distance to give. At slits cut open all the way to the shoulder.