Chapter 1: The Black Sheep of The Family (If Not The Whole Japan)
Notes:
Your Reading Of The Day;
Your dream of becoming a baker does not align with ‘wife material.’ Please adjust the expectations.
Ugly crying at infinity castle movie and this fanfic was born lol (Obamitsu shippers don't come at me)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Banks were a scam. No, scratch that, banks were the scam. You’d just gotten off the phone with yet another loan officer who told you, in the politest corporate voice, that unless you had 'adequate collateral' they couldn’t extend you anything.
Collateral? What did they want, your left kidney? The dream of opening your own bakery in Tokyo apparently wasn’t enough.
You could almost hear the smirk in the man’s voice when he suggested you to “try again once you’re more established.” Established with what, exactly? Rich man and your spite?
So you did what any sane, starving, very-much-not-collateral-having woman would do; you called your cousin, Mitsuri. Or, more accurately, you whined into your phone while elbowing through the afternoon rush toward the station.
“They want collateral,” you groaned, nearly tripping over a salaryman’s briefcase. “Collateral, Mitsuri! Like I have a house just lying around. Do I look like someone with a second property? No, I don’t even have a working toaster!”
Mitsuri’s laugh bubbled through the speaker, sweet and sympathetic. “Maybe you could ask your relatives, they did paid for your college funds, right?”
You winced, they only paid for your college funds because it was part of your grandma's will. But you didn't want Mitsuri to know that, you certainly don't want to piggy back her and her parents kindness.
Being her cousin and best friend and her support is more than enough.
“My relatives?" You snorted so hard a passing high schooler turned his head.
"The same ones who told me I should give up and marry into a family bakery instead? They’d sooner tie me to a rice cooker than lend me a yen.”
You squeezed the strap of your bag tighter as the crowd surged up the station steps. Life wasn’t fair. Men got startups, investments, 'seed money'. Women got told to lower their voices and marry someone older with a pension.
Still, you told yourself, as the smell of grilled skewers drifted from a food stall and your stomach growled in hunger, you’d make it happen.
Even if it meant taking on three part time jobs, bribing the gods, or, hell, selling your kidney to the black markets. You'd make it work.
Your rant cut off when a flicker of movement caught your eye. Someone was keeping pace just behind you in the crowd.
Not unusual, except this man wore a long sleeved black and white striped blouse that looked straight out of an old photograph, his face hidden behind a mask.
And perched on his shoulder, impossibly calm amidst the rush hour throng, was a snow white snake.
For a heartbeat, the crowd around you blurred and the station noise fell away. Two mismatched eyes, one golden, one green, softened as they lingered on you in the glow of a paper lantern. A white snake playfully flickered its tongue to you before rubbing its face to his friend.
The wind carrying the faint sweetness of sakura mochi. He said something, and you smiled, and it was heavy enough to anchor your whole chest.
You blinked hard. The man was just a stranger. You didn’t know his face, couldn’t have, but the sight of him tugged at something deep and half buried, like the ache of a word you couldn’t remember.
You met this guy once, you think.
Mitsuri’s voice was chirping your name from the phone still pressed to your ear, but it barely registered. All you could think, crazy as it is, was; have we met before?
Taisho Period
You didn’t fall in love with baking because it was cutesy or another wife quality that you'd be boasting to your future in laws. You fell in love with it because you were a kid with too much time in your life, a grandma who thought flour could fix everything, and an absolutely no sense of how fire worked.
She had lived through Meiji, when everything Western was suddenly the fad. While most people in your village were still eating rice and miso soup three times a day, she’d once worked in a merchant’s household where the lady of the house insisted on “modern” European things; coffee, butter, and yes, bread.
Grandma never lost the habit, never forgot the taste. “Rice fills your stomach,” she used to say, “but bread makes you stubborn.” she winked at you and you love your grandma.
Your first loaf of bread? The first loaf of bread you ever made was a crime against humanity. It was burnt. Black as your sin, hard enough to kill a rat if you threw it.
You cried like it was the end of the world, and your grandma laughed so hard she scared the neighbourhood cat. Your grandma still smiled and called it 'promising.'
She was a liar, but a supportive one.
“Good,” she said, patting your head with a wrinkled hand covered in flour. “Means you’ll remember not to do it again.”
Most kids would’ve quit right there. But no, you're not most kids, certainly not from the moment you were born as a girl in the family, and that was already a strike against you.
In the Taisho era, that meant your worth had been tallied before you could even walk; how good your marriage would be, how quickly you could produce sons, how well you could smile through someone else’s orders.
Your brothers were praised for holding chopsticks right; you were scolded for holding your voice too high. By the time you could read, it was already decided you weren’t meant to think for yourself.
Girls didn’t get the dreams they want. They got husbands. And every reminder of that made you want to fight harder, if only to prove you weren’t born just to be another quiet shadow in a man’s house.
But that was a battle for the future. For now, you were just a kid whose kimono was worn inside out (a bad habit), with flour up your nose and dough stuck to your elbows, demolishing it like it had personally insulted you.
You weren't most of the kids. You decided. Certainly not one of those dolled up girls your age. You're the type to talk about demolishing the entire empire!
The gods decided to make you stubborn, and maybe a little dumb. Normal girls learned calligraphy. You were trying to invent bread like some lunatic foreigner.
Something about kneading dough, punching it down like it owed you money, and then waiting for it to rise, it got under your skin.
But you liked the process. You liked that the oven didn’t care if you were mad at your cousins or hated your life because how misogynistic your society can be, the oven only cared if you fucked up the temperature.
So, yeah. You stared at that ugly loaf like it was some joke, and for the first time, you actually wanted to get the last laugh.
So you tried again. And again. And again.
Then your second were over salted rolls, and the third you tried to make ohagi that looked more like a fossilized rock than food.
But the mess, the flour on the floor, and your grandma’s laugh, you realized you actually loved it.
You loved baking.
Not in a romantic 'food is life' kind of way. More like; this is the one thing I can do that isn’t total bullshit.
But obviously you weren't the child prodigy you always insisted that you are. The fifth bread you made was still like a crime scene. It looked less like food and more like a weapon you could smuggle into a rebellion.
You should’ve been embarrassed. Normal kids would’ve cried or sworn off baking for life. But you weren’t normal, never had been.
Grandma was patient. Too patient, honestly.
The kitchen was always full of smoke, the neighbors probably thought you were committing arson for fun, and your little brothers used to cry because the house smelled like burnt ass.
Your father didn’t find it funny. He beat you across the back with a bokken more than once, snarling that no decent daughter wasted her time on “foreign nonsense.”
Your mother would fall to her knees, crying, begging him to forgive your attitude, but when the bruises faded, she turned on you too. She told you it wasn’t ladylike to burn rice, let alone to meddle with bread.
“A girl’s duty is to cook for her husband, not pretend she belongs to the outside world,” she chided, the words dripping like poison disguised as love.
That was what ticked you most; your mother had swallowed every chain the world handed to her, and now she expected you to wear them too. But you weren't. And you blow your tongue at them whe they turned their back on you.
But grandma kept showing you how to knead the dough, how to listen to the rise under the heat, how to not screw it up completely.
Most kids were busy thinking about toys, bugs, or whatever nonsense the world decided they should like. You were busy thinking about flour, yeast, and how long it would take for a batch to rise without exploding all over the kitchen.
Because of course you were that kind of girl.
You moved like a tiny little whirlwind, elbows dusted in white powder, eyes narrowed at the dough like it had personally insulted you. You were going to make it obey!
You didn’t care if your little brothers cried, if the neighbors peeked, or if your grandma muttered about “wasting good flour” under her breath. Or the angry look your father sends you. You didn't care.
You had work to do, and nothing, not a single person in Taisho Japan, was going to stop you. Not even the Emperor himself.
You don't know why you wanted to continue baking bread and keep experimenting new ones, ones people haven't seen and tasted before but you just did.
Because that's the kind of girl you are.
Notes:
I made the protagonist angry on purpose. Not “edgy for the sake of it,” but angry because she has every damn reason to be. This is Taisho Japan we’re talking about, the so-called modernizing era that still shoved women into corners, expecting them to marry, stay quiet, and live as accessories to men. Girls were told to be a homemaker which basically meant; sit down, shut up, and pray a husband picks you. So when my MC refuses to play the perfect doll, that’s not rebellion for rebellion’s sake. That’s also because sees the unfairness of it all and wanted to set her foot equally.
Being “ahead of your time” in this period wasn’t glamorous. It was dangerous. Families dragged daughters to matchmakers like livestock. Women weren’t measured by what they wanted, but by how useful they were to a man’s household. So when my MC clashes with a matchmaker or tells her relatives to shove it, that’s not her being quirky. That’s her resisting a system that reduced her to be a womb.
Her anger is justified. If she dreams of running a bakery instead of being a wife, if she curses at the people trying to shrink her down, good. The Taisho era gave her nothing but limits, so of course she spits in its face. Anger is the only thing keeping her free.
And here's a funny thing. Bread isn't that popular in the taisho era (so mitsuri cooking pancakes for tanjiro is prolly from trading since taisho era is a transitioning period into "modernization") Japan already had pan (bread) by Meiji, thanks to Portuguese and European influence. By the Taisho era (1912–1926), bakeries actually existed in cities like Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe, and Nagasaki, but not in rural countryside, it wasn’t a household staple. It was modern, Western, and a bit niche. So MC being into baking bread makes her unusual, modern-leaning, maybe even “odd” to her neighbors. That contrast could actually work in my favor she’s literally ahead of her time.
Please do not repost or copy any part of this work. If you see it elsewhere, please let me know. I don't have any other platforms other than AO3.
Chapter 2: The Cousin Who Smiled Too Much And Got Away With It
Summary:
You’re not special. At least, that’s what your relatives keep saying. Crazy, they called you, for refusing to marry some guy you barely knew. Even your matchmaker gave up on you the moment you said, “Actually, I want to open a bakery.” (Her exact words; not fit to be a wife, or even a lady. Charming, isn’t it?)
So you told them all to go to hell and built your dream bakery from the ground up. People came and went, hungry and curious, and business was good. Then one day, in walked a short man with mismatched eyes, a sour look on his face, and a white snake curled around his shoulders. He didn’t ask for bread, or even dango. He asked for sakura mochi. And that’s when everything changed.
Notes:
Your Reading Of The Day;
A cousin who is you but better. Either be friends with her or die in jealousy. But you can choose both.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
You were slowly figuring out the exact shape of your personality, (and spoiler alert, it was not good) Stubborn? Check. Loud? Check. A walking disaster, and a bitch? Absolutely.
A mean bitch, you hope,
And the most admiring trait about you is at a young age, you already have an immediate crisis; no one in your village appreciated your culinary experiments. First, you blamed the neighbors’ bland taste of food.
Then, the weather, which was clearly conspiring against your dough. Your grandma started hiding her sack of flour so you'd only get to bake once a week.
Finally, you blamed society itself; because honestly, what kind of era expected girls to be graceful, obedient, and endlessly patient at the same time?
Honestly, it wasn't fair seeing your little brothers got the life you desperately wanted.
It wasn’t fair. Your little brothers got to practice swinging their very own bokken and even hold the family heirloom katana, while you were stuck on the engawa, pretending to enjoy sewing because, apparently, that was 'lady-like.' You hated it.
They swung and laughed under father’s approving gaze. You? You got silence, judgment, and occasionally a glare for asking too much. For baking 'foreign' food.
Curiosity once got the better of you. You touched the katana. Your legs were introduced to a guava branch in a way that left tiny gashes, it made grandma cry, and left mother sobbing while forcing your head to the ground in apology.
All for the crime of being born without balls dangling between your thighs. That day, you learned your father loved your brothers more because they will became men and you weren’t. Lesson well received, thanks.
You glanced at your kimono; pristine, colorful, silk so fine it could probably insult you on its own. Meanwhile, your snot nosed brothers’ clothes were meant for training, to get dirty, to be ruined, and no one batted an eye.
Your brothers' hakamas were as expensive as your kimono, but they were meant to be dirtied, and because they had servants. And they had freedom. You had a pristine kimono, itchy, etiquette, and a life lesson in unfairness.
One speck of mud on you and mother would faint into the heavens. You? Just a girl expected to sit quietly, look pretty, and not ruin anyone’s day.
It was suffocating you wanted to die! Fuck etiquette, fuck men being superior! fuck women has to shut their mouth even when they're right! fuck equality being optional!
Fuck the fact that women has to manage the house while men has to work or swing swords or has superiority. Fuck the kimono that made you... Not you.
If God made men and women with equal hands, feet and eyes, then isn't it the same with equality? Women can read as much as men. So they can do what men can as well!
"There are some things women cannot do and men cannot do. Just like how a painter cannot sculpture." Your father said once, drinking tea on cold winter day,
It was wrong. So wrong! But you can't risked getting hit by a bokken again, not when your mother was pregnant with your fifth brother at that time, and you figured your recklessness could get them killed by stressing over you.
You sighed, looking at the ugly embroidery project you're working on. You wanted to make bread.
When your mother shoved the needle and threads into your hand, it felt alive. Almost as if it were smugly grinning at you, whispering, Hello, I am your future disappointment.
You glared. Hard. You wanted to make bread for your little brothers. You wanted to punch dough. You wanted the world to explode rather than puncture one more perfectly aligned thread.
Fuck you, your brain muttered, because yes, sometimes thoughts needed to be honest when the world insisted on manners.
The needle trembled in your hand, probably out of fear. You ignored the misaligned threads creeping over the cloth like tiny rebellions.
One day, maybe, you’d make this needle useful. But today? Today it was only going to watch you make an ugly embroidered Potentilla flower patterns.
You grinned, choosing the muted color yellow to make the flower looked like piss.
But as you glanced at your brothers having fun swinging their wooden swords, it made you wanted to lead a rebellion against the empire, or at least against whoever the assholes that kept saying equality was optional.
Maybe start with a coup, or a tiny protest in the village square, or just a very dramatic lecture in the room while your little brothers watched you stomp around.
The world seemed perfectly designed to favor men, like some sick prank, and you were not having it. Your brothers got the nice chopsticks, the bigger portions, the praise for just breathing, and the freedom to wander the village unsupervised.
You, on the other hand, had to practice perfect bowing, memorize every 'appropriate' phrase, and even sweep the porch before the morning sun, apparently that was more important than learning how to make your own choices.
Meanwhile, trying to reach for flour that wasn’t 'for your height' earned you a scolding that made you want to punch someone in the face.
So yeah, maybe the empire would have been safer if you’d actually tried to storm the palace with a rolling pin. Instead, you settled for the kitchen. Bread was your army, dough was your soldiers, and every burnt loaf was a little act of war.
Sure, the rebellion wasn’t exactly organized, and your strategy mostly involved yelling at the oven, but in your mind, it counted.
Some day, maybe, you’d gather an army of other girls tired of polite smiles, colourful kimonos, and rules that made sons emperors while daughters swept the floors, and you’d finally tell the assholes to hell with it.
Until then… at least the dough obeyed.
When you turned ten, you met your cousin from your mother’s sister. Kanroji Mitsuri. Pretty name. Pretty girl... And there was you. Not pretty. Not polite. Not interested in being liked.
You hated her immediately. Not because she was mean, not because she did anything tha caused you to have wrinkles, it was just because she existed and seemed… normal.
She had hair that looked like someone had bottled pink and green and poured it over her head. You had hair that got tangled in hairpins and smelled faintly like burnt dough half the time.
Mitsuri smiled. Mitsuri ran around. Mitsuri laughed at everything. You wanted to punch her in the face.
The kicker? She's the same age as you! Now that's a hate crime!
You didn’t want to go to her birthday. You were ten. You had six more years of freedom before anyone could legally decide your life for you.
You knew your mother would grab the moment to brag, to parade you like some side show to hint to everyone in earshot that one day you’d be marriageable.
You’d rather be shoved into an oven than sit there while your mither advertise you for strangers.
You thought about your future husband, whoever the hell he might be. You hoped he didn’t mind 'foreign' food, like bread, that you baked in secret. You hoped he didn’t hit you.
But if he did, well… You had five brothers. You knew how to throw a punch. The first man to ever hit you properly had been your father. No men could ever hurt you the way your father did.
You survived him. That counted for something. Ha! Daddy issues. But you decided, here and now, no more daddy issues. Real problems only.
And the real problem was your cousin. How the hell was she allowed to act like a monkey in the house? No one yelled. No one gasped at Mitsuri's audacity. Her father didn't whacked her with a bokken.
No one gave her sharp looks that could cut glass. She smiled. They smiled. They encouraged her. You stared. You wanted to scream.
You were not allowed to smile at will. You were not allowed to move fast. You were not allowed to eat more than your share of sweets without being scolded.
And yet here was Mitsuri, doing all of it. And your family treated it like a feature. Not a bug. She's a girl, you're a girl. But why couldn't you get to be as free as your brothers?
As free as your cousin?
Why doesn't anyone bat an eye when she cling to her father's forearm as he swing her around? Your father never did that to you.
And then Mitsuri walked over to your mother like they were old friends. They weren’t.
You didn’t know why they didn’t gasp, why your mother didn’t frown, why no one corrected her for skipping formalities.
You just stood there. Folding your hands, looking at the floor, and hating everything. Mother smiled. “I hope you two can get along,” she said.
You rolled your eyes. You wanted to respond with something witty, cutting, dangerous, but you didn’t. You weren’t allowed. You ignored Mitsuri for the rest of the day.
But then you looked at her again. She was guiding her mother, who was heavily pregnant with the fifth child, helping her step carefully and not bump into anything.
Mitsuri looked at you and she smiled. You didn’t smile back. You looked away. Guilty. You weren’t supposed to feel impressed. You weren’t supposed to admit anything. You just looked away.
You never did that with your mother when she was pregnant with your five brothers. All you did was hate the world and bake bread, you frowned harder, now it made you looked like a self centered bitch.
A bitch maybe, but never a self centered one!
You felt guilty for looking away. You wanted to be angry. You wanted to be jealous. You wanted to hate her. And you did. A little.
But also, you were impressed. Not that you’d ever admit it. You were ten. You were supposed to hate everything.
And so you did. You hated how easy she made it look. You hated how calm your mother was.
You hated that she made walking, talking, and smiling seem effortless while you had to practice every damn movement in front of a mirror before leaving the room.
L/n Y/n was basically Kanroji Mitsuri, but she's not you.
You hated that she existed. And yet, you watched, quietly, and noticed everything she does is what you supposed to do if you have freedom. What you wanted to do if you have freedom. And you hated that too.
Notes:
I promise I have no beef with Mitsuri, I’m just trying to capture the envy of a girl who feels trapped while her cousin seems to have it all (which, honestly, is pretty justified). The bokken is an inexpensive, relatively safe substitute for a real sword, used in martial arts like aikido, kendo, iaidō, kenjutsu, and jōdō. Its simple wooden construction also means it doesn’t need the same care and maintenance as a katana. Meanwhile, the engawa is a Japanese-style wooden deck or veranda that connects the house interior to the garden, basically, a transitional space between indoors and outdoors.
As for the MC’s POV, I leaned into making her casual, sarcastic, and sharp-tongued, because it fits her role as the “black sheep” of Taishō-era Japan. It’s one of those creative choices I keep coming back to, she refuses to sit quietly, so her narrative voice shouldn’t either.
About the embroidery: the flower MC’s working on is a potentilla. Normally it stands for strength, honor, loyalty, even motherhood and feminine power. Sounds nice, right? On paper, it’s all beautiful. But in MC’s world, those same words are twisted. “Strength” means putting up with everything quietly. “Loyalty” means giving yourself up for men. “Motherhood” means your only worth is your womb. The virtues aren’t the problem, it’s how her society weaponized them. The potentilla could’ve been a real symbol of feminine strength,she’s not rejecting the idea of virtue itself. She just made the artwork ugly.
Please do not repost or copy any part of this work. If you see it elsewhere, please let me know. I don't have any other platforms other than AO3.