Xiaoyi escapes the Pioneers and finds refuge

Xiaoyi escapes the Pioneers and finds refuge in the Dowager’s safe house after suffering sexual violence that her parents not only tolerated but encouraged. At ten, she arrives unable to speak, having slept in a train station and passed through other places before reaching shelter. The Dowager commits herself to keeping the child safe and, believing the perpetrator must be stopped before he can harm others, begins to consider a response beyond what the law can provide.

Arrival at the safe house

Six weeks before the conversation with Aomamé, a women’s consultation bureau sent Xiaoyi to the shelter. For a month she said nothing, as if absent, and had entirely lost the use of speech. The people caring for her initially knew only her name and age. She had been sleeping at a station, in a pitiful condition, and had been moved from place to place before arriving at the Dowager’s safe house. The Dowager spent considerable time telling her that she was somewhere safe and had no reason to be afraid. Eventually Xiaoyi began to speak a few words, though confused and disconnected fragments; by piecing them together, the Dowager reconstructed that something unspeakable and devastating had happened to her.

The disclosure that Xiaoyi is only ten sharply changes the meaning of the story. When Aomamé asks whether the child suffered violence from her husband, the Dowager answers that she is a little girl. Her escape is not simply departure from a dangerous household: it is flight from the people who should have protected her. The Dowager says that Xiaoyi fled her parents, who had permitted the abuse, and clarifies that they had encouraged it.

A refuge built through care

The safe house is part of a private support network the Dowager established in the year after her daughter’s suicide. She converted an empty, single-storey building near her Azabu residence, which was intended for demolition, into temporary accommodation for women who had nowhere else to go. A consultation service organized mainly by Tokyo lawyers connected people in need to the house, where women and sometimes their children could find food, spare clothes, and a community in which residents helped one another. The Dowager paid the expenses herself.

The shelter offered more than emergency lodging. Lawyers and counselors visited periodically to discuss future steps with residents; when she could, the Dowager listened to each woman individually, advised her, and helped her look for work and permanent housing. Tamaru handled situations requiring physical intervention, including attempts by husbands to forcefully retrieve women who had taken refuge there. The network gives Xiaoyi a place to stay after she has been passed between unsafe or inadequate places, and a caregiver willing to listen patiently to speech that comes back only in fragments.

Protection and its limits

The Dowager’s commitment to Xiaoyi is explicit and personal: she says she will take care of the child herself, will not return her to her parents or anyone else who comes to claim her, and will hide her if necessary. She insists that no place could be safer for Xiaoyi than the refuge. Aomamé listens and silently agrees as the Dowager argues that forcibly denying a woman the right to give birth is intolerable; her words connect the immediate abuse to a larger violation of bodily autonomy. The Dowager’s voice trembles as she repeats that the abuse cannot be tolerated, showing how this case tests the calm manner she ordinarily maintains.

The protection offered by the house is practical, but the Dowager acknowledges it cannot answer every need. She and Tamaru cannot resolve everything themselves, and there are cases in which the law offers no help. That admission frames the shelter’s care as both a lifeline and an incomplete substitute for public protection: it can conceal and support a child, but it cannot undo the harm or make the institutions around her dependable.

The proposed response

The Dowager regards the man who abused Xiaoyi as a continuing danger. She tells Aomamé that he must somehow be removed before he can injure anyone else, while insisting that they must act with extreme caution and patience rather than in haste. Elsewhere, she describes how she dealt with her late daughter’s abusive husband: instead of granting him a quick death, she used her influence to ruin him socially and continues to watch him so that he cannot recover. She also says she has made other men disappear when circumstances made it necessary to move them. These disclosures reveal the severe, extra-legal dimension of her protective work, without establishing that any particular action against Xiaoyi’s abuser has yet been carried out.

For Aomamé, the child’s condition makes the cost of the abuse visible without giving her a coherent account of it. As she looks at Xiaoyi sitting across the table, the girl’s unfocused pupils seem fixed on an imaginary point; to Aomamé she resembles what remains after a living being has been abandoned. The escape therefore brings Xiaoyi out of the Pioneers and into shelter, but does not conclude her ordeal. Its immediate consequence is a promise of refuge; its unresolved danger is what the adults will do to keep that promise.