Kunoichi Attentives Sisterhood Mountain Retreat

The Kunoichi Attentives Sisterhood Mountain Retreat is a former convent in the California hills, refashioned as a women’s training center and a refuge repeatedly sought by DL. It brings together histories that do not sit easily: a seventeenth-century religious foundation, a commercial self-improvement enterprise, a disciplined sisterhood, and a computer archive holding a substantial dossier on Frenesi Gates. When Prairie arrives with DL, the retreat is at once a place of shelter and a threshold into the family and political history she has come to uncover.

Setting and History

The retreat stands on a promontory mottled with light and dark green vegetation above a small valley, only a couple of ridges from the railway. Reaching it means taking a dirt road that turns troublesome in mud season and becomes so deeply rutted in the dry season that travelers can find their wheels spinning clear of the ground. The difficult approach places the convent apart from ordinary traffic without making it inaccessible: it is a destination people climb toward, sometimes ill-prepared for the road.

The complex began as a monastery built for Las Hermanas de Nuestra Señora de los Pepinares, an auxiliary order that was never recognized by Rome or the Jesuits. In California, however, the sisters persisted for centuries. Additions accumulated, wings and annexes expanded the original buildings, and repeated renovations altered the convent. After a run of bad investments, the surviving sisters had to rent out the former religious house. They nevertheless continued to distill and sell the cucumber brandy associated with their name, so the retreat’s history of adaptation includes both the leasing of its premises and the continuation of a distinctive trade.

Its old plaster walls are stained by weather and follow the irregular ground rather than imposing a single clean outline upon it. Beneath aged, corroded tile roofs, inset windows seem unrelated to the building’s interior levels. Approaching at night, Prairie makes out arches, a bell tower, cypresses, pepper trees, and an orchard. The surroundings do not strike her as frightening; as a Californian, she trusts the vegetation. The menace she associates with the journey lies instead in the pursuit she has left behind, embodied by Brock Vond.

Training, Business, and Daily Life

During the 1960s, the Kunoichi, themselves in need of money, entered the emerging self-improvement business. Their offerings ranged from fantasy marathons for enthusiasts of Eastern practices to Japanese-themed holidays and discounted weekend ninja programs for groups. They also advertised support for expelled Zen disciples and other Japanese methods. The retreat therefore made its training and discipline available through a commercial operation, accommodating a broad clientele while preserving a distinctive sisterhood identity.

Some dependable customers were older men in safari clothes, with closely cropped military-style hair and a powerful nostalgia for a past they hoped to recover. They expected to find Asian beauties resembling chorus dancers. At orientation, they instead encountered sisters in ninja attire, distant and unsmiling; most were not Asian, and many were Black or Mexican. The mismatch between customers’ expectations and the women they met exposes the retreat’s difference from the fantasy being sold to its visitors. Its outward-facing business could attract people seeking an imagined East, while the community itself was made up of women who did not conform to that image.

The institution’s severe discipline does not extend to its cooking. Sister Rochelle tells Prairie that the retreat is notorious for serving the worst food of any convent. Changing the kitchen staff has not helped: the recurring failure has become, in Rochelle’s account, a karmic consequence of the sisterhood’s high discipline. When Prairie arrives, she encounters the practical evidence of the problem: an antiquated kitchen, a meal in disarray, and a cook overcome by the disaster. The episode makes the retreat’s austere ideals concrete in an unexpectedly domestic form, as an institution’s order coexists with a stubborn, communal inconvenience.

Prairie’s Arrival and the Archive

DL is recognized at both the outer and inner gates, though Prairie cannot interpret the long looks she receives. At the guesthouse, Sister Rochelle leads the welcoming committee. She watches Prairie while initially acting as though she does not see her, then asks whether Prairie interests the law. Her greeting to DL is pointed: she addresses an old disciple and antagonist and asks what new misdeed has brought her back. The reception establishes a history between the two women before Prairie knows its terms. DL bows and presents her companion; the retreat’s hospitality is real, but it does not erase suspicion or old conflict.

When Rochelle asks whether Prairie can cook, the answer leads to the kitchen crisis and then to an offer with far greater personal weight. The retreat subscribes to outside information services but also maintains its own computerized archive, which includes a large dossier on Prairie’s mother. Prairie is eager for any information she can obtain. The dossier has accumulated over many years from assorted sources, sometimes haphazardly: official documents bearing seals and case numbers sit alongside FBI memoranda, defunct underground-newspaper clippings, transcripts of Frenesi’s radio interviews, and material concerning 24fps, the film collective in which Frenesi and DL once worked together.

The archive gives Prairie more than written records. She can call up personal photographs and images published in newspapers and magazines, seeing Frenesi with a camera at demonstrations, under arrest, and beside recognizable figures from the Movement. One image shows her looking toward a riot officer by a wire fence, her hand appearing to touch the barrel of an assault rifle. Prairie’s encounter with the dossier turns the retreat’s computer room into a passage through a mediated past: the records offer evidence, but they also leave her to interpret gestures, gaps, and a mother she has known chiefly through traces.

DL and Sister Rochelle

The retreat is not a first visit or an uncomplicated sanctuary for DL. She has come and gone since adolescence, returning often enough to establish a lasting love-hate relationship with the Attentives, particularly Sister Rochelle. After flying back to California in a distressed state, DL again seeks asylum there. Rochelle sees how badly she is faring and directs her to rest in a cell, postponing their conversation until the next day.

The delay gives DL little relief. She cries, cannot sleep, wanders to the kitchen to eat, then goes to the regression room to watch old television films and smoke cigarettes left in ashtrays. By the time she appears before Rochelle, she has been awake all night. During the confession that follows, Rochelle asks whether DL is certain she did not withdraw at the last moment. DL cannot be certain. Rochelle’s response centers on attention: she interprets DL’s failure as the result of descending into the corrupt world without pausing, preparing, or attending to what was happening. The retreat thus offers shelter without simply absolving its returning disciple; its discipline supplies a demanding way to examine her actions.

Narrative Significance

The retreat’s functions converge in its rooms and routines. Its remoteness makes arrival feel like passage into a separate domain, while the gates mark an actual boundary that DL is known to cross. Its commercial workshops reveal how the sisterhood has adapted to changing circumstances; its kitchen makes discipline’s limits visible in daily life; and its computer archive converts the past into searchable records and images. For Prairie, the archive is the immediate means of approaching Frenesi, but its documents cannot by themselves settle what the photographs mean or restore a living relationship.

The place is therefore neither a simple escape from the world nor a sealed enclosure beyond it. It receives people pursued by unresolved histories and gives them access to information that links private lives to political movements and official records. At the same time, the retreat’s own life is shaped by money, visitors, old antagonisms, and the work of caring for those who arrive. Its enduring significance lies in that tension: refuge here involves entering a disciplined community whose doors open onto both inherited conflict and the difficult work of interpretation.