She plucks out all her feathers, one by one.
“The Crane Wife” is a story from Japanese folklore... And there are so many versions of this story, but in the one I found, there is a crane who tricks a man into thinking she is a woman so she can marry him. She loves him, but knows that he will not love her if she is a crane so she spends every night plucking out all of her feathers with her beak. She hopes that he will not see what she really is: a bird who must be cared for, a bird capable of flight, a creature, with creature needs. Every morning, the crane wife is exhausted, but she is a woman again. To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work. She never sleeps. She plucks out all her feathers, one by one.
― CJ Hauser, The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays (Doubleday, July 12, 2022)
