Last Stories and Other Stories

THE FORGETFUL GHOST

After my father died, I began to wonder whether my turn might come sooner rather than later. What a pity! Later would have been so much more convenient! And what if my time might be even sooner than soon? Before I knew it, I would recognize death by its cold shining as of brass. Hence in those days, I do confess, I felt sometimes angry that the treasures of sunlight escaped my hands no matter how tightly I clenched them. I loved life so perfectly, at least in my own estimation, that it seemed I deserved to live forever, or at least until later rather than sooner. But just in case death disregarded my all-important judgments, I decided to seek out a ghost, in order to gain expert advice about being dead. The living learn to weigh the merits of preparation against those of spontaneity, which is why they hire investment counselors and other fortune-tellers. And since I had been born an American, I naturally believed myself entitled to any destiny I could pay for. Why shouldn’t my postmortem years stretch on like a lovely procession of stone lamps?

If you believe, as H. P. Lovecraft asserted, that all cemeteries are subterraneously connected, then it scarcely matters which one you visit; so I put one foot before the other, and within a half-hour found myself allured by the bright green moss on the pointed tops of those ancient stone columns of the third Shogun’s loyally suicided retainers. Next I found, glowing brighter than the daylight, more green moss upon the stone railings and torii enclosing these square plots whose tombstones strained upward like trees, each stone engraved with its under-tenant’s postmortem Buddhist name.

The smell of moss consists of new and old together. Dead matter having decayed into clean dirt, the dirt now freshens into green. It is this becoming-alive which one smells. I remember how when my parents got old, they used to like to walk with me in a certain quiet marsh. The mud there smelled clean and chocolate-bitter. I now stood breathing this same mossy odor, and fallen cryptomeria-needles darkened their shades of green and orange while a cloud slid over the sun. Have you ever seen a lizard’s eyelid close over his yellow orb? If so, then you have entered ghostly regions, which is where I found myself upon the sun’s darkening. All the same, I had not gone perilously far: On the other side of the wall, tiny cars buzzed sweetly, bearing living skeletons to any number of premortem destinations. Reassured by the shallowness of my commitment, I approached the nearest grave.

The instant I touched the wet moss on the railing, I fell into communication with the stern occupant, upon whose wet dark hearthstone lay so many dead cryptomeria-tips. To say he declined to come out would be less than an understatement. It was enough to make a fellow spurn the afterlife! I experienced his anger as an electric shock. To him I was nothing, a rootless alien who lacked a lord to die for. Why should he teach me?

Humiliated, I turned away, and let myself into the lower courtyard behind the temple. Here grew the more diminutive ovoid and phallic tombs of priests. Some were incised with lotus wave-patterns. One resembled a mirror or hairbrush stood on end. I considered inviting myself in, but then I thought: If that lord up there was so cross, wouldn’t a priest have even less use for me?

So I pulled myself up to the temple’s narrow porch and sat there with my feet dangling over, watching cherry blossoms raining down on the tombs. The gnarled arms of that tree pointed toward every grave, and afternoon fell almost into dusk.

A single white blossom sped down like a spider parachuting down his newest thread. Then my ears began to ring — death’s call.

So I ran away. I sat in my room and hid. Looking out my window, I spied death prising up boards and pouring vinegar on nails. Death killed a dog. What if I were next?

Not daring to lose time, I decided to seek a humbler grave. And right down the superhighway, past the darkly muddy rectangles of rice fields scratched with light, I discovered a wet grey necropolis upon a ridge crowded around with shabby houses. At first I wondered what it would be like to live in that neighborhood, with death right above everybody. And then I remembered that all of us do live there.

The sky had cleared well before twilight. I killed time, so to speak, in a narrow little eel restaurant. Within the lacquered box which the old man served to me, wormlike nut-brown segments lay side by side on their bed of snow-white rice. They were delicious. I felt as if I were getting advance revenge on the nightcrawlers which would eat me someday. And I cried out to the old man: Aren’t you glad we’re still alive?

Sometimes, he replied, I forget about everything but paying my taxes.

By now the moon had risen. Ascending the steep path, I arrived at the thicket of gravestones and found a meager one with just a few lichen-specks on it. The name on it was nearly effaced, and three neighboring steles shaded it so effectively that I had reason to hope that this soul might not be proud. Thank goodness!

I bowed twice from the bottom of my heart, clapped my hands, and knocked upon the tomb. Right away the ghost swam out. He had a wide, pallidly smiling face, and was serenely rigid, glowing like a spray of cherry blossoms in the sun. His eyes were mirrors in which I did not see myself.

Yes? he said. Who are you? Have we met before?

I don’t think so, I replied.

Well, said he, in that case I’m at a loss. I wasn’t sure if I remembered you.

At first I thought him sprightly as well as spritely; his movements were as crisp as the golden characters of the Lotus Sutra marching down blue-blackness, each column ruled off with gold, each letter even both horizontally and vertically with all the others.

I asked his name, and he said: Well, I used to be— Actually, what does that matter? By the way, this moonlight is almost too bright. Doesn’t it hurt you?

Not really.

Oh. I wish I could be as strong as you.

He liked to interrupt me as eagerly as raindrops leap up from stones. In his words and flights he made flashy starts, but soon began to amble uncertainly. He was an entirely friendly ghost; I can’t say I disliked him.

I inquired how to avoid suffering after my death, and he flittered about like an immense carp, smiling so widely that for an instant I took alarm and wondered if he meant to eat me. I asked if I were tiring him; I offered to run away, but he said it wouldn’t do any good.

What’s your aspiration? I wondered, and he told me it was to lick the sweat from a young girl’s leg just one more time — he had grown too uncertain of himself to aspire higher than that.

I tried to learn whether life without consciousness might be preferable to consciousness without life; but to calculate the answers he needed to count several secret variables simultaneously upon his misty fingers, and soon lost track of where he had started. Of course he could not inscribe the sand with anyone’s memorial stick, nor borrow pen and paper from me, being utterly permeable in relation to objects.

Well, then, you wouldn’t be able to lick anyone’s leg, I reminded him. My satisfaction, in which I could not help but bask, consisted of the fact that this ghost was dead and I alive. I was safer, more superior, less likely ever to be dead!

His eyes kept goggling. I asked if I would die soon. — Prune? the ghost echoed in bewilderment.

We continued to discuss the matter of suffering, and he suddenly cried out: But just now I can’t quite remember what suffering means. So sorry! How do you spell it?

S, u…

Beg your pardon? F?

S.

Are you quite sure?

He had forgotten just enough to make a conversation exasperating, but not enough for him to give up hope of communicating his thoughts, such as they were, and of listening to me, in an effort to remind himself of what life was, and perhaps even to escape, however momentarily, into some pretense of life of his own. And how I longed to escape from him! I would have done nearly anything to avoid becoming his younger brother. Unfortunately, it wasn’t up to me. As for him, was it his fault that he wasn’t alive? Many times I have seen old men go through the motions of picking up the young girls who would joyfully have let themselves be carried away in ancient days; it’s as if one needs to learn over and over the lesson of loss, and even then one hopes that since the rules altered before, they might change back again. But they never do, at least not for the better; and although I sought to be as patient as I could, I increasingly resembled the ignorant, bustling child who grows annoyed when its grandfather fails to accompany its lunges to and fro.

He wanted to know the current prices of everything. — How many golden ryo? he asked. How many silver kwan? — He imagined himself to be au courant, since he had not yet forgotten those two bygone coins.

Well, I finally said, I was thinking—

Are you always thinking? interrupted the ghost with extreme interest.

Yes.

Sometimes I don’t think about anything, the ghost confided.

And is that relaxing? Would you rather not think than think?

Is relaxing a pattern or a sound?

A pattern.

And what was it you were trying to ask me?

Never mind.

Oh, you forgot? That makes me feel better. I sometimes forget things also. Do you know why?

No.

I was hoping you could tell me why.

I’d wanted to learn to die, but instead was condemned to try unavailingly to teach a ghost to live. Did it follow that perhaps I could help him forget that he was dead if he in turn taught me to forget that I lived? No matter; I found myself ever less ambitious to ride to death in a palanquin shrine. I’d rather keep hold of my flesh, at least until rain falls in Tokyo and people run away with newspapers over their heads.

The ghost would not stop asking me questions. I finally said: Ask the grass. Ask why it lives.

What an intelligent idea! he said. He bent shyly down over a tuft, and I sneaked away. Perhaps I’d return to the cemetery where the third Shogun’s lieutenants dwelled. I’d dwell again in the shade of the tall cryptomerias. From the spreading cherry tree, there’d come a pale pink rain. Didn’t I possess places to go? Wasn’t I a fellow who once might have been slightly in the know?

But without the ghost I quickly remembered my helplessness in this alien environment and repented of my cruelty. I had lost myself among the crowds of tombstones. Bumping accidentally against them, I discovered myself hounded by marching ghosts in laced red corset-armor, their legs wound up in white like mummy-worms, their faces phosphorescent blotches of horror. They could not really strangle me, but their touches chilled me; my bones ached with cold. Ahead of me loomed an immense black whirling wheel — my death, no doubt. Well, well; it was going to be sooner! Somehow I reached the edge of the cemetery and leaped into the darkness. I fell and fell. When I came to earth, there was scarcely any pain, which made me wonder whether I had died.

Overhead hovered a familiar pallid, plump-cheeked shrine figure. The ghost had fluttered off to wait for me. He was very good at that.

What was I supposed to ask the grass? he inquired.

Ask which one of us is dead.

Dead? Is that spelled with an x or a z?

A z.

Just a moment. I’ll go find out. Actually, I was wondering the same thing.

He flew slowly away, but when he returned his flight was as long and straight as one of the bolts on a sanctuary door. He reported: The grass said just forget you’re dead and then you can go on. Let’s both do it.

Well…

But last time didn’t you say that it’s spelled with an x?

I demanded to know what he meant. The ghost sighed: Don’t you remember how often you’ve been here?

THE GHOST OF RAINY MOUNTAIN

To reach Rainy Mountain one must pass Dripping Pine, where after getting drenched with many silver drops one will hear a crow cry four times.

When Rainy Mountain is dry, even should the day be cloudy and windy, and the peak manage somehow to conceal itself within grey vapors, the mountain remains diminished by being seen, like our childhood homes which once sheltered and imprisoned us so grandly. At such hours paltriness afflicts its pines and cedars, and the spreads of blossoming cherry branches at its foot resemble nothing better than pallid scars in its dark jade flesh. Roofs, wires, aerials gash its lower reaches.

Above the gravel lot between two houses runs a mossy wall over the top of which flower mediocre shrubs beneath a yellow fence which halfway hides a wide pink cherry tree, and beyond that rise the foothills of Rainy Mountain. When the storm clouds begin to swarm, Rainy Mountain appears nearly sinister, while on sunny days the way from here to there is so ordinary that most people would rather entertain themselves at home. (To be sure, some wealthy, lonely man might extend himself so far as to to hire black-lacquered hair and a white-lacquered face in a cinnabar kimono whose metallic flowers shine like jewels; but that he can do in any teahouse by the river.) As for me, I preferred to go farther. Attached to the railroad station stands a small clean tourist office whose three-color map still delineates in a curving route of yellow dashes a self-guided promenade around the circumference of Rainy Mountain, but if you ask the stylish young woman about that, she will explain that two years ago a spring flood washed out the footbridge, which the prefectural authorities will have rebuilt by the beginning of next summer. She apologizes, then brightly recommends the geisha dances of the Three Fern School. There also happens to be a wonder-working Buddha (now retired), five minutes’ walk past the hospital. If you inquire as to whether Rainy Mountain is haunted, she will clap her hand over her giggling mouth. This happened to me, and I for one was charmed.

Praying to Batoh Kannon, the horseheaded mercy goddess, I set out to seek a ghost whom I could love; for I had recently met with disappointments, perhaps on account of my sunken eyes. It was a good day, a rainy day. The mountain could have been a cloud. I hoped and hoped through the green cloud-ribs of a pine tree in spring rain. Although she had never explored in that direction (having been transferred from Niigata just last winter), the girl from the tourist office had declined to accompany me. Smiling and bowing, she said that she must work.

I arrived at the yellow fence by the cherry tree, and seemed to spy a dashed yellow line upon the asphalt path. An old lady cycled past me, sounding her bicycle bell as politely as a cough. I wondered where she had come from, and where I was in life. Ahead, the sky was very dark. The breeze expressed the sad rattlings of sticks. When I thought ahead I grew almost afraid, and yet how I longed to do what I was doing! Whether or not I ever returned from Rainy Mountain, I knew that I would be changed; not changing would have been unendurable; even the yellow fence sickened me with sameness, never mind the world behind. All the misty summer-leafed hills of my youth, and the thunderstorm days which magnified them, now invited me to take my adventure on Rainy Mountain, however lush or eerie this might turn out; for I had been too timid or obedient to ascend them when it could have done me good. What had I grown into? And where might Dripping Pine be? Descending a minuscule dip, I reached the remnant of the footbridge. The creek being low, I easily skipped across, not disturbing a certain muted orange carp.

Tall cryptomeria trees with slender chains around their waists now outlined my way. Ahead of me, the mist held its breath. If I could see inside Rainy Mountain, would it be the same as seeing inside a cloud? This question could only be answered through love, or something else of a similar name.

At the summit of a low hill which had been invisible from the town, the path turned under a many-branched pine whose needles urinated upon me, although there was no longer any wind. Immediately afterward, a crow cawed four times. Before me rose a pyramid of greybearded mist.

Bow two times, clap two times, then bow again, all from the bottom of one’s heart. This is how one is advised to behave at Rainy Mountain.

In Rainy Mountain there is a door whose dark jade shutters bear vermilion-sashed panes, and whose hinges are engraved in crowds of flower-crowned hexagons. I bowed two times; I clapped twice; I bowed. When this door opened, a certain crow cawed three times in the trees behind me.

Within was a wooden lattice-gate. Peering through its vertical bars which had once been green and were now white-streaked like moldy meat, I could see the vermilion steps to a black door with shiny brass hinges, a black door slammed exceedingly well shut! Bowing once and then once more, I clapped the first time and the second, at which the crow cawed twice, and as soon as I had bowed once more the wooden gate opened.

Bowing and clapping before the black door, I then bowed and clapped. The crow cawed. I made my final bow. When this door opened, the ghost of my dreams flittered out.

Her eyes resembled orange slits of light in a black lantern. From her skull sprouted double tassels, as if of horsehair, banded white, then red, then darkish brown with grey streaks showing miscellaneously. Her skirt might have been slats of bamboo chained into tight vertical parallels all around the widening trunk of a giant cypress. Between her breasts, an incense-hole was smoking.

Since she now grinned at me with all her sharp black teeth, I hoped that this particular specimen of ghostly nubility was interested in me, although with ghosts one can never be sure. For that matter, how could I even be sure of myself? Not long after a young girl left me, seven doctors had diagnosed my syndrome as anililagnia, which is to say, sexual interest in older women. Well, when does that become necrophilia? If the lady happens to be a ghost, should we select a different syndrome?

Here she came, her movements as complex and asymmetrical as a Japanese garden. Just as the sheen of rain on vermilion-lacquered shrines is counteracted by the dulling down or darkening of the cloudy atmosphere, so my ardor failed a smidgen, I do confess, the instant that she unfurled her iron claws; but I reminded myself not only of my prior intention to surrender to love, but also of the evident fact that now was no time to be undiplomatic — after all, what in the Devil’s name had I expected her to look like? — so I strode forward to embrace her, hooking my thumbs most conveniently on her cold ribs while her talons settled upon my collarbones. She smelled of moss, not death. Narrowing her glowing eyes, she inclined her head to kiss me. Those teeth of hers could have nibbled my lips right off, but since she derived from a gentle species, kissing her proved no worse than pressing my mouth against a cold railing. To tell you the truth, I was reminded of the vulva of that young woman who had recently decided to leave me; visiting for old times’ sake, she lay down on my bed, so I naturally slid my hand up her skirt, caressing for the sake of those same old times the perfect closed lips of the slit I used to know, at which she opened her eyes and murmured: Stop. — The ghost of Rainy Mountain uttered no such prohibition. Her claws rested ever so delicately around my throat.

She taught me how to beat the lacquered drum, and make the dead dance. When she opened her legs, I found myself looking up into the petals of a gilded lotus. She showed me what lies hid in vermilion darkness. With great kindness she presented to me the hidden opening of that crypt where the urns of our cremated hopes are buried. Entering my preordained place, I became as free as rain falling down a yellow moss-hole.

Oftentimes I fluttered out of her, after which we drifted hand in hand through the soft cool mists of Rainy Mountain where nobody else ever came. Educated into confidence, I now began to reach inside her to withdraw the urns of my hopes, one at time. The lids had been screwed down for eternity, but not far from the door to our vault, a rusty iron band ringed an immense cedar; this served for an urn-smasher. Just as most nongaseous chemical elements in our universe appear white or silvery-grey (not to mention the odd yellow, purple or gold exception), so my pulverized memory-ashes tended to resemble gunmetal, with more or less of a turquoise component; once an urn offered up a mound of granules as scarlet as ladybugs, and I wondered what that particular hope had consisted of; unfortunately, the undertaker had engraved his urns with nothing but my postmortem name, so that the only way to identify their contents would have been to taste them, a prospect of peculiar loathsomeness for me who still lived. Moreover, my sweet Rainy Mountain ghost used to hover behind my shoulder, watching these various residua depart. She might well have felt neglected had I displayed much curiosity about my own waste-years. Affectionately she traced her claws down my back, her rickety metacarpii reminding me of long sticks rattling in the wind. In the drizzles of Rainy Mountain those heaps of urn-matter quickly liquefied and flowed away; although drops of the scarlet element persisted among the moss like menstrual blood; I almost dabbled my finger in the stuff.

Around that cedar tree, urn-shards slowly assembled themselves into a ring-shaped midden of irrelevance.

Stroking her smooth hard breasts, I learned how to pleasure her, at which she would sigh like a child blowing through a bamboo pipe, the breath which issued between her cold black teeth then taking on the odor of pickled metal. Now that she permitted me to withdraw my urns of departed substance from between her thighs whenever I pleased, I felt quite satisfied, not having considered how any such procedure might have compromised me.

But one rainy night after nibbling sweetly on my lower lip in her accustomed manner, her gaze glowing right through my closed eyelids (it now seemed less orange than ocher — perhaps the hue of a tiger’s-eye stone), she abruptly unflexed her claws to full length, which she had never yet done before; and then, as I ought to have expected (no wonder that the girl from the tourist office had declined to accompany me here!), rocketed into the mist like an owl-faced moon, plunged down, and in several slow and, I must confess, excruciating swipes, eviscerated me, so that I too became a ghost, with my intestines left to hang high up on that iron-banded cedar (a crow cawed four times). — More rapidly than the living might suppose, I came to resemble her, not only in my hollowness but also in my ability to fly. Thus I could be to her all that she had been to me; and on certain very humid nights, while the entire mountain wept most pleasantly, she liked to muse in the air beside me, her slit-eyes glowing with affection, her black mouth smiling; and then, in much the way that the giggly hot springs waitress pulls off each new guest’s shoes, she would reach into my unsexed pelvic cradle, presently withdrawing some urn or other of her own cremated past, cradling it in her gristle-blue arms as she bore it above the treetops, in the fashion of the seagull which soars before dropping a closed clam onto sharp rocks. These pulverized hopes of hers, if such they were, appeared less bluish-grey than mine, more charcoal-like; for isn’t each disappointment unique? I admit that I never could have foreseen discovering my dead past within her, much less hers within me — hadn’t I come to her alive, and hadn’t I treasured my ignorance of whoever she had been before our first meeting? Well, this must be what love is.

Surreptitiously I alighted on a single shard, touched my forefinger to a lingering rosy drop of my former substance, then sucked. At once I retasted the humiliation which had permeated my flesh when in my youth a woman I admired met my praises with wary condescension; and at the shining ball to which I brought her, nobody smiled at me all night; she went off and danced with anyone and everyone, while I sat among the old ladies on the long sofa against the wall. One of these kindly souls, laying her wrinkled hand upon my own, said: Dear, it happens to all of us. — That was when I first perceived the comforts of anililagnia. With the right sort of woman, I too could be free; I could be a grey ghost.

Since it was now her turn, my Rainy Mountain ghost swiggled her claws inside my pelvis, withdrew another leaden-colored urn, smashed it against the cedar, and gloated cat-eyed over the blackish powder spilling out. How could I know what she really felt about it? Flittering down to lick up a granule of her discarded old substance, I understood at once how it had been for her on her sixteenth birthday, when she was rejected at the first dance. Grimacing cheerfully and smacking his lips as he pulled, the dark boatman had ferried them all across that river of dirty jade. The farther they went, the cleaner the water became, until it was as crisp as the pleats in the schoolgirls’ navy-blue knee-high skirts. Docking, they awaited the headmistress’s signal. When she raised her arm, they filed by threes into the distant living world of summer: Die if you leap down there! And indeed they were all dead now; but she was the only one before me who had become a ghost upon Rainy Mountain. The girls formed ranks upon the edge of the outdoor stage, their shy hopes nearly as pale as the sun between the evening clouds. There came flute-songs and the crackle of those two flaming tripods, raining sparks some of which flew diagonally upward across the illuminated yellow-green treescape, vanishing into the rainclouds. The boys filed out in chorus, led by the child with the queue, her little brother, who had rotted for a hundred years now in a bomb crater, with mud in his mouth. In his white tabi socks he knelt, awaiting the next flute. It could never have been this way; certainly the face of the boy who eyed her across the polished boards could not have been a mask ivory-colored in the light; nor was his kimono greenish-grey, metallic and tarnished, the effect antique unlike the fresh green trees; but within the ancient soul of my Rainy Mountain ghost, semblances had decomposed and revivified in other images; rendering what had happened all the more true. That was why the ashes of her bygone disappointment tasted metallic to me, like the golden fan ahead and upward of that boy’s forward-bowing face; he came slowly gliding out with unearthly music toward the girl, sad and demonic now, a golden skull with a golden queue, catching the red flickering light — then halted, and although every other pair in the facing lines had met, touching fan to fan, and begun to dance, the dead boy in the ivory mask now struck the fan out of her hand, wheeled and rose up into the air like an incomprehensible ghost! Now every mouth was laughing behind a fan — laughing at the girl, who in her humiliation sank slowly to the ground.

For love and pity I kissed her then, with the dark powder of her life still staining my vaporous lips. Nibbling me fondly with her sharp black teeth, she gestured as if to imply that she felt flattered by my interest. I supposed that she had lost the capacity to weep — although it might also have been that this youthful incident had grown trivial to her. For a fact, she appeared less affected by it than I.

Until now she had (for all her manifold ectoplasmic virtues) reminded me of the woman I once knew who eternally alluded to her secret gynecological difficulty but refused to explicate it. Now I was getting somewhere with her, thank goodness; my darling Rainy Mountain ghost might even love me! Or did she hate me, or did she consider me merely as a thing upon which to feed? She had killed me (I decline to accuse her of murder, since I had given myself to her of my own choice), in order to render my bony substance fit to entrust with the regermination of her own forgotten secrets.

Just as at dawn a sleeping lover’s face so often appears young, open, yet far away, like a zo-onna mask, the countenance of my Rainy Mountain ghost opened unto me as if I were lying beside her on a tatami mat, marveling at her hair. Most days and nights we played with one another as luminously as green- or red-skinned demons on a golden screen. In her yellow-orange eyes a reddish tincture sometimes teased me; could it have been the reflection of my own new ghostly gaze; did I sport red eyes? I hoped not to be ugly, for then how could she love me?

It was not until she had begun to draw her dead emotions out of me that I suspected how dejected I must seem to her, or anyone — and might well always have been, not that it mattered. But how can a ghost be anything but sad? In the words of Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu: If you consider suffering as an ordinary state, you will never feel discontent.

They say that the first Shogun would kill the songbird that failed to sing, the second would teach it notes, and the third would wait until it sang beautifully. Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu was the third. Well, then, like him I would now await the silent singing of my Rainy Mountain ghost in the same spirit that the growing pine needles reach up. Side by side we would learn how to gaze at white rain-jewels and pink magnolia blossoms. The reason I had first approached her was to overcome the defining human error of despising death’s carnality. I had sought to offer my love and desire to her; now I continued to present it to her, continuing the love after the grave, trusting that the breath of corruption would in time become the breath of a flower.

The hinges of our home were all engraved in crowds of flower-crowned hexagons. Moisture beaded in tiny white pimples upon our black door. On the infrequent occasions when the mist blew away from Rainy Mountain, we withdrew to our vault and concealed ourselves within the skull of a stone lamp. She kept me company as elegantly as if she were kneeling on a white tatami mat, gently pouring sake. Helpmeets to each other, we disposed of our miseries, wearing the red laughs of white-toothed dragons.

The longer we dwelled together, the less I could remember. After a season or a century, she ceased to grow gravid with my burial urns. I continued to incubate hers, which she withdrew ever less eagerly. I could not tell whether my tasting of her bygone failures made her bashful, grateful or something else, but I continued to sample their dust, because I wished to know her. These sorrows of hers were pools of silvery-pink water flooding my old life.

Come the middle of a certain rainy morning, when a cool yellow sky somehow found means to insinuate itself between the clouds and the lowlands from which I originated, I could see all the way past Dripping Pine, beyond those high-crowned cryptomerias and down to the city whose front row of houses loomed two-dimensionally like a multitowered battleship. Surely now the railroad tracks must be shining wet, the ballast-stones soft and mossy, the girl at the tourist office sweetly composing herself to perish, for it must have been nearly a lifetime already since my death. Her flesh might have been as sweet to me as all the drops of rain on a plum tree’s galaxy of tiny white blossoms, but I felt no regret, so well suited had I become to my own Rainy Mountain ghost. All the same, that was when I began to study her for hints of change, not realizing that I myself continued to alter, in contradiction to every supposition which premortem entities make about ghosts. It might have been that she was discovering secrets from the urns she drew out of me, although so far as I could tell, the powders which swirled and tumbled from each terra-cotta vessel remained identically ebony — well, their separate blacknesses might vary by a hint of purple or green; or was that merely a trick of my glowing eyes, whose color I could never know? For my part, whenever I tasted the ashes of her life, my love for her softened further, like the mellowing rice brandy which learns to conceal its power within sweet water-blandness. Turning toward me like a slow whitish-beige fish, she taught me how to silhouette myself upon the moon. Her fixed face, the grey-and-black teeth in her dark mouth, her hand frozen on the bamboo staff she sometimes carried, and the fantastic smokelike hair around her skull, all seemed cheerful to me now. From the side, her mouth was a downcurving crescent of darkness. As a girl she had been taught to express not with the face but with the heart; and I would have said that she did so to perfection, although just what she expressed I cannot tell you. She had learned that when one wears one’s death, it grows difficult to look down. When one emerges from a mist or a vault, one cannot feel one’s feet, so it is best to hover. In company one wears, for instance, a memory of the V-necklined dark kimono with the white chrysanthemum pattern, the lavender obi embroidered with white plum blossoms — no matter that what’s left of it is three fibers, four worms and a pinch of ashes.

For her fan I gave her a dewy fern, with which she danced for me on the rainiest nights. It soon decayed, but then we learned that she did not need it; for when she danced, our memory of her fan moved as inevitably as water.

When she withdrew her final urn from my bones and broke it, I greedily descended to nourish myself on its blackish cinders, and at once tasted the occasion when she had first masked herself in a mirror room, pleading with her Elder Sister: I just wish to be more and more feminine. That’s my wish. — Never before had I heard her voice, nor would I again; and these words reached me by bone conduction, as if they derived from my own speech resonating within my skull. How often do we need to remember our own words? Most often it is the words and deeds of others which most eloquently relate our own chapters. Masked, the girl took her place among the kneeling geishas, who locked their hands in their laps. I awaited her error. How would it come? Just as lacquer wears off a shrine’s door, revealing grey wood, so our expectations flake away, leaving dullness struggling to disguise itself in Rainy Mountain’s grey clouds. When would Elder Sister slap her in the face? Bowing, the shamisen-player glided to the corner, then knelt and tuned her instrument. The girl arose. It was her turn to dance.

She disappointed no one, not even herself. Her excellence remained as pure as mountain rainwater. No one could strike her or do anything but bow in awe and gratitude. Here came the clatter of prayer-coins falling between wooden slats while people bowed — to her! To her they clapped two times. She was someone accomplished, even great, who founded the Three Fern School of Rainy Mountain. When she died, crowds burned incense for her.

To be sure, her most fearsome disappointments outlived her — the reason she was compelled to become a ghost — but thanks to these last ashes (which I assure you appeared no different, at least to me, from others), she now spied light instead of darkness through her own skeleton’s latticework. Was she looking out through black-lacquered blinds at the pale branches of early spring?

Until now I had supposed her to be my counterpart. Well, perhaps she was. If only I had tasted that scarlet powder, I might have learned that I too contained more than disappointments.

So was she happy now? Her orange gaze found something in the distance. But then it seemed once again as if she were seeking something within me. Just as out of Keisai Eisen’s woodblock prints an Edo beauty peers sidelong with her glossy black eyes, kissing the air with her tiny red mouth, just so my Rainy Mountain ghost studied me as if she were sorry for me. Her smile resembled one of those multiplying triple circles in a green pond when the rain begins, the ripples pulsing faster and faster, while beneath them, unaltered, comes a carp-flash in the greenish water, a pallid sparkle of shrine-gold. As slowly as a Noh actor, she rotated away from me, as if she were turning upon an invisible roasting-spit. More curious than alarmed, I flittered round to learn her smile’s next chapter. Naturally she couldn’t have forgotten me! Her twin orange eye-beams yellowed the grey-clouded summit of Rainy Mountain. Her gruesome arms sprang out of immobility, her claws parted, and then, head bowed, she flew away forever over Rainy Mountain, with her long hair dripping down her bowed back.

So now I was the ghost of Rainy Mountain, the only one. But I preferred not to be alone, since that made me so very, very disappointed! You might call me a hateful spirit, but nothing I was or felt could have been prevented. No doubt this latest bitterness of mine was already smoking down to nothing inside my soul’s crematorium. But where were all the other urns, whose contents must have been as lovely as certain scrolls of the Lotus Sutra, each a particular hue and decorated with its own calligraphy and stamped crests? When my Rainy Mountain ghost remembered achieving her wish to be ever more feminine, she had improved her destiny; and I thought to do the same. So I set off in the direction that my mate had gone. But I was merely a ghost now — worse yet, an abandoned ghost, with less ichor inside me than any windblown dragonfly. So I fluttered along quite haltingly, much as an old woman clings to every wall, branch or railing that she can, since a fall will be disastrous. That was why it took me quite an eon to fly all the way to the peak of Rainy Mountain. By the time I got there, I would have been tired, if a ghost could ever get that way; perhaps when I am old enough I will indeed feel such a sensation; anyhow, I cannot say that I even remember what the summit looked like; but it must have been very, very grey. Behind a lichened torus, there might have been a vast stone ring filled with greenish water. Perhaps I cannot recollect it because I could not find my reflection in that pool. But I believe there was moss on a stone lamp; it must have been soft like pubic hair. Over this I drifted. Then I passed on through the clouds. No pine dripped on me; I heard no crow.

Emerging on the far side of Rainy Mountain, where it was windy, I heard before I saw it the rattling against the metal railing of those long narrow sticks with black characters on them. Cherry blossoms hung sickly in the streetlight behind a giant spreading tree. Here stood the narrow stele of a family tomb and there another, each stele upon its nested pedestals, each pedestal bearing a pair of silver cups for flowers and often an oval mouth for incense; sometimes a family crest had been etched into the stone. All this reminded me of something I could scarcely name. Between two silver cups lay a groove for incense, at which I finally remembered the breasts of my sweet Rainy Mountain ghost!

More clammy gusts played in this pallid forest of sticks which reached up toward the greyish night sky of Tokyo. Seeking to decode that long sad rattling, I reminded myself: Could they talk, this would be the only way they could do it, since nothing else moves. — Ever more desperately hopeful waxed my longing to see something, even something gruesome, for instance a ghoul or vampire shambling toward me up one of the long narrow alleys of gravestones. For to exist is to be alone.

Stopping at a very dark-shadowed tomb (streetlight glinting silver on its nearest flower-cup and on one granite corner-groove), I discovered the stone to be already engraved with nine names, in each case first the postmortem name and then the secular one. If only I knew what my Rainy Mountain ghost had been called! (I should have known; why didn’t I?) Then I could have drifted from tomb to tomb with some pretense of purpose. But didn’t I have all the time in the world?

Glumly I regarded the tomb, which seemed to stare back at me, for its two glowing cups resembled eyes in a black square stone face.

Falling back on hope, I bowed twice, clapped twice and bowed yet again. Here at once came my Rainy Mountain ghost with a horde of her bygone friends, some of them bearing twin lanterns and fresh white chrysanthemums, most of them skeletal, a few with the heads of foxes or horses, but all of them with their long black tresses perfectly combed. Spying me, they halted as if in confusion. Then, in that universally known gesture of threatening rejection which the dead make to scare away the living (but wasn’t I one of them?), they signified in the air: What cures you harms us, and vice versa. So stay away; stay away!

Ignoring this — what harm could they do me? — I sped toward them almost as rapidly as a cherry petal whirls down an April brook. They wavered, but disdained to sink back underground. So I peered between my sweetheart’s legs, but she was incubating nothing of mine. I won’t pretend I was surprised.

But as I hovered disconcerted, she reached into my bone cradle, pulled out an urn and shattered it against the tomb while her companions tittered. I oozed down upon the blue-black ashes to taste them. Thus was I apprised of her final disappointment — her sojourn with me. After that, nothing remained to me but the words of Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu: Blame yourself, not others.

THE CAMERA GHOST

In Kabukicho a certain crow caws and memory sticks protrude from behind the concrete wall. Unless you know somebody here, you will not think much of this spot — just another cemetery from the Meiji period! White apartment towers stand behind it; plastic pallets sometimes lie before it, mingled with cardboard boxes which once held frozen fish. Seeking the past without expectations, I entered through the open gate. A pine tree was slowly lifting the flagstones of the Naito family tomb. A woman was walking, with her eyes nearly closed, and two incense sticks smoking in her left hand; she was striding down the path of concrete flagstones to her family’s place. Whatever she would meet there would be hers alone, no matter whether she thought of herself as belonging to others. Charmed by her beautiful accomplishment of grief, I dreamed of photographing her. But she disappeared.

Approaching a vermilion-headed shrine high above whose bell was painted a golden swastika, I bowed and clapped my hands twice, hoping to see what was gone. The incense-bearing woman had expressed no such prayer, I guessed; she would have felt she’d done enough. Let the dead bury the dead, said Christ; while the cremated Buddha, smiling, blew smoke-rings as he rose away from his pyre. I for my part thought: Everything ought to be remembered forever.

Bending over a nearby tomb whose inscribed characters were moss-greened, I now descried the representation of a camera, which in my situation I considered lucky. Bowing, clapping and praying for old things, I remained there for the duration of two joss-sticks, then departed the cemetery.

An old man came walking slowly, dressed in tan, with a rust-pocked little Leica dangling from his shoulder. To speak more correctly of his outfit, it consisted of a tan-green coat, dark tan pants, pale beige hat and white gloves. At his shoulder hung a cracked briefcase. He came to me, leaning slowly on his black cane. I was prepared for him; I was the watcher on the side.

I assured him that since he must be the lonelier of us two, I would help him however I could.

He replied: You didn’t call me on my account, so no misstatements! What do you want? Speak quickly; my bones hurt!

Well, sensei, I remember film, paper, chemicals and cameras, real cameras—

I might know a little about those, he allowed, and we both grew happy.

And afterward, with your permission, I’ll buy a bottle of snow-white sake and pour it over your grave.

At this he graciously bowed. Perhaps his other followers had died or forgotten him.

Walking side by side, we passed another young lady; soon she would be smoke and ashes. I said: How sad! — The girl did not hear; she was already gone.

He asked me: How long can you remember her?

Photography remembers, I insisted.

So does imagination.

It only thinks so. You’re testing me, sensei.

Yes. Now answer at once: Would you rather have her before you all the days of her life, or make a picture of her which would be safe forever in some place you could never see?

The second, of course. It would be for her, not for me.

Good. Now tell me what she looked like. Be accurate.

I can’t remember. How long has it been? She was beautiful. Did you see her face? She—

Coughing smoke and dust, my companion remarked: I’ve managed not to regret my death. Anyhow, it’s time to make your wishes clear. My dead bones, you see…

Perceiving how frail he was, I bowed to him and clapped two times, at which he wearily nodded. A funeral shop stood in that block, with open double doors. I escorted him inside, and he inhaled three breaths of incense. That was all he needed. As soon as the clerk approached me, I apologized, and then the old man and I went out.

He said to me: Describe your own regrets. Please get to the point.

I told him that I reckoned my life from before and after the day when film went away. Of course I grieved for the sake of all cameras, but particularly for one of mine which was constructed entirely of metal, silk and glass; this machine had always been heavy around my neck, and even when it was new, other photographers had laughed at me, disdaining what they called its obsolescence. What knowledge it ever brought me I cannot say; whether it made me more or less fitted for life I can answer only too well (my dreams fading secretly in albums, so that I need not see); nonetheless, my camera was everything to me. Needing no battery, nearly impervious to humidity or shock, it could resist a century as easily as a speck of lint. Its round eye was brightly tireless. I told the old man that my camera saw ever so differently from me, and yet it never lied. If it never wept, sometimes what it saw touched the eyes of others. Well, now it had starved to death. Defying reality, I saved a few rolls of film in my freezer; the cosmic rays must have fogged them by now.

The old man nodded patiently, swaying.

Actually, I said, it may be a capability of the silver halides in the film to record mood itself.

You see, imagination does remember!

No, sensei. Only photography can be trusted.

Is that so? he inquired, patting my shoulder.

That was how we spoke, strolling together down Tokyo’s narrow wobbly streets of cyclists. It was Golden Week, and so the vacationers streamed through Shinjuku, where photo store barkers and presenters of priceless facial tissues were chanting.

We recalled cameras and film, he and I, calling them up to praise them. We were proudly, loyally bound by former ties. Smiling and tapping his cane, he described to me a certain elegant wooden pinhole camera with brass fittings: a tiny, topheavy toy from 1899 it was, with nested tapering lens-snouts, the viewfinder like a clotted bubble on the side; not long ago I had seen one much like it for sale in an Argentinean fleamarket; when I raised it to my eye, it showed me nothing but cracks and glowing dust. Hearing this, the old man grew melancholy and shook his head. I told him that when I declined to buy that camera, the vendor had tried to sell me an old rotary telephone. Smiling, the old man said: How sad.

We stood there before the five-storey photo store which no longer sold film, while faces orbited closer and closer, passing on to be replaced by others. (As for the old man, perhaps he disliked noise and movement.) Lord Kiso and Kanehira, Komachi and Yokihi, I saw them all there. Across the street rose an immense department store whose façade had been silkscreened in the likeness of a young girl with emerald-green sunglasses and short brown hair. As I think about it, this must have occurred a long time ago; certainly it was before the great tsunami of 2012.

I confided to the old man that my camera used to see anything, be it wild grass or breezy leaf-shadows on a wall of galvanized zinc in an alley in the middle of a spring afternoon. It had saved from death the four schoolgirls of the black skirts and shiny black loafers and glossy black hair, not to mention the old bicycle with the sad handlebars.

I bought my camera in that shop over there, remarked the old man. In those days, cameras were all of metal.

There must have been some wooden ones, I said, and he laughed in delight, saying: Yes, yes, you remember; you too are old!

In the department store’s seventeenth-floor restaurant I ordered two cups of steaming sake, the kind which was flavored with something like incense, and the old man bowed over his, smiling as if he could enjoy the fragrance.

From his briefcase he withdrew a tiny portrait, printed without error, of a geisha kneeling with her white hands folded. Strange to tell, I nearly seemed to remember her. Her skirts spread out wide around her in a pool of embroidered light. Fearing to touch, I bent over the picture as he held it in his hand. Rescued forever was the bright white parting of her ink-black hair and the long drop of her kimono sleeves. I seemed to hear the sound of snow. The neutral white of the photographic paper distinguished itself from the white, white, living white of her face powder. She was a shadow like a ghost on the paper wall, hair perfectly separating down each side of the head in a series of infinitely thin parallel ink-lines. In a moment, when she rose, her wide sleeves would cause her to resemble a flying bird.

I said: How beautiful! — to which my companion remarked: She has died. — Then he put the picture away.

Well, sensei, you saved her! What about the negative?

Don’t worry. It’s in a dark cool place.

The waitress brought two more cups of sake. She was old, plain and tired; I wished I could have photographed her. My companion inclined his head to her and she bowed.

Now I know you’re worthy, he said. The others only cared about beautiful dead women.

Ordering more sake, which warmed me until I felt immortal, I proclaimed (the waitress clapping her hand over her giggling mouth) that anything dead is especially beautiful, because everything that is never stops deserving to be, and since the living can take care of itself, the bygone calls for chivalry. Meaning to compliment him, I said: Sensei, you and I are both tender toward those departed beings—

So. You know death, said the old man very pleasantly, and at the last moment I perceived his irony, which resembled the reflection of white thunderclouds in a wind-rippled pool of the darkest indigo. I managed not to fear him — after all, if he’d wished, he could have preyed on me in the cemetery — but perhaps I lost a certain confidence. His eyes were unwinkingly bright. Insisting that I presumed comprehension of no mystery, and that my intentions were but to honor, safeguard and facilitate, I drank my sake very quickly, in order to calm myself, while he for his part held his cup just below his nostrils. Before I could have clapped my hands once, the cup was empty, the liquor vapor, and the vapor gone within his skull.

From his briefcase he now took out (as we enthusiasts like to do) more photographs he had made. He even had a loupe with him, in case I wished to inspect the grain. So I ceased to doubt his friendship. And first he showed me a photograph of the place called Hanging Blossom: rocks as complex as vulvas, and curves of glossy-leaved shade on that one fantastical rock which was too complex to be retained in the mind. Yes, this was memory, the thing nearest of all to perfect love. How patiently I had reprinted this negative! But no matter how many hours the darkroom robbed me of, I (who have small aptitude for anything) had never been able to bring out every tone which dwelled in its grain. In our craft we remember a proverb: In each picture, three thousand secrets revealed! Well, how many of us can elucidate them? Not I, not yet; I was sincere but lacked right understanding. But the old man had made so fine a print that I now remembered the shapes of summer water-lilies just beyond the viewing frame, and past them the reflection of Rainy Mountain; I even began to perceive the blurred brightnesses of large fishes, which reminded me of the shiny eyes of a woman who had been crying; her name was Dolores and she said she loved me; there might be other clues of her among the trees which resembled dreamy roots and vipers in that ginsenglike forest. She had died a year ago. The perfection of the old man’s photograph made me feel as joyful as if a new bride had moved into my house.

Smiling, he now remarked (although I cannot claim we spoke in words): I was once your camera. How sad; how sad!

I remembered that I knew that, after which I remembered photographing the geisha kneeling with her white hands folded, who had afterwards sat on my left, with her young hands gently, relaxedly resting on the sake pitcher, ready to serve, and when I asked her to explain the dance she had just performed, the one about Rainy Mountain, she said: I think it implies a love affair, and some woman has come to see her lover. When I danced I was dancing for you, and so you were the lover I came for. — Now her dance was ended; it would never be danced that way again. When I photographed her bowing, that was already something different; my memories turned to dreams, darkening down, darkening down.

Slowly raising and lowering his hand, the old man said: I used to be your friend. I saw and remembered for you! Are you blind now, and have you forgotten all the beautiful things?

But, sensei, how can it matter what I forget? I never saw like you! Anyway, once the photograph is made, the subject will be safe!

He kept saying: So sad, so sad! — Then I remembered that his bones hurt. — Pressing more sake upon him until he grew drunk, I asked how he felt about that geisha portrait, and he said: Every picture tortures me.

I wished to photograph him, in order to hide and cherish him like the ashes of someone loved. Was he two or were we one?

Again he asked why I had disturbed him, and I answered: To save everything. — He said: That’s why you’re expected tonight.

It was the time when people begin to go away, and the cemetery crows stop cawing, the hour when the crickets sing: How sad, how sad! Thinking that what had been might be again, and thirsting for those beautiful things — which is merely to say all the things I had seen, ever brighter by contrast with my greying life, not as if they were any better than whatever the moon would reveal tonight, or the sun tomorrow, although it did appear (but why should this be so?) that these things were truest of all, truer still because once photographed, printed and toned they could be held in my hand, moved closer and farther from my gaze or studied at various angles, without changing — or if they did alter it would be slowly, over the progression of several lifetimes, so that their degradation could be ignored or denied — I opened the gate, which someone had closed at dusk, and strolled past the pine tree whose roots kept stealthily parting the flagstones of the Naito family tomb just as I once parted my bride’s skirts. Whether something was spying on me I could not tell. The moon was as white as a geisha’s neck. The memory sticks were black. In a newer briefcase than the old man’s I carried a bottle of snow-white sake. I felt afraid, but hoped to cross the Bridge of Light. My heartbeats resembled the many holes within the dark skeleton of a dead lotus. Bending over my camera’s tomb, I bowed and clapped my hands twice. Oh, I was no uninvited guest! There came an odor of smoke and stale incense, a warm nauseous dizziness as of fever, and so I felt allured.

Fulfilling my promise, I now poured out sake in my teacher’s honor, and there at once he stood, taller than a cryptomeria tree. His forehead was too high to be visible, but when an oval of darkness grew more opaque I understood that he had opened his mouth.

Praying for everything I had seen and known to be saved, I flew up past the stone lamps, up the wet lichened wall of black stone cubes, to the vermilion façade inset with brass-framed phoenixes and dragons. The old man’s jaws closed around me with a click. Now I could be happy, in the place where pictures are made.

And so I had entered my old camera, or his, which was magnified — or, more likely, I myself had shrunk, after the fashion of old things. The vast metal plate had clicked shut behind me; I remembered that. My fears departed, my longings now shut out, I thought to guard my unfinished dreams. I found myself in the rubescent light of an antique darkroom, whose trays of hyposulphite and boiling selenium gave off those choking sulphurous and briny stenches I loved so well, here in the place where no voice is heard. Within the reel where the fresh film canister would have been seated, I presently discovered a spiral staircase which led me to a round chamber where some high-shouldered daguerreotypist with his back turned toward me was fuming mercury, the silvered plate already tilted to the proper angle. Since he had not observed me, I quietly redescended. The stinging vapors of the selenium now attacked my eyes and nostrils. Passing them by as rapidly as possible, I met with a tray of running water, a still tray of hypo clearing agent in which several sheets of paper floated face down, two trays of fresh-smelling fixer, a vinegary tray of stop bath, which of all my chemicals I used to find most unpleasant to mix, then a tray of developer evidently of the warmtone type, for its exhalations made me nauseous and itchy at once; in the red light, the latter liquid appeared tarry, evidently from precipitated silver; it must have received several sheets of photographic paper already. At last I reached the takeup reel, and, instructed by symmetry, easily discovered the other staircase which took me, as of course it would, to my old enlarger, whose timer was singing away the seconds while the incandescent bulb glowed white, projecting upon the wall above and behind it crooked rays like the legs of a shining spider whose head was the bulb itself. Musing over the easel, where the light cast down the negative’s image upon the paper, stood that same tall, high-shouldered gentleman who had been and perhaps still was fuming mercury in the other tower; he now turned toward me, with an agility I found unwholesome even before I saw his face, which was as featureless as the paper’s latent image. So was he infinitude or utter negation? Just then the timer flicked off and the chamber went dark. Sensing, although I could hear nothing, that he must be bending toward me, as if to get his long pale hands about my neck, I rushed down the stairs, not knowing whether he were an inch behind or had returned to withdraw the exposed sheet of paper, which in any event he would momentarily be carrying down to the chemical baths, because this is how we photographers bear our messages from this world to the world which will come; and indeed, just as I reached the door at the base of the tower, although I had heard no footfall behind me, I felt breath on the back of my neck. The horror I experienced then, when I comprehended that his mouth could be no more than a handspan away, and that his arms perhaps already drew in about me, ought to have stupefied me, in which case I could have been developed and pickled just like the kneeling geisha, but somehow I was able to throw myself down the last step and roll into the sticky, poisonous concretions beneath the long shelf-sink of trays. Now in the rubescent darkroom atmosphere I could see his tall, slender legs, white as a crane’s. His semiskeletonized majesty was as coherent and inevitable, if not as visible, as the sheen of brass chrysanthemum bolts marching in double rows up the black wood of a drum tower. He was as immense as a cedar. Although I supposed that he would promptly bend down and reach for me, he hesitated, perhaps for fear of exposing his fingers to chemical contamination, and therefore staining his prints. And very possibly he held that sheet of lightstruck paper in one hand. If he slipped it into the developer tray, I would gain five and a half to seven and a half minutes while it traveled from bath to bath, each station of which he must rock like a baby. If he set it down anywhere else, it might be ruined by some unseen chemical. While he pondered, I crawled as swiftly and silently as I could toward the other end of my camera, burning my palms and knees in puddles of ferricyanide bleach. My gorge rose and my eyes watered, but my heart pounded for fear of him who (or was it his twin?) now knelt down ahead of me, fishing for me with his long arms. Reversing course, I spied his double likewise hunting me — no shelter within this dark world! Nothing remained to me but to crawl out between those pallid twins, who straightened at once, as I could see all too well in the ruby light, and began to stride toward me with the delicate rapidity of spiders. Fortunately, I now reached what my hands remembered, for I had loved this camera so well that its workings nearly matched those of my own nerves and bones; here was the cam which used to come into play when I pressed the shutter release. Even as my two enemies commenced to strangle me, I rotated it ninety degrees, then pulled, so that the great spring-loaded mirror whirled beneath us as the lens opened and let in moonlight. I glimpsed my own desperate face, silvered down by the lunar rays. Clutching at their own eyeless, noseless faces, which were already blackening with the reliable rapidity of unfixed silver halides, the demons froze, and then, far too late, sought to preserve themselves by dunking their heads into the two hyposulphite baths. Reopening the lens again, reassured by my orbiting flash of face, I this time employed the moonshine to discover the inner catch on the camera back, during which instant my enemies, all the more discommoded by this second exposure to light, trembled hopelessly, while fixer ran down their legs; and pitilessly I pressed the catch, which swung the camera back utterly open.

Although it was worse than foolish of me, for their hearing must have been unimpaired, and they could have trapped me between them in that corner, I skipped around them to peek at the photograph just ripening in the developer, and now, like those monsters, commencing to darken into ruin, and I saw a beautiful picture of mine which I had never printed — the face of the woman I loved. Too late! — As I remember this now, the taste of selenium rises in my gorge, and my eyes begin to sting.

Flying out of the old man’s mouth, growing as I fell, I glimpsed the two demons, who were already smaller than a pair of chopsticks, staring blindly into each other’s ruined faces, as if they recognized that they were or were not the same. I thought: Was it not lonely enough without this?

Grinning like the iron-crowned demon of Kibune Shrine, the old man now bent over me, and placed his Leica around my neck. No one visits him anymore, and so I say to myself: How sad!

The names of those two demons who hunted me I never learned, but upon opening the old man’s camera I found in place of film a tiny scroll in characters of pure gold within sky-blue windows, like certain copies of the Lotus Sutra. I unrolled and viewed it frame by frame, weighting down each rectangle with my ten-power loupe. I seem to remember reading it long ago, in the Imperial Anthology of the Ten Excellent Silver Zones.

Now you have seen my true shape;

there is no difference between us, you and I;

for we both dwell in darkness, in order to devour the light.

My ashes abandoned by my smoke,

I am one and the other, the same,

two empty things which never will share a grave.

Down this road we go, we go;

delusion’s road, where we go between death and life,

here where we pluck tender images out of light;

here we toil out our lives, gathering moonlight out of jade.

All is vain, even escaping from vanity.

My only hope, blind death, kills the eyes on my face;

but each eye remembers the other

and new pictures bloom up for the plucking,

so that I can never rest, never rest.

I have vanished into the dark, to gather light with you.

You are my brother; I am your smoke.

This is of all teachings the most excellent.

In every grain of silver is a palace of practice

where every being is enlightened for thirty-three million eons.

Here is the dwelling place where all is seen and nothing is known,

the place of those removed from this world,

who offer this world their love.

Sometimes I wish I might never desire the beautiful things which dead eyes can no longer see. But who would I be, if that were so? Sometimes I wish to be awakened from sad dreams, but not from this one. Until I have saved everything, I refuse to rest. Then I’ll show you how a man should die! I’ll vanish into the dark, and rise forever above the pines, nevermore to see! But not yet, not yet; nor will I pray to lose my delusion. When I finally leave this world in funeral-smoke, may all I have seen remain.

The waitress who had served us sake in that seventeenth-floor restaurant was there every day; she was wrinkled and yellow and her back ached. Was it she or I who had forgotten to be alive? Bowing, clapping my hands twice, I prayed: Please let me save you from death. — She nodded, smiling bravely. So I raised the old man’s Leica, although there was no film in it. As soon as I gazed through the viewfinder, I found that she was a rain-jeweled branch of pear flowers, unchanged from long before. After this she bowed and said: We have met, so we must part.

How shall I bear this pain? Still I see her; now she has passed away.

THE CHERRY TREE GHOST

Yukiko’s dark little mouth was a plum in the newfallen snow of her face, and her eyelashes were as rich as caterpillars. Even her Elder Sisters, who were very strict, confessed that when this young woman opened a sliding door, following each of the prescribed motions, the effect became perfect. At the Kamo River Dance, even amidst an explosion of geishas in white flower parasols, all of them as stunning as cherry blossoms, it was she who stood out; and had I ever seen her myself, I would have painted her image upon my camera’s polished mirror, making copies in paper and silver. When a man looked up her sleeve while she poured sake, and won a glimpse of her crimson undersleeve, he could not look away; and once two tipsy Kabuki actors fought over her sandal, while her scarlet-lipped white face watched from the doorway until the Elder Sisters summoned help. When a closed palanquin carried her from place to place, people would follow in hopes of glimpsing her perfect hand. Whatever Yukiko was, had or did, years after her disappearance Noh actors continued to discuss the way her white-powdered face used to become ivory when she leaned forward in torchlight, pouring sake for them, the golden maple leaves on her jet-black kimono flickering like stars, the rice spirit streaming in an arch of silver from the mouth of the wooden bottle. The Elder Sisters gave it out that she had made an advantageous marriage in a far-off country. Of course most of them were angry and hurt, while the rest feared that some demonhearted suitor had made away with her.

It happened when she turned twenty. There were pink cherry blooms and wet white tulip-cups of magnolia beneath the grey clouds. Ever nearer drew the night when she must change her collar,* as they say in the flower-and-willow world.

The ancient poets teach that veiled beauty is the profoundest type. Much as autumn foliage barely seen through mist outranks the untrammelled scarlet of the leaves themselves, thus a geisha’s beauty to a maiko’s. As for Yukiko, she preferred to continue as she was, so day and night she prayed to Kannon, goddess of mercy: Preserve me from the hollow chests, yellow teeth, bad breath and grey hair of my Elder Sisters! Don’t turn me into smoke and dirt like them! Let me wear all the colors until I die—

It was February, so she wore a daffodil hairpin. Then it was March. Presently came April. Directed by her Elder Sisters, for the first time she did up her hair in the sakko style and blackened her teeth, because it was her final month as a maiko. Again and again she stopped by Yasaka Shrine, praying to Kannon. Her heart resembled a red tassel trembling against a round mirror. To shorten her obi, and hide her hair beneath the katsura wig, to put on lower clogs and a plain white collar, to know that the older she became, the plainer her kimono, this might be the fate of others; but she felt so sorry for herself that she wept in secret — not much, because that would have spoiled her lovely eyes. Her red collar was already almost obscured by swirls of silver thread when she prayed to Kannon, bowing and clapping two times.

Again she prayed, and in the darkness eight-armed Kannon appeared, stiff and tall, clasping two forearms at her heart, with her other wrists upraised, her other arms outstretched. It must have been because the girl paid threefold reverence to the Three Buddhist Treasures and twofold reverence to the Shinto gods that Kannon took pity on her. Sad and a little stern, darkskinned, in a robe of tarnished gold, the goddess bowed her wide-eyed face toward the girl, promising to preserve her beauty over a long span of years. Yukiko would become a cherry tree, and every spring she would come into flower. Only then would she become again a maiko. Thus for but a handful of each year’s days would she incarnate the lovely being who she now was. Her month would last a decade; her year, a century and more. At other times she would be a cherry tree.

The goddess warned her: What you wish for may not be for the best. You will be trapped in many births and deaths. The sadness you experience will be your retribution.

The girl bowed meekly, her eyes closed as if she were remembering the first song of the cuckoo; and Kannon was touched.

Are you satisfied? asked the goddess.

Yukiko nodded. At once joy overcame her.

When she first reappeared to her Elder Sisters they screamed. It had been several springs; they all looked older, and two new maikos had been taken on by the house. The Emperor had been exiled, they said. Bowing to each, clapping her hands (which made even less noise than before), she requested forgiveness, and promised to return each time the cherry blossoms opened, for so long as they should wish. And because she was rare in several qualities, and cost them nothing, they accepted her; she proved good for business. So the sake flowed sweetly out from her sleeves, and the highest-ranking musicians came to pluck the strings of the shamisen whenever she danced, and even jaded rich men could never drink enough of her. At first the other geishas hated this new Yukiko, for even the way she stamped her feet could not be imitated, no matter how brilliantly they danced, and never mind that their wardrobes entailed kimonos of lavender with golden cherry flowers, and pale pink cherry blossoms upon night-blue, and more others than I could ever tell, while she wore always the same yellow kimono with the pink and white blooms, wrapping herself in layers of farewell, smiling with her perfectly blackened teeth, bowing with perfect grace. When the two maikos and Yukiko danced the Miyako Odori, Taeko wore pink and Sachiko wore blue, while Yukiko wore yellow, of course; cherry blossoms were on their kimonos and on their scarlet obis, and cherry-blossom hairpins adorned their hair. Taeko and Sachiko were beautiful, Yukiko was the one whom they all watched. Who can compete with the moon? The woman who tries is mad, and geishas need to be businesswomen. Therefore they made their peace with this willow-eyebrowed girl, who readily advanced their names to men who desired other company, as sooner or later most men did, since only for six days or seven could one see Yukiko, to whom her Elder Sisters now spitefully referred as the Cherry Tree Ghost, a name which hurt her because she believed herself to be alive.

On this subject something will now be said. No one in this floating world has more discerning eyes than an old geisha, and as the cherry-springs continued to spend themselves one upon the other, the Elder Sisters watched Yukiko with small alert smiles, inclining their heads whenever she bowed down before them. — Younger Sister, they’d say, there’s a stray hair on your neck. Please let me fix it for you. — Or: Dear Younger Sister, isn’t that a loose thread on your sleeve? Please hold still. — And with this or that pretense, they looked her over close up, while she softly thanked them, knowing quite well that all was in place. It lay in their interest as jealous human beings to see her age, so that they could comfort one another with smiling assurance that she too must die. Spring fluttered down upon spring, with winter in between, and while the wrinkles of the Elder Sisters lengthened, and their chins began to multiply, they discontentedly agreed that no flaw yet appeared on Yukiko’s face. But there was one Elder Sister whose eyes were sharpest of all, and among the many fields in which she hunted was Yukiko’s collar, once scarlet, now nearly silver; and after half a century she thought to spy another silver thread. After all, even Elder Sisters make mistakes. Some observant Noh actors agreed that her movements were becoming more fluid, her sleeves slowly clapping and parting like the pulsations of anemones; but this signified nothing more sinister than her increasing mastery. Even behind drawn shutters, in that upstairs room lit only with candle-flames, and the simplest painted screen behind her, she appeared to be dancing in a sky of blossoms.

So there were men who claimed to love her, and as her Elder Sisters aged and died, other geishas learned to dance at her side, and new young men grew up to admire her. She had scarcely known anyone else. Her parents, who had sold her to the teahouse on her third birthday, were since ascended in cremation-smoke; likewise her brother, who had never visited her; now her brother’s children followed the same road; so that her antecedents might as well have been the faded square vermilion seal of Hojo Ujiyasu, whose lines resemble a labyrinth. Perhaps Kannon weighed this when she considered Yukiko’s prayer. What had the girl ever received but loneliness, humiliation, merciless practice and principled punishment, all of which produced in her the determined longing to embody grace? Had she changed her collar and grown old with the rest of them, she might have won allies, dependents, starstruck clients and perhaps even friends of a sort, although the sorrow which I have sometimes seen in the eyes of older women in that world makes me suspect that a strictly governed childhood can never be remedied. So Yukiko had abandoned nobody! None knew who she was, for she was a tree on the other side of Jade River, on a hill nearly as far away as Rainy Mountain; there she stood dreaming while the earth froze around her skirts, and her arms were as wrinkled and withered as her unremembered grandmother’s.

When whitish-pink cherry blossoms began to swell in the whitish-grey sky, then Yukiko remembered who she was, and drew in her arms. Next, her mind itself burst into flower. Finding herself once more in the back room of the teahouse, with the round mirror before her and her wig on its stand, she brushed the white shironuri on her face. They learned to set that room aside for her on the night after the first cherry flower fell at Kiyomizu Temple.

What she was sufficed her at first — all the more as others died. (This speaks more poorly of them than of her.) How many women would decline to be beautiful forever, or even nearly forever? Although they came precisely to forget the iron-and-autumn world, after too much sake her clients might mention famines, rebellions and executions, and she gave thanks to Kannon that such matters could no longer touch her. Rice was cheaper or dearer, maikos’ costumes unfailingly splendid; that was all. The geishas called her Eldest Sister. Her wrists bloomed slowly up, and she crossed her brilliant sleeves, singing “Black Hair.” She seemed beyond change. But she had been given only until the blossoms fell, so that still her hours resembled those swirls of silver thread advancing around her neck, soon to meet beneath her shoulders and drown the scarlet forever. Thus each spring she changed her collar, becoming again a cherry tree in the lonely hills.

Presently she commenced to wonder whether she had been created merely to make others happy, not to be complete in and of herself. She danced just as her bygone Elder Sisters had taught her, not altering a single motion, and the quietly carousing old Noh actors who came here each spring compared her to sunshine at midnight, to a bare peak looming high over a snowy range, to snow in a silver bowl. Sometimes she called for a closed palanquin, and was carried to Yasaka Shrine to pray alone. The house paid for this; that was all she cost; her younger sisters shared her fees among them, saving for old age. Where she hid herself from spring to spring she never said; and if, as some people believe, secrecy in and of itself becomes truth, then her vanishings were preciously inexplicable lessons. By now the Noh actors were certain of her ghosthood. A goddess appeared singularly, whereas these regular apparitions of hers implied some form of unfreedom. So they called her to dance for them in that upstairs room, behind closed shutters, while an old woman sang and plucked the shamisen, and sometimes a young maiko beat the drum. Drinking in sad joy, the actors admired and pitied her.

The Inoue School expresses nothing in the face, everything in the movement. This too is a Noh actor’s way. Mr. Kanze and Mr. Umewaka, present incarnations of those two great acting families, discussed with nearly unheard of approval her fixed gaze’s projection of thoughtful sadness, her slow turnings and the way her wide sleeves hung down like wings. She filled their sake cups, and they smiled — for they could be cheerful enough when their masks came off. Another incense stick burned to nothing. On the following night Mr. Kanze was performing “Yuya,” incarnating the sweetly dancing young girl, and he raised his wrinkled hand in front of his masked face, then turned, the lovely mask smiling and smiling; he seemed to move faster than Yukiko, and presently his head tilted down lower and lower, so that Yuya’s mouth smiled upward in increasing sadness; and her wig of horsehair glistened. The cherry blossoms had already fallen — a matter of greater interest than the recent hunger-riots. After he had withdrawn behind the rainbow curtain and the apprentices carried away his mask and costume, he went out to an eel restaurant with Mr. Umewaka; where, having discussed the carelessness of choruses, the ignorance of certain members of the public and other such eternal matters, they drank sake, then more sake, upon which Mr. Kanze said: Our Cherry Ghost nears the end of her spring at last.

Oh, do you think so?

Did your father ever speak about her?

Not in my hearing, unfortunately. He preferred me not to be instructed by any geisha, however talented.

Of course, of course. When she danced the Yuya Dance for us the other night, it struck me as less fresh than ten years ago. And once my father told me that while her motions were nearly perfect, she had not yet mastered it. You know the second lowering of the fan—

Yes. She has certainly mastered that. In fact, I saw no error in her dancing at all, and as you know, dear friend, I’m very critical.

As I know too well, dear friend! Well, next spring let’s bring our sons, so that when they’re old they may begin to notice something.

My son’s unready, unfortunately. He’s ungifted, quite a shame to me—

Not at all! I’ll never forget the way he performed “Yokihi.” He truly brought her alive, and that daring choice of mask—

He insisted. Perhaps I shouldn’t have indulged him.

So they praised one another, and eventually agreed to bring their sons to see the Cherry Ghost. And when the blossoms came, and they withdrew into that upstairs room where she poured out sake for them and their sons, who were beginners, men in their thirties, still encumbered in their acting by remnants of the deceitful “first flower” which pertains to a young body, Mr. Umewaka requested the Yuya Dance.

The Cherry Ghost demurred, saying: But since I performed it just last year…

Exactly. You possess such grace…

Please excuse my extremely clumsy movements. I feel ashamed to dance before you. But since you insist, sensei, I’ll try my best.

The shamisen player was already kneeling in the corner. The Cherry Ghost began to dance.

That night Mr. Kanze said to his son: Watch her again in thirty years. She too is losing her “first flower,” but I’m sure she’s unaware of it.

In her old teahouse they learned to expect her on that instant when clouds of cherry blossoms filled the sky in Kyoto. Men waited to give her gold hair ornaments, which she passed on to her Younger Sisters. When the last proprietress died, her sisters retired, and rain leached through the rotten roof, she removed to a quiet house employing only three geishas, whose owner was old and expected nothing; she made them all rich. She had heard that Yoshitomo was dead, and the Imagawas nearly exterminated; but when she inquired after these matters, in order to overcome the shyness of a certain drunken samurai, he laughed at her and said: That was long ago! — Perhaps she had already known that; she might have learned it in a song. She danced “Black Hair,” and a tear traveled slowly down the man’s face. His uncouthness annoyed her. But isn’t the lot of the perfect to be surrounded by the imperfect? — When that house likewise went out of business, she gave herself to one in the Pontocho district, thereby freeing it from a parasitic loan; thus she did Kannon’s will. After praying at Yasaka Shrine, she recommenced to dance in Gion, saving the establishment of a retired geisha who had slanderously been called unlucky. By now people interpreted her apparition as a sign of great fortune, saying: The Cherry Tree Lady has come to us! She never ate or drank, but took in the fragrance from incense sticks. Most people still said her face expressed spring.

She carries her ageing beautifully, the current Mr. Kanze instructed his son. You should remember her next time you perform “Kinuta.”

Thank you, father. Is she truly a ghost?

Of course. So never fail to show her respect and pity.

If I were performing her, I’d need our youngest mask—

Don’t go falling in love with her. You know where the prostitutes are.

In Kamakura stands a shrine to Eleven-Headed Kannon wherein the goddess is all hues of gold, crowned with heads; she is vermilion-lipped, yes, very wide-lipped, and guarded behind by a cloud-shroud of swirling gilded metal. Some people say that prayers at this spot find special favor. And that spring when Yukiko flowered back into herself, there on her hill which lay so nearly in the shadow of Rainy Mountain, she wept snowy tears, and longed to go to Kamakura, to pray that this strange weight be lifted from her. But she was bound to appear in Kyoto, in another teahouse in Gion, and from there she could by no means reach Kamakura before the blossoms fell. For that moment she would have liked to keep her budding blooms in her sleeves; but out they came; and thus, freed from her prison of wooden bones, she became a lovely maiko once again.

Then that spring fled, as did the next, and the young Mr. Kanze began to grow old. When he visited her she danced, singing for him the old tanka: Even the dream-road is now erased.

Up on her hill, not quite in the shadow of Rainy Mountain, she gazed across the forests and plains, and the jade-grey river made broad white waves across the rocks. Her flowers had gone; soon she must lose her leaves within the pearlescent colorlessness of the autumn sky.

To be beautiful without loving anyone is as sad as to be unbeautiful and remain unloved. How could Kannon’s warning have been false? Disregarding Keisei’s Companion in Solitude, which warns that a lover’s longings, or even the wish of a faithful old couple to be buried in the same grave, are crimes, she reached for love as a reprieve from her sadness.

In the following spring, there came into that ancient teahouse a hardworking sake merchant’s spendthrift son. His father had engaged him to a gentle girl who was adept at spinning hemp cloth. One night during the Chrysanthemum Festival a little streetwalker in a striped cotton shift led him past chanting and torchlights, around three shrines, and thus to her pillow-room behind the reed fence, where they spent a fine half-hour, after which, happily kissing her hand, he departed, and then, perceiving that only a few copper coins remained to him, he turned around and gave them to the prostitute, who stopped washing herself just long enough to take them, giggled at his silliness, then showed him out again. Not daring to face his father, who would likely beat him, this improvident fellow, whose name was Shozo, began searching for a place to sleep; and wandering past those same crackling torches, which cast ashes into his hair, he spied the youngish Mr. Kanze in a carplike costume — scaly flames and white shell-scales below his waist, white openwork lace above — gliding forward as if the stage were moving beneath him; I swear he was three-dimensional against the suddenly two-dimensional trees; and sparks rushed up into the summer darkness behind him, while the flame-light colored his white mask to ivory and yellow and back again. The windblown pinetops resembled the swaying and pulsing of Kannon’s spider-arms. And when that ivory mask appeared to change expression, what could it mean? Shozo had never wondered this before.

The next time that he could steal money from his father, he attended “Yuya,” which Mr. Umewaka the elder happened to be performing. So it was that Shozo presently won a side view of a lovely female Noh mask in play, so that he could swim into the black gash between its beauty and the flabby bulge of an old man’s throat; and because Kannon had led him here, to him above other men was it now given to achieve true love of woman, which is to say that his heart’s flower would never wither on mere account of a woman’s ageing.

His weary father dispatched him with a fine two-handled keg of sake in order to seal a certain betrothal. Shozo misdirected the porter and sold the keg. With these proceeds he attended Kabuki plays all afternoon, then found one of those high-ranking courtesans for whom the weightiest silver coin is not enough.

The next time his father threw him out of the house, he departed well provided with coin, which he purposed to squander in a geisha house. Kannon appeared to him in the guise of an old friend who often borrowed from him and never repaid. Among Shozo’s virtues was generosity, or at least a sort of consistency: Just as he expected forgiveness from his father no matter what he had done (an expectation ever more often disappointed), so he helped anyone unconditionally. When his friend now approached him, Shozo thought, without resentment or even regret: I won’t be hiring a geisha after all. — And he smilingly greeted the man.

Shozo, said Kannon, I’ve come into some money, so I can finally pay back every sen I owe you. Here it is, with thanks.

And the astonished young man received a heavy purse. Being an experienced traveller in our floating world, he quickly recovered himself, laughed and said: Come help me spend it.

No, I don’t deserve that. If I were you, I’d go to that teahouse in Gion where the Cherry Tree Ghost appears. The blossoms will soon be falling, you know! I’m off to pick one for myself, if you know what I mean.

And his friend hastened away.

So that is what Shozo did, and that is how he met the Cherry Tree Ghost. It was the first of her seven days. People were already streaming to the Eastern Hills to view the flowers.

When from the side he saw her snow-white cheek through the curtain of cherry-blossom strings which issued from her hairpin, he remembered Mr. Kanze’s Noh mask, and loved her because she was more than he could understand. Or perhaps he loved her only for her willow eyebrows. In any event, he longed to disorder her hair on a pillow. How should he proceed? He could hardly hope to persuade her with the maxim that life is brief.

The Cherry Tree Ghost rotated slowly toward him, smiling. Never suspecting that each perfect movement now came as wearisomely to her as do all their drudgeries to those poor girls who burn seaweed for salt, he began to learn the way that the little downward point of hair at the forehead rendered her face heartshaped.

That year the cherry blossoms at Kiyomizu Temple were especially fine. But he did not go there. The Cherry Tree Ghost danced for two nights — and then Shozo’s money was finished… and after the fifth night an early rainy wind came down from the mountains, so that the blossoms began to fall. Shozo’s desire followed her, leaving him alone.

As for her, she scarcely thought to see him again. But as soon as April’s cherry trees flowered in Kyoto, he was waiting for her at the teahouse, this time with money earned honestly. He had even begun to please his father. But his filial piety was not excessive. Longing to see that supermortal geisha’s black hair spread out on his hemp pillow, he had broken off his engagement; to him the admonitions of his parents were as tree-cricket songs. He craved to marry the Cherry Tree Ghost. As soon as she read his face, she commenced to suffer.

Old Mr. Kanze had lately died. When she danced, his son watched knowingly. The house was satisfied; money came in, and all the geishas bowed one by one to their Eldest Sister. Meanwhile Kannon guaranteed that Shozo’s purse was full. And so seven nights spent themselves. In the floating world one rarely gets a keepsake, a bone-hard residuum. Flowers fall. Desperate to comprehend what captivated him, the young man stared owl-eyed, dreading to cheat himself with a single blink. — A maiko explained: The first thing we learn is manners: how to enter a room, how to smile, how to talk. — Then Shozo understood that the Cherry Tree Ghost’s perfection came from experience. — Having lately studied The Tale of the Heike and the Threefold Lotus Sutra, he now knew many allusions, and even the Noh actors who patronized Yukiko’s teahouse had begun to find him less impossible. On the fourth night he had a maiko convey to her a poem he had calligraphed on blue paper, with a willow twig attached:

What will become of me?

Flitting dream who ever returns

to this fading world of ours,

when will you perfume my sleep?

The Cherry Tree Ghost smiled as if she were proud of him, although her smile might also have been sad or mocking. While the maiko knelt waiting, she painted this reply:

Where you will be

and what you might dream

when next the cherry flowers

the cherry does not know.

The maiko glided back to Shozo, bearing this verse on a tray. Shozo’s eyes would not leave the Cherry Tree Ghost, who, well knowing that certain matters must not be discussed, and that in life as in breath the pause is important, vanished easily away in a shower of fragrant white tears, her tiny dark mouth verging on a smile, in order to go happily; before another incense stick could be lit she had become leaves, roots and wood again, on that high hill overlooking Jade River and the meadows.

That year flowered, then fluttered forever off the tree. Because Shozo rarely made mistakes in business, he made profit with small effort. He attended performances of the Kanze School, and when the actors glided before him upon the Noh stage, he seemed to be viewing summer from the edge of Kiyomizu Temple, gazing down into the green and yellow-green treetops, the emerald-lobed clouds of trees swimming above the curvily tapered gable roofs; within that darkness lived a treasury of ghosts, beauties and golden secrets. What world was this, and how could he increase his understanding? Slowly Mr. Kanze (who was already near as old as his father had been) turned back onto the rainbow bridge, gazed down, staggered, froze, then raised his staff. What did it mean? Shozo imagined that every motion of his Cherry Tree Ghost must hide a meaning. How could he approach her until he learned it? With all his heart he prayed in the wooden darknesses of shrines.

The spring buds returned to the capital’s river-willows, and after that he returned to the teahouse, more prosperous than before, but wearing mourning, for his father had died. Since he now had means, and she inclination, for a private hour in that upper room, where her obedient Younger Sisters had closed the reed-blinds, she played the koto for him, with those pink-and-white flowers blooming on her eggyolk-yellow kimono. His prayers redounded upon his face like hailstones. He informed her of his feelings, but because she considered that to undo the destiny woven by Kannon must be as impossible as to find spring flowers in autumn, she calmly discouraged him, then faded softly away, while her flowers issued down like tears.

He continued to read ancient verse, in order to become a less uncultured person. By the time he was getting whitehaired he had made progress; and because he spent so much money at geisha houses, several teahouse proprietresses bowed to him like cormorants. On the twenty-third spring that the Cherry Tree Ghost appeared before him, he recited Teika’s tanka about crossing a gorge in an autumn wind, the narrow bridge trembling like the traveller’s own sleeves, the setting sun so lonely, at which she hid her face in her sleeve. Just as after a rain at Nikko’s temples the dark water runs down the deep square grass-clotted grooves between wall and courtyard, so at each separation their regret for the time they had already wasted apart and their bitterness against the loneliness now to come bled between their bones. So he promised to seek her without fail.

It was still spring in the capital when he departed, informing no one. The moon was less white than her face. Kannon had made him a rich man, so that he possessed leisure to wander through this world; and of his own accord he might have grown a trifle wise. Soon he could no longer hear the village women beating cloth.

Passing the edge of the grass world, he rounded the curve of cool-breathing overhanging forest and forded the first bend of Jade River, crossing from stone to stone. On the far bank he halted to pray to Kannon. Then he knelt at the water’s edge. Seeking intimations of his delightful Cherry Tree Ghost, he saw a band of live white light: indistinct reflection of the white reeds atop the green reflection of the grass.

Now he ascended terraces of trees. Each time he crossed another bend of Jade River, the season latened. At home the people would soon be cutting out cloth for their new garments. It was high summer when he reached the forest gorge of hanging blossoms. Once that lay behind him, the nights elongated and the days began to chill. His hat blew away; his straw cape grew stained and torn. Disdaining scarlet leaves, whose noise kept falling upon the silence of vanished cherry petals, he wandered through this floating world, sometimes losing his way in the similitude of silhouetted tree-mountains, then praying to Kannon and choosing whichever path appeared most difficult; until he came to that abyss over which the bamboo bridge, with a single reed guardrail, swayed with each step, vibrating meanwhile in that cold wind as he picked his way toward the round red sun. The rotten bamboo began to give way beneath him. There was nothing to do but stride carefully forward. Although he was afraid, never in his life had he felt so free as in this moment between life and death, deliberately chosen, the outcome not yet known. Looking down into the gorge, he seemed to glimpse a dragon’s mouth and eyes. The sun was setting ever more rapidly, and for the first time his foot broke through the bridge. Calling loudly and repeatedly on Kannon, he continued through the windy dusk, and suddenly the moon rose, and he found that he was crossing a vermilion bridge, of the sort used only for generals and Imperial messengers. So he passed each glowing vermilion-lacquered lamppost, with darkness on either side of him and even the dragon’s eyes as far below him as reflected stars; so he continued along the curving plank-deck which hugged the steep round fern-rock. When he reached the far side of the gorge, it was a winter’s dawn, and on the hill before him stood his Cherry Tree Ghost, dark, wooden and naked, with her leafless arms over her head.

He fell to his knees, kissing her high and low, but she neither moved nor spoke. After awhile it began to snow, and he weepingly retraced his steps.

Although the journey had taken most of a year, his return took but a day, no doubt thanks to Kannon’s help; and once he had regained his home in Kyoto, the Flower Capital, where the servants had nearly given him up, he rested — for he was not young anymore — then spent the winter whispering entreaties to Kannon in the dim light of brass fittings on black-lacquered appointments of red-lacquered shrines.

In Kyoto there is a temple dedicated to the Thirty-Three Thousand Three Hundred and Thirty-Three Kannons. Believers raised up this structure in the twelfth century. Having purified himself, Shozo approached this place. He bowed three times; he clapped his hands twice. Kannon appeared to him at once, and said: It is not right for you to wish anything for her. You may wish only for yourself.

Then what should I wish for, goddess? I ask your advice.

If you call on me to decide, then I will send you away with nothing changed. Accept what you have.

But will I ever be able to marry the Cherry Tree Ghost?

If I tell you, that will change you. Do you wish to be changed?

To be as I am is misery.

What would you be?

I would be capable of happiness.

Then I leave you as you are.

Bowing and thanking her, he departed. That spring the Cherry Tree Ghost appeared within his house, and became his wife. He was happy then; all he wished for was to die in flower-rain, buried in pink cherry blossoms on golden silk.

Raising the wig from her head with both hands — for it was very heavy — she set it down on the stand which he had procured for her, and for the first time he saw her sweaty hair. She flushed. When he presently perceived her unpowdered and undressed, it became clear that she was not quite as young as he had thought. She might have been twenty instead of seventeen. A Noh actor would have portrayed her not with the ko-omote mask of the radiant girl, but with the waka-onna of the beautiful woman, and beautiful she was, if not so much as art could make her; and because this floating world is shallow, he felt disappointed for an instant, but then his love, desire and gratitude returned, for constancy was the gift which Kannon had given him so long ago without his knowing.

In the morning he asked when the blossoms must fall, and she replied: Tomorrow.

He grew pale. Powdering her face back into a mask, she fell silent.

She implored him to seek out Kannon again, since he had not yet availed himself of anything; but neither one could imagine what he ought to ask her. Of course he had long since erected a shrine to the goddess in one room of his house; there it was, indeed, that they had said their wedding vows on the previous night. Purifying themselves, they prepared to bow, within that frame of wooden darkness. She knelt down first, with the strings of cherry blossoms hanging from her long black hair, and he knelt beside her. They clapped their hands twice.

Folding a wide yellow sleeve across her breast, she began to sing to the goddess, who never appeared. Her complexion resembled clouds over snow.

At least they were happy together for seven days and nights every year, as if they could take the one thing life declined to give. As the old poem runs: Better never to awake from this night of dreams. He asked how it was for her to be a tree, and she said: Sometimes I seem to hear you calling me.

They liked to sit out at night, listening to the bell-insects, and often she would dance for him, pleasing herself with his sad joy.

In the colorless months of her absence he sold sake and prayed to Kannon. Whenever he went out on business, he often paused by dark wooden caves with weathered wooden pillars, because he yearned for the glimmer of the metal votive things within. The wheat harvest passed; trees flowered and withered. Crickets died away. Fearing the future, he gazed ever less openly at this world. At each winter’s departure he pressed his forehead to the floor by Kannon’s statue, awaiting his wife’s return. And when his wife again departed, his belly grew foully pregnant with fear and his chest clenched around his heart. Bowing, clapping, he prayed: Great Kannon, we thirst for your mercy! — He found himself remembering his Cherry Tree Ghost by the way that the wood-carved goddess gazed so softly down past him. 11

Of course he could not live to see her mature into a more sober elegance. Had Kannon so permitted, he would have companioned her forever. In each other they drank the sweet sadness nourishing the branch which has lost its blossom. On the trees, yellow leaves went trembling like the waving, ever reopening fans of dancing girls. Each winter the snow weighed down her branches more heavily.

Kannon flexed her spider-wrists, and he lost his memory (although it might have been that there was nothing to forget); hence to her husband the Cherry Blossom Ghost came no more. In time he died, blind to the color of spring. Each year was yet another dance of upraised flowers, then more rice-stalks reaped up. Knowing their attachment to have been a useless delusion, she now danced without hope or desire, and the Noh actors said that she had attained the true flower. But even before the great eruption of Mount Asama her tree-bark had come to resemble the cracked wooden face of an ancient Kannon statue. Each spring she returned to Kyoto, slowly upraising her tear-moistened sleeve, drinking in from various teahouse mirrors the agony of beginning to lose her beauty. Had a wise Noh actor or priest encouraged her to keep dancing, her sufferings might have made her truly great. But the patrons merely drank her in. So presently she gave up human society, preferring to lurk in shrines, gardens and cemeteries, sometimes gazing upon her dissolution as reflected in ponds. Hating herself, and fearing to be seen, she became as unpleasant as a woman who forbears to wash herself — which we would call retribution for her egotism, were not Kannon, as we know, merciful. There came another great famine, followed by village riots, but those places were distant, and she never heard about such difficulties. A certain stormy winter on her high hill cost many of her branches, and on her return to human form that spring, she stood beneath the Shijo-dori Bridge, staring into the Kamo-gawa River, and discovered that she was well on her way toward being today’s withered old Cherry Tree Ghost who appears in the mockingly inappropriate garments of a maiko. She rushed from shrine to shrine. The wall-stones were wet with green moss, and very ferny. She began to dance, singing: Even the dream-road is now erased. Poisoned with despair, she considered drowning herself, but then Thousand-Armed Kannon rose up before her, a calm Crab Queen. Embracing her, the goddess kindly relieved her of her reason. Ever after, she has seen herself as a lovely ghost-lady from the Old Capital. All this explains why last week a reeking old beggar-woman crossed my path, opening and closing a ginkgo leaf which she supposed to be a fan, gesturing hieratically with her hanging-rag sleeves of yellow, singing: The day is come again, and last night when I went to drink sake, I overheard an ancient geisha entertaining a sad salaryman with a story which began: Eight hundred years ago there was a teahouse in Gion…

PAPER GHOSTS

On the day after the last performance, life had already left the Kabuki-za, whose purple awning-bosom, nippled with two white crests, now hung over nothing but dull glass darkness between the white pillars; and I, who could have spent more afternoons in that ever-ancient melodrama of tricks and colors, drinking beer and spying effortlessly on pasteboard-armored warriors, never mind the shimmering dragon-gods and the white-faced onnagatas* more beautiful than moons, remained with nothing but my own life to look forward to. Although I had fallen in love with any number of horsehair-wigged princesses, to me there had never come a moment when, as there did for that man in the Chinese legend, I would have entered the painted world forever. Instead I liked to watch it pass before me, noisy and bright, self-mocking and au courant, inexhaustible, the way we all desire our futures to be. To sit and watch ladies cross the bridge over a river of colored paper, isn’t this perhaps the best of life?

The final performance took place during a certain business appointment of mine. While I was still young, money had begun to come to me; I spent it easily and forgot it, and since it kept me company as faithfully as air inhaled, I stopped regarding it, for no mortal can plan very far ahead anyway. Then it left me, slowly and with backward looks, to be sure, but without remorse; and I to whom it had come without my doing knew not how to get it back. Perhaps I could have hunted more cunningly, but my ambition, never vibrant, had long since faded like the ocean in an ancient ukiyo-e print. I attended appointments obediently; shouldn’t that have been enough? But the client, who two weeks before had regarded me with due adoration, must have investigated me (in his souvenir album of business cards I once glimpsed the skull-crest of Yama Detective Services); for he drummed on the table, yawned in my face, and disdained even to thank me for paying the check. How could I have expected this? Hadn’t I already prepared a most pleasurable disbursement? I felt as astonished as the woman whose purse has been stolen for the tenth time. The client hissed something out of one side of his mouth; his colleague, whom to my recollection I had never invited — another ten thousand yen — stared at me and laughed. Their behavior was so outrageous that I should have been alarmed, but in truth it felt good to get away from them!

Nakano sat waiting at a café in the Ginza. Had she dolled herself up and accompanied me to the meeting, the client, a fellow womanizer, might have been less bored. But she wasn’t in the mood; her mind had always contained one layer of kimono within the other. More industrious than I and until lately less successful, she had taken my money as easily as I gave it away; once it began to leave me, she demanded to know why I would not work like other people. I explained that I had never known how, even when I was very young and toiled late; because in those days it had been nothing to me if the boss kept me until nine or ten at night; I always knew that the curtain would rise upon my freedom, and ladies would take me by the hand and lead me over the bridge of vermilion paper. Now the curtain was descending. In last night’s dream I had seen Nakano peering out through lace draperies behind the show windows at the Mitsukoshi department store, as if she had joined someone else’s act, and so I woke up anxious. Once upon a time she used to meet me at the Imperial Hotel, in the lobby vast and clean where all murmurs are low. Her daughter needed a new school uniform, and I was supposed to pay for it. That was when my heart swelled with resentment, I won’t say dislike, for my ungrateful client and his colleague, who had violated my right to easy money.

Etsuko’s uniform was ready. In a twinkling the clerk had unfolded it so I could verify that it was perfect. I inclined my head. Thanking me in a chirp of little-girl sweetness, she re-formed it into its original rectangular bundle, which would have done credit to the most fastidious demonstrator of Euclid, wrapped it in sky-blue paper decorated with opened white books and golden chrysanthemums, wove a pink ribbon around it, crowning and locking it with three beautiful knots, bowed her head and offered it to me with both hands. Bowing, I paid, and again she thanked me as if I had done her the greatest favor in the world. As I left the shop she was already cooing and bowing to the next customer.

The uniform had cost twice as much as Nakano said it would. I began to feel worried and sad. How could my ease have come to an end, for no reason? In my life I had never squandered a single yen; every expenditure had gone to satisfy my very reasonable desires. For example, when Nakano required a new kimono, simply because she was tired of the ones her mother had left her, it made me happy to please her, never mind that we might have bought a car for the same price. What would I do now? I could pay next month’s rent, but the month after might be chilly. For a good three years that client had fed me with projects; I had not changed, so why had he? Was I now expected to touch death’s flat golden leafwork on the lacquered doors of night? It was clear that when I told Nakano what had occurred, she would look me over with hatred and contempt. Then I would pay for her lettuce sandwich, and we would go home to Etsuko. Nakano’s lined face was proof that life wears us out, either through worry about losing what no one can keep, or by disappointment about never having gotten it. Tonight would find me sleeping on the floor, no doubt, while Nakano lay rigid on our futon, sobbing silently. Why didn’t the client accept responsibility for that also? Tomorrow morning I should have been going away on another business trip: rainy white skies and concrete lattices smearing themselves against the windows of an express train. Tomorrow evening would then have clothed me in a sweaty yellow evening light on the return train to Tokyo, the conveyance hissing and humming, my ears singing the song of death. Although I disliked going away from Nakano and Etsuko, now I finally perceived how much I enjoyed those moments like flashing windows when one long train speeds past another, both reflected in the watery windows of rice fields; and of course I never failed to feel important when speeding across the sunset bridge.

An old woman whose spine was so badly crooked that she did not even reach to my waist staggered slowly down the sidewalk, clutching a shopping bag in each hand. Diagnosis: calcium insufficiency. Nakano’s mother might have ended up like that, had she lived longer. The old woman stooped so far forward that from the rear she appeared to be decapitated. How much longer could she creep on, and how much pain must she endure — and for what? I would have helped her, but Nakano was waiting.

So I turned away down Chuo-dori, into the promenading crowds, the huge advertising screen in the cylindrical brand-name tower of the many windows, with the café at the bottom named after a mediocre coffee chain. Nakano had left the café, it seemed. Bowing indifferently, the waitress presented me with a note from her; I was no longer to trouble myself with her affairs. I thanked the girl and walked away, not knowing where to take myself; and not even the sunshine on the creamy golden calves of little uniformed schoolgirls consoled me.

Our flat lay an hour and a half from the Ginza: three changes of subway, a bus so crowded that one could rarely sit down, another bus and then a fifteen minute walk. Nakano had found the place when my income became less regular. Perhaps I should have gone straight there. After all, I needed to pack my belongings. Etsuko, who adored me, would jump up and down when I opened the door. I would take snapshots of her in her uniform, and her mother might smile for an instant before she expelled me. But when I reached the subway station, my legs declined to stop. Before I knew it, I had rounded the corner, and reached the Kabuki-za.

Instead of the accustomed line of ticket-buyers and — holders there stood a vague horde, most of them on the sidewalk in front of the theater, and others, the ones with zoom lenses or a yearning for lost panoramas, across the street. They aimed their cameras upward at the row of white-and-black-crested red beehive lanterns above the awning; above these, that familiar wide white arch with the flattened ends roofed the portico; then rose the high façade which was now merely an outermost sarcophagus. The signboards no longer bore the likenesses of brilliant warrior-actors and onnagatas in many-hued kimonos. This saddened me more than my own failures. The authorities had already fenced off the theater with black-and-yellow-striped plastic bars connected by waist-high plastic cones. I could have stepped over them, but someone would have scolded me. Gazing in beneath the awning, I saw a certain door striped wood-brown and tan — closed now. How many times had I entered it?

The window of the semicylindrical box office had closed, and inside, a white sign with black characters marched down it. Behind the purple awning, the three pairs of brass-handled, red-lacquered doors were shut, and through their panes I could see nothing but the crowd’s dark reflections.

Behind the plate-glass windows of the Miu Miu department store stood two mannequins whose well-shapen legs were crystalline plastic, whose arms and heads were brass armatures and whose white skirts were embroidered with red fish-scales around their narrow waists. As I contemplated the glittering silver geoglyphs where their breasts should have been, that same bent crone approached me, creeping and groaning. She had set down those two heavy shopping bags somewhere, but seemed no less weighed down. Bowing, she informed me: Your prayers will no longer be accepted.

By the time I finally returned to our apartment, nobody lived there, and even the number had been obliterated. As I watched, workmen began to carefully demolish the building. A bridge of silver paper was rolling itself up into the sky.

I set down Etsuko’s parcel on the sidewalk, knelt, bowed and clapped my hands. Then I rose and walked away, wishing to spend the rest of my money at once.

Across the street stood a stationery shop where I used to buy Etsuko’s school supplies. She used to cry out for joy and clap her hands when I brought her a new pink notebook whose cover depicted yellow butterflies, or a bookbag dedicated to the goddess Amaterasu, or a lacquered vermilion pencil. Entering this establishment, and exchanging bows with a pretty, chirpy clerk in a black-and-yellow uniform, I discovered just past the magnifiers and inkstones a new subdepartment devoted to folded-paper figurines. A certain warrior wore wide-legged pantalons with a gold-on-cream pattern of upside-down waves; he was as flat and broad as a Noh actor. A certain slender lady, as faceless as a Heian beauty, lived straight and stiff in her cellophane envelope. The hem of her vermilion gown had been neatly creased back to show naked white paper. Most of these origami personages, as I should really call them, were not previously known to me, although I thought to recognize the last Regent of Kamakura. Their beauty aroused my greed, so I bought more than twenty of them. They were all the same price. Counting sweetly in a low voice, the clerk showed me the total, and bowed once more when I paid. The light gleamed on her edible cheeks.

Then I went next door and bought a bottle of sake which was wrapped in a brown-spotted bamboo leaf tied with coarse black cord. Since I still possessed money, I proceeded to the next building, where, abutting the wooden façade of an old shop, there rose a curvy-cornered pillar with a sliding steel grating which must have once opened and closed from side to side, and above this, red and white in plastic relief announced TOBACCO; and from the next storey upward it was all hotel. I checked in. They made me pay in advance. Then I took the elevator to my room.

The snow-white shoji panels beside my bed could open, disclosing a narrow space where a refrigerator squatted unplugged from its outlet and two chairs faced each other across a stained veneer table. Here I sat drinking sake and watching the silver dusk tarnishing the fog upon the forest hills, the whitewashed concrete buildings going grey. I felt safe, and hidden. Sometimes I closed the screens so that there was nobody but the empty chair and me.

Now the world was silver-blue and bluish-grey. The tatami mat beneath my feet was so warm and tan.

In the flats across the street a single window was illuminated, and within I thought I saw Etsuko, sitting on her heels as she always used to do when she was waiting for me to come home.

When I lay down to sleep, I dreamed of a jointed black wall, very shiny, glowing dully with elongated brass hinges in the shapes of nutcrackers, doublecrosses, nippled lozenges, chrysanthemums, insect-eaten leaves; and silently this wall opened. At once I awoke. First I felt refreshed, as if I had slept long and deeply, but the instant I sat up I found that it was not even midnight. So I returned behind the shoji panels and sat watching the darkness.

At dawn, pale blue turquoise light pasted itself within the window, and I lay watching the fading peach-colored shadows of canted latticework upon the far wall of my room, the shoji screens beginning to go faintly whitish-blue. I was febrile. When I listened to the clock, it seemed that each tick was a wave carrying me toward the grave. Presently the turquoise departed from my window, and the world became greyer and greyer, its tones and lines softened by fog. So I rose and dressed.

The instant I pressed the elevator call button, the door to that conveyance slid open, and I was in an ugly steel chamber of approximately the same dimensions as the shower. The elevator stopped at each floor and opened. My room was on the fourth floor. The lobby was on the second. The hotel seemed to be owned by a middle-aged man and an elderly lady; I supposed them to be mother and son. They were indifferent almost to unfriendliness. Evidently they ran the place themselves without any helpers, because the outer door was locked after eleven at night. What I did not know was when it opened, and whether I could go out and wait until it was unlocked. So the elevator stopped at the third floor, then at the second, which was dark and warm, with a thick sleepy atmosphere, then at the first; and when I saw that the front door was not only locked, but sealed off with a heavy curtain, I gave up and decided to return to my room. The elevator awaited me. It stopped at the first floor, then slowly closed its door and groaned upward. When it opened upon the second floor, I saw that a certain luminescence was now swelling from behind the reception desk; but in that instant there was a sinister click, and then the second floor went dark again. Next came the third floor, and then the fourth. It was about five-thirty in the morning. I sat in my niche and watched the fog-tones brighten into peach. Some of the corrugated roofs were striped white in their grooves; what looked like snow must have been fog.

By seven-thirty I found myself overlooking a lovely snowy-fog-world, which appeared as warm as my shoji panels, for the forest hills were smoke-green near the sky and various shades of dark jade below, although it is true that the white walls and roofs of the city crowded together not unlike tombstones.

I wondered how I ought to live.

Now nearly all the roofs were grey, although there remained a few turquoise ones and a green one and even one red one; no, come to think of it, they were all different colors; and beyond them there might have been mountains. In the jade-grey wall of tree-cloud I could see a swirl of pale cherry blossoms. The sky was occupied by a narrow column of mist which rose up to touch a horizontal cloud.

Since my money was even now unexhausted, I descended to the lobby, paid for a second night, went out, bought three more bottles of sake, again selecting that special kind which offered such lovely speckles on its bamboo leaf, and returned to my room, which had been perfectly cleaned during the quarter-hour of my absence. Double-locking myself in, I slid the shoji panels apart, seated myself in one of those two chairs by the window, opened a bottle of sake and began to organize my paper figures. This took me all day. By evening I felt ready to remove them from their transparent envelopes.

Three of them were courtiers, with topknots of lacquered black paper. Upraising their red streamers, they showed me how sad it was when the Heike fled the capital, bearing off the Child Emperor (whom I had not purchased from the stationery shop, so I helped them represent him by means of a monogrammed envelope which I had taken from the reception desk). The tonsure of another far more aloof cutout identified him as the Cloistered Emperor who had commanded their removal from the scroll of visitors, and dispatched the Genji warriors to hunt them to death — hungry spirits, all of them, and as real as I once was. Lowering my ear, I learned that I could hear their murmurings. The Cloistered Emperor was whispering verses from the Golden Lotus Sutra. His bland voice reminded me of a poem about autumn wind.

When the last Kamakura Regent was forced to commit suicide, his soul became as slender as a Japanese lady’s leg. He too was now a paper ghost, flat and stiff, with scallop shells and stars upon the night-indigo of his battle robe. Truth to tell, his epoch was so much later that he should have been sold in a different subdepartment. His topknot was lacquered shiny like the black taxicab which sighs across the castle bridge. He was the most melancholy heir of Yoritomo, who had destroyed the Heike as if they were insects.

In matching transparent packets, four Genji warriors with eagle-feathered arrows in their quivers stood ready to whisper their names to the Heike, and behind them I laid out Shunkan the lonely Genji exile, whom the Heike refused to recall from his hunger-island; chief among their unforgivers I lined up the Priest-Premier Kiyomori, who in his narrow splendor was as foolish as a paper ghost who imagined that he had attained everything; while up against the paper screen I placed six Heike warriors mounted on their paper horses and dreaming aloud of the capital even as they cantered through the air; behind them I found a place for that longhaired Genji horsewoman named Tomoe, so fearsome with bow and sword; and beside her I stood Yukiko the Cherry Tree Ghost (another cutout from a later period), in care of Yoshitsune the Genji hero, who wore a battle robe of crimson brocade. On top of the unplugged refrigerator I positioned Yoritomo. Sometimes I was horrified by Yoritomo’s square white faceless head, his hair tied back with braided silver wires, but then I reminded myself that at their height the Heike had also been cruel.

As feeble as cherry blossoms they all glided to and fro, so that my niche behind the shoji screen grew nearly as crowded as a modern Japanese graveyard. Of all of them the one I loved most was the Jade Lady Yokihi, that celestially beautiful inmate of the Island of Everlasting Pain. Her dance was a poem which achieved its effect by omitting the one line in which its context was stated.

Rolling up my last thousand-yen note, I made a cone of it and inserted the tip in my ear. Then I could hear the paper ghosts whispering: Shigemori is dead. The Cloistered Emperor has passed away. Why cannot I succeed to the position of one of these?

I heard the Cloistered Emperor chant: When the wooden lattice is darkened.

And wherever Yokihi danced her Dance of Rainbow Skirts, the air beneath her tiny feet became illuminated, a miniature path to dreams.

In bygone days, when money still came to me as easily as air and the capital shone at Shikishima, a certain Pale Lady desired me, although I cared for her not; she shared my best friend’s pillow in order to gain my address, then appeared before me in tears and with disordered hair, begging to sleep in my arms. I consented out of pity. Even when I was penetrating her she kept enumerating other lovers; all she truly wished was to add my name to her scroll. Many seasons later, when the woman I loved had abandoned me (I remembered gathering all the cherry blossoms which had fallen into her disordered hair), and I grew so desperate to be held that anyone would have served, I went to my Pale Lady, entreating her to give me comfort in her arms, but she refused with smiling cruelty. Now here she was, crisply remade in a flash of crinkled gold paper. I could not help but recall how I had felt on that occasion, although fortunately my former grief reincarnated itself less viscerally than merely visually, as when a paper general cuts open his belly with his black paper sword, and scarlet paper shows behind the cut. Lowering my ear, I heard her imploring me to do something, in a voice as weak as an autumn cricket’s.

At any rate, she put me in mind to wonder whether all these paper ladies represented old loves of mine, and, if so, whether the rest of them were likewise the paper ghosts of my past.

The Pale Lady said: I dream of you as I once did.

(In the past I had waited for dreams, while Nakano went treading her double path.)

As for Yokihi, whom she represented or recapitulated I could not have said — perhaps Reiko or Michiko, although she might have been Mitsue. Her knee-length golden tassels tickled her pink-and-carmine robe, and her double mass of hair was ribbed with segments of both red and gold paper. Wondering and dreaming, I listened through my homemade ear trumpet and caught her murmuring: It is really impossible to compare my heart to anything.

Yes, they all must have been foam from the past.

They began to dance and masquerade. That was when I realized that I had never known love or beauty before. The long red and gold stripes of Yokihi’s hair ornaments mad me explode with happiness. The Pale Lady took up a poisoned dagger and serenely glided across the floor.

If you have ever seen the wine-tinged rainbows of autumn foliage reflected in a river at sunrise you may be able to imagine how lovely it became on the air-bridge they created. As I gazed up into the blossoming hills, my heart shouted with joy, and my memories passed across the window.

Now I was pretty much finished. Lacking the funds for drunkenness, I purchased a bag of squid-flavored potato chips and set out to join the headbanded, high-cheekboned beggarmen whose heavy sweater-sleeves came halfway down their hands and who warmed themselves with cigarettes and sake as they sat playing cards and guarding their cardboard flat of eggs from other eaters. At first they threatened and abused me, but I charmed them with my paper ghosts, who glided to and fro on eerie errands a hand’s breadth above the dirty sidewalk. No one could harm or catch them; they came only to me. The autumn winds might flutter them about, but between gusts they re-formed into vibrant arrays. I made my living by sitting on a piece of cardboard while they played around me, and passersby dropped coins into my hat. And so the money fell down upon me as easily as ever.

All day I watched elegant women passing before me, silently admiring and critiquing their performances, for I had become not entirely inexperienced. One day I walked all the way to the new Kabuki-za, just to look upon the theatergoers as they waited in line. When they had all gone inside, so that I had the sidewalk to myself, I entertained myself inspecting the posters of the latest beautiful onnagatas. Then I window-shopped at the stationery establishment where I had bought Etsuko’s school uniform. Wishing to make gifts for my paper ghosts, I considered buying a pair of scissors. But which size was best? Wrinkling her nose, the clerk rushed out to the doorway and shooed me off.

I never visited the place where I used to live, but once I took my paper ghosts into a cemetery, where Yokihi danced alone for herself and me and the twilight was shining on the white characters incised in the dark glossy crowd of graves.

I missed Nakano more than I would have expected, which made me smile a little. As for Etsuko, I remembered how when she used to run into my arms her heartbeats reminded me of a ghost’s long and gentle fingers clasped together. Had some rich woman dropped a million yen in my cup, I would have wished to find the girl, and buy her more uniforms and notebooks; thankfully, this did not happen. By now those two had become a pair of painted cherry-ladies against a crimson ground, and my paper memories of them were softened by a cherry tree’s pink storm clouds on the verge of showering down its melting treasures.

In time I grew known among all the edifices from VOICE BAR to GIANT ARENA, whose hopes, like everyone’s, had been tainted by death. For a backdrop I had houses, grubby little apartment towers and glittering corporate castles, all of which looked their best in the dusk. What mortal could fail to be allured by the flower-sleeve of Lady Yokihi, especially when she let down her hair to mingle with her gold tassels? Who could remain indifferent to the sufferings and machinations of the Cloistered Emperor? When I watched the glidings of my paper warrior-ghosts with their lacquered black topknots, I pretended that I too was brave and important, and the man who each day read yesterday’s newspaper all day, pretending not to be unemployed, told me that he had begun to dream of himself in jade armor laced with black silk string. Adoring the movements of the Cloistered Emperor, the former soapland employee imagined that someday he might be invited to pay a visit to the Paper Palace. And whenever Lady Yokihi danced, the homeless women who were my neighbors seemed to become court ladies weeping behind jade curtains.

Atsumori, the flute-playing boy warrior, turned his horse in the middle of the paper river because a Genji warrior had taunted him with cowardice. He rode back to be decapitated — a fact of desperate pathos to my friend and neighbor the terminated salaryman who, unable to inform his family that he was unemployed, had long since become an emperor thin as paper, staggering in the darkness. And on the far bank, a Heike retainer whose crimson stick-body was crisscrossed with long narrow isosceles triangles of pink paper, tips pointing upward, began to draw his sleeves across his eyeless face in token of weeping. If only he had dared to rescue Atsumori, or at least die with him! Having stood ready to reward his fidelity with silver coins, which I planned to make for him by cutting out circles from a soapland advertising flyer, I now enjoyed the pleasure of despising him, while he wept and wept until we could all begin to see straw-islets in the lavender mirror of marsh water behind him. Atsumori’s head was an oval of crinkled silver paper, with a crisp black topknot. For a moment it lay in a polyhedron of pink blood. Then the Genji warrior picked it up, along with the turquoise sliver of his victim’s flute. Thus he had won two trophies. The child’s head would be displayed in the capital, against the will of the Cloistered Emperor. The flute would eventually lead the killer to the Pure Land of Enlightenment, for it uttered notes like night rain. Meanwhile the retainer, yearning and despairing, opened his belly, and the blood was as scarlet as the ribbon in a maiko’s hair. As for the killer, when he mounted his brown paper horse, his yellowish-green paper trimmings rose behind him into a ducktail.

Although robbing me would have been as easy as snipping off a paper ghost’s topknot, no one ever did it, in part because I shared whatever food I had, and it may be that some people feared that I might be magically protected. Dreaming away my days, praising moon-minted autumns, while Yokihi’s or Nakano’s fragrant black hair bloomed in my heart, and the paper Heike ghosts sang of creeping their forlorn way through wet bracken, I enjoyed the world beyond the paper bridge. A branch of flowers waved in the wind beneath a single cloud. I finally bought scissors at a convenience store. Sometimes I cut out swords or horses for my paper ghosts. A policeman bowed to the Kamakura Regent. Once two uniformed schoolchildren took photographs.

By now I had learned to hear my ghosts without my thousand-yen note, which had long since gone for less noble purposes. The Cloistered Emperor was always whispering: Disregard these hateful commoners! They are not human beings.

Just after the first freeze, that bent old crone who had first addressed me in front of the Miu Miu department store became one of us. My tent was in the park, while she was one of those who slept in box houses beneath that long overpass there in Shinjuku. Come winter she thickened herself in so many cast-off jackets that her stoop nearly disappeared within her teardrop waddle. Creeping toward the public toilet, she smiled at me.

The former soapland employee became my friend, because he adored beauty of all sorts, and had nothing to live for. He pretended that we were two Genji warriors striding shoulder to shoulder, with our swords raised as we prepared to engage the Heike. Once he had owned a magnifying glass solely in order to inspect the minute black strokes of an ukiyo-e print’s willow-shaped eyebrows; and when a portrait of some bygone courtesan especially allured him, he employed it to count her pubic hairs. Like me, he had been idle and extravagant. We agreed on lacking regrets, although his eyes were sad and he ached in his bones. Soon he was sitting beside me for half the day on my scrap of cardboard, sharing cheap sake with me, watching my paper ghosts and describing all the women whom he had loved. In particular, he remembered two sisters named Yoko and Keiko — especially when two of my paper ladies in white-crested pink kimonos began to stride past a lacquered drum which I had cut out for them from a rice cracker package; their mincing little feet barely cleared my shoulder, and the former soapland employee said: Yes, they looked just like that, so beautiful! and he clapped his hands. — Now, that girl in the red kimono’s a paper ghost, he said to himself, or perhaps to me. No, her hand’s warm from the sake we drank together, so I know she can’t be a ghost… — He was far more lonely than I. The paper he had been cut from was as black as the opened mouth-square of the Noh knee-drummer who glares straight ahead. No one gave him money, so I took care of him. Once when I came back from buying sake at the convenience store, I found him bent over my paper ghosts (who without me lay dead together in a plastic bag), and he was imploring: If you are someone from the capital, please inform the Emperor that I continue to exist. — He tried to steal Yokihi, soiling her in his attempts to lick the triple tines of naked skin on the back of her white-stenciled neck, but since she was nothing without me, he returned her with apologies, after which we became still closer. — When pneumonia descended on him, as it had last winter and the winter before, the old woman and I cooked soup for him whenever we could afford to do so. Just as the sun of late afternoon pinkens the lobe of a maiko’s ear, so his face grew flushed with fever and drunkenness. If you remember that famous Kabuki scene when Kiyomori confines the Cloistered Emperor in the Prison Palace, you will visualize my friend’s papery gestures of sadness on the night when he told me how sick and desperate he was. He had always been one of those successful prophets who foresaw the worst, did nothing to avoid it, and then exclaimed in agony. Do you remember the Dragon God’s final torment, when a gold-winged bird swoops down to steal his retainers? My bravely defiant friend performed the dance of losing, so that he grew bereft of all his supports. Then he disappeared beneath a flat moon of yellow paper. I could have been a retainer in search of his master. He had always been as invisible as a ghost hidden in skyscraper-shade, so without hope I hunted him here and there, attended by my faithful paper ghosts, who made my living for me even when I felt too dispirited to watch; my life remained as charmed as before, except that I worried about him as I never had about myself, or even Etsuko, who was surely better off without me. I could feel the corners of my mouth pulling down. Wait awhile; wait awhile, sang my paper ghosts. I bit my lip, warming my nose in my mitten or counting cracks in the sidewalk while my paper ghosts performed; sometimes I heard a coin fall into my hat. Then I wandered beneath another overpass. If I could have found him, what a fine dance Yokihi would have accomplished for his rapture! Even the Pale Lady would have entertained him, for she was an accomplished tease. Then he would have laughed between his coughs, which resembled the crying of migrating cranes. — It was not I but the man who eternally read yesterday’s newspaper who found him dead in a public toilet. For a week I felt heavyhearted. But it was cold, and I too felt unwell; I had no strength to grieve for what could not be helped.

One evening the ancient woman, creeping toward me, with a cane in each hand and a garbage bag tied to her back, lifted up her head with effort, composed herself and inquired: Excuse me, but what do you pray for nowadays?

Although her question surprised me, I lacked any reason not to answer it, so I said: I prefer not to give up my hopes and desires completely. I hope not to freeze to death before spring. I always desire a little more sake than I have, but perhaps such wishes are permissible in my situation.

Do you expect your wishes to be fulfilled?

Well, I’ve left my expectations. Anyhow, I have my paper ghosts.

That’s right. You’re getting famous in Shinjuku. Even the Yakuza* are talking about you!

We seated ourselves on a piece of cardboard. My paper ghosts began to play, and so the Genji lady Tomoe, blackhaired and lovely, decapitated Muroshige of Musashi at full gallop, and his corpse took on the many delicious blues and violets in the kimonos and sky of an old ukiyo-e print of Kabuki actors. Yoritomo hanged Yokihi from a flowering cherry whose silhouetted branches writhed into brushstroked Japanese characters. One and all, they watched me serenely, as glad as I that they were dead to me.

A rich lady approached, carrying a shopping bag in each hand. Her hair reminded me of the wet sparkle of Nakano’s spangled handbag and silver raincoat, so I smiled at her. She glanced at us in horrified sorrow, then hurried on without giving anything.

The old woman sat smiling down into the earth. I asked her: You’re a goddess, aren’t you? Did you give life to my paper ghosts?

Never mind. Would you like to be with Etsuko and her mother again?

Thank you, but I would rather not be selfish.

Commendable! said the old woman. You may come to me.

When she removed her mask, she became a young girl. She had long black hair like the Pale Lady, and when she smiled at me, I seemed to remember an ancient moon rising over reeds. — I bowed until my forehead touched the sidewalk.

Then she removed her young girl’s mask, and showed herself as an ancient skull. I was afraid for a moment, but I bowed again.

She said: Are you disappointed?

No, goddess—

Just as in a blast of sunlight cherry blossoms may grow so distinct as to resemble paper representations of themselves, so this divinity became ever truer or more false with each unmasking of herself, but in any case no more known; therefore, I supposed that some further aspect of her, no matter whether I ever saw it, might lie beneath the skull, which anyhow grinned at me as easily as did every significant entity in my life — and, after all, who can hope to rob the grave of its mask?

Come to Mirror Mountain now, she said. I felt free because my heart did not follow after her. Her bent spine was as erotic as the back of a maiko’s neck. So I entered her house, where the summer gardens and winter gardens of richness walled themselves around us both — but only for a moment, to remind me of the paper world I forsook. Our paper ghosts danced for us one more time, although they had all become skeletons. They sang a song about returning to the capital. Yoritomo raised his ribbed paper lance, which was more narrow and three times longer than a chopstick, and then the Pale Lady chanted: Now I sink beneath this mound of grass; now I will fly for awhile. — Then the magic went out of them. I had no complaints; the old woman and I were fond of each other. We earned hundred-yen coins and entertained our friends by acting out the old Kyogen skit about the man who sings best while drunk and in his wife’s lap.