Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (60 page)

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.

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.