Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (63 page)

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.

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 . . .

It seemed that the faded vermilion of the shrine fence now resumed its ancient brilliance.

The Tale of the Heike
,
ca.
1330

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
onnagat
as
*
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
onnagata
s 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.