Japanese Gothic Tales (11 page)

"I could just see his red face. I could see him snarling. Yes, that's just how it made me feel. 'All right, then. I will die. I'm not afraid of dying.' I stood up and walked feebly away from my bed. I fell to the floor and crawled toward the stairs. Just as I grabbed the balustrade, the rain started falling dark and heavy. I cried. The voice disappeared.
Did he go off somewhere? The rain stopped, and the bright sunlight showed again. Then I saw him standing barefooted, with a child strapped to his back. He was about forty, stoutly built, reminding me of the red ogres you see in paintings. That's the image that came to me just now as I was telling you about him.

"I thought of falling back into bed. But then I thought that if I went to sleep I might lose my mind, and so I came wandering out into the sunshine. Maybe I'm crazy, telling all these things to a stranger." She stared at the wanderer as if she had feelings for him. She had lovely eyes.

"Tell me. Do you really think there's such a thing as life after death?"

He didn't answer.

"It wouldn't matter if it were heaven or hell. If the person you love is there, you'd go as quickly as you c
ould." She plucked at the horse
tail grass, one section at a time, entranced. "There's no way to know for sure. But it's too horrible to think that everything just ends when you die. If that's the way it is, it's probably better to live in agony, to be troubled and to waste away, never forgetting until the very end." She bit on the horsetails in her hand.

Amid the green of the embankment, both her skirt, thrown over the man's knees, and her sash beca
me darker in hue. She spoke sud
denly, now in a brash, flirtatious tone. "Stop that! What are you doing?"

She caught the wanderer, unable to answer her question about the afterlife, in the act of retrieving her notebook. It had an olive cover and a pink-ribbon binding, and was lying where it had fallen on the grass.

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"Don't look at that! Give it back!"

She grabbed the edge of the notebook, but then drew her hand back. She turned straight ahead and faced the wheat field.

Sitting beneath the blue sky, he assumed a defiant posture, deter-mined to change the subject. "You write poetry?"

She only laughed.

"You draw?"
She laughed again.

"I'd really like to take a look."

She had let go of the notebook, but her shoulder was still pressed against his. "Should I show you?"

He laughed innocently as the notebook fluttered open in his lap. The pages were like butterfly wings in his fingers. And there, written in pencil, was—

His face suddenly went pale.

They were written large and small, dark and light, all in confusion. Some were half-drawn, others misshapen, others trembling, some abandoned. He saw nothing but triangles, squares, and circles.

"What do you think? The people around here think I'm quite an artist. I come out to this embankment and this is what I do. Better than just sitting here, pretending I'm guarding the valley. My sketches are well regarded, you know. I was even thinking of bringing some brushes and art supplies out and setting up shop right here in the grass. Don't you think they're good?

"This triangle is a mountain, this sq
uare a rice paddy, and this cir
cle the ocean. You can think of them that way. Or maybe the triangle is a doll of a young woman or a samurai dressed in a kimono, the square a body, and the circle a face.

"Or maybe it's something beneath the surface of the waves. If you ask the artist what she thinks these figures are, she'll say she doesn't know. And then you can make an arr
ogant face. Or else you can wor
ship them as the posthumous name of the deceased."

The wanderer finally spoke up. "Posthumous name? What is it? Tell me the name!"

"Master Triangle, Round Round, Lord of the Square.

As she said this, she turned over and pressed her chest to the embankment, spreading her dyed sleeves over the grass, the skirts of her silk kimono trailing down to her calves. One leg was smoothly swimming as she raked the notebook toward her and started writing the three shapes one after another, as if jotting down a secret.

But then came the sound of drums to let them know they were in longer alone. Showing here and the
re in rich flashes of color, like a
camellia blossom ablaze as it falls, spill
ing from behind the thatched
roofs, hiding within the leaves along the rape field road, emerging lightning-quick above the pure yellow of blossoms, two dancers appeared like cocks flying and dancing about the eaves of a thatched hut—two red heads, two dragon heads, one high and another low; one leading, another following, entangled, mad, scraping the flowers, brushing the trees, there by the rape field, then gradually coming to the edge of the green wheat that stretched out from where Tamawaki Mio and the wanderer sat, finally passing in front of the gate of the two-story house. Dragon dancers!

They wore dirty yellow-green knickers. The dust kicked up by their muddy straw sandals seemed to float over the wheat field as they proceeded toward their destination. The drumming stopped as they quickly approached. They were itinerant dancers, the youngest about eight and the oldest about thirteen or fourteen. They cut across to the road leading to Kunoya, the red and white of peony blossoms showing brightly before the wanderer's eyes as the two quickly ran past.

"Wait. Just a minute." The woman called out and pushed herself up. The lion dancers kicked her clogs and sent them flying as she sat over on her side in the grass.

Both lions stopped and turned their heads toward her, their red hoods parted.

"You boys. Wait there, just a minute."

Ten, ten, ten
. Again the small drum sounded. And then the big drum, ton. Coming alive to the sound, the lions began to shiver and dance. The small lion arched and bridged backward over the road. When he looked skyward, they could see his pale face—a round jaw, a well-shaped mouth, his double eyelids splashed with red.

32

"Oh, how marvelous! But don't get so twisted up on my account." She tried to settle them down, and eventually they came to a stop, their lions' heads towering in a heap. From beneath the red headpiece, a boy stood staring at her with round, pleasant eyes.

The other lion trembled until the drums fell silent.

The woman slid her knees over and pulled up her sash. She looked for her purse but found nothing.

"Wait. I want to give you a little something."

She quickly wrote a note in her book, ripped out the page, then handed it to the older boy. "Here. Take this over to that house on the corner. The one with two stories."

It looked as though she were writing a check.

The wanderer reached into the bosom of his kimono. "I have some change here," he said, but he was much too late.

"No. That's all right. Young man, go on. Go and get your money." He held the stick for his drum in one hand. With the other he
slowly reached out, then quickly grabbed the piece of paper. He gave
her a bow and started off.

"And you. Come here."

The smaller of the two boys stepped forward.

He had a blank expression on his face, like a doll that had swallowed a stick. He only stared at her.

"How old are you?"

"Eight."

"Don't you have a mother?"

"Lion dancers don't have mothers."

"Even if you don't know about her, she may know about you." Her white hand pulled him toward her. He fell back into her arms, his sandals rising toward the sky

"See." She seemed calm as she looked back at the wanderer. "This boy could be my own child."

Suddenly the lion slipped out of her arms, twisting upside down, shaking its body, and then standing tall as if nothing had happened.

"Look at this!" The bigger lion rushed back. "Look! We're rich!" He bowed twice, hit his partner on the back, and struck his drum again.
Ten.

"You don't have to do that."

The tail of the smaller lion settled to the ground as the boy inside the costume stared face to face with the other, who was still clutching the large piece of silver in his hand. Both of them were dumbfounded, their mouths agape like red lacquered trays, their eyes flashing.

"But I do have a message I want you to take for me. Wait just a second."

She immediately took up her pencil and wrote something in the margin of one of the pages of the triangles, squares, and circles. Her writing was like undulating water in the springtime. The wanderer saw what she wrote.

Should I have the chance

to see you again,

I'd search the four seas

diving deep as the sea tangle.

He stared out at the ocean and its calm waves. Rising above the horizon, layered above the green wheat and the deep blue of the sea, was a mountain of snow. The reflection of Mount Fuji broke apart in the waves that lapped and thinly covered the sandy beach. The gables of a Western-style villa towered high in the sky. Two or three doves spread their wings and took to the air,
loosely fluttering like a hand
kerchief.

She folded the message tightly and handed it to the younger dancer who, nodding his round face
, seemed to understand. But sud
denly he started off toward the two-story house, seeming to think he was supposed to deliver the message there.

"No. Not that way." She called to him. She smiled. "I just want you to take it with you. I'm not really sending it anywhere. If you drop it, that's fine. And if you lose it, that's all right too. It's a matter of emotion."

"You mean you just want him to take it?" the older lion asked. Receiving her nod, he showed a knowing face and plucked off the lion's mask from the younger boy
, who looked up warily with sur
prise. "Put it in there so you don't lose it."

The two lions lined up together and bowed. Then they started away, fleeing for the ocean, their red hoods fluttering like mist upon the roots of the greening wheat.

33

Thirty minutes later, the wanderer appeared atop a sandy knoll that rose beside the indigo-colored Western villa, where he had seen the doves dancing in the sky.

Rather than continuing to the beach, he fell to the sand, looking exhausted, his legs stretched out before him. Wanting to see where Tamawaki Mio's message would go, he followed the dancing lions, using the occasion as an excuse to leave this woman who still seemed to have much more to say to him. Although his own legs were no match for those of the fleeing lions, he did manage to get away.

His first thought was to return to his room to take a nap. But on the road back from Kunoya, he saw a crowd of people gathered around the station
. Among them were local talents -
young men impersonating kabuki actors and married women stripping off their yellowish-green undergarments. They were performing some awful p
lay, looking like goblins from O
e Mountain. At any rate, he wasn't drawn to what was happening in the village at all.

So he chose to avoid the crowd and had come wandering through the rice paddies. Directly before him was the misty shawl of the mountain queen, perfectly shaped, white as snow. And as far as he could see the blue of the ocean stretched in every direction. On the beach were boats, creels, and strands of seaweed scattered about like horse fodder, none of the items trying to stand out from the others but all of them looking rather like old friends.

There were no other people around. It seemed like a moonlit night at midday, even quieter here th
an in the fields or in the moun
tains, every figure upon the white sand resembling the warmth of fog. In the blue sky, one dove danced whil
e another, resisting the tempta
tions of the gently lapping waves and the pressing breeze, remained steadfast upon its roost, cooing to the other. If a landscape as peaceful as this can't clear away the clouds in your heart, then it becomes like a bed that gives no rest.

When he thrust his hands into the
sand, it formed neither depres
sion nor mound. It simply crumbled into drops, building up around the edges. It was like grabbing water. And as he combed through the dune, he found only shells.

They were everywhere, even in places where there didn't seem to be any. He had only to part the sand to find more shells. Perhaps something else was living there, somewhere nearby. If he searched beneath the waves, he might find the very man who had been staying at the hut. Perhaps the gentleman was still alive and well. Isn't that why she had sent that message?

Should I have the chance

to see you again,

I'd search the four seas

diving deep as the sea tangle.