Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (62 page)

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.