Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (64 page)

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
onnagata
s
.
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.