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Once I am in the deep bath, the water comes up to my chest. I can’t tel from whence it issues, but it is continual y flowing gently out over the edge of the tub. The stone floor never has a moment to dry, and the warmth of it underfoot fil s my heart with a tranquil happiness. Outside, rain is fal ing—at first gently enough merely to haze the night, delicately imparting a subtle moisture to the spring air, but slowly the drops from the eaves begin to fal more rapidly, with an audible drip, drip. A thick steam fil s every corner of the bathhouse to the very ceiling, so dense that it must be seeking a way out through any gap or knothole, however smal , in the wooden wal s.

Chil autumn fog, a spring mist’s serenely trailing fingers, and the blue smoke that rises as the evening meal is cooked—al deliver up to the heavens the transient form of our ephemeral self. Each touches us in its different way. But only when I am wrapped, naked, by these soft spring clouds of evening steam, as now, do I feel I could wel be someone from a past age. The steam envelops me but not so densely that the visible world is lost to view; neither is it a mere thin, silken swath that, were it to be whipped away, would reveal me as a normal naked mortal of this world.

My face is hidden within voluminous layers of veiling steam that swirl al about me, burying me deep within its warm rainbows. I have heard the expression “drunk on wine†but never “drunk on vapors.†If such an expression existed, of course, it could not apply to mist and would be too heady to apply to haze. This phrase would seem truly applicable only to this fog of steam, with the necessary addition of the descriptive “spring evening.â€​

I pil ow the back of my head on the rim of the bathtub, relax every muscle, and let my weightless body float in the translucent water. My soul too drifts lightly, like a jel yfish. When I am in this state of mind, the world is an easy place to inhabit. You unbar the doors of common sense that lock up the mind, and fling open the heart’s barriers of worldly attachment. What wil be wil be, I think, afloat here in the water, at one with the surrounding medium. No life knows less suffering than the life of that which flows, and being in the midst of flow, with the very soul afloat on its waters, is an even finer thing than being a fol ower of Christ himself. Seen in this light, even a drowned body becomes an essential y elegant, aesthetic object. I think the poet Swinburne, in one of his poems, wrote of the happiness felt by a drowned woman. Looked at thus, Mil ais’s painting of Ophelia, which has always somehow disturbed me, is in fact a work of considerable beauty. I have long wondered why he chose such an unpleasant scene, but now I see just why it works as a picture. There is undoubtedly something inherently aesthetic about a figure drifting or sunk, or half afloat and half sunk, lying at ease upon the flow. If you add an abundance of herbs and flowers along the banks, and depict the water and the face and clothes of the floating figure in serene and harmonious colors, there you have your picture. And there is such peace in the expression of that floating girl that it almost belongs to the realm of myth or al egory. Of course, if she were depicted writhing in a spasm of agony, it would quite destroy the spirit of the work, but on the other hand an utterly unal uring and indifferent expression would convey no trace of human feeling. What kind of face would work? I wonder idly. Mil ais’s Ophelia may wel be successful on its own terms, but I suspect that his spirit and mine inhabit different realms. Mil ais is Mil ais, I am me, and I feel the urge to try painting an elegant picture of a drowned corpse after my own fancy. But conceiving of the face I want for it isn’t such a simple thing.

Stil suspended in the water, I next try my hand at composing a eulogy to the drowned figure.

Rain dampens

And the frost chil s.

Al is dark within the earth.

But in spring waters there’s no pain

Afloat on waves . . .

Sunk beneath waves . . .

I am floating there aimlessly, intoning these lines softly to myself, when from somewhere I hear the plucked notes of a shamisen. Now, for a man who cal s himself an artist, it’s embarrassing to confess that I have almost no notion of matters to do with the shamisen; my ears have scarcely ever registered the difference between one modal tuning and another. But listening idly to the sound of those distant strings makes me wonderful y happy, lying here in a hot bath in a remote mountain vil age, my very soul adrift in the spring water on a quiet vernal evening, with the rain adding to the delight of the occasion. From this distance I have no idea what piece is being sung or played, which too holds a certain charm. But judging from the relaxed timbre of the notes, it might be something from the repertoire of the great blind Kamigata performers, played on a thick-necked shamisen.

When I was a child, a sake shop by the name of Yorozuya stood outside our front gate. On quiet spring afternoons the daughter of the establishment, a girl cal ed Okura, would always take up her shamisen and practice the old nagauta songs she was studying. Whenever Okura began to play, I would slip out into the garden to hear her. We owned a plot for growing tea, around forty square yards, in front of which, to the east of the guest room, stood a row of three pine trees. They were tal trees, about a foot in girth, and the interesting thing was that they were visual y pleasing only as a group, not individual y. The sight of them always made me happy as a child. Beneath the pines crouched a garden lantern of rusted black iron on a slab of some kind of red rock, grim and immovable, like an obstinate little old man. I used to love to gaze at it. Around this lantern the nameless grasses that had pushed up through the mossy earth tossed fancy-free in the world’s fickle winds, casting their scent and taking their pleasure in their own sweet way. I discovered a place to squat among these grasses, a space just big enough for my knees to fit, and my habit at this time of year was to go and sit there, absolutely stil . Each day I settled down beneath those pines, glaring back at the grim little lantern and sniffing the scent of the grasses, as I listened to Okura’s distant shamisen.

Okura must by now be wel into marriage, and her face across the sake shop counter would be that of a solid householder. Do she and her husband get along wel ? Do the swal ows stil come back each year to those eaves, their busy little beaks laden with mud? Since that time I have never been able to separate in my imagination the sight of swal ows and the smel of sake. Are those three pines stil there, forming their elegant configuration? The iron lantern has certainly disintegrated by now. Do the spring grasses remember the boy who used to squat among them? No, how would they now recognize someone who even then passed only mutely through their lives? Nor, surely, do they retain any memory of the daily echo of Okura’s voice as she sang “The Hemp Robe of the Mountain Monk,â€​ accompanying herself on the shamisen.

Those plucked notes have spontaneously recal ed for me a vision of the nostalgic past, and I am transfixed, once again the artless boy who inhabited that world of twenty years ago—when suddenly the bathhouse door slides smoothly open.

Someone’s come in, I think, turning my eyes to the doorway as I float. My head is resting on the rim farthest from the door, and the steps leading down to the bathtub are diagonal y visible to me about twenty feet away. But my searching eyes stil cannot discern any figure there. I wait alertly, hearing only the sound of the raindrops along the eaves. The notes of the shamisen have ceased without my noticing.