Praying to Batoh Kannon, the horseheaded mercy goddess, I set out to seek a ghost whom I could love; for I had recently met with disappointments, perhaps on account of my sunken eyes. It was a good day, a rainy day. The mountain could have been a cloud. I hoped and hoped through the green cloud-ribs of a pine tree in spring rain. Although she had never explored in that direction (having been transferred from Niigata just last winter), the girl from the tourist office had declined to accompany me. Smiling and bowing, she said that she must work.
I arrived at the yellow fence by the cherry tree, and seemed to spy a dashed yellow line upon the asphalt path. An old lady cycled past me, sounding her bicycle bell as politely as a cough. I wondered where she had come from, and where I was in life. Ahead, the sky was very dark. The breeze expressed the sad rattlings of sticks. When I thought ahead I grew almost afraid, and yet how I longed to do what I was doing! Whether or not I ever returned from Rainy Mountain, I knew that I would be changed; not changing would have been unendurable; even the yellow fence sickened me with sameness, never mind the world behind. All the misty summer-leafed hills of my youth, and the thunderstorm days which magnified them, now invited me to take my adventure on Rainy Mountain, however lush or eerie this might turn out; for I had been too timid or obedient to ascend them when it could have done me good. What had I grown into? And where might Dripping Pine be? Descending a minuscule dip, I reached the remnant of the footbridge. The creek being low, I easily skipped across, not disturbing a certain muted orange carp.
Tall cryptomeria trees with slender chains around their waists now outlined my way. Ahead of me, the mist held its breath. If I could see inside Rainy Mountain, would it be the same as seeing inside a cloud? This question could only be answered through love, or something else of a similar name.
At the summit of a low hill which had been invisible from the town, the path turned under a many-branched pine whose needles urinated upon me, although there was no longer any wind. Immediately afterward, a crow cawed four times. Before me rose a pyramid of greybearded mist.
Bow two times, clap two times, then bow again, all from the bottom of one’s heart. This is how one is advised to behave at Rainy Mountain.
In Rainy Mountain there is a door whose dark jade shutters bear vermilion-sashed panes, and whose hinges are engraved in crowds of flower-crowned hexagons. I bowed two times; I clapped twice; I bowed. When this door opened, a certain crow cawed three times in the trees behind me.
Within was a wooden lattice-gate. Peering through its vertical bars which had once been green and were now white-streaked like moldy meat, I could see the vermilion steps to a black door with shiny brass hinges, a black door slammed exceedingly well shut! Bowing once and then once more, I clapped the first time and the second, at which the crow cawed twice, and as soon as I had bowed once more the wooden gate opened.
Bowing and clapping before the black door, I then bowed and clapped. The crow cawed. I made my final bow. When this door opened, the ghost of my dreams flittered out.
Her eyes resembled orange slits of light in a black lantern. From her skull sprouted double tassels, as if of horsehair, banded white, then red, then darkish brown with grey streaks showing miscellaneously. Her skirt might have been slats of bamboo chained into tight vertical parallels all around the widening trunk of a giant cypress. Between her breasts, an incense-hole was smoking.
Since she now grinned at me with all her sharp black teeth, I hoped that this particular specimen of ghostly nubility was interested in me, although with ghosts one can never be sure. For that matter, how could I even be sure of myself? Not long after a young girl left me, seven doctors had diagnosed my syndrome as anililagnia, which is to say, sexual interest in older women. Well, when does that become necrophilia? If the lady happens to be a ghost, should we select a different syndrome?
Here she came, her movements as complex and asymmetrical as a Japanese garden. Just as the sheen of rain on vermilion-lacquered shrines is counteracted by the dulling down or darkening of the cloudy atmosphere, so my ardor failed a smidgen, I do confess, the instant that she unfurled her iron claws; but I reminded myself not only of my prior intention to surrender to love, but also of the evident fact that now was no time to be undiplomatic — after all, what in the Devil’s name had I expected her to look like? — so I strode forward to embrace her, hooking my thumbs most conveniently on her cold ribs while her talons settled upon my collarbones. She smelled of moss, not death. Narrowing her glowing eyes, she inclined her head to kiss me. Those teeth of hers could have nibbled my lips right off, but since she derived from a gentle species, kissing her proved no worse than pressing my mouth against a cold railing. To tell you the truth, I was reminded of the vulva of that young woman who had recently decided to leave me; visiting for old times’ sake, she lay down on my bed, so I naturally slid my hand up her skirt, caressing for the sake of those same old times the perfect closed lips of the slit I used to know, at which she opened her eyes and murmured: Stop. — The ghost of Rainy Mountain uttered no such prohibition. Her claws rested ever so delicately around my throat.
She taught me how to beat the lacquered drum, and make the dead dance. When she opened her legs, I found myself looking up into the petals of a gilded lotus. She showed me what lies hid in vermilion darkness. With great kindness she presented to me the hidden opening of that crypt where the urns of our cremated hopes are buried. Entering my preordained place, I became as free as rain falling down a yellow moss-hole.
Oftentimes I fluttered out of her, after which we drifted hand in hand through the soft cool mists of Rainy Mountain where nobody else ever came. Educated into confidence, I now began to reach inside her to withdraw the urns of my hopes, one at time. The lids had been screwed down for eternity, but not far from the door to our vault, a rusty iron band ringed an immense cedar; this served for an urn-smasher. Just as most nongaseous chemical elements in our universe appear white or silvery-grey (not to mention the odd yellow, purple or gold exception), so my pulverized memory-ashes tended to resemble gunmetal, with more or less of a turquoise component; once an urn offered up a mound of granules as scarlet as ladybugs, and I wondered what that particular hope had consisted of; unfortunately, the undertaker had engraved his urns with nothing but my postmortem name, so that the only way to identify their contents would have been to taste them, a prospect of peculiar loathsomeness for me who still lived. Moreover, my sweet Rainy Mountain ghost used to hover behind my shoulder, watching these various residua depart. She might well have felt neglected had I displayed much curiosity about my own waste-years. Affectionately she traced her claws down my back, her rickety metacarpii reminding me of long sticks rattling in the wind. In the drizzles of Rainy Mountain those heaps of urn-matter quickly liquefied and flowed away; although drops of the scarlet element persisted among the moss like menstrual blood; I almost dabbled my finger in the stuff.
Around that cedar tree, urn-shards slowly assembled themselves into a ring-shaped midden of irrelevance.
Stroking her smooth hard breasts, I learned how to pleasure her, at which she would sigh like a child blowing through a bamboo pipe, the breath which issued between her cold black teeth then taking on the odor of pickled metal. Now that she permitted me to withdraw my urns of departed substance from between her thighs whenever I pleased, I felt quite satisfied, not having considered how any such procedure might have compromised me.