But one rainy night after nibbling sweetly on my lower lip in her accustomed manner, her gaze glowing right through my closed eyelids (it now seemed less orange than ocher — perhaps the hue of a tiger’s-eye stone), she abruptly unflexed her claws to full length, which she had never yet done before; and then, as I ought to have expected (no wonder that the girl from the tourist office had declined to accompany me here!), rocketed into the mist like an owl-faced moon, plunged down, and in several slow and, I must confess, excruciating swipes, eviscerated me, so that I too became a ghost, with my intestines left to hang high up on that iron-banded cedar (a crow cawed four times). — More rapidly than the living might suppose, I came to resemble her, not only in my hollowness but also in my ability to fly. Thus I could be to her all that she had been to me; and on certain very humid nights, while the entire mountain wept most pleasantly, she liked to muse in the air beside me, her slit-eyes glowing with affection, her black mouth smiling; and then, in much the way that the giggly hot springs waitress pulls off each new guest’s shoes, she would reach into my unsexed pelvic cradle, presently withdrawing some urn or other of her own cremated past, cradling it in her gristle-blue arms as she bore it above the treetops, in the fashion of the seagull which soars before dropping a closed clam onto sharp rocks. These pulverized hopes of hers, if such they were, appeared less bluish-grey than mine, more charcoal-like; for isn’t each disappointment unique? I admit that I never could have foreseen discovering my dead past within her, much less hers within me — hadn’t I come to her alive, and hadn’t I treasured my ignorance of whoever she had been before our first meeting? Well, this must be what love is.
Surreptitiously I alighted on a single shard, touched my forefinger to a lingering rosy drop of my former substance, then sucked. At once I retasted the humiliation which had permeated my flesh when in my youth a woman I admired met my praises with wary condescension; and at the shining ball to which I brought her, nobody smiled at me all night; she went off and danced with anyone and everyone, while I sat among the old ladies on the long sofa against the wall. One of these kindly souls, laying her wrinkled hand upon my own, said: Dear, it happens to all of us. — That was when I first perceived the comforts of anililagnia. With the right sort of woman, I too could be free; I could be a grey ghost.
Since it was now her turn, my Rainy Mountain ghost swiggled her claws inside my pelvis, withdrew another leaden-colored urn, smashed it against the cedar, and gloated cat-eyed over the blackish powder spilling out. How could I know what she really felt about it? Flittering down to lick up a granule of her discarded old substance, I understood at once how it had been for her on her sixteenth birthday, when she was rejected at the first dance. Grimacing cheerfully and smacking his lips as he pulled, the dark boatman had ferried them all across that river of dirty jade. The farther they went, the cleaner the water became, until it was as crisp as the pleats in the schoolgirls’ navy-blue knee-high skirts. Docking, they awaited the headmistress’s signal. When she raised her arm, they filed by threes into the distant living world of summer: Die if you leap down there! And indeed they were all dead now; but she was the only one before me who had become a ghost upon Rainy Mountain. The girls formed ranks upon the edge of the outdoor stage, their shy hopes nearly as pale as the sun between the evening clouds. There came flute-songs and the crackle of those two flaming tripods, raining sparks some of which flew diagonally upward across the illuminated yellow-green treescape, vanishing into the rainclouds. The boys filed out in chorus, led by the child with the queue, her little brother, who had rotted for a hundred years now in a bomb crater, with mud in his mouth. In his white tabi socks he knelt, awaiting the next flute. It could never have been this way; certainly the face of the boy who eyed her across the polished boards could not have been a mask ivory-colored in the light; nor was his kimono greenish-grey, metallic and tarnished, the effect antique unlike the fresh green trees; but within the ancient soul of my Rainy Mountain ghost, semblances had decomposed and revivified in other images; rendering what had happened all the more true. That was why the ashes of her bygone disappointment tasted metallic to me, like the golden fan ahead and upward of that boy’s forward-bowing face; he came slowly gliding out with unearthly music toward the girl, sad and demonic now, a golden skull with a golden queue, catching the red flickering light — then halted, and although every other pair in the facing lines had met, touching fan to fan, and begun to dance, the dead boy in the ivory mask now struck the fan out of her hand, wheeled and rose up into the air like an incomprehensible ghost! Now every mouth was laughing behind a fan — laughing at the girl, who in her humiliation sank slowly to the ground.
For love and pity I kissed her then, with the dark powder of her life still staining my vaporous lips. Nibbling me fondly with her sharp black teeth, she gestured as if to imply that she felt flattered by my interest. I supposed that she had lost the capacity to weep — although it might also have been that this youthful incident had grown trivial to her. For a fact, she appeared less affected by it than I.
Until now she had (for all her manifold ectoplasmic virtues) reminded me of the woman I once knew who eternally alluded to her secret gynecological difficulty but refused to explicate it. Now I was getting somewhere with her, thank goodness; my darling Rainy Mountain ghost might even love me! Or did she hate me, or did she consider me merely as a thing upon which to feed? She had killed me (I decline to accuse her of murder, since I had given myself to her of my own choice), in order to render my bony substance fit to entrust with the regermination of her own forgotten secrets.
Just as at dawn a sleeping lover’s face so often appears young, open, yet far away, like a zo-onna mask, the countenance of my Rainy Mountain ghost opened unto me as if I were lying beside her on a tatami mat, marveling at her hair. Most days and nights we played with one another as luminously as green- or red-skinned demons on a golden screen. In her yellow-orange eyes a reddish tincture sometimes teased me; could it have been the reflection of my own new ghostly gaze; did I sport red eyes? I hoped not to be ugly, for then how could she love me?
It was not until she had begun to draw her dead emotions out of me that I suspected how dejected I must seem to her, or anyone — and might well always have been, not that it mattered. But how can a ghost be anything but sad? In the words of Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu: If you consider suffering as an ordinary state, you will never feel discontent.
They say that the first Shogun would kill the songbird that failed to sing, the second would teach it notes, and the third would wait until it sang beautifully. Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu was the third. Well, then, like him I would now await the silent singing of my Rainy Mountain ghost in the same spirit that the growing pine needles reach up. Side by side we would learn how to gaze at white rain-jewels and pink magnolia blossoms. The reason I had first approached her was to overcome the defining human error of despising death’s carnality. I had sought to offer my love and desire to her; now I continued to present it to her, continuing the love after the grave, trusting that the breath of corruption would in time become the breath of a flower.