The hinges of our home were all engraved in crowds of flower-crowned hexagons. Moisture beaded in tiny white pimples upon our black door. On the infrequent occasions when the mist blew away from Rainy Mountain, we withdrew to our vault and concealed ourselves within the skull of a stone lamp. She kept me company as elegantly as if she were kneeling on a white tatami mat, gently pouring sake. Helpmeets to each other, we disposed of our miseries, wearing the red laughs of white-toothed dragons.
The longer we dwelled together, the less I could remember. After a season or a century, she ceased to grow gravid with my burial urns. I continued to incubate hers, which she withdrew ever less eagerly. I could not tell whether my tasting of her bygone failures made her bashful, grateful or something else, but I continued to sample their dust, because I wished to know her. These sorrows of hers were pools of silvery-pink water flooding my old life.
Come the middle of a certain rainy morning, when a cool yellow sky somehow found means to insinuate itself between the clouds and the lowlands from which I originated, I could see all the way past Dripping Pine, beyond those high-crowned cryptomerias and down to the city whose front row of houses loomed two-dimensionally like a multitowered battleship. Surely now the railroad tracks must be shining wet, the ballast-stones soft and mossy, the girl at the tourist office sweetly composing herself to perish, for it must have been nearly a lifetime already since my death. Her flesh might have been as sweet to me as all the drops of rain on a plum tree’s galaxy of tiny white blossoms, but I felt no regret, so well suited had I become to my own Rainy Mountain ghost. All the same, that was when I began to study her for hints of change, not realizing that I myself continued to alter, in contradiction to every supposition which premortem entities make about ghosts. It might have been that she was discovering secrets from the urns she drew out of me, although so far as I could tell, the powders which swirled and tumbled from each terra-cotta vessel remained identically ebony — well, their separate blacknesses might vary by a hint of purple or green; or was that merely a trick of my glowing eyes, whose color I could never know? For my part, whenever I tasted the ashes of her life, my love for her softened further, like the mellowing rice brandy which learns to conceal its power within sweet water-blandness. Turning toward me like a slow whitish-beige fish, she taught me how to silhouette myself upon the moon. Her fixed face, the grey-and-black teeth in her dark mouth, her hand frozen on the bamboo staff she sometimes carried, and the fantastic smokelike hair around her skull, all seemed cheerful to me now. From the side, her mouth was a downcurving crescent of darkness. As a girl she had been taught to express not with the face but with the heart; and I would have said that she did so to perfection, although just what she expressed I cannot tell you. She had learned that when one wears one’s death, it grows difficult to look down. When one emerges from a mist or a vault, one cannot feel one’s feet, so it is best to hover. In company one wears, for instance, a memory of the V-necklined dark kimono with the white chrysanthemum pattern, the lavender obi embroidered with white plum blossoms — no matter that what’s left of it is three fibers, four worms and a pinch of ashes.
For her fan I gave her a dewy fern, with which she danced for me on the rainiest nights. It soon decayed, but then we learned that she did not need it; for when she danced, our memory of her fan moved as inevitably as water.
When she withdrew her final urn from my bones and broke it, I greedily descended to nourish myself on its blackish cinders, and at once tasted the occasion when she had first masked herself in a mirror room, pleading with her Elder Sister: I just wish to be more and more feminine. That’s my wish. — Never before had I heard her voice, nor would I again; and these words reached me by bone conduction, as if they derived from my own speech resonating within my skull. How often do we need to remember our own words? Most often it is the words and deeds of others which most eloquently relate our own chapters. Masked, the girl took her place among the kneeling geishas, who locked their hands in their laps. I awaited her error. How would it come? Just as lacquer wears off a shrine’s door, revealing grey wood, so our expectations flake away, leaving dullness struggling to disguise itself in Rainy Mountain’s grey clouds. When would Elder Sister slap her in the face? Bowing, the shamisen-player glided to the corner, then knelt and tuned her instrument. The girl arose. It was her turn to dance.
She disappointed no one, not even herself. Her excellence remained as pure as mountain rainwater. No one could strike her or do anything but bow in awe and gratitude. Here came the clatter of prayer-coins falling between wooden slats while people bowed — to her! To her they clapped two times. She was someone accomplished, even great, who founded the Three Fern School of Rainy Mountain. When she died, crowds burned incense for her.
To be sure, her most fearsome disappointments outlived her — the reason she was compelled to become a ghost — but thanks to these last ashes (which I assure you appeared no different, at least to me, from others), she now spied light instead of darkness through her own skeleton’s latticework. Was she looking out through black-lacquered blinds at the pale branches of early spring?
Until now I had supposed her to be my counterpart. Well, perhaps she was. If only I had tasted that scarlet powder, I might have learned that I too contained more than disappointments.
So was she happy now? Her orange gaze found something in the distance. But then it seemed once again as if she were seeking something within me. Just as out of Keisai Eisen’s woodblock prints an Edo beauty peers sidelong with her glossy black eyes, kissing the air with her tiny red mouth, just so my Rainy Mountain ghost studied me as if she were sorry for me. Her smile resembled one of those multiplying triple circles in a green pond when the rain begins, the ripples pulsing faster and faster, while beneath them, unaltered, comes a carp-flash in the greenish water, a pallid sparkle of shrine-gold. As slowly as a Noh actor, she rotated away from me, as if she were turning upon an invisible roasting-spit. More curious than alarmed, I flittered round to learn her smile’s next chapter. Naturally she couldn’t have forgotten me! Her twin orange eye-beams yellowed the grey-clouded summit of Rainy Mountain. Her gruesome arms sprang out of immobility, her claws parted, and then, head bowed, she flew away forever over Rainy Mountain, with her long hair dripping down her bowed back.
So now I was the ghost of Rainy Mountain, the only one. But I preferred not to be alone, since that made me so very, very disappointed! You might call me a hateful spirit, but nothing I was or felt could have been prevented. No doubt this latest bitterness of mine was already smoking down to nothing inside my soul’s crematorium. But where were all the other urns, whose contents must have been as lovely as certain scrolls of the Lotus Sutra, each a particular hue and decorated with its own calligraphy and stamped crests? When my Rainy Mountain ghost remembered achieving her wish to be ever more feminine, she had improved her destiny; and I thought to do the same. So I set off in the direction that my mate had gone. But I was merely a ghost now — worse yet, an abandoned ghost, with less ichor inside me than any windblown dragonfly. So I fluttered along quite haltingly, much as an old woman clings to every wall, branch or railing that she can, since a fall will be disastrous. That was why it took me quite an eon to fly all the way to the peak of Rainy Mountain. By the time I got there, I would have been tired, if a ghost could ever get that way; perhaps when I am old enough I will indeed feel such a sensation; anyhow, I cannot say that I even remember what the summit looked like; but it must have been very, very grey. Behind a lichened torus, there might have been a vast stone ring filled with greenish water. Perhaps I cannot recollect it because I could not find my reflection in that pool. But I believe there was moss on a stone lamp; it must have been soft like pubic hair. Over this I drifted. Then I passed on through the clouds. No pine dripped on me; I heard no crow.