Although it was worse than foolish of me, for their hearing must have been unimpaired, and they could have trapped me between them in that corner, I skipped around them to peek at the photograph just ripening in the developer, and now, like those monsters, commencing to darken into ruin, and I saw a beautiful picture of mine which I had never printed — the face of the woman I loved. Too late! — As I remember this now, the taste of selenium rises in my gorge, and my eyes begin to sting.
Flying out of the old man’s mouth, growing as I fell, I glimpsed the two demons, who were already smaller than a pair of chopsticks, staring blindly into each other’s ruined faces, as if they recognized that they were or were not the same. I thought: Was it not lonely enough without this?
Grinning like the iron-crowned demon of Kibune Shrine, the old man now bent over me, and placed his Leica around my neck. No one visits him anymore, and so I say to myself: How sad!
The names of those two demons who hunted me I never learned, but upon opening the old man’s camera I found in place of film a tiny scroll in characters of pure gold within sky-blue windows, like certain copies of the Lotus Sutra. I unrolled and viewed it frame by frame, weighting down each rectangle with my ten-power loupe. I seem to remember reading it long ago, in the Imperial Anthology of the Ten Excellent Silver Zones.
Now you have seen my true shape;
there is no difference between us, you and I;
for we both dwell in darkness, in order to devour the light.
My ashes abandoned by my smoke,
I am one and the other, the same,
two empty things which never will share a grave.
Down this road we go, we go;
delusion’s road, where we go between death and life,
here where we pluck tender images out of light;
here we toil out our lives, gathering moonlight out of jade.
All is vain, even escaping from vanity.
My only hope, blind death, kills the eyes on my face;
but each eye remembers the other
and new pictures bloom up for the plucking,
so that I can never rest, never rest.
I have vanished into the dark, to gather light with you.
You are my brother; I am your smoke.
This is of all teachings the most excellent.
In every grain of silver is a palace of practice
where every being is enlightened for thirty-three million eons.
Here is the dwelling place where all is seen and nothing is known,
the place of those removed from this world,
who offer this world their love.
Sometimes I wish I might never desire the beautiful things which dead eyes can no longer see. But who would I be, if that were so? Sometimes I wish to be awakened from sad dreams, but not from this one. Until I have saved everything, I refuse to rest. Then I’ll show you how a man should die! I’ll vanish into the dark, and rise forever above the pines, nevermore to see! But not yet, not yet; nor will I pray to lose my delusion. When I finally leave this world in funeral-smoke, may all I have seen remain.
The waitress who had served us sake in that seventeenth-floor restaurant was there every day; she was wrinkled and yellow and her back ached. Was it she or I who had forgotten to be alive? Bowing, clapping my hands twice, I prayed: Please let me save you from death. — She nodded, smiling bravely. So I raised the old man’s Leica, although there was no film in it. As soon as I gazed through the viewfinder, I found that she was a rain-jeweled branch of pear flowers, unchanged from long before. After this she bowed and said: We have met, so we must part.
How shall I bear this pain? Still I see her; now she has passed away.
THE CHERRY TREE GHOST
If cherry blossoms were never in this world, how serene our hearts come spring!
Yukiko’s dark little mouth was a plum in the newfallen snow of her face, and her eyelashes were as rich as caterpillars. Even her Elder Sisters, who were very strict, confessed that when this young woman opened a sliding door, following each of the prescribed motions, the effect became perfect. At the Kamo River Dance, even amidst an explosion of geishas in white flower parasols, all of them as stunning as cherry blossoms, it was she who stood out; and had I ever seen her myself, I would have painted her image upon my camera’s polished mirror, making copies in paper and silver. When a man looked up her sleeve while she poured sake, and won a glimpse of her crimson undersleeve, he could not look away; and once two tipsy Kabuki actors fought over her sandal, while her scarlet-lipped white face watched from the doorway until the Elder Sisters summoned help. When a closed palanquin carried her from place to place, people would follow in hopes of glimpsing her perfect hand. Whatever Yukiko was, had or did, years after her disappearance Noh actors continued to discuss the way her white-powdered face used to become ivory when she leaned forward in torchlight, pouring sake for them, the golden maple leaves on her jet-black kimono flickering like stars, the rice spirit streaming in an arch of silver from the mouth of the wooden bottle. The Elder Sisters gave it out that she had made an advantageous marriage in a far-off country. Of course most of them were angry and hurt, while the rest feared that some demonhearted suitor had made away with her.
It happened when she turned twenty. There were pink cherry blooms and wet white tulip-cups of magnolia beneath the grey clouds. Ever nearer drew the night when she must change her collar,* as they say in the flower-and-willow world.
The ancient poets teach that veiled beauty is the profoundest type. Much as autumn foliage barely seen through mist outranks the untrammelled scarlet of the leaves themselves, thus a geisha’s beauty to a maiko’s. As for Yukiko, she preferred to continue as she was, so day and night she prayed to Kannon, goddess of mercy: Preserve me from the hollow chests, yellow teeth, bad breath and grey hair of my Elder Sisters! Don’t turn me into smoke and dirt like them! Let me wear all the colors until I die—
It was February, so she wore a daffodil hairpin. Then it was March. Presently came April. Directed by her Elder Sisters, for the first time she did up her hair in the sakko style and blackened her teeth, because it was her final month as a maiko. Again and again she stopped by Yasaka Shrine, praying to Kannon. Her heart resembled a red tassel trembling against a round mirror. To shorten her obi, and hide her hair beneath the katsura wig, to put on lower clogs and a plain white collar, to know that the older she became, the plainer her kimono, this might be the fate of others; but she felt so sorry for herself that she wept in secret — not much, because that would have spoiled her lovely eyes. Her red collar was already almost obscured by swirls of silver thread when she prayed to Kannon, bowing and clapping two times.