At least they were happy together for seven days and nights every year, as if they could take the one thing life declined to give. As the old poem runs: Better never to awake from this night of dreams. He asked how it was for her to be a tree, and she said: Sometimes I seem to hear you calling me.
They liked to sit out at night, listening to the bell-insects, and often she would dance for him, pleasing herself with his sad joy.
In the colorless months of her absence he sold sake and prayed to Kannon. Whenever he went out on business, he often paused by dark wooden caves with weathered wooden pillars, because he yearned for the glimmer of the metal votive things within. The wheat harvest passed; trees flowered and withered. Crickets died away. Fearing the future, he gazed ever less openly at this world. At each winter’s departure he pressed his forehead to the floor by Kannon’s statue, awaiting his wife’s return. And when his wife again departed, his belly grew foully pregnant with fear and his chest clenched around his heart. Bowing, clapping, he prayed: Great Kannon, we thirst for your mercy! — He found himself remembering his Cherry Tree Ghost by the way that the wood-carved goddess gazed so softly down past him. 11
Of course he could not live to see her mature into a more sober elegance. Had Kannon so permitted, he would have companioned her forever. In each other they drank the sweet sadness nourishing the branch which has lost its blossom. On the trees, yellow leaves went trembling like the waving, ever reopening fans of dancing girls. Each winter the snow weighed down her branches more heavily.
Kannon flexed her spider-wrists, and he lost his memory (although it might have been that there was nothing to forget); hence to her husband the Cherry Blossom Ghost came no more. In time he died, blind to the color of spring. Each year was yet another dance of upraised flowers, then more rice-stalks reaped up. Knowing their attachment to have been a useless delusion, she now danced without hope or desire, and the Noh actors said that she had attained the true flower. But even before the great eruption of Mount Asama her tree-bark had come to resemble the cracked wooden face of an ancient Kannon statue. Each spring she returned to Kyoto, slowly upraising her tear-moistened sleeve, drinking in from various teahouse mirrors the agony of beginning to lose her beauty. Had a wise Noh actor or priest encouraged her to keep dancing, her sufferings might have made her truly great. But the patrons merely drank her in. So presently she gave up human society, preferring to lurk in shrines, gardens and cemeteries, sometimes gazing upon her dissolution as reflected in ponds. Hating herself, and fearing to be seen, she became as unpleasant as a woman who forbears to wash herself — which we would call retribution for her egotism, were not Kannon, as we know, merciful. There came another great famine, followed by village riots, but those places were distant, and she never heard about such difficulties. A certain stormy winter on her high hill cost many of her branches, and on her return to human form that spring, she stood beneath the Shijo-dori Bridge, staring into the Kamo-gawa River, and discovered that she was well on her way toward being today’s withered old Cherry Tree Ghost who appears in the mockingly inappropriate garments of a maiko. She rushed from shrine to shrine. The wall-stones were wet with green moss, and very ferny. She began to dance, singing: Even the dream-road is now erased. Poisoned with despair, she considered drowning herself, but then Thousand-Armed Kannon rose up before her, a calm Crab Queen. Embracing her, the goddess kindly relieved her of her reason. Ever after, she has seen herself as a lovely ghost-lady from the Old Capital. All this explains why last week a reeking old beggar-woman crossed my path, opening and closing a ginkgo leaf which she supposed to be a fan, gesturing hieratically with her hanging-rag sleeves of yellow, singing: The day is come again, and last night when I went to drink sake, I overheard an ancient geisha entertaining a sad salaryman with a story which began: Eight hundred years ago there was a teahouse in Gion…
PAPER GHOSTS
It seemed that the faded vermilion of the shrine fence now resumed its ancient brilliance.
On the day after the last performance, life had already left the Kabuki-za, whose purple awning-bosom, nippled with two white crests, now hung over nothing but dull glass darkness between the white pillars; and I, who could have spent more afternoons in that ever-ancient melodrama of tricks and colors, drinking beer and spying effortlessly on pasteboard-armored warriors, never mind the shimmering dragon-gods and the white-faced onnagatas* more beautiful than moons, remained with nothing but my own life to look forward to. Although I had fallen in love with any number of horsehair-wigged princesses, to me there had never come a moment when, as there did for that man in the Chinese legend, I would have entered the painted world forever. Instead I liked to watch it pass before me, noisy and bright, self-mocking and au courant, inexhaustible, the way we all desire our futures to be. To sit and watch ladies cross the bridge over a river of colored paper, isn’t this perhaps the best of life?
The final performance took place during a certain business appointment of mine. While I was still young, money had begun to come to me; I spent it easily and forgot it, and since it kept me company as faithfully as air inhaled, I stopped regarding it, for no mortal can plan very far ahead anyway. Then it left me, slowly and with backward looks, to be sure, but without remorse; and I to whom it had come without my doing knew not how to get it back. Perhaps I could have hunted more cunningly, but my ambition, never vibrant, had long since faded like the ocean in an ancient ukiyo-e print. I attended appointments obediently; shouldn’t that have been enough? But the client, who two weeks before had regarded me with due adoration, must have investigated me (in his souvenir album of business cards I once glimpsed the skull-crest of Yama Detective Services); for he drummed on the table, yawned in my face, and disdained even to thank me for paying the check. How could I have expected this? Hadn’t I already prepared a most pleasurable disbursement? I felt as astonished as the woman whose purse has been stolen for the tenth time. The client hissed something out of one side of his mouth; his colleague, whom to my recollection I had never invited — another ten thousand yen — stared at me and laughed. Their behavior was so outrageous that I should have been alarmed, but in truth it felt good to get away from them!
Nakano sat waiting at a café in the Ginza. Had she dolled herself up and accompanied me to the meeting, the client, a fellow womanizer, might have been less bored. But she wasn’t in the mood; her mind had always contained one layer of kimono within the other. More industrious than I and until lately less successful, she had taken my money as easily as I gave it away; once it began to leave me, she demanded to know why I would not work like other people. I explained that I had never known how, even when I was very young and toiled late; because in those days it had been nothing to me if the boss kept me until nine or ten at night; I always knew that the curtain would rise upon my freedom, and ladies would take me by the hand and lead me over the bridge of vermilion paper. Now the curtain was descending. In last night’s dream I had seen Nakano peering out through lace draperies behind the show windows at the Mitsukoshi department store, as if she had joined someone else’s act, and so I woke up anxious. Once upon a time she used to meet me at the Imperial Hotel, in the lobby vast and clean where all murmurs are low. Her daughter needed a new school uniform, and I was supposed to pay for it. That was when my heart swelled with resentment, I won’t say dislike, for my ungrateful client and his colleague, who had violated my right to easy money.