I heard the Cloistered Emperor chant: When the wooden lattice is darkened.
And wherever Yokihi danced her Dance of Rainbow Skirts, the air beneath her tiny feet became illuminated, a miniature path to dreams.
In bygone days, when money still came to me as easily as air and the capital shone at Shikishima, a certain Pale Lady desired me, although I cared for her not; she shared my best friend’s pillow in order to gain my address, then appeared before me in tears and with disordered hair, begging to sleep in my arms. I consented out of pity. Even when I was penetrating her she kept enumerating other lovers; all she truly wished was to add my name to her scroll. Many seasons later, when the woman I loved had abandoned me (I remembered gathering all the cherry blossoms which had fallen into her disordered hair), and I grew so desperate to be held that anyone would have served, I went to my Pale Lady, entreating her to give me comfort in her arms, but she refused with smiling cruelty. Now here she was, crisply remade in a flash of crinkled gold paper. I could not help but recall how I had felt on that occasion, although fortunately my former grief reincarnated itself less viscerally than merely visually, as when a paper general cuts open his belly with his black paper sword, and scarlet paper shows behind the cut. Lowering my ear, I heard her imploring me to do something, in a voice as weak as an autumn cricket’s.
At any rate, she put me in mind to wonder whether all these paper ladies represented old loves of mine, and, if so, whether the rest of them were likewise the paper ghosts of my past.
The Pale Lady said: I dream of you as I once did.
(In the past I had waited for dreams, while Nakano went treading her double path.)
As for Yokihi, whom she represented or recapitulated I could not have said — perhaps Reiko or Michiko, although she might have been Mitsue. Her knee-length golden tassels tickled her pink-and-carmine robe, and her double mass of hair was ribbed with segments of both red and gold paper. Wondering and dreaming, I listened through my homemade ear trumpet and caught her murmuring: It is really impossible to compare my heart to anything.
Yes, they all must have been foam from the past.
They began to dance and masquerade. That was when I realized that I had never known love or beauty before. The long red and gold stripes of Yokihi’s hair ornaments mad me explode with happiness. The Pale Lady took up a poisoned dagger and serenely glided across the floor.
If you have ever seen the wine-tinged rainbows of autumn foliage reflected in a river at sunrise you may be able to imagine how lovely it became on the air-bridge they created. As I gazed up into the blossoming hills, my heart shouted with joy, and my memories passed across the window.
Now I was pretty much finished. Lacking the funds for drunkenness, I purchased a bag of squid-flavored potato chips and set out to join the headbanded, high-cheekboned beggarmen whose heavy sweater-sleeves came halfway down their hands and who warmed themselves with cigarettes and sake as they sat playing cards and guarding their cardboard flat of eggs from other eaters. At first they threatened and abused me, but I charmed them with my paper ghosts, who glided to and fro on eerie errands a hand’s breadth above the dirty sidewalk. No one could harm or catch them; they came only to me. The autumn winds might flutter them about, but between gusts they re-formed into vibrant arrays. I made my living by sitting on a piece of cardboard while they played around me, and passersby dropped coins into my hat. And so the money fell down upon me as easily as ever.
All day I watched elegant women passing before me, silently admiring and critiquing their performances, for I had become not entirely inexperienced. One day I walked all the way to the new Kabuki-za, just to look upon the theatergoers as they waited in line. When they had all gone inside, so that I had the sidewalk to myself, I entertained myself inspecting the posters of the latest beautiful onnagatas. Then I window-shopped at the stationery establishment where I had bought Etsuko’s school uniform. Wishing to make gifts for my paper ghosts, I considered buying a pair of scissors. But which size was best? Wrinkling her nose, the clerk rushed out to the doorway and shooed me off.
I never visited the place where I used to live, but once I took my paper ghosts into a cemetery, where Yokihi danced alone for herself and me and the twilight was shining on the white characters incised in the dark glossy crowd of graves.
I missed Nakano more than I would have expected, which made me smile a little. As for Etsuko, I remembered how when she used to run into my arms her heartbeats reminded me of a ghost’s long and gentle fingers clasped together. Had some rich woman dropped a million yen in my cup, I would have wished to find the girl, and buy her more uniforms and notebooks; thankfully, this did not happen. By now those two had become a pair of painted cherry-ladies against a crimson ground, and my paper memories of them were softened by a cherry tree’s pink storm clouds on the verge of showering down its melting treasures.
In time I grew known among all the edifices from VOICE BAR to GIANT ARENA, whose hopes, like everyone’s, had been tainted by death. For a backdrop I had houses, grubby little apartment towers and glittering corporate castles, all of which looked their best in the dusk. What mortal could fail to be allured by the flower-sleeve of Lady Yokihi, especially when she let down her hair to mingle with her gold tassels? Who could remain indifferent to the sufferings and machinations of the Cloistered Emperor? When I watched the glidings of my paper warrior-ghosts with their lacquered black topknots, I pretended that I too was brave and important, and the man who each day read yesterday’s newspaper all day, pretending not to be unemployed, told me that he had begun to dream of himself in jade armor laced with black silk string. Adoring the movements of the Cloistered Emperor, the former soapland employee imagined that someday he might be invited to pay a visit to the Paper Palace. And whenever Lady Yokihi danced, the homeless women who were my neighbors seemed to become court ladies weeping behind jade curtains.
Atsumori, the flute-playing boy warrior, turned his horse in the middle of the paper river because a Genji warrior had taunted him with cowardice. He rode back to be decapitated — a fact of desperate pathos to my friend and neighbor the terminated salaryman who, unable to inform his family that he was unemployed, had long since become an emperor thin as paper, staggering in the darkness. And on the far bank, a Heike retainer whose crimson stick-body was crisscrossed with long narrow isosceles triangles of pink paper, tips pointing upward, began to draw his sleeves across his eyeless face in token of weeping. If only he had dared to rescue Atsumori, or at least die with him! Having stood ready to reward his fidelity with silver coins, which I planned to make for him by cutting out circles from a soapland advertising flyer, I now enjoyed the pleasure of despising him, while he wept and wept until we could all begin to see straw-islets in the lavender mirror of marsh water behind him. Atsumori’s head was an oval of crinkled silver paper, with a crisp black topknot. For a moment it lay in a polyhedron of pink blood. Then the Genji warrior picked it up, along with the turquoise sliver of his victim’s flute. Thus he had won two trophies. The child’s head would be displayed in the capital, against the will of the Cloistered Emperor. The flute would eventually lead the killer to the Pure Land of Enlightenment, for it uttered notes like night rain. Meanwhile the retainer, yearning and despairing, opened his belly, and the blood was as scarlet as the ribbon in a maiko’s hair. As for the killer, when he mounted his brown paper horse, his yellowish-green paper trimmings rose behind him into a ducktail.