Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (59 page)

After my father died, I began to wonder whether my turn might come sooner rather than later. What a pity! Later would have been so much more convenient! And what if my time might be even sooner than soon? Before I knew it, I would recognize death by its cold shining as of brass. Hence in those days, I do confess, I felt sometimes angry that the treasures of sunlight escaped my hands no matter how tightly I clenched them. I loved life so perfectly, at least in my own estimation, that it seemed I deserved to live forever, or at least until later rather than sooner. But just in case death disregarded my all-important judgments, I decided to seek out a ghost, in order to gain expert advice about being dead. The living learn to weigh the merits of preparation against those of spontaneity, which is why they hire investment counselors and other fortune-tellers. And since I had been born an American, I naturally believed myself entitled to any destiny I could pay for. Why shouldn't my postmortem years stretch on like a lovely procession of stone lamps?

If you believe, as H. P. Lovecraft asserted, that all cemeteries are subterraneously connected, then it scarcely matters which one you visit; so I put one foot before the other, and within a half-hour found myself allured by the bright green moss on the pointed tops of those ancient stone columns of the third Shogun's loyally suicided retainers. Next I found, glowing brighter than the daylight, more green moss upon the stone railings and torii enclosing these square plots whose tombstones strained upward like trees, each stone engraved with its under-tenant's postmortem Buddhist name.

The smell of moss consists of new and old together. Dead matter having decayed into clean dirt, the dirt now freshens into green. It is this becoming-alive which one smells. I remember how when my parents got old, they used to like to walk with me in a certain quiet marsh. The mud there smelled clean and chocolate-bitter. I now stood breathing this same mossy odor, and fallen cryptomeria-needles darkened their shades of green and orange while a cloud slid over the sun. Have you ever seen a
lizard's eyelid close over his yellow orb? If so, then you have entered ghostly regions, which is where I found myself upon the sun's darkening. All the same, I had not gone perilously far: On the other side of the wall, tiny cars buzzed sweetly, bearing living skeletons to any number of premortem destinations. Reassured by the shallowness of my commitment, I approached the nearest grave.

The instant I touched the wet moss on the railing, I fell into communication with the stern occupant, upon whose wet dark hearthstone lay so many dead cryptomeria-tips. To say he declined to come out would be less than an understatement. It was enough to make a fellow spurn the afterlife! I experienced his anger as an electric shock. To him I was nothing, a rootless alien who lacked a lord to die for. Why should he teach me?

Humiliated, I turned away, and let myself into the lower courtyard behind the temple. Here grew the more diminutive ovoid and phallic tombs of priests. Some were incised with lotus wave-patterns. One resembled a mirror or hairbrush stood on end. I considered inviting myself in, but then I thought: If that lord up there was so cross, wouldn't a priest have even less use for me?

So I pulled myself up to the temple's narrow porch and sat there with my feet dangling over, watching cherry blossoms raining down on the tombs. The gnarled arms of that tree pointed toward every grave, and afternoon fell almost into dusk.

A single white blossom sped down like a spider parachuting down his newest thread. Then my ears began to ring—death's call.

So I ran away. I sat in my room and hid. Looking out my window, I spied death prising up boards and pouring vinegar on nails. Death killed a dog. What if I were next?

Not daring to lose time, I decided to seek a humbler grave. And right down the superhighway, past the darkly muddy rectangles of rice fields scratched with light, I discovered a wet grey necropolis upon a ridge crowded around with shabby houses. At first I wondered what it would be like to live in that neighborhood, with death right above everybody. And then I remembered that all of us do live there.

The sky had cleared well before twilight. I killed time, so to speak, in a
narrow little eel restaurant. Within the lacquered box which the old man served to me, wormlike nut-brown segments lay side by side on their bed of snow-white rice. They were delicious. I felt as if I were getting advance revenge on the nightcrawlers which would eat me someday. And I cried out to the old man: Aren't you glad we're still alive?

Sometimes, he replied, I forget about everything but paying my taxes.

By now the moon had risen. Ascending the steep path, I arrived at the thicket of gravestones and found a meager one with just a few lichen-specks on it. The name on it was nearly effaced, and three neighboring steles shaded it so effectively that I had reason to hope that this soul might not be proud. Thank goodness!

I bowed twice from the bottom of my heart, clapped my hands, and knocked upon the tomb. Right away the ghost swam out. He had a wide, pallidly smiling face, and was serenely rigid, glowing like a spray of cherry blossoms in the sun. His eyes were mirrors in which I did not see myself.

Yes? he said. Who are you? Have we met before?

I don't think so, I replied.

Well, said he, in that case I'm at a loss. I wasn't sure if I remembered you.

At first I thought him sprightly as well as spritely; his movements were as crisp as the golden characters of the Lotus Sutra marching down blue-blackness, each column ruled off with gold, each letter even both horizontally and vertically with all the others.

I asked his name, and he said: Well, I used to be— Actually, what does that matter? By the way, this moonlight is almost too bright. Doesn't it hurt you?

Not really.

Oh. I wish I could be as strong as you.

He liked to interrupt me as eagerly as raindrops leap up from stones. In his words and flights he made flashy starts, but soon began to amble uncertainly. He was an entirely friendly ghost; I can't say I disliked him.

I inquired how to avoid suffering after my death, and he flittered about like an immense carp, smiling so widely that for an instant I took alarm and wondered if he meant to eat me. I asked if I were tiring him; I offered to run away, but he said it wouldn't do any good.

What's your aspiration? I wondered, and he told me it was to lick the
sweat from a young girl's leg just one more time—he had grown too uncertain of himself to aspire higher than that.

I tried to learn whether life without consciousness might be preferable to consciousness without life; but to calculate the answers he needed to count several secret variables simultaneously upon his misty fingers, and soon lost track of where he had started. Of course he could not inscribe the sand with anyone's memorial stick, nor borrow pen and paper from me, being utterly permeable in relation to objects.

Well, then, you wouldn't be able to lick anyone's leg, I reminded him. My satisfaction, in which I could not help but bask, consisted of the fact that this ghost was dead and I alive. I was safer, more superior, less likely
ever
to be dead!

His eyes kept goggling. I asked if I would die soon.— Prune? the ghost echoed in bewilderment.

We continued to discuss the matter of suffering, and he suddenly cried out: But just now I can't quite remember what
suffering
means. So sorry! How do you spell it?

S, u . . .

Beg your pardon?
F?

S.

Are you quite sure?

He had forgotten just enough to make a conversation exasperating, but not enough for him to give up hope of communicating his thoughts, such as they were, and of listening to me, in an effort to remind himself of what life was, and perhaps even to escape, however momentarily, into some pretense of life of his own. And how I longed to escape from
him
! I would have done nearly anything to avoid becoming his younger brother. Unfortunately, it wasn't up to me. As for him, was it his fault that he wasn't alive? Many times I have seen old men go through the motions of picking up the young girls who would joyfully have let themselves be carried away in ancient days; it's as if one needs to learn over and over the lesson of loss, and even then one hopes that since the rules altered before, they might change back again. But they never do, at least not for the better; and although I sought to be as patient as I could, I increasingly resembled the ignorant, bustling child who grows annoyed when its grandfather fails to accompany its lunges to and fro.

He wanted to know the current prices of everything.— How many golden ryo? he asked. How many silver kwan?— He imagined himself to be au courant, since he had not yet forgotten those two bygone coins.

Well, I finally said, I was thinking—

Are you always thinking? interrupted the ghost with extreme interest.

Yes.

Sometimes I don't think about anything, the ghost confided.

And is that relaxing? Would you rather not think than think?

Is
relaxing
a pattern or a sound?

A pattern.

And what was it you were trying to ask me?

Never mind.

Oh, you forgot? That makes me feel better. I sometimes forget things also. Do you know why?

No.

I was hoping you could tell me why.

I'd wanted to learn to die, but instead was condemned to try unavailingly to teach a ghost to live. Did it follow that perhaps I could help him forget that he was dead if he in turn taught me to forget that I lived? No matter; I found myself ever less ambitious to ride to death in a palanquin shrine. I'd rather keep hold of my flesh, at least until rain falls in Tokyo and people run away with newspapers over their heads.

The ghost would not stop asking me questions. I finally said: Ask the grass. Ask why it lives.

What an intelligent idea! he said. He bent shyly down over a tuft, and I sneaked away. Perhaps I'd return to the cemetery where the third Shogun's lieutenants dwelled. I'd dwell again in the shade of the tall cryptomerias. From the spreading cherry tree, there'd come a pale pink rain. Didn't I possess places to go? Wasn't I a fellow who once might have been slightly in the know?

But without the ghost I quickly remembered my helplessness in this alien environment and repented of my cruelty. I had lost myself among the crowds of tombstones. Bumping accidentally against them, I discovered myself hounded by marching ghosts in laced red corset-armor, their legs wound up in white like mummy-worms, their faces phosphorescent blotches of horror. They could not really strangle me, but their touches
chilled me; my bones ached with cold. Ahead of me loomed an immense black whirling wheel—my death, no doubt. Well, well; it was going to be
sooner
! Somehow I reached the edge of the cemetery and leaped into the darkness. I fell and fell. When I came to earth, there was scarcely any pain, which made me wonder whether I had died.

Overhead hovered a familiar pallid, plump-cheeked shrine figure. The ghost had fluttered off to wait for me. He was very good at that.

What was I supposed to ask the grass? he inquired.

Ask which one of us is dead.

Dead? Is that spelled with an
x
or a
z
?

A
z.

Just a moment. I'll go find out. Actually, I was wondering the same thing.

He flew slowly away, but when he returned his flight was as long and straight as one of the bolts on a sanctuary door. He reported: The grass said just forget you're dead and then you can go on. Let's both do it.

Well . . .

But last time didn't you say that it's spelled with an
x
?

I demanded to know what he meant. The ghost sighed: Don't you remember how often you've been here?

To reach Rainy Mountain one must pass Dripping Pine, where after getting drenched with many silver drops one will hear a crow cry four times.

When Rainy Mountain is dry, even should the day be cloudy and windy, and the peak manage somehow to conceal itself within grey vapors, the mountain remains diminished by being seen, like our childhood homes which once sheltered and imprisoned us so grandly. At such hours paltriness afflicts its pines and cedars, and the spreads of blossoming cherry branches at its foot resemble nothing better than pallid scars in its dark jade flesh. Roofs, wires, aerials gash its lower reaches.

Above the gravel lot between two houses runs a mossy wall over the top of which flower mediocre shrubs beneath a yellow fence which halfway hides a wide pink cherry tree, and beyond that rise the foothills of Rainy Mountain. When the storm clouds begin to swarm, Rainy Mountain appears nearly sinister, while on sunny days the way from here to there is so ordinary that most people would rather entertain themselves at home. (To be sure, some wealthy, lonely man might extend himself so far as to to hire black-lacquered hair and a white-lacquered face in a cinnabar kimono whose metallic flowers shine like jewels; but that he can do in any teahouse by the river.) As for me, I preferred to go farther. Attached to the railroad station stands a small clean tourist office whose three-color map still delineates in a curving route of yellow dashes a self-guided promenade around the circumference of Rainy Mountain, but if you ask the stylish young woman about that, she will explain that two years ago a spring flood washed out the footbridge, which the prefectural authorities will have rebuilt by the beginning of next summer. She apologizes, then brightly recommends the geisha dances of the Three Fern School. There also happens to be a wonder-working Buddha (now retired), five minutes' walk past the hospital. If you inquire as to whether Rainy Mountain is haunted, she will clap her hand over her giggling mouth. This happened to me, and I for one was charmed.

Praying to Batoh Kannon, the horseheaded mercy goddess, I set out to
seek a ghost whom I could love; for I had recently met with disappointments, perhaps on account of my sunken eyes. It was a good day, a rainy day. The mountain could have been a cloud. I hoped and hoped through the green cloud-ribs of a pine tree in spring rain. Although she had never explored in that direction (having been transferred from Niigata just last winter), the girl from the tourist office had declined to accompany me. Smiling and bowing, she said that she must work.

I arrived at the yellow fence by the cherry tree, and seemed to spy a dashed yellow line upon the asphalt path. An old lady cycled past me, sounding her bicycle bell as politely as a cough. I wondered where she had come from, and where I was in life. Ahead, the sky was very dark. The breeze expressed the sad rattlings of sticks. When I thought ahead I grew almost afraid, and yet how I longed to do what I was doing! Whether or not I ever returned from Rainy Mountain, I knew that I would be changed; not changing would have been unendurable; even the yellow fence sickened me with sameness, never mind the world behind. All the misty summer-leafed hills of my youth, and the thunderstorm days which magnified them, now invited me to take my adventure on Rainy Mountain, however lush or eerie this might turn out; for I had been too timid or obedient to ascend them when it could have done me good. What had I grown into? And where might Dripping Pine be? Descending a minuscule dip, I reached the remnant of the footbridge. The creek being low, I easily skipped across, not disturbing a certain muted orange carp.

Tall cryptomeria trees with slender chains around their waists now outlined my way. Ahead of me, the mist held its breath. If I could see inside Rainy Mountain, would it be the same as seeing inside a cloud? This question could only be answered through love, or something else of a similar name.

At the summit of a low hill which had been invisible from the town, the path turned under a many-branched pine whose needles urinated upon me, although there was no longer any wind. Immediately afterward, a crow cawed four times. Before me rose a pyramid of greybearded mist.

Bow two times, clap two times, then bow again, all from the bottom of one's heart. This is how one is advised to behave at Rainy Mountain.

In Rainy Mountain there is a door whose dark jade shutters bear
vermilion-sashed panes, and whose hinges are engraved in crowds of flower-crowned hexagons. I bowed two times; I clapped twice; I bowed. When this door opened, a certain crow cawed three times in the trees behind me.

Within was a wooden lattice-gate. Peering through its vertical bars which had once been green and were now white-streaked like moldy meat, I could see the vermilion steps to a black door with shiny brass hinges, a black door slammed exceedingly well shut! Bowing once and then once more, I clapped the first time and the second, at which the crow cawed twice, and as soon as I had bowed once more the wooden gate opened.

Bowing and clapping before the black door, I then bowed and clapped. The crow cawed. I made my final bow. When this door opened, the ghost of my dreams flittered out.

Her eyes resembled orange slits of light in a black lantern. From her skull sprouted double tassels, as if of horsehair, banded white, then red, then darkish brown with grey streaks showing miscellaneously. Her skirt might have been slats of bamboo chained into tight vertical parallels all around the widening trunk of a giant cypress. Between her breasts, an incense-hole was smoking.

Since she now grinned at me with all her sharp black teeth, I hoped that this particular specimen of ghostly nubility was interested in me, although with ghosts one can never be sure. For that matter, how could I even be sure of myself? Not long after a young girl left me, seven doctors had diagnosed my syndrome as anililagnia, which is to say, sexual interest in older women. Well, when does that become necrophilia? If the lady happens to be a ghost, should we select a different syndrome?

Here she came, her movements as complex and asymmetrical as a Japanese garden. Just as the sheen of rain on vermilion-lacquered shrines is counteracted by the dulling down or darkening of the cloudy atmosphere, so my ardor failed a smidgen, I do confess, the instant that she unfurled her iron claws; but I reminded myself not only of my prior intention to surrender to love, but also of the evident fact that now was no time to be undiplomatic—after all, what in the Devil's name had I expected her to look like?—so I strode forward to embrace her, hooking my thumbs most conveniently on her cold ribs while her talons settled upon
my collarbones. She smelled of moss, not death. Narrowing her glowing eyes, she inclined her head to kiss me. Those teeth of hers could have nibbled my lips right off, but since she derived from a gentle species, kissing her proved no worse than pressing my mouth against a cold railing. To tell you the truth, I was reminded of the vulva of that young woman who had recently decided to leave me; visiting for old times' sake, she lay down on my bed, so I naturally slid my hand up her skirt, caressing for the sake of those same old times the perfect closed lips of the slit I used to know, at which she opened her eyes and murmured: Stop.— The ghost of Rainy Mountain uttered no such prohibition. Her claws rested ever so delicately around my throat.

She taught me how to beat the lacquered drum, and make the dead dance. When she opened her legs, I found myself looking up into the petals of a gilded lotus. She showed me what lies hid in vermilion darkness. With great kindness she presented to me the hidden opening of that crypt where the urns of our cremated hopes are buried. Entering my preordained place, I became as free as rain falling down a yellow moss-hole.

Oftentimes I fluttered out of her, after which we drifted hand in hand through the soft cool mists of Rainy Mountain where nobody else ever came. Educated into confidence, I now began to reach inside her to withdraw the urns of my hopes, one at time. The lids had been screwed down for eternity, but not far from the door to our vault, a rusty iron band ringed an immense cedar; this served for an urn-smasher. Just as most nongaseous chemical elements in our universe appear white or silvery-grey (not to mention the odd yellow, purple or gold exception), so my pulverized memory-ashes tended to resemble gunmetal, with more or less of a turquoise component; once an urn offered up a mound of granules as scarlet as ladybugs, and I wondered what that particular hope had consisted of; unfortunately, the undertaker had engraved his urns with nothing but my postmortem name, so that the only way to identify their contents would have been to taste them, a prospect of peculiar loathsomeness for me who still lived. Moreover, my sweet Rainy Mountain ghost used to hover behind my shoulder, watching these various residua depart. She might well have felt neglected had I displayed much curiosity
about my own waste-years. Affectionately she traced her claws down my back, her rickety metacarpii reminding me of long sticks rattling in the wind. In the drizzles of Rainy Mountain those heaps of urn-matter quickly liquefied and flowed away; although drops of the scarlet element persisted among the moss like menstrual blood; I almost dabbled my finger in the stuff.

Around that cedar tree, urn-shards slowly assembled themselves into a ring-shaped midden of irrelevance.

Stroking her smooth hard breasts, I learned how to pleasure her, at which she would sigh like a child blowing through a bamboo pipe, the breath which issued between her cold black teeth then taking on the odor of pickled metal. Now that she permitted me to withdraw my urns of departed substance from between her thighs whenever I pleased, I felt quite satisfied, not having considered how any such procedure might have compromised me.

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.