It goes without saying that the juxtaposition of an old man with an amorous-looking young maiden struck me as most peculiar, although that was not what made me call them “eerie.” No, it was the elaborate craftsmanship of the brocade that had been carefully executed and stood in stark contrast to the artlessness of the background of the portrait. White silk had been used to create a feeling of depth and to depict even the tiniest wrinkles on the man’s face. Strands of human hair had been woven one by one into the material for the girl’s hair, which was coiffed like that of a real person. Doubtless, the hair on the old man’s head was also genuine and had been applied with equal care. The seams of his suit were realistically cut and sewn, and the buttons—not one of them bigger than a grain of millet—attached in all the right places. The swell of the girl’s bosom, the elegantly sensuous curves of the area about her thighs, the splash of scarlet crepe, the glimpse of flesh tones, the nails that grew from her fingertips like sea shells—all in all, the raised brocade was so meticulously crafted that, were one to inspect it with a magnifying glass, he’d see the craftsman included every pore and dewy hair.
I had seen raised brocade work only once before in the shape of faces of Kabuki actors mounted on battledores used at New Year’s. While some of the actors’ faces were elaborately designed, they were no comparison for this portrait, which was so minutely crafted. The brocade portrait of the old man with the pretty young girl was probably the work of a true master of the art. Still, that was not what I found eerie.
Given the age of the painting and the paint flaking here and there, the materials used to make the girl’s red kimono and the old man’s black velvet suit had faded to the point where they were a pale shadow of how they originally looked. Nonetheless, the two figures retained an indescribable—indeed almost lethally poisonous—quality about them. Their faces possessed a vitality that glowed like a burning flame and seared its way deep into the viewer’s eye. Still, that is not what was particularly eerie about it.
Forced to describe it, I would have to say I felt the two people in the portrait were still alive.
There are only one, maybe two, moments in a performance of the Bunraku puppet theater when a master puppeteer succeeds in breathing the breath of a god into a puppet and making the doll truly come alive. Even then, such moments last for a mere second or two. Just like the puppet that comes momentarily alive on the stage, the brocade figures appeared to have been affixed to the backdrop of the painting at the very moment when they were most alive and before the breath of life could escape from them. It looked as though they would go on living there forever.
When the man on the train saw the startled expression on my face, he gave a shout for joy. He sounded so confident about what he had to say. “Aha, I think you are finally getting my point!”
As he spoke, he took out a key and carefully unlocked a black leather case that hung from his shoulder. He removed an ancient pair of binoculars from the case and offered them to me.
“Take a look at the painting through these. No, you’re too close where you are now. Excuse me for ordering you about, but would you mind trying it from over there? Good. That should be about right.”
It was a most peculiar request, but I did as I was told because curiosity was getting the best of me. I did as the man asked. I got up from my seat and walked five or six paces. The man grasped the frame in both hands and held it up to the overhead light in the car so that I could see it better. As I look back on it now, I think what a strange spectacle it was! Why, it was sheer madness.
The binoculars appeared to have been imported to Japan thirty or forty years earlier. They resembled the ones we often saw depicted on signs at the optician’s office when we were children—drawings of magnifying glasses with irregularly shaped prisms. Much like the suit of clothes on the old man in the painting, they had a classic, nostalgic look about them. The brass backing on the case shone in places where the leather was worn from frequent use.
I turned the binoculars over in my hands and fiddled with the adjustments out of sheer fascination. By and by I raised them to my eyes with both hands. It was then that all of a sudden—and I do mean suddenly—the man on the train gave such a shout that I almost dropped them.
“No! Don’t! You’ve got them backwards. You mustn’t look through them backwards. You mustn’t.”
He was white as a sheet. His eyes were as big as saucers, and he was frantically waving his hands. Why was it so awful to look through the binoculars backwards? I was puzzled by the old man’s strange behavior. It made no sense.
“Oh, I see….Yes, I’ve got them turned around.”
I did not give much attention to the peculiar expression on the man’s face because I was so intent on looking through the binoculars. I turned them around, quickly lifted them to my face, and examined the people in the brocade picture.
As I focused the lens, and the two circles of light slowly blended into one, the image, which initially was like a vague rainbow, grew sharper. The upper half of the girl’s torso from her breasts to the top of her head loomed surprisingly large. It filled my entire field of vision, as if there were nothing else in the world to see.
It is difficult for me to convey the manner in which the image presented itself because I have not witnessed anything like it before—or since. The best I can do is to describe a similar kind of feeling. Perhaps it can be likened to viewing a pearl diver from the side of a boat after she dives into the sea. While at the bottom, her naked body looks exactly like swaying sea grasses on account of it being filtered through the complex undulations of the layers of blue water. It moves in unnaturally supple ways. The outline of it is out of focus, and the woman diver takes on the whitish figure of a ghost. But as she rises smoothly and quickly toward the boat, the layers of dark blue water fade and lose their rich color. Her shape becomes clearly visible and distinct, and when her head finally pops above the surface, it is like one’s eyes have suddenly opened after a deep sleep. The white ghost of the watery depths reveals herself in her true form as a human being. That’s how the girl in the painting looked to me as I peered through the binoculars. She began to move like a life-size human being.
Another world existed at the opposite end of the old-fashioned, nineteenth-century prism of the binocular lenses. It was a world quite apart from anything we might imagine today. It was the world in which the erotic young woman with the yuiwata hairdo and the white-haired man in the old-fashioned suit lived out their strange lives. I knew it was wrong of me to spy on them, yet I felt compelled to. It was as if I were made to do so by a worker of spells and magic. As I look back on it now, it was with the strangest, most inexplicable feeling that I gazed upon the bizarre world I saw in the painting. It was as though I were possessed.
No, it was not that the girl moved physically. But my overall impression of her was drastically different from what I had seen with my naked eye. Seen through the lenses, she brimmed with life. Her pale face was slightly flushed with a touch of peach, and a heart beat within her breast. (I actually heard it beating.) It seemed to me that she generated a vitality so intense that it penetrated through the layers of her kimono.
After I let my eyes run the full length of her body, I turned my attention to the happy-looking, white-haired man. He too was alive inside the world of the binoculars. He looked pleased to have his arm around a young woman who looked forty years his junior. At the same time, it was strange that the hundreds of wrinkles on his face were born, it seemed, not of happiness but of sorrow. That may have been because I was standing too close—a distance of a mere foot away. As a result, his face looked excessively large. But the longer and more carefully I studied it, the more convinced I became that the peculiar expression on his face was one of fear and bitterness.
I began to feel I was having a nightmare. To look through the binoculars any longer became unbearable. Without thinking, I lowered them. I let my eyes run wil
dly over my surroundings. Yes, I was still aboard the railway car of a passenger train as it made its way through the lonely night, and the brocade portrait and the man who held it looked just as they had before. Outside the train window everything was pitch dark. I heard the monotonous repetition of the wheels on the train tracks—just as before. I felt sure I’d awakened from a nightmare.
“You, my good sir, have a very peculiar look on your face, if I may be so bold as to say so.”
The man put the picture by the window, sat down, and then motioned with his hand for me to sit in the seat across from him. He looked deep into my face.
“Something’s gone wrong with my head,” I said. “It’s gotten all fogged up.” I meant my reply to serve as a cover for my feelings of awkwardness.
He was hunched in his seat, and he let his long, thin fingers fidget atop his knees as if he were tapping out a secret code as he thrust his face closer to mine. In the faintest of whispers he said,
“They’re alive, aren’t they?”
He bent still farther forward as if he had another, even more important, message to impart. He looked into my face with eyes so wide open and glimmering I thought they might bore their way into my head.
“Would you care to hear their story?” he asked in a whisper.
I wondered if the swaying of the train and the clatter of the wheels kept me from hearing him correctly.
“Did you say ‘their story’?”
“That’s right—‘their story,’ ” he replied in a whisper. “Although it’s really the story of only one of them, the white-haired old man.”
“A story from his youth?” I found myself saying the most uncharacteristic and odd sort of things that night.
“He was twenty-five at the time.”
“I’d be honored if you would share it with me.”
I did not hesitate. I urged him on much as one asks to hear a story about a real, live human being. The wrinkles on the man’s face deepened. He seemed delighted at my reply.
“Aha, then you will listen to it, won’t you?”
With that he began to tell his singularly strange and wondrous tale.
“I remember it precisely because it was the most unforgettable moment in my life. My older brother got to looking like that,” he said, pointing to the old man in the picture, “on the night of April 27, 1895. That was the spring of the twenty-eighth year of Meiji. At the time my brother and I were still living with our parents. The house was in the third chōme of Nihonbashi-dōri. Our father was a merchant who ran a dry goods store. The events of the story took place not long after the ‘Twelve-Story Tower’—that’s what people called it in the vernacular—was erected in Asakusa, the site of the famous temple, arcade, and amusement district in the old part of Tokyo. The tower’s real name was Ryōunkaku, ‘The Cloud Scraper,’ and it was the tallest building in Japan at the time. My brother loved to climb the steps to the top of it every day. He was one of those people who never tired of newfangled gadgets, especially exotic items imported from abroad. Take this pair of binoculars, for instance. He found them in the storefront of a strange-looking curio shop in Chinatown in Yokohama. He was told they once belonged to the captain of a foreign ship. He paid what at the time, he said, was an exorbitant sum to get hold of them.”
Whenever the man said “my older brother,” he would cast a glance in the direction of the man in the painting, or he would point to him as if his brother were sitting next to him. He had confused his actual brother, who existed in his memory, with the white-haired gentleman in the picture. In fact, the way he talked made me feel as if a third party were present—and that the brocade figures in the painting were alive and listening to him tell their story. Still stranger was the fact that I didn’t find this the least bit odd. Somehow or other we had transcended the laws of nature and had entered a different world altogether—a world out of sync with our own.
“Did you ever climb the Twelve-Story Tower? Ah, you didn’t! That’s too bad. I wonder, what magician of an architect built it. It was a truly remarkable and unusual building. An Italian engineer designed the facade, you know. Think about it. Back in those days the amusement park in Asakusa was known for the Human Spider Sideshow…the Women Fencers…acrobats who balanced themselves on large balls…tops that danced on fountain sprays…and all kinds of peep shows. The most exotic exhibit was a model of Mount Fuji called ‘The Maze,’ and then there were the ‘Hidden Cedars of Yajin’ too. But that was the ultimate in what the park had to offer, in those days. And that’s why, my friend, you’d have been taken by surprise to find an unbelievably tall brick tower had suddenly shot up into the air one day. At over ninety feet, it was almost a city block long in height. It was incredibly tall, and on top of the tower was an octagonal platform shaped like a pointed Chinese hat. All you had to do was find a slight rise anywhere in Tokyo, and you could see what everyone called the ‘Red Ghost.’
“As I was saying, it was in the spring of 1895 that my brother came into possession of the binoculars. Not long after that, a change seemed to come over him that affected him both physically and mentally. Father would say, ‘Why, the fool’s gone mad.’ He was quite worried. As you can imagine, I too was devoted to my older brother, and his odd behavior also drove me to distraction. Perhaps I should explain that he virtually stopped eating. He never talked to anyone in the house. He shut himself up in his room and did nothing but brood. He became terribly gaunt, and his face took on the gray pall of someone suffering from tuberculosis. Only his eyes moved—he watched us like a hawk. Of course, he didn’t have the best complexion to begin with, but it was sad to see him grow so pale. But even in this weakened state, he left the house every day without fail as if he were going to work. He left around noon and stayed out until dusk. He wouldn’t say a word if we asked where he was going. Mother got quite upset. She tried every possible means to get him to reveal the source of his depression, but he never said a word. Things continued like this for almost a month.
“Then one day I secretly followed him to find out exactly where he was going. We were all so worried, and I did it at my mother’s request, you see. The day was overcast and unpleasant like today. My brother left shortly after noon with the pair of binoculars slung over his shoulder and wearing a new Western-style suit made of black velvet. He himself had the suit tailored, and black velvet was considered extremely fashionable or ‘high collar,’ as people said in those days. He ambled toward the horse-drawn tramway that ran on Nihonbashi-dōri. I followed him so as not to be seen. Are you following me, my friend?
“My brother waited for the tram bound for Ueno and leapt aboard it when it arrived at the stop. I couldn’t follow him on the next car like you can do today because there weren’t many streetcars back then, you see. I had to use a bit of money that Mother had given me to hire a rickshaw. It is no great feat for a rickshaw runner to keep a tram in sight if he has any strength at all. That’s how I was able to follow my brother.
“When he got off, I left the rickshaw and went on foot for a distance. Wouldn’t you know, he led me to the famous Temple of the Goddess of Mercy in Asakusa. He passed through the gate to the temple—with its two big, glaring guardian kings—but then he skipped the temple altogether and headed straight into the crowd that swirled around the sideshow stalls behind the main hall of the temple. It was like he was parting the waves as he walked. He passed under the stone gate of the Twelve-Story Tower, and paying the admission fee, he disappeared under the sign at the entrance that read ‘Ryōunkaku—the Cloud Scraper.’ Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought he was coining here day after day. I was flabbergasted. I wasn’t even twenty at the time. I still thought like a child. I got the crazy idea in my head that my brother had gotten bewitched by the Red Ghost of the Twelve-Story Tower.
“Our father had taken us there once, and we had climbed the steps to the top. But I had never gone back. I had a strange feeling abo
ut the place, but there was my brother, and he was climbing the stairs. What could I do but follow him, staying one dimly lit story behind? The windows along the stairs were tall and skinny, and the brick walls very thick. That made the tower as cold as a cellar. Japan was in the midst of a war with China, and oil paintings of the principal battles had been hung along the walls in a long, endless row. At the time oil paintings were still quite rare in Japan. Japanese soldiers yelled as they charged, their faces as fearsome as wolves. Using bayonets affixed to their rifles, they gouged out the innards of the enemy. The writhing purple-faced and purple-lipped Chinese troops used both hands to staunch the heavy flow of blood that spurted from their bodies. Decapitated pigtailed heads flew through the air like balloons.
“Such were the scenes portrayed in the unspeakably garish and blood-drenched paintings that glowed in the dim light that filtered through the windows of the tower. Meanwhile, the gloomy set of stone stairs continued to wind like a snail’s shell endlessly up and up alongside the paintings and windows.
“There were no walls to the platform atop the tower. There was only the octagonal railing that created a walkway with a spectacular view. When I finally made my way to the top of the stairs and the darkness suddenly gave way to bright light, I was startled at how much time I had spent in the dark before reaching the platform. The clouds in the sky appeared low enough to reach out and touch. As I looked at the city, the roofs of Tokyo were like trash that had been raked together into a big pile. Meanwhile, the battery along the bay at Shinagawa reminded me of tiny landscape stones arranged in a bonsai tray. I felt dizzy as I dared to look down. I could see the great hall of the temple at the bottom of the tower. The sideshow stalls looked like small toys. All I could see of the people walking below were their heads and feet.
The Big Book of Classic Fantasy Page 139