by Unknown
The mad heat of certainty increased with the darkness. From upstream there swayed a floating fire, accompanied by a plash of oars. The fire could be seen between the hanging ribbons of willow branches, giving off a flurry of sparks. Now came wafts of pine smoke.
The boat approached, cormorants swimming about its prow as if they pulled it, and one of the fishermen within adding more pine to the fire that blazed in the metal basket hanging over the water. Addyson watched, as if his feet had melted into the ground. The wooden vessel, the team of cormorants, the fire, the men half fire, half shadow—all this was slightly too real, so that its reality became noticeable, as with a costume drama. And this phenomenon of bird, fire, water, wood, and man swelled to a convexity of reality at precisely the point where it passed Addyson on the bank. It shrank again as it continued downstream in the eddies etched in fire on the dark water. The downstream landscape as he saw it now, his vision following and rising from the boat, was different from that he had seen before. Previously it had receded toward a horizon. Now it did not recede but rose up, with more distant things merely piling on top of nearer things, as in a scroll painting of manifold hills. There was the curve of the bridge, the wickerwork of timbers that supported it, and then the tree-clouded slopes, where the ornate but regular curves of kawara-tiled roofs were like combs artfully fixed into a coiffure. Two long-legged, splay-feathered herons rose above a layer of mist, and farther or higher still, among giddy foot-trails and asymmetrical humps, were glowing chrysanthemums of yellow, red, white, and pink, which must have been temples.
Above, the force that drew the waves of this landscape, shone the moon.
The boat disappeared beneath the bridge. And then there were sandaled footsteps up the brief steps Addyson had long ago believed so familiar. The heat was abating, replaced by a mellowness, a luxurious almost-sadness. He turned, finding his feet free again. A man in festival clothes approached, not incidentally, but as if by arrangement, someone whose fee has been paid beforehand. He nodded to Addyson, who saw he had a bamboo pole in one hand, at the end of which was a hook. The man reached up and the perspective of the landscape became stranger still, as he appeared to fish with the pole in the rippling sky, its clouds now become water weeds. The hook attached as it was meant to, and from the sky, the man lifted down the moon, a paper lantern, its hidden flame flickering in its cocoon.
The man turned to Addyson again and bowed to indicate that he was ready.
“Please, this way.”
He proceeded along the bank-top path; Addyson followed. The dust of the path, he noticed, seemed clean, as if it had been put there, every grain of it artfully arranged. Yet it was not sterile in its effect, either, as imagination may be both cultivated and fertile.
“Where are we going?” Addyson used his voice for the first time here. The sound of it redoubled the sense of his presence. He was the shadow of that voice.
“We follow the autumn moon,” said his guide, and nodded jovially to indicate the paper lantern, “to the Deer-Viewing Mansion.”
“Autumn? Isn’t it summer?”
“It’s autumn now, because we are now in the future. The future— the true future—is always autumn. But you only come to autumn through summer.”
“How can it be the future? Tomorrow never comes. Except as today.”
“No, this is tomorrow.”
“Which is the Mansion?” Addyson was increasingly eager for specifics.
The man stopped and pointed to one of the glowing efflorescences of architecture on the looming slopes, this one a little simpler than the chrysanthemums—a peony, perhaps.
“The light is so strong. It must be electric.”
“No,” said his guide. “Electricity is obsolete. What you see is not denryoku—it’s muryoku. Can you guess what it stands for?”
There was a searching amusement in the man’s eyes as he looked back at Addyson.
Addyson pursed his lips but did not answer.
“Oneiric energy,” said the guide. He laughed, then nodded. “The true future must be autumn because it is where we harvest dreams. Harvest and harness. There is so much muryoku in the autumn colors. You feel it, don’t you? Spring is hope, summer is knowing, autumn is dream.”
“And winter?”
“The end. Forgetting all things.”
They were ascending by hairpin folds of path upon path. Their vertical progress created in Addyson’s mind the layered image of a pop-up paper landscape—the precise sum of the division of the three-dimensional by the two-dimensional. But there was also horizontal progress, and it was this that had texture. For every incidental fern passed by the wayside, the fractal weave of fulfillment deepened.
Eventually, Addyson’s guide brought him to the Deer-Viewing Mansion, and Addyson recognized that he had been excluded from this place since the beginning of eternity. The interior was tasteful and well kept. Crucially, it blended the maximum of order with the maximum of imaginative license.
Addyson was escorted to what felt like an interior room, though one wall was largely taken up with a glassless window, the view from which was the opposite slope of a gorge, crowded with the chaos of branches and the colorful fertility of foliage. No wind invaded the light-swept room. The guide hung the paper lantern on a ceiling hook, bowed, then departed.
Addyson had questions, but here, in what seemed the main room of the Deer-Viewing Mansion, he felt obscurely reassured that he could answer them himself. Before him was a low table on which were arranged inkstone, ink-stick, a small bowl of water, sheets of paper, and a brush. He knelt before it, wakeful and unhurried. The large window was on his left. The water, stone, leaf, wood, earth—all of this was extraordinarily vivid. Taking it in, he felt neither warmth nor cold. He watched. As a bellows swells the flames of a fire, so the wind swelled the red and yellow leaves of the trees. Some of the leaves fell, drifting down the air with a faint slithering sound. Slower than snow, they added to the layers already fallen.
Addyson wetted the inkstone and began to grind his ink-stick. Everything was obvious, but at the moment, too obvious. It was a dragon of obviousness—in the roots of trees, in water breaking over rocks; scales, claws, smoke, air-distended wings. Such wealth of the obvious could not be reduced to ink markings.
He ground the ink for ten thousand years, watching.
Jangling and resplendent processions passed in S-shaped marches. Sprites played in the river. Tittering lovers with long sleeves chased each other between the trunks of trees, their faces, when glimpsed, like masks of unknown beasts. Grand spectacle of history was followed by scenes of the personal and solitary, whose very element was secrecy. Each thing impressed Addyson like a complete rearrangement of truth.
Then came a longer interval of stillness than was usual between these apparitions. Addyson became conscious of waiting. This was it, he realized. If he did not stay alert now he would miss that for which he had been attentive for ten thousand years. As he tried to pay attention, so he lost attention, but if he relaxed he lost attention too—there never was a finer balancing act, a more demanding acrobatic than this.
And then with an almost silent flicker, it appeared from behind a tree trunk. By what virtue of his could this have been achieved, if not luck? A deer, hesitant, twitching. It was a creature of sensitive lightning. A thing could not be more alive; here for no reason, it might disappear for none. The head tilted, and bells seemed to tinkle from within the antlers.
This lightning twitch—by this, the obvious might be conquered, and even in ink there might be fertility and life.
The ink was prepared, and now Addyson took up the brush. He charged the brush with ink. In doing so, he inhabited (capitalized) a Form.
The deer was still, as if lightning hovered, maintaining its position with the full volatility of its nature, a die thrown again and again to the number six.
Then there was a knocking, a cl
atter, sharp yet indeterminate. It was coming from the shôji that the guide had slid closed upon leaving.
The deer, miraculously, was still.
A voice came.
“Mr. Addyson? Mr. Addyson?”
That knocking again.
He wrote the first line in eel-like undulations.
Dragon, deer, kirin
The noise mounted.
“Who is it?”
“I’ve got another letter for you from Mr. Drummond.”
The deer had bolted. He turned to his page and spilt, in two verses of thirty-one syllables each, a cataclysm of ink.
“Come in,” he called, there being nothing else he could say at this moment of disaster.
The shôji slid open.
“I know what you want,” said Addyson, and he tried to take the still wet page in his fingers.
The room felt cold now, and there was a whistling, scraping sound, as if a wind clung tightly to surfaces and stirred a layer of grit. The page eluded his fingers like a reflection.
Concentrating, he saw that the paper before him was in fact a whole nest of crumpled scraps, covered in scribbles, blotched here and crossed out there. Where was the one he had just written?
His vision recovered, like rippled water returning to calm. There it was. And he could touch it. He took the sheet and turned with it to the boy, whose face he barely saw. The boy left, and it was done—the words dispatched.
The guide returned with his bamboo pole. Addyson watched as he fished the paper lantern from the ceiling. Carrying it at the pole’s end, he approached the window and stretched out into the night.
Japanese, Addyson remembered, is rich in compound words.
Hôchô—setting birds free.
Hôgyo—setting fish free.
Hôgetsu—setting the moon free?
The guide stepped back again, into the room, his pole terminating once more only with a hook. The shôji slid into place with a clack as he departed.
Over a landscape of snow, the moon shone silver.
Addyson shivered.
There were no eyes in his eye sockets. How then, did he see the moon-skull and its eyeless glow? He must see it, he thought finally, not because it was vision, but because, inside or out, even without vision, it was.
Snow buried snow.
Drummond, sitting behind a restored Edwardian writing desk, paused in his questioning of the post-boy. He had only been able to establish an uncertain but worrying picture of Addyson’s current circumstances.
“And he didn’t give you anything?” he tried again, after a sigh.
“He did, but …”
“But what?”
“I don’t think he knew what he was doing.”
“Because he was blind, you mean?”
“I don’t know. He said, ‘I can’t see the room.’ But then he said, ‘Here it is,’ just like he could see, and picked it up from a pile of paper on the floor there.”
“Picked what up?”
The post-boy brought the bag that hung from his shoulder round to the top of his left thigh and delved inside. He drew out what looked like a long and colorful envelope, one end cut open, with the flap of mouth hanging on a hinge of paper.
For a moment, Drummond experienced an unaccountable excitement.
When the boy handed him the envelope, however, he found it to be empty. Its outside surface was decorated with ethereal patterns. There was writing, but he didn’t know the language.
It looked like he might have to make the trip in person, to see what could be salvaged.
Sometimes it was necessary to take speculative action.
He hoped it was not too late.
Fat drops of cold rain fell gently outside.
On such a night, I decided to try and infuse a voice into the Parrot Stone, and after drinking down a bowl of sweet and hot kudzuyu sprinkled with macha tea powder to warm my entrails somewhat, I started out.
According to the legend, the Parrot Stone was Tamayu, the daughter of a man who was the county administrator for this region in olden times, a woman who so resented her betrothed for his inconstancy that she turned to stone. Later, perhaps because this girl had been a lover of music during life, when one spoke to the stone, it was said the speaker heard an exquisite flutelike echo.
The raindrops hit my cheeks and stole the heat from ears and fingers and toes as I walked along the night road. What a mad whim in this chilly weather! A laugh escaped me at my own nonsensical behavior. There’d be no helping it if I were, for instance, to catch cold now.
The sound of the rain blended in with the noise my own feet made crunching along on the gravel, and mud shot up, bleeding into stains here and there on my clothing. A discolored wooden signboard floated up in the dark night road; to the Parrot Stone, Nicho.
Straight ahead.
“My my, such a large frog. Sh’ll we make otsukuri of it, brother?”
A woman clad in perfect form-fitting black came out from the shadow of the sign. The rain had likely been beating down on her for quite some time; she was completely drenched, as if she had just stepped out of the bath. Long eyelashes, bewitching red lips.
I always, inevitably, got the feeling that something would appear every time I passed this way, so not being particularly surprised at the presence of this not especially human-looking woman, I was able to observe her quite closely.
Looking carefully, I saw that what had looked like black, wrinkled clothing plastered to white skin vivid in the darkness was her black hair, long and wavy. Myriad strands of surprisingly long locks were twined around her body. I could see something like a white collar beneath the hair, so I assumed she was not completely naked, but just barely. Brilliant red nipples pushed up against the thin fabric and peeked out from the gaps in the flowing black hair.
“Where’re you off to now, brother? Up for a little fun? My place’s just ahead there.”
“I thought I might go over to the Parrot Stone for a bit.”
“How ’bout after that, hmm?”
As she murmured in a strangely hoarse voice, the woman leaned toward me, almost pushing her body into mine. She was not so heavy, but her skin was quite cool. Perhaps because of the rain, or …
I touched her hair and found it a little slippery. Checking my fingers in the darkness, I saw that the pads of my fingertips were coated with white threads.
She was perhaps a large snail spirit or similar, or at the very least, a fox or tanuki transformed, since she did not have a tail. As I ran through all sorts of ridiculous conjectures, I even dared to consider accepting the woman’s invitation.
“Say.”
I hesitated slightly, and she asked me, “What, brother?”
“Do you suppose that frog sashimi you mentioned earlier would be good?”
“Try it an’ see.”
Dragged by the hand of an essentially naked woman, I walked along and came to a house built like a samurai residence in the grove near a stone monument engraved with nicho. A small sign hung there, announcing koiike ryotei—Carp Pond Dining.
We slipped through the entrance and saw several dried carp hanging under the overhang; I supposed that was where the place got its name. Either way, no matter what kind of monster she might have been, that she would have a restaurant in a place like this was odd. If it had been built in a place with a bit more passing foot traffic, some whimsical types might have come along, and the place could have thrived.
I was shown to a tatami room, where a bottle of hot sake was waiting for me. Rose-scented smoke drifted up from the white porcelain censer placed in the tokonoma alcove.
“Make y’self comfortable.”
After kneeling to press straightened fingers to the floor and lowering her head in a bow, beads of water dripping from her hair the entire time, the half-naked woman with the lon
g black locks quickly pulled the sliding fusuma door shut and went off somewhere.
Ever so timidly, I poured myself a drink and brought the sake to my mouth. Perhaps because I had walked here in the cold rain, the heated sake slid down my throat and warmed my body.
“Good sake.”
After I had drained two bottles, the fusuma abruptly slid open, and the woman from before entered the room, attired in jade green.
Despite the fact that her clothing was dry and her hair arranged differently from when we first met, an ornate hairpin holding it now, her hair was still soaking wet as it had been before.
I did think there was really no reason it could not be dried instantly, no matter how wet it might have been, given that she had such sorcery as to be able to make a restaurant appear in a place like this where there was nothing.
The woman pulled up the sleeve of her kimono, stuck her left hand in, and pulled from her armpit young sweetfish and shellfish, which she then caught with lacquered chopsticks and pressed into my mouth. Under no circumstances could I eat these raw, so I communicated to the woman that it might be kind of her to pass them over a fire, as I wiped away the scales and shellfish innards stuck to my tongue.
After turning a puzzled face my way, the woman stood and again went off somewhere.
I lapped up what little sake remained, and a small tray suddenly appeared before my eyes.
“This’s the frog otsukuri.” A voice identical to the woman’s rang out from somewhere in the room.
Was this what they called frog in the world of the spirits? On the four-legged tray, all I could see was skin that had been lightly peeled off a human face.
The face’s age was perhaps in the mid-forties. A shadow of a beard grew, and there was a gash around the eyebrows. The lips were thick and cracked.
Still, how was it even possible to peel the skin of a face off so cleanly and not take along with it a bit of the underlying flesh?