The Witches' Book of the Dead

by Christian Day

  He had always combed his hair over his pate from the side, which she had never really noticed until one day, while vacationing together by the sea (they swam in what was for the end of June a still miserably cold Baltic), as Nägeli was ambushed from behind by a powerful wave, he had stumbled, minced about, and had forgotten to suck in his belly. Then, when he raised his arms in greeting, laughing and spewing fountains of salt water, she had seen the shoulder-length strand of hair hanging down from his temple, limp and dripping—except for this unsavory extension of hair and some tufts distributed here and there, he was almost entirely bald. He’d looked like a circus clown who’d gotten into a moronic accident and was now sadly hoping for applause, the poor thing.

  Having said this to Amakasu, she leaves the humiliating topography of Nägeli’s sexual character unmentioned, yet she sees before her eyes the tableau following their visit to the beach—abruptly fixed by a flash of memory, there, on the bed of an otherwise nondescript hotel room, a view onto the ocean—the spontaneous manifestation of which causes her to feel intensely embarrassed for Nägeli. He had penetrated her painfully, two drops of saliva, accompanied by a short and muffled sound of moaning, went splat on her back from his mouth, and after half a minute of miserable, pathetic sex, everything was already over.

  But all men are vulnerable through their vanity and so are controllable, Amakasu argues—it’s quite simple: You simply have to twist it around such that eikyō develops, which unfortunately can only partly be translated by influence; these flaws, however, are the sole attributes that make the rather irrelevant male gender interesting in the first place, since you can get men to labor on your behalf. The less one as a woman has to do oneself, the better it is for the ostensible harmony between the sexes, he says, smiling, and then he stands up to fetch the two of them another drink, and in passing places his hand amicably on the young German woman’s shoulder. A pleasant shudder passes through Ida.

  Remembering that he has not eaten anything at all yesterday and today, Amakasu prepares a large piece of dark-brown pig liver in the kitchen. He unwraps it from the oily, opaque packing paper and lays it on the sideboard. He first takes a sharp kitchen knife from the drawer, but returns it as Westernized and imprecise after examining it, chooses a tantō from the shelf, and slices the raw meat into two equal halves, which flop away to the left and right of the knife with an obscene slump. Now he licks off the blade, almost sensually distorting his face. Sure, he cannot stand the sight of blood, but this delectable taste of iron! He rewraps the one piece, hastily wolfing down the other lobe of liver as though he were doing something illicit.

  Ida lights a cigarette, decides against it, and pokes it into the sand-filled receptacle unsmoked. The cuckoo clock strikes quarter of; no bird appears squawking in the little wooden window.

  34.

  Now at long last: the sound of an approaching car, the slamming of doors, voices, footsteps on gravel, then the sound of the doorbell, once, twice, three times (as always three times, like before, in Switzerland), now the warm, muffled sound of a suitcase being dropped on the teak floor, the familiar Ida!, there it is, that pretentious, Swiss I, drawn out slightly in the back of the throat, my goodness, it’s really him, she thinks, just now he’ll come in and toss his hat on the sofa with a flick of the wrist.

  In a fantastic mood, Emil Nägeli flings his hat onto the sofa as he walks in. Ida covers her mouth with her hand—her fiancé has grown ten years younger, his wrinkles have been magically erased (Amakasu calls out from the kitchen, unfortunately they’re out of vodka, can’t they also make martinis with shōchū?).

  Goodness, there’s a dark-brown hairpiece stuck to Nägeli’s head, he’s already bending over to kiss Ida. The tweed fabric of his sleeve grazes her cheek, as always he smells of pencil shavings, she cups his neck with outstretched hands (since, as she realizes with a tingle, she does still love him a little), he wrests himself from her, throws himself backward onto the sofa, and deftly slips off the brown wingtips (wasn’t he supposed to have removed them at the door?), which vanish beneath the coffee table, one after the other, as if they had a life of their own.

  Did she miss him terribly all these months, yes, and besides, what sort of ghastly house had they put her up in anyhow; its (he searches for the right word, shaking his head) eclectic style, which just doesn’t seem to fit at all into this elegant, sedately green street in Akasaka District, might best be described as Tudorbethan. He smirks at the heavy, medieval-looking furniture, at the phony coat of arms, look, there are even stag antlers hanging on the wall next to the dark-wood fireplace; beside that are neo-Gothic chairs whose seats are upholstered one and all in various Scottish tartans, it’s all a little bit gaudy, one does feel like one’s on a film set in this house, but wait, he’s got something for his darling, he’s really so very happy and so on and so forth.

  Over and over Ida begins to ask him why he looks so much younger, why he’s now wearing a toupee, if that’s perhaps powder and makeup or whether he’s had an operation to make his face look more pleasing, that’s the sort of thing, she wants to say, she’s learned film actresses do—for example, having their molars removed in order to seem ageless—but he doesn’t let her get a word in edgewise, as if he has to make up for their lost time together in fast-motion; he chatters ceaselessly, recounting the ship’s passage, how this glorious country has stirred him, the impressive train ride past Fujiyama, and his decision to wear a wig from now on. No, no, he’s been made up only very lightly by the hairdresser. Oh, Ida! What about you?

  No matter, he is already hurrying back to the foyer without waiting for an answer (he almost—sumimasen deshita!—collides with Amakasu, who instantly and with a steady hand raises up the tray with the three drinks) to open his suitcase and retrieve the promised gift; it is a book about Noh theater, by Ezra Pound, inscribed to Ida.

  Ida had thought the volume lost; it was given to her ten years ago when she was a very young, impressionable girl of not quite seventeen and misplaced straightaway at an outing in Ticino at which she drank more Champagne than she had planned.

  He has found the book, really and truly: pour Ida—ma Iseult assoiffée, il faudrait bien l’arroser; thus reads the dedication by Pound in his spidery hand on the first page, merci vielmal, Emil, thank you so much, wherever did you find this?

  And this, by the way, is Mr. Amakasu, she says, as the book is tossed onto a side table and immediately forgotten—her teenage infatuation with Ezra Pound is embarrassing to her in front of this Japanese man with whom she has enjoyed sexual intercourse today three times already and most abundantly yesterday and the entire week before.

  Just now in the foyer Amakasu and Nägeli have sniffed each other out in a dream anamnestically, so to speak, and assured themselves of the other’s true being. Ordinarily this is done by people of their kind in fractions of seconds, and they ignore each other from then on; the path from rebirth to rebirth is much too arduous and cruel to have to share it with other initiates. The dead are profoundly lonesome creatures, there is no solidarity among them, they are all born alone, die, and are reborn alone as well.

  Amakasu has evidently been primed for Nägeli’s anticipated arrival by a letter from Hugenberg; that the man belongs to the same species as he, moreover, makes the matter no less interesting, even though the Swiss film director seems not to harbor the slightest suspicion about Masahiko’s relationship with Ida. Amakasu has not the faintest idea where this will lead him, but does have the impression that it will be a place both wonderful and strange, and while reentering the salon, he experiences a trick of the senses that allows him for a few seconds to catch the malty primordial scent of the sea.

  35.

  Nägeli can safely unpack his things later, just this once he oughtn’t be so small-minded, Ida would so very much like to go to the cinema, wasn’t that a fabulous idea? Afterward they could grab a small bite to eat, sometimes she craves something simple like a plain lettuce salad, the entire cuisine here, with th
e exception of the fried pork schnitzel and the omelets, is just too kooky for her. Emil will soon see (as if he hadn’t long since intuited it himself on his journey) how things are done here in Japan, the magic suffusing ordinary things, one can really only get to know a country best at the movies, please, he should just say yes already.

  In the cinema then, as the theater lights dim, Nägeli’s hand reaches for Ida’s knee, and while the tip of his hastily lit cigarette glows orange-red in the white light of the projector, the hat in his lap conceals his frighteningly pitiful erection.

  Masahiko declares that the famous director, Yasujirō Ozu, operating quite like he, Nägeli, did in Die Windmühle, had the lips of the actress Mitsuko Yoshikawa expressly painted as snow-white as her whole visage, highlighting only the middle of her lower lip with a bloodred dot, as if one were dealing here with a bird of death. Her dark eyes appear to the Swiss director as devoid of life as the rubbery texture of her chalky complexion.

  She’s filmed slightly from below, just look, Amakasu says, the camera is kept at a height relative to the tatami mat. This is because there aren’t any chairs and beds in the Japanese sense of space; the usual higher-angle perspective of camera and observer is an exclusively Western way of seeing.

  While other patrons of the cinema a few rows back hiss indignantly that those down front ought to please keep quiet and not cause such disturbances, Amakasu continues that, luckily, Ozu steadfastly refuses to accept sound film, that mendacious, imperialist, Western notion, and besides, disallowing dialogue is also absolutely applicable to Japanese society. One doesn’t discuss things; that’s just barbaric.

  Nägeli begins to tune him out, leans back, cocks his head a bit as he always does in the presence of genius, and is secretly and in his Protestant manner delighted that Amakasu knows Die Windmühle.

  There is a honking outside the cinema, a siren sounds and drifts away again, and in the off-glow of the film being projected onto the screen in front of them, Nägeli wonders whether Mr. Amakasu, at whose face, by turns brightly and somberly lit, he is staring incessantly from the side—goodness, he cannot escape his charisma; there is something about the man that unsettles him deep within—whether, uh, yes, that’s right, whether Amakasu himself shouldn’t simply play the leading role in his new film.

  The picture is over, and the three retreat from the theater into the foyer amid the disapproving looks of the other cinemagoers, and Amakasu ignores the naked young red-painted woman in the farthest corner of the cinema signaling to him with her protruding tongue. Nägeli orders three glasses of sparkling wine and, after a bit of throat-clearing and foot-shuffling, asks whether the two would like to star in his film as principal actors.

  He’s planning to make a film, and that’s why he’s in Japan. Amakasu does not mention that he himself invited him via Hugenberg; he had not exactly hoped it would be this guileless child, but there you are.

  Nägeli, in any case, has thought it over long and carefully, he wants to work without a script, which indeed has never been done before, but he imagines it more or less like just taking the camera along everywhere, it’ll be a simple handheld camera, he’d shoot in natural light and follow the two of them, Masahiko and Ida, on their journeys through the city, into the streetcar, into restaurants and cafés, into museums, hotels, everywhere. Sure, right now none of this has been fully thought out yet, but one’s got to start somewhere, and so why not now, and what do they think?

  He’d need to go hiking for a few days in the hills beforehand to concentrate, go walking a bit by himself, then he’d return to Tokyo, and then they could get started.

  36.

  Back at their villa, Nägeli prepares the two Swiss 16mm Bolex film cameras, as well as the Bell & Howell device UFA had flown separately to him in Tokyo. The clasp on the housing is a bit jammed, but after a little squeezing, the cameras are loaded with their film cartridges. He cleans them with a dustcloth and first chats about how agreeable and highly intelligent this Japanese man is, even his command of German is quite outstanding, and then he relates that he’s now finally free after his father’s death, that his spirit and his art will no longer be encumbered by anything. His insufferable state of apathy has been overcome, Ida can’t imagine what a burden he’s cast off, that’s also probably why, he lies, he seems to look so much younger.

  Ida yawns like a lioness, complains of a migraine, and disappears for over an hour into the bathroom. When she has finished her evening toilette, Nägeli is lying back on the bed in strap garters, snoring, like a sluggish, blond reptile. The toupee lies beside him on the pillow, which has been faintly stained with makeup. She picks up the hairy thing and lets it slide through her fingers, shuddering imperceptibly; she gently lays it back, creeps through the bedroom down the steps to the salon, smokes several cigarettes on the sofa downstairs, empties a glass of flat Champagne, draws her knees to her chest, and yearns for Amakasu’s skillful, tender hands. If it weren’t so sad with Emil, she thinks, it would all be so very amusing.

  On the way back into the bedroom, she inadvertently rams her foot against the head of the suction spout jutting from the wall at ankle height and thereby activates the house’s central vacuum system, whose nerve-racking mechanical whooshing, welling forth from the bowels of the home, combined with the sounds of Nägeli’s fluttering snores, cheats her—it is almost insufferable—of two whole further hours of sleep.

  Having finally nodded off in the early morning, and after wandering down a long street wreathed in flowers, at the abrupt end of which she pulls open a heavy, chiseled wooden door with some difficulty, she somewhat timidly enters the realm of the dead for a very short while, that world-in-between where dream, film, and memory haunt one another, and there she hears a disembodied aspiration; it sounds to her like a sustained hah.

  37.

  The next day they drive out together in a convertible to the city’s edge, to Asaka’s new golf course. Nägeli brings along his handheld cameras. He spent the previous night, which was overshadowed by a profound feeling of embarrassment, unsuccessfully groping about on Ida.

  Translating, Amakasu reads aloud to them from the newspapers briskly rustling in the wind. They report that the seven young naval officers who had killed the prime minister had, all of them, surrendered to the authorities after it had become clear to them that their coup attempt had failed. To be sure, they had been tried right away, but waves of indignation had sloshed up throughout the whole country, and yesterday, when a delegation had cut off their pinky fingers and sent them to the government as a sign of their obsequious deference, the young people were hastily and unexpectedly acquitted. Chaplin had gone into hiding somewhere, heavily armed.

  Nägeli, having risen from the backseat of the car, Bolex in hand, films Ida at the wheel of the cabriolet and Masahiko reading from the newspaper, and he pans the camera back and forth between the two, discovering in the viewfinder (as if he were unable to see it in real life) the stain of intimacy between his fiancée and his Japanese host.

  Look, the way he lights her cigarette with a smile, how obvious it is. And now they are standing on the saturated green of the golf course, and Amakasu shows her the correct swing, knees bent slightly (Nägeli is still at it, filming, tossing the full cartridges into the cloth bag he has brought along), the iron raised to the right, the sky segmented by pretty clouds; he is standing behind her, thus, in a loose embrace, guiding her hands around the grip of the club.

  All this cannot possibly be happening, Nägeli thinks, dissembling, lowering the camera, smiling, nodding, waving, biting at a thumbnail whose crescent edge just will not come off, damn it.

  A wind whips up, and the three sit on the camel hair blanket, eating the ham sandwiches they packed, their paper wrappings tumbling over the golf course. Masahiko, in high spirits now, poking them both in the sides, amused, slaps his forehead with his palm and runs over to the parking lot to fetch the forgotten bottle of Champagne from the car.

  Nägeli looks at Ida, reach
es tenderly, almost shyly for her hand, his eyebrows raised in a feeble query, as if they could resolve right here and now between them what is still, however, in the realm of conjecture; a fathomless, yellow, trembling feeling of powerlessness has taken control of him, he who has always derided jealousy as an emotion of the bourgeoisie and who nevertheless has refused to perceive Ida as a subject in her own right, separate from him. She withdraws her hand as Amakasu trots up again. Nägeli looks at his own, which is quite moist and rubbery inside.

  38.

  The following day Nägeli is sitting in the living room of the ministerial rental villa, wringing his hands, sucking on one of his fingertips. He gets up to fetch a glass from the oaken cabinet and discovers that there is a small hatchway concealed in the cupboard, right there on the inner back panel.

  He looks around sheepishly, no one’s there (where have those two run off now?), wedges his way into the cabinet, opens the latch, and climbs through into the bowels of the house, noticing in passing that here within the wooden structure it smells as it did in those intolerable farmhouse parlors of his youth, like dust and something greasy.

  He feels as though he were suddenly behind or, rather, inside the sets of a theater. The crossbeams and braces in here are joined to one another without nails, and while realizing from this perspective that the entire house has, distastefully, merely feigned a Western ambience, he ascends the bottommost rung of a stepladder leaning there, at the top of which a bright beam of light is shining through a hole onto the opposite wall.

  He climbs all the way up and spies through the peephole into the bedroom; a painting on the wall there is daubed with the red splotches of a modern artist. Trembling, he observes the monstrous phantasm of Masahiko and Ida, writhing about naked on the bed, and he sees, over and over and over again, how Masahiko, amid her submissive cries muffled by the strip of white linen plugging her mouth, finally mounts her. Her right thigh and the top of her freckled shoulders have been bruised by the pressure of his fingers on her skin.