Kusamakura (12 page)

When the woman appears once more beyond the doorway, I have just such an urge, to call her back and save her from the depths of unreality—but when her dreamlike form glides across the three-foot-wide space before my eyes, I find myself speechless. The next time, I decide, but then once more she slips past. Why can’t I speak? I wonder, and as I wonder she passes again. She passes without the least show of awareness that someone might be watching, or might be gripped by anxiety for her. She passes in seeming indifference to the likes of me, neither burdened by my fears nor pitying me for them. As I watch, summoning myself again and again to call, the clouds at last began to spill the moisture they have so long withheld, and soft threads of rain close their melancholy curtain about that distant form.

It’s cold. Towel in hand, I set off down to the bathhouse.

After disrobing in the little changing room, I descend the four steps that bring me into the large bathroom. There seems to be no dearth of local stone. The bathroom floor is paved with granite; in the middle a bathtub the size of a substantial tofu seller’s vat has been sunk about four feet into the ground, and unlike a normal tub, it too is lined with stone. The place has a name as a hot spring, so presumably the water contains a variety of mineral elements, but it is perfectly clear and thus a pleasure to step into. Lying here in the tub, I even take an occasional experimental sip, but it has no particular taste or odor. The water is reputed to have medicinal qualities, but as I haven’t bothered to ask, I have no idea what ailments it cures. I suffer from no particular illness, so it hasn’t occurred to me to wonder what the water’s practical value might be. The only thing that comes into my head as I lower myself into the tub are the lines from Po Chu-i’s poem, “Softly the warm spring waters / bathed the white beauty’s skin.” Whenever I hear the words “hot spring,” I taste again the deep pleasure that these lines evoke, and indeed it seems to me that no hot spring is of the least value unless it can produce in me precisely the sensation summed up in these lines. My sole requirement for a hot spring, you might say, is that it fulfill this ideal.

Once I am in the deep bath, the water comes up to my chest. I can’t tell from whence it issues, but it is continually flowing gently out over the edge of the tub. The stone floor never has a moment to dry, and the warmth of it underfoot fills my heart with a tranquil happiness. Outside, rain is falling—at first gently enough merely to haze the night, delicately imparting a subtle moisture to the spring air, but slowly the drops from the eaves begin to fall more rapidly, with an audible
drip, drip
. A thick steam fills every corner of the bathhouse to the very ceiling, so dense that it must be seeking a way out through any gap or knothole, however small, in the wooden walls.

Chill autumn fog, a spring mist’s serenely trailing fingers, and the blue smoke that rises as the evening meal is cooked—all deliver up to the heavens the transient form of our ephemeral self. Each touches us in its different way. But only when I am wrapped, naked, by these soft spring clouds of evening steam, as now, do I feel I could well be someone from a past age. The steam envelops me but not so densely that the visible world is lost to view; neither is it a mere thin, silken swath that, were it to be whipped away, would reveal me as a normal naked mortal of this world. My face is hidden within voluminous layers of veiling steam that swirl all about me, burying me deep within its warm rainbows. I have heard the expression “drunk on wine” but never “drunk on vapors.” If such an expression existed, of course, it could not apply to mist and would be too heady to apply to haze. This phrase would seem truly applicable only to this fog of steam, with the necessary addition of the descriptive “spring evening.”

I pillow the back of my head on the rim of the bathtub, relax every muscle, and let my weightless body float in the translucent water. My soul too drifts lightly, like a jellyfish. When I am in this state of mind, the world is an easy place to inhabit. You unbar the doors of common sense that lock up the mind, and fling open the heart’s barriers of worldly attachment. What will be will be, I think, afloat here in the water, at one with the surrounding medium. No life knows less suffering than the life of that which flows, and being in the midst of flow, with the very soul afloat on its waters, is an even finer thing than being a follower of Christ himself. Seen in this light, even a drowned body becomes an essentially elegant, aesthetic object. I think the poet Swinburne, in one of his poems, wrote of the happiness felt by a drowned woman. Looked at thus, Millais’s painting of Ophelia, which has always somehow disturbed me, is in fact a work of considerable beauty. I have long wondered why he chose such an unpleasant scene, but now I see just why it works as a picture. There is undoubtedly something inherently aesthetic about a figure drifting or sunk, or half afloat and half sunk, lying at ease upon the flow. If you add an abundance of herbs and flowers along the banks, and depict the water and the face and clothes of the floating figure in serene and harmonious colors, there you have your picture. And there is such peace in the expression of that floating girl that it almost belongs to the realm of myth or allegory. Of course, if she were depicted writhing in a spasm of agony, it would quite destroy the spirit of the work, but on the other hand an utterly unalluring and indifferent expression would convey no trace of human feeling. What kind of face would work? I wonder idly. Millais’s Ophelia may well be successful on its own terms, but I suspect that his spirit and mine inhabit different realms. Millais is Millais, I am me, and I feel the urge to try painting an elegant picture of a drowned corpse after my own fancy. But conceiving of the face I want for it isn’t such a simple thing.

Still suspended in the water, I next try my hand at composing a eulogy to the drowned figure.

I am floating there aimlessly, intoning these lines softly to myself, when from somewhere I hear the plucked notes of a
shamisen
. Now, for a man who calls himself an artist, it’s embarrassing to confess that I have almost no notion of matters to do with the
shamisen;
my ears have scarcely ever registered the difference between one modal tuning and another. But listening idly to the sound of those distant strings makes me wonderfully happy, lying here in a hot bath in a remote mountain village, my very soul adrift in the spring water on a quiet vernal evening, with the rain adding to the delight of the occasion. From this distance I have no idea what piece is being sung or played, which too holds a certain charm. But judging from the relaxed timbre of the notes, it might be something from the repertoire of the great blind
Kamigata
performers, played on a thick-necked
shamisen.

When I was a child, a sake shop by the name of Yorozuya stood outside our front gate. On quiet spring afternoons the daughter of the establishment, a girl called Okura, would always take up her
shamisen
and practice the old
nagauta
songs she was studying. Whenever Okura began to play, I would slip out into the garden to hear her. We owned a plot for growing tea, around forty square yards, in front of which, to the east of the guest room, stood a row of three pine trees. They were tall trees, about a foot in girth, and the interesting thing was that they were visually pleasing only as a group, not individually. The sight of them always made me happy as a child. Beneath the pines crouched a garden lantern of rusted black iron on a slab of some kind of red rock, grim and immovable, like an obstinate little old man. I used to love to gaze at it. Around this lantern the nameless grasses that had pushed up through the mossy earth tossed fancy-free in the world’s fickle winds, casting their scent and taking their pleasure in their own sweet way. I discovered a place to squat among these grasses, a space just big enough for my knees to fit, and my habit at this time of year was to go and sit there, absolutely still. Each day I settled down beneath those pines, glaring back at the grim little lantern and sniffing the scent of the grasses, as I listened to Okura’s distant
shamisen.

Okura must by now be well into marriage, and her face across the sake shop counter would be that of a solid householder. Do she and her husband get along well? Do the swallows still come back each year to those eaves, their busy little beaks laden with mud? Since that time I have never been able to separate in my imagination the sight of swallows and the smell of sake. Are those three pines still there, forming their elegant configuration? The iron lantern has certainly disintegrated by now. Do the spring grasses remember the boy who used to squat among them? No, how would they now recognize someone who even then passed only mutely through their lives? Nor, surely, do they retain any memory of the daily echo of Okura’s voice as she sang “The Hemp Robe of the Mountain Monk,” accompanying herself on the
shamisen.

Those plucked notes have spontaneously recalled for me a vision of the nostalgic past, and I am transfixed, once again the artless boy who inhabited that world of twenty years ago—when suddenly the bathhouse door slides smoothly open.

Someone’s come in, I think, turning my eyes to the doorway as I float. My head is resting on the rim farthest from the door, and the steps leading down to the bathtub are diagonally visible to me about twenty feet away. But my searching eyes still cannot discern any figure there. I wait alertly, hearing only the sound of the raindrops along the eaves. The notes of the
shamisen
have ceased without my noticing.

A long moment later a form appears at the top of the steps. The large bathhouse is lit by a single small lamp hung from the ceiling, so even if the air were free of steam, it would be hard to make out anything clearly at this distance; now, with the thick steam held down by the evening’s fine rain and prevented from escaping, I cannot discern the identity of the standing figure. Unless it descends one step and its foot goes to the second, and the full light of the lamp bathes it, addressing this figure as either man or woman is impossible.

The dark shape takes a step down. The stone seems velvet soft; indeed, to judge by the sound alone, one could easily believe the shape hasn’t moved at all. But now the outline swims hazily into view. Being an artist, my senses are unusually acute when it comes to the human frame. The moment the ambiguous figure moves, I understand that the person in the bathroom with me is a woman.

Before I can decide, as I float there, whether to warn her of my presence, the woman has appeared in her fullness before me. As I see her there, deep within the warm brimming steam that the million soft particles of light have tinged a hazy pink, her black hair drifting about her like a cloud, and her body held poised and erect, all thoughts of politeness, decorum, and moral conduct flee my mind; I am gripped by the single fervent conviction that I have discovered the subject for a splendid painting.

I cannot speak for classical Greek sculpture, but certainly those nudes that contemporary French artists are so committed to painting give me clear evidence of a striving to depict the blatant splendor of the human flesh, as well as keen disappointment at the lack of any real grace and refinement in the depiction. At the time I merely registered the fact that these works are somehow vulgar, but I realize now that I have all this time been troubled by my failure to understand the reason for their lack of taste. If the flesh is clothed, the beauty of it is hidden; but unless it is hidden, it becomes vulgar. Today’s artists of the nude do not limit their skills to depicting the vulgarity of the unhidden; they are not content simply to present the human form denuded of its clothes. They do their best to thrust the naked figure out into the world of the fully dressed. They forget that being dressed is the normal state of man, and they attempt to bestow complete authority on the naked form. In their eagerness to cry out to the viewer, “Look, here is a nude!” they push beyond all natural bounds. When technique reaches such extremes, people are likely to judge it as a vulgar coercion of the viewer. The attempt to make a beautiful thing appear yet more beautiful only detracts from its intrinsic beauty. “Riches breed loss,” as the old saying about worldly affairs goes.

Reverie and innocence signify composure of mind, which is a necessary condition for painting, poetry, and indeed literature in general. The greatest evil in our present age of art is that the tide of civilization has swept artists along on its crest, goading them to an incessant state of pettiness and fussiness. The nude in art is a good example. The city has what are known as geisha, who trade in the art of flirtation and the erotic. In their dealings with the client, their only expressions are those calculated to make themselves appear as attractive as possible to him. Year after year the catalogs of our galleries are filled with nude beauties who resemble these geisha. Never for an instant do they forget their nakedness; indeed, their flesh squirms with the effort to display it to the viewer.

The graceful beauty before my eyes at this moment has about her not one jot of this crude worldliness. Normal people who divest themselves of their clothes thereby lower themselves to the baser realm of human existence, but she is as natural as a figure conjured from the cloudy realms of the age of the gods, innocent of any necessity for clothes and draperies.

The warm steam that is inundating the room continues to pour forth even though the room is already flooded with it to fullness. In the spring evening, the room’s light is shattered and diffused into semitransparency, all asway in a world of dense rainbows, and from these cloudy depths, hazily, the pale figure gradually swims into view. Even the blackness of her hair is softened to the point of obscurity. Look at the contours of that shape!