Kusamakura (7 page)

As I scribble away, a drowsiness creeps upon me.

Perhaps the word “entranced” is the most fitting to use here. No one can remain aware in deep sleep; when the mind is conscious and clear, on the other hand, no one can be completely oblivious to the outside world. But between these two states exists a fragile realm of phantasms and visions, too vague to be called waking, too alert to be termed sleep. It is as if the two worlds of sleep and waking were placed in a single pot and thoroughly mixed together with the brush of poetry. Nature’s real colors are spread thin to the very door of dream; the universe is drawn unaltered a little way inside that other misty realm. The magic hand of Morpheus smoothes from the real world’s surfaces all their sharp angles, while within this softened realm a tiny pulse of self still faintly beats. Like smoke that clings to the ground and cannot rise, your soul cannot quite bring itself to leave behind its physical shell. The spirit hovers, hesitant yet urging to find release, until finally you can no longer sustain it in this unfeeling realm, and now the invisible distillations of the universe pervade and wreathe themselves whole about the body, producing a sensation of clinging, of yearning love.

I am wandering in this realm between sleep and waking, when the door from the corridor slides smoothly open, and suddenly in the doorway appears, like a phantom, the shape of a woman. I am not surprised, nor am I afraid. I simply gaze at it with pleasure. The word “gaze” is perhaps a little strong. Rather say that the phantom slips easily in under my closed eyelids. It comes gliding into the room, traveling soundlessly over the matting like a spirit lady walking on water. Since I’m watching from beneath closed eyelids, I cannot be sure, but she seems pale, long-necked, and possessed of a luxuriance of hair. The effect is rather like the blurred photographs that people produce these days, held up to view against lamplight.

The phantom pauses before the cupboard. It opens, and a white arm emerges smoothly from the sleeve, glimmering softly in the darkness. The cupboard closes again. The waters of the matting float the phantom back across them to the door. The sliding door closes of its own accord. Gradually I slip down into a rich, deep sleep, a state that I imagine must resemble that in which you have died to your human form but have not yet taken on the horse or ox form that is to be yours in your next life.

How long I lie there, hovering in that realm between human and animal form, I cannot tell. I awaken with the soft chuckle of a woman’s laughter sounding at my ear. The curtain of night has long since been drawn back; the world that meets my eyes is flooded with light. As I lie there taking in the sight of the sweet spring sunlight pouring brilliantly in, shadowing the bamboo latticework in the round window by the alcove, I feel convinced that nothing eerie could lurk in this bright world. Mystery has crossed back over the river of the dead and retreated once more to the limbo realm beyond.

I take myself off to the bathhouse in my night robe and dreamily float there with my face barely above the water for five minutes or so, feeling inclined neither to wash nor to leave. Why did I find myself in such a strange state last night? How extraordinary that the world should tumble head over heels like that between day and night!

Drying myself is too much of an effort, so I leave it at that and go back to the dressing room still dripping. But when I slide open the bathhouse door from within, another shock greets me.

“Good morning. I hope you slept well.” The words are almost simultaneous with my opening the door. I had no idea anyone was there, so this sudden greeting takes me completely by surprise, and before I can produce any response, the voice continues, “Here, put this on.” The owner of the voice steps around behind me, and a soft kimono is slipped over my shoulders. At last I manage “Why, thank you . . . ,” turning as I speak, and as I do so the woman takes two or three steps back.

The supreme effort that goes into describing the features of a hero or heroine has long been a determiner of a novel’s worth. Were one to enumerate all the words, in every language of East and West from classical times until today, that writers have devoted to evaluating the qualities of beautiful women, the list may well rival in length the complete canon of the Buddhist sutras. How many words would it take, I wonder, if I were to select from among this truly dismaying assemblage of adjectives those that might best describe the woman now standing three paces away, twisting her body diagonally to look at me out of the corner of her eye, comfortably taking in my astonishment and bewilderment?

In my thirty-some years I have never until this moment seen such an expression as is on her face. The ideal of classical Greek sculpture, I understand, can be summed up in the phrase “poised containment,” which seems to signify the energy of the human form held poised for action. The resonance of such a figure subtly inheres in that moment before the figure moves and changes into unguessable energies, swirling cloud or echoing thunder, which is surely why the significance of that form still reaches us across the centuries. All the dignity and solemnity to be found in the world lies hidden beneath this quality of poised containment. Once the figure moves, what is implicit becomes revealed, and revelation inevitably brings some resolution into one thing or another. Any resolution, of course, will always contain its own particular power, but once the movement has begun, matters will soon degenerate into mere sludge and squalor, and there will be no going back to the harmonious serenity of the original form. For this reason, whatever has motion is always finally vulgar. The fierce sculptures of the temple guardians that Unkei created, or the lively cartoon figures of Hokusai, both ultimately fail for this simple reason.
⁹
Should we depict motion or stillness?—this is the great problem that governs the fate of us artists. The majority of the words used down the centuries to describe beautiful women can surely also be placed in either one of these two great categories.

But when I look at the expression of the woman before me, I am at a loss to decide to which category it belongs. The mouth is still, a single line. The eyes, on the other hand, dart constantly about, as if intent on missing nothing. The face is the classic beauty’s pale oval, a little plump at the chin, replete with a calm serenity, yet the cramped and narrow forehead has a somehow vulgar “Mount Fuji” widow’s-peak hairline. The eyebrows tend inward, moreover, and the brow twitches with nervous irritability; but the nose has neither the sharpness of a frivolous nature nor the roundness of a dull one—it would be beautiful painted. All these various elements come pressing incoherently in upon my eyes, each one with its own idiosyncratic character. Who can wonder that I feel bewildered?

Imagine that a fault appears in the earth where once stillness has reigned, and the whole begins to move. Aware that movement is contrary to its original nature, it strives to return to its original immobility; yet once unbalanced, momentum compels it to continue its motion, so that now we see a form that from sheer despair chooses to flaunt the movement enforced on it. Were such a form to exist, it would serve precisely to describe the woman before me.

Thus, beneath the derision evident in her features, I sense the urge to reach out and cling. From within the superficial mockery glimmers a prudent wisdom. For all the bravado that suggests her wit and spirit would be more than a match for a hundred men, a tender compassion wells in its depths. Her expression simply has no consistency; in the appearance she presents, enlightenment and confusion dwell together, quarreling, beneath the one roof. The singular lack of any impression of unity in this woman’s face is proof of an equivalent lack of unity in her heart, which is surely owing to a lack of unity in her world. It is the face of one compelled into misfortune, who is struggling to defeat that misfortune. Unquestionably she is an unhappy woman.

Bowing slightly, I repeat my thanks.

In reply, she laughs briefly. “Your room has been cleaned.

Go and see. I’ll call on you later.” No sooner has she spoken than she twists swiftly about and lightly runs off down the corridor. I watch her go. Her hair is up in the simple butterfly-wing
ichogaeshi
style, and below the sweep of hair a white neck is visible. It strikes me that the black satin weave of the obi at her waist would be only a facing.

When I return, dazed, to my room, I see that it has indeed been beautifully cleaned. The previous night’s events still rather disturb me, so I open the cupboard just to check. Inside stands a small chest, and from the top drawer a
yuzen
-dyed soft obi is half tumbled out, suggesting that someone has seized a piece of clothing in haste and quickly departed. The upper part of the obi is hidden from view beneath alluringly gaudy clothing. To one side is a small pile of books. Topmost are a volume of the Zen master Hakuin’s sermons and the first volume of
The Tales of Ise.
¹

That apparition of the previous night may well have been real.

Idly plumping myself down on a cushion, I discover that my sketchbook has been placed on the elegant imported-wood desk, carefully laid open with the pencil still tucked between its pages. I pick it up, wondering how those poems I feverishly jotted down in the night will read the next morning.

Beneath the poem

someone has added

Because it is written in pencil, I can gain no clear sense of the writing style, but it looks too firm for a woman’s hand and too soft for a man’s. Here’s another surprise!

Looking at the next poem,

I see that the person has added below it

Beneath
is written

I tilt my head in puzzlement as I read, at a loss to know whether the additions are intended as imitations, corrections, elegant poetic exchanges, foolishness, or mockery.

“Later,” she said, so perhaps she is about to appear with my breakfast. Once she’s here, I’ll probably be able to make a little more sense of things. Happening to glance at my watch, I see it’s past eleven. How well I slept! Given the lateness of the hour, I’d be better off making do with only lunch.

I slide the right-hand screen door open onto the balcony and look out, in search of echoes of last night’s scene. The tree that I judged to be an aronia is indeed so, but the garden is smaller than I thought. Five or six stepping-stones are buried in a carpet of green moss; it would feel very nice to walk there barefoot. To the left is a cliff face, part of the mountain beyond, with a red pine slanting out over the garden from between rocks. Behind the aronia is a small clump of bushes, and beyond a stand of tall bamboo, its ninety feet of green drenched in sunlight. The scene to the right is cut off by the roofline of the building, but judging from the lay of the land, it must slope gently down toward the bathhouse.

Casting my eyes farther, I see that the mountain slopes down to a hill, which in turn sinks to an area of flat land about four hundred yards wide. This in turn dives below sea level, to emerge abruptly from the water about forty miles out, in the form of Mayajima, a small island that I guess to be less than fifteen miles in circumference. Such is the geography of the Nakoi area. The hot spring inn is tucked in against the mountainside, its garden half-embracing the cliff face. The building is a two-storied one, but here at the back, owing to the slope, it becomes a single floor. If I dangled my feet from this balcony, my heels would brush the moss. It makes perfect sense that the previous evening I thought the place to be strangely devised, as I clambered in perplexity up and down its steep staircases.

Now I open the window to the left. Before me is a wide rock, naturally hollowed out in the middle; the reflection of a wild cherry tree lies steeping in the still pool of water accumulated there from the recent spring rain. Two or three clumps of dwarf bamboo are elegantly positioned to soften the angle of the rock. Beyond stands a hedge of what looks like red-berried
kuko
bushes; the sound of occasional passing voices suggests that directly beyond the hedge lies the steep road that climbs from the beach to the hill. The gentle southward slope on the farther side of the road is planted with a grove of mandarin trees, and at the edge of the valley another large stand of bamboo shines white in the sun. I have never realized till now that bamboo leaves give off a silver light when seen from a distance. A pine-clad mountainside rises above the bamboo grove, with five or six stone steps leading up between the pines’ red trunks, so clearly visible I feel I can reach out and touch them. There must be a temple there.

I next open the sliding door that leads off the corridor to my room and go out onto the porch beyond. The railing runs around four sides of an inner garden, and across it, in the direction from which I guess the sea would be visible, stands a second-floor room. From the railing, I can see that my own room is level with this second floor—a tasteful arrangement. Given that the bathing area is below ground level, I could be said to be ensconced in a room at the top of a three-tiered tower.

The building is a large one, but aside from the room opposite, and another that is level with my railing around to the right, almost every space that looks likely to be a guest room (I know nothing of the living area or kitchen) is closed up. There must be virtually no guests here apart from myself. The outer wooden shutters remain closed over the sealed rooms even during the day, but once opened, it seems they aren’t closed again even at night. Perhaps the front door is not locked at night either. It’s an ideal place for me to happen upon in my journey to savor artistic “nonemotion.”