The Melancholy of Mechagirl (10 page)

30. Who stretched the plum-colored screen with silver tigers leaping upon it down the very narrow line separating the halves of the house? For that matter, who built the House of Second-Hand Carnelian? Sazae-Onna knows, but she doesn’t talk to anyone.

31. Yuki-Onna came to visit the Jar of Lightning. They had been comrades in the army of storms long ago. With every step of her small, quiet feet, snowflakes fell on the peach grove and the Nothingness River froze into intricate patterns of eddies and frost. She wore a white kimono with a silver obi belt, and her long black hair was scented with red bittersweet. Everyone grew very silent, for Yuki-Onna was a Kami and not a playful lion or a hungry Kirin. Yuu trembled. Tiny specks of ink shook from his badger bristles. He longed to write upon the perfect white silk covering her shoulders. Hone-Onna brought tea and black sugar to the Snow-and-Death Kami. Snow fell even inside the house. The Noble and Serene Electric Master left its jar and circled its blue sparkling jagged body around the waist of Yuki-Onna, who laughed gently. One of the bears on the other side of the peach grove collapsed and coughed his last black blood onto the ice. Yuu noticed that the Snow-and-Death Kami wore a necklace. Its beads were silver teeth, hundreds upon thousands of them, the teeth of all of winter’s dead. Unable to contain himself, Yuu wrote in the frigid air:
Snow comes; I have forgotten my own name.

32. Yuki-Onna looks up. Her eyes are darker than death. She closes them; Yuu’s words appear on the back of her neck.

33. Yuu is unhappy. He wants Sazae-Onna to love him. He wants Yuki-Onna to come back to visit him and not the Noble and Serene Electric Master. He wants to be the premier calligrapher in the unhuman half of Japan. He wants to be asked to join Namazu’s dice games. He wants to leave the House of Second-Hand Carnelian and visit the Emperor’s island or the crystal whale who lives off the coast of Shikoku. But if Yuu tries to leave his ink dries up and his wood cracks until he returns.

34. Someone wanted a good path between the human and the unhuman Japans. That much is clear.

35. Sazae-Onna does not like visitors one little bit. They splash in her pond. They poke her and try to get her to come out. Unfortunately, every day brings more folk to the House of Second-Hand Carnelian. First the Guardian Lions didn’t leave. Then Datsue-Ba came back with even more splendid clothes for them all, robes the color of maple leaves and jewels the color of snow and masks painted with liquid silver. Then the Kirin returned and asked Sazae-Onna to marry him. Yuu trembled. Sazae-Onna said nothing and pulled her shell down tighter and tighter until he went away. Nine-Tailed Kitsune and big-balled Tanuki are eating up all the peaches. Long-nosed Tengu overfish the river. No one goes home when the moon goes down. When the Blue Jade Cicadas arrive from Kamakura Sazae-Onna locks her kitchen and tells them all to shut up.

36. Yuu knocks after everyone has gone to sleep. Sazae-Onna lets him in. On the floor of her kitchen he writes a Kappa proverb:
Dark clouds bring rain, the night brings stars, and everyone will try to spill the water out of your skull.

37. At the end of summer, the unhuman side of the house is crammed full, but Ko can only hear the occasional rustle. When Kawa-Uso the Otter Demon threw an ivory saddle onto the back of one of the bears and rode her around the peach grove like a horse, Ko only saw a poor she-bear having some sort of fit. Ko sleeps all the time now, though he is not really sleeping. He is being Yuu on the other side of the plum-colored screen. He never writes poetry on the tatami anymore.

38. The Night Parade occurs once every hundred years at the end of summer. Nobody plans it. They know to go to the door between the worlds the way a brown goose knows to go north in the spring.

39. One night the remaining peaches swell up into juicy golden lanterns. The river rushes become kotos with long spindly legs. The mushrooms become lacy, thick oyster drums. The Kitsune begin to dance; the Tengu flap their wings and spit
mala
beads toward the dark sky in fountains. A trio of small dragons the color of pearls in milk leap suddenly out of the Nothingness River. Cerulean fire curls out of their noses. The House of Second-Hand Carnelian empties. Namazu’s Lions carry him on a litter of silk fishing nets. The Jar of Lightning bounces after Hone-Onna and her gentleman caller, whose bones clatter and clap. When only Yuu and the snail-woman are left, Sazae-Onna lifts up her shell and steps out into the Parade, her pink hair falling like floss, her black eyes gleaming. Yuu feels as though he will crack when faced with her beauty.

40. The Parade steps over the Nothingness River and the Nobody River and enters the human Japan, dancing and singing and throwing light at the dark. They will wind down through the plains to Kyoto before the night is through, and flow like a single serpent into the sea where the Goldfish Emperor of the Yokai will greet them with his million children and his silver-fronded wives.

41. Yuu races after Sazae-Onna. The bears watch them go. In the midst of the procession Hoeru the Princess of All Bears, who is Queen now, comes bearing a miniature Agate Great Mammal Palace on her back. Her children fall in and nurse as though they were still cubs. For a night, they know their names.

42. Yuu does not make it across the river. It goes jet with his ink. His strong birch shaft cracks; Sazae-Onna does not turn back. When she dances she looks like a poem about loss. Yuu pushes forward through the water of the Nothingness River. His shaft bursts in a shower of birch splinters.

43. A man’s voice cries out from inside the ruined brush handle. Yuu startles and stops. The voice says:
I never had any children. I have never been in love.

44. Yuu topples into the Nobody River. The kotos are distant now, the peach-lanterns dim. His badger bristles fall out.

45. Yuu pulls himself out of the river by dry grasses and berry vines. He is not Yuu on the other side. He is not Ko. He has Ko’s body, but his arms are calligraphy brushes sopping with ink. His feet are inkstones. He can still here the music of the Night Parade. He begins to dance. Not-Yuu and Not-Ko takes a breath.

46. There is only the House of Second-Hand Carnelian to write on. He writes on it. He breathes and swipes his brush, breathes, brushes. Man, brush. Brush, man. He writes and does not copy. He writes psalms of being part man and part brush. He writes poems of his love for the snail-woman. He writes songs about perfect breath. The House slowly turns black.

47. Bringing up the rear of the Parade hours later, Yuki-Onna comes silent through the forest. Snow flows before her like a carpet. She has brought her sisters the Flower-and-Joy Kami and the Cherry-Blossom-Mount-Fuji Kami. The crown of the Fuji-Kami’s head has frozen. The Flower-and-Joy Kami is dressed in chrysanthemums and lemon blossoms. They pause at the House of Second-Hand Carnelian. Not-Yuu and Not-Ko shakes and shivers; he is sick, he has received both the pain in his femurs and the pain in his brush handles. The Kami shine so bright the fish in both rivers are blinded. The Flower-and-Joy Kami looks at the poem on one side of the door. It reads:
In white peonies I see the exhalations of my kanji blossoming.
The Cherry-Blossom-Mount-Fuji Kami looks at the poem on the other side of the door. It reads:
It is enough to sit at the foot of a mountain and breathe the pine mist. Only a proud man must climb it.
The Kami close their eyes as they pass by. The words appear on the backs of their necks as they disappear into the night.

48. Ko dies in mid-stroke, describing the sensation of lungs filled up like the windbag of heaven. Yuu dies before he can complete his final verse concerning the exquisiteness of crustaceans who will never love you back.

49. Slowly, with a buzz like breath, the Giant Hornet flies out of her nest and through the peach grove denuded by hungry Tanuki. She is a heavy, furry emerald bobbing on the wind. The souls of Ko and Yuu quail before her. As she picks them up with her weedy legs and puts them back into their bodies she tells them a Giant Hornet poem:
Everything is venom, even sweetness. Everything is sweet, even venom. Death is illiterate and a hayseed bum. No excuse to leave the nest unguarded. What are you, some silly jade lion?

50. The sea currents bring the skeleton-woman back, and Namazu who has caused two tsunamis, though only one made the news. The Jar of Lightning floats up the river. Finally the snail-woman returns to the pond in her kitchen. They find Yuu making tea for them. His bristles are dry. On the other side of the plum-colored screen, Ko is sweeping out the leaves.

51. Yuu has written on the teacups. It reads:
It takes a calligrapher one hundred years to draw one breath.

STORY NO. 6

It’s not easy to find her.

You’ll have to endure a great number of miserable, dusty basements and private, antiseptic vaults where no rot can reach. You’ll have to handle—and I mean handle, for these collectors and archivists are of the most reticent, stuttering, anxious breed—men and women whose bloodless hands have permanently taken on the dry color of film preservatives. Your eyesight will be a friend and a traitor. It’s good if you don’t need too much sleep; she rewards vigilance. Sort through enough film—the old kind, the kind that comes on reels, that, like an exotic, perforated desert plant, hates air and moisture and the wrong sort of light—and you might see her hair disappearing behind a camphor tree in
The Tale of Chibisuke the Midget
, a bare foot glimmering like a lantern behind a screen in
The Spell of the Sand Painting Part Two
. Perhaps her face, whole and round and silver and black, in the palace scenes of
The Water Magician
. Thousands, if not millions, of people have seen her and not known her for what she is—only another exquisite, ancient face in the exquisite, ancient silent films, flickering, monochrome, the color of a lost world.

There is a Kami hiding in those old movies. Which is to say, a god.

Priests have of course been brought in on the case—only a fool does not involve the experts. None would admit that what they saw was of a divine nature. A beautiful woman, to be sure—a mouth so small and dark! Her hairline almost painful in its perfection. Disturbing, unquieting, the way she moves and seems to look out and directly into our eyes. But actresses are beautiful and disturbing; it is their job to be beautiful and disturbing. Beauty always reminds us of the divine, my child; that is its purpose.

Please consider contributing something extra to the upkeep of our shrine when next you visit.

A certain elderly former projectionist paid travel expenses and board to a Western guru in order that he should travel from Australia to view her reels in the secrecy of her Chiba City apartment. She ushered the man, who smelled expensive and educated, inside the cavern of her living space, its windows permanently blacked out, its humidity rigidly controlled. For hours they loaded film and watched images like silver water spill over a white silk screen.
Two Quiet People, The Benten Kid, Samurai Town 2.
The guru placed crystals around him and attuned himself to the energy of what his books called the ninth sphere.

Finally, in the second act of
Scattered Flowers
, they saw her: standing on her tiptoes to see over a long stone wall. Her eyes rose over the masonry like impossible moons. Then she blinked out of the film like a cue mark. The guru’s mouth opened and then closed again. He did it a second time. His sound had been cut off too. But not for long.

Surely not one of the higher deities, he assured the projectionist. Not Ama-Terasu or Susano-no-Mikoto or Inari. Even if they would bother with something as ephemeral and trivial as cinema, the woman in the films bears none of their regalia. Perhaps Ama-no-Uzume—you say she often appears near flowers and trees? Interesting, interesting. I think it’s quite clear the figure is Hora-Sul, an emissary of the ninth sphere with whom I have long been in contact and special intimacy, mistress of amethyst and harbinger of the end of technofascist culture.

She is not Hora-Sul.

The trouble with the Kami is that she is not a repeatable phenomenon. You would think it would be no trouble to prove her being: look, here in the battle scene of
The Master Sword Araki Mataemon
, she is dying. And in the human chest the heart feels her wound. But the Kami is not an extra in a market scene that can be reliably pointed out to anyone with a quick eye for pattern recognition. One moment she is laughing with the traveling troupe of
The Dancing Girl of Izu
, the next she is dressed as a man in
I Have Sinned, Sakubei
. She is never in two films at once. You must chase her out of one frame into another, out of a moonlit peach grove and onto the decks of a naval vessel. You must know that face—as if you could ever forget it, as if it has not already replaced your mother’s face, your childhood love’s, even your own, in the cinema of your memory. You must search after that face, hunt for it, like a great flickering whale moving beneath the surface of the past.

She does not visit DVDs or VHS tapes. An Okinawa tailor claimed to have seen her once on a laser disc of
Why Is Seawater Salty?
but he is not a serious person. No, it is only film that the Kami enjoys, the way a lion enjoys blood and flesh, and not cabbages and china plates. Nor does she traffic with Western movies, nor even Korean or Chinese, but moves like a swift needle only through the ribbons of Japanese cinema. She leaves the film intact when she goes, though it is possible, for a frame or two after she has escaped like steam, to see a glimmer of phosphorus, fitful light from some distant and unknown source.

The longest sequence of her presence anyone has witnessed was in the 1924 classic
Moon Silver Jirokichi
. The witness was a Kyoto fabric dyer by the name of
      
. His wife had recently committed suicide, leaving their young daughter in his care. He loaded up a library-loan print of
Moon Silver Jirokichi
into his home projector on no particular evening, his child half asleep next to him. The Kami entered the famous battle scene and the nape of her neck glowed like the tip of a brand. She dragged behind her the long black expanse of her kimono, so vast it covered the forest set, filling up the frame, its silk draping over the corpses of fallen warriors, shrouding their faces in grace and forgiveness, burying them in gentle, total darkness. Director Goto Taizan’s quick, innovative camera work froze, as though struck dumbfounded by what was happening: The Kami threads her way through the battle; the actors do not look at her, their swords clanging together without sound. She pulls apart two men—neither the protagonist, just two men at arms striving. As though they are coming out of a dream, the actors in their costumes and black eye makeup stare at her, their mouths open. Her kimono sweeps over bodies like a tide, rippling and surging. She puts her hands to their cheeks and her face is full of troubled sorrow. She kisses their foreheads. They begin to weep. She folds her sleeves around them and they vanish from the film. She stares out into the camera, into the fabric dyer’s eyes, full of pity and infinite regret, as the screen slowly fills with black silk, the endless, depthless creases of her gown closing around her face until that too disappears and the piano soundtrack goes silent.

You will have heard that she can alter a film permanently—that once,
Detective Umon’s Diary, Story No. 6
had a swordfight between two women before the final triumph of Detective Umon in rescuing the Shogun from assassins. You can still find a few scattered grandmothers and grandfathers who saw the first run of the picture and could attest to the scene, fuzzy as long years have rendered it. Oh yes, I think one of the women was named Masami, wasn’t she? Strange, back then, to see two women fighting. Was the other one named Hanako?

Watch until your eyes prickle and you’ll never find the scene now. Film historians say it was filmed but deemed indecent by the motion picture committee. Yet you will have discussed the matter with a professor in Yokohama and heard how at a private party of the screenwriter Yamanaka Sadao the tragic genius arranged an early screening for an elegant young woman he hoped to seduce. In
Detective Umon
, the auteur felt he had invented himself over again, more dashing and clever and perfect. If a lady would not share her bed with Yamanaka Sadao, she could not resist Detective Umon. As the climax of the film drew near, and the young woman had allowed him to hold her hand very tenderly, a strange woman strode into a heartbreaking shot of the moon rising over the Imperial Residence. She looked up at the moon, and then at the two noblewomen bearing their husbands’ swords and converging on the plum-blossom-strewn courtyard.
Who is that?
cried Yamanaka.
What idiot slut has wandered off the street into my movie?

The Kami turned to look at him, her eyes like caves with no water at their bottoms. When the noblewomen arrived, blood rising in their cheeks like honor affronted, the Kami stood between them and held out her hands. The women struck their swords through her, unseeing, uncomprehending. At the place where the blades touched, the Kami placed her hand. The weapons blinked out. She touched the sleeve of Masami, and Masami, too, shuddered like a skipped frame and disappeared. She kissed Hanako’s cheek and suddenly the courtyard was empty, with not even the Kami remaining, only plum blossoms half disturbed by an inrushing of air. Yamanaka Sadao felt himself too profoundly upset by the whole business to discuss it with his director or to see his elegant young woman again under any circumstances. Masami and Hanako had been cut out wholesale from every print of the film, not only the prints but the scripts, even the scriptmaster’s shooting copy, as though they had never been. The actresses could not be contacted; their agents could not recall any such clients, nor booking any girls for the new Detective Umon film, but if the director had roles to fill they had a number of beauties available.

But the Kami does not do this often—or at least, she is too subtle and careful to be often caught. Where did she take her swordfighting noblewomen? You would like to know; we would all like to know. You will sooner or later come across the rumor that a local boss in Kazakhstan, a warlord if you want to know the truth, was a great fan of Japanese cinema and paid top dollar for original prints. The story goes that he came into possession of both reels of
A Story of Floating Weeds
and upon his first eager, hungry viewing discovered a sequence between Kihachi’s arrival and the commencement of his long, sad tale. A great ebony palace wholly out of place in the village scenery appeared out of nowhere, its cypress roof green and new, its walls covered in silk tapestries. The camera seemed to grow curious and to stop listening to Kihachi the master storyteller, peering into the new building. Inside, braziers glowed warmly and folk laughed, drinking and eating and greeting each other with deep affection. The warlord thought he saw faces he knew from his boyhood, films he had not seen in years: one of the gamblers from
Migratory Snow Bird
, the younger daughter from
Chibisuke the Midget
, a juggler from
The Dancing Girl of Izu
. And Masami and Hanako, the noblewomen cut from the final edit of
Detective Umon’s Diary, Story No. 6
! They were pouring tea into cups for all, steam wafting like veils. And among them a beautiful young woman in a black kimono, reclining in the midst of all these people, the arc of her hairline almost painful in its perfection. The woman’s face was unbearably serene. It was like a still lake or a flower fully opened to the sun. Beside her rested a man with sad eyes but a smiling mouth, his hands stained dark the way some fabric dyers get, and in his lap a laughing, clapping child. The warlord leaned in to see her more closely—but the palace and its inhabitants blinked out, leaving no hint that they had ever disturbed the telling of Kihachi’s filial tale.

You will have heard this. You will have dreamed about that place and the taste of the sharp, sweet tea in those cups. But rumors are only that, not worth the breath it takes to repeat them. You will keep looking. You will keep watching. You will not look away from the screen, not even for a moment.