The Melancholy of Mechagirl

Kyorinrin makes his home in the foreman’s office. The roof there still keeps rain out. This is important because Kyorinrin is not a person but a large paper scroll. His pages look very old, darkened to a rich animal color. His roller is thick and bronze with a badger stamped on one end and a chrysanthemum on the other. His paper is blank, but that is a temporary situation.

Kyorinrin is not as old as he looks, but he likes to think he provides a sense of continuity. He came to the factory in 1950 in the personal effects of the first foreman, whose name, though unimportant to you and me, was Akiyama Isao. Kyorinrin lived for many years in a glass case along with other objects Akiyama found sacred in a certain private, personal way. These included two small silver rabbit figurines, a photograph of a girl named Akemi who died in the bombardment of Tokyo, a lock of his grandmother’s hair cut on her wedding day, an airplane ticket to a place called Adelaide which Akiyama bought but did not use, a statuette of Jizo wrapped in a red scarf with a red cap on his smooth stone head, a Japanese-to-English dictionary, a miniature onyx elephant with a broken trunk, a map of ordnance sites in the mountains around Yokosuka, and Kyorinrin himself, who bore originally a professionally calligraphed genealogy of the Akiyama clan, inked on commission in 1910, the year Isao was born.

Kyorinrin supposes all these objects make a person, but you can never know very much from the inside of a glass case.

Like the rest of the umbrella factory, the case is broken now. The floor of the office still shimmers with a light snow of shards. Kyorinrin had had enough of silver rabbits and Adelaide and dead girls. He looks at it sometimes from the foreman’s chair. Jizo still stands upright. One rabbit. The lock of hair.

Every evening Kyorinrin rolls luxuriously out to his full length across the factory floor. His paper exults in its own length. Every evening he causes a story to flow over his body in deep, profoundly black ink. Before the sun hefts up over the cinnamon trees, he bathes himself in the employees’ basin and erases what he wrote. He uses the badger end of his roller to spray water down his creases, like an elephant with a working trunk.

The paper scroll does not live alone. Not anymore. He does not remember Tsuma coming, only that one day she was there where she had not been before. She is a kanji representing the word wife. Her brushstrokes are very fine. She stands thirty-three centimeters tall. Her ink is black like his own, though in the moonlight the edges of her glisten dark violet. She claims to have absconded from a large advertisement selling refrigerators. It was not an interesting life. Kyorinrin appreciates that.

“Today I am going to write a story about a white woman,” announces Kyorinrin. The badger’s bronze mouth moves when he speaks. His talk echoes.

Tsuma comes out from behind a dye sink crusted with bright pink stains. Violet ripples along her edges like electricity.

“Why would you want to do that?” she whispers.

WATER

A summer moon sits heavy as ballast on Uraga Harbor. Cicadas shriek at it, but it is unworried. It ripples in the quiet water. Among the mating of the cicadas the mating of the moon goes unremarked. The moon knows his own business—and his wife.

A fox who is not really a fox and an old woman who is not really an old woman also know the moon is in rut. They sit together under a persimmon tree high above the harbor. Fireflies dive and spiral around them, but the old woman keeps puffing up her cheeks and blowing them out. When her cheeks puff, they swell up bigger than green gourds and blush silver. The fox eats the fireflies, whether or not their tiny lamps are lit.

The old woman’s name is Futsukeshibaba. She dresses in long white smoke that looks like a white kimono. Her obi is a length of dark water, flowing in a current around her bony waist. Her mouth is very red and her hair is longer than she is tall. It is the same smoke as her clothes. Her mouth glows in the white of her like fire. Futsukeshibaba blows out the lights of the world. That is the kind of creature she is. She desires only to blow out lanterns and lamps and candles. It is what she was made for. She has blown out the Emperor’s personal lamp and would be happy to tell you about it. Once, she snuffed Issa’s lantern when he fell asleep at his work, thereby saving his papers from the otherwise inevitable blaze. When she sees a flame, she yearns to put it out. It looks like a tear in everything to her, a ragged hole through which entropy can leak. Her breath is needle and thread.

Futsukeshibaba watches the blue-black water. She puffs up her cheeks, blows a sparrow out of the air with one quick cough, and hands it to the fox who is not really a fox because he is Inari, a god who wears his fox’s body like it was a salaryman’s suit. Inari crunches the bones in his fox-teeth. His fur gleams the color of saffron, the white tip of his great tail too much like a golden flame for Futsukeshibaba’s comfort. She has already tried to blow it out several times, even though she knows better.

Inari and Futsukeshibaba are watching ships come into the harbor. They are not Japanese ships, but both the fox and the old woman knew that before they got here.

“What happens to the lights you blow out?” asks Inari, who possesses a great deal of curiosity about anatomy. “Where are they after you have extinguished them?”

“In my belly,” Futsukeshibaba answers. She puts her hand there. “I eat them. They live in me forever as I do not generate waste. The inside of me looks like a festival night.”

“But you hate the light so.”

“I am sustained by the thing that violates my heart and breaks the peaceful dark of my mind. I thought you were a trickster god. Pretty standard riddle of existence.”

“Does it taste good?”

“It tastes like the opposite of desire.”

Inari accepts this. He thinks of the sweet incense of his shrine not far from here, of the electric green spiders in the paws of his statues.

“I don’t know why you insisted we watch this,” he sighs. His furry chest expands like a little sun and contracts again. “I’m bored, to be perfectly clear.”

Prows glide into the harbor; sails and rigging luff and swing. Men sink anchor, secure lines, go about the work of making landfall. They are not Japanese men, but the fox and the old woman knew that before they got here.

“We don’t have to stay. I know you are fond of the theater. It was meant as a gift.”

Inari reaches up one paw and draws a persimmon out of the tree. It is not yet the time for persimmons. The fruit comes out like a drop of oil squeezed from a cloth, the branch bleeding orange, the wind groaning against the wood.

“If you hoped I would stop it—”

Futsukeshibaba interrupts. She does it so softly, like blowing out the fox’s voice.

“Long ago I knew a blue paper lantern named Aoandon. She had a lilac-colored tassel with a pretty knot in it. She was rectangular. On one side of her a faded carp swam upstream. It used to be painted in real gold, but by the time I met her, only the outline remained, like a skeleton. I did not mind.

“Aoandon was not less accomplished than I. Her nature determined that she appear at storytelling festivals and competitions, a soft blue glow appearing when the last tale is told, lighting the way home. Once, she illuminated the midnight path of Murasaki Shikibu, whose sandals were very pale ash wood with charcoal silk straps that nested between her toes. Aoandon was always reluctant to admit that the great lady was tipsy with plum wine and ghost stories, but there it is. When she saw a darkness, she yearned to kindle it.