The Melancholy of Mechagirl

But we have worked our shifts already, and we aim toward home, hurtle toward it, home to the peach tree of immortality and the pearl-troughs of enlightened discourse, where we will disgorge our meals for the pleasure of eating them again.

“Kabu,” says Yatsuhashi, though she knows my full name is Akakabu. She insists on the familiar because she has no manners. “Do you think that dreams taste more like cherries or more like salmon roe? I can never decide.”

“With respect, Yatsuhashi-san, the comparison with roe is not at all apt. Recall that at the bottom of a dream is a hard jewel we may not gnaw, the jewel of the sleeping soul, clung with dream-meat and sugar. Roe is sweet and soft and bursts on the tongue in a shower of golden salt—how rare is the roe-dream! Only the very young and the very old have no pit on which we may break our teeth if we are not careful.”

“Of course you are right, Kabu. But I cannot escape the feeling of fishiness; the dreams of sex-starved aunts wriggle in me so!”

That is my friend’s way of talking. Many Baku talk like this, because they are not sensible, and all they eat all night are the kinds of dreams which do not agree with a tapir’s stomach: drunken dreams, fever dreams, sickness dreams, the dreams of enfeebled children. These are so rich it is hard to resist, like a tiny table set with a cake so moist it wets the cloth, but they make a Baku babble and walk into walls.

Disembark for Yokosuka-Chuo Station.

The mechanical voice is slim and soft and breathy, a dream-voice. I approve. I obey.

THE PARADISE OF THE PURE LAND

Does it surprise you that Pure Land has a train station? It has many. We are subtle, we who inhabit this place—not only Baku but many other beasts and tsukumogami and dragons and maidens with the moon in their hair and bodhisattva with bare feet. We let humans build grey, stocky towers in the Gardens of Right Practice; we let them bring great gun-bristled ships to the Lotus Harbor; we let them pave the Avenue of Yellow Smoke and set up pachinko parlors there. We let them call Pure Land Yokosuka, and we watched the Butterflies of Perfect Thought sizzle on the neon of their nightclub advertisements. We were clever—we are safe, a dream in their sleeping, hidden beneath a human city, where no one, not even their soldiers with golden buttons, will ever think to look for heavenly pavilions.

It is not that there is no sadness in the Paradise of the Pure Land. On the contrary, we must all report for sadness once in our long, endless, peach-saturated lives, so that we may have something hard and terrible to hold against the beauty of the Pure Land. No one likes to talk about their sadness, but we have all reported on schedule and done our duty. I want to tell you about mine, I want you to dream about it, but manners make it difficult to get to the point.

I have an apartment above Blue Street in the Paradise of the Pure Land. The street does not really have a name—it has a number—but the humans thoughtfully paved it with sparkling blue stones, perhaps in some instinctive nod to our tastes, and so we and they call it Blue Street, for we are all of us together sagacious folk. From its window I can see the bay, the green water foamed with trash so that each wave is tipped with beer bottles, cellophane, detergent boxes, swollen manga, orange rinds. Beneath the surface is an improbable depository of bicycles, dumped by poor souls who could not parse out the arcane laws of garbage removal—our nature does shine through in places, and complexity of order is paramount in the pure land of contemplation. Jellyfish tangle in the wheel spokes, confused, translucent, lost.

I am lost too. I have mistaken a bicycle wheel for safe harbor. No one is perfect.

CLOSE YOUR EYES

It would be better if you closed your eyes. I relate more easily with the sleeping. If you could dream my story, I could lumber along the low river of your spine, snuffling out the parts which are too horrible, too radiant, too private for your witness. I could eat them weeping into your brain-pan, and you would wake remembering only salt.

I don’t suppose you are tired. No? Ah, well.

Suffice it to say I loved a creature, and that creature is no more. It is the sort of thing dreams were invented to wrangle.

BASHFULNESS OR THE NIGHT WIND

My love was owned by a white woman. She and I met at work, as all modern lovers do, while I was on my nightly rounds. I had curled into the white woman’s arms and fixed my teeth to her mouth, working at her throat, pulling up the jellied marrow of her little housely terrors. Westerners do not have the most complex palette. She dreamed of a husband in a white uniform, a husband with a sword at his hip and also an oily black gun, a cap of gold, eyes of silver. The husband touched the sea and it glowed phosphorescent green, sickly. He did not smile at her; I ate his smile.

I saw her over the shoulder of the sad little wife. She was tall and dark, standing in the corner as though she guarded her mistress’s sleep. Her figure was angular, her expression still as a soldier’s. Rafu, my Rafu! How I have pored over that first glimpse, held it in my paws, packed it into a box with tears and red tissue, taken it out to warm me when the stars had frozen!

I rested my chin on the Western woman’s shoulder, gazing at the golden-black thing that I did not yet know was Rafu. She bowed slightly. Her hinges creaked. The silk of her panels fluttered slightly in bashfulness or the night wind. A willowy green slip hung half over her face—my Rafu was a folding screen, a silk monster of beauty like statues. A Jotai, a screen so old that one day she woke up and had a name and an address and an internal monologue. Y

ou earn these things after one hundred years or so. The world owes them to you, if you survive it.

“What are you doing here, glory-of-the-evening, in this pretty pale devil’s house?”

Rafu fluttered again. There were golden tigers playing on the silk where her thighs might be. They batted at floaty, cloud-bound kanji like mice.

TO CONCEAL HER FROM HER LIFE

“Her name is Milo,” whispered my not-yet-beloved screen. “Her father wanted a boy. I was a present from her friend Chieko, who chose in her youth to be kind to the Navy wives because they are worse than children: mute, lost, dead, rigid with stupidity, which is their only defense. Chieko loved mikon oranges and had a mole on her left breast. Once a boy kissed it without permission under a persimmon tree, and Chieko never forgot it—she burned warmer and brighter in that moment than she ever did again. Her mother Kayo, whose favorite perfume was made from lotus and lemon water, who had a husband whose face was always red and three miscarriages only I witnessed—I never told anyone—bought me from a teahouse in Yokohama, where I belonged to a little girl who turned into an old woman as if by magic. She was called Masumi and all her kimono were pink with black cherry blossoms. She drank in secret, squatting in the secret shade of me, drinking silver things until she was sick. Her great-aunt, Aoi, loved a man from England who did not love her back, and so she married a ginger farmer whose fingers burned her, and had no children. Aoi found me in a shop in Kamakura, by the sea, and thought that I would suffice to conceal her from her life.

“I have had much time to consider women. Milo is no worse than any of them.”

“Her dreams taste thin and bitter, like the white membranes of limes.”

Rafu shrugged, a peculiar raising and dropping of her slats. “She is sad. She does not speak Japanese. Her husband went to the desert months and months ago. Every day she goes to the market and brings back chocolate, a peach, and a salmon rice-ball for her dinner. She sits and eats and stares at the wall. Sometimes she watches television. Sometimes she walks three miles to Blue Street to look at necklaces in the window that she wishes someone would buy for her. Sometimes she walks along the pier to see the sunken bicycles, pinged into ruin by invisible arrows of battleship-sonar, crusted over with rust and coral. She likes to pet people’s dogs as they walk them. That is her whole life. What should she dream of?”

“Something better.”

DANCING DOWN THE WINDOWS