I bent my roseate face and kissed gently the blessed ruin before turning away.
The Copper Pheasant Ceases Its Call
In the dream of Ayako, there is a pagoda-tower. It is empty. There is no wine-sack. There is no statue whose face has been erased by centuries. There is no Fox with kind eyes. There is no Book. There is no hint of what has or has not passed within it, only the jagged hole in the roof through which unimaginable stars have shone, and which now lets through the first shafts of winter light, falling like snow through the tower.
There is an old woman, curled up like a child, on the floor of the uppermost level, whose rags flutter in the breeze. The sunlight makes her skin translucent, shows the blown glass of her bones and the delicate network of stilled veins.
There is no breath, and her lips are the color of the frozen river parting to receive her steps.
The Tiger Begins to Roam
In the village, the boy whose lot it had been to bring the ghost her yearly offerings of rice and tea lay awake in his soft bed. He had dreamed that he was a prince, and a strange beast had asked him a riddle. Tomorrow, he would go and see the dream-interpreters.
The boy studied the pattern of the roof-wood. He is quiet, so as not to disturb his father and sisters with his fanciful dreams, which, after all, mean nothing. His father always told him that dreams were the province of the poor and the mad.
Outside his window, a squirrel left small footprints in the snow.
Lichee Grass Withers
In Kyoto, a scholar had fallen asleep in the midst of his scrolls, with his spectacles pushed up over his brows. In the cold morning, crows drew their wings close. Sleeping trees stood like soldiers at the gate.
Through an open window, a handsome brown moth fluttered into the room, landed lightly on the smooth hair of the sleeping scholar. It paused, as if in thought, flapping his wings with deliberate grace. It seemed to consider something brought on the snow-scented wind.
When the scholar’s brow furrowed, deep in dreams, the moth lifted away from him, and out into the gray dawn.
Eart
hworms Twist Into Knots
At the foot of the dream-pagoda, the great red torii gate bent low to the ground and cracked under the weight of snow. Her scarlet paint shone horribly bright against the pale earth, as though blood had been spilled. She lay there like a great heart burst open, and the sound of her falling broke the genteel silence for only a moment.
The splintered posts which still stood straight later wounded slightly the foot of a late-migrating magpie.
She would be buried under the ice until the spring, when the cicadas would come to mate in her shadow.
The Elk’s Horn Breaks
On Mountain’s east flank, a shaggy goat with massive horns chewed the tough winter grass. Snow caught in his fur in long matted strands. He balanced on the rocks, searching for the sweet moss he liked best in the winter months. It was difficult work, pebbles slipped into his hooves and down the cliffside, rattling like a shaman’s staff.
As the clouds drifted over his back, he looked down towards the little valley, and thought briefly of the girl who could not climb her tower, how he pitied her, and how her hair smelled of cinnamon.
Underground Springs Move
River refused to think on it.
Slabs of ice moved lazily down his current, grinding against each other as though they were carriages in the city. The fish dreamed and the trees bent low over the rippling stream, a thatched canopy.
If it was true that she could not step in him twice, then she had not stepped in this River at all, he reasoned. Perhaps, then, he had never known her, and therefore should not weep.
Wild Geese Return to Their Northern Home
The silkworm colony of the village suddenly ceased to produce their fine white thread. From the morning of Ayako’s last dream on the Mountain, the generation which were then thriving in the house of the silk weavers produced nothing but a thick, viscous black fluid, which did not dry properly, leaving a strange, knotted coil. For seven worm-generations after this there was no good silk in the village, only the black cocoon-stuff. In the dreams of children the silkworms sang as they birthed it, and whispered that they were weaving a shroud for the death-festival of a ghost.
The boy saw this and was troubled. For no reason he thought of his beast-dream, and wondered what riddle would have this scythe-silk as its answer.
The villagers burned the dream-thread in the spring, and the smell of it lingered into midsummer, clinging to the temple bell-ropes and the granary doors.
Magpies Nest