Myths of Origin

The bones of Ayako still dreamed, but her lips had flushed blue and her body was cold. She had dreamed herself out of her shell, and it remained like a pale gem, slowly becoming dust on the highest floor of the dream-pagoda. She/I/we had composed our song, and moved away from the cocoon-tower to open our throats in the mountains. We left the meadow of shells-within-shells, where we lived within the body which lived within the pagoda which lived within the Mountain.

Perhaps one day there will be tower-shells and Mountain-shells glittering, too, on the grass.

We are finished. Our smile is beatific and mouthless. We have no more body to puzzle us, and our voices multiply in infinite combinations, through the trees and stones and snow:

When one possible woman dies, it is as though a shutter closes, and the light from a certain window is snuffed out. There are many more windows, and really, since the window had already been opened and shut an infinite number of times, since in potential it occupies both the states of Open and Shut, nothing changes at all. This process is indefinite, and cannot be charted.

The Pheasant Calls to Its Mate

The dream-bones of Ayako were not found until the next summer, when the boy whose lot it was to bring the ghost her offerings could not find her. He had not lost the lottery this year, but had traded a bowl of rice and three jade beads to the girl who had, so that he could see the old woman again, and ask her about his dreams.

When he climbed the pagoda and discovered her small heap of pearl-white bones, he was overcome, and wept for the woman who had told him about the dream of the Mountain. He could not decide what would be the correct thing to do with her bones—for it was now clear she had not actually been a ghost, even if she had since become one. So he gathered them up and placed them with some incense and the sack of rice in one of Mountain’s secret clefts.

Until he was forty, and appointed, through his father’s influence, to the royal court at Kyoto, the boy brought incense and rice to her bones at the death of each summer, faithful as a wife.

He would dream of her often, even in his city apartments hung with curtains he had ordered made from the black silk thread of that terrible year. And in his dreams she was young, a child, hiding under a wheelbarrow. She peered out, whispered to him that the fire-goddess had fallen in love with the village.

The dream interpreters would not speak with him.

Chickens Brood

The I-that-is-Ayako tells you these things. It is my lesson, and I have told it. River heard, and Fox. Gate and Juniper listened, and Moth heard rumor of it.

The you-that-is-Ayako has heard it, too.

The Eaglehawk Flies Furiously High

There was a storm the day the boy interred my bones within Mountain. The rain curled down to him in spirals, and the air crackled with the potential of lightning. The stones could hear the song my bones sang, the slight, susurring song of the discarded body. I felt them press in to hear, and the juniper trees bent to catch it.

The Waters and Swamps Are Thick And Hard

Alone, with the mist creeping in like a pale-mouthed thief, Mountain wept.

THE

GRASS-CUTTING

SWORD

A field of mustard,

no whale in sight,

the sea darkening.

—Buson

0

IZUMO

Descent is a peculiar behavior.

There is a sensation of being dragged by the glisten of the bowels. There is a sensation of being pushed at the crown of the skull by a lead-etched palm. There is a silence, and there is a detonation of air, a detonation of sudden light. A new fontanel beats nebulous and netted at the place where tectonic bone-plates converge, a gauze of flesh pink and shimmering, a trembling crevice where before there was only wholeness.

I set these symptoms down for those who might descend after me, for those other red-chested colossi expelled by the sun-woman, cast out by her bronze hands, the boil-blaze of her justice. For it is certain my sister will find fault in others as she found fault in me; some blue-black kernel of my nature which, buried at the depth of sinew, scratched against the red-gold bead of hers.

But I am magnanimous—I grant that our two natures could not inhabit a single heaven. I forgave her, even as she burned against my fog-limbs, even as her ribcage irradiated mine with its feathered fire, even as the salt-sea was dried from my mouth by her banishing blow.