Blue Bamboo: Japanese Tales of Fantasy

Utterly crestfallen, she quietly stacked the dishes, produced an artificial little laugh to hide her embarrassment, picked up the tray, and fled the room. As she shuffled down the hallway, she considered bursting into tears, but since she wasn’t particularly sad she instead began to giggle quite uncontrollably.

The mother felt grateful for the ingenuousness of youth, and was also somewhat ashamed of the turbid state of her own heart and the agitation she had felt. She told herself there was no need to worry.

“Well? Just lie back and let it all come out. I’ll write it down for you. Have you gathered your thoughts?”

The second son lay supine again, pulled the quilt up to his chest, closed his eyes, and furrowed his brow. He seemed to be in considerable agony. Finally, in an affected, austere tone of voice, he said: “I believe I have, indeed. Well, then. If you will.”

The mother stifled a laugh.

The following is the entire text of that day’s son-to-mother dictation.

A beautiful baby boy was born. Everyone in the castle was ecstatic. But Rapunzel, after giving birth, grew weaker with each passing day. The best doctors in the land were summoned, but none of them could do anything to keep her condition from worsening. Soon she was so frail that it was clear her life was in danger.

“I told you... I told you.” Rapunzel lay in bed quietly shedding tears as she chided her husband. “I told you I didn’t want to have a baby. I’m the daughter of a witch... I can tell, in a vague sort of way, what lies ahead. I had a premonition that something bad would happen if I gave birth to a child. These premonitions of mine always, always come true. I wouldn’t mind dying so much, if that would be the end of the curse. But I have a feeling there’s more to it than that. If there really is a God, as you taught me, I think I should pray to Him. Someone holds a grudge against us, I’m sure of it—I can feel it. Maybe we were making a terrible mistake from the beginning.”

“No. No, that’s not true.’ The prince paced back and forth beside Rapunzel’s bed, denying everything she said, but inwardly torn and tormented. His joy over the birth of his son had lasted but a fleeting moment before Rapunzel’s sudden, mysterious decline; now his anxiety was so great that he was unable to sleep nights and spent all his time pacing his lady’s sickroom, utterly beside himself. He did, indeed, love Rapunzel. It would be a mistake to assume that he was merely infatuated with her, that he doted on her only because of the beauty of her face and figure, or because she was, for him, an exotic flower from an alien environment whose ignorance of the world stimulated his protective instincts. And to doubt the sincerity of the prince’s love on the grounds that it wasn’t born of a lofty spiritual bond or a sense of a common ancestry and destiny, would also be a mistake. The prince adored Rapunzel. He was madly in love with her.

He loved her, that’s all. Is that not enough? True love is complete in and of itself. And what women really desire, deep down, is precisely that sort of honest, single-minded devotion. It’s one thing to speak of a lofty spiritual bond or commitment to a common destiny, but if the two parties don’t love each other, it all comes to nothing. Such high-flown words as “spirituality” and “destiny” have no real meaning without love, and are in fact merely used to manage the flood of lovers’ feelings and to justify their passionate behavior. For young lovers, there is nothing so repulsive as such misguided attempts to validate their emotions. Particularly unbearable is the hypocritical man’s pose of aiding a damsel in distress. If he loves her, why can’t he just state it clearly?

The day before yesterday, when I went to visit the house of the writer D., and this subject came up, D. had the gall to call me a “philistine.” I know the man well, however, and from what I’ve seen of his private life, all I can say is that he himself is a calculating schemer who bases all his actions on sheer self-interest. He’s a liar. I don’t care if he calls me a philistine. He can call me anything he wishes. I like to tell the truth, just as I see it. It’s best to do what one likes.

But I digress. I simply cannot imagine a love based merely on concepts like “spirituality” or “understanding.” The prince’s love was open and direct. His affection for Rapunzel was of the purest sort. He loved her from the bottom of his heart.

“You mustn’t say such crazy things. You’re not going to die,” he told her now, with a censorious pout. “Don’t you realize how much I love you?” The prince was an honest person. But honesty, however noble a virtue, was scarcely enough to save Rapunzel now. “You must live!” he cried. “You mustn’t die!” There were no other words left for him to say. His voice dropped to a murmur. “I ask for nothing else—only that you live.” And just at that moment, a harsh voice whispered in his ear.

“Do you really mean that? You’ll be satisfied if she remains alive, no matter what?”

The prince spun around. His hair was standing on end, and he felt as if his entire body had been doused with ice water. It was Rapunzel’s mother, the old witch.

“You!” he bellowed. It was not a courageous bellow, however, but one of terror. “What do you want?”

“I came to help my daughter,” the old woman said calmly, then bared her teeth in a smile. “I knew what was happening. There’s nothing in this world I don’t know. I knew all along that you’d brought my daughter to this castle, and how you’ve loved and cared for her. Mind you, if I had thought for a moment that you were only toying with her affections, I wouldn’t have just stood by and watched. But that didn’t seem to be the case, so I’ve re

mained in the background all this time and let you be. It gives even an old witch like me a little pleasure to know that her daughter is leading a happy life.

“But it’s all over now, isn’t it? I don’t suppose you know this, but when the daughter of a witch is loved by a man and gives birth to a child, only one of two things can happen: either she dies, or she turns into the ugliest woman in the world. Rapunzel doesn’t seem to have been fully aware of this, but she must have had some inkling of what would happen. She didn’t want to have a baby, did she? The poor thing. What do you intend to do with her now? Let her die? Or do you want her live on, with a face as hideous as mine? A moment ago you said all you wanted was that she live, no matter what. Did you really mean it? I myself was every bit as beautiful as Rapunzel when I was young. Then a hunter fell in love with me and I ended up giving birth. I wanted to live, at any cost, and that’s what I told my mother when she revealed the choice I had to make. She cast a spell and saved my life, but it left me with the spectacular face you see before you. Well? What do you say? Just now you said you ask only that she live. You weren’t lying, I take it?”

“Let me die,” moaned Rapunzel, writhing on her bed. “If I die, everyone else can go on living in peace. O my prince, you’ve cared for me all this time, and I ask for nothing more. I don’t want to live on in wretchedness.”

“Let her live!” the prince bellowed—this time with genuine courage. Hot sweat rolled down his agonized forehead. “Rapunzel will never end up with a face like yours, old witch!”

“You don’t believe me? Very well. I’ll see to it that Rapunzel lives to a ripe old age. But can you promise you’ll always love her, no matter how horrible she ends up looking?”

— V —

The passage dictated by the second son from his sickbed appeared, for all its brevity, to constitute a rather considerable leap. Confined to bed and with nothing but rice gruel for nourishment, however, even the haughty, impertinent, spoiled child whose habit it is to heap scorn on the entire roster of contemporary Japanese writers was unable to give us more than a glimpse of his singular genius; indeed, he hadn’t spewed out so much as a third of what he’d originally planned to say before he succumbed to exhaustion. It seems, regrettably, that not even genius can overcome the debilitating effects of a mild fever. He’d no sooner begun his great leap forward than he was forced to entrust the baton to the following member of the team.

Next up was the younger daughter, an impertinent thing in her own right. Driven by a lust for glory so pronounced that she’d have preferred to give up entirely on any endeavor rather than fail to attain spectacular success, she was, from the moment she awoke on the fourth day, restless and fidgety. When the whole family gathered at the breakfast table, she alone confined herself to a slice of bread and a glass of milk, perhaps sensing that stuffing herself with such common, down-to-earth dishes as miso soup and pickled radishes could only serve to impede her flights of imagination. After finishing breakfast she went into the parlor, where she stood at the piano and began pounding away at the keys. Chopin, Liszt, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Ravel—she played whatever passage came into her head, a hopeless hodgepodge of melodies. This was her way of calling down inspiration from above. She had always been given to overblown histrionics.

Inspiration came. With a serene look on her face, she swept out of the parlor, went to the bathroom, removed her stockings, and washed her feet. A strange thing to do, on the face of it. Apparently she thought of this as a way of purifying herself. A perverse sort of baptism. Now, satisfied that she had attended to the purification of both body and soul, she made a leisurely retreat to her study. Once inside, she sat on a chair, looked up, folded her hands, and murmured:

“Amen.”

This was nothing if not extraordinary, since the younger daughter was by no means a religious person. She had merely borrowed the word temporarily, thinking it a suitable vehicle for expressing the precious tension she felt at that moment.

Amen. Indeed, the word seemed to soothe her heart. She ceremoniously dropped a stick of the incense Plum Blossom into the brazier at her feet, took a deep breath, and let her eyelids droop dreamily. She felt as if she understood the state of mind of that great woman writer of olden times, Lady Murasaki, and as she recalled the line “In spring, the dawn,” she experienced a rapturous sense of peace and clarity. Then, remembering that the words were in fact written by Sei Shonagon, she came back to earth with a thud and hastily reached for a volume on her desk—Greek Mythology. A book of pagan myths. This in itself should suffice to demonstrate the spurious nature of that “Amen” of hers. She claimed that this volume was the fountainhead of her imaginative powers, and that she had only to open it whenever the springs of imagination ran dry, and a flood of flowers, forests, fresh-water pools, love, swans, princes, and fairies welled up before her eyes. This claim of hers was best taken with a grain of salt, however. It was difficult to put much faith in anything the younger daughter said or did. Chopin, inspiration, baptism of the feet, “Amen,” Plum Blossom, Lady Murasaki, “In spring, the dawn,” Greek mythology—there was no connection at all. Utter incoherence. She was in fact devoted to one thing alone—the act of putting on airs.

After riffling through Greek Mythology, pausing to gaze at an illustration of a naked Apollo and to smile a thin, spine-chilling smile, she tossed the book aside, opened her desk drawer, extracted a box of chocolates and a tin of hard candies, and, in a hopelessly affected manner, using only her thumb and forefinger and lifting the other three fingers daintily, selected a chocolate, placed it in her mouth, then chewed and swallowed it noisily even as she reached for a hard candy, which she proceeded to crush between her teeth as she reached for another chocolate, and so on, devouring all before her in the manner of a famished ghoul. With this, of course, her efforts to keep her stomach light and airy by breakfasting only on bread and milk came to naught. The younger daughter was by nature a glutton. She’d attempted to appear refined by limiting herself to a light breakfast, but bread and milk were not enough to satisfy her morning appetite—not by a long shot—and once ensconced in her study, away from prying eyes, she had lost no time in letting loose the trencherman inside her. She was a child prone to deceptions of many and various kinds. After gobbling down twenty chocolates and ten hard candies, she assumed a look of childlike innocence and began humming an aria from La Traviata. As she hummed, she brushed the dust from her manuscript paper, filled her artist’s pen with ink, and began to write at a leisurely pace, beginning with a critique which revealed a somewhat objectionable attitude.