But no one can hear you, no one is listening to you or truly cares what you say, your words drowned in the waters, your words lost in the tunnel, and so, before long, the waters are breaking, and off you go, swept along, down the tunnel, through the curtains, into the room and out, out –
‘Niihara Ryūnosuke; Ryūnosuke, dragon-son …’
In the year of the dragon, in the month of the dragon, on the day of the dragon, in the hour of the dragon, at the sinking of the moon, at the rising of the sun, you first see the light of the world, and you weep and you scream, alone, alone, you scream and you scream –
2. ‘Mother / Haha’
You are in an asylum, in an enormous, monstrous room. All the lunatics have been made to dress in the same grey kimonos. It makes the scene even more depressing, if that were possible. One of the inmates sits at an organ, playing the same hymn again and again, over and over with ever-increasing intensity, ever greater fervour, as another dances, hopping and leaping about in the centre of the room. Beside a hale and hearty doctor, the very picture of health, you are looking on. The mad have a certain particular smell and in their odour you catch the scent of your own mother –
The smell of earth, a taste of mud …
‘Shall we go,’ says the doctor.
Your mother was a madwoman. A beautiful, slender and graceful madwoman, born of samurai stock, who married a parvenu beneath herself, becoming ever quieter, ever more timid and withdrawn until the death of your eldest sister, and then your own birth when, and finally, the spectres and the twilight overtook and engulfed her –
In-trancing her, in-snaring her …
Your mother blamed herself for the death of your sister Hatsu, believing the meningitis which killed her had been brought on by a cold she had caught while on a day out together. You were born the year after Hatsu died and so you never knew her, but for the portrait of the little round-cheeked girl with dimples which still stands on the altar in your house. But you and your other sister Hisa were no balm to your mother, no defence against the spectres, the spectres and the twilight –
In-prisoning her …
In an upstairs room in the Niihara house in Shiba Ward, day after day, she would sit alone, all day long, puffing on a long, thin pipe, her hair held up in a bun by a comb, her tiny face ashen, her tiny body lifeless, as though already no longer really here, always never really there, emaciated, fading and wasting away, away –
In-shadow …
But you saw her, saw her then, see her now: your adoptive mother made a point of taking you to see her, leading you up the steep stairs to that dim room, prompting you to say, Hello, hello, Mother. Most of the time your mother would not answer, would never speak, her pipe to her lips, its mouthpiece white and barrel black, though once, just once, she suddenly grinned, leant forward, tapped you on the head with her pipe and said –
‘Conk!’
But most of the time she was a very quiet, placid madwoman. But if you or your sister would ask her to draw or paint a picture for you, then she would take a sheet of writing paper, fold it in four and begin. Sometimes in black ink, sometimes in watercolours. Pictures of plants in bloom, paintings of children on an outing. But the people in her pictures, all the people she drew, they always had the faces of foxes, all fox-faced.
‘Shall we go,’ says the doctor again.
You follow the doctor down the corridor into another room. In the corners, on the shelves, there are large jars of alcohol in which brains and other organs are soaking, pickled –
Preserved …
You remember her death more than her life; she finally wasted away and died in the autumn of your eleventh year. A telegram arrived. You climbed into a rickshaw with your adoptive mother and flew through the night from Honjo to Shiba. You had a thin silk handkerchief wrapped around your neck, with a motif of a Chinese landscape, the smell of perfume: Ayame Kōsui.
Your mother lay on a futon in the parlour beneath the upstairs room in which she had lived. You knelt beside her, weeping with your older sister.
Behind you, someone whispered, ‘The end is near now …’
Suddenly, your mother opened her eyes and spoke.
You cannot remember the words, but you remember you and your sister could not help but giggle. And then your sister began to cry again.
Your own tears had stopped, and they would not flow again. But you stayed kneeling before your mother throughout the night, beside your sister in her constant floods. You believed that as long as you did not cry, your mother would not die.
A few times, your mother would open her eyes, look you and your sister in the face, and then endless streams of tears would flow down her cheeks. But she did not speak again. And on the evening of the third day, your mother finally died. And then you cried, you cried.
A distant aunt, a woman you barely knew, put her arm around you, pulled you to her and said, ‘I’m so impressed by you!’
You could not understand what she meant, why she said what she said; impressed by what, you thought, how strange.
On the day of
