hair, were of them strong.
Eguchi thought of the several days when he had run off to Kyoto, taking the back-country route, with the girl whose breast had been wet with blood. Perhaps the memory was vivid because the warmth of the fresh young body beside him came over to him faintly. There was numerous short tunnels on the road from the western provinces into Kyoto. Each time they went into a tunnel, the girl, as if frightened, would bring her knee to Eguchi's and take his hand. And each time they came out of one there would be a hill or a small ravine with a rainbow over it.
'How pretty!' she would say each time, or 'How nice!' She had a word of praise for each little rainbow, and it would be no exaggeration to say that, searching to the left and the right, she found one each time they came out of a tunnel. Sometimes it would be so faint as to be hardly there at all. She came to feel something ominous in these strangely abundant rainbows.
'Don't you suppose they're after us? I have a feeling they'll catch us when we get to Kyoto. Once they take me back they won't let me out of the house again.'
Eguchi, who had just graduated from college and gone to work, had no way to make a living in Kyoto, and he knew that, unless he and the girl committed suicide together, they would presently have to go back to Tokyo. But, from the small rainbows, the cleanness of the girl's secret parts came before him and would not leave. He had seen it at an inn by a river in Kanazawa. It had been on a night of snow flurries. So struck had he been by the cleanness that he had held his breath and felt tears welling up; He had not seen such cleanness in the women of all the decades since. And he had come to think that he understood all cleanness, that cleanness in secret places was the girl's own property. He tried to laugh the notion away, but it become a fact in the flow of longing, and it was still a powerful memory, not to be shaken from the old Eguchi. A person sent by the girl's family took her back to Tokyo, and soon she was married.
When they chanced to meet by Shinobazu Pond, the girl had a baby strapped to her back. The baby had on a white wool cap. It was autumn and the lotuses in the pond were withering. Possibly the white butterfly dancing behind his closed eyelids tonight was called up by that white cap.
When they met by the pond, all Eguchi could think of was to ask whether she was happy.
'Yes.' she replied immediately 'I am happy.' Probably there was no other answer.
'And why are you walking here all by yourself with a baby on your back? It was a strange question. The girl only looked into his face.
'Is it a boy or a girl?'
'It is a girl. Really! Can you tell by looking at it?'
'Is it mine?'
'It is not.' The girl shook her head, angrily. 'It is not.'
'Oh! Well, if it is, you needn't say so now. You can say so when you feel like it. Years and years from now.'
'It is not. It really is not. I haven't forgotten that I loved you, but you are not to imagine things. You will only cause trouble to her.'
'Oh?' Eguchi made no special attempt to look at the baby's face, but he looked on and on after the girl. She glanced back when she had gone some distance. Seeing that he was still watching her, she quickened her pace. He did not see her again. More than ten years ago he had heard of her death. Eguchi, now sixty-seven, had lost many friends and relations, but the memory of the girl was still young. Reduced now to three details, the baby's white cap and the cleanness of the secret place and the blood on the breast, it was still clear and fresh. Probably there was no one in the world besides Eguchi who knew of that incomparable cleanness, and with his death, not far away now, it would quite disappear from the world. Though shyly, she had let him look on as he would. Perhaps that was the way with girls. But there could be no doubt that the girl did not herself know of the cleanness. She could not see it.
Early in the morning, after they got to Kyoto, Eguchi and the girl walked through a bamboo grove. The bamboo shimmered in the morning light. In Eguchi's memory the leaves were fine and soft, of pure silver, and the bamboo stalks were of silver too. On the path that skirted the grove, thistles and dew-flowers were in bloom. Such was the path that floated up in his memory. There would seem to be some confusion about the season. Beyond the path they climbed a blue stream, where a waterfall roared down, its spray catching the sunlight. In the spray the girl stood naked. The facts were different, but in the course of time Eguchi's mind had made them so. As he grew old, the hills of Kyoto and the trunks of the red pines in gentle clusters could sometimes bring the girl back to Eguchi. But memories as vivid as tonight's were rare. Was it the youth of the sleeping girl that invited them?
Old Eguchi was wide awake and did not seem likely to go to sleep. He did not want to remember women other than the girl who had looked at the little rainbows. Nor did he want to touch the sleeping girl, to look at her naked. Turning face down, he again opened the packet at his pillow. The woman of the inn had said that it was sleeping medicine, but Eguchi hesitated. He did not know what it would be, whether or not it would be the medicine the girl had been given. He took one pill in his mouth, and washed it down with a goo amount of water. Perhaps because he was used to a bedtime drink but not to sleeping medicine, he was quickly pulled into sleep. He had a dream.
He was in the embrace of a woman, but she had four legs. The four legs were entwined about him. She had arms as well. Though half awaken he thought the four legs odd, but nor repulsive. Those four legs, so much more provocative than two, were still with him. It was a medicine to make one have such dreams, he thought absently. The girl had turned away from him, her hips toward him. He seemed to find something touching about the fact that her head was more distant than her hips. Half asleep and half awake, he took the long hair spread out toward him and played with it as if to comb it. And so he fell asleep.
His next dream was most pleasant. One of his daughters had borne a deformed child in a hospital. Awake, the old man could not remember what sort of deformity it had been. Probably he did not want to remember. It was hideous, in any case. The baby was immediately taken from the mother. It was behind a white curtain in the maternity room, and she went over and commenced hacking it to pieces, getting it ready to throw away. The doctor, a friend of Eguchi's, was standing beside her in white. Eguchi was too beside her. He was wide awake now, groaning from the horror of it. The crimson velvet on the four walls so startled him that he put his hands to his face and rubbed his forehead. It had been a horrible nightmare. Was it that, having come in search of misshapen pleasure, he had had a misshapen dream? He did not know which of this three daughters he had dreamed of, and he did not try to know. All three had borne quite normal babies.
Eguchi would have wanted to leave if it had been possible. But he took the other pill, to fall into a deeper sleep. The cold water passed down his throat. The girl still had her back to him. Thinking that she might – it was not impossible – bear the ugliest and most doltish of children, he put his hand to the roundness at her shoulder.
'Look this way.'
As if in answer she turned over. One of her hands fell on his chest. One leg came toward him, as if trembling in the cold. So warm a girl could not be cold. From her mouth or her nose, he could not be sure which, came a small voice.
'Are you having a nightmare too?' he asked.
But old Eguchi was quick to sink into the depths of sleep.
2
Old Eguchi had not thought that he would again go to the 'house of the sleeping beauties.' He had not thought when he spent that first night there that he would like to go again. So it had been too when he left in the morning.
It was about a fortnight later that a telephone call came asking whether he might like to pay a visit that night. The voice seemed to be that of the woman in her forties. Over the telephone it sounded even more like a cold whisper from a silent place.
'If you leave now, when may I hope to see you?'
'A little after nine, I'd imagine.'
'That will be too soon. The young lady is to here yet, and even if she were she would not be asleep.'
Startled, Eguchi did not answer.
'I should have her asleep by eleven. I'll be waiting for you any time after that.'
