Phantasm Japan: Fantasies Light and Dark, From and About Japan Read online

  Wool was spun into twine and the daylight waned, not thickening, it seemed, but thinning into a chill blue. The wheel revolved and the yarn lengthened, and Addyson began to feel it was a self-sufficient reality, that it would continue to exist even when all else was claimed by the growing obscurity. It would be the last thing to exist and would spin itself to an end that was endless. He wanted to disappear in contemplation of it. Not even contemplation—in the dream of it.

  Then there came a voice, repeating a single word with the insistence of an alarm clock. The voice belonged to Fletch; the word was his name.

  Addyson resurfaced, hypnopompically, and found himself in the dark of early evening outside a shop selling yarn and woolen garments. Fletch was beside him, by some wonderful chance, and Addyson was overjoyed at his sudden appearance. Addyson began to recall, blurrily, the outline of his itinerary for the day, but all that seemed unimportant. Nothing mattered except the presence of his friend. He felt himself choosing to prioritize that presence over all else, as if he were gladly sliding into damnation.

  In an enthusiasm that seemed fever-tinged, Addyson persuaded Fletch to walk back home with him, and on the way he bought two bottles of wine heedless of his weekly budget.

  The flat was chilly, as usual, and the breath of both showed on the air as Addyson placed an oil lamp between them and filled two glasses. The conversation felt more agitated than jovial until it occurred to Addyson to produce the letter he had recently received. With this, their talk obtained the ballast it had needed.

  “Have you started on a story?” Fletch asked after examining the letter and the guidelines.

  “No.”

  “I think you should. Don’t you want to?”

  “Yes, I do. The problem is that I’m too old. I don’t mean for writing. But for fiction I am.”

  “How can you be too old?”

  “I think fiction is about suspense and possibility. That is, it is especially meaningful to those in the middle of life, but at least needs a future too large to be contained within the mental field of vision. One writes fiction in order to have a dialogue with life, in the hope that this dialogue will deepen future possibilities. Simply put, one writes fiction with the intention of living it, or at least the values and aesthetics it embodies.

  “I no longer have a future to dream about or to dream with. The horizon is narrowing as it converges on the exit from existence.”

  “You still write, though. I don’t see why it’s different.”

  “Perhaps you’re right. But I haven’t written fiction for very many years. This Drummond has read my old stories, but it’s been so long since I wrote them that I feel a bit like a ghost spying on the posthumous success of the person he was when alive. It’s hard to connect with that success as a living person. When these stories were first published … who knows who read them? Not many, I think. And probably all of them now ghosts like me.”

  “You’re overthinking it. You are still alive, actually. There’s no reason not to make the most of that. Even if you’re a ghost, I bet ghosts have stories to tell. I’d like to hear them.”

  Addyson pursed his lips in thought and poured more wine for them both. He didn’t have an answer for Fletch. He could feel himself straining for a refutation, but why would he do that? It was true that something stood in the way of his writing this story, but since he did not know what it was, there was no use in arguing its case.

  Something else occurred to him, as if linked to, yet also as a means of moving away from, this subject. He stood up and approached an ornately carved wooden box that sat in the place on one bookcase where a clock might have sat. He took a small key from a hidden pocket, inserted it in a lock on top of the box, and opened up the wings of the lid. Fletch watched all this in curious silence. Addyson often referred to the box as “My Death” and had let it be known that it contained documents intended to be read post mortem, including a will, but also various other writings perhaps closer to being a testament. From this box, Addyson drew an envelope-shaped package, with the slight bulge at its lower end that is formed by gravity on loose contents, its outside surface decorated with feminine colors and patterns that might easily have belonged to some ancient vernal past or some brilliant autumnal future.

  He resumed his seat on the floor and passed the package to Fletch.

  “What is it?” asked Fletch.

  “Tea. That was in one of the boxes you brought back.”

  “Really? I didn’t see it. Where’s it from?”

  “Japan.” He watched Fletch’s face, but there was no especial reaction at this word.

  “But how did it get there?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose it’s been there a long time. Probably too long for it to be good to drink. Maybe even from before …”

  “Before?”

  Addyson waved his hand vaguely. “Before …”

  “Oh. Before.”

  “Yes. So it could be contaminated, or, if it’s older, not contaminated, but still too old to drink.”

  “So you’re just going to keep it?”

  “I suppose so. It must be very rare. It might even be the last of this kind of tea in existence.”

  Fletch passed back the packet. Neither of them spoke. This packet of tea seemed to be a conundrum evoking, finally, only silence. In this silence, however, something occurred to Addyson—a delayed understanding. Fletch apparently knew what he had alluded to in saying “Before.” There had been a Japan, very probably. Of course there had. But it was gone now. Maybe that was why it had become such a phantom in his memory.

  Do ghosts age? This one—

  The phantom in my teacup—

  Should reflect my face,

  But has not changed. It longs to

  Rise like steam and tell its tale.

  He awoke in darkness. He thought the darkness was horribly hot, then cold—cold as something forever wrong. When he understood that he was hot under his insulated bedclothes but could feel the chill of night on his exposed face, he began to remember where and when he was, and the long, seemingly inescapable dream of his entire existence. How much longer? And how would it end?

  There was an end, wasn’t there? No, a deadline. But was that an end? Was it?

  He got out of bed, shivering, but also feeling the compass of balance and spatial awareness within him find its north. He drew aside the stained curtain from the window and found, outside, the familiar impartial world. How often, in not recognizing him, had it seemed barren of comfort? But he found comfort in it now, as if what he saw were a line from a song that may, with half a smile, or even a chuckle, be understood, but not explained. The moon floated high over the stable opposite. No one passed and he could hear no sound. The moon—inaccessible again. Until such time as … what?

  Arthur Waley. The name came back to him with sudden buoyancy, surfacing whole in his mind. Arthur Waley had been a great Japanologist. His name had its place in Addyson’s memory like Tom Thumb or Marco Polo. He could not remember when he had first heard it. Nonetheless, he knew that Arthur Waley had been the first person to translate Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji into English—a feat of enormous erudition, dedication, and self-sacrifice. But Waley had never been to Japan and, in fact, never did go. When asked if he wouldn’t like to visit and see the country for himself, he had replied that he would rather not; he would prefer to keep intact within him the Japan he had imagined.

  A poet set against oblivion.

  He would not sleep tonight.

  How long was it till the deadline? Was there enough time for him to remake Japan? Still shivering, he left his bedroom and lit an oil lamp. There was a cardboard box, in the corner, with his writings in, some of it handwritten on loose leaves, some of it in notepads, some printed, some in the form of bound books. He took out the loose leaves, the pads, the books and inspected pages here and there by the light
of his lamp. A panicky impatience seized him, and he threw the paper he was holding on the floor. For a while, he contemplated these paper shards covered in their close lines of words. He thought his hand would tremble when it reached out again. It did a little and then seemed to become empty and calm.

  Everything had become immediate and momentous to his senses, but had there been another to observe, they might have thought him engaged in intricate, many-staged deliberation. Eventually, he took all of his writing, except the poems he had been scribbling of late on scraps, and the documents in his death box and arranged them in a pile in the overgrown communal yard behind the building. He put a taper in his oil lamp and passed the flame to the heap of paper he had just made.

  “Too many weeds,” he said, as the flame began to grow.

  He added sticks and pieces of flammable detritus to the blaze. Soon he had built a bonfire—modest, but just large enough that he could step back a little and still feel some warmth. It had all been simply and easily accomplished. Moreover, he had not disappeared with the onset of the conflagration. The flames had created an emptiness, but he was, in contrast, becoming more solid.

  Poppies of ash were swirling upward on the heat currents. The gloss of the darkness was peeling—these were the colorless flakes that detached from the patches of revealed nothingness. The world, perhaps, was a mirror to the senses. In itself it was empty, though an empty something. It truly became the world when there was someone to look into it. But what if the reflective quicksilver lining that enabled the relationship between world-mirror and person were all to flake away?

  There comes a moment

  When old sayings are not shed

  Skins, but living mounts

  With empty saddles: a cup

  Must be empty to be filled.

  Dawn came, and he felt worn thin, as if by the passage of an Arctic summer, in which only the slenderest interval of night made days plural rather than singular. He had thought he would write, but for now the fertile Greenland of his soul was austere with ice.

  When he reread Drummond’s letter and the guidelines, it was not that he now felt empty. It was more like being presented with the wrong question. The real answer started far anterior to the assumptions from which the question arose. He experienced a fullness that made the question almost irrelevant, almost incoherent, and no words resulted.

  So, he would not write.

  He already knew what he would do. He took the tiny key from the inner pocket where he kept it and opened the two wings that formed the lid of his death box. From this he extracted the packet of tea. Then, he took himself to the kitchen and picked up the scissors from the sideboard. He cut into the long-sealed envelope, opening up the thin line of a new mouth. Holding the package so that it bellowed with air and the mouth opened, he sniffed at the still unseen contents. There seemed to be no scent. Had it all evaporated?

  Scent, a subtle scent such as Japanese tea, was elusive to memory, but he could almost recall how it should smell.

  There was something he could do—something actual and mechanical. Beneath the kitchen sink, in the broken cupboard, was a shoebox containing items wrapped in the pages of long-defunct magazines. From this, Addyson took something roughly the shape of a milk churn and the size of a pepper pot and unwrapped it. He had not thought to use it for a long time—an earthenware oil burner. He scrubbed the oil dish under the tap but couldn’t remove all the gunk, so gave up. Returning to the sitting room with the burner, he poured some of what the tea packet contained into the dish, and beneath this he inserted a tea light, which he lit.

  He sat and closed his eyes.

  What had it been like, that aroma? Resinous, yes. That was one of the words by which he had always tried to describe and remember it. It had about it the freshness of sap. But that alone did not capture it. There was also a sweetness to it, like cake-crumb. Yes, it gladdened the heart the way baking smells do. But this also left something essential untouched.

  Behind his closed eyes, a work of solid engineering erected itself. He recognized it. Yume no Ukibashi, the Floating Bridge of Dreams mentioned in the Uji chapters of The Tale of Genji. Uji Train Station, the terminus of the Keihan Line. Exit the station and turn right, and there is the legendary bridge, crossing the River Uji, into the town of Uji.

  Addyson paused midway across the bridge. It was a bright, brisk day. The sunlight was bracing rather than warm. It glistened at the corners of things, where winds rippled. There was little traffic and pedestrians were few, but Addyson could sense the unobtrusive population within the compact shapes of the semi-urban landscape. The river was wide, and to any who loved rivers, it gave the impression that rivers do, not merely of the majesty of water, but also of air, which with a great river is a huge, unscalable freedom that somewhere becomes sky. He looked to that sky, and then down to where the river eddied in white manes of froth around the bridge’s supports.

  The sense of the present, of being alive, was inexpressible. It was fleeting, obscure—yet imperishable. It was a trivial, a nonchalant feeling—yet how truly splendid. And this bridge and this sun-limned, wind-shaded afternoon belonged to a time when the present was alive, when one could walk and speak in unison with deathless today. It was no dream, that was true, but dream could cross the bridge of the present from birth to death on living legs.

  He remembered where this bridge would take him. When he came to its end, if he turned left, he would enter the carless road that, with tea shops on both sides, led to the Byôdô-in temple. But it was the road he was interested in, and not the temple. He was coming to it now, nearing the end of the bridge. He had only to turn and take a few more steps and on either side would be the tea shops, the smell of roasting green tea wafting from beside and beneath the kanji-splashed noren. That smell, so fresh, so subtle, so thrilling—it was like an afterimage of the present moment itself, an afterimage that in turn became a blueprint for everything loved or longed for in the country he knew as Japan.

  Just a few steps away. But the light was too bright ahead, and the vision would not come clear.

  He opened his eyes.

  The leaves that had been roasting in the oil burner he tipped into a teapot. He refilled the burner and set about boiling water for tea.

  “Though this tea …” He was thinking in a writerly way, composing thoughts in his head. “Though this tea, in its packaging and its scent, gives rise to dream, it comes from a real Japan. The same Japan that Waley never visited. And perhaps my dreams are the same as his. There must be a link between the reality and the dream, as a tree flowers and bears fruit …”

  But after this his thoughts became more disconnected. At last he seemed to lose track of them utterly, and a cup of yellow-brown liquid was steaming before him. Was it off-color because of its age, or because he had just been roasting the leaves? He dismissed the question and blew ripples across the tea’s surface.

  He took the tea to where he had been sitting before and drank, at first in careful sips and then in slurps and gulps. There was something a little repulsive about the taste. It tasted rusty. No, worse than that. The iron tang was more the iron of blood than of rust. But after this taste had become a silt lining his throat, he was more able to ignore it and concentrate on the monad of the tea flavor that had initially been cloaked. He felt the tea absorbed by his stomach, and he closed his eyes again.

  The blinding light had gone, and the road had become solid in its retreat. He could wander autonomously between the tea shops. He was free to go inside any of the shops, through the wooden lattice sliding doors, sit at a counter. What would happen? Even if he were merely served tea, he thought this simple fact might be imbued with the significance of a riddle.

  He did not stop to enter any of the shops. Maybe the thought of entering did not satisfy his imagination. He walked on and passed the lane that led to the temple entrance. Presently, he came to some known steps. They seemed
now noticeably more known than most other things contained in the world. He climbed them to the path that ran, on a raised bank of earth, parallel to the river. Then he turned and looked back at the way he had come—the temple roof, the road threading between shops, their banners fluttering. A pure breeze rose up from below, seeming to suffuse him with a charged, sweet emptiness.

  If he turned a little to his right, he could also see the bridge he had traversed a short while ago. The serene panorama was the implicit sum of his experiences of Japan. And the sum that was implied, in turn implied more, further.

  What came to his nose, his skin, his eyes, and his ears was all the blueprint of that roasting-tea scent. All of it was the product of the delicious fumes from leaves in unseen braziers. But he was no longer sure whether Japan brought him that aroma in his nostrils and that contentment in his stomach, or whether the aroma and the contentment brought him Japan.

  He closed his eyes. Very briefly it occurred to him that he was closing his eyes behind eyes already closed. With the wind gentle on his skin, with the tea aroma still telling a tale of rooftop and backstreet, like chimney smoke, with the liquid narration of the river close by, he could still see everything. But now the light was ebbing. As it waned, something else waxed in its place. It was the excitement, like a baking heat that conducts swiftly and evenly through consciousness itself, that is a form of foreknowledge occurring only on certain rare summer evenings. It was tantalizing, since he did not know exactly when or in what way the thing would come, of which this feeling was the certainty and the proof. But it was only required that he wait and remain alert. The first thing was close to impossible; the second he could not help.