Free Japanese Gothic Tales by Kyoka Izumi Page A

passed. It was a black shadow.
    "'Is someone else here?' he thought. But how could it be? And yet the shadow staggered onto the stage and sat down, back to back, with the woman. When it looked his way, the wanderer saw his own face. It was he."
    "It was who?"
    "The gentleman himself. Later he told me, 'If that had really been me on that stage, I should have died there.' I remember how he sighed and turned pale.
    "He couldn't stop looking. His flesh was leaping and his blood on fire. He saw himself twisting around and looking rapturously at Tamawaki Mio's back. He saw himself use the tip of his finger to trace a peak and then a line, making a triangle on her pale robe.
    "The gentleman's heart was filled with ice, his body soaked with cold sweat. The woman, Tamawaki, kept her head bowed.
    "Next, he drew a square. I mean, he watched himself draw a square. His finger touched her knee and began to tremble.
    "Then he drew a circle, a round line on her back; and just as he was completing the figure, the wind gusted, sweeping the earth and gouging the sky. The torch light down in the valley vanished com pletely, leaving a bright, delicate pink. Was that the beach? Or the color of the ocean? As he stood looking, he heard the rustle of leaves and scattered coins swirling in the wind. He realized that four or five people were huddled together, sitting close behind him, and that they, too, had been watching.
    "The color of the woman's face shone through her bangs, making her look all the more attractive. A smile formed on her lips as she leaned back, resting against his leg, using his knee for a pillow. Her black hair flowed down as she looked up, and the white of her bosom appeared. Under her weight, the man fell back, and the stage slipped down and down into the earth.
    "When the gentleman came to, he was still standing in the same place. He heard a voice that sounded all the way from the tops of the mountains to the valley. Losing his senses, he started running back to the temple. When he finally returne d, I was sleeping inside my mos quito net. He embraced me and called out, 'Water, please!'
    "His body was covered with cuts and drenched with dew. From that moment until daybreak, he confessed everything to me. The next day he slept straight through. In the afternoon, when Tamawaki's wife came to the temple with two of her young women, I did what I could to keep the gentleman from finding out she was here. Believe me, sir, it was hot, but I kept these doors shut tight.
    "And that was when the poem appeared.
    "For the next two or three days, the gentleman secluded himself, bound by his own terror, shut away from the world of delusion. I, of course, cared for him constantly. But when I took my eyes off him for one brief moment, he disappeared. A woodcutter came by just as it was getting dark. 'I just passed your visitor,' he said. 'Over there. By the Snake Cavern.'
    "The Snake Cavern is on the other side of this mountain, two hills over. It's an ancient cave, filled with water. If you shout into the hole, it echoes back with a bottomless sound, stretching for twenty-five miles into the heart of the range. They say the water is connected with the ocean. But who really knows? The gentleman probably wanted to see a performance like the one he had seen a few nights before. We found his body in the ocean."
    A storm came from the directio n of the two-story house. It ap proached only as sound, dressed in robes and traveling up the path, not even dampening the grass. It had obviously been lured out by the woman's ghost. With cloud-black hair and peach-colored robes, the storm came to the garden, accompanied by the butterflies that had been fluttering above the field of rape blossoms. Standing alongside the shimmering waves of heat, it peered in softly through the window.
     
     
     
    Part Two
    The rain soon stopped and left a misty brocade of butterflies and flowers on the velvet moss of the garden and mountainside. The fragrance of rape