Blue Notes on the Samisen in Early Summer

MICHELLE LEIGH

“So, do you love your wife?” She’d asked this question in the middle of Jinbocho crossing. Brilliant sun, and crowds streaming past. She felt like a character in a Rohmer film, with a casual ease about complex love entanglements, a sense of life’s transience weighing down upon the sweetest moment of rapture. Even the sunshine seemed cool, blue, and secretly dark, moody like slow jazz. A Rohmer film set in Japan. There should have been some notes plucked on a samisen just then.

“Yes.” He looked embarrassed. “Do you love your husband?”

“Yes.” Her voice sounded cheerful and bright, a defiant small chirp that rang out clear and was abruptly swallowed in the mass of sound. The utterance had become history, recorded upon the air above the shining lines of cars, in the unknowing imaginations of pedestrians. Yes. No. The meaning of her yes was in this case no. As a defense against his love for his wife, of course. Asymmetry wouldn’t do on this point. Not that she believed him. Perhaps the meaning of the word love should be discussed.

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They’d stopped in a cafe for cold drinks. They’d ordered tricolor coffees, the soft-toned hues of cream, cocoa, and coffee beautifully layered in narrow frosted glasses. His eyes watching her were intense, slivers of obsidian.

It was the first time she’d thought of black as luminous.

“What do you mean by love?” She dipped the long silver spoon into the liquid strata, trying to bring up a spoonful of the lowest level, the espresso at the bottom, without adding mocha or cream to it on the way up. The terzetto of layers began to slip into one another, swirling quickly into a more organic pattern of currents and eddies. She glanced at his drink. It was still a placid arrangement of parallels, three perfect stripes in suspension.

Perhaps this is not a film by Rohmer, she thought. Perhaps it’s Kurosawa, or even Greenaway. Could this be a Greenaway film? Would I like being a Greenaway character? Godard. Maybe this could be a Godard, a new one set surprisingly in an Asian country. Whatever the case, this would be the moment where we fade and dissolve.

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Mist

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Jinbocho at night. The city sky, a tone painting: clouds of dark pink, deep orange, purple-blue. A wet mist hangs in the air. Red paper lanterns gleam at the entrances to small bars, smoky inside. Neon blazes and twinkles overhead. Summer is beginning. Looking down upon the small passages from above, we see a few figures in groups of two or three make their way through the shadowed streets.

There is a man; there is a woman. We see them from behind; they walk with a slow rhythm. Her hair is golden, she wears a pink sweater and a short black skirt. High heels. His hair is black, he wears dark clothing, a suit.

He: I once had an American penpal.

She: Ah.

A construction crew works on a scaffolded building strung with electric bulbs, glaring spots of yellow with watery auras. The men in their frog-shoes balance on narrow beams and pound things with their tools, metal on metal making a comfortable recurring sound.

She: It’s like a strange dream. It’s midnight, but it seems like day.

He: It’s best for them to work at night.

She: So what happened? To the penpal?

He: Ah—she got married. I shouldn’t write to her after that.

Now a close-up view of the woman’s face. Rainy mist on her cheeks like dew. She chews on her finger for a moment. She shivers. She sways close to the man. Her gaze is inward-looking. Behind her, one of the workmen seems to look her way, to stare after the retreating figure, the bright hair, the pink sweater.

He: Shall we drink something?

She: Yes. . . . It’s beginning to rain, isn’t it?

He: I can smell your perfume, in the rain your perfume is released. Like flowers blooming at night.

The man and the woman enter a small bar. Noise emerges as the door opens. It’s crowded. We watch them through the window as they are led to a table toward the back of the room. As if from far away, muffled sounds of talk and glasses clinking.

The night sky above the city, an expanse of starless violet now, below it tall spires and towering blocks playing neon-written script against the sky, the futuristic enchanted haiku of advertising. Moon, stars, and planets have spiraled off into some other landscape. Music: what instruments? The drums and flutes of the Noh, with voice.

A man stands and sings the Noh from the top of a tall building, above rows of randomly gold-lit window squares.

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Sake

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The man and the woman are sitting on a bed in a hotel room. He’s pouring One-Cup Sake into two glasses. Her pink sweater is spotted with rain. He removes his jacket. They touch their glasses together and drink. Rain streaks against the large window, making a soft percussion of small quick taps.

He: Things are not what they seem.

The woman looks puzzled in a vague and slightly drunken way. Her blond hair has become a little disheveled.

He: Things are not what they seem. No, I suppose you’ll say so what, but if you want to understand Japan, that’s crucial. It’s an art here, making sure nothing is what it seems to be.

She: You mean, the fact that people are so polite? Or what? What do you mean?

The man falls back onto the bed, loosens his tie. He seems to be in a state of excited despair. He sighs.

He: I don’t know.

He closes his eyes.

The woman looks at her shoes, kicking one leg out and flexing her toe. She giggles and sweeps her hair back from her face with a carelessly sexy gesture.

The man glances at her out of the corner of his eye. The woman realizes that she has never been in such intimate circumstances with such a narrow-eyed man. She knows he is looking at her, but she can’t see his irises.

She: I’m so sleepy.

He: Well, I’d better go.

The man is sitting now.

The woman looks away from him.

The man reaches over and pushes the ON button on the television. On the screen appears a solemn man who says that the yen is rising again after falling for many days. On another channel a woman sobs alone in a darkened sushi restaurant. The exposed nape of her neck is milk-white in the gloom. In the background, the flax-colored noren sways in the breeze to the somber groan of violins. On another channel a naked woman is being tied, hands bound above her head, to a pink-painted jungle gym in a children’s park. Her assailant roughly handles her breasts, rotating them rapidly, one clockwise, one counter. He puts his mouth to them. The woman cries ah-ah-ah-ah without stopping, while the man is silent. Below the woman’s naked belly is a colorful computer patchwork of glinting, shifting squares. Into this incandescent region the man thrusts his hand. The woman cries out and turns her head from side to side.

On another channel there is a luminous orange fish gliding past coral in green water. Drifting notes of ocean-borne oboe go on and on as the fish swims slowly and flutters its small silken fins.

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Teacups

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Mid-summer, a different hotel room. On the wall, a pair of persimmons painted in the manner of Kokei, simple and lush. Early evening, with full moon cresting the buildings bordering the nearby palace.

The man embraces the woman from behind. He unties the back-tied bow of her yukata sash. The front of her robe falls open; her breasts are pale, white fruits. The man stands behind her and holds a breast in each hand. The woman arches her head backward, her neck is sculpted stone. The tips of her breasts are red, or they seem to be red. The pale green tea in two tea-cups reflects the moon over the night-city.

Staccato dark tones on koto and samisen give way to an uneven cadence of drumbeats suspended in silence. The woman walks across the room. Seen from the back, the fluttering hem of her yukata.

She: I turn off the light but leave the white curtains open onto the smoky black of the sky and the here and there flash of neon: cobalt, yellow, violet, blue. In the grainy darkness of the room, your face is barest shadow, a profile of delicate line, a faint flash of dull light visible between eyelids nearly closed. I notice again the ukiyoe curve of your nose, the strong black straightness of the hair that falls chopped and thick across your forehead.

She stands gazing at the man. He sits on the bed in chiaroscuro light.

He: Ukiyoe? You think my nose is ukiyoe? Eh . . .

She: This time, as with many other times, I feel I catch a glimpse within you of something I once knew but had forgotten. In the half-dark, when the atoms and molecules seem to drift loosely within their forms, I more easily see this.

The woman picks up a teacup and sips tea. The open window in the dusky room makes a frame within which is seen the rooftop of a small building. Laundry still hanging on lines upon the building-top sways in purple-black silhouette against a paler sky, sky rippling with an inner brilliance. A long-haired girl gathers shirt-silhouettes, and her hair sails out black and wild in the new wind, in the fierce twilight.

The woman inside the room takes up her boxwood comb from Kyoto. She begins to comb her pale silk hair with a slow movement, tilting her head and gazing out the window, eyes focused upon an invisible world, upon the quavering air of the city settling into evening. The man is studying his reflection in the mirror.

He: I wanted to live long ago, to wear chon-mage.

He pulls his hair up and back into a tight topknot.

He: How do I look?

She: I’m in love with an ukiyoe man. Would you wear your hair that way when we go out? I’d like to listen to jazz with an ukiyoe man at my side. The chon-mage would look great with your Yamamoto Yohji blazer.

The woman sets her teacup down and turns on the television without turning up the sound. On the screen a man in ornate brocade kimono commits seppuku in slow motion. His long hair flies about his face as he topples forward and out of the frame.

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DEVILS

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The man and the woman lie upon a silk futon; its color is wisteria. The woman lies with her back to the man. The man looks at the hairline at her neck, stroking the hairs upward, finding beauty in that place and in the line of the cheek against the light, plump.

She: Speak to me like a samurai, with a samurai voice.

She turns toward him to watch his face. His hand plays along the line from waist to hip, falls and rises, falls and rises.

^^^^^

He: Do you remember it? The moment of touch, the first one. I catch you in my arms in an embrace that’s been pressing me toward you through the evening.

She: I was wearing a pink sweater.

He: The embrace undared until this moment comes likes a sigh and moves the next soft step toward lips touching just lightly and the body fills with its own old knowledge.

She: You stroked my hair. You said, it’s pure gold. You said, how beautiful you are.

He: The blood speeds up in the somnolent veins and a faint feeling of urgency begins to be felt, and the bodies seek to push against each other, to enter into one another, the bodies fall away and together again with delighted fear. Questions of all kinds are crowding to be heard, not yet to be spoken.

She: You said, I love you. You held me tightly by the waist.

He: Speech becomes fragments, wisps; the breath separates sentence-parts; the voice finds itself ringing from a lowdown place, in the belly-depth; and inside and outside a kind of gathering tide begins to make the sweetness roll and rush across the world which is only the two entwined.

She: There’s the way this felt all old and old new. I looked at your face above me and had known it centuries.

We hear the voice of Noh that rises over the city and soars moonward. The man walks to the window, looks out. Barefoot, he is dressed in yukata.

He: That voice! It throws itself into the sky with a long twining resonance, drones down into earth to where the ancient fires of molten metal slide en masse, brilliant.

She: The call of that voice is to the magical dead and to devils, to sweet-faced, white-faced wives, to ghost-maidens wearing blazing gold and crimson robes, to old men of vigor, long-bearded, bearing fish from poles, and oh! above the gliding moan of the voice, above the flute’s leafy floating, above the sudden sometimes stamp of the perfected foot, pure white-encased, above the crack and call of the small drum, orange-silk tasseled, above the old sighs and wails and creaks and rasps and laments of the seated chorus, gang of pure spirit, the small moon rises.

He: The sky grows dark. In that far vast blue-black dark, what listens?

She: Do a Kabuki face for me. Make a Kabuki face.

He: Kyyaa!

He crosses his eyes and grimaces like an angry warrior god, his hands flexed, palms flattened and moving in slow controlled arcs forward and out across his body. Feet moving over the tatami in the ancient pattern of small swift steps, he comes toward the woman reclining upon the futon.

The woman reaches out to him. Her hand moves slowly upon his arm. He moves toward her.

She: So do you really love your wife?

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LIPSTICK

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A cake shop cafe. A green afternoon. From within the cake shop cafe, one looks out upon a courtyard garden. The garden seems afloat in moisture, all glistening vivid green leaves, dew, and motionless raindrops.

The man and the woman sit with coffee in small white cups. Mozart flickers in the high-ceilinged room. The bamboo and ivy at the windows give the room a golden warmth, as cozy as a grotto.

She: Waiting for you in the rain today, under my red umbrella from Paris, my feet got wetter and wetter.

He: My watch, my wife, my car, the traffic, the time, the street, the moments spent searching for your face nacreous as a lily, shining in the watery gloom. Your red umbrella like a wonderful poppy. Your wet feet.

She: Anyway, it doesn’t matter. They were old shoes.

He: I will remember the day as a blue dark one ebbing slowly into green, a long twilight legato, a day of being inside rooms, a day of quiet thinking, a day of slow looks and the wet-road sound of cars passing, a day when the river began to flow fast and white with mountain water, a day when spiders were still in their water-beaded webs, a day when time swam along like a deep and silent fish toward the sea.

She: I was remembering a girl I knew as a child. This took place in China. She was an English girl of thirteen who became artificially Japanese, a geisha in fact, with dyed-black hair piled into an unappealing arrangement of three mounds, a dusty-looking white face, and a flat and pointy little black-red mouth. She appeared at school every day, a small shredded dream of a geisha sitting at a wooden desk in the back of the room near the window. She never spoke. She seemed always to be on the brink of disappearing, receding into shadows. Like all people, she finally did vanish, all but the wisp of her that’s here now, a few scant words in a small cafe on a day that’s waterborne.

He: Such a young geisha could be very attractive. I can’t imagine a young geisha sitting in a classroom. If I think of such a rare English child, I can only see her from afar, gliding quietly across a great meadow, wearing Heian robes, collar drooping deeply at the neck and trailing swaths of red, black, and periwinkle silk behind her. Her tiny feet would be charming, tilting along in high geta and tripping gently every now and then. Imagine the sweetness of her small sad face in such a setting.

She: I’ve heard that sad beautiful women are very appealing to men. I’ve heard that the kind of story a man likes best is one in which a sad beautiful woman dies. The quiet stillness of the face: eyes closed, lips parted. What do you think?

He: I like women who are alive. But we have a saying that a beauty must die young. Death is a kind of tax she has to pay. So I always worry about you. Possibly you will die very soon. I try not to think about it.

The woman takes out her small mirrored compact and a lipstick. She applies a pearly red color to her lips with a tiny brush. The man gazes at her.

She: Yes. I’m sure I will soon die. I should. It would be a nice gesture to make to your wife. It would make her happy. You could kill me, I wouldn’t mind at all. How erotic! I’ll wear kimono for the occasion. With my hair down, in disarray.

He: Could I kill you? I don’t know how. By suffocation? By strangling, or with a sharp sword? During lovemaking? In a way it’s an exciting thought. It’s arousing. Please mention it again.

^^^^^

The man and the woman leave the cafe and hail a taxi. The sun emerges in a sudden blaze of light close to the horizon. The white-gloved driver is silent. The small passenger television shows a baseball game, a tiny square of white-garbed figures against brilliant green. Sound is tinny. A home run, and the crowd cheers in a long burst of wild static.

On the other side of the city, sun has fallen behind the palace. A woman walks from one of the great gates, pauses to speak with the guard, walks on across the bridge that traverses the wide moat. The sky is big, its color burnished rose, smoke-pink, as deep as history. Building and tree shapes are black. Lights beginning to shine send streams of surprise into the shadowy slumbering magenta sky. The tiny figure of the woman disappears into the cliffs and ravines of the city.

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SULFUR

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The leaves are red in middle morning. The man and the woman recline as if asleep in an outdoor sulfur bath. In the tree above the steaming pool is a crimson-speckled bird pecking at something. Red dragonflies litter the ground amid the dead splendor of the drifting leaves. A wind catches the transparent wings and makes them hum and vibrate, fluttering off and on.

She: The bird looks down with its round eye and sees nudes adrift in space, a painting by Chagall.

The man pulls the woman onto his lap. The woman curves her body into his and floats. They are a study in pastels. Underwater, the chalky yellow-white of sulfur drifts in silt and pebbles. The water is bluish gray. Puffs of mist rise from the surface of the pool.

She: When you are happy, your eyes narrow so that no white shows.

He: The black belongs to the many secret nights we’ve spent together, to the dark heat where skin meets skin in sleeping embrace, to the infinite night of star-space, to the galactic sky-wide passion of the Tanabata lovers.

She: Did you know we would become lovers from the beginning?

He: The black belongs to the ink that flows from the tip of the writing brush, the narrow bamboo brush with which I sketch the characters of your name. The black belongs to the darkness contained in the word love. I have loved you forever. I had been searching for you for many years. I had married at the last possible moment; my wedding was a terrible dream. I didn’t want the wife I saw beside me. I didn’t love her then. I learned to love her later, in a different way. I’m sorry. I love her in a different way from you.

She: I am also your wife. It’s an ancient tradition, one woman for house and children and another for love. She cooks for you.

He: She’s a good cook.

She: I want to die when I think of it. I want to die in your arms, and then you can go home and eat her delicious food.

The woman rises from the bath, taking her small white towel and holding it against herself. She sits on the rocks that ring the pool. The man stares down into the water. He seems unhappy. The woman begins to cry.

From somewhere in the distance comes a faint sound of temple chanting. The drone of a priest’s voice intoning the heart sutra mixes with the sound of many small birds chattering as they fly overhead. The birds land in the treetops with a commotion, shaking the dry leaves.

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MOON

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A mountain landscape in autumn. The man and the woman have been searching for susuki, pampas grass. Susuki’s feathery season has passed, and the long arcing grasses don’t look like delicate fluff-fronds but are more linear, so the man is displeased.

He: It is one month too late for moon-viewing.

She: Look how the white mist hangs low over the mountain. Feel the chill of winter rising from the earth.

The man and the woman sit on cold mossy stones by a small rushing stream, and the woman leans her head against the man’s chest. The man unbuttons the shell-buttons of her red sweater and puts his mouth to the pale curve of her throat. The woman closes her eyes, lips parted, head bent back. With her sweater draped down and half-open about her shoulders, her long purple scarf running like a mountain stream down her back, running like Kabuki water, with her gray skirt floating in loose folds about her waist, her white shoulders and breasts and thighs form an unexpected statuary against the moss and wet fallen leaves.

She: Like this in the mountain on a milk-mist afternoon, I remember strange things.

He: Remember when the moon rose fruit-orange over the storm- cleansed streets, and in the night the soft flashes of fireworks rose up like fiery lilies against the sky? Do you remember that?

She: I remember when the moon was gold, the frosted color of white gold, sitting low in the sky and intimate. We drove toward it along the mountain road and the night turned indigo; the gleam from many small houses’ blue-green roofs made a kind of warmth. I felt in the rooftops an echo of lost early time. I felt as if we had ridden through all time, out of the long ago past.

He: Before my grandmother died she had whispered to me for many days, stories of the old times, twining out tales in her low soft voice. Before she died she grew gradually smaller and more fine, and in those last days her voice’s intonation became something like a tint of quiet sound, an unending ribbon of words swaying through the long nights, in dulcet, cracking, halftone phrases. She spoke to me of ghosts, of feasts, of foxes, of puzzle pieces, of fast rainstorms, of love, of the blood-soaked futons where dead lovers lay embracing. I remember now what she remembered.

She: Will you remember what I remember? Remember that it’s delicious all day, the lingering lilting weariness that follows a long night of luxuriant embrace, the body bruised by ecstasy, the simplicity of it? The salt nectar in the flesh, the dark sweetness, the way the next day the body is alight with the images, the memories, the way one makes a story from it?

^^^^^

The man and the woman remain seated on the stones on the slope in the mountain-depth. Our view pulls back from them slowly. We see for a long time still the graceful white design of the woman’s limbs against the rust-reds, the yellows, the grays and greens of the landscape, we see the white mist as it thickens in the valleys, we see the mountain as one amongst many, we see the small white road that twists its way around the contours of the slopes. There is now only a music of whispers, a peaceful voice like that of an old woman dying, a voice that tells a story, almost unheard.

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CHOCOLATE

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“It’s funny. . . . I once thought of all this as a film by Godard. Why was that?” The man and the woman are sitting side by side in a Shinkansen heading south; it’s early morning, still dark. They are drinking hot green tea from small cans.

“Godard? I remember you saying Kurosawa.” The man slides his hand along her stockinged knee. “Something to do with the samisen.”

The man looks at his watch. The digital display gives off an ectoplasmic pale green glow. “It’s still so dark at six. Could you find a taxi easily this morning? The sky must have been pitch black when you left your house.”

The woman closes her eyes. Wearily, she leans her head against the man’s shoulder. “Shall we have breakfast?” Her question is barely audible, words carried upon a faint sigh.

“I already ate,” The man sets down his tea-can. The kanji characters on the can spell out gyokuro. The can is decorated with green leaves. “But I’ll order you an obento when the girl comes by.”

The man observes his reflection in the glass of the train window. His face is transparent blue, overlaid by rice fields and black mountains. Near his own, the woman’s face is a silent sleeping mask. The sky is endless gray, with the floating ghosts of train passengers. All around him and in the sky above are strangers asleep, eating, looking at comic books and magazines full of photographs of naked women in black and white, on rough paper. The pages open and close across the great cloudy panorama, across the archipelago. The sun is not yet visible. There is the scent of chocolate.

[1994]