My aunt’s memories seemed to grow clearer as she talked, until it felt like she was describing something that had happened just yesterday. The fresher it all became, the angrier she got.
“So I did myself in. I didn’t really think through what I was doing, and boy, did I regret it afterward. But at that time, I believed it would cause him the most damage. How wrong I was! I was stupid.”
She stared into the distance. It was as if she was groping around in the depths of her memory, trying to isolate the precise moment where she had strayed off course—the part that she longed to do again, better.
Studying her face, I tried to remember what she’d looked like when she’d worked at the bar. It hadn’t been a particularly classy place, and she hadn’t worn a kimono, but she was always properly made up, always attentive to her clothes and her appearance. Even when she hadn’t got it quite right, she was never without a thick coat of bright red lipstick, and she’d never given off the sad air of the discount store that she exuded now.
As I watched her, she turned to me, an expression of intense alertness on her face.
“Hey, you remember the time we went to watch the kabuki with your mom?”
The unexpected line of questioning startled me.
“I think you must have been still in grade school. I’ll never forget those gorgeous bento boxes we ate during the interval! But that’s by the by. Remember the play we saw then? The Maid of Dōjō Temple.”
“The maid of what?”
“You know, the story where a woman is betrayed by the man that she loves, so she turns into a snake and climbs onto the temple where he lives and just dances and dances. You loved it at the time. Have you really forgotten? Pah! A heart of stone, you’ve got.”
As my aunt jeered at me, I began scanning through the contents of my head, and soon enough a figure floated up in my imagination, accompanied by the beat of drums and the reedy strains of the bamboo flute. The figure was swaying, gliding, tilting, spinning around and around, never still for a second.
Back then, I hadn’t been able to make out a word of what the kabuki actors said. Being just a child, I had trouble believing it was really Japanese they were speaking. In the first item of the program, middle-aged men came onto the stage one at a time, their faces painted white, talking at length in a language I couldn’t understand. Some would go offstage when they were done, while others would stay on. I was bored silly, my bottom ached, and when the play finally finished, I felt nothing but relief.
During the interval, as my mother and aunt rolled the rubber bands off their bento boxes, they discussed how good or how sexy this or that actor or scene had been. I tried to explain how it felt not to comprehend any of the dialogue, but neither of them took me seriously. “What are you talking about?” they said. “They’re speaking your language! Just listen carefully and you’ll be fine!” As the curtains went up for the next item in the program, I comforted myself that if things got really bad, I could always slip out midway and take refuge in the foyer. At the back of the stage, I saw a group of men playing shamisen and drums and singing things I didn’t understand, and just as my heart began to sink, a woman in a kimono—though really it was a man in a kimono, dressed as a woman—slipped out onto the stage and began to dance. That was Kiyohime.
Kiyohime was extraordinary. At first, her dance was a delicate, ladylike affair, but gradually her movements grew more and more powerful. There was something weird, almost otherworldly about that dance, and she went on dancing nonstop, like a mad thing, for about an hour. Kiyohime wore several kimonos on top of one another, which her assistants whipped off with perfect timing, so that, as she danced, she twirled from one beautiful kimono to the next, and the objects she held in her hands were magically transformed. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before, and I leaned forward in my seat to watch her precise movements as closely as I could. In the final scene of the play, Kiyohime used her power to possess the enormous temple bell, and as she stood brave and magnificent on top of it, her silver kimono sparkled.
After the play had ended, I was in a daze. I found my aunt peering at me with curiosity. “Here,” she had said, pressing a dorayaki into my small palm. “Did you see that silver kimono Kiyohime wore at the end? The glittery one?”
I nodded.
“Snake scales,” she’d said as she nodded back.
“Kiyohime was wonderful, wasn’t she?” my aunt said now. “So persistent, so dynamic.”
She rested her chin on her hands theatrically, and continued, all dreamy-eyed, “I should’ve done the same thing, you know. I should’ve stuck in there, like she did, become a snake, done whatever it took. Thirty years we were together! I don’t know what I was thinking, trying to act cool and composed when I’d just been dumped. Playing the grown-up, then going home and hanging myself. I mean, really! It was pathetic. I’d have been far better off placing a deadly curse on him. I’d have had every right, too. It was what he deserved. For all his show of so-called chivalry, he just did whatever the hell he wanted. There’s nothing less sexy than that.”
With that, my aunt took a big bite of a cookie and munched noisily. “So that’s why I’m developing a special trick.”
“A special trick?”
“I reckon it’s still not too late. I’ve spent this past year learning how to appear like this.”
“Wait, this is a skill you learned?”
“You bet! All the fruit of my own labors.”
“Well, it’s quite a trick!”
“Don’t be silly! This is nothing. There’s no punch to it. I know you thought the same, when I first turned up at the door. You wondered why, if I was a ghost, I was showing up at the door like a regular visitor. I want a special skill that’s truly awesome. Something terrifying enough to scar him for life.”
“Huh.” Not knowing what I was supposed to say, I stuffed a cookie into my mouth. It was delicious, but I felt that the taste was a bit too delicate in some way, the perfume of vanilla too faint. I wondered now if I’d actually eaten the dorayaki that my aunt had given me in the theater all those years ago, its sponge patties oozing with sweet bean jam.
“Anyway, I’m sure you understand what I’m getting at, don’t you? You can’t let the power of your hair slip away from you. You think you have to spruce yourself up after being dumped by that two-timing idiot—that’s why you started going to that hair-removal place. Can’t you see that it’s pointless? Your hair is the only wild thing you have left—the one precious crop of wildness remaining to you. I want you to think long and hard about what you could do with it. Rather than getting all sore because you got dumped by some worthless scumbag, I want you to fight, like Kiyohime did. Your hair is your power!”
I hadn’t failed to register how grating and how batty each and every one of my aunt’s statements was, and as I reflected, I recalled that she’d had these kinds of tendencies before she’d died, too. In fact, I began remembering all sorts of things about her—how out of nowhere she’d started going on about “the force of nature,” producing huge batches of handmade soap and hennaing her hair a dirty reddish shade. She’d been an interesting person, I thought. Why did she have to die? Now, for the first time, I felt like I understood where she was coming from. I even felt grateful toward her for choosing to visit me over Shigeru, despite the black cloud that had, quite understandably, been hanging over him since her death.