Aoki shrubs and bamboos and the red pines blocked his view, but through the leaves he could glimpse a deep, clear jade-green pool in the river. Altogether, she was disturbingly beautiful. As the bell tolled on he stopped straining to listen to it, and then he heard a sound that only a magnificent old bell could produce, a sound that seemed to roar forth with all the latent power of a distant world. Keiko was wearing the same kimono as last night: a bluish figured satin with a design of plovers fluttering among scattered snowflakes. That was after her mother had died, and by then Otoko had made a name for herself as a painter, and photographs of her with the caption ‘the heroine of A Girl of Sixteen’ had begun to appear in magazines. When he saw blood trickling between her lips, Oki hastily forced her mouth open and stuck his hand in it, until she began to choke and retch, and then go limp. ‘The longer it is, the more you’re tortured’. Was it not ill-omened, considering Otoko’s premature baby and Fumiko’s miscarriage? That huge red peony looked like an apparition; loneliness seemed to radiate from deep within it. Calling them lesbians had given Fumiko pause. Visitors to the festival were supposed to drink from a sake bowl reflecting the full moon, so a cloudy, moonless night would have been disappointing. ‘Or out toward Otsu, to see the moon in Lake Biwa?’ ‘I want you to paint me’. Her mother, her lost baby, and Keiko—were they not her three loves? The paper screens facing the garden glowed faintly in the moonlight. Keiko put her hand over Otoko’s eyes and pressed them shut; then she took up one of Otoko’s fingers on her other hand, and bit it. Directly in front of the main hall was a huge silver sake bowl filled with water, reflecting the full moon. A magic couch. Her sweet breath warmed his hair. ‘No, no, don’t stop!’ Otoko knew them all and had images of them in her mind. Frightening words were coming from that beautiful throat. ‘The stones are beginning to frighten me’. ‘I suppose even a woman’s hatred is a kind of love’. All the fireflies seemed to glow at once. Keiko took the first unlined kimono she found from the top drawer of a chest, changed into fresh undergarments, and put it on, slipping her long undersleeves through its sleeves and trying to adjust the front. She jerked it so tight it almost cut into her flesh. Keiko’s tongue played with the tip of the finger. It was a painting of two young geisha playing scissors-paper-and-stone, based on a trick photograph of around 1880. She wanted to give an uneasy feeling that the one girl was two, the two one, or perhaps neither two nor one. Otoko let go. The slender threads of rain vanished into the river without a ripple. As Otoko turned away, Keiko reached out to smooth up a few stray hairs at the back of Otoko’s neck. After parting from Oki, no one had touched her breasts for over two decades. A sense of mortality hung in the air. Otoko remembered her mother’s words. She accepted whatever he did and gave whatever he asked for. Her past love had come back to life. That memory—herself and not herself, unreal and yet real—was a sacred vision sublimated from the memory of their mutual embrace. ‘Wouldn’t it make your flesh crawl to touch a hairy skin?’ Did she lose her sense of reality? Better still, she felt, to have died in childbirth—before she tried to kill herself, and before her own baby died. The thought had come to Otoko that if she thrust her razor into this lovely throat, Keiko would die. I’ll go ahead with my Ascension of an Infant, Otoko told herself. Why did the white lotus bloom in fire? The wind that swayed the pines and bamboos on the hill had veered around to the east and was driving the rain in from that side. The aroma of fermented bean paste was becoming stronger. In Kyoto or Osaka, he would insist, even ordinary gossip was usually very polite, quite unlike Tokyo gossip. All sorts of things—mountains and rivers, houses, streets, heavenly bodies, even fish and vegetables—were referred to with polite terms. He felt disgusted by the insolence of digging up the skeleton of a tragic Imperial Princess, who must have died before she was thirty. ‘My!’ ‘Wouldn’t you like to write something about it, Father?’ He had kept his night with Keiko secret from her. First he saw one of her nipples. Was Keiko’s right breast a somewhat spoiled virgin, and the left still virginal? Loneliness seemed to come and go as it pleased. Oki hurried home and asked for Taichiro. Still, her kimono and obi seemed brand new. Their taxi passed the new factories at Ibaraki and Tatatsuki. Keiko’s hand came stealing over. He was delighted by the view and asked how she happened to know a place like this. They began to hear the twang of a samisen coming from a balcony down the river. ‘But that’s how it is!’ Taichiro was prying clumsily at the broiled sweetfish before him. ‘So falling in love is your revenge?’ ‘The bride doesn’t eat at the wedding reception’. We share the same kind of weaknesses. However, being alone together in an unfamiliar city, with only one another to turn to for consolation, they could not but help glimpse the Oki in each other’s heart. Her awareness of her body was inseparable from her memory of his embrace. ‘I’d gladly give my life for yours, anytime’. Even if two people were lovers, their streams of time would never be the same. Thus she had no idea of the face and form of her baby, only a vision in her heart. It had never occurred to her that bygone memories are merely phantoms and apparitions. As soon as Otoko got up, she went around to the other side of Keiko’s bed, glanced down at her sleeping face in the dim light, and then began opening the wooden shutters. She leaned against him. ‘My revenge is finished. This time it’s my turn to spoil Miss Ueno’s life’. As he climbed the stone steps to the gate, he looked around and saw the hem of her kimono rippling as she followed nimbly after him. Earlier, as their car passed Hirosawa Pond, the view of the beautiful pine-covered hills reflected along the opposite shore had awakened his thoughts of the millennium of history and literature associated with the Saga region. An occasional maple branch hung low enough to touch. Keiko looked and saw a small gravestone, no more than knee-high, flanked by an even smaller stone marker bearing the name of Sanetaka. Not far from the observation point overlooking the lake, they veered off to the left, passed a place where motorboats were racing, went through Hama-Otsu, and turned into a tree-lined driveway of the Lake Biwa Hotel. Each of the wide windows covered a whole wall. He took some tea in his mouth and let it seep little by little between her lips. He felt like he was insulting his mother by listening to her over the phone while Keiko kissed him. The suit left her whole back bare. She had learned from the news report that a girl named Keiko had been picked up by one of the sailboats. Otoko gripped the window curtain.