FASHION: Lady Death! Lady Death!
DEATH: I hope that your hour comes, so that you shall have no further need to call me.
FASHION: My Lady Death!
DEATH: Go to the Devil! I’ll come looking for you when you least desire me.
FASHION: But I am your sister, Fashion. Have you forgotten that we are both the daughters of decadence?
Ancient peoples know that there are no words that do not descend from other words and that imagination only resembles power because neither can reign over Nada, Nothing. Niente. To imagine Nothing, or to believe that you rule over Nothing, is but a form — perhaps the surest one — of becoming mad. No one knew this better than Joseph Conrad in the heart of darkness or William Styron in the bed of shadows: the wages of sin are not death, but isolation.
Akinari’s novella is set in 1454 and tells the story of Katsushiro, a young man humiliated by his poverty and his incapacity for work in the fields who abandons his home to make his fortune as a merchant in the city. He leaves his house by the reeds in the care of his young and beautiful wife, Miyagi, promising he will return as the leaves of autumn fall.
Months go by; the husband does not return; the woman resigns herself to “the law of this world: no one should have faith in tomorrow.” The civil wars of the fifteenth century under the Ashikaga shoguns make the reencounter of husband and wife impossible. People worry only about saving their skins, the old hide in the mountains, the young are forcibly drafted by the competing armies; all burn and loot; confusion takes hold of the world and the human heart also becomes ferocious. “Everything,” says the author, reminding us that he is speaking from memory, “everything was in ruins during that miserable century.”
Katsushiro becomes prosperous and manages to travel to Kyoto. Once settled there, seven years after he bid farewell to Miyagi, he tries to return home but finds that the barriers of political conflict have not fallen, nor has the menace of assault by bandits disappeared. He is fearful of returning to find his home in ruins, as in the myths of the past. A fever takes hold of him. The seven years have gone by as in a dream. The man imagines that the woman, like himself, is a prisoner of time and that, like himself, she has not been able to stretch out her hand and touch the fingers of the loved one.
The proofs of precarious humanity surround Katsushiro; bodies pile up in the streets; he walks among them. Neither he nor the dead are immortal. The first form of death is an answer to time: its name is forgetting, and maybe Katsushiro’s wife (he imagines this) has already died; she is but a denizen of the subterranean regions.
So it is death that, finally, leads Katsushiro back to his village: if his wife has died, he will build a small altar for her during the night, taking advantage of the moon of the rainy season.
He returns to his ruined village. The pine that used to identify his house has been struck by lightning. But the house is still there. Katsushiro sees the light from a lamp. Is a stranger now living in his house? Katsushiro crosses the threshold, enters, and hears a very ancient voice say, “Who goes there?” He answers, “It is I, I have come back.”
Miyagi recognizes her husband’s voice. She comes near to him, dressed in black and covered with grime, her eyes sunken, her knotted hair falling down her back. She is not the woman she had been. But when she sees her husband, without adding a word, she bursts out crying.
The man and the woman go to bed together and he tells her the reason why he has been so late in returning, and of his resignation; she answers that the world had become full of horror, but that she had waited in vain: “If I had perished from love,” she concludes, “hoping to see you again, I would have died of a lovesickness ignored by you.”
They sleep embraced, sleep deeply. As day breaks, a vague impression of coldness penetrates the unconsciousness of Katsushiro’s dream. A rumor of something floating by awakens him. A cold liquid falls, drop after drop, on his face. His wife is no longer lying next to him. She has become invisible. He will never see her again.
Katsushiro discovers an old servant hidden in a hut in the middle of a field of camphor. The servant tells the hero the truth: Miyagi died many years ago. She was the only woman who never quit the village, in spite of the terrible dangers of war, because she kept alive the promise: we shall see each other once again this autumn. Not only the bandits invaded this place. Ghosts also took up their lodgings here. One day Miyagi joined them.
Mizoguchi’s images told a story similar yet different from Akinari’s tale. Less innocent, the contemporary filmmaker’s story transformed Miyagi into a sort of tainted Penelope, a former courtesan who must prove her fidelity to her husband with greater conviction than a virgin.
When the village is invaded by the troops of Governor Uesugui sent from Kamakura to fight a ghostly and evasive shogun in the mountains, Miyagi, to save herself from the violence of the soldiers, commits suicide. The soldiers bury her in her garden, and when her husband finally returns, he must appeal to an old witch in order to recover the spectral vision and spectral contact with his dead wife.
* * *
FOUR, no, four years after seeing the film by Mizoguchi and writing Aura, I found in an old bookshop in the Trastevere in Rome, where I had been led by the Spanish poets Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León, an Italian version of the Japanese tales of the Togi Boko, written by Hiosuishi Shoun and published in 1666. My surprise was quite great when I found there, written two hundred years before Akinari’s tale and three hundred before Mizoguchi’s film, a story called “The Courtesan Miyagino,” where this same narrative is told, but this time with an ending that provides direct access to necrophilia.
The returning hero, a Ulysses with no heroism greater than a recovered capacity for forgetting, does not avail himself of a witch to recover his embodied desire, the courtesan Miyagino, who swore to be faithful to him. This time he opens the tomb and finds his wife, dead for many years, as beautiful as the day he last saw her. Miyagino’s ghost comes back to tell her bereaved husband this tale.
My curiosity was spurred by this story within the story of Aura, so I went back to Buñuel, who was now preparing the script for his film The Milky Way, reading through the 180 volumes of the Abbé Migne’s treatise on patristics and medieval heresies at the National Library in Paris, and asked him to procure me right of entry into that bibliographical sanctuary, more difficult to penetrate, let me add, than the chastity of a fifteenth-century Japanese virgin or the cadaver of a courtesan of the same era and nationality.
Anglo-Saxon libraries, I note in passing, are open to all, and nothing is easier than finding a book on the shelves at Oxford or Harvard, at Princeton or Dartmouth, take it home, caress it, read it, take notes from it and return it. Nothing more difficult, on the contrary, than approaching a Latin library. The presumed reader is also a presumed kleptomaniac, a convicted firebug, and a certified vandaclass="underline" he who pursues a book in Paris, Rome, Madrid, or Mexico City soon finds out that books are not to be read but to be locked up, become rare and perhaps serve as a feast for rats.