"Some gentlemen say that they have good dreams when they come here." the woman had said. "Some say they remember how it was when they were young."
Not even then did a wry smile comes over his face. He puts his hands to the table and stood up. He went to the cedar door.
"Ah!"
It was the crimson velvet curtains. The crimson was yet deeper in the dim light. It was as if a thin layer of light hovered before the curtains, as if he were stepping into a phantasm. There were curtains over the four walls. The door was curtained too, but the edge had been tied back. He locked the door, drew the curtain and looked down at the girl. She was not pretending. Her breathing was of the deepest sleep. He caught his breath. She was more beautiful than he had expected. And her beauty was not the only surprise. She was young too. She lay on her left side, her face toward him. He could not see his body, but she would not yet be twenty. It was as if another heart beat its wings in old Eguchi's chest.
Her right hand and the wrist were at the edge of the quilt. Her left arm seemed to stretch diagonally under the quilt. Her right thumb was half hidden under her cheek. The fingers on the pillow beside her face were slightly curved in the softness of sleep, though not enough to erase the delicate hollows where they joined the hand. The warm redness was gradually richer from the palm to the fingertips. It was a smooth, glowing white hand.
"Are you asleep? Are you going to wake up?"
It was as if he was asking so that he might touch her hand. He took it in his and shook it. He knew that he would not open her eyes. Her hand still in his, he contemplated her face. What kind of girl might she be? The eyebrows were untouched by cosmetics, the closed eyelashes were even. He caught the scent of maidenly hair. After a time the sound of the waves was higher, for his heart had been taken captive. Resolutely he undressed. Noting that the light came from above, he looked up. Electrical light came through Japanese paper at two skylights. As if it had more composure than was he to muster, he asked himself whether it was a light that set off to advantage the crimson of the velvet, and whether it was the light from the velvet set off the girl's skin of the girl like a beautiful ghost. But the colour was not strong enough to show against her skin. He had become accustomed to the light. It was too bright for him, used to sleeping in the dark, but apparently it could not be turned off. He saw that the quilt was a good one.
He slipped quietly under, afraid that the girl he knew would sleep on might awaken. She seemed to be quite naked. There was no reaction, no hunching of the shoulders or pulling in of the hips, to suggest that she sensed his presence. There should be in a young girl, however soundly she slept, same sort of quick reaction. But this would not be an ordinary sleep, he knew. The thought made him avoid touching her as he stretched out. Her knee was slightly forward, leaving his legs an awkward position.
It took no inspection to tell him that she was not on the defensive, that she did not have her right knee resting on her left. The right knee was pulled back, the leg stretched out. The angle of the shoulders as she lay on her left side and that of the hips seemed a variance, because of the inclination of her torso. She did not appear to be very tall.
The fingers of the hand old Eguchi had shaken gently were also in deep sleep. The hand lay as he had dropped it. As he pulled his pillow back the hand fell away. One elbow on the pillow, he gazed it. 'As if it were alive', he muttered to himself. It was of course alive, but once he uttered them the words took on an ominous meaning. Though this girl lost in sleep had not put an end to the hours of her life, had she not lost them, had them sink into bottles depths? She was not a living doll, for there could be not living dolls. But, so as not to shame an old man no longer a man, she had been made into a living toy. No, not a toy. For the old man, she could be life itself. Such life was, perhaps, life to be touched with confidence. To Eguchi's farsighted old eyes the hand from close up was yet more smoother and more beautiful. It was smoother to the touch, but he could not see the texture.
It came to the old eyes warned that in the earlobes was the same warm redness of blood that grew richer toward the tips of the fingers. He could see the ears through the hair. The flush of the earlobes argued the freshness of the girl with a plea that stabbed at him. Eguchi had first wandered into this secret house out of curiosity, but it seemed to him that men more senile than him might come here to it with even greater happiness and sorrow. The girl's hair was long, possibly for old men to played with. Lying back on his pillow, Eguchi brushed it aside to expose her ear. The sheen of the hair behind the ear was white. The neck and the shoulder too were young and fresh. They did not yet have the fullness of woman. He looked around the room. Only his own clothes were in the box. There was no sign of the girl's. Perhaps the woman had taken them away, but he started up at the thought that the girl might have come into the room naked. She was to be looked at. He knew that she had put to sleep for the purpose, and that there was no call for this new surprise. But he covered her shoulder and closed his eyes. The scent of a baby came to him in the girl's scent. It was the milky scent of a nursing baby, and richer than that of the girl. Impossible… that the girl have had a child, that her breast should be swollen, that milk should be oozing from the nipples. He gazed afresh at the forehead and cheeks, and at the girlish line from the jaw down over the neck. Although he knew well enough already, he slightly raised the quilt that covered the shoulder. The breasts was not one that it have give milk. He touched it softly with his finger. It was not wet. The girl was approaching twenty. Even the expression babyish was not wholly inappropriate, she should no long have the milky scent of a baby. In fact it was a womanish scent, and yet it was very certain that old Eguchi had this very moment smelled a nursing baby. A passing spectre? However much he might ask why it had come to him, he did not know the answer. But probably it had come through the open left by a sudden emptiness in his heart. He felt surge of loneliness tinged with sorrow. More than sorrow or loneliness, it was the bleakness of old age, as if frozen to him. And it changed to pity and tenderness for the girl who scent out the smell of young warmth. Possibly only for purposes of turning away a cold sense of guilty, the old man seemed to feel music in the girl's body. It was music of love. As if he wanted to flee, he looked at the four walls, so covered with velvet, taking its light from the ceiling, was soft and utterly motionless. It shut in a girl who had been put to sleep, and an old man.
"Wake up. Wake up." Eguchi shook at the girl's shoulder. Then he lifted her head. "Wake up. Wake up."
It was a feeling for the girl, rising inside him, that made him to do so. A moment had come in which the old man could not bear the fact the girl was sleeping, that she did not speak. that she did not know his face and his voice. That she knew nothing of what was happening, that she did not know the man Eguchi who was with her. Not the smallest part of his existence reached her. The girl would not wake up, it was the heaviness of a slumbering head in his hand. And yet he could admit the fact that she seemed to frown slightly as a definite living answer. He held his hand motionless. If she were to awaken upon such a slight motion, then the mystery of the place, which old Kiga, the man who had introduced him to it, had described as 'like sleeping with a secret Buddha', would be gone. For the old men who were customers the woman could 'trust', sleeping with a beauty who would not awaken was a temptation, an adventure, a joy they could trust. Old Kiga had said to Eguchi that only when he was beside a girl who had been put to sleep could he himself feel alive.
When Kiga had visited Eguchi, he had looked out into the garden. Something red lay on the brown autumn moss.
"What can it be?"