Phantasm Japan: Fantasies Light and Dark, From and About Japan

by Unknown

  The obvious activity by which he might adjust to solitude once more, negotiating the complex balance and counterbalance of feelings, was the storing of the newly returned books.

  Without haste, he approached the boxes Fletch had left behind and began to inspect their contents. Then he rolled back the patch of carpet that covered the floor in the room’s center and revealed a trap door, which he opened. A ladder hung down into darkness, stray light from the sitting room illuminating faintly a few spines of books.

  The cellar was really little more than an underground cupboard, designed to store things rather than to be a bunker for human refuge, as so many of the more recent cellars were. During the hours of darkness, it was even a little daunting to descend the ladder into that confined space.

  He began to empty the books from the boxes and pile them up close to the edge of the trapdoor, so that they could be easily reached from within the cellar. He brought a portable lamp near too, to ensure visibility for his work. When the pile of books was reaching a size bordering on awkward, he climbed down the ladder, paused to collect a handful of books, and continued to the bottom. He found the cord for the cellar light and searched for spaces on the shelves lining the walls. It was a laborious process.

  He had ascended and descended a few times and was getting short of breath by the time he had emptied one of the boxes. When he had almost emptied the second, he made a strange discovery. Between two of the stacked columns of books had been inserted what first appeared to Addyson’s unreliable eyes an enormous silverfish. It was a slim and whiskery object with about it the kind of dusty shimmer that adheres to the wing of a moth. Rather than extract it directly with his fingers, Addyson removed the surrounding books so that the object lay revealed at the dirty cardboard bottom of the box. It wasn’t alive, after all. It wasn’t even a creature. But its vividness in comparison to its gloomy and drab surroundings had given it an uncanny appearance of life. It was not merely vivid, but alien. It was a package of some kind, but the writing on it was not in the Roman alphabet, so what it contained was not immediately obvious.

  Addyson knelt before the box for some time in contemplation of the object, and while he did so his mind formed a narrative around it, as it had earlier with his long johns. The earlier narrative had been amorphous. The flesh of this one grew upon the bones of deduction.

  First of all, there was the object’s ethereality. It seemed woven from the thread of a different and finer reality than that which Addyson awoke to each day. Its shape, its patterned surface, gave an impression of angularity—but an angularity of supreme naturalness and smoothness, like that of a leaf, wet with dew. Its colors were green, pink, gold, white, and black. The background white seemed impervious to time—fresh as spearmint but redolent of age because of the very purity of the freshness. The white appeared even to glow, and the colors upon it to opalesce.

  A poem came to mind—something by Baudelaire. It told of “a poet set against oblivion” who stayed awake to witness the moon’s nocturnal sorrows and to catch her pearly tears when they fell. He thought of what he had written earlier. This strange object was perhaps a teardrop fallen from the moon.

  Memory broke the surface of consciousness. He could read the writing on the package, but the knowledge of this language had lain so long unused in his brain and had grown so atrophied that there was a kind of dislocation between the writing and its apparent meaning in his brain. This was a packet of tea—Japanese tea. That’s what the writing told him, but because of the dislocation, the knowledge remained an impression rather than congealing into fact.

  He had to repeat the words to himself.

  “Tea. Tea. Tea. It’s Japanese tea.”

  In fact, from what he could tell, this was a variety of tea called kari-ga-oto. No—kari-ga-ne. The reading of the last character was an unusual, poetic reading. If he could remember that, surely his brain was functioning. Kari-ga-ne meant “the cry of geese.”

  Finally, he took the packet from the box. This packet of tea—from the town of Uji, he saw—must have been many decades old. He looked for the date. There were numbers, but applied according to the traditional Japanese system, and he could not remember how to convert them. In any case, somehow a packet of tea that he had brought back from Japan, or that had been sent to him from Japan when he had still had links with that country and while it remained a country to have links with, had found its way into this box of books and been left there unopened while the century passed its meridian and disasters of all kinds cratered his emotional experience and his memory.

  He closed the trap door. The remaining books, still piled on the floor, he would deal with later. The change of mood he had required had come to him, though it was a different change than he could have wished for or imagined.

  The next morning was chill and misty. He had long hardened his bones to the austerity of waking with the dawn in order never to miss a scintilla of daylight. This morning, he had trouble telling whether the mist was entirely external or the product of some part of the equipment of his head. He decided his head was at least partly to blame, but, rather eerily it seemed to him, the external and internally generated mist evaporated in harmony.

  His sobriety this morning was close to vacancy, and this vacancy was close to stupefaction. How could he seize the eternity of his existence with the tiny hands of day-to-day?

  Before he had time to break his fast, he heard a voice from outside shouting, “Post.” There followed rapid footsteps on the stairs of the building, the sound of a door being opened, and an exchange of indistinguishable words in the entry hall. Then there were more footsteps, and an unrestrained rapping on the door shrank Addyson back to the locality of his body.

  “Who’s there?”

  For a moment, Addyson had a very odd but not entirely unprecedented sensation: he thought he was blind. Actually, he could see, but what he saw was blank of meaning.

  “Post for Mr. Addyson,” came the reply.

  Realizing he could see and was not helpless, Addyson got to his feet and went to the door. On the other side of the door, when he opened it, the present moment was waiting for him in the form of an unfamiliar post-boy with a letter in one hand, the envelope of good quality, cream-colored paper.

  The post-boy, seemingly aware that he had the appearance of a wayside opportunist, pulled his frayed ID document from a patch pocket and let Addyson read it.

  “Are you Mr. Addyson?” he asked.

  Addyson produced his own ID.

  “Here y’are,” said the boy, and relinquished the letter with an air of bestowing something, as if he had an idea of the letter’s contents.

  Breaking the seal, Addyson found the pages within typewritten but signed by hand. He laid the sheets out on the floor and began to read.

  Dear Mr. Addyson,

  I am more familiar with the name under which you used to write, and I believe still do. I would have used that, but was afraid it might seem too forward. Please advise me as to your preference.

  It is, anyway, regarding your fiction that I am writing to you. Please let me state in advance of everything else that I have a position of moderate influence in the editorial and curatorial department of the Eden Scriptorium, of which I hope you might have heard. You perhaps know of us for the work we have done in salvaging and archiving printed texts. There is also an Eden Press, which has begun to make copies of the rarer and more important works. In fact, we are engaged in an array of different projects, from the cataloguing of typefaces to the production of paper that will last many lifetimes. I hope very much that you will be able to visit our premises at some point, since, once you have seen for yourself the stacks of freshly sheaved paper and seen the glint of drying ink you will understand something of the excitement with which I write to you.

  Let me explain the sequence of events that has led to this communication. It will be no surprise to you that I am a bibliophile, I
would like to say “par excellence.” Not stopping at a conventional reverence for canonical works, I have always delighted in the discovery of the obscure and beautiful, perhaps with something of the thrill of the long-ago entomologist explorer, discovering some richly patterned and as yet unnamed species, somewhere in the tangled, savage innocence of the rain forest. I hope you will understand and allow yourself to believe when I say that a number of your stories came to me as the most brilliant, unexpected, and breathtakingly delicate of exotic moths. In particular, I am thinking of “The Language of Chameleons,” “Unprecedented Forms,” “The Stars and Yellow Doubt” [Not one of mine, thought Addyson, though I think I know who the author is], and “The Hill That Is Not a Hill and Is Not Called Amara.”

  The name Bevis Kemble might mean something to you. He’s a book dealer and antiquarian with whom we do business. As you probably recall, he has visited you on occasion, and some of the books he has bought from you have made their way into our archive. I was oblivious to this situation for years, and it is only very recently that I have learned the truth. I hope you will forgive me if I write that I had assumed you were dead. I don’t even really know why I made this assumption—perhaps because the books with your stories in them are so dusty and brown. I mention this fact in the hope it helps to convey the wonder I experienced when Bevis told me that he knew you. It was almost as if someone had risen from the grave.

  I only recently mentioned to him that I would very much like to find some of your books for the archive. It seems that one of your students had spoken to him of your writing and told him the name you’d written under.

  We must talk about your older work, and I hope before too long, but first there is the question of the anthology I am editing. The working title is The Eden Anthology of New Fiction, and the idea is this: we will collect together new works by old writers, to establish a continuity between our new world and the old. This has the potential to be the cornerstone of a new canon. Literature, as you know, has become less a living thing than it was, and more a matter of antiquarianism. With this book we hope to provide an example to inspire and instruct new writers.

  The student who spoke to Bevis mentioned that you still write. Would you be willing to write something specially for the anthology? I enclose a copy of the guidelines with this letter, and some good writing paper, which I know can be hard to come by. (Please don’t hesitate to ask the post-boy for more.)

  I believe that, from the wreckage of our current age, we have the chance to build a new citadel of literature and a new literary culture to bring it to life—a literary culture as it always should have been, in which both quality and novelty are valued, where writers are paid, and where books are not produced and distributed according to the demands of the least literate, but under the guidance of the most.

  I would be extremely gratified if you were to accept my invitation to help us build such a citadel.

  Please reply to the address heading this letter. You needn’t pay the post-boy. I shall keep this message brief and hope I can look forward to an answer from you soon.

  Yours,

  Kieran Drummond

  The enclosed guidelines included a date by which a finished story was expected. The rate of pay was also given. It was generous. Naturally, he would not be able to retire from one story. In fact, what would most likely happen would be that, in order to write the story, he would have to take a month off teaching, and the payment for the story would go some way to compensating him for the time needed to write it. Still, it might easily lead to other things.

  Addyson was at first surprised to find himself assessing the offer so calmly, but, after all, he was eight or nine decades in on the great, disappointing detour to the unknown that was human existence, and by this time fatalism was as much of a default mechanism with him as it could be without actually being fatal.

  The deadline was not uncomfortably close. He had time to think.

  Laying the letter aside for the present, he looked at the wall clock. He was expecting one of his students, Matthew, today, but he would not be arriving for another three hours.

  His routine was important. It supported his life as a trellis supports a vine. Recently, however, his routine had been disturbed. Not disrupted. It was more as if something had struck a nerve in him that numbed and loosened his grip.

  For the moment he would surrender. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall.

  Perhaps the letter had stirred something up. He found memories and thoughts arising spontaneously that related to a period of his life when he had had work trying to reclaim data from various forms of digital storage. Since the power for the digital infrastructure had gone, a kind of electronic archaeology had developed, whereby energy was generated and then focused strategically with the aim of mining the otherwise inaccessible data of various circuit boards, compact discs, magnetic tapes, and so on. As he remembered this now, an image formed in his mind that had formed there before. He saw the current of electricity as a drill of light, plunged into a digital well in order to pump up fossilized information like oil. Data rose to accessibility in the light of the pulsing drill, but it was shattered. Fragments of fossil text.

  Much of this excavated data was leaked, one way or another. Cults had come into being who claimed that these jagged, recombined mosaics of text were messages from a half-sleeping electronic intelligence that was bound to reawaken. Some of the adherents of this belief would stand in the street and declaim these shattered texts in prophecy. For a while Addyson, too, had been fascinated by the mysticism of the digital potsherds, but a kind of disgust had set in, and he had abandoned the job. That, in fact, had not been such an easy decision. The decision itself had seemed more or less sudden, almost involuntary, but it was as if he had thrown down a monolith he had been carrying for some time. The earth seemed to shake with the surrender. The vast galaxy of digital data, he had decided, could collapse into oblivion. It wouldn’t, of course. Some fraction of it would be recovered. But, personally, he had given it up.

  He opened his eyes and reached for pen and paper.

  We imitated

  An entropy of language,

  Words duplicated

  Without sense in a cancer

  Of unconsciousness—thought death.

  The reason he was losing hold of his all-important routine, he decided, was that packet of tea. Perhaps the loosening grip was incipient anyway, but the packet of tea had been a catalyst, causing what was incipient to germinate and unfold. When he was alone in his flat, he examined the packet again.

  Clearly, this item was from Japan—that was why the writing was in Japanese (was it in Japanese, or was it simply, itself, Japanese?)—but what was Japan? A country, perhaps, since languages were often associated with specific countries, but could he be sure in this case? He had looked up “Japan” in his dictionary. There had been an entry for “Japanese,” and even for “japan,” with a small j, which was apparently a “hard varnish,” but there had been no “Japan.” Could it be that there were Japanese things without any Japan to generate them?

  This was an absurd line of thought. He remembered Japan. And yet the uncertainty persisted. His attempts to settle the matter were ultimately ineffectual. For some reason, none of the books within immediate reach were categorical about the existence of Japan, if they mentioned her at all. He recalled that Japan had made an appearance in Gulliver’s Travels, and he found a copy of this and located the relevant chapter. But then he remembered that most of the places Gulliver visited were fantastical inventions and was maddened to find Japan assuming a fictitious status in her association with them.

  Then something else occurred to him. He had definitely thought, recently, of Hokusai, a Japanese artist to whom real works of art were attributed, and the poems he, Addyson, had written of late were tanka, which was a Japanese form. But where did such knowledge come from? A little effort should be able to verif
y it, but the verification seemed something like the biased selection of matching shards of information in his vast but limited reserves of consciousness, and not much else. Also, the fact that a Japanese theme had started to surface in his thoughts just before the appearance of the packet of tea gave the sequence of events the aura of a mental malaise—an aura that might be extended to include Japan itself.

  Did he really believe Japan to be imaginary? Not quite. And if he committed to such a belief, then soon enough he would be unsure of the most basic circumstantial facts of his existence. But he could not quite get Japan solid in his mental map of reality, either. Just as the language had been slippery from long disuse, so the concept of Japan itself had become, as it were, rusty.

  In any case, whether Japan were imaginary or not, this packet of tea had come from there. And, if he were to judge by the appearance of this object, he would say that Japan was imaginary. This was an object from another world.

  He held the packet in his hand, felt its slight weight, and brought it a little closer to his face. It had something in it, of course, or it could hardly have been a packet. The presumed tea, unseen, shifted inside; if he turned the packet upside down it made a sliding, whispering sound. But the packet was sealed. The silken magnificence of its exterior promised something limitless, but what was promised remained elusive.

  Addyson had gone out to buy one or two things that he needed but had found himself stopping at an open storefront, where a woman was spinning yarn from a batt of wool. The spinning of yarn was obviously in part a display to attract custom, as well as being necessary labor in itself, so the woman should not have minded his watching her. It was really the wool he was intent on, the way the yellowish cloud of it, here and there matted to a darker, brownish tone, was drawn out into the groove of the turning wheel—the thin thread from the formless mass. He felt transfixed by conflicting impressions—that the wool was supremely rare and precious, and that the supply of it was infinite. He was held here, watching, both by a sense of anxiety and of comfort. He knew, of course, that the supply of wool, like all things on Earth, was particular and limited, but was fascinated by the impression that prevails in the immediacy at the demand end of the supply chain, that the goods in question were siphoned from an ideal and inexhaustible source.