Sample Sunday: Tangerine Dream
Author's note: This story is based upon a lucid dream I had in 2011 where I met Nagai Kafu – a Japanese writer who is somewhat obscure in the West. You can read more about the man and his work here.
I awoke in a Japanese house with the cream fusama rippling slightly from a scented breeze and I did not know how I came to be there. Getting to my feet, I examined myself for signs of violence or kidnap, I found none. I was dressed in a plain kimono that reached down past my knees and a pair of slippers, soft and silk-lined, were waiting for me by the partition door. I slipped them on and rested my hands on the wooden frame, feeling it tremble from whatever weather was disturbing the structure of the house. I stood there for an inestimable time with my eyes closed, just listening, just feeling, for the quiet was near-absolute. The lowing of the wind outside reached my ears, nothing else did, seemingly I was alone in this strange house. I should have been scared but I was not. It was strangely comforting to be alone in a place that I did not know, to be out of my old life, the one that had wound tight about me like the ageing skin of a snake. Could the unconscious, worn to the quick by routine, desperate for difference, for change, for otherness, act upon the person and transport them elsewhere? The possibility intrigued me and it had been a long time since I last experienced possibility as a part of my life.
I opened the sh?ji and stepped through into the r?ka. It was lit by small kerosene lamps that were set along the floor at intervals of five feet or so. The glow cast by the lamps was umbrous and autumnal, soothing to my senses, making me walk slowly, a somnambulant abroad. The shadow I saw on the wall was one of the lamps, that was my first thought on it, but then I examined it more closely and realised the design of the lamps was hunched and squat whereas the silhouette cast was slender in shape. I knew it to be a man and that man to be my host. I was ambivalent about meeting him.
Why?
Because he must have brought me here and no-one who brings one to a place without their consent can be less than good, not that 'good' is much of a concept, really. Perhaps I should say that such a person usually desires to disrupt one's schedule, mess with routine, break the simple securities of the plain, ordered world down. No, I was sure that I did not want to meet such a person. That all being said, and thought about, my sense of objection was rendered moot as he opened the sh?ji whilst I dithered about caught up in my usual web of worried reflection and ambiguous, uneasy, over-pause.
I did and did not recognise him for I had not known him in life but his face was familiar to me in this under-lit limbo. A long, louche face with large ears and a locrian mouth, down-turned. The eyes staring out at me nested behind circular black-rimmed glasses. He was not dressed as I was for he wore a grey suit like so many I had seen worn by tired businessmen rocking half-asleep on trains and buses over the years.
"Who are you?" I asked, already knowing.
"Nagai Kafu, and you are late, the world is ending without you."
We sat opposite one another, waiting for the green tea to steep. His eyes were intent on the pot, not on me. I was wondering what was going on, I had questions for him, none I dared ask because I was sitting here with a man dead, gone fifty years ago and he was just brewing tea of all things. How could this be? Surely, the dead rise to perform more pressing matters than brewing tea.
"The tea is ready."
We sat and drank and we talked and, at some point, I clumsily burned my hand on the teapot. There was much to talk to about with the world at its end. Words, thoughts, feelings, sight, smell – all of these things were soon to cease, come to an end, just like that. What then of them, what did they mean, really. What was the purpose of people wailing, screaming and praying to gods and killing their fellows on the say-so of said deities when the world was coming down around them. We spoke not only of spiritual deities but also of the other religions; civil rights, individual rights, patriotism, the worship of the commercial, the love of disco lighting over the amber twilight, wabi-sabi dwelling in the shadows of concrete and the natural whispers of yuugen from the numerous tears of the weeping willow tree, its limpid leaves swimming in the night. Oh, so much we talked about that was little, large and nothing at all. The little things in life were to be no better or worse off than the supposedly greater. The big picture was nothing without its evaporating minutiae and, for some reason, this all made me smile. It was a smile best suited for the funeral of a bitter foe though said foe would have to have been a much-loved part of one's life to begin with before the egregious sense of having been wronged set in. Yes, there was a melancholy to my expression, a pulling of muscles that did not want to be pulled, a tightness that comes when old wounds are scratched at it, made to give up their blackly-seeded bile. That all said, the sweetness of release too, of a thorn taken out and cast far away. All of this made up my smile.
"Would you like to see it?" asked Kafu.
I nodded my gracious thanks and he leaned to his feet with a cry and a crackle of old bones. Shuffling on his bare feet, he went to the outer wall and slid open an outer sh?ji, just a little.
"It is all coming apart you see," he said, "Like a bunjinga, is it not? Painted by hands inspired by another place, another time. Maybe, there is some namban in it too, eh? Who would think that, when it all came to an end, we would see the world as a thing so foreign and poisonous and exotic?"
Looking out through the small opening, I could see world and it was weeping like the willow tree; oils, watercolours, inks and enamel, all running into one another then trailing off into nothingness. Faces, futures, lives and loves forming a disintegrating waterfall, all of it flowing down without making a sound. Blues, yellows, amethysts, old man red, cherry and apricot shapes dissolving into space and coming in, through that space, from in-between, was that scented breeze tasting of tangerines, threaded with a finely-wrought and opaque smoke, which made sighs that were like those of a man who stood at the bottom step of the gallows.
"What is that?" I asked Kafu.
"It is the sound of what is under the world, I think. What the tired and world-weary leave behind. Such people, their spirits sink below and become as this. Who better to wipe the canvas of existence clean than those who were pilloried and harried for their desire to not draw blood, to not believe and to not love as the masses are wont to do? Such sweet dissipation, my dream is here. Your dream too, I think."
"But this is not a dream. Dreams are not places of pain."
I showed him my finger, the bubble of the blister there left by the hot teapot.
"So you feel pain? So what? So what if you are as dead as I am? You would still dream. Shakespeare lied when he said there is undiscovered country ahead, there is no such thing. We die , we lie down, we rot and we dream, even when the maggots have snacked on the last of our brains, we carry on dreaming. I have been dreaming for fifty years and I want to make an end of it, what better end could there be than this?"
"But how can the world be dying, just like that?"
"Who knows? Perhaps it is its hundredth birthday? Maybe it is a tsukumogami and this is how it changes into being alive? Funny to think there were all those people spending their time raging about life and its beauty yet they were really living in a world doing no more than waiting to die but, ah, here they are, at last. My beauties."
Hovering before us, there was a geisha, careworn, hair showing grey, suckling on a last tooth made brown by decay. Her eyes were bright marbles reflecting the chiaroscuro of the dying world's waterfall, she held a withered hand out to me. On either side of her stood a Japanese school girl, no angels were these, their hair shone greasily, thoroughly unwashed, and their cheeks were marked by dirt and catfight-scratches. Their eyes were bilious balls and their skin a preserved amber. They were wicked dolls without shoes on their stockinged feet, each holding out a grubby hand.
"Ah, my old ghosts!" Kafu smiled, showing where he had lost teeth, he clapped his hands together, rapt, "How good of you to come for us!"
He took the hand of one school girl and then the other and saw I was too tentative to take the hand of the Geisha.
"Look here, gaijin, you should take her hand because otherwise you will wake up, go back to where you were, what you were doing. Here, you can take the hand of these unwashed delights and be led into whatever awaits, see what must not be seen, feel what must not be felt," he winked lasciviously at me as he said this.
Kafu then gestured at the nearly-gone world, it was fast becoming a deluge of excretal smears and the scent of tangerines was so strong, so ripe that it was becoming bitter, verging on rotten-brown suggestions of complete decay; soporific softness, lingering liquescent touches, heavily stained with satisfying, sour juices and their aftertaste.
"Take a bite, gaijin. What have you got to lose?"
The geisha snatched at me, trying to grasp me. I felt her touch on my skin, damp and dingily sweaty. I could smell wet refuse from alleyways and soiled linen. I thought of home, my bed, my house, my job, the mundane things we hold so dear. There was a tear in her eye and a small brown bruise on her cheek decorated by a growing web of split capillaries. I took her dirty, desperate hand and she, still sucking rhythmically on her dead tooth, led the way, leading us away.
"Out we go!" cried Kafu, a schoolgirl on each side of him.
Breathing in rich, rancid air, we flew, passing through a thinning veil of yellow rain that was pouring into soundless void below and, as we came to the other side, to what Kafu always dreamed of seeing, the very last sound I heard was his cackling, the laughter of a man satisfied.
I do not know if I was.
"…I want dissipation, to destroy myself in dissipation…"
Nagai Kafu
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