It was our last renku gathering of the year: we sat around a table, taking turns composing verses that link up into one long sequence, following certain conventions. On the table lay some pens, a dictionary of seasonal words commonly used in haiku, and scraps of paper scribbled on all over by the four of us. We began composing the thirty-six stanzas of the Kasen renku in the early afternoon, and now we were down to the last six, the nagori no ura, where the whole stream of verses was supposed to arrive at a quiet dénouement. The group was getting tired by now—someone was bound to make an odd verse, or slip into small talk for a change of pace. After long hours of working out the verses, it was natural for us to slacken a little when we reached the final set.
Gazing idly into the distance, Yukawa-san sat pondering over her next verse. It was her turn to make an answering verse to the one written by Yata-san, but she was stumped. Middle-aged and single, Yata-san was the only man in the group. His verse read:
A calm winter sea—
the doors of a quiet home
left wide open
“A quiet home”: a faint tinge of his life as a single man seeped out of that phrase. Clearly a verse waiting for someone to come. But when Yukawa-san eventually offered her response, it took us by surprise.
O scarlet, scarlet silk
came a voice from the kura
“Scarlet silk?” asked Miuma-san, an older member of the group. “Do you mean the red fabric for lining kimonos, dyed with safflowers? So a voice comes from the storehouse? Whose voice is it? I don’t quite see how this links to the previous verse.”
“Well, you see…” Yukawa-san began in a leisurely tone.
Yukawa-san, a housewife in her fifties, came from a wealthy family up north in Niigata Prefecture. Her family ran a sake brewery, and every time the New Year’s festivities drew closer, the whole place was thrown into a frenzy. They dealt with endless orders of sake, not just for gifts, but also for all the end-of-year and New Year’s parties. It was right around that season, she told us, that she and her sister would sneak into the kura when the grown-ups were too busy to notice.
“You’d be surprised how warm it can be in there, even in winter. Besides, there was this old chest of drawers full of kimonos that my grandmother and aunts used to wear when they were young, and we just loved to pull them out and play with them more than anything else. I remember we even tried doing little nininbaori performances for ourselves—wrapping ourselves up in a single kimono and pretending to be one person.”
“What a refined way to horse around.”
“They’re from an old brewery, after all. Worlds apart from the rest of us!” We all laughed.
Then Yukawa-san went on with a mischievous look on her face: “But that’s not all…”
Every day, she and her sister pulled out the kimonos and played with them. After a while, she began to have strange dreams. Kimonos crawled out like tongues from inside the chest of drawers and whispered, “O scarlet, scarlet silk.” As the whispers gradually grew, the kura became full to the brim with swathes of red cloth. Cloths fluttered in her head, too—she felt as if she was suffocating, yet overcome with rapture, all at once.
“You know nagamochi, those big, wooden trunks for storing futons and things like that? Well, red cloths rolled out of those too, one after another, and danced about, drawing closer like they were about to strangle me. All kinds of clothes thronged the air—undergowns, waist wrappers, silk crêpes, every piece of kimono garment imaginable. They rustled towards me, swathing me with their tentacles.
“All the while, I heard voices chanting, ‘O scarlet, scarlet silk.’ Before I knew it, I was a single sheet of red cloth, dangling from the ceiling beam. I let it sink in—I thought to myself, I’ve turned into scarlet silk, fluttering in the air.
“When I told my sister, she laughed at me. ‘What a stupid dream. And creepy, too,’ she said. But for me, it wasn’t scary, not one bit. The only problem was that phrase, ‘O scarlet, scarlet silk’—it kept slipping out of my mouth whenever we were playing in the kura after that, I just couldn’t help it. I must’ve been calling to the red cloths in the chest of drawers, inviting them to come out. Soon enough, my sister got scared and tattled on me to our mother—so we were forbidden to go in the kura after that.”
But Yukawa-san couldn’t give up playing in the kura. She watched for the right moments when her mother wasn’t looking to steal inside, pulling out the kimonos and draping them over herself in turn, parading around in them like they were fancy kimonos with a train trailing behind her. She simply couldn’t stop.
“Back then, I didn’t really know what ‘scarlet silk’ meant. I just picked up the sound of the words from the grown-ups, like my grandmother and mother. It was only later that I realized what the colour of ‘scarlet silk’ was. That special shade of safflower-red—you don’t see it anymore nowadays, but in the old days, young women’s kimonos were almost all lined with that vermillion silk. I suppose the splash of colour made the woman look attractive, but who knows? Maybe it was for hiding the colour of her blood, too. When you look at it that way, it brings us back down to reality, but that’s the grown-up’s way of thinking. For me, as a little girl, all those red silks were stunning, every single one of them, and each night I couldn’t wait to have that dream again.”
A child’s dreams are often intense. They seem to be charged with some kind of energy, something that can possess the dreamer herself. Around that time, Yukawa-san came down with a cold. No matter how warm it was inside the kura, winter in Niigata was harsh. On top of that, she had been slipping in and out of kimonos, so no wonder she caught a cold. She lay in bed for days, her fever raging on, and everyone was worried sick. It wasn’t only the fever that made them worried. She kept muttering in her sleep, apparently suffering from nightmares.
“It was that phrase, ‘O scarlet, scarlet silk.’ For anyone listening, it sounds like gibberish, doesn’t it? My mother was so frightened that I’d gone mad with the fever.”
In her dream, she was flowing down a scarlet river. Every wave of the river jostled with “紅絹,” the characters for “scarlet”—an astonishing sight. Like salmon leaping upriver, the characters rushed on with incredible vigour, flipping over, creaking and rasping, crashing into each other and shattering into pieces, some fragments getting peeled off. As for our Yukawa-san, she was tossed about in those whirling waves of “scarlet”—the characters knocked into her, shoved her around, swept out her legs, and sometimes stuck to her in a relentless tumult.
“I could see the back of my eyelids coloured by red polka dots and swirls, and my whole body had turned into those characters for ‘scarlet.’ When I was carried to a waterfall, the ‘scarlet’ characters surged down in a raging torrent. Imagine a brilliant red waterfall. I wondered if I was going to die—but I wasn’t alarmed or anything. I wasn’t scared at all. In fact, I even felt pleasure, like I was in a trance. If you were hit by a rush of water, it would hurt, but silk cloths—it doesn’t matter how powerful they are, they’re always soft. It was really lovely.”
Eventually, her fever abated, and she was healthy again. For the first time, Yukawa-san told her mother about the dream she had seen. It was then that she learned what “scarlet silk” actually was.
“I wonder—maybe it was the kimonos, tucked away in the chest for many years. What if it was their cry for help? They might’ve been feeling so cramped that they couldn’t take it anymore. And so they leapt into my dreams and danced about, turning into a magnificent river and a rampaging waterfall. I don’t know if this is a thing—but once something sucks in some warmth from the body of a human being, maybe they want to go back to it, to feel its warm touch again.”
Thoroughly drawn into her story, we laughed quietly and let out a small sigh of wonder. I had old kimonos in my house, too. Stowed away in a chest of drawers, they hadn’t seen the light of day for many decades. When my grandmother was still alive, we used to air them out at the change of seasons, took them to a kimono shop for washing and stretching, and sometimes dyed them again in a different colour. They weren’t expensive kimonos, but we took good care of them to some extent. But now? They were left abandoned, no one to give them a thought, let alone an airing.
“So, what happened? After that,” I asked Yukawa-san. I didn’t give a hoot about the verses anymore—I just wanted to hear the rest of the story.
“Nothing, really,” she said. “Only, my mother and grandmother did make up their mind to go back to the kura and sort through the kimonos. Oh, but they were shocked when they went in that time. All the drawers of the chest were flung open, and kimonos were scattered across the floor. Every single one of them with scarlet linings, inside out and sitting in crumpled heaps like someone had just slipped out of them. My sister and I had left them out after playing with them. I got a good scolding again thanks to that, but not long after—about half a year later, maybe—my sister and I each got a lovely long-sleeved kimono. They’d taken some old kimonos and turned it into something for us kids. When I wore it, spots of red blossomed around the cuffs and the hems, and it was just beautiful. I strode around in it every New Year’s.”
“Lucky you!” said Miuma-san.
“So the scarlet silk won,” I quipped.
Yata-san said with a carefree laugh, “My verse pulled something rather strange out of the box.”
But there was still more to the story.
“I’m still possessed by the scarlet silk,” Yukawa-san went on with a slight frown. “I can still hear a voice from somewhere—‘O scarlet, scarlet silk.’ Ah, by the way, the kura is all gone now. It was taken down completely when we rebuilt the house. We gave away the rest of the kimonos to antique dealers and other people who wanted them. So that’s done and dusted. But what’s not done is the thing in my head. I don’t dream about it anymore, but sometimes, something red flows past. Like just now. When I was trying to come up with the verse, the ‘scarlet silk’ came drifting along. When I followed it, I saw the kura in my mind—the kura that’s long gone—and see, that verse popped up.”
“‘O scarlet, scarlet silk, came a voice from the kura,’ was it?” Yata-san chuckled.
“Exactly.”
“Adding a punchline takes the air out of the story,” Miuma-san remarked. “Anyhow, why don’t we leave this verse in as it is, as a mystery of sorts?”
And so we turned back to the next verse in the link—but I couldn’t keep my mind away from it. No matter what kind of verse came to me, there was always a stream of scarlet silk flowing through it. Apparently, it was the same for everyone.
“Oh, what now?”
“It’s thrown me off.”
Little sporadic murmurs of frustration broke the silence.
Nevertheless, we eventually wrapped up the thirty-six Kasen verses, far into the night.
The very last verse was read by Yata-san:
The letter lies folded;
the dim shadow of an island in the haze.
It meant the story has come to an end, he explained, but a mist hangs over it. The shadow of an island—was that meant to be the vanished kura? When I asked him, Yata-san groaned, pressing his fingers down on his tired eyes. “Hmmm, who knows? You’re welcome to read it as you like,” he said with a laugh.
