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the patterned hem, and her hair up in the takashimada style . . .” 8
    “Yes, she didn’t go down by boat, did she. We used the horse. She stopped off here on her way through, I remember.”
    “That’s right. The horse stopped under that cherry there, and just then there was a little flurry of falling petals. That splendid takashimada hair was all dotted with them.”
    I open my sketchbook again. This scene could be a painting, or a poem. I picture in my mind’s eye the figure of the bride, imagine the scene as if it were before me. Pleased with myself, I jot down
    Praise be to the bride
who rides across the mountains
through blossoming spring.
    The odd thing is that, although I can clearly picture her clothes and hair, and the horse and the cherry tree, I simply cannot visualize the bride’s face. I try out this one and that, until suddenly the face of Ophelia in Millais’s painting springs unbidden to my mind, fitting itself perfectly under the takashimada hair. 9 This won’t do, I think, hastily dismantling my careful picture in order to start afresh. But though the clothes and hair, and the horse and cherry tree, all disappear instantly from the scene, the figure of Ophelia, floating, hands folded, down the stream, still hovers dimly in the depths of consciousness, like smoke that a ragged broom cannot quite manage to dispel from the air. I have a weird sense of something like foreboding, as if I have witnessed a comet suddenly trail its light across the sky.
    “Right then, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off,” says Gen.
    “Drop in again on your way back through. I’m afraid all that rain will have made the Seven Bends difficult to get around.”
    “Yes, it’s a bit hard going,” Gen replies as he moves away. His horse sets off behind him. Clang, clang goes the bell.
    “He’s from Nakoi, is he?”
    “Yes, his name’s Genbei.”
    “He once led some bride over the pass on his horse?”
    “When Shioda’s daughter went down to the town as a bride, they put her on a white horse for the bridal procession, and she came along past here with Genbei on the lead rein. Good heavens, how time flies—it’ll be five years ago this year.”
    One who laments her white hair only when she looks in a mirror must be accounted among the happy. This old woman, who first comprehends the swiftness of the turning wheel of Time as she counts off on bent fingers the passage of five years, must then surely be closer to the unworldly mountain immortals than to us humans.
    “She would have made a beautiful sight. I wish I’d come to see.”
    The old woman gives a chuckle. “You can see her still. If you call in at the hot spring inn, she’ll be sure to come out and greet you.”
    “Aha, so she’s in the village now, is she? If only she were still dressed in that wedding kimono with her hair up in the takashimada .”
    “She may well dress up for you if you ask.”
    I very much doubt this, but the old woman does seem remarkably serious. This is just the sort of situation that a journey undertaken in the spirit of artistic “nonemotion” needs to encounter to make it worthwhile.
    “She’s very like the Nagara maiden, actually,” remarks the old woman.
    “Her face, you mean?”
    “No, I mean the way things turned out for her.”
    “Really? Who’s this Nagara maiden?”
    “The story goes that there was once a beautiful daughter of the village rich man, who went by the name of ‘the Nagara maiden.’”
    “Yes?”
    “Well, my dear, two men went and fell in love with her at the same time.”
    “I see.”
    “Her days and nights were spent tossing in an agony over whether she should give her heart to the Sasada man or whether it should be the Sasabe man, and she was sorely torn between them, till finally she composed a poem that went:
    As the autumn’s dew
that lies a moment on the tips
of the seeding grass,
so do I know that I too must
fade and be gone from this brief world. 10
    And then she threw herself into