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a pool and drowned.”
    Little could I have dreamed that I would find myself in such a poetic place, hearing from such a poetic figure this elegant, time-worn tale, told in such elegant language!
    “You ought to take a look at the Nagara maiden’s grave while you’re on your way through. If you go a little over half a mile east from here, you’ll find the old stone grave marker.”
    I immediately decide I will do just that.
    The old woman continues, “The Nakoi girl had the same ill fortune of being loved by two men, you see. One was a man she met while she was off training in Kyoto. The other was the richest man in the local town.”
    “Aha, and which did she give her heart to?”
    “She was set on marrying the man in Kyoto, but her parents, no doubt for their own good reasons, made her accept the local man.”
    “Well, it’s a blessing she didn’t have to end up throwing herself in a pool, isn’t it.”
    “Ah, but . . . this man wanted her on account of her beauty and talent. He may have been very good to her for all I know, but she’d been forced into the marriage and apparently she never got along with him. The family seemed very worried about how it was all going. And then along came this war, and the bank where her husband worked went bankrupt. After that she came back home to Nakoi. People say all sorts of things about her—that she’s heartless and unfeeling, and so on. She was always such a gentle, reserved girl, but these days she’s apparently turning a bit wild. Every time Genbei comes through here, he tells me how worrying she is.”
    It would ruin my planned picture to hear any more. I feel rather as if I have at last stumbled upon the magic feather cloak that will turn me into a mountain immortal, only to have some heavenly being come along and demand that I return it. 11 To find myself dragged back down into the vulgar world again, after having braved the perils of those Seven Bends to arrive at this place at last, would destroy the whole point of my aimless journey. If you let yourself become involved with worldly gossip past a certain point, the stench of the human world seeps in through the pores of your skin, and its grime begins to weigh you down.
    “This road goes straight through to Nakoi, doesn’t it?” I inquire, rising to my feet and tossing a small coin onto the table.
    “If you take a shortcut by following the path down to the right from the Nagara maiden’s gravestone, it’s a quick half mile. The path’s rough, but it’s probably the better way for a young gentleman like yourself. . . . This is very generous payment, sir. . . . Take good care.”

CHAPTER 3
    The evening is a strange and unsettling one.
    It is eight o’clock at night by the time I arrive at the inn, so even my sense of direction is somewhat confused, let alone my grasp of the layout of the house and the type of garden it has. I am taken along a very winding passageway of some sort, and finally shown into a small, six-mat-sized room. The place is quite unlike my memory of it from the previous visit. I have my dinner, take a bath, return to my room, and am sipping tea when the maid arrives and offers to lay out the bedding. The strange thing is that it is this same maid who has done everything since I arrived—answering the door to me, serving the evening meal, showing me to the bathhouse, and now laying out my bed. What’s more, she has scarcely spoken a word, though she doesn’t seem particularly countrified in her ways. Earlier I followed behind this girl as she wound along the endless passageway-cum-staircase to my room, a chastely knotted red obi around her waist and an old-fashioned oil taper in her hand, and then I followed the same obi and oil taper down the same passageway-cum-staircase, on and on, as she led me to the bathhouse, feeling almost as if I was a figure coming and going in a painting.
    While serving my evening meal, she apologizes that I have to put up with a room normally used for