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she ever did again. Her mother Kayo, whose favorite perfume was made from lotus and lemon water, who had a husband whose face was always red and three miscarriages only I witnessed—I never told anyone—bought me from a teahouse in Yokohama, where I belonged to a little girl who turned into an old woman as if by magic. She was called Masumi and all her kimono were pink with black cherry blossoms. She drank in secret, squatting in the secret shade of me, drinking silver things until she was sick. Her great-aunt, Aoi, loved a man from England who did not love her back, and so she married a ginger farmer whose fingers burned her, and had no children. Aoi found me in a shop in Kamakura, by the sea, and thought that I would suffice to conceal her from her life.
    “I have had much time to consider women. Milo is no worse than any of them.”
    “Her dreams taste thin and bitter, like the white membranes of limes.”
    Rafu shrugged, a peculiar raising and dropping of her slats. “She is sad. She does not speak Japanese. Her husband went to the desert months and months ago. Every day she goes to the market and brings back chocolate, a peach, and a salmon rice-ball for her dinner. She sits and eats and stares at the wall. Sometimes she watches television. Sometimes she walks three miles to Blue Street to look at necklaces in the window that she wishes someone would buy for her. Sometimes she walks along the pier to see the sunken bicycles, pinged into ruin by invisible arrows of battleship-sonar, crusted over with rust and coral. She likes to pet people’s dogs as they walk them. That is her whole life. What should she dream of?”
    “Something better.”
DANCING DOWN THE WINDOWS
    It is not that I thirsted for Milo’s dreams. I could have had better from any rice-cooker salesman on Blue Street, marbled with darkness and longing for kisses like maple sap. But Rafu stood in the shadows of Milo’s house, wrapped in the grassy yellow-green perfume of new tatami, showing the stars through her skin, laughing when I told her the jokes Yatsuhashi had snorted to me on the morning train. I rocked on my haunches below her and showed her all the things I could be: tapir, tiger, salaryman, shadow, water.
    I forgot to fix my mouth to the sailor’s wife. Her sawdust-dreams did not glisten. She cried in her sleep, chasing ships I wished to know nothing of, lost in her tired colonial despair.
    I lost weight, as lovers will do.
    On the seventh night I knew my Rafu, I unfolded into a silk screen with lonely tapirs drinking from a moonlit stream painted on my panels. I wanted so to please her. We stood side by side, saying nothing, content. Delicate snow came dancing down the windows. Milo slept on her mat below us and did not see our still, silent lovemaking.
    “I can do that too,” said Rafu coquettishly, when we had finished and sweat shone like water on our screens. “I can fold up into a tapir, a tiger, a salaryman, shadow, water. A girl.”
    “Show me!”
    “Not yet,” she demurred.
BECAUSE OF HER NAKEDNESS
    “Come away from this tailless old alley cat,” I begged my Rafu, resplendent in the night, golden against the dark. “I have an apartment above Blue Street. I will never throw clothing over you. I will show you the secret Peacocks of Right Intention, who make their nests in the Admiral’s mansion and peck at him when he orders his men to stand in ridiculous lines and speak the nonsense of demonkind. He cannot see them—the poor man thinks he has eczema. It is an excellent joke. I will take you walking through the Carnival of Right Livelihood, and we will eat black sugar burnt in the Ovens of Contentment. You can take the Baku-train with me every night and continue your study of women—I will eat only the dreams of women for your sake! Into the pachinko parlors we will go, hoof in hinge, and in the plinking of those silver balls we alone will hear the clicking movements of stars in perfect orbit and know that nothing is