Dedicated to “The Lady Aoi”

from Five Modern Noh Plays— by Mishima, Yukio.

 

That’s why I can’t have the least of what they call "understanding” for the patients or, if you’ll excuse me, the patients’s families or visitors. Don’t you agree? Every last of them is the ghost of a libido.

 

How gently they breathe, they who are about to die Look at them die, brazenly flaunting their wounds, the gaping, fatal wounds. 

 

We’re angels compared to them. We stand aloof from the world of love, from the hour of love. All we do, and that only occasionally, is to produce in bed a chemical change. 

 

No, there’s nothing in my hands. My flowers are invisible. Flowers of pain is what they are. 

 

These buds I arrange by her pillow will open into ash-colored blossoms. Many horrible thorns are hidden underneath the leaves.

 

What do you suppose night is? Night is when all things are in harmony. By day light and shadow war,

 

but with nightfall the night inside the house holds hands with the night outside the house. They are the same thing. 

 

I really don’t know myself why I’ve come. When I feel I want to kill you, I must be thinking that id like to be pitied by your dead self. 

 

And amidst feelings of every sort, simultaneously, there is myself. Isn’t it strange that I should be present at the same time with all those different existences?

 

Yes, I did. I wasn’t particularly in love with you. All I had was a childish curiosity. 

 

You took advantage of it. I suppose you’ve learned now the punishment a woman gets for taking advantage of a man’s curiosity. 

 

It was your fault not to have realized it. Couldn’t you tell that my eyes had long since lost their pride? The clearest sign that a woman has lost her pride is when she talks in a highhanded way. 

 

In those days, I was unstable, shaky on my feet. I wanted to be chained. I wanted a cage to shut me in. You were that cage. Then, when I wished to be free again, you were still a cage, a chain. 

 

Don’t you find it disagreeable to share the same memories with me?

 

They’re not the same. We happened to have been together, that’s all. 

 

Tonight you’ll hear them. And the shrieks that a chicken lets out before it dies, when a fox is ripping its throat. 

 

Wasn’t that a voice somewhere just now?

 

The wind has shifted, isn’t it? I see the reeds on the shore plainly now, blending in the wind. The wind is shaking spasms over the surface of the lake. 

 

I’m sure I heard a voice.