its length is written:
This is the Book of Dreams.
Sparrows Dive Into the Water Becoming Clams
Metamorphosis. It is a long line of bellies, chained together flesh-wise, circling each other in a blood-black smear. A book is a belly, too. It is full of dark, nameless things decaying into each other, dissolving in acid, jostling for position. Kingfishers dive into the water and become women; women dive into the earth and become books.
What woman was this book before it grew its leather wings? I do not want to disturb her, to open her and pry out her secrets with a knife.
I was breathing heavily, trying to escape the book without moving. Perhaps peace lay in it, perhaps not. I did not want to know. I wanted my bean patch and my first floor. I wanted River and Mountain sleeping beside me in the dark.
I knew then I would not open it. I knew my story, I did not need the book. I would not harm it, its capacity for infinite wisdom, by reading what was truly there. I was not sure, I reasoned, that I could read any longer.
But I could not stop looking at it, the vulgarity of its bulging cover. I wanted it, like a barren woman wants a child. I would leave it, let it remain quiet and alone, as I have been for so long. Let the scholars in Kyoto pour over pages until their eyes dribble onto their cheeks. I took my lessons from Gate and Moth, Goat and River, and Mountain, above all my patron Mountain, who held me in his arms and whispered lullabies.
I stood before the book. I was the anatomy of a no. All of me cried out in rejection of the black heart of the dream-pagoda.
I had to escape it. Up. Up onto the fifth floor, where there would be no terrible book to make my sinews tear themselves like so much paper.
Chrysanthemums Are Tinged Yellow
I dream that I begin to seduce the city. I touch its walls lightly, with a fingertip. I brush my lips over the ramparts. I am better now, I know how to make the fire last. I know how to take my pleasure from a city.
Before the Gate a dream-battle is raging. Armor has fallen in the dirt made mud by the glut of black blood, bodies are piled up to be burned. Two men are slashing at each other, their faces turned into masks of beasts, theatre-clay with fleshy ribbons. The rest of the army looks on, waiting on the outcome. The only sounds are the cheap, hollow ring of swords, the dull thud of blows landing on leather-wrapped shields, and the hush of my body moving over the bricks of the city.
My nipples dip into the fountains and they are dried, my hair falls over a siege tower and it crashes to the frothing earth. I laugh and laugh. What they battle over is already mine. I have claimed it.
And on the great carved gate is written:
This is the Book of Dreams.
The Wolf Sacrifices the Beasts
The fifth floor was perfect. I simply climbed up a ladder which had not a single rung broken, and stood in the center of a room with no cracks in the floor, no pockmarks on the walls—even the paintings were untouched. They showed strange and terrible things—a beast sitting atop a low wall, half lion and half eagle, with the face of a woman. A woman tied to the earth with a green-walled palace built in her mouth. A woman standing in a river much vaster than my little creek, with the severed organs of some nameless man draped over her body. A woman whose skin flamed red, sighing onto a city which caught flame from her breath.
And in the corner stood a small Fox, beautifully auburn and cream-furred, with pert ears and a gentle snout, sitting on her haunches with an expression on her face which in the world of foxes must have passed for a smile.
“Why did you not open the book?” she asked softly, in a cultured, harmonious voice which rustled through the room like a veil blown from the shoulders of some pretty child.
“I did not want to disturb it,” I gulped, suddenly ashamed at my cowardice.
“If I brought it here now, would you change your mind?”
I considered it, thought back on the dark oils of its cover. “No. I would rather you tell me lessons. I would rather Gate spoke to me under the stars.”
“But