The Silken Fan of Kaori

The village of Shirahama was the home of a beautiful young woman named Kaori. Her father was poor and thrifty, but her mother had been a woman of breeding, and had taught her daughter the subtle arts of silk weaving. Kaori soon exceeded her in skill, particularly in the making of silken fans.

Now, the town of Kasumi-zawa, which lay just over a crest of wooded hills, was a center of much commerce; indeed, many of the merchants who traded there lived in Shirahama, for Kasumi-zawa was close to a marsh with unhealthy odors. So it was that Kaori’s skill became known to the merchants, and her fans held in great esteem. When pressed to explain her great skill with the delicate silks, she merely remarked that the pressure of one’s breath is infinitely more gentle than even the most skilled fingertips.

The merchants prevailed upon her father to sell these silken fans in the town below, and in this way they became known to the world beyond the village. And so in the days of high summer when the sun and clouds were still new, a marquis of the neighboring province passed through Kasumi-zawa, searching for the maker of the silken fans he prized so highly. Kaori’s parents were ambitious for her, and her mother was of some standing. So although Kaori’s love was for a young man named Tarou who gathered and sold scraps of rag and bone, she was soon betrothed to the marquis.

The parting of Kaori and Tarou was bitter indeed, for the marquis resembled nothing so much as a fat, grey toad, and Tarou scorned the girls in the village. The night before Kaori's departure they met secretly in a ruined temple that lay near the road between the village and town. There they swore an obscure oath, and separated.

Eventually the summer withered and withdrew. Autumn crept over the wooded hills, laying a carpet of scarlet and gold for the merchants’ feet. Twice a day they passed the ruined temple, in the morning to the town to buy and to sell, and in the evening back to the paper houses where cooking fires twinkled. Each evening on his way home, Tarou laid a small bone on the temple altar, and each morning from it he collected a silken fan, with which he cooled himself during the still hours of the day. From the fan would sigh the sweet breath of Kaori, caressing his cheeks. But with the setting sun it would crumble to dust.

The marquis was not blind to the peculiar absences his wife suffered. “Your eyes are the eyes of a doll,” he chided her. “They are dark and lustreless.” And he found Kaori limp in his arms, like a thing of rags.

The marquis was not moved to anger, however; nor did he seek to unravel the causes of her strange absences. He could guess at its reasons, for he was not beautiful even in his own eyes. But even so, he passed the nights sleeplessly, in his own bed.

So he took to riding far and wide, to distance himself from a wife whom he scarcely knew. In furtherance of such he put himself under another lord, to fight in his wars, to forget.

(And his departure pleased Kaori, for he had made himself a nuisance with small and pitiful gifts; nobility had prevented him from mastering the subtle arts of self-abasement.)

War took the marquis outside the province, and in the spring he came again to Kasumi-zawa, to sleep in a ruined temple above the town. Wearily he slept and wearily he awoke, to find a silken fan on the altar. Taking it to cool himself he was suddenly struck by a keen and wholly unlooked for presence. “Kaori!” he exclaimed in a whisper.

When Tarou came to the temple he found the fan, laying not on the altar but on the ground, trampled in the dust. Taking it, he found that it blew only a dry and bitter air that stung his cheek and drew hot tears to his eyes, and that it soon withered as though consumed by an invisible flame. Angered, that evening he laid on the altar the charred bone a self-immolating suicide.

The marquis rode hard in horror all afternoon, and it seemed to him that the wind in his face mocked and goaded him; at evening the sun fell boiling into a black sea of storm clouds. He reached the doors of his fortress only late that night, and took the stairs to Kaori’s bedroom four at a step. He found the servants had laid her on the bed and cut the silken noose from around her neck; her thighs were blackened with blood and bruises.

The marquis sought out and slew Tarou, though it gave him neither comfort nor satisfaction; and now in the evenings he sits alone in his fortress and repeats to himself this sad and meaningless tale.