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Kyorinrin makes his home in the foreman’s office The roof there still keeps rain out This is ie paper scroll His pages look very old, darkened to a rich anier stamped on one end and a chrysanthemum on the other His paper is blank, but that is a temporary situation

Kyorinrin is not as old as he looks, but he likes to think he provides a sense of continuity He came to the factory in 1950 in the personal effects of the first foreh unimportant to you and lass case along with other objects Akiyama found sacred in a certain private, personal way These included two sirl named Akerand day, an airplane ticket to a place called Adelaide which Akiyaht but did not use, a statuette of Jizo wrapped in a red scarf with a red cap on his slish dictionary, a miniature onyx elephant with a broken trunk, a map of ordnance sites in the mountains around Yokosuka, and Kyorinrin hienealogy of the Akiyama clan, inked on commission in 1910, the year Isao was born

Kyorinrin supposes all these objects make a person, but you can never know very lass case

Like the rest of the umbrella factory, the case is broken now The floor of the office still shih of silver rabbits and Adelaide and dead girls He looks at it soht One rabbit The lock of hair

Every evening Kyorinrin rolls luxuriously out to his full length across the factory floor His paper exults in its own length Every evening he causes a story to flow over his body in deep, profoundly black ink Before the sun hefts up over the cinnamon trees, he bathes himself in the eer end of his roller to spray water down his creases, like an elephant with a working trunk

The paper scroll does not live alone Not any, only that one day she was there where she had not been before She is a kanji representing the ife Her brushstrokes are very fine She stands thirty-three centih in the listen dark violet She claierators It was not an interesting life Kyorinrin appreciates that

“Today I a to write a story about a white woer’s bronze mouth moves when he speaks His talk echoes

Tsuht pink stains Violet ripples along her edges like electricity

“Why would you want to do that?” she whispers

WATER

A sua Harbor Cicadas shriek at it, but it is unworried It ripples in the quiet water Aoes unremarked The moon knows his own business—and his wife

A fox who is not really a fox and an old woman who is not really an old woether under a persih above the harbor Fireflies dive and spiral around the theourds and blush silver The fox eats the fireflies, whether or not their tiny lamps are lit

The old wo white sth of dark water, flowing in a current around her bony waist Her er than she is tall It is the salows in the white of her like fire Futsukeshibaba blows out the lights of the world That is the kind of creature she is She desires only to blow out lanterns and lamps and candles It is what she was made for She has blown out the Emperor’s personal lamp and would be happy to tell you about it Once, she snuffed Issa’s lantern when he fell asleep at his work, thereby saving his papers from the otherwise inevitable blaze When she sees a flame, she yearns to put it out It looks like a tear in everything to her, a ragged hole through which entropy can leak Her breath is needle and thread

Futsukeshibaba watches the blue-black water She puffs up her cheeks, blows a sparrow out of the air with one quick cough, and hands it to the fox who is not really a fox because he is Inari, a god ears his fox’s body like it was a salaryman’s suit Inari crunches the bones in his fox-teeth His fur gleareat tail too olden flame for Futsukeshibaba’s comfort She has already tried to blow it out several tih she knows better

Inari and Futsukeshibaba are watching ships come into the harbor They are not Japanese ships, but both the fox and the old woot here