Pathway to Japanese Literature

Author: Miyamoto Yuriko

Even a dagger capable of casually taking young girls' lives or ravaging pristine bodies lay wrapped in the soft pouch of being called the young mistress of a grand shop, ensconced in brocade bags. A heart akin to Empress Mo Xi's lurked beneath that thick fabric lining, while the daughter—who shone with nothing but splendor born from decades past, from dreams of beautiful men and women who died and were reborn—was named Oryu.

From around fifteen or sixteen, her parents began noticing a mysterious glow flickering deep within her heart.
The parents could imagine what would occur when that glowing entity grew larger.
Whenever they saw the faint yet terrifying shimmer of the luminous being dwelling within their daughter's heart, the elderly parents found themselves compelled to reflect on their own youthful days.
When the mother was eighteen, she had defied her parents, abandoned her home, and thrown herself before the current master of that merchant household.
The scene unfurled anew before her eyes—how she, crushed beneath the terrible force called "Time" from her birth family's shop with its gradually tilting curtain, had bared white teeth in laughter while comparing it to the man's establishment growing more prosperous by the day.
"We'll face retribution for this."

The two clasped their aged bony hands and thought such things.

With each expansion of the glowing entity dwelling in Oryu’s heart, her beauty intensified—a splendor and temperament straight from ancient lore—and it wasn’t merely her parents who recognized this.

Her appearance—clad in bold-patterned trailing kimonos she favored, her hair always coiled atop a wig foundation—possessed such beauty that the shop’s young men remarked even a neighboring girl bearing her powderless translucent whiteness and luxuriantly heavy tresses would at least warrant love letters.

At sixteen, disliking having her name written as Oyanagi, she persistently demanded it be changed to “Oryu,” even making them go through all sorts of troublesome procedures until they wrote it as Oryu. She detested it, declaring that a meek willow trailing green threads—especially sharing the same name as Sanjusangendo’s willow—was utterly contrary to her own heart.

“How much better it is for women to have gentle names…”

“In my youth, women with overly impressive names were disliked…”

The mother said this halfway through hearing her daughter’s complaints.

“So a name like some flower that blooms only to wither and scatter—some blossom that turns elderly in an instant—would be better?”
“But I like Oryu, you know.”
“The part where the dragon rides those black clouds, throws open its jaws and breathes fire is irresistibly splendid—but really, I absolutely adore even an ordinary snake making its scales glisten corpse-pale while flicking out its red tongue... Isn’t it wonderful?”

Staring with those intensely gleaming eyes as if yearning, Oryu spoke these words, then watched her mother’s face blanch pale from the corners of her pitch-black eyes.
In the room that should have held craftwork boxes, actor postcards, and storytelling books, hell paintings covered every inch of the walls; on the tatami lay scattered moth-eaten yellow-covered volumes and beautiful new editions, while inside a crimson-lacquered box rested a butterfly with peerless wing colors impaled on a pin.

Such things were enough to make the mother’s eyes well up inexplicably.
After graduating from higher school, she had since been casually taught by the shop’s people, but the young men tasked with teaching avoided her as much as possible, fearing their own minds would unravel under the daughter’s cold beauty.
Whenever Oryu saw the young man gripping his pencil beside her—gazing at her profile while flushing crimson or sighing faintly—she would deliberately misinterpret what amused her to feign irritation, then watch with satisfaction as the timid man hung his head pitifully before retreating to her room with a faint smile. This had become her custom.

Oryu, who had been devouring novels haphazardly, found a chapbook depicting Mo Xi.
The illustration showed a woman wearing a crown studded with blinding jewels, her supple body leaning against a tower railing as she coldly laughed at a man writhing between life and death while crimson blood flowed from him.
Drawn in by the illustration's terrifying power, Oryu immersed herself in reading it with fierce concentration.
As she turned each page one by one, her hands trembled faintly and her lips turned fire-red.
Her pristine white face became like bleached wax.
Tracing each character, she felt astonishment surge from her heart's depths—an indescribable emotion swelling like clouds at how perfectly her own feelings matched those permeating the text. Staring fixedly downward, Oryu contemplated her mind as if observing it objectively.
As if receiving revelation, she declared: "I am a woman specially forged—endowed with power to stay beautiful by drinking men's blood until death."
Gazing into empty space with fiercely gleaming eyes as though pledging to some formless entity, Oryu spoke these words.
When she exhaled sharply and tossed the book onto her lap with a thud, the shoji paper had already darkened to ash-gray.
From early afternoon until now she'd read without pause, and at her own earnestness and the thrill of this new self-awareness, she released a brilliant peal of laughter.
Simultaneously, she detected something—flung from the dim room's edge like ejected matter—that left a flickering shadow as it concealed itself.
Recognizing the shadow's owner by their slender neckline, the daughter—as if struck by some realization—let out a laugh pitched even higher than before.

The terrifyingly clear voice resounded startlingly far.
Listening intently to her own laughter fading away while imagining a man shuddering at that sound, she let slip a soundless smirk.

Oryu stood up and changed into a fresh kimono. Adorned in bolder, more vivid patterns than ever before with matching obi, her made-up face and figure became twice as beautiful. Glancing briefly at her smiling reflection in the mirror, Oryu slid smoothly into the corridor and moved soundlessly forward, stealthily heading toward the storehouse outside the shop. The young man sat clutching his head against the cold stone steps, immersed in a leaden heart as if dragged into the abyssal depths of a fathomless sea, lacking even the awareness to notice Oryu standing beside him. "The master’s daughter—with that icy demeanor, she’d surely expose anything I did. And she’s still so young—" Such thoughts tormented the heart of the young man who felt Oryu was driving him to madness.

The young man thought it would be better to resolutely leave this house rather than suffer such torment. To spend even a single day without glimpsing that beauty was something he could not possibly endure. The young man’s feverish heart surged with such force that he could hardly stay still—he wanted to scream at the top of his lungs as he recalled being laughed at mockingly and the girl’s burning intensity he had witnessed...

With his head burning like fire and his body rigidly suppressing violent tremors, the young man saw Oryu standing soundlessly beside him as he rose. The young man’s face turned even redder than before, then bluer than a corpse’s, as he stared fixedly at the daughter’s face with glistening, trembling eyes. The daughter also fixed her eyes—filled with an allure the young man could not withstand—and peered into the depths of his pupils. Time stood between them with extreme swiftness; the young man bowed his head as if drained of strength. The woman continued to pursue those downcast eyes. Oryu lightly arched her eyebrows with a triumphant air and took the man’s limp hands into her own—cold as a female snake’s skin. The man’s body suddenly began to tremble. The woman observed, without altering her complexion in the slightest or disturbing a single strand of her hair, the sight of clamoring blood coursing through his entire body and his hair turned completely red. The young man collapsed onto the stone steps like a puppet with its strings cut, his hands still held in her grip.

“You’re talking about—”

Without heeding the man’s faint, fragmented voice, Oryu tightened her grip even harder.
She noticed tears spilling from the man’s eyes.

“Just think you were chosen by a snake…”

In a clear, low voice, the woman whispered.

“Please――don’t torment me……”

The man spoke in a voice even weaker than before.

“I won’t let go—no matter what happens, even when we’re both reduced to nothing but bones—”

Oryu remained motionless as she had spoken, making no move to release her grip. Mirroring in her heart as if in glass—the man’s violently churning emotions, the pitifully rigid lines of cheeks clenched to suppress tears, his terror-stricken powerlessness to break free—she cast a smile toward the warehouse door glowing pristine white. With a disinterested flick like an infant discarding a toy, Oryu let the man’s hand fall from hers. Her two pale hands resumed their limp drape at her sides; the man lifted downcast eyes for an instant’s glance upward before fixing them downward again with piercing intensity. Oryu gazed fixedly at his face suspended in dim shadows. Observing slender white fingers veiling features and faint sorrow-sounds seeping through their gaps, she slipped away like a dissipating illusion. The young man sprawled across stone steps as one might discard luggage—for an interminable span, truly endless—Could this be a dream? Had he been toyed with? Why had such feelings overtaken him?—he trembled, heart and body near dissolution from joy interwoven with boundless dread and sorrow.

From then on, those who saw the two young figures standing before the dimly lit warehouse were not merely one or two maids who had come to put away kimonos.
Oryu also knew about what was clawed onto the warehouse door bearing the painting of two faces lined up beneath an umbrella.
Day by day, the man’s eyes grew damp and clouded, their vigor diminishing.
No one failed to find strange the man’s demeanor—sighing lightly, suddenly recalling something, then giving a faint smile.

About three months later, the man was abruptly expelled from the shop. Placing before her the pale-faced, emaciated man who had spent the previous night weeping on the cold stones before the warehouse until dawn, Oryu issued her final command in her father’s stead. The man spilled a single tear onto his knee, looked up at the woman with glistening eyes, and swayed two or three steps closer to her—then left without uttering a word or making a gesture, never to show his face in this shop again. The woman let out a “Fufufu” laugh from between her beautiful teeth as she watched the man’s deathlike state. Those in the household who had both heard and witnessed this matter set about solving the puzzling mystery—even though they were favored by their employer—but found it utterly impossible to resolve. They merely came to regard the name Oryu as that of a special person endowed with power, and whenever her beautiful figure came into view, people would huddle together as if swept aside, peering up at her dazzling form from the corners of their eyes.

Whenever Oryu saw such squirming indecision, she cherished the glowing entity residing within her own body and heart.

On her sixteen-year-old face already lay the composed, well-ordered shadow of a woman who had fully understood men.

For the parents, viewing Oryu as their own daughter proved far too dreadful.
They lived with hearts like packed gunpowder—straining not to lay hands on her, straining not to make the glowing entity within flare brighter.
The two sank into gloom, cowed by the very phrase “family’s fate”—this inescapable karma that bound them even as they sought escape.
The parents resigned themselves to knowing no amount of wishing could sustain this household for decades more.
They could only tremble as they watched their daughter grow ever more fearsome through helpless eyes.
In her seventeenth spring, the specially fashioned woman moved to a snug nearby house, taking her favored maid, hell paintings, novels, kimonos, and household tools.
With worldly poise stripped of shame—hair loosely coiled in a gingko twist, clad in a Taki-striped Omeshi kimono fastened at the collar and cinched with a white Hakata obi—her bearing stood unmatched that year, equally suited to a queen of that tiny realm or a gang mistress commanding dozens of underlings with a tilt of her chin.

The flames in the hell paintings on the wall blazed, Datsueba’s white hair standing on end; in that uncanny room, the woman with snow-white teeth and vermilion lips would often smile faintly, confident in her power.

A dagger was always placed on the woman’s desk.
Oryu favored its rainbow-hued color, its radiance, the slenderness of its tip, its chill—all qualities mirroring her own heart.
There was a still-young man who would visit Oryu with sincere, untainted devotion.
Oryu would test her power on the man as always and smile.
Even at the mocking smile, the man felt happy and smiled back.
The young man came to Oryu with an utterly serious and sincere demeanor.
When responding to even a single remark—Oryu showering down from above while he lifted up from below to reply—when she looked down and laughed derisively, he looked up and laughed back.

“I’ll give this to you.”

With a mocking laugh that ridiculed others lingering in her eyes, the woman drew the dagger from the desk.

“Huh? What for… Are you telling me to die…?”

The man’s eyes widened as he spoke.

“Hehehe… Who knows? We all die once—both of us… don’t you think?”

With deep-rooted persistence, she fluttered the dagger before the man’s eyes and uttered these words.
Fixing her beautiful eyes on him, she peered along the blade’s edge,

“I can do anything I please now, I tell you.”
“I could toss your head to dogs this instant or fling it to sky-soaring birds, you know.”
“Should the dog abandon its prize, heaven’s birds would swoop to feast, I assure you.”
“…don’t you agree?”

The woman spoke in crystalline tones.
The young man never doubted this was anything but deadly earnest.

“What madness… You’re unnatural—cease these frights.”

“I’ll haunt you proper—till you’re naught but withered husk gasping final breaths.”

“You with such a beautiful face shouldn’t say such terrifying things…”

“Enough! You ought to realize you can’t dictate what I should or shouldn’t do.”
“Yes—exactly! I was born to startle and shock the men of this world until they drop dead—!”

“Aren’t you afraid yourself?”
“Oh, spouting such nonsense—you’re truly no proper young lady at all.”

“Terrifying? There’s nothing terrifying in this world at all, I tell you.”

“I’m thinking of crafting a curse against men unlike any before—not some half-baked thing like sticking needles in straw dolls… A curse—a word with a splendid ring to it, shaped like the character ‘kō.’”

The man listened to this talk with frightened eyes, and the woman spoke with a triumphant gaze.

“Let’s stop talking about unpleasant things and go somewhere—come on, I feel like there’s something cold behind me—”

“That’s right—exactly as it should be—there’s something clutching a dagger right behind you, I tell you…”

“Stop harping on such nonsense—come now, let’s go somewhere.”

The mere fact of his existence—a man with entirely alien emotions and flesh—in this space where hell paintings loomed, where daggers lay ready, where the woman’s power swirled unrestrained, made him feel his neck constricting as if bound by invisible cords, truly as though his head might tumble any moment. He kept pressing her to hurry toward where he might see others of his kind—men like himself. The woman watched his darting eyes and laughed.

Shortly thereafter, Oryu—draped in a light blue mantle, wearing clogs with red cords, her hair styled over a wig base like some specter—and the man walked along the bustling asphalt-paved □ Street.
Every passing man seemed to want to take Oryu away from himself, and the woman too appeared to know each man she encountered beyond him, conversing through some invisible voice.
The man gazed with an utterly feeble look at the woman’s eyes positioned about two inches below his own.
Even before the man could look, the woman had been staring at his bewildered state.
When the man’s fixedly staring eyes clashed with the woman’s motionless gaze, he had to helplessly avert his own.

“I’ve grown tired of walking with you—”

Oryu abruptly stopped, said this, and then briskly walked alone to the other side without a sideways glance.
When the woman acted this way—unlike the half-teasing affectations of ordinary women—it somehow felt terrifying, and the man wanted to immediately chase after her and walk by her side again.
Yet when he considered himself a man, the realization that his heart was being utterly dominated by a mere seventeen-year-old girl felt too humiliating—so much so that he kept turning his feet around and around, taking the opposite path.
The man saw how every male passerby who crossed paths with Oryu kept glancing back timidly even after moving past her, as though drawn irresistibly—he found it utterly impossible to keep walking alone.

“What!”
What a spineless coward I am—a damned monk! Ha!
Ridiculous—

The man berated his own heart, but this only made him grow more jealous of the men who kept looking back at Oryu until he felt an overwhelming urge to show them all—That woman is mine!
Being face-to-face with Oryu who wielded a power too strong to put into words was terrifying—yet he had made a point of going out to meet men who shared his own heart and body as a man himself. Still, in his heart, there was only growing torment.
The man crossed the wide road diagonally and walked pressed close to Oryu’s side.

The woman displayed nobility and beauty akin to a queen walking with pitiful slaves whose tongues had been severed, neither laughing nor moving her head.
The man desperately wanted to make even one muscle twitch in that ice-cold face through his own power.
From beneath his coat's shadow, he groped for and seized her ivory-smooth hand hidden under the light blue mantle.
While staring at her impassive profile, he stealthily tightened his grip—only to receive an icy, sharp pain that seemed to pierce through his skull's marrow.
The man jerked his hand back with a start, sidestepping to look at her.
Her faintly smiling teeth gleamed white enough to appear blue.

In the man’s mind surfaced memories of the dagger he had been shown and the needle’s sharpness used for poison injection—both looming threateningly.
A weight seemed to press upon his heart.
With dying eyes he inspected his hand—no wound existed, only a drop of blood pooled like a ruby blooming on his blueish knuckle.

At this sight he sucked at it frantically—chu-chu—wiped it with paper, then hid the hand inside his coat.
He could not comprehend how this had happened—no matter how he tried.

“Heh heh heh heh heh.”

With a snort that seemed to leap from the tip of her nose, the woman saw that and laughed.
Upon hearing that voice, the man seethed and pondered, yet couldn’t help but laugh back—*“Hihihihihi.”*
Overwhelmed by terror and an indescribable emotion, the man found himself unable to speak.
As he walked silently beside the woman, suddenly he was pushed so hard he staggered.

When he turned his startled eyes toward the woman, something glinted at the fingertips of her hand emerging as if sprouting from the light blue mantle. When he slowed his walking pace, he realized it was a silk needle threaded with purple silk—its tip slightly clouded with blood. Along with that came the understanding of what had pierced him. When the man tried to take it, the woman swiftly withdrew her hand and clenched it out of sight. Thinking he might be stabbed again if he reached out, he simply resumed walking. The man thought how fragile his own heart was—how no matter how much he steeled himself before the woman, it would still bow in defeat.

“Let’s just end this stupid thing—you’re not the only woman in the world…”

Though he thought this way, it was but a momentary whim—no different from a naive girl who kept saying she wanted to die over trivial matters yet never did—for he lacked resolve sharp enough to act upon it.

The two wandered aimlessly until night deepened and returned home; upon entering the dimly warm room, the woman immediately slipped out of the kimono and became clad only in a white crepe underrobe embroidered with a jorōgumo spreading its legs wide across its surface before throwing herself down upon a Yuzen-dyed cushion dominated by crimson hues.
The pale yellow collar coiled around white flesh like a snake playfully embracing its prey; hands emerged past elbows as if exhaling fragrance while scarlet crepe sashes crawled across tatami mats.
Narrowing eyes like slivered moons, she stared at him sitting soundless before her.

“Stop staring so intently. I’m a living human, not a mirror.”

“You truly embody what it means to be a human man—you’ve got all that foolishness every man possesses so perfectly—haven’t you?”

The woman said such things while laughing.
Noticing the glint of the needle that had pricked him earlier in the hollow of her chest,
“Please discard that needle quickly—it’s dangerous.”

“Please discard that needle quickly—it’s dangerous,” the man said uneasily.

“Is it because you’re frightened?”
“That was truly amusing earlier—had you coated it with poison beforehand, it would’ve been even more delightful.”

“So if I gradually turn purple and die, that’s how it would be, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, I adore human corpses, snakes, jorōgumo spiders, and rotten persimmons.”

“Don’t keep spouting such vile things. I’m growing more terrified of you by the moment.”
“I want to flee, yet I can’t move my limbs as I will.”
“Am I truly infatuated with you from the depths of my heart? If not, I should be able to escape even now.”

“It doesn’t matter one bit. You’re intoxicated by the sickly-sweet poison oozing from my body—you can’t move a single muscle.”
“I know full well that even if you fled, you’d never manage to truly escape…”

“What would you do if I managed to escape?”

“Well then, starting today, shall we see whether the frog chosen by the snake can successfully escape, or whether the snake who chose him will outlast him in this test of endurance?”

“The snake that chooses its prey will swallow the frog even in death—it’s been decided since ancient times……”

The woman said with an even chillier gaze than before.

“For such things I’m still much too young—let’s stop now, this seeing-through has become unbearable...”

The man said such things while trembling faintly.

The woman laughed as though from the very depths of her heart and stood up.
Wearing a padded robe over her underkimono, with her obi wrapped tightly around her waist and her cheek resting on her hand atop the desk, the man compared Oryu’s appearance to the hell painting forming her background and found her terrifyingly beautiful in her proximity.
From the cool, smooth texture of Oryu’s skin, it seemed a poisonous air that shortened his own lifespan was gradually rising, and within her hair that felt like a pitch-dark forest, he thought there might dwell many snakes.

“I surely would have been happier had I never known you... And perhaps you might have been too…”

“I don’t think about things like happiness or unhappiness—such matters.”
“I believe I was destined by heaven to be born this way, and I have faith in my own power…”

“Ah, you truly are a woman like a poppy flower.”

“I myself rejoice in having been born thus.”

The woman exhaled deeply as though blowing her poison into the man’s heart.

A long silence persisted between them.
Their hearts drifted apart; each lost in their own selfish thoughts.

“I’m leaving.”

The man stood up as if suddenly remembering something and tugged at the front of his garment.

“Right—”

The woman made no move to stop him and followed the man to the entrance.

“Next time then.”

Though the man spoke in a small voice, the woman merely cast a wan smile.

That smile became one of those things the man could never forget.
In the silence, she smiled faintly in gratitude toward her own power—this ability to release the man without surrendering her body completely.
Sliding closer, she took up the round hand mirror and peered at her face.
Plump rounded cheeks; eyes possessing a special beauty and brilliance; a nose leading to crimson lips; an indescribable faint chill permeating her entire face—she felt all these things within herself,

"I am young—and have been bestowed by God with power beyond that of others. I possess the power to make any man—no matter how high his status—my slave."

While placing the hand mirror face down on her lap, she whispered thus in a voice trembling with joy.

"I am young—"
Repeating it again in a murmur, she reached out and extinguished the light. Until the sun rose high, the woman lay with a face like transparent glass. Upon waking, she immediately looked at the hell painting by her pillow—the woman let clear laughter resound through the house without a trace of sleepiness.

At dusk, the man once again stood before Oryu’s entrance.
On the narrow earthen entryway lay unfamiliar men’s geta left carelessly discarded.
The man—associating this with what he found most repulsive—spat and stepped back.

“As if I’d ever come back! Even if that bitch apologized through tears, you think I’d come crawling back? You whore!”
“I definitely won’t come back—I’m a man too!”

The man, his face flushed red, was earnestly pondering something as trivial as a child who had just woken up, his shoulders squared in defiance.

For about seven days, the man didn't even go near the woman's house.
Yet those very days were anything but pleasant—before the man's heart laid bare, the woman's smiling visage from that recent night would instantly surface.
Being given the cold shoulder also weighed on him.

“It’s really true—it’s true.”
“I’m a frog chosen by a snake! Before that woman, I’m nothing but a powerless man! It’s just like starting opium—knowing it’ll shorten your life but being unable to quit!”

The man who had grown accustomed to this specially crafted woman’s barbed words, demeanor, and gaze found it utterly impossible to remain completely alone.
Carrying an incomprehensible, anguished heart—his face paler and far more enfeebled than before—he opened the lattice door of her house.
As he placed his hand on the lattice and peered inside, there stood the woman with her usual smile filling her face.
The man slightly drew back his hand yet planted himself resolutely on the opened earthen entryway.
Without a word, the woman retreated into her room—her fortress.
The man followed after her, closing the shoji behind him with one hand even as his knee already touched the tatami.
Seeing his dejected state, Oryu remarked in an icy voice,

“So you’ve finally come back—looking all forlorn like a runaway lovesick cat that’s come fluttering home—”

With that, she gave him a light poke.

The man lacked the composure to protest.
With fingertips trembling,

“Just how many men have you been twisting to your will?”

In a voice thick with suffocation, the man spoke.

“How many? All men in this world are mine to command as I please—I am a woman specially born……”

Oryu replied in an unperturbed—nay, solemn—tone.
To the man’s eyes, shimmering purple threads seemed to rise from the hair she had swept back over her shoulders, enveloping her body.

“Ah! I truly am a frog chosen by a snake!”

The man said in a voice utterly devoid of strength.
The woman’s eyes sparkled like diamonds shining in the darkness of night, radiant with the joy of victory.

Then once again, the man resolutely opened the lattice door of the woman’s house once each day. There were times he stayed all day, and times he returned late into the night. Yet she permitted contact only through the icy tips of her beautiful fingers.

Drawing the young man’s blood from some unseen, imperceptible place, her beauty grew ever more potent within her body. The man drawing near her side remained oblivious to his own wasting form as he gazed upward at her increasingly radiant visage.

The woman turned twenty.

The man,

"I've fallen gravely ill these past days.
"I've wasted away so terribly—even *my own eyes* see how gaunt I've grown! Yet daily my body shrivels further... daily my will weakens more... till staying apart from you becomes unthinkable."

With teary eyes, he spoke thus.

“By gathering only our most beautiful hearts, by gathering only our noblest blood—you grow ever more beautiful each day—”

He also said such things.

“Since I’ve given you every last bit of my best parts, I’ll resolutely die soon enough.”
“I truly cared for you from the heart—but you just used me as fertilizer for your own beauty and cast me aside! Once chosen, I couldn’t escape…”
“I’ve stared too long at your beauty—and compared to you, I was far too honest.”

The emaciated, visibly weakened young man came every single day to cling to the woman’s hand.

“I know I’ll die soon,” he said.
The woman laughed coldly as ever, never letting the man beyond her fingertips—poking and prodding him.

At that time, Oryu kept a large jorōgumo. She would have it build nests between her fingers or crawl around her neck. Even then, Oryu made it walk across her lap while blocking its approaching legs and teasing it. When it tried to move forward, it hit a hand; when it tried to retreat, found itself obstructed—so the spider darted up and crawled onto the man’s neck. Then it slid smoothly across his chest, leaving an itchy trail wherever it passed, before emerging from his sleeve cuff. The woman caught it and placed it back on her lap.

While being crawled upon by the spider, the man felt what he believed must be an unprecedented sense of pleasure.

Seeing him lying there with closed eyes as the spider traversed his body, the woman laughed—a high-pitched sound like a flute’s note.

That day, he returned home suffused with unbearable sweetness.
He collapsed onto the tatami mats, grinned with vacant delight, and slipped into sleep.

By morning, he still wore that smile—now frozen on a shriveled lump of flesh, its tiny nose withered, mouth silent and cold.
“That man became the very first fertilizer for my beauty!”
The woman offered no other remark.

After that as well, countless men opened the lattice and drew near to the specially crafted woman.

By taking the men’s hearts and squeezing their blood, the woman grew ever more youthful—her skin whiter, her hair blacker, her eyes shining brighter.
To make the specially crafted woman more beautiful, men with pure hearts died laughing, countless upon countless.
Each time a man died, the woman’s beauty advanced a stage. The splendor forged from men’s precious lives possessed a radiance like silver threads stitching moons together and a fragrance so intoxicating it could cloud the senses.

Growing more beautiful, the woman grew old.

Though she had capriciously handled countless men over a long period, the woman remained a virgin; the specially crafted woman possessed the power to remain a virgin.

In the dim candlelight, with her back to the hell paintings, one evening the woman stood before a mirror that fully reflected her body.
Her cheeks were round, her lips red, and her hair black—but the woman discovered faint shadows around her eyes and a single brown spot that had formed on her cheek.

"It’s a sign that my beauty has begun to decline."

At once, the woman thought this thought. She thought that in four or five years, she too would have to start doing the sorts of things ordinary women do.

Oryu, who believed herself to be a specially crafted woman, found the idea of having to do what ordinary women do more detestable than death.

She stared fixedly at the mirror’s surface once more.
The black-shadowed brown spot was indeed there.

When seeing men who had become sacrifices for her sake, she let slip from between her teeth a cold, hollow laugh of the kind reserved for such moments. Smoothly undoing her obi and shedding her outer garments, she became nothing but a single underrobe bearing a jorōgumo with hands spread wide. She removed the mirror from its stand and placed it on the tatami mat. The woman sat laughing upon it. Her seated feet, hands, and head were all reflected exactly as they were in the mirror below. Gazing at her own eyes reflected in the mirror, she unleashed a maddened cackle. Then with her right hand slipped deftly into her bosom, she released the jorōgumo she had been clutching within her pure white, soft chest.

The woman snapped open her eyes, let out an ashen laugh, and gazed at herself in the mirror.
The female jorōgumo in her chest whirled round and round, scurrying nimbly about.
The instant the female jorōgumo in her chest froze, the body of the specially crafted woman—still laughing, still staring—toppled onto the mirror with a hollow clack.
With her laughter petrified, the woman stared into her own eyes within the mirror.
The candle cackled shrilly while casting up a yellow flame.

The female jorōgumo crawled slowly from her chest up her neck to her eyes.
And between abruptly opened eyelashes, it began to spin threads like silver.
From within the glittering fine web, agate-like eyes gazed at the eyes within the mirror’s web, a pallid smile lingering on her lips.
The morning light shone fully upon the mysterious form of the specially crafted woman.

The specially crafted woman—with no dark shadows around her eyes nor brown spots on her cheeks—could never comprehend the candle’s flicker.