The Melancholy of Mechagirl Read Online Free PDF

to gnaw on your shoulders, your breasts, your eyelids. I must open up a hole in you, to crawl through to the red place where your dreams spool out.
    You put your arm around me in the night. Do you remember? My belly was taut and black, a tapir’s belly, a tapir’s snout snuffling for your breath as a pig for truffles. You were my truffle, my thick, earthy mushroom. You were delicious, and I thank you for my supper.
A JEWEL WE MAY NOT GNAW
    At dawn, blue light shines on my woolly stump-tail. I catch the tin-patched 6:17 commuter train from your house to my home, deep in the Paradise of the Pure Land. My friend Yatsuhashi lumbers on board at your aunt’s house, the one with the wide white porch. She is fat and full of your aunt’s dreams of straddling her supervisor while he recites Basho. She takes her seat in the empty car; I take mine. She sits up and her tapir body unfolds neatly along three creases to become the body of a respectable businessman in a respectable black suit. I, too, unfold and straighten my tie. The attendant brings cups of hot, sweet matcha , but we refrain, straining at the pelt with the night-feast. If you saw us, you would not think we had snorted and snuggled against you all through the dark and moony hours. You would think: There go two wealthy and reputable gentlemen, off to their decent, clean desks in the city.
    But we have worked our shifts already, and we aim toward home, hurtle toward it, home to the peach tree of immortality and the pearl-troughs of enlightened discourse, where we will disgorge our meals for the pleasure of eating them again.
    “Kabu,” says Yatsuhashi, though she knows my full name is Akakabu. She insists on the familiar because she has no manners. “Do you think that dreams taste more like cherries or more like salmon roe? I can never decide.”
    “With respect, Yatsuhashi-san, the comparison with roe is not at all apt. Recall that at the bottom of a dream is a hard jewel we may not gnaw, the jewel of the sleeping soul, clung with dream-meat and sugar. Roe is sweet and soft and bursts on the tongue in a shower of golden salt—how rare is the roe-dream! Only the very young and the very old have no pit on which we may break our teeth if we are not careful.”
    “Of course you are right, Kabu. But I cannot escape the feeling of fishiness; the dreams of sex-starved aunts wriggle in me so!”
    That is my friend’s way of talking. Many Baku talk like this, because they are not sensible, and all they eat all night are the kinds of dreams which do not agree with a tapir’s stomach: drunken dreams, fever dreams, sickness dreams, the dreams of enfeebled children. These are so rich it is hard to resist, like a tiny table set with a cake so moist it wets the cloth, but they make a Baku babble and walk into walls.
    Disembark for Yokosuka-Chuo Station.
    The mechanical voice is slim and soft and breathy, a dream-voice. I approve. I obey.
THE PARADISE OF THE PURE LAND
    Does it surprise you that Pure Land has a train station? It has many. We are subtle, we who inhabit this place—not only Baku but many other beasts and tsukumogami and dragons and maidens with the moon in their hair and bodhisattva with bare feet. We let humans build grey, stocky towers in the Gardens of Right Practice; we let them bring great gun-bristled ships to the Lotus Harbor; we let them pave the Avenue of Yellow Smoke and set up pachinko parlors there. We let them call Pure Land Yokosuka, and we watched the Butterflies of Perfect Thought sizzle on the neon of their nightclub advertisements. We were clever—we are safe, a dream in their sleeping, hidden beneath a human city, where no one, not even their soldiers with golden buttons, will ever think to look for heavenly pavilions.
    It is not that there is no sadness in the Paradise of the Pure Land. On the contrary, we must all report for sadness once in our long, endless, peach-saturated lives, so that we may have something hard and terrible to hold against