I'm going to relay a curious story to you, told to me on one of those fanciful trips that you book from a magazine--spend eight days walking on the shores of the Greek Isles and piss in the Aegean or whatever, all for the low fare of 2,000 dollars. I was on such a trip, a brief jaunt into Japan, and it was on a very hot day that I drifted away from the group of tourists to get a quick drink.
The place I stepped into was small but intricately designed. The wooden inlays were of fierce dragons laying siege to mountainside villages, with finely carved spears, held aloft as though they could pierce the skin of a god. And beside those, another repeating pattern of a beautiful woman with long hair wrapped around her entire, presumably nude, body. The second picture caught my eye, which the owner must have noticed because he said, "I knew her," with a faint accent, as he turned a glass around in his hands.
I sat down at the bar to hear his story.
She was a strange woman because she came from a small village in the mountains. There were not many villages left at this time, and it was strange that a woman so beautiful should have still been single when Japanese businessmen were passing through nearly every city and gathering up all the blossoms. And yet there she was, my beautiful wife.
Naturally, I spent a few weeks with her in the mountains before we were to be married and nothing seemed amiss. She was quiet, though intelligent. We often sat in a warm bath across from one another and looked out at the mountains and trees in her quiet village, and she'd tell me which birds were calling from the trees or how they'd started irrigating crops from the river a lifetime ago.
I took her home to be my wife. And the strangest thing happened that at first I was certain it could not be true, and I thought that I must have been dreaming, and so I spent part of the morning pinching myself and trying to will myself awake. All of this to no avail.
When she slept, my wife's hair grew longer and longer, uncoiling like a snake, or more like a spool of endless thread. And the hair would spread out around her, enveloping the entire bed in a fine gloss of black. Mind you, though strange, this was the sort of thing that a man can bear for a beautiful and quiet woman. However, the strange part is that her hair took on a life of its own, at first gently brushing along my back, tickling me, a forgivable annoyance. Though, and I noticed this after several nights, as the hair grew more voluminous its intentions grew more clear. It would try and push me out of bed with all of its thin strength, such that the first three nights I wound up on the floor without precisely knowing why. Though each time I was surprised to find my wife surrounded by an endless array of hair.
The fourth night I stayed awake and was thus aware when the hair started trying to push me from bed. I hear you already saying it. Yes, of course we could have started to sleep in separate beds, but my wife was young and beautiful, and we were still in the stage where your bodies are learning one another, and I did not want to spend an evening away from her.
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