Haruo ochikochisu.”[(h)]
“Omoi kitte fukeyuku
Haruno hitorikana.”[(i)]
Sleep was stealing over me by the time I had finished committing the last piece to the sketch-book.
I was half asleep and half awake, in a condition, to describe which was invented, I thought, the expression “as in a trance.” Nobody is conscious of self in a sound sleep; but in wakefulness the world outside is never forgotten. Between the two regions lies the borderland of vision, where things look too misty to be called awake, and yet too animate to be in sleep. It is a condition in which “up awake” and “lie asleep” are put in one and the same cup and stirred and mixed up with the straw of poetry and song. Shade off the colours of nature into all but a dream, push this universe of reality adrift into the sea of haze, and smooth into curves all sharp angles with the magic hand of the genie of sleep. Breathe slow pulsation into the world so tempered. Imagine clouds of smoke crawling the surface of such a world, unable to fly away though it would; imagine again your soul about to depart lingering, unable to leave its shell. Such is the condition I mean. It is again the state in which the soul is lambently struggling, and finally unable to preserve its entity dissolves into an ethereal existence and clings and hangs about with no heart to depart.
I was traversing this borderland of dreamy consciousness when the “karakami”[(16)] of my room opened, as if of its own accord, and in the opening appeared the figure of a woman, like a phantom. The apparition did not cause me surprise, nor did it frighten me: I simply looked at it with easy pleasant sensation. Perhaps I put it too strongly to say I “looked at”; for the truth was, the shadowy thing slid with no permission of mine behind the lids of my eyes, which were closed. The phantom slowly came into my room, with the smoothness of a fairy queen walking across a placid surface of water. The matted floor gave no sound of human foot steps. I could not tell distinctly as I was looking through closed eyelids; but she looked fair, with a wealth of hair and a long well-shaped neck, making me feel as if I were throwing my eyes on a vignette of latter-day vogue, held up against a light.
The vision stopped before a cupboard in the rear of the room. A karakami screening the cupboard was pushed open and a slim arm visible in the dark came out of a sleeve. The screen closed then and the phantom sailed noiselessly back to the opening, which, in the next moment, closed of itself. Sleep now gathered faster and faster on me. The dead must feel as I did then, I obscurely imagined, before being reborn into a horse or an ox.
I did not know how long I had been wandering between man and horse; only I opened my eyes. The curtain of night had apparently been raised long since, and the world was light from end to end, with the bright Spring sun printing darkly bamboo lattices on the window “shoji,”[(17)] leaving no room, as it appeared, for any spooky things to lurk about on the face of the earth. The mysterious apparition must have hied into the far, far away world on the other side of the Styx.
I went straightway down to the bath-room for a morning dip. I just held my head above water for a full five minutes, perfectly will-less to wash my face or to be getting out. How could I have gone, I wondered, into such state of mind as I did last night and how could the world go head-over-heels so completely by merely crossing the boundary line of night and day.
I was too lazy to dry myself and was coming out of the bath-room almost wet, when to my surprise, simultaneous with my opening the bath-room door from within, a voice—that of a woman—outside said: “Good morning, did you sleep well last night?”