The Melancholy of Mechagirl by Catherynne M. Valente Page A

two women before the final triumph of Detective Umon in rescuing the Shogun from assassins. You can still find a few scattered grandmothers and grandfathers who saw the first run of the picture and could attest to the scene, fuzzy as long years have rendered it. Oh yes, I think one of the women was named Masami, wasn’t she? Strange, back then, to see two women fighting. Was the other one named Hanako?
    Watch until your eyes prickle and you’ll never find the scene now. Film historians say it was filmed but deemed indecent by the motion picture committee. Yet you will have discussed the matter with a professor in Yokohama and heard how at a private party of the screenwriter Yamanaka Sadao the tragic genius arranged an early screening for an elegant young woman he hoped to seduce. In Detective Umon , the auteur felt he had invented himself over again, more dashing and clever and perfect. If a lady would not share her bed with Yamanaka Sadao, she could not resist Detective Umon. As the climax of the film drew near, and the young woman had allowed him to hold her hand very tenderly, a strange woman strode into a heartbreaking shot of the moon rising over the Imperial Residence. She looked up at the moon, and then at the two noblewomen bearing their husbands’ swords and converging on the plum-blossom-strewn courtyard. Who is that? cried Yamanaka. What idiot slut has wandered off the street into my movie?
    The Kami turned to look at him, her eyes like caves with no water at their bottoms. When the noblewomen arrived, blood rising in their cheeks like honor affronted, the Kami stood between them and held out her hands. The women struck their swords through her, unseeing, uncomprehending. At the place where the blades touched, the Kami placed her hand. The weapons blinked out. She touched the sleeve of Masami, and Masami, too, shuddered like a skipped frame and disappeared. She kissed Hanako’s cheek and suddenly the courtyard was empty, with not even the Kami remaining, only plum blossoms half disturbed by an inrushing of air. Yamanaka Sadao felt himself too profoundly upset by the whole business to discuss it with his director or to see his elegant young woman again under any circumstances. Masami and Hanako had been cut out wholesale from every print of the film, not only the prints but the scripts, even the scriptmaster’s shooting copy, as though they had never been. The actresses could not be contacted; their agents could not recall any such clients, nor booking any girls for the new Detective Umon film, but if the director had roles to fill they had a number of beauties available.
    But the Kami does not do this often—or at least, she is too subtle and careful to be often caught. Where did she take her swordfighting noblewomen? You would like to know; we would all like to know. You will sooner or later come across the rumor that a local boss in Kazakhstan, a warlord if you want to know the truth, was a great fan of Japanese cinema and paid top dollar for original prints. The story goes that he came into possession of both reels of A Story of Floating Weeds and upon his first eager, hungry viewing discovered a sequence between Kihachi’s arrival and the commencement of his long, sad tale. A great ebony palace wholly out of place in the village scenery appeared out of nowhere, its cypress roof green and new, its walls covered in silk tapestries. The camera seemed to grow curious and to stop listening to Kihachi the master storyteller, peering into the new building. Inside, braziers glowed warmly and folk laughed, drinking and eating and greeting each other with deep affection. The warlord thought he saw faces he knew from his boyhood, films he had not seen in years: one of the gamblers from Migratory Snow Bird , the younger daughter from Chibisuke the Midget , a juggler from The Dancing Girl of Izu . And Masami and Hanako, the noblewomen cut from the final edit of Detective Umon’s Diary, Story No. 6 ! They were pouring