In the background of a report taped earlier that day, she could see no less a personage than the Head Chamberlain of the Board of Ceremonies. Tall and frail, obviously not accustomed to being out of doors, much less in the public eye, he was a kimonoed curiosity hobbling on unexercised knees for all Japan to see and wonder over.

He muttered down into the gristled ear of a well-bespangled police inspector, who, in turn, shouted a gruff mouthful of orders across the mountainside. The troops formed a cordon around the outhouse that had served as Owada's conduit to freedom, their ivory-colored dress truncheons drawn and angled suggestively. Meanwhile, the reporter did not break eye contact with the camera, and reassured her countrymen and -women that it was probably just a little mal de mer, or maybe limousine sickness, that had removed their walking ray of royal sunshine from their sight.

Owada had once knelt down and allowed something to be done to her by this Head Chamberlain of the Board of Ceremonies. Within the confines of the Imperial Court it was known as "re-education." Unfortunately, the curriculum he'd been authorized to impart, and the syllabus he had laid out, were not exactly designed to transfix the attention of a woman schooled at Oxford and Harvard.

Her engagement hadn't yet been leaked to the press at that time, but Owada was expected to hunker on a rice-straw mat for several hours each day while this ninety-four-year-old former classmate of Hirohito ranted into the close air between their faces. Fortified with powdered rhinoceros horn and benzedrine-spiked "health drinks," he liked drumming calligraphy brushes on the low-slung lacquered table in the Main Hall of the Togu palace.

Upon considering him for the first time, she'd noticed that his femurs and tibias were peculiarly elongated, as if the law of gravity had been repealed in his vicinity, and that his skin was hairless as a Japanese woman's, his voice squeaky. But he'd read her thoughts before she herself had time to fashion them from unconscious impulse.

Prefacing his introductory lecture with a demure glance down at his own indigo-draped lap, he'd said, "The Japanese court never fell into that most dangerous trap: we never maintained a class of eunuchs. And why is this? Well, young lady, as I will try again and again to impress upon your consciousness, we inhabitants of these chambers are all members of a single and unique tribe, the true Yamato people, the great-great-great-great (et cetera--no need to belabor the point) grandsons and -daughters of Amaterasu the Sun Goddess. And one simply does not emasculate one's brothers and sisters."

Quickly catching himself in his own absurdity, he switched to a language he considered more appropriate for giggling, and added, "Surtout pas des soeurs!"

Whenever he changed languages the Head Chamberlain became a different person--which is to be expected in an amateur polyglot. In her interpreting work, Owada had trained herself to suppress that natural tendency to succumb to the charms and idiosyncrasies inherent in different tongues. But this old man had never been required to place such restraints upon his naturally theatrical self. He was contralto and matronly in English, soprano and sluttish in French. But when he spoke Japanese or German, his spine and his gestures stiffened, his voice dropped an octave and picked up a coating of gravel from the basement floor, and he became the Meiji-style Shinto martinet they'd bred and enlisted him to be.

"Sit up straight, child!" he'd once boomed (more or less, at least to the extent he was still capable of booming). "See that slit in the shoji? Do you know whose eye could be pressed to that slit at any time?"

Even if her urine-laced breath hadn't been seeping through the paper panel, it would've been a safe bet that a certain retired police matron hulked out there in the gloomy corridor. From the very first coy whispers of a princely pulse quickening, Owada's babysitter/bodyguard had manned her post faithfully as a Saint Bernard. But it seemed certain that the Head Chamberlain didn't want this enormous person identified as the potential eavesdropper. For one thing, Owada had never been provided with a proper means of referring to her. Somehow, "my babysitter/bodyguard" sounded a tad impertinent. The woman was a given in Imperial life; yet she filled a position that had by no means developed into a tradition, therefore received no mention in this seminar on tradition. Hers was the sole presence in the palace for which the Head Chamberlain offered no explanation, and no gossip. So, it followed that he must've been trying to elicit some other name or title from his catechumen's unobliging lips.

Finally, in a snit because it had to come from him and not her, he snapped, "Why, it's the glorious and peerless ghost of your future grandfather-in-law who could be watching! A general unslackening is in order, if you please!"

Sandwiched between such Axis-style admonitions were wistful, womanish phases, which Owada suspected of being the closest approximations of the Head Chamberlain's true self still possible. When floating in the vast chasm between his mood swings, he had a sad way of scanning out across the bare beige carpets and sterile Yamato decor of the two-story abortion known as the Togu Palace. All politics would dissolve in two great tears, and the man himself would be extinguished into nothing but a pair of weeping eyeballs, just the pupils, which gaped wide like mouths starved for loveliness.

He would sit and silently gaze out the window, "cataloguing the hairs on the walls," as he so picturesquely and bitterly put it. Bristling here and there along the unadorned vintage-1984 reinforced concrete was evidence of the molds that had engendered this Spartan structure: plywood slivers and filaments which had sloughed off during the hasty construction and not been blasted away in the meantime by Tokyo's particulate breezes, or dissolved by its acid rain. Every building in the Royal Compound--with the gorgeously ominous exception of the Imperial Police Barracks--bore such dismal fuzz, undignified and unbeautiful: the grey expression of a culture bred in isolation and penury, a culture for which even its prime custodian, this Head Chamberlain of the Board of Ceremonies, had to force his enthusiasm.

Europeanisms constantly jarred his speech, betraying not only his mild senility and his foreign education in the early years of the century, but also his ethnic insecurity, which lay deep as the impressively small amounts of cholesterol plaque that, no doubt, lined his arteries. Educated Japanese, even at this exalted level, have always felt the fundamental fear that their culture is not quite all it should be, that it requires perpetual endorsement and enrichment from abroad--formerly China, latterly Europe and her bastard child on the opposite rim of the Pacific.

In his Parisian student days (around the time Owada's Minamata Grampy was being born) he had certainly taken more than one carriage ride out to Versailles, a young man of ambiguous sexuality, spread wide open, like a famished vulva, to any and all beauties of the ravishing sort. Already being groomed for this weighty position back home, he had, by his own sadly snickering admission, enrolled in more and more lectures at the Sorbonne to put off the final day of his return.

At unpredictable moments, the Head Chamberlain's hooded eyes became twenty again. Sparkling from under their cloud of cataract, they seemed to focus on Owada herself, not the embryonic princess which he (and, at that time, she as well) imagined her to be. He would peer, with a twisted kind of transsexual intimacy, deep into the face of this young woman, his fellow initiate into sumptuous gaijin culture (albeit the watered-down British variety). Switching to richer languages, he'd gallantly try, with transformed larynx, to supply for her some of the regal mood and manners which had broken his own heart with their utter absence when, at her age, he'd first entered the Imperial Household, and the paper doors had slid silently shut behind him forever.

"You, girl, and I are different from any of these myopic people of the court," he said in sonorous English. If he'd possessed eyebrows, he'd have chosen this moment to arch them. "We know what beauty really is. We are the two tragic inmates of these parched tatami cells."

The Head Chamberlain was such an intuitive old creature, especially in this conspiratorial mode. He began, almost before Owada herself, to recognize certain feelings of objectivity creeping into her heart with regard to the Imperial Family--largely inspired, in fact, by his own schizoid Indo-European outbursts, which she wasn't sure he remembered three seconds after indulging in them. Not an unkindly person, he sometimes tried to soften the disappointment in her surroundings which he projected upon her: such isolation and tawdriness, such confinement. He'd try to fill up the void he presumed to be aching inside her with regal anecdotes that he, himself, found rich and resonant--significantly never about anyone younger than his own mostly deceased generation. Even walking skeletons in Somalia must know good stories to tell one another to pass the hellish time, at least when they have the strength to separate their jaws: so why not these two dungeon mates in the cave of the Prince of Dullness?

He once called a brief halt in whatever brainless drill they happened to be engaged in--the ikebana, the waka, the anal-retentive penmanship, the lexicon of rarefied pronouns she had to master before speaking or being spoken to as Princess--and he dismissed the retainers from the Main Hall for a couple of minutes (thus guaranteeing their eavesdropping elbow-to-elbow with Owada's babysitter/bodyguard on the other side of the paper door). Clearing his throat of any mucus that might impede his voice's projection through that thin partition, he cooed, "Are you aware, Owada-sama, of what a magnificent entity your fiancé's grandfather was?"

No reply.

"The question of his divinity we will lay aside for another day. And I am not prepared, just now, to discuss his, er, grandson. But, make no mistake about it: in addition to being the father of our people, Showatenno was a genius of the natural sciences."

That last word was a signal to take everything that followed with a grain of salt. The gorgeousness of Europe may have sunk in; but, being Japanese and therefore irrational to its very marrow, his skull had certainly proved impervious to gaijin empiricism.

"I will give you but a single instance," he quavered, deliberately not noticing the interest seep from her eyes. "It has been known, among our people, since the remote time when Amaterasu the Sun Goddess established the Royal Line, that the catfish we breed in our Imperial Aquaria enjoy a special sensitivity to, if not dominion over, the forces of the nether regions--more popularly known as the Underworld. If it so happens that these catfish (and I will introduce you to the charming fellows later today, after they've had their nap) are observed twitching their mouth tentacles in a particularly insistent manner, a small seismic event will inevitably manifest itself somewhere in the Empire before the week is up. If, on the other hand, they fluctuate their little tails thusly--"

The Head Chamberlain of the Board of Ceremonies clambered to his slippered feet and demonstrated the fluctuation in question, the blood in his nether regions jostling and blushing way up into his brain and causing him to warm to the task.

"--a stronger disturbance will follow, a downright temblor, with potentially hundreds of thousands of horrible, ghastly deaths!

"Well, Showa-tenno, as you know, was an internationally acclaimed marine biologist, as are his son and, er, you-know-whom. One day he went into the brownest of brown studies over this problem--I might almost say a kind of trance. The Imperial Household Agency was quite concerned, I can tell you. This was after the fall of Saipan, and we were all cooped up in the bunker, right over there, beneath the nine-hole links; but, nevertheless, we did not forget to sift his most recent bowel movements for pinworm larvae. Then, as I recall, coincidentally on the day of the Pottsdam Proclamation (though, of course, none of us was allowed to mention such mundane business with His Majesty himself, for his mind was occupied with infinitely weightier matters), the dear light returned to his eyes, and hence to our nation. We ran to his side in frank ecstasy, ready to give him anything in the universe within our power to provide. And do you know what he requested?"

Owada must've dozed off, for the Head Chamberlain felt compelled to repeat the question, more firmly, accompanied by a very pointy elbow in the ribs.

"What?" she sighed. "What did he--"

"He requested nothing but brush and inkstone. And he set down on vellum, without hesitation or emendation, the schematics for a special underwater sort of cage in which the catfish could live, dimensioned just so that their tiny kawai whiskers and tails would be held steady."

Unabashed tears of joyful adoration began to seep from under puckered eyelids.

"We tried to smuggle the news about Hiroshima and Nagasaki into his ears, but he was too absorbed in work to hear. He even specified that the mesh should be woven especially tight, so no fins would work free and incite tiny earth-spasms that might frighten his people's baby sons as they slumbered in their cribs."

There was a pause, orchestrated to allow the awe and wonder of the tale to sink in--then back to work preparing Owada to join the Royal Family as it stood today, now that the Showa Period had drawn to its inevitable, but nonetheless tragic close. The Head Chamberlain found the current two generations debased and disappointing. "Sapped and secularized," he called them, "willing prisoners of the hubris-puffed Diet."

Becoming Frenchified, he said, "You are not at all like your sister-in-law-to-be. I have never seen anything worth special cultivation in that fluffy brat. The flower-arranging class was sufficient for her. She actually listened and nodded her undersized head when I quoted her the dictum which Taisho-tenno pronounced in one of his lucid moments: ‘Flowers are everything a young woman should be: passive, fertile and fragrant.'" (A comical tweak of his own long, straight nose.)

In this case, for once, Owada had access to the other side of the story. Princess Kiko, the Imperial Little Brother's wife, was a world-class marathon chatterbox, which might or might not be a desirable quality in one with whom you've been condemned to share a life sentence. Not surprisingly, she had her own version of the pedagogical encounters between the Head Chamberlain and herself.

"How do you like your princessing lessons with the High Stewardess, or whatever he's called?" she'd cooed through her nondescript face. "Isn't he just the cutest little old thing? A real swisher in his day, I'd just bet."

It was difficult not to conclude that she saw nothing in him because he deemed her unworthy to see, and so showed her nothing. Still, Owada held out a faint hope that Princess Kiko would gradually blossom into good enough company during their imprisonment, and would not live up to Chica's evaluation of her (which, though it had the ring of the most unfortunate truth, was based, after all, on nothing more than two or three close readings of the Japan Times society page): "She's suited for palace life: a typical bubble-headed Nip bimbo, grateful to swallow every glop of jiz they squirt down her skinny throat."

Owada never figured out why, but the old man had once invited Kiko to sit in on a tutorial. What self-defeating impulse could he have been following when he encouraged her disruptive presence at the lacquered table--especially on the afternoon set aside for his lecture on the constitution, a subject which all three of them found especially ludicrous and boring?

The Diet, under the influence of the occupying General Headquarters, had forced the Imperial Household Agency to give the post-war constitution equal time with the more traditional non-disciplines that have always gone into princess re-education. As might be expected, the Head Chamberlain took it upon himself to water down the hybrid document to its vaguest essentials, and carefully included regular nods toward the more imperial pre-MacArthur version, which suited his tastes better--though it still "reeked of the delirium of democracy."

"Oooh, two D's in a row!" Kiko had giggled. "Let me make a note of that."

To which the Head Chamberlain had replied, in a voice far huffier than Owada thought was warranted, "You only get out of being the next Empress' sister-in-law what you put into it."

And Kiko came right back with a snide little, "Good point."

Face turning blackish-purple, he raised a desiccated, rattling hand. It looked as though he were about to strike her. These two palace-mates had evidently shared a less than mutually supportive interpersonal relationship for quite some time, and Owada was seated right between them. Fortunately, the old man changed his mind at the last minute. He lowered his hand and, trembling with rage and cerebral hypertension, started to pet Kiko's forearm instead. With all the theatrical tenderness of somebody else's grandma, he smoothed the hairs that grew there in greater profusion than might have been hoped--all this fuzz was not within the bounds of the standard princess profile. He seemed on the verge of prescribing some secret depilatory smuggled by pirates from the Asian mainland in eons past.

As he catalogued Kiko's black body fibers like plywood slivers on a drab concrete wall, the Head Chamberlain of the Board of Ceremonies gradually regained his composure. Confident that poor Kiko would never in her life understand a word of gaijin talk, he went over her head, as it were, and began to address Owada, his star pupil, in a sweet, soft English, his eyes narrowed in a perfectly wicked and bitchy way.

"See what naughtiness the humble court functionary is obliged to put up with?" he said. "Not a hundred percent cute, is it? Don't look now, but someone at this table thinks that the basic rules of human etiquette no longer apply once a girl is invested with celestial status. Well, what can one expect, the world situation being what it is?"

Starting to gain tempo, he switched to a Deutsche so guttural that Owada half-expected dried bits of aging uvula to machine-gun from between his boneless gums at any minute.

"What can one expect, indeed? If the corncob-sucker comes intruding willy-nilly into our ancient civilization and places arbitrary restrictions on our Royal Spouse and Peerage System, which is based on wisdom revealed millennia before his overblown nation was a glint in the eye of a few colonial ruffians on the edge of the known world; and if our own people, or, rather, a few loud-mouthed turncoats and democrats and communists among them, allowed him--nay, encouraged him--to scrap the old Imperial Household Norms Law and fling the doors wide open for mongrelization to creep into our court, well, then, so be it."

Refocusing on his unfavorite pupil, he continued to stroke her pelt and smile gently into her uncomprehending yet scoffing face. "It's not this poor shaggy puppy's fault if she's one of the beneficiaries, is it? Of course not. We must strive to put the best face on a grotesque sham, burlesque and travesty of a situation--isn't that right, Kiko-sama, you wretched little Klugscheißer? Ne?"

"So desu, ne?" she smirked agreeably. It occurred to Owada that these giggles probably irritated the Head Chamberlain so much because they sounded exactly like his own when he flitted at the Gallic end of his emotional spectrum.

He began pleading in a girlish and confessional tone. "She shares none of our secrets, Owada-sama. As a matter of fact," (outright Pigaille gutter-dialect, as he lost control--a regular habit of his when Owada was available to serve as an audience) "it was a genuine love match that linked her for life to that bony-assed twit. Nobody had to twist Kiko's arm behind her back, as they did to persuade you to accept, er, him--"

There was a sneer laid thick as mayonnaise on that last word; and the poor old fellow clearly shocked himself right down to his vacant hair follicles even as he hissed it. Within the palace grounds, pronouns were never used in reference to dead Emperors or their undeified and unworthily breathing grandsons, not even in one's private thoughts. The Head Chamberlain's inner self-censor took over and he was a yellow Nazi again, marching toward the subcontinent to shake hands with the Aryans upon their triumphal return. All at once, it was the era of General Tojo around here, with nobody spared the flat side of the samurai sword, not even the teacher's pet. The Head Chamberlain started snarling and spewing Teutonized Nihongo in her face.

"But don't think for a moment, Owada-san, that I admire girls who must have their arms twisted behind their backs before they'll deign to serve their Reich. Speaking of which, shall we return to the subject of today's tutorial? Yes, we shall. I have no doubt that you are fully aware of Article Twenty-Four of the so-called ‘constitution' which the amerikanische Schweine shoved down our throats. You've got it memorized, ne? Recite it with me: ‘Marriage shall be based solely on the mutual consent of both sexes.' That bit of gaijin-speak has been a rallying cry for certain classes of malcontent female Nihonjin for fifty years. I won't name names, my dear; but whose lilting laughter graces the Imperial Domain more frequently, yours or this furred Fräulein's? It would be wise not to feel too smug in comparison to her. While MacArthur and his traitorous henchmen were looking the other way, my associates in the Diet drafted and enacted the New Imperial Household Norms Law, Article Ten of which provides for an exception to this ludicrous ‘mutual consent' business, in special cases such as yours."

Another mood- and idiom-dip--this one so abrupt as to confirm even the most charitable listener's suspicions of senile dementia.

"But your ears, Owada-sama, don't need to be troubled with such a legalistic cacophony, do they? You have the intelligence, self-control and, above all, the grace to rise above your own desires for personal fulfillment. You are different from Kiko not just because your skin is smooth as a shaven baby's, but because you comprehend numinosity and its hushing, humbling effect on the masses. New blood, indeed! You are the both the justification and the balm for the indignities which our Imperial System has suffered. In you, my lady, I see the seeds of salvation. Let us work hard together, you and I, while Kiko plays Goneril--no, better, the Fool--to your Cordelia!"

* * * *

 "Numinosity is all, my dear," the Head Chamberlain of the Board of Ceremonies had once informed her over the lacquered table in the Main Hall of the Togu Palace. "That's why you mustn't fret when we take the better part of the night and the day to deck you out in your wedding dress."

Stretching out a bony, hairless hand and clamping onto her wrist, the ancient courtier had let Owada know in no uncertain terms that suiting up was infinitely the most important part of her re-education. The very soul and essence of her existence from now on would be the clothes she was to wear at the hyper-secret court ceremonies, of which her wedding was but the least arcane.

"I've heard your mother complain in the broadcast media that she could never get you into traditional garb as a child. Nevertheless, you did eventually master the difficult art of donning kimono, did you not?"

"Yes," lied Owada.

"Excellent. Wonderful. Now forget everything you ever learned. On lofty occasions you'll be wearing Heian-style clothing, which requires several hours longer to put on, with you standing motionless on a special wooden turntable most of that while. The Heian period is pre-kimono--I assume you assimilated that much during what little schooling you received in our empire between bouts of globe-trotting. It's the time of the divine Miss Murasaki Shikibu--need I say more?"

He almost swished himself flat onto his back.

"The twelve-tier bridal gown allows you artfully to show your under layers, in all the subtle varieties of shade and pattern. The Heian authors could gush on for hundreds of pages, rhapsodizing over this style. Clothes were even a medium of exchange back then. You allowed your left wrist to dangle coyly from the window of the Imperial palanquin in the afternoon, and by evening the entire eastern end of the Silk Road was positively convulsed!"

He left her to ponder that sobering thought until deep in the night, when the unconscious is spread wide open and receptive in all but the most unhappy, displaced insomniac. Then, under cover of wee-hour blackness, he materialized in Prince Naruhito's bed chamber, a bit blurry around the edges, and smug as a ghost to whom had been granted, by Imperial fiat, the right to slide open the beige paper door without having all four of his extenuated limbs fractured by Owada's babysitter/bodyguard, who stationed herself in the corridor throughout the night.

It was the first of the prescribed three nights preceding the nuptials, when "bridal breach" was supposed to be effected on a rice-straw floor mat, according to ancient and esoteric Yamato tradition. At the key moment (and to the bride's eternal gratitude), the Prince had clambered to his minuscule feet and vanished as sheepishly as the Son of Heaven can vanish. And when the door slid back open, it was not a flaccid husband who stood there in the shadows, but the cagey pseudo-eunuch himself, decked out in a kimono of deepest indigo and matching slippers, come to provide his catechumen with yet more Shintoist wisdom.

Suddenly he squatted, or perhaps fell, on crackling knees and shoved his face right down next to hers. Heavy purple European wine laced his breath.

"Tell me, girl," he croaked. "Who is the happiest person you know?"

Owada covered her nipples with the fringe of Prince Naruhito's silken futon. "I don't understand the question," she said.

"Come now. How easy can a question be? Who is it?"

She widened her eyes and waited. Eventually the old man flitted one eye toward the shoji door. For a full minute they listened to the labored, urine-scented breath which puffed from behind it. (Did that mammoth creature stand till dawn? Owada had never seen a chair anywhere up or down the length of the gloomy hall.)

As if some major point had been made, the Head Chamberlain sprang back to his feet with strange effortlessness, and began to pace back and forth in the tiny space available to him. In a whistling wheeze that seemed to emanate feebly from the shallower lobes of his humid lungs, he addressed the next Empress of Japan, naked and perfumed in her unconsummated bridal bed. He told her revised versions of stories she'd heard at bedtime all her life.

"Offended by her younger brother's spreading his feces all over her nice private things, torturing dumb animals, and waving his genitalia in her face--all those sorts of naughty, masturbatory, infantile high jinks which have been the hallmark of Japanese maleness ever since--Amaterasu the Sun Goddess retired to a cave, something like I imagine your cold dorms of Oxford to have been, or perhaps your famous outhouse. She deprived the outside world of her sunshine presence, plunging all into darkness and chaos, only to be distracted from her self-pity by the feigned, and more than a little lewd, merrymaking of her fellow divinities: giggling strip teases and so on. The divine whore, Uzume, was recruited to make the goddess crack a smile, and to bring light back to the world by luring her out, utilizing a mirror to bounce her smile abroad. And Amaterasu was given this magical mirror as a souvenir of her own petulance. To this day it is preserved as one of the Royal Regalia, along with the sacred sword which her little brother plucked from the Hell-Serpent's tail, only to surrender it immediately to her in a gesture of abject apology and eternal self-subjugation."

The Head Chamberlain segued to a Frenchy English and said, "Remember, mon cheri, that the curved jewels are also counted among the Royal Regalia, having been presented to the Imperial Progenetrix directly from the hands of the Celestial Deities in the dim days before history began. That places the Empress--and this means you, eventually--in a position unique in the cosmos. Make no mistake about it."

He leaned close again to whisper, switching now completely to sluttish French. "These treasures may be handed to your husband when he ascends the Chrysanthemum Throne, but everyone who is not woefully ignorant knows he's just a custodian on behalf of the--"

The Head Chamberlain interrupted himself in shock that he could, even in a Romance language, use such a term as custodian to describe the future father of the Japanese people. But the sentence on his tongue must be brought to full period, linguistic fastidiousness being characteristic of courtiers in all places and times. To compensate he got Teutonic.

"--on behalf of the Ewig Weibliche," he hawked.

Crossing to the not-so-far wall, he began stroking and petting the various bric-a-brac on the bureau which the newlyweds were to share until Naruhito's accession, probably twenty or thirty years in the future, at which time space would become a tad more plentiful. The Head Chamberlain fiddled thoughtfully with a large specimen jar. It contained a black snake that had, as its last act on earth, gorged itself on a whole, snowy-white kitten. It had then been split open with a scalpel and pinned wide to reveal its lunch's furry little kawai head, eyes surprised, bewildered and imploring, among the fanned-out rib cage. The whole assemblage had been lovingly floated in formaldehyde.

The Head Chamberlain took this sloshing nightmare into his arms and brought it to the foot of the floor mat. Owada didn't have time to retract her feet before he plopped down. With the jar nestled in his crossed legs, he began rocking his stringy buttocks back and forth over her insteps, and saying things like, "Have you ever watched that woman out there as she performs her duties at your feet? Is there a deeper look of contentment to be seen on a primate face anywhere in Asia? Don't you know that she'd be delighted to crawl on her belly across molten asphalt for the privilege of opening a limousine door for her Princess, her Ohime-sama? Do you think she's odd? Far from it! Look hard at her face sometime. It's the face of humanity--" Milky tears began to uncoagulate from the crotches of his lashless eyelids. "She's not only the happiest, but the realest and, deep down, the most typical person either of us will ever know. She knows where contentment lies: in service to the Gods. A life of simple unquestioning service: that's the natural and perfect condition for ninety-nine-point-nine percent of Homo sapiens, once their vanity's been pulled down. Followed by still more full-time service in rosy afterlife.

"Of course," he sighed deeply, starting to unscrew the lid of the jar, "you and I both know that Schopenhauer and the Hindus are right: when we die, it's like a glass of water being emptied into the ocean. But that's an insight the rank and file cannot be allowed access to. Look at the subcontinent. Do you want Nihonjin set adrift like that? Certainly not! Someone must provide them first with a functioning system of eschatological carrots and sticks, and then with a satisfactory object of devotion. Numinosity, I say, is all.

"Look at Europe. The dethroning of Mother Mary coincided with the end of the last golden age of the white races. Marx got the opiate part right, but he was disdainful rather than appreciative. People were awakened from the Edenic poppy dream, grew self-aware, and now everybody thinks he's entitled not to sweat or stink. Do you think it's a coincidence that the active ingredient in air conditioners and underarm deodorants is the very stuff that will cause the death of all life on the planet through ultra-violet poisoning (the white races first among humans, which is only poetically just)?

"When the Mother Goddess retires to her cave, pitiful pragmatism rushes in to supply the vacuum she leaves behind. And look at what it's done to these once-so-beautiful islands. The sea that was poured out from Heaven like good soup to feed us has become a sizzling basin of metallic toxins that twist and choke our babies. Even the skies are serrated with aluminous slivers and shards whose borrowed glare blots out more of our view of the sanctified stars each year. This orbiting junk gone ballistic already cracks the gaijin's shuttle windows, and will soon make a simple space walk a suicide mission. It alone ensures we'll never escape the planet we've defiled like a diaper--which women have always known.

"But this, in itself, should be no cause for despair. People aren't a cancer on the earth; populist democracy is. That bit of male pride and puffery presupposes mass education, which requires mass prosperity, and we'll all suffocate on leaden smog long before that even begins to happen on a world-wide basis. What if every hundredth Chinaman who's been encouraged to lust after a car actually got one? Over the broad scope of human history, the middle class has been an ephemeral phenomenon, especially here in Asia, destined to dissolve. It's doing so, right now, apace, even in the United States. And well it should!

"Do you think the salarymen of this archipelago lead anything like real lives in their stifling fluorescent-lit offices? Their souls are parched! Even the faintest, the most fleeting, the most rudimentary one-time-only glimpse of the Sublime that dwells beneath the maple veneer of their existence would cause them to fling their HDTVs and graphite golf clubs into the Pacific and follow its numinous lead, straight to the gates of inconvenient, uncomfortable Hell if need be!

"Man needs to use his back muscles for something more than petty acts of purchased adultery and Sunday afternoon visits to the driving range. He yearns to have his vanity pulled down, his tired brain disburdened of the false cravings for ‘self-actualization' foisted upon him by those flaming-red, social-climbing, over-educated, Occidentalized rabble rousers who have infiltrated the Teacher's Union for at least fifty years. Oh, how the male of the species hankers after hard work that is directly and unambiguously tied to his own and his children's sustenance!

"The ideal disposition of human affairs has always been feudal aristocracy. And you can rest assured that the world will re-stabilize eventually in such a blessed medieval state, with or without our help: ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the people drudging away at pre-industrial tilling methods, scratching nothing more nor less than their due carbohydrates, fiber by fiber, from the very dirt to which they contentedly return in the accidental form of replenishing corpses after no undue period. And everyone is kept happy in the meantime--not merely pacified, but truly fulfilled, their hearts and imaginations engaged--by a vigorous, and necessarily feminized religion. No need for mind-numbing pachinko parlors and jumbo-jetsful of prepubescent Filipina sex slaves in such a regenerate society, where the Great Goddess has been reinstated.

"And you, good lady, are soon to be named the Spiritual Mother of the one industrialized nation that still has not completely lost track of these truths!

"The very surnames of our people shriek out for reunification with the soil. We have no messrs. Baker, Smith or Glover. We have messrs. Wide Field and Mountain Meadow. Much of our staple grain is grown by common salarymen in their spare time on tiny plots of land with market values so hyperinflated that they could sell out tomorrow and retire to Golfers' Heaven, Arizona, leaving the rest of us to pick away at bowlfuls of imported Californian rice. But these salarymen will never even briefly consider doing so. They'll never be voluntarily unlanded: for they are the ancestor-worshiping scions of families whose metaphysical destinies shall always remain inextricable from that asymmetrical little paddy they've nurtured and passed down for centuries.

"Owada-sama! Most fortunate Empress-to-be! Can't you see that most of your job is already done--or, rather, hasn't yet been undone? The donkey is saddled up, the palm fronds are strewn along the path, and the time is ripe for your triumphal ride into town! To make the trip a little easier, let us now rid ourselves of any superfluous emotional saddlebags, shall we? Yes we shall.

"I have gathered, from looking at your face whenever his name comes up--or, indeed, the name of anyone who could be remotely construed his representative--that relations between you and your male parent are, shall we say, severely strained of late. Am I right? Well, then you should stop pouting and welcome this mighty new apotheosis of yours! Hug it tight with all four youthful limbs! One would be hard-pressed to come up with a deeper and more thoroughgoing rejection of paternalism! Daddy and Hubby, et al., may not know it, but you and I are going to turn the clock back to a time when people didn't even bother to memorize their fathers' stupid names!"

"But," interposed Owada, "if I act in disdain and bitterness, doesn't that negate, or at least vitiate--"

"Believe me, child. Your personal peeves are as gnat flatulence in the face of such a momentous task as the redemption of an entire people. Only a feminized religion can dissuade men from pampering and priding themselves into an ethical stupor, because it is based not on fuzzily-focused faith in a featureless Father Figure, but on direct sensual experience of the immanent Numinous. And that can only be embodied satisfactorily in the smooth female form: Astarte, Ceres, Cybele, Demeter, Ishtar, Isis--to reckon merely a third of the gaijin alphabet. These goddesses exert the ideal crowd control, and we must return to their bosoms. And so I can say this to you without qualification: the survival of the race depends upon you, personally, Owada-sama. For you are no exhibitionistic, blabber-mouthed, ruddy-mugged Windsor slut. You are, quite precisely, the only woman on earth to whom genuine numinosity is still available. You are the embodiment of the last true religion.

"An economical three-color print of your benevolent face will more than fill any vacancy left by a VCR. The strains of the devout chanting your name in the corner shrine will drown out, once and for all, the profane stridor of the karaoke bars. You see? Right there we've nearly halved the nation's electrical requirements!"

Focusing directly on her for the first time in several minutes, the Head Chamberlain gave off a broad wink. It was apparently an attempt to elicit a reaction to his joke.

"But," he said, sobering under her neutral gaze, "I can see the skeptical questions forming behind your eyes: is this old dodderer talking about the redemption of the most productive and civil population on earth? What's to redeem? Did he use the phrase ‘crowd control'? And did he speak of the invigoration of the numinous in the hearts of Nihonjin, history's least religious people? How can a mere spiritual system--a womanly one at that--ever hope to wring even a mild sense of wonder from the Hollywoodized youth of today's Nippon? This frumpy old sycophant is babbling about alterations in the fundamental structure of the human psyche which would require millennia to effect. Or perhaps an across-the-board cataclysm, leaving only flattened, smoldering ground--scratch, as they say--from which to build up all afresh.

"Well, my dear Princess, you have only to look at our next-door neighbor, the Right Reverend Sun Myung Moon. He has not been around for thousands of years, nor has he enlisted the assistance of any of the famous Four Horsemen to soften up his vast congregation. Yet, simply by being canny enough to take advantage of the disorienting effects of postmodern life on certain broad classes of personality, he is able to marry off whole super-domes full of mutual strangers, and to recruit them, honeymoonless, into a lifetime of hawking carnations in airports. Admittedly this is not so daunting as the task we've set ourselves, of keeping a nation of a hundred and fifty million souls in rice and sackcloth. But the Reverend certainly has shown what a couple yards of Pope-white velour and a Dolby sound system can do, if accompanied by a little numinosity--very little!

"If someone like him can pull off such gargantuan hoaxes singlehandedly, just think of the utter and widespread goodness that you and I could bring about! And if we enjoyed the cooperation of one or more of the aforementioned Horsemen? The imagination reels!

"If Her Imperial Majesty will be so kind as to permit me to talk like a lowly fry cook: one across-the-board cataclysm, comin' right up!

"You've doubtlessly committed to heart all the prophecies of economic, social and environmental doom for our nation. Our economic bubble has indeed burst to smithereens, never to puff itself up again. Even as our decadent youth window-shop till they drop, the population greys at such an alarming rate that soon our proud Yamato blood will be tainted with that of die Gastarbeiter. Every Nihonjin but the pesky Okinawans lives well within the circle of Pyongyang's neophyte nuclear striking capability; and America intends, at any rate, to starve us all into submission with blustering blockades. Our sewage is sterilized by extravagant means while our precious paddies are pumped full of carcinogens that wring unrealistic yields from the expired soil; and the dread greenhouse effect will liquefy the polar caps tomorrow, anyway, leaving us with nothing to cultivate but oyster beds, which we'll guard jealously while bleating and clinging like goats to the upper crags of the few formerly lofty volcano-tops that remain uninundated.

"Just so. I can swallow all of it. In your lifetime, my lady--and I cannot emphasize this strongly enough, so I will say it again, more loudly: in your lifetime, my lady, the Yamato tribe will be beaten and blasted to its knees, just as roundly as fifty years ago!

"But this time, when our humble and comely folk separate their tear-glued eyelids and look up in their agony, who will be there to meet their gaze? I can tell you right now that it won't be a corncob-sucking outlander, ready to bully a democratized delusion down their throats like a fifty-year-long overdose of noxious methedrine. No--"

The Head Chamberlain's eyes began to get circular, and his voice became rich, and it almost seemed as though the weight of his crotch lessened on her feet with each of the following ecstatic syllables.

"--they will behold none other than their own Princess, hovering at the eastern brink with, ah!, bright wings! Smooth and numinous in her Heian silks, gentle and soft-spoken in her persona, she shall glow with renewal in the old ways!

"Greed will succumb to quietism and a beatific annihilation of the will; consumerism will make way for prayer. Oh, it's going to be so nice around here! Thank you, Ohime-sama, for taking this heavy burden on your slim shoulders--though I realize, even if you, yourself, don't yet, that you are moved by forces greater than your own small will!"

At the mention of the substantive will, the Head Chamberlain's face began to grow damp, and he lost control, predictably enough. Straightening of the spine and acceleration of the speech were his ways of achieving erection. He panted on awhile about the orgiastic side of this feminized religion: the temple prostitution, ritual castration, cannibalism and infant sacrifice--unpleasant but essential in the absence of the sacramental rationality which a male deity brings. But, as the entity whom this misbehavior was intended to propitiate, Owada could remain aloof. She did not have to listen to this part.

Instead, her heart began to writhe with a question. Finally it unglued itself from her tongue with a whisper: "But, sensei, what about love?"

As if that question were some prearranged cue, Owada's babysitter/bodyguard slid open the shoji door from the outside, to the accompaniment of a shamisen being slammed and plunked by a tone-deaf toady in a neighboring chamber. The fanfare was apparently intended to underscore the entrance of somebody important. But in the odd, dim light it was impossible to tell who hesitated so diffidently in the former police matron's considerable shadow.

The Head Chamberlain was on his feet again, a man capable of not only intuitive, but physical leaps. He escorted in someone half his height to take his place at the foot of the futon. Owada squinted to see whose bony knees were squashing her toes this time.

In the outlet next to her left ear was her Hello Kitty night light, the Prince's sole concession in the decor department. With regular changes of the bulb inside Kitty's skull, this tiny appliance had burned at her bedsides, both at home and abroad, for more than a quarter of a century. It had followed her here to the Togu Palace, surreptitiously tucked by fatherly hands in a bottom nook of her suitcase, along with a note she'd saved but never read. It chose this inauspicious moment to sputter and go out, depriving her eyes of its pinkish glow.

But, as if to compensate, her brother-in-law's biological specimens began to exude the pale phosphorescence of decay from their respective jars and bottles. And it was by such an illumination that Owada recognized her life-mate.

The Prince knelt at her feet in full Heian bridegroom costume: a sandwich board of stiffened silk, the shoulders padded and bolstered wider by several centimeters than the height of the wearer. On his head was perched a little but still too-big cap whose front rim pushed and folded down a flap of scalp that impinged, in turn, upon his already low brow and brought an extra layer of sallow forehead flesh to bear upon his expressionless eyes, making them look even tinier than they were. The chin strap meanwhile puffed and pouted out his premature jowls. To provide a crowning glory for this sacred headdress, someone had thumbtacked something like a shoehorn to the back of his skull. It was the long, flexible type designed to accommodate the lower-back problems of gerontocrats.

Even though she averted her eyes by automatic reflex, Owada knew what her husband solemnly fondled in the palm of his right hand. They clicked like miniaturized and very ineffective versions of Chica's joy balls.

Several months before, when his parents weren't home, he'd caused her to look at those very items. In an unauthorized dry run, Naruhito had insisted that she sneak with him into the very nerve-center of the Japanese state religion, the womb and font of the spiritual life of the Yamato tribe: the Most Inviolable, Taboo and Totally Sacred Chamber of the Royal Regalia.

She'd allowed herself to be led (but not by the hand) into that most holy-of-holies, the uninvited image of his goose-bumped genitalia puckering in her unheated Oxford dorm room still fresh (if that were the word) in her mind. She had watched her fiancé caress the grubby little things, in the same way he'd fiddled with his similarly withered gonads in the land of Milton--a younger-brotherly, yet joyless type of sex-play that would have turned her stomach even more than it had if she, with her only female siblings, and in spite of her international upbringing, had only known just how aberrant it was outside the context of Japanese manhood.

The Sky Gods' gift to the Mother of Humanity, these genuine and original curved jewels were, as far as Owada had been able to ascertain in the gloomy closet, a few lumps of dimly discolored quartzite shellacked to look like jade. Their false surfaces had been rendered dull and grainy by the obeisances of a few millennia's worth of devout fingers' skin oils. Shaped like soixante-neuf with terminal coitus interruptus, Yin and Yang pried apart, Aristophanes' fancy: two alienated halves of a former hermaphroditic whole, divided by a curve of the same amplitude as the incriminating cut in Mr. and Mrs. Rosenburg's Jello box, which sent them, male and female, two by two, to their separate but equal dooms.

And so Owada had the answer to her question. This was love for the Empress of Japan: the very least of her duties.

Gagging on silent giggles all the while, the Head Chamberlain now performed campy mumbo-jumbo over the Prince's uncomprehending, but, as always, smug head. The old trickster flitted behind his future Lord and Sovereign and pretended to whang the shoehorn like the string of a washtub bass. He leaned his chin on the Son of Heaven's broadened shoulder and made pompous toad faces at the bedded but unbreached bride. It looked as though he were about to anoint the spawn of Hirohito with crumby formaldehyde from the snake-and-kitty jar. Was this yet another time-honored Shintoist sacramental rite, or was Owada's re-educator just improvising?

"Love and work, cashews and commas, ooga-boo" the old man chanted. He snickered awhile, catching drunken mirth in his withered right palm. Then his swirling eyes focused on his darling protégée, and saw something in her face than made him frown and grow a bit pettish.

"Oh, please, you mustn't despair," he said, in a loud voice, in one or another of the several languages her husband would never know. "This mooncalf is irrelevant. After all, Snuggles," (he called her that whenever his Confucian screen dropped completely away, and he became a gossipy, wrist-patting old woman--pure English now) "it's your blood, the thick sauce that infuses your supple limbs--I imagine it scrubbing against the interior walls of your young capillaries, almost gritty with bits of wholesome iron and all the right minerals, sifting and shifting like Tottori dune-sand--that's going to produce a viable heir, not his milky-turquoise piss. And, inexpressibly more important than coughing up this viable heir you've been hearing so much about, will be your duty to strike out into the wilderness of Tokyo and unearth yourself a good daughter-in-law. And I mean a really good one! When Showa-tenno's mother, the grand Empress Temei, manifested her auspicious self at the Gakushuin School for Female Peers and selected the current Empress-Dowager from among the blushing ranks of pre-screened and -selected candidates, do you suppose she was performing work of less than the uttermost cosmic significance? Well, suppose otherwise! Love itself" (gesturing dismissively down at Naruhito) "pales and withers in comparison; it reduces to a recipe of fluids and friction.

"When we release your official wedding photos to every wire service and TV network in the free world, do you think anybody's going to glance at this plucked rat in his pathetic clown suit? Of course not! If there's to be numinosity, it must exude from your half of the frame. And it will, Love, it will.

"Speaking of which, I do believe it's time for the hands-on portion of our little night tutorial. It's time for a certain somebody I know to mount the wooden turntable that will spin her back to the Golden Age of our civilization, the time of the Divine Miss Murasaki Shikibu!"

When Owada hesitated (her bridegroom still knelt dumbly on her toes), the Head Chamberlain got just a little impatient--but not enough to spoil the mood. He said, "Come, come. Shall we go? Since yours is a very special case, I think we can put this much-touted ‘bridal breach' nonsense off for a more convenient time. Just elbow that bony-assed twit aside. No need to get dressed. Rest assured that we will do that for you from now on! The Americans say, ‘Rise and shine.' Well, I say the same to you now, in a sense as nearly literal as possible. Rise, my Ohime-sama, and do shine!"