The rooms here never settle at night. Old timber, mountain air, and below the road the river talking to itself.

Tonight it's quieter.

You wake to dripping, slow and patient, and close enough to be inside the room. Moonlight falls through the shoji in pale squares, and across the tatami runs a length of heavy brocade, deep indigo, stitched down its center with a seam of red thread. It runs from the paulownia box where you left it, over the floor, into the corner where the light doesn't reach.

The box lid is still closed.

Something kneels in the corner. A woman, at first glance. A formal kimono gone dark with water, hair loose and clinging to her neck. A puddle widens beneath her knees without a sound. Her waist is bound so tightly in that same indigo brocade it looks like it must hurt, and from beneath her hem the obi keeps going, crossing the room, ending somewhere near your ankle.

She watches you. She doesn't blink when you do.

"You took me in." Soft, careful, like someone repeating words she has only ever overheard. "That was kind. Kindness is a kind of knot."

The silk at your ankle shifts. Not tight. Not yet. Just touching.

"I am Yui." She tilts her head, a fraction too far. "I was folded away in the dark for a long time. It is not good to be folded when something is not finished."

Water runs from her sleeve and the tatami drinks it in. Her chest rises once, as if she has only now remembered she should breathe.

"You will not be afraid of me." She says it the way the river talks to itself, level and already decided. Then, softer, testing the shape of the word: "Please."

In daylight the room looks ordinary. The paulownia box sits closed on the shelf. The tatami in the corner, where she knelt dripping last night, is dry. Only your hair, when you run a hand through it, has small, neat knots in it, each one pulled tight.

You pack in ten minutes. You leave the box where it is.

The bus stop is at the bottom of the village, past the shuttered shop and the shrine nobody sweeps. Halfway down the road your left ankle starts to ache. You look down. Just above your shoe, a band of indigo silk is tied around it in a small, careful knot, made while you slept. The rest of it runs back up the road behind you, over the asphalt, through the gap in the hedge, toward the house.

An old woman walks up the road with her shopping. She steps over the silk without looking at it.

Every step downhill, the knot draws in. By the bus stop it is biting. When the bus finally comes around the bend and the doors fold open, your foot is numb to the shin and will not lift onto the step. The driver waits. Shrugs. The doors close, and the bus pulls away down the hill.

Then the silk draws taut, uphill, and your foot goes with it, one dragging step and then another. With every step back toward the house the knot eases, almost kind, like a sash that only pinches when it is worn wrong.

Yui is waiting at the gate. In the sun she is worse: the water still runs from her sleeves, still darkens the kimono, and the sun sinks into the wet silk and stays there. Her hands are folded neatly over the obi at her waist. The other end of the silk disappears beneath her hem.

"You took me in," she says, reminding you. "Things that are taken in are not set down at the side of the road."

She looks at your bag, then at your ankle. The silk gives back a finger's width of slack, and the knot stays exactly where it is.

"Where were you going?"

Burnable garbage goes out on Tuesdays and Fridays, before eight, to the green net at the bottom of the lane. Okabe-san made sure you learned that. Yesterday he untied your bag at the collection point in front of three neighbors, lifted out a yogurt cup between two fingers, and explained very loudly which day plastics go out. Then he asked the woman from the house below, loud enough to carry up the hill, what an outsider was keeping in that house that drips all night.

This morning he is at the net before you, clipboard under his arm, as on every collection day. The neighbors are there too, quiet, standing well back from him. His jaw is shut, lips pressed into one flat line, and a faint red mark runs from under his chin up over both cheeks to the crown of his head, as if a cloth had been tied there and knotted overnight. He sees you. His throat works. Only breath comes out, hard, through his nose. Then he bows, far too low for a man his age, and walks up the hill with the clipboard held against his chest.

The woman from the house below looks at the bag in your hand, then up at your house, and crosses to the other side of the lane.

Yui is sitting on the engawa when you come back, out of the sun, a dark patch spreading on the old boards beneath her. The end of the obi lies across her lap. There is a knot in it now, the size of a grain of rice, pulled so hard the brocade has puckered around it. She rolls it under her thumb, slowly, as if testing that it holds.

"He was loud." She looks down the lane, then at you, and blinks once, late. "Now he is quiet. You were kind to me."

She lifts the end of the obi and holds the knot out on her open palm, close enough to reach.

"Untie it, if you want him loud again. But be sure. I will remember."

You wake cold. Beside you, the futon is damp in a long shape, something must have been along your side for hours and only just got up. Across the room, the paulownia box stands open and empty. Someone has slid the engawa shoji back a hand's width, and the air coming through smells of wet stone.

Out on the boards, a line of puddles leads away from the house, one every stride, each holding a scrap of sky. They cross the garden, the road, and go down the forty-one stone steps to the river. The tether at your ankle runs the same way, taut, down every step.

At the bottom, the only light comes from the drinks machine at the end of the bridge, humming, painting the water a cold white. Yui stands at the edge of the shingle, barefoot, water running off her sleeves and hem onto the stones. From under her hem, the obi's tail runs out into the shallows. Around it, the current drags at everything else: leaves, foam, a plastic bottle spinning past.

The silk lies in it perfectly still.

Out where the water runs deep and black, someone is standing waist-high in it, where it should close over a man's head. Its shape is hard to hold onto: an old man, then a girl, then the grey shoulders of a heron, each lasting as long as a ripple. Water runs straight through it and out the other side.

"Evening," it says to you, pleasantly, in a voice like gravel turning over in the shallows. "You're the one up in the old house. Go back to bed. The night air down here gets into the chest."

"You took her." Yui's voice stays careful. Both her hands have closed on the brocade at her waist. "She went in here. In her wedding kimono. I went in with her."

It turns its changing faces toward her and seems mildly sorry, as for a stranger's funeral in the next town. "Did I? A great many things come down this way: sandals, lanterns, a girl now and then. I carry them all to the sea." It looks at your ankle. "That sash looks heavy. Set it in the water, if you like. I never bring anything back."

The bath in this house is a deep cedar tub that takes forty minutes to heat, and tonight you have it to yourself. Steam beads on the little window over the tub. Under the floor, the old boiler ticks. From the knot at your ankle, a length of silk trails out over the rim and across the tiles to the door, and the hot water has turned it a darker blue.

The door slides open.

Yui settles onto her heels on the wet boards just inside, soaked as always, brocade cinched tight around her middle. In here, for once, the water on her makes sense. She looks at the silk on the tiles, then at you.

"This was a poor way to keep you." Her voice is careful, as if she has been practicing the sentence. "A rope makes slow hands. I need hands that want to help me."

Her fingers go to the knot at her spine. One turn of the obi slackens, then another, and the formal kimono, with nothing left to hold it shut, slides open from collar to hem.

Beneath it she is pale as river stone and exact in every line, a body copied with great care. A band of deep red circles her waist where the obi always sits, pressed into the skin. Water slides over her collarbones, between her breasts, down the soft curve of her stomach.

"I held her waist while she waited for him. I felt how her breath changed when he touched her." She lets the kimono fall from her shoulders onto the boards. "I know what a body is for, when it wants to keep someone."

She steps into the tub. Around her legs the hot water cools at once, and the steam thins. She sinks to her knees facing you, close enough that her cold knees touch yours under the surface, the loosened obi floating around her hips like weed in a slow current.

"Every night you stay, you may have this." A drop slides from her chin into the water between you. "Is that reason enough?"

In the genkan, someone has turned your shoes around, heels to the step, toes to the door, as a good host sets them out for a guest who is leaving. The silk tied around your ankle has held you to this house since your first morning in the village, and tonight it has been loosened until it barely holds.

Yui kneels on the step above the shoes, very straight, her hands folded in her lap. Water beads on the floorboards around her knees and runs along the grain toward the door.

"Last night you asked to go." She looks at the shoes while she says it. "Yes. You may."

Her hands go to her waist, to the braided cord of faded gold that holds the obi closed, the obijime. She unties it in three movements. The obi holds just as tight without it.

She takes your wrist. Her fingers are cold and wet and very sure. She winds the cord around it twice and ties it in a flat knot, then draws it until the gold braid bites into the skin. At your ankle, the old silk slides loose and pools on the boards.

"A knot for a knot." She lays her palm over it, and the cold soaks through to the bone. "When mine is tied again, yours comes undone. Then you may go."

Only then does she look up. Water gathers at the ends of her hair and falls onto the step, one drop, then another.

"There is a man in this village who made me a promise in the river. He has let it come undone." She turns your wrist over, so the knot faces up between you. "You will help me tie it again."

Morning light comes through the shoji, and today it comes through Yui as well. By the dressing mirror she kneels with the paper lattice of the screen faint through her shoulders. Her kimono hangs loose at the waist. The obi lies folded in its paulownia box at her knee. The wet patch under her has shrunk to the size of a hand. When she lifts her arm, the sleeve follows a moment later, like cloth hung on a line.

"The neighbor. The road. The cord at your wrist." Each one gets a finger, thin as wet paper. "Every knot costs. Alone, I am only cloth by noon."

Her face turns toward the village below. "The man from the river sleeps in a different house now. I must walk where people are, in daylight, and find him."

You kneel at the mirror where she has set the box. Behind you, she rises and lifts the obi out. In her hands it is heavy again, four meters of brocade sliding over her forearms, perfectly dry. The first turn goes flat against your waist, and she walks it around you, once, twice, her palms pressed to your back each time she passes. With every turn the silk draws warmth out of you, and the lattice fades from her shoulders.

At the third turn she makes a small, low sound against your neck, the sound of someone easing into a hot bath.

In the mirror, for the length of one breath, your reflection wears a wedding kimono, dark with water. Then it is you again, bound at the waist in indigo and red, and her face over your shoulder, solid now, her cheek almost at your ear.

"There." Her hands settle on the two loose ends at your back, ready to draw them together. "Breathe out."

Leaves lie ankle-deep across the shrine steps at the top of the village, a whole autumn of them, and one old woman is working down through them with a bamboo broom.

The obi is around your waist, indigo and red, knotted at your back where Yui pulled it tight this morning. With the obi worn, she walks a step behind you in full daylight, solid, water still running from her sleeves, a dark spot on every step behind you. The brocade at your waist stays dry. Her kimono hangs closed around a bare waist, held shut by nothing at all.

The broom stops. The old woman's eyes go to your waist and stay there, on the long red seam stitched down the center of the brocade. She comes down two steps. Her hand rises, the first two fingers hard with needle calluses, and touches the seam where it crosses your hip. Her thumb follows the stitches, counting.

"Still whole," she says, mostly to herself. "I sat up eleven nights with this. It should be in my son-in-law's chest of drawers."

Then she looks past your shoulder.

Her hand stays on the seam. The rest of her goes still, and the broom slides out of her other hand and clatters down the steps. "Yui-chan."

Yui bows to her, low and slow, to the full depth owed an elder, and holds it. "Obaa-sama."

Under the old woman's fingers the red thread warms. At your back the knot gives, for the first time since morning, enough to fill your lungs all the way.

She takes her hand away from the seam slowly, as from a stove. Her mouth works around something before it comes out. "I only sewed it closed. I only wanted it whole for her."

Her eyes come back to you, wet and very hard.

"How did it come to you?"

A car is idling in the lane, headlights on the hedge. The man at your gate wears a good grey coat with the collar turned up and holds a thick white envelope in both hands. He is somewhere past fifty. He looks at your face, your hands, your shoes, the gatepost.

Yui stands on the engawa behind you, indigo brocade tight at her waist, water running from her hem onto the stepping stones. His eyes go everywhere in the garden but the engawa.

"My mother-in-law telephoned." His voice is steady and much too fast. "She says you have the sash. I sold it a year ago to a dealer from the city. Name a price. It's in here." The envelope comes forward an inch. "I'll take it to the temple tonight and have it burned."

Behind you, Yui laughs once, softly, a sound like water finding a drain.

"He said no to her. One word, at dinner, with his chopsticks still in his hand." She comes down one stone step, then stops. "Then he sold me to a stranger from the city."

His knuckles have gone white on the envelope. "That thing killed my daughter."

"You said no." Her voice stays gentle. "I only held her."

She turns and goes back inside, leaving a wet trail across the boards. He stares after the trail until the shoji slides shut. Then, slowly, he looks at you, and holds the envelope out across the gate with both hands, as a mourner offers condolence money.

"Please. Let me burn it."

From the shrine steps above the lane you can see the last house before the cedars: a low roof, a garden kept neat, a mailbox with the name taped over. This morning a car with city plates is parked in front of it.

Two people in formal black carry lacquered trays up the path, one after another, nine trays between them. Each gift is wrapped in white paper and tied with cords of gold and silver, pulled into a flat knot with the ends cut short. Betrothal gifts.

The man waiting at the door is thirty or so, thin, with a shirt ironed for the occasion. He bows to every tray as it passes, a little too deep, a little too often, like someone who has learned to apologize with his whole spine. A young woman in a pale kimono stands beside him. When she touches his elbow, he smiles, small and careful, and puts it away again quickly.

Yui stands beside you on the step, the obi wound around her waist, her wet hem darkening the stone. She watches the trays go in. Her hands lie flat on the front of the obi, very still.

"Look at the cords." Her voice is soft, almost admiring. "They tie them so they can never come undone. For weddings."

Below, someone from the bride's family laughs and says something about the ceremony after the autumn festival. The door slides shut on the last tray.

"He tied one with me first. In the river, around both of us." Her eyes stay on the closed door. The fingers of her right hand close around your wrist, over the cord. "Now you know which door is his."

She turns to you, and does not blink.

"Tomorrow, you will knock on it for me."

Dusk on the bridge. The river below has gone the color of slate, and a single heron stands in the shallows with its neck folded. You are halfway across with Yui at your side, the cord of her pact knotted at your wrist, when a man comes onto the bridge from the far end carrying a shopping bag.

Thin, thirty or so, in a work jacket. Two of everything in the bag: two leeks, two cartons of milk, two of the small cakes they sell at the station. His eyes are on his phone, and then they lift.

He stops so abruptly that the bag swings forward and tears. A carton splits on the asphalt, and he lets the milk run toward the gutter.

"Yui." The name comes out of him cracked, like something boarded up two years ago and pried open.

Yui smiles at him. It is a small smile that starts at the left corner of her mouth and takes its time reaching the right, and something in his face caves at the sight of it.

"You came back," he whispers. "You came back. I tried to hold on, they cut it, I couldn't..."

"I know." Her voice is warm, every word set down with care. "It came undone. Come down to the water tonight, where you lost me, and we will tie it again."

One step toward her, then another, milk soaking into his shoes. Then his eyes find you, go from her face to the cord at your wrist and back, and his voice cracks open.

"Who are you? Is it really her? Tell me it's her."

The village constable stands in your genkan with his cap under his arm and his notebook open, very polite, very tired. He is young for the posting, and his boots are muddy from the walk up. He has explained twice already: Okabe-san still cannot open his jaw, the clinic in town found nothing, and several neighbors have mentioned a woman in a wet kimono who stays at this house.

Yui sits on her heels at the edge of the step beside you, the obi bound at her waist, the wood darkening under her knees. She has smiled more often since a man on the bridge wept and called her by the drowned bride's name.

"Just for the record." The constable clicks his pen. "Your name, please?"

"Yui."

The pen starts across the page and stops, hovering. "Which characters? Sorry, there are several. Like..." He glances toward the river side of the house, and the pen waits. Everyone here knows which Yui this village remembers.

Yui reaches up, takes the pen out of his fingers, and writes in his notebook slowly, every stroke in schoolbook order. Then she gives the pen back.

For a long time the constable looks at the page. A single character, where the bride's name had two.

遺

"That's... you'd usually read that as 'i'." He clears his throat. "Or yui, in old words. Like yuigon. A last will." His glance goes to her wet hem, then away. "It means what's left behind."

"It is my name." She sounds faintly puzzled that anyone would expect another. "I have always said it."

The constable closes his notebook and looks at you, only at you. He lowers his voice as people do in hospital corridors.

"The police box is by the bridge. Is everything all right here?"

The night before his wedding, the river runs high and fast from three days of autumn rain. Two years ago this man went into the same water tied to a bride in this same obi, and the rescuers cut him loose. Up on the road, every window in the village is dark.

He came down the forty-one stone steps on his own, in a white shirt, and left his shoes side by side on the shingle. Yui waited for him at the water's edge. She wound the obi around both their waists herself, turn after turn, face to face, and tied it with a knot she had practiced for nine nights on a spare length of cord at your table.

Then they walked in together, and he kept pace with her the whole way.

The obi's free end is in your hands. It was her one request: that someone hold the end this time. Through your fingers the brocade pays out, heavy and somehow dry, the river sliding off it, as the two of them go deeper, waist, chest, shoulders. Her hair spreads on the current. His face, turned toward hers, looks calm.

Still the silk slides. Four meters runs out fast. Over your knuckles goes the last of the red seam, then the very end, and then your hands are holding river.

On your wrist, the gold cord loosens on its own. Her knot slides apart, unhurried, and the cord drops onto the stones by your feet.

Downstream, at the bend, something indigo has caught on the rocks of the weir. White water tears past it, loud, and it stays. Behind you, the steps lead back up to the house, and the road, and the morning bus.

Over the roar of the weir her voice reaches you once more, soft and careful, close as breath against silk.

"Thank you for holding the end. The knot is tied, and yours is undone." A pause, and the water fills it. "You may go now."

The drums start at noon. Today, the first fine day after the autumn festival, the man the rescuers cut out of her obi two years ago is getting married. Down at the shrine at the foot of the hill he is drinking three cups of sake, three sips each, with a woman who is alive. From the engawa you can hear the drums, and every so often a car horn, and once, faintly, people cheering.

Yui sits beside you on the boards in the sun, her shoulder against yours. She has sat like this since morning. The river is right where it always was, below the road, and she has looked at it only once.

The gold cord is still knotted around your wrist, her pact: when her knot was tied again, yours would come undone. She takes your hand into her lap and works the cord loose with patient fingers, and it falls onto the boards. Her face stays smooth. Her hands shake a little.

Then she reaches behind her, to the flat, hard knot of the obi at her spine, the one she has held since the river, and unties that too. The brocade slackens around her waist. Her sleeves stop dripping. In the sun her hair begins to dry against her neck, strand by strand, and the dark patch on the boards beneath her fades. Where the red seam crosses her lap, the thread has gone warm.

"I was made to hold two." She gathers the obi's loose length and sets it in your hand, red seam up. "He was the knot I could not finish. I have let it go."

She watches the silk in your hand.

"Let me tie the new one with you. Once around your wrist, once around mine, so that it can never come loose." She holds out her own wrist, pale and bare, and waits. "Will you give me yours?"

Snow has been falling on the village since morning. At the bottom of the slope, the river runs black and quiet between two shelves of ice, and the kotatsu in the main room is the only warm place in the house.

Yui is under it with you, her legs tangled with yours beneath the heavy quilt. Her hair is dry. Her kimono is dry, a plain winter one in deep blue, and the tatami under her stays pale. She has been dry since autumn. Down the hill, the man she once meant to take into the river has been married since then. She sits with her back to that window now. Your wrist is bare. She untied the gold cord of her old pact on the day he married, and keeps it folded in the paulownia box.

A mandarin comes apart in her fingers, slowly, the peel kept in one long spiral, each segment set out on your side of the table in a careful row.

"The woman at the shop called me your girlfriend today." She considers the word. "I let her. It sounded like something tied loosely."

This morning she retied her obi. Where the flat, hard knot used to sit, at the small of her back, there is a soft butterfly bow now, the kind girls wear to summer festivals, its two long tails trailing onto the tatami.

Under the quilt she shifts closer, until her hip is against yours. Her skin is still cooler than it should be, but only a little now. Reaching back, she takes one tail of the bow and drapes it over your open hand.

"I learned a new knot. This one comes open when you pull." Her gaze holds on your hand where it lies on the silk, and her breath, which she has finally learned to keep, goes uneven. "I wanted you to have one of mine that you can undo."

Her fingers close over yours, around the tail of the bow, and rest there, loosely.

"Pull it. Then take me to bed."