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113 Manidoo Envoy Ronin is the tattoo teaser of his own stories, the crucial native creator of aesthetic, erotic pain in the atomu ruins. Horiatomu, his signature as a tattooer, incised a giant, invisible chrysanthemum on the back of a miko shaman of the bakery. Miko showed me the tattoo the first time we met some months later at the Hotel Manidoo. Ronin had vanished once more, another one of his eternal samurai suicides. She visited me first and then contacted other natives at the White Earth Reservation. She heard many stories about his cagey character, tricky shifts, rebuts, and fade away, but no one ever worried about his absence. Contrary to his peace moves in the ruins, on the reservation his presence was animated more by stories. Miko lowered her silk blouse and turned to show me her shoulder, but only a faint trace, a mere shadow, of the floral tattoo was visible . Ronin teased me with descriptions of her lusty body moves. I was ready, naturally, and excited by the stories he wrote about her, and even more, of course, by the presence of her bare breasts, but her pose at the window was courteous, not erotic. She presented a work of art on her back, a tease but not a carnal show of her body. I was the trusty of the stories. I was determined to see the hand of the leper, so she removed her blouse and invited me to massage her back. I was aroused, as you can imagine, and doubly by the sight of her huge nipples and the wild scent of her body. The natural heat of her soft, strong skin surrounded my rough hands. I was bound to the heat, and slowly the trace of an invisible chrysanthemum emerged by my touch. Then a marvelous , waxen, leprous hand moved when she turned her head and tightened the muscles on her back. Ronin created forever a slight minatory motion on her back, an invisible trace and erotic memory of the leper in the atomu ruins, the Rashomon of the Atomic Bomb Dome. The motion of that hand on her back was a gift of a chrysanthemum story. Oshima cried, she said, when he saw the trace of his hand move on her back. He had never been so aroused or honored. Miko had sex with that lucky man twice on the bench in the peace park. She told me the second time he almost died by orgasm as he watched his three hands move on her back. 114 Ronin never mentioned Seikichi in ‘‘The Tattooer,’’ by Junichiro Tanizaki, but he surely read that short story in Seven Japanese Tales when he visited me at the Hotel Manidoo. His father had read the same story, and the book was stacked at the side of his wicker chair near the window. Ronin shared the aesthetic practice and singular, literary pain of irezumi, or horimono, long before he was marked by invisible tattoos. Donald Richie pointed out in The Japanese Tattoo that the tattoo master used the word horimono, ‘‘to dig things,’’ but never the ‘‘rather common term, irezumi, for his craft.’’ Once the tattoo is completed , the ‘‘master is ready to sign his work. He has left space, usually an oblong box under the arm or along the thigh. Into this he puts his name.’’ The master uses the character for horu, ‘‘to dig,’’ in his name. Horisada, for instance, is the name of a tattooer. Ronin, as you know, signed his name as Horiatomu of the Ruins. Ronin borrowed the sense of an expression, the ‘‘hues of my passion ,’’ from ‘‘The Tattooer.’’ Tanizaki wrote, ‘‘He saw in his pigments the hues of his own passions.’’ Seikichi, the tattooer in the story, was ‘‘famous for the unrivaled boldness and sensual charm of his art.’’ He ‘‘cherished the desire to create a masterpiece on the skin of a beautiful woman.’’ Seikichi promised a geisha that he would make her ‘‘a real beauty.’’ He created overnight a huge spider with black ink and cinnabar , and in the morning the ‘‘weird, malevolent creature had stretched its eight legs to embrace the whole of that girl’s back.’’ Seikichi was a tricky, master tattooer. Ronin must have been inspired by the story of that spider on the back of a geisha. ‘‘To make you truly beautiful I have poured my soul into this tattoo,’’ said Seikichi . ‘‘Today there is no woman in Japan to compare with you. Your old...

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