Love fades, they say;

Better to marry

for more tangible things

Money, which can be spent

Land, which can be sold

Connections, which are hateful

If one is always left with nothing

I had rather marry for love.

---Lady Suzume Murasaki, 1766-1790.

I put the translation aside. It was for the best that I had read it here and now, and not, say, at home. If Suzume had been there I might very well have done something...imprudent. The truth was, that letter was not unlike Shakespeare's sonnet number 116, the one that begins 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments.' One simply couldn't read it without feeling a deep well of yearning, the desire to love like that and to be loved like that.

Although it did solve the problem of what to say to Suzume that night should she bring up the topic of marriage again, I had another problem to contend with: Kemp. His obsession had already led him beyond the pale, and he showed no signs of stopping any time soon. To that end, at lunchtime I took out the recorder which Ms. Harris' translation of the scroll was on, listened to it again to be sure no mention of the day or date existed on it, then converted it into an MP3 file and attached it to the following e-mail.

Dear Mr. Kemp;

I have received and read the translation of the jacket letter which you sent to me. I did find it of great interest. However, I never requested that you send it or anything to me, and I never agreed to send or share anything with you. It is now Wednesday; since Saturday, when the auction took place, you have invaded my privacy, pursued me to my workplace, stolen from me, and intruded upon me again when you returned what you stole (the mere fact that you returned my property unharmed is no more a defense than that offered by joy-riders who steal a car).

Despite the protestations of contrition in the note you included with the scroll, you did not wait for me, the injured party, to contact you. Instead you used your credentials to force yourself into my way at work, possibly jeopardizing my career. Dr. Eagleton was offended when you dropped your pretence of interest in him or the department, and that may have repercussions on me. I am only an assistant professor, Mr. Kemp, without tenure and with precious little status. You are safe, a distinguished visitor from a foreign country with no concern as to where you will be looking for a job next term.

In short, you have made yourself so offensive that I can only wonder what you may do next in your obsessive pursuit of the Lady Suzume. Do you already know where I live? Will I return home to find you lying in wait upon my doorstep, or will you have my house burgled instead? You now have my e-mail address--what will you do with that? Why did you let me win the auction on Saturday? It is now apparent to me that you deliberately lost, since you have more resources than I to draw upon. Was it to track me down and find out what I know?

I do not consider myself under any obligation to you, but in the interest of fairness, I have attached a file with a recorded translation of the life and death of Lady Suzume. Please do not contact me again. I do not know you. I know already that I cannot trust you. It is for me to decide whether to contact you or not in the future. Any attempt to do so on your part will be regarded as a hostile gesture.

Sincerely,

Dr. Jonathan Crane

I sent it with a sense of vindication, hoping, rather than believing it would have any effect, and went off to the library. One advantage of being faculty rather than a student is that one can check out anything one likes for an indefinite period of time, and I found a variety of items which would, I hoped, foster greater understanding between myself and my house guest--or house ghost.

My other selves were being quiet at the moment. I wondered if that was good or bad. Far be it for me to stir them up when I had some privacy for a moment--as long as 'Dr. Crane' would be there when I needed him for the next class.

After classes were over, I went back to the shopping center where I had bought my new laptop, making another couple of stops along the way while I was there. When I returned home, it was with several shopping bags, one of which had everything (or so the salespeople had told me) I needed to get on line.

I unlocked my front door to be greeted by the sounds of what was possibly a cat dying by inches in the kitchen, or else by the worst singer in the world. Very likely traditional Japanese music was very different from modern day American music, but unless it was a complete 180 from what we thought of as music, Suzume had a truly dreadful singing voice. "Murasaki O-Suzume-sama?" I called, shedding my shoes.

The song broke off, and Suzume rushed in, looking pretty and flushed and slightly flustered. "Ka-ra-ne Jun-san!", she began, and went on for a while in Japanese which I interpreted to mean, 'I'm sorry I wasn't waiting to greet you when you got home, but I didn't know when you were going to get home, and--.'

"It's quite all right, you don't have to apologize," I interrupted her. "Here--this is for you." I handed her the largest bag I was carrying. This was all part of a plan to at least temper her resolve concerning marriage.

She took it, asking, 'This is for me?' Setting it down, she took out a print top in shades of straw, coral and blue. 'You bought me clothing?' There was a petite-size shop in the same strip mall as the electronics store, and before I went to get my new router, I first stopped in so Scarecrow and I could tell a sympathetic saleswoman about my friend who had just flown in from Japan only to find her luggage had gone to parts unknown. There was no telling when or if it would resurface, and she was currently suffering from jet-lag, so I thought I would surprise her when she woke up. Two or three day's worth of clothing should be enough to see her through, but the problem was I didn't know her exact size. However, she was four foot ten and weighed about ninety pounds, give or take, and she didn't care for anything too revealing or provocative. Could the saleswoman help me? She could. I went to the electronics store, and when I came back, she had a mini-wardrobe assembled from components which didn't rely on exact fit.

One has certain expectations about how a young lady will act when someone unexpectedly gives her a lot of new clothing all at once, and Suzume fulfilled those expectations. She pulled every garment out of the bag, exclaiming over it, feeling the fabric and holding it against herself. Including, embarrassingly, the thongs, which perplexed her. Maybe she had seen enough of a cross-section of the female population of Gotham last night to figure out how the other articles of clothing were worn, but not those.

Thongs as in underwear, not flip-flops, which I had no idea the saleswoman had included. Yes, I had said everything, but--oh, I did not need images of her in those lacy bits behind my eyelids. Speak for yourself, the Scarecrow said in my ear.

Suzume held --did one call a thong a pair, as one might a more substantial panty?-- up to eye level, looking at with the expression of someone doing a Sudoku on the subway. Then her face brightened and she reached up to put it in her hair.

"Uh, no." I said, and picked up the print catalog the saleswoman had included in the bag, flipping through the pages until I found the one with models wearing that particular item.

'You've got to be kidding me,' she said, or so I interpreted. For a moment I was afraid I was going to get slapped again. 'No way am I wearing those!'

"No, you put other clothes on over them," I explained, picking up a skirt and gesturing. "Why don't you go upstairs and try them on?" She got the idea and dashed lightly up to the second floor, her arms full.

While she was occupied otherwise, I set up the router. This model was advertised as being self-configuring, and for once, it was almost true. In the twenty minutes it took Suzume to try everything on and be ready to come down and show off a new outfit, I actually did have the router set up, a new network established, and got on line.

I was just getting a question translated when she came down wearing a knee length skirt the color of ripe cantaloupe with a white sleeveless knit top which was so thin it was almost see-through and so clinging she might as well have been naked. Since bras were difficult to fit without knowing an exact size, the saleswoman hadn't even tried to choose some, and I could definitely state that in terms of support, Suzume did not need one. I could further state that she was not flat chested. Small-breasted, such as would fit into an old fashioned champagne glass, yes, but present in their proper place and with hazelnut sized nipples. I managed to refocus on her face before she noticed. Holding out a lacey crocheted sweater , she asked (again, I interpreted from context,) how it was worn. She couldn't tell which end was up.

I turned it around for her, and helped her put it on, moving her heavy pony tail of hair out of the way. There was no way to avoid touching her, my knuckles grazed her neck, and I could smell her hair. All it smelled of was soap, the same soap I showered with every morning, so why should my hands tremble? Yet tremble they did. This was beyond a doubt the most erotically and emotionally charged moment I'd experienced in years, a fact of which I was painfully aware.(As would Suzume be if she stepped backward into me. Any pretense that my feelings toward her were strictly brotherly would go up in flames like a dry California hillside in the wildfire season.)

I hadn't felt like this since I used to help Sherry Squires with her homework, back in high school--and I wasn't a callow teen anymore, but a grown man. It was that letter she'd written, talking of 'finding joy in the embrace of love'--well, that and the knowledge of what she was and wasn't wearing under those clothes.

Sensing something, Suzume turned her head to look up and me, and she was lovely. 'Do something, damn it!' said the Scarecrow--'No, the hell with it, I'm fed up with waiting for you.'

It was the Scarecrow who kissed her, but the lips were mine.

Unfortunately, so was the groin she kneed.

My plans had just officially gone awry.

A/N: Traditional singing, as Suzume would have learned, would sound to us like she couldn't carry a song in a bucket. Really.