Ikebana

To prepare the body, aim for the translucent perfection you find in the sliced shavings of a pickled turnip. In order for this to happen, you must avoid the sun, protect the face under a paper parasol until it is bruised white like the skin of lilies. Use white soap from a blue porcelain dish for this. Restrict yourself. Eat the whites of things: tender bamboo shoots, the veins of the young iris, the clouded eye of a fish. Then wrap the body, as if it were a perfumed gift, in pieces of silk held together with invisible threads like a kite, weighing no more than a handful of crushed chrysanthemums. Light enough to float in the wind. You want the effect of koi moving through water. When the light leaves the room, twist lilacs into the lacquered hair piled high like a complicated shrine. There should be tiny bells inserted somewhere in the web of hair to imitate crickets singing in a hidden grove. Reveal the nape of the neck, your beauty spot. Hold the arrangement. If your spine slacks and you feel faint, remember the hand-picked flower set in the front alcove, which, just this morning, you so skillfully wired into place. How poised it is! Petal and leaf curving like a fan, the stem snipped and wedged into the metal base— to appear like a spontaneous accident.