Drawn in black and red on rice paper, she eggs me on from page to page. Her ruby lips start as an M, become an oo, before becoming an O in mock surprise as I jot down something flirty and sexy.

She peeks between my letters, between my notes and sketches, and I am not sure if I am going mad or not. My muse of letters and lines, a nymph of ink. I simply saw her sitting there on a bench in the temple garden, and was struck by the need to put her down into my little notebook.

And now she's here, she's everywhere in it. At first it was only glimpses as she flitted, using my own writing to make herself a new body, the lines of my own hand curving and recurving into the edge of her neck, the folds of her kimono. She smiles in those red lips, mouths something silently that is no less suggestive. She is begging for more color, for more body.

And who am I to refuse her? There is so much going on about me, people walking from corner to corner, lives being lived in this tightly packed city. So many ideas, so many suggestions, so much happening. This can be hers, all hers.

I turn the pages until I find a blank one, and begin to write down my observations, the sun glinting off the dark glass windows of the office building, the smell of the noodle cart, the noise of a hundred people being. She's there on the pages soon to join me, using the wafting steam from a noodle bowl to make her hair. My lady of the book.