The Tokaido Road (1991)(528p) (28 page)

“No, master. . .Hachibei. . .mistress.” Kasane was trembling so badly that she would have collapsed had there been room. She had stumbled onto a devil tied up in darkness, as the old saying went. She was trapped with a demon shape-changer. A fox or a badger or worse.

“I am Usugumo, Pretty Cloud.” Cat remembered the popular stories about love suicides, and she improvised as she went along. “My lover was banished to the southern island. I’m traveling in disguise to meet him there. We plan to sink together so we can sit on the same lotus flower before Amida’s throne in the Western Paradise.”

Kasane was ashamed to think how she had pitied herself and lamented her own petty problems. “I will serve you faithfully on your journey, mistress,” she whispered.

“Stop talking such foolishness.” Cat held her temper. Kasane had saved her life. Cat owed her a debt she couldn’t repay in several lifetimes. The least she could do was treat her civilly.

“My lover’s enemies think I go to offer him the aid of my family. You’ve seen what they’re willing to do to stop me. Now I’m wanted for murder. Surely you know the punishment for that.”

“I do, mistress. But please take me with you.”

No wonder peasants had a reputation for being blockheads. Cat took a deep breath and started again. “You must not come with me. A foot ahead all is darkness. The Beloved Amida alone knows what fate awaits me.”

“Forgive my rudeness,” Kasane whispered. “But none of us knows what fate awaits us. Take me with you. Please . . . Hachibei.” Kasane had already sorted out Cat’s various identities and arrived at the appropriate one for the occasion.

“In the morning I’ll hire you the best boat on the beach,” Cat said. “I’ll send you back to Pine village in grand style.”

“Fate has rowed me far offshore already.”

Cat smiled sadly at her. Kasane had indeed been through all the dangers implied in the old phrase. “We’ll see how the world looks in the morning,” she said.

“Thank you. Thank you.” Kasane bowed until the oiled club of her
shimada
grazed the floor. “Thank you.”

Kasane probably couldn’t have explained why she preferred traveling the TMkaidM with a fugitive to returning to Pine village. She didn’t know what dangers lay ahead on the road. She did know that if she returned to Pine village, her parents would blame her for the death of her younger brother, their only son. She would have to live with their grief and silent recriminations.  Her neighbors would consider her soiled goods. They would gossip about her until she died.

Kasane raised her head and looked directly into Cat’s eyes. “You need have no worries about me.” She said it with astonishing dignity and passion. “Should your enemies cut me up and salt me, I won’t betray you.”

Lovelorn cats howled and moaned in the darkness beyond the See No Evil’s front reception room. Before an audience of guests and servants, the seven sages were acting out the story of the Sakai sisters. It was a popular story, known to everyone.

At twelve, one of the sisters had sold herself to a brothel to provide money for her impoverished family. She rose to become a famous
toyu
in the Yoshiwara, but she dreamed of returning to care for her parents in their old age. Her younger sister came looking for her to tell her that their father, a
samurai,
had been killed for defending the farmers of his district from unjust taxes.

The seven sages acted out the scene where the younger woman, ridiculed by the courtesans for her rustic accent, was recognized by her older sister. After a tearful reunion the younger sister told of their father’s tragic end. Tearfully Hawk and Bamboo clutched each other and declaimed, in song, their vow to avenge their father’s death. The scene played to a chorus of snuffling and nose blowing from the audience. By the time Hawk delivered the last lines, not a dry sleeve was left.

The merchant of scrolls, the wallpaperer, the itinerant pot polisher, the young farmer on pilgrimage, and the mantis-thin cloud dweller were dabbing at their eyes. Cat had been studying the last two guests with particular care.

The farmer was powerfully built and had an innocent, earnest expression. But he was traveling alone, an unusual circumstance on the TMkaidM, and Cat was suspicious. He hadn’t been paying attention to Cat, though. In fact, he had been casting shy glances at Kasane.

The old courtier had been one of the poets with Musui the night Cat had fled the inn in Totsuka. But neither he nor his aged servant, who was almost blind, recognized Cat. In fact, a serious distraction had been added to the cloud dweller’s usual befuddlement. His lord, the former emperor, was dying. Stricken with grief, the old man was trying to reach KyMto to wish him farewell.

He sat straight as an arrow in the back of the room with his servant just behind his right shoulder. It would have been hard to guess from the old nobleman’s bearing that he had hardly enough coppers to make a clinking sound in his sleeve. His robe with the cloud and lightning design was of Tozan silk, long out of fashion. The neck of his second-quality hempen undergarment was frayed. The patches on the servant’s robes were patched in turn. Cat was sure that each spring the old courtier pawned his one winter jacket and robe and redeemed his summer clothes at twenty percent interest. Each fall he reversed the process.

The old man had already taken each male guest aside. In a low, cultured voice he had offered them a sample of his calligraphy, either an original work or a poem of their choice. Of course no mention of payment was made; but Cat had given him a silver coin, ostensibly to bring her good luck.

As Cat was contemplating the sad fate of the nobility in this time of vulgar mercantilism, a particularly lustful cat yowled in an agony of passion.

“Sir Mountain of Love,” Hawk called out playfully, “sing for us.”

Cat bowed politely. She stepped behind the screen where the sages had left their props and chose a gaudy robe to drape around her. She pinned a small scarf into her hair, to cover the area just above her forehead. It was a ploy used by the
onnagata,
the male
kabuki
actors who specialized in women’s roles. The scarves hid the fact that the crowns of their heads were shaved like a man’s, in compliance with government orders.

When Cat reappeared she hitched the collar of the robe provocatively away from the nape of her neck. She fluttered her fan in front of her face and minced across the stage, trailing the robe’s hem behind her. She imitated a peasant boy burlesquing a city woman. She sang the courtesan’s song in a falsetto.

With no care for duty or people

or strange looks,

or the opinion of other cats,

one cat striped and the other white

climb to the ridge of the roof.

Driven by the need of love

which is stronger than death.

One day the wind of winter shall come

and they will not know each other.

My soul, I envy the love of cats.

When she finished, everyone called out compliments.

“Ka-sa-ne-san.” Hawk began the chant, and the other sages took it up. Kasane tried to hide behind Cat, but she pushed her forward.

“This is a poem I learned from my mother.” Kasane looked as though she were about to cry from embarrassment. She turned her head and cleared her throat.

Kasane glanced up at the pilgrim. He held her eyes prisoner for the briefest of moments, before she looked down again. “Fog clings to the high mountains,” she recited in a trembling voice. “My eye clings to him. ...”

A ROPE WOVEN FROM A WOMAN’S HAIR

“A beautiful woman is an ax that cuts off a man’s life.” But even as he said it, Gobei the gambler studied the portraits in the album with care. He turned the heavy, pleated pages slowly. The wrestler Mountain Wind looked over his shoulder.

The rest of the card players crowded around. The fifteen-year-old artist Okamura Masanobu hadn’t included just any women in this collection. These were twelve of the most beautiful courtesans of Edo’s Floating World. Masanobu had caught each in a gesture, in a moment stolen from time and fixed for eternity. They were gazing into their mirrors or lounging with robes draped carelessly. They were walking in high lacquered
geta
through new-fallen snow or smoking a pipe on a riverside balcony and staring pensively out over the water.

“Which one ran away?” someone asked.

“Number seven.”

“I was there the night she escaped.” Mountain Wind pointed a thick finger at the page and began again the tale of his experiences at the Perfumed Lotus.

Hanshiro could hear the men’s loud conversation through the floor of his upstairs room. He knew that his prey, the young Lady Asano, was in the album of Masanobu’s women. It was a copy of the book Kira’s retainers had been discreetly showing to innkeepers,
kago
bearers, and postboys all along the road.

One of those retainers had bet it and lost it to Gobei two hands ago. He had gone out into the rainy night with his shoulders bunched against the cold and his thoughts written on his face. He was trying to invent a lie that would save him from the unpleasantness of disemboweling himself to appease his irascible lord.

Hanshiro had disdained to approach any of Kira’s lackeys, so Cat’s picture had eluded him. He refused to join the crowd now. He stayed where he was, alone in the small room at the back of the house. The gambler Gobei had been dealing cards in the room beneath him since the hour of the Cock.

Hanshiro knelt with spine straight and with his legs folded under him. He held a paintbrush poised, resting lightly between the tips of his thumb and index finger. He seemed entranced by the sheet of white paper on the low writing stand in front of him. To draw bamboo he knew he must see it first in his mind. Then he must transcribe what he saw as quickly as the hawk stooped on the hare. He was so engrossed he barely heard the
shoosh, shoosh
of Gobei’s stockinged feet on the polished boards of the corridor floor.

“Isogashii?”
Gobei called politely from the doorway. “Busy?”

“Irasshai.
Welcome.”

Gobei entered and sat on the other side of the clay-lined fire-well. The coals in the well spread a welcome heat into the damp chill of the room. Both men sat sideways to the door, so that neither would have his back to it.

Gobei crossed his legs, bringing his feet under his baggy yellow
hakama
stenciled with dark blue ginkgo leaves. He laid the folio, its cardboard covers tied shut with gold silk cord, on the
tatami.

Hanshiro drew in a deep breath. His hand dropped suddenly, and he drew the bamboo with swift, sure strokes—strokes called by names like “goldfish tail,” “startled rook,” “stag’s horns,” and “fishbones.” He was using the technique called “flying white,” painting with a fairly dry brush so that the paper could be seen underneath. He worked unperturbed by Gobei’s presence.

Gobei shook back the sleeves of his quilted silk jacket and poured himself tea. “Aren’t you done dabbing at that paper yet?” He added more tea to Hanshiro’s almost empty cup.

 “Confucius said a work is finished not when the last thing has been added, but when the last thing has been taken away.”

“As one whose business it is to take away the last thing, I can only agree with Confucius.” Gobei shifted his toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. He had full lips nestled in a black beard, a high, narrow nose, bushy brows, and eyes that were little more than slits in his broad face.

“Have you finished taking away the last things from the unfortunates downstairs?” Hanshiro asked.

“I left them the hair in their anuses and their manly organs.” Gobei grinned wolfishly. “Peasants are not called the ‘great august treasure’ for nothing. It is their fate to give, mine to take.”

He reached for the tobacco canister on the wooden, boxlike tray the waitress had set beside him. He packed the bowl of his oversize pipe and lit it with an ember from the firebox on the tray.

He held the big pipe horizontally in the palm of his hand, with his fingers folded diagonally over the stem. Brigands carried large pipes and held them this way, and it was an affectation of Gobei’s.

“You can work with me, you know,” Gobei said. “My offer stands, old friend. You can be a rich man and live with a fan in your left hand.”

Hanshiro’s mouth twitched in a shadow of a wry smile as he bowed. His nod expressed refusal, but with just the proper balance of sincere regret, irony, and condescension.

He added an elegant tracery of characters down the upper right-hand side of the page, a poem of his own composing. He should have been offended by Gobei’s effrontery, but he had known him too long for that. And he found him amusing.

Besides, Gobei was the head of the gamblers’ syndicate. His word was law along the TMkaidM among the hundreds of men who were considered members of the guild. Some of the men in the guild made their livings by more nefarious means than dice and cards. Taking issue with their leader would have gained Hanshiro nothing and could have put obstacles in his way.

Gobei leaned over to inspect Hanshiro’s ink painting of bamboo bent before a wind.  “ ‘When calm, paint iris.’ ”  He quoted the ancients. “ ‘When angry, bamboo.’ ”

“Anger is like breaking wind in a typhoon,” Hanshiro said. “It provides temporary relief but avails little.”

 “This fleeting world is temporary; but temporary is better than nothing at all. As the poets say, ‘Enjoy life! Tomorrow we may end as sea wrack on the rocky shore of Oya-Shirazu, Not-Knowing-Parents.’ ” Gobei lifted the large folio to his forehead with exaggerated courtesy, then bowed as he held it out to Hanshiro.

“I brought you the book,” he said. “But you need not leaf through it by the light of the night lantern while you bedew the palm of your hand. Self-pleasure is like scratching your foot through the sole of your sandal. Allow me to show you Odawara’s garden of night-blooming flowers. I will introduce you to Lotus.” Gobei molded the air sensuously with his hands. “Her buttocks remind one of a ripe peach.”

“Another time, Gobei-san.” Hanshiro laid the unopened folio aside. At least with Gobei Hanshiro didn’t have to bother with punctilio.

‘ ‘From your interest in young Masanobu’s art, I assume you’re hunting the
yakko,
the
samurai
courtesan, and not the boat-swallowing fish who’s been reducing the population of late.” Gobei leaned forward and grinned across the firewell. “I hear that rascal made soldier soup of two Edo men in Hiratsuka.” Gobei laughed in delight at his own pun on the words for soup stock made of dried bonito and the word for soldier.

“I’m hunting the impossible, a night’s sleep in a dry bed free of fleas and cutpurses.”

Hanshiro cleaned his ink stone. He washed out his brush and laid it on a silk pad. He emptied the dirty water from his gourd-shaped porcelain container into the wide-mouthed jug placed there for that purpose. With a silk cloth he wiped each item in his writing case and replaced them in their proper compartments.

“You needn’t have rushed to Odawara through that tantrum of a storm in the dark of night. This story of the Asano wench’s escape is a ruse, Tosa-san.” Gobei lowered his voice. Sound carried through paper walls. “Kira had her kidnapped from the brothel. He has dispatched her spirit to the Western Paradise and her body to the burning grounds at Hashiba. You’re chasing her smoke, my boy. Kira’s conducting this hoax of a search to allay suspicions. Everyone knows it.”

Gobei knocked the dottle from his pipe into the bamboo container in the tobacco box. “Do you really think a woman would be foolish enough to attempt the HakMne barrier,” he continued, “to tread on the tail of the tiger?”

 “I have no pressing engagements. I shall wait by the road and see who passes.”

“Have a care, my friend. This murderer has the authorities in an uproar.”

“Thank you for the warning, Gobei-san.”

“And now I shall pay a visit to the white-necked ones. I stayed away from the House of the Wisteria several days last month when I was ill with stomach pains. When I returned, my sweethearts there held me down and threatened to cut off my topknot for neglecting them.”

“If that’s the worst they threaten to cut off, you have nothing to fear.”

“Would you honor a miserable wretch by allowing him to add this magnificent painting to his collection of works in the Tosa school?” Gobei bowed. When Hanshiro handed him the rolled paper, he stowed it carefully in the gap where the left side of his jacket overlapped the right.

Gobei rose and shut his fan with a clack of farewell. As he left he opened it again, gesturing with it in the slow dance of the
NM
drama. With his other hand he slapped his rear end to keep time. He took the part of Ono no Komachi, an old woman possessed of the ghost of a former lover. The words to his song, however, were of his own invention.

“I ... am ... the ... Devil . . . farting,” he declaimed in the nasal singsong of
No.
The technique made the words sound stretched and distorted. “I am the ba-a-a-stard child of the god of swi-i-indlers.”

As Gobei disappeared down the hall, Hanshiro could hear his singing and slapping and tongue clicking in imitation of wooden clappers grow fainter. The maid appeared to lay out the bedding, trim the lamp wick, and lower the wooden nightshade over the lantern. Then she bowed and wished him a pleasant rest.

When she had knelt in the corridor and closed the door in front of her own bowing face, Hanshiro sat alone in the shadows a while longer. He listened to the night crier clapping his wooden blocks and warning against carelessness with fire. He watched the slow undulating pulse of the lantern’s shadow on the wall.

Finally he untied the cord and opened the folio. He turned the pages slowly and stopped at the seventh portrait. It carried the red, gourd-shaped seal and the words “From the genuine brush of the Japanese artist Okamura Masanobu.”

Cat was posed in front of a latticework bamboo fence covered with wisteria flowers. Her body was half-turned toward the right edge of the page, but she was glancing over her shoulder to the left. Cat’s sumptuous robes and sash were hand-colored in heron’s-egg-green and rose tints.

She was holding a half-opened paper umbrella at an angle off from her left shoulder. She wore a man’s headband rakishly tied at the side in a large, flat knot. A wind was blowing her robe against her left hip and thigh and lifting her hem to reveal the men’s gaiters that women of fashion were sporting in the Eastern Capital.

Masanobu had spared no detail of Cat’s dress. Her face, however, was difficult to distinguish from the others in the album. Masanobu had given all the women the stylized features considered most desirable. He had painted Cat with brows thin as black silk thread, tapered eyes that were little more than slits, a long hooked line for a nose, an impossibly tiny mouth, full cheeks, and a round chin.

But Masanobu had captured something in Cat’s face that none of the other women had. As she stared over her shoulder, the look in her eyes was defiant. It was the pose and the look Musui’s handsome young disciple had given Hanshiro the night he’d discussed poetry with the monks at the temple near Kawasaki. It was the look he had mistaken for lust. Suddenly Hanshiro realized why the boy had seemed familiar. He resembled the nun he had seen near Lord Asano’s grave at Spring Hill Temple.

The heat that reddened Hanshiro’s face was as much chagrin as a surge of desire mixed with admiration. The young Lady Asano had made a fool of him, just as she was making fools of Kira’s men. Hanshiro didn’t like being reduced to the level of Kira’s men, but he had to admit the Lady Cat was very good. Perhaps she had mastered the art of
saiminjutsu,
hypnotizing her enemies.