by Ronan Frost
*
My bedding was moved to another room, a narrow and dark place reserved for those undergoing the kaihogyo.
“It is a little dusty,” said the old monk who helped me relocate my scant possessions, his apology an understatement. The walls showed cracks open to the elements, where leaves and dirt had blown in over time, pushed up in drifts against the corners. He swept the floor with a stiff broom, sending gusts of dust spiraling out of the open door.
“You know the way through the forest, boy?” he asked.
I made a small noise in the affirmative: the day after Kan’emon had accepted my proposal, Yobutomo had shown me the course I must run. It was an eighteen-mile loop, punctuated by a score of small shrines along the way. Although it was but a fraction of the larger course that I must run in later years, it had taken several hours, and my muscles had ached for two days afterward.
The monk gave his broom a final flourish and straightened his back. “And you have the handbook?”
Again, I nodded, checking for the hundredth time that it still lay within my satchel, for I was told to keep it close and secret. It had taken me two days hunched over a desk to copy the characters from the original kept in Kan’emon’s library.
The monk gave a grunt, and helped me lay my thin mat upon the reeded flooring, as well as a candle and some flint. He brought a basket and withdrew from it a folded white cloth which he lay upon the bed. He then withdrew a curiously long rectangular hat, wide enough to cover only the width of the head but extending out far in the front and back, which he placed carefully atop the white cloth. Finally, next to these items, he placed a length of cord and a well-worn knife. His tasks completed, he paused and looked at me with his hands upon his hips. He stood a little taller than me, despite the hunch to his back. “A watchman will call the hour of the Ox, just after midnight, to awaken you,” he said.
He was collecting himself when I cleared my throat nervously.
“The other monk,” I began, before he could leave. “Will he sleep here too?”
“Which monk?”
“A few months ago, I met a monk undergoing the kaighogyo.” I looked around and saw my foolishness, for there was no evidence of another’s bedding. “Although perhaps by now he has finished…”
The old monk seemed to be weighting his words in his head before speaking, and when he did, it was with slow reluctance.
“The final year of the trials are very difficult. The man you speak of fell ill, and could not complete the required distance one day. He took his own life.” He continued to study me a moment, then added: “I wish you better fortune.”
After he had left I sat for a time in the growing dark of that room. Finally, I moved to pick up the white cloth. It felt slick under my fingers, the cotton as finely woven as those imported from across the western sea. A shiver traced my spine as I shook it out, for, unlike the robes of the other monks, who wore traditional black, this robe was bleached entirely white: the color of death.
There was a noise and a sudden inrush of air as the door opened, startling me from my reverie.
“Would you take a short walk with me, Tonbo?” Yobutomo asked.
I nodded quickly, welcoming the interruption, and crossed the floor, found my shoes, and went outside.
Yobutomo was already walking slowly away, and I hurried those few steps to catch up. He smiled with fond sadness as I joined him at his elbow, as if his thoughts were far away. Fluttering moths swarmed under lanterns strung under eaves that cast gentle pools of light like islands in the deepening shadows. Yobutomo did not speak, and I simply followed his steady pace, keeping close to his side, feeling very much a small boy. We seemed to be moving to a quiet area, where the noises of activity of the bustling temple complex receded into the background. At last, we came to a low stone wall, where Yobutomo stopped, and placed his palms upon the top. Here the sound of insects chorusing was louder than that of anything else.
“I was very lonely when I first came here, as a young man,” he said, looking over the wall. “This place used to bring me comfort.”
I peered over the edge of the waist high wall and saw a small pond. The clouded sky overhead made it almost impossible to see the quiet, inky surface. The smell of standing water was heavy in the air. Yobutomo answered my unspoken question.
“This is the mirror pond,” he said. “When a loved one has passed from this earth, they may have a window upon us here.”
I glanced at Yobutomo. My eyes had grown used to the darkness, yet his expression remained hidden. When he spoke again, his voice was laden with a heavy sadness.
“I was a proud man, full of hubris and arrogance, as only a samurai can be. I served the family of my Lord, and I did it with all of my heart. I devoted myself entirely to the art of battle and to service.” He paused, his eyes still upon the surface of the water. “That part of me feels like a dark dream, and even as an old man, with the past far behind me, it is still difficult to talk about. But I leave tomorrow, and I don’t know if I will return, and I want you to know this about me.”
His voice seemed to come as part of the forest, barely louder than that of the singing insects.
“I had a wife, and a child - a boy - almost two years old… I didn’t spend much time with him, but he would smile up at me with pure and unrestrained joy, and it would bleed a little light into my ironclad heart. He was always so calm, even when he could run, he would move with careful certitude, so different to the unbound flailing of other children I had seen. There was a hidden depth in his eyes, a kind of wisdom. One evening, I came home from my Lord’s training ground. Things had not gone well that day; I had been reprimanded for some slight, a minor infraction the details of which I forget, and I was brooding and angry with myself. I ate sullenly the food my wife had prepared, hardly tasting it, and made preparations to sleep. I do not recall how, but all I can remember is my boy’s cries that night – he would not be quiet. I was so tired, all I wanted was to rest, but there was that incessant whine. My wife slept soundly at my side, I wondered how she could sleep through such noise.” Yobutomo huffed breath through his noise and his mouth turned up wryly. “I guess she was exhausted.”
Yobutomo ran his hand along the top of the stone, feeling its smoothness, tracing its curves with his fingers.
“At last, I got up to attend the child. My temper in those days was quick to rise, and a white-hot frustration was running in my veins, which only grew worse when nothing I could do would calm him.” Yobutomo’s voice quavered and his throat moved as he swallowed. “That moment of temper changed my life. I tried to fool myself into thinking things could be repaired, my ridiculous samurai pride swelled my head, refusing to believe I could be at fault. I was a weak man hiding behind harsh words. I blamed my wife, I told her she had spoilt our boy, making him so dangerously fragile. Day by day our misery grew, my wife became quieter and quieter. After her suicide, I had nothing, and I woke up to myself and realized the demon I had become. I sat, alone in that small room, and prepared myself for ritual suicide, seated with the point of my sword at my gut. There would be no reprieve; I had nobody standing at my side to behead me once I made the cut, nobody to bring a swift and painless end. My death would be writhing agony. My guilt and shame deserved only that.”
Yobutomo reached into his waist sash and withdrew his wakizashi, the dagger traditionally twinned with the larger katana, the blades of the samurai. He handled it carefully and lay it flat upon the stonework. Clouds overhead parted, and starlight glistened coldly from the mirrored surface.
“This blade belonged to my father and his father before him. Both were forged by a master craftsman; they do not break. Yet as I pulled the katana toward me, the blade hit the folds of my robe at my stomach and separated neatly from the haft. All I held was the harmless handle. It is simply not possible for the katana to break clean like that – the blade runs into the grip.
“I grabbed furiously at the blade that lay on the floor. At first, there was
no pain, but everything went wet and slippery in my grasp. I couldn’t hold it, and it felt again to the floor. Then I saw the blood.” Yobutomo turned the fingerless pad of his right hand over before his eyes, studying it in the starlight as if it were something he had just discovered, flexing and cupping the palm and curling his thumb. The stumps moved only fractionally, useless nubs of flesh.
He said, “For a time, I just watched as the pool of blood grew larger, and then the pain crept up my arm. I staunched the flow of blood with rags, and knotted it tight about the club of my right hand with my teeth. I fled the castle that night in shame. I left almost everything, my armor, my gold, and taking only the clothes on my back and this wakizashi that remained in my belt. I struck out into the wilderness, looking for something to kill me.”
Yobutomo raised his head, bringing himself out of his reverie, and swept his gaze from left to right. “Eventually, I found this place. And I learnt of the trials, and in a manner of speaking, it did kill me. When I completed them I was a new man. With nothing else to hold me, I did it again. Fourteen years of running through the forests scoured my soul.”
Yobutomo’s eyes met mine, and he held my gaze. His hand touched my shoulder, held it firmly.
His throat bobbed as he swallowed, drew a breath, and said; “I will live with that bitter seed of my past for every day of my life. It is something that can never be forgiven. I have come to allow it to be part of my past. Not forgotten, for it still shapes who I am every moment of every day, but it is no longer a burden. Like I once did, I hope that in the kaihogyo you will find self-acceptance.”