Fudoki

by Kij Johnson

  It is also true that Nakara was tired of her people, for there were only nine of them for a month’s travel; and she was used to the hundreds of people always to be found at the Osa Hitachi estate. Because she was on pilgrimage she observed the ten prohibitions, and perhaps she was bored. There had been little company on the road, and even the monks and priests at the shrines and temples had been surly, as they settled in for what was becoming a cold and wet winter.

  People of the provinces are not like people in the capital, and Nakara was not like a court woman. For one thing, she spoke to all her people, men and women, even the lowliest boy brought along to tend the oxen for the trip. For another, she saw no necessity to hide her face behind fans or sleeves; she had no die-away airs. If she wanted something, she simply asked for it. If she didn’t want something, she said so—very unlike the women of court, who on occasion find themselves married because they are unwilling to say no. She could use a Chinese abacus, but was hopeless at the poem-matching game.

  She was capable of skinning out a deer or commanding her estate’s defense from bandits, in the unlikely event that her brothers (and all their useful, strong, martial men) were far away. When she had been younger, barely a girl, she had served as nurse at an estate in Hida province. There had been a terrible disaster, and she had escaped with the clothes on her back and a ten-year-old boy, the only survivor. Together they walked two hundred fifty miles through the mountains in the dead of winter, to her family home in Hitachi. She avoided bears, wolves, and robbers, managing so well that on arriving she and the boy were well fed, clad in fur, and bearing weapons.

  We would have considered her at best uncouth and at worst a barbarian, and she was both these things—but there is nothing to stop me from speaking the truth, however improper it is. She was brave and full of laughter and wisdom, and I would have liked to have called Osa Hitachi no Nakara a friend.

  The tortoiseshell knew no one. Her clan were all dead. In her traveling, she met people on the road for no more than the shared instant of passing. Her meetings with the kami on the crystal-clear road were short and without satisfaction. She had no skill at conversation, polite or otherwise. She was moved with quick powerful grace, and there were moments of contentment or even happiness that softened her eyes; but the black grief at her heart made her less-than-light company. And though no one would have guessed she was a cat, there was something people did not recognize about her, something strange. We avoid those who grieve; we avoid those who are not like us; and so she was doubly distanced from her fellow travelers.

  Friendships are strange. I meet one woman and I like her instantly. Another I dislike and distrust as quickly. They are both of good family and have beautiful manners and taste; they both laugh when I say something I consider clever. My woman Shigeko resembles a thousand of the women who have served me, her independence of thought her only difference—and even in that, there have been others. And yet she is one ear, and I the other.

  Osa Hitachi no Nakara was another twenty days on the road returning home. Many things can happen in such a time. A woman can have a baby, or fall in love, or lose a loved one to death or indifference (though that can happen in an instant). The tortoiseshell learned about people. Nakara gained a friend.

  The weather was mostly cold, for the twelfth month is solidly winter. Snow fell and lingered from one day to the next, until the oxen pulling the cart could not get through in places, and they had to stop until things became easier. When the sky was clear, the tortoiseshell woman rode beside the ox-cart, or ranged far ahead of the Hitachi party, tasting air so cold that it burned her lungs. For reasons she did not understand, she returned each evening to Nakara’s people, to sleep wherever they did. Often she brought back animals she had killed, rabbits or sika deer draped across her horse’s shoulder. The sorrel did not seem to mind the smell of blood or the twitches of dying prey; in this he was his mistress’s match.

  Though they considered their pace quick (particularly for winter), the party traveled far more slowly than she would have alone. An ox-carriage is not exactly noted for its swiftness. These oxen had been selected more for sturdiness than for fleetness of foot (if a fleet ox can even be imagined), and they lumbered through cold mud and hock-deep snow. The useful portion of the day was very short, so that there were days it seemed that they had barely begun to travel when the sun set abruptly over the mountains to the west—if they saw it at all; the sky was often overcast, or even snowing.

  Snow like this would have stopped dead the soft people of the capital. We have snow, but it is not generally deep or long-lasting; and it is up to the servants and the guardsmen and the peasants to make their ways through it. We women merely watch from our sheltered verandas, and admire it as if it were painted on a scroll. It would never occur to us to take a winter pilgrimage of a hundred miles or more.

  The farther one travels on the Tkaid, the more real snow becomes. No longer just pretty spangles on a robe, it grows deeper and lasts longer. People can die in it, and not just because they passed out in a ditch and drowned, overcome by too much sake. They can die from this eastern snow due to even the tiniest carelessness, or karma, or simply bad luck. Storms come up where the flakes fall so thick that a stranded traveler cannot see the eave-light of a farmhouse a hundred—a dozen!—paces away. Someone lost can scream until she is hoarse, yet her voice is swallowed as if she shouted into a quilted robe. And these storms can last for days.

  There are clear days, when the sky is a particular frozen blue, and the sun on one’s face leaves no warmth. These days are bright, but oh, so cold. One’s breath attaches itself as ice to one’s clothing, and even tucked into sleeves, one’s hands ache until they grow numb. Lakes and rivers freeze over and become solid for months instead of days; ferries become irrelevant. A cart can feel its way across the ice without falling through. (I have just realized: I do not think I will see snow again. How strange.)

  Winter becomes harsher in the east, but the people somehow disregard it as we of the capital never can. They live and carry on their business even through snow and cold and darkness. There is no farming, of course, but the horses and cattle and other animals must be tended. Messengers still bring urgent business from outlying estates or along the roads. There is hunting and even fishing. My golden-eyed lover used to tell me about watching the fisherfolk of his district push their boats onto the sea on days when great snowflakes dissolved into its black water. They like it, he said; snow keeps the waves down.

  Nakara and her people had adapted. They walked easily in high wooden clogs that no one in the city could manage with any facility. Their feet were often wet and always cold; but they shrugged this off as no more than an inconvenience. They did not panic if snow caught them unexpectedly; they sheltered themselves and made fire, and waited.

  So travel was not fast. Beyond the limitations forced by the weather, the party stopped often for its own reasons. Nakara stopped at every temple and every shrine along the road, staying the night at the larger places, if they had guest quarters.

  “Why do you stop so often?” the tortoiseshell woman asked once, when they pulled up for the third time in a day, before an unprepossessing little roadside Buddha cloaked in snow.

  Nakara finished her prayer and laid her offering before the statue: food and a sheaf of votive papers, each printed with a hundred tiny Buddhas. She turned, her face sober.

  “I had three brothers. Now I have one killed and one, my adopted brother, gone to the capital. How can I not pray for them every chance I get?” She stepped onto a plank that had been laid over the ridges and whorls of frozen mud between the Buddha and the road.

  The tortoiseshell followed her an arm’s length behind, frowning. “You pray for males? They have no place in fudoki—clan, you would say.”

  “Don’t they?” Nakara said. “And yet, I miss my dead brother every minute.” She sighed. “I pray that the gods leave me the brothers I still have.”

  “Gods do not listen,” Kagaya-
hime said. “They just talk, talk, talk, and none of it makes any sense.”

  Nakara turned. “They speak to you?”

  “Not to me,” the tortoiseshell woman said. “Not anymore.”

  “Perhaps at least they listen,” Nakara said, and turned away.

  Tabu slowed them, as well. Nakara traveled with three women (and the tortoiseshell woman), and so there were days when they could not travel due to this or that one’s monthly courses. There were directional tabus, which would not allow them to start a day’s travel in certain directions; often Nakara ordered the party to head in an acceptable direction for a quarter mile (though this might lead through fields, or down a country road that led nowhere). The party then returned to the road, having addressed at least technically the gods’ wishes. Delays were inevitable. There was a night when everyone was forced to stay up to protect their souls against demons, and they were too tired to travel far the next day. The tortoiseshell woman remained a cat in that she had no courses, and wondered at the delays of this and the other tabus.

  “We have no choice,” Nakara explained that night. “Well, not much. There are times when I have had to ignore the strictures, but I prefer not to.”

  The tortoiseshell woman snorted. “Do you think the gods notice?”

  “Well, I notice,” Nakara said.

  And then there were the ten thousand things they stopped to see only because it pleased Nakara to do so. The east is strange and beautiful, and doubly so in winter. Nakara did not travel as much as she would wish, generally busy administering the estate, and she looked about avidly.

  A waterfall splashed over black rocks, on either side forming great intricate sculptures of ice, and Nakara and her women pretended they were mandalas, and searched them for tiny Buddhas and bodhisattvas. The tortoiseshell woman looked with them, but saw nothing, even when one of the women (Junshi was her name) broke a bit off and pointed out the half-formed face and draped robes. And yet the tortoiseshell’s eyes were clear enough that she saw an ayu-trout sleeping just below the waterfall, and threw her knife and startled it.

  Later, just after they crossed Matsusado ford (now a stretch of slippery, dangerous ice that groaned under the cart’s weight), they passed a wild black sow, the biggest any of them had ever seen, scrounging for stubble under the snow of a sunken rice field. The black against the white of snow and brown of earth was stunning, but Nakara stopped at the next farm to warn them that the pig was stealing their straw. The farmer explained that he allowed this because he knew where the old sow farrowed, and collected her piglets each year to sell. Nakara left a gift, charmed by the man’s enterprise.

  They came to a place beside a temple where a river had not frozen. Even though it was winter, a hundred ducks of every variety remained here, tempted by the open water and the grains the monks threw to them. A monkey moved among the ducks, squabbling with them as though he had been born from an egg. Nakara laughed until she cried, and stayed for nearly a day, using up all the fried rice cakes feeding this odd flock. The tortoiseshell woman did not laugh; perhaps did not know how to laugh.

  Halfway through Shimosa province, there was a cinnamon tree as large as a hinoki cedar, alone in a field as flat as if it had been in the Kant. Nakara and the women left the ox-carriage and felt their way across the field, which turned out to be less level than it looked, small stones hidden under moss and weeds and snow. The air was perfectly still, and they fell silent as they approached the tree. There was no shrine, nothing to indicate a kami was here (though of course they are everywhere), but Nakara saluted the tree as if it were a god, and removed her outermost robe and laid it at the roots. The tortoiseshell woman came close enough to see claw marks in the bark, as if a giant cat had scratched there. She pressed her face to them, but they smelled faintly of bear and not cat. She had known they could not be a proof of kin, for they were too large and too far away from the capital. Nevertheless, her sorrow nearly drove her to her knees.

  They turned back, and when they got a certain distance from the tree, Nakara said, “I will tell my nieces and nephews of this.”

  The tortoiseshell woman frowned, abrupt in her unhappiness. “Why? What will you tell them? ‘I saw a tree’? I have seen a million.”

  Nakara stopped and turned, surprised. “That tree is—you did not sense it? It is sacred.”

  “To whom? The gods? Which gods? Do we stop at all these places so that you may find sacred things?”

  Nakara turned back and walked slowly. “Not really. I stop because I must, I suppose.”

  “Why?” the tortoiseshell woman asked, black grief forcing her to speak more harshly than she might have. “I understood the ducks and the monkey and the black pig, a little. But you can’t eat a tree. One is just like another. Where is the use in that?”

  “It warms my eyes and my heart,” Nakara said, “and the world is cold enough. That is the use of that.”

  Their conversations were often strange, for the tortoiseshell woman did not always make predictable (or even socially acceptable) statements. Nakara was not shocked. There had been a time when she was young, when she had lived under an enchantment, attendant to a fox in distant Hida province. Her life had been filled with wonders and strangeness. A woman who was also a cat did not surprise her.

  Nakara treated the stranger as a peer and a friend, and gave her a sobriquet: “Princesses may say what they like; the rest of us must be more circumspect,” Nakara said to her at the end of one of their conversations.

  “But then what is the good of speaking?” the tortoiseshell woman asked. “You might as well be silent.”

  “We are not all princesses,” Nakara said. “And yet we have things to say.” That was how the tortoiseshell woman came to be called Hime, princess. The sorrel they called Biter, for obvious reasons.

  It is very late; the only light in my room is the brazier’s dim red gleam and a faint sift of starlight that has somehow managed to ease its way past the screens and walls and curtains that otherwise protect me from the elements. My writing grows large and sloppy; I am sure that in the morning it will look to me as irregular as a child’s.

  Shigeko kneels across from me in silence, though I have written many pages since she first entered my rooms. She is pulling at a flaw, a loose thread in a sleeve. I can only trust that the thread is there; I see the tension in her hands and the soft puckering of the fabric, but the thread itself is invisible in this light. The night conceals her age; with her sleeping robes all askew around her shoulders, and her hair tied with paper tapes into a single hank to keep it from snarling, she looks like a small girl awakened by a bad dream.

  “Shigeko, stop doing that, you’ll ruin the fabric.” She looks at her hands as if surprised they are hers, and places them in her lap abruptly. “Are you hungry? Would you like something warm to drink?” There is another attendant with me (there is always an attendant with me), a younger woman who silently bows and leaves, to try and find hot broth at this absurdly late hour. I no longer remember the younger ones’ names; it seems pointless, like naming maple seeds.

  Shigeko has stopped pulling threads; now she pulls the tapes from her hair and drops them into the brazier. Each bursts into tiny flames before vanishing utterly, a gold flare that illuminates her face’s lines, touches the white in her hair.

  I ask, “What’s wrong, Shigeko?”

  She does not answer immediately. Despite the tapes, there are tangles: she begins to comb out the knots using her fingers.

  Except for visits to her family or the shrine at Ise, and her monthly retreats for her courses, we have been together nearly every moment of every day of fifty years. She seems to have no great dreams, no restless desire to be anything but what she is. For fifty years, she has been content to select robe combinations, sew even seams, exclaim about the weather, and exchange gossip with my other women—and to do it all again the next day, and the next. All these decades of shared minutiae have mounded up around us, concealing the fact that she is her own pers
on, with yearnings and tastes of her own. I know her better than anyone, in the same way I know the texture of my own skin, or the shapes of my fingernails. There is a disadvantage to this: I do not always see what I am looking at.

  The young attendant returns with bowls of hot taro soup and slivers of boar meat on a lacquered tray. I am not hungry: the growing thing that kills my body makes it difficult to eat, but I watch Shigeko drink her soup with tidy little sips, just as she has drunk every bowl of soup for fifty years. It is just as well that her manners are good, or she would have driven me mad, and I would have had to send her away. And this would have been like losing an arm.

  The Tkaid takes to the great sea for a short while, on a long boat ride that just skims the Noumi peninsula, entering a vast inlet, landing the traveler at last in the Shida district of Hitachi province. This is (usually) safe in the summer months, but less so in winter, when snow can blind the pilot, and winds and strange tides may pull a boat far from shore before it can duck into the shelter of Shida inlet. The Osa Hitachi party waited for days before the weather and tides were such that the ferryfolk would take them. The only place they could stay at this time of year was a small and bitterly cold inn, mostly closed down for the season. Whatever their ranks, everyone gathered in the raised room beside the kitchen area of the main building, where the ovens kept things a bit warmer. The men went out often, for they had the animals to tend and various preparations to make, but the women stayed inside, and Hime often waited with them. They read aloud sometimes from a palm-leaf sutra they carried in a deerskin case; or from a handful of notebooks containing monogatari tales. Hime ignored the sutras (alas; she might have learned much from thinking of the Buddhas), but the tales intrigued her. “Though they are not very interesting,” she said aloud.