by Kij Johnson
Junshi put down the notebook from which she had been reading. “No? When Genji is exchanging such heartfelt poems with Aoi?”
“There is no fighting,” Hime said. “No wonders, no strangeness. Not like the fudoki of my people.”
“Tell it then,” Nakara said.
“Tell you my fudoki?” Hime said, taken aback. She remembered all the cats’ stories as vividly as if they were her own paws, but to tell them to one not of the group—this stymied her.
Nakara laughed at her expression. “I’m sick of our stories; I’ve heard them a thousand times. I say I’m praying for my brother’s success, but I have to admit that a big part of my prayers is the hope that he brings me something new to read from the capital.”
The Five-Colored Cat, The Cat with Three Legs, The Straw-Cloak Cat. She could tell the tales, and they would be heard, they would be witnessed. The fudoki would continue. But it would be wrong. The tale would be like the woman’s ghost back in the capital, begging her charred body to awaken. “No,” she said. Her eyes burned. “I have no tale to tell. Not anymore.”
The other women begged a little, but Nakara said nothing, only poured tea for them all and led the conversation down safer paths. Hime left shortly afterward, to “see to the horse,” and did not return for many hours.
She did see to Biter, and then stayed with the sorrel. Nakara might have been hurt had she realized this, that Biter was the closest thing Hime had to a friend. Hime did not speak to him, except the little nothings we say to our pets and our horses. He never spoke back. He did not behave in any human way; he was totally and unequivocally a horse, which is to say stubborn, occasionally stupid, frequently lazy, and occasionally savage.—Which is quite human, if I think on it.
Biter was an animal, and Hime, suspended between cat and woman, longed to be one. Perhaps Nakara would have understood this better than any of us might expect.
Nights were too dark to read anything, and so they talked, and Hime learned more of the party’s mission. “It’s complicated,” Nakara warned.
Hime—thinking of the intricate interrelations between cats and people, dogs, horses—shrugged. “I will try to keep track,” she said.
It was complicated, the sort of tricky political situation that usually ends with disaster of some sort. The band, the east, has always been a troublesome part of the empire. The original inhabitants were absolute savages (they wore furs and drank blood and carried arrows in their hair!), but they were controlled many centuries ago, when families from the central provinces and the southwest were sent by the empire to pacify them. Over time, some of these people became little better than those they defeated—though at least they did not drink blood. The eastern families are many months’ travel from the capital, and generally well armed and well mounted (indeed, Osa Hitachi no Nakara’s family is not atypical). The families develop independent ambitions and become fractious, and then the emperor (any of a dozen emperors over the past four hundred years) must send or assign troops to remind them of his absolute authority.
Or so it was explained to me so many years ago, on the one hand by my half-brother; on the other by my golden-eyed lover, Mononobe no Dmei. My lover came from Mutsu province, as far north and east as one may go, and his perception of the situation was quite different from my brother’s, naturally. I tried to find a medium between their varying reports, but I must believe my half-brother was right. Was he not emperor?
Nakara explained to Hime: there was a problem. The Osa Hitachi clan controlled a neglected estate somewhere in Mutsu province. (I cannot say in which of the districts, for they’re all barbarous places; there’s no point to keeping track. The only district I know in Mutsu province is Iwate, which was Dmei’s home.) The second Osa Hitachi brother managed the estate, which he did well, opening new land for rice fields and producing small amounts of gold from a mine on the site.
But after some years, the second brother offended a local family, an ambitious branch of the ubiquitous Abe clan. The initial cause might have been anything—disputed land; a stolen (or eloping) wife; a killing, accidental or intended; theft; an impolite letter; simple willfulness or pride or temper or greed. The Abe were very powerful, with allies and contacts as far south as Kurobe river, and they were used to managing things in their own way. They killed the brother, his family, and his followers, then burned the estate.
The governor of Mutsu province did not care about this—he had relatives among the Abe—but there were others who did. It is not a wise thing to kill the brothers of powerful men, and the oldest Osa Hitachi brother was vice-governor (and actual leader, for the governor would have been a cousin of mine from the capital, leader in name only) of Hitachi province, just to the south. The central government is uninterested in mere bickering so far from the capital—and a few tens of deaths a million miles away was hardly more than that—and so I think that perhaps the vice-governor lied in the letter he sent, claiming that the Abe family were not paying their taxes or had too large a household military force or were concealing weapons; and asking for a warrant to destroy them. He sent his adopted brother, Osa Hitachi no Kitsune, to the capital for a tsuitoshi warrant authorizing an attack on the Abe.
“So your oldest brother has asked your youngest brother to lead an attack—” Hime said, setting things clear in her mind.
“Yes.”
“—for someone who left their fudoki to found a new one—”
“I don’t quite understand ‘fudoki,’” Nakara said.
“—home, then—because someone killed him to take his ground—home—when they had a perfectly good home of their own?”
“Yes,” Nakara said.
“But he’s dead, the one who left. Why do this?”
“He was my brother,” Nakara said. “They killed him.”
Hime frowned. “He was a male, and he was far away. He was not part of the fudoki.”
“What the Abe did was wrong, against the codes.”
“This isn’t about codes, though,” Hime said.
Nakara laughed suddenly, a humorless bark. “No. It’s about revenge.”
The day came when the ferryfolk were at last willing to travel, the sky overcast but calm. They left early, at the tiger’s hour, to catch a tide that would drift them up Shida inlet. The air was so heavy and wet that everyone (except the oxen) shivered and fretted. The horses hated the trip, as did Hime, who hung her head and vomited for the duration. Nakara pointed out sights to her at first, hoping to distract her: the home of the great kami Kashima, the Aze passage, the Island of Nine Shrines. Later, when it became clear that Hime had no attention for such things, she left her alone. By the time they landed on Enoura inlet in the purple light of dusk on snow, Hime was too weak to walk, and had to be carried ashore, still retching helplessly. She was barely conscious when Nakara’s women wrapped her in clean, dry robes and tucked her into a little curtained enclosure at the center of a room.
Hime awoke in the rat’s hour, in warmth and darkness. For a moment everything was all right; she had been sick, but now she lay close to her mother’s nipples, a sister cuddled next to her, other kittens pressing her down. She nestled closer, and Nakara sighed in her ear.
She was not home; she was not that kitten. The smells were wrong; the warm weight was robes heaped over her. Hime had been alone since her mother died. Her cousins and aunts had not cared deeply about her—cats came, cats went; only the fudoki remained—but even they were gone. A guardsman had scratched the ground before her, coaxing. She became a woman: a peasant with a necklace of ducks offered help; a farmer’s wife took her hand and asked who she was. A provincial woman asked for her company. That was all the contact she had had.
If she had remained a cat, I do not think she would have seen just how alone she was. But she was not a cat, not entirely anyway. She made a single sob, and bit her lip to silence it.
“It’s all right,” Nakara said softly: awake. “We’re on land now. Go back to sleep. You’ll feel better in the morn
ing.”
“No,” Hime said, “I won’t,” and she cried and could not stop.
When her eyes wept blood and her sleeves were soaked through, she at last calmed and spoke a little, of her mother’s death, and her home burning down, and her time alone on the Tkaid since then. She never explained that she was a cat, for it didn’t occur to her that it would matter. Nakara listened and held her until the sobs were finished, and she lay limp in Nakara’s arms.
At last Nakara said, “What are you?”
Hime said, “Nothing and no one.”
“I understand a little, what it is to be so alone,” Nakara said.
“How can you? None of this is right.” Hime shook her head, and tears flew.
Nakara leaned back. “I will tell you a tale, and you can decide whether I might know. It’s about a girl who woke up one day and found herself nursemaid to a family in Hida prefecture. She remembered nothing before that morning. No: she woke up and there she was. There was a father and a mother and their son and servants and gardens, and everything was just the way you’d expect.” She paused for a moment, and pressed her cheek to the top of Hime’s head.
“But it wasn’t normal, not really, because in the corner of her eyes, the girl caught glimpses of something different—foxes and bare dirt and rainwater in a fallen leaf. She feared that she was just part of the illusion, and she cried herself to sleep every night over this. You think you are the first one to look around her and realize that she has nothing, no one?” Nakara’s laugh was brief. “You are at least real.
“After a time, she made up little stories about the life she wished were hers. She would be from a long way away, Hitachi province, maybe; and she would have parents who loved her, and brothers even; and she would have a hundred interests and a thousand friends, and they would all be real.
“And then there was a crisis, and all that was left was herself and the boy. She brought him to Hitachi province, and found it all just the way she dreamt: parents and brothers and home and horses. But she will never know whether she somehow made these things, or whether she was remembering what had always been there.”
No more was said. Woman and cat-woman watched the brazier coals fade. Sleep came eventually.
We all cry all the time at court, and anything may set us off: a particularly delicate sunset, a sika deer calling to his wife, the purity of the lady Izumi’s calligraphy. The disadvantage to this is that at times of great sorrow, we have no deeper expressions of grief than those we have already used for a thousand more trivial matters. I think this is why the women in all those tales died at the end. If the cherry blossoms move me to tears, then there was nothing intense enough to express my sorrow at losing my golden-eyed lover. Except for death.
I did not die, of course. I am a princess, descendant of gods, granddaughter and daughter and half-sister and aunt and great-aunt to emperors. We do not die for pretty young men who leave for their homes with only a scrawled note, with not even an attempt at elegant writing or a thoughtful poem. (I will miss you, it said. You would have loved my home. I wish… and no more.) I still wept at all the appropriate sights (moons and cherry blossoms), and never mentioned him to anyone. But there were nights when my woman Shigeko held me, and stifled my sobs against her robes until the tears, the true tears, the ones that taste like poison and leave one sick and light-headed, were past.
I have reached an age where I have known many people, but by now more of them are dead than alive. I look for them in the young people at court—hoping to catch a certain expression, or the movement of a head turning, that reminds me of someone I knew long ago. Sometimes it is there, but often as not this is because the young woman I see is the daughter (or granddaughter) of the woman I once knew.
Every cat is an echo of the first cat I knew, the little nun, Shisutko. She remained as independent-minded as a scholar, but as she grew older, she began to spend more of her time with me and my women, curled up as close to the braziers as we allowed; for we could not believe that she would not inadvertently set herself afire, despite all the years of proof to the contrary. She caught less of her own food, relying instead on the bits of fish and fowl that we set aside for her in a little pewter bowl that eventually came to be used for no other purpose. She still had her wild moments, when she bolted from end to end of a room or across the garden. Her tail took ten thousand positions, each like a rapid brush stroke—the fluid calligraphy of a cat’s life.
Certain cold nights she slipped between my curtains and coiled herself into a tight little knot on my bed robes. She did not like to be stroked much, but in these quiet hours, she permitted my touch and even purred under my hand. She was always gone by morning, but I cherished this shared secret we had.
There came a time when she moved only reluctantly, remaining always in my rooms, straying only as far as my verandas to raise her face to the sun’s warmth. She stopped eating and developed a growth on her shoulder. “A tumor,” said one of my women, whose family had cats and understood these things. “They get them, just as people do.”
I kneaded the lump, a strange solid contrast to her dry fur and the skin thin as bird’s skin that hung from her stick-like bones. “Then she will die.”
“Oh, yes, my lady. I am so sorry.”
And it was twilight one day in the ninth month, and the world was shades of dim purple, like my subtlest robes. The little nun stepped slowly off the veranda to a stone, and then to the round gravel of my courtyard, her fur taking on the same lilac tones as the air. She made her unsteady way toward the mossy shadows beneath a copse of red and white pine in the gardens. “Wait—” I said to her, but she was well beyond the sound of my voice, and had never attended me in any case. She paused for a moment at the copse’s edge to carefully sniff some small bush; and then she stepped tidily into the darkness, and did not return.
Strange that it has been fifty years since she died, and she was a mere cat—and hardly affectionate—and yet her death moves me as even my half-brother Shirakawa’s does not. Perhaps this is because I was young then and death was a strange land to me, a place farther than India even. Now that I am old, I know so many more people who are dead, and am myself so close to death that it no longer shocks me.
(I lie. Shirakawa does not affect me because I dare not let it. I still need my strength.)
Do not misinterpret. I am still terrified of death—terrified. If I thought anything could postpone it, even for a day, I would do that thing. I would give a thousand mirrors to the shrine at Izumo; I would write with my own hand a thousand sutras. But, unlike Kagaya-hime, the gods do not speak to me. Is there a Pure Land, hells, demons and Buddhas and bodhisattvas? Will my soul return reincarnated, perhaps with Dmei, lovers for a thousand lives?
6. The Genji-Poem Scroll
I can’t imagine what I was thinking, keeping this paper for so many years—though I can see why I have not used it before this. I was never a lover of spring colors, and the scroll is busy with silver leaves and pale gray poems, an intimidating background to any words I might choose to record. Why would I write on something that is so obviously full of its own importance? But my eyesight is not what it was; the poems are mere patterns to me now, no more meaningful than the paw-marks of a restless cat on a rainy day.
I take a private joy in admitting this here, on paper; for my conversations have been all about poetry, lately. I have a former attendant visiting, a woman I have not seen in some years. She married a Kaya, and has been for some time off in the backwoods somewhere—Hida province? Shinano? Evidently her marriage is a trial, and she has left her husband and returned here. I invited her for a visit, grateful for her company, since Shigeko has a kaze-cold and is staying with a nephew somewhere on Nij avenue until she has recovered. My guest’s faith in the proprieties is touching: she is careful with her robe combinations and poetic allusions, as if such things mattered in the long run. This would be irritating if her critical eyes ever turned outward, but she judges no one save herself.
I say whatever comes to mind in my conversations with her, but there are times she thinks I speak in poems. I stifle a smile, for this seems to be all the difference between a poem and a statement, or a poem and a background pattern on scroll’s paper: intention. And she can scarcely be thirty, too young to have learned that the intention is what matters.
It was a beautiful day when the Osa Hitachi party came at last to Hitachi province. Hime woke to bright daylight filtering down from the eave openings. The other women were awake and gone, but she heard shouts and laughing screams from outside. She stretched, and waited through the moment of grief she felt every morning, when she realized that she was still a woman, still with no ground and no fudoki, still alone. When her eyes stopped burning, she went outside.
Enoura was a posting station, and a fishing and farming village. Enoura inlet bordered them to the south, its open water nearly hidden by a tissue of mist, the only proof that there was any warmth in the thin sunlight. The houses of the village were large, with room under their roofs for cattle and sheep, though most animals (and people) were out, tramping through the stripped rice fields just up the hill from the inlet, hoping to find some overlooked treasure. A small fenced enclosure contained the border shrine, though the gate was open.
Nakara and her women stood at the covered well before the shrine’s entrance. They dipped water from a bucket and threatened one another with it as if they were still children. As Hime approached, they settled down at last, and each washed her mouth and hands and clapped and bowed to the east.
“The god Kashima,” Nakara explained when Hime was close enough. Recognizing the wariness that protected Hime’s heart, she said nothing of the night’s tears. “Agh, that’s cold. I think my teeth will crack. Do you want to—?”