by Nogami Yaeko
Riki, of course, hadn’t known Rikyū when he was younger. But often she would stare at Kisaburō and say, “So much like you,” trying to find Rikyū’s younger days in her son. Sometimes she would ask Kisaburō to try to be more like his father, which only made him angrier.
Kisaburō loved his mother unconditionally, but when she asked him to be more like Rikyū he almost hated her. He wanted to believe that he was fine just being himself, and that there was no need for him to try to be more like his father. But the similarity was there, and he couldn’t escape it. He was afraid that as he got older, he would start to take on some of Rikyū’s weaknesses as well.
Certainly, he could study tea more seriously, and if he applied himself he could become a tea teacher like his father. If he were given his father’s social status, he could be Rikyū reborn. He couldn’t imagine a worse fate.
Although it was childish, he was envious that nobody ever talked about his brothers resembling Rikyū. His oldest brother, Dōan, still practiced tea despite his rheumatism, and Shōan was enjoying himself, living an unrestrained life even while making excuses for his behavior. What kind of life did that leave for Kisaburō?
“I’m not good enough at tea to become a respected teacher on my own merit,” he mused out loud. “But I don’t want to get a position just because of my father. If I wanted to follow in his footsteps, I might as well just take over the family business and become a merchant. I could have a wife who was pushed on me by my parents and have three or four children. When the dawn comes, the morning comes, and then the dusk, and then the night. There’s a new year, then the Bon festival, then the Osuwasama festival, and that cycle would become my whole life. If I had to live that way, I might as well just fall into a ditch somewhere. Once a person is born, his ultimate fate is death. But in between, there are no rules for living, and there are many ways to live. The value and joy in living is being able to live on one’s own terms.”
All of those things ran through his mind, but he was no closer to understanding what kind of life he wanted. His unsettled mind kept slipping, as if he were trying to hold onto an oiled pole. His impatient thoughts kept coming back to the same idea, that he was not where he belonged, or doing the things he was meant to do.
He wanted to strike out from his house in Sakai and keep going until he had crossed the ocean. It didn’t matter if the ship was bound for Europe, the South Seas, Korea, China, or India, as long as whatever he found there was a completely different life. He would be able to tear off the invisible masks he had been collecting since he was born and become a fresh, new person. Just as the cicada crying from the treetops had no relation to its cast-off skin, he would no longer be related to his father’s name.
While he had been sitting in his uncle’s office, it had gotten dark. Stars appeared sparsely up in the sky. The garden had been painted in the monotone hues of night. Even now, as he leaned against the white window screen, the hidden thoughts revealed by Ochika’s question were still feeding his daydreams of another life. He knew there was a lamp on a stand next to the shelf, but he didn’t feel like picking up a flint. He didn’t even notice the sound of footsteps by the entrance as his uncle brought two of his students home.
“Kī-san, are you sitting in the dark?” Ochika’s bright voice came to his ears from another part of the house. “Your uncle has come back. Why don’t you come out?”
Kisaburō hastily got up and went to greet his uncle. Yahei, who had already changed into a house robe dyed with a design of a big flower inside a diamond, smiled affectionately at his nephew standing in the hallway. “Hello, Kisaburō. I’m sorry I wasn’t home when you arrived. I heard you’re leaving the day after tomorrow. Are you feeling better? Oh, you must be better. That’s good. But next time you should plan to stay longer. Or I might be able to visit you sometime soon.”
“You haven’t visited us for a long time. Do you have business in Kyōto?”
“As you know, the new play Vengeance on Akechi is finally finished. I may have a chance to take part in the performance of the play at Jurakudai.”
“Oh, that’s great. How did the play turn out?”
“I can tell you, but I need to eat something first. The fellows from Kishiwada were insane. They claimed that at our Noh practices we only do our favorite plays instead of practicing our entire repertoire, so we had to do the full thirty-six plays. We were chanting for two days from morning to night. Even when we stopped to eat, our stomachs didn’t have time to digest the food.” His trained voice, with its wide range, echoed throughout the house. He called to Ochika, “Isn’t dinner ready yet? Just fix something quickly. Tonight we have students who need to eat, too.”
Ochika’s high-pitched voice answered him like an echo over a valley, not at all affected by Yahei. “The food is ready and on the table, and there’s more than enough for the students.”
Kisaburō enjoyed the unrestrained atmosphere more than the unusual food. From the kitchen, diagonally opposite the middle hall, came the scent of rich frying oil, garlic, and exotic spices that couldn’t be smelled in any other house in Sakai or Fushinan. That smell existed only in his uncle’s house.
After dinner, Kisaburō took the night boat from Tenma in Ōsaka back to Fushimi. It was close to noon the next day when he finally entered his father’s house in Jurakudai.
Rikyū wasn’t there, but it looked as though there had just been some kind of tea gathering. His mother was cleaning up the four-and-a-half-mat tearoom. Rikyū preferred to host these gatherings by himself, but if he needed assistance, the only one allowed to help him was Riki.
“I’m back,” Kisaburō announced, coming into the room through the host’s entrance and crouching with one knee on the floor.
Riki spun around as if she’d been frightened by her son’s voice. She was very pale. He wondered if she had been ill while he was away. She looked so tired and drawn, and it wasn’t like her to be startled so easily. “What’s the matter with you? Mother, is there anything wrong?”
“‘Wrong’ isn’t the word for it.” At a loss to explain what had happened, her mind fastened on her usual reproaches, in which there was barely concealed anger. Why had it taken him so long to get home? It couldn’t be helped that he was sick and in bed, but he should have come home as soon as he got better. “What were you doing for ten days? You must have been enjoying yourself, not thinking about how worried I was. You probably went to Daikumachi, didn’t you?”
Kisaburō was used to handling those types of questions. He didn’t make excuses, or try to change the subject back to what was wrong with his mother. Looking around, he saw a daisu, a two-tiered stand used for formal tea gatherings. He realized that it must have been a special tea today. From the kettle with a hail design on its surface to the cold-water jar, the ladle holder, the lid-rest, and the waste-water bowl, the arrangement showed more care than usual. His father seldom used that small, eggplant-shaped tea container and that white tenmoku-ware tea bowl. Kisaburō took note of each item carefully, just as he did when he was the host’s assistant at a gathering. He watched his mother carefully wipe a small, square red lacquer tray with a carved design and put the tea container back in its white brocade bag. “You had a very special guest today, didn’t you?” he said, with studied casualness.
“Not really. We just had the usual four monks.”
Unsure of whom she meant, Kisaburō started to name the monks. When he mentioned Kokei, his mother’s eyes narrowed. She looked afraid to even hear the monk’s name mentioned.
“I heard that he was exiled from Daitokuji Temple,” she said in a husky, breathy voice. She wasn’t supposed to tell him, but she couldn’t hold the secret inside anymore. She didn’t know why Hideyoshi had suddenly cut off Kokei. “Your father isn’t the kind of man who talks about politics at home, as you know.” She understood that it was a man’s virtue to keep his public and private lives separate, but occasionally she thought Rikyū was too distant. Her faint resentment was hidden in her words.
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But as she started to talk, the enjoyment of gossiping with her son made her loosen up. Kokei had been exiled to far-off Kyūshū. Today’s tea gathering had been to bid him farewell. Besides Kokei, the guests had been two monks from Daitokuji Temple, called Shunoku and Gyokuho, and one from Miidera Temple, Hongakubō Senkō. When the tea was finished, the four monks had climbed into palanquins at the entrance to the garden and were carried off into the street. The gathering had been a secret, but as Rikyū stood there, watching the monks go, he had received a sudden summons from Hideyoshi. Rikyū hadn’t been scheduled to go to Jurakudai, but Hideyoshi wanted to see him right away.
The summons had scared Riki. If Hideyoshi had found out about the tea gathering, his temper was so uncertain that there was no telling how he would react. Her concern was reasonable, but Kisaburō responded calmly.
“Hideyoshi makes plans for Rikyū on a whim all the time.” He said it as if he was sure there was nothing amiss, and changed the topic to the steamed fish paste and marinated sea bream with miso that he had brought from Sakai. “Oseki told me that you particularly like steamed fish paste, and she had it prepared especially for you. We can have it for lunch.”
“Oh, your father likes it more than I do.” She smiled for the first time and said he could have lunch after they had cleaned up. As they were finishing and Kisaburō was about to leave the tearoom, she said, “Kisaburō, could you take the scroll from the tearoom and put it away? Your father asked me to do it.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s next to the dōkodana,” she said, referring to the small stand that Rikyū had used during the gathering.
Even without looking at the name on the top of the box in which the scroll was kept, Kisaburō knew it was the one by Kidō, a Zen monk who had lived at Keizan Temple in China at the end of the Southern Sung Dynasty. Rikyū had been looking after the scroll for Hideyoshi. It had been selected by its original owner, Ikushima, as an especially fine example of tea art, and the scroll was later known by the name Ikushima Kidō. Since he had bought it, Hideyoshi had been dissatisfied with the mounting and had ordered Rikyū to have it fixed. Now that it had been remounted, Rikyū must have been showing it to the tea guests, Kisaburō thought. There was nothing so unusual about that. Rikyū didn’t make much distinction between his own tea things and those belonging to Hideyoshi. It wasn’t the first time he had used Hideyoshi’s things without permission.
Instead of taking the scroll to the next room, Kisaburō sat down in front of the alcove and opened the box. He wanted to see how the mounting had changed; once Rikyū took the scroll back to Hideyoshi, Kisaburō would never have a chance to see this famous calligraphy again. But just as he started to untie the cord that bound the scroll, his mother returned from the kitchen.
“What are you doing, Kisaburō?” she screamed, as if she were experiencing a sharp physical pain. “I told you to put it away.”
His mother couldn’t tell him the reason for Kokei’s exile, and Rikyū, who came back from Jurakudai that night, didn’t mention it at all. Even when Kokei left for Kyūshū two days later, Rikyū didn’t say a word to Riki or Kisaburō. But the word on the street told Kisaburō more than he wanted to know.
People said the long grudge between Maeda Gen’i and Kokei was the hidden root of the problem. The direct cause was the building of Tenzuiji Temple in honor of the seventieth birthday of Hideyoshi’s mother. Kokei still held lingering resentment because he had never been granted his own temple. Then there was the issue of Tenzuiji’s name. Even though the temple was part of the Daitokuji Temple complex, it was named as if it was an independent temple, and that was something Kokei could not forgive. Maeda Gen’i said that Kokei’s complaints meant he had no respect for Hideyoshi’s authority. Sōkenin, the subtemple Kokei led, had been built in honor of Nobunaga, but its name still marked it as part of the greater Daitokuji Temple complex. Gen’i concluded that Kokei felt that Hideyoshi was exceeding his status by giving his temple an independent name, and that if being part of the Daitokuji Temple complex was good enough for Nobunaga, then it should be good enough for Hideyoshi also.
Ishida Mitsunari, who among Hideyoshi’s retainers was the closest to Maeda Gen’i, was quick to support Gen’i’s assertion. Mitsunari had been on guard against Kokei since Nobunaga’s funeral, when Hideyoshi had started favoring Daitokuji in general and Kokei in particular. The letter from Hideyoshi to Kokei donating land to build Tenshōji was still just a promise, which was a good way for Gen’i to keep Kokei’s status down and ignore his existence. Mitsunari didn’t want to lose the opportunity to discredit Kokei further. And one does not need two arrows to shoot one object. All Mitsunari had to let slip was that Kokei still considered Nobunaga to be higher in status than Hideyoshi. The arrow hit its mark. The decision to exile Kokei was made immediately.
Rikyū never talked about outside matters to his family, a fact that Riki resented, but Kisaburō’s keen, youthful senses sniffed out the relationship between his father and Mitsunari. On the surface, there was no hint of animosity, with both men showing the highest respect and friendliness to each other. But like hunters who cover their traps with small twigs, they skillfully concealed the depths of their true feelings. Their secret conflict was intertwined with the ill feeling between Kokei and Maeda Gen’i. Rikyū must have been stricken by Kokei’s exile as if he himself had been punished. Thinking about it, Kisaburō understood why Rikyū was even quieter than usual. And if he was silent in the house, he must have been the same in Jurakudai.
Kokei had been Rikyū’s instructor in Zen since Kokei moved to Sakai. Kokei was not only Rikyū’s student in tea, but his best friend, and Rikyū had been the one who introduced Kokei to Hideyoshi. Now Rikyū wasn’t even trying to defend Kokei in front of Hideyoshi, pretending that the matter had nothing to do with him. Kisaburō imagined that he was trying to be even more polite to Mitsunari and Gen’i than usual.
Kisaburō, who was a straightforward person, had trouble accepting that. Days later, he still remembered the moment when he had seen the scroll by Kidō sitting next to the tearoom shelf. Rikyū had purposely used the scroll for Kokei’s gathering before returning it to Hideyoshi. Kisaburō thought about how Rikyū had asked Riki to put the scroll away immediately after the gathering. It was atypical behavior for Rikyū, who was usually careful not to do anything that might offend Hideyoshi.
“It was his small protest against Hideyoshi.” But rather than feeling sympathy for his father, the thought only made Kisaburō impatient, and a bit contemptuous.
6
It was the beginning of October, and in the midst of blooming chrysanthemums and red-tinged maple leaves, the new Noh play Vengeance on Akechi was performed for the first time at Jurakudai. It wasn’t a full-scale presentation. Hideyoshi wanted to make the first official performance a splendid affair, and so he had invited the emperor and a variety of nobles and added other well-known plays. This was only a private showing, where Hideyoshi would demonstrate his skill at Noh by taking the lead role. The only people who received permission to attend were Hidenaga, Mitsunari, Gen’i, Ōmura Yūki—who had written the play—a retainer named Masuda, and some of Hideyoshi’s intellectual retainers, secretaries, pages, attendants, and tea masters.
The Noh stage at Jurakudai was a covered outdoor pavilion, separated from the main building by a broad swath of sand and small pebbles. The audience, perhaps a hundred people, sat in two large rooms inside the main structure, one for the male retainers and one for Hideyoshi’s wife, other important women, and their ladies-in-waiting. The paper sliding doors that normally served as one wall of the seating area had been taken away to give the audience a full view of the stage. To one side of the seating area were gold screens that protected the high-ranking female attendees from view.
In the distance, the two o’clock drum could be heard. As if on cue, the first flute player appeared on stage, followed by one musician with a small hand drum and another with a large hand drum. They proceeded
down the bridge that led to the back of the main stage and sat in front of the backdrop, which was painted with one pine tree. As soon as they were seated, a door opened at the back of the stage, at the right, and the chorus entered, arranging themselves in two rows on the right of the stage. The musicians and chorus members were wearing formal samurai costumes (suō) and hats (eboshi). A man with classically handsome features sat in the middle of the second row. He was Konparu Tayū Hachirō, Hideyoshi’s favorite Noh actor. Torigai Yahei was sitting on the end of the front row. On the far left side of the stage was Kurematsu Shinkurō, ready to assist the actors with costume changes and other backstage needs.
Once all the supporting players entered, the flutist raised his instrument from his right knee and laid it on his mouth. A cool, sharp sound flowed out, intertwining with the beat of the shoulder and hip drums. As the music hit its stride, the five-colored curtain at the end of the bridgeway opened swiftly. Hideyoshi entered in a warrior’s Noh costume wearing a hat that tied underneath his chin [orieboshi], a lined two-piece costume [kakehitatare] and a floor-length robe [atsuita] covered by wide, white kimono trousers [shiro ōkuchi], a sash, a small sword, and a fan. He was followed by an assistant carrying a sword and six actors playing soldiers wearing white headbands on their foreheads, sleeveless jackets [sobatsugi] to represent armor, long robes [atsuita] covered with wide, white kimono trousers [shiro ōkuchi], and sashes and swords at their waists. The way Hideyoshi moved on stage was careless, as if he were walking across an ordinary room, but at least he followed the correct sequence of steps as he walked along the bridge to stand in the middle of the main stage.
As the actors playing the soldiers lined up next to him, he started to chant in a strong, carrying voice. “Hurry, hurry, my horse. My mind is far away.” As he came forward to recite the next line, stating the character he was playing, his voice held a surprising vigor. “I am Hashiba Chikuzennokami Hideyoshi,” he began, using the name he had held when he served Nobunaga. “I was ordered to attack the western countries by our lord Shōgun Nobunaga. Since the spring of the tenth year of Tenshō, I have been fighting to conquer the province of Bicchū. I was informed that Akechi Mitsuhide rebelled against Nobunaga and killed him. I am speeding on my way to sever Akechi’s head. The time is the beginning of the sixth month. Having many enemies on my heels …” He continued to chant, setting the scene for the coming action. “It’s three a.m. We have just passed the Akashi lagoon, the beaches of Suma, the Nunobiki waterfall that empties into the wide seas of Ashiya, and the Naniwa inlet, arriving at the Serigawa River … Let’s gather our soldiers here. We can plunge into the midst of our enemies and kill the betrayer as an offering for our lord’s memorial service.” He sat on the stool that Shinkurō had carried onto the stage for him and shouted, “Is anybody there?”