by Givens John
Neither of the samurai said anything.
Ready for whatever the world offers. And if it doesn’t offer anything, then you go take what’s yours.
Nothing’s yours, said Koda.
The boy smirked at that. You’d be surprised.
About what?
What I can do and how well I can do it.
They drove him away and were still debating whether to continue on to the next waystation when the merchant’s caravan came into view, and this time there was an opportunity for employment. Part of their consignment had to be re-routed to a castle town up in the mountains. It was a day there and a day back. The main body of the caravan would continue on in the direction they were going, but the merchants had decided they didn’t want to split their defensive contingent.
One silver, said Hasegawa.
The head merchant gazed up the road, once again his expression that of a thoughtful man considering his options although there was nothing out there but forests and rivers, and they all knew it. One silver each, Hasegawa said.
Two days later they were back at White Rock Village with money to spend, but the innkeeper hadn’t changed his opinion of them. He said he wouldn’t tolerate troublemakers. He said he was firm in his principles. The two samurai stood in the slanting orange light at the end of the summer day and were told that the innkeeper’s bullies had caught a sneak thief that very morning and taken him down to an old quarry and crushed him.
What did he steal?
He didn’t get anything.
You caught him in the act?
We caught him before he could even start.
Hasegawa and Koda went down to the quarry. The feral boy lay there still, heaped with a pile of rock slabs that had been added one upon the next. His head had been left exposed for the amusement of his tormentors; and his face was swollen and blackened like an overlooked melon, the eyes encrusted by death, nostrils clotted with dried blood, his gaping mouth active with foraging insects.
That was always going to happen to him, Koda said. One way or another.
Hasegawa said nothing.
Doesn’t make you feel any better about it though.
No, it doesn’t.
Koda hunkered down beside the corpse. He picked up one of the rocks and hefted it like an evil-day compiler confirming a supposition. He replaced it as it had been.
Hasegawa thought that a flask of the local rice wine might improve their mood even if they had to drink it on the veranda.
He poured for Koda and drank his own cup then refilled it and placed it on the table then refilled Koda’s cup too. Both men looked at their cups then picked them up and drank. Hard way to die, Hasegawa said.
Koda sat across from him and said nothing. A squad of drovers had also been denied admission, and they sat at the far end of the veranda sharing a double-flask. The inn’s public room was deserted. Most of the loose tables had been fitted together into a single row down the centre, as if anticipating the advent of banqueters.
So I guess you don’t think about dying like that?
I don’t care about it much, Viper Koda said.
You mean you don’t want to talk about it?
I mean I don’t care about it.
So what do you care about?
Where those bullies are tonight.
I guess we could ask the innkeeper.
I intend to, Koda said.
Hasegawa poured their cups full and they both drank. You don’t ever think about how here you are in the midst of the facts of the world, all of it in its wonder and beauty, and then a rock’s placed on you and you feel it, and then another one and you feel its weight too, and then another one and another one, and then you’re here less, and then you’re here even less, and then you aren’t here at all.
No, Koda said.
I think about things like that, said Hasegawa. About how that gap, that crossing-point, can never be rectified in any way.
Koda looked at him sullenly. I guess yours is chatty wine.
I guess we’re drinking out of the same pot.
Koda said nothing. His anger was like a small vicious animal he was feeding.
Just that I think about things like that, what it’s like…
The innkeeper brought out two bowls of mountain gruel. Koda stared at the portion placed before him as if it were an obstacle to be surmounted.
It’s not like anything, Koda said. Just instant after instant after instant. Each complete in itself. Death’s what people who are afraid call their fear. Something you can use. Like an implement, a handle. It’s what scares some fool of a sword-swinger into attacking with his feet placed wrong. Coming in too soon or too high. Follow-through all tangled up in panic.
Hasegawa finished his bowl and set it aside. Koda hadn’t even touched his. Hasegawa drank another cup of wine then poured it full again, but his friend had stopped drinking too. You can’t say it didn’t matter to him, said Hasegawa. Feeling each rock added on.
Of course it mattered. But there’s nothing there. Just a breath that doesn’t finish itself.
Hasegawa drank again then refilled his cup. Most people can’t live that way.
Koda looked down at his full bowl. Most people don’t live much of any way at all.
So then what were you wondering about down there?
Koda shoved his bowl away. How long they waited between rocks.
The innkeeper made it as far as the road but lost his footing and went down hard. He lay there screeching.
Viper Koda landed on him with a slash knife. I asked you to tell me something. You didn’t do it.
I don’t know where they are, the innkeeper cried.
They coming back?
Maybe. I don’t know…
If I cut your neck it help you remember?
Usually they’ll be around for some part of the evening.
Why don’t you send somebody to find them? Why don’t you tell them their presence is required?
I don’t want to be involved in this, said the innkeeper.
You are involved. You got involved on the day you were born.
The bullies knew what it was, but they thought they could handle it. It was six against two. They spread out and came in at odd angles, but Koda the Viper caught the first one and opened him across the midsection with his too-long sword.
The man gasped and dropped to his knees, blood-slobber sliding out between his hands as he tried to catch the slimy loops of intestines that came slithering out over his wrists and down onto his thighs. The man beside him sat down with his head in his lap, his mouth gaped open and blood bubbling up out of his neck-stump.
Hasegawa had blocked any chance for escape, and the four remaining bullies threw down their swords and pled for peace.
Hasegawa and Koda made the innkeeper come too.
They had a couple of hand lanterns to see by, and the bullies were required to use their swords and knives to dig a hole for the feral boy. Once they had it deep enough, they pulled apart the rock cairn then placed his body in the grave.
I want it filled with dirt, Koda said. Then I want those rocks put on it properly.
Afterwards, the two rogue samurai continued up the road in the dark and bivouacked in a grove. They didn’t think the bullies would be coming after them, but the decision not to kill them meant they might.
I didn’t much like him, Koda said, and Hasegawa said, Neither did I.
But it wasn’t right.
No, it wasn’t.
They sat staring in silence at their comfort-fire, then Koda said, We should’ve made that innkeeper forfeit a cask of wine.
We’d have to carry it…
And a horse, too, Old Koda said. Just to get it to wherever we’re going.
UNDER BLOSSOMING BOUGHS
Ohasu went upstairs to collect the scarlet underskirts herself.
A single wild cherry tree had emerged from the pre-dawn mists shrouding the moorlands, sparsely covered with blossoms and insignificant when compared to
the grand cherry trees that grew inside the walls of the pleasure quarters. No one but her seemed even to have noticed the little tree, and Ohasu stood at the railing of the rooftop laundry platform and took comfort in its flowering, for she too often went unnoticed.
A small packet in her robe sleeve contained a gift from her patron. The gel cubes of candied agar-agar were the colour of the spring sea: limpid, glistening, and dusted with honey crystals like flecks of sunlight. Ohasu had been a child with neither breasts nor shame-hair when her patron began visiting her. She had wept at first but eventually stopped weeping, and she had learned where to place her fingers and how to use her lips although she was judged too small and too melancholy for an age that celebrated cheerful brightness. Her patron had remained steadfast for the most part, however, indulging himself only occasionally with other girls; but the years had passed, his courting become feeble, and although Ohasu still tried to encourage him with smutty gossip and loose sashes, sustaining the throb of love’s urgency was beyond the old fellow now, and most visits ended with him sinking to the bottom of a wine pot.
Ohasu checked the underskirts to make sure they were dry, then selected one of the cubes of agar-agar.
Her patron had watched her copying poems into a pillow book one night and told her that only by seeing into the true heart of a matter could you write about it. He said the great haikai poet Bashō himself often said it.
Ohasu had wondered how you could be certain that what you were seeing was really the heart. She pressed the yielding lump of gel against the roof of her mouth and felt it dissolve in a flood of sweetness. What if inside one heart you found another? Smaller, quieter, even more frightened?
There had been a wild cherry tree near her childhood home, and she used to play under it while her mother worked in the fields. She would make twig dolls and wrap them in mulberry-bark robes she stained with berry juices. But that world had ended and this one replaced it, and not even the beauty of seasonal changes could compensate her for what had been lost.
Ohasu smoothed out the scarlet underskirts they would wear that day then folded them neatly. She popped another candy in her mouth and hurried back downstairs.
Spring arrives
in the faint haze that wreathes these nameless hills.
HIS EYES OPENED TO THE GLOW of a sun not yet risen. The air was dry and cool and still, and he listened for the first stirrings of neighbours then sat up and slid open his white paper doors.
Dew coated the planks of the narrow veranda-corridor. The leaves of the potted camellia were beaded white with it, and Old Master Bashō breathed deeply in the dawn air, his thin chest lifting and falling with the exaggerated effort he associated with good health. He lived alone now but still wondered at times what it would be like to share his cottage with another. His last acolyte had disappointed him by asking to be allowed to apprentice himself to a playwright known for his vivid imagination.
The day’s radiance had begun seeping up into low clouds that were strung like peach-coloured banners above the shogun’s metropolis. Droplets of water fell back into the communal well, reminding the old poet of the familiar yearning to insert himself into the world and say what could truly be said about it.
Actors stamping and flapping and shouting imprecations. Gaudy costumes. Painted faces. Improbable coincidences leading to unlikely resolutions. Better by far to be an old man alone in a hovel, abandoned, gnawing on a fish bone.
He smiled at the hyperbole but also enjoyed the bitterness of it.
So, the sound of the falling water in the well and the sound of rain on the broad, raggedy leaves of the plantain growing at his front gate…
Or the scent of rain arriving in dust. Or the colour of rain shimmering in a hardwood forest. Or the shape of wind-driven rain striding across empty moorlands…
Or of rain lacing the river to the sky. Or pocking sleet floating on the surface of an old pond…
Or, rather, how rain in a rooftop collection barrel leaks out onto the roof tiles, the stillness of it understood at the moment of its interruption. Or, better still, the murmur of rain dripping into the tub of scouring ash kept at the scullery door: not what it’s like but what it is…
He turned away, dissatisfied with his inability to resist endless elaboration, and sought refuge from himself in the magnificent cherry tree blooming in his neighbour’s garden.
One heavily laden branch hung over the back fence, the shell-pink clouds of blossoms glowing in the misty light with a delicate and preemptive beauty. He studied the unmoving masses of flowers then closed his eyes to see the image more intensely; and as he did so, a temple bell sounded in the distance, the long, slow, mournful reverberations like the voice of the Earth itself, reminding him of things he remembered and things he’d forgotten.
Clouds of cherry blossoms,
is the temple bell at Ueno? At Asakusa?
THE WIFE OF THE TEAHOUSE PROPRIETOR believed in the virtue of steady accumulation. Those who placed their trust in the possibility of an unanticipated windfall profit were fools in her opinion, although she seldom said as much because her own husband was just such an improvident person, and nothing could be done about it.
Your services have been requested, the wife declared to the three girls kneeling before her. For a picnic outing on the riverbank under blossoming boughs. Merchants. Shogunate officials. And a poet.
The wife knew that pleasure seekers considered Oyuki indefatigable and Osome silly but pliable. Little Ohasu had seemed an odd choice, however. Older visitors enjoyed the girl’s fondness for linked poetry so probably the presence of the great Bashō explained her inclusion.
If they tell you to dance, sway like willows in a gentle breeze. Let the softness of the season suggest love’s languor. Your time has been purchased, but other arrangements have not been made. Let your sleeves hang long, loosen your bodices. They will wish to feel like superior beings. Ease them into it.
The proprietor’s wife paused to make certain the girls understood her instructions.
You are to imply that more is available than might have been thought. Precious secrets, hidden mysteries. You are to suggest that your natural willingness to conform to the desires of others is impeded by constraints over which you yourselves have no control. You are to assure your guests that only here within the walls of the New Yoshiwara can the deeper hues of the colours of spring be revealed. Is this clear?
No one replied, and the scullery maid waiting in the doorway used this silence to announce that morning gruel was ready.
Is there anything about this you don’t understand?
The three girls looked down meekly at their hands, Osome and Oyuki contemplating breakfast, and Ohasu wondering if she would have time to prepare a few stanzas of her own for the day’s linked poem.
How envious:
mountain cherries north of this floating world.
OLD MASTER BASHō DRIBBLED a splash of water into the well of his inkstone then began rubbing his ink stick on its upper slope, the sour-dark scent of blackness rising into the splendid pink glow of his neighbour’s cherry tree.
He had intended to edit his travel journal from the previous year; but the prose sketches of places visited and the stanzas written in praise of them now seemed lifeless to him, like objects draped with cloths so that their shapes remained even as the things themselves became obscured. What he wanted was to make statements about the world that deserved to exist in it. But ideas accumulated, images multiplied, and even as he struggled to cut out unneeded phrases, new ones occurred to him. Better ones. Different ones…
Neighbours began shoving their night shutters into the wooden frame-holders, the swish-crack, swish-crack like the sound of loud counting.
His boy used to complain about it. He said it was too noisy for delicate ears. But the young fool soon would be prancing about on stage dressed in a woman’s robe and wearing a wig, smirking at shouts of approval from bumpkin samurai and pouting flirtatiously. Delicacy indeed.
Old Bashō bent to his task. He would need a hokku head stanza to start today’s poem. The merchants who funded him styled themselves as followers of the way of haikai linked poetry, although for them it was just an amusing pastime. He had the last half of an idea – Nothing you own is yours – but no good image to introduce it; and as he pondered various options, the first tentative squawks of a bean-curd vendor’s horn sounded in the distance, lonely as a heron’s cry and reminding him of his own irrelevance.
Recollecting various things:
the blooming of cherry blossoms.
BLOOD-RED SOUL BANNERS HUNG in a swollen mass under the eaves of the shrine for the unborn, the newer ones still bright with pain.
Osome went on ahead to the baths, but Ohasu waited with Oyuki as she bowed in the sanctuary and clapped twice to call her losses to her. On this day too I ask for your forgiveness.
Ohasu never became pregnant. She didn’t know why and she didn’t know whether she should feel relief or regret, but suspected that one day it would be the latter.
You who never were will never cease to be for me. Oyuki’s face was shadowed by the tumourous red bundle suspended above her. Although supplications inked onto the newer strips were still legible, none of the soul banners carried a name. The unborn were like bits of foam floating anonymously as they transited to the yellow springs of hell. On your behalf I call for the relief of the pure promise of the Lotus Sutra. And also in the name of the Jizō Bodhisattva, I request it for you.
Oyuki had been betrayed by a lover she trusted. He was the son of a rich trader and famous in the pleasure quarters for wearing robes and sashes secretly lined with exotic silks. The insides of his sleeves might show a pale apricot when folded back, a dark cinnabar, a rufous gold, or even the luscious gleam of ripe pomegranate seeds. Oyuki had given this Second Genji whatever he asked for – her money, her love, the best of the gifts she received – and he had pledged to redeem her contract one day and set her up in a cottage near his family mansion. But his father had betrothed him to the only child of a soy-brewing magnate from the west; and although the lovers had soaked their sleeves with weeping, Oyuki was left alone in Edo while her heart’s desire trudged off to assume his bride’s name, her father’s fortune, and the duties of family progenitor.