by Givens John
Except Oyuki hadn’t been left quite alone enough, and the abortifacient she took made her sick for weeks.
If the Second Genji had felt oppressed by his new responsibilities as adopted heir, he soon discovered the solace that could be obtained in the pleasure quarters of Kyoto. Carnal novelties filled his nights and days. Endurance matched invention; observers became participants; and outrageous tales of concupiscent glory reached Edo eventually, so that for Oyuki, the memory of the taste of his love on her lips became like that of bitter radish.
It’s not much, said Oyuki as the two young women continued down to the baths. To offer such prayers.
Perhaps not, said Ohasu. But they hear you.
Empty words, said Oyuki.
Perhaps. But there’s comfort in them.
A bush warbler
shits on the rice cakes at the end of the veranda.
CHERRY PETALS FILTERED DOWN like flickering chips of pink light.
Lovely, yes, Oyuki said. She inserted the bridge then twisted the middle tuning peg of her samisen, the plucked note rising as the silk string tautened. But they won’t last the night.
No. Ohasu gazed out at the spring river thudding past, the heavy flow reaching the grassy edge of the riverbank. It’s the end of the season.
Talk that Old Master Bashō’s followers wanted him to take on a housekeeper had reached the ears of the proprietor’s wife, and she had spoken with Ohasu as the girls awaited their palanquins.
Make yourself agreeable, the wife had told her. Show them how well you can obey.
Disposing of Ohasu while recovering the cost of her contract would be viewed as a double blessing by the teahouse, for undesired pleasure providers soon became a burden.
Speak in a mild voice, the wife had said. Don’t interrupt the gentlemen when they are composing their poems, and don’t offer any ideas of your own. But do try to find out who will make the final decision.
Oyuki flipped her sleeves back then began adjusting the top and bottom pegs, sending those tones too soaring upwards into the pink light of the cherry blossoms above them. Osome must be lost, she said, and Ohasu nodded but said nothing.
She would not disturb the Old Master in any way. She would rise early and do her chores quickly and quietly. She would clean and cook and serve food arranged beautifully on decorative platters; and when other poets visited, she would tuck herself away in a corner and listen as they discussed literary matters. Probably they wouldn’t even notice her. But if someone did ask her opinion about an image or a phrase, she would reply modestly but forthrightly, and they would realise that she was a person of substance.
Oyuki loosened her bodice as the merchants began arriving then shoved the neckband of her robe back away from her nape. Make them want it, she said, and plucked out the opening bars of a popular old remorse ballad, embellishing the arpeggios shamelessly, her skirt flap parting open as she swayed from side to side, revealing the inner slope of a white thigh.
Their guests were ruddy, well-fed men, each secure in the magnitude of his own accomplishments. The merchants’ robes were muted shades of beige and lavender, taupe and pale grey, as required by sumptuary regulations; but cunningly wrought ivory baubles dangled from silk cords on their sash pouches: a grinning skull, a rat on a rice bale, a sleeping cat, a sack of coins, a snake tied in a knot, and a rare hinged one of a pair of baboons squat-fucking, the realistic action of which was much admired by connoisseurs, who detected in the intricacy of its design and the audacity of its mechanism the epitome of the style of the Edo townsman.
The merchants had sent servants at dawn to encircle the area around one of the larger cherry trees with red-and-white-striped barrier curtains. All down the length of the riverbank other parties had done the same. Red felt ground-mats covered the grass, casks of rice wine stood against the trunks of every cherry tree, and black lacquer stacked-boxes of seasonal delicacies dominated the centre of each picnic site, along with tray tables arranged for the convenience of pleasure seekers.
At last! Osome pushed her way through the barrier curtains, her plump cheeks rosy. I couldn’t find a good bush! she cried breathlessly. Then I got lost coming back!
Osome waved a flowering branch of cherry blossoms like a dancer in the new-style kabuki theatre. And all these cherry trees look alike!
Oyuki whacked her samisen as if punctuating a dramatic entry, and Osome cocked her hip in a saucy pose then began singing, ‘Oh, come and look! What won’t you see?’ in a sweet if reedy voice.
Start again, said Oyuki, struggling with the unfamiliar melody; but Osome continued with, ‘Rice crackers, salmon crackers and…’ and I forget the rest of it.
She flopped down beside her companions, jarring apart the elaborate brocade mass of her front-tied sash knot. Next time I’ll just piss in those reeds down there, Osome said, smirking at her own foolishness.
The grassy scent of rice wine greeted Ohasu as she began filling the long-handled pourers. People thought she seemed older because she was so thin. But she would let it be known that she rarely became ill and still had all her teeth. And that because she was small, she wouldn’t take up much space.
A scattering of cherry petals spangled the lid of the wine cask, the pale pink flakes lovely against the reddish-brown lacquer surface. Ohasu was careful not to disturb them as she replaced the lid.
Osome came over to help, her collapsing sash knot clutched up against her midriff. Which one’s your poet? she whispered, then slipped in behind the tree to reconfigure herself.
He’s not here yet, Ohasu said.
And these are the ones who will decide it?
Perhaps some of them.
And you’ll go if requested?
It’s a matter of the price for my contract…
Of course. But if you do go, then you’ll have lots of opportunities to practice your poetry. Osome struggled with the stiff, new oversized knot, jerking it tighter then backing it off slightly. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?
Yes.
Under the trees, soup and fish salad too:
cherry blossoms.
PETAL FALL CONTINUED STEADILY throughout the afternoon. Every cherry tree on the riverbank had its crowd of revellers regretting the passing of the year’s most precious season, and consoling themselves with music and laughter, dancing and wine. The rising wind riffled the surface of the river, blew up dust on the cart tracks, and sent latecomers scurrying through pink swirls of cherry petals as they searched for an open space where they too could celebrate what was so poignantly ending.
Old Master Bashō accepted wine when it was offered but didn’t seem to mind when the pourers were commandeered by others. Osome heaped a dish with fish salad for him, and he smiled at the excess and declared he couldn’t finish even half that amount. Ohasu interceded. She selected a few of the choicest titbits and arranged them nicely for him.
Bashō sat by himself at the edge of the red felt ground-mat. He replied politely to queries about his well-being and commented on issues of local concern but volunteered nothing about himself and asked no questions about others. Ohasu watched him covertly. She thought he seemed exactly as he should be: subtle and self-assured.
You don’t need to control the source of supply, a provisioner to the shogunate claimed loudly, the wine making him boisterous, but you do need to control distribution. He held out his cup and Ohasu refilled it. Manage your carters, said the provisioner, watching Oyuki as she worked out the complexities of the rice crackers song. And your dockers too. Keep them sweet.
‘What won’t you see…’ Oyuki picked tentatively at the opening phrases, mistiming the tricky up-pluck syncopation. ‘Lips and … and tongue…’ She tried it again. ‘A husband’s lies and a something something and lips and … lips and … tongue…’ I just can’t get that part!
You’re too tentative, Ohasu said, starting around with the wine pourers again. Just jump at it.
Jump at it?
You have to make it bigger. Up quick th
en down hard.
Are you talking about me? asked a cotton merchant, his face flushed pink and his smile loose and easy.
Or you could cheat and finger-pluck it with your left hand, said Osome; but Ohasu said no, the next stroke still had to be timed properly. Up big then down. Ohasu chopped the beat with her free hand as if wielding a plectrum herself, and the cotton merchant tried his joke again. So, it’s a thing that goes up and gets hard then comes back down again? Whatever can it be?
Oyuki stroked out the first notes of a love song and sang, ‘Some men yearn to discover a shy beauty waiting under the blossoms…’ Then she released the tension in her centre string so the tone wilted in comic deflation. ‘And some to find her shame-place pink and slimy as the gill slits of a sea bass…’
What! shrieked Osome, and Ohasu laughed too. That’s smutty! she cried, glad that Old Master Bashō seemed not to have heard it.
You’re too much for me, said the cotton merchant, glancing around for allies. For all of us, the provisioner concluded approvingly. Girls swollen with the juices of spring.
Osome snapped off the tip of a blossoming branch then dropped to her knees beside the cotton merchant, wrenching her sash knot open and releasing it in a sudden surge of brocade that spilled down onto the man’s lap. ‘Oh, come and look, what won’t you see!’ Osome inserted the spray of pink flowers in his topknot. Who can be moderate under the blossoms? She twisted sideways then leaned against the cotton merchant to reconstruct her sash knot again, emitting little grunts of consternation at the effort required.
‘Orange and pink on the…’ No, it’s, ‘orange and pink on the … this and this!’ Oyuki hit the up-twang perfectly. She began it again, but no one seemed to be listening so she retuned her samisen and began strumming out the lugubrious opening bars of Green Willows Pink Blossoms, holding each note cluster solemnly before sliding on to the next.
‘Spring rain sad in the dripping green of the willows,’ Ohasu sang; and Oyuki joined in at, ‘Wetting my sleeves and the hems of my skirts, wetting the path as I walk on my weeping way;’ then Osome came in as they sang, ‘Sad spring rain in the lonely sadness of the willows,’ their plaited voices rising sweetly plaintive within the flickering pink lattices of falling cherry petals, while the merchants sprawled on their red felt mats discussed forward contracts and funding strategies as they sipped from their elegant wine cups, and the old poet on his own seemed aware of everything and nothing.
The bell fades,
but the scent of blossoms resonates in the evening.
THE MERCHANTS CARRIED OSOME off to see the evening cherry blossoms illuminated by bonfires suspended in iron baskets, but Old Master Bashō stayed behind at the picnic site. Ohasu poured for him. Despite the wife’s advice, she had prepared a few ideas on the chance that she might be invited to participate in the merchants’ linked poem that day; but they had tossed out stanza after stanza with the casual ease of boys flipping pebbles into a cistern, and the poem was quickly completed.
It seemed too easy, Ohasu said.
It was what they wanted. Old Master Bashō had made suggestions for improvements here and there, and he reworded a few awkward phrases, but the finished poem had met the aesthetic requirements of the fee payers.
Ohasu sat so as not to block his view of the river. Didn’t you hope for more?
The Old Master held out his cup and she poured for him. Does it matter?
Just that the blossoms will be mostly gone by tomorrow…
He drank again and thrust out his cup. That too is something over which I have no influence.
The rest of their party returned subdued. There’s a baby, Osome said.
A baby?
Floating in the shallows.
Ohasu and Oyuki followed Osome back to an inlet filled with rubbish and river foam. Servants at a nearby party had already waded out to retrieve the little corpse. It lay on the grassy bank, its umbilical cord still attached and the dead grey flesh spangled with cherry petals.
Osome clutched the front of her robe closed. It was a girl.
Yes.
Someone went to inform the abbot of a nearby Pure Land temple, and the others who were there soon began drifting off. Osome and Oyuki returned to the merchants’ party, but Ohasu remained, kneeling beside the tiny body, the two of them wound within the blowing swirls of falling cherry blossoms as the evening wind continued to strip the trees.
The Old Master came up behind her, his carry sack hooked over one shoulder. You couldn’t leave her here alone.
No.
She wouldn’t know.
I’d know.
Bashō told her he had waited all year for this day, determined to say what he truly felt about it. But all that had occurred to him were things remembered, phrases borrowed, images salvaged from previous failures. So his page remained blank. Perhaps it was better that way.
You don’t mean that, Ohasu said.
You’re telling me what I mean?
Ohasu gazed up at him then lowered her eyes. No, she said meekly.
If you love something in the way you describe it, then all you love is words.
Ohasu placed one hand on the baby’s chest. How would you describe her?
Bashō stood for a moment longer then began trudging up towards the embankment road, and Ohasu called after him. They said you might need a housekeeper…
Who said it?
Ohasu looked down at her hands, embarrassed by her boldness.
I need no such thing.
I would do what I was told. Then just sit in a corner and learn from what you taught others.
About what?
The art of poetry. So I can write truly about my life.
Who would read it?
My mother.
Then what you want to write is a letter, not a poem.
She’s dead.
He looked back at her. And that’s what you think poetry is?
Because I had no chance to say I forgave her…
Old Master Bashō regarded her silently then said, We all need forgiveness. But he also asked if she understood the requirements of the seasons, and Ohasu said she thought she knew most of them.
Only briefly above the cherry trees:
tonight’s moon.
THERE WAS DANCING THAT NIGHT, but it was the merchants who danced. They threw themselves about wildly, hopping and pivoting and waving their sleeves, executing clever steps and complicated figures, not all of which came off as intended.
Oyuki played the same tunes again and again, always willing to do whatever was asked of her, and Ohasu and Osome tapped on small hand drums and cried Hoi! Hoi! to encourage the merchants in their mad capering.
THE PALACE ORPHAN
Mugen Bonze carried a walking staff with a cluster of metal rings fitted at the top as a jingle warning for insects, and he halted when he reached the rogue samurai squatting alone by the roadside. Mugen’s pair of piebald goats stopped too.
Autumn’s the season for mountain rambling, said Mugen Bonze. High skies.
Hasegawa Torakage looked up at him then returned to tending his small comfort-fire.
Lean as a wind-dried mackerel, his robe patched and faded, the rogue samurai could have been mistaken for a common vagabond were it not for his matching pair of swords.
A good season for napping, too, said the bonze, and for reading instructive books.
Hasegawa’s feet and shins were flecked with dried blood, and the skirts of his robe were stained with it.
Mugen Bonze moved his goats over to the lush grass on the road verge opposite. He had a rice straw rope, and he tied the hind leg of one goat to the hind leg of the other. Good for eating yam gruel, too, said the bonze, and fried dumplings.
That keep them there? asked the samurai.
It confuses them. Makes them easier to catch.
Samurai without masters were unpredictable, and sensible people avoided them. But Mugen Bonze was on his way back to his solitary hermitage; and although he had chose
n the life of a recluse and wanted no other, he was a garrulous sort who enjoyed contact with his fellows.
You can carve a Buddha-image out of rotten wood, said Mugen whenever questions arose about his sociability. It’s still rotten. But it’s also still a Buddha.
The bonze told Hasegawa that he’d gone to preside at the funeral of a relative and come away in possession of the man’s goats. No one else had wanted them. They’d all just stood there looking at them. He said he hadn’t wanted them either, but the only other solution seemed to be to turn them loose or maybe kill them for food, and he didn’t want that. It wasn’t appropriate for a follower of the Way of Zen to own anything so he considered himself a guider of wayward goats. He said the word ‘wayward’ described them well, as it did all sentient beings. If the goats were a nuisance at times, there was also a certain amount of pleasure to be gained from their company. Of course they get a little reeky, said the bonze, particularly when wet. But then I guess I get that way too.
Mugen dropped into a squat in the middle of the empty road. The stubble on his head was the same length as the stubble on his cheeks and chin, and his black monk’s robe was even shabbier than the robe worn by the rogue samurai.
Of course, they might become a hindrance on begging rounds. You could be standing there at the gate with your alms bowl held out in this irresistible manner … and then realise your goats were back there in granny’s garden munching on radish tops.
The bonze waited for Hasegawa to laugh or smile or say something then said, On the other hand, they might become a curiosity. He nodded in self-agreement. Hard to predict how a person might feel about a goat.
The road through the barrier mountains led down to the shogun’s capital city of Edo, still several days’ walk away. The mountains were covered with dense conifer forests, and the silence of the autumn morning was broken occasionally by the distant belling of a stag somewhere on the upper slopes. The road had been improved and extended after the civil wars ended in 1601, and the military outposts that had guarded strategic passes were replaced by travellers’ inns, public wineshops, teahouses and brothels. Commercial traffic flowed where armies had once rampaged. Craftsmen fashioned arrows but now sold them as souvenirs. There was a certain amount of brigandage still in the remoter areas, and the remains of malefactors decorated gibbets at bridge plazas or crossroads and served as a warning to others. Hamlets grew into villages where pleasure providers could be found who wore their sashes knotted loosely in front, offer-makers lured the unwary, easy-way boys followed drunks into shadows, and entertainers sought paying audiences at the sites of famous battles so that the spirits of local warriors who had died in the struggle against the Tokugawa family were obliged to find what comfort they could in plangent ballads, accompanied by the rattle of copper coins in collection cups.