by Givens John
Of course, a lot of people don’t even know that we have goats in this country. Probably came from Korea originally, or maybe China. Or Mongolia. He scratched himself. Or some other such place.
Mugen Bonze waited for the morose samurai to say something then got tired of waiting and said, I came from a funeral, but you look like the one in mourning.
Hasegawa poked at his fire but said nothing.
The goats had moved off in opposite directions, each following his own inclination as to where the grass would be sweetest, and they were soon kicking and hauling at each other so the bonze had to go restore order.
He squatted back down where he’d been. I guess you don’t want to talk about it.
Hasegawa added a stick to his fire. He told him he’d killed some people.
All right.
I mean just recently. This morning.
In a fight?
A fight. He thought about it. An unfair fight.
You said some people?
Five men.
And that was the unfairness? Five against one?
The unfairness was that I knew how to kill them, but they didn’t know how to kill me.
I see, said the bonze. He gazed around at the dense forest that lined both sides of the road. You don’t seem remorseful.
I’m not.
But you aren’t pleased about it either.
Hasegawa poked at his fire, sending up a flurry of sparks. I’d do it again. But I’m sorry I did it. He levered one burning stick up onto another. But I’d kill them again. So I guess that doesn’t make much sense.
The bonze watched him. You hated them that much?
Hasegawa began shoving the unburned ends of sticks onto the centre of his fire. I guess I thought I did.
But now you have doubts?
I guess I knew that doing it wouldn’t make me feel any better about things, but I did it anyway.
Because not doing it would have been worse?
Maybe that’s it.
You don’t sound sure.
No. I don’t.
They harmed you?
They killed a woman who was in my care.
I see. So it was a serious matter then.
Yes.
But you aren’t satisfied with your decision.
No. I am.
You don’t seem it.
I guess not.
The bonze nodded to himself, as if squatting on a mountain road with a melancholy assassin was an occupation for which he suspected he might have an affinity. Crow thinks he’s a cormorant. Until he gets in the water.
I guess that must just about be the case of it, said Hasegawa. And when Mugen asked why the men had killed the woman, he told him they’d fucked her without permission and were afraid she would tell someone who could do something about it.
Meaning you.
Meaning me.
And this all happened this morning?
Last summer. I just found them this morning. He poked at his fire, cracking it open. They were hard to find.
Because they knew you’d come looking for them?
Hasegawa poked at his fire.
I always heard that samurai kill for pride first.
Some probably do.
But not you?
I guess that’s something else I haven’t quite worked out yet.
The bonze picked out a stick and began arranging his side of the fire, moving things around in a helpful manner before tossing the stick back into the flames.
So now their souls are getting ready for the hovering part, said the bonze. Forty-nine days of shivering with anticipation. Lined up like ants in a food file. Although probably they won’t come back very well. He watched Hasegawa staring into the shifting architecture of his fire. Probably you won’t either.
All right.
All right. The bonze shoved his hand into the front flap of his robe and scratched himself thoughtfully. So, a flea, a horsefly, a wasp, something such as that might be about as good as you wrathful types can hope for. You were told the truth of the dharma but you didn’t hear it. Do the right things. Live the right way. Simple enough when you think about it. But even if you’re only a horsefly on the next loop through, you can still be a good one.
A good one?
A horsefly has a horsefly’s virtues, said the bonze.
Probably you’ve never had horses in warm weather. The way they’re tormented by them.
Horseflies are a horse’s fate.
I’d kill every one of them if I could.
Well! Another step down the slippery road to hell.
Hasegawa looked at him then looked away. Probably I’m just missing what I used to have.
Such as?
Things to look forward to.
All right.
People to be with, I guess. Occurrences and events. Or even just something that I can say I chose for myself. The rogue samurai sat poking his fire then said, You really believe that about their souls?
All our souls.
All our souls? That it’s a return to the next turn? Each connected to the one coming?
Thread has to go where the needle went, said the bonze.
That didn’t answer my question.
I’m not sure you really asked it yet.
The rogue samurai poked at his fire. He said he did not believe that there was a place for him other than the one he occupied. He said he awoke to the sun in the morning and went to sleep with the moon at night. He said he’d heard things said. Promises and justifications and warnings. But he’d never found anything he thought more true than the simple assurance that when spring comes, grass grows.
By which I guess you mean you think you can’t change.
I guess that’s just about it.
The bonze watched his goats like a person confirming an hypothesis then turned back to the rogue samurai and his fire. Tell me again why you killed them.
I told you.
Tell me better.
Hasegawa stayed with his fire, adjusting it, scraping it around, the smoke rising up into the dark green shadows of the cedars.
Because she was unacknowledged. An orphan of the palace, unwanted and unprotected. With no hope for a future and no reason even to wish for one. And because I was being paid to take her to a place she didn’t want to go. And then one night I found her in some bushes in a ditch. What she looked like lying there. Slashed and hacked. Her face mostly gone. Bloody gouts of long black hair. Gauze robes shredded like war banners shrieking in the wind. Throat cut so deeply her head hung sideways…
So she did mean something to you…
Some evenings we had to bivouac by the roadside. I listened as she told me things. She said she wasn’t asking me to do anything differently. She just wanted me to know what I was doing.
To her?
To her.
Hasegawa said the palace orphan told him she had been born into a world that a country samurai could never even imagine. It was a world of unwavering requirements and ancient precedents, a world of women without function, women who waited behind screens in anticipation of moments of formal intensity that they would assess with an antique rigour, demanding the same of others and admitting no deviations. She told him there were combinations of colours that if worn together would result in a humiliation that could never be erased. She said there were notes plucked on a koto that would illicit endless jeers, written words misshaped in such a way that the woman with the brush in her hand would be ostracised, and not even her death could atone for the shamefulness of such ineptitude. She told him that for women like her, redemption lay in the perfection of the art of the way of withholding. Women like her lived in harmony with the dead, and their only necessity was to refine the expression of their acceptance of the inevitable.
One night we got caught in a rainstorm and took shelter in an old shrine. I woke up to find her close beside me, raised up on her elbows, her long black hair combed straight back over her shoulders like ink-dark wings. No sneak assassin with a s
lash knife could have crept up on me like that but she had done it.
He told him how he’d traced the shape of her nose, the curve of her lips, the soft swelling of her cheeks and the hollow under her jaw. The rain was pounding the roof tiles and bits of spray bounced in through gaps on the side walls. He told him that her eyebrows had been removed in the old style of the original court. He said her ears were small and lay flat against her head. Her neck and nape tasted faintly of the salt of her body. Her tongue touched his, invited it, moved with it; and he eased her back and sank down beside her, her vulva moist under his hand. She sighed at the offer of his finger sliding into her and drew one scented sleeve up over her face. The silver-white haze of her night-wrapper lifted away as her legs came apart. Her thighs and belly were damp and warm in the summer darkness. She had found him with her hand and guided him inside her, and she had asked him to go slowly and feel it with her and not hurry anything, the promise he was building with the woman he had been paid to deliver was being built by her back up to him, seeking him, grasping him as he held her, asking him not to rush the wordless questions he was asking her.
The rogue samurai poked at his fire.
She said she and girls like her had been raised among women who sat all their lives in empty rooms and waited for something that they knew would never happen. Younger ones called older women their mothers and were allowed to do so. Sometimes she pretended one of them really was her own mother, and she tried to model herself after the woman she’d selected. But she knew it was foolish. And fraudulent. And she soon learned to hide her feelings, and to force herself to accept not knowing.
And did she ask you to help her?
No.
And did you think of doing it yourself?
I thought of it…
But because she didn’t ask it…
She told me how their mothers were mocked as dreary by those who had displaced them, and their gardens and reception chambers and boudoirs had become so unfashionable that even the night visits of violators had dwindled away to nothing. Then one day it was announced that a maple tree judged to be the oldest and finest in the palace compound was to be viewed, and the divination of an unfavourable direction on the date selected meant that a circuitous route had to be followed in order to avoid provoking malign influences. The detour would pass directly along the main veranda-corridor in the part of the western chambers allocated to unwanted women. No event could have seemed more auspicious. The sliding doors on the inside edge of this corridor were replaced by hanging reed blinds with space left open at the bottom. The women configured their many-layered court robes in a manner befitting the season, and they practised arranging their sleeve-bundles artfully so that portions of the fabrics might be glimpsed under the blinds. They studied the effects of various combinations, hoping to arrive at a mixture of colours and textures that would stimulate the august curiosity and perhaps lead eventually to an inquiry.
None of them slept well the night before the viewing, so filled were they with yearning. She said all were in place behind the reed blinds early, their sleeves positioned as had been agreed. Finally, they could hear the sliding feet of the seneschals on the polished wooden floors and the twanging of bowstrings in the garden as guardsmen saluted what for them could only have been dim shapes moving behind white paper doors. As the procession grew nearer, the women fell silent, their heads down, their hearts pounding. But just as the arrival began to occur, it was remarked by a trailing courtier that the weather was fine that day; and the august attention was awarded to the external side of the veranda-corridor in demonstration of an awareness of the source of the beauty of the afternoon glow. The procession passed by. Their display had gone unnoticed.
She told me that after that, the tedium of normal days had returned; and in the weeks and months and years that followed, the women began dying, smothered by the necessity of doing the same thing at the same hour and in the same way, with no possibility for any change ever.
And you were taking her back to that?
Hasegawa said that was what he was being paid to do.
She asked me once if there wasn’t some other way of managing things, and when I told her I would do whatever was required to deliver her to her destination, she closed her eyes and never said another word to me. Not even when the men following us found her.
You mean she never called out?
Hasegawa didn’t answer, and the bonze waited until he was sure he had nothing more to say on the subject then got up and went to retrieve his goats. He stood for a moment studying the rogue samurai who seemed to him like a man willing to sit by the edge of the road until the world itself shuddered to its end. Why’d you kill all of them?
Hasegawa poked at his fire.
You have a group like that, and one or two will be the cause of such evil deeds, and one or two will just go along with it. But maybe at least one of them didn’t really deserve to die.
Which one?
Well, I don’t know. No way for me to know.
Me either, said Hasegawa. He looked at him. I guess that’s another thing for me to feel bad about. I already had quite a few.
WINTER SECLUSION
They were cold, and they were tired; and after reaching the half-way point, they had foundered on: Night rain at the barrier gate, and along this road walks no one, an idea that seemed to offer no way out of the gloom they had created for themselves.
Old Master Bashō’s white paper doors still glowed with reflected snow light, but the circle of linking poets sat buried in shadows like funerary sentinels. Some moved their lips, considering options or sifting through precedents; some tapped folded fans against the floor mats, checking rhythm against syllable-count; and some – deep in thought or chilled into stupefaction – stared blankly at nothing.
Wine?
It’s all gone.
Tea then?
Pot’s cold.
The session scribe offered to read back the half-finished sequence from the beginning, but the Old Master said no. If they couldn’t recall their arrival, how could they hope to fashion a departure?
Although they had heard this criticism before, usually in the same or similar terms, the linking poets configured their faces in the manner of thoughtful persons who have just been provided with unexpected information, delaying, for the moment at least, the burden of the necessity of responding.
Whatever their teacher possessed was provided by them. Rolls of cotton cloth or silk cloth were left on his veranda, and writing paper and ink sticks added to the supply on his alcove shelf. The Old Master would find sacks of rice dumped into his rice bin, pickled vegetables stored in his larder, and packets of tea poured into his tea caddy. Before formal group sessions, a cask of rice wine would appear inside his entryway gate, as would trays of rice cakes topped with strips of pressed fish, and afterwards, a few silver coins would be found tucked away discreetly in odd corners.
‘Walks no one,’ a voice intoned, ‘along this road walks…’
‘No one,’ echoed another, but he too could do nothing with the bleak stanza.
Then the only woman in the room, Little Ohasu, swaddled like a bagworm in a winter robe too sombre for her profession and too large for her person, bowed formally, picked up her fan, and, her hand trembling with consternation and the cold, suggested a link:
‘A moonless dawn: in the icy clarity of the mountain stream, fingerlings.’
The session scribe leaned forward to observe the woman kneeling demurely at the bottom of the room. Ohasu had never before dared to speak, much less attempted to add a stanza of her own. ‘Along this road walks no one,’ then, ‘a moonless dawn?’ He turned questioningly towards Old Master Bashō. ‘In the icy clarity of the mountain stream,’ the session scribe recited tentatively, as if requesting a clarification. ‘Fingerlings,’ wasn’t it? But the old man said nothing, and those around him sat staring straight ahead, their fans lying untouched before them.
Ohasu picked up her fan again. Yes. To
extend the emptiness of the road at the gate. But then to fill it in, add to it. So no moon. Because of the rain. And no sun yet either. But the first brightening of the dawn sky means the rain is ending. And with that light you can see enough to have a sense of … of things beginning again. And it’s … like that.
I see, said the session scribe. ‘Fingerlings.’ And there would be a few of them, I suppose. So it moves the tone of the poem from solitude to convergence. A nice change.
Ohasu shot him a quick glance of gratitude then lowered her eyes. But he was no ally; she didn’t have one here.
The silk merchant picked up his fan. Kichiji was a large, well-fed man who had accumulated an immense fortune over the years, and who detected within his talent for shrewd business manoeuvres an overall excellence of perception. It’s as I’ve always said, said the silk merchant. The energising faculty of the engaged imagination generates its own transcendent experience. One has been awake all night no doubt, sitting beside a mountain stream and musing on the sadness of the beauty of the nature of things, hearing the changeless change of deep water moving deeply, as if welling up from within the mountain’s dark depths…