The Tokaido Road

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  Cats perched everywhere, and the odor of their urine pervaded the place. The ceilings were water-stained. The fine latticework on the round windows and the carved openwork over the doorways were coated with grime. Most of the paper panes in the sliding door panels were ripped. The See No Evil seemed determined to sink into ruin despite the desultory efforts of the antique manservant who dozed by the door and the three young maids from the country.

  The plaster on the wall out front had fallen off in large slabs, revealing the packed mud and straw underneath. The monkey carved on the faded sign over the roofed gate may have had its hands over its eyes in chagrin. The See No Evil had started as a respectable establishment, built sixty years earlier to elegant proportions. It had slid considerably since then.

  Its open corridors were ranged around the ruins of a tiny garden. Only a few wiry azaleas and durable ferns were left in what was now a pond of mud. Wooden washtubs sat atop the garden’s three decorative boulders.

  In sunny weather laundry dried there. Today however, beyond the doorway of the seven sages’ room and the open corridor, rain was still falling. The cascade of water from the eaves created a steady roar under the sages’ banter.

  When Cat and Kasane had arrived, soaked and shivering, at the See No Evil, the sages had been delighted to see Cat again. They remembered her as Musui’s handsome acolyte, Endurance, but they accepted the fiction that Cat was Kasane’s younger brother, Hachibei. If they noticed that Cat’s accent had grown thick and rustic in two days, they said nothing. Stranger things than that had happened along the TMkaidM.

  They had made a fuss over Cat. They renamed her the Mountain of Love. With playful slaps and tickles, the sages had offered to strip off Cat’s wet clothes and rub her dry. Cat had barely managed to towel off and slip into Kasane’s brother’s baggy-seated peasant trousers and tie the sash around his spare jacket before the sages had come looking for her.

  Laughing and teasing, they had dragged her into their room to keep them company while they passed the rainy afternoon. Cat was there now, feeling the warmth of the tea flowing into her stomach. The chipped porcelain cup felt wonderfully hot between her numb hands.

  The sages wore only their unbelted underrobes as they sat in front of their mirror stands and arranged each other’s hair and makeup. O-Taka, Hawk, the leader of the sages, had already dressed Cat’s wet hair in a boyish style—a short queue atop two full side folds with the back section drawn up tight and tied with a red paper cord. When Hawk had finished she beckoned Kasane to sit in front of the mirror.

  “I’m far too homely for you to trouble yourself with,” Kasane murmured.

  Hawk laughed. “White hides seven defects.” She held up a box of face powder. “And even a devil is pretty at seventeen.”

  “I was once maid in charge of the front service of Lord Hanobo’s mansion.” Sea Wave, the proprietress of the See No Evil, lounged by the door. She watched Hawk divide Kasane’s damp hair into three parts and rub camellia oil into it.

  As Cat sipped tea she too watched Kasane intently. She worried that Kasane would forget to call her Hachibei instead of “master.” She worried about what the peasant woman would do when she finally realized she had attacked a samurai. It was a crime that, given Kasane’s low status, would earn her a gruesome death. But Kasane sat still as a statue, as though bewitched by the gentle touch of Hawk’s kindness.

  “Lord Hanobo’s mansion was a fine place, I can tell you.” Wave puffed contentedly on her small pipe. She was long-waisted and sturdy, and she wore a blue-and-white cloth tied around her disheveled hairdo. She had shrewd eyes, a child’s voice, and the build of a rice mortar.

  “My lady had a fawn-colored traveling outfit of eight-roll silk, with flaming maples embroidered on it,” Wave went on. “When we promenaded, we all wore the same color robes with my lady’s crest on them. She made us dress like country bumpkins with our sashes tied behind, while she wore her sash high and her sleeves open in the masculine way that was all the rage. I received a yearly salary of a hundred and twenty momme and clothes for the four seasons.”

  Hawk smoothed the rear section of Kasane’s thick hair and folded it into the hanging hairdo called a seventeen shimada because it was worn by seventeen-year-old women. She sculpted it to lie in an outwardly curving loop along the nape of Kasane’s neck. She held out her free hand, and Bamboo, the youngest of the sages, gave her a flattened black paper cord to tie it in place.

  “Why did you leave the lord’s service?” Hawk poked a wooden skewer into the coil and used it to ease the hair into a fuller contour.

  “My lady became jealous. I was thought by some to have slightly better than average looks, though you would never guess it now.” Wave caught a cat that sauntered by, headed for the tray of broiled bream. An animal crossing a room was bad luck. “Please excuse me,” she said to it as she turned it around and boosted it out the door.

  “My lady became cruel toward me,” Wave went on. “She refused to renew my contract.”

  “You should have stolen her husband to spite her.”

  “The ladies of the inner apartments seldom catch a glimpse of a man, much less smell the perfume of a loincloth.” Wave smiled slyly. “For their pleasure they must court their middle fingers. But as I was in the front service I saw my lord every day. He became quite taken with me. Our pillowings were so tempestuous, we caused the sliding doors to rattle in their tracks.”

  “Why didn’t he keep you?”

  “His wife’s family was influential, and she had a high nose. He was spread under her buttocks. Besides, I was born in a Fiery Horse year. When my lady dismissed me, he said nothing in my defense. I was a wisteria without a pine to cling to.”

  The women hissed in sympathy. Women born in a Fiery Horse year were usually too spirited for marriage. Fiery Horse women were inclined to kill their husbands. Not many men were willing to risk extended liaisons with them.

  When Hawk finally finished, the women exclaimed on the transformation. Kasane tried to hide her powdered and painted face in her hands.

  For the rest of the afternoon she rubbed Cat’s feet and back. She served her tea and lit her pipe while Wave and the sages gossiped. Now and then she reached up cautiously to pat the thick clubbed topknot of her shimada as though it were a pet cat with an inclination to claw. She sneaked glances at her painted face in the big round mirrors propped on their stands.

  Toward the middle of the afternoon the old servant appeared and whispered in Wave’s ear. Wave excused herself. She came back excited.

  “Murder was committed in Hiratsuka. The police were here asking if anyone suspicious had checked in. They looked through my guest book.”

  “A murderer!” The sages were thrilled.

  Kasane dropped the canister of tobacco. “Please, excuse my stupid clumsiness.” With trembling fingers she brushed the spilled tobacco back into the jar.

  “Forgive my fool of a sister.” With her folded fan Cat rapped Kasane hard on the shoulder. “She’s stupid and clumsy by nature; but fear makes her doubly so.” Cat looked at Wave with wide, guileless eyes. “Imagine,” she said. “We came from Hiratsuka this very afternoon. The killers may have been on the road with us. How many were there?”

  “Only one.” Wave was disappointed that the police would part with very little information for her to pass on. “Witnesses say he was huge, with red eyes and a fearsome expression.”

  Cat was relieved. No one had seen Kasane use a wooden tub to drop the samurai.

  To Cat’s and Kasane’s relief, the talk left the present and meandered off among stories of past murders and suicides and illicit affairs. Wave talked of her decline from maid of the front service to the ranks of “nighthawks,” older women who solicited trade in the darkness under bridges. As a nighthawk she had consorted with men who didn’t even carry paper handkerchiefs to clean up after themselves.

  Not many who sank so low rose again, but Wave had become the beloved mistress of the owner of the See No Ev
il. When he died he left behind no wife or relatives to dispute Wave’s claim to the inn.

  Bamboo had poured a bit of sake into her teacup. When she rose to entertain them all, her robe fell off one shoulder, exposing a small white breast. She fluttered her fan coquettishly at Cat and danced a few mincing steps.

  “I think I’ll wash my testicles with care.” As she danced she sang with exaggerated innocence. “For as the old saying goes, ‘If you don’t polish a ball, it won’t shine.’ ” She ended in a suggestive and definitely masculine pose.

  The sages’ laughter and their simple songs and tales made them seem carefree and innocent in spite of their profession. Cat imagined the sages back in the unlicensed brothel that masqueraded as a bathhouse. She knew that after their customers had bathed, dressed, climbed into their wooden geta, and clattered off into the night, the attendants who had made engagements to meet men at their inns ate a quick meal and prepared to go out.

  They would probably borrow a sash or a veil or paper handkerchiefs from the women who were staying home. Those who had made no assignations would share the bathhouse’s scant bedding and wadded nightclothes. They would lie hip to hip and talk of actors and of their home villages and of the latest fashions worn by the courtesans of the Yoshiwara.

  The day’s light was fading when the See No Evil’s ancient seneschal came to tell Cat the bath was ready. The tiny size of the inn’s dark bathroom with its round, one-person cedar tub saved Cat from having all the sages offer to crowd in to scrub her down. To be safe, she tied the door closed with a straw cord. She washed from the basin on a stand in the corner, near a flickering wall sconce. She barely had room to climb the step to the platform that held the tub and get in.

  She heard the old servant’s knees creak as he stooped to poke twigs and leaves and wood scraps into the tiny furnace opening on the other side of the thin wall. As Cat soaked in the scalding water, with the nape of her neck resting on the rim and her knees drawn up to her chest, she savored one of the prime benefits of being male, the right to be first in the bath.

  Finally she stepped out of the tub and dried off with her damp cotton towel. She was struggling into her stiff new loincloth, and bumping her elbows in the cramped space, when Kasane yanked on the door and broke the cord holding it. She stood silhouetted in the lighted doorway. She carried a wadded jacket loaned by Wave for the boy the sages now called the Mountain of Love.

  “Mas—” Kasane stopped in midword. She stared open-mouthed at Cat’s small, taut breasts, turned a bright pink by the hot bathwater.

  Cat grabbed her arm and yanked her inside. She pulled the door closed and used her sash cord to tie it shut again. The time had come for a heart-to-heart. A talk with their knees drawn together. Cat would have to act out two fictions at once.

  With Kasane almost chest to chest with her, Cat put on Kasane’s brother’s old jacket. Then, to maintain the level of superior above inferior, she sat on the edge of the tub platform. Kasane knelt on the tiny square of floor. She faced at an angle to one side with her eyes downcast, as courtesy required.

  “Do you know who I am?” Cat whispered.

  “No, master. . .Hachibei. . .mistress.” Kasane was trembling so badly that she would have collapsed had there been room. She had stumbled onto a devil tied up in darkness, as the old saying went. She was trapped with a demon shape-changer. A fox or a badger or worse.

  “I am Usugumo, Pretty Cloud.” Cat remembered the popular stories about love suicides, and she improvised as she went along. “My lover was banished to the southern island. I’m traveling in disguise to meet him there. We plan to sink together so we can sit on the same lotus flower before Amida’s throne in the Western Paradise.”

  Kasane was ashamed to think how she had pitied herself and lamented her own petty problems. “I will serve you faithfully on your journey, mistress,” she whispered.

  “Stop talking such foolishness.” Cat held her temper. Kasane had saved her life. Cat owed her a debt she couldn’t repay in several lifetimes. The least she could do was treat her civilly.

  “My lover’s enemies think I go to offer him the aid of my family. You’ve seen what they’re willing to do to stop me. Now I’m wanted for murder. Surely you know the punishment for that.”

  “I do, mistress. But please take me with you.”

  No wonder peasants had a reputation for being blockheads. Cat took a deep breath and started again. “You must not come with me. A foot ahead all is darkness. The Beloved Amida alone knows what fate awaits me.”

  “Forgive my rudeness,” Kasane whispered. “But none of us knows what fate awaits us. Take me with you. Please . . . Hachibei.” Kasane had already sorted out Cat’s various identities and arrived at the appropriate one for the occasion.

  “In the morning I’ll hire you the best boat on the beach,” Cat said. “I’ll send you back to Pine village in grand style.”

  “Fate has rowed me far offshore already.”

  Cat smiled sadly at her. Kasane had indeed been through all the dangers implied in the old phrase. “We’ll see how the world looks in the morning,” she said.

  “Thank you. Thank you.” Kasane bowed until the oiled club of her shimada grazed the floor. “Thank you.”

  Kasane probably couldn’t have explained why she preferred traveling the TMkaidM with a fugitive to returning to Pine village. She didn’t know what dangers lay ahead on the road. She did know that if she returned to Pine village, her parents would blame her for the death of her younger brother, their only son. She would have to live with their grief and silent recriminations. Her neighbors would consider her soiled goods. They would gossip about her until she died.

  Kasane raised her head and looked directly into Cat’s eyes. “You need have no worries about me.” She said it with astonishing dignity and passion. “Should your enemies cut me up and salt me, I won’t betray you.”

  Lovelorn cats howled and moaned in the darkness beyond the See No Evil’s front reception room. Before an audience of guests and servants, the seven sages were acting out the story of the Sakai sisters. It was a popular story, known to everyone.

  At twelve, one of the sisters had sold herself to a brothel to provide money for her impoverished family. She rose to become a famous toyu in the Yoshiwara, but she dreamed of returning to care for her parents in their old age. Her younger sister came looking for her to tell her that their father, a samurai, had been killed for defending the farmers of his district from unjust taxes.

  The seven sages acted out the scene where the younger woman, ridiculed by the courtesans for her rustic accent, was recognized by her older sister. After a tearful reunion the younger sister told of their father’s tragic end. Tearfully Hawk and Bamboo clutched each other and declaimed, in song, their vow to avenge their father’s death. The scene played to a chorus of snuffling and nose blowing from the audience. By the time Hawk delivered the last lines, not a dry sleeve was left.

  The merchant of scrolls, the wallpaperer, the itinerant pot polisher, the young farmer on pilgrimage, and the mantis-thin cloud dweller were dabbing at their eyes. Cat had been studying the last two guests with particular care.

  The farmer was powerfully built and had an innocent, earnest expression. But he was traveling alone, an unusual circumstance on the TMkaidM, and Cat was suspicious. He hadn’t been paying attention to Cat, though. In fact, he had been casting shy glances at Kasane.

  The old courtier had been one of the poets with Musui the night Cat had fled the inn in Totsuka. But neither he nor his aged servant, who was almost blind, recognized Cat. In fact, a serious distraction had been added to the cloud dweller’s usual befuddlement. His lord, the former emperor, was dying. Stricken with grief, the old man was trying to reach KyMto to wish him farewell.

  He sat straight as an arrow in the back of the room with his servant just behind his right shoulder. It would have been hard to guess from the old nobleman’s bearing that he had hardly enough coppers to make a clinking sound in his sleeve
. His robe with the cloud and lightning design was of Tozan silk, long out of fashion. The neck of his second-quality hempen undergarment was frayed. The patches on the servant’s robes were patched in turn. Cat was sure that each spring the old courtier pawned his one winter jacket and robe and redeemed his summer clothes at twenty percent interest. Each fall he reversed the process.

  The old man had already taken each male guest aside. In a low, cultured voice he had offered them a sample of his calligraphy, either an original work or a poem of their choice. Of course no mention of payment was made; but Cat had given him a silver coin, ostensibly to bring her good luck.

  As Cat was contemplating the sad fate of the nobility in this time of vulgar mercantilism, a particularly lustful cat yowled in an agony of passion.

  “Sir Mountain of Love,” Hawk called out playfully, “sing for us.”

  Cat bowed politely. She stepped behind the screen where the sages had left their props and chose a gaudy robe to drape around her. She pinned a small scarf into her hair, to cover the area just above her forehead. It was a ploy used by the onnagata, the male kabuki actors who specialized in women’s roles. The scarves hid the fact that the crowns of their heads were shaved like a man’s, in compliance with government orders.

  When Cat reappeared she hitched the collar of the robe provocatively away from the nape of her neck. She fluttered her fan in front of her face and minced across the stage, trailing the robe’s hem behind her. She imitated a peasant boy burlesquing a city woman. She sang the courtesan’s song in a falsetto.

  With no care for duty or people

  or strange looks,

  or the opinion of other cats,

  one cat striped and the other white

  climb to the ridge of the roof.

  Driven by the need of love

  which is stronger than death.