The Tokaido Road

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  On each side was a low platform of wide, rough-cut boards where the woodcutters slept. On the floor next to the fire was the small pile of lotus and burdock roots, watercress, nuts, and mushrooms Cat and Kasane had gathered. They had found a tree that still had several ripe red-gold persimmons hanging from its bare branches, and Cat had boosted Kasane up after them. They had eaten them immediately.

  “Show me how to start a fire with bamboo, elder sister.” Cat looked up at the sun, now straight overhead. The day wouldn’t get much warmer than it was now. “While the food cooks we can bathe and wash our clothes.”

  The water in the pool where they bathed had begun as melted snow. It hadn’t warmed much on its journey down the mountain. Immersion in icy water in wintertime was a form of religious asceticism but Cat had bathed quickly. She didn’t want to be caught naked by some wandering local.

  Now Cat and Kasane sat on the lowest of the three log steps leading up to the door of the hut. They were sitting in the warmth of the sun, but their hair was wet. Their clean damp robes felt clammy on their backs.

  Kasane had whittled them each a pair of bamboo chopsticks, and Cat used hers to reach for the last slice of bamboo’s child on the bamboo sheath that served as a platter.

  Kasane was deftly weaving a wide-brimmed hat of papery sheaths and the pliable splints she had weighted with a rock and left soaking in the pool that morning.

  “Do you think someone will come?” Kasane asked.

  “I don’t know.” The icy bath had invigorated Cat. She felt more than just clean. She felt as though she had left in the muddy yard in Mishima not only her few paltry belongings, but the worst of the past. With a long bamboo twig she began drawing characters in the dirt.

  “Forgive my rudeness, but what does the writing say?” Kasane finished the hat, set it aside, and started another one.

  “ ‘ A pale moon waning.’ ” Cat pointed to each character as she read it. “ ‘Wisp of cloud shadow passing. It is. Then is not.’ ”

  “My poem.”

  This was the gift Cat had recited to her the night before, to comfort her in the dark and rain-soaked forest.

  “Would you honor this unworthy person by telling its meaning again?” Kasane never tired of discussing this poem.

  “It means you think his regard might already be waning. It might be a passing fancy. Like the shadow mat crosses the moon’s face.” Cat shook the twig in the direction of the TMkaidM to the east and to the unseen bustle of the world there. “One can never be too careful with men, elder sister.”

  “Maybe I’ll never see him again.”

  “One cannot control one’s fate. Sleeve touches sleeve because it’s predestined to do so.”

  “What does this one mean?” Kasane leaned over to place her finger under the first character.

  “The writing is onna-de, woman’s lettering. Each mark stands for a syllable, a piece of a word.” Cat pointed with the twig. “These three spell ‘waning.’ ”

  “Ma! Imagine that!” With the tip of her finger Kasane hesitantly drew an awkward character in the dirt.

  “Curve the tail in more, elder sister.” Cat closed her hand around Kasane’s and guided her finger.

  Kasane giggled. “I’m too foolish to learn to do this.”

  “No gem sparkles unless polished.” Cat demonstrated the strokes of the hrigana character. “Try again.”

  Kasane hurriedly finished her own hat. Then with a broom of Cloud Sweeper leaves she cleared the bare ground in front of the hut. Cat drew each of the forty-seven characters of the hiragana syllabary, and Kasane began copying them. As Cat watched her she understood Kasane’s exhilaration. She was unlocking the great treasure chest of writing. A hidden world was unfolding in front of her. Cat remembered her own fervor.

  When she was young, the ten-day period between each visit of sensei, her calligraphy teacher, had always seemed interminable. An hour ahead of time she would line up her brushes, ink stone, ink stick, and water pots on the low, lacquered writing desk. Then she would sit, waiting for him in the wide, sun-filled room that opened onto the garden of her mother’s mansion.

  The room had been lined with shelves of books. The poem scroll hanging in the tokonoma, the alcove, had been changed with the seasons. In honor of sensei’s visit, special incense always burned on a teakwood stand near the low writing desk.

  Someone else lived in the mansion now. Someone else’s scrolls hung in the alcove. The books were gone. But the room and the anticipation Cat had felt there existed in a fragile bubble of memory.

  During her lessons, Cat had lost herself in the strokes and curves, in the silent voice of the ideographs. Unlike most girls, Cat had learned the Chinese writing used by men and scholars. She had learned the layers of meaning and allusion in each of the thousands of characters.

  Even in the depths of winter, when her fingers had been almost too numb to hold the brush, she had sat on the tatami through the hour of the Ram and halfway into the hour of the Monkey. She had sat with her legs under her, her tabi-clad feet turned so her toes pointed inward, her back absolutely straight.

  Once she had blundered. She had leaned almost imperceptibly forward for the briefest of instants. With deep regret sensei had looked at her across the low writing table.

  “The young mistress is not ready to study today.” He had risen in a rustle of silken gray robes. He had bowed to her sorrowfully and left. She had sobbed inconsolably all evening. She had never slumped again.

  To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you—Cat thought of the old poem, her teacher’s favorite—and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations—such is a pleasure beyond compare. Cat shook her head to burst the memory of that room until she could re-form it again at a time of leisure.

  “Elder sister ...” Cat regretted interrupting Kasane’s lesson. “We have to return to the road.”

  “Couldn’t we sleep here? We could keep a fire burning to frighten away demons.” Kasane was beginning to think of this hut as a haven. As a home.

  “ ‘What shall I do? What shall I do?’ ” Cat quoted the Mad Poet of Cold Mountain. “ ‘Take this old body home and hide it in the mountains!’ ”

  “Yes!”

  “We could be Kanzan and the Foundling.” For a moment Cat indulged in the dream. “The madwomen of the mountain.”

  “We could, mistress!”

  Cat sighed. The fancy was a tempting one. She too dreaded the TMkaidM and its dangers. To return to it was like immersing herself once more in the icy waters of the pool. She envied Kanzan his aerie on Cold Mountain. She remembered his description of it.

  Where I spend my days

  Is farther than I can tell.

  On the naked trees

  Clouds hover in place of leaves.

  Touch of rain, the mountain quakes.

  “The woodcutters might come back,” Cat said finally. “You can stay, elder sister. It would be better for you if you did. But I have to continue my journey.”

  “Of course. Please forgive my stupidity.” Kasane was mortified that she had forgotten her mistress’s lover, waiting for her on the southern island.

  With her broom of bamboo leaves Kasane swept away the writing in the dirt. Cat filled two bamboo canteens with water from the pipe. She plugged their ends with carved wooden stoppers. She gave one to Kasane and tied hers to her sash with a strip of bamboo. She put on the hat Kasane had made her. She passed a rolled strip of cloth, torn from the hem of Kasane’s robe, under her chin, then through the bamboo loops around her ears. She twisted it around itself to keep it from slipping and tied the ends in the hollow under her bottom lip.

  “One’s life is like the morning mushroom.” Cat pulled the hat low so it hid her face. “It springs up at dawn and shrivels away before nightfall. We must do what we can with the small amount of time allotted us.”

  “Yes, mistress.”

  Cat settled her sash on her hips and picked up her staff. She took a deep breath and
led the way down the woodcutters’ steep path toward the TMkaidM.

  She and Kasane passed the outlying farms and fields as night was falling. They stood under an ancient pine at the margin of the road and watched the evening traffic as people hurried to reach shelter before darkness caught them. After the solitude of the mountain the scene had a fantastical quality about it. Cat felt as though she had come into a theater in the middle of a performance.

  Across the road stood a beggar with the matted beard and hair and the tattered robes of a mountain ascetic. He was leaning on two forked branches padded with straw and propped under his armpits. His torn, frayed trousers were tied up high, exposing legs as twisted and knobbed as blackthorn limbs. He had placed oil and a twisted grass wick in the palm of his hand and had set it alight. With mad eyes blazing, he chanted sutras while the wick burned and the oil heated in his bare palm.

  Cat hesitated. She had planned to give the money to someone who was obviously in great need, not a certain madman and a possible mountebank. But the idea was to rid herself of the last of her resources.

  Dodging the porters and kago bearers, she walked deliberately across the highway. She drew her hand into her sleeve, pulled out the twenty coppers, and dropped them into the holy man’s begging bowl set in the dust. He didn’t stop chanting. He didn’t acknowledge Cat or her gift, but behind her she heard Kasane gasp.

  “It wouldn’t have bought us enough to matter, elder sister. We must remember the rat’s head and the ox’s neck.”

  “To eat?”

  “No.” Cat smiled at the idea of rat-head-and-ox-neck soup. “We have to stop worrying about insignificant details like what we’ll eat or where we’ll sleep.”

  “ Yes, younger brother.” Kasane sounded dubious. Her stomach was inquiring anxiously about supper.

  “The great swordsman Musashi wrote that when we’re preoccupied with details our spirits become entangled with them. We have to enlarge our spirits. We have to think of the ox’s neck as well as the rat’s head.”

  “It’s as you say, younger brother.”

  Cat turned westward, into the last pools of sunset color silhouetting Mount Fuji’s graceful cone. She set out for Numazu.

  They reached the outskirts of the village in half an hour. Both she and Kasane looked longingly at the big temple gate as they passed it. It promised a roof and a hot meal and kindness to weary pilgrims.

  “We can’t stay here,” Cat said. “The priests might report us to the authorities.” Cat studied the road as it passed through the lit streets of Numazu. “The guidebook says that near the temple there’s a bridge over the Kise River. We can sleep under it.”

  They took a side road and soon saw the dark curve of the bridge against the paler gray of the sky. They could also see the glow of a few small fires on the dry riverbed under the bridge.

  Cat and Kasane climbed down the open-weave bamboo crates full of huge stones that shored up the embankment. They walked across the sandy bed toward the fires. When they approached close enough to see the huddled shapes sheltering under the huge, diagonal crossbeams of the bridge, Kasane shrank back in horror. She held up the four fingers that meant four-legged beast.

  “Hinin!” She whispered the dreaded word. “Nonhumans!”

  CHAPTER 39

  A SORELY PRESSED BIRD ...

  Even after she had sat for a while, holding her hands and feet to the flames to warm them, Cat couldn’t tell how many hinin, outcasts, were at the other two fires on the dry riverbed under the bridge. Dark forms sat around them, but their number was obscured by the huge wooden piles supporting the diagonal struts. However many there were, Cat assumed they were all members of the despised caste called nonhumans.

  Behind her tangled, dirty hair the woman sitting near Cat was young. Hunger and hardship had made her loveliness even more haunting. There was a waxy translucence to the skin stretched across her angular cheekbones. She wore the straw matting from a sake cask draped across her shoulders.

  With one hand she massaged her blind grandfather’s stooped shoulders. She held her baby in the other arm, shielding her from the cold wind blowing off the river. The baby was nursing at her breast, exposed where she had pulled aside the front opening of her torn paper robe. Her small son, naked but for a loincloth, was asleep curled on a scrap of matting with his head on her lap. Both children had two spots of soot on their foreheads to fool demons into thinking they were dogs.

  “My husband disappeared five days ago.” She stroked the sleeping boy’s thatch of black hair, cut like a bowl around the top of his head. “On New Year’s eve we had no money to pay the landlord or the grocer or to buy bean paste and millet. To pay our bills at the previous midyear we had pawned an umbrella, a teakettle, my only sash, a measure box, and a pair of pottery bowls. They were the last things we owned.”

  The young woman spoke in a calm, light voice, as if her troubles were just minor inconveniences. To do otherwise would have shown an overweaning regard for herself and her personal problems.

  “At New Year’s our hearth was cold. We sat in the dark while the creditors pounded on the door and called insults through the shuttered window.”

  A horse clattered across the wooden roadbed overhead, setting up a thundering din below. The young woman waited until the noise died, then went on.

  “Even though we had no one to care for the babes, I told my husband I would sell myself so they could at least have food. But the boy began to cry. He begged me not to leave him. My husband became even more despondent.

  “That night, while we slept, he sneaked out. He waylaid the bailiff’s drunken assistant returning late from a tea house. He knocked him down and robbed him.

  “When he came home the next day he brought New Year’s rice cakes with a pinch of burdock, and a kite for the boy. He brought me a new green sash of hemp. He brought Grandfather a sack of tobacco. He brought a picture of Ebisu-sama to set on the empty god shelf and bring us wealth in the coming year. For an hour at least, we had a merry time. Then the police knocked on our door.”

  Cat had hardly slept at all in the last two days. She was exhausted and dizzy with hunger. As she listened to the young woman’s tragic story, she felt light, as though her flesh and bone and blood had dissolved. The hollow was filling with grief for outcasts.

  What distilled the grief were Cat’s memories of her own New Year’s celebrations. She remembered the frantic stridulation of abacuses from the wing where the man sent by her father settled the year’s accounts in the big ledgers. The accompanying tinkling of the bill collectors’ tiny metal mallets on the balances of their money scales had been a merry sound. They had rung in a new year, cleansed of debt.

  For days, servants had pounded out the glutinous paste for rice cakes in huge vats. In New Years past Cat had feasted on chestnuts and lobsters and delicacies of the season. The servants, dressed in her mother’s gifts of new clothes, had decorated the eaves with sprigs of pine. They had put huge pine branches on each side of the front gate to insure long life to those inside.

  But the New Year had always been a disappointment to Cat. She had watched the palanquins of merchants and happy visitors crowd the street outside the gate, but they were going to the other houses with their gifts and good wishes. Very few people visited Cat’s mother’s small mansion set inconspicuously on a side street, even though on New Year’s eve the neighborhood had been bright with pine flares and raucous with the sound of laughter and scurrying feet. Cat had had no one to play battledore with in those days except her nurse’s niece, Plover.

  “What happened then?” Cat shook her head to clear it. She was ashamed of all the times she had pitied herself as an outcast of sorts.

  “My foolish husband was judged as a criminal ought to be. The magistrate decreed that he wear a red sash.”

  Kasane gasped. The red sash marked him as an exile to whom no one could speak. He was excluded from the companionship of his fellow beings. It was the most hideous of punishments. At least if one we
re executed, one had a hope of being reborn into another body. Banishment was death in life.

  “We had to leave our house.” The young woman sighed. “We had to leave the village where we were born. We became yadonashi, those without a lodging.” The young woman sighed. “Better than a feast elsewhere is a meal of hot water and millet at home.”

  “Such a pity.” Cat knew her words were useless, but she didn’t know what else to say.

  Those without lodging were not registered with the government. They had no recourse, no legal existence. This young woman had done nothing wrong, not in this life, at least. Her children, her grandfather, were all innocent. Yet they were being punished cruelly. Such was their fate.

  “Worse than four hundred and four illnesses is the disease of poverty,” said the grandfather.

  “For almost a year we have begged for our food,” the young woman went on. “We have slept under boats on the beach and eaten fish entrails thrown down for the dogs. We have slept in pine groves, or under bridges or temple porches.

  “Five days ago my husband earned a few coppers burying a corpse. Even though I begged him not to, he went to buy wine with them. We haven’t seen him since. I’ve asked everywhere in Numazu. No one knows where he went. Have you seen him? He has a red, gourd-shaped mark on his cheek.”

  “No,” Cat said. “We haven’t seen him.”

  “If he doesn’t come back tomorrow, grandfather and the children and I will start up to the Western Capital. We’ll ask Kannon-sama at Kiyomizu temple to have pity on us.”

  “I’m sure she’ll help you,” Cat said.

  “Do you think so?”