by David Kirk
Soon enough, without even thinking about it, he came to stand before the armor once more.
It taunted him; the extravagance of it reminded him of how obscene a man he had once been, and of course that name that he had damned always there, stitched in white. It was too much to bear. He kicked it, and sent the suit clattering across the floor. He watched as the helmet rolled around and around until it finally came to rest, and in the silence afterward he let a single, low curse escape his lips.
Why would the boy not kill him?
Maybe if he had told the fullness of the story, Bennosuke might have. Maybe if he had told of the crucial moment. But that moment … That, Munisai knew he could never admit before another. Here, though, here in the solitude of the house where it all happened—here, he could remember.
There was once a girl who was beautiful, and more than that had a beautiful heart. Her name was Yoshiko.
It meant child of glee, child of joy, and this was the perfect name for her, for every man she crossed paths with fell in love with her. It was said that she had a grace that she must have inherited from a past life, and from the very moment she started to grow into her womanhood she was fawned over. Many an evening she spent dining with men of wealth and renown, hearing boastful stories of bravery, intelligence, wit, and war, and so generous was she that she pretended to believe them.
The offers of marriage duly came, and yet so little differentiated them—the size of estates, the number of maids she would have, the titles her children would inherit … Her father listened to each carefully, biding his time for the most prudent choice, but to her it meant nothing.
Sixteen and still she wore the long-sleeved, gaily patterned kimono of the maiden. She lived in a dream and she dreamed of love, and because the gods and spirits were mostly men and Yoshiko was Yoshiko, they allowed her to find it.
Munisai Hirata was introduced to her first at an afternoon of poetry. Two dozen of them, samurai men and women all, sat by a stream on soft grass, with the women beneath paper parasols and the men squinting in the light. A servant would release a floating cup of sake from upstream, and by the time it reached them one by one they had to compose a few lines on a given theme—the flight of birds or the warmness of the wind, say.
It was fun, and they laughed, and even though their words were mediocre no one cared, because the sake was so delightful. Then it came time for Munisai to compete. Though he was a few years older than Yoshiko he was the youngest man there, but he did not act it; he gave a dismissive gesture and then he said with a sly grin:
“I’ll write a poem only on the day I die.”
It was boorish and arrogant and rude, but as the others feigned polite amusement, at the base of her throat Yoshiko felt something hot and wonderful pulse as she saw him sit there gleaming in the sun.
His name was mentioned a lot in the months that followed, and how Yoshiko listened. Men spoke of a brashness matched only by his precociousness with a sword (and the women added his looks to this, but only away from their husbands), and soon it came to be that Munisai won a victory in a wooden-sword duel against one of the Lord Shinmen’s higher-ranking bodyguards. It was no small feat for a man of his age, and he could not hide the pride as he stood before her in the courtyard of her house recounting the tale. He had arrived unannounced and her mother was looking on, bemused, and then before Yoshiko could ask him why he had come he answered:
“I wanted you to know,” he said, and then he smiled, bowed, and left.
It changed then; he visited with increasing regularity until it seemed that every other day they were walking the city streets together. They were careful that their eyes never met and they talked loudly of nothing so as not to cause scandal, and yet all the while the backs of her fingers brushing against his knuckles where they lay ever clasped over the scabbard of his sword stole the sense from her.
Knuckles became the softness of palms as streets became secret hideaways; and then came the day when she told him how she felt. They were in a bamboo grove and what she remembered was the vivid greenness of it, all emerald and quiet there among the trunks, their fingers entwined and their breasts so tight against each other that she could feel his heart beating.
As she leaned in toward his ear she hesitated a moment, smelling his hair as he lowered his head to hers. Then she whispered the sweetest thing she could:
“If I can’t have you, Munisai, I’ll slit my throat.”
A naked moment, when she was certain he would reject her, but then a sort of shudder went through him and she felt the longest hairs of his mustache upon her ear.
“I’ll do it for us both,” he said.
She wanted to cry; he could not have said anything more perfect. As a joint suicide they would leave the world together for their spirits to be reborn as twins—a part of each in the other for all eternity. She did cry, in fact, and Munisai held her until she stopped, and the world was a beautiful place.
Suicide was not necessary, it turned out. For all his gall, to look at Munisai was to see his star ascendant, and so Yoshiko’s father consented to a marriage. He marched behind them in their bridal procession to the shrine, and then six months later in the first winter after she left his house in the city to live in Miyamoto he died. A sickness stole him from the world in a matter of weeks, and her mother did not linger long after. She stopped eating, withered, and then she too was gone.
Their names were carved on the family tombstone together, and though Yoshiko grieved she was not distraught, because she was not alone. She knew that Munisai was hers and that was enough.
But what did Munisai have? He was surprised the first time he found himself mulling over the question dispassionately, examining love like a raven at a corpse. He had loved her, he was certain, in that bamboo grove, loved her for what she was with a simple, pure love that she returned.
Time crept in, though, and now that they were married and her affections were secured, what did he feel? He looked at her when she slept, at the whiteness of her hand upon the pillow by her face, and found that his heart no longer lurched. He realized that perhaps he had not wanted her for her, but for the fact that he had something that other men wanted.
That, he was also surprised to find, pleased him.
A callous freedom grew within him. He knew the gods loved him. He was handsome and young, immensely talented with the sword, and he had the wealth of both his family and that which Yoshiko’s parents had left them. All this was his and he was not yet twenty-five years of age—so why not take more? A suit of armor with his name shining upon it. More sake. More food. More dice.
More women, just for the sheer hell of being young and virile.
The first night he had come back smelling of a whore’s embrace, he had staggered into his bedroom to find Yoshiko kneeling there waiting for him. He felt a rare pang of remorse, such was the look in her eyes.
“Why?” she asked simply.
“Because I can,” he said, then shrugged and went to bed.
He felt the bedding move softly with her sobbing body during the night as she lay behind him weeping silently. He was too drunk to care.
In the morning Yoshiko forgave him, but this she never told him. She reasoned it a unique moment of weakness, and if it never happened again then it never happened at all. Desperately she clung to this hope, but it was as futile as it was inevitable; he went and did as he pleased. Again and again and again, and never once did she plead with him to stop—she couldn’t understand why she would have to.
Instead it was her tears that stopped eventually, replaced by a numbness that robbed her days alone of any sense of time. Over these unfelt months the emptiness twisted into loathing, most of all at the fact that Munisai was not doing this out of malice. He didn’t taunt her, boast of his exploits to try to force cathartic hysterics out of her; he simply did it and expected her to care as little as he did, as a good wife should.
In her memory the perfect emerald of the bamboo grove decayed into putrid
shades of rot.
It all seemed hopeless. She knew that she could sue for divorce, but with no family to take her in where would she go? A life of indulgence had left her with no real skill, which meant that she could shave her head and join a nunnery or become a whore herself. She was trapped here, her loneliness abject and total and forever, until one night as she slept she heard the voice of her father.
There was no sympathy in his voice—he reminded her of what he had taught her in her childhood, and then, and in all the subsequent nights he came to her, he asked of whom she was a daughter, of whom she was a great-great-great-granddaughter?
The answer was samurai, and self-pity was not their way. No. A slur on clan or family or name was unforgiveable, and led to one thing alone:
Vengeance.
What else were men and women put upon this earth to do other than to give their lives over to something entirely? And how similar vengeance and love were, for both were born of devotion and obsession—but where love was a shapeless haze with no clear end, vengeance took those same emotions and focused them, drove them toward a wonderful climactic moment.
The promise of that ending, that vanishing point, that one instant of triumph and vindication—that made living for vengeance better than living for love. This, Yoshiko told herself.
On a bitter night she donned a crown of candles and set out barefoot in the dead time after midnight at the hour of the ox. She walked to a shrine in the next town over, murmuring invocations and carrying a straw phallus that she intended to nail to a tree within the grounds as a declaration to the spirits and her ancestors of her intentions.
But with the hammer and nail in her hands she hesitated. Still Munisai gleamed in her memory. Perhaps … She hardened herself, drove the nail through the fetish, and then extinguished the candles against the wood with them still atop her head.
The next three nights, Yoshiko sat beside Munisai’s sleeping body with the dagger her mother had bequeathed her in her hand, staring at him, thinking of how many other women had been where she alone should have been. It could not make her bring the blade from the sheath. For his flesh merely to die was not enough. He needed to see, to understand—to feel as harrowed as she was. How could she do this?
She wandered the hallways, and there she came across his armor with his name in white.
Denkichi was a thresher, a gangly man with cold and callused hands. He was the tallest peasant in Miyamoto, and perhaps it was his height that made him stand out to Yoshiko. Or perhaps not. It did not matter—any one of them would have done. She had to coax him stage by stage into her bed, for he was rightfully timid, but she could still pretend to be the girl she had been in her youth and she won him over eventually.
When they were together the peasant would try to whisper sweet things to her, attempt in vain to speak like an educated man, all the while with the stink of the fields on him and a body that was hard and angular. Yoshiko ignored his words and the sensations and thought of Munisai.
Munisai went on as he was. He had no idea what was happening and was mildly surprised to learn of her pregnancy—their times together hazy and drunken and often unfinished—and as her belly grew there was no change in him. He took on a wet nurse and a midwife to help her along, and then cared as little as he did before.
Yet when Bennosuke came, small and pink and wailing, he became Munisai’s pride. He held the boy, spoke to him softly, paraded him in front of friends. Yoshiko smiled at him demurely and properly as he did so, but inside what little was left of her was being eaten away. It taunted her with what they should have had, that joy in his eyes and that babe in his arms. That, they could have created together, but …
For five years Bennosuke grew, and there were moments when regret stabbed through her, when she thought about never telling Munisai. But always the love he showed the boy was never shown to her. They shared the name Hirata, the three of them, but Yoshiko realized she had it only in the same way his armor did. Not like Bennosuke had, and it was this that Munisai truly loved—all he loved—and it was this that always hardened her once more.
Denkichi had stayed away during her pregnancy and Bennosuke’s infancy, but Yoshiko lured him back. She let him even hold his son sometimes, and while he did so she would hide things of his to leave as clues for Munisai to find later—his sandals or the band he wrapped around his head as he worked.
Munisai never noticed. He would kick whatever it was to one side, or mutter about the servants being more mindful of their things.
Yoshiko wanted to laugh until she cried. She was so little to him that the idea that she could harbor deceit or spite or any human emotion at all simply did not occur to him.
The bamboo grove had lost the color even of rot. It was nothing now. She found herself asking if the entirety of this life was any different. And so it came to that night.
Yoshiko prepared herself for the role she would have to play, a character of exaggerated ice and steel to break him utterly. The moment she had planned for these long years approached, and while Denkichi was inside her she felt a detachment to the world that was somewhere between euphoria and resignation.
They finished early as they always did, but when Denkichi made to leave she pulled him back with her arms around his neck.
“Stay,” she said.
“But …” said Denkichi, worry on his ugly face.
“He won’t be back,” lied Yoshiko. “He’s away for a week. Stay. I get lonely.”
He obeyed because he was simple and thought this was real. They coupled again, and as they did so she heard the footsteps coming up the path. She took a breath, prepared herself, and just as the door was flung open she uttered a silent apology to Denkichi. His karma would be good. Perhaps he would come back samurai.
Then Denkichi’s soul was gone and his body was in pieces and she was naked in the courtyard and her nose was bleeding and people were watching and she was laughing in the dirt. Munisai was furious, seething: he felt!
“Whore,” Munisai hissed. “How long has this been going on?”
“How old is Bennosuke?” she asked.
“What does that have to do with it?” he said.
She looked up at him then. This was it, she realized, the moment she had lived for—there was only one thing left to say, the final wound that would make her vengeance complete. Yoshiko knew that her ancestors would be watching, willing her on to prove herself samurai, and she longed for the great instant of ecstasy and satisfaction that would rush into her.
But in Munisai’s eyes she saw something human there again finally, hurt and angry and vulnerable, and it cut through time. The greenness of the bamboo grove was eternal and they should have been in it together there forever, and what had she made of this life these past years? What had he made of this life?
It shattered the armor of her charade and tears rolled from her eyes as one gasping sob shook her body.
Oh, it was futile, all of it. Shame coursed through her and she tried to suck the tears back up before she hardened her face once more and fixed it into a bitter grin—a face fit to leave this pitiless world with. She was samurai, after all.
“If he is five, then I would say that this has been going on for about five—” she began, and that was the end of Yoshiko.
The armor was still scattered before Munisai on the floor. The lantern in his hand had begun to splutter and falter. He barely noticed.
Those tears. That racking sob that escaped her. The instant before she hardened and spoke the words that broke him … That was what defined him, and yet his pride as a samurai would never let him tell anyone but himself of this. Not even her son. Not even when he wanted to die.
It had taken him years to even acknowledge it himself. At first he had fixated on that final smile Yoshiko had forced onto her face. He had thought about it every night while he waited for sleep to come and saw it in the edge of every sharp sword that flashed toward him. It filled him with anger and hatred, and those were easy to deal with.
/>
They were false and constructed enemies, though, and he always knew it. Even then, part of him admired her; the samurai in him saw her resolve and dedication in pursuit of a correct and proper vengeance. The rest of him could not hold out forever. Slowly, slowly over the years wandering in the wilderness and then those in Shinmen’s service, he gradually allowed himself to admit the presence of the tears, to admit the truth of what he had done.
He remembered the rustling of the sheets and the gentle rocking of the bed as Yoshiko lay weeping behind him that first night he had betrayed her. He thought of that innocent, rare joy he had blithely trampled and tarnished. It tugged at his soul relentlessly, and his anger had turned to shame. He came to realize he had brought what Yoshiko had done to him onto himself with his arrogance, and for that he had murdered her.
Today, after eight years, he had thought at last that he could atone. It had come to him suddenly, when he had become aware of Bennosuke following him as he walked to the temple. What could be more perfect than her son killing him? Tell the story, in vivid, stark detail, steal the wits and the restraint from the boy, and then let him do what he would do; clean and quick and justice done.
But the boy …
After he had finished with killing, Munisai had watched the fire burn down within the village for some time, and then had returned to his estate. He did not enter, but instead slumped against the wall on the outside looking down across the valley. Cries of terror, pain, and grief echoed as dawn came, but none approached the house. Munisai sat in his filthy kimono alone, until he looked up and saw Dorinbo there in the daylight.
The monk said nothing. He must have walked through the carnage to reach the house. Dorinbo looked at Munisai, and the samurai knew the monk expected some kind of apology or an explanation, but there was nothing left in him. All he could do was look back.