CHAPTER TWO

A STATE OF CONFUSION

Cat slid the quilt sling and its stiff cargo along the cherry planks of the hallway. The wood was smooth, with a satiny patina buffed by forty years of daily rubbing with damp cloths. A single candle on an iron stand shed a dim light. The body bumped over the threshhold and onto the raised wooden walkway across the dirt floor of the storeroom. Cat let her breath out slowly and waited for her eyes to adjust to the gloom.

The storeroom was a wild disorder of goods and tools stacked as high as the dusty rafters. Five hulking cedar barrels bound with hoops of twisted bamboo splints were stacked in a far corner. Old Jug Face transferred sake from the distilleries’ smaller casks into them so she could water it. The barrels were almost as tall as Cat was. This wouldn’t be easy.

Cat knew she would have to put the body into the top rear barrel, which should be about half-full. The servants regularly siphoned off the sake from that one, figuring Old Jug Face wouldn’t notice. Cat was sure the mistress of the Perfumed Lotus charged the customers extra to cover the loss. That was easier than trying to stop the larceny.

When Butterfly returned, Cat set the candle holder on a small shelf. Then she boosted the child onto the first row of barrels. “I’ll push while you pull.”

Cat and Butterfly hauled the body up the side until the customer’s waist was balanced on the rim. Cat grasped each foot and shoved the corpse the rest of the way. She put the wooden pry bar on top of the casks, then climbed up a stack of bales of rice and onto them herself.

She pried open the rear lid and slid it off. She and Butterfly wrestled the body into position and eased the customer headfirst into his last bath. Cat had to lean on his feet to crumple him enough to fit.

The sake covered the guest’s soles. He wouldn’t begin to smell until the servants drained off enough wine to uncover him. Cat set the lid back on. She climbed down, scooped up a handful of fine dust from the dirt floor, and sifted it onto the cask lids to cover the evidence of activity. With a small broom Butterfly swept away their tracks in the dust behind them as they and the quilt retreated to Cat’s dressing room.

The guest’s clothes hung on a wooden rack in the small reception room that led into the sleeping chamber. Cat regarded them with distaste. The shgun, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, banned his officials from frequenting the pleasure districts. The ban was ignored, of course, but those affected by it generally wore disguises. Cat’s guest had favored the clothing of a common laborer.

Cat left the long strip of cloth the guest wore as underwear in his travel box sitting behind a low screen in her dressing room. She found another length of cotton cloth in her own big cedar chest. She stripped off her robes, folded them neatly, and put them in the chest.

She stood perfectly still while Butterfly wound the cloth around her hips, pulled the end into the cleft of her buttocks, passed it between her legs, and tucked it into the front of the belt. When she finished, Cat was wearing the loincloth sported by men of the laboring class.

Next Cat held one end of another long piece of cloth against her abdomen while Butterfly walked around her, pulling it taut as she wrapped it around Cat’s abdomen and chest.

“Tighter,” Cat whispered.

The cloth was called a haramaki, and commoners wore it around their stomachs for warmth and to protect their navels, the seat of their emotions, from the mischief of the Thunder god. Her uptilted breasts were small, but they were taut, and the nipples were large and firm. The haramaki, wrapped higher than usual, would flatten and hide them.

Cat pulled on the blue drawers with their tight legs and baggy seat and tied them at the waist. Then she slipped into the light undershirt. Butterfly held up the dark blue wadded jacket with narrow sleeves. The number ten had been embroidered in white floss inside, indicating the clothes had been rented for this occasion. Cat flinched when the rough hemp cloth settled on her shoulders.

It reached to her knees and had “Nakagawa Freight Company” and “Felicitous Service for Fifty Years” emblazoned in bold white characters down the back. Cat overlapped the front edges and held them while Butterfly wrapped the wide, stiff sash three times around her and tied it in back. The child arranged the sash high on Cat’s hips and rakishly low in front.

Cat pulled the jacket up to shorten the hem hanging around her knees and expand it above the sash. It made her look bigger and provided hiding places for the things she would need on the road.

Finally Cat knelt in front of her mirror again. She held her hair out taut, sucked in her breath, and, with her shears, cut it off just below her shoulders. Butterfly moaned. A woman’s hair was her pride.

The three-foot-long hank of hair was still tied with the paper ribbon. She coiled it and folded it into a sheet of pliable rice paper. She tied the packet inside a blue silk scarf decorated with the Asano crest of crossed feathers stenciled in white. She put it into the front of the jacket, under her sash. No sense leaving behind any clues as to how she looked when she escaped.

She pulled her hair together at the crown of her head and tied it into a man’s topknot. She draped the guest’s thin blue cotton towel over her head and knotted it just under her lower lip. The customer had worn it that way for the same reason Cat did, to hide his face.

Butterfly watched with dread and fascination. Her mistress was a shape-shifter. She was one of the enchanted cats who disguised themselves as beautiful women to cause trouble for men. Cat certainly had caused trouble for the man who right then was sole deep in more sake than he’d ever dreamed of having.

With her shears Cat cut off her long fingernails and wrapped them carefully in one of her embossed paper handkerchiefs. “Give them to Plover to sell for you.” She handed them to Butterfly.

Butterfly knew how valuable they were. A courtesan would cut off a fingernail to give to a patron as a pledge of faithful and exclusive love. However, she often made the same pledge to several men. Since more than one short fingernail on her hand would expose the trickery, she bought extras.

Cat hid the scissors inside her coat, under the sash. She had been planning to kill herself with them in four months, on the second anniversary of her father’s death. Now she had a higher purpose. She had decided to take revenge instead.

“Mistress …” Butterfly sucked her knuckles nervously while Cat rifled the customer’s small travel box.

“Look down at your feet, child. Are they covered with rice paddy mud? A courtesan’s little sister doesn’t suck her fingers.” Cat felt a sharp pang of remorse. She might be endangering the child. “The less you know about this the better, little Butterfty.”

“But, mistress …”

“Bring my travel cloak.”

Cat didn’t know what to pack for a trip. Servants had always packed for her. In fact, servants had done just about everything for her.

She rolled a thin cotton towel and draped it around her neck as commoners did. Inside her jacket she stowed her flat wallet of paper handkerchiefs and the bag containing her long-stemmed pipe with its tiny brass bowl. With a straw cord she hung from her sash a bamboo container that held wine but could be used to carry water. She considered taking along the collapsible pillow stand but decided it was too bulky.

She found the guest’s wallet, opened the drawstring, and peered at the money inside. The three rolls of a hundred coppers each had been strung onto straw cords and the ends knotted to hold the coins tight against each other. A smaller roll was made up of silver coins.

Cat wasn’t as naive as the noblewoman who thought a roll of coins was a huge caterpillar. Cat had seen money, but she had rarely held it. She folded back the opening of the wallet and touched the hard metal. She stroked the rough, round edges and wondered what these would buy. Then she pulled the drawstrings shut and tucked the sack inside her jacket, too. Old Jug Face would have separated the guest from his money in the morning anyway.

Cat was wondering what else to take when she heard Old Jug Face shriek. She was so startled that she almost slowed down. Her father would have said she almost stopped the sword in its deadly arc. That was always a mistake, usually a fatal one.

“Lout! Radish!” The auntie wasn’t shrieking at Cat, though. A customer must have urinated against the paper panels enclosing her office near the entrance of the Perfumed Lotus. Now and then a drunken guest, too lazy to walk to the privy, missed the edge of the veranda and hit the paper panes.

“What about the auntie, mistress?”

Cat sighed. When she made her decision to sell herself into the Yoshiwara, she went to the House of the Carp, where her nurse’s niece, Plover, lived. Plover had told Cat about the Carp’s kind mistress and friendly atmosphere. But Cat had been ignorant of the customs of the pleasure district. She hadn’t realized that the house where she and Plover lived was not the one where they would work. They met their guests in the Perfumed Lotus, and Old Jug Face ruled the Perfumed Lotus.

“I’ll sneak past her,” Cat said. But she and Butterfly both knew that wasn’t likely. Old Jug Face employed brawny peasants and out-of-work samurai as shopmen, inside men, bed men, overseers, bath men, and downstairs men, not to mention the people Lord Kira had sneaked in as spies. They all took turns as night watchmen.

Confusion. Cat reviewed the advice in Musashi’s Fire Book. “Induce a state of confusion in the opponent.”

She scooped up the orange cat still sleeping on her bookshelf, his stomach and legs hanging over the edge. She had named the scarred old warrior Monk for good reason. He maintained a meditative tranquillity in the midst of all this late-night activity and shape-changing.

“Please deliver Monk to Little Dragon’s room.” She handed the cat to Butterfly. “Then go to Mistress Plover’s room and stay with her. Tell her I asked that she say you were with her all night.” Cat glanced at the joss stick’s wooden holder. The sandalwood had burned almost to the notch marking midnight, the watch of the Rat. “Tell Mistress Plover I’ll miss her.”

Butterfly slung the inert Monk over the crook of one arm. With her free hand, she poked under her mattress until she found a small brocade sack closed with a drawstring. When she handed it to Cat the copper coins inside clinked cheekily for such a piddling sum. They were her secret fund, the tips customers had given her for running errands.

“No, little Butterfly,” said Cat. “Keep your tea money. One day, if a rich, handsome man doesn’t marry you first, you’ll save enough to buy your freedom.”

“Mistress, forgive my rudeness, but this is a good-bye present.” Butterfly gathered the courage to contradict Cat. “You’ll need money to eat and sleep out there.”

Butterfly had almost forgotten what “out there” was like, but she had overheard the guests’ stories. Out there people had to struggle for their daily rice and a roof. Bandits and demons and tax collectors lurked out there.

Tears brimmed in Butterfly’s eyes. Lady Cat had been a good mistress. She sent warmed sake out to her box bearers on cold nights. She hushed up the maids’ indiscretions. And if, during a long night of entertaining, Butterfly fell asleep on the job, she didn’t scold.

Lady Cat was haughty, that was true. But Butterfly knew hauteur was to be expected in a woman of a samurai family. And she sensed that Cat’s eyes mocked the world so no one would pity her. Only Plover and Butterfly had seen, in Cat’s rare, unguarded moments, the grief in her dark eyes.

Butterfly also knew that Cat was old. She would turn nineteen at the celebration of the New Year. Nineteen was a most unlucky age. The characters for nineteen also meant “repeated sorrows.” Cat had had more than her share of sorrow.

“The Lord Buddha will watch over me.” Cat knelt so she could look into Butterfly’s face. She put her best jade comb into the sack with Butterfly’s tea money. “Please accept this trifle in thanks for all you’ve done. As one more favor I ask that you deliver Monk.” Cat smiled conspiratorially.

Butterfly slid the wall panel open just enough to slip through. Cat picked up the guest’s rented hat, shaped like a wide, flat, shallow bowl. She slipped the inner woven cap onto her head and tied the paper cords under her chin. The name of the rental shop was painted on the brim. The hat too was designed to hide a face.

Cat went to the open wall panel and waited. She didn’t look over her shoulder at the rooms where she had earned her living for the past year. Most of her books and her ornate chests full of the sumptuous robes of her new profession were in the room she shared with Plover at the House of the Carp.

Cat didn’t have to wait long. Butterfly knew the brothel’s maze of narrow back hallways well. She silently slid aside the thin wooden panel of Little Dragon’s rear wall. Little Dragon was entertaining her guest with the erotic tricks her small dog, Chin-Chin, could perform. From the darkness outside the room, Butterfly slung Monk back in both hands and heaved him inside as high and as hard as she could. When Monk landed he was irritated.

Chin-Chin’s plumed tail stiffened over his back like a battle banner. Yapping hysterically, he scrambled up the length of his mistress’s prone, naked torso, leaving claw tracks on her stomach and chest. Getting a purchase on the foothills of Little Dragon’s hairdo, Chin-Chin launched himself at Monk, who was ricocheting off the folding screens and shredding the paper walls. Monk sounded as if he were being skinned and gutted to make a samisen. Against Chin-Chin, Monk had the edge in weight, speed, reach, and volume.

Little Dragon’s naked customer fell seat first into the glowing coals of the firebox sunk into a well in the floor. His howls of pain, Little Dragon’s screams, and the crash of mirror stands and sake jars and folding screens caught Old Jug Face’s attention. Cat could trace the auntie’s progress by the rise and fall of her shouts as she ignored corridors and charged straight through adjacent entertaining rooms to save time.

In his hurry to get to the excitement, a drunken three-hundred-pound wrestler plunged through a wall into the game of Follow the Leader. Floors and walls shuddered under the impact. Someone began screaming, “Earthquake!” From all over the house footsteps and shouts converged on Little Dragon’s rooms. Cat could hear Monk’s battle cries above the din.

Soak in, Monk. Close with your enemy and strike quickly. Cat thought about the Fire Book again. Monk was like any good warrior. He was meditative in peace and formidable in war. He was capable of taking on the entire assembly if necessary.

Cat smiled grimly to herself. There was no turning back now. The boat had been boarded, as the old saying went.