CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE DISCIPLE IS THE THREAD

What was taking him so long? Musui was such an amiable, unaffected sort, hardly the type to suffer from constriction of the bowels. Cat stared at the head-high thicket of bamboo screening the roadside privy in the hills above Kanagawa. She stamped impatiently and splattered mud. This was her fourth day on the road, and she hadn’t even reached the third post station.

Rain dripped steadily from the brim of her hat. She shivered in the raw wind. She stamped her feet again, this time to relieve the cramp in her calves.

Cat was offended. She didn’t want Musui to recognize that she was the daughter of Lord Asano, of course; but she expected him, somehow, to realize he was in the presence of a peer. Musui, however, seemed unaware of his own privileged birth, much less hers.

He had left Cat standing in the road, in the cold rain. The muddy stream of rainwater washed over her sodden straw sandals and soaked her tabi. Her toes were numb with the cold.

Far below, at the bottom of the hill, a group of pilgrims in bamboo hats huddled like mushrooms under a bead tree. Otherwise, the road was empty. Sensible travelers had all sought shelter.

Cat carried Musui’s big cloth bundle, his furoshiki. The knotted ends cut into Cat’s chest, but she dared not take it from under her raincape. It would have been soaked immediately. Cat had never had to carry her own things, much less someone else’s. The indignity of it bothered her more than the effort.

The bundle had seemed light enough when she started, but it had grown more burdensome with each step. She felt like the greedy woman who tricked an enchanted sparrow into giving her a basket of riches. The basket had grown heavier and heavier as the woman carried it. When opened, not riches but demons tumbled out.

Cat was wearing the yellow-and-black-striped jacket and the gray breeches given her at the temple. The bottoms of the breeches were tucked into her old black canvas leggings. When she walked, the rubbing of the wet cloth stridulated, measured and imperious as a cricket’s call.

She had to hold on to her hat or the wind blew under it, causing the straw cord under her chin to choke her. Rain fell from the edge of the brim and sluiced down the rectangular cape of woven straw. The cape refused to compromise with her body. It stood out from her back and flapped like a broken wing. The sandals and wet tabi had rubbed raw places on Cat’s feet. Those feet had carried her only two ri today, and she felt they couldn’t take another step.

She and Musui had left the broad plain of Musashi behind. The hills had become increasingly precipitous since leaving Kawasaki. Rags of mist drifted among the trees on the steep slopes. The Tkaid followed the coastline where possible, but at times it was forced up and over the stubby green fingers of headlands poking into the surf. As the road wound upward it passed beneath ancient pines, twisted by the ocean’s salty breath.

After a long climb Cat and her master had reached the crest of a high tor. A large stone phallus, covered with moss, stood nearby. A pile of rocks as tall as Cat stood next to it. Each rock was the offering of some traveler who had gained the top.

To the southwest Cat could see the thatched roofs of Kanagawa rising from a lake of mist. The village was wedged into the crotch of two steep headlands. It backed up to a bay that was pale under a gray sky. A glow at the horizon, like a row of floor lanterns behind a screen, promised better weather.

“What a splendid privy!” Musui was still adjusting the tucked-up skirts of his robes as he emerged, beaming, from the thicket of bamboo.”It qualifies as Daibenjo, a Great-Convenience-Place.”

Like Cat he wore a clumsy raincape and a wide hat on which was written “We two, pilgrims together.” The second pilgrim referred to was the long-dead priest, scholar, artist, educator, humanitarian, and builder, Kb Daishi. Musui also had on a short white underrobe and a black outer one and muddy brown gaiters. His prayer beads and bell hung around his wrist. On top of his raincape rode the roll of his sleeping mat with his pilgrim’s scroll and flute inside.

He opened his umbrella and smiled his lopsided grin at Cat. Musui was so suffused with good spirits that Cat found it hard to stay angry with him, but she managed. She lowered her head so the hat hid her scowl as she hurried through the wet bamboo to the privy. In the past four days she had had more experience with commoners’ toilets than she wanted.

But Musui was right. As roadside privies went, it was exceptional. Some enterprising farmer had made additions to lure travelers into passing up other privies in favor of his, thus providing more fertilizer for his fields.

A waist-high screen of supple bamboo shielded its occupant while allowing a fine view of Kanagawa’s roofs, like peaked, straw-colored waves, and the bay lapping at its back doors. The floor around the hole was of fragrant, newly cut cypress. The farmer had fastened two blocks of pine, cut in the shape of feet, on each side of the hole, to help the weary traveler adopt the best position. A thatched roof sheltered it all. Wisteria vines climbed the support posts.

With his piece of charcoal Musui had written a poem on the tight weave of the bamboo screen. Cat wasn’t surprised. He had been leaving poems on the sides of storage houses, on gates and fences and rain barrels. The rich merchants of Edo, eager for the furtive status derived from acquisition, would have paid stacks of thin gold coins for samples of Musui’s poetry and his sinuous calligraphy. Yet if the rain washed off the words as soon as Musui drew them, it seemed to make no difference to him. The privy’s roof, however, kept this one dry.

Flocks of silver birds
Shift and veer toward coming night,
And do not heed me.

As Cat balanced herself on the raised footprints, she watched through the doorway as gusts blew the rain westward in undulating lines across the hard-packed earth. When they hit the ground the drops splattered, sending up twin sprays that did look like the wings of the birds in Musui’s poem. Cat became mesmerized by the erratic flights of the phantom birds. They exploded into life, then vanished, to be replaced by others, blown along in front of another gust.

Cat took as long as she could at the privy. She was grateful to be out of the rain and wind. Grateful not to be climbing interminable hills and sliding in the mud. But she knew she mustn’t keep her master waiting long. She sighed and trudged out to the road.

“A farmer with the heart of an artist.” Musui held the umbrella so it sheltered them both. Then he and his bamboo staff splashed off through the water, and Cat had to hurry to keep up.

“Daishi knew the importance of commoners,” Musui said. “He preached that one can’t make a delicious meal with one flavor or a beautiful song with but one note.”

Maybe the Honorable Daishi never had a commoner drop a turd in his begging bowl, Cat thought.

“The next village looks like a pleasant place to eat.” Cat was trying to maneuver Musui into resting.

“I had hoped to have a talk with that gentleman from Tosa.” Musui was not to be maneuvered. “But he seemed to be pressed by urgent business.”

He’s no gentleman, Cat thought. And his buttocks are in the fire all right, until he has me in his flea-cracking grasp.

She was glad Musui had delayed so long at the temple that morning. By the time he had chanted the entire Lotus sutra and he and Cat had completed the Hundred-Times-Worship, backward, Hanshiro had been gone for many hours.

The Hundred-Times-Worship had taken more time than usual because the temple grounds were teeming with the faithful, come to worship and to cheer for their favorite wrestlers. Musui and the abbot had shouted encouragement as one after another, the local aspirants entered the ring and tried to get a purchase on Mountain Wind’s unaccommodating bulk.

The challengers had wrapped their arms as far around him as they could reach. They had clung to his broad leather loincloth in desperate embraces. But he had waddled them over the ring of rice bales faster than they could name their home villages.

“Hanshiro is from the Cape of Muroto.” Musui seemed unaware of the murderous thoughts his disciple was harboring for the taciturn rnin. “Daishi-sama achieved enlightenment there, you know. I wonder if Hanshiro has seen him. Perhaps we’ll meet up with him on the road and I can ask him.”

“A torii, sensei.” Cat was eager to change the subject.

“Where?” Musui squinted into the lush, sodden undergrowth. Almost hidden among the trees and up a slope, an old wooden gate leaned forward precariously. It marked the entrance to a shrine.

Musui stopped at every roadside temple and shrine. Small shrines and temples dedicated to local deities abounded, and members of the Shinto and Buddhist pantheons were often mixed together. Shinto or Buddhist, Musui worshiped at them all. He rinsed his hands and mouth, dropped a coin in the slatted wooden box, and rang the big bronze bell if there was one. He burned incense. He clapped his hands, bowed his head, prayed, and chanted. When Cat finished her much shorter rituals, she waited.

At first Cat had been impatient with Musui’s delays. But as the road grew steeper and the rain drummed on her hat and she slid in the muddy streams flowing past her feet, she began to look for chances to stop. She preferred the monuments with roofs where she could get out of the weather, but any rest was welcome.

The narrow trail to this almost forgotten shrine was overgrown. As Cat pushed through the wet bushes, more water showered down on her. Mossy stone steps, all a-tilt, staggered up the wooded hillside. They led to a small shrine to Hachiman, the Shinto god of war.

Sharing his roof was the Buddha Fudo-sama, a ferocious figure surrounded by carved flames and sitting on a lotus flower. That Fudo-sama was here was an especially propitious omen. He represented unshakable resolve and invincibility. He was the patron saint of warriors.

Cat pictured the ideogram for “desperate.” Its ancient meaning was “to risk one’s life for a place on this earth.” Cat was certainly desperate, but she didn’t expect to find a place on this earth.

Her father’s name had been abolished and disgraced. The family’s fortunes had gone to provide for its displaced servants and retainers. Cat knew that to change that would be like trying to put spilled water back in a basin. But she was prepared to lie, dissemble, and kill to reach Oishi.

Cat thought about all that as she bowed before Fudo-sama. The blue paint had long since worn off his face, but he still brandished his wooden sword and rope and scowled fiercely. Fierce Fudo in his cloak of flames cheered her a little. Fudo, Buddha of the Unmoved and Immutable, frightened away evil spirits. And perhaps he would bless her quest.

The chapel, an odd mixture of Buddhist and Shinto styles, was neglected. The paint had peeled away from the ornate diaperwork around the ceiling. Moss and weeds grew on the rotted cedar shingles of the roof. The scent of mold, like the musty odor of chrysanthemums, pervaded the dark interior. But behind the building was a small waterfall whose splashing was cheerful, even in the rain.

Musui filled the small altar lamps with fragrant rapeseed oil. He lit the lamps and a bundle of incense. Sitting cross-legged on the warped wooden floor in front of the statues, he chanted the Lotus sutra and confessed to the sins of the six senses. Finally he intoned an invocation to Amida. By the time he finished, the sun had set.

“Please lay out our sleeping mats,” Musui said. “We’ll spend the night here.”

Cat started to protest but stopped herself. One didn’t argue with one’s master. If you would have retainers, the old proverb went, first you must be a retainer.

She opened the mats out on the veranda under the wide eaves of the hut. She set the wet cloth bundle, the furoshiki, between them.

Musui said he preferred a furoshiki to a wicker travel box, because the cloth could be tied around just about anything. And if one wanted to be free of material effects, one could just throw them to the winds, fold up the cloth, and stick it into one’s sleeve. So it should be with one’s material things as one grew older, he said. By the end of the journey one should have nothing.

Cat’s stomach growled. Musui was taking too much to heart his own philosophy of having nothing. The day’s only meal had been breakfast at the temple. It had been a pitiful affair of cold rice and a few pickled vegetables. Cat had saved part of it to offer to Jiz with a request that he keep watch over her father’s spirit.

“Do you think we need to bathe?” Musui peered out into the darkness and the steady rain.

“If bathing under an icy waterfall makes one holy, sensei,” she said, “then we are truly the holiest of the holy.”

She held up her hands. The pads of her fingers were wrinkled by the day-long soaking. Musui’s laugh was so infectious, Cat laughed, too, in spite of herself. Like children, the two of them sat on the edge of the narrow porch and wiggled their toes as they held their bare feet under the cascade off the eaves to wash away the mud.

By the light of the altar lamps, Musui searched among the contents of the furoshiki—his writing box, jars of oil, packets of incense, scrolls of sutras and other religious paraphernalia. He found two towels, two pairs of chopsticks, and a flat wooden box tied with a cord.

Cat almost cried with relief when he opened it. The abbot had included a meal with his good-bye gifts. Inside the box nested six fat balls of rice, wrapped in crinkly strips of dried seaweed. Tucked neatly around them were pickled plums and coils of boiled gourd peels, all garnished with a spray of pine needles.

When they finished eating Cat packed away the box with a pair of rice balls left in it for breakfast. She cupped her hands, caught the runoff from the eaves, and drank. Then, while Musui played his flute, she watched the curtain of rain fall from the roof.

Cat had heard flutes played often, of course; but here, in the forest at night with the rain falling, the song was eerie. It seemed to be calling to the restless spirits that surely must inhabit such a dark, brooding place.

When the song ended Musui handed the flute to Cat. It was cool and glossy and slightly curved in her hands, as though falling away from her grasp. It was made from the section of the bamboo nearest the root. The walls of the long joints were thickest there, and the natural bore became narrow, making high notes possible.

“Mountain bamboo is strong, yet delicate,” Musui said. “It bridges the earth and the sky. Its roots are planted firmly in the ground, yet clouds nest in its leaves.”

Cat took a deep breath and blew into the flute as hard as she could. Only the harsh whistle of air emerged from the other end.

“Emptiness is the necessity,” Musui said softly. “The universe is an empty shell in which your mind plays. Think of your body as an empty room with walls of skin. Look at a bowl without seeing the sides.

“The walls of the flute do not sing.” His voice was hypnotic. “Nor does the fire that cures it, nor the lacquer that glazes it, nor the string that binds it. The emptiness sings. Hold in your hands the emptiness that is the flute. Play not with your fingers but with your abdomen, your soul.”

Cat held the flute through the hour of the Cock and into the hour of the Boar. The lamps had long since burned out. The rain slowed to a diffident tread on the roof, then stopped. Fragments of a waning moon, misshapen but as fat and white as the rice balls, glowed through the branches of the pines. Musui sat silent near her in the darkness.

Stand in sound as though under a waterfall. Cat heard the words, but she was sure no one spoke them. Hear the sound of sound.

Cat put the mouthpiece to her lips and merged the pulsing emptiness in her skull with that of the flute. She was rewarded with the hint of a tone, like that of a wind blowing across the moist mouth of a jug. But try as she might, she couldn’t make it sound again.

“Maybe tomorrow it will sing with you.”

“Where are we going tomorrow?” Cat handed the flute back to him.

“Does the cloud ask where it’s going? Does the river?” Musui lay down on his mat and draped his spare robe over him.

“‘The teacher is the needle and the disciple is the thread,’” Cat murmured.

“And who has taught you the words of the sword saint, Musashi?”

“I must have heard them somewhere. ‘Even boys hanging about the temple gate learn to chant sutras,’ as the old saying goes.”

“And do they learn to count, too?”

Count? Cat turned hot, then cold. He had tricked her into counting the straws for him that first day. Perhaps he was not as guileless as he seemed. “One must count to survive, sensei. Counting is not reading or writing.” Cat couldn’t tell by the silence that followed whether Musui believed her or not.

“You must have a journey name.” He seemed unconcerned about whether she had lied to him. Or what her background was. His lack of curiosity unnerved Cat. She had been auditioning and rehearsing various stories about herself, but he had asked for none.

“As you say, sensei.”

“Your name shall be Shinobu, Endurance.”

“You honor this miserable person too much, sensei.”

Shinobu. It was a girl’s name, but boys were sometimes given girls’ names to mislead the demons of disease and bad luck. Shinobu meant more than endurance, really. It had an undermeaning. To hide oneself. To live in concealment. It was a good name.