CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

KARMA PILED UP

A young man sat in an unsavory drinking establishment on the outskirts of Totsuka. He was dressed in a threadbare dark blue hempen laborer’s jacket. His legs were bare. His high, shaved forehead was divided horizontally by a faded blue towel, twisted into a roll and tied in front. Clear, artless eyes shone from under the dangling ends of the knot.

He watched an old couple shuffle by as the divergent tides of the Tkaid surged around them. They were dressed as pilgrims, but their unpatched robes were cotton, not paper. The square bamboo pack the husband carried was shiny and new.

The young man rose to his feet, settled his sash lower on his thin hips, slipped his toes through the thongs of his straw zoris, and sauntered after them.

His smile was affable and polite. “Grandfather, allow me to carry your pack. It will earn me merit on the Great Wheel.”

“Thank you, my son. How kind of you. Thank you so very much.” The old man’s exhaustion made him effusive.

The teakettle and the small pot tied to the pack jangled when he took it off. His wife squatted, panting, in a patch of late-afternoon sun.

“We’re on our way to Ise to ask Amaterasu-sama, the Sun Goddess, to cure my old woman’s ailment.” The man’s face was as circular as a soup bowl. His features were rounded and flattened, as though weathered by the elements. His sparse eyebrows arched high above slightly bulging eyes, giving him a faded, startled look. His wife resembled him remarkably.

“The trip is difficult for her,” he said. Actually the couple looked too frail to walk to the public bath, much less make an arduous trek across wild rivers and over mountains.

“My beloved, devout mother journeyed to Amida’s Land of Pure Light last year.” The young man’s smile shifted to grief. “I have sworn to help any old people I meet. I myself am on my way to Mount Koya to bury her ashes and to pray for the repose of her soul.”

“Buddha has sent you, and He will bless you.” The old man helped his wife to her feet and put an arm around her waist. She clung to him as she laboriously slid one foot in front of the other. “We were about to seek lodging at an inn,” he said. “It’s getting dark, and my wife cannot travel farther today in any case.”

“I know a fine inn, grandfather.” The young man was earnest. “It’s run by a pious woman who charges a pittance for pilgrims. But it’s a bit off the trampled road.” He gently herded them onto a narrow path along the dike between the rice paddies.

The path led into the hills just west of town. The man followed his prey patiently. “Just a little farther,” he called cheerfully. “The inn has a splendid view of the town.”

To take their minds off the deepening twilight and the extra distance, he described the simple, wholesome meal that awaited them. He praised the hot bath the mistress of the inn would draw for them. He promised to massage their feet himself.

When the path passed the last farmhouse and entered a towering, whispery grove of bamboo at the base of the hill, he decided they’d gone far enough. He started forward to close the space between them and himself, but although his feet continued to move, his body stayed where it was. He reached back to free the pack straps of whatever was snagging them. He touched warm flesh.

His yelp startled a flock of crows into the air. He twisted, trying to see what had such a firm grip on the pack and his sash. His companions swiveled, as slowly as two stranded sea turtles, to see what was happening.

Still holding the thief helpless, Hanshiro put his mouth close to his ear and spoke in a low voice. “Do not reach into your coat. Remove the pack. Take off your coat. Then lie on your stomach and do not move.

“Here then! What are you doing?” The old man brandished his staff. “Cullion! Bandit!”

When he saw the two swords in Hanshiro’s belt, he folded stiffly to the ground, pulling his wife with him. “Spare the lad, honorable sir,” he cried. “Kill us. We’re old. But the boy was only trying to help.”

“Take everything.” Wearing only his loincloth, the thief lay sprawled facedown in the loam of the grove. “I’ll show you where you can hide their bodies. I’ll work for you.”

Hanshiro pulled a straw cord from his sleeve.

“Come here, grandfather.” He quickly tied the thief’s wrists.

He looked up to see that the old man was still prostrate on his knees, his body and arms flung forward. He trembled so hard that he rustled the dry bamboo leaves. His wife was chanting the Mantra of Light to dispel evil karma.

The thief recited a garbled lament that included his widowed mother and six starving siblings, ailing grandparents, a deserted sister and her brood, a typhoon, a fire, a plague, the malice of neighbors, and an ancient curse. When that failed to get him any pity he offered Hanshiro the sexual favors of his widowed mother, his sister, all of his younger siblings, nieces, nephews, and himself.

“Come here, grandfather.” Hanshiro’s impatience didn’t sound in his voice. He had paid a boy to watch the road for him, but he knew that while he tarried, his quarry might be passing through Totsuka. “I won’t hurt you.”

The old man struggled to his feet and crept toward him, as though Hanshiro were a poisonous snake. Hanshiro held the man’s bound hands up for inspection. “Do you see calluses?”

“No.” The old man peered at the soft palms and long nails.

“Yet he wears the clothes of a laborer.” Hanshiro rolled him over. The knife was stuck into the back of the waistband of his loincloth. “He planned to kill you with that, uncle.”

“But all we have are a few coins, the stamps and amulets from the temples we’ve visited, and the spare clothes in the pack.” The old man was bewildered.

“It’s easier for a hawk to attack a morsel of mouse than a meal of wild boar.” Hanshiro gestured toward the village of Totsuka. “Take his coat and sash. You can sell them and get something for the trouble he has caused you. Go back to the main road. When you pass the stables and the tatami maker’s shop, ask for the Bamboo Inn. It’s on the street of the medicine-box makers. Tell the mistress that the rnin from Tosa sent you. She’s honest.”

Hanshiro didn’t bother lecturing them to be less trusting. Dishonesty wore so many masks on the Tkaid, he could never list them all. As the old man led his wife away she was still chanting the mantra. Hanshiro’s rescue had only convinced her further of its efficacy.

Resting his weight on his heels and his elbows on his thighs, Hanshiro crouched near the thief’s head. The man’s topknot had come loose, and his stiff, oiled hair fanned outward. He had drawn his knees up to his chest and his chin down to meet them. He was weeping and pleading incoherently now. His tears mixed with the black soil and muddied his face.

“I am Emma, lord of Hell,” Hanshiro said quietly. His victim drew into a tighter coil and sobbed and babbled louder.

“Listen to me.” Hanshiro poked him with the cold iron ribs of his fan. “I stand at the gateway of Hell, and I am in a hurry. Tell me where the bodies are, and I may turn you away from my kingdom this time.”

The thief made a prodigious effort to control himself. He had already soiled himself. Three long shudders rolled through him before he could speak. “In a small cave. In the side of the mountain at the edge of the grove. By the big pine.”

Hanshiro hauled him to his feet and shoved him forward. The thief led him to the cave’s small opening, hidden at the base of the slope by rank growths of wild azalea and rhododendron. It was covered by a wall of stones that looked like a rock slide. With a second cord he tethered the man’s feet so he could walk with tiny steps but couldn’t run. Then he untied his hands.

“Pull away the stones,” Hanshiro said. “And remember that Emma, the king of Hell, has more important business to attend to. If you delay him, you irritate him.”

When the thief pulled down the first few stones the stench expanded outward from the opening as though it were inflating like the bloated corpses inside. Hanshiro almost gagged.

“Faster.” Hanshiro tied his towel across his nose and mouth. He could see that this was not a cave, but a small cavity in the face of the hill. The faded light of sunset illuminated patches of the tangle of rotting limbs and bare bones jammed inside. The ominous, relentless buzz of flies seemed to be the chanting of sutras for the abandoned spirits of these dead.

Hanshiro thought of the poem written eight hundred years earlier.

Karma piled up from long ages past
keeps us coming and going in these bitter lives.

When the man had pulled away most of the rocks, Hanshiro retied his wrists. He pulled the thief’s towel off his head. He unknotted it, tore off a strip, and stuffed the rest into his mouth. He used the strip to tie the wadded cloth tightly in place.

He picked him up and stuffed him into the opening, on top of the charnel pile. The softened flesh gave way easily under him. Hanshiro wedged him in so he couldn’t work his feet loose and kick away the stones. The flies and ants that swarmed over the heap began climbing over him.

The gag muted his screams, but Hanshiro could hear them as he methodically piled the stones up again, walling the thief inside with his victims. He left one rock ajar so he could breathe.

Without looking back he reentered the cool, green-and-silver-and-russet twilight of the bamboo grove. The bamboos’ sleek grace and the creak and rustle of their culms and leaves calmed him. As he walked among the shiny stalks, Hanshiro agreed with the Chinese poets who said a bamboo grove was the best of all places to get drunk. He decided that getting drunk was a good idea.

When he caught up with the old couple on the thread of a path dividing the rice fields, they slid down the side of the dike. They clasped their hands and bowed, their foreheads resting on the edge of the path.

Without a glance, Hanshiro stalked by them with his splay-footed gait. He was annoyed with them even though he understood why they made these pilgrimages to the great shrine of the Sun Goddess at Ise.

They had years of blessings to give thanks for and paltry sins to atone. Now that the current lifetime was drawing toward the end, they thought more about how they would spend the next one.

Hanshiro considered their kind the bane of the Tkaid. Serene in the unswerving belief that their piety would protect them, they clogged the road. They slowed traffic. They filled the inns. They interfered with commerce. And like the annual summer hatching of mayfly nymphs with dampened, crumpled wings, they encouraged swarms of sharp-toothed pike to feed on them.

Hanshiro wanted to turn on them and shake his fan at them. He wanted to admonish them to stay home and let their sons support them, their daughters-in-law wait on them, and their grandchildren crawl over them. But that would have been disrespectful. And he would have had to listen to their apologies and their self-recriminations and, worst of all, their thanks.