CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

MEETING A BUDDHA IN HELL

“‘I’d like to be called a traveler in the mist …’” As Musui recited the opening of Bash’s famous poem, he bowed to the group of men shuffling on their knees across the tatami of the reception room of the Four Heavenly Kings Inn in Totsuka.

Again lodging under sasanqua from place to place. Cat silently finished the famous verse.

She didn’t care that the men had interrupted her calligraphy lesson. She despised having to make crude, wobbly strokes with the brush. She found it difficult to look blankly at Musui when he recited poetry she knew as well as her own family lineage. Several times she had almost blurted out the classical references that were the sign of her breeding.

She especially missed her books, bound in rue-scented silk covers to protect them from insects. She longed for the authors in whose company she had spent so many pleasant, solitary hours. After she moved to the Yoshiwara she had treasured them for the escape from loneliness and sorrow they had provided her.

This evening, Musui’s visitors included three more innkeepers, the manager of an employment agency, and an ancient cloud dweller, as the nobility were sometimes called. This one had been a courtier to an emperor long retired. The nobleman now eked out a living teaching calligraphy and the art of distinguishing scents. There was also a manufacturer of high-grade hair oil, a fish broker, and a maker of brocade borders and ties for mosquito nets. Each one carried his lacquered writing box and a scroll of his own poetry.

The margins on most of the scrolls were filled with commentaries made by Totsuka’s professional literary critics at one copper a verse. The hair oil magnate carried a much thumbed recent edition of the fivehundred-year-old text, Good Poetry of Modern Times. Besides examples of superior poems, it listed poetic phrases that could be used frequently with impunity. In composing poetry, creativity was not admired nearly so much as the ability to incorporate the classics into one’s verse.

The innkeeper bowed apologetically to Musui. “My friends heard you were honoring us here, sensei. They beg your candid opinion of their attempts at verse.”

You mean you sent servants on the run to inform them, thought Cat.

She watched closely, to be sure the host showed the proper respect for Musui in the seating arrangements. In their efforts to appear cultured, many of the townsmen foolishly hired mountebanks to instruct them in the Ogasawara school of etiquette. As far as Cat was concerned they had no more idea of refined behavior than a chicken. But the host gave Musui the seat of honor in front of the tokonoma, the tall niche for displaying flower arrangements and scroll paintings. The others settled back on their heels and arranged their robes and writing materials.

Musui smiled graciously through the introductions. This happened almost everywhere he stayed, which was why he hadn’t minded spending the previous night in the abandoned chapel.

“Would you be so kind, sensei, as to forgive my presumption and inscribe my fan with a few words?” The fish broker folded at the waist until he touched the tatami with his forehead, then slid the paper folding fan toward Musui.

“You honor me.” One of Musui’s seemingly endless supply of rules of the road was “Never refuse a request for calligraphy, but never offer it unless asked.” He dipped his brush into the ink and quickly, effortlessly, wrote:

The joy of meeting,
longer than a lover’s sash
in bed at midnight

Everyone gasped with pleasure as the fish broker passed it around. Cat knew that from now on he would find a reason to display it to every person who entered his house. He would boast of this night until, when his friends saw him approaching, they would remember urgent business on the other side of the street.

Maids hovered with jars of warmed wine and plates of rice dumplings and raw sea bream with a searing horseradish sauce. Other maids broiled strips of abalone on a hot stone. After the men had sat around hissing and sucking bits of food from their teeth, after flattery and self-deprecation had taken up a quarter of the hour of the Dog, the host raised his hand for attention.

“I propose a contest of linked verse.”

“Hai! Yes!” They all had drunk enough sake to be bold. They didn’t require much. “What topic shall we pick?”

“Not frogs,” said the mosquito net trimmer. “We’re simple country folk. We could never equal the poetry of Bash’s famous frog match. You were there, were you not, sensei?”

“I was.” Musui smiled at the thought of it. Bash and nineteen of his disciples had recited away the spring night and raised the dawn with frog poems. Toward sunrise they had been so tired and tipsy that the last few matches had been undecided. But the poems had been collected into a book that was widely read.

How Musui missed the master. Bash had refined linked verse and given it a humorous, gentle serenity all his own. He had taken it from the intellectual snobs and the nobility and had made a present of it to everyone.

“Shall we compose serious verse or haikai, the comic stuff?”

“I propose haikai,” said Musui. “Let our topics be the crane and the pine tree.”

“We must have a judge,” said the manager of the employment agency.

“Musui-sensei! Musui must judge.”

“I shall record the poems.” The innkeeper motioned for his servant to bring his writing kit.

The other men began laying out their ink stones and brushes, water containers, mats, and felt pads, lining up everything precisely. With small figures carved of ivory or jade or wood they weighted down the long strips of mulberry paper on which they could write their own copies of the poems and the commentaries. In an evening with Musui they would receive free instruction worth many silver chogin.

The eight earnest poets paired off. One of each pair would compose the first part, or the hokku, of the poem. The other man would add the wakiku, the second part, using linked associations or pivot words or word-plays. Musui would decide the winner of each match.

As the honored guest, Musui opened the performance. He arranged a graceful compliment to the host into the requisite three lines of five, seven, and five syllables. The innkeeper linked it to a self-deprecatory second part of two lines of seven syllables each. Then the match began in earnest.

The cloud dweller, the old nobleman, was an adequate poet, but his mental faculties weren’t what they once had been. The townsmen were slow, and their efforts were clumsy at best. The performance was interrupted by laughter and the loud hissing of a man in the throes of creation and by the clapping of hands and cries of delight at a particularly agile phrase.

In games like this, the wit and the quantity of the verses counted more than their aesthetic quality. But as far as Cat was concerned, she and her friends in the House of the Carp had performed better. Linked verse required training and intense concentration and cooperation. The performances had complex rules of subtle word associations and categories, and Cat listened carefully to Musui’s comments and corrections. He deserved his reputation as a master.

“Shinobu, Endurance,” Musui whispered to Cat while the fish broker was pondering his line and muttering and sucking his breath loudly through his large front teeth, “please fetch my tobacco.”

Cat rose in the discreet swish of her hakama and bowed. She slid the carrying stick through the wire handle of a small floor lantern and padded down the hall. The laughter and murmur of voices from the poetry circle faded. Cat heard the ubiquitous sound of chopping from the kitchen and men’s wheedling voices. The poetry guests’ sandal bearers were trying to cadge wine and fleshy favors from the scullery maids.

As Cat entered the dark hall next to the inn’s entryway, she heard talk of a more serious nature.

“Have you seen this woman?”

She set the lantern down at a distance so she would be in darkness. She eased up the paper wall screen so it wouldn’t squeak in its track and slid it open a crack. Through the slit she saw two of Kira’s men standing on the flagstones next to the raised wooden flooring of the entryway. They held up a copy of Masanobu’s Portraits of Courtesans of Edo.

The book was opened to the stylized drawing of Cat. From his higher position on the raised floor, the head steward peered down at it by the light of the lantern a servant held.

“Forgive my abysmal ignorance and inability to help, but there’s no woman here who looks like that.” The steward was punctilious and apologetic and absolutely uncooperative. He was adept at recognizing the lowborn trying to impersonate the highborn.

“Of course there isn’t. She’s in disguise.” Both men were irritable by nature, and their days of futile questioning hadn’t improved their dispositions. Also, Lord Kira was sending them increasingly petulant and threatening letters via courier. “We must speak to the master of the inn.”

“It’s my most regrettable duty to inform you that the innkeeper is unavoidably indisposed now. But if you’ll follow that homely, foolish little maid, she’ll try her unworthy utmost to make your most honorable persons comfortable at our humble establishment whilst you await him.”

With courtesy so exaggerated it could only be disdain, the steward bowed the two into an inner room. He would keep them there as long as possible. He would see that they were well supplied with food and drink and entertainment. Then he would present them with an exorbitant bill for it.

Cat walked quickly and silently through the maze of inner corridors to the small room she shared with Musui. She hung the lantern on the wrought-iron stand and trimmed the wick as low as she could. Musui had been so kind. Even if it meant peril to her, she couldn’t leave him thinking her ungrateful.

She cleared the tea things off the tray. With a teacup she scooped sand and ashes from the firewell onto the tray. She smoothed it with a chopstick and sprinkled water from the teapot to dampen the surface. Then she held the chopstick poised over it. She hadn’t the nerve to compose a poem of her own for a poet of Musui’s stature, so she decided on one he would be sure to recognize.

If I could do as I wish
I would acknowledge more profoundly …

“Ungrateful slut!” The voice that interrupted her came from behind the sliding paper panels separating Cat’s room from the one next to it.

Cat jumped at the suddenness of it. She saw a man’s pacing shadow grow large, then recede, then grow against the paper panes. She didn’t have to hear much to realize that the speaker was a procurer unhappy with his strumpet.

“I rented you this robe and a scarlet crepe underskirt, a brocade sash, and a silk floss veil at ten momme. Not to mention the travel cloak for three momme extra. I paid three hundred mon to have this room alone in a high-class inn.” The man’s voice was low and menacing.

“I paid the old hag of a go-between two momme,” he said. “I paid the shampooer and the hairdresser one momme. I hired a kago and cushions and two bearers at three momme, thirty mon … .

The procurer hadn’t added the cost of this night’s food, drink and lodging to the tally. He and his commodity wouldn’t be here in the morning when the bill was presented.

The procurer planned to collect the rest of the fee when the merchant finished his business with the woman. Then he would sneak her out the rear gate and continue on to Edo where he would sell her to a bathhouse.

“Stop sniveling!” he muttered. “The customer is a rich man. If he weren’t afflicted with a slight problem, he wouldn’t have settled for the likes of you. And his cock is not so badly diseased. You won’t notice in the dark, anyway.”

As soon as Cat realized the conversation didn’t concern her, she ceased hearing it. She finished writing the poem.

If I could do as I wish,
I would acknowledge more profoundly
the sorrow of departing in winter.

She knew that at any moment Musui might send a servant to look for her. She hurriedly changed into the tattered leggings and the old black jacket that once had been her priest’s robe. She folded the borrowed page’s clothes neatly and laid them on top of a camphorwood chest, along with her travel papers.

They were useless to her now. The inn’s steward wouldn’t interrupt his master during the linked verse contest, but the innkeeper would see Masanobu’s album of courtesans eventually. When he did he would certainly notify the authorities. They would be on the alert for someone wearing Cat’s clothes and carrying her papers.

Cat prayed to Kannon-sama that Musui wouldn’t get into serious trouble; but after spending a few days with him, she was rather sure he wouldn’t. Trouble seemed to wash off Musui like water off a frog’s face, as the old saying went.

Cat stuck her few possessions into her sleeves and the front of her jacket. Carrying only what she had had when Musui found her, she turned to go.

As she headed for the door, she brushed against Musui’s flute, which jutted out over the edge of the wall shelf. It was inside its brocade bag, but it hit the floor with a thud that coincided with a silence in the other room. Cat was bending to pick it up when the procurer shoved aside the dividing panel and rushed in.

“What did you hear, boy?” He grabbed for her. As though making a graceful, sweeping dance movement, Cat swung the bamboo flute up and back in both hands and then slammed it into his head. The flute was designed to double as a club. Its dense, thick wall made a sharp cracking sound even through its cloth bag. The procurer slumped at Cat’s feet.

She hissed in exasperation. She didn’t have time for this. She snuffed out the lantern, grabbed the procurer’s ankles, and dragged him into the other room, closing the panel behind her. She hardly noticed the young peasant woman huddled in her tawdry finery against the far wall.

Cat untied the procurer’s loincloth and trussed him up quite artistically with it. She had learned the art of knot tying at the Perfumed Lotus. There were customers who fancied being helpless for the “trembling silk” of foreplay and the “bursting fruit” of orgasm.

This particular pattern of binding would strangle the procurer if he tried to struggle. There was a system of knots for each social class. The one Cat tied now was reserved for beggars.

Cat used one of the inn’s thin cotton towels to gag him. She opened the bedding cupboard and heaved his torso, then his legs, inside. She closed the sliding door and turned to her next problem.

The peasant was still crouched against the wall. She was about sixteen, two or three years younger than Cat. Her eyes were wide with terror, and she looked even younger.

She clutched a torn wicker pack to her chest. She had been through terrible troubles, and the pack had become her only link with the past, with herself. Cat was strong, but it would have taken someone even stronger to wrest it from her.

Irritated, Cat considered her. The homely piece of white goods would almost certainly spread the alarm. She would have to come along.

“Put on your sandals.” Cat grabbed the young woman’s arm in a hard, tight grip and yanked her to her feet. “If you make a noise, I’ll gut you like a herring.”

She dragged the peasant behind her, out the room’s rear exit and into the dark passageway. Cat had already located the rear exit. She was learning to plan for escape.

By the light of the moon Cat dragged her captive, stumbling in her long, confining robes, through the inn’s rear yard. They felt their way among stacks of roofing tiles, bamboo scaffolding poles, and big wooden tubs. Cat rolled several of the tubs up to the wall and made the peasant help her stack them into a pyramid. She could see the dark triangles of iron spikes set into the top of the wall, but she would get over them somehow. The problem would be hauling the peasant baggage over them.

She unwrapped the long cord from the woman’s sash and knotted it around her wrist. She would take her to the outskirts of town, tie her up, and leave her for someone to find in the morning.

“Master …”

“I’ll go over the wall first.” Cat ignored the peasant’s timid murmur. “Tuck your skirts into your sash and follow me. If you even squeak, it will be your last.”

“Master, the procurer left the gate unlocked.” The young woman cringed, expecting a blow for her insolence.

The peasant knew that one master had been exchanged for another; but she had been thrown into the company of such scoundrels that, for all his threats, this one didn’t seem so bad. At least he was young and handsome.

She doubted she was meeting a Buddha in hell, as the saying went. She hadn’t found a protector. But the wretch who had mistreated her was now tied up in a closet. She didn’t believe her fortune had taken a turn for the better. It had just taken a turn.

 

 

Halfway through the hour of the Boar, Musui reached for his pipe and realized that his disciple hadn’t returned.

“Dear friends,” he murmured, “forgive my rudeness.” He knew they would assume he was visiting the place-for-business.

As the tea and wine took effect, there had been many such interruptions. The only exception was the cloud dweller. He followed the custom of those who had participated in interminable court rituals. When his bladder filled, he signaled his equally ancient servant, who held a bamboo container so the old man could relieve himself in place.

Musui visited the privy. Then he went to see if his disciple was in their room. He lit the lantern and saw the clothes folded as a woman would fold them. He knelt by the tray and read the poem.

If I could do as I wish,
I would acknowledge more profoundly
the sorrow of departing in winter.

May the Lord Buddha protect you, Lady Asano, he thought. I shall do my best to mislead them.