CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

A ROPE WOVEN FROM A WOMAN’S HAIR

“A beautiful woman is an ax that cuts off a man’s life.” But even as he said it, Gobei the gambler studied the portraits in the album with care. He turned the heavy, pleated pages slowly. The wrestler Mountain Wind looked over his shoulder.

The rest of the card players crowded around. The fifteen-year-old artist Okamura Masanobu hadn’t included just any women in this collection. These were twelve of the most beautiful courtesans of Edo’s Floating World. Masanobu had caught each in a gesture, in a moment stolen from time and fixed for eternity. They were gazing into their mirrors or lounging with robes draped carelessly. They were walking in high lacquered geta through new-fallen snow or smoking a pipe on a riverside balcony and staring pensively out over the water.

“Which one ran away?” someone asked.

“Number seven.”

“I was there the night she escaped.” Mountain Wind pointed a thick finger at the page and began again the tale of his experiences at the Perfumed Lotus.

Hanshiro could hear the men’s loud conversation through the floor of his upstairs room. He knew that his prey, the young Lady Asano, was in the album of Masanobu’s women. It was a copy of the book Kira’s retainers had been discreetly showing to innkeepers, kago bearers, and postboys all along the road.

One of those retainers had bet it and lost it to Gobei two hands ago. He had gone out into the rainy night with his shoulders bunched against the cold and his thoughts written on his face. He was trying to invent a lie that would save him from the unpleasantness of disemboweling himself to appease his irascible lord.

Hanshiro had disdained to approach any of Kira’s lackeys, so Cat’s picture had eluded him. He refused to join the crowd now. He stayed where he was, alone in the small room at the back of the house. The gambler Gobei had been dealing cards in the room beneath him since the hour of the Cock.

Hanshiro knelt with spine straight and with his legs folded under him. He held a paintbrush poised, resting lightly between the tips of his thumb and index finger. He seemed entranced by the sheet of white paper on the low writing stand in front of him. To draw bamboo he knew he must see it first in his mind. Then he must transcribe what he saw as quickly as the hawk stooped on the hare. He was so engrossed he barely heard the shoosh, shoosh of Gobei’s stockinged feet on the polished boards of the corridor floor.

“Isogashii?” Gobei called politely from the doorway. “Busy?”

“Irasshai. Welcome.”

Gobei entered and sat on the other side of the clay-lined firewell. The coals in the well spread a welcome heat into the damp chill of the room. Both men sat sideways to the door, so that neither would have his back to it.

Gobei crossed his legs, bringing his feet under his baggy yellow hakama stenciled with dark blue ginkgo leaves. He laid the folio, its cardboard covers tied shut with gold silk cord, on the tatami.

Hanshiro drew in a deep breath. His hand dropped suddenly, and he drew the bamboo with swift, sure strokes—strokes called by names like “goldfish tail,” “startled rook,” “stag’s horns,” and “fishbones.” He was using the technique called “flying white,” painting with a fairly dry brush so that the paper could be seen underneath. He worked unperturbed by Gobei’s presence.

Gobei shook back the sleeves of his quilted silk jacket and poured himself tea. “Aren’t you done dabbing at that paper yet?” He added more tea to Hanshiro’s almost empty cup.

“Confucius said a work is finished not when the last thing has been added, but when the last thing has been taken away.”

“As one whose business it is to take away the last thing, I can only agree with Confucius.” Gobei shifted his toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. He had full lips nestled in a black beard, a high, narrow nose, bushy brows, and eyes that were little more than slits in his broad face.

“Have you finished taking away the last things from the unfortunates downstairs?” Hanshiro asked.

“I left them the hair in their anuses and their manly organs.” Gobei grinned wolfishly. “Peasants are not called the ‘great august treasure’ for nothing. It is their fate to give, mine to take.”

He reached for the tobacco canister on the wooden, boxlike tray the waitress had set beside him. He packed the bowl of his oversize pipe and lit it with an ember from the firebox on the tray.

He held the big pipe horizontally in the palm of his hand, with his fingers folded diagonally over the stem. Brigands carried large pipes and held them this way, and it was an affectation of Gobei’s.

“You can work with me, you know,” Gobei said. “My offer stands, old friend. You can be a rich man and live with a fan in your left hand.”

Hanshiro’s mouth twitched in a shadow of a wry smile as he bowed. His nod expressed refusal, but with just the proper balance of sincere regret, irony, and condescension.

He added an elegant tracery of characters down the upper right-hand side of the page, a poem of his own composing. He should have been offended by Gobei’s effrontery, but he had known him too long for that. And he found him amusing.

Besides, Gobei was the head of the gamblers’ syndicate. His word was law along the Tkaid among the hundreds of men who were considered members of the guild. Some of the men in the guild made their livings by more nefarious means than dice and cards. Taking issue with their leader would have gained Hanshiro nothing and could have put obstacles in his way.

Gobei leaned over to inspect Hanshiro’s ink painting of bamboo bent before a wind. “‘When calm, paint iris.’” He quoted the ancients. “‘When angry, bamboo.’”

“Anger is like breaking wind in a typhoon,” Hanshiro said. “It provides temporary relief but avails little.”

“This fleeting world is temporary; but temporary is better than nothing at all. As the poets say, ‘Enjoy life! Tomorrow we may end as sea wrack on the rocky shore of Oya-Shirazu, Not-Knowing-Parents.’” Gobei lifted the large folio to his forehead with exaggerated courtesy, then bowed as he held it out to Hanshiro.

“I brought you the book,” he said. “But you need not leaf through it by the light of the night lantern while you bedew the palm of your hand. Self-pleasure is like scratching your foot through the sole of your sandal. Allow me to show you Odawara’s garden of night-blooming flowers. I will introduce you to Lotus.” Gobei molded the air sensuously with his hands. “Her buttocks remind one of a ripe peach.”

“Another time, Gobei-san.” Hanshiro laid the unopened folio aside. At least with Gobei Hanshiro didn’t have to bother with punctilio.

“From your interest in young Masanobu’s art, I assume you’re hunting the yakko, the samurai courtesan, and not the boat-swallowing fish who’s been reducing the population of late.” Gobei leaned forward and grinned across the firewell. “I hear that rascal made soldier soup of two Edo men in Hiratsuka.” Gobei laughed in delight at his own pun on the words for soup stock made of dried bonito and the word for soldier.

“I’m hunting the impossible, a night’s sleep in a dry bed free of fleas and cutpurses.”

Hanshiro cleaned his ink stone. He washed out his brush and laid it on a silk pad. He emptied the dirty water from his gourd-shaped porcelain container into the wide-mouthed jug placed there for that purpose. With a silk cloth he wiped each item in his writing case and replaced them in their proper compartments.

“You needn’t have rushed to Odawara through that tantrum of a storm in the dark of night. This story of the Asano wench’s escape is a ruse, Tosa-san.” Gobei lowered his voice. Sound carried through paper walls. “Kira had her kidnapped from the brothel. He has dispatched her spirit to the Western Paradise and her body to the burning grounds at Hashiba. You’re chasing her smoke, my boy. Kira’s conducting this hoax of a search to allay suspicions. Everyone knows it.”

Gobei knocked the dottle from his pipe into the bamboo container in the tobacco box. “Do you really think a woman would be foolish enough to attempt the Hakone barrier,” he continued, “to tread on the tail of the tiger?”

“I have no pressing engagements. I shall wait by the road and see who passes.”

“Have a care, my friend. This murderer has the authorities in an uproar.”

“Thank you for the warning, Gobei-san.”

“And now I shall pay a visit to the white-necked ones. I stayed away from the House of the Wisteria several days last month when I was ill with stomach pains. When I returned, my sweethearts there held me down and threatened to cut off my topknot for neglecting them.”

“If that’s the worst they threaten to cut off, you have nothing to fear.”

“Would you honor a miserable wretch by allowing him to add this magnificent painting to his collection of works in the Tosa school?” Gobei bowed. When Hanshiro handed him the rolled paper, he stowed it carefully in the gap where the left side of his jacket overlapped the right.

Gobei rose and shut his fan with a clack of farewell. As he left he opened it again, gesturing with it in the slow dance of the N. drama. With his other hand he slapped his rear end to keep time. He took the part of Ono no Komachi, an old woman possessed of the ghost of a former lover. The words to his song, however, were of his own invention.

“I … am … the … Devil … farting,” he declaimed in the nasal singsong of N. The technique made the words sound stretched and distorted. “I am the ba-a-a-stard child of the god of swi-i-indlers.”

As Gobei disappeared down the hall, Hanshiro could hear his singing and slapping and tongue clicking in imitation of wooden clappers grow fainter. The maid appeared to lay out the bedding, trim the lamp wick, and lower the wooden nightshade over the lantern. Then she bowed and wished him a pleasant rest.

When she had knelt in the corridor and closed the door in front of her own bowing face, Hanshiro sat alone in the shadows a while longer. He listened to the night crier clapping his wooden blocks and warning against carelessness with fire. He watched the slow undulating pulse of the lantern’s shadow on the wall.

Finally he untied the cord and opened the folio. He turned the pages slowly and stopped at the seventh portrait. It carried the red, gourd-shaped seal and the words “From the genuine brush of the Japanese artist Okamura Masanobu.”

Cat was posed in front of a latticework bamboo fence covered with wisteria flowers. Her body was half-turned toward the right edge of the page, but she was glancing over her shoulder to the left. Cat’s sumptuous robes and sash were hand-colored in heron’s-egg-green and rose tints.

She was holding a half-opened paper umbrella at an angle off from her left shoulder. She wore a man’s headband rakishly tied at the side in a large, flat knot. A wind was blowing her robe against her left hip and thigh and lifting her hem to reveal the men’s gaiters that women of fashion were sporting in the Eastern Capital.

Masanobu had spared no detail of Cat’s dress. Her face, however, was difficult to distinguish from the others in the album. Masanobu had given all the women the stylized features considered most desirable. He had painted Cat with brows thin as black silk thread, tapered eyes that were little more than slits, a long hooked line for a nose, an impossibly tiny mouth, full cheeks, and a round chin.

But Masanobu had captured something in Cat’s face that none of the other women had. As she stared over her shoulder, the look in her eyes was defiant. It was the pose and the look Musui’s handsome young disciple had given Hanshiro the night he’d discussed poetry with the monks at the temple near Kawasaki. It was the look he had mistaken for lust. Suddenly Hanshiro realized why the boy had seemed familiar. He resembled the nun he had seen near Lord Asano’s grave at Spring Hill Temple.

The heat that reddened Hanshiro’s face was as much chagrin as a surge of desire mixed with admiration. The young Lady Asano had made a fool of him, just as she was making fools of Kira’s men. Hanshiro didn’t like being reduced to the level of Kira’s men, but he had to admit the Lady Cat was very good. Perhaps she had mastered the art of saiminjutsu, hypnotizing her enemies.

Hanshiro closed the book and retied the cords around it. Then he took from the front of his jacket the flat brocade case like the one in which he carried his paper handkerchiefs. Inside was the silk cloth with the crossed-feather crest. He unwrapped it and held it in the palm of one hand. With his fingers he stroked the coil of Cat’s hair, black and glossy as a leopard flower seed.

Now he could combine the perfume of the incense in her room and the cool sleekness of her hair with her face and her form. He could construct her from memory and his own heart’s yearning. Like the image of the bamboo he had just painted, Cat appeared in his mind’s eye.

He could imagine this length of hair flowing in a cascade down her slender back. He pictured it lying along the curve of her haunch. He saw it swaying as she walked in the “floating step,” the hesitant, hip-swinging gait of the courtesan on promenade.

Hanshiro felt as though a loop were tightening around his heart. A rope woven from the locks of a woman’s hair, the old poem went, would bind a very elephant.

What was he to do? Lady Asano’s quest was madness. She would surely be caught, and even if she weren’t, she could accomplish nothing. No vendetta had been registered in her father’s name. Her uncle was in exile. The Ak retainers had scattered. Their leader, the Councilor Oishi Kuranosuke, had sunk in a mire of debauchery. Lady Asano would be shamed and executed for her folly. Hanshiro saw, suddenly, this lovely hair crusted with blood.

He decided to start a rumor in the morning to throw Kira’s men off the trail. He knew he would have to find Cat before she reached the Hakone barrier. But he also knew he could do it. He now knew what she looked like.

He would return her discreetly to the Perfumed Lotus before she was connected with the attack at the ferry and the murders in the bathhouse. Some rich merchant or lord would redeem her. She could start another life as an outside consort or a daimyo’s pampered woman of the province.

Hanshiro convinced himself that what happened to Her Ladyship after he returned her was a fire across the river. It was no concern of his. Even so, a woman’s laughter in another room set his heart to pounding.