CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

RAT’S HEAD, OX’S NECK

Cat and Kasane found an abandoned woodcutters’ hut at dawn after a long, cold night huddled in the open. Kasane used the knife to cut bushy, low-growing bamboo for a bed. Exhausted, soaked, and shivering, Cat and Kasane curled together for warmth and slept on the mattress of leaves until the sun was above the trees.

Then they went foraging for food. Cat had no idea where to start, but Kasane led the way to a grove of bamboos whose feathery tops showed above the persimmon and cedar trees.

“Listen with your toes.” Kasane frowned in concentration as with her own feet she kneaded the rich loam of the bamboo grove.

“Here’s one!” Cat felt the hard lump of the bamboo shoot in the ground under her bare foot. She was excited, but she kept her voice low. Shouting would have been more than merely stupid and dangerous. It would have disturbed the murmuring green peace of the grove.

Cat knelt in the dry leaves. For the first time in her life she began digging with the knife and her bare hands. She scooped a heap of the black dirt into her palm and crumbled it between thumb and fingers. She lifted her palm to her face and breathed in the musty perfume of it.

When Kasane realized she couldn’t dissuade her mistress from dirtying her hands, she instructed her not to bother with the bamboo’s children that had already pushed aboveground. They would be fibrous and unpalatable. Now she was teaching Cat how to use her feet to find the hidden ones.

“The bamboo’s children will be small because no one heaped dirt on them as they grew.” With the knife Kasane hacked at the packed dirt and sliced the exposed base of Cat’s find where it narrowed and attached to the rhizome. “But the shoots of Kanzan-sama are good to eat any season of the year.”

“Did you know this bamboo is called Kanzan after the Mad Poet of Cold Mountain?” As she talked Cat noted where and how Kasane severed the tapered shoot, encased in its yellow-brown sheath. “He usually appears with his friend, the Foundling.”

“Are they the ones with the brooms?” Kasane placed the sprout onto the pile she had gathered.

“Yes.”

“Is that why they call these bamboo Cloud Sweeper?” Kasane glanced up at the delicate silvery underside of the canopy whispering above her.

“I suppose so.” Cat sat back on her heels and looked around the open grove with its hundreds of slender culms. “Confucius says that without meat, people become thin; but without bamboo they become vulgar.”

“That’s true,” Kasane murmured.

The thin-walled culms were hard and shiny, as though they had been painted dark green, brushed with silver and emerald and purple, and then lacquered. They swayed sedately in a breeze that rustled the leaves above Cat’s head. The culms creaked as though pressed by the weight of the sky.

With the knife, Kasane hacked down a young bamboo and sliced it off where it began to narrow, about shoulder height. She buried the blade in the top of the culm, and tapped it, pushing it down and slicing off a thin strip. She repeated the process until she had a supple pile of splints. She bent them into a circle, overlapping the ends, and tied them. Then she slung the coil over her shoulder.

She loaded the shoots into the tucked-up skirts of her robe. Cat brushed her hands off on the front of hers. Both robes were stained with mud from the fight the night before. The sound of falling water grew louder as the two of them walked back to the woodcutters’ hut.

A small waterfall cascaded over thick mats of glistening moss and through tiers of ferns growing from crevices in the dark granite outcrop. It splashed into a pool in the bedrock. The woodcutters had diverted water from the pool through bamboo pipes to a basin chiseled from a boulder near their hut. A steady stream poured from the mossy end of the pipe into the hollowed rock. The overflow had carved its own channel down the rocky hillside.

The windowless hut was spacious, although in disrepair. Its plank roof and sides were covered with vertical sheets of cypress bark held in place by saplings lashed horizontally. Inside, an earthen passage ran lengthwise from the front to the back door. The hearth was in the center of it. A tree limb with a branch whittled off to form a hook was suspended from the smoke-blackened beam over the charred remains of past fires. A rusty iron pot hung from the hook.

On each side was a low platform of wide, rough-cut boards where the woodcutters slept. On the floor next to the fire was the small pile of lotus and burdock roots, watercress, nuts, and mushrooms Cat and Kasane had gathered. They had found a tree that still had several ripe redgold persimmons hanging from its bare branches, and Cat had boosted Kasane up after them. They had eaten them immediately.

“Show me how to start a fire with bamboo, elder sister.” Cat looked up at the sun, now straight overhead. The day wouldn’t get much warmer than it was now. “While the food cooks we can bathe and wash our clothes.”

 

 

The water in the pool where they bathed had begun as melted snow. It hadn’t warmed much on its journey down the mountain. Immersion in icy water in wintertime was a form of religious asceticism but Cat had bathed quickly. She didn’t want to be caught naked by some wandering local.

Now Cat and Kasane sat on the lowest of the three log steps leading up to the door of the hut. They were sitting in the warmth of the sun, but their hair was wet. Their clean damp robes felt clammy on their backs.

Kasane had whittled them each a pair of bamboo chopsticks, and Cat used hers to reach for the last slice of bamboo’s child on the bamboo sheath that served as a platter.

Kasane was deftly weaving a wide-brimmed hat of papery sheaths and the pliable splints she had weighted with a rock and left soaking in the pool that morning.

“Do you think someone will come?” Kasane asked.

“I don’t know.” The icy bath had invigorated Cat. She felt more than just clean. She felt as though she had left in the muddy yard in Mishima not only her few paltry belongings, but the worst of the past. With a long bamboo twig she began drawing characters in the dirt.

“Forgive my rudeness, but what does the writing say?” Kasane finished the hat, set it aside, and started another one.

“‘A pale moon waning.’” Cat pointed to each character as she read it. “‘Wisp of cloud shadow passing. It is. Then is not.’”

“My poem.”

This was the gift Cat had recited to her the night before, to comfort her in the dark and rain-soaked forest.

“Would you honor this unworthy person by telling its meaning again?” Kasane never tired of discussing this poem.

“It means you think his regard might already be waning. It might be a passing fancy. Like the shadow that crosses the moon’s face.” Cat shook the twig in the direction of the Tkaid to the east and to the unseen bustle of the world there. “One can never be too careful with men, elder sister.”

“Maybe I’ll never see him again.”

“One cannot control one’s fate. Sleeve touches sleeve because it’s predestined to do so.”

“What does this one mean?” Kasane leaned over to place her finger under the first character.

“The writing is onna-de, woman’s lettering. Each mark stands for a syllable, a piece of a word.” Cat pointed with the twig. “These three spell ‘waning.’”

“Ma! Imagine that!” With the tip of her finger Kasane hesitantly drew an awkward character in the dirt.

“Curve the tail in more, elder sister.” Cat closed her hand around Kasane’s and guided her finger.

Kasane giggled. “I’m too foolish to learn to do this.”

“No gem sparkles unless polished.” Cat demonstrated the strokes of the hiragana character. “Try again.”

Kasane hurriedly finished her own hat. Then with a broom of Cloud Sweeper leaves she cleared the bare ground in front of the hut. Cat drew each of the forty-seven characters of the hiragana syllabary, and Kasane began copying them. As Cat watched her she understood Kasane’s exhilaration. She was unlocking the great treasure chest of writing. A hidden world was unfolding in front of her. Cat remembered her own fervor.

When she was young, the ten-day period between each visit of sensei, her calligraphy teacher, had always seemed interminable. An hour ahead of time she would line up her brushes, ink stone, ink stick, and water pots on the low, lacquered writing desk. Then she would sit, waiting for him in the wide, sun-filled room that opened onto the garden of her mother’s mansion.

The room had been lined with shelves of books. The poem scroll hanging in the tokonoma, the alcove, had been changed with the seasons. In honor of sensei’s visit, special incense always burned on a teakwood stand near the low writing desk.

Someone else lived in the mansion now. Someone else’s scrolls hung in the alcove. The books were gone. But the room and the anticipation Cat had felt there existed in a fragile bubble of memory.

During her lessons, Cat had lost herself in the strokes and curves, in the silent voice of the ideographs. Unlike most girls, Cat had learned the Chinese writing used by men and scholars. She had learned the layers of meaning and allusion in each of the thousands of characters.

Even in the depths of winter, when her fingers had been almost too numb to hold the brush, she had sat on the tatami through the hour of the Ram and halfway into the hour of the Monkey. She had sat with her legs under her, her tabi-clad feet turned so her toes pointed inward, her back absolutely straight.

Once she had blundered. She had leaned almost imperceptibly forward for the briefest of instants. With deep regret sensei had looked at her across the low writing table.

“The young mistress is not ready to study today.” He had risen in a rustle of silken gray robes. He had bowed to her sorrowfully and left. She had sobbed inconsolably all evening. She had never slumped again.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you—Cat thought of the old poem, her teacher’s favorite—and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations—such is a pleasure beyond compare. Cat shook her head to burst the memory of that room until she could re-form it again at a time of leisure.

“Elder sister …” Cat regretted interrupting Kasane’s lesson. “We have to return to the road.”

“Couldn’t we sleep here? We could keep a fire burning to frighten away demons.” Kasane was beginning to think of this hut as a haven. As a home.

“‘What shall I do? What shall I do?’” Cat quoted the Mad Poet of Cold Mountain. “‘Take this old body home and hide it in the mountains !’”

“Yes!”

“We could be Kanzan and the Foundling.” For a moment Cat indulged in the dream. “The madwomen of the mountain.”

“We could, mistress!”

Cat sighed. The fancy was a tempting one. She too dreaded the Tkaid and its dangers. To return to it was like immersing herself once more in the icy waters of the pool. She envied Kanzan‘his aerie on Cold Mountain. She remembered his description of it.

Where I spend my days
Is farther than I can tell.
On the naked trees
Clouds hover in place of leaves.
Touch of rain, the mountain quakes.

“The woodcutters might come back,” Cat said finally. “You can stay, elder sister. It would be better for you if you did. But I have to continue my journey.”

“Of course. Please forgive my stupidity.” Kasane was mortified that she had forgotten her mistress’s lover, waiting for her on the southern island.

With her broom of bamboo leaves Kasane swept away the writing in the dirt. Cat filled two bamboo canteens with water from the pipe. She plugged their ends with carved wooden stoppers. She gave one to Kasane and tied hers to her sash with a strip of bamboo. She put on the hat Kasane had made her. She passed a rolled strip of cloth, torn from the hem of Kasane’s robe, under her chin, then through the bamboo loops around her ears. She twisted it around itself to keep it from slipping and tied the ends in the hollow under her bottom lip.

“One’s life is like the morning mushroom.” Cat pulled the hat low so it hid her face. “It springs up at dawn and shrivels away before nightfall. We must do what we can with the small amount of time allotted us.”

“Yes, mistress.”

Cat settled her sash on her hips and picked up her staff. She took a deep breath and led the way down the woodcutters’ steep path toward the Tkaid.

She and Kasane passed the outlying farms and fields as night was falling. They stood under an ancient pine at the margin of the road and watched the evening traffic as people hurried to reach shelter before darkness caught them. After the solitude of the mountain the scene had a fantastical quality about it. Cat felt as though she had come into a theater in the middle of a performance.

Across the road stood a beggar with the matted beard and hair and the tattered robes of a mountain ascetic. He was leaning on two forked branches padded with straw and propped under his armpits. His torn, frayed trousers were tied up high, exposing legs as twisted and knobbed as blackthorn limbs. He had placed oil and a twisted grass wick in the palm of his hand and had set it alight. With mad eyes blazing, he chanted sutras while the wick burned and the oil heated in his bare palm.

Cat hesitated. She had planned to give the money to someone who was obviously in great need, not a certain madman and a possible mountebank. But the idea was to rid herself of the last of her resources.

Dodging the porters and kago bearers, she walked deliberately across the highway. She drew her hand into her sleeve, pulled out the twenty coppers, and dropped them into the holy man’s begging bowl set in the dust. He didn’t stop chanting. He didn’t acknowledge Cat or her gift, but behind her she heard Kasane gasp.

“It wouldn’t have bought us enough to matter, elder sister. We must remember the rat’s head and the ox’s neck.”

“To eat?”

“No.” Cat smiled at the idea of rat-head-and-ox-neck soup. “We have to stop worrying about insignificant details like what we’ll eat or where we’ll sleep.”

“Yes, younger brother.” Kasane sounded dubious. Her stomach was inquiring anxiously about supper.

“The great swordsman Musashi wrote that when we’re preoccupied with details our spirits become entangled with them. We have to enlarge our spirits. We have to think of the ox’s neck as well as the rat’s head.”

“It’s as you say, younger brother.”

Cat turned westward, into the last pools of sunset color silhouetting Mount Fuji’s graceful cone. She set out for Numazu.

They reached the outskirts of the village in half an hour. Both she and Kasane looked longingly at the big temple gate as they passed it. It promised a roof and a hot meal and kindness to weary pilgrims.

“We can’t stay here,” Cat said. “The priests might report us to the authorities.” Cat studied the road as it passed through the lit streets of Numazu. “The guidebook says that near the temple there’s a bridge over the Kise River. We can sleep under it.”

They took a side road and soon saw the dark curve of the bridge against the paler gray of the sky. They could also see the glow of a few small fires on the dry riverbed under the bridge.

Cat and Kasane climbed down the open-weave bamboo crates full of huge stones that shored up the embankment. They walked across the sandy bed toward the fires. When they approached close enough to see the huddled shapes sheltering under the huge, diagonal crossbeams of the bridge, Kasane shrank back in horror. She held up the four fingers that meant four-legged beast.

“Hinin!” She whispered the dreaded word. “Nonhumans!”