CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

BOILS AND TUMORS

Cat and Kasane reached Mitsuke when everything was still tightly shuttered against the eleventh-month wind and the night. With their travel cloaks blowing about their legs, they limped wearily down the empty main street. They sat on a pile of poles and watched the sky lighten and the mist rise from the fast-flowing Tenryu River.

Cat had wanted to cross the river, but a pack driver had already hired the only ferryman awake. Cat could see that loading and ferrying the horses two by two would take a long time. Besides, Kasane was nodding where she sat, and she had begun limping badly the last ri.

Cat put an arm around Kasane’s waist. She helped her back to the lane that crossed a red-painted bridge over a ditch, then meandered off between the hedges of bush clover through the dark forest. Faded characters on a small wooden sign promised an inn at the end of the lane.

A servant was just opening the shutters. In the dawn’s light the place seemed secluded and tranquil. Cat and Kasane were grateful for the tiny, cluttered room they were given.

The tranquillity didn’t last long. The roosters were the first to shatter the silence, then the wood seller with her shrill, monotonous song. A rice huller started up somewhere with a low, hollow thud that vibrated the floor and walls like a heartbeat. Only thin sliding screens divided Cat and Kasane’s room from the inn’s usual morning exuberance.

Most of the overnight guests were preparing to leave, and they were discussing the packing arrangements with their servants. The kago bearers and porters laughed loudly outside. Horses neighed. A shrill quarrel erupted in the kitchen, where pots and tubs and ladles rattled as though a minor tremor had settled there on a semipermanent basis. A baby was crying, and someone was beating a hand drum and chanting his morning devotions at full volume.

The proprietress was a big woman with a capacious blue apron. She had tied back the wide sleeves of her kimono. She had wrapped a thin blue towel around her hair. She followed the maids around, shouting instructions and remonstrances at them as they shook and flailed the bedding. Over it all was the steady patta, patta, patta of paper-strip dusters against the panes of the wall screens.

Cat wasn’t used to the noise necessary to running a large household. The rooms where she and her mother had slept had always been serene. She had wakened most mornings to the soft rustle of the servants’ robes and tabi socks, to the song of birds in the plum tree outside her veranda, and to the splash of water falling into the carp pond.

“Don’t grasp the brush as though it were a rice mortar.” Cat rolled over so her back was to Kasane. She covered her head with the thin quilt that was molting gray cotton wadding, and she tried to ignore the cacophony. “Hold it lightly between your thumb and first two fingers,” she added. “Keep your wrist limber. Move the brush from your elbow.”

Kasane continued covering the cheap sheet of paper with tiny black characters of the hiragana syllabary. When she came to the left-hand side she began again, filling in the spaces from right to left, top to bottom.

She had found the letter from Traveler on the temple message board. She was composing a reply. Even though she was as exhausted as Cat, even though her remaining pair of straw sandals, like Cat’s, was in tatters and she had walked the last ri limping with the pain in her ankle, love was an elixir. She was wide awake. She cheerfully offered to keep watch while Cat slept.

More than anything, Cat wanted to sleep. She had crossed the raging Oi River and come eleven and a half ri since the previous morning. She had walked all night to do it.

Cat felt disoriented in time as well as in place. The rhythm of her life had been disrupted. She was trying to sleep while the world went about its business. Finally exhaustion overcame the uproar. She slept for hours.

She awoke to a man’s voice that sounded as though its owner were at her bedside.

“In this age work and ingenuity don’t count. Only money makes more money.” The man was in the next room. He spoke with a thick Osaka accent.

A pair of maids tittered. Men’s voices growled in agreement. The proprietress, suddenly demure, murmured in admiration of her wealthy, uncultured guest.

Cat reached from under the quilt and found the staff she had left by the lumpy pallet. Kasane was asleep on her own bed. The paper on which she had been practicing still lay on the low writing stand. It was black. When she filled it she had written over the previous characters, until they could only be distinguished by the shininess of the wet ink.

“One press of my seal can open chests of gold,” the merchant said.

Cat relaxed. She laid her head back on the hard cylindrical cushion of the pillow stand and closed her eyes. In the House of the Perfumed Lotus she had heard this sort of boasting many times. The women listened dewy-eyed until such guests left. Then they bet on how long the wastrels would take to spill their fortunes with a winnowing fan in the pleasure districts. They joked about how soon the men would be reduced to cooking their millet gruel over a fire of broken chopsticks and fingernail parings.

Cat glanced out the round window at the roof. She assessed the angle of shadow on the thatch and sagging eaves and bamboo gutters where weeds had sprouted. She realized she must have slept most of the day away. The house was quieter now. Kasane was breathing evenly. Her face was young and peaceful in sleep. Cat lay still, floating in the sluggish river of her exhaustion.

“I have my sources of private rice, you know.” The merchant in the next room lowered his voice conspiratorially, although it was still perfectly audible. “I’m on my way back from the tenth-month distribution in Edo. I have warrants to collect for three lords and seventy-two samurai.” He tapped the mouthpiece of his brass pipe on a locked document box.

Rats and rice brokers multiply at harvest time, Cat thought.

She knew what he was. In the early days of the Tokugawa family’s rule, officials had collected their own rice stipend. But as peace continued and the bureaucracy grew, lowly government positions were filled by low-ranking samurai or rnin. Unable to live on their meager annual salaries of twenty koku or less, they borrowed from the merchants against the three yearly distributions. They gave them warrants to collect the rice on their behalf, thus saving themselves the trouble and indignity of waiting in line.

Cat remembered them, the threadbare warriors, waiting in the tea houses near the government storehouses. With ivory toothpicks they probed meditatively between their teeth as though they had just eaten, when in fact they hadn’t money to buy bean paste or a bowl of pickled vegetables.

Government officials were assigned payment dates according to rank or, for those of equal standing, by lottery. The system was so complex, the men often waited for days before the broker brought them the monetary equivalent of their rice allotment. After the go-between subtracted his fees and commission, as well as the amount of the original debt and its exorbitant interest, his clients were usually indigent again.

“What use are the samurai and their arts of war?” Food had been served in a hollow clatter of lacquered bowls and cups and trays. The merchant talked with his mouth full. “Their swords are only good for paring radishes. Their skill with the naginata might scare off the occasional burglar. They could shoot their cats with arrows for stealing their fish.”

He slurped his soup loudly as everyone laughed politely at his wit. “The daimy owe a hundred times more money than exists in the country. They do no work, yet their retainers swagger through the streets as though they owned even the maggots in the piles of horse dung.”

Once—only days ago, in fact—Cat would have slammed aside the sliding screen and served him up a bitter course of her fury. Now she almost smiled. He was his own punishment. All the money in the country wouldn’t expand his soul or make him a whit less vulgar.

She remembered what her father had told her. “Others deal in visible things,” he had said. ”We deal in the invisible. The only business of the bushi, the warrior, is to maintain ‘rightness.’ If we didn’t exist, right would disappear, the sense of shame would be lost, and injustice would prevail.”

“The rnin are the worst.” The proprietress sounded as though she had been tasting some of her own sake.

“The rnin are a plague in the country,” someone agreed.

“Take Asano’s man, the coward Oishi, for example.” The rice broker sucked his teeth and belched. “He’s so cautious he carries a lantern in daytime.”

Everyone in the next room laughed. Cat stiffened. The fact that Oishi hadn’t registered a vendetta had made him the object of ridicule from one end of the country to the other.

“Last month, at the hour of the Tiger, I was returning from the House of the Maple Leaf,” the broker continued.

“Where is that?” asked the proprietress.

“Shimabara. Kyto’s paradise.” He must have leered because the maids giggled again. “There by the light of my servant’s lantern I saw Oishi lying in the road.”

“Was he hurt?” the proprietress asked.

“He was drunk. He was covered with his own vomit and singing abominably.”

“Disgraceful.”

“‘You’re a boneless man,’ I said to him. He only babbled stupidly. I was so disgusted I kicked him. He didn’t move. So I spat on him. I couldn’t be bothered circling around him. I stepped on his hand and continued on my way. I may only be a wretched townsman, but I have more heart than Asano’s councilor.”

The screen slid open next door. “Does anyone want tobacco or tooth powder?” a youthful voice said. “I have here the finest nose papers from my master’s shop on High Street.”

The conversation turned to the clerk’s selection of wares, but Cat didn’t hear it. She lay with her eyes closed. A hot tear ran down her cheek, and sorrow burned inside her.

Kasane reached across the tatami between the pallets and took Cat’s hand. She rested her upper body’s weight on one elbow, leaned close, and whispered, “Pay no attention to him, mistress. Like boils and tumors, tactless people don’t care where they appear.” Kasane’s hand was warm and callused and strong. “Oishi-sama will help you,” she whispered.