CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

CLOUDS OF BEWILDERMENT

Because Cat and Kasane started from Mitsuke late in the afternoon, the hour of the Dog was half over by the time they were approaching Maisaka. Cat could see the lanterns of travelers, though. They were taking advantage of the level terrain and hurrying to reach the ferry at the treacherous stretch of water called Now Broken.

When she reached a fairly deserted area of the highway, Cat showed Kasane the “floating step.” The courtesans had originally used it, but it had caught on among women of fashion in both capitals. Cat was still trying to teach Kasane the various arts of attracting a man. She was hoping Kasane’s suitor would become so taken with her that he would lure her away from Cat’s dangerous company.

“Turn your body like this.” Cat swiveled slightly at the waist. “Move your feet as though you’re kicking sand with your toes.”

Kasane laughed behind her sleeve as she minced along. Cat put her hands on Kasane’s shoulders and turned them a bit more.

“Stand as though you’re about to glance back over your shoulder at your lover,” she said. “Your body should express your melancholy at leaving him. Or you can look as though you’re inviting him to follow you.” Cat stood back to assess the effect. “It’s more effective if you’re wearing geta.”

The hollow whap of a hand drum interrupted them. It was being played by a woman who stood near a red torii gate leading to a small Shinto shrine.

“Stop here. Stop here,” she called. “Learn what the Love-Knowing Bird predicts for your future.” She rattled a narrow wooden box with a hole at one end. “All my fortunes concern love.”

Kasane slowed as she passed and glanced wistfully back over her shoulder. Cat recognized the look. Diviners lined the steps of every temple and shrine and haunted most street corners. From time to time Cat herself had been tempted to pay for a glimpse at fate’s plans.

Cat held out a ten-mon piece. The woman took it, drew her hand into her wide sleeve, and deposited it. Then she shook the box until a narrow strip of bamboo slid from the hole.

Kasane pulled it out and read the number painted on it. “Sixty-four.”

Cat sighed. The number was an unlucky one. Cat feared Kasane was in for disappointment. The woman searched through her basket of paper fortunes until she found one, folded lengthwise, with “sixty-four” written on it.

Kasane unfolded it, but all she could see was the shadowy hint of a drawing.

“The ink is invisible until you hold it up against the light.” The woman held out her lantern.

“Look!” Kasane moved aside so Cat could see the characters emerging, pale and spidery, next to the darkening picture of a crudely drawn bird.

“‘The person who draws this paper,’” Kasane read, “‘let that one live by the heavenly law and worship the blessed Kannon. As for love, the one desired is betrothed.’” Kasane looked at Cat, alarm and despair in her eyes.

Cat started to tell her that the woman was a fraud, that her foolish fortunes meant nothing. But she thought better of it. She gave the woman another ten-mon coin. “Try another, elder sister.” She smiled at Kasane, who looked as though she feared the bamboo marker would sting her.

Cat noticed that the woman tilted the box so a bamboo slip from the other side fell out. Cat was sure the box had a partition inside, separating the good from the bad. She was also sure the diviner regularly gave her customers a bad fortune first. Few people would walk away without trying for a better one.

“‘Ninety-nine.’” Kasane looked at Cat for reassurance. Cat smiled. Ninety-nine was propitious.

“‘The person who draws this paper,’” Kasane read, “‘let that one worship the gods of prosperity. If anything is lost, it will be found. If one is sick, recovery is certain. If one loves, she will win the affection of her beloved.’”

Kasane beamed as Cat steered her back onto the road. The drumming took up again behind them.

“Ei-sassa, ei-sassa, ei-sassa.” A mail carrier trotted by chanting in rhythm to his footsteps. As usual, Kasane stared after him longingly. Maybe he was the one carrying her lover’s next letter to Futagawa. “Ei-korya, sassa, sassa.” He disappeared into the darkness.

“Have you thought about what you’ll do if you find Traveler himself at the temple gate instead of just his sentiments?”

“No, mistress.” Kasane blushed. “The petty affairs of such a one as I merit no thought until you’ve found Oishi-sama. Until the great wrong done your father is avenged.”

“Do you love him?”

Kasane blushed a deeper crimson and ducked behind her sleeve. “I don’t know,” she murmured.

“What if he turns out to be a disastrous character?”

“It’s impertinent of me to disagree, mistress, but he couldn’t. His poems are so heartfelt.”

“I don’t mean to be cruel, elder sister, but the poems of men are usually prompted by a part of them that’s quite distant from their hearts.”

“A flute.”

Cat laughed. “Yes, the part that rules them resembles a flute, but they prefer to have someone else play it for them.”

Then Cat heard the music. The flute player’s only audience was an old man with a pilgrim’s staff, bell, and pack and a small satchel of food around his neck. The two of them were standing next to a roadside shrine under a few gnarled pines on a small knoll. Behind the trees stretched rice paddies.

“Why is he playing in the dark?” Kasane asked.

“Night and day are the same to him,” Cat whispered. “He’s blind.”

The flute player finished his piece and slid the flute into a sack.

“There’s no rush to reach Maisaka,” he said.

Cat almost jumped when he spoke to her. His sightless eyes stared straight at her.

“Why?” she asked.

“They’re all running around as if their heads were on fire.”

The musician was a young man with a shaved head. He was dressed in a faded hakama and robe and a torn black coat of wadded cotton. He chuckled. “A delegation of red-haired barbarians is on its way to the Eastern Capital and has reached Maisaka. The populace is in a frenzy to catch a glimpse of them. And others are possessed by Ise fever.” He took his fan and a chopstick from his sash. “Bide a while and hear the story of Yoshitsune and Benkei at the barrier.”

“Clearly we were born at an auspicious hour,” the old pilgrim said. “To partake of such an august talent as yours.”

The old man’s shabby paper robe and cloak were covered with dust. His tiny topknot was thin and gray. He stood with a rapturous look on his face while the minstrel chanted, marking the rhythm of his lay by scratching the chopstick across the ribs of the fan. Cat waited politely, and Kasane listened spellbound.

When the minstrel finished Cat bowed and put paper-wrapped coppers into his bowl. The old pilgrim did the same.

“I give thanks that destiny has allowed us the privilege of hearing you, honorable sir,” he said. Then he hurried after Cat and Kasane.

“Are you pious folk bound for the Sun Goddess’s holy shrine?”

“Yes,” Cat answered.

“Ah, how fine! So are we.” He smiled brightly at them.

Kasane looked around for the old man’s companion but saw no one. Cat assumed he was possessed of a gentle madness.

“For thirty-eight years my wife and I would go arm in arm to look at the cherry trees growing on the embankment near our humble house.” He seemed serenely unembarrassed by this self-indulgent talk of affection for the woman he had married. For him, shame had indeed been left behind when he traveled. “We sat under the trees at sunset and dreamed of visiting the sacred shrine.

“My wife collected discarded mussel shells and sold them at the lime kiln. She saved in a tea canister the coppers she earned. At planting time I cleaned the other farmers’ ditches. I earned a copper for every six feet cleared. I added the coins to the canister. Then, when the children were grown, my dear wife became ill. And so we had to postpone the pilgrimage until now.”

His eyes sparkled in the moonlight. “But what a marvelous journey it’s been for us. We’ve enjoyed sitting in the shade of a pine and opening our little tub of sake. We watch the pilgrims go by singing and ringing their bells, tan, tan, tan.”

“Excuse my rudeness, sir.” Kasane blurted it out before Cat could nudge her into silence. Cat had noticed the brocade bag hanging around his neck. It was the kind that usually contained wooden mortuary tablets. “Is your wife waiting for you in Maisaka?”

“My wife is here, dear child.” He held up the stoppered bamboo tube that hung on a cord next to the bag. “When we have seen the shrine of the Heaven-Shining-Great-August-Deity together, we’ll go to Mount Koya. I’ll beseech the monks there to bury her ashes”—he tapped the bamboo tube—“and add her memory to the prayers they raise from the altars. The Buddhas will usher her spirit into the bliss of Amida’s Pure Land.”

“My sister and I would be honored by your company and that of your wife,” Cat said.

 

 

The blind musician had been right. Maisaka was in chaos. All the lodgings were full. Travelers’ belongings filled the courtyards and overflowed into the streets. The crowd, however, was concentrated around the inn where the delegation of Dutch traders was staying.

Normally the folk who lived along the Tkaid were too worldly to become excited about the unusual. The road, after all, provided a daily parade of the unusual. Many people had seen the two elephants that passed through a decade ago, with all the pomp and status of the most powerful daimy.

The red-haired foreigners traveled the road twice a year on their way to and from Edo and their audience with the shgun. But now Maisaka was filled with simple pilgrims from the outlying hamlets and from the villages between the official post stations. To make matters worse, a sake shortage had caused a shortage of goodwill as well.

The Dutch traveled in palanquins that were carried into the wide entryways of the first-class inns before unloading so the occupants couldn’t be seen from the street. The foreigners were forbidden by law to show themselves once they stopped for the night. But that didn’t stop the populace from trying to see them.

In spite of the police’s efforts to disperse them, people had climbed onto the roofs of the buildings around the Dutchmen’s inn. Cat and Kasane and the old pilgrim stopped to listen to an altercation between a policeman and a group of indignant farmers.

“Our miserable lives will pass without once seeing a foreign devil,” a woman shouted. “It’s most unkind of you to keep this great sight to yourself.”

The argument was interrupted by a loud crash and screams. A roof had collapsed under the weight of the people on top of it. The owners of the other shops and houses ran into the street, shouting pleas and threats to those on their own roofs. Cat and her companions hurried through the turmoil.

“My cousin’s house is not far,” the old man said. “It’s on the old road around the bay. It’s a humble place, but you can stay there with me tonight. Walking around is better for the young lady anyway. Crossing this particular stretch of water is bad luck for marriages.”

Cat was quite willing to avoid the ferry. She feared that Kira’s men might be watching for her there. She didn’t realize that as she traveled farther from Edo their threat lessened. Kira had more difficulty communicating with them. The discription of Cat grew more and more vague with time and distance. The men who had survived earlier encounters with her had exaggerated the circumstances until it was impossible to say what they had been.

Those in the fight at the kabuki performance in Kambara said Lady Asano had a gang of fierce swordsmen with her. The man who lived through the attack at Satta Pass wrote in his report that she was defended by a spear player the size and ferocity of Benkei and a shrieking female demon in the shape of a green ball of fire.

Kira had come to distrust all the messages he received from his retainers on the road. Besides, he had troubles of a much more serious nature than a runaway woman. The rumors in Edo of Cat’s escape and flight had been replaced by gossip of a revenge plot against him. Kira stayed behind the walls of his mansion and called back most of the men he had sent after her. He kept secret the fact that many of them had returned in casket tubs slung from poles and carried by porters. The casualties confirmed his belief that Lady Asano wasn’t acting alone and that her father’s retainers were finally rising against him.

Halfway through the hour of the Boar, Cat and Kasane and the pilgrim came to a double row of houses perched on a ledge between the side of a hill and the river below. The single street through the hamlet was so narrow, the eaves almost met over it. No lights shone from the open spaces between the mud-plastered walls and the roofs. Several houses were propped up with poles that extended into the narrow roadway, and the three travelers had to pick their way around them.

The pilgrim’s cousin’s house was the most prosperous of the lot. He pounded on the shutters and called to those inside. Then the three of them stood among the large cylindrical open-weave baskets in the darkness under the eaves and waited. They could hear voices and footsteps inside, but they also heard a faint rustling and creaking much closer.

“Ma!” Kasane jumped and squealed and grabbed Cat’s arm. “Something touched me.”

“Cormorants,” the old pilgrim said. “My cousin fishes with them.”

The storm shutter slid open with a loud squeal. When a lantern’s light shone on the baskets with their hinged wooden lids, the birds inside stirred and muttered. They poked their bills through the weave and nattered for fish.

The house was a single room occupied by the aged cousin and his wife, their son, daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren. They moved to make room for Cat and Kasane and the pilgrim. Kasane piled their sleeping mats one on top of the other, and she and Cat lay curled together for warmth. Cat could feel Kasane shaking.

“Are you cold, elder sister?” Cat whispered.

“No.” Kasane snuffled. She hesitated before giving in to a personal confession. “This house reminds me of the one where I used to live.”

Cat held her close to comfort her. She lay awake after Kasane finally cried herself to sleep and looked up at the bunches of long white radishes hanging like ghostly, rat-gnawed stalactites from rafters black and shiny with soot. She was still awake when the family’s questions and conversation ceased and the room was filled with the sound of heavy breathing.

She heard a low shudder nearby.

“Grandfather,” she whispered, “are you ill?”

The old man let out a long, tremulous sigh. “Once I stepped on my dead wife’s comb,” the old pilgrim murmured. “The chill of it under my bare heel pierced my heart. At night she used to comb her hair with it.”

“You know as I …” Cat softly recited the ancient poem:

The nature of this illusory world,
How nothing stays—
Endeavor to be brave and stalwart,
Do not wear out that heart in grief.

But the old man lay awake a long time, stifling quiet sobs in the crook of his arm. Cat lay awake, too, with tears running silently down her cheeks. The weight of sorrow seemed enough to wear out her heart. She cried for herself and for her parents and for Kasane, an exile, too. And even though she knew her mother’s faithful servants were only living out their karma, she cried for them, turned out into the world with neither rice nor protector. She cried for Oishi Kuranosuke, the once proud warrior lying in the gutter. And for his abandoned wife and children.

She wondered what Musashi would have had to say about the tears. Would he have considered them clouds of bewilderment? When your spirit is not in the least clouded, he wrote. When the clouds of bewilderment clear away, there is the true void. In the void is virtue and no evil. And no tears, she thought.

Cat stiffened once when a horse’s hooves echoed between the walls of the houses lining the hamlet’s only street. The sound roused the cormorants, which clucked and murmured and shook themselves restlessly. As the hoofbeats faded Cat slipped, finally, into sad dreams, and Hanshiro continued on through the night, toward Futagawa.