Musashi: Bushido Code (57 page)

"I suppose you can't go back home, of course. Well, we reap what we sow. Munisai must be weeping in his grave!"

"I've stayed too long," said Musashi. "I must be going now."

"Oh, no you don't!" said Kaname angrily. "You stay right here! If you go wandering around this neighborhood, you'll get yourself in trouble in no time. That cantankerous old woman from the Hon'iden family showed up here about a half year ago. Recently she's been around several times. She keeps asking us whether you've been here and trying to find out from us where you are. She's after you, all right—with a terrible vengeance."

"Oh, Osugi. Has she been here?"

"Indeed she has. I heard all about you from her. If you weren't a relative of mine, I'd tie you up and hand you over to her, but under the circumstances ... Anyway, you stay here for now. It'll be best to leave in the middle of the night, so there won't be any trouble for your aunt and me."

That his aunt and uncle had swallowed every word of Osugi's slander was mortifying. Feeling terribly alone, Musashi sat in silence, staring at the floor. Eventually his aunt took pity on him and told him to go to another room and get some sleep.

Musashi flopped down on the floor and loosened his scabbards. Once again came the feeling that he had no one in the world to depend on but himself.

He reflected that perhaps his uncle and aunt were dealing with him frankly and sternly precisely because of the blood relationship. While he had been angry enough earlier to want to spit on the doorway and leave, he now took a more charitable view, reminding himself that it was important to give them the benefit of every doubt.

He was too naive to accurately judge the people around him. If he had already become rich and famous, his sentiments about relatives would have been appropriate, but here he was barging in out of the cold in a dirty rag of a kimono on New Year's Eve, of all times. Under the circumstances, his aunt and uncle's lack of familial affection was not surprising.

This was soon brought forcefully home to Musashi. He had lain down hungry on the guileless assumption that he would be offered something to eat. Though he smelled food cooking and heard the rattle of pots and pans in the kitchen, no one came near his room, where the flicker of the fire in the brazier was no larger than that of a firefly. He presently concluded that hunger and cold were secondary; what was most important now was to get some sleep, which he proceeded to do.

He awoke about four hours later to the sound of temple bells ringing out the old year. The sleep had done him good. Jumping to his feet, he felt that his fatigue had been washed away. His mind was fresh and clear.

In and around the city, huge bells bonged in slow and stately rhythm, marking the end of darkness and the beginning of light. One hundred and eight peals for the one hundred and eight illusions of life—each ring a call to men and women to reflect on the vanity of their ways.

Musashi wondered how many people there were who on this night could say: "I was right. I did what I should have done. I have no regrets." For him, each resounding knell evoked a tremor of remorse. He could conjure up nothing but the things he had done wrong during the last year. Nor was it only the last year—the year before, and the year before that, all the years that had gone by had brought regrets. There had not been a single year devoid of them. Indeed, there had hardly been one day.

From his limited perspective of the world, it seemed that whatever people did they soon came to regret. Men, for example, took wives with the intention of living out their lives with them but often changed their minds later. One could readily forgive women for their afterthoughts, but then women rarely voiced their complaints, whereas men frequently did so. How many times had he heard men disparage their wives as if they were old discarded sandals?

Musashi had no marital problems, to be sure, but he had been the victim of delusion, and remorse was not a feeling alien to him. At this very moment, he was very sorry he had come to his aunt's house. "Even now," he lamented, "I'm not free of my sense of dependence. I keep telling myself I must stand on my own two feet and fend for myself. Then I suddenly fall back on someone else. It's shallow! It's stupid!

"I know what I should do!" he thought. "I should make a resolution and write it down."

He undid his
shugyōsha's
pack and took out a notebook made of pieces of paper folded in quarters and tied together with coiled paper strips. He used this to jot down thoughts that occurred to him during his wanderings, along with Zen expressions, notes on geography, admonitions to himself and, occasionally, crude sketches of interesting things he saw. Opening the notebook in front of him, he took up his brush and stared at the white sheet of paper.

Musashi wrote: "I will have no regrets about anything."

While he often wrote down resolutions, he found that merely writing them did little good. He had to repeat them to himself every morning and every evening, as one would sacred scripture. Consequently, he always tried to choose words that were easy to remember and recite, like poems.

He looked for a time at what he had written, then changed it to read: "I will have no regrets about my actions."

He mumbled the words to himself but still found them unsatisfactory. He changed them again: "I will do nothing that I will regret."

Satisfied with this third effort, he put his brush down. Although the three sentences had been written with the same intent, the first two could conceivably mean he would have no regrets whether he acted rightly or wrongly, whereas the third emphasized his determination to act in such a way as to make self-reproach unnecessary.

Musashi repeated the resolution to himself, realizing it was an ideal he could not achieve unless he disciplined his heart and his mind to the utmost of his ability. Nevertheless, to strive for a state in which nothing he did would cause regrets was the path he must pursue. "Someday I will reach that state!" he vowed, driving the oath like a stake deep into his own heart.

The shoji behind him slid open, and his aunt looked in. With a voice shivering around the roots of her teeth, she said, "I knew it! Something told me I shouldn't let you stay here, and now what I was afraid would happen is happening. Osugi came knocking at the door, and saw your sandals in the entrance hall. She's convinced you're here and insists we bring you to her! Listen! You can hear her from here. Oh, Musashi, do something!"

"Osugi? Here?" said Musashi, reluctant to believe his ears. But there was no mistake. He could hear her hoarse voice seeping through the cracks like an icy wind, addressing Kaname in her stiffest, haughtiest manner.

Osugi had arrived just as the pealing of the midnight bells had ended and Musashi's aunt was on the point of going to draw fresh water for the New Year. Troubled by the thought of her New Year being ruined by the unclean sight of blood, she made no attempt to hide her annoyance.

"Run away as fast as you can," she implored. "Your uncle's holding her off by insisting you haven't been here. Slip out now while there's still time." She picked up his hat and pack and led him to the back door, where she had placed a pair of her husband's leather socks, along with some straw sandals.

While tying the sandals, Musashi said sheepishly, "I hate to be a nuisance, but won't you give me a bowl of gruel? I haven't had a thing to eat this evening."

"This is no time for eating! But here, take these. And be off with you!" She held out five rice cakes on a piece of white paper.

Eagerly accepting them, Musashi held them up to his forehead in a gesture of thanks. "Good-bye," he said.

On his way down the icy lane, on the first day of the joyous New Year, Musashi walked sadly—a winter bird with feathers molted, flying off into a black sky. His hair and fingernails felt frozen. All he could see was his own white breath, quickly turning to frost on the fine hairs around his mouth. "It's cold!" he said out loud. Surely the Eight Freezing Hells could not be this numbing! Why, when he normally shrugged off the cold, did he feel it so bitterly this morning?

He answered his own question. "It's not just my body. I'm cold inside. Not disciplined properly. That's what it is. I still long to cling to warm flesh, like a baby, and I give in too quickly to sentimentality. Because I'm alone, I feel sorry for myself and envy people who have nice warm houses. At heart, I'm base and mean! Why can't I be thankful for independence and freedom to go where I choose? Why can't I hold on to my ideals and my pride?"

As he savored the advantages of freedom, his aching feet grew warm, down to the tips of his toes, and his breath turned to steam. "A wanderer with no ideal, no sense of gratitude for his independence, is no more than a beggar! The difference between a beggar and the great wandering priest Saigyō lies inside the heart!"

He suddenly became aware of a white sparkle under his feet. He was treading on brittle ice. Without noticing, he had walked all the way to the frozen edge of the Kamo River. Both it and the sky were still black, and there was as yet no hint of dawn in the east. His feet stopped. Somehow they had carried him without mishap through the darkness from Yoshida Hill, but now they were reluctant to go on.

In the shadow of the dike, he gathered together twigs, chips of wood and anything else that would burn, then began scratching at his flint. The raising of the first tiny flame required work and patience, but eventually some dry leaves caught. With the care of a woodworker, he began piling on sticks and small branches. After a certain point, the fire rapidly took on life, and as it drew the wind, it fanned out toward its maker, ready to scorch his face.

Musashi took the rice cakes his aunt had given him and toasted them one by one in the flames. They turned brown and swelled up like bubbles, reminding him of the New Year's celebrations of his childhood. The rice cakes had no flavor but their own; they were neither salted nor sweetened. Chewing them, he thought of the taste of the plain rice as the taste of the real world about him. "I'm having my own New Year's celebration," he thought happily. As he warmed his face by the flames and stuffed his mouth, the whole thing began to seem rather amusing. "It's a good New Year's celebration! If even a wanderer like me has five good rice cakes, then it must be that heaven allows everybody to celebrate the New Year one way or another. I have the Kamo River to toast the New Year with, and the thirty-six peaks of Higashiyama are my pine tree decorations! I must cleanse my body and wait for the first sunrise."

At the edge of the icy river, he untied his obi and removed his kimono and underwear; then he plunged in and, splashing about like a water bird, washed himself thoroughly.

He was standing on the bank wiping his skin vigorously when the first rays of dawn broke through a cloud and fell warmly on his back. He looked toward the fire and saw someone standing on the dike above it, another traveler, different in age and appearance, brought here by fate. Osugi.

The old woman had seen him, too, and cried out in her heart, "He's here! The troublemaker is here!" Overcome by joy and fear, she nearly fell down in a swoon. She wanted to call to him, but her voice choked; her trembling body would not do as it was told. Abruptly, she sat down in the shadow of a small pine.

"At last!" she rejoiced. "I've finally found him! Uncle Gon's spirit has led me to him." In the bag hanging from her waist she was carrying a fragment of Uncle Gon's bones and a lock of his hair.

Each day since his death she'd talked to the dead man. "Uncle Gon," she'd say, "even though you're gone, I don't feel alone. You stayed with me when I vowed not to go back to the village without punishing Musashi and Otsū. You're with me still. You may be dead, but your spirit is always beside me. We're together forever. Look up through the grass at me and watch! I'll never let Musashi go unpunished!"

To be sure, Uncle Gon had been dead only a week, but Osugi was resolved to keep faith with him until she, too, was reduced to ashes. In the past few days, she had pressed her search with the furor of the terrible Kishimojin, who, before her conversion by the Buddha, had killed other children to feed to her own—said to have numbered five hundred, or one thousand, or ten thousand.

Osugi's first real clue had been a rumor she'd heard in the street that there was soon to be a bout between Musashi and Yoshioka Seijūrō. Then early the previous evening, she had been among the onlookers who watched the sign being posted on the Great Bridge at Gojō Avenue. How that had excited her! She had read it through time and time again, thinking: "So Musashi's ambition has finally got the better of him! They'll make a clown of him. Yoshioka will kill him. Oh! If that happens, how will I be able to face the people at home? I swore I myself would kill him. I must get to him before Yoshioka does. And take that sniveling face back and hold it up by the hair for the villagers to see!" Then she had prayed to the gods, to the bodhisattvas and to her ancestors for help.

For all her fury and all her venom, she had come away from the Matsuo house disappointed. Returning along the Kamo River, she had first taken the firelight to be a beggar's bonfire. For no particular reason, she had stopped on the dike and waited. When she caught sight of the muscular naked man emerging from the river, oblivious of the cold, she knew it was Musashi.

Since he had no clothes on, it would be a perfect time to catch him by surprise and cut him down, but even her old dried-up heart would not let her do that.

She put her palms together and offered a prayer of thanks, just as she would if she had already taken Musashi's head. "How happy I am! Thanks to the favor of the gods and bodhisattvas, I have Musashi before my eyes. It couldn't be mere chance! My constant faith has been rewarded; my enemy has been delivered into my hands!" She bowed before heaven, firm in her belief that she now had all the time in the world to complete her mission.

The rocks along the water's edge seemed to float above the ground one by one as the light struck them. Musashi put on his kimono, tied his obi tightly and girded on his two swords. He knelt on hands and knees and bowed silently to the gods of heaven and earth.