The Tokaido Road (1991)(528p) (36 page)

“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 TMkaidM.

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!”

A SORELY PRESSED BIRD ...

Even after she had sat for a while, holding her hands and feet to the flames to warm them, Cat couldn’t tell how many
hinin,
outcasts, were at the other two fires on the dry riverbed under the bridge. Dark forms sat around them, but their number was obscured by the huge wooden piles supporting the diagonal struts. However many there were, Cat assumed they were all members of the despised caste called nonhumans.

Behind her tangled, dirty hair the woman sitting near Cat was young. Hunger and hardship had made her loveliness even more haunting. There was a waxy translucence to the skin stretched across her angular cheekbones. She wore the straw matting from a
sake
cask draped across her shoulders.

With one hand she massaged her blind grandfather’s stooped shoulders. She held her baby in the other arm, shielding her from the cold wind blowing off the river. The baby was nursing at her breast, exposed where she had pulled aside the front opening of her torn paper robe. Her small son, naked but for a loincloth, was asleep curled on a scrap of matting with his head on her lap. Both children had two spots of soot on their foreheads to fool demons into thinking they were dogs.

“My husband disappeared five days ago.” She stroked the sleeping boy’s thatch of black hair, cut like a bowl around the top of his head. “On New Year’s eve we had no money to pay the landlord or the grocer or to buy bean paste and millet. To pay our bills at the previous midyear we had pawned an umbrella, a teakettle, my only sash, a measure box, and a pair of pottery bowls. They were the last things we owned.”

The young woman spoke in a calm, light voice, as if her troubles were just minor inconveniences. To do otherwise would have shown an overweaning regard for herself and her personal problems.

“At New Year’s our hearth was cold. We sat in the dark while the creditors pounded on the door and called insults through the shuttered window.”

A horse clattered across the wooden roadbed overhead, setting up a thundering din below. The young woman waited until the noise died, then went on.

“Even though we had no one to care for the babes, I told my husband I would sell myself so they could at least have food. But the boy began to cry. He begged me not to leave him. My husband became even more despondent.

“That night, while we slept, he sneaked out. He waylaid the bailiff’s drunken assistant returning late from a tea house. He knocked him down and robbed him.

“When he came home the next day he brought New Year’s rice cakes with a pinch of burdock, and a kite for the boy. He brought me a new green sash of hemp. He brought Grandfather a sack of tobacco. He brought a picture of Ebisu-sama to set on the empty god shelf and bring us wealth in the coming year. For an hour at least, we had a merry time. Then the police knocked on our door.”

Cat had hardly slept at all in the last two days. She was exhausted and dizzy with hunger. As she listened to the young woman’s tragic story, she felt light, as though her flesh and bone and blood had dissolved. The hollow was filling with grief for outcasts.

What distilled the grief were Cat’s memories of her own New Year’s celebrations. She remembered the frantic stridulation of abacuses from the wing where the man sent by her father settled the year’s accounts in the big ledgers. The accompanying tinkling of the bill collectors’ tiny metal mallets on the balances of their money scales had been a merry sound. They had rung in a new year, cleansed of debt.

For days, servants had pounded out the glutinous paste for rice cakes in huge vats. In New Years past Cat had feasted on chestnuts and lobsters and delicacies of the season. The servants, dressed in her mother’s gifts of new clothes, had decorated the eaves with sprigs of pine. They had put huge pine branches on each side of the front gate to insure long life to those inside.

But the New Year had always been a disappointment to Cat. She had watched the palanquins of merchants and happy visitors crowd the street outside the gate, but they were going to the other houses with their gifts and good wishes. Very few people visited Cat’s mother’s small mansion set inconspicuously on a side street, even though on New Year’s eve the neighborhood had been bright with pine flares and raucous with the sound of laughter and scurrying feet. Cat had had no one to play battledore with in those days except her nurse’s niece, Plover.

“What happened then?” Cat shook her head to clear it. She was ashamed of all the times she had pitied herself as an outcast of sorts.

“My foolish husband was judged as a criminal ought to be. The magistrate decreed that he wear a red sash.”

Kasane gasped. The red sash marked him as an exile to whom no one could speak. He was excluded from the companionship of his fellow beings. It was the most hideous of punishments. At least if one were executed, one had a hope of being reborn into another body. Banishment was death in life.

“We had to leave our house.” The young woman sighed. “We had to leave the village where we were born. We became
yadonashi,
those without a lodging.” The young woman sighed. “Better than a feast elsewhere is a meal of hot water and millet at home.”

“Such a pity.” Cat knew her words were useless, but she didn’t know what else to say.

Those without lodging were not registered with the government. They had no recourse, no legal existence. This young woman had done nothing wrong, not in this life, at least. Her children, her grandfather, were all innocent. Yet they were being punished cruelly. Such was their fate.

“Worse than four hundred and four illnesses is the disease of poverty,” said the grandfather.

“For almost a year we have begged for our food,” the young woman went on. “We have slept under boats on the beach and eaten fish entrails thrown down for the dogs. We have slept in pine groves, or under bridges or temple porches.

“Five days ago my husband earned a few coppers burying a corpse. Even though I begged him not to, he went to buy wine with them. We haven’t seen him since. I’ve asked everywhere in Numazu. No one knows where he went. Have you seen him? He has a red, gourd-shaped mark on his cheek.”

“No,” Cat said. “We haven’t seen him.”

“If he doesn’t come back tomorrow, grandfather and the children and I will start up to the Western Capital. We’ll ask Kannon-sama at Kiyomizu temple to have pity on us.”

“I’m sure she’ll help you,” Cat said.

“Do you think so?”

“She once helped a young woman who believed in her.” As Cat began her story, the heaps of matting at the other fires stirred and moved closer so the people huddled under them could hear better.

“At a time now past there was a small shrine to the goddess of mercy at the top of a mountain.” Cat spoke in the guttural, drawn-out rhythm of the storyteller. It turned the telling of this old tale into a performance.

“A young wife who lived in the valley worshiped Kannon-sama devoutly. Every evening, when she finished her work, she went to the shrine to pay homage to the statue of the goddess. The young woman’s husband grew suspicious of her nightly trips. He was sure she was being unfaithful. Jealousy gnawed like a rat at his soul until he could stand it no more. He took his sword to be sharpened.

“One night, after she had left, he hid in the dark woods by the path. When she passed on her way home he swung his sword at her, cutting deep into her shoulder.”

By now the various pieces of matting were sitting upright. They framed dark faces with shaggy black hair. The outcasts were listening raptly.

“He wiped the blood from the blade and went home, satisfied that he had punished his wicked wife and sent her to be reborn much lower on the Great Wheel. When he arrived at his house he was astonished to see there the woman he thought he had hacked to death. He took a lantern back to the place where he had ambushed her and found drops of blood in the road.

“Then he went home again and asked her, ‘Didn’t you feel something strange when you passed the eight-limbed pine tree at the stream?’ ‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘For a moment my blood turned cold in my veins.’ “ Cat lowered her voice to a husky whisper.

Her audience drew closer to the comfort of the fire.

“When the husband went out the next morning, he found a trail of blood from his house all the way up the mountain to the shrine. The statue of Kannon-sama had a long cleft on her shoulder, in the exact place he had struck his wife the night before.” Cat paused eloquently. “So the tale’s been told, and so it’s been handed down.”

“Ma!”
A murmur rose from the listeners.

“The merciful goddess substituted herself to save the faithful wife.” The young woman seemed to find comfort in the story.

“That’s right,” Cat said.

After a short silence the grandfather spoke. “Why are you two young people alone on the road?” He looked at Cat with milky eyes that seemed to see through her.

“My sister and I are the children of poor but loving parents.” Cat spoke in the same detached voice as the young woman, as though her story had happened to someone else. “Our mother and father rose before dawn and worked until long after dark to provide for us.

“Because our father was the farmers’ representative, he was responsible for delivering the five-families’ assessment to the headman. He discharged his duty punctually, but he absent-mindedly left without getting a receipt for the rice.

“The next day the headman claimed the rice had never been delivered. He accused our father of stealing it. Our father protested his innocence. He begged the headman to clear his name, but to no avail.

“While we and our mother were in the yard, heckling what little rice was left after four
koku
out of every five had been taken for taxes, our father threw a rope around a beam in the kitchen. He tied one end to a pillar and put the other around his neck. He stood on a bucket, then kicked it out from under him. We found him hanging there when we returned at nightfall.”

Kasane wiped her eyes on her sleeve. She knew Cat was making up the story, but she was crying anyway.

“Our mother went mad with grief.” Cat sighed sadly. “She shaved her head and disappeared.”

Cat regretted lying to people whose own troubles were so great, but she had no choice. In any case, her father truly had been betrayed and had killed himself. Her mother had shaved her head and become a nun.

“We have vowed to visit every temple until we find her.”

“May Amida Buddha help you,” the young woman murmured. She held out a small packet wrapped in a bamboo sheath. “I was saving this for the morning meal, but we can always beg more.” She saw that Cat was about to protest. “As a holy gift, Your Honor.”

One could not refuse a pious gift to pilgrims. Tears stung Cat’s eyes as she bowed low and took the package. She opened it, split the crisp, toasted rice cake inside and gave half to Kasane.

The most ferocious-looking of the men knelt in front of Cat and bowed. The wadded cotton of his ancient jacket showed through the huge rips in it. “A token of gratitude for the story of the substituting Kannon-sama.” He held out a short cylinder of coppers wrapped in a scrap of grimy paper.

‘ ‘Thank you.” Cat was so affected by the kindness, she could hardly speak. It wasn’t just that he had given her money when he obviously had almost none himself. He had not given her the coins naked, as one would toss them to a beggar.

“Amida bless you,” she said softly. “As you travel, may no wind stir the pine trees along the road. May those you meet be polite and generous. May ferrymen not overcharge. And may the young and the blind walk safely alone.”

Cat took off her travel cloak and draped it over the sleeping child. “My sister is tired,” she said. “We’re going to sleep now.” She pressed her comb into the young woman’s hand. It was one of the few things she had had on her when she and Kasane had fled Mishima.

“You’re too kind to the unworthy, Your Honor.” But the young woman smiled as she tucked the cloak around the boy. Then she began running the comb through his hair.
“Oyasumi-nasai,”
she called softly to Cat. “Rest well.”