The Tokaido Road

  At first Cat had been impatient with Musui’s delays. But as the road grew steeper and the rain drummed on her hat and she slid in the muddy streams flowing past her feet, she began to look for chances to stop. She preferred the monuments with roofs where she could get out of the weather, but any rest was welcome.

  The narrow trail to this almost forgotten shrine was overgrown. As Cat pushed through the wet bushes, more water showered down on her. Mossy stone steps, all a-tilt, staggered up the wooded hillside. They led to a small shrine to Hachiman, the ShintM god of war.

  Sharing his roof was the Buddha Fudo-sama, a ferocious figure surrounded by carved flames and sitting on a lotus flower. That Fudo-sama was here was an especially propitious omen. He represented unshakable resolve and invincibility. He was the patron saint of warriors.

  Cat pictured the ideogram for “desperate.” Its ancient meaning was “to risk one’s life for a place on this earth.” Cat was certainly desperate, but she didn’t expect to find a place on this earth.

  Her father’s name had been abolished and disgraced. The family’s fortunes had gone to provide for its displaced servants and retainers. Cat knew that to change that would be like trying to put spilled water back in a basin. But she was prepared to lie, dissemble, and kill to reach Oishi.

  Cat thought about all that as she bowed before Fudo-sama. The blue paint had long since worn off his face, but he still brandished his wooden sword and rope and scowled fiercely. Fierce Fudo in his cloak of flames cheered her a little. Fudo, Buddha of the Unmoved and Immutable, frightened away evil spirits. And perhaps he would bless her quest.

  The chapel, an odd mixture of Buddhist and ShintM styles, was neglected. The paint had peeled away from the ornate diaperwork around the ceiling. Moss and weeds grew on the rotted cedar shingles of the roof. The scent of mold, like the musty odor of chrysanthemums, pervaded the dark interior. But behind the building was a small waterfall whose splashing was cheerful, even in the rain.

  Musui filled the small altar lamps with fragrant rapeseed oil. He lit the lamps and a bundle of incense. Sitting cross-legged on the warped wooden floor in front of the statues, he chanted the Lotus sutra and confessed to the sins of the six senses. Finally he intoned an invocation to Amida. By the time he finished, the sun had set.

  “Please lay out our sleeping mats,” Musui said. “We’ll spend the night here.”

  Cat started to protest but stopped herself. One didn’t argue with one’s master. If you would have retainers, the old proverb went, first you must be a retainer.

  She opened the mats out on the veranda under the wide eaves of the hut. She set the wet cloth bundle, the furoshiki, between them.

  Musui said he preferred a furoshiki to a wicker travel box, because the cloth could be tied around just about anything. And if one wanted to be free of material effects, one could just throw them to the winds, fold up the cloth, and stick it into one’s sleeve. So it should be with one’s material things as one grew older, he said. By the end of the journey one should have nothing.

  Cat’s stomach growled. Musui was taking too much to heart his own philosophy of having nothing. The day’s only meal had been breakfast at the temple. It had been a pitiful affair of cold rice and a few pickled vegetables. Cat had saved part of it to offer to JizM with a request that he keep watch over her father’s spirit.

  “Do you think we need to bathe?” Musui peered out into the darkness and the steady rain.

  “If bathing under an icy waterfall makes one holy, sensei,” she said, “then we are truly the holiest of the holy.”

  She held up her hands. The pads of her fingers were wrinkled by the day-long soaking. Musui’s laugh was so infectious, Cat laughed, too, in spite of herself. Like children, the two of them sat on the edge of the narrow porch and wiggled their toes as they held their bare feet under the cascade off the eaves to wash away the mud.

  By the light of the altar lamps, Musui searched among the contents of the. furoshiki—his writing box, jars of oil, packets of incense, scrolls of sutras and other religious paraphernalia. He found two towels, two pairs of chopsticks, and a flat wooden box tied with a cord.

  Cat almost cried with relief when he opened it. The abbot had included a meal with his good-bye gifts. Inside the box nested six fat balls of rice, wrapped in crinkly strips of dried seaweed. Tucked neatly around them were pickled plums and coils of boiled gourd peels, all garnished with a spray of pine needles.

  When they finished eating Cat packed away the box with a pair of rice balls left in it for breakfast. She cupped her hands, caught the runoff from the eaves, and drank. Then, while Musui played his flute, she watched the curtain of rain fall from the roof.

  Cat had heard flutes played often, of course; but here, in the forest at night with the rain falling, the song was eerie. It seemed to be calling to the restless spirits that surely must inhabit such a dark, brooding place.

  When the song ended Musui handed the flute to Cat. It was cool and glossy and slightly curved in her hands, as though falling away from her grasp. It was made from the section of the bamboo nearest the root. The walls of the long joints were thickest there, and the natural bore became narrow, making high notes possible.

  “Mountain bamboo is strong, yet delicate,” Musui said. “It bridges the earth and the sky. Its roots are planted firmly in the ground, yet clouds nest in its leaves.”

  Cat took a deep breath and blew into the flute as hard as she could. Only the harsh whistle of air emerged from the other end.

  “Emptiness is the necessity,” Musui said softly. “The universe is an empty shell in which your mind plays. Think of your body as an empty room with walls of skin. Look at a bowl without seeing the sides.

  “The walls of the flute do not sing.” His voice was hypnotic. “Nor does the fire that cures it, nor the lacquer that glazes it, nor the string that binds it. The emptiness sings. Hold in your hands the emptiness that is the flute. Play not with your fingers but with your abdomen, your soul.”

  Cat held the flute through the hour of the Cock and into the hour of the Boar. The lamps had long since burned out. The rain slowed to a diffident tread on the roof, then stopped. Fragments of a waning moon, misshapen but as fat and white as the rice balls, glowed through the branches of the pines. Musui sat silent near her in the darkness.

  Stand in sound as though under a waterfall. Cat heard the words, but she was sure no one spoke them. Hear the sound of sound.

  Cat put the mouthpiece to her lips and merged the pulsing emptiness in her skull with that of the flute. She was rewarded with the hint of a tone, like that of a wind blowing across the moist mouth of a jug. But try as she might, she couldn’t make it sound again.

  “Maybe tomorrow it will sing with you.”

  “Where are we going tomorrow?” Cat handed the flute back to him.

  “Does the cloud ask where it’s going? Does the river?” Musui lay down on his mat and draped his spare robe over him.

  “ ‘The teacher is the needle and the disciple is the thread,’ “ Cat murmured.

  “And who has taught you the words of the sword saint, Musashi?”

  “I must have heard them somewhere. ‘Even boys hanging about the temple gate learn to chant sutras,’ as the old saying goes.”

  “And do they learn to count, too? “

  Count? Cat turned hot, then cold. He had tricked her into counting the straws for him that first day. Perhaps he was not as guileless as he seemed. “One must count to survive, sensei. Counting is not reading or writing.” Cat couldn’t tell by the silence that followed whether Musui believed her or not.

  “You must have a journey name.” He seemed unconcerned about whether she had lied to him. Or what her background was. His lack of curiosity unnerved Cat. She had been auditioning and rehearsing various stories about herself, but he had asked for none.

  “As you say, sensei.’”

  “Your name shall be Shinobu, Endurance.”

  “You honor this miserabl
e person too much, sensei.”

  Shinobu. It was a girl’s name, but boys were sometimes given girls’ names to mislead the demons of disease and bad luck. Shinobu meant more than endurance, really. It had an undermeaning. To hide oneself. To live in concealment. It was a good name.

  CHAPTER 20

  A TRUE WARRIOR

  Cat awoke to a washed and sparkling morning. Through the dark green branches of the pines she could see shards of a winter sky pale and lambent as porcelain. Musui stretched, yawned, and wandered off into the bushes to urinate and to scrub his teeth at the waterfall.

  Cat rolled her mat. Then she made a small offering of rice cake and prayed for her father’s soul. As always when she thought of her father, she wished she had had a chance to speak with him before he died. But actually Cat spoke more with her father now that he was dead than she ever had when he lived.

  When she was growing up he had visited only rarely her mother’s house. As soon as Cat was old enough to understand, her mother had explained that her father’s many duties required him to be elsewhere. When he did visit he often quoted Lao Tsu, who said one should govern people as one would cook fish, poking as little as possible. Lord Asano seemed to have the same attitude toward raising children, as though fatherhood were a government post to which he’d been appointed.

  Cat was fiercely proud of him, though. She thought him the handsomest man born. As a child she had wanted his approval more than anything else, which may have been why she trained until the naginata shaft rubbed her palms and fingers raw and glistened with her blood. Her mother said she had inherited her father’s obstinacy, but Cat did it to make up for the shame of being born a girl when she knew he wanted a son. And for the slight nod he would give when she pleased him.

  Now Cat laid everything out on the big cloth, the furoshiki, brought the corners up to the middle of the bundle, and tied them. Then she hung the brocade bag around her neck. Inside, wrapped in the waterproof sheath of a bamboo culm, was her new travel permit.

  THE TLKAIDL ROAD 125

  The abbot had seemed pleased to be able to thwart the shMgun’s law by issuing illegal papers. He had sorted through a stack of them while Cat knelt with head bowed. They all had been made out for pilgrims, authorizing them to visit the holy places. They had been signed and stamped by the local magistrate and by the abbot himself, as head of the home temple.

  Musui had been apologetic about the bother, but the abbot had waved a languid hand. “Don’t worry. Pilgrims arrive here every day with no more notion of permits than seaweed has when it washes up on the shore. Or they have a thousand excuses for losing theirs.”

  The abbot had mimicked the terrified grimace of a peasant. “ ‘Forgive this miserable fool, Your Most Illustrious Grace.’ “ His voice had quavered as he imitated the exaggerated trembling of a peasant faced with authority. “ ‘My paper fell down the privy hole while I was squatting.’ Or, ‘The river kappa grabbed it when the ferry sank.’ Or, ‘It burned up in the inn where I was staying.’

  “Sometimes the heretics who pose as holy men convince the faithful to boil their permits and drink the broth as an elixir.”

  The abbot was feeling particularly vexed with itinerant holy men that day. In the midst of the temple’s festival a gang of them had set up housekeeping in a corner of the temple compound. They had proceeded to ring their bells and chant unceasingly and at full volume.

  With brush inked and poised above the heavy rice paper, the abbot had looked at Cat. “Name?”

  “Ichiro.” Cat had answered without hesitation. It meant “Firstborn Son,” and it was her father’s pet name for her.

  “And are you indeed the firstborn?”

  “Yes, Your Reverence.” That at least was true.

  After Kanagawa, Musui took a side road into the hills in search of a temple that claimed to have a sample of Daishi-sama’s writing. But the small, run-down building had an abandoned air about it. It was closed up, and Musui could find no one to open it for him. Cat could tell he was disappointed. She herself was annoyed by the useless delay.

  By the time they returned to the TMkaidM the sun was well on its way to setting behind the mountains that crouched in purple ranks to the horizon. The rain had brought warmer weather, and the road to Hodogaya was crowded with travelers. The bay below reminded Cat of a cloak dyed with mountain indigo. A line of surf undulated like a white thread along the shore. In the distance to the southwest, Mount Fuji towered above them. Its smoke-blue slopes swept heavenward in graceful folds.

  When Cat had been much younger she and her mother had accompanied her father on the yearly trips to AkM. A lord’s official wife couldn’t leave Edo with her husband, but an outside-wife, “a noble woman of the province,” could. While her nurse napped, Cat had hung from the window of the big palanquin. She had watched the sacred mountain grow as the procession of retainers and porters, sandal bearers, servants, maids, and palanquins approached it.

  Cat remembered how carefree those journeys had been. Her father’s standard-bearers had cleared the road ahead of them. The staffs of the best inns had been lined up and waiting to make them comfortable. Cat had stepped from the palanquin directly onto the floor of the entryway, and her feet never touched the road. As they traveled Cat had slept or read or listened to her nurse’s songs and stories.

  Cat wished she were in that palanquin, napping while the road flowed by, traversed by the efforts of others. And she missed her nurse, who in a way had been more familiar to her than her own mother.

  Maybe the group of women who passed reminded her of her nurse. They were rice hullers. They shook the bran dust from their aprons and massaged their stiff shoulders and arms.

  When Cat and her mother were forced out of their house and the money set aside for them mysteriously disappeared, Cat’s nurse had gone to an employment agency. The only work available was as a rice huller in a government granary. It was exhausting work. Cat remembered her coming back to the tiny house late in the evening, her clothes covered with bran dust. She had developed a racking cough from the dust. Cat worried that it would ruin the old woman’s health, but she insisted on doing it so she could add her few coppers to the household funds. Her uncomplaining sacrifice had been part of Cat’s decision to seek a contract at the House of the Carp.

  As Cat and Musui walked onto the arc of the bridge outside Hodogaya, Musui lifted his staff so it wouldn’t tap on the planking. “We mustn’t disturb the Daishi’s sleep.”

  Cat leaned over the railing to look underneath. Bundles of belongings were stacked against the big stone pilings where the bridge spanned dry land. It seemed that someone, if not the Daishi, was sheltering there.

  “In his wanderings the Daishi was once refused lodging and had to sleep under a bridge,” Musui said. “He wrote a poem about it.”

  “What was the poem, sensei?” She knew the poem already, of course, but was maintaining the pretense of ignorance.

  “ ‘They refuse to help a traveler in trouble,’ “ Musui recited. “ ‘One night seems like ten.’ “

  Musui smiled and bowed and called out greetings to everyone he passed. Musui was a traveler. He had been up this road many times. He could probably answer any question Cat had about the TMkaidM. And Cat had lots of questions.

  She wanted to know how closely the daimyM scrutinized travelers passing through their lands and how quick they were to flog or crucify those who displeased them. Which rivers boiled with rapids, and how did one bargain with river porters? What was the cost of a night in a respectable inn? Of a bowl of rice or a bath? Did bandits really lurk in the mountains? Most important, where was the next government barrier?

  “Sensei...” She thought it best not to appear too curious about details. “What is the road like ahead?”

  “The Path?” Musui’s expansive embrace included the bay, the hills, Mount Fuji, and the terraced brown paddies following the contours of the slopes. He beamed at the colorful stir of travelers that swirled around them.


  “Everyday life is the Path. To ask about it is like the birds asking what is air; or the fish inquiring as to the nature of water.”

  Cat sighed. This would be difficult. She tried an oblique approach. “Have you made many pilgrimages, sensei?”

  “Ah, yes. Three times I’ve circled Shikoku, visiting the eighty-eight temples associated with the Daishi. I’ve been to his burial place on Mount Koya. I’ve been to the Land of the Eight Clouds Rising.”

  Musui bowed to a huge stack of brushwood creeping along on a pair of legs as thin as the iron chopsticks used to transfer live coals. The old woman underneath was bent at a right angle, her chest parallel to the ground. She walked with the aid of a gnarled branch.

  “Auntie, let me carry that for you.”

  She stared suspiciously up at Musui from under the load. When he tried to lift the frame the wood was tied to, she veered, tugging it out of his hands. She was astonishingly strong, but when Musui let go of the load its weight carried it off in the opposite direction. The old woman had to skip a few steps to get control of it again. “Baku,” she muttered under her breath.

  “I have no plans to steal your wood, auntie.”

  “A gentleman like you shouldn’t bother with the likes of me, Your Honor.” She continued to stare up at him like a rat cornered in the woodpile. She was trying to analyze this madman’s scheme to trick and rob her.

  Cat was appalled. Surely sensei wasn’t considering carrying wood like a peasant. She was even more appalled by the possibility that he would expect her to carry it in his stead.

  “Please, auntie.” Musui smiled at her beguilingly. “Allow an unworthy pilgrim the honor of bearing your burden a short way. For the sake of O-Daishi-sama.”

  Reluctantly the shoulder-burden-auntie lifted the woven straw carrying strap from across her bony chest. Even more reluctantly Cat helped Musui heave the heavy wooden frame onto his back.

  Having her load removed made no difference in the old woman’s posture. She still walked bent double at the waist, as though searching for something dropped. She had to hold her head at an angle that made her chin jut out. With one hand she clung to the staff. She held the other arm straight behind her for balance. Her bare feet left long scuff marks in the damp earth.