The Tokaido Road (1991)(528p) (11 page)

NOT AT HOME

Fragile skeletons of half-finished umbrellas crouched like giant insects in the corners of the room. The smell of glue was almost overpowering. Hanshiro’s contemplation of his new, red oiled-paper umbrella was interrupted by crockery hitting the other side of the thin wooden wall.

“Cockroach!” a woman shouted. Another bowl crashed.

The old umbrella maker hammered on his side of the wall with a length of loquat wood. His workshop was so tiny that he didn’t have to leave his seat to do it. Plaster had fallen away from the many such beatings the wall had received.

“Be a man,” he shrieked at the woman’s unseen husband.   “Beat the fox demon! Drive her away! Find yourself a handsome boy to love!”

“Chikusho!”
she screamed back. “Four-legged beast!” Another crash.

“The fool is spread under a woman’s buttocks.” Still muttering, the umbrella maker concluded his business with Hanshiro.

He bowed until his forehead rested on the floor, and Hanshiro inclined his head slightly in return. When the old man took Hanshiro’s paper-wrapped coins, his fingertips were hard and shiny with dried glue. Hanshiro imagined his heart encased in the same impervious stuff.

For fifteen years Hanshiro had come to this dark Edo alleyway for his umbrellas. For fifteen years he had pushed aside the same dusty bamboo blind. He had seen the same clutter, each item of which appeared in exactly the same place it had been on his first visit. He had waded through the fluttering drifts of colored paper scraps on frayed
tatami
so old it was soft and sunken in places. He had sat cross-legged among the bamboo parasol skeletons and sipped weak tea with the old misogynist.

For his regular customers, the umbrella maker always kept in stock a few parasols made of tough loquat wood rather than bamboo. They were the only kind Hanshiro bought.

As he left the shop Hanshiro looked around him gloomily. Except for a more pronounced stoop to the umbrella maker’s shoulders and an ever-sharper loathing for women, the old man hadn’t changed in the years Hanshiro had known him. His tiny shop was still squeezed between a seedy bathhouse and a store whose faded banner promised a remedy for unwanted hair. But the neighborhood around his shop had altered considerably, as had Edo itself. The changes weighed on Hanshiro’s spirit.

As always, shabby, dark pine shutters shielded the merchants’ houses from the dust and noise of the narrow street. But behind them the rice brokers and hardware sellers, the wholesalers of tea and clothing,
sake
and lacquerware, lived in forbidden splendor. After each of the fires that swept through Edo, the merchants rebuilt their houses larger than before. Hanshiro scowled as he stalked past the illusory poverty.

None of the five Tokugawa
shMgun
had been able to prevent the despised merchant class from accumulating great sums of money; they could only forbid the flaunting of it. Tokugawa Tsunayoshi allowed no cedar doors, no frieze beams or fine woods, no openwork or lacquering. But as with the restrictions on travel and clothing, the townsmen found ways around the edicts.

They threw lavish parties in the pleasure districts that were officially off limits to the upper classes. Under their drab hempen robes flashed brilliant silk linings in crimson or plum or green the color of a cicada’s wing. On the walls of their inner rooms hung rare works of art. Behind the grimy, soot-darkened facades of their houses were sumptuous palaces of fragrant cypress and cryptomeria wood, and white-plastered storehouses stacked to the rafters with chests of silks and lacquer ware and porcelain.

The world was topsy-turvy here. The natural order had gone awry. Lowly exchangers of goods and that most vulgar of commodities, money, lived like princes. Worse yet, while the emperor, the descendent of OAmaterasu the Sun Goddess and rightful ruler of Japan, languished in faded splendor in KyMto, the Tokugawa usurpers ran the country.

Each succeeding
shMgun
had recruited more men from outside the ranks of the classically trained warriors. Now they brawled in the streets with the lower classes. They swaggered about Edo wearing the two swords of
samurai
while the real warriors, the
bushi
like Hanshiro, wondered where they would get their next
koku
of rice.

Hanshiro hadn’t taken long to prepare for this trip. The umbrella was the last necessity. He had bought his favorite brands of tobacco and tooth powder in the shop next to the umbrella maker’s, the one that also sold the remedy for unwanted hair. He had visited the apothecary and replenished his supply of ginseng, bear’s gall bladder, and oil of toad.

In the two-
tatami
room he rented on a noisome back alley, he rinsed out his thin cotton towel. He put on his black
tabi.
He tied his faded black canvas gaiters around the wide skirts of his
hakama
to keep the hems from the dust and to make walking easier. He slipped his travel permit into the flat wallet that contained his paper handkerchiefs and put it into the front opening of the loose, faded jacket that had lost its shape at the shoulders.  He stuck into the back of his patched sash the heavy war fan with the sharpened iron ribs.

When he had stowed each of the journey’s modest necessities into its accustomed place, he rolled his other wadded cotton coat and his old paper rain cloak inside a thin mat woven of rushes. He tied a long straw cord around each end of the mat and slung the resulting loop across his chest so the mat rode high on his back.

He had tried to find one of the books portraying the famous courtesans of Edo. The young artist Masanobu had included Cat’s portrait in them. But all the copies had mysteriously disappeared. Lord Kira probably had ordered them bought up. He would want to keep Lady Asano’s picture from the avid public. If word got out that Lord Asano had a daughter and she had been employed in the Yoshiwara, gossip about the entire affair would be revived.

In fact, Hanshiro suspected most of the books had been bought as keepsakes. The folk of Edo, high class and low, followed the fashions and gossip of the Floating World. A small army of messengers had left the pleasure district that morning to spread the news of the odd contents of the
sake
barrel in the House of the Perfumed Lotus, the accidental immolation of Lord Kira’s cousin, and the disappearance of the lovely courtesan named Cat.

Hanshiro hefted his new umbrella in his hand, testing the balance of the heavy, lacquered cording on the butt of the handle. He opened it, taking a somber delight in the crimson of the oiled paper, clear and translucent as poppy petals. He spread his damp towel across the convex surface to dry, rested the handle on his shoulder, and rocked it back and forth gently so the towel wouldn’t fall off.

For Hanshiro joy and sorrow were frivolous indulgences, unworthy of a man of his calling. But now that he was leaving Edo, a diffuse aura of pleasure put a bounce in his step. No matter that the job was a trifling one. He felt buoyant as a fifth-month paper carp swimming in the currents of the wind above the rooftops. For Hanshiro the warrior’s Way was most easily traveled on the road.

He turned off a
ri
before the barrier at Shinagawa. He tied the towel around his wrist and closed the umbrella. Then he walked down the double row of ancient maples, almost bare of leaves now, and through the ornate, roofed wooden gate of Spring Hill Temple. A group of children played among the tombstones in a far corner. The ringing of small bells and the muffled chanting of priests emanated from the temple’s main hall.

A shabby palanquin, its wickerwork torn, lay toppled and abandoned under a large willow near Lord Asano’s grave. The bearers and attendants obviously had fled. At the grave itself, four men surrounded a small figure wearing over her head the large white scarf of a Buddhist nun.

The men wore nondescript clothes, but even without seeing the crest of three paulownia leaves, Hanshiro was sure Kira had sent them. He would be trying every means possible to find his enemy’s daughter before she incited the AkM men to revenge. But he would be discreet. He was already in enough trouble.

The fugitive called Cat must have exchanged Shichisaburo’s monk’s disguise for a nun’s, but Hanshiro saw that he had guessed right. She had come to her father’s grave to pray for his soul. Kira’s men had caught her. Now all Hanshiro had to do was take her from them. He was disappointed. He had allowed himself to look forward to the chase.

Two of the men shoved their captive toward the palanquin, and the scarf fell away. The woman’s eyes were calm, remote, as though none of this had anything to do with her. Even with her head shaven she was beautiful, but she certainly wasn’t young enough to be Asano’s daughter.

Hanshiro leaned his umbrella against a tree. Fanning himself casually, he stepped into the open.

“Move, stray dog.” One of the men tried to push past him while a second held the woman’s arm and the other two drew their swords.

Moving too fast to be seen, Hanshiro snapped the iron fan closed and drove it into the closest man’s neck, just under his ear. He fell like a stone down a well and lay unconscious. From his ineptness Hanshiro judged him to be a hireling and not one of Uesugi’s well-trained retainers.

The one holding the woman shoved her aside, and he and the other two circled, carefully. They weren’t very skilled, but they weren’t stupid, either. They could see that the
rMnin
was faster than anyone they’d faced. They knew that if they attacked him at once, they would most likely end up slicing each other.

As always when in battle, Hanshiro fell into
mushin,
“no-mind.” His mind and his body were one. His body and his weapons were one. He and his opponents were one. He could react, without conscious thought, to their moves, just as he could react to the fingers of his own hands. Hanshiro could tell from his opponents’ stances that being-not-being was a state they talked about, bragged about, strived for, and had never attained.

Hanshiro raised the fan into the path of the second sword as it swept downward toward his skull. So far, the contest had been almost silent. Now steel rang against iron, and the sword snapped. The broken end clattered onto the paving stones.

The children stopped their play and lined up to watch from behind the tombstones. Pain from the impact of the sword on the fan ran like an electrical current up Hanshiro’s arm. The man drew his short-sword but warily kept his distance. Hanshiro could tell from his eyes and his posture that he was considering flight. He was beaten already.

Hanshiro’s graceful dance of thrust and parry continued as he used the New Shadow school technique of “circling crows” to avoid his opponents’ strikes. The fact that he didn’t bother to draw his long-sword enraged the other two. They knew they were being mocked.

Holding his sword raised in both hands, the third man attacked from the rear. Hanshiro whirled, ducked, and dropped sideways to one knee, his other knee bent and his foot braced in front of him. His lunge brought him up between the man’s two arms and his sword. He shoved his shoulder into his opponent’s groin and raised his other arm, pushing the fan up under the man’s chin, paralyzing his windpipe. The
samurai
dropped onto all fours, gagging and trying in vain to suck in air.

The fourth shouted his name and charged an opponent who was no longer there. He screamed in pain as Hanshiro slammed the fan onto his fingers, crushing bones against the sword hilt.

The first man was still unconscious. The second sheathed his short-sword, turned tail, and fled. The other two were no threat. The woman had disappeared, probably taking refuge with the monks, who were also prudently absent.

As Hanshiro turned to go, he saw a knotted, blue silk scarf dropped by the nun. Printed in the center were two crossed feathers, the AkM-Asano crest. The nun had been either Lady Asano or Lord Asano’s outside-wife.

When Hanshiro untied the knot, the four corners fell away and hung over the edges of his big, outspread hands. In the center of the scarf lay a shiny black coil of hair. Hanshiro raised it to his face and smelled it.

Sandalwood. Musk. The camellia oil with which the shampooer had dressed Cat’s hair. The sensuous aromas brought back Cat’s rooms, complete in every detail, except one, her face. Hanshiro retied the scarf and put it inside his jacket, next to his travel papers. The wind chilled the sweat on his face, and he wiped it with his sleeve.