The Tokaido Road (1991)(528p) (43 page)

HE WONDERS IF HE OUGHT TO WASH HIS CLOTHES

Shichisaburo’s assistant was waiting for Hanshiro when he left the police office and walked out into the dawn’s pale light. The troupe was packed and waiting to leave when he arrived at their quarters on the temple grounds. Shichisaburo was understandably nervous. He knew that Hanshiro knew he had been sheltering a miscreant, a crime for which he could be severely punished.

Even if Hanshiro didn’t inform on him, Shichisaburo expected the magistrate to change his mind and throw them all in jail until the officials in Edo gave a ruling. That could take a very long time, and conditions in the jail were worse than execrable.

While his people waited anxiously outside, Shichisaburo presided at a hasty meal of tea and cold rice. “I so much regret the inconvenience you have suffered,” he said as he poured the tea.

Hanshiro leaned forward. Walls had ears. “No one need be inconvenienced any more”—his calm voice contained a calculated menace—”if you tell me how that person escaped and where that one’s going next.”

Shichisaburo blanched under his light, daytime makeup. “An old tunnel.” His hand shook, spilling a few drops of tea, which he hastily mopped up with one of his embossed paper napkins. “I truly don’t know where the person plans to go, other than up to the Western Capital.”

“Don’t worry.” Hanshiro took pity on him. After all, Shichisaburo had, at great risk to himself, helped the woman who had snatched away Hanshiro’s heart. “I wish to serve the person’s cause.”

Shichisaburo regarded him so warily, Hanshiro laughed out loud. “You think that’s setting a cat to guard dried bonito, don’t you.”

“I’m only a wretched riverbed beggar, honorable sir. My opinions are worth nothing.”

“But your help is worth something.”

“We are in trouble already.” Shichisaburo’s voice held an entreaty. He had more than discharged his obligation to Lady Asano. He didn’t want to live out his life in exile for a woman with whom he hadn’t even pillowed. “We must be beyond the town borders before the hour of the Dragon or face penalties.”

“If you won’t intercede with our mutual acquaintance on my behalf, at least allow me to accompany you. Seeing me in your company might help persuade the person of my honorable intentions.”

Shichisaburo bowed an unhappy acquiescence.

“Of course, I can count on your discretion in this matter,” Hanshiro added.

“ ‘If a thing is said’ ”—in a voice barely above a murmur, Shichisaburo quoted Basho—” ‘the lips become very cold, like the autumn wind.’ ”

By the time the troupe reached Okitsu, Hanshiro was beginning to regret his decision to travel with them. The members of the Nakamura-za trailed for nine
cho
behind Hanshiro and Dragonfly. They were all afoot. Because of government restrictions on those they called riverbed beggars, not even Shichisaburo, the head of the most popular theater in the Eastern Capital, could legally hire a horse or a
kago.

Shichisaburo was about halfway back in the long line of actors and their apprentices and servants. He was followed by musicians, carpenters, wig makers, shampooers, tailors, dressers, stagehands, and almost a hundred porters. He was keeping a close eye on the man carrying the lacquered box that held his carved head. During the riot at Kambara he had rescued it at some peril to himself.

Like the other actors, Dragonfly was hidden beneath the huge rush hat he was required to wear when mingling with people on the road. His wadded silk travel robe, the color of cloves, was covered by a drab, rusty-black paper cloak. His paulownia wood
geta
were of a utilitarian height, which made life easier for the servant who walked behind him, holding a paper umbrella over his head. His son, identically dressed, was at his side as always.

Dragonfly was possessed by curiosity about the handsome boy he had helped escape. He had spent most of the trip trying to wheedle information from the taciturn
rMnin
of Tosa. Hanshiro had replied only in noncommittal grunts. He himself had learned that rumors abounded among the members of the company. The one closest to the truth said the young stranger was an Asano retainer, trying to deliver a message to the councilor, Oishi Kuranosuke.

As Dragonfly walked he held a small piece of sandalwood to his nose, to mask the mélange of odors around him. He stepped delicately around a pile of horse dung that hadn’t been collected yet by some enterprising farmer’s child.

‘ “Travel is a gloomy and trying experience.” He waved a limp hand at the passing throng, which, strangely enough, seemed to include more than the usual number of children. “Candles exhaust themselves to give light to men.” He sighed the words in a wan, melancholy tone.

“If I had known you were going to rest your head so uneasily on your pillow last night,” Hanshiro said, “I would have invited you to share my accommodations.” He was amused to discover that he liked the actor. He found him easy to talk to. Dragonfly had the sensitive nature of a cultured woman, yet he wasn’t bent on seduction for profit.

Hanshiro suspected that Dragonfly’s complaints masked the real cause of his unhappiness. He missed the loving wife and three young daughters waiting for him in Osaka.

“Oh, hideous!” Dragonfly tilted up his chin so he could give Hanshiro a look of sympathy from under his hat brim. “I pity you. Spending all night in that police office with those ruffians.”

“It was very instructive,” Hanshiro said.

The police had deftly chain-tied all the offending farmers together and herded them into a small outer room. By nightfall they had sobered up and were quite chastened. But because Hanshiro had been kept in a separate room with the others of his class, he had been able to listen to Kira’s men talk among themselves. He hadn’t learned much that he hadn’t been able to guess already, however.

Bureaucracy wasn’t to be hurried. The magistrate had spent most of the afternoon listening to the complaints of exasperated farmers from a nearby village. The headman’s grandmother had been stealing again. Because everyone in the village knew of her predilection, the only thing she had found to take were buckets of night soil. She had collected quite a hoard of them before the stench revealed her crime. The story was a complicated one, entailing a series of events that went back years. The magistrate listened patiently to all of it.

He was probably avoiding the larger problem that filled the police office and overflowed into the yard, where the rioting farmers’ families had set up camp. So many people had been involved in the artistic debate at the Nakamura-za’s performance, the magistrate had insisted on sending to Edo for advice.

The young westcountryman who called himself Nameless had sat silently in a corner throughout the night as, one by one, men were called in to present their cases. He was still sitting there when Hanshiro finally left at dawn. Like Hanshiro, he seemed to be considering the consequences of his own folly.

The hunter pursuing the prey sees not the mountains, as the old saying went. Hanshiro had been so intent on his fight with Nameless that the police had been able to twist their blunt pitchforks into his sleeves, immobilizing his arms. It had been humiliating. As Hanshiro had sat, straight upright, through the night, he had thought of the ancient poem:

Beautiful lady, standing alone,

None in the world like her,

A single glance and she upsets a city,

A second glance, she upsets the state.

She had certainly upset him. The prospect of seeing Lady Asano was still distracting him. He was even conscious of the shabbiness of his appearance for the first time since he had left Tosa.

“ ‘He wonders if he ought to wash his clothes,’ “ he recited aloud.

 “ ‘ Having lived with them for a while . . .’ ” Dragonfly continued the old poem. “ ‘He now loves the lice.’ ”

Dragonfly smiled to himself under his big hat. He understood now the purpose of the stoical
rMnin’s
quest. He was in love with the fugitive lad from Edo.

As they passed the salve shops clustered outside the big gates of Seiken temple, Dragonfly studied the bright robes and broad sashes of the lads who sold the wonderful salve that was Okitsu’s most famous
meibutsu,
“name thing.” The painted boys themselves were Okitsu’s second most famous product. They didn’t impress Dragonfly, though. He slanted his brim up again to share a look of disdain with Hanshiro.

Okitsu boasted over two hundred houses, and the shopping district around the temple was always busy. But the activity today seemed even more frenetic than usual. Laughing, shouting children dodged among the two-wheeled handcarts and the stacks of vegetables and goods. The adults’ voices were loud. An almost palpable excitement shimmered in the air, which was already charged with an oncoming storm.

Hanshiro and Dragonfly and his son passed between the old plum trees outside the temple gate. The trees’ limbs had grown so heavy that they crept along the ground. A child stood sobbing among them as people brushed past him.

He was very young. His head was shaved except for a round patch of hair gathered into a bunch on his crown. He wore a bib and loincloth and quilted jacket and a small damask bag at his side for the amulet that would protect him from childhood’s calamities.

Hanshiro crouched in front of him. “What’s the matter?”

“My brother went to the shrine of the Sun Goddess without me.”

“You’re too young to travel so far.” Hanshiro wiped the boy’s eyes and nose with one of his paper handkerchiefs.

“But I found one, too.” The child opened his bag and drew out a wrinkled scrap of paper.

“Where did you get it?”

“They rained down during the night. We’ve been finding them everywhere. Everyone says they’re a holy sign. The other children are going. I want to go, too.”

Hanshiro studied the smudged writing on the paper. It was hastily done, but even though he knew it was highly unlikely, Hanshiro thought he recognized Lady Asano’s hand.
Fool,
he thought.
You imagine her everywhere.

 “Dame!
Impossible child!” A frantic woman scooped up the boy and hoisted him onto her back. He clung to her neck while she supported his small bottom with her forearms crossed behind her. He bounced along as, without a glance at Hanshiro or Dragonfly, his mother trotted off through the crowd.

Hanshiro stood and looked around. The clerks of a nearby thread shop were writing names and addresses on wooden tickets to hang around the young pilgrims’ necks. Another merchant was giving them straw sandals. Beside the gate a woman was passing out oranges from a large basket.

Was this the beginning of something like the mysterious mass pilgrimage to Ise that had happened almost sixty years ago? And could Cat have started it? As Hanshiro entered the temple’s grounds behind Dragonfly, he stopped to look over the hundreds of messages, invocations, and pleas written on wooden tags and hung from the message board near the massive gate. He did it at each big temple or shrine he encountered.

“Anything there from someone you know?” Dragonfly asked.

Hanshiro grunted noncommittally. But he stayed where he was as Dragonfly swept on through the gate with his son, his servants, and the Nakamura troupe after him.

The bold, black calligraphy of one letter was unmistakably Lady Asano’s. “To the Traveler,” it said. “From the Floating Weed.”

Hanshiro knew the reference, of course. It was from a poem written nine centuries earlier by Lady Ono no Komachi, one of the six poetical geniuses. “So forlorn am I, that my body is like a floating weed.” “Floating weed” had come to symbolize a precarious, uprooted existence.