Musashi: Bushido Code (22 page)

Tōji, whatever his shortcomings, had experienced the training of a samurai. He was trying desperately to figure out what Musashi might do. "He's completely unknown in the capital, but he's a great fighter. Could he just be sitting silently in that room? Our approach has been quiet enough, but with this many people pressing in on him, he must have noticed. Anyone trying to make it through life as a warrior would notice; otherwise he'd be dead by now.

"Mm, maybe he's dozed off. It rather looks that way. After all, he's been waiting a long time.

"On the other hand, he's already proved he's clever. He's probably standing there fully prepared for battle, leaving the lamp lit to put us off guard, just waiting for the first man to attack.

"That must be it. That
is
it!"

The men were edgily cautious, for the target of their murderous intent would be just as eager to slay them. They exchanged glances, silently asking who would be the first to run forward and risk his life.

Finally the wily Tōji, who was just outside Musashi's room, called out, "Musashi! Sorry to have kept you waiting! Could I see you for a moment?"

There being no answer, Tōji concluded that Musashi was indeed ready and waiting for the attack. Vowing not to let him escape, Tōji signaled to right and left, then aimed a kick at the shoji. Dislodged from its groove by the blow, the bottom of the door slid about two feet into the room. At the sound, the men who were supposed to storm into the room unintentionally fell back a pace. But in a matter of seconds, someone shouted for the attack, and all the other doors of the room clattered open.

"He's not here!"

"The room's empty!"

Voices full of restored courage muttered disbelievingly. Musashi had been sitting there just a short while ago, when someone had brought him the lamp. The lamp still burned, the cushion he had been sitting on was still there, the brazier still had a good fire in it, and there was a cup of untouched tea. But no Musashi!

One man ran out on the veranda and let the others know that he had gotten away. From under the veranda and from dark spots in the garden, students and retainers assembled, stamping the ground angrily and cursing the men who had been standing guard on the small room. The guards, however, insisted that Musashi could not have gotten away. He had walked down to the toilet less than an hour earlier but had returned to the room immediately. There was no way he could have gotten out without being seen.

"Are you saying he's invisible, like the wind?" one man asked scornfully. Just then a man who had been poking around in a closet shouted, "Here's how he got away! See, these floorboards have been ripped up."

"It hasn't been very long since the lamp was trimmed. He can't have gone far!"

"After him!'

If Musashi had indeed fled, he must at heart be a coward! The thought fired his pursuers with the fighting spirit that had been so notably lacking a bit earlier. They were streaming out the front, back and side gates when someone yelled, "There he is!"

Near the back gate, a figure shot out of the shadows, crossed the street and entered a dark alley on the other side. Running like a hare, it swerved off to one side when it reached the wall at the end of the alley. Two or three of the students caught up with the man on the road between the Kūyadō and the burned ruins of the Honnōji.

"Coward!"

"Run away, will you?"

"After what you did today?"

There was the sound of heavy scuffling and kicking, and a defiant howl. The captured man had regained his strength and was turning on his captors. In an instant, the three men who had been dragging him by the back of his neck plummeted to the ground. The man's sword was about to descend on them when a fourth man ran up and shouted, "Wait! It's a mistake! He's not the one we're after."

Matahachi lowered his sword and the men got to their feet.

"Hey, you're right! That's not Musashi."

As they were standing there looking perplexed, Tōji arrived on the scene. "Did you catch him?" he asked.

"Uh, wrong man—not the one who caused all the trouble."

Tōji took a closer look at the captive and said with astonishment, "Is that the man you were chasing?"

"Yes. You know him?'

"I saw him just today at the Yomogi Teahouse."

While they eyed Matahachi silently and suspiciously, he calmly straightened his tousled hair and brushed off his kimono.

"Is he the master of the Yomogi?"

"No, the mistress of the place told me he wasn't. He seems to be just a hanger-on of some sort."

"He looks shady, all right. What was he doing around the gate? Spying?"

But Tōji had already started to move on. "If we waste time with him, we'll lose Musashi. Split up and get moving. If nothing else, we can at least find out where he's staying."

There was a murmur of assent and they were off.

Matahachi, facing the moat of the Honnōji, stood silently with his head bowed while the men ran by. As the last one passed, he called out to him. The man stopped. "What do you want?" he asked.

Going toward him, Matahachi asked, "How old was this man called Musashi?"

"How would I know?"

"Would you say he was about my age?"

"I guess that's about right. Yes."

"Is he from the village of Miyamoto in Mimasaka Province?"

"Yes."

"I guess 'Musashi' is another way of reading the two characters used to write 'Takezō,' isn't it?"

"Why are you asking all these questions? Is he a friend of yours?" "Oh, no. I was just wondering."

"Well, in the future, why don't you just stay away from places where you don't belong? Otherwise you might find yourself in some real trouble one of these days." With that warning, the man ran off.

Matahachi started walking slowly beside the dark moat, stopping occasionally to look up at the stars. He didn't seem to have any particular destination.

"It is him after all!" he decided. "He must have changed his name to Musashi and become a swordsman. I guess he must be pretty different from the way he used to be." He slid his hands into his obi and began kicking a stone along with the toe of his sandal. Every time he kicked, he seemed to see Takezō's face before him.

"It's not the right time," he mumbled. "I'd be ashamed for him to see me the way I am now. I've got enough pride not to want him to look down on me. . . . If that Yoshioka bunch catches up with him, though, they're likely to kill him. Wonder where he is. I'd like to at least warn him."

Encounter and Retreat

Along the stony path leading up to the Kiyomizudera Temple stood a row of shabby houses, their planked roofs lined up like rotten teeth and so old that moss covered their eaves. Under the hot noonday sun, the street reeked of salted fish broiling over charcoal.

A dish flew through the door of one of the ramshackle hovels and broke into smithereens on the street. A man of about fifty, apparently an artisan of sorts, came tumbling out after it. Close on his heels was his barefooted wife, her hair a tangled mess and her tits hanging down like a cow's.

"What're you saying, you lout?" she screamed shrilly. "You go off, leave your wife and children to starve, then come crawling back like a worm!"

From inside the house came the sound of children crying and nearby a dog howled. She caught up with the man, seized him by his topknot and began beating him.

"Now where do you think you're going, you old fool?"

Neighbors rushed up, trying to restore order.

Musashi smiled ironically and turned back toward the ceramics shop. For some time before the domestic battle erupted, he had been standing just outside it, watching the potters with childlike fascination. The two men inside were unaware of his presence. Eyes riveted on their work, they seemed to have entered into the clay, become a part of it. Their concentration was complete.

Musashi would have liked to have a try at working with the clay. Since boyhood he had enjoyed doing things with his hands, and he thought he might at least be able to make a simple tea bowl. Just then, however, one of the potters, an old man of nearly sixty, started fashioning a tea bowl. Musashi, observing how deftly he moved his fingers and handled his spatula, realized he'd overestimated his own abilities. "It takes so much technique just to make a simple piece like that," he marveled.

These days he often felt deep admiration for other people's work. He found he respected technique, art, even the ability to do a simple task well, particularly if it was a skill he himself had not mastered.

In one corner of the shop, on a makeshift counter made of an old door panel, stood rows of plates, jars, sake cups, and pitchers. They were sold as souvenirs, for the paltry sum of twenty or thirty pieces of cash, to people on their way to and from the temple. In stark contrast to the earnestness the potters devoted to their work was the humbleness of their boarded shack. Musashi wondered whether they always had enough to eat. Life, it appeared, wasn't as easy as it sometimes seemed.

Contemplating the skill, concentration and devotion put into making wares, even as cheap as these, made Musashi feel he still had a long way to go if he was ever to reach the level of perfection in swordsmanship that he aspired to. The thought was a sobering one, for in the past three weeks he'd visited other well-known training centers in Kyoto besides the Yoshioka School and had begun to wonder whether he had not been too critical of himself since his confinement at Himeji. His expectation had been to find Kyoto full of men who had mastered the martial arts. It was, after all, the imperial capital, as well as the former seat of the Ashikaga shogunate, and it had long been a gathering place for famous generals and legendary warriors. During his stay, however, he had not found a single training center that had taught him anything to be genuinely grateful for. Instead, at each school he had experienced disappointment. Though he always won his bouts, he was unable to decide whether this was because he was good or his opponents were bad. In either case, if the samurai he had met were typical, the country was in sorry shape.

Encouraged by his success, he had reached the point of taking a certain pride in his expertise. But now, reminded of the danger of vanity, he felt chastened. He mentally bowed in deep respect to the clay-smudged old men at the wheel and started up the steep slope to Kiyomizudera.

He had not gone far when a voice called to him from below. "You there, sir. The rōnin!"

"Do you mean me?" asked Musashi, turning around.

Judging from the man's padded cotton garment, his bare legs, and the pole he carried, he was a palanquin bearer by trade. From behind his beard, he said, politely enough for one of his lowly status, "Sir, is your name Miyamoto?"

"Yes."

"Thank you." The man turned and went down toward Chawan Hill.

Musashi watched him enter what appeared to be a teahouse. Passing through the area a while earlier, he had noticed a large crowd of porters and palanquin bearers standing about in a sunny spot. He couldn't imagine who had sent one of them to ask his name but supposed that whoever it was would soon come to meet him. He stood there awhile, but when no one appeared, resumed his climb.

He stopped along the way to look at several well-known temples, and at each of them he bowed and said two prayers. One was: "Please protect my sister from harm." The other was: "Please test the lowly Musashi with hardship. Let him become the greatest swordsman in the land, or let him die."

Arriving at the edge of a cliff, he dropped his basket hat on the ground and sat down. From there he could look out over the whole city of Kyoto. As he sat clasping his knees, a simple, but powerful, ambition welled up in his young breast.

"I want to lead an important life. I want to do it because I was born a human being."

He had once read that in the tenth century two rebels named Taira no Masakado and Fujiwara no Sumitomo, both wildly ambitious, had gotten together and decided that if they emerged from the wars victorious, they would divide Japan up between them. The story was probably apocryphal to begin with, but Musashi remembered thinking at the time how stupid and unrealistic it would have been for them to believe they could carry out so grandiose a scheme. Now, however, he no longer felt it laughable. While his own dream was of a different sort, there were certain similarities. If the young cannot harbor great dreams in their souls, who can? At the moment Musashi was imagining how he could create a place of his own in the world.

He thought of Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, of their visions of unifying Japan and of the many battles they had fought to that end. But it was clear that the path to greatness no longer lay in winning battles. Today the people wanted only the peace for which they'd thirsted so long. And as Musashi considered the long, long struggle Tokugawa Ieyasu had had to endure to make this desire a reality, he realized once again how hard it was to hold fast to one's ideal.

"This is a new age," he thought. "I have the rest of my life before me. I came along too late to follow in the footsteps of Nobunaga or Hideyoshi, but I can still dream of my own world to conquer. No one can stop me from doing that. Even that palanquin bearer must have a dream of some sort."

For a moment he put these ideas out of his mind and tried to view his situation objectively. He had his sword, and the Way of the Sword was the way he had chosen. It might be fine to be a Hideyoshi or an Ieyasu, but the times no longer had use for people of their particular talents. Ieyasu had everything neatly tied up; there was no more need for bloody wars. In Kyoto, stretched out below him, life was no longer a touch-and-go affair.

For Musashi, the important thing from now on would be his sword and the society around him, his swordsmanship as it related to existing as a human being. In a moment of insight, he was satisfied that he had found the link between the martial arts and his own visions of greatness.

As he sat lost in thought, the palanquin bearer's face came into view beneath the cliff. He pointed his bamboo pole at Musashi and shouted, "There he is, up there!"

Musashi looked down to where the porters were milling about and shouting. They began climbing the hill toward him. He got to his feet and, trying to ignore them, walked farther up the hill, but soon discovered that his path was blocked. Locking arms and thrusting out their poles, a sizable group of men had encircled him at a distance. Looking over his shoulder, he saw that the men behind him had come to a halt. One of them grinned, showing his teeth, and informed the others that Musashi seemed to be "staring at a plaque or something."

Musashi, now before the steps of the Hongandō, was indeed gazing up at a weather-beaten plaque hanging from the crossbeam of the temple entrance. He felt ill at ease and wondered if he should try frightening them away with a battle cry. Even though he knew he could make quick work of them, there was no point in brawling with a bunch of lowly laborers. It was probably all a mistake anyway. If so, they would disperse sooner or later. He stood there patiently, reading and rereading the words on the plaque: "Original Vow." "Here she comes!" one of the porters cried.

They began talking among themselves in hushed tones. Musashi's impression was that they were working themselves into a frenzy. The compound within the western gate of the temple had quickly filled with people, and now priests, pilgrims and vendors were straining their eyes to see what was going on. Their faces brimming with curiosity, they formed circles outside the ring of porters surrounding Musashi.

From the direction of Sannen Hill came the rhythmical, pace-setting chants of men carrying a load. The voices came closer and closer until two men entered the temple grounds bearing on their backs an old woman and a rather tired-looking country samurai.

From her porter's back, Osugi waved her hand briskly and said, "This will do." The bearer bent his legs, and as she jumped spryly to the ground, she thanked him. Turning to Uncle Gon, she said, "We won't let him get away this time, will we?" The two were clothed and shod as though they expected to spend the rest of their lives traveling.

"Where is he?" called Osugi.

One of the bearers said, "Over there," and pointed proudly toward the temple.

Uncle Gon moistened the handle of his sword with spittle, and the two pushed through the circle of people.

"Take your time," cautioned one of the porters.

"He looks pretty tough," said another.

"Just make sure you're well prepared," advised still another.

While the laborers offered words of encouragement and support to Osugi, the spectators looked on in dismay.

"Is the old woman actually planning to challenge that rōnin to a duel?" "Looks that way."

"But she's so old! Even her second is shaky on his legs! They must have good reason to try taking on a man so much younger."

"Must be a family feud of some kind!"

"Look at that now, will you! She's lighting into the old man. Some of these old grannies really have guts, don't they!"

A porter ran up with a dipper of water for Osugi. After drinking a mouthful she handed it to Uncle Gon and addressed him sternly. "Now see that you don't get flustered, because there's nothing to be flustered about. Takezō's a man of straw. Oh, he may have learned a little about using a sword, but he couldn't have learned all that much. Just stay calm!"

Taking the lead, she went straight to the front staircase of the Hongandō and sat down on the steps, not ten paces from Musashi. Paying no attention whatever either to him or to the crowd watching her, she took out her prayer beads, and closing her eyes, began moving her lips. Inspired by her religious fervor, Uncle Gon put his hands together and did likewise.

The sight proved to be a little too melodramatic, and one of the spectators started snickering. Immediately, one of the porters spun around and said challengingly, "Who thinks this is funny? This is no laughing matter, you imbecile! The old woman's come all the way from Mimasaka to find the good-for-nothing who ran off with her son's bride. She's been praying at the temple here every day for almost two months and today he finally showed up."

"These samurai are different from the rest of us," was the opinion of another porter. "At that age, the old woman could be living comfortably at home, playing with her grandchildren, but no, here she is, in place of her son, seeking to avenge an insult to her family. If nothing else, she deserves our respect."

A third one said, "We're not supporting her just because she's been giving us tips. She's got spirit, she has! Old as she is, she's not afraid to fight. I say we should give her all the help we can. It's only right to help the underdog! If she should lose, let's take care of the rōnin ourselves."

"You're right! But let's do it now! We can't stand here and let her get herself killed."

As the crowd learned of the reasons for Osugi's being there, the excitement mounted. Some of the spectators began goading the porters on.

Osugi put her prayer beads back into her kimono, and a hush fell over the temple grounds. "Takezō!" she called loudly, putting her left hand on the short sword at her waist.

Musashi had all the while been standing by in silence. Even when Osugi called out his name, he acted as if he hadn't heard. Unnerved by this, Uncle Gon, at Osugi's side, chose this moment to assume an attacking stance, and thrusting his head forward, uttered a cry of challenge.

Musashi again failed to respond. He couldn't. He simply did not know how to. He recalled Takuan's having warned him in Himeji that he might run into Osugi. He was prepared to ignore her completely, but he was very upset by the talk the porters had been spreading among the mob. Furthermore, it was difficult for him to restrain his resentment at the hatred the Hon'idens had harbored against him all this time. The whole affair amounted to nothing more than a petty matter of face and feelings in the little village of Miyamoto, a misunderstanding that could be easily cleared up if only Matahachi were present.

Nevertheless, he was at a loss as to what to do here and now. How was one to respond to a challenge from a doddering old woman and a shrunken-faced samurai? Musashi stared on in silence, his mind in a quandary.

"Look at the bastard! He's afraid!" a porter shouted.

"Be a man! Let the old woman kill you!" taunted another.

There was not a soul who was not on Osugi's side.