The Plum Rains and Other Stories (18 page)

They dragged the skiff ashore and rolled it over then lifted its prow onto the trunk of a wind-felled tree and crawled under it. They sat far apart and stared out at the dragons roiling the lake's back, creases of spume splintering open with each blow.

That stern oar is gone, the boy lamented. It will be
impossible
for me to return without it.

You'd go back out there?

Not now. He squatted with his arms wrapped around his shins. Only that I have suffered a loss.

You have your life.

They'll charge me fifty coppers for that oar. Maybe more.

T
HE ARSONIST'S WIDOW MIGHT
have been awakened by the gentle murmur of wavelets lapping the shore, or perhaps by the fragrance of lake water shimmering in warm sunlight.

Jirobei had hiked all night to reach her, and he watched from the edge of the forest as she crawled out from under the overturned skiff and stood gazing at the glassy surface of Little Grebe Lake. He would have liked to see it as she did – the pale green water calm and lovely under a few clouds, the darker green of the cedar forests surrounding the lake on all sides – and he would have liked to describe his own thoughts about it to her. Large vessels and small ones came and went: fishing boats and passenger ferries and cargo carriers. Among them was a
double-hulled
barge with an ox on board, the huge beast snubbed to the aft transom and bellowing in distress.

Jirobei stayed within the tree shadows as the widow
carried
her bundle around to a sheltered cove. She pulled off her muddy robe and unwound her underskirt then waded out into the water, a small mammal stripped of its pelt. She bathed then came back and perched on a rock in the sunlight, and the sense of well-being he felt was like that of a proprietor.

Jirobei waited until she had put on a clean robe and set off again then went down to the lake himself. Weeds torn out by the storm were aligned in bunches along the waterline like crops harvested. He rinsed his robe the way she had done then took off his loincloth and rinsed it too. He hung both garments on the same willow branches she had used then waded out into the lake and washed himself. The stern oar bobbed in the debris of a backwash cove. He dragged it ashore then chose an outcropping of rock near the overturned skiff and occupied it, his immense red body heating in the morning sun.

The oar boy emerged from under the skiff and saw him. He didn't know what his presence meant but he knew it meant something. What do you want from me?

Jirobei strolled over to where the boy waited. He grasped the near edge of the long, slender boat and with a powerful heave flipped it back onto its keel. He dragged the prow around so that it was facing out into the lake.

You can't just go around naked.

Jirobei retrieved the stern oar then laid it against the flange of its mounting bracket but did not bother with the shredded ropes that hung there, for the flange block had worked loose and would not support the weight of the oar without being pounded back into place.

They'll be wondering if you drowned, Jirobei said.

I don't know what you want.

Jirobei studied him. What do you want?

Nothing.

Not to go home?

To go home then.

Your wife will be worried.

The oar boy looked away, frightened. I don't have a wife.

Your mother then.

What do you want from me?

Jirobei continued to observe him. Where's she going?

The boy glanced at him then quickly lowered his eyes. Who?

Your passenger. From yesterday.

I don't know.

Don't say that to me.

The oar boy couldn't look at the huge pariah's naked body, his immense belly hanging out in a great swollen mass of muscle and fat, his chest and shoulders and thighs spangled and hatched all over with pit-scars and ridge-welts from stab wounds and slash wounds, like a map charting the impact chance had
inflicted
on him. There was a storm, he said. We just washed up…

You just washed up.

The oar boy stood with his hands dangling. There's a small landing. Farther up the shore. It leads to the road into the
barrier
mountains. We couldn't find it because of the storm.

All right. Jirobei gazed out over the placid green surface of the lake. Get a rock.

What?

Get a rock. A large one.

A rock?

A rock. One about the size of your head. Jirobei was
watching
him now. And bring it to me.

T
HE ARSONIST'S WIDOW CONFRONTED
Jirobei late the following day. He had set up a solitary bivouac beside a wayfarers' shrine, and he told her he'd been waiting for her.

You didn't know I'd come looking for you.

I knew you'd relent.

You didn't know anything of the kind.

Jirobei had stripped off his robe and hung it on a protruding pine branch then seated himself in the middle of the road like a massive and objectionable Buddha. But you did come. Here you are.

Because you aren't allowed, said the arsonist's widow. So I guess what I need to do is say that to you.

And haven't you?

So you hear it.

Jirobei's body in the gathering darkness was coated with a coppery sheen of perspiration, and his immense black coif was so heavy with oil that it hung down onto the swollen muscle and fat of the back of his neck and left greasy streaks there.

You came back because you realised you were wrong about me, Jirobei said.

The widow deposited her gear inside the wayfarers' shine but settled herself on the entryway stoop, as if the huge creature sitting cross-legged in the middle of the road was just another feature of the landscape. All right, she said. I'm listening.

Jirobei told her that her husband had committed a serious offence. For that reason, he did not regret cutting him. To try to escape from a debt was your husband's karma, Jirobei said. As was the failure of his attempt. And his death.

It was natural, Jirobei said. Like blossoms falling. Like the way green shoots push up through last year's withered grasses.

Jirobei told her it was his obligation to preserve public
order
, but he knew that at times, he too yielded to moments of excess. It had therefore occurred to him that the manner of her husband's death was an injustice to her. He said he wished to make amends.

And that's why you're following me?

You came back for me, Jirobei said.

To be done with it!

Jirobei had two rice cakes topped with wedges of pressed mackerel, and he gave them both to the arsonist's widow. He said he had heard doctrines he believed worth considering. It was not for him to speak of such matters, but unless she had
objections
he would. He himself was of course a non-human and therefore judged to be a creature without a soul. But he believed that to be true of all beings. There was no individual soul. The idea itself was an error. Persons, pariahs, animals, fish, insects all occupied a series of temporary expediencies. Flow was
granular.
Each instance mutated into the next. There was no linkage connecting occurrences together, other than the consistency of the fact of transformation. That alone was the bond. To hold otherwise was to live in delusion. He told her that some
believers
credited the persistence of the soul as the mechanism that enabled the chain of rebirths from life to life, but in his view this too was mistaken. Every thing links to every other thing as it arises within the irrevocability of itself. No separate component is required.

The widow had finished one rice cake, and she sat with the second held in both hands. She said she found such ideas
difficult
to understand. She asked if he had met others who shared his views.

All men to me are other, Jirobei said. Sometimes he tried to find a place to meet, but in his heart he knew that any such attempt would be futile.

Jirobei told her that in the course of his duties, he
encountered
fearful persons who would not see him as he drew nearer, who would not accept his presence even when he was very close. My breath touches their cheeks and my lips brush their skin, but they in their terror can't fulfil their obligations to themselves.

The widow finished her second rice cake. Because they're afraid, she said.

But you came back. Didn't that mean she wasn't afraid of him?

It doesn't, said the widow. She came back because she knew he might hurt her wherever she was, and she had no way of preventing it.

And if he managed to reassure her in some manner she credited?

She said that any relief she felt would be false since he could easily change his mind. She said she believed that he in his
otherness
might do her a fatal injury, but that he also might protect her from peril, and that both states might dwell within him so that the centre of each was at the centre of the other, and the edge of each extended to the edge of the other and no farther because there could be no space beyond for it to extend into.

Jirobei felt himself flooding with contentment. There's no centre, he said. Nor is there ever an edge.

Then what was there?

The beauty of the world in its shimmering.

All through that night Jirobei sat in the middle of the
roadway
and guarded the arsonist's widow as she slept peacefully inside the wayfarers' shelter. Had an army of ten thousand
gibbering
demons assaulted him, he would not have flinched. Had all the wasps and serpents and poison-toads of hell risen up around him in a heaving cloud of annihilation, he would have remained an unmovable presence.

When the widow awoke the following morning, Jirobei had already departed.

On the entryway step was the skull of a small mammal,
lacquered
a rich hue and decorated with mysterious symbols. It was a gift. She kept it.

T
HE ARSONIST'S WIDOW VISITED
Jirobei on the day before his execution. She was the only person to do so.

His crime was impertinence. It had not resulted from
something
he said or did but from something he had failed to do or say.

The pariah squatted in the gaol courtyard. A heavy iron chain that had once secured the anchor of a sailing ship from Europe tethered his neck to an iron cleat affixed to one of the foundation stones of the gaol, and he told her that the
shogunate
guards had asked him not to try to wrench it out for fear of damaging the structural integrity of the building.

And you said you wouldn't, she said.

It was kind of you to come. Jirobei looked at the patch of dirt between his naked red feet. I would never do anything harmful to the shogunate. His mangled lips were unable to form the words well but she understood what he meant.

I wanted to bring you food but they said it wasn't permitted.

Much isn't permitted, Jirobei said.

Are you suffering?

About the right amount.

They told me what they're going to do.

Yes. Crush me. They've been gathering slabs of rock on the riverbed. A great mound has been collected.

Can nothing be done?

It's not uncommon to wish to inflict pain on those you
despise
, Jirobei said.

The widow stood over him uncertainly. I'm sorry, she said
finally
; and Jirobei's round red face tilted up towards hers. He told her he was grateful for her visit, but it was time for her to leave. There may be complaints if you seem too sympathetic, he said.

I don't know what to do, the woman cried. I regret that I –

No. There's nothing to regret. And nothing to do. Jirobei told her that he acknowledged the world's right to reject him. He smiled up at her shyly. He said he had always accepted the
hatred of others. It was like a ladder for him. Killing him was just the top rung.

The arsonist's widow told him there had been occasions when she sensed him nearby as a kind of compression of the moment, as if what was happening had finished sooner than would have been expected, like an inward folding of the
promise
of duration that had thickened and foreshortened it. It felt comforting, she said.

Jirobei's eyes closed and he bowed his head.

That's not much, said the widow.

It is to me, Jirobei said.

The arsonist's widow went down to the riverbank on the day after Jirobei's execution. She didn't bring incense to burn, aware that such a gesture would have been judged eccentric, nor would flowers have been appropriate for the death-place of a pariah.

The corpse remained where it was, entombed under an
immense
pile of rocks.

Riffraff had gathered there, rowdy with drink, and one sloppy fellow smirked when he saw her and said that for twenty coppers, he would uncover the pariah's face.

She ignored him. She already had what she came for. It was no weightier than a grain of sand in a cauldron, a fleck of dust on a mirror, a speck of pollen drifting in the wind. But he was in it, the whole of him.

When the widow turned away without replying, the smirker called after her, Fifteen coppers, then? Ten?

T
HE
P
LUM
R
AINS

S
he came back after first prayers and slid open her white paper doors.

Misty drizzle filled the cedar forest surrounding the
nunnery.
The inside walls of her room were tacky with the damp, the tatami mats slick with it, and a faint grey scum furred the brocade mat-bindings. It was a tired season, a time of wistful melancholy.

The Nun Aoi had prayed that morning as she did every morning for the souls of those she’d betrayed. The rain shutters of the Image Hall had been fastened in place, and the rows of kneeling women murmured the wondrous words of the Lotus Sutra while the gentle rain fell silently on the roofs and verandas and gardens. It was the season for listlessness and regret, for longing for what could never be recovered.

But her dead have grown old and infirm. Their faces no
longer
came to her. Nor did her terror flood up at their fear. Nor her remorse.

The nunnery for condemned women was located at the top end of a narrow valley deep in the mountains. The various old buildings were linked together by covered corridors, and a high wall kept out intruders, not that anyone ever tried to breach it. Aoi was there because the shogunate could not kill her. She had thought they might relent and send a sneak assassin, but even
that possibility had faded over the years, and she had come to accept the permanence of her incarceration.

A dry stream of raked pebbles separated Aoi’s veranda from the mist-shrouded trees on the hillside. It flowed past upright rocks configured like miniature islands, a long flat stone that looked like a bridge, and emptied finally into the sea of raked gravel in the back garden. Most of the pebbles were the size of soy bean kernels – granite, ovoid, rolled smooth in mountain cataracts – but some were as large as quail eggs; and she had brought one inside soon after her arrival and kept it for solace, for the sense of the small dry stone in the palm of her hand, of its being there as a specific weight and shape and texture that would never vary, never depart from the fact of itself. The pebble had possessed her as she possessed it; and although Aoi had long since admitted the foolishness of such thoughts, the pebble still had its place on her personal Buddha-shelf beside a small sandalwood statue of the Kannon Bodhisattva and the death plaques of the Hori family, the incised gold words on them
faded
, the once glossy black lacquer surface matte, and with hardly any scent remaining.

Aoi had joined her voice to the voices of the other
condemned
women, all of them bound together under the inward gaze of the Amida Buddha; and when she prayed for the Hori, she made no distinction between the eldest son, who had died for loving her, and his parents and younger brothers, who had died as a result of his death. All of them would be waiting for her like wavering shadows on the yellow sands of hell, and she would hear their cries of torment and accept their accusations, for their lives had been denied them and the fault was hers.

O
NE OF THE NOVICES WAS STANDING
in Aoi’s doorway, a
tedious
little weeper who, like Aoi, had been betrothed to the son of an Imperial concubine.

The novice was incapable of caring for herself. Her black robes were often stained, and she always smelled faintly of urine. Her father, scion of an impecunious branch of the aristocratic Fujiwara Clan, had misbehaved in some ill-defined manner, causing his future son-in-law to wish to renege on an
arrangement
now judged disadvantageous. A mechanism was needed; and the shogunate had agreed to condemn the girl, thereby
establishing
an obligation to be redeemed at a time of their
choosing
. No crime was ever stipulated, and the Fujiwara novice still hoped for a different life although Aoi knew that the shogunate would never relent for the simple reason that if one woman who had been sequestered unfairly were released, all the others would begin clamouring for it, creating disharmony.

The abbess has requested your presence, said the weepy little novice.

Now?

If it is acceptable…

Aoi was called in to receive devotional instructions
occasionally
although these interviews soon evolved into friendly chats. The abbess was from a branch of the Imperial family, and her concerns with sanctity were perfunctory. She had been only a small child when her name was placed on a list, and she had been proclaimed abbess and carried up to this remote mountain nunnery to end her days in repentance – for what was never stipulated. Her nurse had accompanied her, also shaving her head, but she had died of loneliness after a few years. The abbess had never been permitted to leave the compound and knew of no other life. But she had seen men at a distance and understood that they were in possession of distinctive if improbable
anatomical
characteristics so that Aoi had been obliged on occasion
to give an account of previous experiences, describe her own participation in them, and explain what they had meant and why they had meant it. The older woman would ponder these reports like someone hearing of a remote land where the sun shines at midnight and fire burns inside ice.

Aoi had scarcely seated herself when she was told that a senior official from the shogunate was waiting to see her. He was accompanied by a popular writer whose name was known to all who loved stories.

I’m not allowed to have visitors.

He’s in the forecourt.

Aoi reminded the abbess that she was forbidden any
interaction
with others, but the woman only looked at her as if she were a fairy-phantom whose true incarnation had finally been revealed. The summons can’t be ignored, she said. The shogun himself issued it.

Aoi took one of the nunnery’s yellow oil-paper umbrellas. The day was too humid for a cloak so she draped a white gauze shawl over her bald head like a loose hood and wore high clogs against the probability of the forecourt being muddy.

The little novice trailed after her. She asked where she was going, and before Aoi could reply, asked if she couldn’t go with her.

It may be my death, Aoi said. Do you want to join me there?

T
HEY HAD TIED HER HANDS
behind her back, lashed her wrists to her ankles, and left her kneeling on the dirt of an enclosed courtyard-garden, her hair hacked off and her head roughly shaved. The sense of air on her naked scalp had astonished her. What a thing it was to feel the absence of your life’s hair and
accept
that you were no longer what you had been. It stung where
the razor had nicked her. There was a spattering of blood drops on the thin layer of white silk stretched over her thighs, and she assumed there would be blood stains on the back of her robe too. She also assumed she was waiting to be killed. The ropes binding her were too tight, and her hands had gone numb. She wasn’t afraid of dying although she was afraid of the pain of it. She tried touching her thumbs to her fingertips but felt nothing. She was also afraid of the terror she would experience at her death moment.

An ant went past her knees. She watched it out of sight, studying its asynchronous articulation. Her eyelids were crusted with dried tears. Gnats alighted there, drawn by the salty
residue
. She shook them away, but they came back so she stopped doing it. There were other, smaller insects on the dirt, each with its own life and following its own inclination.

She had noticed the young Hori samurai among the guards that occupied the barracks at the palace gate. They were
retainers
of the Tokugawa shogun himself, sent from Edo to protect the Imperial family from malcontents and to prevent its
members
from conspiring with them. The shogunate didn’t think the Imperial family would dare rebel against the government but judged it prudent to eliminate even the possibility of such an indiscretion.

Aoi had found a love note slipped under her screen-of-state. She knew it couldn’t have been from her betrothed – he had no incentive to woo what he’d already secured, and no
particular
interest in her other than as a prestigious addition to his household. None of her maids or lady companions had any idea who had sent it, but one night the outside shutters had been fastened imperfectly and Hori Ushimaru crept into her wing of the palace and found where she slept behind a screen hung with brocade robes.

He had insisted she tell him about her life, but what she’d said was nothing more than the kind of narrative offered by any superfluous woman, half apology, half complaint. He had eased her thighs apart murmuring promises and platitudes, and she had yielded to him so as not to have to admit to herself that she was unwanted. She had had no answers for the questions he asked, no response to his demands other than to spread her legs wider and accept the violation because no other person would ever wish to do it. Afterwards, Hori Ushimaru hadn’t known what to say. His release had seemed the result of his own
desperation,
and he’d rolled away and remained on his back like a man alone. Yet the next night, she was the one who made certain the shutters weren’t in place, and each night after that when he came to her, she would pull him into her quilts and take as much as he took so that when she was finally confronted by a shogunate official with a head razor, she had known she deserved whatever would be done to her.

An ant like the one she’d seen before passed in front of her knees, also wonderful in its method of ambulation, its path like that of the other except following an alternate trajectory. Had they begun at the same place? Would they end up together? Aoi knelt with her head down and felt the warmth of the sun on her naked skull and the tiny caresses of gnats in her eyelashes.

The decision to conclude matters was made late in the
afternoon.
The white paper doors were removed, and Aoi was confronted by a chamber opened like a pavilion and occupied by representatives of the shogunate. A personage too eminent to be identified sat on a dais behind a screen-of-state. He would not demean himself by addressing her directly but spoke in a quiet voice to his steward, who listened with his head bowed then repeated his words.

It is instructed that you be told what will happen to you. The Hori violator has been chastised. His family has asked to
be allowed to atone for his crime themselves. This family has always been a loyal vassal of the shogun. It is wished therefore that some comfort be found for them.

Old Hori was brought into the courtyard with his wife and his two remaining sons. They were dressed in white robes. Hori was calm although his wife, a plump woman with her hair configured in a provincial style, had been weeping; and the two young boys seemed frightened. None of them so much as glanced at Aoi. The hilts of Hori’s short sword and dagger had been replaced with simple ones of paulownia wood, and the
naked
blades were wrapped in pure white paper. Hori’s assistant, a young warrior from his domain, came in behind him, his long sword carried still sheathed.

The Hori family knelt in front of the veranda where the shogunate officials sat. They bowed together, the younger boy mistiming it by starting too late and ending too soon.

Guards brought out the head of Hori Ushimaru resting on a wooden tray. The blood had been washed off and the hair combed then treated with hair oil and formed into a topknot with a white tag attached to the binding cord. They placed the head at the edge of the veranda, and the younger boy cried out at the sight of it and had to be comforted by his mother.

Old Hori stated his name and his lineage. He declared that the Hori family had always supported the Tokugawa Shogunate and would always continue to do so. He acknowledged he was at fault for allowing his son to misbehave with a woman of the palace, and he accepted that this was unforgivable. He agreed to atone for it. His wife would accompany him. But he wished to request humbly that his remaining sons be spared. Their lives had only just begun. More should be allotted to them. Old Hori bowed again, touching his forehead to the dirt of the courtyard and held it there.

The steward had listened to this plea with displeasure. Would your sons not remember your death and wish to avenge you? How would your loyalty to the Tokugawa appear then? And if they attempted revenge and found success, then their actions would create more disharmony. And if they failed, then the shame of that would be an added burden to them. And how much worse would that burden be if they were unable even to make an attempt?

No, Hori, your boys should not suffer such a fate. The
natural
flow of things is the better one.

The kneeling samurai lifted his head and observed the steward then bowed again in submission. He took up his short sword. He removed the purification paper then touched the blade reverently to his brow. His middle son knelt upright with his back very straight. For the life you have given me, I thank you. His knees were spread apart and his ankles crossed properly so that he would not topple over sideways. And for preceding you, I apologise. He waited with his head up, his hands on the tops of his thighs, and his eyes fixed on the steward. His father took him across the throat quickly and deeply, and he folded forward as if bowing in obedience to the blood-release.