The Plum Rains and Other Stories (8 page)

Nighthawks kneeling in side alleys and cul-de-sacs burbled offers as the silk merchant strode past. They let their rolled-up back mats protrude into his path but didn’t try to seize his hems or touch his feet.

Friends of yours? Kichiji said humorously to Ohasu.

One of the women squatted at the edge of the lane as if pissing there, her skirts bundled up.

Kichiji stopped in front of her then said, What do you think I might do?

Anything for twenty coppers, said the nighthawk, her voice quavering in the cold.

No. Not what you will do. What do you think I might do?

The woman didn’t understand. She held her back mat clutched against her chest as if some warmth might be found in it.

Kichiji towered over her, prodigious in his heavy winter over-robe, his sleek hair shining in the winter darkness. You can’t answer because you can’t imagine what I am, he said.

Ten coppers then…

Kichiji pushed on and Ohasu came trotting along behind him. You should reconsider your life, Kichiji said, not looking back at her. You could end up like that.

They stood in the gate while the door tout went to find a palanquin. Did you hear what I said?

Yes…

The black dome of the night sky was spangled with stars, and the berm road leading back into the shogun’s city lay under it like a strip of frozen bone. You will manage the poems, Kichiji said.

Of course. If you want me to…

Nothing serious. We need doggerel. Puns, double entendres, obscene jokes. He looked at her. You know the kind of thing I mean.

It’s not what I usually –

You
know
, the silk merchant said, what I mean.

There were several lively parties underway when Ohasu got back to the teahouse, but she scurried past them and climbed up to her room. It was cold. There was no charcoal for her brazier so she spread her quilts then undressed and climbed in shivering, the damp cotton clammy against her skin.

A
BNEGATION

T
he collapsed gate lay in the weeds. It looked like the wreckage of something discarded in a repudiation of
husbandry
. Hasegawa could also see pieces of what must have been a fence, but no sign for the Unreal Hermitage anywhere.

The path led up into a forest of giant bamboo, each thick as a man’s leg. He pushed through it until he came to a clearing. The bark roof of the shanty there was overgrown with summer ferns, and Mugen Bonze sat half-naked on the veranda, a scrawny and disreputable creature, his black monk’s robe a sloppy bundle wrapped around his waist.

Hasegawa lifted his main sword from his obi and leaned it against the side of the hermitage. You’re hard to find, he said. The walls were plastered in places with mud patches crudely sheathed with strips of split bamboo. Neat pyramids of clay pellets beneath some of these renovations suggested the better order that could be achieved by insects gifted with enterprise and enthusiasm. Hasegawa removed his carry-sack and dropped it at the end of the veranda. Living out here in the middle of nowhere like this.

Mugen slapped a mosquito then wiped the blood smear off his arm. Another new Buddha, he said, and wiped his palm on the wad of his robe.

Mugen didn’t seem to feel like talking so the rogue samurai didn’t say much either. They watched as the day seeped out of the sky, and the end-of-summer fireflies began appearing in the weeds, their tiny lamps flaring and fading then flaring again.

‘In the morning, damp rises up through holes in the floor,’ Hasegawa recited; ‘and in the evening, drizzle leaks down through gaps in the roof.’

Mugen snorted derisively. Just the kind of thing a fool
samurai
would find impressive.

Hasegawa smiled at him. Probably I should give it up.

Probably you’d be better off without it.

Probably I would be.

Darkness settled around them as the sky took on the deeper blue of an autumn evening.

If I had any rice wine, I’d ask if you wanted some, said the recluse bonze. And if you asked if I wanted some, I’d ask if you had any. But it wouldn’t get us any closer to drinking.

No. Hasegawa watched the fireflies stitching the garden together, weaving random patterns beyond any possibility of improvement. I came here to ask you something, he said.

I thought you might have.

But I have to tell you something first. What I was given and what I kept. Samurai expectations. The requirements of candour. Answering to a name that’s more important than you are. And accepting a willingness to cut others or be cut by them. Or to cut yourself when it comes to it.

What poetry! Mugen seized both earlobes like a man with burnt fingers then began rocking from side to side, a holy-mad Daruma roller grimacing at the comedy of the sham of the
display
. But so then tell me, O honoured killer, where’s the wine after you drink it?

Probably I expressed myself badly.

Probably you did.

An owl flapped out across the open space at the far side of the abandoned garden, a shifting portion of that night’s shadows differing only in intensity from the other shadows surrounding it.

Hasegawa waited until he was looking at him again then said, Where’s the ‘you’ after the drinking?

Too easy! cried the recluse. But I can see why you’re still
bewildered
. He scratched himself then gaped at the rogue samurai like a wildwood bogey. Can you?

I guess not. Hasegawa returned his attention to the
darkening
bamboo forest. My life would be lonely if it weren’t for the solitude?

Those are just words.

I know it. But where are your words without you saying them?

You read that somewhere, said Mugen. You have a bookish stink on you.

It’s where I’ve been getting things recently. Things I trust.

Off dead men, Mugen said. You can’t see how it is? You writers get yourselves all tangled up in words. I’d rather be the shit-scraper hanging on a peg in a public latrine.

I guess that’s true enough, said Hasegawa, what you said, I mean. He grinned at him. The clever way you expressed it.

Still too easy, the recluse said. Words wobble. Fall over. Lie there looking up at you. He scratched at a sore on his arm,
making
it bleed, then touched his tongue to the blood. Non-words do too, he said.

So what should you do?

Piss it out! he shouted.

Hasegawa smiled. I used to want things. Then I thought I didn’t. Now I don’t know. He told the recluse bonze that he had been wandering in the back country for over a hundred days, seeking rigours for the body as a mechanism for measuring the
resilience of the soul. But instead of wanting things, I found myself wanting to remember them, Hasegawa said. Then writing that down.

The beauty of the soul of the poet wanderer, Mugen intoned sententiously. Grass pillows and sky quilts. The sun in the
morning
and the moon at night.

Eating unripe berries and drinking out of muddy streams is more common, said Hasegawa. And worrying about bears. People said they still live up there, but I never saw one.

Nor had he met any person who’d encountered such a beast. He told the bonze how he went all the way around to the Western Coast Road, walking through the heat of the day and bivouacking wherever evening stopped him. Finally came to a place where I could smell the sea. Turned around and came back the way I’d gone. One direction as good as any other. So then I thought that if I –

Bear shit?

Bear shit…?

See any?

He hadn’t.

Recognise it if you saw it?

No. Probably not.

The recluse bonze nodded to himself and plucked at the unravelling hem of his black robe. What I know how to do is sit, he said. Learned it at the Great Virtue Monastery in Miyako. Big old buildings full of shave-pates all pushing as hard as they can. Backs straight. Feet tucked in. Faces so still and solemn it’d make a cat laugh just to look at us. Nobody could match me there.

I don’t doubt it, said Hasegawa.

Ask about me. They’ll tell you. Here’s an iron-ass bonze who will not move!

They remained silent for a long moment, the world outside lowering itself into a blackness that became one with the
interior
of the ramshackle hermitage.

I thought I’d write about things as I saw them, said
Hasegawa
. Mountains and rivers, birds and flowers. But all I could devise was the words that said what they looked like. Not what they are.

All right.

Hasegawa pulled up his water gourd by its cord and took a drink. What I wanted to say before is that the way of the
samurai
is no longer needed. The shogunate’s a bureaucracy. They worry about who they know and where they sit. Men who used to trust their blades now make entries in account books and are judged by the quality of their calligraphy. Men who used to fight and die in the rain and snow now gloat over dinner invitations.

Gone! Gone! The old happy days of slaughter!

Hasegawa laughed. He said he’d been raised to accept the inevitability of the fact of convergence. But now he too went back over what he’d written and tried to devise ways of making it better.

All right. Mugen gazed around then said, You go knock on the gate of the Great Virtue. They’ll tell you about a
wonder-bonze
whose Zen roared like a blazing fire. He scratched
violently
in his armpit then examined what he’d rooted out. Of course back then you’d also find this old fraud climbing over the monastery walls at night. Talk about greed!

You being him.

Me being stupid.

All right.

The topic being greed.

Hasegawa smiled. Meaning mine?

Meaning ours.

All right. Hasegawa went out to the edge of the bamboo grove to piss then came back and sat where he’d been sitting. What I try to make never seems true. So I try the words
different
ways. If I can’t fix it, I throw it away. But I can’t throw away what it should have been. So I keep that.

Try spitting straight up, Mugen said. Maybe you’ll learn something.

They watched the fireflies, each tiny light disappearing then reappearing a certain distance from where it had extinguished itself, weaving webs of transience. No walls for the ego’s self to climb out here, Hasegawa said.

Ask about the marvellous bonze they lost. They’ll tell you he could sit zazen all day and drink rice wine all night. Local whores called for him by name. You can still hear echoes of them shouting for joy: Hey, good girls! Come upstairs! Crazy old Mugen’s riding his little pink pony tonight!

So your pride’s still with you?

You can’t keep what you write if you don’t like the
words
?

Hasegawa thought about it then said, You can describe the world as being simpler than it is, and a reader will take
comfort
in your easy answers. Good is rewarded, evil punished, and lost children are restored to their mothers. Or you can declare how it’s impossible to say anything really true about the world, and your reader will think you’re a profound fellow with deep thoughts. Or you can say: Here it is. Just this much, but absolutely this much. And then press at what it is and press and press at it until you push through to its original state, and those
readers
who persevere will follow you into the depths of the beauty of the essence of being.

Well
said
! The recluse bonze leaned to the side, lifted one buttock, and released a long slow sonorous fart of remarkable resonance and duration.

I guess you don’t agree, Hasegawa said, smiling. He stroked the weather-worn boards of the veranda, scraping together seeds that had blown up there, feeling a pile take shape under his
fingertips
. I showed some of what I’d written to Old Master Bashō. He made a few corrections, said it wasn’t entirely hopeless.

So then that’s what you have, said Mugen. Red marks on sheets black with ink.

Hasegawa squared-up his seed pile then started another.

So here’s mine. One hot summer day some few years ago, the much admired Zen-hammer Mugen left the Old Imperial City of Miyako. Birds wept to see him go, and the eyes of fish were filled with tears. A golden nimbus shone around the noble bonze as he hiked without hesitation into the forest, left foot right foot, left foot right foot, straight as a shot arrow. Went right on through blocking bushes and tangling vines, streams and rocks and trees no obstacle. Where he’d been became where he wasn’t. Finally reached here. A nameless place not encumbered with obligations.

Other than the ones you brought with you.

Other than them, Mugen said. But you probably want to know why the wonder-bonze never went back to the Great
Virtue
. He might tell you he got tired of city dust, but that’s not true. He liked the dust, liked to stir it up. And you might think they wouldn’t have him with all his hopping fleas and crawling lice. But that’s not the case either. They wanted him, wanted his big loud Zen. So finally a delegation of city monks came out full of words, but Mugen wouldn’t listen. They said what they’d come to say and stood around waiting then went back where they belonged. Left some things in the garden. Robes and
sandals
and books and begging bowls and cooking pots and knives and ladles and sieves. Once autumn passes and the weeds die back, you’ll see bits of it sticking up.

I don’t understand.

It’s a story.

A story.

And yours is too. And both end.

The moon rose out of the blackness, silvering the tops of the giant bamboo so that they glittered like the surface of the sea as seen from below.

Hasegawa said, So then I guess you don’t think you’re free from the chain of unavoidable consequences…

The recluse bonze scratched himself. You don’t listen very well, do you?

No. I guess not.

Tree frogs had begun proposing an agenda for that night. The single voice starting it was soon joined by others, braiding in various opinions and refinements until the possibilities that had accumulated formed a tapestry so rich in its implications that a moment’s silence was required for the song-weavers to ponder the marvel of their design.

Women and words and reputations, said the recluse. Can I learn not to want the accidents of the world? I can learn it!

But it’s harder not to want the not-wanting, Hasegawa said, his face again turned towards the bobbing lamps of fireflies, their numbers beginning to decline as their brief evening ended. Walking. Remembering. Writing. Walking…

And you think that’s good enough?

Hasegawa sat on the edge of the veranda, the moon’s
radiance
leaking into the dark ligatures of the bamboo forest, filling the weedy garden, all of everything everywhere holding itself much the way fingers might be cupped on the hands of
someone
cradling newborn kittens. I guess even a needle thief can dream of spears, he said.

M
UGEN’S METHOD OF AMBULATION
involved a series of abrupt adjustments, with some choices yielding an easier route and
some not. Hasegawa followed along willingly enough as they pushed through the giant bamboo then began climbing into the cedar forest on the upper slopes. At about the hour of the horse, they reached an island of exposed granite. They drank from their water gourds then lay on their backs on the sun-flooded rock and watched a hawk tilting directly above them, gripping the air with an easy grace.