The Plum Rains and Other Stories (9 page)

The recluse bonze sat up and unstopped his water gourd again. You ever hear the story about how old Nansen taught the truth of the dharma?

No.

Well, then. This old-time abbot Nansen, he –

No.

No?

No.

He looked at him. You decided you don’t like stories?

Hasegawa said there were times when a person didn’t want to hear explanations, teachings, anecdotes, and that for him this was one of those times, or was about to become so.

Seems to me one time is the same as any other, said the recluse, and he drank then tapped the gourd stopper back in place.

They continued hiking uphill through the middle part of the day then came to an elongated alpine dell filled with
jade-green
mountain ferns and ending against a towering backdrop of limestone cliffs. Mugen waded in then flopped over
backwards
, rolling in the ferns with his elbows flapping, carving a space for himself like some kind of mud-monkey flushed up into the open air. You go all the way back, he said, his eyes closed and breathing deeply, filling himself with the scent and
sensation
of the crushed ferns. See that jumble of rocks at the bottom? There’s a path there.

You’re not coming?

No.

Any reason why not?

None.

The sheer upright expanse of grey limestone was fractured into irregular pinnacles and palisades. Seepage darkened the surface of the stone, and at the base lay a tumble of mossy
boulders
. Hasegawa climbed up to the entrance of the limestone grotto. Hewn blocks of cliff-rock formed the front walls and entryway portal, the surfaces smoothed from centuries of wind and rain, as if the upright pilaster-supports and the massive horizontal stone forming the lintel were being reabsorbed into the mountain itself.

The floor of the cavern was slippery and slanted downward. Droplets fell from the ceiling. The air was damp and cool and smelled of dust and decay. Hasegawa crept forward, peering into the blackness. A broad shelf ran along the back wall, carved
directly
out of the flanks of the mountain and serving as a crude altar. No candlesticks or incense burners were to be found there, no stacked sutras or bowls of crystal fruit or vases of porcelain lotus blossoms. Only the array of seated images showed that this was a place meant for worship. Gaunt human figures sat rigidly upright and frozen in full lotus position, their ancient monk’s robes and cowls and caps rotting off in places and hanging in dusty silken shreds. Some would have been there for hundreds of years, others were more recent. But each of the Followers of the Way of Perfected Abnegation had achieved a state of self-mortification that transcended the stench of the flesh of the world, their faces dried to skin-covered skulls, their leathery bellies sunken to hollows beneath out-bowed rib cages, their dry arms and legs little more than sinewy sticks bound within the preservative of death’s sheathing.

Hasegawa studied the face of the avatar located at the end of the shelf, trying to detect some glimmer of meaning in the two sunken patches of dried shadow that obscured what had
once been eyes, the nose crumpled like a withered walnut, the pale wedges of a few remaining teeth.

Hasegawa placed one hand on the knee of the desiccated creature and held it there, asking nothing and giving nothing and only confirming what he already knew. Then he turned away and went back out into the light of the high autumn sky framed by the forest trees, and the bonze still wallowing in his nest of crushed ferns.

He sat down beside him.

The recluse waited long enough to be sure his silence was intentional then said, Maybe you didn’t see it.

There’s nothing there.

Maybe you didn’t look hard enough.

They hiked back downhill, not mentioning the grotto of the perfected ascetics nor discussing any other such topics until they were seated on the ramshackle veranda of the Unreal
Hermitage
, once again watching dusk settle into the bamboo grove.

Probably you could say, why should I search for what I haven’t lost? said the recluse bonze. And then I would say, how can you know whether you’ve lost it if you don’t know what it is?

Hasegawa said nothing then he said, It seems wrong.

So maybe you were just curious? Is that the way it is with you? Wondering what it’s
like
?

Hasegawa studied the bright surfaces of the bamboo trunks still holding the last gleam of twilight, unsure what to propose and unhappy with whatever occurred to him.

You taper off, the recluse said. Rice gruel and tofu and
pickles
. Then just tree ears and fern shoots, nuts and berries, wild mountain plants. For years and years. Then no plants, then no berries. As you get closer, you shift to certain barks. The tannin helps preserve the skin. Then just pine needles. Then just the tips of pine needles. Then just the points of the tips. Then just the prick of them.

All right.

Then just the memory of it. The recluse slapped at his bare shoulder and smeared the blood spot off his palm. Another Buddha. Born of my hand. He smirked like an offer-maker with an obtuse audience. I guess what it comes to is that it doesn’t mean much, which side of the line you’re on. Other than that there’s a line.

Still sounds like something made out of words, Hasegawa said. But he wasn’t satisfied with it, and he didn’t know why.

‘Rats occupy the four corners,’ Mugen intoned. ‘A wasp nest hangs under the roof beam. And spiders and beetles and
centipedes
circulate throughout the room, and do whatever they desire…’

Hasegawa nodded, recognising the quote. So then you too try?

I try not to try.

Just point at it?

Finding the traces before seeing the ox.

It’s still the same. Anecdotes. Stories. Lessons. Everything made out of words. Hasegawa stared out at the darkness. I guess what I don’t understand is why I don’t feel any better about knowing that.

Maybe because you don’t know it yet.

Maybe not.

Whatever they are, and whatever you think about them and their yearning for perfection, what they did is not made out of words.

Hasegawa sat gazing into the autumn twilight. But it’s also just becoming dead as slowly as possible, he said. And watching it happen from the inside. Also a kind of greed.

Mugen grinned and shook himself like a water-spaniel back on dry land. So then what in your honour’s opinion did you encounter up there?

Dead men in a hole, Hasegawa said harshly. With no reason for it.

The recluse laughed. And so we confirm once again that your samurai values still hold you.

I’ve cut down men and been sorry about it. But there’re also some I’m not sorry about. And I guess I don’t know what else to say.

I guess that’s all right then.

But it was mockery, and Hasegawa thought he deserved it. No, he said. It isn’t.

The recluse observed him. You ever tell the truth?

Hasegawa looked back at him mutely.

I mean, to yourself?

I knew what you meant, Hasegawa said.

So then what will you say to the man who kills you?

You mean if I’m not him?

All right.

Hasegawa returned his attention to the arriving night, the way shadows flowed our from dark pockets into lighter planes. I don’t know, he said. I don’t see how that’s the kind of thing you can know.

But you’d kill someone.

I guess I would.

They sat together silently for a long moment, then the
recluse
said, I guess that’s all right then; and the following
morning
, bright and early, he guided him down through the bamboo forest to a path that led around the edge of a swampy meadow and would join up with the main road. Sunlight bathed the reeds and water grasses growing there, and small white
butterflies
filled the air, fluttering around each other like bits of torn paper dancing. Hasegawa continued alone out into the open, his feet sinking into the swampy earth and releasing the fragrance
of it. He stopped then came back. I guess you forgot to give me your lesson. Probably the fault is mine.

Probably.

So?

So anyway, a long time ago, there was this old abbot in
China
named Nansen, and he knew a lot. Could answer your
question
before you even asked it. Had a stick to hit you with when necessary. So anyway, one day one of his lip-flapping monks got a little too close and the stick-whack dropped him to his knees. If there’s a dharma truth no one has professed yet? Old Nansen shouted out. Isn’t that what you’re wondering? Well, yes, there is one! The lip flapper rubbed his bruised head and said nothing. Old Nansen told him he wanted to know about it. The lip
flapper
moved back to where it was safer then admitted that he did. And Old Nansen spoke up with a voice that shook like thunder and said, This is not the mind. This is not the Buddha nature. This is not a distinction between being and non-being.

Mugen’s mouth gaped open and he leaned forward, staring intently into the face of the rogue samurai. Don’t you want to know what the ‘this’ is?

You forget to bring your stick?

If I need one, I’ll borrow yours.

Hasegawa held out his empty hands. I guess you already have.

By which you think you mean there’s no answer to it?

And never was, said the rogue samurai.

Of course not. Otherwise, why ask?

Hasegawa smiled. He gazed around at the swampy
moorland
, the unfolding scent of living mud heating under the morning sun. Nevertheless, it’s our nature to wish to praise it, Hasegawa said, the world as it is. And he told him he
acknowledged
the truths of the transmitted doctrines and revered them.
He said he knew he was at fault and would continue to be so. And he said that was all he had to say.

Mugen watched him depart then turned away himself and scampered back into the bamboo forest, an absurd and filthy apparition slapping at the upright trunks of giant bamboo for the sound it made and the feel of the hollow smack against his palm.

S
OLITARY
R
AMBLER ON THE
W
ITHERED
M
OOR

S
he thought it should become lighter, but Hasegawa liked the muted, melancholy image of a lost sandal sunk to the bottom of a winter pond and wanted to keep it.

Try it my way and see, said Little Ohasu.

A single porcelain brazier was sufficient to warm her small room. Ohasu had suspended her two best gaudy-robes spread open against the back wall, salmon pink and gold silk beside a shimmering, icy green satin decorated with sprays of reeds in silver appliqué. Her bedding fitted into a storage space beside the display alcove. Her sewing box was tucked in there too. She had floor cushions and tray tables and a mirror stand with the mirror covered as a defense against untoward reflections. In her alcove hung an ink sketch by Old Master Bashō, depicting a kettle on a trivet with a few wisps of steam rising up through the words of a haiku praising winter interiors. She’d arranged a few winter chrysanthemums for it in an old lidless ginger jar.

So, then, ‘A summer shower, with the raindrops visible only when –’

No. ‘An
evening
shower, with the –’

Right. ‘…with the raindrops visible only when…’

‘Lightning flashes.’

Right. ‘Lightning flashes.’ Then … ‘blue herons wading alone under …’ yellow kerria roses, was it?

‘At the water’s edge, blue herons wading each alone: yellow kerria roses.’

Hasegawa thought about it. You’re right, he said, and added her stanza then signed it ‘O-ha-su’ in kana at the end. But I’ll also keep my idea. He jotted it down on a scrap of paper. I may want to use it later.

You’ll almost certainly
try
to use it later.

He looked at her. You’re mocking me.

I would
never
do that! Ohasu blushed when amused and squeezed her hands together. How could I?

Morose, self-critical, sometimes troubled by insomnia, the rogue samurai Hasegawa Torakage had lost the privileges of the warrior class but kept its requirements. He had no family but had been taken on as a house retainer by the local daimyo warlord. After Lord Dewa had released him from his service, Hasegawa had wandered the country, sometimes in the company of other vagabonds and sometimes alone. He had developed a desire to record his true feelings; and although Old Master Bashō had no place for him in his linked poetry group, one of his senior followers, Silk Merchant Kichiji, had recognised the potential value of a masterless samurai and employed him in the pleasure quarters. Hasegawa was used to convince welshers to honour their debts. He discouraged drunks who were becoming excessively obstreperous, intervened with pleasure-seekers who became abusive, and placed himself in the path of any
scabbard-brusher
looking for a fight. In addition to his fees, Hasegawa was provided with a small room just off the scullery of the
assignations
teahouse. He got his meals there, too, and rice wine, although never the best.

It would be foolish to discard a good idea.

It would indeed, said Little Ohasu.

A faint whiff of her mother’s milk still clung to Ohasu, and she attracted an elderly and sedate clientele. Many of her evenings were spent matching seashells or comparing iris
rhizomes
or playing the poem cards game while connoisseurs with rheumy eyes recited lugubrious old remorse ballads and fingered her hem hopefully.

Instead of ‘blue herons’, it could be ‘white egrets’.

‘Blue herons’ is better, said Ohasu.

The rogue samurai and the little pleasure provider matched each other stanza for stanza; and while Hasegawa’s reading of old poetry anthologies resulted in links that reverberated with the muted echoes of ancient temple bells, Ohasu was the one who found a surprising new music in the patterns emerging.

Let’s do it again, Ohasu would say, let’s try it a different way.

Or maybe like that one we did last week, Hasegawa might suggest, and she’d tease him for his timidity.

Ohasu thought Hasegawa wrote with the excessive care of someone sorting through rice grains with a needle. He said her poems whipped past like silk threads attached to flying birds. He trusted the poets of the past, she wanted to explore
novelties
, and her opinions usually prevailed. Ohasu opened doors for Hasegawa to peer into if not fully enter – even when they were lying naked together under her quilts – but one cold winter afternoon as they sat in her window watching the first flakes of a fresh snowfall arriving, she asked why he seemed so remote; and when he replied vaguely, she made the mistake of demanding to be told what was wrong, and he made the mistake of telling her.

The shogunate had condemned the Hasegawa family when he was a child of six; and his mother had chosen to die with his father and brothers. She was a samurai wife. Her submission to necessity would be viewed as the flower of her life. But young Torakage had never been able to forgive her for abandoning
him, and her death was like a hole he kept peering into, hoping one day to see the bottom.

You don’t have to explain…

She tucked me in my quilts the night before she died. She told me I would have to endure the unendurable, and she expected me to be able to do it. She said we had no choice. And the following morning, I awoke to mounted warriors occupying the main gate. Others were already inside our family compound, the crests on their sleeves showing them to be Tokugawa
retainers
. I was told to stay in my room. I did so at first, but the waiting became impossible, and I rushed out, unable to bear the silence.

On a side veranda were five confirmation-head caskets. Four had already been sealed, and they brought my mother’s head around from behind the outbuilding where she had died. They’d cut off her hair first, and bits of it stuck up in ragged tufts. The executioner lowered her head into its cylindrical
casket
. He poured in the rice wine preservative then fitted on the lid, tapping it down in preparation for the trip back to Edo.

That’s not a thing to hear said…

It’s not a thing to say…

Then why are you telling me?

I watched her killer wash the blood off his fingers. The senior retainer sat on a camp stool. He noticed me and gave instructions. One of his men retrieved my father’s small sword and handed it to me. Perhaps they thought I might want to try to revenge myself on them. Perhaps they thought of it as a kindness. Or like an offer to help me die too. For the honour of the family…

Ohasu’s head was down. You were only a child.

Hasegawa said nothing then he said, I still have that sword. But I’ve never pulled it out of its scabbard. Surely it has rusted.

Why are you telling me this?

Hasegawa spent the rest of that night in the public room of a neighbouring wineshop. When he came swimming up to the surface of the following morning, he found Ohasu kneeling inside his doorway. She had brought hot coals for his brazier, and he could feel his little room warming.

Did you decide?

Hasegawa pushed off his quilts and sat up. Decide what?

Ohasu looked at him then looked at her hands folded meekly in her lap. I haven’t asked anything of you.

No. Hasegawa said he had always trusted that he would be able to figure out what needed to be done when the time came to do it. But I don’t know what you want, he declared.

No. You don’t know what
you
want.

Words they used to find easy to say now went unsaid. Each submitted to the necessity of an interim arrangement in order to postpone the irrevocability of a rupture. Ohasu accepted
engagements
she might previously have declined, and the rogue samurai often found himself alone and untended, hanging around the edges of public rooms or stalking aimlessly through winter lanes, his geta clogs clattering on the frozen mud.

Yet when Ohasu received a gift of fine writing paper, she shared it with him; and when a visitor awarded her with a
wonderful
Chinese ink stick, she broke it in half. On some afternoons, they engaged each other as they had before, sheltering under the rules and restrictions of
haikai
linked poetry, and twisting skeins of words into a shifting sequence of seasonal images, with each stanza emerging from the one before naturally. Was that love? They wouldn’t have used the word; but they each trusted the consistency of their expectations; and for that reason, on a
bitterly
cold afternoon, they decided to sequester themselves in her room and spend the day making a hundred-stanza sequence in imitation of the medieval three-poet style. They brought in extra charcoal, a double-flask of rice wine, plenty of tea, and boxes of
rice cakes topped with pressed fish or pickled vegetables. They hung a taboo tag on the closed door, suspecting that the other pleasure providers might add some comic desecration to it, for they were women who preferred modern pastimes such as the kabuki theatre, animal mimics, basket jumpers, contortionists, and the reciters of lurid tales.

The rogue samurai and the pleasure girl intended to finish their sequence before twilight. They would not indulge in wine or food until at least half of the hundred stanzas had been completed, or at least not indulge in it excessively. Each was to compose a stanza alone, then they would create the
third-poet
stanzas together and sign these, ‘The Solitary Rambler on the Withered Moor,’ a name they judged suitably exotic. They wrote about love, and the moon, and cherry blossoms. They wrote about spring haze and autumn leaves. Angels in
feathered
cloaks rode moonbeams; toads croaked under cedar tubs; the colours and textures of the seasons bloomed and faded, the winds danced, and the rain sang. They had driven the sequence forward despite occasional quarrels – the shared stanza usually the source of disagreement – until Ohasu suggested, ‘In the weak winter sunlight, radish slices in a Holland-style dish,’ an image that Hasegawa thought too eccentric for an old-style formal sequence.

But it’s a clear glass dish, you see, and so cool in its
transparency
…

But from Holland? How can you include such a bizarre place?

But that’s the idea. She smiled at him. But of course since you’ve never seen it used in a poem before…

I don’t just get ideas from books!

Her smile grew mischievous. Of course not.

And the image is cool not cold, said Hasegawa stubbornly, not ‘cold-season’ cold. And how do you even know about such things?

Ohasu removed the pot of winter chrysanthemums on her alcove display shelf. She pried up one of the shelf-boards then retrieved a hidden parcel. On the lid of the wooden box were words written in the alphabet of butter eaters, ugly awkward glyphs that Hasegawa thought looked like the scratch marks of chickens, and inside was a clear glass bowl.

The Hollanders also have cups made of glass that they use to drink grape wine, said Ohasu, lifting out the glass bowl. Grape wine is red.

Red?

Like blood! She shuddered with pleasure at the grotesque idea.

You can’t have seen butter eaters do such things?

No. How could I? But it would be like drinking blood out of a piece of ice.

Hasegawa handed the bowl back to her. Where did you get it?

Do you really want to know?

Hasegawa said nothing; and Ohasu waited then said, With all due respect, I’m the one who’s being rejected. So don’t deny me my pleasure in a silly glass bowl!

I’m not rejecting you…

But you are. You just haven’t been able to admit it yet.

Hasegawa was still in her room when Ohasu came back from the bath. She stripped off her robe then knelt in front of her mirror and began patting white makeup onto her face and throat.

A new girl, still a child with a chest like a boy’s, hovered in the doorway and listened as Ohasu told her again what she had said many times before. Sometimes customers became too lively
and their bad behaviour had to be allowed. Other times they could be distracted by smutty games or silly contests. If one girl was being abused, the others should try to charm her abuser. Encourage drunks to sing. Feed bullies to the point of torpor. But if someone becomes too rowdy or behaves in an intolerable manner, then she must tell Hasegawa, and he will speak with the offending person and settle matters.

The girl glanced doubtfully at the rogue samurai brooding in the corner. But what if he can’t?

He always can, Ohasu declared. He’s very persuasive. Even I sometimes believe him.

Their certainty that they would be the ones controlling the flow of the evening suggested that he himself was being managed, and Hasegawa also detected within their banter an anticipation of the gratification of desire. A young shogunate retainer from the north was condemned as a rural buffoon, but mention of his sexual prowess elicited smiles. A rich ship owner had no imagination while his only son risked disinheritance due to the audacity of the configurations he devised, with myriad girls rolled together sleek as dumplings, and with a drum-boy or two folded into the revelry so as to have available all the slippery ways of carnal love. He was celebrated as a ‘Bejewelled Treasure Stalk’ and given the best food and wine. The lyrics of popular ballads were reworked to include praise of his stamina, with old favourites like
Mounted Warriors Never Waver
taking on new and salacious implications.