The Tokaido Road (1991)(528p) (22 page)

Things that pierce the heart:

night travel, boat travel, being on the road,

a roadside inn,

a voice reciting
sutras
from a mountain temple in a dark wood,

a lover who leaves you before you’re tired of him.

The lanterns outside cast an artificial light on the facade of the buildings across the way and on the street between. They gave the TMkaidM the appearance of a stage. The travelers were extras entering and exiting. Dancers were about to open the program.

When the seven women passed, drumming and singing and dancing, several of the tea house customers applauded. Musui had taken off his big hat, and it hung against his back. His page’s face was still covered by his hat, but Hanshiro recognized his clothes and the lithe body inside them. He took deep, slow breaths until the merry caravan passed and the music and laughter faded.

It was time to forget about boys. It was time to see who the bandaged painter of lanterns really was. Hanshiro picked up his kettle of
sake
and affected the exaggeratedly upright manner of someone drunk trying to appear sober. He wove a tipsy course to the bench where the artist sat brooding.

“ ‘To keep silent and act wise,’ ” Hanshiro recited, holding up the kettle.

“ ‘Still not as good as drinking
sake,
getting drunk, and weeping.’ ” The artist finished the poem through clenched teeth. He was in pain from the blow inflicted by the butt of Cat’s
naginata.

Hanshiro introduced himself as the Cup No Man Can Finish,
rMnin
and underpaid fencing instructor for the spoiled brats of minor nobility. The westcountryman confided that he was called Mumyosai, Nameless,
rMnin
and underpaid painter of Benkei on the Gojo Bridge.

As the evening progressed Hanshiro and Nameless drained a few more jars of
sake
and drank toasts to the old days. They were waving their bowls in rhythm and chanting ancient Chinese poetry about overflowing wine when the inn’s servants closed the big front shutters. They were still chanting when teams of waitresses heaved them to their feet and half carried them, half led them to the steaming bath.

MEETING A BUDDHA IN HELL

“ I’d like to be called a traveler in the mist. . . ” As Musui recited the opening of Basho’s famous poem, he bowed to the group of men shuffling on their knees across the
tatami
of the reception room of the Four Heavenly Kings Inn in Totsuka.

Again lodging under sasanqua from place to place.
Cat silently finished the famous verse.

She didn’t care that the men had interrupted her calligraphy lesson. She despised having to make crude, wobbly strokes with the brush. She found it difficult to look blankly at Musui when he recited poetry she knew as well as her own family lineage. Several times she had almost blurted out the classical references that were the sign of her breeding.

She especially missed her books, bound in rue-scented silk covers to protect them from insects. She longed for the authors in whose company she had spent so many pleasant, solitary hours. After she moved to the Yoshiwara she had treasured them for the escape from loneliness and sorrow they had provided her.

This evening, Musui’s visitors included three more innkeepers, the manager of an employment agency, and an ancient cloud dweller, as the nobility were sometimes called. This one had been a courtier to an emperor long retired. The nobleman now eked out a living teaching calligraphy and the art of distinguishing scents. There was also a manufacturer of high-grade hair oil, a fish broker, and a maker of brocade borders and ties for mosquito nets. Each one carried his lacquered writing box and a scroll of his own poetry.

The margins on most of the scrolls were filled with commentaries made by Totsuka’s professional literary critics at one copper a verse. The hair oil magnate carried a much thumbed recent edition of the five-hundred-year-old text,
Good Poetry of Modern Times.
Besides examples of superior poems, it listed poetic phrases that could be used frequently with impunity. In composing poetry, creativity was not admired nearly so much as the ability to incorporate the classics into one’s verse.

The innkeeper bowed apologetically to Musui. “My friends heard you were honoring us here,
sensei.
They beg your candid opinion of their attempts at verse.”

You mean you sent servants on the run to inform them,
thought Cat.

She watched closely, to be sure the host showed the proper respect for Musui in the seating arrangements. In their efforts to appear cultured, many of the townsmen foolishly hired mountebanks to instruct them in the Ogasawara school of etiquette. As far as Cat was concerned they had no more idea of refined behavior than a chicken. But the host gave Musui the seat of honor in front of the
tokonoma,
the tall niche for displaying flower arrangements and scroll paintings. The others settled back on their heels and arranged their robes and writing materials.

Musui smiled graciously through the introductions. This happened almost everywhere he stayed, which was why he hadn’t minded spending the previous night in the abandoned chapel.

“Would you be so kind,
sensei,
as to forgive my presumption and inscribe my fan with a few words?” The fish broker folded at the waist until he touched the
tatami
with his forehead, then slid the paper folding fan toward Musui.

“You honor me.” One of Musui’s seemingly endless supply of rules of the road was “Never refuse a request for calligraphy, but never offer it unless asked.” He dipped his brush into the ink and quickly, effortlessly, wrote:

The joy of meeting,

longer than a lover’s sash

in bed at midnight

Everyone gasped with pleasure as the fish broker passed it around. Cat knew that from now on he would find a reason to display it to every person who entered his house. He would boast of this night until, when his friends saw him approaching, they would remember urgent business on the other side of the street.

Maids hovered with jars of warmed wine and plates of rice dumplings and raw sea bream with a searing horseradish sauce. Other maids broiled strips of abalone on a hot stone. After the men had sat around hissing and sucking bits of food from their teeth, after flattery and self-deprecation had taken up a quarter of the hour of the Dog, the host raised his hand for attention.

“I propose a contest of linked verse.”

“Hai!
Yes!” They all had drunk enough
sake
to be bold. They didn’t require much. “What topic shall we pick?”

“Not frogs,” said the mosquito net trimmer. “We’re simple country folk. We could never equal the poetry of Basho’s famous frog match. You were there, were you not,
sensei?”

“ I was.” Musui smiled at the thought of it. Basho and nineteen of his disciples had recited away the spring night and raised the dawn with frog poems. Toward sunrise they had been so tired and tipsy that the last few matches had been undecided. But the poems had been collected into a book that was widely read.

How Musui missed the master. Basho had refined linked verse and given it a humorous, gentle serenity all his own. He had taken it from the intellectual snobs and the nobility and had made a present of it to everyone.

“Shall we compose serious verse or
haikai,
the comic stuff?”

“I propose
haikai,”
said Musui. “Let our topics be the crane and the pine tree.”

“We must have a judge,” said the manager of the employment agency.

“Musui-sensei!
Musui must judge.”

“I shall record the poems.” The innkeeper motioned for his servant to bring his writing kit.

The other men began laying out their ink stones and brushes, water containers, mats, and felt pads, lining up everything precisely. With small figures carved of ivory or jade or wood they weighted down the long strips of mulberry paper on which they would write their own copies of the poems and the commentaries. In an evening with Musui they would receive free instruction worth many silver
chogin.

The eight earnest poets paired off. One of each pair would compose the first part, or the
hokku,
of the poem. The other man would add the
wakiku,
the second part, using linked associations or pivot words or word-plays. Musui would decide the winner of each match.

As the honored guest, Musui opened the performance. He arranged a graceful compliment to the host into the requisite three lines of five, seven, and five syllables. The innkeeper linked it to a self-deprecatory second part of two lines of seven syllables each. Then the match began in earnest.

The cloud dweller, the old nobleman, was an adequate poet, but his mental faculties weren’t what they once had been. The townsmen were slow, and their efforts were clumsy at best. The performance was interrupted by laughter and the loud hissing of a man in the throes of creation and by the clapping of hands and cries of delight at a particularly agile phrase.

In games like this, the wit and the quantity of the verses counted more than their aesthetic quality. But as far as Cat was concerned, she and her friends in the House of the Carp had performed better. Linked verse required training and intense concentration and cooperation. The performances had complex rules of subtle word associations and categories, and Cat listened carefully to Musui’s comments and corrections. He deserved his reputation as a master.

“Shinobu, Endurance,” Musui whispered to Cat while the fish broker was pondering his line and muttering and sucking his breath loudly through his large front teeth, “please fetch my tobacco.”

Cat rose in the discreet swish of her
hakama
and bowed. She slid the carrying stick through the wire handle of a small floor lantern and padded down the hall. The laughter and murmur of voices from the poetry circle faded. Cat heard the ubiquitous sound of chopping from the kitchen and men’s wheedling voices. The poetry guests’ sandal bearers were trying to cadge wine and fleshy favors from the scullery maids.

As Cat entered the dark hall next to the inn’s entry way, she heard talk of a more serious nature.

“Have you seen this woman?”

She set the lantern down at a distance so she would be in darkness. She eased up the paper wall screen so it wouldn’t squeak in its track and slid it open a crack. Through the slit she saw two of Kira’s men standing on the flagstones next to the raised wooden flooring of the entry way. They held up a copy of Masanobu’s
Portraits of Courtesans of Edo.

The book was opened to the stylized drawing of Cat. From his higher position on the raised floor, the head steward peered down at it by the light of the lantern a servant held.

“Forgive my abysmal ignorance and inability to help, but there’s no woman here who looks like that.” The steward was punctilious and apologetic and absolutely uncooperative. He was adept at recognizing the lowborn trying to impersonate the high-born.

“Of course there isn’t. She’s in disguise.” Both men were irritable by nature, and their days of futile questioning hadn’t improved their dispositions. Also, Lord Kira was sending them increasingly petulant and threatening letters via courier. “We must speak to the master of the inn.”

“It’s my most regrettable duty to inform you that the innkeeper is unavoidably indisposed now. But if you’ll follow that homely, foolish little maid, she’ll try her unworthy utmost to make your most honorable persons comfortable at our humble establishment whilst you await him.”

With courtesy so exaggerated it could only be disdain, the steward bowed the two into an inner room. He would keep them there as long as possible. He would see that they were well supplied with food and drink and entertainment. Then he would present them with an exorbitant bill for it.

Cat walked quickly and silently through the maze of inner corridors to the small room she shared with Musui. She hung the lantern on the wrought-iron stand and trimmed the wick as low as she could. Musui had been so kind. Even if it meant peril to her, she couldn’t leave him thinking her ungrateful.

She cleared the tea things off the tray. With a teacup she scooped sand and ashes from the firewell onto the tray. She smoothed it with a chopstick and sprinkled water from the teapot to dampen the surface. Then she held the chopstick poised over it. She hadn’t the nerve to compose a poem of her own for a poet of Musui’s stature, so she decided on one he would be sure to recognize.

If I could do as I wish

I would acknowledge more profoundly . . .

 ‘
‘Ungrateful slut!” The voice that interrupted her came from behind the sliding panels separating Cat’s room from the one next to it.

Cat jumped at the suddenness of it. She saw a man’s pacing shadow loom large, then recede, then grow against the paper panes. She didn’t have to hear much to realize that the speaker was a procurer unhappy with his strumpet.

“I rented you this robe and a scarlet crepe underskirt, a brocade sash, and a silk floss veil at ten
momme.
Not to mention the travel cloak for three
momme
extra. I paid three hundred
mon
to have this room alone in a high-class inn.” The man’s voice was low and menacing.

“I paid the old hag of a go-between two
momme,”
he said. “I paid the shampooer and the hairdresser one
momme.
I hired a
kago
and cushions and two bearers at three
momme,
thirty
mon.
...”

The procurer hadn’t added the cost of this night’s food and drink to the tally. He and his commodity wouldn’t be here in the morning when the bill was presented.