The Tokaido Road (1991)(528p) (5 page)

Cat threaded her way through the deserted palanquins parked outside the gate. She passed the small shrine to Inari-sama, the Rice God, and the Colt-Tethering-Pine-Tree near it. She passed the tiny kiosks that sold guidebooks to the pleasure districts. And she hurried by the stands that rented clothing and hats. In the morning they would no doubt send a man to try to collect the price of the clothes and hat from the dead guest.

Cat walked down Dressing Hill, where men adjusted their clothing before going home to their wives. At the Gazing-Back-Willow she turned to look at the high wall. Behind it, the spy was transmuting into greasy smoke, dark and ominous against the pale moon. Cat could hear people shouting, but the spy’s screams were weakening. She waited until they stilled. The
bronze fire bell stopped ringing, but its booming voice resonated in Cat’s ears.

The watchman’s wooden clappers struck the hour of the Rat. The rectangle of light in the Great Gate disgorged a gout of men before it narrowed, then darkened. The Yoshiwara was closed for the night.

One man pulled away from the group outside the gate as though the others had stopped to chat. Centipede’s courier had tucked the rear of his
kimono
up into his sash at the small of his back. He held a tall spear vertically in one hand. It was his badge of office.

As the courier passed the Gazing-Back-Willow at a dead run, Cat could see the taut muscles in his powerful legs. The thick fringe of horsehair ringing the top of his long spear quivered and jounced. He disappeared down the raised causeway that threaded through the marsh surrounding the Yoshiwara.

It has started,
Cat thought.

Through the coarse skirt of her jacket coat, Cat hitched up the unfamiliar waistband of her loincloth. She pushed the wide sash lower on her hips.

In her year as a courtesan Cat had learned to converse with men. She knew their slang and their rhythm of speech. She was used to taking boys’ parts in impromptu dances and dramas for the entertainment of more favored guests or for the amusement of the other women.

Without much effort she shed almost nineteen years of training as a paradigm of feminine grace and subtlety. She trotted into the darkness with the peculiar, flat-footed, light-footed, splay-footed gait of a peasant used to scurrying at his superiors’ beck.

“Shire mono!”
she grunted. “Idiots!”

THE BURGLAR IN THE HOUSE

Cat dodged through the late-night foot traffic. The roadway was crowded with entertainers and with
samurai,
beggars, hawkers, holy men, and sightseers. This was the teeming neighborhood between the pleasure district and the city of Edo itself. It and the Yoshiwara made up what had come to be called
Ukiyo,
the Floating World. Life here was of the moment, lovely and perishable as cherry blossoms.

Commoners came on foot, and the aristocracy arrived in the privacy of closed palanquins. Merchants and mountebanks had settled here to cater to them. There was no demand, however trivial, not met by some entrepreneur.

Beyond the marsh and rice paddies surrounding the Yoshiwara, the high, packed-dirt road was hemmed in by open-fronted shops of dark wood. The crooked alleys that wandered among the two-story buildings were wide enough for only two people to walk abreast. They were festooned with paper lanterns painted with advertisements.

White cotton banners hung almost to the ground and fluttered in the winter wind. In bold, black characters they announced each shop’s specialty. Laundry hung on the bamboo poles that laced together the wide, second-story eaves above the passageways.

At this hour many of the shops were shuttered, but not all of them were. Some still displayed souvenirs and guidebooks to the pleasure district or hand-colored prints of actors and courtesans. Food and
sake
vendors still called out to passersby.

The short curtains strung across the tops of the open fronts forced people to duck to see what was offered. The theory was that if the head could be lured inside, the rest of the customer would follow. The merchants here were determined that no denizen of the Yoshiwara should be left with a single copper in the bottom of his wide sleeve.

The smell of noodle soup and roasted rice dumplings coated with sweetened soy sauce, the odor of fried fish and fresh garbage, made Cat’s head reel. She hadn’t eaten since long before the customer had devoured the serving of blowfish, and her stomach ached with hunger.

In her year in the Yoshiwara, Cat often had sat at night on the second-floor balcony of the House of the Carp and looked out at Edo. From that distance the Eastern Capital had seemed a fairyland of colored lights. Currents of music and laughter had drifted on the wind across the dark carpet of marsh grass.

Up close, the enchanted city was a confusion of alleys and slums. The poor houses, set side by side, were so narrow they were called “eel beds.” Many neighborhoods were sealed off with barriers that were closed at night because of rice riots in years past. In a hundred years the five Tokugawa
shMgun
had turned a swampy fishing village into their capital city, a metropolis of more than half a million inhabitants. As she walked, Cat considered the task of finding her way around in it.

Cat had been raised in Edo, but she had only seen its streets from between the narrow slats of the blinds covering the windows of a palanquin. If she had been able to locate the house where she grew up, there would be no point to it. It had been confiscated along with Lord Asano’s town mansion and second villa in the suburbs. The
shMgun
had given them to someone else.

Cat’s mother was living in a shabby house in the drapers’ ward, but Cat didn’t know how to find her, either. Even if she could locate the house, she would only carry disaster through the gate.

She did know that after Lord Kira’s retirement he had moved to his new villa across the Sumida River, but she didn’t know where. The city was full of the government’s informers, and Cat could hardly go up to strangers and ask for directions. She realized that if she was going to avenge her father’s death, she would need help and information from someone.

She went through the possibilities. Many men were besotted with her. The small rosewood casket in her room at the Carp was full of their letters. Whenever the box became too full, Cat had paid a discreet servant to transform the poetry and passion into smoke. But Cat knew she could expect the least help from those who claimed to be most smitten by her.

They certainly wouldn’t help her escape from the Perfumed Lotus and their own grasp. Even those who had proposed setting her up as their outside-wife were only offering her another sort of cage. Besides, they were all too cowardly to risk the wrath of Kira’s third son, the powerful Lord Uesugi.

Cat knew of one man who might help her. She even knew where to find him. She stepped to the side of the road, pulled a playbill from inside her coat, and studied it. Somehow she had to reach the heart of Edo, the Nihon Bridge.

Nihon Bridge was the commercial center of the city. Most people considered it the center of the country. All distances were calculated from the middle of its high, crescent span. All highways, including the great TMkaidM, began there. The theater district lay nearby.

Cat had visited the theaters three times, but she hadn’t crossed the city to get there. She and the other women of the Carp had traveled by boat down the Sumida River to Nihon Bridge. Because
kabuki
plays started at dawn, they had had to board at the hour of the Ram, when most of the world slept.

The excursions had been the only times Cat had felt at peace in the past year. She and Plover and the others had drunk
sake
until they were giddy. They had sucked the sweet flesh of grilled river trout from delicate bones. Accompanied by Plover on the
samisen,
they had sung sad ballads, their voices floating out over the river. On the way home the next evening they had heatedly discussed the merits of the actors and the details of the plays and the costumes.

Cat remembered all that as she rolled the playbill and stuck it into the front of her jacket. If she could find the Sumida, she could find the Nihon Bridge and the theaters. She could find someone who might help her.

“A true inhabitant of Edo never keeps a coin overnight in his wallet.” The voice sounded, loud and hoarse, at Cat’s elbow, and she jumped.

Its owner was hidden by the short, divided curtains hanging from the front opening. The curtains were dyed dark blue with white caricatures of octopi wearing short coats and towels, twisted and tied around their heads as sweatbands. A purple-veined hand snaked out from between them and clutched the hem of Cat’s jacket. Another hand pulled aside the curtain.

Cat looked down at a mass of wrinkles, interrupted by the broad, concave delta of a nose. From the center of the weathered landscape gleamed two black eyes, shiny as beetle carapaces. They glowed with points of colored light, reflections of the paper lanterns.

Like those on either side of it, the shop’s dirt floor was below street level. The old woman sat cross-legged on a tattered cushion on a platform that she shared with a small, rectangular iron grill. The grill was covered with eels that had been sliced open, spread out flat, and threaded on skewers.

The coals underneath were so hot that the old woman had pulled her skinny arms out of her ragged sleeves. In spite of the tenth-month chill, her patched wadded cotton robe hung over the sash around her waist, leaving her chest and back bare. If she hadn’t been careful when she dressed, she would have caught the empty sacks of her breasts under her sash.

“Handsome, most honorable customer, try our delicacy.” She tugged at Cat’s jacket tail, which was taut because Cat was pulling away from her. “Our eels are guaranteed to make you fertile, Your Honor.” The eel vendor had lost so many teeth, she had forgotten how her own wares tasted. “O-Inu-Kubo-sama, Honorable Dog
ShMgun
himself, eats them.”

Cat knew that was a lie. Tokugawa Tsunayoshi was called the dog
shMgun
because he forbade the killing of animals, although seafood seemed to have escaped his notice.

Keeping her grip on Cat’s coat, the old woman selected a stick from among those slowly turning to charcoal on the grill. The eel had roasted to a dark mahogany color, and its odor was overwhelming. She held it up tantalizingly. Cat wanted it.

But Cat had never paid cash for anything. When merchants brought their wares to her mother’s mansion or to the House of the Carp, she never had to ask the price. Everything was charged to the clandestine account her father had set up for her mother, or to the Carp. In the latter case Cat’s debt was taken from her earnings. Even now she couldn’t bring herself to discuss something so vulgar as money.

She bowed to the level proper for the owner of the clothes she was wearing. It was a very low level. “I have the empty wallet of a true Edokko. I shall borrow a few coppers from my friend and come right back.”

“You wouldn’t trick an old woman who shares her wretched hovel with the god of poverty, would you?”

“I assure you, I shall return shortly and bring my hungry friend with me. He’s waiting for me at the Sumida River. Can you tell me which way it is?”

The eel seller considered a moment before pointing the eel eastward. She knew very well this particular fish would swim away and not come back, but there were other fish, and bigger.

“You!” She waved the skewered eel at a shaggy, emaciated black bear and his bearded Ainu handler. The eel had the bear’s complete attention.

“Step right up, Your Honors,” the old woman cajoled. “Try our delicacy. It’ll make you fertile.” With a round paper fan she blew the coals under the grill as though she were preparing to temper steel.

“Tell me,” she said conversationally. “Which of you hairy barbarians is carrying a purse?” The eel seller broke into a storm of laughter that set her wrinkled breasts to quivering. But since neither the bear nor the Ainu understood her language, the joke was lost on them.

Cat melted back into the crowd with the eel seller’s laughter still in her ears. Was the old woman an informer? Would she wave a hand at Cat’s retreating back? Would Cat find a pack of Edo’s policemen, solid and impassive as stone monuments, blocking her path?

Cat felt as if she carried her father’s crime and her own blazoned across her hat, the way religious pilgrims painted the names of their hometowns on theirs. But when no one ordered her to halt, when a slender shaft of steel didn’t intrude under the sloping eave of her hat, her heart slowed. She had been perspiring with fear, and it felt cold on her brow in the winter air. She took several deep breaths and headed in the direction the eel vendor had pointed.

The route took her down silent streets fronted by the high walls and massive gates of the mansions of the
daimyM.
Cat felt small and lost and alone walking past them. Dogs barked at the sound of her footsteps echoing off the walls.

The
shMgun’s
decrees strictly defined the size and ornamentation of the gates each lord was allowed. The classifications were based on the number of
koku,
or bales of rice, raised on the
daimyMs’
estates. These gates all belonged to men who, like her father, rated fifty thousand to seventy thousand
koku.
Her own father’s mansion, or the one where he ended his life, might be nearby.

Cat wondered if her father traveled down this very street, to spend his final hours as a prisoner in Lord Tamura’s house. He had been dressed in shabby hempen robes. He had been carried in a
kago,
the flimsy open-weave sedans used by commoners. The guards had thrown a net over it and paraded him through the streets like a criminal. Cat’s face grew hot even now at the shame of it.

She left the residential neighborhood and walked until she came to the government’s granaries lining the Sumida’s banks. During the day this was a bustling place. Men hauled bales of rice through the noisy traffic of handcarts. Lighters crowded the wharves. But now the rows of huge, white-plastered warehouses were silent and ghostly in the moonlight.

When Cat reached the broad Sumida she stood on the stone embankment. The full moon was almost directly overhead. It threw a shirred ribbon of light across the water. It seemed to hang so low that Cat felt as though she could reach up and touch it.

A moon this full and bright had the power to illuminate the past. As Cat stood in its spectral light, she remembered the last moon viewing in the garden of her mother’s house. It had been in the second month of the year of the Dragon, a month before her father’s suicide.