The Floating World

by Elijah Stephens

  Workers were rummaging through the aftermath of war on the grasslands, placing weapons and armor onto horsedrawn carts. As Onozawa headed north into the forest, the drop in pressure cooled the air and the climate calmed him with a sense of being within a limitless organism. After water briefly covered the land, the wind dissipated and left the mist collecting as a fog.

  Once at the crossroads to other provinces, he moved into the open and saw the end of daylight brought on by dark clouds. Assuming that the storm would slow the traveling ronin if they kept to the road, Shinji decided to circle the mountains inside the dense woodland. He scanned the waystations between provinces, to see if villages and marketplaces showed any sign of who he was searching for.

  At the edge of a small town, passing traffic became heavier where farmers sold their goods. As pedestrians rushed under the protection of slanted rooftops, a group of young men from the Thieves Guild waited in a cozy restaurant among dry patrons. Onozawa shadowed the group under an awning while they ordered nihonshu rice-wine from the cook and conversed about the good fortune they were having due to the instability of provincial wars.

  The political structure provided an opportunity to unify all lands under a single ruler, but every Shogun who fought to control Edo had proposed a divine right to rule as an excuse to gain power, not to bring an end to the civil wars that had plagued them for centuries. The thieves spoke about their travels and apparently knew about the conflict in the Southland, but only that a number of mercenaries had heeded Yoshimizu’s call. They decided not to test the security of either province until the rivalry had been finished.

  They also spoke about a change of leadership in the Assassins Guild, who had broken their truce with the thieves, perhaps because the money they stole from royalty would otherwise be used as payment by nobles who had trouble financing their conflicts. Mercenaries were left without work unless rulers like Yoshimizu called for them. Since the flux of the guilds influenced bordering provinces, every thief and assassin was forced to prove their skill or fall below the peasant class and starve.

  The young men of both guilds were impetuous and greedy, and often rented themselves out as infantry before turning on the Governor who hired them. Shinji knew that he would have to travel further to find trustworthy ninja to hold back the disreputable thieves who would see the weakened Southland as easy prey. After the group said something nasty about a passing ronin, he followed their gaze to a disheveled middle-aged samurai walking through the rain. When he saw an eagle insignia displayed on his rusted armor, he remembered Takeda’s warning.

  He trailed the man to a local hotel. After the ronin entered a single-story building, Onozawa hurried around the brick structure and peered between the wooden slats of the window. The samurai with the eagle crest sat against the wall, guarding a young girl who was tied to the bed. The other man ended his shift and went to the adjacent room, where his friends were drinking with courtesans. There were too many enemies to take on at once, so Shinji waited patiently.

  Within the hour, a drunken ronin declared that he was going outside and a rough-faced warrior called Arata came into the open and let the cool rain refresh him. His helmet was crooked as he bent over to run his fingers through the mulch, giving Onozawa enough time to sneak up behind him. When he slipped a wire over the man’s head and pulled tight, constricting his windpipe, the ronin dropped to one knee and threw Shinji over his shoulder. Arata pulled a serrated sword after tearing the wire from his skin and opening a generous flow of blood from his neck.

  “Are you going to call your friends?” Onozawa taunted him.

  The samurai strained to speak. Even if he had wanted to yell, his injury was too severe. He attacked with his katana held underhanded and Shinji ducked, letting it dig into the tree behind him. He scratched the ronin’s hand with climbing claws to break his grip, then he leapt off the sword-handle jutting from the bark and connected with a swift kick to the side of the Arata’s helmet, spinning him with the impact.

  * * * * *

  Dressed in the dead man’s armor, Onozawa walked into the hotel where the samurai with the eagle’s crest was guarding Yukio. He checked to see if she was hurt and found her sleeping under the weight of all the stress.

  “Back so soon, Arata?” said the skinny ronin named Hashimoto, who was lounging comfortably with his polished helmet on the table beside him. “What’s wrong, too drunk to speak?”

  “Arata will see you in the afterlife,” said Shinji.

  Hashimoto jumped to his feet with knives protruding from his fist like claws. Onozawa blocked and long gashes were torn across his forearm. He threw his helmet hard against his enemy’s skull and the ruckus called the attention of the men next door, who scrambled from their stupor to see what was happening.

  With Hashimoto dazed from the impact, he twisted the ronin’s claws back upon him and pierced his leather armor. When the door was opened by a bearded samurai named Satoshi, Shinji threw a sai into his hand, stapling him to the wood. Then he shoved Hashimoto outside to block his friends and flipped the table over to secure the door.

  Yukio was awakened by the commotion and struggled to see through her blindfold. Her savior cut her loose and said, “Let’s go.” After he picked her up and kicked open the window shades, she wrapped her arms around him and started to cry.

  “My bird,” she reminded him, pointing to the cage in the corner.

  * * * * *

  The five remaining ronin pummeled the door until it opened. Finding the room empty, they circled the hotel to find the body of Arata with his throat slit. “Whoever he was, he bashed Hashimoto’s skull in and took the girl,” Satoshi reported. “We still have the key. Maybe Yoshimizu won’t care that we lost his little girlfriend.”

  While perched on the roof of the building and hidden within the dense fog, Shinji held Yukio tight until the men were gone. He set her down with her birdcage. “Do you think it’s time to let her go yet?” he asked.

  “I’m not ready,” she replied while half-asleep. “I still love her too much.”

  “How do you know it’s a girl?”

  “Because I named her Omi. Can we go home now?”

  He picked her up again and jumped to the ground. They walked into the wind as the dying sunlight behind the clouds painted the sky into a dull gray. During their trek around the mountain range, Yukio kept her arms around his neck and closed her eyes.

  “Is my father dead?” she asked him.

  “Yes.”

  “Those men did it?”

  “Yes,” he answered honestly.

  “Then I’m glad you hurt them. Can I walk by myself?” Though she was barefoot, he put her down and held her hand as they walked through the drifting mist. “What’s a courtesan?” she wondered.

  “What did you hear in that hotel?”

  “It sounded like animal noises.”

  “A courtesan is a woman who sells herself to man’s basest desire.”

  Yukio was surprised. “She chooses that?”

  “Some women are forced into it, but they are victims of great tragedy. Other women choose that life and use their bodies to earn a living. It’s the easiest commodity to sell, even though the value of what they give up is far greater than anything in this world.”

  “And what do they give up?”

  “They sell their bodies, but they abandon self-respect. They harm their higher nature by succumbing to the lowest, because that career only requires them to be animals.” He heard a twig break in the distance and listened for movement.

  “Why would they choose to hurt themselves?”

  “Sometimes it begins with an affliction. Somebody hurts them and directs them to that path with abuse. Once momentum drives a person down, it takes integrity to pull themselves back up.”

  “Is that why they continue to fall?”

  “Sadly, yes. No one forgets the tragedies they relive with endless shame.”

 
“Then we should learn to help them,” she said with wisdom greater than her years.

  “The path of the lost is a singular journey. The greatest virtue of humanity is making the best of a tragic situation,” he replied. “But every life has an individual course and the true strength of any person relies on their ability to overcome.”

  “Not everyone is alone in their struggles...”

  “Being an individual means that you’re alone inside yourself. If I could always be there to protect you, you wouldn’t have been kidnapped in the first place.”

  She studied the dirt beneath her feet. “Was I going to be turned into a courtesan?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied, unwilling to accept the possibility.

  “Do you think I would have been strong enough to change myself back?”

  “There is no coming back from that experience. The only option when the walls of your identity crumble is to fight through the pain. That’s why there are two types of innocence, the naïve and the wise.”

  “Then I must be naïve to ask all these questions,” Yukio lamented.

  “It’s the only way to understand what you’ve experienced. If you want to help people, become wise. Study life as much as you study books and give others what you’ve learned. Life is inherently painful, but there are paths that no one should have to take.”

  “Even though I lost my family, I can’t always feel it. I don’t want to be naïve.”

  “Then you must be strong, because not many people face life so bravely.”

  “The samurai do,” she said.

  “No, they just need war to justify the idea that they’re not weak or afraid. Good people go through hell and do not hurt others. They implode with that energy by focusing it inward. It makes loss that much more intense, but when they heal themselves, they don’t accrue the negative karma of torment caused to others.”

  “It’s sad,” she observed. “Everyone seems lost.”

  “There’s a better way to see it,” said Shinji. “There are those who betray themselves, while others make the choice to build a kingdom within. There is always the option of resistance, the way your sister is fighting now.”

  Yukio’s eyes lit up. “She’s alive?”

  “She wouldn’t let them abuse her. She fought back.”

  “What will I do if she dies?”

  “You’ll always be a Princess.”

  She skipped on her toes. “What if I become a warrior, a woman swordfighter?” she asked, floating in her imagination.

  “I have killed men in battle, fathers with children no less innocent than you.”

  “But they chose to be there. My father was defending his home, the war had nothing to do with that stupid key.”

  “Did the ronin speak of it?”

  “They said it was a worthless thing to destroy a kingdom for. Without a Shogun, our province will fall, right? Is that what they were talking about?”

  “I’m not going to let that happen,” he promised.

  “Then why didn’t you take the key back from them?”

  “Because Yoshimizu didn’t go to war for the key, he wants to rule the entire Southland. The key’s only value is found in the golden case and nothing in it could be more valuable than you.”

  She squeezed his hand. “When I grow up, I hope I fall in love with someone who lays it on as thick as you do.”

  “It isn’t flattery if I’m being honest.”

  She thought about it. “If I can’t do anything about this war, I’ll have no place in my own home.”

  “I’ll be there to take care of you,” he said. “But first I have to end this.” As they reached the crossroads and entered the forests of the eastern province, the smell of flowers filled a gentle breeze that pulled in from the ocean.

  “Would you kill for me?” Yukio asked.

  “I already have, Lotus. I don’t know if any higher power mourns the death of ronin, but I can’t be sure. I was raised with a great respect for nature, and I spent so much of my life outdoors, it was inevitable that I would be connected to the land that helped me survive.”

  “My sister read me books on Shintoism and the tradition of nature worship, but most of the stories seemed like fairy tales. If I didn’t know what created the moon, I would say it was a spirit. It even has a face, but that wouldn’t be true, it’s just a way to understand it.”

  “That kind of superstition is dangerous when it comes to disaster. It was a storm that defeated the Mongol army before they tried a second time to conquer our islands, but when the Earth shakes and people are killed, no one wants to believe that the same divinity caused it. If they did, the only reason it could happen is because we deserved it. People want there to be meaning behind it all and a higher will that decides our fates, but in truth nothing decides our destinies apart from our own decisions. Everyone hurts, everyone gets hungry, people die of disease and war. It isn’t always personal.”

  “Like my mom?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you for not talking to me like I’m nothing but a child,” she said. “Everyone I asked about her death treated me like I was beneath understanding.”

  “Who did you ask?”

  “My father and my sister.”

  “Maybe they couldn’t answer your questions because they were beneath understanding. You have the Shinto shrine, have you tried speaking to your mom?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Shinto ancestor worship is designed to give the dead a place to live on inside us.”

  “I thought it was just to remember her by. Everyone who goes there cries a lot because they wish they could speak to her again.”

  “What makes you think they can’t? She’s dead, not gone. She’s a part of you and that never changes. I lost my own own mother when I was young.”

  Yukio looked up at him. “You did?”

  “She killed herself because her beliefs were too rigid. When our province fell apart, so did her identity.”

  “I’m sorry, Shinji,” she said, holding his fingers with both of her small hands.

  “I learned from her death that we cannot overcome what we do not understand. Since there will always be so little that we can comprehend from limited experience, it is best to keep an open mind. Consciousness that is rigid will crack under pressure because it is too brittle, and one that is too soft will bend to others without the ability to choose for itself. As always, the middle way is the correct path.”

  “Do you ever speak to your mom?”

  “I’m not ready to face what she destroyed when she took her own life. My father lost his will to live. When that happened, he followed her into the grave. He drifted away slowly like the mist.”

  “So your mother made you lost?”

  “We could have moved on. We were low class anyway, we gave up no social status with our Shogun’s demise. We could have lived somewhere else, and even if it was a dangerous place, at least we would have been a family.”

  “Is that why you love my family so much, because it was like getting your own back?”

  He regarded her observation. “This is a floating world,” he said. “Life is a flowing river and every person is a leaf upon its current. Each leaf falls from a tree into the water while moving with the flow. No matter how that leaf floats, it will inevitably pass over rough water, rocks, and whirlpools. It can only decide, as a human does, how to deal with that turmoil. When a person chooses to attach themselves to negativity, the leaf is pulled to shore, where it is fixed in that position until it dries up. The leaves that choose to continue over the rapids, getting knocked around and torn apart, eventually come to the end of the river where a waterfall drops them into a collected pond. In that place after death, there is no sadness and no need to be attached. Souls are able to collect in absolute comfort, free from the pain they experienced during life.”

  “You think our mothers are there?” Yukio wondere
d.

  Shinji thought about it and said, “I think yours is.”

  * * * * *

  She asked to be carried again as the day wore on. He didn’t mind the slow pace since it gave him time to plan his next course of action. After all, any vengeance brought against Yoshimizu would not only be for his treachery against Hideyoshi, but to solidify Yukio’s safety in the future. She slept with her arms around his neck and he felt her warm breath, making him wish that he could bring her pleasant dreams. He thought about Rumiko and her battle for survival in the healer’s hut.

  She would be clogged with a fever from her body trying to repair itself while Takeda did what he could to stop the infection. From his wandering life, he found stability in her that always made him content. She was so worthwhile a person that he believed he had a purpose and felt justified to forget himself as long as they were together. He never thought ahead in their relationship either, because he wanted it to progress in a way that suited her desire.

  He had seen the dissolution of the Shinobi Guild, when thieves and assassins broke apart from a single criminal clan to battle for scraps from the higher classes. The thieves chose a career centered on leeching off of others while the ninja served an inconstant master when they were needed as clandestine spies. Their skill was so apparent in their ability to survive that it was said that some must have been dishonored samurai attempting a new career.

  Shinji had grown disgusted with the in-fighting between two wicked professions, so when he heard Hideyoshi’s decree spread over the island, he knew that it was his chance to change. The danger of the lifestyle was its anonymous nature and that was easily remedied. Though he could not alter his past experience, he found new loyalty in something higher than himself.

  He stopped acting like a ninja and allowed the Daimyo’s daughters to get to know him, the greatest faith to be placed on him after his parents died. The new bodyguards were constantly watched and rigorously tested by samurai who worried about allowing dishonest people into the heart of their province. Only a few ninja eventually grew to deserve the respect of the Daimyo, and those entrusted to help guard his family were given the responsibility to defend against all threats, even other ninja.