by Frank Wynne
Midori, who happened to be going by, took one look at his dirty jacket and proffered her crimson handkerchief. “Here, you can wipe it off with this.”
There were those, however, who were jealous of this attention from Midori. “For a priest’s son, he sure knows how to flirt. Look at him smile when he thanks her! What’s he going to do—take her for his wife? If she goes to live at the temple, then she really will be Miss Daikoku: from Midori of the Daikokuya to Daikoku, goddess of the kitchen! That ought to suit a priest.”
Nobu couldn’t stomach all the talk. He had never been one to enjoy idle gossip and had always shunned tales about others. How, then, could he tolerate it when he found himself the target of the rumors? He began to dread hearing Midori’s name. He was snappish whenever anyone mentioned field day. “You’re not going to bring that up again, are you?” It never failed to put him in a bad mood. Yet what reason was there, really, for this loss of temper? He knew he would do better feigning indifference. A stoic face, wait it out, he told himself. He could silence his tormentors with a word or two, but the embarrassment was still there. A cold sweat followed every confrontation.
At first, Midori failed to notice any change. On her way home from school one day she called out with her usual friendliness. Nobu trailed behind amid a cluster of people. The blossoms at the roadside had caught her eye, and she waited for him to catch up. “See the pretty flowers, Nobu? I can’t reach them. You’re tall enough—won’t you pick me some?”
She had singled him out from his younger companions. There was no escaping. He cringed at what he knew the others would be saying. Reaching for the nearest branch, without even choosing, he picked the first flower he saw, a token effort. He flung it at her and was gone.
“Well, if that’s how he’s going to be! Unsociable thing!”
After several of these incidents, it dawned on Midori: Nobu was being mean to her deliberately. He was never rude to any of the others, only her. When she approached, he fled. If she spoke to him, he became angry. He was sullen and self-conscious. Midori had no idea how to please him, and in the end she gave up trying. Let him be perverse; he was no friend of hers. See if she’d speak to him after he’d cut her to the quick. “Hello’s” in the street were a thing of the past. It would take important business indeed before she would deign to talk to him. A great river now stretched between them that all boats were forbidden to cross. Each of them walked alone on separate banks of the stream.
From the day after the festival, Midori came to school no more. She could wash the mud from her face, but the shame could not be scrubbed away so easily.
They sat together side by side at school—Chōkichi’s gang and the main-street gang—and one might have expected that they could get along. But there had always been a sharp division.
It was the act of a coward to attack a weak, defenseless girl. Everyone knew Chōkichi was as violent and as stupid as they come. But if he hadn’t had Nobu backing him, he could never have behaved so brazenly. And that Nobu! In front of others he pretended to be gentle and wise, but a look behind the scenes would reveal that he was the one pulling all the strings. Midori didn’t care if he was ahead of her in school, or how good his grades were. So what if he was the young master of Ryūge Temple! She, after all, was Midori of the Daikokuya, and not beholden to him in the slightest. She had never borrowed a single sheet of paper. So who were they to call her a tramp, or those other names Chōkichi had used? She wasn’t about to be impressed just because Ryūge Temple had a prominent parishioner or two.
What about the patrons her sister Ōmaki had? The banker Kawa, a steady customer for three years now; Yone, from the stock exchange; and that short one, the member of parliament—why, he’d been all set to buy her sister’s contract and marry her, till Ōmaki decided she could do without him. And he was somebody! Just ask the lady who ran Ōmaki’s house. Go ahead and ask, if you thought she was making it up. Where would the Daikokuya be without her sister? Why do you think even the owner of the house was never curt with Midori and her parents? Just take that porcelain statue of Daikoku, the one he kept in the alcove. Once when she was playing shuttlecock, she knocked over a vase accidentally and smashed the master’s favorite statue to smithereens. He was sitting right in the next room drinking. And all he said was, “Midori, you’re turning into a little tomboy.” Not one word of reproach. Had it been anyone else, you can be sure, he wouldn’t have stopped there. The maids were green with envy. No question about it, the child’s privileges derived from her sister’s position. Midori knew it, too. Her parents were mere caretakers for the master’s house, but her sister was Ōmaki of the Daikokuya. She didn’t have to take insults from the likes of Chōkichi. And too bad for him if the little priest wanted to be mean to her. Midori had had enough of school. She was born stubborn and she was not about to suffer anyone’s contempt. That day she broke her pencils and threw away her ink; she would spend her time playing with her real friends. She wasn’t going to need her abacus or her books.
*
In the evening they rush into the quarter, at dawn they leave less cheerfully. It’s a lonely ride home, with only dreams of the night before to keep a man company. Getaways are under cover. A hat pulled low, a towel around the face. More than one of these gentlemen would rather that you didn’t look. To watch will only make you feel uneasy. That smirk of theirs—not half-pleased with themselves as the sting of their lady’s farewell slap sinks in. After all, she wouldn’t want him to forget her. Careful when you get to Sakamoto. The vegetable carts come barreling back from the early morning market. Watch out when you hit Crazy Street. Until Mishima Shrine, you won’t be safe from those who wander home all gaga and enraptured from the night before. Their faces never look so resolute the morning after. It’s rude to say it, but don’t they all suggest love’s fools? The fishwives seldom hesitate to sum them up. Look, there goes a man with money. But that one over there, he couldn’t have a penny to his name.
One need hardly cite the Chinese “Song of Everlasting Sorrow” and the heights to which Yang’s daughter rose to see that there are times when daughters are more valuable than sons. Many a princess comes into the world among the shanties of the back street. Today she calls herself “Snow” in one of those swank geisha houses over in Tsukiji, a celebrated beauty whose accomplishments in dance have entertained a nobleman or two. But yesterday she was a mere delinquent and she earned her spending money making playing cards, you know. “What kind of tree does rice grow on?” she asks, as if she’d grown up in the lap of luxury. Around here, of course, she is not the celebrity she used to be. Once they leave, they’re soon forgotten. Already she has been eclipsed by the dye-maker’s second daughter, Kokichi, a home-grown flower of a girl, whose name you’ll hear throughout the park. The lanterns are up these days at The New Ivy, in Senzoku, where that one works.
Night and day, it’s the daughters that you hear of. A boy is about as useful as a mutt sniffing round the rubbish. Every shopkeeper’s son is a wastrel. At seventeen, the age of insolence, the young men band together. Before they go completely gallant—you don’t see any flutes tucked into sashes yet—they join up with a leader whose alias is invariably a solemn, grandiose affair. They deck themselves out with matching scarves and matching paper lanterns. It won’t be long now before they learn to gamble and to window-shop the quarter. Bantering with the courtesans will begin to come more easily. Even with the serious ones, the family business is only something for the day. Back from the evening bath they come in kimonos of a rakish cut, sandals dragging. “Hey, did you see the new one? At What’s-Its-Name? She looks like the girl at the sewing shop, over in Kanasugi. But, with that funny little nose of hers, she’s even uglier.” It’s the only thing remotely on their minds. They bum tobacco, a piece of tissue at every house. The pats and pinches they exchange with each beauty along the way: these are the things that bring a lifetime of renown. Even the sons of perfectly upstanding families decide to style themselves as local toughs. The
y are forever picking fights around the Gate.
Ah, the power of women. One need hardly say more. In the quarter, prosperity makes no distinctions between the autumn and the spring. Escort lanterns are not in vogue these days, and still the men are carried away. All it takes is the echo of a pair of sandals. Here she comes! The little girl from the teahouse who will take them to their ladies. Clip-clop, clip-clop. The sound mingles with the music of the theater. They hear it and they stream into the quarter. If you ask them what they’re after, it’s a flowing robe, a scarlet collar, a baroque coiffure, a pair of sparkling eyes and lips with painted smiles. The beauties may in fact have little of the beautiful about them. The minute they are courtesans, they climb the pedestal. Those of you from other parts may find it all a little hard to understand.
Needless to say, Midori, who spent her days and nights immersed in such a world, soon took on the color of the quarter. In her eyes, men were not such fearsome things. And her sister’s calling was nothing to disparage. When Ōmaki was on the verge of leaving for the city, how Midori had cried. Not in her wildest dreams had she hoped to accompany her sister. And now here they were. Who wouldn’t envy a sister like Ōmaki? What with her recent success, it was nothing for her to repay all the debts she had ever owed her parents. Midori had no notion of what price Ōmaki might have paid to reign supreme in her profession. To her it was all a game. She knew about the charms and tricks the girls would use. Simpering to summon men they longed for, like mice grabbing cheese. Tapping on the lattice when they made a wish. She knew the secret signals they would use to give their guests a parting pat. She had mastered the special language of the quarter, and she didn’t feel the least embarrassed when she used it.
It was all a little sad. She was fourteen. When she caressed her dolls, she could have been a prince’s child. But for her, all lessons in manners and morals and the wifely arts were topics to be left at school. What never ceased to capture her attention were the rumors of her sister’s suitors—who was in and who was out of favor—the costumes of the serving girls, the bedding gifts that men would lavish on Ōmaki, the teahouse tips for the introduction of a patron. What was bright and colorful was good, and what was not was bad. The child was still too young to exercise discretion. She was always taken with the flower just before her eyes. A headstrong girl by nature, Midori indulged herself by fluttering about in a world that she had fashioned from the clouds.
Crazy Street, Sleepy Street. The half-witted, groggy gentlemen all pass this way as they head home. At the gate to this village of late risers, the sweepers and the sprinklers have already cleaned the streets. But look down main street. They have roosted for the night among the slums of Mannenchō or Yamabushichō, or perhaps Shintanimachi, and now here they come: what for want of any other word one might as well call “entertainers.” The singing candy man. The two-bit player. The puppeteers. The jugglers and the acrobats. The dancers with their parasols. The clowns who do the lion dance. Their dress is as varied as their arts, a gauze of silk, a sash of satin. The clowns prefer the cotton prints from Satsuma, with black bands round the waist. Men, pretty women, troupes of five, seven, even ten, and a lonely old man, all skin and bones, who totters as he clutches his battered samisen. And, look, there’s a little girl of five or so they’ve got to do the Kinokuni dance. Over there, with the red ribbons on her sleeves. But none of them stop here. They know where the business is, and they hurry to the quarter. The guest who has lingered at the teahouse, the beauty in a melancholy mood—these are the ones it pays to entertain. The profits are too good to give it up, or to waste time with benefit performances along the way. Not even the most tattered and suspicious-looking beggar would bother to loiter around here.
A lady minstrel passed before the paper shop. Her hat all but concealed her striking face, yet she sang and played with the bearing of a star. “It’s a shame we never get to hear the end of her song,” the shopkeeper’s wife complained. Midori, bright from her morning bath, was lounging on the shop’s front step, watching the parade pass by. She pushed her hair up with her boxwood comb. “Wait here. I’ll bring her back!”
The child never mentioned slipping something in the lady’s sleeve to coax her to perform but, sure enough, back in tow she came to sing the requested song of thwarted love. “Thank you very much for your patronage,” she concluded in her honeyed tone, and even as it echoed they knew that they were not about to hear its likes again.
“To think—a mere child could have arranged it!” bystanders marveled, more impressed with Midori than with the minstrel.
“Wouldn’t it be fun to have them all perform?” Midori whispered to Shōta. “The samisen and the flute and the drums! The singers and the dancers! Everything we never get more than just a glimpse of!”
Even for Midori, the proposal was ambitious. “Don’t overdo it, girl,” Shōta muttered.
*
“Thus have I heard it spoken,” the reverend priest intoned the sutra. As the holy words were carried from the temple by the soft breeze through the pines, they should have blown away all dust within the heart.
But smoke rose from fish broiling in the kitchen. In the cemetery diapers had been seen drying over tombstones. Nothing wrong here in the eyes of the Order, perhaps; those who fancied their clerics above worldly desires, though, found the doings at Ryūge Temple rather too earthly for their tastes.
Here the fortunes of the head priest were as handsome as his stomach. Both had rounded out nicely through the years. The man’s glow of well-being beggared description: not the sunny pink of the cherries, not the deep pink of the peach; from the top of his freshly shaven pate to the bottom of his neck, he shone like burnished copper. When he whooped with laughter—bushy, salt-and-pepper eyebrows floating heavenward—the noise of the old man’s excess could have toppled Buddha from the altar.
The priest’s young wife (she was only in her forties) was not an unattractive woman. Her skin was fair, and she wore her thinning hair in a small, modest bun. She was always cordial when people came to pray. Even the florist’s wife outside the temple gate held her tongue where the reverend’s wife was concerned—the fruit, you may be sure, of the temple lady’s kindliness: a hand-me-down here, a leftover there. At one time, she herself had been among the parishioners. But her husband died young, and, having nowhere to turn, she came to do the sewing at the temple. In exchange for meals, she took over the washing and the cooking. Before long she was out in the graveyard, sweeping away with the best of the groundsmen. The priest was quick to offer his compassion, and quicker still to calculate the advantages. The woman knew full well that the difference in their ages, some twenty years, might make the arrangement appear a bit unseemly. But she had nowhere else to go, and she came to consider the temple a good place to live out her days and to meet her end. She learned not to lose too much sleep over prying neighbors.
Some in the congregation found the situation shocking. Soon enough, however, they began to acknowledge that in her heart the woman was a good person, and they ceased to censure her. While she was carrying their first child, Ohana, the priest finally made an honest woman of her. A retired oil dealer over in Sakamoto, one of the parishioners who went in for such things, acted as the go-between—if you want to call it that.
Nobu was their second child. Someday he would do his father proud, but at the moment he was a taciturn, moody boy who preferred to pass the day alone in his room. Ohana, on the other hand, was quite the opposite, a lovely girl with fine skin and a soft, plump little chin. To call her a beauty would be going too far, perhaps, but since adolescence she had had her share of admirers. It seemed a shame to waste such a girl, for she might have been a geisha. Who knows? There may be worlds where even Buddha enjoys the music of the samisen. In this world, at any rate, there was the matter of what others said, and talk they would if the daughter of a temple became an entertainer with her skirt hitched up. What the priest did instead was to establish Ohana in a little tea shop in Tamachi. He put her beh
ind the counter, where she could vend her charm. Young men with no idea in their heads how tea was weighed and measured began to gather at the shop. Seldom was Ohana’s empty before midnight.
But his holiness was the busy one. Loans to collect, the shop to oversee, funerals to arrange, not to mention all the sermons every month. When he wasn’t flipping through accounts, he was going through the sutras. If things didn’t let up, he’d wear himself out, he would sigh as he dragged his flowered cushion onto the veranda, where he fanned himself, half-naked, and enjoyed his nightly hooch. He was a fish-eater, and Nobu was the one he sent over to the main street for the broiled eels that he liked. “The big oily ones, if you please.” It galled Nobu. His eyes never left his feet as he trudged over to the Musashiya. If he heard voices at the paper shop across the street, he would keep on going. Then, when the coast was clear, he’d dart into the eel shop. The shame he felt! He would never eat the smelly things.
The reverend was nothing if not practical. There were some who might call him greedy, but that never bothered him a whit. He was neither a timid soul nor an idler: give him a spare moment and he’d set about fashioning kumade charms. On Otori day he would have his wife out peddling them. Whatever doubts she may have had about the venture, they were short-lived once his holiness started to bemoan the killing everybody else made, rank amateurs up and down the street. He soon persuaded his reluctant wife, set up a booth not a stone’s throw from the temple gate, and installed her there to sell his charms and good-luck hairpins. She tied her hair back with a headband, just like the vendors and all the young men. In the daytime, she knew enough to stay out of sight and mingle with the crowd, leaving the florist’s wife to manage things. But when the sun went down—who would have guessed it?—the woman had a field day. At dusk she took over for herself, quite forgetting what a spectacle she made with her sudden itch for profit. “Everything marked down! Prices slashed!” she barked after a customer who backed away. Buffeted and dizzy from the throngs, the victim soon lost his powers of appraisal. They had fled along with memory: two days earlier he had come to this very temple as a pilgrim. “Three for only seventy-five sen.” But her price left room to negotiate. “How about five for seventy-three?” “Sold!”
