by Kij Johnson
She had climbed high in trees before this, but she had never seen the city in its entirety, cradled between the Kamo and Katsura rivers, cuddled in this hollow of the mountains. She had small imagination, and little ability to understand the significance of what she saw. She only knew that the city was far larger than she had realized. She would never have found her way back home; the loss of hope had been an appropriate response.
She turned her head and looked south, away from the city. There were buildings everywhere, and paths and roads threading through fields and copses in a thousand directions. To the south, the Kamo and the Katsura joined beside the abandoned capital Nagaoka. The city’s tidy grid of roads was still visible after centuries, a subtle brocade of lighter and darker grasses.
One road was greater than the others, broad enough for ox-carts to pass. It marched off east to merge with another that marched north beside the city and then lost itself in the hills. We recognize this road immediately, even if we have never seen it before, even if we have never left our dark rooms in the court and the residences of our fathers and husbands, because we are raised with the romantic tales of the savage east ringing in our ears. She was a cat, and her stories are different from ours; she could not know that this was the Tkaid, the great road that begins at Raj gate and skirts the sea for what seems a million miles before ending in distant Mutsu province. She only recognized that the Tkaid had a direction, a meaning, and that this made it unlike her.
We ascribe meanings because it is our nature to do so. The Tkaid means mystery and wonders and adventure. We can no more see a thing without searching for a meaning than we can see a snag in a robe without pulling on the loose thread. When does this begin? With adulthood? Perhaps, for I remember when I was seven—the year before my mother’s death—when the great comet came.
I do not remember much from when I was so small. I remember I had many nightmares and liked to play in dirt. I remember touching a snake once. It felt warm and muscular, and the gardener told me, “It’s not the snake that is warm; it is the sunlight,” though I had no idea what this meant. A story my nurse told me, something about monkeys and Kannon; but because I had once seen a picture of the goddess riding a carp, I thought Kannon was the fish, and so I did not understand the tale at all. A blue robe that my nurse wore always, as far as I can recall, that reminded me of the ocean, though I had never seen anything bigger than the garden’s three ponds and the tame little brook that ran through them. That is all, really. And then the comet.
I heard of the comet before ever I saw it. The adults fretted among themselves—was it an omen? a kami falling? was it related to the drought we’d been having?—but since I had no idea what a comet might be, these statements made as little sense as all the other incomprehensible things adults said.
(Was the comet an omen? Had it a direction, a meaning? I did not think so then, but when I grew older I started to wonder, for we had been suffering from a great drought, and it was the year after this that my mother died. Still later, I decided that comets, like roads, have only the intentions we ascribe to them. And now I have no idea. If a comet is without meaning, it seems possible that a woman is likewise so; and I do not wish to think this of myself.)
There was one night when a terrible nightmare awakened me, and for once there was no nurse to coax me out of my tears—no one at all, and I was not used to being alone. Sniffling to myself, I pulled my robes close and padded out to the veranda to find someone who would pet me and cuddle me (and, I know now, spoil me).
It was wintertime, and very dark; either the moon had not yet risen or had already set, or perhaps it was the new moon, the beginning of the month. The garden was silver and black, all color gone. There was ice everywhere.
I saw gathered in the garden a handful of tall shadows: adults, men and women standing, talking together. (Now I realize how strange, how improper, this was: no screens, no curtain-stands.) I suddenly felt shy, for I knew that the nights belonged to adults, that here was an entire world that I was not meant to see. Still, a visitor straying by chance into the private quarters of a monastery does not immediately leave; she looks about for a moment before she returns to the public areas. Before I returned to my rooms and sleep (my rightful domain), I would see what was so special about the adults’ world.
The sky overhead was thick, furred black, spangled with a thousand stars, and dominated by the comet, which hung overhead, a blurred streak of silver as long as my hand. I thought I could see it shimmer as if it were fire, or water flowing over silk (I must have seen such a thing before, to think this); I imagined that I heard a tingling noise: the comet moving through the sky.
At least I think I remember this.
I do remember that night, the adults in the darkness; and all the talk about the comet. But the story my nurse told me of that night is quite different: she and the others had gone out into the garden to watch the comet, and heard a child’s voice singing, and found me utterly absorbed in cracking the shell of ice from a twig. When she had held me up to see the comet, I looked with polite disinterest, then returned to cracking ice from the twig in my hand. “As if you’d never seen ice before,” she said years later, “when you’d spent all afternoon cracking ice!”
A child (or a cat) is not awed by the same wonders that an adult is, because everything is equally new and therefore wondrous. My nurse (and the adult I became) sees or imagines a comet and is struck dumb by the beauty of it. A child has not seen so much that she knows that ice on the trees is common, and a comet rare and therefore precious. It is only age that tells us what is precious, what is new.
Now that I am old, I think I have perhaps come back to this perception. I cannot afford to wait for another comet, and so I watch the tiny things of each day and am amazed by them.—Or I try to do this, anyway: there are a lot of days when I watch nothing at all except my breaths, and wonder how many more I will have.
The tortoiseshell cat dreamt of voices that night, tucked in a crotch between two beams high in the Raj gate, under the quarter-moon of the ninth month. Dreams had always been silent for her: she chased prey or slapped fruitlessly at swimming fish in a world of scent, but without noise. Sounds were too important for dreams. Awake, they warned her of things she could not see, and even in sleep her ears were pricked, listening for threats or opportunities that should not be ignored.
But this night she dreamt with sounds, a thousand chaotic noises that flooded her, threatening to overwhelm her and send her into nightmares. She fought down the fear—nothing in dreams could be as terrifying as her waking hours had been since the earth shook—and noticed that there was sense to them, that the chaos she heard was actually myriad voices, speaking at every pitch and pace. Words flickered out of the background, like sparrows launching from a wind-tossed tree: wave’s crest, memory, heart, Tosa, rice, Why should I?
She understood little, but I see much more than she. The kami do not speak to me, but they nevertheless speak, to others and to one another, and (if they are lonely, or have secrets) to themselves. They are everywhere, of course, in everything from my family’s shrine to a dying cycad-palm on a beach in distant Satsuma province; and their voices are everywhere, all chattering or twittering or intoning at once.
Though they speak with the dead, cats hear neither kami nor Buddhas. Cats are too fierce for gods; they came godless from Korea many tens of years ago, and they worship no one. This is good, for they are free in ways men are not; but this is bad, because they are utterly alone in the world. Indeed, they seem reluctant to see any god but the living emperor, and even him they do not respect as they should. The cats at court (and there are always a few, besides the kitchen cats) seemed to disregard his presence altogether; when he was emperor, my half-brother used to laugh and tell me that the cats were his only attendants who did not bow and scrape and lie all the time. I said nothing in response, of course: the emperor may laugh at himself, but no one else is permitted to.
I cannot tell you why the tortoisesh
ell heard the kami—all the kami—or why she heard them now, and not yesterday, or in the fifth month, when she still lived warm against her mother’s nipples in an abandoned fox den. Perhaps her ears had been attuned by her grief, or by the echoing chambers of the Raj gate. Or perhaps it was this: that one kami chose to speak to her, and by opening her ears to its voice, it opened her ears to all.
“What are you?” something asked suddenly, close and very loud in her mind.
The tortoiseshell knew she was dreaming, for she stood, not on a perilous ledge in moonlight, but on a broad path as clear and bright as crystal that curved off into gold-gray fog in both directions. “Nothing,” she said. “No one.”
“Unlikely,” the voice said. “You clearly exist. You must be something. And someone.”
“I am a cat,” she said. “That’s all that’s left to me.”
“A cat,” the kami repeated. “I am unfamiliar with your people. But now that I think on it, I recall that I have perhaps seen some of you before this, from the corner of my eye, as it were.”
“What are you?” she said hotly. “I see no one here.”
The road beneath her shook slightly, as if laughing. “And yet I also exist. I am this road, and those who walk it, and the trees and inns that line it. And I am the god who watches it all. And other things.”
She tapped at the road with a paw, and ripples formed at her touch, perfect circles growing until they slipped off the road’s edges and into the fog. “How can you be all those things?”
“How can you be a single thing, a cat and nothing else? You do not seem to be very creative, if that is all you’ve managed to become.”
“I have no choice,” she said bitterly. “I hadn’t yet found a place in my tale, but at least I was part of my family and my ground. My fudoki. And that’s all gone.”
“Your tale,” the kami said. “A tale contains a thousand things. I think you are more than you believe.”
“Not now,” she said. “Not anymore.”
“You would do better if you had gods,” the kami said. “Then you would have something, at least.”
“Well then, what is a god, and where do I find one?” she asked.
“I think you have already found one.” The road’s tone was perhaps a touch smug.
“I don’t see how I can carry you with me.” She tapped the road again, harder this time, her claws just bared. The road shook like a horse’s withers, and she went flying.
“I just told you,” it said, “though perhaps you did not listen very carefully. I am this road, and—”
“Never mind,” she said. “I don’t see what the point of a god is.”
The kami said, “I do not see what the point of a cat is,” and the tortoiseshell awoke.
When I was a girl, I longed for the voice of the gods—any kami, any Buddha or bodhisattva or saint. I prayed to a statue of Kannon my mother ordered erected in her room before she died. I thought I prayed for her health, but in truth I did not know her well—losing my nurse would have been much sadder—and what I really wanted was a sign that gods—any god—existed. I wanted to see the robes we had draped over the statue move as she reached out with one of her thousand hands to touch my mother. This did not happen. My mother died.
After that I made up a kami. I have never said so to anyone, but I wanted a god of my own and so I picked a little pink-and-black-and-white rock in the garden, no larger than a cat, and I honored it. I made a little hut over it, and smuggled it a bit of rice each day. I gave it flowers I stole from elsewhere in the garden, and I wrote prayers on slips of fabric in my childish writing: Let me be pretty when I am grown. May my nurse let me keep my collection of moth’s wings. Let my half-brother the heir like me.
When my nurse found out, she rapped my hands with a piece of bamboo and insisted that I never visit that rock again; but I did, and I found that others had begun to leave flowers and scraps of fabric there; and the hut had been remade, and better. I knew I made up the kami of that stone, and yet others worshiped it, as well. After thinking on this for some years, I decided that I was wrong: is not everything filled with kami, every stick and rock and leaf? Perhaps I had been the first to recognize and worship this kami, but that did not mean it had not been there, lonely and hungry for attention, like a bored little girl.
Now, so many decades later that I do not choose to count them up, I think there may be another truth to this—that the rock was worthy of worship because it had been worshiped—that every shrine in the world began as mine did, with someone’s longing for something greater than herself. I wonder if the shrine to the little rock is still there, and I wonder if, a thousand years hence, it will be as honored and hoary as the shrine at Ise.
The tortoiseshell hears kami because I cannot, and even though I created her (as perhaps I created the kami of that little rock), I envy her. For her they may be strange, but they are as close and immediate as dirt.
3. The Grass-Character Notebook
How many notebooks have I filled in my life? I have trunks filled with them—and the other odds and ends of my life: old letters and calligraphy samples; fans and robes; hundred-pace incense, long dead but still haunted by scent; a man’s sash forgotten before a dawn forty years ago; scrolls and fan-folded notebooks of the poetry collections I gathered when I was first at court, before I gave up even the appearance of interest in poetry; a set of shallow lacquered boxes filled with moths’ wings; a sutra that I began to copy when I was twenty and never finished.
I discard these once-precious things more easily than I could have dreamt. I empty the shallow boxes, and moths’ wings flutter to the ground, a momentary illusion of life. Even the notebooks are taken apart and dropped like autumn leaves into my brazier; without sadness I watch them flare and then vanish into smoke. The sutra has more merit than the rest; to die working to finish it would indicate virtuous intention, at least.
And yet I fill one notebook and start another. I am dying, but there are still many things to say—to myself, if no one else.
The tortoiseshell woke in the ox’s hour, after the moon had set. She clawed her way down the Raj gate’s south face, and dropped to her feet on its wood steps. There were several guardsmen there, and one called softly to her, “Sneaking out to meet a lover, little one?” Another guard chuckled, and the first crouched down and made meaningless noises to her, tickling the dirt under his fingers. She crouched there watching him, unsure. She was unused to kindness from humans (the servants at the residence of her fudoki had a tendency to throw things, and caught up in their own problems, everyone else had ignored her as she fled across the city), but his voice sounded a little like the warm sounds that a mother cat makes when she is grooming, and his hand’s movements were strangely intriguing.
“She’s not going to come to you,” the other guard said. “She’s wild, can’t you see that?”
“But she’s tempted, isn’t she?” The guard inched forward, and she stood up and tensed to run.
“Oh, leave her alone. Some girls just aren’t susceptible to your charm.”
“I suppose.” The guard straightened and dusted his fingers off on his thigh. “Good luck, little one. When you return come find me. I’m here every night. Maybe I can show you around, hmm?”
She trotted into the shadows of a low shrub and watched him for a long time, but he did nothing else incomprehensible. The stars were fading when she crossed the bridge over the moat and moved on.
One generally travels with a goal. Even noblewomen travel to a purpose, however minor the journey ends up being: be at the banquet-pine grove by midday to view the cherry blossoms; be at the lady Chnagon’s rooms by dusk to watch the moonrise. This generates a sense of mission and of urgency, however spurious. The tortoiseshell had no goal. She traveled because with no fudoki one place was just like another, and there are small edible animals everywhere. It was easier to move than to stay still, for movement eases pain—or distracts one, anyway. She had not yet lived through a winter, so sh
e did not know the comfort of a familiar warm sleeping-place; winter was months away, at any event—as incomprehensible to her as gods.
She followed the Tkaid’s first miles more by accident than anything, and her pace was so slow that it was a fortnight and more before she came to the great Buddha just beyond the Osaka barrier, and that is only a handful of miles from the capital. The road was very busy in the daylight hours and into the evenings, and so she hid in trees and underbrush, and slept and watched passersby, and sometimes the little boats on Biwa lake.
She stayed with the Tkaid because its sense of direction and meaning were attractive to a cat with neither—even though the food was not quite so good as it might have been farther afield, where there were seed eaters in the fields. She caught a lot of squirrels. It was the time of year when squirrels seem to lose all the little sense they had, to run stupidly into the centers of kitchen yards and under the hooves of horses, and into the waiting claws and teeth of cats. She found them so easy to catch that she was not often hungry. Sometimes she caught them just to taste them, to learn what she could of the country she passed through, and she caught hints of taro root and horseradish.
A dog that loses a leg learns to cope, and after a time no longer seems to remember its loss. But on cold nights, when it is brought inside to doze beside the hearth pit, it licks the stump where its leg once was, and when it dreams, its remaining legs gallop in the pattern of a four-legged dog, instead of the three-legged gait that fills its waking hours. The tortoiseshell learned to cope with the loss of herself, and even found occasional joy—when she actually caught a fluttering oban-coot, or when she found a freshly dead fawn, miraculously unclaimed. But in quiet times, when she dozed or sat, the empty place filled her with despair.
