Fudoki

by Kij Johnson

  Miles: days. Or a journey can be measured by sights, the smooth exchange of vista and intimate detail, shrine and temple. She saw the great mountain Fuji when she was as far away as Yoshida, back in Mikawa province, though it was many days before she saw it a second time, for the air hid it in clouds or mist. She crossed under the sullen black forests of Ashigara mountain, and overheard the elegant savage songs of the countrywomen there. She led the sorrel across the plains of Morikoshi, where she saw no flowers (and did not know enough to look for them, having no experience with the poetry we have all read a thousand times). She passed through reeds so tall that even standing on the sorrel’s back she could not see over them. Mountains, rapids, marshes that stretch for days, dunes dusted with snow as white as the sand. Skies that stretch a million miles east across the endless ocean. A lake so clear that she could watch a sleeping fish as long as her arm, suspended as if in crystal.

  I have not seen these sights, but I have heard of them, and longed to hear more. When I was young, I foolishly imagined myself in love with a guardsman who had been sent from Mutsu province. He was handsome, though his eyes were unsettling, for they were not properly black but instead liquid gold.

  He could not write poetry, but I didn’t care. Poetry did not laugh the way he did, and it did not come warm to my bed on certain brilliant moonlit nights. Poetry did not tell me about the great mountain Fuji at dawn, when it is the color of roses and pearls and peaches. Fuji captured a cloud sometimes, he told me, round and flat as a mirror. “You cannot imagine how big it is,” he said to me, and I reached under the bed robes and grasped him. “Not that!” He laughed, and told me more, about the plains of the Kant, which run to the very foot of Fuji, so that it seems but a handful of miles away, instead of the seventy and more that it is. There are many herds of half-wild horses there, each a hundred or more together, all more beautiful than anything you’ve ever seen.

  He told me about all these places, and others besides. I did not write them all down back then. I regret this now, even though I would be burning those notebooks tomorrow in any case.

  “You love it there, don’t you?” I said to him: a little wistfully, for his eyes never shone when he looked at me, not as they did when he spoke of azumi, the east. “You will leave someday, and return there.”

  He said, “I serve my emperor as directed by my father; but come dawn of the first day my duty is done, I’ll be gone.”

  And so he was. I cried a bit, for he had been very handsome, and was a kind lover. But mostly I cried from envy for his freedom, and because there was a place he loved like this.

  Strange, how I have not let myself think of him until now.

  One night, when she was still in Sagami province, she slept outside, for there were no houses or inns close—though there had once been a salt-making place close by; the silvered wood ruins looked and felt like ancient bones. The sky was clear and brilliant with stars, for the three-quarters’ moon of the eleventh month was not yet up. She was very near the sea here, on Morikoshi plain. She could hear the surf, and feel it in the darkness, a great restless weight to her right.

  She unsaddled her horse and hobbled him, and he began to pull up grass, and to strip the needles from a small tree stunted by the wind.

  She built a fire of driftwood and watched the flames leap up taller than her own height. She had flinched the first few times she’d made fire, but that was many nights and miles (and sights) ago. She no longer saw the fire-cats who had tried to speak to her with their distended mouths. There were no cats, fire or flesh, in these lands she passed through. She was the first, which only increased her sense of loneliness and loss. The words of her fudoki were rather pain than comfort, though she could not help but recite them some nights, as a child cannot help sucking her thumb.

  Her ears were still sharp. Even through the crackling of the fire, she heard a tiny rustling in one of her unstrapped saddlebags, and so she flipped it upright, and began to remove things carefully until she saw her intruder. It was a straw-brown mouse, small as her thumb. Its black eyes stared up at her. “Mouse?” she said, and got no answer. “Do you speak? Do you feel? Have you a soul? Do you have gods?”

  It only stared at her, vibrating with fear, and so she tipped the saddlebag onto its side and let the mouse go. Mice were less than a mouthful these days, anyway, and she would have gotten little satisfaction from eating this one.

  She came to Musashi province at the end of the eleventh month, and forded Sumida river a few days into the twelfth month. The air was crisp, and heavy forest crowded the Tkaid on either side, so she buried her hands in her cloak, and let the sorrel pick its own path. Through a thinning in the trees she saw a wood yard, and a great tree propped up to be sawed into planks. A wiry little man in a loincloth stood atop the tree, pulling through the wood a saw as tall as he was. Sawdust drifted down in the heavy still air. Two other men watched him and said something—but she could not hear it, for by that time, she and the sorrel were past, and she had been craning back in her saddle to watch.

  There was little traffic. She watched her breath puff in front of her and thought of mice. Ahead, a large party had pulled off the road near a roadside shrine to Inari. A well-dressed provincial woman and her women laid a packet of silk and a little barrel before the moss-green statues of Inari’s foxes, bowed and clapped. The tortoiseshell woman picked up her reins, and helped her horse choose a path through the cloud of servants and guards and horses and oxen that clogged the road. The noblewoman lifted a hand and hailed her, and the tortoiseshell woman stopped.

  “We are about to eat,” the noblewoman said. “Would you be so kind as to join us?”

  The tortoiseshell woman looked down from her saddle for a moment. The noblewoman was of middle age but still lovely, with a clever expressive face and merry eyes. She had kilted her padded robes to her knees, but this had not prevented their hems from being splashed with mud. The noblewoman looked down at herself and said, “I must look a perfect demoness to you; but I promise I’m hardly that. I don’t exaggerate when I say it would be a kindness for you to join us. We’ve been on pilgrimage for half a month now, and we are sick of each other’s faces.” She laughed and her attendants laughed with her. Provincials have a very different sense of the proper relationships between a master and the various sorts of servants. “Please.”

  The tortoiseshell woman trusted no one, and yet she found herself sliding from her saddle. One of the noblewoman’s menservants reached for the sorrel’s bridle. “My horse doesn’t like—” she began, but the sorrel finished the statement by lashing out at the man, teeth slamming together with an audible sound a hairs-breadth from his arm.

  He laughed and grabbed its bridle. “Settle down, biter.” He caught the tortoiseshell woman’s eye and said, “I like ’em feisty. Horse like a dragon, here.”

  “He’ll make sure your horse gets some food and water,” the noblewoman said. “Please, come.” She bowed and took the tortoiseshell woman’s hand. If she felt the burn scars she said nothing, only led her to a rush-walled ox-carriage and helped her up into it.

  It was warm in the carriage, and when the noblewoman followed her inside, it was crowded. There were five of them, all women, kneeling on thick cushions. They passed around little boxes filled with food of various sorts, and each helped herself with smooth little sticks to pickled cabbage, cold fried rice cakes, salted eggplant, and sea slugs. The tortoiseshell woman had never used sticks to eat, but she found a pair tucked into her sash—a thing she understood without learning, like horses and knives and knot-making. When the women were done, they handed the boxes out of the cart, and the men filled them with hot tea. She sniffed it warily (cats do not like hot things to drink), and carefully sipped. The warmth soaked right through her, along with a sweet, bright grassy flavor. She remembered with bitter clarity that summer afternoon, crouched on the wall at her grounds, the last moment she had still belonged. Her eyes filled with tears and she turned her face from the women.
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br />   There was little talking until the tea.

  “I realized I have said nothing of who we are,” the noblewoman said suddenly. “I am the oldest daughter of my family. I’ve been to the temple at Takeshiba to pray for my youngest brother’s success in an endeavor. These are my women.” She named each, but the tortoiseshell woman frowned. She didn’t understand names: unlike a cat’s place in the fudoki, they said nothing useful about a person. The noblewoman laughed at her expression. “Never mind, you can ask again later, when there aren’t so many of them. Now: who are you and where are you from?—because this is the middle of nowhere, you know. Hitachi province is not the end of the world—that would be Mutsu province”—the women laughed—“but we can certainly see it from here, on a clear day anyway.”

  “I am nothing and no one,” the tortoiseshell woman said. “I have no ground.”

  The noblewoman looked at her from the corner of her eyes. “Ah. The Buddha says that this is the way to wisdom, to understand that family and property are nothing. How enlightened of you.”

  “This Buddha is wrong, if it says that,” the tortoiseshell woman said, her voice hot, anguished. “Family and tale are everything.”

  The noblewoman smiled, but her eyes were suddenly sad. “And you have lost both, I surmise. I am so sorry. Such loss I can understand.”

  Somehow, though she never later understood how, when the tortoiseshell woman climbed out of the ox-carriage and returned to her sorrel, it was understood that she would travel with them. And that was how she met Osa Hitachi no Nakara.

  5. The Kihada-Dyed Notebook

  I had friends when I was a small girl, before I came to my half-brother’s court. Most were boys, and were inevitably of lower rank, but I loved them dearly. Their toys were so much more interesting than my own—mulberry bows and mugwort arrows, stilts, riding whips made of vine, hoops, and mock swords—and they could do so much more. They played between the horses in the stable and chased mayflies across the garden. They ran the streets around my home in the eastern quarter of town, all equally ragged and breathless, and told me stories of their achievements, when I could sneak away to see them.

  I could not join them, but I had my own interests. I used to watch vermin, green caterpillars eating lacework holes into leaves; ants running about or walking in formal trains, bearing gifts to shrines hidden deep underground. When my attendants restricted this (“Squatting like a peasant? My lady!”), I bribed the household boys with rice candy to bring me things—moths’ wings and beetle shells and birds’ eggs—whatever my interest of the moment was.

  I eventually discovered mice, when a boy caught one in the gardens and brought it to me, a tiny black-eyed brown thing crouching in a tall lacquered box. Its whiskers were finer than silk thread drawn taut. Carrying it in my hands, I asked a gardener who knew of such things to tell me of mice. As I watched and listened, tiny pellets appeared from the creature’s hindquarters, black with a small earthy smell. The gardener told me such creatures slept in cracks and crevices and ate seeds and grasses. “A small life, and a short one,” he said. “Everything eats them—dogs, hawks, owls, foxes.”

  I frowned and shifted the mouse to my other hand, shaking the soiled one clean. “Then what’s the point of being a mouse? They’re not going to learn anything, so they’ll just have to come back as a mouse again next time. What’s the good of that?”

  The gardener laughed a little. “Maybe that is the point of being a mouse, little one—being eaten. Maybe the lesson they learn is grace in the face of unavoidable tragedy.”

  This made sense to me: monogatari tales are full of women (and sometimes men) dying gracefully. But—” What’s graceful about mice? They don’t write little poems before they die, or throw themselves into Uji river because their lover forgets to visit”—for my nurse had been reading to me from Genji’s tale.

  He laughed louder. “You think most people face tragedy with poems? No—we are a lot like mice. Some of us squirm under the cat’s paw. Some fight, some freeze. I suppose a few have dignity.”

  “I will behave with dignity,” I said. “With grace. But no poems.” I wrinkled my nose and peered down at the mouse, a tiny quivering hot spot in my hand.

  The gardener leaned closer to me, or perhaps the mouse. “Little one, the truest grace comes after the squirming and the fighting and the panic. To accept tragedy without despair. Can you do that?” I could not tell to whom he spoke.

  I did not know the answer then. But I thought about it when my father died; and when my golden-eyed lover returned to the east, betraying us all; and when Shirakawa died; and now, as I feel my lungs fight this losing war to breathe. At last, perhaps I find an answer.

  To show grace in tragedy? All those irritatingly stupid women in monogatari tales exhibit this, with their elegant little death-poems, their lovely corpses floating on willow-clogged waters. And they are stupid. What man, what lost love or deceased kinsman is worth death? The space in my life that my half-brother once filled is now an aching icy pain, like the hole left after a tooth is pulled, and I am dying in weeks or months—and yet I still fight for life, as every mouse does, until the final beak-blow. The grace in tragedy is not to succumb, but to fight on.

  I knew none of this back then, of course: certain lessons come late. I was eight when I received my first mouse. What did I know? I made a cage of silk gauze and wood, but it ran away, as did the next and the next. For a time, I made up little stories about the mice, as dramatic and full of event as any tale from Ise. As I learned to keep them for more than a day or two (pottery stopped them, as did wire mesh), I told fewer stories involving thrilling adventures. The more I learned of them, the less convincing the stories were, even to me. I’ve found that’s often the way with stories. Perhaps the only reason I tell the tale of the tortoiseshell cat is that, even after decades of living with cats, I still understand them not at all.

  After a time I didn’t keep the mice caged, but still they stayed. Mostly it was food that kept them, though I liked to imagine it was love. They slept in my sleeves, so that I learned physical grace because I did not want to crush them. They hid in my hair and startled my tutors and nurses, if I didn’t have time to return them to their box. They allowed me to touch them, to feel their ribs fine as grass stems, the shapes of their delicate skulls. Their hearts beat fast in the palm of my hand.

  I no longer kept mice when I came to court, nor did I engage in any of my less-acceptable hobbies. I wrote my notebooks strictly for my own satisfaction, though my woman Shigeko was forever asking to read them. I read the Chinese classics, because, while irregular, it was not unheard of for a woman to do so. I built water-clocks only when my monthly courses or illness kept me away from court and I returned to the cinnamon-tree courtyard at my uncle’s house.

  When I came to court, I studied the first cat I met there with the same interest I had reserved for mice and other vermin. Our cat was small and gray, with blue-gray eyes. We tied bright-colored cords around her neck, choosing colors that were appropriate to the seasons, but she tore them off and played with them, tiny gaudy snakes. After a time we took to calling her Shisutko, the little nun, because of her dislike of finery and her soft gray color.

  Shisutko was not exceptional in any way. She did not grow up to be arrogant, as so many cats do, and she did not grow loving, as so many of us hoped she would. She remained a creature of teeth and claws, and the only way we could show affection in an acceptable fashion was to fold paper into shapes and thread them onto string for her to chase. She slept near us, but she spent the rest of her time elsewhere. Sometimes, we heard her screaming in the garden; several months later she would vanish, and return with kittens.

  We offered her bits from our food, but she was as picky as a pregnant empress. She was uninterested in sweet rice candies, but she liked fish and the hot-tasting pickled vegetables. She also begged from the kitchen house, but mostly she found her own meals, sometimes bringing them to us. I was less squeamish than the others, s
o it often fell to me to remove the mice and voles. I examined one once, its tiny broken bones like twigs, and blood and saliva at the back of its neck. It was panting, eyes bright and fixed on me. I killed it.

  “What have you done?” one of my women gasped.

  “I stopped its pain,” I said, and handed the mouse back to the cat to eat. Typically, she was no longer interested, absorbed instead in cleaning her paws, eyes half-closed as she lay in a patch of sun on the veranda. This was my first experience of a cat’s nature.

  And now: Myb has been sleeping on the sleeve of my maple-colored robes since this morning. I was wearing those robes but had not the heart to disturb her, so I slipped my arm free, and eventually discarded them altogether to change into another set, leaving her in undisputed possession. If I were to ask her what the point was of being a cat, what would she answer?

  And what is the point of being a woman?

  I cannot say why the tortoiseshell woman and Osa Hitachi no Nakara became close. The cat-woman expressed no affection and had little in common with Nakara, and yet they were friends. Nakara had her own concerns, so perhaps she saw the tortoiseshell woman’s grief and her strangeness, and pitied them, and her. And Nakara had certain experience with the creatures who could take human form, and it is possible that she saw a cat’s nature in her companion, and so understood not to expect what she might from a woman.