Fudoki
Page 32
Another piece of this story: a small tortoiseshell cat stands on the banks of a stream. The sun is out, but it is very cold; snow has mounded into strange shapes on the ground. Her breath puffs from her nostrils, like smoke from an inner fire, but she does not feel the cold through her winter-thick fur.
The stream’s water is brilliantly clear, and there is a fish there, a trout as long as her tail. She can see it hover, every blue-green scale as brilliant as Mikawa silk, or a butterfly’s wing. The fish’s shadow hangs against the warm gray stones of the streambed. The tortoiseshell is reluctant to risk falling into the water, which she knows would be horrid. Still: a fish, and such a fish, fat and beautiful, and so close to the water’s surface. And she is always hungry, keeping the kittens in her womb fed until they are born. She creeps down to a stone that touches the water, and crouches low, one paw raised over the water, patient.
The fish seems to examine the paw, as if it were an insect hovering above the water. Its eye is bright and shallow as a blade. It flicks a fin and raises higher in the water, closer to her claws.
“Cat!” Otoko’s voice, behind her. “There you are.” The tortoiseshell blinks and the fish is gone, as quickly as that. She stretches and sighs, and saunters closer to the man.
“Look what I have, girl.” He cracks open his basket to show her the contents, all blue-green scales and blade-bright eyes; half a dozen trout. “Let’s go home and have Uona cook these up, hey?” The tortoiseshell lets him stroke her head for a moment and then follows him home.
This notebook is nearly filled, but I have enough room to tell this much more. Kagaya-hime will have six kittens, from five fathers. This new land will belong to her, a part of a new fudoki that begins with her.
16. The Last Notebook
There is nothing left in these rooms: only two small trunks, and several bundles of indeterminate shape—and, I am afraid, contents; there are always a thousand last-minute requirements for anyone traveling, and they never fit into the storage space allotted to them.
I have burned all the notebooks but this one. I wrote them for my own reasons. When their job was done, I burned them, converting ink on paper to the loose calligraphy of smoke. Before I leave these rooms, I will burn this one as well.
The priests have been with me all morning, preparing me for my entrance into Kasugano—and, eventually, the Pure Land, though I’m afraid I daydreamed through their interminable prayers—regrettable, since I expect I will have need of their good wishes. I kneel behind a curtain (for not even now am I expected to be barefaced before these men; really, this makes me nearly laugh), so when I receive my nun’s robes, they are handed past the curtain, and it is Shigeko who drapes them over my own blue-green robes and then kneels again beside me. She and I share a smile, but we say nothing.
The priests have offered to clip a mere hand’s length of my long hair: a polite symbol of my separation from this world with none of the embarrassment (not to say shame) of having hair short as a servant-girl’s. The priests sound impressed, if a little shocked when I demand that they cut it to my shoulders; even Buddha’s servants are not impervious to social proprieties. Shigeko gathers the lengths of my hair in her hands, tugging at my head a little as she passes them through an opening in the curtain. The shears make a grating noise, and then a cascade of black and white pours back through the gap: the new ends of my hair. They aren’t willing to go so far as shoulder-length hair, but it only hangs to my waist now, and my head feels weightless, light on my neck. If I decide it is still too long, I can always have Shigeko cut it shorter.
They give Shigeko her robes, and cut her hair, as well. There is a little more praying, and they bow themselves out. They do not stay to accompany us: we have told them that the emperor very kindly offered men and carriages to carry us the short miles to Kasugano. I nearly laugh out loud.
For I am lying to everyone except Shigeko. I am running away—or rather, we are running away together, two old women sneaking away to see what sights they can before they die.
Shigeko has found a useful man of no rank whatsoever, but immense virtue in that he understands animals and traveling. And the Tkaid. His mother accompanies us to empty chamber boxes and makes sure we are fed; she used to wash for us, so we know she is patient with the foibles of old women. He has found others to assist us, guards and grooms and carters; and some quiet horses and two pairs of (I am assured) extremely well-mannered oxen. If we need further help, we will find some useful peasant-girl and exchange hair ornaments for her exertions.
I can’t say how far I will be able to travel before the weight in my chest kills me. It may be no farther than Otsu, just past the walls of the city, or the first ferry (I might cross water in a boat! Think of it!). I think it’s too much to hope that I will see the great mountain Fuji before I die, but at least I will see the sky unfringed by walls.
And I have this letter, in whisker-fine calligraphy, about fish that “mention my name.” It was unsigned, of course—she never did have a name, only what she was called—but there is a single line after the poem. If it is a poem: I still cannot decide:
I look forward to meeting you.
Of course it is she, now mother and grandmother to a thousand cats, The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles. She returned to her cat’s shape, but she is no longer just a cat. Why might she not have questions for me, just as I have questions for her? And why might we not meet?
Shigeko and I have talked much about her these last days. I know that she is as real as I am. I thought that I invented her, that she had no more existence than any other set of words on paper; but I know now that this is not true. She saw things I did not expect, and felt things I did not mean her to. She is as real as flesh, as ghosts.
I am not sure if she means I will make it all the way to Mutsu province; or that we travel toward one another and will meet in some monastery or temple between here and there, when I grow at last too ill to travel; or even that she will meet me in the Pure Land when we are both dead. I am not sure whether she will be a woman or a cat—or, for that matter, what I will be. But then, I will still be Harueme, and she will still be the cat Kagaya-hime.
I would like Shigeko to meet her.
Author’s Note
Fudoki, which may be translated as “records of wind and earth,” were eighth-century documents collecting information about individual provinces for the imperial court. They included descriptions of natural features and population centers, local resources and products, bits of folklore and history—anything that the compilers thought might be of interest back in the capital. I adopted the word as the closest parallel to my cats’ shared reality.
Harueme writes her notebooks in the year 1129, during the reign of her great-grandnephew, Sutoku. While she is fictional, she shares some characteristics with Shirakawa’s real sisters, Atsuko and Reishi. She has somewhat more in common with the noblewoman in the tale-fragment, “The Woman Who Loved Vermin.”
Favorite primary sources for this book were: The Emperor Horikawa Diary (tr. Jennifer Brewster), and the war-tales Mutsuwaki (tr. Helen Craig McCullough), and Hgen monogatari (tr. William R. Wilson). Secondary sources I found useful were Insei by G. Cameron Hurst III, and the second volume of the Cambridge History of Japan, edited by Donald H. Shiveley and William H. McCullough. Favorite material on feral cats included Paul Leyhausen’s Cat Behavior, Claire Necker’s The Natural History of Cats, and especially Jack Couffer’s The Cats of Lamu.
Karl F. Friday proved a generous and invaluable resource. His book, Hired Swords, was a fascinating and useful exploration of Heian-era military power. In addition, he very kindly answered even my stupidest questions with patience and clarity, and allowed me to see unpublished material on Heian combat technique. I can never fully express my gratitude for all his help.
I wish to thank the following for their assistance: Irene Michon for her insights into the writing process; writers Walter S. Williamson, Melissa Shaw, Louise Marley, and the Kilomon-keys (Wolf Baur
, Ted Chiang, Jeff Grubb, Bridget McKenna, Marti McKenna, Chris McKitterick, and Lorelei Shannon); formerly feral cats Baby, Bro, Meerkat, Helen, Tatsuko, and Sanj; and especially Peg Kerr and Chris McKitterick. Mistakes in this book are entirely my own.
Since it all happened a long distance away, I am sensible of having made a great many blunders, which anyone acquainted with the truth is at liberty to correct.
—Mutsuwaki
translated by Helen Craig McCullough
Tor Books by Kij Johnson
The Fox Woman
Fudoki
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
FUDOKI
Copyright © 2003 by Kij Johnson
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
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New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Johnson, Kij.
Fudoki / Kij Johnson.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN: 978-1-4668-0065-6
1. Women soldiers—Fiction. 2. Metamorphosis—Fiction. 3. Japan—Fiction. 4. Cats—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3560.O379716F83 2003
813'.54—dc21
2003053345