The Tokaido Road

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  Only a single slice of fugu, blowfish, remained. It was paper thin and transparent enough for Cat to see the deep blue waves painted on the porcelain platter under it. Unless cleaned correctly, a speck of the poison in the fish’s ovaries and liver could kill a person.

  As the numbness spread through his body, the guest had been able to think clearly but unable to talk. He probably had known he was dying when he’d lost control of his arms and legs and then his lungs and sphincter.

  Kira, Cat thought. He won’t be content until he’s killed me.

  Tomorrow was the fourteenth, the monthly anniversary of her father’s suicide. Lord Kira Kozuke-no-suke Yoshinaka had been responsible for that suicide. Maybe Kira feared Cat would do something rash on the fourteenth. Maybe he thought she was plotting revenge. Maybe he merely had decided to ensure that Cat bore no children to threaten him in the future.

  With a chopstick Cat poked the last slice of fugu. Not often did death arrive in such a lovely package. The filmy slices of pale flesh had been artistically arranged in the form of a flying crane. It was the sort of ironic gesture Lord Kira would make. The crane was a symbol of longevity. But fugu was also a powerful aphrodisiac, which was why the customer had eaten with such gusto. A pinch of death was spice for fornication as well as for food.

  Except for the inconvenience his corpse caused, Cat wasn’t sorry the guest was dead. He had recently come into an inheritance and had been scattering it like rice chaff about the Yoshiwara. He was a clerk in the government finance office, a bannerman with ambitions.

  He had bad breath, a face like a pickle jar, and his poetry was trite and contrived. Cat regarded him as she would a slug that had invaded her rooms and left a trail of slime behind it. His remains would cause a great deal of trouble to Old Jug Face, the auntie of the Perfumed Lotus, but he was still inconsequential. The important problem was that Lord Kira was trying to kill Cat.

  As Cat knelt on the wheat-colored tatami in the pool of pale golden light thrown by the night lantern, she withdrew into herself.

  We lock infinity into a square foot of silk;

  Pour a deluge from the inch-space of the heart.

  The ancient poem calmed her. Behind her closed eyelids Cat could see the ink-laden brush drawing it out in bold, black strokes. For a moment she dwelt in the inch-space of her heart, the core of her being. She didn’t stay there long because in his Water Book Miyamoto Musashi warned to beware the stopping-mind. Cat knew she had to act.

  Slender and graceful as an iris, she rose in a murmur of silk and glided across the elegant room, her purple satin overrobe billowing behind her. She slid aside a panel of the paper wall and slipped into the small dressing room. It was as homey and cluttered as the entertaining room was bare.

  Cat’s toiletries lay scattered about the freestanding black-lacquered shelves. The mirrors, the combs, the jars and boxes and brush handles, matched the shelves. All bore, in mother-of-pearl, the Asano family crest of crossed feathers. In a corner, a big orange cat slept on a second set of shelves that held books and the long-necked samisen Cat had been learning to play.

  Cat moved to the screen standing in the opposite corner. The steep black ravines and gray clouds, the prickly pine trees and silver swirls of mist painted on the screen looked inviting. Cat wished she could walk into the landscape and disappear among the pines.

  “Butterfly.” Cat knelt beside the pallet behind the screen. She gently shook the child sleeping under a pair of thin quilts.

  “Earthquake?” The girl sat bolt upright, then fell back with a thud against the pillow stand when she realized the roof tiles weren’t chattering in the throes of a tremor.

  “Get up.”

  “What hour is it, mistress?” Butterfly mumbled.

  Cat glanced at the slow-burning incense joss on the bookshelf. It was perfuming time as well as marking it. “Almost midway through the hour of the Boar. Centipede will lock the Great Gate soon. We have to hurry.”

  “Where are we going?” Butterfly was confused. The hour was too late to promenade or to run an errand. And she had not gone outside the walls of the Yoshiwara pleasure district since her distraught and impoverished mother had sold her to a procurer two years before, when the girl was seven years old. As far as Butterfly knew, her mistress, Cat, had left it only a few times. Almost none of the white-necked ones left the Yoshiwara unless they were dead or dying. Was her mistress dying?

  “I need you to comb out my hair,” Cat whispered over her shoulder as she brought the rough earthenware jug of water from beside the shelves.

  Butterfly hastily wrapped an apron around her wadded cotton sleeping robe, tied back her sleeves, and pondered this latest surprise. Cat never drew her own water. Old Jug Face employed a small army of maids and servants and apprentices to do that sort of work.

  Cat obviously wasn’t going to explain anything, and the child dared not ask more questions. She knelt behind Cat, who sat in front of the big round mirror on its lacquered stand. While Butterfly untied the hidden paper ribbons that held the tiers of coils and falls of Cat’s hairdo in place, Cat scrubbed the white makeup from her face.

  “How shall I fix it, mistress?” Butterfly asked softly. The soft, glossy mass of hair lay across her palm, and she continued combing it almost reverently.

  “Simply tie it.”

  Butterfly wound a flat, red paper ribbon around the hair, catching it just above Cat’s waist in a style no longer in fashion. It made her appear archaic, like a lady of the royal court.

  When Cat finished washing the layer of powder off her face, neck, arms, and hands, she dipped a brush into the jar of black paint and thickened her arched eyebrows. With her heavy eyebrows and the few freckles scattered across her nose, Cat looked like a demon, a very beautiful demon.

  The festivities next door had grown more boisterous. They were having so much fun, in fact, that the party on the other side of them slid back a section of the paper-paneled wall between the rooms and joined them. A guest had pulled the bumpy skin of a sea slug over his erect ano mono, “that thing.” One of the women had drawn a face on it with her teeth-blackening paint. Now it was preceding its owner, leading them all in a game of Follow the Leader. The drum beat steadily, and the paper walls vibrated as they danced in a long, tipsy, naked line around the enlarged room.

  “Help me drag him out of here.” Cat pulled the big, soiled quilt around the customer as efficiently as if she were changing dirty linen.

  The quilt was shaped like a large kimono, and Cat brought the bottom edge up between his spraddled legs and put it together with the sleeves. It formed a bulky sling with the customer’s skinny shins sticking out in opposite directions. With his staring eyes and his open mouth, he seemed about to protest the indignity.

  “I might wake him.” Butterfly inadvertently touched his hand. It was as rigid as a bamboo back scratcher. She squealed.

  “Only the Beloved Amida, Buddha Himself, can wake him now.” Cat rapped Butterfly lightly on the crown of her head with a folded fan to recall her from death’s distractions. “He certainly doesn’t care what you do. And I didn’t kill him. The fugu wasn’t cleaned properly.”

  Butterfly looked in horror at the flimsy tissue of blowfish whose edges were curling up slightly as it dried. A dead fly lay on it.

  When Cat and Butterfly dragged the body off the pile of mattresses, it landed with a thud and knocked over a tall iron candle holder. Trapped gas escaped in a noisome explosion from the guest’s bowels. Butterfly giggled nervously into the palms of her hands. Cat looked around in alarm.

  She needn’t have worried. Against the ranks of sliding paper wall panels receding into the brothel’s dim interior, the writhing shadows and rustlings of professional courtship went on unabated. The laughter and drumming continued. Distant music cascaded from a samisen.

  “See if anyone is in the storeroom.” Cat was much stronger than her slender body looked. She dragged the bundle across the slick tatami to the opening through which Butte
rfly had just disappeared. She peered into the narrow servants’ corridor. For once, she was glad Old Jug Face had spitefully assigned her these rooms at the rear of the house.

  Butterfly scurried back, her feet snapping the hem of her robe. “It’s empty.”

  “Now find a candle on the shelf next to the books. Light it and bring it.”

  “Will you hide him in there?” Butterfly nodded toward the dark doorway of the storeroom.

  “I’m going to pickle him like an eggplant.”

  CHAPTER 2

  A STATE OF CONFUSION

  Cat slid the quilt sling and its stiff cargo along the cherry planks of the hallway. The wood was smooth, with a satiny patina buffed by forty years of daily rubbing with damp cloths. A single candle on an iron stand shed a dim light. The body bumped over the threshhold and onto the raised wooden walkway across the dirt floor of the storeroom. Cat let her breath out slowly and waited for her eyes to adjust to the gloom.

  The storeroom was a wild disorder of goods and tools stacked as high as the dusty rafters. Five hulking cedar barrels bound with hoops of twisted bamboo splints were stacked in a far corner. Old Jug Face transferred sake from the distilleries’ smaller casks into them so she could water it. The barrels were almost as tall as Cat was. This wouldn’t be easy.

  Cat knew she would have to put the body into the top rear barrel, which should be about half-full. The servants regularly siphoned off the sake from that one, figuring Old Jug Face wouldn’t notice. Cat was sure the mistress of the Perfumed Lotus charged the customers extra to cover the loss. That was easier than trying to stop the larceny.

  When Butterfly returned, Cat set the candle holder on a small shelf. Then she boosted the child onto the first row of barrels. “I’ll push while you pull.”

  Cat and Butterfly hauled the body up the side until the customer’s waist was balanced on the rim. Cat grasped each foot and shoved the corpse the rest of the way. She put the wooden pry bar on top of the casks, then climbed up a stack of bales of rice and onto them herself.

  She pried open the rear lid and slid it off. She and Butterfly wrestled the body into position and eased the customer headfirst into his last bath. Cat had to lean on his feet to crumple him enough to fit.

  The sake covered the guest’s soles. He wouldn’t begin to smell until the servants drained off enough wine to uncover him. Cat set the lid back on. She climbed down, scooped up a handful of fine dust from the dirt floor, and sifted it onto the cask lids to cover the evidence of activity. With a small broom Butterfly swept away their tracks in the dust behind them as they and the quilt retreated to Cat’s dressing room.

  The guest’s clothes hung on a wooden rack in the small reception room that led into the sleeping chamber. Cat regarded them with distaste. The shMgun, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi[i], banned his officials from frequenting the pleasure districts. The ban was ignored, of course, but those affected by it generally wore disguises. Cat’s guest had favored the clothing of a common laborer.

  Cat left the long strip of cloth the guest wore as underwear in his travel box sitting behind a low screen in her dressing room. She found another length of cotton cloth in her own big cedar chest. She stripped off her robes, folded them neatly, and put them in the chest.

  She stood perfectly still while Butterfly wound the cloth around her hips, pulled the end into the cleft of her buttocks, passed it between her legs, and tucked it into the front of the belt. When she finished, Cat was wearing the loincloth sported by men of the laboring class.

  Next Cat held one end of another long piece of cloth against her abdomen while Butterfly walked around her, pulling it taut as she wrapped it around Cat’s abdomen and chest.

  “Tighter,” Cat whispered.

  The cloth was called a haramaki, and commoners wore it around their stomachs for warmth and to protect their navels, the seat of their emotions, from the mischief of the Thunder god. Her uptilted breasts were small, but they were taut, and the nipples were large and firm. The haramaki, wrapped higher than usual, would flatten and hide them.

  Cat pulled on the blue drawers with their tight legs and baggy seat and tied them at the waist. Then she slipped into the light undershirt. Butterfly held up the dark blue wadded jacket with narrow sleeves. The number ten had been embroidered in white floss inside, indicating the clothes had been rented for this occasion. Cat flinched when the rough hemp cloth settled on her shoulders.

  It reached to her knees and had “Nakagawa Freight Company” and “Felicitous Service for Fifty Years” emblazoned in bold white characters down the back. Cat overlapped the front edges and held them while Butterfly wrapped the wide, stiff sash three times around her and tied it in back. The child arranged the sash high on Cat’s hips and rakishly low in front.

  Cat pulled the jacket up to shorten the hem hanging around her knees and expand it above the sash. It made her look bigger and provided hiding places for the things she would need on the road.

  Finally Cat knelt in front of her mirror again. She held her hair out taut, sucked in her breath, and, with her shears, cut it off just below her shoulders. Butterfly moaned. A woman’s hair was her pride.

  The three-foot-long hank of hair was still tied with the paper ribbon. She coiled it and folded it into a sheet of pliable rice paper. She tied the packet inside a blue silk scarf decorated with the Asano crest of crossed feathers stenciled in white. She put it into the front of the jacket, under her sash. No sense leaving behind any clues as to how she looked when she escaped.

  She pulled her hair together at the crown of her head and tied it into a man’s topknot. She draped the guest’s thin blue cotton towel over her head and knotted it just under her lower lip. The customer had worn it that way for the same reason Cat did, to hide his face.

  Butterfly watched with dread and fascination. Her mistress was a shape-shifter. She was one of the enchanted cats who disguised themselves as beautiful women to cause trouble for men. Cat certainly had caused trouble for the man who right then was sole deep in more sake than he’d ever dreamed of having.

  With her shears Cat cut off her long fingernails and wrapped them carefully in one of her embossed paper handkerchiefs. “Give them to Plover to sell for you.” She handed them to Butterfly.

  Butterfly knew how valuable they were. A courtesan would cut off a fingernail to give to a patron as a pledge of faithful and exclusive love. However, she often made the same pledge to several men. Since more than one short fingernail on her hand would expose the trickery, she bought extras.

  Cat hid the scissors inside her coat, under the sash. They might prove useful in the days ahead. She had decided to take revenge.

  “Mistress ...” Butterfly sucked her knuckles nervously while Cat rifled the customer’s small travel box.

  “Look down at your feet, child. Are they covered with rice paddy mud? A courtesan’s little sister doesn’t suck her fingers.” Cat felt a sharp pang of remorse. She might be endangering the child. “The less you know about this the better, little Butterfly.”

  “But, mistress ...”

  “Bring my travel cloak.”

  Cat didn’t know what to pack for a trip. Servants had always packed for her. In fact, servants had done just about everything for her.

  She rolled a thin cotton towel and draped it around her neck as commoners did. Inside her jacket she stowed her flat wallet of paper handkerchiefs and the bag containing her long-stemmed pipe with its tiny brass bowl. With a straw cord she hung from her sash a bamboo container that held wine but could be used to carry water. She considered taking along the collapsible pillow stand but decided it was too bulky.

  She found the guest’s wallet, opened the drawstring, and peered at the money inside. The three rolls of a hundred coppers each had been strung onto straw cords and the ends knotted to hold the coins tight against each other. A smaller roll was made up of silver coins.

  Cat wasn’t as naive as the noblewoman who thought a roll of coins was a huge caterpillar. Cat had seen mon
ey, but she had rarely held it. She folded back the opening of the wallet and touched the hard metal. She stroked the rough, round edges and wondered what these would buy. Then she pulled the drawstrings shut and tucked the sack inside her jacket, too. Old Jug Face would have separated the guest from his money in the morning anyway.

  Cat was wondering what else to take when she heard Old Jug Face shriek. She was so startled that she almost slowed down. Her father would have said she almost stopped the sword in its deadly arc. That was always a mistake, usually a fatal one.

  ‘ ‘Lout! Radish!” The auntie wasn’t shrieking at Cat, though. A customer must have urinated against the paper panels enclosing her office near the entrance of the Perfumed Lotus. Now and then a drunken guest, too lazy to walk to the privy, missed the edge of the veranda and hit the paper panes.

  “What about the auntie, mistress?”

  Cat sighed. When she made her decision to sell herself into the Yoshiwara, she went to the House of the Carp, where her nurse’s niece, Plover, lived. Plover had told Cat about the Carp’s kind mistress and friendly atmosphere. But Cat had been ignorant of the customs of the pleasure district. She hadn’t realized that the house where she and Plover lived was not the one where they would work. They met their guests in the Perfumed Lotus, and Old Jug Face ruled the Perfumed Lotus.

  “I’ll sneak past her,” Cat said. But she and Butterfly both knew that wasn’t likely. Old Jug Face employed brawny peasants and out-of-work samurai as shopmen, inside men, bed men, overseers, bath men, and downstairs men, not to mention the people Lord Kira had sneaked in as spies. They all took turns as nightwatchmen.

  Confusion. Cat reviewed the advice in Musashi’s Fire Book. “Induce a state of confusion in the opponent.”

  She scooped up the orange cat still sleeping on her bookshelf, his stomach and legs hanging over the edge. She had named the scarred old warrior Monk for good reason. He maintained a meditative tranquillity in the midst of all this late-night activity and shape-changing.