The Tokaido Road

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  “Please deliver Monk to Little Dragon’s room.” She handed the cat to Butterfly. “Then go to Mistress Plover’s room and stay with her. Tell her I asked that she say you were with her all night.” Cat glanced at the joss stick’s wooden holder. The sandal wood had burned almost to the notch marking midnight, the watch of the Rat. “Tell Mistress Plover I’ll miss her.”

  Butterfly slung the inert Monk over the crook of one arm. With her free hand, she poked under her mattress until she found a small brocade sack closed with a drawstring. When she handed it to Cat the copper coins inside clinked cheekily for such a piddling sum. They were her secret fund, the tips customers had given her for running errands.

  “No, little Butterfly,” said Cat. “Keep your tea money. One day, if a rich, handsome man doesn’t marry you first, you’ll save enough to buy your freedom.”

  “Mistress, forgive my rudeness, but this is a good-bye present.” Butterfly gathered the courage to contradict Cat. “You’ll need money to eat and sleep out there.”

  Butterfly had almost forgotten what “out there” was like, but she had overheard the guests’ stories. Out there people had to struggle for their daily rice and a roof. Bandits and demons and tax collectors lurked out there.

  Tears brimmed in Butterfly’s eyes. Lady Cat had been a good mistress. She sent warmed sake out to her box bearers on cold nights. She hushed up the maids’ indiscretions. And if, during a long night of entertaining, Butterfly fell asleep on the job, she didn’t scold.

  Lady Cat was haughty, that was true. But Butterfly knew hauteur was to be expected in a woman of a samurai family. And she sensed that Cat’s eyes mocked the world so no one would pity her. Only Plover and Butterfly had seen, in Cat’s rare, unguarded moments, the grief in her dark eyes.

  Butterfly also knew that Cat was old. She would turn nineteen at the celebration of the New Year. Nineteen was a most unlucky age. The characters for nineteen also meant “repeated sorrows. “ Cat had had more than her share of sorrow.

  “The Lord Buddha will watch over me.” Cat knelt so she could look into Butterfly’s face. She put her best jade comb into the sack with Butterfly’s tea money. “Please accept this trifle in thanks for all you’ve done. As one more favor I ask that you deliver Monk.” Cat smiled conspiratorially.

  Butterfly slid the wall panel open just enough to slip through. Cat picked up the guest’s rented hat, shaped like a wide, flat, shallow bowl. She slipped the inner woven cap onto her head and tied the paper cords under her chin. The name of the rental shop was painted on the brim. The hat too was designed to hide a face.

  Cat went to the open wall panel and waited. She didn’t look over her shoulder at the rooms where she had earned her living for the past year. Most of her books and her ornate chests full of the sumptuous robes of her new profession were in the room she shared with Plover at the House of the Carp.

  Cat didn’t have to wait long. Butterfly knew the brothel’s maze of narrow back hallways well. She silently slid aside the thin wooden panel of Little Dragon’s rear wall. Little Dragon was entertaining her guest with the erotic tricks her small dog, Chin-Chin, could perform. From the darkness outside the room, Butterfly slung Monk back in both hands and heaved him inside as high and as hard as she could. When Monk landed he was irritated.

  Chin-Chin’s plumed tail stiffened over his back like a battle banner. Yapping hysterically, he scrambled up the length of his mistress’s prone, naked torso, leaving claw tracks on her stomach and chest. Getting a purchase on the foothills of Little Dragon’s hairdo, Chin-Chin launched himself at Monk, who was ricocheting off the folding screens and shredding the paper walls. Monk sounded as if he were being skinned and gutted to make a samisen. Against Chin-Chin, Monk had the edge in weight, speed, reach, and volume.

  Little Dragon’s naked customer fell seat first into the glowing coals of the firebox sunk into a well in the floor. His howls of pain, Little Dragon’s screams, and the crash of mirror stands and sake jars and folding screens caught Old Jug Face’s attention. Cat could trace the auntie’s progress by the rise and fall of her shouts as she ignored corridors and charged straight through adjacent entertaining rooms to save time.

  In his hurry to get to the excitement, a drunken three-hundred-pound wrestler plunged through a wall into the game of Follow the Leader. Floors and walls shuddered under the impact. Someone began screaming, “Earthquake!” From all over the house footsteps and shouts converged on Little Dragon’s rooms. Cat could hear Monk’s battle cries above the din.

  Soak in, Monk. Close with your enemy and strike quickly. Cat thought about the Fire Book again. Monk was like any good warrior. He was meditative in peace and formidable in war. He was capable of taking on the entire assembly if necessary.

  Cat smiled grimly to herself. There was no turning back now. The boat had been boarded, as the old saying went.

  CHAPTER 3

  AIM FOR HIS WEAK POINT

  Cat sat on the large flat rock that served as a stoop at the side entrance and selected a pair of straw sandals left there by the guests’ servants and box bearers. The rough straw weave began to abrade her tender feet the moment she put them on. From inside she heard Chin-Chin’s howl deteriorate into tormented yipping. Monk had soaked in. He had closed with his enemy.

  As Cat stood in the narrow passageway between the two-story Perfumed Lotus and the House of the Spring Fan next door, her metaphorical sword hesitated briefly in its course. Cat suddenly understood Old Jug Face’s ancient parrot.

  The parrot was bald on top, but for one tattered feather. He looked as if his mistress regularly dusted hard-to-reach corners with him. He brooded malevolently in his cage, his stubby gray head lowered and swinging in tiny arcs, like a snake preparing to strike. He lived only to eat rice, swill sake, and tenderly nibble Old Jug Face’s pendulous earlobes. He bloodied any finger that strayed within range. He was a moth-eaten tyrant until his mistress let him out of his cage. Then he cowered until she put him back.

  Cat put a hand on the rough, weathered timbers of her own cage. Had she escaped the dragon’s mouth, or was she walking into it?

  No matter. She hadn’t escaped anything yet. She still had to pass under Centipede’s ravaged nose.

  The back alleys of the pleasure district were quite different from the lovely gardens and serene front rooms where guests were received. The narrow passage was crowded with buckets and tools, broken barrows and strings of braided barrel hoops. Cat scuffed the reeking stew of alley mud onto her smooth, pale feet. She pulled the hat brim lower over her eyes and drew her slender, manicured hands into her sleeves. Abandoning the hip-swaying gait of the courtesan, she walked with the deliberate care of someone drunk trying to pass for someone sober.

  She moved smoothly into the unsteady stream of men who hadn’t the money to stay until dawn with their “one-night wives.” Groups of them laughed and sang and composed poetry to the white-necked ones and to rented passion. Cat walked among them as though in a dream. As though she were looking down on herself and on the tipsy throng around her.

  Both sides of the main thoroughfare were lined with round paper lanterns hanging from the first-story eaves. As the Yoshiwara emptied, sleepy servants lowered the lights on the ends of long poles. When snuffed, the wicks gave off a strong odor of whale oil that settled over the street. Almost directly overhead, the moon, which was almost full, looked like a lantern they couldn’t quite reach.

  Most of the beggars and musicians and peddlers had moved outside the gate to importune the men as they exited. Servants were sliding the heavy wooden shutters across the open fronts of the tea shops and assignation houses. Soon they would present a uniformly blank face to the customers who had spent their silver and were of no further use. The “ground-tea harlots” no longer sat behind the wooden grills in front of the lower-class brothels. They had gone to work or to bed, which amounted to the same thing.

  The gay district called the Yoshiwara covered eighteen boggy acres enclosed by a high wal
l. Besides the massive two-story houses where the courtesans lived or met their guests, there were hundreds of tea shops called “introduction houses” where arrangements were made for evening trysts. In the tea houses near the Perfumed Lotus, a list of Cat’s accomplishments was included on the menu of second-rank courtesans.

  Cat was one of those known as “midway starters.” Because of her upper-class upbringing she had become a courtesan without having gone through the usual apprenticeship. If Cat had stayed in the Yoshiwara, she surely would have been elevated to toyu, courtesan of the first rank.

  In the pleasure districts toyu were royalty of sorts. They selected their patrons from among the richest and most refined men. Their beauty, grace, and accomplishments were admired throughout the country, and they set not only fashion, but style. There were only four toyu in the Yoshiwara.

  If Cat had stayed, her earnings would have assured a comfortable life for her mother. Providing for her mother was why Cat had sold herself in the first place. She had done it even though she knew that would make it easier for Lord Kira to spy on her. Even though her beauty and talents were filling Old Jug Face’s brass-bound money chests with the lozenge-shaped gold coins. When Lord Kira and Old Jug Face discovered Cat was missing, the search for her would be thorough and extensive.

  Thousands of courtesans, waitresses, apprentices, cooks, scullery help, and maids lived here. The Yoshiwara was a city of women, constant and pliant, perplexing and accommodating. Men flowed in and out like the tides. Now, as the hour approached midnight, the tide was ebbing. The flow was constricted at one narrow outlet, the small door in the Great Gate, guarded by Mukade no Gonzo, the man everyone called Centipede, but not in his hearing.

  As Cat drew closer she saw the old man standing, small and wiry and intense as a hummingbird, at the gate. Near by, his assistants took the wooden tickets men handed them in exchange for their weapons. The long swords and the occasional bows, halberds, and spears were stored by type on wall racks in the small gate house. It wouldn’t do to have a samurai, deep in his cups, decide to dice a paying customer. Guests were required to check their weapons at the entrances to the various houses. Some men, however, preferred to leave their arms with Centipede.

  Centipede was seventy. Old scars cleaved the dark, wrinkled leather of his nose and parted the bush of his left eyebrow. Each year, as his hair receded, he had to shave less of his head to maintain his warrior’s topknot. But he was still lean and tough and resilient as the steel of his two swords, heated, folded, and hammered repeatedly in the forge of adversity. His eyesight and memory were as keen as his blades.

  The small door in the fifteen-foot-high gate was brightly lit with lanterns. Centipede studied every person who passed through it. He would remember the unremarkable customer in the shabby blue Nakagawa Freight coat even though the press at the door grew more frenetic as midnight approached.

  For a man without money to be locked into the Yoshiwara was humiliating at best and often disastrous. He would have to seek shelter in a house that would extend him credit. Knowing a man was at their mercy often resulted in exorbitant expenses for one night’s lodging. Toughs from some of the lower-class establishments had been known to move into a defaulter’s home and wreak havoc on his domestic life until the debt was paid.

  As Cat neared the periphery of Centipede’s buzzard stare, she wandered out of the traffic and into the shadow of a stack of fire buckets at the head of an alley. She sneaked the bamboo cylinder from her coat and decanted it. She spread her feet, cocked her hips, and tilted the cylinder under her coat hem. While the stream of wine splashed into the dust, she stared contemplatively out over the throng. She wore the usual look of a man astonished yet again that pissing was such a thoroughly soul-satisfying act.

  As she shook the last drops from the cylinder, Cat finished her survey of the crowd. Her means of escape was somewhere among the guests and servants, the messengers, jugglers, procurers, shills, cutpurses, and food vendors with their portable shops balanced on bamboo poles across their shoulders. Cat’s means appeared as though on cue.

  He was a person of great importance, which was why he was dressed as a peasant. Forbidding bureaucrats to visit the Yoshiwara was like forbidding a tidal wave to hit the shore. Thousands of men were required to run a government based on intrigue and pervasive suspicion. They were the Yoshiwara’s most valuable customers.

  This one was a metsuke, an inspector and an official gatherer of intelligence for the shMgun’s junior council of elders. He was a ponderous blotch of a man who had drunk too much sake to make the journey to the Great Gate unaided. Two huge, shaven-headed servants of the House of the Winged Mountain supported him between them. The weaving course the servants steered indicated they had been drinking, too.

  The metsuke wore a big bamboo hat and straw sandals. Even though the night sky was cloudless, he wore a raincape made of thick layers of rice straw tied around his neck and waist. It thatched him from his trio of overlapping chins to his bulbous calves. He looked like a straw stack with feet. Cat recognized him.

  Thank you, Kannon-sama, she thought. The thousand-armed goddess of mercy had sent the perfect man for Cat’s needs.

  During the mornings and afternoons the Yoshiwara was empty of guests. A languorous tranquillity settled over it then, the more precious because it was transitory. The young apprentices swept up, and servants cleared away the night’s debris or watered down the dust in the streets. Trusted go-betweens delivered “next-morning-letters.” Maids gossiped at the district’s new well.

  In the mornings men emptied the contents of the privies into long buckets and carried away the precious cargo to fertilize the outlying fields. Paperers came with their rolls of heavy rice paper, glue, and laths to repair panels mangled in the night’s revelry. Farmers carried on their backs towering wooden frames piled with lotus roots and cabbages and huge white radishes. On the corner of Yedo-cho and Ni-cho-me streets, greengrocers and fishmongers hawked their wares.

  The courtesans gathered then for dance or calligraphy or samisen lessons in the large, uncluttered tatami rooms behind the closed shutters. They discussed the latest permutations of the hairdo fashions while the blind shampooers plied their trade. They talked endlessly of love and the possibility of some rich patron freeing them from the Yoshiwara. They bathed together in cedar bathtubs big enough to soap down a horse. They joked about the guests.

  Their laughter found its way through the cracks in the wooden shutters and rippled throughout the Yoshiwara. When this one’s name was mentioned, the jokes turned bitter.

  This one’s juices flowed only when he inflicted pain. But Cat hated the man for more than his casual cruelty. He was a distant cousin of Lord Kira.

  Aim for his weak point, Musashi advised. And with your body rather floatingly, join in with his movement as he draws near.

  As he approached her, Cat put her small pipe in her mouth as though she were going to take a few puffs. She separated one of her paper handkerchiefs from the folded stack of them in her wallet and twisted it. She lifted the oiled paper shade of a square street lantern and lit the end of the twisted napkin. She shielded the guttering flame with her sleeve as she swiveled smoothly. She bent and, hidden by the bulk of the servants’ backs, held it to the bottom of the straw-thatch raincoat as the metsuke passed.

  The flame spread noisily outward and upward, toward the peak of the official’s rented, conical straw hat. The layers of straw in the raincape curled and blackened behind the fire, exposing hairy calves and the folds of an expensive silk brocade kimono tucked up into the man’s sash.

  The metsuke sniffed in alarm. A strong smell of smoke always made people nervous. Fiery holocausts swept the city so often, they were called the Flowers of Edo.

  The servants flailed at the blaze with their cloaks but only succeeded in fanning it. The metsuke clawed at the cape’s ties, knotted at his neck and waist, while the flames reached up around him, embracing him. He began to scream. Cat could smell burning
hair and burning flesh at about the same time.

  The watcher in the fire platform atop the tea house nearest the gate began tolling the big bronze bell. Men and women, in dishabille and carrying whatever they could grab, spilled into the streets. The metsuke decided that if he couldn’t get the cape off, he would run away from it. As he raced, shrieking, back into the Yoshiwara, people scattered in front of him. The wind of his passing only made the blaze hotter. Sparks billowed and pranced upward.

  “Shire mono! Idiots!” Centipede elbowed through the crowd, trying to clear a path for the fire brigade.

  When Cat ducked through the low door, no one followed her. The government had devised a variety of inventive public executions, but seeing a man immolated alive was a rare form of entertainment. No one wanted to miss it. Cat was almost pushed back by those outside rushing in to see the spectacle.

  Cat threaded her way through the deserted palanquins parked outside the gate. She passed the small shrine to Inari-sama, the Rice God, and the Colt-Tethering-Pine-Tree near it. She passed the tiny kiosks that sold guidebooks to the pleasure districts. And she hurried by the stands that rented clothing and hats. In the morning they would no doubt send a man to try to collect the price of the clothes and hat from the dead guest.

  Cat walked down Dressing Hill, where men adjusted their clothing before going home to their wives. At the Gazing-Back-Willow she turned to look at the high wall. Behind it, the spy was transmuting into greasy smoke, dark and ominous against the pale moon. Cat could hear people shouting, but the spy’s screams were weakening. She waited until they stilled. The bronze fire bell stopped ringing, but its booming voice resonated in Cat’s ears.

  The watchman’s wooden clappers struck the hour of the Rat. The rectangle of light in the Great Gate disgorged a gout of men before it narrowed, then darkened. The Yoshiwara was closed for the night.