The Tokaido Road

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  Cat knelt on a silken cushion and tossed crushed acorns into the turbulence. She dipped her fingers in the water to feel the nibbling of the fish’s hard mouths and to hear the chuffing sounds they made. But the cherry blossoms turned to snow and piled up around her. An icy wind began to blow. Cat tried to pull her thin spring robes closer around her, but they shredded under her fingers and fell away.

  She heard loud voices and the heavy tread of men’s feet in the quiet corridors. She turned to see that the paper panes of the door panels beyond the garden veranda were ripped. Their torn edges flapped in the sudden wind. Tall weeds had sprouted among the flat gray stones of the pathways.

  As Cat slept, she drew her knees up tighter and jerked in a spasm of terror. She tried to scream but could only whimper. She awoke with a start and lay there, orienting herself and remembering.

  She remembered the stifled sobbing in distant rooms, as the servants hurried to empty the storehouse and pack the household goods. The shMgun had granted them only a day to leave the house that had been Cat’s home since birth. By the time Cat’s father committed seppuku, in a distant garden, the house had been turned over to government agents.

  Forgive me, Father. I wanted to bid you good-bye.

  Cat hadn’t been allowed to watch him carry out the shMgun’s sentence, but she knew the ritual well. He had dressed in the white robes of death that every samurai kept ready. He had knelt under the cherry tree with blossoms blowing around him. A trusted swordsman, blade poised, stood behind him. He had pulled his arms out of the wide sleeves and tucked them under his knees so he would fall forward instead of sprawling in an undignified way. He had reached for the dagger on its tall, ceremonial tray and held its paper-wrapped hilt steadily in both hands, the blade turned toward himself.

  Cat couldn’t see what followed, though. Even if she had been present, the act would have happened too swiftly for the eye to see. The sword descended in a flash of light. Cat could only picture her father’s head hanging from the piece of skin the swordsman left so it wouldn’t bounce away. To keep from crying out, Cat bit down hard on the heel of her thumb.

  Everything that happens in life is reward or punishment for what we have done. Only the ignorant resent their fate. Cat’s mother had said it often. It had been her soft admonition throughout Cat’s rebellious childhood. But Cat did resent the cruelties of fate. That was why she hadn’t become a nun as her mother had. She could not sit in a small room copying sutras for the rest of her life. A hunger for revenge was gnawing at her soul. Religious piety wouldn’t satisfy it.

  Still shivering with the cold, she stood stiffly. In the cramped space she tried to brush out the wrinkles in the baggy hempen trousers of her priest’s costume. She straightened the tattered, belted overcoat whose frayed lower edge reached just below her knees. The pale hem of the short priest’s robe showed below it. Then she walked around in front of the statue.

  She put her palms together, fingers pointed heavenward, and draped Shichisaburo’s rosary over them, holding it in place with her thumbs. She bowed her head and asked the goddess, Kannon-sama, to bless her. The statue was ancient, carved from a camphor log in some forgotten time by some forgotten hand. The gilt paint that had covered it had mostly worn away.

  This particular image of the thousand-armed goddess had only four hands. Two were folded in prayer. One was raised toward heaven. The fourth held a lotus blossom. Kannon-sama’s lovely face looked no older than Cat’s own. She smiled down so serenely that Cat almost smiled in return.

  Cat looked out from under the dripping eaves of the small chapel. A gray veil of mist twined through the grounds of Spring Hill Temple, as though the old stone monuments themselves were dissolving. Jewels of dew covered the dark green moss on the crowds of monuments and statues and the tall stone lanterns.

  The sky was as gray as the mist and the breasts of the pigeons flying about the wide eaves of the main temple building. The dawn bell began ringing. Night was opening. Cat had overslept.

  She took deep breaths to push back a momentary panic. This was where her father was buried. The police and Lord Kira’s men would certainly search here for her. She had to hurry.

  Close to Cat’s shelter was the stone marker of her father’s grave. His last poem had been incised into it. Cat had memorized it, but through her tears she read it anyway.

  Far more fragile than

  Tender blooms, so soon scattered

  By the fresh spring winds,

  Must I now bid you farewell

  And leave gentle spring behind?

  Oishi Kuranosuke had made arrangements for erecting this monument to his lord. He had contributed the funds to assure that the priests here performed the rituals for Lord Asano’s soul at the proper intervals. The grave was covered with fresh cedar boughs, a fragrant expression of grief. Someone had set out offerings of persimmons and rice. Cat could see the stubs of hundreds of joss sticks burned in her father’s memory.

  The temple bell continued tolling, its booming notes following one on the other like waves against a rocky shore. With a heart so full of grief that Cat feared it would break, she picked up the bamboo ladle lying on the stone basin. She filled it and rinsed her mouth to purify it. Then she poured more water over her hands and over the grave. She put her palms together and rubbed the beads of the rosary as she bowed her head and chanted a scripture for the repose of her father’s soul.

  In front of the statue of Kannon-sama lay a heap of wooden strips. Mourners had painted on them the names of dead loved ones. Cat had none for her father, but at least she could leave something.

  She took out the paper-wrapped coins from the dead guest’s purse and the blue scarf with its coiled hank of her shorn hair. This was the last money she could give her mother. Cat didn’t expect to live to see her again.

  She looked for a place to hide them and decided on the squat brass censer with its lid perforated in a design of autumn grasses. Cat recognized the urn. It had sat for years in the ornate altar cupboard in the main reception room of the inner apartments of her father’s mansion. Oishi had said it belonged to him so that Lord Asano’s wife would allow it to stay at the grave.

  When Cat emptied the ashes and blew out the residue, their aroma reminded her so strongly of home that she became disoriented for an instant. The incense was called Smoke of Fuji, a blend of camphor and sandalwood and secret ingredients mixed by the master, Wakayama. The subtle, magical smell had pervaded everything belonging to Cat’s mother. It had permeated her clothing and the tatami and bedding and screens of the inner chambers where she spent her days.

  As Cat breathed in the lingering traces of Smoke of Fuji, she breathed in her mother’s essence. She heard her soft voice, her laughter, like delicate wind chimes in another room. Cat longed to see her. Just a glimpse, a word. She could bear any danger then and any hardship. She could bear even the loneliness.

  As she was laying the scarf and the coins inside the censer, a clamor of bells and voices and small hand drums sent the pigeons flapping in all directions. Out of sight in the courtyard behind the temple the monks were kneeling in a line on square mats. They had begun their morning devotions. The time had come to start for Shinagawa, and the barrier set up to regulate travel.

  Cat reached into Kannon-sama’s chapel, picked up the flat brass bell lying there, and slipped the hemp cord over her head so the bell hung at her chest. Next, she pulled out a tall, bulbous cylinder of a basket with a section of latticework woven in. She settled the inner frame onto her head, tied the cords, and adjusted the hat so she could see through the open weave. Her face was unrecognizable behind it. The basket made her look taller than she was.

  Dressing Cat as a komuso, a priest of “empty nothing,” was Shichisaburo’s solution to the problem of a disguise. Komuso were mendicants, often former samurai, who traveled alone. At times they engaged in sorcery and exorcism. The fact that people expected them to behave strangely might cover the mistakes Cat was sure to make on the road.


  Shichisaburo had ransacked his theater’s costumes and props and had been rather proud of the result. Cat’s cropped hair was pulled into a shaggy horsetail near the top of her head. Even belted, the short white hemp robe and black coat were so big and shabby that they disguised Cat’s body. The bottoms of the rough, straw-colored trousers bloused out at the knees, below which they were gathered into black canvas gaiters and black tabi that buttoned up the back. The tabi socks hid her aristocratic feet and cushioned them from the chafing of the ties of her straw sandals.

  Best of all was the six-foot-tall bamboo walking staff that had been a prop from one of Shichisaburo’s plays. It contained the slender oak shaft for a halberd, a naginata. Holes had been bored through the solid joints of the bamboo. The rigid partitions at the joints held a naginata shaft in the bamboo’s hollow center and kept it from rattling around. A wooden stopper fit tightly into the opening at the top. Fastened over it was a cap of ornate iron filigree in the shape of a paulownia leaf. Three iron rings hung from each side loop.

  Housed in a leather sheath, then swaddled in cloth, was the long, gracefully curved blade that attached to the naginata shaft. The government forbade the use of metal in stage swords, but Shichisaburo’s troupe had skirted the law by rationalizing that a naginata wasn’t a sword.

  Cat would have preferred to carry a weapon she didn’t have to stop to assemble, but this was far better than nothing. The naginata was unadorned, but solid. Musashi would have approved of it. He wrote that just as a horse must have endurance and no defects, so it was with weapons.

  The naginata was the weapon of choice of women of the samurai class. Several of them had hung over the front doorway of Cat’s mother’s house. In these times of peace neither Cat nor her mother would have been required to defend the mansion against invaders, but the naginatas hung there anyway. They were symbols of the days when the women of a samurai household were a castle’s last defense.

  Shichisaburo also had given Cat a priest’s wicker backpack with the bamboo framework extending below the bottom to form feet. Usually such packs were filled with religious articles, but Shichisaburo had ransacked the actors’ dressing rooms for useful items and stray food that hadn’t been nibbled by cockroaches.

  Cat’s pack contained the naginata blade, spare straw sandals, a rain cloak of paper soaked in persimmon juice, an extra coat made of heavy paper, and a well-worn pair of tabi. Packed on top of the clothes was a dried bonito wrapped in oiled paper, a comb in a charm bag, a peck of uncooked hulled rice, and most important, a packet of powder that Shichisaburo had assured her would discourage fleas.

  Cat also had five silver mame-ita, the smallest denomination, and the string of a hundred copper mon that Shichisaburo had given her. They were all that he had had on him. He had offered to get more for her when his banker opened his shop in the morning, but Cat had dared not wait for that.

  Cat put her arms through the woven straps and adjusted the straw pads under them where they dug into her shoulder. She bowed and once more chanted a prayer to her father’s memory.

  “You! What do you want?” Spring Hill Temple’s new assistant abbot was so fat, he rocked from side to side as he rumbled down the steep stone steps of the temple’s main hall.

  Cat figured this was as good a place as any to try begging. She held out her cracked wooden bowl and thumped her walking stick, jangling the iron rings on top.

  “Namu Amida Butsu. Homage to Amida Buddha,” she droned through her nose. “I ask a small donation in the name of the All-Loving Buddha for the temple we are building to honor the god often thousand good fortunes.”

  “Begone!” The assistant abbot ran out of breath halfway down the steps. He wheezed like a pair of wet sandals and waved his sleeves at Cat.

  “Buy a talisman of the Thousandfold Blessing,” she said. “It will banish the danger years. It will make you fertile.” Cat held the bowl out farther.

  “Begone!”

  “Who is it?” The head abbot stood in the temple’s doorway.

  “Some wretched, thieving ‘abandoning-priest.’ “ His assistant trundled back up the stairs toward the clangor of the monks’ bells.

  Even though the head abbot couldn’t see Cat’s face, she lowered her head and retreated. Spring Hill Temple was near her former home. The abbot had been an old friend of her father’s. He had given Cat and her mother religious instruction. Unlike his new assistant, he was a kind man. Even if he thought her no more than a mendicant priest, he might have invited her in for morning tea and a talk.

  Cat paused before passing through the gate, though. She turned and looked back toward her father’s grave, surrounded by the hundreds of other gray monuments, the ranks of the dead.

  “I will not forget you,” she whispered. “Not even for an interval as short as those between the notes of the bells.”

  CHAPTER 7

  THE JOURNEY OF A THOUSAND RI

  A tall pole stood near the fence leading to the barrier in Shinagawa. One short crosspiece was lashed near the bottom of the pole and a longer one farther up. A naked man hung with feet braced on the bottom crosspiece and arms outstretched and tied to the top one.

  All his blood had drained from the ragged gashes torn in his sides by a spear blade. The ground under the pole was black with it. The executioner had been clumsy or careless or cruel. He had stabbed the man several times before puncturing enough organs to finish the business.

  The dead man had been caught trying to sneak around the barrier. His body had been hanging here for three days as a lesson to anyone with similar plans. Men of the eta, the outcasts, leaned on their shovels and puffed on their tiny pipes and joked around the open hole where the body would be thrown. The soil of the mass grave was studded with bones, hair, and teeth.

  In spite of the stench, only Cat seemed to notice. While they waited their turn, pilgrims and travelers and porters sat on their luggage near the corpse. They chatted as they munched on the rice cakes and pickles and sweet potatoes they had retrieved from their packs and big cloth bundles. Whether they considered themselves too worldly to notice another public execution or whether they were really afraid, Cat couldn’t say.

  The TMkaidM Road wove through Shinagawa like a river meandering through a low wooden canyon. Here the highway followed the line of hills on one side and the bay on the other. Shinagawa’s role as a way station for people headed somewhere else was clear. It was famous for its restaurants and its audacious “rice servers,” women who, for a fee, delivered more than rice.

  At the end of the commercial district stretched a forbidding wall. It funneled all the foot traffic, for no wheeled vehicles were allowed on the TMkaidM, through one narrow gate. Government officials checked the travel papers of everyone passing through it.

  Cat’s nerve almost failed her when she saw the early-morning crowd of travelers bunched at the barrier. A group of samurai, each with a pair of swords stuck through his sash, guarded the gate. They were separating out the women and escorting them into a nearby building.

  To keep the restive daimyM under control, the first Tokugawa shMgun, Ieyasu, had devised a form of loyalty-by-hostage called “alternate attendance.” The lords were allowed to spend time on their fiefs scattered about the country; but they had to leave their wives and children in Edo as a guarantee of their good behavior.

  If a daimyM could smuggle his family out of Edo, he could foment rebellion without fear that their heads would decorate Edo’s execution grounds. So women, especially women of the nobility, were watched very closely. Cat knew the women were being stripped and inspected by female examiners. If they didn’t match the detailed descriptions on their permits, they would be detained or sent back to Edo or punished.

  Cat wished she could stop at one of the busy, open-fronted tea houses and spend an hour or so over a steaming cup and a bowl of rice and vegetables. It would give her time to observe the barrier and the procedures there. But to drink tea and eat rice she would have to take off the basket co
vering her face.

  Beyond the narrow alleyways between some of the buildings, Cat could see the quartz-and-sapphire glitter of the bay. Boats bobbed on its surface. Gulls dipped and swooped overhead, unaffected by man-made barriers. Cat envied them.

  Shichisaburo had said that priests and nuns and holy men didn’t need travel permits. But what if he were wrong?

  Cat read the notices painted on strips of wood and hung on the big, roofed-over board standing outside the gate. She found only the usual admonitions to the lower classes to work hard, avoid frivolous pastimes and showy clothing, and honor one’s superiors. There was no mention of a murder or two in the Yoshiwara. No word of a runaway courtesan.

  For the first time since her escape from the House of the Perfumed Lotus, Cat would have to face government officials. She would have to speak to them. And if they discovered she was in disguise, they would arrest her.

  In situations like this Musashi advised seizing the initiative. Cat jangled the iron rings on her staff. Those at the rear of the crowd jumped. They were less indifferent to the specter of death by crucifixion than they seemed.

  “Namu Amida Butsu,” Cat droned.

  People glanced up in annoyance and moved away. A few pressed their hands to their sashes or the fronts of their jackets where they kept their purses. Cat approached the roughest men she saw.

  “Buy a talisman of the Thousandfold Blessing!” She draped the mendicant’s cloth over her hand and held out her begging bowl to a group of kago bearers. They were sprawled in a patch of morning sun, drinking warm sake and swapping lies.

  “Try this talisman’s virtues,” Cat said. “It will cancel out the danger years. It will banish warts. It will make you fertile.”

  One of the men had a dragon tattooed the length of his arm. With his round, woven-bamboo fan he scooped up a pile of dog excrement and dropped it into the bowl. His friends doubled over with laughter.