The Tokaido Road

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  He was squat, with long, powerful arms. The thick calluses on his shoulders marked him as a kago bearer. The snake tattoo that started at his face wound in thick coils down his neck, across his chest, and around his torso. The tail disappeared into the pouch of the loincloth that was his only clothing. Cat suspected that the tip of the tail ended at the tip of ano mono.

  He hissed politely as he bowed. “For reasons obvious to all but a blind man, these stewed tea loaf fools call me Mamushi no Jiro, Viper.” He gestured at the world in general. It was the sort of name a bandit or gambler would adopt, and Viper seemed pleased with it.

  He motioned her toward a flimsy bamboo kago sitting on the sand. Another bearer squatted beside it. As Viper slogged off through the sand, he hitched up his loincloth and tightened it for the work ahead. Cat stared, fascinated, at the golden-and-black-striped tiger face covering his bare, tightly muscled buttocks.

  The narrow white roll of loincloth partially obscured the pink nose at the point where his nether cleavage began. The huge eyes glowered from either side of it. The tiger’s cheeks followed the contours of the nates, and when Viper walked, his great cat seemed to be chewing thoughtfully.

  Cat knew that to cross the expanse she would have to trust her own instincts. Her instincts told her Viper was offering her more than shelter. He was offering her sanctuary.

  “What do you want of me?” She pulled her staff and pack from under the boat.

  “To speak to the dead.”

  CHAPTER 10

  THINGS LATELY FASHIONABLE

  Hanshiro’s posture marked him as a true swordsman. And for the eye untrained in such subtleties, his two swords were usually warning enough. The hem of his baggy, thigh-length coat rode up over the scabbards. They formed the distinctive silhouette that identified him as a warrior and a man to avoid. But bearing and a pair of swords didn’t always ensure respect, certainly not here in Edo’s theater district.

  Hanshiro ignored the acrobat who trotted along on his palms beside him. He had wrapped his feet around his neck and held a begging bowl in his agile toes. He jingled the few mon inside it beguilingly. Safe in his haven of imbecility, he tilted his head sideways to grin up at Hanshiro.

  “Read your fortune, honorable sir?” asked a heap of paper rags. The diviner inside them sat on a small square mat. His divining sticks were laid out in front of him.

  He was blind and couldn’t see Hanshiro’s scowl or his swords. The scowl deepened and hardened. It was a look that usually guaranteed Hanshiro wouldn’t be bothered, but in the theater district bothering people was the principal occupation.

  Hanshiro joined the crowd of theatergoers and sightseers, peddlers, street entertainers, and beggars, holy and profane. The narrow roadway was lined with fifteen-foot-tall poles. The white banners that hung vertically from them were painted with the actors’ crests and bold black ideograms announcing the plays.

  Shops and tea houses, built side by side, fronted directly on the street. Posters of the actors in their most famous poses covered the walls. Strings of spherical, red paper lanterns decorated the first- and second-floor eaves. From the balconies, people called down to their friends passing below. Drums sounded continually as touts tried to attract attention. The noise of people hawking everything from firewood to love amulets reverberated off the walls, making it difficult to hear anything below a shout.

  Even though the opening dance had started at dawn and the actors were well into the first play, the river imps were still at work here. Like the kappa, their demon namesakes, they plucked at the sleeves of likely customers and tried to draw them into the theaters.

  “Come to the finest show in Edo.” They bowed and wheedled and circled their victims. “Witness the tragic story of the courtesan Oshu. Your tears will saturate your sleeves.”

  “Buy a program. Buy a program.” Younger boys wore foot-tall wooden pattens called geta and waved the booklets over their heads so they’d be seen in the press of people.

  To get their money’s worth, country folk had left their homes at two in the morning, the hour of the Ox, to arrive in time for the first dance. They had long since rented small mats to sit on and had settled into their places, packed shoulder to shoulder with the Edokko on the bare earth of the pit. They had spent the morning eating cold rice from their wooden lunch boxes, smoking their tiny pipes, nursing babies, chatting to each other, and calling out criticism and encouragement to the actors. The pit was redolent with tobacco, pickles, and urine.

  Those who rented the expensive box seats were more urbane. They thought it fashionable to come late. Rollicking parties of them brushed by Hanshiro. They wore geta to keep their travel cloaks and the hems of their bright robes out of the dust. They twirled parasols painted with flowers and poetry.

  Their servants followed with rattan boxes swinging from poles over their shoulders. The boxes contained supplies for a day at the theater—makeup and changes of clothing, playing cards, books, tobacco, and pipes. And most important of all, paper, ink stones, porcelain water containers, and brushes for poetry contests and love notes. Employees from the tea houses hurried alongside, bowing and soliciting business.

  The latecomers bought programs and clattered into the slate-paved entry ways of the tea houses. They would spend most of the hour of the Snake eating and drinking and discussing the plays. Before going to the theater they would change their street robes for elaborate kimono. It would be the first of two or three costume changes they would make before darkness ended the day’s performance.

  As Hanshiro watched the bright crowds swirl past, he wondered what made people mad for the latest nuance of sash knot or sleeve length. The zeal with which people pursued such absurdities mystified him. Fashions changed, but the mania for being fashionable endured the ages. The theater district always made him think of a song written almost five hundred years earlier.

  Things lately fashionable in the capital:

  Painted eyebrows, hairdos, hairpieces,

  Saltwater bath robes, women in men’s clothes,

  And not a nun who doesn’t have her naginata.

  “Here you are, here you are!” One of the wicket geisha beckoned to Hanshiro. On a long bench next to the theater’s doorway he danced and shouted enticements to the crowd. “Buy a ticket and see the famous Shichisaburo perform in the tragic story of Oshu. See the spirit of the famous courtesan rise from the flames of her lover’s letter. Step inside. Step inside.”

  The wicket geisha wore a woman’s robes and a blue towel draped over his head and tied under his chin. The towel was dyed with Shichisaburo’s crest. The geisha stalked the length of the bench in Shichisaburo’s soft-stuff style. He flourished his open fan over his head, cocked his other elbow, crossed his eyes, and struck a mie, the particular pose Shichisaburo had made famous. Then he squatted to be at eye level with Hanshiro.

  “ You look like a man of fine sensibilities, rMnin.” He shielded his mouth with his fan, as though sharing a secret. “The new impersonator, Dragonfly, from Osaka, acts the part of the doomed courtesan. He’s very sensual. Irresistible.”

  Hanshiro hardly spared him a scrap of his glower. He strode through the stacks of cake and clothing boxes and sake barrels, gifts from adoring patrons to their favorite actors. Many of them bore Shichisaburo’s crest.

  Hanshiro turned into the alleyway, behind Shichisaburo’s theater, the Nakamura-za. Casually, as though only passing time, he used the butt of his old parasol to scatter the heap of trash there. He didn’t expect to find anything, but from what people threw away he could reconstruct entire lives.

  At the bottom of the pile he found the charred remains of a blue hempen coat. The white characters for Nakagawa were still visible. With hundreds of secondhand stores and pawnshops in the city, no one threw away clothing unless they had a good reason.

  Hanshiro was waiting for Shichisaburo when he made his dramatic exit. The agitated clacking of wooden blocks signaled the climax of the first act. It was accompanied by shouts o
f “That’s the way, Shichisaburo!” from the audience.

  A pair of black-clad, masked, hooded, and stockinged assistants followed Shichisaburo. They had hovered about him on stage, adjusting his sixty pounds of layered, weighted, gold-and-silver-embroidered robes each time he moved. They continued to do it here.

  Beyond the black curtain Hanshiro could hear the rustle and murmur of people stampeding for the passageways to the nearby tea houses. The tea houses had privies. The theater didn’t.

  “I haven’t time to chat.” Shichisaburo was preoccupied.

  His lady love had sneaked out of the shMgun’s palace and into the city. She was waiting for him in a back room of the tea house next door. As a pledge of her affection she had sent her fingernail clipping in a tiny jade box. Anticipation had Shichisaburo in a fevered state.

  Hanshiro held out the handle of the parasol with the charred jacket dangling from the end of it. Shichisaburo blanched under his thick crust of rice powder makeup, but he put on a brave show. Earlier that morning he had convinced Kira’s retainers that he was ignorant of the young Lady Asano’s whereabouts. Shichisaburo was, after all, an actor. The simple westcountryman from AkM had fared no better with him.

  “I’ve already told Lord Kira’s rabble I know nothing of the matter.” Shichisaburo looked around for help as Hanshiro, stiff-legged, silent, and somehow much larger than the physical space he occupied, crowded him toward the stairs to the dressing rooms.

  The mob of Shichisaburo’s female admirers shouted their offers of love and/or marriage and/or a brief dalliance from a safe distance, a tribute to the ferocity of Hanshiro’s demeanor. Ordinarily they would have crowded close to press flowers and gifts and middling but fervent verse on their idol.

  The shadowy stage assistants prudently disappeared, leaving Shichisaburo to tussle with his costume and the surly stranger. As he climbed the narrow stairs, the long train of his heavy robes tangled with his feet. The sleeves of his huge outer coat were four feet square and stiffened with bamboo splints. The bamboo caught on the door frame and bent backward. When they released and sprang back into shape, one of them bruised Shichisaburo’s hand. He was rubbing it dolefully when he reached the upstairs dressing room.

  Hanshiro spread a silk cloth on the tatami and laid his long-sword on it. With his left hand he deftly slapped the baggy hem of each hakama leg out of the way as he crossed his legs and sat down.

  When he was comfortably seated he regarded the actor with a chilly smile. “Now, honorable riverbed-beggar, tell me what you know.”

  CHAPTER 11

  NOT AT HOME

  Fragile skeletons of half-finished umbrellas crouched like giant insects in the corners of the room. The smell of glue was almost overpowering. Hanshiro’s contemplation of his new, red oiled-paper umbrella was interrupted by crockery hitting the other side of the thin wooden wall.

  “Cockroach!” a woman shouted. Another bowl crashed.

  The old umbrella maker hammered on his side of the wall with a length of loquat wood. His workshop was so tiny that he didn’t have to leave his seat to do it. Plaster had fallen away from the many such beatings the wall had received.

  “Be a man,” he shrieked at the woman’s unseen husband. “Beat the fox demon! Drive her away! Find yourself a handsome boy to love!”

  “Chikusho!” she screamed back. “Four-legged beast!” Another crash.

  “The fool is spread under a woman’s buttocks.” Still muttering, the umbrella maker concluded his business with Hanshiro.

  He bowed until his forehead rested on the floor, and Hanshiro inclined his head slightly in return. When the old man took Hanshiro’s paper-wrapped coins, his fingertips were hard and shiny with dried glue. Hanshiro imagined his heart encased in the same impervious stuff.

  For fifteen years Hanshiro had come to this dark Edo alleyway for his umbrellas. For fifteen years he had pushed aside the same dusty bamboo blind. He had seen the same clutter, each item of which appeared in exactly the same place it had been on his first visit. He had waded through the fluttering drifts of colored paper scraps on frayed tatami so old it was soft and sunken in places. He had sat cross-legged among the bamboo parasol skeletons and sipped weak tea with the old misogynist.

  For his regular customers, the umbrella maker always kept in stock a few parasols made of tough loquat wood rather than bamboo. They were the only kind Hanshiro bought.

  As he left the shop Hanshiro looked around him gloomily. Except for a more pronounced stoop to the umbrella maker’s shoulders and an ever-sharper loathing for women, the old man hadn’t changed in the years Hanshiro had known him. His tiny shop was still squeezed between a seedy bathhouse and a store whose faded banner promised a remedy for unwanted hair. But the neighborhood around his shop had altered considerably, as had Edo itself. The changes weighed on Hanshiro’s spirit.

  As always, shabby, dark pine shutters shielded the merchants’ houses from the dust and noise of the narrow street. But behind them the rice brokers and hardware sellers, the wholesalers of tea and clothing, sake and lacquerware, lived in forbidden splendor. After each of the fires that swept through Edo, the merchants rebuilt their houses larger than before. Hanshiro scowled as he stalked past the illusory poverty.

  None of the five Tokugawa shMgun had been able to prevent the despised merchant class from accumulating great sums of money; they could only forbid the flaunting of it. Tokugawa Tsunayoshi allowed no cedar doors, no frieze beams or fine woods, no openwork or lacquering. But as with the restrictions on travel and clothing, the townsmen found ways around the edicts.

  They threw lavish parties in the pleasure districts that were officially off limits to the upper classes. Under their drab hempen robes flashed brilliant silk linings in crimson or plum or green the color of a cicada’s wing. On the walls of their inner rooms hung rare works of art. Behind the grimy, soot-darkened facades of their houses were sumptuous palaces of fragrant cypress and cryptomeria wood, and white-plastered storehouses stacked to the rafters with chests of silks and lacquer ware and porcelain.

  The world was topsy-turvy here. The natural order had gone awry. Lowly exchangers of goods and that most vulgar of commodities, money, lived like princes. Worse yet, while the emperor, the descendent of OAmaterasu the Sun Goddess and rightful ruler of Japan, languished in faded splendor in KyMto, the Tokugawa usurpers ran the country.

  Each succeeding shMgun had recruited more men from outside the ranks of the classically trained warriors. Now they brawled in the streets with the lower classes. They swaggered about Edo wearing the two swords of samurai while the real warriors, the bushi like Hanshiro, wondered where they would get their next koku of rice.

  Hanshiro hadn’t taken long to prepare for this trip. The umbrella was the last necessity. He had bought his favorite brands of tobacco and tooth powder in the shop next to the umbrella maker’s, the one that also sold the remedy for unwanted hair. He had visited the apothecary and replenished his supply of ginseng, bear’s gall bladder, and oil of toad.

  In the two-tatami room he rented on a noisome back alley, he rinsed out his thin cotton towel. He put on his black tabi. He tied his faded black canvas gaiters around the wide skirts of his hakama to keep the hems from the dust and to make walking easier. He slipped his travel permit into the flat wallet that contained his paper handkerchiefs and put it into the front opening of the loose, faded jacket that had lost its shape at the shoulders. He stuck into the back of his patched sash the heavy war fan with the sharpened iron ribs.

  When he had stowed each of the journey’s modest necessities into its accustomed place, he rolled his other wadded cotton coat and his old paper rain cloak inside a thin mat woven of rushes. He tied a long straw cord around each end of the mat and slung the resulting loop across his chest so the mat rode high on his back.

  He had tried to find one of the books portraying the famous courtesans of Edo. The young artist Masanobu had included Cat’s portrait in them. But all the copies had mysteriously disap
peared. Lord Kira probably had ordered them bought up. He would want to keep Lady Asano’s picture from the avid public. If word got out that Lord Asano had a daughter and she had been employed in the Yoshiwara, gossip about the entire affair would be revived.

  In fact, Hanshiro suspected most of the books had been bought as keepsakes. The folk of Edo, high class and low, followed the fashions and gossip of the Floating World. A small army of messengers had left the pleasure district that morning to spread the news of the odd contents of the sake barrel in the House of the Perfumed Lotus, the accidental immolation of Lord Kira’s cousin, and the disappearance of the lovely courtesan named Cat.

  Hanshiro hefted his new umbrella in his hand, testing the balance of the heavy, lacquered cording on the butt of the handle. He opened it, taking a somber delight in the crimson of the oiled paper, clear and translucent as poppy petals. He spread his damp towel across the convex surface to dry, rested the handle on his shoulder, and rocked it back and forth gently so the towel wouldn’t fall off.

  For Hanshiro joy and sorrow were frivolous indulgences, unworthy of a man of his calling. But now that he was leaving Edo, a diffuse aura of pleasure put a bounce in his step. No matter that the job was a trifling one. He felt buoyant as a fifth-month paper carp swimming in the currents of the wind above the rooftops. For Hanshiro the warrior’s Way was most easily traveled on the road.

  He turned off a ri before the barrier at Shinagawa. He tied the towel around his wrist and closed the umbrella. Then he walked down the double row of ancient maples, almost bare of leaves now, and through the ornate, roofed wooden gate of Spring Hill Temple. A group of children played among the tombstones in a far corner. The ringing of small bells and the muffled chanting of priests emanated from the temple’s main hall.