The Tokaido Road

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  ‘ ‘What does the stone mean?” Kasane whispered through the open top half of the shed.

  “It means we’re not going over the pass.”

  “Where are we going, then?” Kasane was bold enough now to ask it of Cat when she came out of the shed.

  “To Okitsu.”

  “But—”

  “We’re going by the lower route. By way of ‘Not-knowing-Parents.’ ”

  Cat was too impatient to wait for the tide to ebb completely. The surf was still crashing when she and Kasane made their way down the overgrown path and through the tumbled boulders to the base of the cliff.

  Kasane took off the cotton cloth wrapped around her waist as an underskirt and laid it on the ground. She put the wig and geta in the middle of it and knotted the ends around them so she could sling the bundle over her shoulder. Then she hitched up her skirts. She was ready to follow her mistress into whatever calamity the TMkaidM might provide.

  “According to the guidebook, ‘Not-knowing-Parents’ is only twelve cho across,” Cat said. But she could see that reaching the other side of the great stone barrier would be difficult.

  The strip of boulder-strewn beach had been aptly named. In fleeing the tiger’s den, they had entered a dragon’s hole. Cat tried to imagine lines of travelers passing this way fifty years earlier, when “Not-knowing-Parents” was the only route.

  Some of the boulders rose three or four times higher than Cat. Waves crashed against them, sending up geysers of salt spray that stung their eyes. Before Cat and Kasane had gone twenty steps, they were soaked to the skin and shivering with cold. Flat swags of glossy brown seaweed twined around their ankles. The dark, wet-slick stones that paved the narrow beach rolled about under their feet.

  Cat and Kasane splashed through tidal pools. They clambered over the branches and tree trunks and flotsam snagged among the boulders. Barnacles cut them when the larger breakers pushed them against the rocks, then tried to drag them out to sea.

  About halfway around the vast bulge of the escarpment, Cat stopped suddenly as she was passing between two huge boulders. She braced herself with each hand pressed against one of the rocks and stared ahead.

  ‘ ‘What is it?” Kasane asked.

  ‘ ‘Fuji-san.”

  Cat reached out to steady Kasane over a particularly rough stretch, then stepped to one side so she could see. The two of them held hands in the shower of cold spray, with the waves surging around their legs, and stared at Mount Fuji.

  “It’s splendid,” Kasane said at last.

  “So it is.” Cat regretted being cheated of the view from the pass. If it was this beautiful here, it must be magnificent from above.

  The mountain was framed by the jagged, glistening black crags of “Not-knowing-Parents.” Its backdrop was a blue sky, so clear it seemed to pulse. Snow had fallen on Fuji during the night, cloaking the graceful slopes in a gleaming white mantle. A cap of cloud hung over the volcano’s cone.

  “Do you see a dragon’s form in the cloud?” Cat asked.

  “A dragon, mistress?”

  “A dragon in the clouds above Fuji means success.”

  Kasane stared intently. “I think I see one. There. That’s his nose and that’s his tail.”

  “I see it.”

  Twenty waves roared in and crashed against the rocks before Cat finally broke the mountain’s spell. She started forward again, then stopped when she heard Kasane’s cry. She turned in time to see her twist and pitch sideways, her foot caught in a crevice between two rocks.

  “Sister!” Cat scrambled back to help her up before the next wave washed over her.

  “It hurts,” Kasane said softly.

  “Put your arm around my shoulders.” Cat put her own arm around Kasane’s waist and supported her weight as Kasane limped forward.

  “I’m so clumsy.” Kasane was sobbing, not with pain but with remorse at slowing Cat’s progress toward her love, waiting, she thought, among the ferocious southerners of Satsuma. “I’m so stupid.”

  “It’s my fault, dear Kasane.” Cat held her close as though Kasane were a child in need of comforting. She cried, too, stung by her own remorse. “I was too impatient to wait for the ebb tide. I’m sorry.”

  Together, they struggled toward a large tangle of debris. Kasane winced each time she had to put weight on the injured ankle, but she made no complaint.

  Cat was helping Kasane over the slippery trunk of a fallen pine when they saw the naked body. The man’s fractured arms and legs were wrapped at impossible angles around the spokes of the tree’s upturned roots. Cat and Kasane stared down at him.

  “He hasn’t been here long,” Cat said.

  “The kappa must have caught him and pulled his liver out his anus.”

  “Bandits, more likely.” Cat laid her head back, trying to see the trail at the top of the rough gray wall towering over them. A fish hawk swooped from its nest in a crevice and soared out over the bay.

  “They stole his money and his clothes and threw him over the side,” Cat said. “Even the poor are not safe.”

  “Was the path-barring-stone a warning about bandits?”

  “Probably.” Cat knew there was more to the warning than bandits, but she saw no use in making Kasane unhappier than she already was. A blind person feared not the snake.

  When a wave lifted the man’s head, Cat noticed the red, gourd-shaped mark on his cheek. “Do you know who this is?”

  “Who?”

  “The husband of the outcast under the bridge.”

  “That’s right.” Kasane rested against the trunk as she considered the implications. “His family must not know he’s gone on to travel the Three Paths.”

  “No.”

  “Probably no one but us knows.”

  “That’s right.”

  “He’s a homeless spirit.” Kasane shivered from dread as well as from cold and pain.

  “We’ll burn incense and pray for him at the first temple we come to.”

  Of the many forms Cat had seen death take, this one was the saddest, to lie broken and forgotten, discarded like a worn-out umbrella on a rubbish heap.

  “And then we saw you,” Cat recited.

  Pillowed upon your shaking beach,

  Using those wave-beaten rocks

  As if the coast were spread out for your bedding;

  On such a rugged place

  You have laid yourself to rest.

  “That’s a sad poem, mistress,” Kasane said. “Did you write it?”

  “It was written long ago by someone who found a body on a beach like this. The end of the poem is saddest of all.”

  If I but knew your home,

  I would tell them where you sleep;

  Your wife would come searching for you.

  How she must be waiting,

  How anxiously now longing for you,

  She the dear one you call wife.

  Kasane knew that the outcast had spit against heaven and must suffer the retribution he deserved. But she had a tender heart. She gave a small whimper of a sob and wiped her eyes on her sleeve, which didn’t do much good since her sleeve was soaked.

  With Cat supporting her Kasane started slowly toward the far end of the cliff; but she kept looking back, as though the homeless ghost might be following her, drifting along just above the beach like some hideous supernatural flotsam.

  “We children found a man on the beach once,” Kasane said.

  “Was he someone you knew?”

  “It was impossible to tell. The crabs had eaten his face.”

  Kasane was struck by a sorrow and a fear from her childhood. She remembered the nights she had looked out over the black water, searching among the many fishermen’s lights for the one on the prow of her parents’ boat. Her dread was the one morning her parents’ cumbersome, leaky vessel wouldn’t return. Their bodies would be found washed up on the beach and covered with a shifting crust of crabs. The broken planks of their boat would be scavenged to form part of some villager�
�s hut.

  Kasane trembled inside the wet silk robe that clung to her like another skin. She closed her eyes against the stinging spray of a breaker. She tried to ignore the pain radiating up from her ankle. She tried to ignore the longing for her parents and her village and the sonorous call of the evening bell.

  CHAPTER 44

  A FAST BUSY SPIRIT

  Okitsu’s Pine Beach was as lovely as the guidebook claimed. Cat and Kasane waited in the sand among the children who had gathered to watch the ceremony to appease the restless spirit of the homeless ghost. The old priest stood at the water’s edge. He gazed past Suruga Bay and its jagged, dark green rim, the forested mountains of the Izu peninsula to the southwest.

  The calm waters of the bay had been burnished by the rays of the setting sun. The late-afternoon light gilded the fishermen’s sails as the last of them dipped and bowed in the wind. Behind him, Mount Fuji’s slopes glowed copper.

  The priest was chanting softly to himself. When he finished, Cat waded out into the icy surf. She carried the small boat Kasane had made of straw and loaded with a paper flower, a bundle of burning incense, and a lighted candle. She waited until a wave was retreating, then set the boat afloat and gave it a careful push. The priest intoned scriptures and tapped on his bowl-shaped bell while the small craft bobbed on the low swells.

  When a wave finally swamped the boat, the priest bowed, turned, and headed up the beach, still chanting. His feet sank into the soft sand, which flowed into his straw sandals, slowing his progress almost as much as the children who swarmed around him. The children gave Cat an idea.

  She walked alongside the priest. “Thank you, holy one.” She unobtrusively placed a packet of coins into his begging bowl.

  “If life comes, this is life. If death comes, this is death.” It wasn’t the response Cat expected, but in the short time since Kasane had hobbled up with this priest in tow, Cat had come to realize he never said the expected.

  “Holy one, I want to buy your talismans.”

  The old man opened the drawstring of the pouch around his neck and with the long, tapering nails of his first and second fingers extracted a folded slip of paper. “When one passes through the gateless gate . . .” He handed it to her gravely. “One walks freely between heaven and earth.”

  “Excuse my rudeness, holy one, but I need all your talismans.”

  He took the pouch from around his neck, but he paused before he gave it to her. His eyes were as remote as a corpse’s, and yet Cat felt as though he were speaking directly to her inner thoughts. “If someone hesitates,” he said, “he is like a person watching from a window. Life will pass by the window and be gone, and he will not see it.”

  The priest bowed and with both hands held out the bag. “That which is form is emptiness. . . .” He began chanting again, turning away from Cat as though she had ceased to exist. “That which is emptiness is form.”

  Cat fingered the soft, much-worn cloth of the sack as she watched his progress through the wind-gnarled pines that grew almost to the water’s edge. The trees rose from a haze of smoke from the piles of seaweed that were being burned for salt. Clusters of drying octopi dangled from long poles stuck in the sand. Brown swags of nets hung from tall bamboo racks.

  The children returned to their play and to their chores, separating the day’s catch from the nets or bailing out the boats. Fathers sat under the pines and dandled their little ones, as they did every evening.

  A line of women balanced shallow wooden tubs on their heads as they walked along the shoreline. They wore their sashes brashly tied in front. The well-side gossip was that men who bought their flatfish, mollusks, and seaweed could also rent their clams.

  It was a lovely scene, but Cat wasn’t in a mood to appreciate it. She had money now, but it wouldn’t buy her peace of mind in a public accommodation. Kira’s men were probably checking them all.

  “We can’t stay at an inn, elder sister,” Cat said. “Enemies are still searching for me.”

  “Then we can sleep on the beach like a pair of gulls.” Kasane smiled happily at her.

  “Where?” The blind fear no snakes, Cat thought again.

  “About sea matters, ask a fisherman.” Kasane was almost elated at being able to provide shelter for her mistress and protector.

  Cat had purchased a crude crutch in Yui. Kasane used it as she led the way past the fishermen’s tiny reed shacks and open-air tea shops to a deserted, marshy part of the beach where the river emptied into the bay. With Cat’s help she cut a few saplings and propped them against two pines to make the sloping roof of a lean-to. She used the tough river reeds to lash fallen branches across them as a framework.

  With her crutch under one arm, she waded into the marsh at the river’s mouth and began cutting the long reeds that grew there. She showed Cat how to use single stems to tie them into bundles, then split the bundles and slide them over the poles, forming a simple thatch.

  Cat had always assumed that it was the nature of peasants to be clever with their hands. However, she was beginning to think that Kasane, if given time, could fabricate from bamboo and straw and river grass anything they might need.

  While Cat walked down the darkling beach to buy bream from the day’s catch, Kasane laid out the sleeping mats, cut grass for pillows, and started a fire of pine needles. As they ate Okitsu’s famous bean flower dumplings and the bream, broiled on a driftwood plank, Cat watched the lights across the curve of the bay. They were from the fishing village of Ejiri, nestled among the dark folds of the foothills.

  Ejiri was only a ri away. Even after buying secondhand clothes and mats and other necessities in Okitsu, they could have rented a horse and traveled at least that far tonight. But for the first time Kasane had balked, and not because of her injured ankle.

  “It will be dark before the ceremony for the restless spirit can be completed, mistress,” she had said.

  “It can be done in the dark.”

  “Please, couldn’t it be done here? Now?”

  There had been a tremor in Kasane’s voice. She feared that the homeless soul of the dead man might have fixed on her and Cat. She was terrified that the ghost would catch them in the dark before it had been appeased. Cat had agreed to stay.

  Now Cat concentrated on mending the drawstring on her bag of patience, as the old saying went. So far today her heedlessness had not only slowed her down, it had injured Kasane. Musashi said that speed was not part of the Way and that the truly skilled never appeared busy. Musashi said that a fast, busy spirit was undesirable.

  “The bream is delicious,” Cat said.

  Kasane ducked her head shyly. “It seems too dry. I must have foolishly overcooked it.”

  “It’s perfect.” With her chopsticks Cat picked up the last crisp curl of skin and savored it. “And it certainly doesn’t lack seasoning.” She grinned at Kasane over her hand as she put her tongue to it to taste the salt left by the seawater. Then she cleansed her mouth with pale tea.

  The lopsided moon wouldn’t rise for hours yet, but stars spangled the night robe of heaven. Their light outlined the wind-sculpted forms of the pines and twinkled like fireflies among the needles. Cat closed her eyes and inhaled the fragrance of pine resin.

  “Your pipe, mistress.”

  Cat bowed in thanks. “Hold out your leg, elder sister,” she said.

  ‘ ‘It’s better now.” Kasane was disconcerted by the attention, but she put her foot near the fire so Cat could see the bruised, distended ankle. She winced when Cat probed it with her fingers. “Surely it will be much better tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow blows tomorrow’s wind.” Cat opened the prettily packaged clamshell that held the medicine. “Let’s see if the Maru-ichi shop’s Salve-Conveyed-in-a-Dream is worthy of its repute.”

  She put a dab of the thick black paste onto one of her paper handkerchiefs laid out on a flat rock. She took a glowing pair of brass chopsticks from the fire and smeared it around. The heat released an odor so pungent, Cat’s nos
e wrinkled as though in retreat from it, but she gently placed the medicated paper onto the ankle. Cat felt as responsible for the sprain as if she herself had taken Kasane’s foot in her hands and twisted it.

  “The young women who sold the salve were very beautiful.” Kasane leaned forward to watch Cat wrap her towel tightly around the ankle and the paper.

  “Dear Kasane, you’re as ignorant of the world as a frog in a well.” Cat laughed. “They aren’t women.”

  “They aren’t?”

  “Of course not. They’re boys.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes.” Cat tucked in the end of the bandage and eased Kasane’s foot down in the cushioning sand.

  Then she lit the pinch of Okitsu’s famous Dragon King tobacco and looked out at the starlight on the bay while she smoked it. Kasane used a twig to write in the sand by the light of their small fire. “A very foolish person tried to compose a poem,” she said.

  “Please recite it.”

  “It’s unfinished.” Kasane deeply regretted mentioning it. “It’s clumsy and vulgar.”

  Cat leaned forward to read what Kasane had written. “ ‘Your look, a silk robe . . .’ ”

  Kasane turned bright pink and hastily smoothed the sand, erasing her words.

  “It’s a good start,” Cat said. “When you think of an ending line, you can write to your pilgrim yourself.”

  “Excuse my rudeness, mistress, but he already knows your hand. He’ll be looking for it.”

  “That’s true.” Cat remembered that the last letter from Kasane’s pilgrim had said he would check the notice board of each temple for word from her. “We’ll think of a finish to your poem, and I’ll write it for you.”

  “He must be very handsome,” Kasane murmured.

  “Who?” Then Cat realized that Kasane was referring to the fictional lover waiting on the southern island. “Some people say he’s fair of face,” she admitted.