Love knows many names.
Alone in the darkened woods,
all names sound silent.
The next morning, Kaze wandered into the courtyard and approached the cage that held Jiro. The night before, he had blandly told Manase that the search had failed and that he would have to think of another stratagem for finding the bandit camp. Nagato was there as well, and he fidgeted constantly, waiting for Kaze to mention the ambush. Kaze didn’t. Instead, he started a long conversation about the relative merits of haiku poetry versus the longer tanka form of poetry. Manase loved it and kept up a lively conversation with Kaze for hours. During this whole time, Nagato was compelled by protocol to sit perched on his folded legs, supporting his considerable weight by resting on his heels and knees. He was soon in agony, praying for the boring conversation to end. But every time it looked like the discussion was about to finish, the ronin samurai would bring up some other subtle poetic point, and he and Manase would pursue that point for endless minutes. In his pain he cursed the samurai and couldn’t understand why he would pick this occasion to engage the Lord in such a long discussion and not bring up the ambush. By the end of the evening, Nagato could barely get up to walk home.
As Kaze approached Jiro’s cage, he wrinkled his nose at the stench. They didn’t let Jiro out to go to the bathroom. Jiro had tried to perform his functions in one corner of the cage, but in such an enclosed space his actions were more of a gesture than an effective measure.
The old charcoal seller looked up at Kaze with tired eyes.
“Are they giving you water?” Kaze asked.
Jiro nodded an affirmative listlessly.
“How about food?”
He shook his head no.
Kaze reached into his sleeve and pulled out a large rice ball wrapped in leaves. He handed it through the slats of the wooden cage into Jiro’s trembling hands. Jiro ripped open the leaves and started to eat the rice ravenously.
“Careful,” Kaze admonished. “It would be stupid to choke on a rice ball before I can do something to get you out of here.”
Jiro was so surprised that he stopped eating. For the first time his eyes had some life to them. Tears started forming.
“Stop that crying,” Kaze said brusquely. “I hate pathetic people. There are too many of them in our land now, and it gets wearisome. Do you know where the bandit camp is?”
“No.”
“Then you are going to stay in this cage a long time. I need to find that camp to see something. It might help me to get you out.”
Jiro thought a minute. “Aoi,” he said.
“Love?” Kaze answered. Aoi meant love.
“Not the word love. Aoi is a woman’s name. She’s the village prostitute. A widow. This is a poor village, but she has too much money and too many fine things. Only the bandits have money. Maybe she gets her money from them.”
Kaze looked at the hunched-up figure and said, “A few days in a cage has loosened both your mind and your tongue. That’s a good suggestion. Maybe you should make a similar cage for your house after I get you out of this one.” He started walking out of the courtyard.
“Careful,” Jiro called after him.
Later that afternoon, Aoi stepped out of her hut and looked up and down the village street. She knew that in a place as small as Suzaka, her comings and goings would be noticed by others, so in her arms she had a basket for gathering wild mushrooms, with a cloth covering its contents. Acting nonchalant, she wandered out of the village into the surrounding hills and woods.
She wandered for several minutes, taking a meandering route that skirted the edge of the village. She was in no hurry, and she carefully selected a route different from the last one she took to the camp. She had been schooled in precautions, and the lessons had been punctuated with curses and dire threats about what would happen if she led anyone to the camp.
In the woods, the afternoon was still and quiet, and the dry scent of the trees was a subtle combination of pine and pitch and dried sap. Although her view through the trees was limited, Aoi would stop occasionally to look around, to make sure no one was on her trail. For some reason she felt uneasy and skittish, even though this was a common journey for her. Despite her caution, she saw and heard nothing out of the ordinary.
After walking into the forest for an hour, she stopped and placed her basket down. She lifted a cloth in the basket and pulled out a colorful cotton kimono. Shrugging out of the plain kimono she was wearing, Aoi donned her working clothes. Tying the sash of her kimono snugly around her hips, she carefully arranged the collar to show the nape of her neck to its best advantage. The nape was considered elegant and erotic, and Aoi wished she had white powder to dust on her face, neck, and shoulders to spruce up her fading beauty.
When she was young, she worked the fields with her parents and nine brothers and sisters. They all sweated in the hot summer and froze in the bitter cold of winter and, like all farmers, they had the capricious weather to contend with. When Aoi was thirteen, her family faced an especially hard winter. Their dried daikon radishes were depleted, and a meal consisted of a handful of millet cooked in a common pot. They faced the prospect of slowly starving to death, one by one.
So, without telling her what they were doing, Aoi’s parents took her up a snow-clad road to the village of Suzaka. There, after a few days’ negotiation, they sold her to an old farmer for enough food to keep the rest of the family alive for a few months.
Aoi’s mother cried bitter tears as they left her in the custody of the old farmer. “He’s your husband now. Be a good wife,” was all her mother could say as they left her.
“Come on,” her father said, tugging at Aoi’s mother’s arm. “At least we didn’t sell her to a brothel just so we could make more money off her. She’ll be a respectable wife.”
Aoi stood and watched her parents leave, a flood of tears clouding her vision. The hard grip of the farmer pinched her arm to make sure she didn’t run after her parents. When her parents were out of sight, Aoi was put to work cleaning the farmer’s hut. The farmer closed the door of the hut and sat watching her work. When the cleaning was done, she made dinner for the farmer. Aoi was not allowed to eat with her husband, so she watched greedily as he shoveled mouthful after mouthful of food down his gullet. Her mouth watered at the sight of so much plenty after such a long time of want. After her new husband was done eating, Aoi was able to wolfishly eat her fill, something she hadn’t been able to do for months.
The millet and brown rice gruel was hot and satisfying, and Aoi had sweetened it with chunks of daikon radish and sweet potato. She took bowl after bowl of the gruel, reveling in the sensation of having an abundance of food that she didn’t have to share with brothers and sisters. She ate so much that before she was done, her stomach was churning with the unfamiliar sensation of excess food packed into it.
Suddenly, Aoi bolted to her feet and pushed open the door of the hut. The farmer, thinking she was trying to run away, made a grab for her, but she managed to elude his grip and burst out of the doorway. But Aoi was not intent on escaping. She was just trying to make it to the privy before she threw up from all the food she had packed into her belly. She didn’t make it.
She fell to her hands and knees halfway along the path to the privy, heaving up great gobs of undigested food onto the grass that lined the path. The farmer caught up with her and reached down to grab her hair so Aoi couldn’t escape once she stopped throwing up. After many long minutes, Aoi’s stomach emptied itself and she was able to sit, her mouth sour with her recently expelled dinner and her head hurting from the farmer pulling at her hair.
When she was able to wobble to her feet, she made her way back to the hut, the farmer right behind her, still grasping her hair. Aoi felt dizzy and sick and would have gladly curled up in a corner and fallen asleep. Instead, the farmer pulled out a dirty sleeping mat and roughly forced Aoi to lie on it. Then, with shaking hands, he pulled the clothes off Aoi and fell on her.