As a country girl, Aoi knew the basics of procreation from watching animals. She also knew about the male anatomy from living in close proximity with so many brothers, often diapering her younger brothers when they were babies. But none of Aoi’s girlish knowledge prepared her for what the farmer did to her, and she lay there with the taste of vomit in her mouth, a large, smelly body pressing down on her, and a newfound pain between her legs. She cried more tears, until the flood of them washed down her thirteen-year-old face like a stream.
When Aoi was fifteen, she made a cuckold of her husband for the first time. Like all agrarian people, the peasants of Suzaka were keenly in tune with the rhythms of life. The rising and the setting of the sun marked their workdays. When winter came and the high snows drifted into the mountains, they cherished their meager allotment of light as they sat in their darkened houses, bundled against the cold and preparing material for the coming spring. In winter they would make tools or hand-carve bowls or plait grass rope, all useful implements for the daily chores of life.
Suzaka, being a mountain village, always had a rather meager rice crop, and the people were heavily dependent on dry crops like millet, as well as the gathering of ferns, bracken, and wild mushrooms from the surrounding forest. This made Suzaka a very poor village, because in Japan rice was money. The wealth of a lord was measured by how much tax in rice was due him from the peasants of the district. When services were not exchanged or bartered, portions of rice were more commonly given than coins.
Only merchants, samurai, and the rich dealt in copper, silver, and gold, and to the common peasant, richness was equated with baskets of rice grains that could be planted or eaten.
Throughout the year an enormous number of small festivals and observances were honored in the village. When times were good, these observances became parties, often degenerating into wild bouts of drinking, with amorous couples sneaking into the forest for a romantic tryst. As with all farmers, the parties were full of earthy humor, with bawdy songs and dances that often imitated both rutting animals and people.
When times were bad and food was short, the religious observances were still held, but they were somber, not wild occasions. In the Land of the Gods, each home’s hearth, well, and kitchen had its own collection of protective deities, and when hard times and famine were felt, each and every God was implored to make the next cycle of life less harsh and less hungry.
Aoi’s husband was old and taciturn and had lost physical interest in her after the novelty of her young body had worn off. During the second Higan celebration of Aoi’s marriage, she slipped off from the revelries with a young man of eighteen, who already had a wife and a child. He and Aoi coupled for a few minutes in a quiet meadow in the woods. To Aoi’s surprise, although her partner was more pleasing physically than her old husband, she didn’t find the act itself more pleasing. To Aoi’s genuine pleasure, however, the man gave her a roughly carved comb as a present when the act was done. The possibility that lying with a man might result in tangible goods was not something she had actually worked out, and that crudely carved comb was the genesis for a career as a part-time village prostitute.
She was seventeen when her husband found out how Aoi was getting a whole collection of combs, clothes, and extra spending money that he finally noticed, but to Aoi’s surprise the old man didn’t seem to care. All he said was “Shikata ga nai. It can’t be helped.”
When Aoi’s husband finally died, she was twenty-three. She continued to farm the land and slept with villagers and the occasional traveler. She rebuffed all efforts to find her another husband as she continued to bed the husbands of others. As the bandits grew strong in the area, they became her most lucrative customers, and Aoi’s business increased to the point that she no longer had to do any farming to get food.
One thing she didn’t like about visiting the bandit camp was that she was expected to sleep with Boss Kuemon before she could sleep with any of his men. The actual act with the bandit leader took only a few minutes because it took only a few fake moans on Aoi’s part to get him to perform with the quickness of a rabbit. It wasn’t sleeping with him that she objected to. Aoi’s objections were based on the fact that Kuemon never paid her. He said it was a tax in kind for allowing her to ply her trade to the rest of his men.
Aoi straightened up and adjusted the sash on her kimono. Then, plastering a mechanical smile on her face, she put her old kimono into her basket, picked up the basket, and walked the remaining few hundred yards to the little ravine that held Boss Kuemon’s camp.
Boss Kuemon came out of the log hut that served as his shelter and headquarters. He was wearing only a loincloth, and he idly scratched his round belly. On his shoulders and back he had a large blue Chinese dragon tattooed, and he liked to walk around half-naked to show off the artwork that adorned his body. His shoulders were thick and muscular, and when he walked across the camp he had the distinctive, bent-legged, rolling gait of a palanquin porter.
Kuemon’s father had been a palanquin porter, and, for the first twenty-two years of his life, Kuemon had followed his father’s trade, often literally following his father’s footsteps as his father took the front of a palanquin pole and Kuemon took the rear.
The palanquin was used to transport cargo or people. Two porters would hoist a long pole on their shoulders, each facing forward. In the middle of the pole was a small platform, hung from the pole by ropes. For a fee, people could ride on that platform while the porters shuffled off in a rolling jog, carrying the passengers to their destination. In a mountainous land with almost no improved roads, the palanquin was more practical than a cart and cheaper than a horse.
In the normal course of things, Kuemon would have remained a porter his entire life. But things were hardly normal in Japan. First, after three hundred years of constant warfare, one particularly powerful warlord named Oda Nobunaga almost succeeded in uniting Japan. Oda was assassinated, and one of Oda’s generals, a man called Hideyoshi, the Taiko, seized power and, through diplomacy and war, did unite Japan. The astounding part was that Hideyoshi was a peasant. This was a lesson not lost on Kuemon. Where numerous hereditary warlords failed, a talented peasant was successful.
Kuemon considered himself talented. He was a good fighter and a leader of men. He abandoned his life as a porter and took up the life of a brigand. He was not sorry for his choice. Now he had a nice band of men, and he made a living a thousand times richer than any palanquin porter could make.
Hideyoshi was dead and, slowly but surely, Tokugawa Ieyasu was tightening his control on the government while Hideyoshi’s son and widow remained cowering behind the thick walls of Osaka Castle. Kuemon decided Ieyasu would kill Hideyoshi’s son when he was ready. It’s what Kuemon would do.
Despite understanding what Ieyasu would do, Kuemon did not identify with the new head of Japan. Ieyasu was an aristocrat, not a peasant. Although he affected the spartan ways of the warrior, Kuemon had heard that Ieyasu claimed a newfound family link with the Fujiwaras. This convinced Kuemon that the days of peasants rising to generals were numbered and that birth would become paramount under a Tokugawa regime. The Fujiwaras were one of the families that could claim the ancient title of Shogun, and that meant Ieyasu had a preoccupation with the trappings of birth and an interest in claiming the ancient title for himself. Because of his low birth, Hideyoshi could never claim this title, and he had had to accept the less important title of Taiko.