Kaze didn’t open his eyes and made no move when Jiro entered. From the heavy sound of his footfall, he knew it was the old charcoal seller, still hauling his large basket. Jiro hesitated a moment at the doorway, then closed the door behind him and shrugged off his basket. He cleared his throat.
“Excuse me, samurai-san, but would you like something to eat?”
Kaze popped his eyes open. “Why are you getting so formal now? I already know how gruff and rude you are.”
Jiro scratched his head and grinned. “You were so quiet and still that I wasn’t sure I should disturb you.”
“I was thinking. When I awoke this morning, I realized I was about to make a samurai’s mistake.”
“What’s that?”
“Confusing activity with action. Sometimes thinking is action. I came here to observe the village, but I realized this observation was worthless without considering everything I knew and working up a strategy.”
“What is it you’re trying to observe?”
“That’s what I should be thinking about. In the heat of battle, some samurai rush about like a school of fish, darting this direction and that, showing a lot of activity, but not killing too many of the enemy. The great Takeda Shingen would sit, holding his war fan and directing his troops. He would never move, even when the enemy was on top of him. He could do that because he would pick the strategic place to sit; the point where the entire battle would be decided. They called him The Mountain. He thought about the battle and knew where The Mountain should be placed. He didn’t try different locations like a flea hopping across a tatami mat. If I’m going to be Matsuyama, pine mountain, I should take a lesson from Shingen and think about what I know and what I want to see. Then I can place the mountain at the spot where I’m most likely to see it.”
“You say the strangest things. I can’t understand you sometimes.”
“That’s all right. I can’t understand myself sometimes. Let’s have some breakfast, then I want to go back to thinking.”
The charcoal seller and the samurai shared a simple peasant’s breakfast of cold millet gruel and hot soup. After cleaning up, Jiro excused himself to go out and work in his fields. Kaze nodded and settled back into the lotus position, closing his eyes and thinking about what he had seen and heard over the last several days.
His breathing slowed and his entire being was focused on the meaning of the two bodies at the crossroads. In his mind he reviewed everything he had seen on the two bodies, carefully cataloging anything that seemed unusual or out of place. He tried to recall exact details, like a hunter examining the subtle turnings of grass blades or faint impressions on hard soil, searching out his quarry.
In his mind, he tried to replay every conversation he had had with every person he had met over the last several days, relistening to words and intonations and trying to recall minute changes in facial expression.
He also thought about his own actions, and he realized he had been hasty. He should not have eliminated the Magistrate as the first killer on the basis of a few arrows grabbed in panic on the night he played the trick on the village. The Magistrate could have several types of arrows. Boss Kuemon was also a possibility, perhaps killing the first samurai while someone else killed the boy. But was it likely that two different people would use the same type of high-quality arrow to kill? Even a woman could use a bow, and, if she was close enough, it would not take special skill or practice to hit her target. So Aoi was a possibility. Kaze knew Ichiro was probably capable of killing if provoked. Who knew what might provoke him if he or his family was threatened? So many choices to consider, and being hasty was not the way to consider them.
The sun climbed slowly to its zenith and started descending toward China. It passed behind the peaks of the mountains that ringed the village of Suzaka and caused the blue twilight that marked the time when the men and women trudged home from the fields. Before Jiro got home, Kaze opened his eyes. He said, “Good.”
CHAPTER 21
Strange beast, with no eye
to perceive unripened fruit.
Some destroy the young.
“Hurry! Hayaku!” Nagato pulled the sniveling girl deeper into the forest. The girl hung back, tugging at his tight grip on her wrist. Nagato found it gave him a jolt of pleasure to cruelly twist the youngster’s arm. She bent downward under the strain put on her limb and yelped in pain. He smiled. “You should be happy for what I’m about to do to you, you little whore!” he said.
He turned and continued to drag the eleven-year-old into the woods. Lust shot through him as sudden and hot as the desires of a sixteen-year-old. With the crying girl stumbling behind him, all his frustrations with Manase-sama and his wife and Boss Kuemon and the loss of money that the death of Boss Kuemon meant seemed to fade. He felt that he was truly a man after all, capable of conquering others, even if the other was just a young child and her peasant family.
Just a few minutes before he had been stomping away from the village, upset because of his latest fight with his wife and crone of a mother-in-law. His wife, as if sensing the fact that he was putting money aside for the purchase of a concubine, had been spending at a profligate rate. Nagato realized that money could buy power and that money could buy pleasure, and he was ready for either, but his wife seemed determined to deny him both.
Ideas came slowly to Nagato, and the idea that money could change his life had come equally slowly. But once the thought was planted, he embraced it with gusto. Unfortunately, it was Nagato’s mother-in-law who had the money. He had not been clever enough to arrange for the assets of his father-in-law to be transferred to him upon death. As an adopted son-in-law, he inherited the position of Magistrate, but his mother-in-law still had the house, land, and money that should have been his.
Three years after their marriage, his wife had finally conceived a son, but soon after the birth of a Nagato heir, his wife had lost all tolerance for sex and started rebuffing him when he made his clumsy attempts to crawl into her futon at night.
Nagato, a man violent and bad-tempered with all underlings, was at a loss as to what to do about the abrogation of his rights in the marriage futon. Worse yet, his wife had told her mother about her new preference for sleeping alone, and the sharp-tongued old harpy had supported her daughter, threatening economic consequences if Nagato beat his wife or forced her to submit. This turned Nagato’s world upside down, because he assumed it was the natural right of any husband to beat a wife who displeased him. That there might be consequences to this action befuddled and frustrated him, and he could think of no action to set his domestic world right except to find a concubine whom he could abuse and treat in a manner that he thought was fitting for a man to treat a woman.
The spring before, his interest had alighted on the daughter on the village headman, Ichiro. As was customary for all women and men in the village, during the hot months all the peasants worked stripped to the waist. Ichiro’s daughter, Momoko, had just turned eleven, and she was helping the other village girls in the planting of the tender shoots of rice into the fetid water of the rice paddies.
This was a community effort, for no individual farmer could prepare the fields, plant the rice, care for the growing green shoots, and finally harvest and winnow the rice by himself. Some said this was why Japanese village culture was so close-knit and interdependent, but, to the peasants involved, acting cooperatively was the only way to survive.