“You agreed to it, too. That makes you just as big a fool!”
“So you admit that you’re a fool!”
“I admit nothing. It’s just that-”
The knocking at the door of the theater sounded like blows on a taiko drum, reverberating in the empty theater and causing the two peasants’ eyes to grow round with surprise.
“Who’s that?” Goro asked in a whisper.
“I don’t know. Go see.”
“I don’t want to see. Why don’t you see?”
“Why should I see? Why don’t you-”
The knocks were repeated, even more insistently.
The two men looked at each other.
“Why don’t we both see?” Hanzo suggested.
Goro nodded and followed his partner to the theater door. Goro removed the stick that acted as a lock and slid the door open a few inches. He gasped and jumped away from the opening.
“What is it?” Hanzo asked.
Pointing a shaking finger, Goro said, “Look!”
Tentatively, Hanzo peeked through the open slit of the door. There, in the pale light that spilled out through the slit, Hanzo saw an apparition. It was in the shape of a man, with its kimono dripping wet and hanging loosely on its body. A sword was stuck in its sash, and its face was obscured by wet hair. Two eyes glowed out, watching Hanzo like a hawk watches a mouse.
“What’s the matter?” the apparition said.
Hanzo started, but then recognized the voice. “It’s the samurai, Matsuyama-san!” he exclaimed. Goro put his head next to his partner’s, confirming the identification despite the figure’s appearance.
“You look like a ghost!” Hanzo answered.
The figure smiled.
“Don’t smile!” Hanzo said hastily. “It looks even worse when you smile.”
“Well, then, open the door and let me in, or I will be a ghost. If the authorities don’t see me, then the cold will kill me.”
Hanzo slid the door open and allowed Kaze into the theater. Then he slid the door shut and locked it.
“What happened?” Goro asked the samurai.
“I went for a moonlight swim,” Kaze said. He had swum underwater to the darkness under the bridge. That allowed him to surface and take a breath. “I did most of my swimming underwater tonight.” Seeing Goro’s puzzled face, Kaze added, “I had to stay underwater or I’d have been killed.”
“Killed! By who?”
“By you, if you don’t allow me to get out of these wet clothes.”
Kaze was amused. Behind the curtain that hung across the theater’s stage was another world. In a corner, bamboo baskets held wigs and small props. In the center of the backstage area, tatami mats were laid, with small chests that held makeup of various sorts. Along the walls were bamboo poles hung with costumes of all varieties. Kaze had selected a samurai’s costume, but much gaudier than any he would have actually worn.
Hanzo took a small kettle from a firebox and poured Kaze a cup of tea.
Kaze took the cracked cup gratefully, sipping at the bitter liquid with relish. “Oishii! Good!” he said.
“So why did you have to go swimming, Samurai-san?” Goro said.
“If I tell you, it may be dangerous,” Kaze replied.
“The first time we met you, you said it might be dangerous. Didn’t we do good with that danger?”
“You did very good.”
“So tell us.”
Kaze considered for a moment. He didn’t know if he could trust these two, but he needed a base of operations in Edo. He decided that he should tell the two men about the reward, not as a test, but because undoubtedly notice boards would spring up all over the city by morning. Now there was no advantage in keeping the reward a secret. “If I tell you, I must also ask you to resist the temptation of a thousand ryo.”
“A thousand!” Goro spluttered.
“Now, now, let’s not get excited about money we don’t have,” Hanzo said to his partner. “This samurai was kind to us and treated us with honesty and respect. No other samurai has done that for us. I think we should help him.”
“Yes, but a thousand ryo …” Goro muttered.
Scratching his chin, Kaze said, “Actually, I think if you can kill me, you can earn ten thousand ryo.”
“Ten thousand ryo!” Now it was Hanzo’s turn to splutter.
“This man is a devil,” Goro said to Hanzo. “For ten thousand ryo a man would kill his own beloved obaasan! If a man would kill his own grandmother, how can he expect us not to do something with him?”
Kaze smiled. “You might find me a little harder to kill than your beloved grandmother,” he suggested.
“Now calm down,” Hanzo said. “The samurai is obviously teasing us. No one could offer ten thousand ryo as a reward. That’s impossible!”
“But with our business failing, even a few ryo would help.”
“Is your theater in trouble?” Kaze asked.
Goro put his hands to his head. Hanzo looked at Kaze and said, “We were cheated when we bought this theater. We were told it was a big moneymaker, and it was, but only because the Kabuki allowed women to do lascivious dances onstage. The Tokugawas recently banned that, so now we have to depend on actors to bring in the crowds.” He sighed. “Now the actors do plays that are like Noh dramas, but they’re not really trained in Noh, and the audience doesn’t seem too interested in it anyway. I was told the audience was mostly men, but without the women dancing, we seem to get only a few family groups. We don’t know what to do. We thought we’d just buy the theater and collect the money, but now we’ll lose everything.”
Kaze shook his head.
Hanzo sighed. “Well, we can settle this in the morning. Don’t worry, Goro and I won’t do anything to turn you in. We have a room at a boardinghouse near here. We’d invite you there, but it’s a small room and-”
“Don’t worry,” Kaze said. “I’ll be quite comfortable here. We’ll talk in the morning again.”
“All right,” Hanzo said. “Come on, Goro, let’s let the samurai sleep, and we need rest ourselves. We have to figure out what we’re going to do to save this failing theater, and with it our money.”
Hanzo and Goro left, leaving Kaze alone in the dark theater with a single lantern to pierce the murky gloom. Kaze found a robe in one of the costume baskets, and he used it to cover himself as he stretched out on the floor. He blew out the candle and lay in the dark, thinking about his next moves and what he would have to do.
As long as the Tokugawas thought he was the assassin, he would never be able to rescue the girl. If he stood on the street observing the Little Flower brothel, eventually someone would become suspicious and report him to the authorities. He didn’t have money or proper clothes, so he couldn’t walk into the brothel, pretending to be a customer, to look for the daughter of his Lady. In its way, the Little Flower Whorehouse was as tough a fortress to crack as mighty Osaka Castle itself.
As Kaze lay in the darkness, he became aware of a tiny patch of starlight high on the wall. It came from a vent on the back wall of the theater that allowed smoke from lanterns and hibachis to escape. A bamboo lattice covered the vent, keeping out birds and bats, but between the bars, Kaze’s sharp eyes were able to make out individual stars in the sky. Without a pattern to guide him, Kaze wasn’t sure what stars he was looking at, but it comforted him to know that, through those tiny holes in the bamboo lattice, the stars that had accompanied him on all his journeys were once more looking down at him.
From the lattice grill, Kaze also heard the faint, plaintive sounds of a bamboo flute, the shakuhachi. The high-pitched, breathy notes of the flute floated above the crude roofs of Edo and wove themselves through the starlight. Kaze didn’t know the tune being played, but he did know it was a song of loss and sadness. He closed his eyes and allowed himself the luxury of dropping his guard for just one moment, immersing his being in the slow rhythm of the music.
Kaze thought of the story in Uji shui monogatari, which told of Fujiwara Yasumasa, who was walking across a desolate marsh one moonlit night. To while away the time, he started playing his flute. Unknown to him, a dangerous bandit was hiding in the underbrush, waiting to kill and rob him. Through the mastery of his flute playing, Yasumasa mesmerized and overwhelmed the robber, charming him into submission as he fell under the flute’s spell.