Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [20]
Looking down on the rooftops of Miyamoto, Otsū sat and daydreamed. She was a wisp of a girl, with fair complexion and shining black hair. Fine of bone, fragile of limb, she had an ascetic, almost ethereal air. Unlike the robust and ruddy farm girls working in the rice paddies below, Otsū’s movements were delicate. She walked gracefully, with her long neck stretched and head held high. Now, perched on the edge of Shippōji temple porch, she was as poised as a porcelain statuette.
A foundling raised in this mountain temple, she had acquired a lovely aloofness rarely found in a girl of sixteen. Her isolation from other girls her age and from the workaday world had given her eyes a contemplative, serious cast which tended to put off men used to frivolous females. Matahachi, her betrothed, was just a year older, and since he’d left Miyamoto with Takezō the previous summer, she’d heard nothing. Even into the first and second months of the new year, she’d yearned for word of him, but now the fourth month was at hand. She no longer dared hope.
Lazily her gaze drifted up to the clouds, and a thought slowly emerged. “Soon it will have been a whole year.”
“Takezō’s sister hasn’t heard from him either. I’d be a fool to think either of them is still alive.” Now and then she’d say this to someone, longing, almost pleading with her voice and eyes, for the other person to contradict her, to tell her not to give up. But no one heeded her sighs. To the down-to-earth villagers, who had already gotten used to the Tokugawa troops occupying the modest Shimmen castle, there was no reason in the world to assume they’d survived. Not a single member of Lord Shimmen’s family had come back from Sekigahara, but that was only natural. They were samurai; they had lost. They wouldn’t want to show their faces among people who knew them. But common foot soldiers? Wasn’t it all right for them to come home? Wouldn’t they have done so long ago if they had survived?
“Why,” wondered Otsū, as she had wondered countless times before, “why do men run off to war?” She had come to enjoy in a melancholy way sitting alone on the temple porch and pondering this imponderable. Lost in wistful reverie, she could have lingered there for hours. Suddenly a male voice calling “Otsū!” invaded her island of peace.
Looking up, Otsū saw a youngish man coming toward her from the well. He was clad in only a loincloth, which barely served its purpose, and his weathered skin glowed like the dull gold of an old Buddhist statue. It was the Zen monk who, three or four years before, had wandered in from Tajima Province. He’d been staying at the temple ever since.
“At last it’s spring,” he was saying to himself with satisfaction. “Spring—a blessing, but a mixed one. As soon as it gets a little warm, those insidious lice overrun the country. They’re trying to take it over, just like Fujiwara no Michinaga, that wily rascal of a regent.” After a pause, he went on with his monologue.
“I’ve just washed my clothes, but where on earth am I going to dry this tattered old robe? I can’t hang it on the plum tree. It’d be a sacrilege, an insult to nature to cover those flowers. Here I am, a man of taste, and I can’t find a place to hang this robe! Otsū! Lend me a drying pole.”
Blushing at the sight of the scantily clad monk, she cried, “Takuan! You can’t just walk around half naked till your clothes dry!”
“Then I’ll go to sleep. How’s that?”
“Oh, you’re impossible!”
Raising one arm skyward and pointing the other toward the ground, he assumed the pose of the tiny Buddha statues that worshipers anointed once a year with special tea.
“Actually, I should have just waited till tomorrow. Since it’s the eighth, the Buddha’s birthday, I could have just stood like this and let the people bow to me. When they ladled the sweet tea over me, I could’ve shocked everyone by licking my lips.” Looking pious, he intoned the first words of the Buddha: “In heaven above and earth