Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [201]
Through the bleak, ceaseless moaning of the great trees in the sacred forest, Musashi’s ear caught another sound. Somewhere, not far away, flutes and reeds were giving voice to the strains of ancient music, music dedicated to the gods, while ethereal children’s voices sang a holy invocation. Drawn by this peaceful sound, Musashi tried to stand. Biting his lips, he forced himself up, his unwilling body resisting every move. Reaching the dirt wall of a shrine building, he grasped it with both hands and worked his way along with an awkward crablike movement.
The heavenly music was coming from a building a little farther on, where a light shone through a latticed window. This, the House of Virgins, was occupied by young girls in the service of the deity. Here they practiced playing ancient musical instruments and learned to perform sacred dances devised centuries earlier.
Musashi made his way to the rear entrance of the building. He paused and looked in, but saw no one. Relieved at not having to explain himself, he removed his swords and the pack on his back, tied them together, and hung them on a peg on the inside wall. Thus unencumbered, he put his hands on his hips and began hobbling back toward the Isuzu River.
An hour or so later, completely naked, he broke the ice on the surface and plunged into the frigid waters. And there he stayed, splashing and bathing, dunking his head, purifying himself. Fortunately, no one was about; any passing priest would have thought him insane and driven him away.
According to Ise legend, an archer named Nikki Yoshinaga had, long ago, attacked and occupied a part of the Ise Shrine territory. Once ensconced, he fished in the sacred Isuzu River and used falcons to catch small birds in the sacred forest. In the course of these sacrilegious plunderings, the legend said, he went totally insane, and Musashi, acting as he was, could easily have been taken for the madman’s ghost.
When finally he leaped onto a boulder, it was with the lightness of a small bird. While he was drying himself and putting on his clothes, the strands of hair along his forehead stiffened into slivers of ice.
To Musashi, the icy plunge into the sacred stream was necessary. If his body could not withstand the cold, how could it survive in the face of life’s more threatening obstacles? And at this moment, it was not a matter of some abstract future contingency, but one of taking on the very real Yoshioka Seijūrō and his entire school. They would hurl every bit of strength they had at him. They had to, to save face. They knew they had no alternative but to kill him, and Musashi knew just saving his skin was going to be tricky.
Faced with this prospect, the typical samurai would invariably talk about “fighting with all his might” or “being prepared to face death,” but to Musashi’s way of thinking, this was a lot of nonsense. To fight a life-or-death struggle with all one’s might was no more than animal instinct. Moreover, while not being thrown off balance by the prospect of death was a mental state of a higher order, it was not really so difficult to face death if one knew that one had to die.
Musashi was not afraid to die, but his objective was to win definitively, not just survive, and he was trying to build up the confidence to do so. Let others die heroic deaths, if that suited them. Musashi could settle for nothing less than a heroic victory.
Kyoto was not far away, no more than seventy or eighty miles. If he could keep up a good pace, he could get there in three days. But the time needed to prepare himself spiritually was beyond measuring. Was he inwardly ready? Were his mind and spirit truly one?
Musashi wasn’t yet able to reply to these questions in the affirmative. He felt that somewhere deep inside himself there was a weakness, the knowledge of his immaturity. He was painfully aware that he had not attained the state of mind of the true master, that he was still