Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [203]
“This is for you, Sekishūsai! You bastard!” With every pull and tug, he execrated the giants he respected, those supermen who had brought him here and whom he must and would conquer. “One for you, Nikkan! and you, Takuan!”
He was climbing over the heads of his idols, trampling over them, showing them who was best. He and the mountain were now one, but the mountain, as if astonished to have this creature clawing into it, snarled and spit out regular avalanches of gravel and sand. Musashi’s breath stopped as though someone had clapped his hands over his face. As he clung to the rock, the wind gusted, threatening to blow him away, rock and all.
Then suddenly he was lying on his stomach, his eyes closed, not daring to move. But in his heart he sang a song of exultation. At the moment when he had flattened out, he had seen the sky in all directions, and the light of dawn was suddenly visible in the white sea of clouds below.
“I’ve done it! I’ve won!”
The instant he realized he had reached the top, his strained willpower snapped like a bowstring. The wind at the summit showered his back with sand and stones. Here at the border of heaven and earth, Musashi felt an indescribable joy swelling out to fill his whole being. His sweat-drenched body united with the surface of the mountain; the spirit of man and the spirit of the mountain were performing the great work of procreation in the vast expanse of nature at dawn. Wrapped in an unearthly ecstasy, he slept the sleep of peace.
When he finally lifted his head, his mind was as pure and clear as crystal. He had the impulse to jump and dart about like a minnow in a stream.
“There’s nothing above me!” he cried. “I’m standing on top of the eagle’s head!”
The pristine morning sun cast its reddish light on him and on the mountain as he stretched his brawny, savage arms toward the sky. He looked down at his two feet planted firmly on the summit, and as he looked, he saw what seemed like a bucketful of yellowish pus stream from his injured foot. Amid the celestial purity surrounding him, there arose the strange odor of humanity—the sweet smell of gloom dispelled.
The Mayfly in Winter
Every morning after finishing their shrine duties, the maidens living in the House of Virgins went, books in hand, to the schoolroom at the Arakida house, where they studied grammar and practiced writing poems. For their performances of religious dances, they dressed in white silk kimono with crimson widely flared trousers, called hakama, but now they had on the short-sleeved kimono and white cotton hakama they wore while studying or doing household chores.
A group of them was streaming out the back door when one exclaimed, “What’s that?” She was pointing to the pack with the swords tied to it, hung up there by Musashi the night before.
“Whose do you think it is?”
“It must be a samurai’s.”
“Isn’t that obvious?”
“No, it could have been left here by a thief.”
They looked wide-eyed at each other and gulped, as though they had come across the robber himself—leather bandannaed and taking his noonday nap.
“Perhaps we should tell Otsū about it,” one of them suggested, and by common consent they all ran back to the dormitory and called up from beneath the railing outside Otsū’s room.
“Sensei! Sensei! There’s something strange down here. Come and look!”
Otsū put her writing brush down on her desk and stuck her head out the window. “What is it?” she asked.
“A thief left his swords and a bundle behind. They’re over there, hanging on the back wall.”
“Really? You’d better take them over to the Arakida house.”
“Oh, we can’t! We’re afraid to touch them.”
“Aren’t you making a big fuss over nothing? Run along to your lessons now, and don’t waste any more time.”
By the time Otsū came down from her room, the girls had gone. The only people in the dormitory were the old woman who did the cooking and one of the maidens who had taken ill. “Whose things are those hanging up here?” Otsū asked the cook.
The woman