Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [233]
“Do you know what happened to the girl I brought home last night?”
“She was a nice-looking wench, wasn’t she? If I’d been able, I wouldn’t have let her get away. Not long after you left this morning, a young samurai with a long forelock and a huge sword on his back came and took her away. The monkey too. He had one of them on one shoulder, one on the other.”
“Samurai … forelock?”
“Uh. And what a handsome fellow he was—handsomer by far than you and me!”
The humor of this sent the beggar into a paroxysm of laughter.
The Announcement
Seijūrō arrived back at the school in a foul mood. He thrust the falcon into a disciple’s hands, curtly ordering him to put the bird back in its cage.
“Isn’t Kojirō with you?” asked the disciple.
“No, but I’m sure he’ll be along presently.”
After changing his clothes, Seijūrō went and sat down in the room where guests were received. Across the court was the great dōjō, closed since the final practice on the twenty-fifth. Throughout the year, there was the coming and going of a thousand or so students; now the dōjō would not be open again until the first training session of the New Year. With the wooden swords silent, the house seemed coldly desolate.
Desperate to have Kojirō as a sparring partner, Seijūrō inquired of the disciple repeatedly whether he had returned. But Kojirō did not come back, neither that evening nor the following day.
Other callers came in force, however, it being the last day of the year, the day to settle up all accounts. For those in business, it was a question of collecting now or waiting until the Bon festival of the following summer, and by noon the front room was full of bill collectors. Normally these men wore an air of complete subservience in the presence of samurai, but now, their patience exhausted, they were making their feelings known in no uncertain terms.
“Can’t you pay at least part of what you owe?”
“You’ve been saying the man in charge is out, or the master is away, for months now. Do you think you can keep putting us off forever?”
“How many times do we have to come here?”
“The old master was a good customer. I wouldn’t say a word if it were only the last half year, but you didn’t pay at midyear either. Why, I’ve even got unpaid bills from last year!”
A couple of them impatiently tapped on their account books and stuck them under the nose of the disciple. There were carpenters, plasterers, the rice man, the sake dealer, clothiers and sundry suppliers of everyday goods. Swelling their ranks were the proprietors of various teahouses where Seijūrō ate and drank on credit. And these were the small fry, whose bills could hardly be compared to those of the usurers from whom Denshichirō, unknown to his brother, had borrowed cash.
Half a dozen of these men sat down and refused to budge.
“We want to talk with Master Seijūrō himself. It’s a waste of time to talk to disciples.”
Seijūrō kept to himself in the back of the house, his only words being: “Tell them I’m out.” And Denshichirō, of course, would not have come near the house on a day like this. The face most conspicuously absent was that of the man in charge of the school’s books and the household accounts: Gion Tōji. Several days earlier, he had decamped with Okō and all the money he’d collected on his trip west.
Presently six or seven men swaggered in, led by Ueda Ryōhei, who even in such humiliating circumstances was swollen with pride at being one of the Ten Swordsmen of the House of Yoshioka. With a menacing look, he asked, “What’s going on here?”
The disciple, while contriving to make it plain that he considered no explanation necessary, gave a brief rundown of the situation.
“Is that all?” Ryōhei said scornfully. “Just a bunch of moneygrubbers? What difference does it make as long as the bills are eventually paid? Tell the ones who don’t want to wait for payment to step into the practice hall; I’ll discuss it with them in my own language.”
In the face of this threat,