Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [314]
Like a pouring of large and small pearls into a plate of jade.
We heard an oriole, liquid, hidden among flowers.
We heard a brook bitterly sob along a bank of sand…
By the checking of its cold touch, the very string seemed broken
As though it could not pass; and the notes, dying away
Into a depth of sorrow and concealment of lament,
Told even more in silence than they had told in sound…
A silver vase abruptly broke with a gush of water,
And out leapt armored horses and weapons that clashed and smote—
And before she laid her pick down, she ended with one stroke,
And all four strings made one sound, as of rending silk.
“And so, you see, one simple lute can produce an infinite variety of tonalities. Since the days when I was an apprentice, this puzzled me. Finally, I broke a lute apart to see what was inside. Then I attempted to make one myself. After trying a number of things, I finally understood that the secret of the instrument is in its heart.”
Breaking off, she went and got the lute from the next room. Once reseated, she held the instrument by the neck and stood it up in front of him.
“If you examine the heart inside, you can see why the tonal variations are possible.” Taking a fine, keen knife in her lithe hand, she brought it down quickly and sharply on the pear-shaped back of the lute. Three or four deft strokes and the work was done, so quickly and decisively that Musashi half expected to see blood spurt from the instrument. He even felt a slight twinge of pain, as though the blade had nicked his own flesh. Placing the knife behind her, Yoshino held the lute up so he could see its structure.
Looking first at her face, then at the broken lute, he wondered whether she actually possessed the element of violence seemingly displayed in her handling of the weapon. The smarting pain from the screech of the cuts lingered.
“As you can see,” she said, “the inside of the lute is almost completely hollow. All the variations come from this single crosspiece near the middle. This one piece of wood is the instrument’s bones, its vital organs, its heart. If it were absolutely straight and rigid, the sound would be monotonous, but in fact it has been shaved into a curved shape. This alone would not create the lute’s infinite variety. That comes from leaving the crosspiece a certain amount of leeway to vibrate at either end. To put it another way, the tonal richness comes from there being a certain freedom of movement a certain relaxation, at the ends of the core.
“It’s the same with people. In life, we must have flexibility. Our spirits must be able to move freely. To be too stiff and rigid is to be brittle and lacking in responsiveness.”
His eyes did not move from the lute, nor did his lips open.
“This much,” she continued, “should be obvious to anybody, but isn’t it characteristic of people to become rigid? With one stroke of the pick, I can make the four strings of the lute sound like a lance, like a sword, like the rending of a cloud, because of the fine balance between firmness and flexibility in the wooden core. Tonight, when I first saw you, I could detect no trace of flexibility—only stiff, unyielding rigidity. If the crosspiece were as taut and unbending as you are, one stroke of the pick would break a string, perhaps even the sounding board itself. It may have been presumptuous of me to say what I did, but I was worried about you. I wasn’t joking or making fun of you. Do you understand that?”
A cock crowed in the distance. Sunlight, reflected by the snow, came through the slits in the rain shutters. Musashi sat and stared at the maimed body of the lute and the chips of wood on the floor. The crow of the cock escaped him. He did not notice the sunlight.
“Oh,” said Yoshino, “it’s daylight.” She seemed sorry that the night had passed. She reached out her hand for more firewood before realizing there was none.
The sounds of morning—doors rattling open, the twitter of birds—infiltrated the room, but Yoshino made no move to open the rain shutters. Though the fire was cold, the