Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [362]
“Maybe it sounds like I’m just spouting moral platitudes. But from a vagabond like me, it’s not that. I can’t begin to tell you how lonely I feel when I come across a beautiful view, then suddenly realize there’s no one to enjoy it with me.”
Musashi paused to catch his breath and took hold of his friend’s hand. “You yourself know what I’m saying is true. You know I’m speaking as an old friend, a man from the same village. Let’s try to recapture the spirit we had when we went off to Sekigahara. There are no more wars now, but the struggle to survive in a peaceful world is no less difficult. You have to fight; you have to have a plan. If you’d give it a try, I’d do anything I could to help.”
Matahachi’s tears dropped onto their clutched hands. Despite the resemblance of Musashi’s words to one of his mother’s tiresome sermons, he was deeply moved by his friend’s concern.
“You’re right,” he said, wiping away his tears. “Thanks. I’ll do what you say. I’ll become a new man, right now. I agree, I’m not the type to succeed as a swordsman. I’ll go to Edo and find a teacher. Then I’ll study hard. I swear I will.”
“I’ll keep my eyes open for a good teacher, as well as a good master you might work for. You could even work and study at the same time.”
“It’ll be like starting life over again. But there’s something else that bothers me.”
“Well? As I said, I’ll do anything I can to help. That’s the least I can do to make up for making your mother so angry.”
“It’s sort of embarrassing. You see, my companion is a woman…. Not just any woman. It’s—oh, I can’t say it.”
“Come on, act like a man!”
“Don’t get angry. It’s somebody you know.”
“Who?”
“Akemi.”
Startled, Musashi thought: “Could he have picked anybody worse?” but he caught himself before saying it out loud.
True, Akemi was not as sexually depraved as her mother, not yet at least, but she was well on her way—a bird on the wing with a destructive torch in its mouth. Besides the incident with Seijūrō, Musashi strongly suspected there had been something going on between her and Kojirō. He wondered what perverse fate led Matahachi to women like Okō and her daughter.
Matahachi misinterpreted Musashi’s silence as a sign of jealousy. “Are you angry? I told you honestly, because I didn’t think I should hide it.”
“You simpleton, it’s you I’m worried about. Have you been cursed since birth, or do you go out of your way to find bad luck? I thought you’d learned your lesson from Okō.”
In reply to Musashi’s questions, Matahachi told him how he and Akemi happened to be together. “Maybe I’m being punished for deserting Mother,” he concluded. “Akemi hurt her leg when she fell into the ravine, and it began to get worse, so—”
“Oh, here you are, sir!” said the old woman from the inn in the local dialect. Vague and senile, she put her arms behind her back and looked up at the sky, as though checking on the weather. “The sick woman isn’t with you,” she added, her flat inflection leaving it unclear as to whether she was asking or telling.
Flushing slightly, Matahachi said, “Akemi? Has something happened to her?”
“She’s not in bed.”
“Are you sure?”
“She was there a while ago, but she isn’t now.”
Though a sixth sense told Musashi what had happened, he merely said, “We’d better go see.”
Akemi’s bedding was still spread out on the floor, but otherwise the room was bare.
Matahachi cursed and made a futile circuit of the room. Face burning with rage, he said, “No obi, no money! Not so much as a comb or hairpin! She’s crazy! What’s wrong with her—deserting me like this!”
The old woman was standing in the doorway. “Terrible thing to do,” she said, as if