Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [414]
“You old bitch!”
Jumping to their feet, they surrounded her threateningly.
Osugi did not flinch. “Come outside!” she commanded grimly as she placed her hand on her short sword.
The workmen had second thoughts. The way she looked and carried on, she had to be from a samurai family; they might get into trouble if they weren’t careful. Their manner softened noticeably.
Observing the change, Osugi declared grandly, “Henceforward, I’ll not countenance rudeness from the likes of you.” With a look of satisfaction on her face, she went out and started up the road again, leaving the spectators to gape at her stubborn, straight back.
She was hardly on her way again before an apprentice, his muddy feet grotesquely covered with shavings and sawdust, ran up behind her, carrying a bucket of mucky clay.
Shouting, “How do you like this, you old witch?” he slung the contents of his pail at her back.
“O-w-w-w!” The howl did credit to Osugi’s lungs, but before she could turn around, the apprentice had vanished. When she realized the extent of the damage, she scowled bitterly and tears of sheer vexation filled her eyes.
The merriment was general.
“What’re you nincompoops laughing at?” raged Osugi, baring her teeth. “What’s so funny about an old woman being splattered with grime? Is this the way you welcome elderly people to Edo? You’re not even human! Just remember, you’ll all be old one day.”
This outburst attracted even more onlookers.
“Edo, indeed!” she snorted. “To hear people talk, you’d think it was the greatest city in the whole country. And what is it? A place full of dirt and filth, where everybody’s pulling down hills and filling in swamps and digging ditches and piling up sand from the seaside. Not only that, it’s full of riffraff, like you’d never find in Kyoto or anywhere in the west.” Having got that off her chest, she turned her back on the sniggering crowd and went rapidly on her way.
To be sure, the city’s newness was its most remarkable feature. The wood and plaster of the houses was all bright and fresh, many building sites were only partially filled in, and ox and horse dung assailed the eyes and nostrils.
Not so long ago, this road had been a mere footpath through the rice paddies between the villages of Hibiya and Chiyoda. Had Osugi gone a little to the west, nearer Edo Castle, she would have found an older and more sedate district, where daimyō and vassals of the shōgun had begun building residences soon after Tokugawa Ieyasu occupied Edo in 1590.
As it was, absolutely nothing appealed to her. She felt ancient. Everyone she saw—shopkeepers, officials on horseback, samurai striding by in basket hats—all were young, as were laborers, craftsmen, vendors, soldiers, even generals.
The front of one house, where plasterers were still at work, bore a shop sign, behind which sat a heavily powdered woman, brushing her eyebrows as she awaited customers. In other half-finished buildings, people were selling sake, setting up displays of dry goods, laying in supplies of dried fish. One man was hanging out a sign advertising medicine.
“If I weren’t looking for someone,” Osugi mumbled sourly, “I wouldn’t stay in this garbage dump a single night.”
Coming to a hill of excavated dirt blocking the road, she halted. At the foot of a bridge crossing the as yet waterless moat stood a shanty. Its walls consisted of reed matting held in place by strips of bamboo, but a banner proclaimed that this was a public bath. Osugi handed over a copper coin and went in to wash her kimono. After cleaning it as well as she could, she borrowed a drying pole and hung the garment up by the side of the shanty. Clothed in her underwear, with a light bathrobe draped over her back, she squatted in the shadow of the bathhouse and gazed absently at the road.
Across the street, half a dozen men stood in a circle, haggling in voices loud enough for Osugi to hear what they were saying.
“How many square feet is it? I wouldn’t mind considering it if the price is right.”
“There’s two thirds of an acre. The price is