Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [447]
In the midst of this ecstatic scene, someone asked, “What if they come back?”
There was a moment of sudden, anxious stillness.
“They won’t be back,” Musashi said firmly. “Not to this village. But don’t be overconfident. Your business is using plows, not swords. If you grow too proud of your fighting ability, the punishment heaven will mete out to you will be worse than any raid by mountain devils.”
“Did you find out what happened?” Nagaoka Sado asked his two samurai when they got back to the Tokuganji. In the distance, across field and swamp, he could see that the light of the fires in the village was fading.
“Everything’s quieted down now.”
“Did you chase the bandits away? How much damage was done in the village?”
“The villagers killed all but a few of them before we got there. The others got away.”
“Well, that’s odd.” He looked surprised, for if this was true, he had some thinking to do about the way of governing in his own lord’s district.
On leaving the temple the following day, he directed his horse toward the village, saying, “It’s out of the way, but let’s have a look.”
A priest came along to show them the way, and while they rode, Sado observed, “Those bodies along the roadside don’t look to me as though they were cut down by farmers,” and asked his samurai for more details.
The villagers, forgoing sleep, were hard at work, burying corpses and cleaning up debris from the conflagration. But when they saw Sado and the samurai, they ran inside their houses and hid.
“Get one of the villagers to come here, and let’s find out exactly what happened,” he said to the priest.
The man who came back with the priest gave them a fairly detailed account of the night’s events.
“Now it begins to make sense,” Sado said, nodding. “What’s this rōnin’s name?”
The peasant, never having heard Musashi’s name, cocked his head to one side. When Sado insisted on knowing it, the priest asked about for a time and came up with the required information.
“Miyamoto Musashi?” Sado said thoughtfully. “Is he the man the boy spoke of as his teacher?”
“That’s right. From the way he’s been trying to develop a piece of waste land on Hōtengahara, the villagers thought he was a little soft in the head.”
“I’d like to meet him,” said Sado, but then he remembered the work waiting for him in Edo. “Never mind; I’ll talk to him the next time I come out here.” He turned his horse around and left the peasant standing by the road.
A few minutes later, he reined up in front of the village headman’s gate. There, written in shiny ink on a fresh board, hung a sign: “Reminder for the People of the Village: Your plow is your sword. Your sword is your plow. Working in the fields, don’t forget the invasion. Thinking of the invasion, don’t forget your fields. All things must be balanced and integrated. Most important, do not oppose the Way of successive generations.”
“Hmm. Who wrote this?”
The headman had finally come out and was now bowing on the ground before Sado. “Musashi,” he answered.
Turning to the priest, Sado said, “Thank you for bringing us here. It’s too bad I couldn’t meet this Musashi, but just now I don’t have the time. I’ll be back this way before long.”
First Planting
The management of the palatial Hosokawa residence in Edo, as well as the performance of the fief’s duties to the shōgun, was entrusted to a man still in his early twenties, Tadatoshi, the eldest son of the daimyō, Hosokawa Tadaoki. The father, a celebrated general who also enjoyed a reputation as a poet and master of the tea ceremony, preferred to live at the large Kokura fief in Buzen Province on the island of Kyushu.
Though Nagaoka Sado and a number of other trusted retainers were assigned to assist the young man, this was not because he was in any way incompetent. He was not only accepted as a peer by the powerful vassals closest to the shōgun but had distinguished himself as an energetic and farsighted administrator. In fact, he seemed more in tune with the peace and prosperity