Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [49]
“Give you his head! Not on your life! It’s the business of the clergy to conduct funerals, but giving away the corpses, or parts of them … Well, that’d give us priests a bad name, wouldn’t it? No one would trust us with their dead, and anyway, if we started to just give them away, the temples would go broke in no time.” Even with the samurai’s hand resting on his sword handle, Takuan couldn’t resist baiting him.
Turning to the mob, the monk became serious again. “I ask you to talk it over among yourselves and give me an answer. What shall we do? The old woman says it’s not enough to kill him outright, we should torture him first. What do you think of lashing him to a branch of the cryptomeria tree for a few days? We could bind him hand and foot, and he would be exposed to the elements day and night. The crows will probably gouge out his eyeballs. How does that sound?”
His proposal struck his listeners as so inhumanly cruel that at first no one could answer.
Except Osugi, who said, “Takuan, this idea of yours shows what a wise man you really are, but I think we should string him up for a week—no, more! Let him hang there ten or twenty days. Then I myself will come and strike the fatal blow.”
Without further ado, Takuan nodded. “All right. So be it!”
He took hold of the rope after freeing it from the railing and dragged Takezō, like a dog on a leash, to the tree. The prisoner went meekly, head bowed, uttering not a sound. He seemed so repentant that some of the softer-hearted members of the crowd felt a bit sorry for him. The excitement of capturing the “wild beast” had hardly worn off, however, and with great gusto everyone joined in the fun. Having tied several lengths of rope together, they hoisted him up to a branch about thirty feet from the ground and lashed him tightly. So bound, he looked less like a living man than a big straw doll.
After Otsū came back to the temple from the mountains, she began feeling a strange and intense melancholy whenever she was alone in her room. She wondered why, since being alone was nothing new to her. And there were always some people around the temple. She had all the comforts of home, yet felt lonelier now than she had at any time during those three long days on the desolate hillside with only Takuan as a companion. Sitting at the low table by her window, her chin resting on her palms, she reflected on her feelings for half a day before coming to a conclusion.
She felt that this experience had given her an insight into her own heart. Loneliness, she mused, is like hunger; it isn’t outside but inside oneself. To be lonely, she thought, is to sense that one lacks something, something vitally necessary, but what she knew not.
Neither the people around her nor the amenities of life at the temple could assuage the feeling of isolation she now felt. In the mountains there had only been the silence, the trees and the mist, but there had also been Takuan. It came to her like a revelation that he was not entirely outside herself. His words had gone straight to her heart, had warmed and lighted it as no fire or lamp could. She then came to the innocent realization that she was lonely because Takuan was not around.
Having made this discovery, she stood up, but her mind still grappled with the problem at hand. After deciding Takezō’s punishment, Takuan had been closeted in the guest room with the samurai from Himeji a good deal of the time. What with having to go back and forth to the village on this errand and that, he’d had no time to sit down and talk with her as he had in the mountains. Otsū sat down again.
If only she had a friend! She didn’t need many; just one who knew her well, someone she could lean on, someone strong and completely trustworthy. That was what she longed for, craved so badly that she was