Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [499]
“Why let yourself get angry over that?”
“I couldn’t help it. No matter where I went, there wasn’t anybody who’d say anything good about you.”
“Nothing I could do about that.”
“You could have cut down the men spreading the rumors. You could have put up your own signs challenging them.”
“There’s no point in starting fights you can’t win.”
“You wouldn’t have lost to that scum. You couldn’t have.”
“No, you’re wrong. I would have.”
“How?”
“Sheer numbers. If I beat ten, there’d be a hundred more. If I defeated a hundred, there’d be a thousand. There’s no possibility of winning in that kind of situation.”
“But does that mean you’re going to be laughed at for the rest of your life?”
“Of course not. I’m as determined as the next person to have a good name. I owe it to my ancestors. And I intend to become a man who’s never laughed at. That’s what I came out here to learn.”
“We can walk all we want, but I don’t think we’re going to find any houses. Shouldn’t we try to find a temple to stay in again?”
“That’s not a bad idea, but what I really want is to find someplace with a lot of trees and build a house of our own.”
“It’ll be like Hōtengahara again, won’t it?”
“No. This time we’re not going to farm. I think maybe I’ll practice Zen meditation every day. You can read books, and I’ll give you some lessons in the sword.”
Entering the plain at the village of Kashiwagi, the Kōshū entrance to Edo, they had come down the long slope from Jūnisho Gongen and followed a narrow path that repeatedly threatened to disappear among the waving summer grasses. When they finally reached a pine-covered knoll, Musashi made a quick survey of the terrain and said, “This’ll do fine.” To him, any place could serve as home—more than that: wherever he happened to be was the universe.
They borrowed tools and hired a laborer at the nearest farmhouse. Musashi’s approach to building a house was not at all sophisticated; in fact, he could have learned quite a bit from watching birds build a nest. The result, finished a few days later, was an oddity, less substantial than a hermit’s mountain retreat but not so crude as to be described as a shed. The posts were logs with the bark left on, the remainder a rough alliance of boards, bark, bamboo and miscanthus.
Standing back to take a good look, Musashi remarked thoughtfully, “This must be like the houses people lived in back in the age of the gods.” The only relief from the primitiveness were scraps of paper lovingly fashioned to make small shoji.
In the days following, the sound of Iori’s voice, floating from behind a reed blind as he recited his lessons, rose above the buzz of the cicadas. His training had become very strict in every respect.
With Jōtarō, Musashi had not insisted on discipline, thinking at the time that it was best to let growing boys grow naturally. But with the passage of time, he had observed that, if anything, bad traits tended to develop and good ones to be repressed. Similarly, he had noticed that trees and plants he wanted to grow would not grow, while weeds and brush flourished no matter how often he cut them down.
During the hundred years after the Onin War, the nation had been like a tangled mass of overgrown hemp plants. Then Nobunaga had cut the plants down, Hideyoshi had bundled them up, and Ieyasu had broken and smoothed the ground to build a new world. As Musashi saw it, warriors who placed a high value only on martial practices and whose most noticeable characteristic was unbounded ambition were no longer the dominant element in society. Sekigahara had put an end to that.
He had come to believe that whether the nation remained in the hands of the Tokugawas or reverted to the Toyotomis, people in general already knew the direction they wanted to move in: from chaos toward order, from destruction toward construction.
At times, he’d had the feeling he had been born too late. No sooner had Hideyoshi’s glory penetrated into remote rural areas and fired the hearts of boys like Musashi than the possibility of following