Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [510]
“Don’t worry. I’ve thought about that already. But let me ask you this: How can I be sure that after I’ve done my job you won’t refuse to pay me the rest?”
“Hmph! It may seem like bragging, but money’s the least of my worries. Feast your eyes on those boxes.” He held the candle up so Matahachi could see better. All over the room were boxes—for lacquered trays, for armor, for many other purposes. “Every one of them contains a thousand pieces of gold.”
Without looking very closely, Matahachi said apologetically, “I don’t doubt your word, of course.”
The secret conversation went on for another hour or so. Matahachi, feeling somewhat more confident, left by the back way.
Daizō went to a nearby room and looked in. “Akemi, are you there?” he called. “I think he’ll go straight from here to hide the money. You’d better follow him.”
After a few visits to the pawnshop, Akemi, enthralled with Daizō’s personality, had unburdened herself, complaining about her present circumstances and expressing her desire to move on to something better. A couple of days earlier, Daizō had remarked that he was in need of a woman to run his house. Akemi had shown up at his door very early this morning. When he’d let her in, he’d told her not to worry, he’d “take care of” Matahachi.
The prospective assassin, serenely unaware he was being followed, returned home. Hoe in hand, he then climbed through the dark grove behind the house to the top of Nishikubo Hill and buried his treasure.
Having observed all this, Akemi reported to Daizō, who immediately set out for Nishikubo Hill. It was almost dawn when he returned to the storehouse and counted the gold pieces he had dug up. He counted them a second time, and a third, but there was no mistake. Only twenty-eight.
Daizō cocked his head and frowned. He profoundly disliked people who stole his money.
Tadaaki’s Madness
Osugi was not one to be driven to despair by the sorrows and bitter disappointments of unrequited maternal devotion, but here, with the insects singing amid the lespedeza and eulalia plants, with the great river flowing slowly by, she was not unmoved by feelings of nostalgia and the impermanence of life.
“Are you home?” The rough voice sounded harsh in the still evening air. “Who is it?” she called.
“I’m from Hangawara’s. A lot of fresh vegetables came in from Katsushika. The boss told me to bring you some.”
“Yajibei’s always so thoughtful.”
She was seated at a low table, candle beside her and writing brush in hand, copying the Sutra on the Great Love of Parents. She had moved into a small rented house in the sparsely populated district of Hamachō and was making a reasonably comfortable living treating other people’s aches and pains with moxa. She had no physical complaints to speak of. Since the beginning of autumn, she had felt quite young again.
“Say, Granny, did a young man come to see you earlier this evening?” “For a moxa treatment, you mean?”
“Unh-unh. He came to Yajibei’s, seemed to have something important on his mind. He asked where you were living now, and we told him.”
“How old was he?”
“Twenty-seven or -eight, I guess.”
“What did he look like?”
“Sort of round-faced. Not very tall.”
“Mm, I wonder….”
“He had an accent like yours. I thought maybe he came from the same place. Well, I’ll be going. Good night.”
As the footsteps faded, the voices of the insects rose again like the sound of drizzling rain. Putting down her brush, Osugi gazed at the candle, thinking of the days when she was young and people had read portents in the halo of the candlelight. Those left behind had no way of knowing how husbands, sons and brothers who’d gone off to war were faring, or what fate might lie in their own uncertain futures. A bright halo was taken as a sign of good fortune, purplish shadows as an indication that someone had died. When the flame crackled like pine needles, a person they were expecting was sure to come.