Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [575]
From the village of Mount Kudo, they climbed a little farther up the mountain to a residence set apart from the other houses. The enclosure, surrounded by a low stone wall topped by a fence of woven grass, resembled the semi-fortified house of a lesser provincial warlord, but all in all one got the impression of refinement rather than military preparedness.
“My father’s over there, by that thatched building,” said Daisuke as they went through the gate.
There was a small vegetable garden, sufficient to provide onions and greens for the morning and evening soup. The main house stood in front of a cliff; near the side veranda was a bamboo grove, beyond which two more houses were just visible.
Nuinosuke knelt on the veranda outside the room Sado was shown to. Sado sat down and remarked, “It’s very quiet here.”
A few minutes later, a young woman who appeared to be Daisuke’s wife quietly served tea and left.
While Sado waited for his host, he took in the view—the garden and the valley. Below was the village, and in the distance the inn town of Kamuro. Tiny flowers bloomed on the moss clinging to the overhanging thatched roof, and there was the pleasant fragrance of a rare incense. Though he could not see it, he could hear the stream running through the bamboo grove.
The room itself evoked a feeling of quiet elegance, a gentle reminder that the owner of this unpretentious dwelling was the second son of Sanada Masayuki, lord of Ueda Castle and recipient of an income of 190,000 bushels.
The posts and beams were thin, the ceiling low. The wall behind the small, rustic alcove was of roughly finished red clay. The flower arrangement in the alcove consisted of a single sprig of pear blossoms in a slender yellow and light green ceramic vase. Sado thought of Po Chü-i’s “solitary pear blossom bathed by the spring rain” and of the love that united the Chinese emperor and Yang Kuei-fei, as described in the Chang He Ke. He seemed to hear a voiceless sob.
His eye moved to the hanging scroll above the flower arrangement. The characters, large and naive, spelled out “Hōkoku Daimyōjin,” the name Hideyoshi was given when he was elevated to the rank of a god after his death. To one side, a notation in much smaller characters said that this was the work of Hideyoshi’s son Hideyori at the age of eight. Feeling it discourteous to Hideyoshi’s memory to have his back turned to the scroll, Sado shifted a little to the side. As he did so, he realized suddenly that the pleasant smell came not from incense burning right then but from the walls and shoji, which must have absorbed the fragrance when incense was placed there morning and evening to purify the room in Hideyoshi’s honor. Presumably an offering of sake was also made daily, as to established Shinto deities.
“Ah,” he thought, “Yukimura’s as devoted to Hideyoshi as they say.” What he could not fathom was why Yukimura did not hide the scroll. He had the reputation of being an unpredictable man, a man of the shadows, lurking and waiting for a propitious moment to return to the center of the country’s affairs. It took no stretch of the imagination to conceive of guests later reporting his sentiments to the Tokugawa government.
Footsteps approached along the outside corridor. The small, thin man who entered the room wore a sleeveless cloak, with only a short sword in the front of his obi. There was an air of modesty about him.
Dropping to his knees and bowing to the floor, Yukimura said, “Forgive me for sending my son to bring you and for interrupting your journey.”
This show of humility made Sado uncomfortable. From the legal viewpoint, Yukimura had given up his status. He was now only a rōnin who had taken the Buddhist name Denshin Gessō. Nevertheless, he was the son of Sanada Masayuki, and his older brother, Nobuyuki, was a daimyō and had close connections with the Tokugawas. Being only a retainer, Sado was of much lower rank.
“You shouldn’t bow to me that way,” he said, returning the greeting. “It’s an unexpected honor and pleasure