Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [67]
“Think of this room as your mother’s womb and prepare to be born anew. If you look at it only with your eyes, you will see nothing more than an unlit, closed cell. But look again, more closely. Look with your mind and think. This room can be the wellspring of enlightenment, the same fountain of knowledge found and enriched by sages in the past. It is up to you to decide whether this is to be a chamber of darkness or one of light.”
Takezō had long since stopped counting the days. When it was cold, it was winter; when hot, summer. He knew little more than that. The air remained the same, dank and musty, and the seasons had no bearing on his life. He was almost positive, however, that the next time the swallows came to nest in the donjon’s boarded-over gun slots, it would be the spring of his third year in the womb.
“I’ll be twenty-one years old,” he said to himself. Seized by remorse, he groaned as if in mourning. “And what have I done in those twenty-one years?” Sometimes the memory of his early years pressed in on him unrelentingly, engulfing him in grief. He would wail and moan, flail and kick, and sometimes sob like a baby. Whole days were swallowed up in agony, which, once it subsided, left him spent and lifeless, hair disheveled and heart torn apart.
Finally, one day, he heard the swallows returning to the donjon eaves. Once again, spring had flown from across the seas.
Not long after its arrival, a voice, now sounding strange, almost painful to the ears, inquired, “Takezō, are you well?”
The familiar head of Takuan appeared at the top of the stairs. Startled and much too deeply moved to utter a sound, Takezō grabbed hold of the monk’s kimono sleeve and pulled him into the room. The servants who brought his food had never once spoken a word. He was overjoyed to hear another human voice, especially this one.
“I’ve just returned from a journey,” said Takuan. “You’re in your third year here now, and I’ve decided that after gestating this long, you must be pretty well formed.”
“I am grateful for your goodness, Takuan. I understand now what you’ve done. How can I ever thank you?”
“Thank me?” Takuan said incredulously. Then he laughed. “Even though you’ve had no one to converse with but yourself, you’ve actually learned to speak like a human being! Good! Today you will leave this place. And as you do so, hug your hard-earned enlightenment to your bosom. You’re going to need it when you go forth into the world to join your fellow men.”
Takuan took Takezō just as he was to see Lord Ikeda. Although he had been relegated to the garden in the previous audience, a place was now made for him on the veranda. After the salutations and some perfunctory small talk, Terumasa lost no time in asking Takezō to serve as his vassal.
Takezō declined. He was greatly honored, he explained, but he did not feel the time was yet right to go into a daimyō’s service. “And if I did so in this castle,” he said, “ghosts would probably start appearing in the closed room every night, just as everyone says they do.”
“Why do you say that? Did they come to keep you company?”
“If you take a lamp and inspect the room closely, you’ll see black spots spattering the doors and beams. It looks like lacquer, but it’s not. It’s human blood, most likely blood spilled by the Akamatsus, my forebears, when they went down to defeat in this castle.”
“Hmm. You may very well be right.”
“Seeing those stains infuriated me. My blood boiled to think that my ancestors, who once ruled over this whole region, ended up being annihilated, their souls just blown about in the autumn winds. They died violently, but it was a powerful clan and they can be roused.
“That same blood flows in my veins,” he went on, an intense look in his eyes. “Unworthy though I am, I am a member of the same clan, and if I stay in this castle, the ghosts may rouse themselves and try to reach me. In a sense, they already have, by making it clear to me in that room just who I am. But they could cause chaos, perhaps rebel and even set off another bloodbath. We are not in