Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [71]
Musashi covered her small white hand, which was resting on the railing, with his own. “Listen,” he said plaintively. “I beg of you, just stop and think.”
“What’s there to think about?”
“I told you. I’ve just become a new man. I stayed in that musty hole for three years. I read books. I thought. I screamed and cried. Then suddenly the light dawned. I understood what it means to be human. I have a new name, Miyamoto Musashi. I want to dedicate myself to training and discipline. I want to spend every moment of every day working to improve myself. I know now how far I have to go. If you chose to bind your life to mine, you’d never be happy. There will be nothing but hardship, and it won’t get easier as it goes along. It’ll get more and more difficult.”
“When you talk like that, I feel closer to you than ever. Now I’m convinced I was right. I’ve found the best man I could ever find, even if I searched for the rest of my life.”
He saw he was just making things worse. “I’m sorry, I can’t take you with me.”
“Well, then, I’ll just follow along. As long as I don’t interfere with your training, what harm would it do? You won’t even know I’m around.” Musashi could find no answer.
“I won’t bother you. I promise.”
He remained silent.
“It’s all right then, isn’t it? Just wait here; I’ll be back in a second. And I’ll be furious if you try to sneak away.” Otsū ran off toward the basket-weaving shop.
Musashi thought of ignoring everything and running too, in the opposite direction. Though the will was there, his feet wouldn’t move.
Otsū looked back and called, “Remember, don’t try to sneak off!” She smiled, showing her dimples, and Musashi inadvertently nodded. Satisfied by this gesture, she disappeared into the shop.
If he was going to escape, this was the time. His heart told him so, but his body was still shackled by Otsū’s pretty dimples and pleading eyes. How sweet she was! It was certain no one in the world save his sister loved him so much. And it wasn’t as though he disliked her.
He looked at the sky, he looked into the water, desperately gripped the railing, troubled and confused. Soon tiny bits of wood began floating from the bridge into the flowing stream.
Otsū reappeared on the bridge in new straw sandals, light yellow leggings and a large traveling hat tied under the chin with a crimson ribbon. She’d never looked more beautiful.
But Musashi was nowhere to be seen.
With a cry of shock, she burst into tears. Then her eyes fell upon the spot on the railing from which the chips of wood had fallen. There, carved with the point of a dagger, was the clearly inscribed message. “Forgive me. Forgive me.”
Book II • WATER
The Yoshioka School
The life of today, which cannot know the morrow …
In the Japan of the early seventeenth century, an awareness of the fleeting nature of life was as common among the masses as it was among the elite. The famous general Oda Nobunaga, who laid the foundations for Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s unification of Japan, summed up this view in a short poem:
Man’s fifty years
Are but a phantom dream
In his journey through
The eternal transmigrations.
Defeated in a skirmish with one of his own generals, who attacked him in a sudden fit of revenge, Nobunaga committed suicide in Kyoto at the age of forty-eight.
By 1605, some two decades later, the incessant warring among the daimyō was essentially over, and Tokugawa Ieyasu had ruled as shōgun for two years. The lanterns on the streets of Kyoto and Osaka glowed brightly, as they had in the best days of the Ashikaga shogunate, and the prevailing mood was lighthearted and festive.
But few were certain the peace would last. More than a hundred years of civil strife had so colored people’s view of life that they could only regard the present tranquility as fragile and ephemeral. The capital was thriving, but the tension of not knowing how long this would last whetted the people’s appetite for merrymaking.
Though