Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [79]
While Matahachi made an effort to hold back his angry tears, Okō and Akemi turned their backs on him. But even after they were out of sight, he stood staring at the doorway. When Okō had hidden him at her house near Mount Ibuki, he’d thought he was lucky to have found someone who would love and take care of him. Now, however, he felt that he might as well have been captured by the enemy. Which was better, after all? To be a prisoner, or to become the pet of a fickle widow and cease to be a real man? Was it worse to languish in prison than to suffer here in the dark, a constant object of a shrew’s scorn? He had had great hopes for the future, and he had let this slut, with her powdered face and her lascivious sex, pull him down to her level.
“The bitch!” Matahachi trembled with anger. “The rotten bitch!”
Tears welled up from the bottom of his heart. Why, oh, why, hadn’t he returned to Miyamoto? Why hadn’t he gone back to Otsū? His mother was in Miyamoto. His sister too, and his sister’s husband, and Uncle Gon. They’d all been so good to him.
The bell at the Shippōji would be ringing today, wouldn’t it? Just as it rang every day. And the Aida River would be flowing along its course as usual, flowers would be blooming on the riverbank, and the birds would be heralding the arrival of spring.
“What a fool I am! What a crazy, stupid fool!” Matahachi pounded his head with his fists.
Outside, mother, daughter and the two overnight guests strolled along the street, chatting merrily.
“It’s just like spring.”
“It ought to be. It’s almost the third month.”
“They say the shogun will come to the capital soon. If he does, you two ladies should take in a lot of money, eh?”
“Oh, no, I’m sure we won’t.”
“Why? Don’t the samurai from Edo like to play?”
“They’re much too uncouth—”
“Mother, isn’t that the music for the Kabuki? I hear bells. And a flute too.”
“Listen to the child! She’s always like this. She thinks she’s already at the theater!”
“But, Mother, I can hear it.”
“Never mind that. Carry the Young Master’s hat for him.”
The footsteps and voices drifted into the Yomogi. Matahachi, with eyes still red with fury, stole a look out the window at the happy foursome. He found the sight so humiliating he once again plopped down on the tatami in the dark room, cursing himself.
“What are you doing here? Have you no pride left? How can you let things go on this way? Idiot! Do something!” The speech was addressed to himself, his anger at Okō eclipsed by his indignation at his own craven weakness.
“She said get out. Well, get out!” he argued. “There’s no reason to sit here gnashing your teeth. You’re only twenty-two. You’re still young. Get out and do something on your own.”
He felt he couldn’t abide staying in the empty, silent house another minute, yet for some reason, he couldn’t leave. His head ached with confusion. He realized that living the way he had been for the past few years, he had lost the ability to think clearly. How had he stood it? His woman was spending her evenings entertaining other men, selling them the charms she had once lavished on him. He couldn’t sleep nights, and in the daytime he was too dispirited to go out. Brooding here in this dark room, there was nothing to do but drink.
And all, he thought, for that aging whore!
He was disgusted with himself. He knew that the only way out of his agony was to kick the whole ugly business sky high and return to the aspirations of his younger days. He must find the way he had lost.
And yet … and yet…
Some mysterious attraction bound him. What sort of evil spell was it that held him here? Was the woman a demon in disguise? She would curse him, tell him to go away, swear he was nothing but trouble to her, and then in the middle of the night she would melt like honey and say it had all been a joke, she really hadn’t meant any of it. And even if she was nearly forty, there