The Tokaido Road (1991)(528p) Read Free

something rash on the fourteenth. Maybe he thought she was plotting revenge. Maybe he merely had decided to ensure that Cat bore no children to threaten him in the future.
    With a chopstick Cat poked the last slice of fugu. Not often did death arrive in such a lovely package. The filmy slices of pale flesh had been artistically arranged in the form of a flying crane. It was the sort of ironic gesture Lord Kira would make. The crane was a symbol of longevity. But fugu was also a powerful aphrodisiac, which was why the customer had eaten with such gusto. A pinch of death was spice for fornication as well as for food.
    Except for the inconvenience his corpse caused, Cat wasn’t sorry the guest was dead. He had recently come into an inheritance and had been scattering it like rice chaff about the Yoshiwara. He was a clerk in the government finance office, a bannerman with ambitions.
    He had bad breath, a face like a pickle jar, and his poetry was trite and contrived. Cat regarded him as she would a slug that had invaded her rooms and left a trail of slime behind it. His remains would cause a great deal of trouble to Old Jug Face, the auntie of the Perfumed Lotus, but he was still inconsequential. The important problem was that Lord Kira was trying to kill Cat.
    As Cat knelt on the wheat-colored tatami in the pool of pale golden light thrown by the night lantern, she withdrew into herself.
     
We lock infinity into a square foot of silk;
Pour a deluge from the inch-space of the heart.
     
    The ancient poem calmed her. Behind her closed eyelids Cat could see the ink-laden brush drawing it out in bold, black strokes. For a moment she dwelt in the inch-space of her heart, the core of her being. She didn’t stay there long because in his Water Book Miyamoto Musashi warned to beware the stopping-mind. Cat knew she had to act.
    Slender and graceful as an iris, she rose in a murmur of silk and glided across the elegant room, her purple satin overrobe billowing behind her. She slid aside a panel of the paper wall and slipped into the small dressing room. It was as homey and cluttered as the entertaining room was bare.
    Cat’s toiletries lay scattered about the freestanding black-lacquered shelves. The mirrors, the combs, the jars and boxes and brush handles, matched the shelves. All bore, in mother-of-pearl, the Asano family crest of crossed feathers. In a corner, a big orange cat slept on a second set of shelves that held books and the long-necked samisen Cat had been learning to play.
    Cat moved to the screen standing in the opposite corner. The steep black ravines and gray clouds, the prickly pine trees and silver swirls of mist painted on the screen looked inviting. Cat wished she could walk into the landscape and disappear among the pines.
    “Butterfly.” Cat knelt beside the pallet behind the screen. She gently shook the child sleeping under a pair of thin quilts.
    “Earthquake?” The girl sat bolt upright, then fell back with a thud against the pillow stand when she realized the roof tiles weren’t chattering in the throes of a tremor.
    “Get up.”
    “What hour is it, mistress?” Butterfly mumbled.
    Cat glanced at the slow-burning incense joss on the bookshelf. It was perfuming time as well as marking it. “Almost midway through the hour of the Boar. Centipede will lock the Great Gate soon. We have to hurry.”
    “Where are we going?” Butterfly was confused. The hour was too late to promenade or to run an errand. And she had not gone outside the walls of the Yoshiwara pleasure district since her distraught and impoverished mother had sold her to a procurer two years before, when the girl was seven years old. As far as Butterfly knew, her mistress, Cat, had left it only a few times. Almost none of the white-necked ones left the Yoshiwara unless they were dead or dying. Was her mistress dying?
    “I need you to comb out my hair,” Cat whispered over her shoulder as she brought the rough earthenware jug of water from