Kusamakura Read Online Free PDF

forlorn pairs of rough straw sandals dangle from the eaves’ rafters, swaying listlessly to and fro. Below them is a neat row of three boxes containing cheap cakes, with a scattering of small coins at their sides.
    “Anyone there?” I cry again. Several plumped fowl, asleep atop a hand mill that is tucked in one corner of the entrance, awaken with a start and set up a raucous cackle. Beyond the threshold a clay hearth stands, wet and partly discolored by the rain that is still falling. Above it hangs a blackened tea-kettle, whether earthenware or metal I cannot tell. Happily, the fire in the hearth is lit.
    Since there is no reply, I take the liberty of going on in and sit myself down on a bench in the entrance area. The fowl flap noisily down from their perch on the hand mill and hop up onto the matting of the raised floor. They might well walk right into the room beyond if the screen doors weren’t standing in their way. The rooster gives a lusty crow, and the hen takes up the cry more softly. They seem to view my intrusive presence as they would some fox or dog. On the stool sits a smoker’s tray, about as large as a two-quart measure. The coil of incense inside it is sending up a tranquil curl of smoke, as if oblivious to the passage of time. The scene has a simple serenity. The rain gradually eases.
    After a while footsteps are heard from within, then one of the grimy screen doors slides smoothly open. An old woman appears.
    I have been expecting someone to emerge sooner or later. The fire in the hearth is lit, after all; coins lie scattered about the cake boxes; the incense is left nonchalantly burning. Someone must eventually appear. But this casual way of leaving the shop open and unattended is rather different from the city ways I’m used to. And to simply go in and make myself at home like this, despite receiving no answer to my call, and to sit there patiently waiting, feels a little like stepping into an earlier century than the twentieth. All this is intriguingly otherworldly, that “nonemotional” realm I aspire to. What’s more, I take an immediate fancy to the face of the old woman who has emerged.
    Two or three years ago I saw a Hosho School production of the Noh play Takasago, 1 and I remember being struck by the beautiful tableau vivant it made. The old man, brush-wood broom on his shoulder, walks five or six steps along the bridgeway leading to the stage, then turns slowly back to face the old woman behind him. That pose, as they stand facing each other, remains vividly before my eyes to this day. From where I was seated, the old woman’s face was more or less directly facing me. Ah, how beautiful! I thought, and in that moment her expression burned itself like a photograph into my heart. The face before me now and that face are so intimately alike that the same blood might flow in both.
    “I’m afraid I’ve come in and made myself at home.”
    “Not at all. I had no idea you were here.”
    “That was quite some rain, wasn’t it?”
    “You must have had hard going, with this unfortunate weather. My goodness, you certainly are wet! Let me get the fire going and dry things off for you.”
    “If you’d just build up that fire a little, I can stand beside it and dry off. I seem to have got rather cold sitting here.”
    “I’ll get it going right away. How about a cup of tea?” She rises to her feet and chases the fowl away with a quick “Shoo! Shoo!” Clucking indignantly, they scramble off the age-stained matting, trample through the cake boxes, and flee out to the road, the rooster depositing a dropping in one of the boxes as he goes.
    “Here you are,” says the old woman, reappearing in no time with a teacup on a tray made from a hollowed piece of wood. In the bottom of the cup, which is stained a blackish brown from years of tea, three plum blossoms have been casually sketched with a few quick brushstrokes.
    “Have a cake.” She fetches me a sesame twist and a ground-rice stick