The Harsh Cry of the Heron Read Online Free PDF Page A

spark of wit or originality.
    Akio was the Master
of the Kikuta, the greatest family of the Tribe, who had retained the skills
and talents that once all men had possessed. Now even among the Tribe those
skills seemed to be disappearing. Hisao had been aware since early childhood of
the disappointment he had caused his father: he had felt all his life the careful
scrutiny of his every action, the hopes, the anger, and always, in the end, the
punishment.
    For the Tribe raised
their children in the harshest possible way, training them in complete
obedience, in endurance of extremes of hunger, thirst, heat, cold and pain,
eradicating any signs of human feeling, of sympathy and compassion. Akio was
hardest on his own son, Hisao, his only child, never in public showing him any
understanding or affection, treating him with a cruelty that surprised even his
own relatives. But Akio was the Master of the family, successor to his uncle,
Kotaro, who had been murdered in Hagi by Otori Takeo and Muto Kenji at the time
when the Muto family had broken all the ancient bonds of the Tribe, had
betrayed their own kin and become servants of the Otori. And as Master, Akio
could act as he chose; no one could criticize or disobey him.
    Akio had grown into a
bitter and unpredictable man, eaten up by the grief and losses of his life, the
blame for all of which lay with Otori Takeo, now the ruler of the Three
Countries. It was Otori Takeo’s fault that the Tribe had split, that the
legendary and beloved Kotaro had died, and the great wrestler Hajime and many
others, and that the Kikuta were persecuted to the extent that most of them had
left the Three Countries and moved north, leaving behind their lucrative
businesses and moneylending activities to be taken over by the Muto, who
actually paid tax like any ordinary merchant and contributed to the wealth that
made the Three Countries a prosperous and cheerful state where there was little
work for spies, apart from those Takeo himself employed, or assassins.
    Kikuta children slept
with their feet towards the West, and greeted each other with the words, ‘Is
Otori dead yet?’ replying, ‘Not yet, but it will soon be done.’
    It was said that Akio
had loved his wife, Muto Yuki, desperately, and that her death, as well as
Kotaro’s, was the cause of all his bitterness. It was assumed that she had died
of fever after childbirth: fathers often unfairly blamed the child for the loss
of a beloved wife, though this was the only weaker human emotion Akio ever
displayed. It seemed to Hisao that he had always known the truth: his mother
had died because she had been given poison. He could see the scene clearly, as
though he had witnessed it with his own unfocussed baby eyes. The woman’s
despair and anger, her grief at leaving her child; the man’s implacable command
as he brought about the death of the only woman he had ever loved; her defiance
as she gulped down the pellets of aconite; the uncontrollable wave of regret,
shrieking and sobbing, for she was only twenty years old and leaving her life
long before she was ready; the shuddering pains that racked her; the man’s grim
satisfaction that revenge was partially completed; his embracing of his own
pain, and the dark pleasure it gave him, the beginning of his descent into
evil.
    Hisao felt that he
had grown up knowing these things; yet he had forgotten how he had learned
them. Had he dreamed them, or had someone told him? He remembered his mother
more clearly than should have been possible - he had only been days old when
she died - and was aware of a presence at the edge of his conscious mind that
he connected with her. Often he felt she wanted something from him, but he was
afraid of listening to her demands, for that would mean opening himself up to
the world of the dead. Between the ghost’s anger and his own reluctance, his
head seemed to split apart in pain.
    So he knew his mother’s
fury and his father’s pain, and it made him both hate Akio