The Plum Rains and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

Hasegawa. A Dewa warrior of cunning and integrity, and a man who will never be moved.
    Perhaps he’s still in the wineshop then?
    Do people sleep there?
    You mean at the wineshop?
    Where else would I mean? Hasegawa poured out his tea himself. Did we meet last night?
    She glanced at him shyly. Meet?
    Do you not understand the language I speak?
    Do you not remember last night?
    Hasegawa looked at her. Some parts of it better than others, he admitted.
    The maid lowered her eyes, abashed at her own boldness; and Hasegawa turned his attention to the light-shot camphor tree, the bright shining masses of yellow-green leaves glowing in the fullness of summer. Yesterday we walked without stopping all the way from the seventeenth station. A distance that usually requires two full days.
    The maid bowed to acknowledge the wondrous nature of this achievement. You must have important affairs awaiting you.
    I meant only to express the source of my confusion. We arrived well after dusk, and thoroughly exhausted.
    Yes, of course, the young maid agreed. Yet you seemed very lively last night.
    Giddiness caused by excessive exhaustion.
    The maid smiled. Clearly that must be the fact of it. But do you not remember singing the libretto of the Noh play? About the old woman damned to suffer as a wandering ghost because she had been unfeeling when young and beautiful?
    Of course I remember that, Hasegawa said. A scattering of sparrows had begun dropping down into the dirt garden in twos and threes. Now that you mention it.
    All in the wineshop were favourably impressed.
    Hasegawa said nothing.
    And do you not remember buying the carcass of the dead cart horse? And paying for its funeral? You said it would thereby find release from being reborn into this world of suffering and delusion.
    I don’t remember that…
    You said fifty repetitions of the Lotus Sutra would be required . You said the chanting must be done with a firm but musical intonation.
    I said that?
    Firm but musical.
    A grey horse … wasn’t it?
    And that it would thus reach the Western Paradise, the maid said, her eyes twinkling with amusement. And share a golden lotus throne with the Amida Buddha.
    Hasegawa studied the camphor tree against the soft morning haze of the summer sky. A few sparrows moved among the exposed roots searching for insects while others settled into patches of loose dirt and began taking dust baths, their wing-flurries creating furious little beige clouds.
    All in the wineshop praised your sense of pity.
    So I paid for it, did I?
    The young woman smiled. Very generously.
    Whenever the rogue samurai Hasegawa Torakage found himself among the hacked ruins of enemies, he seldom felt remorse for what had happened. If they were thirsty, he gave them water. If their agony was unbearable, he ended it for them. The rogue samurai would watch the blood-flow of defeated men draining away into summer grasses or pooling on the frozen earth of a winter’s night, the dead and dying often like him, men whose companionship he might otherwise have shared, and he did not try to follow back along the chain of irrevocable consequences and determine the one true source of their undoing. Hasegawa accepted the inevitability of convergence. Their deaths had wanted them as would one day his want him. For that reason, he sat calmly where he was and sipped his tea, and the young maid bowed then departed, leaving him to his ruminations.
     
    K ODA THE V IPER SQUATTED IN THE gate-shadows of a roadside shrine. He had a sword that was twice as long as was customary, and he held it upright between his knees, the oversized blade in its bright scarlet scabbard rising above his head like a finial of defiance although his blood-shot eyes, stained robe, unshaven forehead and off-centre topknot lessened the effect of ferocity. Koda was a small man, the scion of an ancient samurai lineage and so permitted to wear his father’s two swords although poverty had resulted in him selling the blades to