The Tokaido Road (1991)(528p) Read Online Free PDF Page A

tattered feather. He looked as if his mistress regularly dusted hard-to-reach corners with him. He brooded malevolently in his cage, his stubby gray head lowered and swinging in tiny arcs, like a snake preparing to strike. He lived only to eat rice, swill sake, and tenderly nibble Old Jug Face’s pendulous earlobes. He bloodied any finger that strayed within range. He was a moth-eaten tyrant until his mistress let him out of his cage. Then he cowered until she put him back.
    Cat put a hand on the rough, weathered timbers of her own cage. Had she escaped the dragon’s mouth, or was she walking into it?
    No matter. She hadn’t escaped anything yet. She still had to pass under Centipede’s ravaged nose.
    The back alleys of the pleasure district were quite different from the lovely gardens and serene front rooms where guests were received. The narrow passage was crowded with buckets and tools, broken barrows and strings of braided barrel hoops. Cat scuffed the reeking stew of alley mud onto her smooth, pale feet. She pulled the hat brim lower over her eyes and drew her slender, manicured hands into her sleeves. Abandoning the hip-swaying gait of the courtesan, she walked with the deliberate care of someone drunk trying to pass for someone sober.
    She moved smoothly into the unsteady stream of men who hadn’t the money to stay until dawn with their “one-night wives.” Groups of them laughed and sang and composed poetry to the white-necked ones and to rented passion. Cat walked among them as though in a dream. As though she were looking down on herself and on the tipsy throng around her.
    Both sides of the main thoroughfare were lined with round paper lanterns hanging from the first-story eaves. As the Yoshiwara emptied, sleepy servants lowered the lights on the ends of long poles. When snuffed, the wicks gave offa strong odor of whale oil that settled over the street. Almost directly overhead, the moon, which was almost full, looked like a lantern they couldn’t quite reach.
    Most of the beggars and musicians and peddlers had moved outside the gate to importune the men as they exited. Servants were sliding the heavy wooden shutters across the open fronts of the tea shops and assignation houses. Soon they would present a uniformly blank face to the customers who had spent their silver and were of no further use. The “ground-tea harlots” no longer sat behind the wooden grills in front of the lower-class brothels. They had gone to work or to bed, which amounted to the same thing.
    The gay district called the Yoshiwara covered eighteen boggy acres enclosed by a high wall. Besides the massive two-story houses where the courtesans lived or met their guests, there were hundreds of tea shops called “introduction houses” where arrangements were made for evening trysts. In the tea houses near the Perfumed Lotus, a list of Cat’s accomplishments was included on the menu of second-rank courtesans.
    Cat was one of those known as “midway starters.” Because of her upper-class upbringing she had become a courtesan without having gone through the usual apprenticeship. If Cat had stayed in the Yoshiwara, she surely would have been elevated to toyu, courtesan of the first rank.
    In the pleasure districts toyu were royalty of sorts. They selected their patrons from among the richest and most refined men. Their beauty, grace, and accomplishments were admired throughout the country, and they set not only fashion, but style. There were only four toyu in the Yoshiwara.
    If Cat had stayed, her earnings would have assured a comfortable life for her mother. Providing for her mother was why Cat had sold herself in the first place. She had done it even though she knew that would make it easier for Lord Kira to spy on her. Even though her beauty and talents were filling Old Jug Face’s brass-bound money chests with the lozenge-shaped gold coins. When Lord Kira and Old Jug Face discovered Cat was missing, the search for her would be