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

thorough and extensive.
    Thousands of courtesans, waitresses, apprentices, cooks, scullery help, and maids lived here. The Yoshiwara was a city of women, constant and pliant, perplexing and accommodating. Men flowed in and out like the tides. Now, as the hour approached midnight, the tide was ebbing. The flow was constricted at one narrow outlet, the small door in the Great Gate, guarded by Mukade no Gonzo, the man everyone called Centipede, but not in his hearing.
    As Cat drew closer she saw the old man standing, small and wiry and intense as a hummingbird, at the gate. Near by, his assistants took the wooden tickets men handed them in exchange for their weapons. The long swords and the occasional bows, halberds, and spears were stored by type on wall racks in the small gate house. It wouldn’t do to have a samurai, deep in his cups, decide to dice a paying customer. Guests were required to check their weapons at the entrances to the various houses. Some men, however, preferred to leave their arms with Centipede.
    Centipede was seventy. Old scars cleaved the dark, wrinkled leather of his nose and parted the bush of his left eyebrow. Each year, as his hair receded, he had to shave less of his head to maintain his warrior’s topknot. But he was still lean and tough and resilient as the steel of his two swords, heated, folded, and hammered repeatedly in the forge of adversity. His eyesight and memory were as keen as his blades.
    The small door in the fifteen-foot-high gate was brightly lit with lanterns. Centipede studied every person who passed through it. He would remember the unremarkable customer in the shabby blue Nakagawa Freight coat even though the press at the door grew more frenetic as midnight approached.
    For a man without money to be locked into the Yoshiwara was humiliating at best and often disastrous. He would have to seek shelter in a house that would extend him credit. Knowing a man was at their mercy often resulted in exorbitant expenses for one night’s lodging. Toughs from some of the lower-class establishments had been known to move into a defaulter’s home and wreak havoc on his domestic life until the debt was paid.
    As Cat neared the periphery of Centipede’s buzzard stare, she wandered out of the traffic and into the shadow of a stack of fire buckets at the head of an alley. She sneaked the bamboo cylinder from her coat and decanted it. She spread her feet, cocked her hips, and tilted the cylinder under her coat hem. While the stream of wine splashed into the dust, she stared contemplatively out over the throng. She wore the usual look of a man astonished yet again that pissing was such a thoroughly soul-satisfying act.
    As she shook the last drops from the cylinder, Cat finished her survey of the crowd. Her means of escape was somewhere among the guests and servants, the messengers, jugglers, procurers, shills, cutpurses, and food vendors with their portable shops balanced on bamboo poles across their shoulders. Cat’s means appeared as though on cue.
    He was a person of great importance, which was why he was dressed as a peasant. Forbidding bureaucrats to visit the Yoshiwara was like forbidding a tidal wave to hit the shore. Thousands of men were required to run a government based on intrigue and pervasive suspicion. They were the Yoshiwara’s most valuable customers.
    This one was a metsuke, an inspector and an official gatherer of intelligence for the shMgun’s junior council of elders. He was a ponderous blotch of a man who had drunk too much sake to make the journey to the Great Gate unaided. Two huge, shaven-headed servants of the House of the Winged Mountain supported him between them. The weaving course the servants steered indicated they had been drinking, too.
    The metsuke wore a big bamboo hat and straw sandals. Even though the night sky was cloudless, he wore a raincape made of thick layers of rice straw tied around his neck and waist. It thatched him from his trio of overlapping