Chapter XXII

Hamaji, in secret, mourns her relations;

Nukasuke, in sickness, yearns for his child

We resume our tale with Ōtsuka Hikiroku, who, together with his wife Kamezasa, treated Shino with every show of affection from the day they welcomed him into their house, but only to burnish their reputations: in their hearts, often enough, they were sharpening knives for him.

How, one might ask, could this be? Hikiroku had already deceived the villagers and appropriated unto himself Bansaku’s Tillage, not a smidgen of which he employed on Shino’s behalf. And yet, he had not yet obtained the longsword Rainmaker. “Once I have my hands on that, I shall make an end of the boy. I shall at long last rise in the world, thanks to that precious blade, and then I shall take for Hamaji a more fitting groom, one more able to make my old age pleasant. And yet reflection teaches me that Shino, in countenance and spirit, is not like the normal run of boys: rather than rushing in and ruining things, it may be best to let sleeping dogs lie for a time, else the issue may not be worth the investment. Nay, I shall lull him into carelessness with unstinting hospitality: nothing could serve me better.” Such were his deepest thoughts, which he expressed in confidence to Kamezasa and no other; thus did they plot.

Shino’s peril, then, was that of a hen’s egg laid among rocks, or a chick nesting in firewood. But he had, in addition to his father’s foresighted final counsel, a talent, a capacity, and a daring all his own. He was a rare youth who could have outmatched Ushiwaka for wit, who was not a whit Masatsura’s inferior¹; he was well aware of Hikiroku’s feelings, and never for a moment let down his defenses, but rather kept that treasure, that sword, at his waist every moment from the day he moved into his aunt’s house, even as he had when he was in his old home. When he sat, the sword rested by his side; when he slept, it lay by his pillow; he guarded it diligently, and left no opening for thieves.

A year and more passed with host and guest expending their energies in this way, until Hikiroku, versed as he was in all cunning, began to doubt. “Suppose I lay a hand on him, but recklessly, in such a way as to bring blame upon my head; then all my years of daily mental exertion will disappear like foam, and what will become of me then?” His will to steal the blade weakened ever so slightly. Then this year, too, he thought, “Even if the sword Rainmaker does come into my hands, ’twill do no good to present it to the house of the Overseer as long as Shino remains safely secluded here. Yea, though the precious blade be not in my possession now, it and its master are here. It may not be mine, but as long as it is in my house, it is as good as mine, in the end. Haste lays waste to good plans—’tis an obstacle, a danger. My daughter Hamaji is yet a child. I can wait ten more years and still ’twill not be too late. The farther ahead one plans, the greater the gain one stands to reap; shortsightedness brings no merit.”²

Having at length arrived at these reflections, he brought Kamezasa to accept them and laid away his larcenous plans. Nevertheless he still quite often caused Gakuzō to sound out Shino’s innermost thoughts; however, he never received any news in this way. For his part, Gakuzō cursed Shino outwardly whenever his master and his master’s wife questioned him on the matter, while inwardly taking care never to say anything that could bring Shino harm. Furthermore, everything he was asked and everything he answered he secretly repeated to Shino, so that the latter was more firmly on his guard than ever, even while outwardly affectionate toward his aunt, and as willing to be employed as any menial.

Thus it was that the twofold essence continued in its inexorable, gentle progression, brightening into spring, darkening into autumn, never allowing the months and days as they flowed by to stagnate, and the Bunmei era reached its ninth year.³ This was Shino’s eighteenth year, and as Hamaji was two years younger she was twice eight this spring when the blossoms shone as bright as flames, their fragrance rising like smoke before the moon, while the willows grew greener with every glimpse of them, rustling restlessly, through tears in the veil of haze. One was now a youth of prodigious talent, the other a maiden of arresting beauty. His ability and her charm were such as is rare among rustics.

For such a man to have such a woman to wife bespoke a fate decreed by Heaven, and all the villagers praised the arrangement, and reminded the Estatesman and his wife of it at every encounter. Hikiroku and Kamezasa were troubled for a response, given what they had already said on the subject. A will to do Shino harm once again formed in their hearts, and secretly they began to chafe for a way to conclude matters with him—and yet the lad’s excellence made him even harder to reckon with now than he had been at eleven or twelve. He was a man now, five feet and eight or nine inches in height, with strength to match.

“’Tis as the saying has it: you can nip it in the bud, or use an ax later. I should have been rid of this problem long ago; ah, what a lamentable thing I have done.” Regret gnawed at Hikiroku’s innards, but to no avail. He pondered the matter until it pained him—“This course is no good, but neither is that”—and then an unexpected upheaval occurred in the neighboring region, which broke into battle.

Inquiring into the cause of the affair, we learn that there was in these parts a warrior known as Nobumori of the Taira, or Toshima Kageyuzaemonnojō, master of the territory of Toshima, in the district of Toshima, in the land of Musashi. He was no very great lord, but he did oversee a territory that included several villages, including Shimura, Jūjō, Oku, and Kaniwa. His younger brother was Heizaemon Masumori of Nerima—that is, he occupied the manor at Nerima. There were in addition the Hiratsuka and Marutsuka families, prosperous and well-favored houses that had spread throughout the region. Nobumori and his brother had begun as followers of the two Overseers, but had then found some slight cause to resent them, until now they were as distant as the Huns and the Viets.

Furthermore, at this time one of the elder retainers of the Yamanouchi Overseer, Kageharu of the Taira, the Nagao Lieutenant of the Guard, had brought the lands of Echigo and Kōzuke into submission to him, and had already begun to aspire to autonomy. Accordingly he conferred with Toshima, and Nobumori and his fellows instantly agreed, and thenceforth were no more followers of the Overseers. Then did the two Overseers, Yamanouchi and Ōgigayatsu, hold discreet councils of war in which they hammered out a strategy: they would strike first, while the enemy’s force was yet feeble, and they would strike at Toshima.

On the thirteenth day of the fourth month of the ninth year of Bunmei, then, an army consisting of over a thousand mounted men, under the generalship of Ōta Mochisuke the vice-lord of Bitchū, the Uesugi who held the post of Lesser Assistant in the Ministry of Punishments, and Yoritane the Vice-Lord of Chiba, appeared as if from nowhere and advanced, with thunderous hoofbeats, on Ikebukuro. The Toshima side had let down its guard, not expecting the enemy to attack, but each clan was close by, and every man threw on his armor and galloped off to the fight. They gathered from all around, the troops of Nerima, Hiratsuka, and Marutsuka joining themselves to Nobumori’s camp until they numbered over three hundred mounted men.

These sped toward Ekoda and Ikebukuro. They joined their voices in a battle cry and loosed their arrows of war, and then the two armies were plunged into one another’s midst, crossing spears, hitting and being hit, throwing off sparks. They fought until the day was more than half over. The Toshima forces were fewer, but in the initial clash they laid waste to the Chiba and Uesugi armies—they rode repeatedly to victory—and yet, the whole affair had been a surprise, and their men had not brought provisions, so that both officers and men began to suffer exhaustion from hunger and thirst. When they tried to pull back, the attacking general Mochisuke, Vice-Lord of Bitchū, brandished his tasseled baton to rally his allies. They attacked as if spurred, and the Toshima forces buckled; men fell in untold numbers.

This emboldened the Chiba and Uesugi men. They arrayed themselves in a fish-scales formation, rode out in a cross formation, and pummeled the enemy so as to leave him no chance to catch his breath. The Toshima forces, officers and men, were jumbled like so many yarrow stalks—they were all cut down—even Nobumori and Masumori were felled in the midst of the rampaging armies. Ah, the pity of it! The two generals of Toshima and Nerima gauged not the relative strength of their forces, but used up their clansmen and vassals, so that their ancient houses disappeared of a sudden, and all for a morning’s grudge.

This brought unrest into the world for a period, so that even in the villages of Sugamo and Ōtsuka people’s hearts were disturbed. Hikiroku and Kamezasa alone saw it as a blessing. “This will make it difficult to arrange the children’s wedding this year. Next year, once the tempest has subsided, we shall surely marry Shino to Hamaji, and yield to him the village headship.” This was the word they put out to the villagers, and with that they had dodged the issue.

It so happened that Hikiroku’s adopted daughter Hamaji had, since the age of eight or nine, taken the words of her parents that “Shino is your husband, and you are his wife,” their dewlike blandishments, as truth, like pearls the seafolk find, and she had dedicated her jewel-like heart accordingly. She took a bashful joy in the thought, and a pleasure in any word, no matter how meaningless, he spoke to her—all these feelings she shut up in her heart, as she served him. Now, her parents had never told Hamaji that she had been adopted, and had always treated her as if she had been born their daughter, and yet there were those who told her, in secret. Hamaji was twelve or thirteen when she heard, indistinctly, that her real father was a retainer in the Nerima house, something-or-other by name, and that she had a sibling.

“Now it begins to make sense to me why my present parents have always made a great show to others of prizing and loving me, when in fact their words and hearts do not agree. When no one else is around, they curse me to shame for a trifle, and often, when I was a child, they would pinch me and make it look like a caress. I do owe them no small debt of gratitude for raising me, but in fact they are not my birth parents, and I cannot say it grieves me they are not. My real father, now, he is a retainer of Lord Nerima: and what is his name? And it seems—I am told—I have a sibling: is he to me an elder brother or a younger, or is it perhaps an elder sister, or even a younger—have I a sibling at all, truly?” But she could learn no more from what people would repeat.

She did not let her parents see her sleeves stained with tears of longing for her parents, of a yearning that seemed to reach to the farthest tip of Tsukushi, though her home, she had heard, was not seven miles away. Not distant at all, and yet to her it felt very far in spite of its proximity, as if the nine switchbacks of Mt. Kurama separated her from it; when horses arrived, backs laden with the spring crop of radishes, and she heard that they came from Nerima, she felt an unexpected welling-up of affection that only doubled her sadness.

This year, when she heard that the house of Nerima had been destroyed, and that their kin the Toshima and Hiratsuka and so many of their followers had been struck down, officers and men, Hamaji was so stricken with grief that she knew not what to do. “If this be so, then my true parents, and my sibling, can hardly have escaped. Does my mother yet live? A woman might have been spared—and yet has she not then been left bereft of support? I do not understand my course—even if my adoptive parents had made it clear to me from the start that I had real parents somewhere, could I now ignore the love I owe them for raising me from infancy? And yet I did not know, and there is nothing to be done about that. I did learn of my parents’ and sibling’s existence, but through rumors so indistinct as to have taught me no name. And now I cannot even inquire as to whether they died in battle—is this karma, evil visited upon my head as a punishment for things I did in a past life? Oh, what am I to do?” As insects in the grass in broad daylight that hesitate their songs to raise, she dried her sleeves bedecked with dew from sighs of woe and hid her face, that none might know she wept: she reapplied her powder, but like frost at dawn it melted with her tears and ran.

In her mind, Hamaji kept reaching the same conclusion. “I can do nothing about this sadness in my heart—I look right, I look left, and nowhere do I find anyone I can discuss it with. For me there is only Master Inuzuka: though we are not yet wed, our parents gave us to each other when we were very small, and he is my husband. He is sober-minded, never in the least frivolous, and appears to be the most reliable of people. If I tell him plainly of all my sorrows and seek his wisdom, then may he not inquire on my behalf after the names of my real parents, indications as to whether they are alive or dead, if they perished in the fighting?”

She began to wonder, then, how she might speak to Shino of these questions, and cautiously she watched for a moment when nobody else was around. Then one day, Shino was shut up in his room, alone, with his elbows propped on his desk, reading the Collection of Lessons to Peruse.⁴ Inwardly rejoicing, Hamaji tiptoed to his side, and was about to address him when another burst noisily upon the scene. “Alas,” she cried, and ran off; her footfalls as she did so were the first thing to catch Shino’s attention, and he turned around to look.

The newcomer was Kamezasa. Shino went to push away his desk, that he might stand to greet her, but Kamezasa, having opened the Chinese-paper door, did not enter his room, but rather stood in the doorway eyeing Hamaji’s back suspiciously as the girl ran to hide herself. Then she spoke.

“Lo, Shino. You know, milord, of old father Nukasuke’s long illness—well, I have just heard from his neighbors on every side that he has reached a crisis these last two days; no elixir will pass his throat. He says that as you, milord, once lived next to him and conversed with him as an intimate friend, he desires to see you once again while he yet draws breath. I imagine it concerns arrangements for his burial, or else an honorarium for the physician. Either way, it reminded me that there is neither virtue nor, alas, profit in befriending the poor—but I could not very well ignore the matter, and so I tell you. If you have a mind to call on him, you had best do it quickly.”

Astonished, Shino replied, “Bitter news is this. He did not look that poorly when I inquired after his welfare the other day. When a man above sixty is touched by an epidemy it is cause for unease. I shall go at once.” He slung his sword at his waist and set out. Kamezasa saw him off, then went to her room.

What, then, did Nukasuke say to Shino when they met—what words did he leave behind him? All this shall be explained in the next book—read on.

End of Book I of Volume III of the Lives of the Eight Dogs of the Satomi

1. Ushiwaka was the boyhood name of famed hero Minamoto no Yoshitsune (1159–89); Masatsura (1326–48) was the loyalist son of loyalist hero Kusunoki Masashige.

2. A saying found in Bokeishū (circa 1486), a collection associated with warlord Ōta Dōkan (1432–86).

3. 1477. The “twofold essence” refers to the Daoist principles of yin and yang.

4. Ōe no Koretoki’s (888–963) Kin’etsushū, a record of teachings found in Chinese military treatises.