He breathes in deep the aroma of moist soil and detects its every component — the autumn rain, the tilling earthworms, the loam, the tang of decadent leaf and twig, the acid of pine needles. His hands, now indistinguishable from his other tools, probe the loose soil, exposing a subterranean world as busy and mysterious as the one men live in. He feels the tiny hairs of roots, the grit of wet sand, the slippery caress of a passing worm. He places some pale creature, tiny and round, in his palm, and watches its translucent legs sweep like oars across a rough sea. Ants hold aloft impossible loads, undeterred by his disruption of their trails. Above him, persimmons dangle, awaiting dissolution in the earth, much as men do. The shadows of birds in flight mix with those of waving boughs.
Since boyhood his hands have been in the soil, for his father was imperial gardener. Upon his father’s retirement some years ago, Yamashina Shoshi inherited the post. His father now tends a humbler garden and plays, at night, the shakuhachi. In the evening his playing draws the moon from below the horizon and the notes float upward to their home. From some gate in the blackness, a kami pauses at the entrance to his vaster world, to listen to a tone so sweetly pure. The kami flies toward the moon, or perhaps the moon is displaced toward him. He seats himself and tilts his head to one side, the better to listen, while below him human lives wink on and off like candles in a shrine. To his eye our world is contours of sound and shape, and the melody of the shakuhachi reminds the kami of the beauty of his world, much as a traveler far from home one night hears a voice singing, from courtyard in the dark ward, a song from his homeland, and his heart aches with longing and bittersweet memory.
Shoshi, as kneels among the strips of cedar bark and crawls in the shade of red maple and slumbering pampas grass, raises his head at the sound of laughter and elegant language. They seem to float, the court ladies, in their robes of dazzling brocade. Swallows soar among wisteria, scarlet leaves twirl earthward, perfect grasses bow under the sun’s weight — their robes tell stories, just as the ladies’ scents match the vivid beauty of their world. The laughter, throaty yet thrilling in its intensity, like new wine, surrounds them, part of a world they carry with them like the snail his home. In their hands books of poetry, opened to favorite passages, are squiggles of black ink that they somehow transform into a music of words, fertile in association. They sing of the inconstancy of men, and a phrase means “promise”, but sounds the same as the name of a waterfall, a famous sight in the woman’s district. The implication overwhelms him, and he wonders at the beauty he can only guess exists.
The court ladies drift by Shoshi, who pants quietly like prey watching from its burrow the stalking hunter. One woman, looking sad, but perhaps just tired or distracted, walks at some remove, her golden fan fluttering, a phoenix flapping its wings and scenting the air with sandalwood. Something brushes his face, as quick and soft as a moth’s wings. He looks down at his hands, blackened by the sun, calloused, soil under the nails that no bathing can lift, and at his hunched form that seems to grow from the earth, yet he knows from the lump in his throat that he has fallen in love.
Shoshi ventures from the undergrowth when he hears the tittering of the women. He leans upon his hoe and marvels as they pass. His sighs reach the court lady’s dainty ear, which interprets them as the breeze soughing in the trees. She takes no more notice of him than of the flags in the garden walk or the jamb of the entrance to the palace. Shoshi sometimes curses his blackened hide and body so like that of a draught animal. At night he silently bays at the moon. His father finds for him a tutor to school him in the rudiments of literacy. Shoshi wields the wolf’s hair brush with a hand more accustomed to the pruning hook.
An officer in the imperial household is soon apprized of this state of affairs. He issues, therefore, a summons for Shoshi to present himself at the officer’s courtyard.
Although every detail of the imperial officer’s garden is known to Shoshi, who had indeed designed it, he still feels disoriented walking down the central path between his escorts. In his years of tender care of the garden, Shoshi had kept to the hidden trails among the shrubs and raked gravel, that, on a small but accurate scale, reiterates the highways and mountain passes that bind provinces to the Emperor.
In their rich but subdued elegance, Shoshi’s robes admirably suit his position as imperial gardener. Inwardly, however, he battles to maintain his dignity, for he knows that love makes him a fool. Shoshi prostrates himself, face touching the ground, elbows turned outward, and waits for the words that will humiliate him.
“It has come to my attention,’ the official begins, “despite your precautions, that you have been smitten by the beauty of the Lady Akazome and have fallen in love with her.”
So, thinks Shoshi, that is her name!
“We are not unaware,’ continues the officer, leaning on his armrest, “of the turmoil in your heart, especially in view of the exulted station of the Lady relative to your rank. Nevertheless, your skill, bordering on an art, and your devoted labor bend our thoughts to appreciation, and thence to compassion, for have not even our noblest men suffered the pangs of unrequited love?”
Shoshi is not sure whether to answer or not, and so remains silent and prostrate.
“Consequently,” the official says, “I set before you a promise. You may have the Lady Akazome in marriage — provided you carry the box yonder around this courtyard some thousand circuits.”
The official indicates with his folded fan a cube, richly brocaded in red and gold and tied with green cords.
“The burden,” the official adds, “is light and must be borne on your back.”
Shoshi’s gaze falls upon the delicate box, and he rejoices once more in the power of his limbs and the endurance of his strong back. He begins to worry whether he can handle the box without crushing it.
Shoshi arises, approaching the box, and touches its fine ornament. In his mind he rehearses the profession of undying love he has painfully composed and committed to memory. He is aware that his phrases may strike her as awkward, at times perhaps inappropriate, at others ludicrous with their false archaisms, but the genuineness of his feelings cannot be lost on her. These crowd out questions of the box’s origin, its contents and the motives of the official of the imperial household. The box itself remains mute, gorgeous and undeniable.
Careful not to dent its delicate sides or tear its fine brocade, Shoshi grasps the box and tries to heft it onto his back. The box barely moves. His most persistent exertions cannot even tilt the box. Bewildered, Shoshi gathers his strength, this time raising the box a few inches above the ground. As he struggles he hears the splash of carp in the pond he built and hears the gurgling of water in the pipes of bamboo. Sweat flows in rivulets swollen with tears of frustration. He can no longer hold the box, which settles on the earth without leaving an imprint. The official looks on, but seems on the point of losing interest. He pretends to study the lush scene painted on his fan, he exchanges a glance with a retainer. Their faces are blank.
Shoshi worries the official may rescind his promise, and so with renewed concentration wills his spent muscles to lift the box. This time the box is immobile, and Shoshi’s spirit sinks deeper into despair. The official’s patience is inexhaustible, his demeanor courteous, disinterested.
“Oh, spirits of my ancestors, do not desert me!” Shoshi wails.
Just when his exhaustion and pounding heart bring him to the brink of collapse, unsuspected reserves of strength arise from some internal source of vitality, just as hot springs well to the surface driven by the fires that feed Mount Fuji. The agony sickens him, but then in a vision comes the breathtaking beauty of his Lady, that visage of preoccupation, perhaps with thoughts unfathomable, of a kind as beyond his ken as the tone of the catalpa bow.
As time passes, not even the most haunting images of his Lady’s beauty can replenish his ebbing strength, and thus Shoshi, having used up his vital energy, no longer has the will for another heartbeat, another breath, another blink of the eyes. With his last exhalation his spirit leaves him, his mind yet dreaming on for a moment of his Lady’s enigmatic frown.
As men in less ornate livery remove Shoshi’s body for the pyre, the official of the imperial household reports to Lady Akazome.
Lady Akazome’s book of poetry falls from her hand and flutters to the tatami. The sharp intake of breath and the way she raises her eyebrows make her all the more beautiful and graceful. A passing breeze blows some strands of her long hair across her face, but she does not brush them aside. She leans forward, her palms on the floor supporting her under some invisible weight.
The Lady Akazome sings:
On the salt wind a stork’s cry,
Yet only waving reeds.
In the moving wood,
A flower opens in the third hour.
The face of the dancer at Kitasagi
Is a shadow behind her fan.
The sage has just left —
I rest before journeying down the mountain,
And hear, faintly, his voice,
Singing as he gathers herbs.
Her attendants scarcely breathe, the official quietly slides backward toward the entrance and retires. In the stillness a candle splutters, the only sound.
Gathering her robe, the Lady Akazome arises, the heavy brocade rustling slightly, and makes her way to the courtyard. There the ornate box remains, giving no sign of its having been touched, or for that matter, of ever having been anywhere else.
The Lady Akazome, seeming to glide rather than walk, approaches the box as a boat might near an island or an egret on still wing might land on the shore of a pond. The box bears no insignia, no trace of a special pattern in the brocade to reveal its provenance, no peculiarity in the way of the tying of its knots, nothing but its ordinary elegance and the fact that a man has died for it.
The Lady Akazome bends forward slightly, half kneeling, and a silence unbroken by even a cicada, she contemplates the box, alone in the courtyard.
© Robert L. Fisher, 1993
