“My Lord’s wife and child were captured during the siege. I managed to rescue his wife, but not his child. As she was tortured, she was told that their daughter would be sold into slavery. The sorrowful fate of her child would eat at her like some tiny animal living in her heart. Because of the torture she lived only a short time after I rescued her, but she made me promise to find her child and free her.”
Kaze bowed once again, touching his forehead to the ground. He sat up and said, “So you see, I’m sorry I brought misfortune to your house and caused you to commit seppuku. But the Tokugawa government, the government that now rules Japan, is not one that I can go to for justice. And I’m very sorry to have to say this, Lord Manase, but you were not a good ruler.
“Our beliefs tell us that harmony and balance must be kept if a Lord is to rule according to the natural order of things. Then peasants, merchants, priests, and other people can understand that there is a natural hierarchy to society and that the ruler is in place at the top of this hierarchy because of the benefits he brings to all, not just to himself. I’m sorry, but you forgot that principle and devoted your life to your own pleasure and interests, abandoning the people who depend on you to incompetent magistrates, bandits, and their own resources.
“That is why I decided to take action in this case, even though it involved only the death of one samurai and one peasant in a land where hundreds of thousands have died through wars and other types of injustices. I hope you’ll forgive me.” Kaze bowed once more, then he stood up. He took Lord Manase’s horse and tied him to a bush on the road. When they came to look for the District Lord, they would find the horse and thus find the body in the meadow in the woods.
Kaze made sure his sword was secure in the sash of his kimono, then he turned and started walking down the road, starting his often-interrupted journey out of the District. He felt no elation over the outcome with the strange District Lord, but as he walked, breathing in the clean air, looking at the blue sky filled with small white tufts of clouds, he soon shrugged off his concerns.
He started humming an old Japanese folk song under his breath and stopped to examine the tattered sleeves of his kimono. As he did so, he found the bit of cloth with the senbei that the youth had given him at the inn and finally decided to eat it. He unwrapped the cloth and took a bite from the toasted rice cake he found inside. After all this time, it was a bit stale but still tasty. He was about to toss aside the scrap of cloth it was wrapped in when he froze, dropping the rice cake and holding the cloth in both hands.
There, on the inside of the cloth, was a mon with three plum blossoms. It was the mon of his Lord and Lady. It was the mon on the clothing of the girl he was seeking. Perhaps the cloth came from someone else in Kaze’s scattered clan and perhaps it was simply a rag that had somehow come into the possession of the motley trio intent on revenge. And perhaps, just perhaps, it was a tangible link between that trio and the girl Kaze had been seeking for over two years.
The strange trio had a head start of many days on Kaze, but he knew where they were headed: the great Tokaido road.