The heat of summer gave way to the onset of autumn. Then came the equinox; autumn lilies blossomed around the rice fields. The storms of late summer abated; the leaves turned red and gold; chestnuts ripened in the forest and persimmons in the gardens. Work in the fields seemed endless to bring in the harvest of rice, beans, and vegetables that would feed them through the winter. The air echoed with the sounds of flails as the grains were separated from the husk, the dull chopping of the bean straw and shelling of the pods, beans falling into baskets and buckets with a patter like hail.
One day, suddenly it seemed, the work was finished; the fields were bare and brown. Mist hung around the mountains, and the first frosts stiffened the bamboo grass and turned it white. The airy rooms of the temple that had been cool in summer became freezing as the autumn wind chilled. The year turned and snow fell, closing off the temple from the outside world.
13
The last stone was slipped into place, and Akane could no longer see her father’s face. The stone slid perfectly in, its carefully hewn edges fitting seamlessly into the stones on either side. She stood at the northern end of the bridge. There was a huge crowd behind her, yet they left a space around her, people pressing to see but no one wanting to approach her in her grief-or, possibly, come close enough to catch the contagion of the curse that must surely lie on her family.
There was a gasp from the crowd, a collective drawing of breath. The men who lifted the stone-Wataru, the stonemason’s right-hand man, and Naizo the apprentice-stood with white faces and rigid jaws; Wataru’s eyes were bright with tears; Akane could see muscles in Naizo’s neck twitching from the strain, his face contorted in a grin of fear and pity. The masons moved backward until they no longer stood on the bridge. Her father was alone on it-the only living thing, entombed in stone.
The stone would never be removed. Her father was behind it in the dark. He would never see daylight again, never feel the spring breeze on his face or see the cherry blossom drift down onto the green waters of the river, never hear the river’s changing song as it ebbed and flowed with the tide. Would he sit with the same calm that he had displayed till now, while the air was slowly exhausted? Or would he panic now that there was no one to see his shame and despair?
She had lived by the river all her life. Mori Yuta was not the first person she had seen drowned; she knew how hands grasped and clung and scrabbled for life. Were her father’s hands scrabbling like that now? Looking for chinks in the stones he knew fitted perfectly, his strong flexible hands where his gift was contained-the hands she knew so well and had watched so often, holding adze and chisel or curved around a tea bowl at night, the stone dust still embedded in the lines around the joints of knuckle and wrist and across the palms. He smelled of dust and sometimes came back at night looking as if he had been hewn from stone, gray from head to foot. He had been admired and respected, had built wonderful constructions, but the obsession with the bridge had undone all that. He neglected his family. His wife bore no more children-the neighbors joked maliciously that she would have needed a body of stone to attract her husband. Their only daughter ran wild, a thin strange child who could swim like a cormorant and handle a boat like a man. When she turned fourteen, not a single family would consider her for marriage to their sons, even though the sons themselves were not averse to her lithe body, slender neck and wrists, and beautifully shaped eyes. But the family was obviously deeply unlucky if not actually cursed, and Akane had a bold look about her that drove away future mothers-in-law. It was obvious to everyone except her father that the girl would become a prostitute. Even as a child, she’d had that look, they said knowingly.
And brow-beaten girls, not much older than Akane and already married, envied her silently, for they could imagine no life worse than their own drudgery.
Akane had overheard plans for her future being discussed by her father and the brothel owner; her father was shocked by the man’s suggestion; Akane was more shocked by how low a price was being offered. She went immediately to a rival establishment, run by a widow, and bargained for over twice the sum, half of which she gave to her parents and half she kept for herself. Her parents were moved by her decisiveness and filial devotion and relieved that she would not become a burden to them but, on the contrary, would be able to support them in their old age-particularly her mother, since her father’s obsession seemed all too likely to lead to penury. And her mother hoped that eventually Akane would attract a long-term protector who might even want to have children with her.
For the lack of grandchildren was their greatest disappointment in Akane’s new arrangement. All her attentions and dutiful behavior could not make up for the fact that there were no grandchildren. The stonemason’s line would die out: he had no sons or nephews, and now no grandsons to tend his grave and pray for his spirit.
He did not know then that his grave would be both public and anonymous: that hundreds would walk past it every day, that his stone would declaim the Otori challenge to those who entered their city, and that his voice would be heard forever, as he talked endlessly with the river.
AKANE WAS BARELY fifteen when she moved to the widow Haruna’s establishment and worked as a maid to the girls there. Men came to drink wine and eat Aunt Haruna’s legendary fried octopus and sea urchin. The girls sat with them, their company as highly valued as the other services they provided, and Akane learned how a quick wit was as attractive as a shapely body, long silky hair, or a flawless nape. Some of the girls sang; they danced like children and often played childhood games with an added sexual edge. Aunt Haruna’s establishment was fairly exclusive, visited by richer merchants and even the sons of the warrior class.
In an attempt to control prostitution, Lord Shigemori had decreed that all brothels should be confined to one district, in the new town across the river from the port. It was on the opposite side to the stone bridge; at the back of Haruna’s place was a natural hot spring, and behind it rose a small volcano on whose slopes grew a variety of shrubs and flowers warmed by the mountain itself: camellias, azaleas, and other more exotic plants that grew nowhere else in the Middle Country. The priest who served at the shrine of the god of the mountain loved plants more than people, it was said. He hardly spoke to pilgrims to the shrine-the mountain was supposed to protect and increase the virility of men-but spent most of his time tending and talking to his plants.
The southern slope of the volcano, then, was a fine place for a pleasure house. Haruna’s was named the House of the Camellias, and she was in her way an artist-of pleasure. Akane, who had grown up absorbing the elements of beauty and design from her father, found herself responding with her whole being to her surroundings. She was spoiled and petted by the older women and became a favorite with the men, though Haruna did not allow any of them to take her with them into the private rooms. She guarded Akane jealously, and Akane did not resist it; the rooms were called private, but with their flimsy walls and fragile screens they were hardly that. Akane grew accustomed to the sounds and smells of desire. She was interested in men’s enslavement, as it seemed to her, to the pleasures of the flesh, how desperately they sought release within the body of a woman. She found their need, their desire, both pitiable and arousing-it seemed so easy to satisfy them and so pleasurable-and so much more comprehensible than her father’s desperate obsession with the unforgiving stone.