Fudoki (10 page)

A dog barked. She stopped until it came up to her, yelling, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” and then it, too, froze.

They eyed one another in the near-dark, the woman who was a cat and the little dust-colored bitch. “Why,” the tortoiseshell woman said, “you’re no taller than my knee.”

“You’re—what are you?” the dog asked.

“Bigger than you,” she said, and threw her stick at it. The dog tumbled backward into the grasses and vanished, and she did not see it again that night.

She continued to the farm. She looked around: there were a number of buildings, and she could tell what some were simply by their smells: a barn, a food-storage house, a granary. Everywhere were spaces into which she might have crawled had she still been a cat, all too small and unwelcoming for a woman. She stood indecisively in the farmyard’s center.

“Hey,” a voice called. The tortoiseshell woman spun and dropped into a fighting crouch: ready.

“Easy, easy, now,” the voice said, comfort and laughter in its tone. She saw its owner: a man, barely more than an outline under the farmhouse’s eaves. “I mean no harm, miss. This is my farm, is all. My wife here, she’ll want to invite you in. Yukio?” he called into the farmhouse. “Come on out here.”

A wood door slid open, and a woman stepped out, outlined in the dim light from inside the building. “Where—” she said, looking around. “Oh, there you are, husband. And miss. Come in, stay the night. We don’t have much to eat, but you’re welcome to it, such as it is. You shouldn’t be out at this time of night. Wolves; other things.”

The tortoiseshell woman took a step forward, then another. It is not an easy thing for a cat to trust people. They keep their own counsel even in the best of circumstances, when they are cherished pets (indeed, My
b
, who pats at my damp ink stick as I write, has clawed two women I asked to take her away, and refuses even my touch); how much harder it must be for one who had never felt a gentle person’s hand. She might not have come in at all, but the wife gestured. “Come on up here, where I can see you.”

The tortoiseshell woman stepped through the sliding door onto the dirt packed hard as stone that floored half the house. She slipped off her clogs (another thing she knew without knowing) and stepped up onto the boxwood floor of the raised section, following the couple to the square hearth pit. Mats were clustered here, and trays crammed with little metal bowls.

Here she learned one of her first lessons about people: “not much to eat” is a matter of opinion. As a cat, she had lived on whatever animals and insects (and, to be plain, garbage) were most easily captured or found, which had necessarily limited her options; as a woman her options had not broadened much. But the farmer and his family were not constrained. They grew many things and traded for others. It was autumn, so there was much to eat, and she tried it all: cooked rice with sweet vinegar and beans, and fresh and salted fish, a soup made of sweet potatoes and gromwell, little pickled quails’ eggs, dried slices from a pungent orange melon, and preserved plums so sour-salty that her eyes watered after the first tiny bite.

The three of them ate together on the polished floor that surrounded the hearth pit. On the other side of a wall that lost itself in the shadows of the immense eaves were laughs and conversation from the two servants.

We—people—may not always recognize the feeling, but we can tell when a thing is not right. We walk into a room and know immediately that something has changed, though it may be days before we realize that it is the eye-blinds have been replaced. The farmer and his wife knew that the tortoiseshell woman was not what she seemed, even though they could not have told you precisely what she seemed to be. She was no peasant. She might have been a noblewoman—the weave of her robes was very fine—but her hair was chopped short as a nun’s or a servant’s. She might have been a nun, but she did not wear the drab grays that would be correct, and she neither begged nor offered prayers; if she were a wealthy nun, she had no servants. If she were running away from home, she would be attended by the lover who had talked her into eloping. That left only two possible explanations for her presence.

“Are you on pilgrimage?” the farmer asked.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

“Then you must be selling something,” he said with total assurance. “What is it?”

“Sharpness,” she said, listening to herself with surprise. “Claws and teeth.”

“Needles?” his wife asked, as if she’d heard different words. “I need one. Mine is bent.”

“I don’t—”

“They’d be in your pack, yes?” the wife said. “May I get it for you?” She stood and crossed to the sliding door, and gathered up something that had been there. It was a footed wicker box with straps so that one could carry it over the shoulder, like the packs the monks carry.

The tortoiseshell woman frowned. “This is not mine.”

“Of course it is,” the wife said. “We saw you bring it here. You put it right there when you came in, along with your cloak and other things.”

The tortoiseshell woman opened the basket. Inside were bundles of various sizes. She unwrapped the first: a handful of needles pinned to a scrap of the indigo cloth that peasants use for everything, rolled tight to protect them. She handed this to the wife, who
ooh
ed over their sharpness, the lack of rust. There was a larger lumpy bundle of oiled cotton, as well. She unrolled it on the floor, and found wrapped in rabbit-patterned silk nineteen knives.

“Those are nice,” the farmer said. “What do you want for them?”

The knives were each precisely as long as her palm, each identical to the one in her belt. “I—cannot trade these,” she said, looking at them.

The farmer shrugged. “Someone else wants them, eh? It’s a pity, they look good and sharp.” But despite the fact that she had nothing to give him, he gave her a cloth filled with goose meat and rice balls.

They slept soon after that, and she was nearly asleep when she heard the farmer’s wife whisper: “My lady? Men, they see little, but you are more than a seller of needles, or even a flighty girl running away from home. Who and what are you?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, honestly but warily, remembering the last time she’d answered this question, for the black cat who had attacked her. “No one.”

“No one is no one,” the farmer’s wife said. But nothing else happened, and when she went her way at dawn the next morning, the farmer’s wife said nothing of this.

I try to write of the common people, but, really, what do I know? I have never met any. I have never slept in their homes, eaten their food. Even my servants are of good family, elegant and civilized women all. I imagine what their lives must be like, yet my imaginings are necessarily naïve. But what else do I have? Is it better to write and think only of what I have myself experienced? Most
monogatari
tales are about what their authors already know: life as a court noblewoman, the mannered round of exchanged poems and misunderstood intentions. I am intimately familiar with this world: I was born for it, and have lived at court for fifty years. And here, where I tell the tale of the cat who became a woman, I confess frankly that much of my life bored me senseless.

I have watched the full moon many times, crossing the same arch of sky between the same mountains to east and west, lighting gardens that were nearly interchangeable: here the three lakes, there the stand of reeds and iris, the pagoda from China, the perfect little bridge. Yes, it is always beautiful, each month’s moon unique. But all my life I longed to see a place where the eye was drawn, not by delicate nuances in oh, so familiar sights but by utter newness, by a blow to the mind. Perhaps this is why I write a tale now, something so foreign to my experience—because in doing so I am for a minute or a month freed from my life.

I have traveled as much as was allowed. I have gone as far north as Funaoka hill, and been on pilgrimage as far away as Ise, Hase, Yoshino mountain, two days’ travel and more from the capital. I even saw the moon rise over the ocean once. But every night the tortoiseshell woman sleeps under a new sky and a new moon. She has lost everything, and still I envy her from the bottom of my heart.

In the morning
it was raining. The wicker pack was still there, and so she shrugged into its straps. There was also a basket-hat, deep enough to conceal her face, with a trailing veil of ivory gauze. She had not had this the day before; but she took it without comment, along with the walking-stick beside them.

She crossed the border to Mikawa province, and stopped to eat her goose meat and rice. Her hands were cold and clumsy (a mixed advantage: fingers were better than paws had been, but then paws had never felt cold, even in the rainiest weather. Still, she was young and had not lived through her first winter; she did not know the numbness that snow brings to even the most leathery of pads) and she dropped several of the rice balls. She was not a lover of rice, so she left them where they lay, hoping some edible animal would find them and grow fat and slow, ready for her should she ever return this way.

There were few people on the T
kaid
that day. No one traveled for pleasure, and even men who
must
travel—for pilgrimage or with news from the provinces for the capital—find there are days when they cannot quite bring themselves to hustle about. Such a day as this—cold, wet, and monotonous—encouraged a certain lack of discipline, and everyone who could stayed inside. But the tortoiseshell woman did not travel for pleasure or because she was required to, by gods or man. She traveled because there was no reason not to, because her misery was independent of weather, and so she moved on.

That evening it was still raining, steadily and everywhere, so she stopped in an abandoned roadside temple. (She slept much at shrines and temples: they were near the road, and they did not require her to talk with people, which became fatiguing sometimes, with their interminable chat about families.) There were no priests or monks, and not even a statue to show to which of the ten thousand Buddhas and saints the temple had been holy. All that was left was a bell the color of verdigris, its silver tassels tarnished and frayed; fading vermilion paint on the beams; and empty stone pedestals: the ghosts of Buddhas. The little stones once heaped before the statues were still here, scattered to the temple’s corners. With each step the tortoiseshell woman kicked aside now-purposeless pebbles. The roof was more cracks than shingles. Water fell through everywhere.

Using wood she broke from a ruined screen, she started a fire on the largest pedestal. Her wicker pack held many things, it seemed, though she only found them when she needed them; one was an oiled deerskin bag with a flint, and a bundle of dust-dry grass. The fire was small but bright, for the wood had been resinous. It spat colored sparks, and hissed when rain fell into it. Smoke seeped upward and let itself out at the cracks in the roof. She shook her cloak dry, and was soon warm again.

I cannot say quite how it was, but she was still a cat in some ways. Her robes never got as wet as they would have on a person, as if they were fur and she could shake and then groom herself dry whenever she wished. She did not know that this was not normal for people, and so she never thought of it. But I do. I have taken everything else from her: home, family, story. I know some of where she goes, into winter and conflict and more loss. And I find that I cannot make her physically miserable, as well: not tonight as she huddles in an unfamiliar body, anyway. We—the gods who create things, even we small gods who write
monogatari
tales—find that there are limits to our cruelty.

She ate the last of her food from the farmer, and curled up in her cloak to sleep.

She was dozing when something bit her hand. She killed it without waking up fully, and only after it was dead did she look at the little creature. It was small enough to fit in the palm of her hand, fat, and the dead-white of rice or ghosts. When she turned it over, she saw that it had either no legs or myriad tiny legs, though she couldn’t tell which in the dim light of the dying fire. She felt another bite, on her ankle, and slapped at it, killing another of the little things. She was ready for the third one, and caught it between her hands when it sank its teeth into her calf. “Stop that!” she said.

The thing squirmed. “Let me go!”

She felt it trying to bite her fingers, so she shook it and then cracked a little opening to look inside. It was like the others, small and white; when she looked around, she saw several more, just out of the firelight. “Stay back, or I’ll squash this one.” She flattened her hands a little, and the others squirmed back into the darkness.

She returned her attention to her catch, which lay rigidly still in her hands. “What are you? Killing animal, prey, something else?”

“I am a rice ball,” it said with a certain pride.

It did look a bit like one, though.—“Rice balls don’t talk, or move. Or bite me,” she added as it tried to do so, and she closed her hands and shook it again.

“I’m not just
a
rice ball,” it said when it could talk again. “I am one of
your
rice balls. You dropped us. Remember?”

“You weren’t alive then.”

“You
abandoned
us,” it said, full of a sense of ill-usage. “Bad enough that you eat my brethren; bad enough that my
destiny
is to be eaten, but then you don’t even do that! You drop me on the ground, where mice or foxes will find me. Wasted!”

“Hey,” she said, and shook the rice ball again. “I said something: you weren’t alive when I dropped you. What happened?”

“How do I know?” the rice ball snapped. “How do
you
know, for that matter? Maybe we
were
alive, and you were just too much of a clod to notice.”

She considered the rice ball. This was the first time that something she might eat had ever spoken to her. Prey animals didn’t have souls and could not speak—her mother had taught her this, and it must be true.

“You have a soul?” she asked dubiously.

The rice ball said, “Why do
you
care?”

“If you do, then perhaps mice and rats and all the other prey animals have souls as well. I’m curious.”

“Would that stop you eating them?”

“No,” she said honestly. “Not if I can catch them.” (Cats are like that.) “But it might make things a little more difficult.”

“Why?” said the rice ball. “Life is all about eating and being eaten.”

“I suppose,” she said. “What do rice balls eat, then?”

It was an unanswerable question, and so it tried to bite her again. She popped it in her mouth and bit down. There was a single squeak, and her mouth was filled with cold sticky rice. The other creatures rolled to her feet, their life gone: no more than rice balls now. After eating two more (for she was hungry), she pushed the rest into the fire. I cannot say whether this was a touching attempt to offer them a Buddhist cremation, or whether she was making sure they would not come back to life and harass her in her sleep. Perhaps she meant both these things. It is seldom that our motives are uncomplicated.

“Perhaps now you are willing to listen,” the road said.

She stood on a road as clear as crystal, fading into fog at either end. Ten thousand voices chittered, growled, chanted in the back of her mind:
turn; cedar; emulate; I hear it now; rain-wet sleeves.
“Go away,” she said as she had before, but added: “Did you make the rice-ball creatures?”

“The farmer made them,” the kami said. “His wife and the little pregnant servant-girl, actually. You take cooked rice and a bit of vinegar and—”

“No, I mean did you make them live?”

The road shrugged, causing the tortoiseshell to stagger. “I am the road.”

She gave up. “Did they all die?”

“Why do you care?” the kami said, echoing the rice ball.

“Because—” She sat down. “If they didn’t all die, they might breed. Perhaps someday they might tell tales to one another. I wondered what a rice ball’s story might be like.” (As do I, though I cannot tell their stories myself. I must pick carefully what tales I tell in the time I have left.)

The road was warm, with a pulse like a heartbeat against her legs, she curled down until her face and side were against it. She found herself purring at the warmth. She had not felt warm all the way through since winter had started, and that had been at the border of Owari province, miles and days back.

“So why are you here?” she asked at last. “I told you to go away, the last time I saw you.”

The kami’s voice in her head sounded a bit like a snort. “You made an offering. And I came.”

“I did not!” She straightened. “And this is a temple, not a shrine. It wouldn’t be an offering to
you,
anyway. Even if it were one.” It was another thing she knew without knowing, the difference between the Buddhas’ temples and the shrines of the kami.

“The Buddhas were done with it,” the kami said, “so I took it back. And there was an offering. Water in a fallen leaf. And rice. Though it would have been nice for you to offer something else, as well.”

“The rice balls? They bit me, and then they turned back to rice and I threw them on the fire.”

“Quite. Was there anything else you wanted to give me?”

The tortoiseshell woman sighed. “I suppose you could have the cloth they came in. It’s in my wicker pack. As if you cannot tell.”

“An excellent gift”—as it was. The cloth was linen (if a little sticky and greasy), and flax is always appropriate for a kami.

There was silence for a moment—or an age; there is no telling about time when it is dark and there are no watchmen to sound the hours—and then the tortoiseshell woman spoke. “What are these voices?”

“The gods,” the kami said. “The eight million gods, speaking all at once.”

“Are they all roads?”

“That would be a lot of roads. No. They are peace. War. Rice, barley. A thousand forges, ten thousand gates. This lake, that pond, the other river. The houses of Fujiwara, Minamoto, a dozen others. A tree, all trees, a forest, all forests. I am not here to discuss theology.”

“How can there be so many of you, and I have never met a god before this?”

“How would you know if you met one? You cats live in a cat-shaped world. There do not appear to be any cat-shaped gods.”

“And now I am not even a cat,” she said bitterly.

“You are no more and no less than you ever were,” the kami said. “You lost nothing that was yours in the first place.”

“I am nothing and no one. Is that all I ever was?” She tipped her face toward the darkness, and felt hot tears on her cheeks. “I did not ask for this shape.”

“Do you hate it?”

“Yes! No. Sometimes. Parts are good. But,” she added, “I’m sure there are good things to being a mouse, and yet I have no desire to become one. I want to be a cat again. Change me back.”

“Who says
I
did this?” the kami asks. “Eight million gods and all the Buddhas and all the demons and all the dead; foxes and
tanuki
-badgers, snakes and spiders. Monkeys. Magicians. Any of these might have done this, or encouraged it to happen, or convinced you to do this to yourself.”

“I wouldn’t do this. I think you’re a nightmare,” she said. “I don’t think you’re really here at all—you or any of the others. At least rice balls are real. But what are
you
? No one can eat you.”

“I exist,” the kami said. “But never mind.”

“Wait—” she began, but it was gone. She had no more dreams that night.

When she awoke, she saw tiny pawprints in the dust on the floor and the cold ashes of the fire. Mice had crept past her as she slept and had eaten the rice balls.

A journey can be defined by miles or by days. Hers was defined by both, for each day meant more miles under her clogs. The T
kaid
is a comparatively easy road, though in winter it can be blocked by drifts of snow taller than a man’s height, or muddy wallows tens of feet across and knee-deep in the center, which stay liquid in all but the coldest weather. As on even the best of roads, there are ruts that can break a cart’s axle, but constant usage keeps much of the path free of tangling weeds. Even the Hakone pass is not high. Roads and trails trail off to both sides. Some have signs painted or carved into wood stakes stabbed into the ground at the fork; others say nothing, keeping their mysteries to themselves.