The komusō had not shown his face to anyone for eleven years.
He wore the basket of his order, woven of rush, which came down over his head like an upturned bucket and hid it to the chin. He saw the world through the weave. The world saw a basket, a plain robe and a bamboo flute. That was the point of it. Under the basket a man was nobody, and a nobody could walk the roads where the shogun’s checkpoints stopped everyone else.
His temple was Reihō-ji, at Ōme, out on the far side of the Musashino. A road ran from Ōme across the plain to the post town of Naito Shinjuku, where it met the Koshu road at the fork, and the komusō walked it in all weathers, and played at doors for rice and coppers.
Eleven years ago he had been Nagai Hikozaemon. He had kept the accounts of a small domain’s house in Edo, and kept them well, until the year they came up short by a sum that was never his. A samurai who had done wrong could escape his sentence by taking the basket. Nagai took it. He had not said his name since, and nobody had said it to him.
He had a daughter. She had been six. She was seventeen now, and that autumn she had married into a house in Yotsuya, just inside the great gate. He knew which house. Three days ago he had stood at its gate with his flute and played, and she had come out with the rice. She put two handfuls into his bowl, and bowed to the basket, and went in.
On the night of the seventh day of the first month, the night Edo eats its rice with the seven herbs, snow came down on Naito Shinjuku. The inns were full of men who had walked in for the New Year. The komusō played at their doors and was given coppers. He could not count them through the weave.
At the last door a man in grey was standing in the snow, as if he were waiting for somebody, and it was him.
“He asked for you, komusō-san,” said the man in grey. “He said you would come with the snow.”
The komusō did not ask who. The whole post town knew that the one in black had come down from the hills for the New Year. Nobody knew from where. For a week lords’ men had been riding through the town and not stopping at the inns.
“The first drop costs nothing,” said the man in grey, and went ahead of him onto the marsh.
A path of planks ran north from the road into the reeds of Tsunohazu. At the end of it stood a low shed with a drop burned into the wood over its door. A boy was waiting there with a dipper of water. He poured it over the komusō’s hands, as the water is poured at the basin of a shrine, and the komusō knelt and went in through the low door.
On the boards inside lay more pairs of swords than he had seen anywhere outside a castle.
The stair went down so steeply that he took it as a ladder, with the flute in his teeth. At the landing a door was shut, and behind it a dice cup came down on a mat, and somebody groaned. At the bottom hung a curtain with one drop painted on it.
Below, there were seven lamps.
The cellar went out under them further than any of them could show. There were benches for forty men, and forty men on them: lords’ men in crested haori, and merchants in the forty-eight browns and the hundred greys that the shogun’s laws left a man in trade. The noise of them came up the stair like the noise of a market. A man was waving the new ranking sheet from Bakurocho, which had come out for the New Year and put a house of Noda at the head of the East. The man beside him said it should have been Choshi. Nobody agreed with either of them.
At the far end, beyond the last lamp, a man sat alone, in black.
Nobody looked at him, and everybody knew he was there. When the man in grey came past the lamps, he stopped and bowed low to the man in black. The man in black did not rise. He turned his head, and bowed to the dark behind him. The man next to the komusō said one word under his breath.
“Kuronushi.”
“This is the tasting,” said the man in grey.
A small dish was set in front of every man. It was pale clay, unglazed, and new. Beside it were a little spoon, a cup of water and a cedar lid. The bottle was a squat brown crock. The man in grey went along the benches with it, and at every dish he lifted the lid, and let one drop fall into the middle of it from a height, and put the lid back. He sold as he went, and the benches argued with him, and laughed.
He came to the komusō last.
“Lot three,” he said. “Tamari. From Taketoyo, on the Chita peninsula, in Owari. A young house. The fourth Deguchi to be called Mataemon began it eleven years ago. Soybeans and salt, and almost nothing else. This is from the first vat he ever filled. Eleven winters.”
He lifted the lid. The drop did not spread. It stood up on the clay like a bead of black lacquer.
“It is said that the first of it gathered at the bottom of a monk’s vat in Kishu, six hundred years ago,” said the man in grey. “The same monk brought home the music of your flute, komusō-san.”
The komusō looked at the dish through the weave, and could not see it.
Nobody told him what to do. There was nothing else to do. He took the basket off.
The lamplight came onto his face. It was the first time in eleven years. The men on the benches did not look at him. They were looking at their own dishes. At the far end, beyond the lamps, the man in black looked.
“Nagai Hikozaemon,” said the man in black.
It was the first thing he had said that night. Nobody had said that name for eleven years.
Nagai held the dish up to the lamp. The drop was black in the middle and red at its rim, where it ran thin, the red of a coal at the bottom of a brazier. He tilted the dish, and the drop leaned, and held.
It was the gate in Yotsuya, in the snow. His daughter came out with the rice. There was no basket. She looked up into his face, and the rice stopped in her hands, and she knew him.
He brought the dish to his face. It smelled of cedar, and under the cedar of something older, and under that of snow.
He drank the water. He took the drop up on the tip of the spoon, and tasted it, once. It tasted the way her hands had smelled of rice.
The dishes were taken away. Nobody saw who took them.
Then the noise of forty men stopped, all at once, as if the snow had come down into the cellar.
“We begin, as always, with a sensible number,” said the man in grey. “One ryō.”
1840 · Bid!
1 ryōthe komusō
He had no gold. He had raised the paddle before he remembered that.
3 ryōa lord’s man in a crested haori
10 ryōthe komusō
40 ryōthe rice broker from Kuramae
The broker lent to the shogun’s men against their rice, and knew to the coin what every man in the room was worth. He looked at the basket on the komusō’s knees, and added it up.
Nagai’s face had gone white under the lamps. Without the basket, everybody could see it.
120 ryōby the pillar
Nobody looked at the pillar.
“She bowed to the basket,” said the man in black, from the dark.
It was the second thing he had said that night.
300 ryōthe komusō, in kind
The man in grey looked down the room to the man in black. The man in black inclined his head.
The mallet fell once on the cedar block, with a small dry sound.
“Shoyuken,” said the forty men together, quietly.
Nagai set the basket on the cedar block.
The crock was wrapped in paper and put in a box of plain wood. A komusō has nowhere to keep a box, so it went on the long shelf behind the lamps, with a wooden tag. The man in grey asked what name to write on the tag. The man in black had already said it. The man in grey wrote it.
In the book, below a lord’s name, the man in grey wrote a name that had not been written anywhere for eleven years.
At dawn, at Tenryū-ji, the bell rang before any other bell in Edo, to send the men in the inns home. Nagai came up the stair without the basket. The snow had stopped. In the street men looked at his face the way men look at any face, and went past.
He walked to Yotsuya. At the gate of the house his daughter was sweeping the snow from the step. She looked up at the man in the street, a man with a plain robe and a flute and no basket, and bowed to him as one bows to a stranger, and went on sweeping.
He had his flute. He did not play it.
That night he went back to the marsh. The low door was shut. It was shut the next night too, and the night after.
The basket still hangs on a peg behind the shelf. Nobody has worn it since.