The peony girl reloaded her pipe and lit it with a coal like a glowing tooth, sucking the smoke up in two quick gasps then tapping the bowl empty.

But shouldn’t I wish for something for myself? Isn’t there somewhere that I should place my hopes? It’s a question for which I have no answer. So I pour wine and sing and dance and chat and play finger games. And when special requests have been negotiated and extra fees paid, magpies build bridges and I wait where I am told and do whatever is required.

The wind came up in an abrupt rush that flung a wet spray deeper onto the veranda, and they scrambled to get farther back under the eaves, laughing at their own agitation.

“A sudden evening shower,” Ohasu recited, “and the ducks run around the house quacking.”^[2]

The old poet smiled. Did you write that?

I tried it another way too. “A sudden evening shower, and a solitary woman sits gazing pensively.”^[2] But that seems too sentimental to me.

Old Master Bashō picked up his cup and sipped at it. Your “gazing pensively” stanza would be easy to link to. You could use it to connect a poem on love to one on the summer rain.

Perhaps, said Ohasu. Yet, still, it seems too obvious.

A fragment from Hyakunin Isshu (100 Poets Anthology)
Tokyo National Museum

And the “ducks” stanza is lighter, I suppose. He sat watching the rain lashing the trees then said, But it’s within the link itself that beauty lies, the interval between two stanzas.

Not in the words?

No. In what jumps across from one stanza to the next and spans the gap. Our method is found in the art of collaboration. Poets sitting in a room composing a sequence together. Each voice pushing off from the one before.

I like the stanzas, Ohasu said.

So do I. It’s what blocks me.

Do your followers appreciate the distinction?

Some do. Most don’t. He turned towards her and said, Most are like those of you who live in the floating world, drifting along, accepting every occurrence as it arrives.

And is that how you see us?

The old poet said nothing.

But I suppose it’s true. I am indeed a fashion. Ohasu loosened her bodice and pulled it open for the cooling she might find. A father is unable to pay his debts, and a small girl is sold to a pleasure provider in Edo. A city man is sent as his agent. He ties a rice-straw rope around the girl’s waist and leads her out through a village emptied of its people, for no one there wishes to see the shame of the girl who is the one selected to be sold. The girl wept the night before but now her eyes are dry. She doesn’t gaze about to remember the world of childhood she will never again see. Her mother calls and she looks back. But there is nothing for her to say and nothing to do, and the small girl walks away doubting that she will ever see her again.