The morning sun warms them and steam from tilled fields rises in silver clouds of moist air. Her mother has not prepared a travel bundle for the girl because there was nothing she could be given. Her hands are empty. They hang at her sides. She doesn’t even grasp the rope which connects her to the city man plodding along before her; and when he turns off the road and finds a secluded dell with a boulder the size and shape of a kneeling cow, she lies on her belly. Her robes are bundled up around her middle, and her legs pried apart so that her little jade gate is exposed. Does she still remember the feel of the city man’s breath on her bare skin? The sound of the slap of his hand rubbing up the red wad of his man-parts?

The trees were there, the rocks and grasses and insects were there, as were the bird calls and flecks of sunlight and shifting breeze. But the small girl was absent.

No. Because she wasn’t there. The trees were there, the rocks and grasses and insects were there, as were the bird calls and flecks of sunlight and shifting breeze. But the small girl was absent. She didn’t hear the city man snuffling in his lust. Nor did she smell the crushed ferns at her feet, nor feel the gritty surface of the rock she was lying on. Look at me, the city man croaked finally, look at me now. But the girl wasn’t there so she made no response to the stinking mucus splattering on the backs of her thighs.

It had happened. But it had not happened to her.

Do you understand why I’m telling you this? Ohasu picked up her long pipe again. Such absences are for me my intervals.

The old poet sat in silence beside her.

And yet it is in the telling of such things that I connect together my intervals. So perhaps that is why I find comfort in stories, in the shapes and sounds of the words as well as their meanings.

There’s no real comfort there.

No? Ohasu poured for Old Master Bashō then poured for herself. When Oyuki and I were brought into the Nightless City, we were children who were permitted only to obey. When we cried, we were told to stop crying, and when we asked to go home, we were told we had no homes to return to.

All must bear their lives.

I would have preferred mine otherwise. Ohasu took up her wine cup and drank then set it back on the tray table with a sharp click. Tell me, she said, why should there be no solace for women like me? Can you in your black sleeves explain that?

Old Master Bashō regarded her for a moment then said, There’s no answer for such a question.

No? “My love-passions flame up but in my breast my heart chars.” ^[3]

Ohasu poured for her guest and poured for herself then said, A useless indulgence, I suppose. Yet those words were written by a woman who felt what I feel, and they do seem to offer me comfort. The words, she repeated, are what comfort me.

Old Master Bashō looked at her again, studying the small woman sitting stubbornly beside him, then he returned his attention to the thunderstorm raking the trees, the rain thrusting downward in broad swinging sheets, the world closing down within the turbulence of the gathering of its darkness.

She asked him why he was so dissatisfied.

Perhaps on another occasion I can explain it.

She said she wasn’t sleepy. And he heard a soft rustling as she crept around the folding screen that divided the shared room, her small body pale in the humid darkness. Tell me now.

I tried before…

Try again.

He lay waiting in the sweltering darkness then said, The desire to describe an instant of beauty is a habit difficult to overcome. As is the wish to have what you make seem true. And important. Because then you’re doing it for others. And therefore it’s theirs, not yours. And only if it’s yours can you release it.

For others to link to?

Yes. To complete.

She leaned forward to be nearer. And that’s the goal? To free yourself of solitude?

Old Master Bashō did not answer at first, unsure how to respond and trusting that she would listen to what he said and understand what he meant so that he had to be certain he believed it himself. There are mosquitoes still. Come in under the net.

She slipped in quickly and lay beside him at the edge of his quilt.

He told her that penetrating into the beauty of the true nature of things had been the goal of the poets of the past, and that he himself had struggled to achieve it. But no longer. It is the ordinary that seems satisfying to me now. And not the ordinary seen in new ways, but the ordinary as it is, the ordinary linked to the ordinary.

So it does become the leap across? Not the idea, but the connection? I wonder if your followers can understand that. Ohasu lay on her belly with her bare shoulders raised, supported by her forearms. So a summer night becomes the scent of its orange blossoms, and that in itself is enough…