Once he had rested, Ox-Blossom continued out through the tenth-day market that was arranged along the banks of the river. He examined the leaf crowns of blunt red carrots limp in the dry heat, the crumbling black knots of soil gripped within the rootlets of giant white radishes, the piles of cucumbers, aubergines and runner beans, and the muddy segments of lotus root like stained bones displayed on the broad leaves they had been wrapped in. Old Master Bashō had described this market in one of his last travel journals, and Ox-Blossom wished to see it through the eyes of his teacher. Yet as he watched itinerant peddlers pick through heaps of cabbages, checking for worm damage, leaf burn, and the depredations of fungal rot — aware that their own customers would do the same — whatever lightness might be found in the scene was lost on him. No doubt an intensified understanding was required, an appreciation of nuance that he himself seemed not to possess.

Tayū with Phoenix Robe
Anonymous
(Nineteenth century Japanese painting)
Honolulu Museum of Art

At the river ferry’s quay Ox-Blossom paid his copper and joined the other passengers. A young wife with a pale complexion took the seat beside him. She was well-dressed for someone living in such a rural district; and she carried a pheasant cock in a woven bamboo basket-cage, the bird’s long tail feathers protruding through a gap in the weave. The young wife told him her husband had snared the pheasant in the moorlands that morning. She was on her way to the retirement villa of a connoisseur who would pay five silver for the opportunity to paint a true image of it.

Is that so? A true image?

He is an artist who creates the exact likeness of what he sees placed before his eyes, and who condemns as frivolous city painters in Edo or Kyoto, with their phoenixes and dragons and Chinese kirin.

A painter of integrity, said Ox-Blossom.

Stew it with ginger and onions in a sweet-wine broth, called the front oarsman from his perch at the fore transom. The young wife smiled and glanced at Ox-Blossom in a way that reminded him of how whenever his little peony girl had become amused by something, she would check surreptitiously to see if his dignity would permit him to share it.

Being in a narrow boat on a swift river made the young wife anxious; and as they caught the current, she distracted herself by describing how she was obliged to manage two small children, a flock of ducks, an aged father-in-law who wandered in the lanes and became confused, and a husband who, although enterprising, had a fondness for squandering his time and money in the wine shops and brothels of the provincial castle town. The ducks, in particular, were a burden to her. There’s no end to the ways they find to sicken and die, she said.

A difficulty indeed, said Ox-Blossom, watching the maples and liquidambars on the near shore sliding past, mostly still green but with full-autumn arriving in the orange and red of the lacquer bushes, the bright splashes of color reminding him of the gaudy robes his little peony girl had worn, her nape exposed and the hem of her scarlet underskirt showing.

They will eat moldy grain and collapse from bloating.

Is that so?

And rapeseed meal! How can they be so stupid as to eat something that poisons them?

A difficult question indeed…

His purchase of her contract meant his little peony girl could now live anywhere that would take her. He had wondered what she would do to support herself and instructed his house steward to keep track of her once she left the pleasure quarters. He did not necessarily require further access himself — the acceptance of necessity being a point of pride with him — but he was curious about her fate.